Comparing Last Epoch and Diablo 4

[Erasculio]

Diablo 4 has, as expected, a much higher production value than Last Epoch – all dialogue has voice acting, the game has plenty of the trademarked Blizzard cinematics, there are very detailed character animations, and so on. Considering the behemoth company funding D4, this is only to be expected, and is not the kind of thing EHG could possibly compete with.

Diablo 4 is also superior from a technical point of view: the game is incredibly well optimized, it runs greatly even on old machines, and it has very few noteworthy bugs. Even now, with the influx of players from Season 4, servers have been very stable, and I have never seen downtime or even a queue. This is something I don’t really expect EHG to mirror, but it’s something they could improve in Last Epoch.

But Diablo 4 has a much, much worse skill system. I have seen D4’s skill tree being called a “skill twig”, and that’s a very apt description – it’s incredibly shallow, with little room for variations or personalization. In comparison, Last Epoch’s skill system allows a huge variety of builds – the unique skill tree for each ability is really something that outshines everything D4 has.

Diablo 4 also has an open world, unlike Last Epoch, but honestly the open world feels like a failure. It’s bloated and repetitive – the same handful of events everywhere, enemy types are very similar in all regions of the game, even the environments are bland and almost monochromatic. I’m very happy that Last Epoch has not wasted their time with something like this.

And the Diablo 4 campaign is arguably as bad as LE’s one – the world is filled with uninteresting NPCs that all feel the same, the main storyline is incredibly shallow, and there are very few unique scenarios. Last Epoch’s campaign lacks polish, but at least it has far more variety than D4’s one.

The only aspect in which I think Last Epoch could learn from Diablo 4 is, ironically, the itemization – which is funny, considering that D4’s “loot reborn” season appears to be inspired by LE’s crafting system. The newly implemented system in Diablo feels better than what we have in EHG’s game:

• Upgrades in Diablo (such as legendary aspects and temper manuals) are unlocked, rather than spent. This means that even at low levels we can find an item that helps us through the entire game (by unlocking good modifiers). In Last Epoch, upgrades are spent, not unlocked – so items we acquire through the campaign are largely irrelevant, and will have no impact on what we use at the endgame.

• Diablo 4’s system is more forgiving. Most of the RNG in their crafting comes from using manuals to add new modifiers to items – each attempt adds a random modifier from the small list available at each manual. However, if we don’t get the desired modifier at first, most items allow for a few retries. Compare this with legendary forging in Last Epoch – we get one try, and if it fails, that’s it.

• Modifiers in Diablo 4 are more interesting than those in LE. While both games have the boring, basic ones (increased health, armor, resistances, etc), Diablo has (mostly through tempering using the crafting manuals) a significant list of unique modifiers that really help to define a build. The closest Last Epoch has are the experimental mods, but those are very limited (cannot be crafted, only found) and few in number.

In conclusion: Diablo 4 has flawed systems filled with bloated, repetitive content. The game is very polished, sure, but its foundation is a rotten one; unless they do more massive reworks like the current “loot reborn” update, it’s not really going to improve.

Last Epoch, in other hand, has a lot of flaws, but its foundation is solid. I believe the game can grow and become a huge success if EHG caters to LE’s strengths – not huge cinematics or an open world, rather a very robust skill system that gives a lot of flexibility and replayability.

[tess619]

I think it would be fairer to compare LE and D4 at the same point of their respective releases. D4 was OK at release, but the first major patch just about killed it. Remember, also, that D4 had nearly 30 years of story-line to build on, not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison to a brand-new game like LE. And don’t get me started on D4’s stash space!

After I stopped playing for awhile during the 0.9.2 days, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the game’s current state. I have hope that the campaign will continue to grow and get better, but I totally agree with the repetitive NPCs.

[Chaustrologic]

Some thoughts on your post:

@Erasculio

• Upgrades in Diablo (such as legendary aspects and temper manuals) are unlocked, rather than spent. This means that even at low levels we can find an item that helps us through the entire game (by unlocking good modifiers). In Last Epoch, upgrades are spent, not unlocked – so items we acquire through the campaign are largely irrelevant, and will have no impact on what we use at the endgame.

