Community Designed Unique: Reveal!

Hello Travelers, and once more: Welcome to the final post of the Community Designed Unique Event!

Over the course of 6 weeks, we held a total of seven polls to result in a new Unique item to be immortalized within Last Epoch. This event has been a very special one. The entire unique from start to finish has been designed by the community.

Throughout this event, there have been many amazing ideas brought forward by the community, and some very close races in the polls. Some of these ideas may not have won the polls, but our hearts instead, and may well live to see implementation in some other form (Long unlive zom-bees!). However the community has spoken, and the Community Designed Unique has been created!

While our production team has been hard at work on multiplayer, Performance, and other top-secret changes for the next major update, our art team has been hard at work over the last couple of weeks to bring this Community Designed Unique to life for us to show off today. As an additional teaser: Since you all have decided on a new conversion for Volcanic Orb requiring new visuals, weā€™ve also taken this opportunity to bring the model and VFX for Volcanic Orb up to our current standards. These changes aim to give it a much more engaging visual design alongside many other combat and visual improvements. Weā€™re also looking at the SFX for Volcanic Orb, however, todayā€™s reveal will be covering some of the updated Visuals for Volcanic orb, the new Unique Spear, and the first reveal of the completed Unique itemā€™s stats!

So without further ado, allow us to introduce you all to your new unique item:

Lament of the Lost Refuge

Weā€™re really excited about where this new unique can be taken. Weā€™ve seen what can happen with Void based mages in the past, and weā€™re re-opening that door with this weapon. This unique effect also offers a lot of versatility in how its power is leveraged, rather than specifying skill combination . This gives it a strong ā€œuniqueā€ aspect rather than simply being a point of power for existing builds. Weā€™ll be monitoring the power of this unique closely on release to ensure it meets what weā€™re looking for. As part of that - we want this, as with almost all Uniques, to keep relevancy throughout the game. If the community finds it needs some more power after getting their hands on it for a while, or perhaps itā€™s destroying the hordes of the Void a little too easily, weā€™ll make sure it has a good solid home in Last Epoch as the very first Community Unique. So, with that, letā€™s take a look at what this new Unique looks like, and what kind of stats it will be bringing to the table in Last Epoch. Please note that these stats are not final, and are still subject to further QA testing.

To get ahead of at least one question - weā€™re currently looking at Corrupted Heraldry to have a 12 stack limit, with a 12 second duration per stack. This allows you to maintain full stacks so long as youā€™re following closely to the orb to be getting hit by shrapnel.

As mentioned, weā€™re taking this opportunity to enhance the visuals for the core Volcanic Orb skill as well, and would like to share the amazing new 3D models for Volcanic orb - The baseline Fire version, the cold conversion, and the all new Void conversion provided through this unique!

And finally, weā€™ve prepared a quick video demonstrating the new Item in action with its special effect and new Volcanic Orb visuals! Again, note that we are still tweaking some of the new visuals, and not all are necessarily final.

The Wrap-up

We were looking forward to running this kind of event for a long time, and are extremely happy that we finally arrived at a window in which weā€™ve been able to commit to it. A big thank you to everyone who got involved with this event submitting both your ideas, and your votes, to create this amazing new Unique item.

This event as far as weā€™re aware, has been a first of its kind. Full community guidance for creation of an in-game item is something which presents a number of challenges. With our ties to our community, we were more than happy to take these challenges head on, and weā€™ve learned a lot through this event. Weā€™re extremely happy with the outcome of the event, so there is a decent chance we may do something like this again in the future in a further refined form. But for now, this is our one and only, dearly created, Community Designed Unique.

We are planning to welcome the ā€œLament of the Lost Refugeā€ to the world of Eterra in the next major update for Last Epoch, so feel free to start your fallen Void Mage theory crafting! A final thank you to all of our awesome community, and weā€™ll see you in the next news post!


April 8th - Community Designed Unique Kick Off
April 15th - Community Designed Unique: Item Type
April 22nd - Community Designed Unique: Item Theme
April 29th - Community Designed Unique: Unique Effect
May 6th - Community Designed Unique: Item Art
May 13th - Community Designed Unique: Item Name and Flavour Text
May 27th - Community Designed Unique: Reveal!

