There’s been a number of posts and comments about the difficulty of act 9 on the discord, subreddit, and in twitch streams, and the new mobs that have come with it. So I wanted to just post my opinion on how the game feels atm (pushed into empowereds, done arena to 100, all on a new char I started with the patch, not super far into the game, but anything further is just going to be about pushing endgame, as opposed to experiencing the content and I wanted to put my feedback out while it’s fresh in my head).
The most noticeable thing is that act 9 is just a big step up in difficulty from the rest of the story, it almost feels like going from easy to normal, or normal to hard. Personally I love this, the difficulty in act 9 forces you to engage with the systems in the game if you hadn’t already. Learning how crafting works is very beneficial, paying attention to resists is very helpful(though this is arguably something you learn to pay attention to in act 7/8, its just been a while since I was going into those blind), and you learn that you have to pay attention to what normal mobs abilities do to a much greater degree than previous acts (in previous acts it only really feels like there’s a couple of mobs that you have to pay attention to, and the the bosses on top of that). I really really hope this is the direction the games going in.
Now with all that said, the biggest problem for me with the act 9 difficulty, is that going into monoliths is substantially easier. You can safely do monoliths from lvl 30-35 if you know what you’re doing, and if you don’t you’d have no real problem going into them from lvl 40-45. And honestly it’s probably more beneficial for a new player to do that. Why I think it’s more beneficial for a new player to do that, is that the difficulty curve is much better going into mono’s after act 7 or 8, than continuing the story. I’m not 100% as to why it feels like that, but I think the main things I’d put it down to initially are:
Mob density/map layout- In act 8, and even more so act 9, the amount of mobs that are packed together increases a lot, and tied to this the map layouts for the most part feel a lot narrower. This makes the difficulty of engaging those packs much higher, and reduces the room for error substantially. Whereas in early mono’s the maps are much more open generally, and the amount of mobs packed together is much less because of this, and for some echo’s just is less mobs than act 8 or 9 maps.
Type of mobs- In act 8 to a small extent, but in act 9 to a very large extent, the type of mobs you face are substantially harder than the vast majority of what you’ll see in the first monolith. They have more abilities, or abilities that are much harder to deal with (i.e. you can’t just ignore them, or sidestep out of a thing, you actively have to prioritize what you kill first), and their abilities in general feel like they do significantly more burst damage. In early monoliths, the damage is very high if you’re going in under levelled but it’s fairly easy to deal with it. You don’t tend to get mobs that can move very fast, and most of the scary abilities are just a telegraphed attack you step out of. Compare that with mobs that teleport onto you, rapidly spam out projectiles, throw spears at you from offscreen, or just summon a giant whirling tornado of poison. Well it’s just much simpler to go into a monolith.
The other thing I’ll add about the difficulty disparity, is that some of the new mobs feel almost unfair, and they don’t really feel like their going in the direction Last Epoch has always felt like for me.
You have the Scarab Riders (I think that’s their name) that fling spears at you from halfway across the arena, with no tell. Now I’m not entirely sure if there’s a bug with the sound effect they make, in that it plays too late and not when they attack, or if this is how they’re intended. But this mob for me personally is the worst offender in the new patch, it’s just a mob that’s going to potentially one shot you from offscreen, and you’ll have no way to counterplay it (other than by running around in circles incase one spawns, which isn’t a rewarding strategy). But if the sound effect thing isn’t a bug, I do think just giving it a sound effect when it flings out a spear would alleviate this alot, because then you can hear it, and quickly react by moving away from where you’re standing.
One I personally haven’t had much issue with yet, but can definitely see it being very frustrating is the Crystal Elemental, it shoots off projectiles very very quickly, that move very quickly. I feel like it’s damage is about on par with Ice Elementals, but how Ice Elementals attacks gives you a much better way to counter play them (you bait the attack, then step to the side and rush them). Because the Crystal Elementals attack in a spinny circle, it’s very difficult to actually identify what’s happening, and react in time to avoid being hit. I don’t personally think there’s a problem here neccacarily, but I’ve seen a number of people point to them as one of the harder mobs to deal with, so I do wonder whether they should just have slightly slower projectiles; so that the reaction time needed is less.
Poison Tornado spawning snake people (I don’t remember their name at all). In my opinion these are nearly perfect, they fit really well into the feel of playing Last Epoch on a mechanical level. However there’s one big caveat, and that’s tied into my thought on map layout making act 8 and 9 harder than monoliths. If you get one of these in a coridor, it’s much much harder to deal with than nearly any other mob, because of how quickly the tornado takes down your health, and how quickly it grows (over time the growth time won’t feel as bad, but at the moment it almost feels chaotic and unpredictable, because it just happens so quickly and I’m not use to the size it becomes). I’m not sure if anything should change here, but my first thought is that the damage should increase exponentially as you’re hit by the tornado. I.e. When you first get hit by it it’s enough for you to go ‘oh no, im being hit by something, time to move’ and if you then dont react fast enough, you start to drop as quickly as it does now.
The last new mob type that just, really really feels painful, are the dudes that teleport/dash onto you and rapidly attack you (I don’t know the names of these either!). I like the mob design, it has flavour, the animation looks good. But I would expect these mobs in a much more fast paced arpg. I’ve tried a few ways to deal with these when doing arena, kiting them, using anomaly while i get in position to attack them, movement abilities to get away to get time to deal with them. And while the latter two work to some extent (anomaly with the node that freezes stuff being the best thing to do), they are just way too fast. I really enjoy how many thing in Last Epoch reward playing proactively, this mob seems like it’s designed to purely be about playing reactively. And to me they just don’t really feel like they fit into the game in their current implementation. I’d really like to see them feel like they have some weight to them, so that there’s more room for being proactive about dealing with them.
