Developer Stream - June 23, 2023 (Transcribed)

AndrewTilley · July 8, 2023, 1:44pm

Below is a transcription of the developer stream on June 23, 2023 that’s hosted by Mike Weicker, a senior developer at EHG.

I’ve transcribed everything to the best of my abilities, but when (or if) the stream gets uploaded to YouTube you’ll be able to click each questions source link to watch them for yourself. Currently, those links are just placeholders and don’t actually link anywhere.

Also, the entirety of this stream is spread across two posts within this thread as it exceeded the 50,000 character limit, so please continue reading beyond this initial post.

Q: Are you going to have to keep doing the campaign?

Mike: We don’t plan to remove the campaign from the game. The campaign is always evolving and all that sort of stuff. The only thing I can say for certain is that at 1.0 and our plan, initially, going forward after that is that the campaign is still part of the leveling process. Something that we haven’t tutorialized well enough to players, because every time I this question comes up and I mention this most of the time the answer is ‘oh my god, I didn’t know that was a thing.’ [Mike laughs] Just in the off chance you haven’t heard this, dungeons are a campaign skip. Each dungeon is not an entire campaign skip but each dungeon skips a chunk of the campaign. So, for example, Lightless Arbor takes you to the End of Time but you can access Lightless Arbor way earlier – oh wait, this might have changed with the structure change. There are campaign skips! [Mike laughs] Each dungeon is a campaign skip so each dungeon skips you forward in the campaign. The idol slot and passive point quests – there are more idol slot and passive point quests than there are rewards. While there are 15 passive points you can earn through quests, there are more than 15 passive point reward quests. [Mike opens the map to view quests] Like this quest right here, it would reward a passive point if I hadn’t got 15 rewards already. So I don’t have to do this quest, though I still can for the other rewards but you can skip chunks of the campaign and not lose out on rewards at the end because you can pick those passive point quests up later elsewhere.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: When can we expect an overhaul of the monolith to make them less monotonous? I know it’s been on the to do list for a while.

Mike: I think there’s maybe miscommunication here because an overhaul to the monolith has not been on the to do list for a long time. We’re really happy with the monolith system. However, it does lack unexpected content. And maybe that ends up overhaul enough of changes for you, but it doesn’t involve changing anything that’s there already. It’s more around – because the monolith system, and when we talk about the monolith system we’re talking about the different timelines, the different echoes, and things like that. That core interaction and progression loop and that sort of stuff, that’s something we’re very happy with. If we were looking at an overhaul then that’s something I’d consider would be changed. Previously the monolith didn’t have a grid to pick the individual nodes from, it was just pick echo 1 or echo 2. So every time you went into an echo you were dealing with only two options for that echo, and then we changed to the current system. That was an overhaul.

As far as adding in unexpected content – things that can happen in the monolith that you don’t expect. Right now when you enter an echo there’s a high probability that you know, if you’ve played a thousand echoes, there’s a pretty high probability that you can tell most of what’s going to happen in that echo. That’s the problematic part of it really that you find yourself just racing to the finish and you know where the finish is. There’s nothing like, ‘maybe this cool thing could happen here.’ No, there’s no option for that cool thing to happen because it doesn’t exist. So adding this unexpected content – and the most basic example I always bring up when I talk about this is, and sorry if you’ve heard this before, is the…and this is not, we do have plans to add something but this is not the first things we’re planning on adding, but the easy example I like to share is a treasure goblin. It’s a really basic thing, it’s an implied quest, it’s unexpected content. You see a goblin and it runs away so you go chase him and if you can kill him before he teleports away you get a big reward. Great. Unexpected content, implied quest…awesome. It shakes things up and you get a reward. Fantastic.

That’s the style of content the monolith is really missing because the term you used was monotonous and I think something that really leads to monotony feeling that way is knowing what’s going to come and not having any surprises really. Currently the only real surprises that happen are the gear that drops, so you’re surprised by the gear that dropped and you’re like, ‘oh cool this gear dropped, that’s awesome’, and by which echoes are revealed after completing an echo on the monolith map as there’s an element of surprise there and you’re like, ‘oh what did I unlock, what are the next things available.’ So there’s not a lot of unexpected things that can happen in the monolith which is one of the major problems with it, I think. So that’s in the works – having something that’s unexpected show up/to do while you’re playing the monolith, and other endgame content too, is something we’re working on.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Thanks for the clarification and I did not know dungeons could be used as campaign skips.

