I agree. I think the portal charms were a really illconceived solution. I actually hope EHG will remove them and give us something better when (if?) they rework dungeons. I’m not sure EHG has enough courage for this, though, considering how looks like they are already wavering on the imprint issue.
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You make a lot of valid points in your post.
What I suggested was one possible approach, but thinking about it more, I agree it doesn’t fully solve the core issue, which is the friction and “jank” around accessing essential systems like the Eternity Cache.
It might point more toward a broader rework of how dungeon rewards are structured, especially for systems that are essential to progression. In that case, a full skip likely wouldn’t make sense anymore.
That’s a good point, and I think that’s where dungeon identity becomes important.
My suggestion to rebalance dungeon rewards (alongside adding mechanic-based charms) was meant to give each dungeon its own gameplay value beyond just a system for a boss drop or reward access.
Right now, a lot of that content feels outdated compared to how the current gameplay loop has evolved, so players tend to engage only with what’s strictly necessary (eg. eternity cache or a specific boss drop) and running the dungeon itself becomes a chore.
I agree, balance is one of the biggest pain points for me right now.
One of my main frustrations is how wide the gap can be between builds. Some can delete Uber Aberroth with relatively low investment, skipping mechanics entirely, while others struggle even with heavy investment.
That kind of disparity makes it harder to experiment or feel rewarded for pushing less meta builds, which might make players quit sooner or not engage with new content at all.
That said, one positive is that most builds can still clear regular Aberroth if played well, which is a good baseline to build on.
I was thinking more along the lines of a new encounter with its own mechanics and identity.
It doesn’t necessarily need to match Uber Aberroth in difficulty. Could be something slightly above the current Season 4 Woven Echo boss.
The current Woven Echo Crystallized Heart Rift Beast feels more like a “harder variant” of the same evolved rift beast fight, rather than offering a meaningfully different challenge.
I really enjoyed the echo chains. I think its a big step in the right direction for the endgame.
My main point is that customization still feels a bit limited in practice. For example, even when investing into Echo Chain-related nodes, you often still end up running a lot of standard echoes.
The goal with my suggestions was to push that system further, so players have more consistent control over how their endgame experience plays out.
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Hmm, I think that we should try to attune to both camps.
Having an option to skip the campaign after killing uber is a good thing. It gives the game longevity, I like creating multiple characters and testing them out.
I switch factions every season (so this season was CoF season), but my friends are all marketplace people, I’ve heard many complaints this season from them as the player count is quite low and selling/buying items has become harder because of it.
A typical gameplay loop for my friends is:
- Farm Items
- Sell Items
- Buy potential upgrades (Unique LP2+ + Exalted item with T7)
- Try slamming
It is actually a “quit the game” moment if you see 5+ hours of gameplay wasted, because of a bricked slam. So this is making people QUIT and NOT making them come back. The game should have some kind of mechanic that rewards time spent means better chance at slamming a potential next item. I have said this before, it got improved a little by guaranteeing one stat at least.
Some of my friends have become very anxious even thinking of slamming. And i’m quoting here, my friends were saying exactly this: “I have to slam my item now… Ughhh how can a game give me this much anxiety, I don’t want it to fail again, because it will mean another full day of farming gone in 30s. I don’t even know if I want to keep playing if it fails”.
I know 5 people that play Last Epoch and out of those 5, 4 would immediately quit if there’s no way to get the top 5% items.
Also, I think you are underestimating the appeal of the “perfectionist” trying to get perfect gear. It’s one of the reasons PoE is as popular as it is (even though it is WAY more hardcore than LE). None of the “perfect” gear is easy to get in PoE either, but there’s a chance and way to get them.
Having lots of options in one game is one of the reasons my friends and I play Last epoch. I can be CoF, they can be MG. We can still play together and have our own goals in the game.
Please no. Don’t gate quality of life features by killing uber or reaching level 100 or whatever; either have them, or don’t.