There’s probably other mobs that people have some issues with, but for me these are 4 that stand out as having something about them that doesn’t feel quite right; either from personal experience, or seeing other peoples thoughts on them.
But like I said at the start, I do think the act 9 difficulty is really good. And I’d love to see the difficulty of every act increased, so that the curve is much smoother. I feel like it’s fair to say that right now the story is probably on the easy side. While I’ve definitely seen some people bring up issues with certain bosses, or in certain parts of the story, these generally seem to all stem from those people just not doing the mechanics of a certain fight, or didn’t get enough resistance (The 3 boss fight with Yulia, the Matriarch/Patriarch fight, Lagon, etc…)
Act 9 is a really really really good direction in terms of general difficulty, outside of a few mobs that maybe don’t feel like they fit into what the gameplay of Last Epoch has been up until now, I was super happy that act 9 forced me to think about the game more.
So with all that said, I’m going to bring it back around to monoliths as an alternative to the story.
I don’t want to do this personally, I play every character solo, and I’d be perfectly happy if I had to do the story on every new character before touching endgame. But I also like playing optimally, and being time efficient. Right now it’s not optimal or time efficient to do story before touching monoliths. As I addressed above, early monoliths are just much easier, while giving much more exp than the mobs in the acts. I wouldn’t want to see a xp penalty put on higher level stuff, I don’t think that’s a good way to deal with these problems, and it honestly just feels like a bandaid fix whenever games do it. I’d really really like to see a change come in that makes the normal monoliths much harder across the board. It should still be a viable choice to go into monoliths early, but it shouldn’t be one that’s doable by so many people; just the really good players, running builds to do it. I don’t really have any thoughts on how to go about this, it’s probably just a numbers thing. Though my thoughts above do make me wonder whether it just needs more mob variety, and map layouts that emphasize the danger of the mobs you face. (I’ll also add that you really shouldn’t be able to tp out of an echo to reroll the mobs you face in it, without that echo failing. This currently isn’t a thing, and I have rerolled the mob types a few times when it’s been the act 9 mobs, because they’re just noticeably harder than everything else)
And while this could be seen as simply a choice thing, I could just do the story first, where I sit it being more of a problem is in why people, me included, are going into monoliths first. Someone in the discord brought up the good point that going into monoliths early isn’t because we struggle in the acts. And this is really where I think the main problem lies.
Doing monoliths early doesn’t have any friction to it, there’s no sense of struggle for anything related to this choice. You just do them early, because it’s faster and simpler. If the story was much harder, and monoliths were a place to grind before continuing, that’d be really interesting. Or on the otherhand, if the monliths were really hard, but struggling through them rewarded you (in this case, by getting more xp for your time than doing the story). Then I think it would be fine, there’d be some weight behind the decision.
Obviously I don’t think the first of those two ideas is what anyone really wants, though I do think it would feel better than right now, but the second is where I think most people want the difficulty to be at. For me right now, my thoughts on how to get to x point quicker aren’t about doing the story quicker, it’s just me thinking about what’s the earliest it would be viable to enter monoliths. This is what I want to always exist (if theres the option to go into monoliths before finishing the story), but the problem right now is that monoliths are so much easier than they should be, and are just straight up easier than the later acts, that I’m thinking about going in at lvl 30 or maybe even lvl 25; and figuring out if theres a way to optimise that to being time efficient. Whereas my ideal situation would be having to do both, I should need to think about optimizing my route through the story more, and not just using a movement ability to dash through every map until I hit lvl 35, then entering mono’s. And I should need to think about optimising my first through maps in a monolith, because the difficulty is enough that I have to make calculated and conscious thoughts about how to make it worthwhile.
I got a little bit rambly there, but the gist is: Monoliths should be much harder, so that playing through the story has more meaning to it, and it would be good to have to make optimizations and choices while progressing through to lvl 50-60 because of difficulty; as opposed to now where you’re choice is just ‘do i want to be time efficient or not’.
Finally I’ll talk a little bit about how the difficulty feels at the start of empowereds, and doing arena to wave 100~. It’s defintiely more difficult than before the patch, however the difficulty isn’t consistent. If you don’t get any new mobs, or the only new mobs you get are the silver and gold elementals, then it’s the exact same feeling as before. However if you do get the new mobs, specifically the diamond snake people, the teleporting assassins, or the spear throwing dude, the difficulty immediately starts to feel much more. I prefer when it’s that difficult, and while it’s going to slow down progression, and reduce how high people are pushing in arena, I do honestly think that’s a good thing.
So to sum this all up:
Consistency in difficulty is what the game’s missing right now, and some mobs that feel too ‘rippy’ (they can one shot you too easily, or are super hard to be proactive about) make the difficulty feel more aggravating than fun. I don’t think this means the games got too difficult, or act 9 is too difficult. I think it’s just that there’s a feeling of it being all over the place, and that naturally emphasizes the harder thing, than the easier thing. Watching new players stream the game, and seeing how much more they enjoy act 9. Or seeing the discussion about act 9, or the mobs in it, or specific fights (looking at you Majasa), makes me really think act 9’s difficulty is the right direction. So I just wanted to post all this to address that point of view, because I would really be sad to see things heavily nerfed.
I’ll also add that I’ve been playing with void cleave+erasing strike, and it’s maybe a bit overtuned. So I’ve tried to take that balance side of things into account with how I’ve viewed the difficulty, though obviously they’ll always be an element of bias there.
And lastly, Majasa is an exceptional fight, please please please please give us an uber difficulty version of her in the end game somewhere!
(Sorry if some of this is a bit rambly or not structured very well, I realized halfway through that I had more to type than i’d initially planned!)