Mike: Yep. [Mike laughs] The tier 1 of dungeons isn’t tuned probably yet. That’s something that I really want to get on to as soon as possible – is making an early dungeon on a new character feel possible. Something that we did do in the last major patch, that I think helps leveling alts a ton, is legendary items not increasing the level requirement to use them from the base unique. So you can now have a legendary with sweet affixes on it and it’s the same level as the base unique item. Low level uniques have a high probability, compared to high level uniques, of having more legendary potential so you can have surprisingly high powered leveling items for these low level legendaries. So you can make some pretty sweet leveling pieces. Even if you’re not going to use them long-term just having a 4 LP Hammer of Lorent – I know people always used to talk about how it was a useless item because even if you stuck awesome things on the legendary stats for it it was no longer a low level item so you couldn’t level with it properly. Now it’s an amazing leveling item, because it also scales with your level.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What about changing the mods in echoes? Instead of just basic damage/hp/defense mods, have more interesting things like environmental effects, unique enemy modifiers, etc.

Mike: I will say that the things that we do have for unique enemy modifiers those are the ones we get complaints about the most by far. But yeah, adding more modifiers to the monolith is definitely something that we want to do and will do. There’s quite often very subtle reasons why something doesn’t… [Mike died and lost his train of thought] There’s a lot of modifiers that were chopped/that have gotten cut that might seem like obvious slam dunks. But yeah, there are more that we’ve got sort of it the list of, ‘okay, we want to add that but we need to add this text to do that and oh well, this other thing is higher priority so we got to do that first.’ There are a lot of things that fall into categories like that.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will it be possible that party members get the same reward as the host for the echo?

Mike: It causes a ton of problems. The short answer is no. We did have that as the original way. The initial multiplayer release had everyone getting – the way it works right now, just to recap in case somebody doesn’t know, if you’re in a party with someone…say you’re in a party with me and I picked this node here, so I wanted glyphs as a reward, we all go in, we do the glyphs one, we finish it, I get my glyphs reward and you get to choose between two randomly generated rewards at that point that have the same weighting as this node here has for its weighting when it’s selected what its reward is. So that’s basically looking at corruption and distance from center. What this does is, on average, you’ll get the same quality of rewards but you can’t target them quite as specifically if you’re not the party leader. So if someone’s after a really specific reward, super hard, needs to be this one thing no matter what then generally you can let them be the party leader and go for it otherwise it’s – I actually prefer not being the party leader myself, personally, but it’s an each to their own type thing.

Originally when we released it the way it was was that everyone got the same rewards and immediately what we saw was that people would take their echo trees and they would prime – you’d get 4 people that would each prime a tree to have as many of the really standout nodes that you’d want, like the unique nodes and the ones you’re really hunting for. So you’d have as many of those prepped and unfinished as possible and then you’d have one person or all 4 people would join one party leader and do all of those nodes and then they’d join the next person and do all of those nodes and then join the next person and do all of those nodes and then join the next person and do all of those nodes. This was a gameplay pattern that really encouraged players to slit up and not play together and then come together for a brief moment to play together and then split up again for most of the time.

It was really encouraging a play pattern that we didn’t really think was a) healthy for the game as a whole just from gameplay experience and b) it forced people who didn’t want to play this way. Which I think if you looked at and said, ‘if the rewards were the same for this and normal play, which would you pick?’ Most people would probably pick normal play. And c) it was really hard on our servers as well. So we’re like this is a lose, lose, lose situation. It was just bad, we had to change it. We could not go on with that. This is the best solution we’ve come up with so far. If you really don’t like it and think you’ve got a better idea then please let us know. But yeah, I think it’s a really interesting and fun solution. But yeah, the short answer is no. [Mike laughs] Unless you can fix the problem in a better way, nah.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will 1.0 be full release?

Mike: Yeah, but that doesn’t really tell you – like we’re not going to go all the way to 0.9.9 before we do 1.0. It’s also not a decimal system, it’s a versioning system. So the third number, we’re on 0.9.x right now, and that third number is not like once it gets to 10 it rolls over and the next full version. No, it’s a number. We’re not going to do this, I want to be super clear that this isn’t happening, but with the way the versioning system number works the number 0.9.15 is still a valid number in the versioning system. So you can’t really get any information about when full release is going to be based on the fact that the number is going to be 1.0, just in case that’s what you were trying to do. But yes, 1.0 will be full release.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I was wondering if there is an estimate date to launch the system for the 2 factions that will allow trade/solo playing for character progression?

Mike: Quite frequently when this question comes up it gets phrased in an SSF/non-SSF or trade/solo type framing and I feel it’s very important to make it very clear that the trade factions, the Item Factions is what it’s actually called, so the Item Factions have an incidental connection to party and SSF play but don’t have a literal or mechanical or real connection. So you can play SSF as Circle of Fortune and you can play non-SSF as Circle of Fortune. It doesn’t matter, you can do both. So it’s not the SSF faction and the non-SSF faction. Now if you’re playing SSF you’re going to want to play Circle of Fortune because you can’t interact with the trade faction anyways, so there is some loose connection there. I just wanted to make that clear. You can still play with other people and use the item gifting system to transfer items between each other the way it is now and it will be with the resonance system added on top as well as a CoF player. That all still works together and that’s not going anywhere.