I’m not following with where you are going with spent vs unlocked because in LE we get something like aspects that are built into the skill tree itself. It would be like if Blizz redid the skill tree and incoporated all the aspects and the way they modified skills into the tree/paragon systems.

One of the complaints right now is how rares in D4 have become useless. Legendaries are soon replaced by GA gear. Many people don’t even look at anything that doesn’t have a GA affix. So both games have the consequence of gear progression which is that the further one gets then the more scarce upgrades become.

Let’s not even go into how uniques in D4 , for the most part, are where Sets are in LE.

@Erasculio

• Diablo 4’s system is more forgiving. Most of the RNG in their crafting comes from using manuals to add new modifiers to items – each attempt adds a random modifier from the small list available at each manual. However, if we don’t get the desired modifier at first, most items allow for a few retries. Compare this with legendary forging in Last Epoch – we get one try, and if it fails, that’s it.

Another very common complaint from D4 players is how even the tempering system is far too RNG for their liking.

When it comes to min-maxing gear towards the end of character progression then I’d say time and cost of getting BiS gear via Masterworking isn’t much better or less random than legendary forging in LE.

Let’s not forget that the new crafting mechanics in S4 of D4 are largely inspired by LE’s own crafting system.

@Erasculio

• Modifiers in Diablo 4 are more interesting than those in LE. While both games have the boring, basic ones (increased health, armor, resistances, etc), Diablo has (mostly through tempering using the crafting manuals) a significant list of unique modifiers that really help to define a build. The closest Last Epoch has are the experimental mods, but those are very limited (cannot be crafted, only found) and few in number.

Most of the tempering affixes are just damage additions, CDR, and AoE Radius.
Theses modifiers that tweak/enhance the skills already exist in LE via the skill tree itself. Many players right now have stopped using uniques all together because they just aren’t strong enough to be a viable replacement for Tempering & GA affixes.

Just look at Druids as an example, their class falls about 20 tiers behind other classes due to relying on Uniques that no longer hold up in the endgame.

Blizzard also cut down many affixes that simply weren’t doing anything which is the going in the right direction but many people building their paragon boards simply ignore 95% of it to get: Glyph Spots/More Hp/More Crit (or Vuln).

This leads me to my biggest complaint of D4 and how additive damage buckets work. It essentially encourages players to stack on damage additive type due to how the bucket works. If you look at the paragon board and how many build makers essentially ignore additive damage nodes and rush to glyphs to get those multipliers.

[BroncoCollider]

@Erasculio

Diablo 4’s system is more forgiving. Most of the RNG in their crafting comes from using manuals to add new modifiers to items – each attempt adds a random modifier from the small list available at each manual. However, if we don’t get the desired modifier at first, most items allow for a few retries. Compare this with legendary forging in Last Epoch – we get one try, and if it fails, that’s it.

The idea that Tempering in D4 is the equivalent of Legendaries in LE is so far off the mark that it makes me question if you could hit water after falling out of a boat. Tempering is not - by and of itself - a pinnacle end game system by which you create the most powerful items in the game. It’s just a shittier version of LE’s bog standard, everyday crafting, flipped around backwards and with more "fuck you"s from the RNG.

Rerolling a temper and repeatedly getting the same shitbox stat that is completely unusable to me is a more annoying experience by miles, which is multiplied by having to do it for every gear slot, repeatedly. I will choose slamming Legendaries all day long and getting results that are at least a marginal increase in power over the original, because of the Exalted item I chose.

@Chaustrologic

It would be like if Blizz redid the skill tree and incoporated all the aspects and the way they modified skills into the tree/paragon systems.

In other words, it would be like if Blizzard made an actual skill tree.

[tess619]

And again, we’re comparing Tempering, something added one year after launch, to a Legendary system that was just released. And, as @BroncoCollider so eloquently stated, it’s trash compared to LE.

One thing that I really hope doesn’t happen here is what happens to too many games - people complain about underpowered skills/items, devs say eff it and buff everything. Which describes the latest D4 patch to a tee.

