Honesty Thoughts & Feedbacks about end game

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Hi EHG team, first thank you for making such a great game. I bought the game 2 days before harbinger cycle release, since then almost a month passed and I have spent over 320 hours into the game.

I’ve played 4 Characters up to now, Paladin Lv79 (CoF), Sorc Lvl98 (MG) , Falconer Lv76 (MG) & Lastly a new character Rune master which now I am progressing through the campaign again.

There are 3 Root issues I would like to address:

1. Corruption level causes monsters power spike

Monolith was one of its kind, unique map-style grind, playing through has been fun & challenging, I managed to reach Empowered Monolith just with my fireball build, which right off we begin with 100 corruption as a base, this is where problems start to arise.

Corruption gave too much damage boosting to monsters, which caused a sudden damage spike, and the gameplay’s dynamic from enjoyable to tense & stressful experience.

I understand this is an endgame grind, and you wanted to boost the monster to leverage its power to the difficulty & the rewards. But It was way overdone.

My personal experience? The grind & gameplay became very tedious because of certain monsters’ imbalances, the whole “action” RPG became dodgeball/tag game, whoever touched the other guy first gets the win, what’s the fun in this?

Imagine being able to take some hits and suddenly the monster can easily kill you just 2-3 hits due to ridiculously high damage & stuns? I’m over 200 corruption to nearly 300. The whole grinding experience instantly dropped to a level where i felt exhausted. DoT also way off the charts.

Not to mention your lightning system, terrain lightning/blocking obstacles, the minimap overlay is not showing properly, sometimes it’s just so hard to see in certain dark maps, or there’s an aoe skill released by Covenant of dominant , or that shock by lightning elemental which did not see it coming from my screen & got one shot.

Please reduce the corruption damage boost, make it for every 10 corruption, monster gain 3% increased damage , 5% increased HP. That way we can adjust the difficulty to the level we are comfortable to grind.

2. Stun Mechanic caused by high damage

PLEASE, PLEASE for the love of god. Remove the stuns caused by high damage, you already have stun affixes for melee , ranges & spells, you must rework that. I couldn’t emphasize how many times a stupid stun caused by a regular monster which leads to my demise scenario. Not to mention all the harbinger could easily stuns you, it is way too obnoxious.

3. Viable builds & META builds

With reducing damage spike & also the stuns, we should no longer have issues with the smooth experience in the late game. This also allows other builds to be viable, which will greatly impact the market in MG. That way people don’t always need broken META builds to farm till the end game.

I was enjoying my fireball meteor sorc until at 160c I could hardly proceed anymore, I then jump onto static orb META build, the whole experience was a lot different, yet, the root issues remained unchanged.

It’s funny oftentimes game devs don’t want people to break the game, but their flawed design has caused people to do so, because there was no other way around it.

From there you can do a much better balancing on skills & builts, instead of nerfing META all the way.

Doing too much nerfs will just upset players & kill the game. We don’t need to be extremist hardcore, we only want to enjoy a smooth grinding experience without too much hassle.

Also, CoF experience might need some changes, especially for the weapon rolls, the pool is waaay to diluted to get the weapon you desired. It’s awesome feeling to grind stuff on your own, but near the endgame, it is always missing some decent gear, which impacts on the game progress. Which leads me start playing new sorc characters. My Sorc was able to find some decent equipment for my paladin to swap, it was a leverage.

Also, don’t make CoF character drops all “cannot be trade” , you already have CoF tags, allowing some good random drop able to sell into MG market makes more items available.

That is all for now. I will give more feedback & thoughts in the future.
Thank you for reading through this.

2 Likes
2

Did you jump into empowered the moment you unlocked it?

I personally think that difficulty levels like that should exist, so if you have a very well build you can directly jump into the new difficulty, but if your character is not quite powerful enough you need to spend some more time in the normal Monolith until you can tackle empowered.

I personally don’t think directly going to empowered after finishing normal should be the expected norm and should only be an option for people you have eyperience/already very good characters.

Just because you unlocked a new difficulty doesn’t mean you are ready for it yet.