I’m asking this 100% in sincerity, not trying to be snarky, but: what’s the difference between that and the crafting in Path of Exile? In PoE, multiple systems have been made involving gambling (the former creative director liked to talk about the “excitment” of closing his eyes and slamming an Exalted Orb on an item, which could make it awesome or more likely brick it), almost all of which are more likely to fail than to succeed. Crafting in PoE usually requires using dozens of items before a player gets what they want, with multiple steps in which a item can be ruined.
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I’d say that at least in PoE if that exalt hit the wrong affix you could at least return to a previous step in the grafting process & carry on trying again. Trying to corrupt or double corrupt an item in PoE? Yeah, that may well “brick” the item, but at least there’s still some crafting possible on corrupted items now.
I kinda disagree with this, unless you’re talking about corrupting an item. It’d require lots of currency & crafting steps, but you can generally go back to a previous step.
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While this is technically true, for the point he was making it’s kinda irrelevant. In PoE you can spend a full day farming and your efforts could be gone in 30s as well. It’s just that you keep the item in most cases and you can try to revert it back. But you still lost “progress” just the same.
Not to mention that PoE does have currency that has a very high chance of simply poofing your item as well and there’s no returning from that.
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Please no. Don’t gate quality of life features by killing uber or reaching level 100 or whatever; either have them, or don’t.
Don’t mind either, I actually think the current way to make an alt is good. However, I would smooth out the last few missing idol slots and passive points. Because now you are left hussling the sidequests even after skipping the dungeons. I made a couple of alts this season.
I’m asking this 100% in sincerity, not trying to be snarky, but: what’s the difference between that and the crafting in Path of Exile? In PoE, multiple systems have been made involving gambling (the former creative director liked to talk about the “excitment” of closing his eyes and slamming an Exalted Orb on an item, which could make it awesome or more likely brick it), almost all of which are more likely to fail than to succeed. Crafting in PoE usually requires using dozens of items before a player gets what they want, with multiple steps in which a item can be ruined.
This is definitely not a snarky question, I have asked them the same question (I played PoE back in the days for a few seasons). They said that crafting in Last Epoch is actually better/easier. While crafting in Path of Exile is mostly luck. However, you can buy almost everything in Path of Exile, as long as you have the money. Also there’s no forging potential, you can keep crafting until you get the stuff you need. You can also go back to scratch. So currency is your “forging potential”. The only way when something is really bricked is when it’s corrupted and it fails.
I also heard there’s an item that can reveal that outcome of a craft, “Hinekora’s Lock”, it’s expensive but if you really don’t want it to fail, it’s another option. And additionally you can sell items in every step. So if you made a good base with the right stat, you could sell it for example (for someone else to continue to the process).
I might be saying it wrong, as I haven’t played it for a while and it was a long story. But the biggest problem is that you can’t re-sell stuff again in Last Epoch on the auction house, while you can in Path of Exile. So a “bricked item” for them, might mean a good item for someone else. Except they can’t sell it again, therefore the item will be rotting in their stash forever. If you could re-sell “failed slams”, that would solve a big issue.
Because that would mean you could buy “bricked LP2” items, that seem “bricked” for someone trying to get the right stats on an LP3 item. So you are forced to gamble in Last Epoch, while in Path of Exile it’s an option (there’s many ways to go around it). You can buy stuff that nobody continued or failed in some step in the crafting process.
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I only play in true off-line, I had no idea about that. Thanks for telling me about it.
I would support that.
Monoliths:
- Agree on consolidating monoliths, corruption slider, and shared-stash-wide corruption.
- I would keep Quest Echoes for 0 Corruption, but once the player defeats the timeline boss the first time, have that add 1 Corruption and remove the Quest Echoes. Maybe add a brief animation (not a cutscene, just some UI animation) to call attention to this upon clicking the timeline crystal again after defeating the boss.
- I’m not really sold on more Blessings unless there are some compelling ideas for what new blessings would give.
