After having fallen out with PoE for multiple years due to not liking the direction it has taken, and the spectacle of the latest league I decided to finally try this game out after keeping on eye on it for a long time. The following are semi-coherent ramblings about my feelings for Last Epoch. Sorry, this will be long.
My first impression for Last Epoch was in regards to the speed of the campaign and how gearing during it was a non-issue.
As someone that never pays attention to stories in aRPGs and skips all dialogue, I greatly appreciated how the map layouts are not randomized, compared to PoE where you can run into randomly generated dead ends that serve no purpose other than to waste your time. This meant that my second go around through the campaign went significantly faster as I was able to (for the most part) remember exactly where to go for what, knowing what was important for passives, idol slots, etc.
The gearing was also smooth as butter. I didnât feel like it was absolutely mandatory to cap my res by the second half of the campaign in order to not get one-shot constantly, which was a nice change. Items dropping already identified and being able to tell with experience what affixes an item had just based on name before even checking the tooltip was also great.
I didnât at any point feel like I had been screwed out of RNG for the gear necessary to smoothly finish the campaign (something that has happened to me before in PoE, i.e., no tabula drop, and not enough div cards = damage is terrible and bosses take forever). This is greatly a result of the crafting system which I will touch on later.
In short, Last Epochs campaign is a much smoother experience in comparison to PoE, but I think at some point an alternative leveling system is in order, at the bare minimum being available for any character created after the first in a given cycle. The campaign will eventually get stale and tedious for long-term players, and many people (myself included) will just want to blast through dungeons or a mini-monolith to level and gear instead.
Combat feels great. It was a little slow for me at first coming from the zoom and boom style gameplay of PoE that I had come to love, but Last Epochs slower approach grew on me, mostly due to the boss design, and once I got to endgame and started stacking movement speed it became a non-issue anyway and provided me the speed I craved.
Both builds I played were Bladedancers, one using Shadow Cascade for all purposes, and another using Umbral Blade for clear, and Shuriken for single target. The latter felt much better, and it would be the one I would attempt to minmax, and this is where I go into gearing, crafting, and how good it feels until you start to attempt min-maxing.
In my research on builds in Last Epoch, I came across a few stories of content creators and streamers having been caught editing saves and cheating in items for builds, and after chasing those high tier exalts and LP uniques I can understand why. The crafting system currently as it is, is amazing for making âperfect raresâ for a build. It provides all tools necessary to accomplish that and only asks reasonable time and item investment to do so. But I am of the opinion that âfinishingâ a build to the point of absolute min-max is a goal that should be reasonably achievable on at least one build per cycle by dedicated players. Depending on how long a cycle lasts for Last Epoch in the future, this could go either way. What I will say though is that it took a long time to find exalts or good uniques with LP to replace my t20 rares, in fact it didnât start happening until the last 30 or so hours of my playtime when I had pushed above 300 corruption. If I substract the time I spent learning the basics of the game on my first character, thatâs about 250 hours before I started replacing rares with exalts.
Iâm not game a developer, but I have a few ideas to make this feel a little better.
I understand not wanting regular crafting shards to give access to t6 and t7 affixes, but one idea I had was to make them immune to runes of removal, so that forge potential can go into changing more of the affixes on the item you donât want into ones you do. This way, as long as you drop an exalt with a good affix you want, you can at least make it into some form of an upgrade to a rare by knowing you wonât lose that one modifier.
Another idea I had was an endgame dungeon or boss encounter that provided access to a special crafting station with points that scale to your actions in the dungeon, or some form of endgame grind (maybe an âuberâ boss accessed through monolith and crafting points scale with corruption?). This could give access to crafting options such as sealing a t6 or t7 affix, changing one resistance affix into another, etc. Can be as expensive as you want, as long as it exists in a way that converts time investment into constant improvements, it serves the purpose.
As for legendary potential, I feel like there just needs to be a better way to farm this. It doesnât feel like it scales with corruption that well, and even as I currently approach 400 corruption Iâm still dropping Bleeding Hearts with only 1, or even 0 (most often 0) LP. Occasionally a 2, sometimes a 3, no 4 LP drops yet, I mention this specifically because apparently its the easiest unique to get 4 LP on.
Another issue is arena uniques. I tried farming arena for hours upon hours going for an LP Vaionâs Chariot because I wanted to try out stacking movement speed with its % increased damage per movement speed, and after countless runs I never got one, and only got the boots to drop at all twice. I feel there are too many layers of RNG here. Not only do you need to get the correct arena champ, but they need to drop the item as well, and then after that you still have to hope for LP. I feel like endless arena is a perfect solution to this, however going to wave 224 I only encountered a champion once. And it did not even drop the unique.
To sum up gearing: It feels great until you start needing exalts or legendaries to achieve an upgrade. This may just be a difference in perspective and goals, as I know many people view these items as âbonusesâ and not necessary, but I feel a reasonable and semi-deterministic chase for such items would only lead to people like me playing every single cycle in order to min-max some new build we think seems cool, meaning more potential microtransaction income for you, the devs. For perspective my most played league in PoE was Harvest, which I played from week 1 until it ended. I spent $120 on the game that league for cosmetics just because I found being able to actually progress gear to min-max for once extremely healthy for my enjoyment of the game, because instead of frustration in dead-end items, I was having fun knowing I was constantly making progress on my next upgrade, and I wanted that to last. However, it didnât due to constant harvest nerfs, and I never spent money on the game again, eventually quitting it for good.
One last thing I want to touch on in regards for this is picking up crafting shards. Iâve seen already that at least some of the devs are highly opposed to this, but if nothing else for the sake of the health of our hands I feel like this needs to be vacuumed up like gold. Picking up all shards in a range is nice until you start having piles next to piles just outside of pick up range in high corruption monolith, and it feels like Iâm right back to picking up bubblegum currency in the start of a PoE league. The notion of the items having âweightâ honestly doesnât even hold any water when Iâve reached the point Iâm either not paying attention at all to what shards are dropping and just picking them up, or Iâm ignoring them entirely because I just canât be bothered to care in that moment. If youâre absolutely hard opposed to auto-pickup at least consider doubling the pick up range, and/or having them automatically sent to the forge from the start. IMO if it ever reaches a point your players are ignoring crafting items, something is wrong.
Thatâs mostly it. I could ramble some more about my feelings about game balance, trade, and monetization, but that would less so be feedback on Last Epoch, and more so explaining complaints I had with other games and why they pushed me away. Such feedback is probably better saved for when they come up as bigger topics for the games development
To wrap this up, I think this is a great foundation so far, personally I just feel the remaining implementation of endgame content needs to in some fashion fill a role for access to min-max crafting and gearing, that an alternative leveling system is needed at some point, and that picking up shards needs to be rethought. But if 1.0 sticks the landing by avoiding heavy handed nerfs, having a good trade system that doesnât rely on third party tools or websites, monetization is fair and not overpriced like your major competitor cough $420 supporter packs cough, then this will definitely be my next long term game.