Corruption does give more damage and health, because it’s multiplicative with enemy modifiers.

The impact of corruption got significantly increased with 1.0 but the scaling curve got smoothed out a lot.

I actually think that the scaling curve for corruption is really really good right now.

While there will always be meta builds I do think that LE has a very very good build diversity and build viability. You can make virtually everything work for 100-200 corruption.

I personally stay away from meta builds and always play the most hipster stuff imaginable and never had the feeling that I can’t do or achieve anything.

More often then not it just makes more sense nerfing the few top percentile builds instead of buffing dozens. Hundreds of other builds.

I personally never understood people being upset with skills or builds getting nerfed, because from my perspective it allows you to look at other skills or build setups after such a nerf. So in a way nerfs open up more possibilities.

If previously this one particular way of playing Skill X was so good and meta everybody did it and now after the nerf that is weaker (but still possible to play) you can look at slightly different setups that are now in the same ballpark.

Previously those other options were strictly inferior but now they became valid options without feeling be of playing a “worse setup”.

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Regarding absurd damage I recommend this video for you to watch:

It is not clarified in game in obvious way and will help you understand why same mobs sometimes tickle you and then one shot you.

3 Likes
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I don’t think so. For example, if a Fireball Sorceror could not kill bosses like T4 Julra and Aberroth and struggled at 150 corruption. Nerfing Static orb does nothing for it since this build is still struggling anyway.

Jelkhor’s Marksman got nerfed in 1.1 did this make Charged puncture or charged Detonating arrow a valid option in any way?

Just to be clear here, I’m fine with outliers getting nerfed but I don’t think it opens up more possibilities or improves diversity.

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Well, obviously you don’t just nerf the OP outliers, you also buff the UP outliers. Until they all sort of meet in the middle.

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Corruption scaling is fine, absolutely and utterly so, the issue is somewhere else.

More EHP reduces stuns, they barely happen end-game unless something went wrong with your build. Your only character in empowered monoliths has a bit of a wonky sustain. As much as I saw besides the natural regeneration of ward the majority comes from expending heftier amounts of mana for ‘Lost Knowledge’. Which I always found a rather unreliable node overall.
Since you need to expend 40 mana you get the leftover amount as a sudden ward boost but the more you cast the less ward you gain. It’s a rather high-level play to enforce yourself to cast juuust enough to sustain the optimal way with your mana level, which isn’t always possible after all and definitely goes for the cost of dps to do.

And that’s the issue… you don’t go backwards in fixing things, you just fix the root issues.

If a specific build is not working as well then you adjust them to meet all at the desired point of balance.

That’s the fix. Proper balance.

The root issue is that you’re not all too experienced in building a character yet and what measures are those that are important to make your character progress and survive as well.
Which is fine, comes with experience, takes time.

The actual root issue of the game solely is class balance in the direction you’re talking.

Yes, agreed, 100%

No, all CoF drops should be ‘cannot be traded’. The Faction tags are those that are causing more issues then good.

Very good find and a prime example why Last Epoch has a really bad UI.
Especially in a game like this numbers should be available to the player upfront to make informed decisions.
Enemy damage ranges should generally be low, near static. You need to expect how much you’re hit rather then hope for the best.

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Funny when you mention like that. The fact that Empower monolith doesn’t have restrictions at all, we can straight jump in, that was its purpose. If not, why does the empower monolith exist in the first place? Obviously for better loot.

Even with decent builds, getting one shot by a monster with over 6k wards, it’s overkill. If it’s a boss, I have nothing to say. But it’s not.

That’s exactly what I did in the first place. I picked fireball because it wasn’t meta, it’s surprising I was able to go through all the way till 160+ corruption. Along the way I have respec my skill over 5 times, changed my passives at least 7 times, entire gear changed. Still end up getting one shot. Hence I jump over to static orb sorc. It’s great, I can kill easily, but like I mentioned earlier, it became a Tag game, not fun.

Often times when nerf came, it would hugely impact the gameplay, if the devs doesn’t go down to the root, in this case which is the monoliths, because it’s the core mechanics, you don’t adjust character first, you adjust the core first, because characters are build around it.

