Devs PLEASE re-think these issues

Feedback and Suggestions
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Devs, Please re-think Stun and resists mechanics…

I love everything about this game, except how it seems to revolve around Resists, and Stun.

Why would you guys make it so it is necessary to max out our resists, THEN make it so monsters can SHRED those resists down to -999 if a fight goes that far? It puts us into 1 shot fail, because there is NOTHING we have to prevent it. Please fix this, so that either enemies cannot shred our resists (obviously we just take more damage in higher corruption) or give us some sort of resist shatter prevention stat…

Another issue is everyone assumes that “metal clanking sound” is from stun, but there is no direct info available about if thats actually what it is. IF it is a stun… why doesnt it just stun lock us? Why does 1 “stun” hit take away 2k ward +75% health in 1 hit… it seems like stun avoidance isnt preventing this no matter how much we have, yeah we dont get “froze” by the stun, but still that hit does 2k ward, and 75% health damage…

Its so frustrating to stack up all your defenses (resist, stun avoidance) at the cost of replacing it for damage and it STILL does nothing…

Why have defenses if you make the monsters capable of
Completely by passing them??? Everytime this happens no matter what i try to correct , i just get frustrated and shut the game off… I have HIGH Endurance, High Resists, HIGH ward, and pretty high Armor… these 1 shots are getting out of control, especially with the frequency of how they happen.
For Example, i play a Runemaster Sorc, in these Monos there are mobs that put their Metal clinking sound circles down at such a fast frequency that (since i cant move while casting, If i stop even for a split 0.43344 second to throw a spell to try and kill this enemy i get nailed by that monster ability and it kills 2k ward + 1000 health… Please look into this i cant be the only one.

I really enjoy the game for everything except thosr issues… and those things are enough to make me stop because nothing i do seems to allow me to succeed

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I agree 100% the defense system is stupid. just to play softcore you have to build your character like you would do in hardcore in other arpg’s

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Yeah, right now im in that level range where i gotta farm 100 monos just to get exp, and its murdering me no matter what i try i fail… it seems way worse since full release… i literally hear *TING TING TING TING ever 1 second till im dead and im trying to avoid this stuff but i cant stop to cast for even a second before it nails me again!

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You don’t need to actually cap your resist. Getting more health is more important than having 75% resists on everything. Most of the time 65% resists is good enough. Also, there are more layers of defense which are important. Namely block/dodge/ward. You should invest in one (and only one) of them as well.
So your priorities should be:
-Getting more health (this might not be as necessary if you’re doing low life)
-Getting resists up and your selected other defensive mechanic

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Right now i have 371 ward retention, 50% endurance , 1632 stun avoidance , 1228 health, my ward in fight shoots up to about 1700+ , my armor is 38% … resists are kind of all over the place atm only because when i had them maxed it wasnt doing anything… i still hear ting ting ting ting and get nailed

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And with so many different kinds of defensive stats you have to focus, makes it really hard to just craft thje issue away, unless you get lucky with some good bases to craft with.
i have only played through the campaign on a couple of characters, so i cant state anything about the late game. but playing a class who doesnt get alot of defensive stats through passives, can get rough.

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  1. You don’t need to cap your resistances. This game’s resistance system is actually very forgiving in that way. Armor, Block, Dodge and Ward are much more important later to want to get high levels of. Endurance also is pretty nifty if you can get a big threshhold.

  2. Stun avoidance avoids stuns, not damage from the attack that stuns. Attack still hits, you just avoid the stuns, not the damage. And you probably got crit, get crit avoidance. Stuns are small enough I usually dont’ care for stun avoidance. Mitigating crtis are way more important.

  3. Monsters don’t just “bypass” your defenses. Imagine for a moment in your games if you build no defenses. How much damage do you think you’d take? A lot more. If you built 20% resistances, you’d take 55% more damage and if you had no dodge or armor or block, you’d just fall over with a stiff breeze.
    a. Shred is a way for monsters to temporarily remove your defenses, sure. But there are many ways, in each class, to cleanse ailments. If you arent making use of those, you are dying to yourself.
    b. Also maybe don’t get hit by big hits from big monsters. There are tells for many big-hitter monster abilities. I’m not sure I’ve every taken 2k+ damage from anything that wasn’t an excessively telegraphed attack from a bigger monster or boss. Those big monster hits you aren’t suppose to take, period. Taking a bunch of damage is the punishment for not moving away from it.