[BroncoCollider]

D4 has a very different target audience than LE does. I don’t think we need to worry about LE doing the “skip through lush and sunny fields while pretty flowers ejaculate loot and power into your open arms” thing.

[Chaustrologic]

@BroncoCollider

I will choose slamming Legendaries all day long and getting results that are at least a marginal increase in power over the original, because of the Exalted item I chose.

Speaking of endgame crafting:

On a decent build it takes maybe 5-10 minutes to clear Temporal Sanctum assuming we’ve got the desired unique and exalted item. The gear hunting itself may take a little or a lot longer but the process of crafting is quick.

Now let’s assume in D4 one is running a build like Shadow Mages Necro (S-Tier but not the meta) and getting one gear fully MW’d:

PIT BREAKDOWN SOURCE

0-8 Rank takes x5 runs of T61
9-12 Rank takes x27.5 runs of T61 (550 Neathiron)
8.5 Mil Gold total

Lets say this build that takes roughly 4.5 minutes per run. Max efficiency IIRC is between 2-3 minutes but most players aren’t at that level and will probably take a little longer than 5 minutes.

That is a total of 2.4 hours to upgrade one item from 0-12. For x9/10 pieces of gear that is a full day of playing nonstop to get everything maxed along with 85 million gold. This is assuming one nails every one of those 25% affix increases they need.

Higher tiers this gets faster but only a handful of builds can push those tiers while keeping their clear time under 5 minutes.

[Heavy]

@Erasculio

• Upgrades in Diablo (such as legendary aspects and temper manuals) are unlocked, rather than spent. This means that even at low levels we can find an item that helps us through the entire game (by unlocking good modifiers). In Last Epoch, upgrades are spent, not unlocked – so items we acquire through the campaign are largely irrelevant, and will have no impact on what we use at the endgame.
• Diablo 4’s system is more forgiving. Most of the RNG in their crafting comes from using manuals to add new modifiers to items – each attempt adds a random modifier from the small list available at each manual. However, if we don’t get the desired modifier at first, most items allow for a few retries. Compare this with legendary forging in Last Epoch – we get one try, and if it fails, that’s it.

Both of these points are not “better” in D4 comapred to LE.
They are just different, and for me in a worse way.

Especially the first one is something I don’t want to see in LE at all.
Loot doesn’t need to be usefull for entire game.
Sometimes this “Collection System” feels like a Rogue-Lite, especially on follow up characters.
I don’t want to play Panini Sticker Album with my loot.

The second one, comparing Tempering with Legendary crafting is a bit of a stretch IMO. Legendary Crafting only applies to one rarity of item in LE, which are fixed stat items that are generally speaking not modifiable. Legendary crafting just gives you extra power on top of whatever the unique is giving you. And you as a player are in full control over the exalted item and all possible 4 stats that are potentially get transferd to the unique.
If your build already uses the unqiue anyway, any stat that gets transfered will be an upgrade. The problem that I see a lot is people having a lot of hyperbole opinions about “the wrong affix” getting transfered.
There are some cases, where a Legendary craft is only useable when a certain affix is transfered, but in those cases you usually don’t use the unique baseline anyway and rather use a rare or exalted item with that specific affix.

[Chomp96]

I see this a bit as cherry picking, maybe you have played only in meta build in LE, but no, if you have a normal build, and clearly not a fully crafted one, couse you are doing that dungeon to get that upgrade, if you need to face the t4 version of the dungeon you definitely will not clear it in 5/10 min, most likely you will countinue to die for hours, let’s be real, both of them need some times, and probably infinite time to get to the right perfect gear, and it’s fine. And also the thing that if you miss you have a small improve in LE, no, when you have unique with few LP most likely you have also useless stats, if you don’t want to craft the base item risking of brick it adding another layer on the process, let’s not minimized everything, seems almost that LE now is the more casual of the two

[Heavy]

@Chomp96

if you have a normal build, and clearly not a fully crafted one, couse you are doing that dungeon to get that upgrade, if you need to face the t4 version of the dungeon you definitely will not clear it in 5/10 min, most likely you will countinue to die for hours

Uniques that require T4 Temporal Sanctum are already on the more powerful side of items.
If you havea build utilizing these kind of items and your build cannot comfortably do T4 Temporal Sanctum, your character has a dozen different avenues of progress/upgrades as well.
That one legendary craft is not the only thing you can do to improve your character.