Thanks, I will check it up.

I do hope they buff more than nerfs. Hopefully this doesn’t ends up becoming like PoE nerfing leagues.

If it was that wholesome, no people would complaint. The fact I have done 3 chars now to test the game, it is not fine at all when there are huge AoE attacks that can deal over 5k-6k damage, it’s ridiculous.

You think a player who have made his way till 160c with fireball as main skill did not take any viable option? That’s why I mentioned above, let the Non meta build shine, because certain skills really doesn’t sync with the passives. I have meteor, but it’s huge mana cost prevent me to sustain long enough in a fight, often times I ran out of mana before able to kill huge group of monsters.

The fact that even tanky build like paladin couldn’t stand there and face tank aoe dmg is baffled. Before empower mono, yes, after? NO. The mono is a game core mechanics. We can nerf/buff/balance as much character/skills as many times as we wanted, but the core, which in this case, it’s the root cause. Tune down the difficulty doesn’t diminish the game. I’m not asking to nerf those timeline/mono boss, just a general overall damage buff, they can later adjust back the boss damage & health individually, which I have no objection, because bosses where meant to be tough to beat, not regular monsters.

Fairly speaking, this game is still new, from what I’ve known, before I joined the game, ward was way beyond broken, they have to nerf it, that alone tells me, this game has a lot room for improvements. I’m maybe new to this game & it’s mechanics, but I am no stranger to RPG games.

I am referring to Non CoF prophecies drop, those without CoF tags, it should not come with “Cannot be trade” tags.

I believe with years to come, it will get better. The fact there is so much performance issues, which I did not mention , because I understand when comes to coding & rendering, it is not that simple. It takes time, just like warframe, they are over 12 years old, they come a really long way.

I believe EHG will fix this & improve further in the future because it’s a global issue.

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And if they only buff then it becomes D3 with it’s ridiculous numbers that no one takes seriously. Not to mention rampant power creep.
It’s healthier to nerf the OP builds while buffing the weaker ones so everything ends up kinda on the same tier while not trivializing the starting mechanics.

Pretty much all people that complain are people that don’t understand how the defense layers work in LE. They have a mentality best summed up by you, as in:

Ward is only one of the layers. Just slapping ward on stuff and hoping that’s enough is the most common mistake.

And there’s also the important factor that if you have infinitely scaling content, the damage mobs deal will also infinitely scale. So even when you do layer your defenses properly, there will always be a point where you get one-shot.
Corruption farming is about finding the highest corruption possible that you can comfortably farm, not the highest you can actually push.

At the moment, almost all builds can reach 300c. Some do require more effort to gear up than others, but almost everything can get there.
For example, in this patch, there’s a meteor/fireball build that can kill Aberoth. You just have to work for it. You don’t need to go meta.

It’s an infinitely scaling content. All you’re proposing is easier numbers, but you’ll get the same issues when you reach 250 instead of 160. Nothing changes there.
And they have actually gone the other way, where they buffed mono difficulty with 1.0.

There is really nothing in the game after 300c. You get a soft cap at 500c and minimal gains past that. As long as most builds can do 300c (which they can), mono difficulty is fine.

You have base 30% increased drops at rank 1. That alone makes it so that anything that drops can’t be traded, otherwise everyone would be farming with CoF to sell in MG.

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It’s also meant to be a distinct step-up and not a gentle breeze forward. ‘You’ve done it! Now get ready for the real challenge.’

That’s 98% of the time multiple shots hitting in conjunction, which often comes down to experience for how to close in on enemies or move as to reduce the hits actually getting you.

It’s still not optimal as some enemy compositions are fairly messy overall… but it reduces the time this happens substantially, for some people even nigh completely.

This is a skill-issue which many people have, me included. It’s not the game there in the majority of the cases.

Some of those adjustments are deeper even, itemization and progression rate, which is even further down then the monolith system, it’s the core progression.

But that’s extremely hard to adjust properly, from a coding and from a balancing standpoint.

