(The following is my feedback based on my experiences as a player. You don’t have to agree with me, but please do not attempt to invalidate my experience)
The transition from pre-Imperial era > Imperial era is very rough. I’ve played various builds and classes and every time I reach this era the game goes from being ‘fun’ to ‘micro-managing stats to survive’.
Everything prior to Imperial has been an absolute cakewalk, I could delete entire screens fulled of enemies with Frost Claw and Volanic Orb, freezing everything and obliterating. There was absolutely no indication dps / survivalbility was not going to hold up in a few moments time.
This mage being my fifth character now, I’m well versed in how to build the stats and upgrade the existing items. I shatter items that will benefit my build and constantly improve that has good synergies. That said, even with this forehand knowledge of the game systems you can still often find yourself gear-locked and having to farm the previous era to get better gear/shards.
I’ve seen countless threads, topics of people getting stuck at Lagon, so I’m very very well versed in the fact that YOU NEED RESISTS and not to be just glass cannon. I have done what I can with the drops given, my resists are quite low and this isn’t by choice. I couldn’t sacrifice any more DPS otherwise Imperial would be even harder.
Enter Imperial Era.
The enemies are 10x more deadly than before, much more HP and more ranged attacks.
In addition there are now multiple one shot mechanics from the laser based enemies that can quickly claw through ones HP (in my case, 490hp + 90ward) in a mere moment. Nothing prepared me for this.
The transition from gear you’ll obtain pre-ceeding Imperial Era doesn’t sufficiently give you enough time to prepare for the spike that is to come. I cannot agree, that going from overpowered to underpowered in a single act transition is good balance.
I know the players with much more experience than me will just say “crap build, get good, learn to play, get/craft better gear, i didn’t have any issues must be a you problem” and these are all valid opinions. However these will come only with time, and the timing does not match up based on my own personal experience from playing.
Not going to lie, there were a few moments there were I felt well this is just not fun I don’t want to play for a while. I love the game, and I’ll keep playing, I’ve had a blast so far and I know that I can get through this.
I welcome others feedback and thoughts on this but keep it constructive, feel free to point out mistakes. Feel free to point out hey, that gear is actually really bad, you got some crap RNG there.
TLDR
Transitioning into Imperial Era has a massive difficulty spike
Unless you get good drops/shards for crafting you could be vastly underprepared
No wind up to the introduction of more difficult mobs/mechanics, you’re just thrown into it.
Yes it does get better when you get better gear, its the spike here that im providing feedback on.
Hey ! The good news is : there is a lot of things you can do to help you out!
You talk about items dropping, but I don’t think you’re crafting a lot on your gear, right ?
Since you have a silver ring with 5 tiers total (level req. 2), instead of having a ring with 12 tiers (for t3+t3+t3+t3, the level requirement is 26). You really need to keep your gear up to date ! Press F and start upgrade those affixes that you like. Don’t worry about the shards, you will always have plenty of the common ones. Here is an example of a generic ring of someone aroung level 30.
Also, the Imperial chapter is really “Necrotic-themed”, so you really want to have more than 0% necrotic resistance You also always need physical resistance but you already have a good amount, so good job on that front!
One of the main defense layer of the mage is Ward, but that’s a bit hard to build at first, I suggest you to focus on Health + Armor for the time being. Armor is a great stat for any characters at low level. There is eventually a diminishing return and it becomes harder to scale it late game (without the right passives or items), but I always suggest to people to get some armor stats at the start.
Hope that helps, i’m sure you’ll get through.
Edit : By the way, if you don’t know what a stat exactly does (like Armor for example), you can press G in game and search for the term. The in-game guide is GREAT.
Thanks for the tip I didn’t realise they were so low tier. The barrier for me at the moment has been finding a suitable replacement that I can craft some decent stats over onto which leads me to holding onto things much longer than I’d like (not just the ring but other parts of the gear too).
Do you have any suggestions or tips to help get the affixes I need?
Do you have a loot filter ?
If that’s not the case, I really really advice you to learn how it works. It’s very easy and don’t take more than a few minutes.
