Building a Better Last Epoch: Our Commitment to Quality

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Hello Travelers,

At Eleventh Hour Games, our goal has always been to deliver the best ARPG experience to our players. That commitment goes beyond new features and content. It’s rooted in consistently improving the overall quality of the game. A major part of achieving that comes directly from our community. Your feedback, suggestions, and bug reports play a critical role in helping us understand where the experience is excelling and where it needs improvement. Every report and discussion helps us build a clearer picture of what matters most to you.

The Player Experience team exists to ensure that your voice is not only heard, but meaningfully represented in our development. We work closely the team to surface trends, highlight pain points, and provide context around what players are encountering in-game. By translating community feedback into actionable insights, we help prioritize the areas that have the greatest impact on your experience. This allows us to focus our efforts where they matter most and make informed decisions that improve the game in tangible ways.

As part of a broader initiative to strengthen quality of our development, we’re introducing a new quality poll campaign. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of focused polls. Each one is centered on a specific area of Last Epoch that affects your player experience. These polls are designed to give us more insights in addition to the feedback we already receive. By gathering this data, the Player Experience team can leverage this to help adjust priority, impact, and severity of issues. We will be running polls on the following topics:

  • Skills and Passives
  • Combat
  • Items
  • UI
  • Audio
  • Connectivity and Performance
  • Environment
  • Quests
  • Crafting

Our goal is to continuously raise the bar and deliver an ARPG experience that feels polished, reliable, and worthy of the time you invest in it. With that being said, our first poll below is focused on Skills and Passives and is open until Friday May 8th at 11 AM CDT. Afterwards, we will launch another poll for another topic until all topics have been completed. We appreciate everyone who contributes their thoughts into these and help shape Last Epoch into the greatest ARPG.

Skills and Passives: What impacts your experience in Last Epoch the most? Choose two.
  • Skills not behaving as expected
  • Skill nodes or passive nodes not working
  • Skill nodes or passive nodes not interacting with each other correctly
  • Scaling issues (i.e. can’t gain enough damage, mana costs too high, cooldowns too long)
0 voters
How often do skill or passive issues impact your experience?
  • Never
  • Rarely
  • Sometimes
  • Often
0 voters

IMPORTANT: Please reply to this thread with all the skills, skill nodes, and passive nodes that are impacting your experience negatively. Please be as specific as possible.

2 Likes
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My longest standing gripe still exists since the start of the new Season and prevents me from playing a build I’d like:

You still can’t use Dancing Strikes on a controller the same way as you can with keyboard/mouse.

First you can’t use it stationary, the skill automatically moves you on controller.

Second you can’t change directions between the strikes on controller while you can on KB/M

4 Likes
3

Love the idea, but I’m struggling with the execution of this poll. The first question is quite broad and then has 3 nearly identical answers and then one about scaling. These four (or two really) options don’t really cover much; leaving out visual clarity, accessibility, item dependency, ease of use, etc etc. So any answer you get is creating a false dichotomy between basically two options (something doesn’t work or it doesn’t scale).

And what is meant by an issue in the second one? Just the categories from the first? Do you mean bugs? Balance and scaling decisions impact our experience every time we press a button. Bugs would be different, but how can we tell what you mean by what’s been presented here.

9 Likes
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The bigger problem is the timing of the fixes. Excitement is at the highest when the patch drops, given the complexity bugs are expected. When you fix them 2 months out or 2 weeks later it’s kind of the same. Anything that’s blocking a build from functioning would make a world of difference when it’s a hot fix in the first few days vs any time after the first week. Would really appreciate it if these types of fixes come out as hot fixes within the first couple of days of launch.

2 Likes
5

I answered the poll but you are 100% right. Hope the results won’t be the alpha and omega of what comes next in terms of fixing skills in general.

1 Like
6

The big problem is that there’s a lot of skills / node / item interactions that don’t work but there’s no easy way to tell.

Skeletal mage damage increase for acolyte was broken and did nothing (don’t know if it’s fixed).

Right now storm totem deciding it doesn’t want to attack anyone. There’s been bug reports of that for years, still happening. In my testing it seems to happen when you have both Unmatched Storms and Shielding totem specc’d. With both it stops attack and provide a visual aura like Holy Aura does. With either one specc’d it works fine.

3 Likes
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My problem with skills/passives/items interacting is I have no way of confirming in game if i am getting that 5% boost to my minions damage. unless i sit a a dummy and start a timer for 2 minutes then guestimate at how many pixels are gone, was it more or less than last time?