Hence instead you tackle something which still does a lot which is the uppermost thing, and that’s number balancing for characters.
Also it makes finding the actual issues easier when they’re not muddled by others, and a general adjustment for value ranges (which character balancing majorly is) is easy to handle in comparison to the others, causing positive ripple effects to make those other things then easier to adjust as well.

That’s… not true at all though.
People are notoriously bad at discerning where a problem is. ‘The game is crap!’ happens for a reason as an argument, people most of the time know the feeling of it ‘feeling bad’ but have no clue at all where it comes from.
Some others get an inkling, speaking about ‘corruption level’ or ‘the legendary mechanic’ or ‘content diversity’… but those are all not core issues. They’re top-level issues, building up on others below… which build up on others below as well often. If you just see the top layer then the actual issues elude you.

Also wrong. Even with my necromancer I can walk around with my mind shut off at 200 corruption and I have ‘only’ 5-7k ward. So that’s definitely not the case.

And a properly build paladin is vastly stronger.

Also what are you talking about with ‘tanky’ there? Pure EHP? Sustain? Mitigation?
Those are all parts of that, and some allow you to do different things then others. High sustain allows to recover from hefty hits so you can take single ones and be full swiftly after. High mitigation causes you to not get those large hits in the first place, reducing stuns. Pure EHP solely is a buffer though if you can’t recover it accordingly.

You’re basically putting the cart before the horse with that train of thought there.
It’s not the content at fault, the scaling rate is well set, the post-campaign scaling overall is really well done, the math checks out.
It’s the character progression scaling which is screwed and doesn’t check out.

In the campaign for example it’s different. Character progression is decently done there overall but the content scaling is a mess.

Newly released, yes. But on the market for over 5 years now.
Which is anything but ‘new’. People had time to become extremely proficient and solely need to adapt to the changes rather then learning the core gameplay.

And yes, the game has massive amounts of potential for improvements in the current state, and a massive need as well. It’s a decent game… but not ‘fantastic’ at all, it’s at best ‘middling good’, clearly above mediocre but not close to anything beyond ‘good’.

Which ones? Soul-likes? Jrpgs? western rpgs? diablo-clones? RPG is vast.
Are you talking about other diablo-clone games in the ARPG direction?

Yes, and I’m saying that shouldn’t be changed.
Instead the CoF tag needs to go :slight_smile:

Yes, absolutely, if they’re given the time at least. In the current situation of the game sector and the competition I’m not sure if they’ll be handed that time though.
The downside of moving into a competitive environment rather then a niche.

100% agreed with that! Properly doing it both ways.

To be fair the tagging system by itself needs to be overhauled massively for CoF, a lot of the stuff isn’t properly tagged, only created items are as much as I know, not upgraded ones. So a double T7 exalted item will likely show as ‘untagged’ for CoF despite being ‘created’ by it, solely because it has been upgraded from a worse item through the mechanic… which I would deem necessitates the tag.

Otherwise what is the tag for? EHG implemented it with a fairly extreme downside for players to avoid a fairly uncommon and small measure of double-dipping possibility in comparison… that would also need a big amount of investment from the side of the player to even do.
Hence if they already go with that system they should to it properly and be thorough, because now you can farm up exalted items in CoF and outfit your characters with things you would need to buy for very very much gold in MG… if even obtainable at all.

That wasn’t the plan I would imagine.

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There are many games where you can unlock a new difficulty but you canvt handle it right away and need to improve your character or player skill.

Ward is only one of many defensive layers. This statement has no weight because we donvt know anything else. What enemy killed you with what ability? What does the rest of your characters defense look like?

The defensive setup does not really rely on your main skill for the most part though. With some exceptions where your main skill also contributes significantly to your defense (like leech, health on hit or Ward generation).

The defensive setup is mostly independent from the offensive setup of a build, especially on the gear prefixes are offensive and suffixes are defensive for the most part)

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This game is very casual up until it definitely isn’t and then it is not in a way that is like PoE is (was?). But maybe it’s even worse.

