As per the title, I’ve played a verifiably unhealthy amount of Last Epoch since launch. In that time, I’ve hit level 100 (plus over 40% of “level 101”) on one character and almost 98 on another, plus hit around 600 Corruption, killed T4 Julra, and reached Rank 10 with Circle of Fortune. As for my other ARPG experience, I’ve played D1 in 1997, tons of D2, at least 4,500 hours of PoE since open beta, and around 750 hours of D4.
After seeing several similar topics, I figured I’d take some time to throw my hat into the ring. The aim is to provide as much constructive feedback as possible. I obviously enjoy the game quite a lot, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered writing this, nor would I have invested this amount of time into it in barely a month.
Cycles
-
Ideally, I’d like to see Cycles implement content that’s exclusive to them, while also adding new things to the core game, such as new endgame activities. Otherwise, add a themed/gimmick mechanic to Cycles only, then introduce it in a more reserved state into the core game afterward (al a PoE). There needs to be a reason to play Cycles beyond “FrEsH.” If the first couple of new Cycles feature fulsome core game upgrades, I could understand them lacking an exclusive theme or features, but I feel this is highly necessary beyond that.
-
At the original time of writing this post, I had a point here about mid-Cycle balance changes, but the published survey results satisfied my point. The only complaint I have regarding them is players who abused bugs to achieve a high ladder ranking should have their ranks purged completely. Sanctions should be taken against more flagrant abuse cases (Ghostflame), especially ones that promote server instability. Otherwise, it encourages players to abuse bugs early and often, if the only consequence is the bug getting fixed. By encouraging bug abuse (not punishing = it’s allowed), this not only invalidates the ladder, but it also damages trade.
-
I’d like to see more detrimental bugs fixed mid-Cycle. While it’s important to fix abusive builds like Ghostflame and Profane Veil, I’d like to see issues such as characters freezing after using movement-based abilities, the Wraithlord randomly going on strike, non-functional passive nodes, etc, addressed with a similar priority. Disregard this if it’s a product of my outsider’s perception.
-
In terms of permanent additions to the game, horizontal power is ideal to help curtail power creep. An example of this was PoE’s Eater/Exarch Influence implicit mods being mutually exclusive with the other Influences and their explicit mods.
-
Cycle Challenges would be a nice addition. There could be 11 (for no reason in particular…), with a cosmetic awarded on every even challenge (so 1 per base class, or 5 agnostic ones). The 11th challenge could include a special reward, such as your account name being added into a Hall of Fame.
Itemization
-
Hopefully “chase” items are on the to-do list for 1.1 and beyond. As it stands, there aren’t really many chase items in LE, and they lack the mustard offered by items such as Headhunter or Mageblood. The closest thing we have to chase items beyond ultra-rare drops such as Omnis and Red Ring of Atlaria is finding items we already have, but with high LP.
-
Set items are obviously too weak. I’ve completely hidden them on my loot filter, and have yet to use the ones I have collected. Sets should be solid early/midgame options in many cases, as well as be BiS or close to BiS for specific builds only, perhaps via build-defining complete Set bonuses. They should be able to compete with 1-2 LP Uniques in terms of desirability when it comes to rare endgame Sets.
Circle of Fortune
-
Overall, it feels like CoF falls short of MG by a significant amount. While I’m under no illusion that it can truly compete with trading, it feels like CoF could use a little love on the LP front. Perhaps offering Prophecies that require high (500-600+) Corruption to satisfy, that guarantee 2 LP items, or add an additional passive LP chance multiplier that scales with Corruption. This way, CoF could have a good chance of finding 2-3 LP items at higher Corruption levels, but obviously not to the point of the game shitting out 2-3 LP Omnis every 3 feet. I suspect MG would still be well ahead of CoF, even with this buff.
-
Rank 9 feels completely useless apart from the 3rd Lens sockets. Due to how wretched Sets are, the only thing Rank 9 is doing for me is making me hear that THUNK several more times, because Sets are completely hidden in my loot filter. Even if Sets are made relevant, this bonus should be changed to something worthwhile (perhaps the LP buff I suggested above). This would allow you to design rare endgame Sets without making their acquisition trivial for CoF players, which is a risk if Sets are made too good.
