I’m currently playing at around 500 Corruption, and after several seasons, I feel like some of Last Epoch’s fundamental problems are still exactly the same.
I’m not talking about a character built entirely around damage and then complaining about dying.
My character has two Red Rings, around 20% less damage taken, roughly 5,000 Armor, 75% to all resistances, and permanently maintains around 5,000 to 6,000 Ward. I’ve also taken pretty much every relevant source of “less damage taken” available through my skill trees and abilities.
Despite all of that, at around 500 Corruption, I can go through three or four maps tanking pretty much everything the game throws at me without really seeing my Ward move.
I can run through huge packs of monsters, tank the new seasonal mechanic, and constantly feel like my character is extremely durable.
Then, three or four maps later, I run into a Champion.
And suddenly, it’s the complete opposite.
There’s a complete mess of visual effects, multiple AoEs appearing on the ground, abilities overlapping each other and becoming extremely difficult to read, and then suddenly I go from 5,000–6,000 Ward to instantly dead.
Very often, I don’t even know which attack killed me.
And that’s what bothers me.
At 500 Corruption, I think it’s perfectly normal for the game to become dangerous and for mistakes to be heavily punished.
I have absolutely no problem with Champions being a serious threat.
But there’s something extremely strange about being able to tank almost everything the game throws at you for several maps, only to suddenly get instantly deleted by a Champion in the middle of a pile of overlapping effects and barely readable AoEs.
It creates this weird situation where all the defenses you’ve stacked feel extremely effective for 99% of the content, until suddenly they feel like they don’t exist anymore.
I don’t think a random Champion encountered in a map should sometimes feel more dangerous than certain bosses.
And separately from that problem, there are still monsters capable of attacking you from literally one or two screens away.
And when I say off-screen, I don’t mean an enemy sitting just at the edge of my screen.
There are situations where I genuinely have to travel one or even two full screens just to find the mob that keeps spawning abilities directly underneath my character.
So I’m being attacked by something I can’t see, can’t immediately identify, and sometimes can’t even reasonably know where it is.
And this becomes even more ridiculous when you’re simply trying to interact with certain game mechanics.
Nemesis is probably the best example.
The mechanic literally requires you to stop.
You open an interface, look at the items, compare your options, and potentially put a Unique inside to try to get Legendary Potential.
But while you’re doing all of that, the game keeps running normally.
So even after clearing the entire area around the Nemesis, some mob sitting one or two screens away can still keep spawning attacks directly underneath your character while you’re simply trying to read the interface.
The solution ends up being to clear an absurdly large area around every interactive mechanic just so you can use it in peace.
I find that particularly strange in a game that regularly asks you to stop, read, compare things, or make a decision.
That’s not really challenging. It’s mostly frustrating.
And that brings me to a more general problem I currently have with Last Epoch: progression.
I love having to farm and gradually optimize a character. That’s literally why I play ARPGs.
I know perfectly well that you don’t need 3 LP or 4 LP items everywhere to play the game. With the right character, the right build, and some good 1 LP or 2 LP items, you can already go extremely far.
But that’s not really what I’m looking for in an ARPG.
What I enjoy is grinding a ridiculous amount to progressively push my character until I end up with completely insane gear.
And I have absolutely no problem with that taking an enormous amount of time.
The problem is that after several seasons, I increasingly feel like Last Epoch sometimes confuses progression with stacking more and more random systems on top of each other.
Every season, we get a new mechanic.
The presentation changes, the rewards change, the monsters change, and sometimes the way you interact with the mechanic changes.
But very often, the fundamental loop remains extremely similar:
Do the mechanic → hope for the right result → get nothing → repeat.
Then another mechanic gets added and gives you another way to pull the lever on the slot machine.
And this becomes especially obvious when you look at the actual process required to create one really good item.
Let’s take a Unique that you want to turn into a really good Legendary.
The first step is simply getting that Unique.
Depending on the item, you can already spend a huge amount of time farming it.
Then it finally drops.
Jackpot.
You finally have your Unique.
Except it can drop with 0 LP.
Now, yes, Last Epoch currently has several different mechanics that let you try to recover from that situation, and I think it’s great that those options exist.
You can use Nemesis or other systems to take that Unique and try to improve it.
But the problem is that these mechanics don’t actually remove the slot machine.
They mostly allow you to pull the lever again.
The result can be amazing.
Or it can be completely useless.
You might manage to get LP, or you might end up with a result that does absolutely nothing for your build, including LP that’s already been consumed by something you don’t even want.
There are also other options, including Weaver Cores and their associated mechanics, that allow you to take certain items and try to improve their Legendary Potential.
But once again, the result is random.
Your 0 LP item can stay at 0 LP.
It can go up.
With enough luck, it can potentially become a 2 LP or 3 LP item.
So yes, the game gives you more ways to fight against a bad initial outcome.
But those options are themselves jackpots.
You won once by getting your Unique.
Now you’re using that Unique to try to win a second time and get the LP you’re looking for.
And let’s say you succeed.
You finally have your rare Unique with the 2 LP or 3 LP you wanted.
Huge jackpot.
But your item still isn’t finished.
Now you need to farm the Exalted item you’re going to put into it.