The game doesn’t wanna just hand you everything you want. There is challenge. There is difficulty. There are nuances with making builds that make some good and some suck.

And no, you probably are not the only one this happens to. I’m sure a lot of new players or non-vets to the ARPG genre are getting their butts kicked in higher level areas.

I’d start looking at your build and seeing what you can do to make it better. From what you described of it’s defenses, it doesn’t sound like it has a ton of sustain. GOing to 1700 Ward is nice, but ward-regen alone isn’t enough to sustain for echo-clearing. You need to be actively building Ward at all times while fighting. Ward on hit, ward on kill, ward on dodge, ward gained on mana spent, stuff like that. It isn’t enough to just rest at 1700 ward.

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I have all this stuff… i generate tons of ward during battle. The only thing i wont have is block, because i do not intend on using a shield… Dodge stays low no matter how much i put into it, my other defenses seem great … as far as the monster hit circles go, as i said above the frequency of these hits is ridiculous, true, i could run around the same monster for hours dodging these attacks, the second i stop to cast an ability (because you cant cast while moving its TING! And in a fight that should be pretty quick (trash rare and blue mobs) its cast-Ting(healpot)-cast-ting(healpot) times 7 … (more heal pots than i have. As you said building ward means casting… so i find myself in a situation where if i stop to cast i cant avoid circles, i get hit which nails my health down beyond ward to 35% so im not building ward in these circumstances because if i stop to attack im getting nailed again , also by the monos falling particles.
I have 100% crit avoidance, using woven flesh… ive literally pulled out all my stops … at lvl 87 im getting crushed on this 100 mono no matter what i do… and if i play the 90 monos im barely getting any exp

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Empowered monoliths, level 100 monoliths, are not just level 100, they are level 100 with 100 corruption baseline, which increases monster health and damage by 60% each. You are both 13 levels under leveled and in an area that begins the infinite scaling part of the game. Empowered monoliths are meant to be much more difficult, by design. Maybe that isn’t an excuse as to why you get pummelled, but it does explain why you are getting pummelled.

My level 91 Rogue has 1700 life, no dodge chance, just high armor, endurance and 100% chance to glance blows. I don’t get 1 shot ever, at least not by things that aren’t big and obvious “don’t stand here” monster attacks.

It’s really just about stacking defenses man. Lose a little damage if you have to.

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Ive done that bro lol… maybe you are right, maybe i just need to scale up my level… i honestly have placed passives and spells points into defense and ward generation but im getting nailed way harder than i remember before release… my other char on eternal is same build and everything except extra damage uniques but this is alot worse… I am looking to suceed while trying not be given easiness but something definitely feels off… Almost to the point where i seem bugged or the nodes i am entering are… i cannot stop to cast a spell without being nailed by a circle i could easily dodge as long as i dont stop .5 sec to cast… seems rougher and i am jacking my guys defenses up.

For now i am chalking it up to being under leveled and ill see how i go from there… Even with very little damage passives i can kill this stuff no problem its just the matter of stopping to cast… would be sweet if the game made that possible… (casting while moving) Thanks for the feedback

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Port your build into a planner and link it, see if we can figure anything out

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Yea I agree, I would also like to see your build Papa-Kilo.
im level 83 and lv90 monolith with no corruption are easy. but I was doing them at level 70 or so too.
heck if you stream ill go watch.

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Ok, so a bit more in-depth way to explain how defensive layers on LE work and how not to get one-shot repeatedly in empowered monoliths:

The layers:
I’ll push them into ‘tiers’ from 1-4, 1 being the most important, 3 the least. If you got ward or health is of no meaning there, your EHP pool is always a Tier 1 and should be self-explanatory.

Resistances (Tier 2):
Maxing them is great, being 10-15% under is no big issue though. Even having 10-20% resistance will make it solely more dangerous. It’s a stat which should be maxed but is not mandatory in comparison to others.

Armor (Tier 1):
It reduces all incoming direct damage but doesn’t work on damage over time.
There are gloves fixing that as well as an experimental mod doing the same. It’s a high value stat as it increases EHP in the majority of cases.

Dodge (Tier 3):
It gives you a chance to avoid damage completely. Sounds nice… but in the end mitigation is king. Why? Because it doesn’t matter if you avoid 99 attacks and attack 100 bitch-slaps you into oblivion.

