I have played Last Epoch on and off since early access. I think the game is good solid skeleton and potential, but I want to give some constructive feedback. For the reference I started this league with my own build, without following any guides. My build was Flame Reave Spellblade, so nothing broken.
Campaign in general
The campaign feels to long/dragged out. First of all, it was way too easy and I mean it doesn’t need to be Poe level hard, but most of it gave zero challenge. First time I needed to craft anything was in chapter 9, but more about that later.
There is weird “transition” areas that doesn’t have any or very low amount of monsters and no point of interests. You just go in, walk a little while and go to new zone. Why these exist? Just remove these or add something in them.
There are many quests (23) that give you passive points, but the passive points you can get from them is capped at 15. I don’t understand why? Is the point that the player will choose what quests they want to do or what? I would either trim the excess quests or make them give something else. Like maybe choose from different, random rare weapons, idols or something. Later campaign rewards could maybe be that choose from 3 different exalted items. This could also create some nice moments like showing your friends that you got some lucky roll.
Campaign Difficulty
The difficulty in this game is weird. The start of the game, it is nice level of challenge when you don’t have any gear. Then after the first town you just mown down everything, I mean everything, before Lagon. Then in Lagon the difficulty spikes up a lot. To me, Lagon being difficult is fine, the mechanics are not hard to learn, but the problem is the contrast to the rest of the campaign. Also I think Lagon has too much health and the add phase takes too long. Both of these things make the fight feel like a slog, not harder. I would either lower Lagons health, maybe 20%, or make it so that hurting the tentacles in the add phase also hurt Lagon. They are his tentacles, so it would make sense right? I would also add second add phase to make the fight more interesting, but make the indevidual add phases shorter.
Then chapter 9 felt lot harder than the chapters before it, maybe because I was playing sorcerer and all the enemies where doing lot of physical or poison damage. But again this was fine in itself, I crafted some gear and was okay, but the contrast to the rest of the campaign feels out of place. Then the chapter 9 boss, Majasa, was basically impossible to win. The first phase was fine, he hits hard, but you can dodge the attacks. I don’t know what the weird squere things do, because they die so easily, but fine. The second phase, jesus christ. He just sticks on to you and basically auto-attacks you. You can’t dodge these attacks, you can’t escape, you are just a punching bag. I had phys res capped and some armour, but no can’t win. This would probably be way easier with sentinel or with the more imbalanced builds, but I just decided to skip him and go to monoliths. I overleveled like 10 levels and then went back to mob floor with him, but this is not good gameplay.
Monoliths and difficulty
Then after the campaign, you just start to mown down the monster until the empowered monoliths. Normal monos are just a snooze fest. I know you can raise the corruption, but that is made so tedious that you don’t want to do it. Why does the corruption only rise like 4 to 7 % or am I missing something? In the best case you have to farm and kill the shade 8 times to get the corruption to the cap of 50, in the worst 13. Shade should give 10% of corruption, always. Even then it would propably be pointless to farm him, just go straight to empowered monos, except…
Then the difficulty spikes again like crazy. In the normal monos I fell a sleep and then empowered monos I was strugling hard. Again, the difficulty in itself is not the problem, the problem is the huge cap between content. I was fine with the idea that my build reached it limits in the empower monos, but then my farming options basically were either farm the snoozefest monos or strugle clearing the empower monos, nothing in between. And the worst thing about this is that you don’t share the progression on the monoliths with your other characters, so you have to do the boring monos with every character you have, even the thought of this makes me not want to create new characters. The normal monos should be harder, corruption should be faster to raise and there should be a step to play the echoes at lvl 100, but without corruption instead of the 100% that the empowered monos now have as a baseline.
Bonus
I am sure that you are aware, but the balance of ward and the new masteries is so out of place, that it is unbelievable. For the masteries I feel like you didn’t play test them at all and for the ward I don’t know has it always been so busted or are the new masteries just abusing it, but I hope all of these are gonna get hard nerfed till next league, because there really is no point to play anthing else right now.