So here’s what I’m saying. If you don’t know to start building for defense early, you definitely don’t know which items (slot-wise) have the defensive affixes you need (health, endurance, crit avoidance) and you get to corrupted mono’s and you have crappy defenses… and now you have to scramble to try to replace the gear which is doing good damage with gear that ideally still does good damage but has better defenses.

And all the old timers show up with zero compassion to tell you that it’s a build/builder issue. And they are right, it is a build/builder issue. And now you, as a new player, have to learn how defenses work and which items slots those defensive affixes roll on. But you need to do that at the same time that you fight with item drop RNG with items that have too many affixes.

And a crash-course on the filter that you’ve been ignoring. While dying in mono, which is decidedly less ‘casual’ than the competition, i.e. you don’t get to try again, but you do have to do that node again to get onto the next one. It’s kind of a kick in the nuts for pretty much no reason other than, “it needs to mean something… even though you’ll run hundreds of these and they really won’t mean anything”.

As a new player a ton of shit gets thrown at you all at once that previously nothing made you pay attention to. Now you basically need to completely rebuild your items for defense and try to get upgrades … which you probably won’t get. You’ll probably get something that you need defensively, but you’re going to lose on offensively. You need to step backward to step forward, gear-wise.

And unless you have spent a lot of time with the forge, that is yet another layer of frustration.

So, with all of that, I’m not really surprised when people just peace-out. Which is a shame because it’s a good game.

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Not even maybe, it is factually worse for itemization in a massive way.

Yes, and that needs to change. Which is why I’m pressing so hard at the early game experience, which is easier to get into for a new player then PoE but leaves you - similar to PoE - to then force you to learn new stuff which you’ve likely forgotten even exists by that time.

I’m neither, the game needs a lot of work still, it’s good, the basic game-loop is well done, everything above needs at times vast balance sweeps or full-on reworks.

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I hope they find a middle ground. LE certainly falls into “way to easy” in the campaign, which I dont really mind. I think normal monos and empowered monos need to be removed as concepts. For even non experienced players, players with a better grasp of the genre, normal monos do nothing, and just exist as padding.

Where as PoE I cant get any of my casual friends to dip in and try it, because they go to act one, hit a blue pack of “causes cold exposure” water elementals that then chain freeze them, they die on repeat, and the answer is supposed to be “uh get freeze immunity I guess xd” or “just get enough hp and cold resistance by level 5 when you enter the depths to pray you can not get chain frozen”

PoE has an insanely bad habit of introducing mechanics before you have a way to counter them realistically.

Where as LE just does not introduce the player to any sort of scaling at all until it suddenly spikes the play with 1.6x damage going from the 90 monos to the 100 monos(its probably more, because of the 90 → 100 jump on top of corruption!)

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Well, tbf, people who can’t handle empowered yet are NOT supposed to go right to them… They even introduced Harbingers to help stop people mindlessly jumping to empowered if their builds are not decent yet. They’re supposed to scale corruption up to 50 in normal monos before, instead, they ask for someone to help kill the Harbinger and cause themselves this “issue” when their builds can’t tackle empowered solo.

See how you just ignored the 50 Corruption you can get in normal monoliths? Of course it’s gonna spike hard if you jump through content like that.

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Which goes against the natural progression.

Section done → enter new section.

Which is the whole issue there. Shouldn’t be the case. And if it’s the case you make it utterly and absolutely clear that ‘now shit’s starting for real! better prepare or you’ll have a baaad time!’ as how most other games do it which have a good progression overall.

Everyone ignored the 50 corruption because the content is set up in a way that you won’t actively pursue it, which is the problem. Only thrives the point home from above.

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Well, you did ignore the whole part I talked about how people who struggle at empowered, most probably had asked for help to be able to defeat the first Harbinger, so they did not really clear that section, somebody else did, thus should not enter new section by themselves.

I can straight up buy T16 maps in PoE as soon as campaign is finished, doesn’t mean I should run them by myself If my build can’t handle them. And even if I decide to try them, I should not post in their forums complaining about how difficulty “suddenly” spiked without any warnings, because I decided to jump from campaign straight to late game.

