Warning: very long post ahead. Grab a coffee and hold on to your butts.
After spending some considerable time with Last Epoch’s mid- and end-game systems I’ve decided to jot down some thoughts, criticisms, and ideas I had over the course of 150ish hours of fairly dedicated farming at what I would call a fairly high level of play and optimization. I’ve tried to organize my thoughts into general categories but there’s bound to be some overlap, which I hope will not be too distracting.
To start things off: I love this game. I loved it before the recent crafting and legendaries update, and it has only gotten considerably better since then. This may not seem to be the case after the rest of my post, which will be outlining many areas of the game which I feel could be improved, but ultimately I hope that my criticisms will at least contribute somewhat to improvements that will make the game feel better overall for everyone. I am fully aware that LE is not in a fully released state yet, and more balance/system/whatever changes will certainly be coming that will likely address some of the issues I will bring up here, so no need to point that out.
I opted to play through a fresh character (not in Solo mode, but I did not really utilize many twink items other than a surplus of shards for early gear) after the big update to the crafting system and the introduction of legendary crafting. I feel that currently the early, middle, and early-late (up to empowered monos and 200ish corruption levels) portions of the game feel fantastic. Character progression is rapid, there are lots of viable choices for skills that can play in very different ways, and acquiring gear feels far better than in any other game of this genre, largely in part to the new runes/glyphs combined with the powerful yet easily accessible loot filter. Even playing in a single-character oriented mindset, meaning that my loot filter was extremely restricted and I likely filtered out a LOT of good drops that would simply not benefit my character, I felt that gear progression was very consistent, and maybe even a bit too powerful.
That said, once my character was established and I began pushing endgame, my progress (and consequently enjoyment) slowed down drastically, and I ended up getting pretty bored at around the 700 corruption / 1000 time echo completion mark. I think that the problems I experienced are entirely fixable, but as it currently stands the game is very lacking for players that build tall rather than wide (focus on 1-2 characters and play them to death rather than having multiple alts to rotate through). Obviously the following are all strictly my personal opinions and I by no means claim them as gospel, but I suspect that others who have spent some time with the lategame systems of LE will be able to relate to at least some of these issues.
So after all that foreplay, please find attached my list of loosely grouped thoughts, ideas, concerns, and suggestions for improvement regarding several key aspects of Last Epoch.
MONOLITH / TIMELINE
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Being able to search the current timeline by node information and/or being able to leave custom markers on nodes to be able to plan optimal paths. It would be very nice to be able to search for particularly dangerous mods, or be able to somehow mark nodes in advance. At least in my experience of playing at 700ish corruption, stacking 2 or 3 of the particularly dangerous mods (such as all enemies have 100% increased life and damage, or 200% increased elemental damage) would make certain layouts basically unplayable with off-screen oneshots. Being able to better plan the traversal through the timeline and be able to do a lot of nodes in succession after some preparation would feel a lot better than having to stop and check each node every single time.
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Currently, with the exception of the nodes that guarantee some exalted drops of a specific item type, all of the reward types are essentially useless. Gold, shards, keys, experience, rare items, idols, etc – once you are farming at the 500+ corruption level (or even sooner), these contribute absolutely nothing to your build or progression. Sure, you may be able to squeeze out an extra 0.05% if you roll the perfect idol, or you may want to grab one EXP node to try a new skill configuration and respect quickly, but I found myself not even opening the central reward chests at the end of most runs because I knew that nothing I would need would drop. Even though I was chain corrupting a single timeline in hopes for a particular unique, I didn’t even have any luck with the guaranteed unique nodes for my item of interest (for those curious, I ran over 1100 time echoes in my search for an Omni staff in the Empowered Stolen Lance, ending up at around 700 corruption, opening every single unique staff node and generic unique item reward node I could find. I got a grand total of 0 staves from these nodes, though I did manage to get 4 of them from about 40-50 runes of ascension; regrettably, all were LP0 and worthless to me).
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Monolith nodes that give specific reward types need to scale better at higher corruption. As mentioned above, I was ignoring 95% of all rewards because they weren’t actually rewards. The only ones I was excited for were exalted rewards, and, to a much lesser degree, unique staff rewards. I did not see a noticeable increase in the average quantity of either of these reward nodes at 700 corruption vs. at 100 corruption, and I feel like that is a big issue. I stopped feeling the desire to push my corruption values higher when I realized that I wasn’t getting more of what I needed for my build. Sure, I had higher overall rarity and was getting more uniques and exalteds to drop in general, but every time I opened the timeline I had spent a week grinding in, and saw the same useless reward nodes coming up in my path, I would lose a lot of steam.
