Casual Looking For VET Epoch Players Insight

General
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Howdy All :smile:

I have had a POE account for years. There are mechanics I like, some I don’t, but no complaints. The thing is, I have very little time to game. It’s one of the few things that truly clears my mind, so I love gaming. If Im watching most TV shows, my brain is still on. But with gaming, that’s not the case. It actually gets my mind off stuff.

With POE, I never get past CH 4 or 5 with a toon because I have so little time to play that the league ends, and I have start all over. Standard is an option but their respec system allows no wiggle room once I get a build going, which sucks when they gut your build. I usually have a few toons into the mid 40s by leagues end.

I paid for Last Epoch some time ago, it was still on Mac. Then I got a PC, bought that version, and I picked it up again over the holidays. I really enjoy the shadow blademaster build, and the game is frackin’ gorgeous! There are lots of things I like a ton. The new crafting is very enjoyable, on and on I could go.

I’m unclear if LE, when it’s out of BETA, will be going to the same approach as POE where a given build gets gutted every time a new league starts? And if I stay in whatever “standard” will look like in LE (which is the only way I could ever get through end game by 2040 :laughing: given my limited game time) can I even get through endgame without spending the often quoted (on POE) 1000 hours?

LE is like Dr Who, POE, and Diablo had a baby! I like that I can slowly build up to end game (although the main campaigns seems a lot more reasonable time wise than POE). I’m just looking for how casual friendly you think the game is now, and might be in the future. Obviously, being able to respec is a huge plus to this game.

Anyways, I realize the game is not out of BETA and thus Im asking for speculation to a degree, but any insight would be appreciated about being a casual. I ask because I need to upgrade my PC which will cost more than a nickel, and I dont want to get stuck in another POE type of situation. Im not to monolith yet but I really like the map variety and looks, again, big fan of this game.

Thanks,

Dizzy

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I’m fairly new to the game myself, but I think have enough general gaming and theorycrafting experience to speak to this topic.

When you talk about “gutting” a build, it’s important to differentiate between “it’s damage or survivability were reduced”, “It’s not as fun to play”, and “It’s impossible to do because of talent changes”.

Damage & survivability tweaks are ALWAYS going to happen. If you’re a player that enjoys playing only the absolutely strongest builds, and tends to go for the outliers…you know, that ONE build that seems to be doing WAAAY better than everyone else…then part of the developer’s job is to bring those builds in line (ie, "nerf) them. Game balance is NEVER done.

I have seen some guides on the forums labeled for previous patches that are legitimately impossible to play now because of passive & skill node changes, which (I assume) is more of what you’re talking about. This is a shame when it happens, but from what I’ve seen, EHG seems open to constructive criticism on lots of topics, so only time will tell.

The situation where a change makes a build less “fun” to play is difficult to address because fun is subjective, and this type of “gutting” can’t really be avoided, although communication can help if you’re very specific about WHY it doesn’t feel as fun (and assuming the developers listen and see it as a legitimate concern).

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We don’t know how much more “content” LE will receive over the years, but generally speaking LE has a lot less different content right now compared to POE.

The Story will take you about 4-8 hours playtime depending on your way of playing. And after that endgame starts already.

One big advantage of LE for people that don’t play a lot of play very deep into the endgame is, that basically all content right now in LE is avaialble very early, but has different “difficulties”.

Normal Monoliths/Empowered Monolith, Arenais just infinitely scaleable and Dungeons have T1-T4.

“Experiecning” ALL content in LE is fairly, easy since completing a T1 or T2 dungeon and going through the normal monolith absically already gives you “all the content” and everything beyond that will just be the same content scaled up.

We don’t know how much this will change, eventuelly we might get a few endgame modes that are only accessable at the very top/deep endgame, but even the two new dungeons that will come next patch will have T1-T4, so these can be experiecned fairly early as well.

Builds progression in LE is very fast and you will get together a very specialized buil very early, there is no need to play “Build X” until you can play “Build Y” properly.
You can jumpo right into the game and chase the build you want to go for from the get-go, which is a major advantage for people that don’t have time to gear up a character for 20 horus before they can actually play, what they want to play.