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I yawn through the harbinger since the harbinger is a distinct different type of play (a singular mechanical fight about positioning) and then get demolished at empowered monoliths every time again.

It happened before Harbingers… it still does. They weren’t meant (and if EHG did an awful job) at making entrance into empowered monoliths harder.

And since you brought the PoE example up… you get prepared by killing Kitava the first time that the game gets a distinct difficulty spike. That spike isn’t harsh at Kitava to Act 6, but you clearly feel it. Then when you kill Kitava the second time it’s a vastly stronger spike, but you understand it since it happened before. ‘Ah, game told me it gets harder, ok, that’s how it looks like, makes sense!’

LE sadly has nothing of that. The Harbinger is based on alpha damage, singular strong damage output. All you need to do is either avoid it (which bosses taught you by then) or have high enough EHP to survive.
Monoliths don’t focus on EHP, they focus on sustain. Hits in conjunction to each other. That’s an entirely different concept. You can sacrifice EHP to get sustain… but you don’t learn it during the progression with LE.

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Really? I’m really surprised by this. Wouldn’t ever thought you had issues with 100C empowered.

I personally never had before 1.1. That is because this is the first time I ever played a SSF character (consequently, first time playin CoF also) and really had to work on normal monoliths before jumping to empowered on my first toon this cycle, and I couldn’t progress much further than 150C at ease, before I decided to build a new one, which was able to climb from 100 to at least 200 right after unlocking empowered simply because I had many decent items stored already.

Had never experienced this playing MG. Every time I had any issues clearing a map, I just had to go to the baazar and change some pieces for less than 100k gold, all good.

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Not ‘issues’, it’s mindless playing along and then getting slapped in the face suddenly.

I’m quite experienced with diablo-clones, which means I’m also falling into the traps of something which is outside of the ‘normal expectation’ for me.
That’s simply something which happens in LE easily. I go and do the campaign… Lagon slaps me 3 times since I’m in ‘lazy mode’ mentally before I wake up and decide to get slightly serious to actually kill him and not get hit.
Then lazy mode returns again since he’s the biggest hurdle. That alone tells me ‘whoops, something went wrong with the usual fairly straight scaling of the genre’.
I play through the rest of the campaign and monoliths, not even thinking what I’m actively doing since I’m ‘used to it’ and after the Harbinger once more such a ‘whoops’ moment comes, the jump from monolith to empowered is simply quite distinct.

It’s not a struggle at all, it’s rather a ‘I suddenly need to think more then expected’. And if I experience that… how must it feels for someone not experienced in the genre? For me it’s a ‘mild inconvenience’ where I go along and might need a new item at best or finish crafting on a started one… for someone newer to the genre it’s a sudden spike and stop-gap which doesn’t feel ‘nice’ at all.

I stopped at 250c this time when the grind - before it was fixed - with the Harbingers become a major annoyance to me which made it feel like I was forced to re-do my progression again as I usually focus on a single timeline and only branch out when I want a bit of variety, bringing corruption up this way for other timelines very slowly and gradually.

Just because a experienced player - like me - knows exactly ‘I was too lazy there’ or ‘this is beyond my comfortable skill level’ those things are not the case for someone which has no experience in the genre. Instead you get steamrolled, don’t understand why (because you don’t know yet how to build a character or how to mess with the AI so you reduce hits for example) it happens and it frustrates you then.
That’s not a player-problem… while it is a skill-issue it’s also a fault of the game to provide a comfortable progression rate in-between at those 2 distinct steps of the game. Lagon worse then empowered definitely though.

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It’s not as standard in the genre, though. In D2 you were cruising along until Duriel slapped you in most builds. Same for Diablo himself. Those 2 are a great difficulty spike rise out of nowhere.
In PoE, like you mentioned, Kitava is also a huge jump in difficulty, as is the Brine King.
In GD the same thing happens. Out of nowhere, one of the bosses is much harder than the previous ones.

It’s not always easy to make scalar adjustments in difficulty all the time and spikes are expected. In fact, I’d say they are kinda staple by this point.