@Chomp96

And also the thing that if you miss you have a small improve in LE, no, when you have unique with few LP most likely you have also useless stats, if you don’t want to craft the base item risking of brick it adding another layer on the process, let’s not minimized everything, seems almost that LE now is the more casual of the two

This really is a issue that people put upon themselves for the most part. As a player you are in full control which exalted item you sacrifice for a legendary craft and if that exalted item has useless stats that is on you. There are basically no cases where a item slot doesn’t have at least 4 good stats. If you don’t have an exalted item with 4 useful stats yet, you have to judge for yourself if its worth risking taking an exalted items that might has 1-2 very good stats and 1-2 useless stats or if you wait for a better exalted item.

On top of that people very often always want the best possible outcome and anything less than that is “complete garbage”. In reality it is almsot never that black & white. There are outcomes that are still very good, just not “the best possible outcome”.
But people make huge drama out of that.

There really is no “bricking” in legendary crafting unless your build requires a very specific affix, which is very rare and even fi it does, you most likely don’t use that specific unique without a legendary craft anyway, so you are still using a rare/exalted item with that affix.

[Chaustrologic]

@Chomp96

I see this a bit as cherry picking, maybe you have played only in meta build in LE, but no, if you have a normal build, and clearly not a fully crafted one, couse you are doing that dungeon to get that upgrade, if you need to face the t4 version of the dungeon you definitely will not clear it in 5/10 min,

@Chomp96
Frost/Fire Skelly Build I made and play mainly.

I avoid playing meta-builds because I’m pretty much a minion player and find a lot of the meta builds to be boring. (I don’t play wraithlord/falconer either). I’ve killed Julra using this build with largely 1/2LP items.

I’ve since updated this with current gear: Frost/Fire Skelly Build which is by no means meta at all. I have a video killing Julra and even playing sloppy I managed to kill Julra in one minute. I spend around 5 minutes running through the dungeon and thats if im having bad luck finding the exits.

@Heavy

Uniques that require T4 Temporal Sanctum are already on the more powerful side of items.
If you havea build utilizing these kind of items and your build cannot comfortably do T4 Temporal Sanctum, your character has a dozen different avenues of progress/upgrades as well.

To add onto this: The highest item level that you can slam in T3 is lvl75 which covers a majority of build enabling uniques. If a build requires an item beyond then that is build that would probably be easier to play as an alt.

[Llama8]

@Erasculio

And the Diablo 4 campaign is arguably as bad as LE’s one – the world is filled with uninteresting NPCs that all feel the same, the main storyline is incredibly shallow, and there are very few unique scenarios. Last Epoch’s campaign lacks polish, but at least it has far more variety than D4’s one.

And yet D4’s story, writing & characterisation is leagues ahead of D3’s.

[xMetra]

Alright, I’m going to break this down as simple as I can.

Diablo 4 has and will forever be a game, played by individuals that want quick, immediate satisfaction. Most importantly, they all wish to earn the “participation” award. Ex., you put in 200hrs to get BiS gear and a player that has played 5hrs is now complaining that they aren’t getting that BiS gear, goes and complains and Blizz dev make it uniformly easier–bam, participation award!!

LE is doing it well. There needs to be chase items, items that are extremely difficult to earn. Additionally, bricking items is part of that chase. The satisfaction of getting that BiS item is rewarding and if instead it was nearly guaranteed the game will slowly fall apart.

Too many people nowadays are NOT putting in the time and effort and complaining on social media because they too want the amazing stuff–but with NO EFFORT.

Not good for the health of the game long-term.

EHG – keep at it! Great game!

[tess619]

@xMetra

Too many people nowadays are NOT putting in the time and effort and complaining on social media because they too want the amazing stuff–but with NO EFFORT.

You just described modern Society perfectly.