In your filter, add a line that recolor items with :
Affixes with “Juicy stuff” (Health (flat and %), resists, armor, your stat (int if mage), vitality)
and in the advance options (just under), you want to put “Total affix tiers of : X”
The idea is that “X” can be easily modified as you grind the campaign. Early, I put 3. So, items with a t2 affix + t1 affix of “Juicy stuff” will show red. At level 30, I’d say X=5, so you’d have a good base to craft upon.
You can add another line with the same principle, but instead of “Juicy stuff”, it’s “Boom power”, so all affixes damage related that you like (spell damage, elemental, cold probably, crit or not). Same thing, I just up the “X” value by 1 once in a while.
It’s fast, easy and convenient. DON’T pick all the rare items and waste time comparing them when the game can do it for you.
I am using a generic mage loot filter from the last epoch tools website. Might get red of it and set my own up like you’ve outlined, a better understanding of what loot I want to see would be more beneficial and make sure im not missing anything important.
Definitely creating your own filter is a great start. The generic filters are helpful, but unless you understand WHY certain things are being allowed through it can be tough to find what youre actually looking for or knowing what to temporarily disable (all filters have a little check box by the rules, and you can enable and disabled them without deleting any for different needs/parts of the game).
Adding on to, disabling parts of, or tweaking premade filters is great if you have a good grasp of them and theyre useful tools, but I definitely recommend starting with custom filters you made yourself and can tweak and modify as needed just so you really get a sense of how to fine tune them to find exactly what youre looking for. It really does make a huge difference
After reading through your post and looking at your LE Tools I think you are just falling into a trap I often did when I started the game. Early game LE really rewards you for “eating your vegetables” before getting into the meat of what you want to do with your character. Like you I tried to do a balance of defense and offense while leveling but as the years went on I found a more defense minded build approach paid off more.
For example my current cycle character was a Forge Guard that didn’t even begin putting points into the forge guard tree until level 50 or so. The main reason being the other mastery trees had very efficient defensive nodes all within the first 3 tiers that made gearing absolutely trivial. I also leveled with with more defensive talent choices in my skill tree and proceeded to reset them towards the end of the campaign when I had a decent gear base.
Ironically this let me be far more aggressive with my affix rolls as I had a solid 30-40% all resist and plenty of base health to work with. So my advice to you would be to try a tree that is more like this:
I saw you had 36 passives so that’s what I stuck too. Here you have 30% ele resist and some decent base ward retention. You also get a 200 or so ward shield every 12 second if you get spiked ( more with ward bonuses and lasts much longer due to ward retention). For your skills I reworked your frost claw to be more on the defensive side. With your current gear and the tree you should be generating about 20+ ward per cast per claw and get bonus claw cast when being hit by swarms for even more ward.
I made flame ward completely defensive which should make it a much better defensive tool that you can weave between your other 70% health ward cooldown. I finally left volcanic orb alone as it looked solid enough.
Lastly look for defensive bases and prioritize bad gear with resist over good gear without. LE has a plethora of good leveling based that are both generic and class based. Gold rings for example give a large chunk of elemental resist and Heoborean boots give decent cold resist.
Find what resistance your class is weak to an start stacking those. Eventually through idols and your passive tree you can meet somewhere in the middle. Resistance is more important that flat health in the early game. If all your gear has on it is a t2-3 mod of resist it may far out way a "decent " 4 affix piece. Not to say don’t try to roll good pieces but for example:
1 piece has spell damage, int, health.
Another piece has throwing damage, physical resist
The physical resist piece could very well be the pick early game. Also don’t skip out on a decent flat regen pieces if you can find it. A few flat regen +5s and could be regening 10%+ of your hp a second early game.
Thank you for the very detailed response. I’ve taken a look and I have to agree with the trap you mentioned. Every other class i’ve always focused on the resists first (and melee/spell life leech), this is actually the first time (other than rogue) where I’ve gone deep into the DPS leaving the resists from the skill-line out of the equation. I can see now thats a massive mistake, simply put an extra 20% resist is drasticly reducing the damage I’m taking.