The only reliable way for me to tell if the skills interact is by posting in #ask-the-devs-not-support. And i LOVE that i can ask there and talk straight with the Devs but I shouldn’t NEED to.

I know Devs and people are against dps meters in game, without going into that, having better stats especially on minions would be amazing.

4 Likes
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This, combined with the fact that all your abilities de-level when you want to make changes makes any robust testing of skills so laborious. I admire anyone who finds some of these bugs, because the effort going into testing them has to be on par with or greater than what a QA team would be doing.

2 Likes
9

Most channeling skills mana costs are way too high to make them worth using at all. Ghostflame in particular is ridiculously expensive. Provides less damage than warpath but takes insanely more investment to even use.

3 Likes
10

For me, A lot of the old passive trees need to be brought up. Marksman in particular is struggling. I thoroughly enjoyed the bladedancer update and something like that for marksman would be great. I wouldnt know the first thing about balancing but i always found it weird that classes that can block can cap block and get more block dr than glancing blow. And glancing blow cant be capped or can increase the dr.

Id say take a good solid look at all the oldest and go from there. bring them up to what we have today. Keep up the communication and try to not make it too long between updates! you got this.

1 Like
11

Great initiative and once again a terrible poll lmao. I would’ve split this in multiple sections Scaling, Bugs/Interactions, and Impact. The way this is presented is it mixes several fundamental issues, and I think the results are hard to illustrate the problem.

In what is shown, scaling, bugs, and interactions are all blended together, even though they affect player experience in very different ways.

For example:

  • A skill being numerically weak is not the same issue as a passive literally not functioning.
  • Two nodes interacting incorrectly is different from descriptions/tooltips being unclear.
  • “Can’t gain enough damage” and “mana costs too high” are balance concerns, while broken interactions are reliability concerns.

So, I think the survey would provide much more actionable data if it were separated into categories.

Scaling / Balance

  • Current scaling in LE is generally:
    • Too Weak
    • About Right
    • Too Strong
  • Resource costs and cooldowns feel:
    • Too restrictive
    • Appropriate
    • Too forgiving
  • Which areas contribute most to scaling problems?
    • List related options

Bugs / Interactions

  • Skill nodes and passives function as described:
    • Strongly Disagree
    • Disagree
    • Neutral
    • Agree
    • Strongly Agree
  • Skill nodes and passives interact correctly:
    • Strongly Disagree
    • Disagree
    • Neutral
    • Agree
    • Strongly Agree
  • Tooltips and descriptions are clear/coherent:
    • Strongly Disagree
    • Disagree
    • Neutral
    • Agree
    • Strongly Agree

Impact

  • Which two categories impact your enjoyment the most?
    • Balance/Scaling
    • Bugs
    • Interactions
    • Skill/passive node clarity
  • How often do those issues negatively impact your gameplay?
    • Never
    • Rarely
    • Sometimes
    • Often
4 Likes
12

Skills tree’s being outdated horribly. Spriggan Form is my main complaint, but is not the only skill by a long shot. Random conversions for skills with 0 support from the base class passive tree or skill tree. The unclear nature of if you actually got a DPS boost or not from an item, or conversion, or skill/passive point investment.

Not trying to cry, just didn’t feel the poll offered enough options to accurately offer my feedback. Also bad at articulating my thoughts, so hopefully this make some sense.

13

Generally everything works fine for me. Most of issues are with scaling (some skills have just not much going on so it’s hard to push them further), however it’s fine if skill has utility/defense at least.

I would improve and generalize skill interactions UI. Interactions need to be like in separate tab maybe, with clear ways to see what interacts with what. :nerd_face:

14

These polls are a nice initiative :slight_smile: Thanks for taking the time to make them.

Something that often feels frustrating when making my own builds, when it comes to interactions between skills, is things being ambiguous. This often makes it difficult to properly plan builds, and I often resort to asking questions to Mike on discord (and Mike, if you’re reading this, please know that your diligence in answering questions is far more valuable to me that you probably realize, so thank you again! <3).