-
In all, the more CoF falls behind MG, the more the “burden of optimal play” makes me feel compelled to reroll to MG, even though I vastly prefer the CoF play style. A gap between the two factions is fine, as it’s pretty much impossible to make CoF better than trade without unreasonable buffs, but there shouldn’t be a chasm between the two factions, either. In all, if the initial purpose of the item factions was for them to be comparable in power level, CoF needs major buffs to achieve this, and the buffs should be at higher ranks, as the gap occurs and grows later into a league.
-
If necessary, consider creating a secondary “legal tender” for players enlisted into CoF. All gold looted or gained from vendoring items would convert into this new currency, which would be used for vendor purchases, buying stash tabs, and the vault at the end of Lightless Arbor. This would resolve the “burden of optimal play” issue that caused key gold sale values to get nerfed, at a fundamental level. This currency would obviously be completely worthless to MG players, and couldn’t be exchanged for gold. Items bought or sold to vendors would need a hidden internal tag that forces the currency exchanged at a vendor to match what they were bought and sold with, to prevent players from circumventing this partition.
Endgame
-
Allow alternate characters to Empower Monoliths straight away, assuming a character has completed regular Monoliths on that account mode. By “account mode,” I mean whatever permutation of Cycle or Legacy + HC or SC + SSF or non-SSF, etc. Basically, if an alt has access to your other character’s stash and crafting materials bank, they can access this fast-track.
-
Allow alts to fast-track to your main’s Corruption level, or a specific fraction of it. Re-grinding Monoliths on very geared alts can get quite boring, as you have to do a lot of trivial content in order to reach what your character is capable of handling. Perhaps make the Bonus Corruption mechanic apply globally to your account mode, as opposed to merely character-wide? These two requests are based on the design philosophy of the Campaign and using Dungeon Keys to skip the majority of it.
-
Add a display for Stability and Corruption levels for each Monolith on the over-world map.
-
I’m unsure if it’s intentional to be able to “reroll” a map by TPing out if the objective and/or mob types are undesirable, without sacrificing your reward. If it’s unintended, then the things players are trying to avoid should be adjusted alongside a fix.
-
Display the Exclusive Echo Rewards on the over-world map. Perhaps there could be a toggle to show this information, as well as the Stability and Corruption, similar to the one available in the CoF telescope. Additionally, an “Active Prophecies” indicator for Prophecies that have specific Monolith requirements would be welcome.
-
Add a ladder for Corruption levels.
-
Ladders should differentiate between SSF and non-SSF, or at least CoF and MG. Otherwise, “burden of optimal play” will “force” players to play trade league if they want to compete. Part of the reason for SSF being its own thing beyond “the honour system” is to have a separate ladder.
-
If redoing Lightless Arbor’s end-of-dungeon reward is on the table, then turning it into LE’s version of a “Vaal Altar” could be a good idea. Maybe set tier-based level restrictions similar to Temporal Sanctum on what items you can “slam” into it. What I’m thinking, is it could change an item’s LP, with equally weighted outcomes being something like: 1) add 1 LP; 2) remove 1 LP; 3) nothing happens; or 4) delete the item. Performing this would add a tag that prevents it from being “slammed” again.
-
In response to the notions of dungeons being tweaked due to how tedious navigating the floors could be, I feel like a good starting point would be reducing the number of barricades and seeing how us players respond to layouts being less annoying.
-
I’m torn on the Lightless Arbor boss. On the one hand, its phase one mechanic fits the dungeon’s theme and gimmick extremely well, but on the other, it ignores build scaling; a naked level 1 takes the same amount of time to burn through the kindling that a fully decked out level 100 does, and that feels bad. Making kill speed somehow scale with gear level might defeat the purpose, however.
Multiplayer
-
Overall, this feels quite janky. My friend and I are often placed in different instances, bosses sometimes don’t “die” or drop rewards (they sit at 0 HP), and my friend’s ability effects can make it harder to avoid enemy telegraphs due to them being higher priority when they overlap.
-
Shrine buffs should apply to every player in the same zone. Having to call out Shrines and avoid clicking them in order for both of us to get the buff is annoying.
