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, we’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. We’re also looking at the SFX for Volcanic Orb, however, today’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 item’s stats!
So without further ado, allow us to introduce you all to your new unique item:
Lament of the Lost Refuge
We’re really excited about where this new unique can be taken. We’ve seen what can happen with Void based mages in the past, and we’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 “unique” aspect rather than simply being a point of power for existing builds. We’ll be monitoring the power of this unique closely on release to ensure it meets what we’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 it’s destroying the hordes of the Void a little too easily, we’ll make sure it has a good solid home in Last Epoch as the very first Community Unique. So, with that, let’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 - we’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 you’re following closely to the orb to be getting hit by shrapnel.
As mentioned, we’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, we’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 we’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 we’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 we’ve learned a lot through this event. We’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 “Lament of the Lost Refuge” 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 we’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!
(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 =)