But those questions are, almost all the time, questions that should be answered by the description of skill tree nodes. (I don’t mention passive tree nodes here because there are far fewer ambiguity issues in those)

Here are a few examples off the top of my head (though I’m 100% sure to miss a lot that have annoyed me in the past :p):

  • Smite - “Grace” node: “Smite heals allies for more health - Smite healing: +x%”
    Is this stat healing effectiveness, which stacks additively with other sources of healing eff.? Or is it “More Smite healing” (multiplicative)?
    Since it’s more healing, I feel like wording it “More Smite healing: +x%” would make it less ambiguous.
  • Same thing for Summon Spriggan’s “Aura of Life” and “Aura of Loyalty” nodes.
  • Spirit Plague - “Laceration” node: “Your hits have a chance to apply bleed when you hit an enemy affected by Spirit Plague”
    I assumed the stacks of bleed that are applied from this node would scale with Spirit Plague’s tree - notably, its intelligence scaling, which usually applies to ailments.
    But, according to a few very helpful people on discord, it seems like they scale with neither Spirit Plague’s tree, nor the tree of the skill that constitutes the hit; but do benefit from the phys penetration for bleed that comes from the node behind Laceration (Exsanguination).
    Having this information available in the advanced tooltip would, in my opinion, be very useful.

On top of those, something that I find often unclear is how triggered skills are affected by the scalings of the skills that trigger them.

For instance, Surge can trigger Lightning Blast during its travel, and has a node that reads “Surge deals more spell lightning damage”, which I’m assuming refers to the Lightning Blast it triggers.
But if a Surge node that says “Surge deals more spell damage” affects the spells it triggers, does that mean that a node that would say “Surge deals more damage” would also affect them? Is that different for triggered skills that have a skill tree, and those that don’t? I would appreciate those things being stated explicitly on skill tree nodes that allow skills to trigger other skills.

Another such example, that is a little more complex, concerns the Scorpion and Maelstrom. The summoned Scorpion scales its damage with the player’s strength and dex, while Maelstrom scales with attunement. But, when the Scorpion triggers Maelstrom through its skill tree, the Maelstrom it casts does not scale with the player’s attunement any more.

Explicitly stating the scalings that are (or are not) inherited when skills are triggered, be it scalings from skill tree node or from attributes, when pressing Alt to view details on the tooltip of the skill tree nodes that enable the trigger, would be very welcome.

One last example of ambiguity with triggered skills is about Pearls of the Swine, an amulet that allows Bone Curse to also apply another curse.

When a skill applies a curse from its skill tree, the curse benefits from the skill tree - for instance, if Ghostflame applies Decrepify because of its “Decrepit Mortals” node, the damage of Decrepify will scale with Ghostflame nodes that say “Ghostflame deals x% more damage”.

So I assumed that, when using the amulet to have Bone Curse apply Decrepify, the skill tree nodes of Bone Curse would scale Decrepify’s damage - or, at the very least, that Bone Curse’s intelligence scaling would be inherited by Decrepify.

But after some testing, it wasn’t the case, and Decrepify’s damage seemed to be the same when applied by Bone Curse regardless of my intelligence and of Bone Curse’s skill tree. This is another thing that I think would deserve to be made explicit in an advanced tooltip of Pearls of the Swine.

One last thing that I think is a little archaic and would deserve to be brought up to newer standards is the tooltip (or lack thereof) of a lot of minor subskills - the main example I have in mind being Poison Bolt (from Wandering Spirits and Aura of Decay).

That skill is stated to have 100% chance to poison, and has an effectiveness of added damage on hit, so I assumed that, since it seems to be a hit, the global poison chance would apply to it. But, according to Mike, it doesn’t really count as a hit in that sense, which means it will always only apply one stack of poison.

I would love for this skill (and, ideally, every subskill of the sort, though I realize that would represent a lot of work) to have a proper in-game tooltip that details exactly how it works (the crucial information here being that sources of chance to poison do not apply to its “hit”).

That’s all I had to say, have a nice day <3

1 Like
15

Hi, just my quick opinion, the lack of consistency between old nodes/skills and the new ones is annoying on the long run to me, this is a reason why i do not play more than 2/3 builds per cycle, because a lot of stuff exists, yes, but a lot of it feels poor, clunky and outdated compared to the more recent options we gain in every patch.

I totally understand the game will constantly evolve, and i certainly hope it continues to do so, but in my opinion this brings a mixed feeling about the build diversity available in game, you clearly see and feel what’s new and older and the difference between the two is very large. The game is meant to be very rich when it comes to builds, and it is, but the gap is sometimes so much huge that it makes a lot of these builds some chunks of bitter and annoying experiences, therefore the diversity isn’t that much great after a few runs.

Thanks for your work anyway.

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there’s no my variant - Skills and nodes are not clearly stating what interacts with what and what scales with what etc. The system of subskills in skill trees needs to be more CONSISTENT and CLEAR

17

I mean, they won’t know what bugs are happening till people are deep into their builds. How would they know a bug happens when you use Skill Y with Passive X while holding item Z.

From what I’ve seen is they have been fixing bugs that we, as the community help report.