As for when that will happen, I don’t have any details on the release date for that. We do plan to have it in by 1.0. When’s 1.0? No details on that, sorry.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Has there been internal discussion about the current player consensus on how all hit builds must be crit in order to scale into endgame? And full DoT must go all attack speed in order to get 300+ stacks of whatever? Aka, people feel that hit builds that also utilize DoT are not viable. Obviously hybrid isn’t optimal. Any thoughts?

Mike: I mean, yeah. This is not a new discussion. This in not a new topic by any stretch of the imagination. We added the Singularity idol a little while ago. It’s a 1x1 idol that basically makes hit not crit builds good, or tries to. [Mike laughs] At least better than it was. And yes, I’m aware that it doesn’t do enough on its own to make that type of playstyle really shine. Though, this is something that we’ve been aware of for quite a while and it’s not a new topic for us at all.

There’s a new style of DoT appearing in one of the new skills that we made recently that’s trying to break the mold on that too. I don’t think that this is an overnight change that’s going to be like, ‘and we’ve decided to add these hundred things and remove these hundred things specifically to combat these two things.’ No, I think these are a little bit more subtle problems than what might appear at first glance type of thing. I don’t think the scales are – they’re definitely imbalanced, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think they’re as imbalanced as it might feel right now. There’s probably some surprisingly minor changes that will end up having surprisingly large impacts on the situation, I think. But yeah, it’s a topic of discussion. It’s something that does get addressed and changes do get made with these concerns in mind, frequently.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What is the primary purpose/design intent behind factions?

Mike: One of the primary goals for the factions system as a whole is to have a progression system for your characters that are not tied directly to experience, something that you can continue to improve and expand upon and have progress in post level 100 or something that you can work on across multiple characters. It’s not coupled to a single character, a single experience bar, it’s progress that’s outside of that. That’s one of the main goals of the overarching system. Specifically the Item Factions, that are going to appear as the first factions available, a big part of the goals there is having trade in the game without ruining the game for people that don’t want to play trade. That’s basically it.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Have you guys thought about doing an in-game lore or bestiary codex?

Mike: Yes, I know that’s something the lore-master has been wanting to get wrapped in for a long time now. We’ve started adding in little story moments with the books you can find to help people explore the story a little bit. Something I’d really like to see is having a place where you can view all the books you’ve ever picked up and maybe have it show you all the ones you’ve missed, maybe be greyed out with a question mark to show that there’s another one that you haven’t found somewhere or something like that, and a bestiary to show details about enemies that you’ve killed…all those sorts of things. I really like the idea – a Pokedex is basically a bestiary and I really like how it starts off with if you’ve seen one it’s got some information and then if you catch one it gives you extra information. I really like that distinction. It’s something I’ve always thought was a nice touch there.

Source: YouTube Link

[Mike is selecting an increased drop rate blessing but isn’t presented with any options relevant to his build]

Mike: Ah nothing! Good news, so it’s interesting as this actually highlights… If you didn’t know this it would seem as though these would actually be bad, like actively negative for your character because the wording probably isn’t as good as it could be. We should probably add this to the Alt text actually. Because what it does is it doesn’t actually shift – it adds items to the drop quantity as well as increasing the rate of this. [Mike hovers his cursor over the “32% increased one-handed maces drop rate blessing”] You get exactly the same amount of every other type of item and you get 32% increased one-handed maces, but it doesn’t affect your drop chance or drop rate of wands, for example, or axes or swords or helmets or anything like that. It only affects the drop rate of maces and just gives you more items overall. So it’s not the end of the world. It just doesn’t help me at all. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What would you say the level of build viability/variety is in LE? One of the things I struggle with in Diablo is the inability to play how I want to play and it be viable.

Mike: So I think overall pretty good. If I’m going to give just a broad statement…pretty good, not as good as we want to be, better than some games out there, not as good as some games out there, and I think it’s still something we’re improving on. I think a lot of the problem with build viability in general comes from the inexactness of it. So, like viable for what? Viable to do something visually impressive. Okay, this build is definitely viable. This build looks visually impressive. I’m going to spam Meteor’s everywhere. Cool. Viable for pushing top-tier content? No, this build is not good enough. It might be able to get there a little bit, you know, but it’s not there yet at all. So it’s kind of like viable for what do you want to do?

One thing that we do really, really well is that it’s really hard get your character into a situation where it’s screwed and you have to start over. I think that’s very important. If viable means complete all of the content and you can do everything then I think there’s a huge amount of builds that are viable, and you don’t really need to follow a build guide for most of it. Pushing corruption to 1,000, yes I know it goes higher than that, pushing arena wave 1,000, and that stuff then no, not just anything is viable. There’s a pretty few select builds that can handle that content really well. So where’s that line for viable, is kind of the hard question to answer.