Endurance (Tier 2):
Endurance is iffy. Unless you got the threshold up - which takes more affix slots - it only provides you with a reduction in damage taken for the last 20% of your life-bar. So if you have 2000 life it actively provides you another 400*0,6 EHP, which is 240 HP.
That’s not much.

Endurance threshold (Tier 3):
As explained with Endurance, only use it if you got the ability to allow for free slots, otherwise other stats are more important.

Crit Avoidance (Tier 1):
That’s probably the most important stat defensive wise in LE. It needs to be 100% at all times without question. Not only reduces it the incoming damage massively but also takes care of the majority of stuns, since being crit causes the most of them.

Stun Avoidance (Tier 4):
It’s a fairly bad stat. High life and mitigation cause you not to get stunned in the first place. Other mods are more important simply.
There is actually not a single instance where it has a higher value then any of the other provided stats given.

Glancing Blows (Tier 1):
A general 35% mitigation? Try to get it to 100% if possible. Together with armor it makes you a walking tank.

Block (Tier 2):
As with Endurance, a secondary thing, good to have but not needed. It mostly helps with repeated hits coming your way, not helpful for alpha-damage though… as with dodge it will go through sometimes and that’s when your character takes a deep eternal rest all too suddenly, unless you invest into somehow blocking 100% of hits.

Block Effectivity (Tier 3):
Same here, if you don’t get the block up first it’s a useless stat, and even if then the alternatives are generally more superior.

If you follow roughly along those tier guidelines then your experience will also be vastly better. Sure, many of those will only shine in end-game, but along the way getting them up as far as possible never hurts.

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What games have y’all been playing before Last Epoch? How did you develop these awful habits?

You’re level 87…running a 100 level epoch, what did you think was going to happen if you get hit. I ran monos way higher than my current level too, and I knew it was a viable strategy with certain chars and builds, and with others it would be impossible as I’d have to tank too many hits to deal damage.

Many of the comments like yours give the impression you just wanna craft a couple items and one-button click through the game. I applaud the devs for adding some challenge and depth in the ARPG genre where it’s notoriously difficult.

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You missed parry. Ward and HP > then resistences when it comes to tankyness.

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Ah true, forgot about parry!
And I mentioned that HP and Ward are a given to be T1 as it’s your baseline EHP pool.
Resistances are not as important though, enemies can have res-shred which puts you in the high negative no matter what you do.

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For everyone saying: “Capped resists don’t matter.” Every 1% under 75 you are late game is the same as taking 1% more (multiplicative) damage. Maybe if you’re 1-2% under (for a single resist) don’t give up a much better bonus, but staying 5%+ under cap is silly, especially if it’s on all your stats.

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Once again, there’s several enemies which have the ability to shred your resistances with hits, cumulative as well, up to 20 stacks.
Each of those stacks has a value of 5% resistance reduction.
So the total possible reduction is down 100%, or with capped reduction we have a -25% res for the respective damage type.

Now let’s put resistance value into a math example, baseline 75%, hence capped. It means you would only take 25% of that damage type, but given the prevalence of ARPGs to need as much capped resistances as possible (outside of D4, because D4 is weird) we can take that as the ‘basis’, hence 100% damage taken.

Each example following will be taken from a baseline of taking 1000 damage, and that damage being a crit.

Adding crit avoidance:
Baseline critical strike multiplier is 200%, hence damage is doubled. Meaning from those 1000 damage we’ll only take 500 instead.
This is a 50% reduction in damage taken.

Glancing blows:
Glancing blows makes you take 35% less damage. So instead of taking 1000 damage you’ll instead take 650.
35% reduction in damage.

Armor:
Armor reduces every single hit taken, outside of DoT. For non-physical damage it only has 70% effectiveness.
So let’s say we have 30% mitigation as a baseline through armor. This means 1000 damage physical will become 700 damage.
All other damage will have 9% less reduction (70% of 30% = 21%) which means instead of 1000 we take 790 damage.
In our example it means:
Physical damage is 30% reduced
All other damage is 21% reduced

Those are all the reliable sources of reduction. Others are great too! But not 100% reliably.

Now let’s take resistances into the equation for the examples before:
Every % of reduction towards your cap means you’ll get 4% more damage.

