Before I go into the feedback and suggestions I have gathered from my 78 hours of Last Epoch in the last couple months, I’d like to give a little context and background information about myself (to clarify, I do not believe my experience makes my feedback any more or less important than anyone else’s as it is all relevant).
I began playing video games around the age of 5 with one of the early versions of the Atari. After that I had spent countless hours and nights playing many games on many consoles and systems but nothing quite captured my attention and thoughts quiet like the first time I played Diablo 1. At the age of 13 I received the Diablo 2 battle chest and from then til today I easily have over 25k hours into Diablo 2. After being disappointed with Diablo 3 and getting into Path of Exile back in June 2012 it quickly became my main game and I have since sank around an estimated 10k-15k hours into it as well as spending over 10k USD on supporter packs and having designed Unending Hunger (the best in slot Spectre jewel) and The Craving divination card. I have also spent hundreds of hours in multiple other ARPGs like Grim Dawn. During my time in these games I not only gave feedback and reported bugs often but was very active in their communities learning what people actually found fun in the games and what the differences were between those things and what I personally found fun.
So now that I’ve gotten into Last Epoch, I’d like to offer my thoughts, feedback and suggestions on everything I’ve had thoughts about so far in Last Epoch that I feel would improve and benefit the game the most. I will split this into two main sections, the first for suggestions and what I feel needs improvement, and the second for what I feel is good or should remain in the game.
— Suggestions (With reasoning and in the order of importance I feel they have from most important and moving down towards things that could wait longer to be improved. Also, I apologize if I mention anything that is already known or has improvements planned.):
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A. Minions should teleport/move with you when returning through a town portal. Currently when returning through a town portal they spawn at the beginning of the instance and run towards you.
B. Reasoning: Self Explanatory -
A. Enemies should not respawn when leaving/returning (it happens on one of these events, not sure which) to an instance.
B. Reasoning: This discourages returning to town to vendor items and can be unnecessarily problematic for hardcore characters if dangerous enemies respawn near a town portal, especially for minion builds that currently always either have to resummon their army or wait for their army to run back to their location from the beginning of the instance after returning to the instance through a town portal. -
A. Character movement/pathing and visual representation of physically blocked spots needs updating/improved.
B. Reasoning: Currently there are a moderate amount of areas your character seems to have trouble pathing around/through, especially many of the doorways early on in the story (Which I’m guessing also end up in the end game areas?). -
A. Assemble Abomination should consume minions faster by default or grant your character (by default) a significant amount of reduced damage taken and/or life regeneration while channeling to summon it.
B. Reasoning: Not only are you losing minions as you channel, the things that kill enemies and protect you, but you cannot move or stop channeling if you don’t want to spawn your abomination half-baked. If you do try to channel Assemble Abomination until all your other minions have been consumed during combat you become extremely likely to die before it spawns and if you stop channeling to avoid damage but still want an abomination maxed out from all the minions you can have you not only have to start channeling it again but also resummon all minions you lost first. -
A. Your abomination should either not be able to be consumed by the effect from the Necromancer passive “Effigies” or should have an easy to get point in it’s specialization tree that accomplishes that.
B. Reasoning: Not only is this an issue because of the problems mentioned in the reasoning for suggestion 4, but because if you just consumed all your minions to spawn your abomination you are likely to be low on life from damage sustained while channeling and your big beefy abomination is likely to be the only minion you have around. Therefore if you get hit once your abomination is out there’s a decent chance it gets sacrificed to heal you leaving you with zero minions almost immediately after spawning your abomination.
C. I wanted to put this here: I was extremely excited to try out Assemble Abomination and was a bit disappointed for the reasons above but overall I really like a lot of it’s specializations, functionality and interactions and believe it has good potential to become one of the most interesting and most popular minion skills ever put into an ARPG/RPG. -
A. Replace the altar (the monster wave event) and towers that need to be destroyed with more interesting prerequisites for completing monolith encounters.
B. Reasoning: A lot of times, especially if I am seeking to put my build to the test, I want a boss or something with a significant amount of health to destroy. I like the quests and regular bosses but the two completion events I mentioned above feel lacking to me in a few ways. -
A. Items should have 6 affix slots rather than 4.
B. Reasoning: With the very large number of affix shards it is possible to have and the amount of potentially desirable affixes and types of protections/modifiers I feel like I’m often making choices I don’t want to make while choosing suffixes/prefixes. I also feel like it’s a bit of a struggle to get all the affixes you want across all your gear.
— Things I really like:
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Skill specializations and the way most of them open up many builds and play styles with the same skills.
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The uniqueness and interesting things the passive trees offer.
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The crafting system.
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The way many mechanics already interact with or buff each other further enabling builds and making theorycrafting even more interesting.
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The graphics and amount of detail in many of the areas, especially the snowy areas and coral/sea themed areas.
— Additional thoughts:
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Not much of an issue due to finding items for other classes being pretty rare, but at some point before full release I would like it to not be possible to find items for other classes on solo characters that can’t share items through their stash anyways.
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I noticed a significant improvement in optimization between the time I received Last Epoch earlier this summer and now, though it still has a long way to go.
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I would like to be able to refresh the regular vendor inventory in addition to the gamble vendor.
I might return to this post to add suggestions, feedback or thoughts, and again I apologize if any of my suggestions are things already known/planned to be changed. I’d also like to say I haven’t played classes other than Acolyte much and have little experience with end game so I didn’t have much feedback outside of what I have experienced so far.
Thanks for reading!