You mention Diablo and Diablo 2 is the one I can talk to you the most about, really…which is one of my favourite games of all time. It doesn’t have a huge variety of uber viable character builds. There’s like one per class, and Paladin doesn’t count because it’s broken. So you’re playing a Smiter or you’re playing a Kicker or you’re playing a – like there’s not a huge variety of endgame builds. I haven’t played much since the Sunder Charms came out so that may have changed a little bit. If you just look at builds that can complete Hell, Act 5 – like can you down Baal solo? I think I can do it with any skill as the primary damaging skill in that game, and as I say that I bet someone’s going to pick Frost Armor. [Mike laughs] But yeah, you pick any major archetype and you’re ready to go. So it’s where that line for viability is drawn, but I think we’re pretty good overall and something we are working on to get better as well.

One thing that is really nice that I see a lot when a question similar to this gets asked on our Reddit or forums – the question is like, ‘I’m a new player, is this build going to be viable or should a follow a build guide?’ and usually the response the people give you is, ‘Just go try what you think sounds cool and if you hit a wall get some advice on how to improve the quality of you build and if your build really hits a wall then maybe switch things up a bit.’ But because you can respec so freely, not completely freely – every mastery has endgame push-able builds…most masteries have super endgame push-able builds. [Mike laughs] Some of them have more flexibility in their builds than others, let’s put it that way.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: If I wanted to pick a base archetype and decide to do a basic attack build with that being the focus, would that be viable?

Mike: Basic attack is – okay, I forgot that basic attack is an option technically. Good luck on basic attack. [Mike laughs] Every class has abilities that are basic attack plus, like they’re basic attack and something else. So Mana Strike here for Mage is basic attack but also does more damage and scales off of stats that you care about and returns mana to you. Every class has at least one ability like that. So you probably won’t be using basic attack unless you really want to use basic attack for some reason.

Q: So hypothetically, would that be viable? You see where I’m coming from though. I just don’t want my creativity capped.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get what you’re saying and if you pick an ability and say, “I’m going to focus on that ability because I think that ability sounds sweet. I’m going to build my character around that ability.” There’s a very high probability that you’ll be totally fine getting to endgame. There are a few dud’s out there that are not as good and they need some love. Shaman comes to mind with Tempest Strike. [Mike laughs] Tempest Strike is kind of the poster child for a trap ability right now where it’s not actually good. It is on the block for a major rework. But yes, you should be able to take nearly any ability and build your character around it and at least make it to endgame, like get to empowered monoliths. There’s probably some exceptions to this, but for the most part you should be good.

And we’re trying to – we are working to move more of that power from the skill trees itself, from the skills themselves, and move like the power level of things more towards… This is a slow shift thing as well. It’s not like a flip a light switch thing. But we are working to move them more towards items as well. So the power level of the skills themselves, the individual skills, has less impact than it does now.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Could you see a crossover event with another game feasible or has it ever been discussed?

Mike: Um, so it’s tricky to do. It’s not impossible. It’s one of those things where all the games I think it’d be beneficial for us to do a crossover style event with are probably pretty significantly bigger than us and I don’t know if I see the benefit for them to do it. [Mike laughs] It is a really cool idea and I do really like the idea of it. I know nothing’s been planned for anything like that and I’d be surprised if anything like that happened any time soon, but it’d be cool. It’d be really cool. There’s lots of other games out there that are awesome. Usually the way something like that comes about is through a shared publisher, I think. I could be wrong about that, but I think that’s usually one of the main catalysts is a shared publisher. Well, we do have investors, we don’t have a publisher. Technically we don’t have a publisher at all.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Someone mentioned in the game chat on Wednesday that version 0.9.2 of the game is coming out, when can we expect it?

Mike: The next major patch release will happen on a roughly similar schedule to what we have established as our cadence prior to 0.9’s release. I don’t have a specific date for you, I’m sorry. I’m not going to say a number of month’s in-between patches just because it’s not set in stone and all that sort of stuff. It fluctuates a little bit here and there but there’s a rough patch cadence that you can draw from if you look at the dates for patch 0.8.1, 0.8.2, 0.8.3, 0.8.4, and 0.8.5. Average them all out, or take the highest and the lowest timing and it’s somewhere in that range of highest and lowest timing from 0.9.1 to the next patch. It’s roughly a similar cadence to what we’ve been doing and then we take that and we look at when it’s going to fit nicely with other things coming out. We also account for what features we want to include with it and how long those features are going to take to add.