-
Corruption not being shared amongst players who progress a Monolith together basically makes group play in Monoliths a nonstarter. If I grind out a bunch of Corruption with my best friend, and one of us wants to play alone for a bit, only the “driver” of the Monolith keeps their progress, so the “passenger” is left with all their progression at 100 Corruption. If this is a countermeasure to curtail boosting, it feels like the cure is worse than the disease, as this heavily discourages group play, which already suffers from a lack of QoL.
UI/Quality of Life
-
Item labels on the ground are too hard to click on, and can stack weirdly if there are too many that drops. This gets extremely annoying on “mortar” maps.
-
On a similar vein, Dungeon/Arena Keys have no reason to be itemized. Ideally, they could bind to your account similar to crafting materials.
-
Shards/Runes/Glyphs currently have no reason to be itemized once they’re looted. Either add a purpose to them being itemized, or make them loot directly to your Forge. Having to click on them to loot them is fine, aside from the cases where the vacuum pick-up causes your game to freeze for a split second.
-
Implement a feature for all loot to drop at once after a certain threshold of dropped items is met. I’m only at 600ish Corruption as of writing this, and it takes a comical amount of time for chests and major monsters to finish dropping their loot.
-
I’d like the ability to unpin Campaign Quests from my tracker once I have defeated Majasa.
-
Add a full respec option for passive points, or at least “respec entire tree.” This obviously only concerns the points spent, not Mastery choice, nor a request for any discounts on respec fees. To prevent issues with spending 0 points in your core tree, allow the refund to occur, but disallow points from being spent in any of your Mastery trees until you have 20 in your class’s base tree.
-
The Wraithlord should have a health bar on his “portrait” that’s currently a white square.
-
If only one Shade is active and has a duration, such as Dread Shade, make its buff icon function similar to a Shrine buff’s to display its duration.
-
Telegraphs do not have high enough priority in some cases. Player effects and other things can conceal telegraphs, making them harder to see unnecessarily. Some telegraphs can blend in with the environment (e.g. the white circles made by a spell caster mob on snow maps). Beyond this, telegraphed abilities are mostly very clear and very fair.
-
Introduce some method to “store” Blessings to allow for swaps between Blessings we’ve already earned. Grinding out a high roll on an idea Blessing is tough by itself let alone swapping to a new one, and perhaps swapping back as needed. Complete freedom to swap would likely be too generous, however.
-
Holding left-click feels quite janky overall. Mousing over a Shrine or zone entrance while holding down left-click will function as if you’d clicked it. This also causes me to walk away from my stash if I mouse over the ground when dragging my cursor between my stash and my inventory. “Randomly” walking away from my stash while doing inventory management is highly annoying.
-
A full-inventory sale/deposit button (depending on if you’re at your Stash or a vendor) would be welcome.
-
Allow pet buffs (e.g. Shades being cast on Wraiths) to work via mousing over your pet’s frame in the top-left corner of the screen.
-
Chat auto-filter is way, way too strict. Last Epoch isn’t a children’s game, so there’s no reason for chat to completely block messages containing swear words. Obviously, auto-filtering out racial slurs and the like is a good thing, but LE’s filter needs to be dialled back a ton. Swearing should be allowed, since the game has a profanity filter option.
-
The chat box sometimes appearing, even when chat is disabled, is annoying. The same goes for “/p” not working to bring up party chat. I ended up disabling chat entirely, because the chat auto-filter blocks most messages (except, oddly enough, RMT sales spam…), and General/Global chat kept getting re-enabled. Due to this and the reason above, I’ve disabled chat entirely until changes are made.
Loot Filters
-
Remove drop sounds and map markers from hidden items. Getting “baited” by hearing the “THUNK” of an Exalted item drop off-screen, then running to it to see it’s filtered, is annoying for ranged builds. This gets quite bothersome at high Corruption with CoF, due to the sheer amount of Exalted items that drop.
-
Allow us to filter by Legendary Potential and Weaver’s Will values on Unique items. Once you’re deep enough into endgame, most Uniques aren’t worth even looking at if they have 0 LP. This would require conditions pertaining to each WW/Unique item in the game. For example, I’d always want to see Omnis regardless of LP, but I have no interest in seeing a Boneclamor without at least 1 LP, Siphon of Anguish without 2 or more, etc.