Regarding to Nerfs and Buffs @invispoet basically covered it already, but these things will always happen, its what keeps things fresh and game balance is never perfect to begin with.

We don’t have a lot of informations on Cycles (LE’s Leagues/Seasons) yet, but there will be something similar to standard.

Regarding respeccing in LE: You can respec everything, except the mastery.
Respeccing does cost you a couple of minutes (literally).

So the only reason to play multiple characters would be to play multiple Masteries.

But even one character with the same mastery can be played in dozens different ways.
You can see every Mastery as their “own class” and within that class you have plenty of different playstyles and build opportunities.

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Thank you for the post (cool user name!). You had a lot of good insights. My First AARPG was Diablo 3, got it up into the high torments, very user friendly. I enjoyed it until the last few torments, then it got tedious. But it was fun.

Its hard to put my finger on why I feel there is such a big difference, for me personally, between this game and POE. Im not slamming POE and actually have a lot respect for the game, and the player base has always been very supportive. But I think this game could be something I could stick with over the long haul, but I for my playstyle. And I know, try as I might, POE is just not a fit.

I used to be heavy into MMOs but not in many years, so yep, balances- a never ending part of life. I guess every game has its own game company house style to ongoing balancing. Wild Star, ugh, they never listened and thus went under. I have nothing but good things about EHG.

Thanks for your insights

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[quote=“Heavy, post:3, topic:47740”]
Builds progression in LE is very fast and you will get together a very specialized buil very early, there is no need to play “Build X” until you can play “Build Y” properly.
[/quote] ---- this is such a big deal, and this repeats in POE every league. Thanks for pointing this out and all your other comments. Being I had not yet gotten to Monos, I felt like the experience would be as you describe, but its very reassuring to see that my assumptions are correct.

To be clear, one question, you can’t respec the mastery, but you can respec how you have allocated those mastery points, yes? Meaning, I’m a blademaster, and I want to change up my blademaster build, I can do that, yes? Totally agree on the toons, Ive already taken several out for a run.

Great feedback along with Da Poet :sunglasses:

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Yes, you can do that, you can also put points into the non chosen mastery, you can only not respec the chosen mastery itself.

And it only cost you a bit of gold.

So respeccing in LE is like: Very Easy and Fast, aside from THE ONE THING, that is not respeccable at all.

And the mastery gives a lot of identity to a character so if you wanna play a different mastery you have to play a new character, which is good IMO, bcause it gives you a lot more immersion into the character.

If you want you can still put hundreds of hours into ONE character with the same mastery trying out all the different builds within that mastery.

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I loved wildstar for what it was. Science Fiction instead of Fantasy, and it had an AMAZING leveling process. The developers where 100% up front about their target audience being the “hardcore” MMORPG players, yet everyone kept asking them to change this mindset. The gave a little bit of ground in the crafting system, but stuck to their guns, and then didn’t have a large enough audience to support the game. It’s a shame really.

In my mind, POE does ALMOST everything right. I don’t like the lack of a combat log, which means I can’t figure out exactly what killed me, which means learning the fights is harder than it needs to be, and prevented me from playing hardcore (I usually start normal chars until i get comfortable with a game, then go hardcore). Their skill, class , passive tree, and currency systems are all very well done, and they’ve done a great job of making the combat feel more smooth and impactful…but the lack of information on what damage I have coming in eventually got me to quit.

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I’m the same casual. This topic is close to me. The only difference is that I have more days off than casual games and as a result I have more hours of play. But as a true casual player, I experience certain difficulties in the game:

  1. Excessive health/damage for mobs.
    The fact that the mobs kill the “glass cannon” is clear to me, but I did not manage to assemble a tank build on the paladin. At 100+ corruption, sometimes I meet a rip. You almost always have to kite. I even thought about something, how long ago and in what game did I have to kite when playing as a melee fighter? The only thing that came to mind was my tanking in the last two WoW expansions. Even in more stringent RPGs, I managed to collect a “tin can”, but here I failed. And if you look at the build planner of many guides, then in most of the items in the affixes there is health, an increase in health, and even more health. Probably not easy.