So, hypothetically, let’s say an example of a date would be a 3 month cycle. Clearly that’s not what I’m saying it is at all. I do not know when the next patch date is. I could go look it up but I don’t know what it is off the top of my head. Let’s assume it’s roughly 3 months and then we see that three months out there’s a PoE league launch so let’s shift it to avoid that. If we make it earlier there’s a D4 patch. So if we make it later there’s nothing there. Okay, let’s do that. That’s roughly the process it goes through. So somewhere in and around that rough type of timing I described from the previous patch cadences will be roughly where it is. I’m sorry, I’m being so inexact. I don’t know what the date is so I don’t want to give any details. I’ll just be wrong. I know what I have to get done, and I know it’s got to be done fast. That’s all I know. I’m doing it as fast as I can.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Do you think we will see more useful and main damage type minions that are summoned via weapons/passives or see current ones buffed (Bone Harvester, Revenant, etc.)? Or something like Araakali’s Fang in PoE?

Mike: I think there are – probably not much changes. There aren’t any major changes planned for it. I think it’s difficult to balance the – I think it’s really easy for minions like that to become extremely powerful early and drop off late. Having them be more consistent and have their power level adjust to you as you level up is tricky, and that’s part of that shift of power from skills to items that we are trying to work in more. So I think you’ll see that naturally improve but not a targeted change so much. I think we’ll see that just naturally happen a little bit.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Any plans for an API for LE? Would an API interact with the bazaar, or the goal is to be only in the game itself?

Mike: We do hope to eventually release an API to help with some things around like character information and possibly game data in general. Like how much damage does Lightning Blast deal, and what are the roll ranges on armour when it’s applied to a helmet, things like that. As far as interacting with the bazaar API, we’ve actually talked about this and it’s explicitly not planned. We don’t plan to be able to set up a way to interact with the bazaar, like to be able to build a website that lets you be able to use the bazaar when you’re not playing the game. We have no plans for that right now. We actually have plans not to do that right now. Usually when I say no plans it’s like no plans either way, but this is like plans not to.

Source: YouTube Link

AndrewTilley · July 8, 2023, 1:45pm

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Q: Do you think its possible for an ARPG to have good PvP?

Mike: Absolutely yes, definitely! Now just to clarify, our distinction of good PvP is extremely different I bet. [Mike laughs] But yeah, I think that there’s room for – I don’t know if there’s room for a PvE-first ARPG, like Last Epoch is, and I would argue that all of them are right now. Oh, there’s probably an example that I’m not thinking about right now. Anyways, all of the major ones…we’ll say that. I don’t think anyone has achieved awesome, high quality competitive balance in PvP. Similar to the way that, for example, like WoW, and I am not up-to-date on WoW’s PvP scene at all, but they do strive for a competitive balance and there’s a competitive meta that evolves and all these things that happen around PvP in it. Maybe League of Legends would be a better example. That’s a PvP first, basically PvP-only game and that’s really the focus there. So I think that there’s ways to do PvP well in an ARPG, I think it’s totally possible. There’s certain expectations that people have for making PvP systems that would be required to make it good that those expectations might not be possible to hit.

I think sometimes it comes down to like a banned list, is something it needs to have. I’m going to use Magic cards as an example here. It’s something I know really well and can talk about. There’s different formats for Magic cards. So you’ll have a Magic card that gets printed and it can be played in many different formats, and so we’ll talk about formats in the same way we talk about PvE vs PvP as a different format for playing an ARPG. Let’s say that a skill is analogous to a card. So you have these skills that are designed for one environment that end up getting used in another environment. So you have PvE skills that end up getting used in PvP.

So you see in Magic that Commander is a popular format, Standard is a popular format, and Limited is another popular format. There’s different pools of cards that you can play in each one of those formats, and there’s a lot of other ones too – there’s Pauper and Historic and Alchemy and Legacy and Type 2 and Block Constructed…there’s lots of different formats. I didn’t even hit them all – Penny Dreadful, and if you’ve never heard of it and you like to play Magic I recommend checking out the format DanDan. It is the single weirdest format ever but is super cool. Anyways, and I think that having these different – so Magic gets away with having these different formats, different banned lists, and different card pools because there are, I don’t know how many cards, like a million cards at this point…200,000 cards, I don’t know. It’s some huge amount of cards that you can pick from and so you don’t need to have all them available to make a fun format. There’s enough options to pick from.

So, I think, in order to make a successful PvP mode in an initially PvE developed and focused ARPG – I think the key piece is having a skill ban list. Having certain skills that just aren’t available because there’s not really going to be a fun way to make them functional in PvP as they were designed initially with PvE in mind. I am bringing this back to Last Epoch, don’t worry.

