Here’s a few tips for starting out in Last Epoch and making your own build. I’ll divide this into starter/useful information and then basic building advice. This basic information is mostly intended for players discovering Last Epoch and perhaps also for those whom are having a tough time making their first character(s).
Starter tips :
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Be careful of the wording! There are differences between Added and Base damage, between %more and %increased damage. (for more info see last line and “unintuitive mechanics guide”)
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Watch the ground ! Most of Last Epoch’s strong ennemies have ground-pointers indicating where they’ll do damage
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In the skills panel, ALT+right-clicking a skill will give you a lot of information for the skill, including the damage scaling and attribute-scaling.
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The increased scaling found inside active skill trees is multiplicative with the sum of other increases (from gear or passive trees)
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Ask for help on Discord. If there are things you don’t understand or if something seems to be going wrong, come ask on discord. You’ll find quite the active develloper and community members presence to help you out.
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Craft often and from early on ! It’s rather easy (click F to open the panel and the “?” for more information) and will help you a lot with the leveling process, however… (see next line)
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Glyphs of the Guardian are your most important crafting commodities, so keep them until you’re crafting good decent gear (don’t use any before levels 30-40+)
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Crafting good gear (past early level stuff) is best done on decent item bases which are further improved. Crafting from a white item is ill-advised (unless it’s for making early/quick filler items such as mentionned before). This is because every craft makes subsequent crafts harder (for more info, see the ingame explanations in the crafting panel, click F then the “?” )
Building tips :
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Plan your build. This is best done on an already leveled character which can look at the active skill trees AND at the passive trees. If you don’t have a character of the class you want to play, just starting a new character and looking at the passive trees give you a decent idea already.
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Don’t neglect defenses ! Plan wisely which ones you’ll use. Even more so if melee.
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Defenses include protections (requires a mix of gear and passives, depending on class and available skills), dodge (mostly gear dependent, very good defense early on as it doesn’t take much crafting to have a good chance to evade), glancing blows (probably the best defense mechanic, requires crafting and starts appearing past level 25/30+), block (mostly for sentinel and mage/spellblade classes), and ward (mostly for mage, acolyte and maybe sentinel/paladin classes ).
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If you’re an attacker, make sure to have a healthy balance of flat damage (sources = your weapon’s implicit and explicit modifiers, and sometimes from passive or skill tree) and increased damage scaling (sources = passive tree and gear)
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If you’re a caster, make sure you use a wand with a high “+%base spell damage” implicit (they start out at 5%, then quickly grow up to +260%ish on “prophecy wands”) and get a decent increased damage scaling (sources = passive tree and gear)
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Two-handed weapons have x1.8 affixes stronger affixes, and body armors x1.5. There is thus a heavy price to pay for using an unique body armor, and if you’re attacking and not using your shield (for blocking or getting some good stats), two handers are quite worth it.
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On most classes, its a good idea to take the initial +hp passives (each class but acolyte has +hit points on the first passive line)
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Make sure you know how your intended main spell/skills scale, and plan ahead in passive tree/gear.
Class-specific building tips :
Sentinel :
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Pick up the +10hp/+1 vit passives, 8/8, they’re very good value and help with leveling a lot (there are a lot of void monsters and quite some necrotic monsters in the main story)
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Decide early on wether you’ll use shields or not. If you do, pick up heal on block it’ll be very useful.
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Both Void Knight and Paladin have very strong utility spells (devouring orb is a strong defensive buff, reversal is both a life-saving button and mana-refilling tool ; Holy Aura provides powerful buffs)
Mage :
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Pick up +hp/mana passives, they are both offense and defense (offense because more mana before kiting/regening/mana striking), unless you plan on stacking a lot of ward (which is very easy to do as of now)
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Probably also pick up +INT/elem protect nodes (int is damage for all or nearly all mage skills, including spellblade attacks, but it is also ward retention).
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Teleport is both really good utility and amazing defense as it can generate a lot of ward, especially with the INT-scaling passives, and also taunt ennemies with clones. [A nerf is expected but even at 1/10th of it’s current strength it would be worth it.]
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If Spellblade, Iceward is really good for blocking. Mana strike can generate a lot of ward in melee
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If Sorceror, Black Hole is very good crowd control.
Primalist :
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Pick up the +hp/minion hp% points, they’re double defense as your pets can tank quite a bit for you.
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Fury leap is very powerful, providing both damage and utility for all kinds of builds (+105% damage for you and minions, +30% attack speed, % chance to reset being the go-to utility nodes)
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If melee, use a two-handed weapon, there’s very little reason to use a shield as a primalist.
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If you’re not a summoner yet want a tanky pet, sabertooth cat is the tankiest (thanks to it’s dodge and other defensive passives).
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If you’re a summoner, be careful about attribute scaling and chose wether you want to scale strength or attunement yet (most pets are str-aligned, totems spriggan and vale spirit are attunement-aligned).
Acolyte :
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Pick up 8 points into intelligence. Wether you’re a summoner, attacker or spellcaster it’ll increase both your damage and defense.
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On the right in acolyte tree pick up “Mania of Immortality”, at least 5 points too, it’s really good ward generation and will compensate for your low health pool.
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Hungering Souls and Harvest are very strong leveling skills (also viable later on).
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If melee, use a two-handed weapon, there’s very little reason to use a shield as an acolyte.
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If you’re not a summoner, Bone Golem can still tank for you as it has some good defensive nodes.
Lastly, if you want to delve in a bit further, I’d humbly suggest reading my “unintuitive mechanics guide” which can be found here : Unintuitive Mechanics Guide for LE