  2. Stop movement while casting some abilities.
    Some builds from this become “jerky”. And at higher levels of corruption, it becomes more and more dangerous. And on many bosses too.

  3. Some difference in build-forming abilities.
    I managed to squeeze out a maximum of 25K dps from Warpatch. In another build, Smythe brought it up to 80K dps. The difference is big. Playing with Warpatch, I almost fell asleep when I finished off the boss. The choice is obvious. Now I’m running build Smite. But remembering the Warpath build, I shed a mean male tear. Yes, of course, on Smite, I scored a few legendaries that significantly increased Smite damage (lightning ). And for Warpath, I did not find such options in the legendaries. Maybe they will show up later. I understand that this is a beta. I understand that it is impossible to put everything into the game at once and polish everything at once.

  4. Number of affixes.
    My friends (they have not played LA yet, they are waiting for localization) are scared by the number of affixes in the game. “Why so many?” was told to me when I told them about affixes. I myself am not particularly embarrassed by such a number of affixes, but there is some influence on the game as a whole. If there are 20 affixes in the game, then it is easier to meet an item with the desired variant than in a game with 200 affixes. I’m not saying that we need to cut it down to 20. It’s just that some could be combined into one. Probably. Liflich for example or shocking (stun), attack speed in its various manifestations, etc.

P.S. If the developers read my post, then do not take it as criticism. It is quite possible that you will enter something by 1.0, something later. It’s just that we casuals are always afraid that someone will forget about us somewhere. In any case, please accept my gratitude for your work. I really like what you’ve done so far. Seeing huge potential. I will play even if Warpatch is not reanimated. :)))) How can a casual mode be introduced? Maybe an anti-masochist? Although the fragmentation of the community also never benefited the game.

P.P.S. Sorry for the google translate. I don’t speak English.

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You might not speak English, but your collaboration with Google Translator delivered some killer lines that had me cracking up. Your greatest hits from my POV:

"“sometimes I meet a rip.” … “I shed a mean male tear.” … “How can a casual mode be introduced? Maybe an anti-masochist?”

I look forward to buying the book.

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Ну, что есть, то есть. Других вариантов донести свою мысль для англоязычного большинства у меня нет. Попробуйте и Вы скопировать сиё послание в Гугл-переводчик. Вполне возможно, что оно Вас повеселит не меньше предыдущего. В любом случае был рад приподнять Вам настроение. А на счёт книги… чукча читатель - чукча не писатель. :)))

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Hello and welcome.

I like your post because after playing PoE a lot, I left for similar reasons: I got tired of having so many deep changes with each and every season. A few adjustements are great, but with them it is really deep and it affects almost all builds every time. I ended up feeling I was spending more time studying the changes than actually playing.
(Not flaming, I still think PoE is one of the greatest games ever made in many, many respects. The depth and amount of new concepts they brought is stunning.)

Now, about LE, I think a lot of factors make it much more casual-friendly. Namely:

  • The campaign is much shorter, meaning you can unlock all content in a short time. It is also (I think) much easier. And therefore even faster.
  • Building characters is far easier. You don’t have to spend hours theorycrafting or just blindly follow a build you don’t really understand, you can just jump in, pick any skill and see what happens. And it works. Or in the very rare cases where it doesn’t work, respecing is fast and easy.
  • The separation in classes, as opposed to an enormous tree shared by everyone, makes me believe that even if re-balancing happens between “seasons”, it will never be as huge as in PoE. Or if it is, it would only affect one class, not all of them. I guess.

Conclusion: go for it, you won’t be disappointed!
:slight_smile:

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I think you nailed it, far more succinctly than me. LOL I appreciate you chiming in. Well, crap, looks like its time for a new gaming laptop, Yo!

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Спасибо за помощь !

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