We’ve created a pseudo PvP environment in the arena. The limited arena runs end with you fighting an NPC, an enemy, that is using player abilities. So it’s kind of that PvP environment where you just got an AI controlled PvP character because it’s using PvP abilities, right. There’s a Rogue there, and I talk about this almost all the time because I just love it…the person that made it great job, and one of the abilities that the Rogue casts in the limited arena runs is Decoy…against the player. Wow, what good does Decoy do? It doesn’t actually force you to ever target the Decoy so what’s the point? It doesn’t do anything, right? It just explodes after a little while and you just walk away and don’t take a bunch of damage. Okay, great. But if you kill it quickly enough it drops a bunch of runes and glyphs and stuff so it does draw your attention. It acts as a taunt.

So there’s subtle things you can do like that to change skills – and that probably wouldn’t really work in PvP because you’d just have people agree to not hurt each other and just keep spawning Decoy’s to get infinite glyphs and shards, so we can’t actually do that. However, I think it’s a good example of an out-of-the-box workaround to making a non-PvP functional skill work in PvP. If that’s not possible then I think just banning it is fine. I think there’s things like that that you can do to make PvP fun. I just think you can’t be scared to make big changes and to really shake things up for a PvP situation. Now one of the hard parts about that then – I’m saying, okay, yeah, it’s possible to do it. You got to make a lot of changes. You got to do a lot of stuff. That’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of scope that’s tacked onto the game and so it can’t just come as a small little thing and be fun, I don’t think. I don’t think there’s a way to do PvP in an ARPG that’s initially developed PvE focused quickly, cheaply, and good. [Mike laughs] You know, you got to pick two of those things and drop the third.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will something be included for those of us who have finished the main story and want to create a new character but don’t wish to start the whole story from the beginning? It really takes a lot of time.

Mike: Okay, so this comes back to if you’re re-running the campaign on another character you’ll have dungeon keys and use those dungeon keys to skip ahead. If you’re in multiplayer you can just get someone to warp you to the End of Time very quick. We’ve also pulled the entrance to the End of Time earlier so you can access it quicker. There’s also lowering the level requirements for legendaries so that they’re not upgraded based on the affixes that get added to them from uniques so it saves their unique base. It makes leveling alts easier as well. Leveling alts, I think, in Last Epoch is faster than most other ARPG’s, and there’s some tricks you learn along the way to make it go even faster obviously. But yeah, you’re very first alt will probably take a similar amount of time to your first character, but your tenth alt will take way less time.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will a damage meter ever be added or do they not fit in ARPG’s?

Mike: I don’t think that they fit into our ARPG. I don’t want to make a blanket statement about them not fitting into ARPG’s in general. We don’t plan to add a way to explicitly measure your exact damage in a given situation. There are ways that you can get estimates and get things that are close – see if things are significantly better or significantly worse and things like that, but we really don’t want to create a situation where like all skills that can’t be measured over a million DPS are considered completely unviable and pointless so don’t take them ever. Those types of hard numbers, I think, can be damaging to build diversity and player creativity. Not always but it can be. So right now we don’t plan on adding them.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: About the damage meter thing, I do wish the dummies would have a number above them for DPS just to make sure that your damage actually went up when making a change since Tooltip DPS is never 100% accurate in ARPG’s.

Mike: Yeah, that’s the type of thing that we’re not planning on doing. I just want to be clear. That’s also off the table. I mean, it’s not completely off the table. Nothing’s ever completely off the table, but I know that the last time that that came up in conversation as a discussion point in a design meeting the conversation went something like this, ‘Any thoughts on adding a DPS meter to the game? No. No. No. No. No. Bye, next topic.’ That was the whole discussion. [Mike laughs] No one was in favour of it. No one made an attempt to argue for it. It was just no. There was probably more said then that but – I feel like I know someone who probably went on a small explanation as to why.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: The in-game game guide is such a great feature, are you planning to add skills and whatnot? I’d love to see it fleshed out!

Mike: Oh yeah, it’s going to keep getting expanded. It got added and put in there to a point where it’s pretty good but not fantastic. It needs to be expanded, it needs to be improved. I set it up initially and I’m sorry, I made some mistakes when setting it up that I see now were kind of dumb. [Mike laughs] We’ve been adding things to it in the dumb way that I set it up. But it’s kind of frustrating to add things to it right now. We need to improve the editor interface for it. That’s the big thing that needs to change before we can really expand it too much.

The big inspiration for that feature – I played a lot of Civilization and the Civilopedia that’s in there was a big, big inspiration for the game guide. It’s definitely very different because big difference in the genre so big difference in the things that need to be in there, different ways things need to work, and all that sort of stuff but that’s where that idea came from initially.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Do you have a specific amount of skills that each mastery should have in the end?