- I’m indifferent on the proposed pinnacle bosses.
Weaver Tree:
- Indifferent on the “block mechanics nodes.” I guess this would block their specific echo chains plus block them from appearing in other echoes, so maybe the niche use would be to get more echo chains of unblocked types by blocking some?
- I personally like the idea of consolidating the “appear more often” nodes that already exist into "force mechanics nodes if new nodes are being added just to keep the web from becoming way too big and awkward to path through.
- Agree with additional reward-block nodes.
- I don’t think there need to be reward-conversion nodes if the block nodes are expanded. They achieve similar things already.
- Indifferent on more pack size nodes.
- Arena Nodes need to be way less point-intensive than they are now. I’m wary about trying to add themed arenas if it’s done via the Weaver Tree without making other arena nodes less point-heavy first.
- Agree on smaller (and I guess bigger) Tomb/Cemetery nodes.
- Idol-rolls feels more like a COF feature than a Weaver Tree node to me.
- Indifferent on Woven Enchanter uses node.
- Indifferent on Omen Window spawn speed node.
- I would have an “extra omens” node just replace the roaming omens node. Roaming omens are really disappointing. But I agree an extra omen windows node would be nice.
- Indifferent on a Possessed Omens node.
- Evolution control node honestly makes me think there should just be a separate Primal Hunt faction.
- The Primordial drop conversion idea feels like it could be part of either a new Primal Hunt faction or the existing COF faction.
- Nemesis Egg node feels to me like it would be better in a new COF Tree or Harbinger Tree than Weaver Tree.
- Exiled Mage Nemeses also feels like it would belong in a new Harbinger Tree.
- Agree that the imprint nerf went too far for exalted items especially.
Dungeons:
- Disagree on making them outdoor / open-area maps. But agree that the current layouts are often terrible. (Roaming Lightless Arbor from one door all the way to the other just to find out you preferred the first door but weighing whether it’s worth the runback is certainly an experience…)
- Agree on rebalancing rewards.
- Indifferent on new dungeon tier unlocking mechanism.
- Indifferent on Omen/Rift Beast/Nemesis/Exiled Mage charms for Dungeons.
- Disagree with adding Tomb/Cemetery charms for Dungeons. That’s too matryoshka for me.
- Agree with applying Corruption scaling to Dungeons.
- Indifferent with souls being a currency.
- Disagree with a reward room charm.
Champion’s Gate Arena:
- Indifferent on anything Champion’s Gate-related.
Classes:
- Disagree on “fifth skill[s]” being a priority. If they make sense as a solution for fixing build variety and balance issues classes have, sure, but at this point that feels more like a tool available to solve a problem than the problem itself.
- Agree underperforming masteries should get rather sweeping adjustments.
Campaign:
- Agree on non-dungeon shortcuts.
- Agree on passive/idol/waypoint/etc. unlocks being shared across same-stash characters.
Sets:
- Disagree on craftable slots unless it’s weighted in a way similar to LPL, so that items like the weaver amulet aren’t being treated the same as much weaker set items.
Crafting:
- Indifferent on Area Level increasing FP.
- Agree with Rune of Removal proposed change.
- Indifferent on Rune of Shattering change.
- Agree on reducing maximum FP cost of Runes of Havoc, Redemption, Refinement, Shaping, and Evolution, and for adding affixes.
- Disagree on the proposed Glyph of Despair change. Frankly I think it should be turned into a Rune instead, used for sealing an affix, and have nothing to do with upgrading affixes. I would allow it to seal higher than T4, but with a higher chance to fail if trying to seal a higher tier.
- Would add that Glyph of Envy should be replaced with a 1-FP-consuming Woven Echo similar to Oerdan’s Watch. The player should sacrifice 1 item (like Gauntlet of Strife) to change a second non-unique, non-set item of the same type to have the subtype of the sacrificed item.