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Beacon nodes (the ones that reveal the timeline a few extra nodes out) seem to have some slightly clustered spawning behaviors. Maybe it was just my particular experience and I was seeing patterns where there are none, but far more often than not, if I found and ran a beacon node, I would find at least 1 more that got revealed and was just 2 node hops away, and sometimes even more than 1. While I like the functionality of these nodes (despite the annoying arena-like event you have to complete to finish the node), I think that they should be distributed more sparsely, and maybe reveal an extra hop away in distance to compensate.
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When pushing for increased corruption, it seemed like I was spending as much time on loading screens as I was actually playing, since the dominant strategy there is to run through nodes as quickly as possible, and unless it’s a huge layout (looking at you, Alpine Halls) or you stack 3-4 complementary defensive modifiers on your timeline, it takes less than a minute to complete a node. I think that there needs to be more incentive to complete more of a node, or somehow make it so there are fewer nodes overall but their rewards are pooled/scaled together.
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Similar to the above point, I felt that playing with the goal of raising corruption was not rewarding as it was too slow. I planned to push my build to levels of corruption that would become uncomfortable and then focus on selecting easier node options to farm at a high level of rarity and challenge, and instead got bored of only being able to increment my corruption by 12-14 at a time. It would be nice to see either additional incremental corruption growth prior to fighting a shade (perhaps as a new type of reward node), or give us the option to somehow skip past a dead-end Shade node to proceed in the same direction and be able to acquire more corruption in one go by traveling further from the center.
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Monolith quests are not fun and take far too long. Even if the boss of the timeline you are doing does not drop something you want, you will still have to complete the questline multiple times to get the blessing that you want, and even more times to get that blessing at a good roll value. The quests are always the same, they give no reward other than the blessing/boss drop at the end, and just seem to be in a pretty bad place right now.
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Resetting the timeline’s nodes is one of the strongest features of the mapping system, and encourages spreading out in all directions to have a lot of nodes to reset at once in hopes of seeing some exalted nodes pop up. As such, it would be nice to have some sort of indicator of how many/what types of nodes have been completed, rather than having to memorize or scroll through and re-read the dozens of nodes you’ve completed, so you can tell just how good a reroll will be and time it better.
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I found high corruption effects to be extremely underwhelming. Even at 700 corruption, I could select 3-4 harmless modifiers (such as stacking enemy crit chance on a 100% CA build) and basically AFK through the next few nodes. On the other hand, selecting even 1 particularly dangerous mod could result in instant death in many situations. I feel like the weighing between the dangers of node mods vs. corruption stacking needs to be changed to alleviate that. One idea I had to kind of achieve this would be to introduce a blessing-like system for certain corruption increments: say, at 500 corruption you get to select from a pool of modifiers that further increase difficulty (e.g. all enemies have a 100% chance to receive a Glancing Blow, but permanent for this timeline) as well as reward (e.g. every EXP reward node gets replaced with an exalted reward node).
THE TEMPORAL SANCTUM
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Currently this is the best place to farm exalted items, but certain base types are excluded (I’ve yet to see chest, gloves, boots, or belt in the “enemies drop substantially more X” options). I assume that this is by design, but fail to see the reasoning behind it. Why let us target farm half our items so efficiently, and completely lock out the other half from this pool? I would like to either just see the remaining base types be added to the pool of rewards, or, if they were excluded for balance reasons I cannot see, give us the option to enable them with some cost (e.g. provide a seed of a Legendary item with at least 2LP at the beginning of the dungeon, which will destroy the item but enemies/boss will drop more items of the same type of item).
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Having the front door rewards reset just once a day and us having 0 control over them feels really bad. Seeing glyphs/runes be the front door reward for T4 several days in a row is really discouraging and makes me want to not engage with what should be one of the primary endgame systems.
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Need more options for difficulty/reward scaling. Once you have beaten T4 Julra once, you know that you will pretty much always beat her afterwards, since the amount of hp/damage will vary by a marginal amount, and the mechanics do not change. At this point, the dungeon just becomes an exalted-printing slog on days with a good front door bonus, and pretty much ignorable otherwise. It never really becomes more rewarding or challenging once you have mastered T4, and seeing as a huge appeal of the endgame of LE is unlimited difficulty/reward scaling, I see this as a pretty big oversight.