Mike: What we’re considering completed for a class, though it’ll expand after so it’s not really completed, but before we start adding more on top of this milestone all of them are going to reach this milestone. [Mike has the Skills & Specializations window open for Mage] And that milestone is what you see here plus the 5 skills that are missing here for Runemaster. So 8 skills here, 4 here, 5 here, 5, here, and 5 here. That’s a full class and that’s the milestone we’re planning on hitting for all the classes first. Once we’ve hit that milestone for every class we’ll then start to expand that. So there can be a 6th skill for each mastery, this can expand here so that there can be more skills for the base classes, and there could also be an extra mastery put in. So this will expand after the fact but that first initial – like all the classes have their “finished” first version of like initial completion version…that will be expanded on after. This is not completed. I’m having a hard time saying completed here knowing that it’s not the end. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

Q: A lot of the boss fights in the game are very melee unfriendly. Any intention of fixing that?

Mike: Um, I mean, it’s not necessarily broken. I think it’s good that there are bosses that melee struggles with and minion builds struggle with and ranged builds struggle with. Having that variety in what type of character does well against this type of boss. Having that variety is good. We do try to make bosses as similarly difficult but uniquely interactive for different primary archetypes – so melee, range, spell, minion, all that sort of stuff. So having them – maybe they play differently but they’re similarly difficult is something that we do try to do for bosses, for the most part.

I do think that it’s good that there are some that are like, ‘Oh, well this one is real easy for melee, this one is real easy if you’re a minion build, this one is real easy if you’re a spell build, but otherwise they’re really hard’ or something like that. I think that’s really good. It’s more variety, it’s interesting. It lets you like say, ‘Oh I really want to focus on farming this boss so maybe I need to make a character that’s more tailored to farming that boss.’ Maybe that’s a minion character, maybe that’s a spell character, or maybe that’s a melee character. There’s different things that can come in there. I think that’s interesting. But if you think that it’s overly disproportionate and you’d like to see changes then please head over to our forums and leave feedback there.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: From a competitive arena standpoint, does EHG recognize the current disparity between melee builds being at a significant disadvantage compared to ranged builds?

Mike: Honestly, I have not looked at the overall balance of the ladder recently. I know that it’s going to be way off. I am not surprised that the ladder is in absolute shambles right now, as far as balance of something like that goes…at all. That is not surprising. I know we very intentionally did not make some – there were some nerfs for some builds that we very intentionally held off on doing until the next ladder cycle. We’re still trying to really dial in what strategy we’re going to be using for mid-cycle balances and I expect we’ll probably be airing on the side of caution for making changes. So we’ll probably be hesitant to make large nerfs mid-cycle, especially for high powered builds that are achieving top ranks on the ladders.

At the same time, like if you’re not going to nerf those things mid-cycle you’re kind of left in sort of a weird situation where if you buff other things to keep up with them… Sorry, let’s start right off the top. If you nerf those things – let’s say every build in the game can do 100 waves, I know that’s not true, and one build can do 500 waves. Oh my god! There’s people at the top of the ladder with 500 waves and you’re like that’s clearly the massive outlier. The obvious solution is to nerf that one build so that it’s not crazy more powerful than everything else, right. Easy…so nerf it. Great, now nothing can ever take the top spot on the ladder. Well that sucks. [Mike laughs] Suddenly the ladder is just dead for the rest of the entire cycle. What do you do?

The other option, and I know that these are very simplistic answers here – another simplistic answer is just buff a few other things so that they’re competitive now. Okay, so now you’ve made the new expected point on the ladder 500 waves instead of 100 waves. Is that something you want? Is that good for the game? Does that have any knock-on effects? Well yeah, there’s a knock-on effect in the sense that now you’re expecting to sit around playing for 500 waves instead of 100 waves to compete. Is that fair? Is that healthy for people? Maybe not. What do you do? Who knows.

Then after the end of the cycle, if you’ve done that and things were competitive for the cycle, and then the next cycle you’re like, ‘Okay let’s bring things back to 100 waves’ so you’re just going to go nerf like crazy. So the start of every cycle, and let’s say you fall into that pattern, at the start of every cycle you have huge nerfs and halfway through the cycle you have big buffs, and that does not feel good. What ends up happening is you’re like, ‘Okay huge nerfs at the start of the cycle’ and everyone gets really upset about it, and then you start to buff things mid-cycle because one thing stood out and you didn’t nerf it. That’s something to avoid for sure.

We’re still working on how best to fit all of that in and it’s going to come down to a case by case basis. It’s not going to be a one rule fits all situation. But yeah, I hope that gives a little insight into that topic a bit.

I can’t remember what the question was. Did I just start rambling for no reason? Oh yeah, it was just about melee being in shambles for arena. Again, this comes back to the thing I was talking about with formats and game modes and balancing relative game modes and things like that because suddenly you’re looking at – okay, what’s the primary game mode? What do you balance things around? Do you put specific changes in certain game modes that aren’t in others? We’ll use Magic as an example again here. There’s a game mode that came out recently for the new computer client for Magic, Magic Arena. So not new anymore, but to be clear it’s distinct from Magic Online but they’re both online.