And obviously, if you just spent that much time getting a rare 2 LP or 3 LP Unique, you’re not going to sacrifice the first mediocre Exalted item that drops.
You need the right base.
The right T7.
The right affixes around it.
And let’s not even start talking about double or triple T7s.
So you go back to farming.
Then eventually, after enough time, your Exalted item drops.
Another jackpot.
But even that Exalted item isn’t necessarily ready.
You may still need to work on its other affixes, with Forging Potential limiting how many modifications you can make.
And once again, you can find an amazing base, start working on it, and then run out of Forging Potential before you’ve managed to get exactly what you wanted.
So you can still lose your jackpot during the preparation process.
But let’s say everything works.
You have your Unique.
You have its LP.
You have your Exalted item.
You have your T7.
You have the affixes you want.
Your crafting went well.
After potentially dozens of hours, you finally have all the pieces you need.
And now comes the Legendary Craft.
The final slot machine.
If your Unique has less LP than your Exalted item has affixes, you still need the correct affixes to be selected.
So even after beating the RNG at every previous step, you still need to win one more time.
And if the wrong affixes transfer?
Trash.
Your Unique is used.
Your Exalted item is used.
Your Legendary is created.
And the item you potentially spent dozens of hours working toward isn’t what you wanted.
You can’t simply dump a huge amount of additional resources into it to gradually fix the result.
You lost the final roll.
Back to the beginning.
And that’s my real problem with Last Epoch’s gearing.
It isn’t:
“I want less RNG.”
This is an ARPG.
I want to grind.
I want the best items to be extremely rare.
I want to be able to spend an unreasonable amount of time optimizing my character.
My problem is more:
“How many times do I have to win the lottery before the game finally considers that I’ve actually obtained my item?”
Because here, you don’t simply win one extremely rare jackpot.
You win a jackpot that gives you access to the next one.
Unique → jackpot.
LP → jackpot.
Exalted → jackpot.
T7 and the right affixes → jackpot.
Preparing it with Forging Potential → more RNG.
Legendary Craft → another jackpot.
And if you fail late enough in that chain, several of the jackpots you already won end up meaning nothing for the goal you were pursuing.
And this is where I find the comparison with Path of Exile interesting.
In PoE, when you’re trying to craft a truly powerful item, there’s also a massive amount of RNG involved.
I’m absolutely not claiming that crafting in PoE is easy, or that an item can always be saved.
But in many situations, you can build your craft step by step.
You can secure certain affixes.
You can guarantee certain steps.
Sometimes you can go back or continue working on your craft after a bad result.
And very often, that extra level of control is extremely expensive.
But that’s exactly the point: it costs resources.
And you get those resources by playing the game.
That’s the fundamental difference for me.
In PoE, your playtime can gradually become a way to reduce some of the RNG.
The more you farm, the more resources you accumulate.
And the more resources you accumulate, the more you can invest into protecting certain stages of your craft, guaranteeing certain outcomes, or simply giving yourself additional attempts without necessarily throwing away everything you’ve already built.
You don’t remove the grind.
You don’t remove the RNG.
You gradually turn part of your grind into control over the RNG.
And that’s something I really miss in Last Epoch.
Because even the mechanics that have been added to help you deal with bad outcomes often feel like another way of pulling the slot machine lever.
Nemesis gives you another chance.
The mechanics around LP give you another chance.
Crafting gives you another chance.
But at a certain level of investment, I’d like my playtime to also allow me to secure more of what I’ve already achieved.
I’m not asking for a perfect 4 LP item to be easy to obtain.
I’m not asking for four perfect affixes to be guaranteed.
I’m not asking for completely insane items to be easy to craft.
I specifically want to grind for those things.
But I’d like that grind to progressively build the item rather than mostly buying me more attempts.
Because there’s a huge difference between farming for 100 hours to progressively build something incredible and farming for 100 hours to repeatedly earn the right to try to build something incredible.
And I think that’s also why my feelings about Last Epoch have changed so much over the seasons.
The first time I played the game, I found a lot of these systems genuinely interesting.
There was so much to discover.
Crafting, Exalted items, LP, Legendaries, all the different mechanics…
But the more I replay the game, the more I start seeing the same fundamental loop behind many of these systems:
You farm to earn an attempt.
You try.
You succeed or you fail.
And if you fail, you go back to farming to earn another attempt.
After a while, that feeling of progression gets replaced more and more by the feeling of constantly playing a slot machine.
And that’s a shame, because I think Last Epoch has a lot of genuinely great ideas.
Legendary Potential is a great idea.
Being able to revisit certain Uniques through different mechanics is a great idea.
The Exalted system is a great idea.
I wouldn’t want any of these systems removed.
I’d simply like them to be connected by a stronger sense of progression, where a player’s massive investment can gradually reduce some of those layers of randomness.
Not to make the game easier.
Not to guarantee the best items.
But so that after investing an enormous amount of time, I can genuinely feel:
“I’m getting closer to my item.”
Rather than:
“I’m getting closer to my next attempt.”
Because to me, there’s a fundamental difference between grinding for a long time to win an incredibly rare jackpot and grinding for a long time to win a jackpot that simply gives you access to the next jackpot.
PS: And then there’s Corruption, which is another jackpot. So… yeah.