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The dungeon layout and mechanics are OK the first couple of times, but become an exercise in tedium shortly afterwards. It always looks exactly the same, and having layers of “doors” that require frequent flipping between timelines becomes boring very quickly. Other than different layouts, I’d like to see the ability to somehow open up said doors to reduce having to run through the same paths multiple times when clearing both timelines.
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Julra’s unique item drop rate seems pretty off. I didn’t see the unique relic a single time after 20+ T4 kills, and I don’t even think that it’s her best item and as such shouldn’t be so rare. Would like to see all uniques be more common overall, and rather than locking 1 unique per tier difficulty, higher tiers should give higher chances for good LP rolls. I did not see a single LP2+ over the course of all my Julra kills, and feel that LP on these should be easier to attain given that Legendary forging is the main appeal of the dungeon in the first place.
ARENA
- Uh. Do something with arena. I think at some point it was decent for EXP, but now I see absolutely no reason to run it. Fundamentally it’s an interesting idea and is a nice alternative to running monoliths 24/7, but currently serves no purpose other than virtual dick measuring. Maybe have it interact with one of the new systems, so that players are encouraged to engage with multiple systems to increase rewards if they put in the effort (e.g. you can put in an LP1 item into an altar at the beginning of the arena. You HAVE to use that item throughout the whole time you are in the arena. If you reach a certain number of waves, you get a chance of increasing its LP by 1 by virtue of that item’s legendary performance in slaying baddies. Alternatively, get some sort of token as a drop upon reaching X waves in the arena. Token can be redeemed in the dungeon to get an extra modifier that increases targeted drops as well as difficulty).
GENERAL GEARING
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The concept of legendary items is fantastic. Making “better” uniques have lower chances at getting good LP values makes sense, though defining uniques as good or bad becomes quite subjective. Overall, however, players currently have virtually no agency regarding LP. I get that they are extremely powerful and should not be easily attainable, and are meant as “chase” items. I’m fine with having to work my ass off for them, but relying on almost 100% pure RNG and just running thousands of echoes and hoping to get lucky is not a good feeling, especially when the core of LE’s gearing system is such a perfect combination of RNG and player agency. We need something that lets us make measurable progress towards our chase LP item, whether it’s a new rune that affects LP, a way to combine/reroll unwanted uniques with LP, or something of that sort. Note: I get that eventually when trading is a thing, we will be able to buy our items from lucky individuals. If this will be the only way of getting an LP unique you want other than getting ultra lucky and getting it as a drop, and no other systems are added, I suspect I will end up getting bored within a week rather than playing for months.
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Set items – with a couple exceptions, most set items themselves, and the set bonuses they provide, are awful. Even before legendaries were a thing the vast majority of sets were very underpowered, and now the power gap between them and well-rolled exalteds or low-tier uniques with good LP is even wider. Sets either need to just be reworked, or at least be able to get LP (maybe make it more restrictive – attach the affixes from LP to the set bonus itself, so you’d need to wear a full set with LP on each piece to be able to get the LP bonuses?)
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I would like to see the ability to make incremental progress towards rare uniques. Concepts like divination cards and collecting pieces of uniques from Harbinger maps in POE come to mind. Make us work for it, but give us the chance to get a guaranteed unique given enough grind. I mentioned before that I completed over 1100 echoes in the Stolen Lance, ended the grind with 700 corruption, opened every unique staff and generic unique node I came across, and never got a single Omnividence. That is not a good feeling, and I don’t see a whole lot of people being willing to put in this amount of effort and not get what they were after, and be no closer to getting what they are after either. If it was a build-defining unique and not just a potential upgrade given a lucky LP roll, I would have felt even worse and likely given up on the game entirely. Again, I understand that we will eventually be able to trade for rare uniques, but I believe that the game needs to be balanced around being able to reliably get everything yourself, even if it takes a long time.
LOOT FILTER
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Let us customize sounds/volume for loot filter entries.
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Make the filter easier to use by restricting affixes based on selected item types: if I set up a rule to highlight body armor, and want to restrict it by only showing armors that have certain affixes, I shouldn’t see affixes that can never show up on any chest in the list. If I’m trying to optimize my build, I shouldn’t have to tab out to an external source to see what kind of affixes can roll where, and what their values are. That information should be easily accessible in-game.
BALANCE
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There needs to be a more universal source of Damage Over Time mitigation. Hits have a variety of defensive mechanics for mitigation that are accessible to all classes, whether it’s resists, endurance, armour, dodge, GB, or block. As far as I know, the only thing that mitigates DOTs are resists. I think Endurance may also help with them, but when you’re down to 20% life it’s kind of hard to tell. Other than getting a good roll on one very specific amulet type, there are no DOT mitigation affixes, and it’s not readily available from skills or passive trees. I don’t expect to be able to ignore DOTs completely, but I would like to not have them be a source of almost immediate death on a character with 3.6k hp, 60% endurance, 5k armour, max resists, and massive health leech. I’m fine with having to invest more to be able to tank DOTs more comfortable, but I need the ability to be able to do so.
