Hi, all! I’m a veteran of the ARPG space with thousands upon thousands of hours compiled across, but not limited to, D2, D3, Torchlight II, PoE and now Last Epoch. I’d like to think my experience counts for a little something but know, at best, it’s one of many thousands of such voices. Regardless, here’s my negative feedback on LE after my first 40 hours. There are many things positive to be said about the game but I wanted to focus this post on the constructive criticisms I have.
- Itemization feels really bad in general
There’s something that always struck a nerve with me about getting a legendary drop that’s 25+ levels below me. I get that, with how LE (and PoE to a lesser extent) is itemized, a low-level legendary can sometimes be the right fit for an endgame build but it just feels bad. It feels as though 90%+ of my legendary drops are all low-level and useless which brings me to my second point:
- Upgrades are painful and boring
Take the much-talked-about but much-maligned (despite being one of the most successful ARPG of all time) D2 and D3. When you get “that drop”, you get a HUGE power boost immediately. You feel it. You immediately move up in difficulty. You immediately start seeing even better drops because you can now tackle better content. In LE, upgrades are most often so small and so meaningless that you don’t really feel it. It’s like the old MMORPG talent trees where you put a point in a stat that gives you +1 Strength. Woo hoo! My ability that hits for 1000 now hits for 1025. Amazing. To this end, I have not replaced a single piece of gear in the last 15 hours I’ve played. Not one. There hasn’t been a need/reason to. I’m running the build I want to run and I have gear with the rough stats I’m looking for. I’m not looking to min/max things in a beta game yet so I’m good and the drops simply don’t matter enough.
- Leveling is too slow for my tastes
This one strikes a nerve every time I mention it in general chat but the leveling is too slow for me - especially after about level 20 or 25. I’m ensuring I’m in a properly-leveled zone. I’m ensuring that I’m able to clear quickly. Still, the levels seem to crawl in and this is a real shame given the depth there is to builds in LE. I WANT to experience lots of different builds and progress through those builds quickly but I simply can’t. My first character, I got to level 40-something and had to quit because I found it too boring/slow to continue. I rolled the good 'ol spin-to-win Sentinel next and was able to push it to 71 but have hit a wall yet again. I simply don’t feel like progressing any more - especially given points 1 and 2 above!
- The entire idea of minimum skill level and a penalty for respeccing skills needs to be scrapped.
There’s nothing that feels worse in LE than wanting to try out a new, exciting build with your character that took forever to level - to experience the fun and depth of the passive and skill trees - only to realize you have to start back 12-13 levels on most of your skills and slog through it again. Yes, the skills level fairly quickly at first and you’ll get back to level 17 or 18 pretty fast before the last 2-3 points take forever but, I ask again, why? For what reason? Are we really that worried about people swapping out skill sets quickly before bosses? Who cares?
Anyway, again, there’s a lot of positive things I could say about the game such as the depth of the skill and passives systems to the graphics for an ARPG to the end-game content that feels well thought-out and fun if it weren’t for the issues above but this post was intended for constructive criticism. At this point, I think I’m going to try out one more character and then probably call it with LE for a while. Good luck, all!