COF Rework:
- Honestly I hope they go with a “tree” system and leverage imprinting rather than use the lenses. The tree can branch into roughly four quadrants (with some pathing between them), roughly corresponding to the four telescopes currently, as well as some general benefits.
- Agree with the rank bonuses, but as tree nodes.
Merchant’s Guild:
- Indifferent on Merchant’s Guild.
Enemies:
- DOTs seem to be improved for the most part now, but yes, a thorough comb-through would be good.
- I would add a “last 5 seconds” on-death look back or something though to better recognize what actually killed the player. Often when I die and get something like “68 damage” I know something else clearly hit me for several thousand just before that DOT finished me off, but not what.
Bug Fixes
- Yes.
Achievements:
- Entirely indifferent.
Season Mechanic:
- Indifferent / would rather be surprised what EHG is cooking up. Also not really interested in any of those ‘Divine’ ideas except maybe the Idols one.
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None of this will matter if the server remain non-functional. LE-51, LE-52, Connection bug. I have 1140+ hours played and the servers are the worst they have ever been.
Apart from vaals, which ones are they?
Yeah, that’s by design, to negate some of the worst types of (trading) behaviour in an arpg.
TBF, it may be bricked for your build but not for another. Or it may just be an upgrade 'cause their gear sucks. And this I do kinda like.
This is true.
Orb of chance has a chance to destroy the item, just like the tainted mythic orb does, although in those cases you don’t actually care about the base item since you’re only trying to find a unique. You still lose the item, though.
Then there’s the volatile vaal orb which wil simply poof your item more often than it corrupts it. It doesn’t even just brick your item like a regular vaal orb, it just poofs it. And it’s used a lot on the higher endgame uniques to try to make them more valuable.
I think this goes a bit deeper than just “a failed slam = quit moment.”
We already have guaranteed 1 affix on LP slams (which was a great change in my opinion), and that’s where a big portion of the power comes from. So the question becomes: why, for some players, does missing the extra desired affixes still feel like failure?
From what I’ve seen and experienced, it’s a mix of factors:
-
Player expectations
- Some players feel like their build needs very high LP items (2LP Red Ring, 3LP World Splitter, etc.), along with double T7 or near-perfect slams — which aren’t realistic, especially after imprint changes.
-
Balance disparities
- Some builds can clear Uber content with just a 1 T7 slam, while others need significantly more investment. That gap pushes players toward chasing “perfect” slams just to stay competitive and be able to clear uber on less meta builds.
-
Dopamine vs. anti-dopamine
- ARPGs thrive on big drops feeling amazing. Getting a rare LP unique or near perfect exalted and then “bricking” it feels like the game taking that moment away, especially if it’s something you might never see dropping again. The anti-dopamine moment might drive players away from the game.
-
2+ LP Slams (especially for CoF)
- Crafting for 1LP slams is easy enough now, with all the tools available. But for 2LP+, when you need specific affixes, it becomes much more RNG-heavy, and that got worse with imprint nerfs.
-
Underwhelming Suffixes
- Many suffixes aren’t desired affixes to slam. So in some cases missing a prefix slam might as well be considered a “brick”.
I’m not sure players expectations can be “fixed”, but some systems can help smooth this out. That’s where some of my suggestions may help:
- Better class/build balance, so more builds can push uber content without needing near-perfect slams
- Crafting improvements (FP changes) to make crafting exalteds more consistent and “achievable” in a more reasonable amount of time
- The LP-lock rune idea: allowing a controlled T5 craft on top of the already guaranteed 1 LP affix slam. The tradeoff is the item can no longer be corrupted and the crafted affix is limited to T5
- CoF improvements (which we know are coming)
- Potential new blessing options to help offset missed slams
These help reduce the feeling that a single outcome invalidates hours of progress.
The idea becomes more relevant as the number of mechanics keeps growing.
We already have: exiled mages, nemesis, tombs, rift beasts and omens. Since each new season seems to always add a new mechanic, we will soon have “too many things” that can spawn in a single monolith echo.