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Potions – unless you’re specced specifically into potion shenanigans via one of the unique belts or full hp->ward conversion, I can’t really see a use for them. They are too limited in quantity and do not scale with hp. I don’t think I’ve pressed the potion button once during my whole endgame grind run.
QOL
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Faster respeccing and/or letting us save passive skill profiles for varying up playstyle on a single character without having to spend 5-10 minutes juggling skill points around.
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Better and more transparent tooltip DPS calculations, and/or a more robust training dummy that displays more information (breakdown by skill, crit vs. non-crit, etc) and can have customizeable defenses for more accurate representations of damage output. If providing more information is not possible for some reason, at least make sure the information we do get is accurate (e.g. why do I get massive DPS bonuses from increasing cast speed on a spell that has a cooldown? The cooldown doesn’t decrease, the spell doesn’t hit more often, all it does is animate faster, so why the DPS jump?)
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Affix shards – when examining stored affix shards, it would be very nice to be able to see values of the stats they modify; would be particularly useful for affixes that have different values on 1H vs. 2H weapons. Currently if I’m trying to optimize a piece of gear, I have to tab out to compare potential values for different affixes, and believe that information should be available in-game.
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Several skills rely on first building up a number of stacks of an effect, and then triggering (e.g. Rogues get Flow, Mages get Firebrand stacks). In higher corruption areas with bad mods, taking your eyes off your pathing can mean instant death if you run into an AOE with a ground indicator. Rather than having to look down to the buff bar, find the right icon, check the stack count, and then act accordingly, it would be nice to have some sort of visual indicator on the character model, to make combat flow more smoothly.
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Exalted items should show on the minimap. At the same time, I should be able to turn off map markers for items I don’t care to see (cough sets, cough dungeon keys).
MISC
- This relates to a couple of the previously mentioned points, but I think that there need to be additional uses for gold and for EXP. Gold and EXP are “rewards” that you will be receiving throughout the entire game even if you don’t target them, but they very quickly stop feeling like rewards since they have absolutely no use past a certain point of your character.
As I understand it, gold will be the most likely primary currency for trade between players, but even if that becomes its one use in the lategame, I believe it will feel very lackluster. There needs to be a goldsink that will help drive the economy.
With no EXP penalty on death and having infinite access to the highest-level content, EXP becomes another “reward” that loses 100% of its value once you’re 100. Yet you will still constantly see EXP nodes as rewards in the monolith, and your bar will continue to climb and reset as you kill monsters. As with gold, being constantly rewarded with something entirely worthless is a very bad feeling. If you are unlucky with drops, you can have absolutely nothing to show for 10+ hours of endgame farming except an extra 0 in your gold stack.
Some ideas for uses of gold:
• buying rare glyphs/runes from NPC vendors;
• hiring mercenaries that provide otherwise inaccessible bonuses to your character; re-rolling or enhancing nodes in the monolith;
• buying keys to mini-dungeons with rewards that are otherwise hard to access
• revamped gambling with higher gold cost and more risk, but also higher rewards
Some ideas for uses of EXP:
• temporary bonuses to character stats for X echoes (think D3 Paragon, but only lasts a very limited amount of time for when you want a little boost in particularly hard echoes)
• bonuses to monolith rewards that are not accessible anywhere else (e.g. nodes that reward rare items are guaranteed to reward at least 1 exalted item; nodes that reward specific uniques have a chance to drop 2 items instead of 1, etc)
• permanent character bonuses that do not affect damage or survivability directly, but still feel like an improvement (movement speed, gold/shard collection radius, potion drop rate, etc)
Welp. This ended up being just a teensy bit longer than I first anticipated. I know that by this point it seems like I am just shitting on the game, but I took the fairly considerable time to type all this out not in the hopes of getting the devs to commit Sudoku, but to provide some perspective and feedback in the hopes of seeing improvement in a game that I feel is already exceptional, and with some work could easily be the best in the genre. Hopefully this turns out to not just be the ravings of a nolife madman, and others can relate to and weigh in on what I feel to be substantial, but also entirely rectifiable, issues with the game.
The feedback on Monolith really resonated with me and I had brought up many of the pointers you raised to the devs before as well.