21 Likes

either brokenly good, or avg cant wait to try it out!

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152 flat void spell damage (at max stacks) is quite a lot & the ā€œbaseā€ spell damage without any stacks is comparable to higher end staves but without any of the other caster implicits.

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the other issue there are not many ways to really play it. use movement skill lose buff. the only other real way get more void scaling with reyah chest piece. Not to mention you are missing out on crit you would normally get. So there are alot of downsides for that high value. Which would in turn give less scaling options. So the base would have to be high to compensate. But without playing i dont know if its enough. hence my speculation.

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Will we have to wait for the September patch to see this in action, or will there be a minor patch to add it to the game sooner?

Love the look of the new weapon. The flat added damage looks scary :fearful:

Weā€™re planning to roll this out with the next Major Update (which weā€™re currently looking at around ā€œSeptemberā€™ishā€).

Scaling this seems strange. The Mage trees donā€™t really accommodate Void damage too well. There are generic crit/spell crit scaling in the tree but you donā€™t get any extra crit on the item and it locks you out of using a Catalyst for crit.

It will still be interesting to see what people do with it.

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The difference between scaling a certain damage type or generic spells isnā€™t too much of a difference. Surely you get a bit fewer options on the passive tree, but most skill spec trees are not damage type specific and gear is very versatile anyway.

That is the thing with uniques that support a theme, the class is not inherently designed for, but that makes it even more interesting and less obvious how t oscale certain things.

Also there are a ton of other unique or set items you can combine it with.
There are even opportunities to give volcanic orb base crit or other interesting stats because this unique will change its tags.

There are also a lot of not so obvious options being enabled by this item. (Not volcanic orb related). That will be certainly something I will explore.

It will just end up being one no one uses. Orb is not good to begin with. This wonā€™t fix that at all

3 Likes

Feels Broken! CANT WAIT :slight_smile:

160 melee damage is pretty nice base damage without any mods. This intended for volcanic orb spell blade combo?

Bruhhh, the visuals look so great. :raised_hands: :raised_hands: Spellblade with this and Dark Shroud of Cinders seems like such good fun.

Overall I think the event was very intresting and engaging. Iā€™m super happy we didinā€™t end up with a Convention of Elements type item :sweat_smile:(Diablo 3 community unique). I really hope you guys come back with another version of this event. Some improvements could be made but I still enjoyed it a bunch. Thanks EHG =)

Hello again Kain. That weapon looks sick. Wish I had gotten into this game sooner so I could have participated. If you guys ever need new weapon or armor designs I do 3D modeling and texturing hint hint =P

Volcanic Orb need a buff, it should have more shards ( at least 2 times more ) and be able to hit same foe multiple time at bare minimum i guess

Probably too slow for Spellbladeā€¦ very little hope of getting decent ward using the typical spellblade mechanics of ward on meleeā€¦ never liked Orb style play in the first place so this unique is probably gonna be a damp squib for me personally.

It can if that target is big enough and this is made more effective if you gave some of the idols that reduce its speed.

Nice design. I like that the orb starts ant the tip of the spear. The VFX look really nice.

Iā€™m also not sure where this ā€œorb is a bad/ weak skillā€ attitude comes from. I experienced Orb as a really powerful skill.

Iā€™m very excited to build around that item.

orb doesnt hold up past 200+ corruption in empowered monos, I havent even played with the item yet and im disappointed.

When i first used V.Orb it was like humā€¦at one epoch xx ( sry donā€™t remember very well when^^) i know wasnā€™t impressed by this clear speed, not enought shards to my liking.

@llama humā€¦ ok maybe but just 2-3 hit at the big target i guess it still not enought for end game ? I may be wrong though.

My bad, yes nice work for the weapon guys, itā€™s just the skill himself that iim not very confident with.

The impact hit portion of the orb itself can only hit each target once.

But Shrapnels can hit targets dozens of times.
If you spec into shrapnel frequency and reduce the orbs speed enough orb can single handly hit a target more than any other skill per one use.

For clear shrapnel focused orb is also very strong, if you spec into shrapnel pierce.