The purpose of blocking nodes is to give players control over what they don’t want to engage with. For example:
- The player Blocks Rift Beasts and invests into the “most echoes are echo chains”
- Rift Beasts echo chains no longer spawns, increasing chances of the remaining echo chains types spawning instead
- Any monolith Echoes you play won’t have Rift Beasts, increasing chances of other mechanics spawning instead
So it’s less about niche filtering, and more about shaping your farming environment.
A very fair point.
I personally haven’t run into many issues, but I have seen a consistent number of reports about connection problems. Regardless of systems or content, server stability is foundational and if that’s not working well, everything else becomes secondary.
To be fair, given that Uby is the top pinnacle content of the game and considering how such content is often placed in other games, it would be more likely that a good balance would make it so that all builds can push uber content only with near-perfect slams.
So rather than make the hardest content in the game easy for everyone, it would make the hardest content in the game hard for everyone.
I think we have to be careful with any demands for “skips”. Any feature that lets you skip the player progression just invalidates content and makes players quit even faster. Because what’s the point of playing more than a few hours when you can basically get fully decked out in a short time? Players will just cry out that there’s no content.
I honestly think rather than an actual effortless “skip” (such as campaign skip) it’s better to have an alternative path or varied experience that takes you there gradually too but takes an equal amount of effort (unlike D4 adventure mode). The journey should be the goal.
Best example are the portal charms and the guaranteed 1LP slam. The portal charm raises the question now, why we even need to enter the dungeon, do the boss, place items in the forge and press another button to switch times.
The guaranteed 1LP slam just raises the bar across the board. Next, players demand guaranteed 2LP slam and so on.
I’m afraid EHG will never be able to rip the portal charms bandaid off at this point without causing a major uproar. Once an effortless skip is in place, it’s hard to ever get rid of it again.
Some people just want to have things handed to them without realizing that these things are interesting exactly because they are not just given for free without any effort.
Got it, so you’re saying something else would roll in the same random encounter slot (rather than the blocked thing merely being gone). That’s the piece I was missing (since already nothing forces you to interact with a Nemesis that spawns, for example).
I never said anything about filtering. But anyway.
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I think some simple QoL stuff would help the feel of this. For instance, once you unlock Empowered Monoliths, it should unlock all Waypoints though out Eterra and trigger/complete all Campaign quest lines regardless. Gets really annoying when you want to dummy test stuff but you skipped most of campaign on an alt character at the Waypoint to that area is locked off behind numerous areas.
I’m willing to bet this is coming at some point.
That’s a really good idea.
I think we’ll see a lot more of this once the Orobyss story is finished but I don’t see them being able to do that feasible until then.
Lot of great suggestions in here. I think a fair amount of them are ‘in process’ and once all the core assets are in place (i.e. chapt 11/12, remaining skills, etc) they’ll have more opps to tackle this stuff.
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What do you mean “destroy the item”? It chances a white item into a magic/rare/unique. Last I checked, none of those were “destroyed”.
50% chance is not “more often than not”. But it is weird that it can destroy the item.
Do people bitch that the Volatile Vaal can destroy their items though?
Right, it’s just the tainted mythic orb that destroys the item, got confused. Still, that’s 2 currencies that just poof the item entirely. And they even did the same in PoE2.
No idea. Some probably do, like they complain of regular vaal bricking items. But most people doing corruption at endgame with these items are grinders that buy dozens of items to flip, so I guess they’re fine with it.
The point is that there are things in PoE that also really brick your item and can cause you to lose progress.
After all, the initial point was “I played for 5h and felt like I lost all progress”, which is something that can easily happen in PoE as well.
And even though you can usually revert an item to a previous state, you can still lose progress, by having a craft go wrong and forcing you to reset the item to its state of a few sessions ago, which is actually worse than in LE.
Or just by the craft not giving you what you want and staying in the same spot, which isn’t as bad and equivalent to what happens in LE.
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