Anyways, Magic Arena has a game mode called Alchemy where cards get re-balanced. It’s something that you can’t do in a physical card game. You’ll just have to ban the card if it’s too good or format warping because you can’t change the text on the card – that’s not entirely true, you can and they have done that. Let’s say that, for the most part, it costs 2 mana to play a card. Okay, that’s too strong…let’s make it 3 mana to play that card to balance it. You can’t make that change in a normal card game but in a digital card game you can because you can just change what the card does in that format. We’re in a situation now where there are cards that have literally different stats depending on which game mode you’re playing. If you play Limited it says one thing and if you play Alchemy it says another thing. I think it’s really cool that they’re doing this. Personally, I’m not a big fan of the format and I don’t play it but I love that they are experimenting with it. They’re also putting mechanics in there that you can’t put in paper card games.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are there going to be additional monolith timelines with new bosses and blessings?

Mike: Um, I’d say there’s – likely yes. I’d say there’s a good chance we’ll probably start – because there’s an upper limit on the number of timelines you can have in a monolith system like this and have it still feel good, I think. I think we’re pretty close to the upper limit on it. So there’s a good chance that you’ll start to see things like cycle out in cycles. So maybe one of them gets replaced for a different one for a cycle and then it comes back in to replace another one for a cycle and things start getting shuffled around in cycles. You have a similar total number of them. Maybe it goes up by one or down by two or something like that and it changes a little bit, but for the most part there’s a similar quantity but different ones that are there. Maybe we take a timeline out but take it boss and slap it in another system…I don’t know. I think that’s the sort of thing that’s actually really cool to do in cycle, to shake things up a little bit. Keep things fresh and interesting, but there’s a point where there’s too many of them. So we’ll have to be aware of that.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Did this game add pay to win items? I saw it got review bombed on Steam.

Mike: No. We have not and will not any pay-to-win or pay-for-convenience items. This is a very strict rule we’ve had since day 1. We don’t want it in our game. We won’t add it to our game. You can quote me on that, absolutely. This has been a hard line that we’ve drawn from day 1 and will continue to draw.

The problem that a lot of people had with it was adding a cosmetic shop, but that had to happen. It’s also something that we’ve done since day 1. That’s not something new. There’s technically been cosmetic MTX since literal day 1. It’s a communication problem I think we had where maybe we didn’t communicate well enough that this is not something new. But oh well. I have confidence in the quality of our game to bounce back on the reviews.

Source: YouTube Link

Iceberg · July 8, 2023, 3:00pm

Thanks for this!

Since I can’t find the stream on twitch either I’m curious if you know about this one:

Does that imply we’ll be able to start fresh in 0.9.2 ?

AndrewTilley · July 8, 2023, 3:06pm

It does…and as I was transcribing it I’m like I’m not sure that’s what he means but he said it…so…

Yeah, it’s certainly a good question to follow-up on.

eliel77 · July 8, 2023, 4:08pm

Despite a lot of good information to look forward, this part finished me off.

I think it’s bad because its something that can add so much to the game and is always neglected, it’s avoided even in comments.
Seems that it’s either the “darling” mode devs think for real it’s already tuned and balanced or it is so difficult to address it that it’s better to avoid anything related to the mode to give all the other things priority.

Anyway thanks for the great work, I tried to watch most of it in YouTube but I missed some important parts like this one.

CaiusMartius · July 9, 2023, 12:13am

I live for this kind of detail.

Seriously though, thank you so much for transcribing this. Beers on me.

CaiusMartius · July 9, 2023, 12:30am

Okay, this one needs some clarification. I’m going to go on a limb and say the original Q was talking about things like Lagon (smite and lunge are entirely non-functional). As a big time melee fan I don’t mind tough fights but when certain skills and functions of the class don’t even work that’s not something I find enjoyable. I really hope they aren’t considering this ‘a feature’.

AndrewTilley · July 9, 2023, 12:58am

I’m not certain the question is talking about bugs relating to bosses, but I could be wrong. Personally, I took it as bosses like Julra that are generally harder for melee characters to complete when compared to ranged characters.

I believe Mike was answering the question irrespective of bugs and just as an overall blanket statement that melee has it harder than other archetypes, which I think most people would argue is true.

CaiusMartius · July 9, 2023, 2:45am

Yeah, I don’t mind that sort of ‘harder’ because it’s tactical (across characters) but actually things not working…that’s another issue. Was just hoping to get some clarification on it. Thanks!

vapourfire · July 9, 2023, 12:44pm

Cheers for this bud.