-
This may not be possible with the filter system’s current architecture, but it would be nice to be able to filter by roll values for certain things as well. For instance, I’d only want to see small Idols with 6-8% resistance, while hiding ones that roll 5% or lower.
Stash Tabs
-
Searching could be improved (regex?). Currently, typing “physical res” will show Idols that don’t have any Physical Resistance on them, because those two words appear in item’s affixes directly or in their advanced tooltip (“health” highlighting Vitality Idols is a big example of this).
-
Further, the contrast between highlighted and faded items searched should be increased. I’ve missed items before due to them not standing out enough.
-
Tab/Category Affinities would be welcome, though aren’t as necessary as they are in PoE.
-
Category labels’ minimum “width” could be shortened.
-
The stash’s sort feature could use improvement. A big example of this is it doesn’t even sort Keys properly (all Keys of the same name should be bunched together, but aren’t). Another issue is I still find myself having to play a bit of Tetris after using the sort button on tabs that are almost full.
-
The default tab your stash opens to feels inconsistent. It’ll open to some random tab in the middle of my stash, as opposed to the leftmost tab in the leftmost category, or the tab I most recently sorted/edited. Performing the latter option “fixes” this, but only for the current session.
Major Bugs
-
There is an interaction involving travel-based skills that can cause characters to become unresponsive until certain other skills are performed, though the “fix” is not consistent. I had to abandon my almost-98 Void Knight who used Warpath, Void Cleave, Shield Rush, Volatile Reversal, and Anomaly, because I was dying to this bug more often than player error while pushing Corruption.
-
The Wraithlord sometimes decides to become ornery. He’ll randomly like to zoom off-screen, doing his own thing, and not perform any attacks or other abilities. Teleporting him with a Traversal effect remedies this.
-
Charge-based skills (Shield Rush in particular) get stuck way too easily on terrain. One example is you cannot use Shield Rush for mobility in the Emperor of Corpses’ arena, because it’ll get stuck on a flat surface for no apparent reason. The slightest shift in elevation (looking at you, winter lodge maps) also stop Shield Rush.
-
Shrines appear to not function at all in Tiered Arena after Wave 10, when it switches maps. I haven’t done Endless Arena yet, so I’m unsure if this bug exists there as well.
Misc Suggestions
-
To deepen itemization in a later patch, one idea I came up with is to add a Rune of Eterra and a Rune of Orobyss. These would add an appropriately themed affix specific to them, but would add it to the “sealed” slot, and perhaps keep it mutually exclusive with Experimental. Having the affixes be only one tier might also be appropriate. This adds a dimension to items, without making power creep get crazy (and, since it’s sealed, cannot be slammed onto Uniques, and it adheres to the 1 sealed affix limit).
-
An idea for an “Uber” boss I had is the Immortal Emperor’s Chief Engineer. Fighting him would involve a “boss rush” of soul machines (al a Cortex from PoE), and the “Uber” version could have a final extra phase of the Engineer himself after the boss rush. An idea for the Uber-only loot he could drop is a chest piece with generically powerful stats, but comes with a guaranteed +2 LP, so finding one with 3 LP would be equivalent to finding Omnis with 1 LP, etc. The idea is the player can craft their ideal chest easily (thematically ties in with the boss’s theme). Obviously, a combination of the entrance fee to the encounter, the encounter’s difficulty, and the item’s drop rate would need to reflect its power, as it’s intended to be a chase item.
-
Glyphs themed around the four gods to add or replace implicit mods to items, depending on balance. These items being Glyphs would make them mutually exclusive with Glyph of Hope, so they’re more of a “final step” in crafting.
-
Why not add a very rare Unique ring, called “The Stone of Corbel”? Its artwork could be a ring set with a jet, and its stats could be a throwback to SoJ. Hell, the word “mox” could even be worked into the item’s flavour text.
Apologies for the length, but I’ve sat on this for quite a while. I felt this was the most appropriate place to post something like this, as it doesn’t fit into the official Discord’s feedback/suggestion threads properly, and I’ve noticed the official subreddit’s been quite trigger-happy with burying constructive feedback posts in downvotes this past week or two.
Hopefully this is useful in some way.