18

My biggest problem is General skills being ignored. It feels like you design masteries as a package. And you push builds towards using 3 or 4 skill slots from mastery and 1 general skill as travel/utility

General skills are filled with random utility and basically flavor points, coupled with lackluster damage node.

After the sentinel rework i was hopeful, becuase general skills actually got interesting and sometimes strong nodes.

I was so hyped about acolyte “rework”, after 2 seasons of acolyte “changes” it is still an absolute joke.

Love the game, or atleast the idea of the game. Might come back if atleast half the classes will be in a good place.

19

This game’s best feature is its skill trees, but they are also its worst enemy in some ways. They’re extremely cool, and a still very unique way to approach character building in ARPGs. The problem is that the skill node interactions are almost never explained in enough detail to know what’s actually going to happen when you spec into multiple functionality-altering nodes, and the skill leveling system makes it actual torture to try to play around with different combinations.

1 Like
20

You said everything with specifics so prepare for wall of text. I’m just going to make additional replies for other classes over next few days since this takes a while to write up.

Acolyte

  • Rip blood: Mostly fine, I wish coagulated blood orbs actually could be scaled in some way though.
  • Summon Skeleton: Sources of max skeletons are scattered about at random on highly contested slots, but the numbers on the skeletons themselves are so undertuned that even if you do get max skeletons high enough they will still barely be able to handle trash mobs. The tree itself is full of annoying point sinks with resummon chance and max skeletons that really should just be part of the default behaviour (of course those point sinks don’t matter because there is one total damage node on the whole tree, three if you count the rogue node and the fact that fire/ice arrow just deal double the damage of the base attack)
  • Wandering spirits: Recently I looked at making a build around this skill. I got the skill level to 40. I still didn’t have enough points to click the hard required nodes (Either channel or reveal duration) in combination with any amount of damage nodes. One of the big issues is that similar stats are scattered around the tree instead of being grouped. Poison conversion is on bottom, but the other poison nodes are on the right side. Even at 40 points I still felt like half my points were spent pathing through things that were either pointless or a net downside (Looking at you increased spirit movespeed and fear) Bit of a suggestion would be to place the channel node right at the start. The skill could also benefit from seeing a node somewhere that makes the spirits home in on enemies a bit.
  • Harvest: This skill is so bad I wrote a whole essay in its own section down below.
  • Bone Curse: Mostly fine. Brittle bones being able to cull yourself is a little bit weird though, imo players should most likely be immune to cull especially if they have ward. I do think the mana drain on signet of agony should just be removed. the downsides of cursing yourself with bone curse are already enormous.
  • Transplant: I am a cap hater, but the Azure Veins node needs to have a cap of like max 10-30% of your current health/ward removed per cast. Maybe put a node behind it that scales off the amount removed, could be a fun place to re-add the additional detonations back from old transplant?
  • Hungering Souls: This skill just needs a full rebalance. 11 base mana cost for 45% damage effectiveness hit + 75% dot is laughable at best. The big soul node should get the usual treatment of “%more damage per soul that would have been fired” and the base mana cost should be moved over to the added projectiles nodes. Pretty much the entire left half of its tree is in dire need of a rework as well, it feels like the node effects were just chosen at random with a dartboard.
  • Summon Skleleton Mage: Archmage node really should be a lot stronger than it is. Maybe scale it per maximum skeleton mages? The cold and fire sections of the tree feel redundant and could most likely be merged together. I know other people have mentioned they would like to see a utility focused skeleton mage type which could be fun.
  • Assemble Abomination: I hate what this skill has become so much. It used to have a lot of identity with the health decay and it’s really high scaling ceiling but all of that is gone now and has been replaced with a new identity of “generic permanant minion with the best numbers”
  • Summon Wraith: Melee wraiths actively worse in raw numbers than flame wraiths (because flame gets to take stationary for free). I’d like to see poison wraiths replaced with something else. Also feel like the tree is lacking ways to customize the wraiths, some nodes that add dashes or skill interactions (your melee wraiths now use harvest?) would go a long way.
  • Summon Wraithlord: Totally ruined flavour wise by the Twin Spirits and Sequel of Avarice nodes. Bake the stats from those nodes into the wraithlord’s base stats and make them only apply to normal wraiths. It could also use some better scaling overall, maybe more damage per normal wraith summoned?
  • Aura of decay: I wish it did damage. I also don’t understand why it doesn’t have the spell tag… Symbols of Hope and Holy aura have the spell tag.
  • Flay: I wish the melee hit could be scaled to a reasonable level. The auto targeting is also really clunky especially when used as a traversal. The base attack speed is also way too low and most of the attack speed nodes on the tree are additive for some reason which is weird.
  • Reaper form: After the aura of decay healing got halved this skill became my #1 source of frustration when playing lich. Every time I leave combat for like 5 seconds to check loot/interact with nemesis/whatever the form drops and I just have to stand there for 20 seconds waiting to get it back. It’s not fun. Can we please give it the druid shapeshift treatment where we can spec a node somewhere either on passive tree or skill tree to make the decay pause out of combat?
  • Chaos bolts: Really underwhelming numbers wise, tree needs a lot of additional support for direct casting of the skill it’s like 1/10th the damage of marrow shards which is just laughable.
  • Soul Feast: Low base damage, only 2 damage nodes on whole tree, crazy high mana cost, can only be used conditionally. I am struggling to find a build that can scale soul feast damage high enough without accidentally killing the enemy with the curse you needed to apply before being able to cast it.