This means to make up the mentioned defensive layers you can remove the following % of resistances to achieve the exact same effect:
Crit avoidance: 12,5%
Glancing Blows: 8,75%
Armor phys: 7,5%
Armor other: 5,25%

That’s why resistances are Tier 2 and not Tier 1.
Yes, you need em as high as possible.
No, you shouldn’t avoid getting those other modifiers to fully cap them.

Especially not when we take the multiplicative nature of them into mind, meaning branching out into different layers has overall a higher effect.

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19

You’re wrong on several points though:

Resistance Shred is only 2% per stack on players, to a maximum of 10 stacks (20% total)
And crit avoidance can go as low as 5% damage reduction, namely the 5% base crit enemies have.

And most importantly, enemies already have 75% resistance penetration, unlike in other games such as PoE.

So, to come back to your comparison, even with 50% dmg reduction on crit avoidance (in case of monolith mods)

Crit avoidance: 0,5%
Glancing Blows: 0,35%
Armor phys: 1%
Armor other: 0,7%

You’re also wrong about the branching out part of multiplicative effects. 100% Glancing Blows and 30% Armour = 65% * 70% = 45.5% damage taken. You can see it as Armour doing only 19.5% reduction after Glancing Blows, or Glancing Blows only doing 24.5% reduction, either way, mixing them reduces effectiveness. It is why going for 100% Glancing Blows is always better than mixing it with Block or Dodge. (Armour guarantees to work on every hit and is therefor often picked as safety net vs chance-based reduction.

The reason branching out of Armour, Dodge or Block Effectiveness is beneficial is because they have internal Diminishing Returns formulas which reduce the rating needed per % gained. At a certain point, other sources outweigh that DR, but that is not because of the reasons you mentioned.

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Ah true! Sorry about the shred part, 2%, hence 40% max reduction for players. My bad there.

As for the crit avoidance… not true. If you have 100% crit avoidance you can’t get crit, period.
If you have 50% crit avoidance and an enemy has the baseline of 5% crit chance then you get crit 2,5% of the time.
100% crit avoidance does exactly what it says, you avoid crits 100% of the time.

Take into consideration we’re talking about alpha damage and not DPS here, that’s a completely different topic. The topic here is ‘one shots’ and not ‘overall survivability’ because that makes the whole topic a lot more complex.
Also we’re not talking about DoTs but solely Hits here, to take it into perspective.

Which also means your follow up math is not right according to the presented situation.

But you’re right about the resistance penetration, I forgot to put that into consideration!
Hence the values presented from my side are even more important rather then less. Since it means missing 10% res is a flat 10% increase in damage rather then a 40%.

So to make up for the extra damage you would receive you would need to miss the full amount of resistances in comparison to the reduction provided otherwise.

And yes, mitigation options are multiplicative, absolutely true! Which makes it important to put them into perspective to each other 1 to 1.

If you have capped res the multiplier is ‘1’ simply for our examples without any shred. Hence alpha damage with full crit avoidance, 30% armor and clancing blows would be:
1x0,5x0,65x0,7=0,2275 for physical damage, meaning 22,75% total damage received.
Or:
1x0,5x0,65x0,79=0.25675 for other damage, meaning 25,675% total damage received

So let’s remove 30% resistance in that case and see the outcome.

1,3x0,5x0,65x0,7=0.29575 phys or 29,575%
1,3x0,5x0,65x0,79=0.333775 other or 33,3775%

Now let’s remove the glancing blow chance, after all we’re giving up that one layer to achieve full res cap!

1x0,5x0,7=0.35 phys or 35% taken
1x0,5x0,79=0.395 other or 39,5% taken

That should be fairly clear, resistances fall under the multiplicative measures of mitigation after all. It doesn’t ‘reduce effectiveness’ as much as you think since multiplicative measures are commonly better then additive ones. But you’re right, if you go below a threshold of resistances then the missing ones will cause problems!

Getting block to 100% reliably is hard for most builds (exceptions apply) and dodge is capped at 85% anyway, so a 15% chance to get bitch-slapped into oblivion from a big alpha hit.

Sure, adding them or even focusing partially on them is a good overall defensive measure, but here it’s solely about one-shots, alpha strikes, damage spikes. And for those the list I made is fairly good.

Edit: using ‘*’ for multiplication with the formatting way miiiiight have been a bit of a problem. Chanced it to ‘x’

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