[Jerle]

I dont think there is anything to take away from D4 for LE from a game design perspective. The only thing D4 has over LE is the technical polish.

[Sol77]

Most points have been covered by this and I couldn’t agree more:

@Jerle

I dont think there is anything to take away from D4 for LE from a game design perspective. The only thing D4 has over LE is the technical polish.

But I have something to say about this:

@Erasculio

• Modifiers in Diablo 4 are more interesting than those in LE. While both games have the boring, basic ones (increased health, armor, resistances, etc), Diablo has (mostly through tempering using the crafting manuals) a significant list of unique modifiers that really help to define a build. The closest Last Epoch has are the experimental mods, but those are very limited (cannot be crafted, only found) and few in number.

These “boring” modifiers are important and we have quite a variety: 6 base stats, armor, dodge, resists, health, ward, block, attack speed, crit, crit multi, penetration…

The more of those we have, the merrier. Different builds can scale off different modifiers.

History lesson (if you care ):

I feel like I could give the Elrond speech of “I was there…” in every other post. In this case I mean Blizzard’s itemization choices over the course of WoW. Vanilla had many different modifiers, too and people had to figure out which were good and which were bad. Enter the brainless. Come WotLK items had an “item level” that people used to rank other people, making decisions on whom to take to a raid and whom not. However back then it was possible for an item of lower ilvl to be better than one of higher ilvl, which is the norm in item-based games. Obviously a random 2h-axe from a lvl 100 zone isn’t better than a well-rolled one from a lvl 90 zone. But people didn’t get that and Blizz had to cater to their audience by making sure an ilvl 100 axe was always superior to an ilvl 90 axe. Hence every item got: matching base stat for the class, health and two affixes from a heavily trimmed pool of those.

Now that’s WoW, but development of that and the Diablo franchise have always been hand in hand, hence D3 got the same negligent itemization. And let’s not go to deep into what D4 suffers from WoW… open world, collecting herbs… wtf.

Now what I would change in LE is the overabundance of “damage on tuesdays” class specific affixes. Everything + skill is fine, but of the rest, I feel like 50% could be trimmed.

There are affixes that can be removed altogether like “50% of void damage taken as physical”. I get that there are theoretical use-cases, however they are just that: theoretical. Getting that to 100% takes a higher toll on affixes than just capping void res in the first place. And yeah, armor applies, but it simply doesn’t add up.

Others could be grouped: Inc damage while transformed/channeling/wielding a dagger. Or instead of grouping just open up the regular inc damage affixes to helmets and chests and lose all that bloat. It’s been three weeks since I went back to my main only to get a certain exalted helmet and that’s so frustrating.

[Llama8]

@Sol77

Now what I would change in LE is the overabundance of “damage on tuesdays” class specific affixes.

I know what you mean with regard to D4’s “damage on Tuesdays”, but in LE (with the exception of damage v high/low life), the vast majority of conditions are trivially easy to meet & are things you would build for anyway (eg, Lightning Blast’s more damage v shocked or chilled). So, respectfully, LE’s “damage on Tuesdays”, isn’t even slightly in the same, or even adjacent categories, as D4’s.

[Sol77]

You may be right regarding the requirements, but my point is the sheer amount of those affixes that makes rolling helmets and chests a nightmare.

The only relevant function of this is to stack two inc damage prefixes that fully apply to your build. Like I can use inc dagger and inc sword if wielding one of each. If we simply removed all of those for the regular affixes, I could only get inc lightning like on other slots. Looking at the build planner, Rogue has 52 (!) prefix options on helmets vs 20 suffixes. That’s way, way, way too much. Trimming those to 20 should be doable without losing functionality or creating too much power - you can’t group those +4 skill affixes to apply to multiple skills (well maaaaaybe group + skills to traversal or something like that)
Int and attunement can also go on a helmet that only Rogues can use, which is nigh pointless - the only use is to slam those affixes onto a unique, but that’s truly not important.

[LowBudget]

I play both: D4 and LE (And also POE). They are all fun in their own different ways. I prefer D4 over LE though just because of the art direction and combat.