I think Last Epoch is on a good road but the crafting and endgame both have a long way to go. The problem I find for myself is that after about a week of a new season I stop finding progression. Gear hits a softcap really fast and then you just hit a wall after slamming items over and over again with missing Legendary slams or bad rolls on gear making 2 or 3 LP items worse than 1 LP items in many ways. The end game should feel more rewarding and it should feel like you can continually progress your character. Even after spending hours and hours trying to kill Uber Aberroth, when you finally kill him you when you don’t a drop or you do get the item you want but it’s got such a bad roll and no LP so you can’t use - it feels horrible.
There’s too many parts of this game that feel like time wasted in my opinion.
The 1lp slam, as much as I love it, and spam it like everyone else was terrible for the game, absolutely terrible shit cooked.
You used to need to slam an item 3-4 times just to hit the 1/4 cause you got unlucky, this was frustrating for some, but it kept you hunting for loot. We didnt have havocs or redemptions, so getting and slamming that t7 onto your 1lp item was a decent hunt.
Now you can literally be decked out in full 1lp legendaries literally in sub 20 hours of a season. by day 3 and im a casual I had killed abberoth and gone up to like 600c.
They have removed a lot of the little friction here or there in climbing to the hardest parts of the game.
This is an extremely risky way to tackle frustration, as yes, the game feels better to play, but its also over way quicker.
So now what you are suggesting, making crafting and lp slamming even more powerful? uberroth always drops really good rolled items?
The end game falls off too fast because they took away everything before the really big gearing wall, even as short ago as 1.0 you didnt even hit the gearing wall, the amount of crafting and item creep is frankly out of control.
Making the wall easier to get past just exacerbates the issue rather then solving it imo, as right now you are able to blast through the content available in record pace, there is so little friction adding more content basically hardly matters because players are able to get to/beat it so quick thanks to the core systems being so rewarding to progress.
The game doesn’t offer much content. Pick one of the strong builds and you’re through in 30-40 hours latest.
Comparatively other contenders of the genre provide you with 150-400 hours of gameplay time to achieve the same thing with a mediocre amount of skill needed.
And no, I’m not solely talking about PoE, TL:I is also vastly more content-dense then LE… and that game was pre-released in 2022 and left EA in 2023. P2W still… but nonetheless a much more coherent experience which knows what business model they even use. Unlike EHG which seemingly doesn’t as their designs are so often nonsensical related to being a live-service game.
It’s true, any changes will be met with outcry, and T4 Julra is a trivial boss these days too.
Maybe add t5 dungeon bosses that are similar difficulty to normal abberoth and have that as a condition for a guarenreed slam, and add some special reward types for doing t5 of the other dungeon types too.
That way something is being added at the same time as making the slam harder to get, it might help mitigate the outcry.
My point is simply that the feeling of progression in the end game falls off pretty hard. People obviously play the game at different paces and that’s great. I’m definitely more on the casual side, far from a speed runner. From years of playing games and arpgs in particular, my observation is that the game would retain a larger player base longer if progression in the end game was a bit more steady and the reward for time spent feeling had a little more impact. I played the game when it was in it’s first state as well. I understand slams used to be even worse. I don’t think that was good for the game and I think it can be even better than it is now. Just because something was changed and improved doesn’t mean it can’t be further improved.
Yes I do feel that for people spending hours or 50-100 attempts at fighting a boss should be rewarded with a good item if they manage to beat it. Don’t need to make the fight easier but it’s not exactly enjoyable to farm and at the end of the day the game should be enjoyable and feel rewarding.