Harvest

First, this skill is single handedly gatekeeping the entire melee lich archetype from being playable. Second, this skill has no competitors, there is no alternative skill you can slot in as the spammable bread and butter skill for melee lich, so even if the numbers on it were overtuned by a factor of like 10 it wouldn’t actually matter because of all the other nightmares you need to deal with on the melee lich archetype. Not sure how else to describe this, but basically harvest can’t be undertuned, it can’t even be average. Harvest needs to be enough of a powerhouse skill to tempt you into playing melee on a class that is 99% focused on spells.

In terms of base stats on the skill: as a starting point, 200% base damage effectiveness minimum, 400% against cursed.

Another issue with the skill though is it doesn’t have any fun scaling vectors to play with. There is nothing about it that screams “Try building around me”. One suggestion I have would be to take out the self inflicted bleed node and add a whole branch focused around it. Like start of the branch would be inflict yourself with damned on use (convert to other ailments if you take the conversion nodes) and then behind that node you could have things like %more damage per self ailment stack (again, convert to other ailments when conversion nodes are taken, perhaps each self ailment could have its own secondary scaling stat that in addition to the more damage?) This would create some cool interplay between the self damned node in death seal, the conversions on harvest, and the conversions on aura of decay. If you end up capping these effects, please aim high (like 200+ self stacks) rather than the usual 20 or so since 20 stacks doesn’t have any real downside for a player.

Going to go through some specific node related issues on the tree:

  • Mind Harvest: Why is the ward gain capped? Follow up question: Why is it capped at 36 ward per second for 3 whole points invested? A t2 ward per second affix gives the same amount as 1 point put into this node and that affix doesn’t require you to go melee range and hit things on a caster… 6% damage per point is also too low but if the ward on hit was more than flavour text on the node it might be ok. Just something to keep in mind though, this is one of five starting nodes on harvest
  • Morbid Fury: I’m convinced that this node is a typo. I think it was meant to say %more attack speed, but even if it did the numbers are still quite bad, maybe like 6% + 3% per point as a more multiplier would be ok?
  • The whole blood spectre corner: Is this really even needed? Anyone playing blood spectres is using sacrifice to summon them, and this also is only proccing on kills and the bonuses given to blood spectres here are way worse than what sacrifice gives anyway. I’m very curious to know how many total people have ever used these nodes.
  • Iron Mouths/Legion of the lich/Learned Weakness/Spectral Whetstone/Wraith Skin: I don’t like the placement of these nodes. I think Learned Weakness and Legion of the lich should just be merged and make it grant shared crit chance and crit mult, keep it over by the minion stuff. Iron mouths and Wraith skin could be moved over to where learned weakness is now, maybe replacing spectral whetstone entirely?
  • Seeds of Undeath: I have a serious pet peeve with caps on nodes like this. I don’t mind a cap existing, but I really would prefer if the caps were something you had to invest significantly to reach rather than something you reach without any effort. I also am more of a fan of softer capping, for example on this node maybe instead of limiting the number of times it can proc you could just increase the mana cost significantly per proc in last few seconds.
  • Mark of the Locust: If my memory isn’t failing me, this node used to do something along the lines of making spirit plague deal its total damage faster and stacked on hit, kind of like the aura of decay node in flay? Personally I think the old effect was a lot more interesting.
  • Agonizing Siphon: The conditions to proc on this node are weird and prevent it from being used to build around. Perhaps take a leaf out of the rip blood marrow shards book and make the condition just simply “When hitting a boss/rare or hitting 3 or more normal enemies”. I do like this node overall.
  • Steal Youth: This node is boring. There are a lot of ways to make it less boring (hint, the frenzy node in shadow rend).
1 Like