Good morning from the Ruhr area, after indulging in nostalgia for 4 hours last night, I knew what was missing from Last Epoch all the time.
The hit feedback!
Yes, I can tell when I’m doing damage, but I don’t know what source it came from.
Example, I use the combination of bleeding and poison, but I still only get white numbers or yellow for crits.
Do I hit with poison? Or with bleeding and if so, how long and which monster?
I realized this yesterday when I saw my poisoned opponent turn green and feel “at home”.
I like Last Epoch a lot better than this excursion in the old days and I even prefer it than the competitor from New Zealand, but I personally miss the feeling “yes you harmed the opponent with xyz”.
I get your point and agree. D2 had very detailed feedback back in the days, like the poison example you mentioned.
Also I miss the base damage type effects. For example, if you have a weapon with fire damage, you saw a small flame effect on hit. If you had cold damage you sa a blue icicle effect, small lightning tendrils when you had lightning damage.
If you killed a frozen enemy, you could shatter his body and it would sould like breaking glass.
These are details that are missing in LE. Maybe this stuff is all on EHGs radar for the polishing phase. I hope so.
I also voted for more different death animations and effects, depending on the damage type that they were affected by. If enemies died while ignited, they could turn into ashes. Dying from poison could make nasty sizzle sounds. Cold O already covered above.
This and the missing hit feedback makes the feel of combat very flat. Screenshake is not a solution, because most people turn it off. It can become annoying. It’s animation (small stagger) and crisp hit sounds.
You get used to the LE combat and after playing for a while, you don’t care that much anymore. But if you then play another game (doesn’t have to be the same genre) you can see and feel the difference. And that are the exact moments where I realise that theres still stuff missing on LEs combat. Other games are better in delivering a feel of impact.
LE is improving a bit from time to time. Yet, I’m still missing the “big” step, the noticable improvement that makes the difference.
The feel of combat is one of the most important features of a game. Sometimes people might just play a worse game with worse mechanics, less depth, less features, if just the moment to moment gameplay is superior.
So now that I’ve been trying a new build for quite a while, a Poison Minion Witch, I have to revisit this thread.
I don’t have any feedback from the game, whether the attacks are physical in nature or whether it’s direct damage or damage over time from poison, that’s a shame.
Rather even annoying, because since I can’t see how much damage my minions are causing with their abilities, it remains a guessing game.
I still think it would be much better to give the damage figures “explanatory” colors or effects so that a conclusion can be drawn.
Just my opinion
Skill gfx are generally colour-coded based on the tags/base damage types (dark red for physical, red/orange for fire, purple for void, etc) which works well enough for spells & minion (to a lesser extent) but not so much for melee/bow/throwing skills.
The damage numbers you see don’t, to be fair, give you much info as to what elements you’re doing & the devs are working on redoing the character screen to include all of the skill data you want. Minion damage does get damage numbers though not a DPS tooltip unfortunately.
I agree with the other posters about the lack of satisfying combat especially after jumping in another ARPG and such. If I’m honest, I’m getting a bit worried about their approach to this because the last patch didn’t feel like a big improvement on this. I guess Javelin is okay but it feels/sounds like firing a dart and not hurling a giant spear and impaling someone. And while the next patch does sound awesome, again, I don’t see as much of an improvement (so far).
The only skill that looks like it might be impactful is Maul from Werebear. However, and I’m repeating what I’ve said in the Spriggan thread, stuff like the summoned Vines or Big Vine look so out of place model wise and it lacked any indication of actually slamming/lashing an enemy.
Doesn’t help that some forum/Reddit threads that were asking for improvements in this area go as far back as 2019… You’d think something like having good gameplay feel would be a lot higher of priority.
Maybe all of my concerns are quenched next patch and they iterated further of them after said previews. I mean that’s what development is at it’s core, iteration upon iteration. It’s just weird to me that it’s not an actual point on the roadmap since so many people have been asking for it. And what I mean by this is that it isn’t just under the ‘generic’ improvements like reworked content etc. but an actual focal point of a patch.
I personally don’t care as much for a bunch of systems because while that might be good to break up the monotony, it won’t keep me invested because the gameplay feels like hitting air. Basically, more systems don’t grant me satisfaction, good combat does and let’s me ignore all of the bad.
Bit of a rant, sorry for that. Anyway, I also wanted to mention that they’re not adding specific damage coloring for DoTs. I can’t find when this was answered but I know it was on Discord. Imagine you have different DoTs on your gear during leveling, a bit of Ignite/Poison/Doom/Bleed/Electrify. If all of these dots had their own colour you would be overwhelmed by numbers on your screen and it would be a mess to glance at what damage your actually doing, even moreso when you crit inbetween these hits. It just wouldn’t look good.
