I saw a Reddit post from Judd saying EHG were collating all the feedback about game difficulty, so I thought I’d get some feedback in now.
First, while most of the post will provide criticism, the new season has been great overall. It’s still early days, but the new content has made the Monolith of Fate more interesting and the new crafting options have opened up some novel builds (looking at FrozenSentinel’s strength-stacking BrandMaster!) Hopefully we’ll see even more whacky builds emerge from the woodwork. I think it’s been well worth the 9-month wait.
Now for the detailed feedback.
Healing Hands Traversal
I saw a post on Reddit that extolled the virtues of the new traversal mechanics that allow characters to traverse over out-of-bounds parts of the map or even through walls. I can see the appeal in terms of removing the drudgery of navigating narrow paths and the like, but it’s noticeably immersion breaking for me and I’m not one to worry usually about immersion in games like this. I bring up Healing Hands because it’s the traversal skill I’ve been using the most and it’s the one that really breaks immersion: how can it possibly allow a character to run through walls or over water/void space?
Such traversal makes sense for Teleport and Transplant, even though I think both should require line of sight of the destination. But it makes not sense for things like HH and Shift. On top of that, poor Shield Rush and Flame Rush users are still tripping over pebbles. I suspect this has something to do with them being channelling skills. Why the different treatment of Healing Hands and Flame Rush, despite them being very similar animation-wise? From the player’s perspective, it shouldn’t matter whether one is channelled and the other not.
Loot
I’ll say it up front: I have no idea what the ideal loot drop rate should be. It’s just at this point I’m feeling rather desensitised to loot explosions and loot drops in general. Yes, you can always make filters stricter and stricter, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of loot explosions in the first place?
Ultimately, I don’t care that much about the quantity of loot drops themselves. I’m rather looking for steady gear progression with the occasional “wow, that’s actually amazing!” moments. I fear the current level of loot drops may overwhelm us and force us into making stricter filters, which would come with the side effect of us missing really good loot. As an anecdotal example, I recently got my best gear upgrade from a body armour that just dropped as a normal exalted item. I was lucky I decided to check it, because I was already ignoring most generic exalted drops at this point.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the new crafting options have made more drops viable as good bases, making it ever harder to craft suitable filters without hiding good stuff. Speaking of which, I think we need an option in the filter for the condition “any affix”, since the Rune of Havoc means we just want any affix with T6 or T7 without caring about what the affix is necessarily. Yes, you can just mark all the affix types for the same result, but it seems like an unnecessary amount of clicking to get there. A simple “Any” option for the affix type would be better for the player.
I would also like to point out that reducing drop rates would not suddenly make the game like PoE 2. Like many others, I find the gear progression far too slow in that game. But this isn’t a binary problem. Drop rates and related vectors for gear progression lie on a continuous curve. And on top of that, I think LE’s crafting makes it easier to reduce drop rates while still maintaining a good level of gear progression. More loot is not always good.
Difficulty/challenge
Well, this seems like a contentious issue. So I’ll just try to focus on what seems to work for me and what doesn’t.
Prior to season 2, one of the things I liked about Last Epoch was that deaths felt fair (on the whole). I could usually tell what killed me and I would learn how to deal with that particular enemy. It took me a while to work out why the Covenant of Oblivion was killing me out of the blue, but once I learned about its Explosion ability, I felt a sense of progression. Even during the campaign, there were areas that used to scare me, like the Welryn Ruins or transitioning to the Imperial era and getting owned by skeletal archers if my defenses were lagging behind.
This season feels different on two notable fronts. The first is visual clarity: the introduction of possessed enemies and the new enemies within tombs/cemeteries has made the game feel more like PoE 1, and not in a good way. All the gold and green glows combined with the number of enemies that we’re often encountering is leaving me bewildered. I generally have no idea what’s going on and I’m just trying to dodge stuff without understanding what it is. I often find myself losing chunks of health in big fights without a clue as to the source of the damage.
I’m slowly learning about some of the abilities, such as the moving nets that are granted by the Erased Hunter spirit, but even then, I’m struggling to work out what’s actually dangerous. I decided to look up the new enemies on Tunk’s site in order to try to determine just that. I don’t think the game should require such research.
I suspect it’s a mistake not to have these in the campaign with reduced mob sizes, so players can learn about these enemies and their abilities. I would also appreciate a bit more visual clarity in the tombs and cemeteries when there are large packs of enemies together (the Champion room is the most egregious example of overwhelming visual effects).
The second front is the general ease of the campaign and early monoliths. A lot of the mobs have been toned down, the Covenant of the Oblivion being the most recent one I’ve noticed. While that’s been happening, player power has been creeping up. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of PoE 2’s campaign, which I find to be a slog. But I would like to feel some sense of danger occasionally when I’m starting a character from scratch. I would like to care what enemies are doing.
Of course there are several factors at play here: the strength of the build you’re playing, player experience, and luck on gear drops to name a few. I’ve levelled three characters now: one Forge Guard (Forged Weapons), one Runemaster (Firestarter’s Torch Fireball) and one Fissure Smite Paladin. The sentinels pretty much didn’t care at all about what enemies were doing (Healing Hands is so strong), whereas the Runemaster definitely had some scary moments.
So I think classes may need some tweaking for their early balance. On top of that. I think the appearance of Nemesis in the campaign needs a review. I’ve been running a house rule of no Nemesis during campaign on my last two characters and it makes a noticeable difference. The way it provides almost end-game level of gear that can be equipped even in the first few chapters is a big factor in trivialising the campaign. And I think it might harm the experience of new players because they don’t need to learn about what enemies can do. Perhaps its rate of occurrence could be reduced or maybe you could limit the power level of the items it provides.
On a more general note, have you considered using action speed as a means to gently increase difficulty? I was wondering whether something like a +5% action speed on enemies at normal monoliths and another +5% at empowered (with perhaps a lower starting corruption) might make bosses in particular more interesting to gauge with. I’m sure such a change would require a lot of retuning of enemies across the board, so I suspect it would require a substantial amount of work. I was just thinking that a lot of the old bosses are largely easy/boring because they have long/slow animations.
Bonus Request
Please, please, please make the entrance to Maj’elka shorter 
I don’t understand why it’s such a long walk to the waypoint, particularly as it’s a town and so we can’t use any skills to get through it quicker.