I wanted to start this discussion a while ago and there will probably be some thing that will eventually change, once multiplayer and trading comes in.
But nevertheless I wanted to know how people think Last Epoch is balanced for Solo Players (no trade or shared stash).
One major difference compared to other similar games is, that the current “Solo” game mode in Last Epoch does not even feature a shared stash, that means every solo character starts from scratch.
There are a couple of things, which dictates how good or bad a game is for this type of game mode:
Difficulty (and how strong your character needs to be to effectively move on)
Adjustability (changing your build on the fly without any major drawbacks)
Accessability (of items and content)
Difficulty
Last Epoch is very easy and the initial difficulty is very low. There are a couple of difficulty spikes across some chapters of the story, which can take unprepared, unexperienced players by surprise.
But generally speaking you can make it through the story and normal monolith with basically any skill or build, when you at least out some effort into finding somewhat synergistic combinations.
Obviously there are always some skill or builds combinations that don’t make any sense and will not bring you very far (like multiple mana spending abilities, without any way of regaining mana).
But this will lead to the next section:
Adjustability
Changing and evolving builds on-the-fly is something that Last Epoch excels at over any other similar game I have played.
There are a lot of skills that scale very similarly and you can interchange them on very similar builds. The ability to respecc individual skills or change entire builds from one into another is pretty crazy.
Only in games like D3, where “builds” literally are just a few button presses in your skill setup and action bar, changing your build is even easier than in Last Epoch, except that one little thing:
Your mastery, this is the only thing that is not respeccable in LE and will be the only “major choice” you have to make during your character progression, relatively early in your journey (like 4-8 hours into the game).
Besides that respeccing in LE does come with some opportunity cost, like losing a few skill levels, which will catch up in a couple of minutes.
So, when you are following a build guide or have a theorycrafted build, the only thing you need to respect is the chosen mastery, everything else is very easily changed and adjusted on-the-fly.
Even when your planned final build is something utilizing a specific build-enabling unique, it is still worth going for this build on a complete solo character from the get-go, because of the next point: Accessability
Accessability
Items
Items or content being “out of reach” for a build, can be very frustrating and demotivating.
The vast majority of items, that are gated behind some higher-tier content (like T4 Dungeons, Empowered MoF or High-Corruption-only drops) are not truely build enabling. A lot of these are highly desired but not required to make a build work. (Example: Apathy’s Maw, Wings Of Argentus or Core of the Mountain)
There are a few “build-enabling” items that are gated behind high-tier content, but those are the minority and I think its cool to have some very unique and cool pinnacle items, that are hard to get your hands on early. And with the power of Last Epochs respec system you can build very similar to these until you get your hands on them and then switch over to use these items. (Example: Eulogy Of Blood, Pyre Of Affliction or Yulia’s Path)
There are a couple of random-drop only uniques that are “build-enabling” and these are the main focus for this point. (Example: Exsanguinous, Eye Of Reen, Life’s Journey, Scales Of Eterra and Vilatria’s Set) just to name a few of the more rare ones. There are much more, but a lot of these are not even particularly rare.
And Last Epoch offers great tools for target-farming, with things like Item Types drop rate-blessings, Rune Of Ascendence and specific Unique/Set items.
Outside of Unique Items, also regular items and crafting in LE is very accessable and even when not utilizing “the most efficient strategy”, you can make pretty determinsitic progress towards desired items (base items and affixes)
Content
Also in terms of content LE has a very simple approach:
All the “High-End Content” basically is not unique and only scaled up.
A player only needs to play through all the timelines in normal to experience all of LE’s content at least once.
I hope that we eventually will get 1 or 2 “pinnacle boss fights or areas” that are not as easily accessable, but for the moment, that is not the case.
Spoiler for all the people that hate to read about comparisons with PoE
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Solo vs. SSF
I know some of these comparisons are not quite fair, because PoE uses SSF (solo-self-found with a shared stash between all characters with that game mode. -
Starter Build vs High Budget Build
In PoE there are a lot of builds that are very good to start with, but that don’t scale to well into endgame. And then there are other builds that need some very high baseline of ressources or items to start becoming good.
Last Epoch doesn’t really have these clear disctinction, because you can essentially turn most builds into a late game scaling build with some minor changes, once you have the items or skill levels. -
Respeccing
While theoretically PoE offers the ability to fully respec your character entirely in reality this is impractical, because the amount fo ressources you would have to use for that outweight the time you need to re-level a character. Also for non-veteran player, that are not 100% sure if their respecced character would actually be better this would be a high-risk investment.
In Last Epoch you simply need to play the same mastery as your final endbuild and everything on the way to that build and in-between doesn’t really matter.
Obviously having a buidl simialr to the planned endbuild helps with gear and ressources, like shards but you can do a 180° in LE without any major issues. -
Relying on build-enabling uniques
This is the main deal breaker for me personaly and the biggest difference between PoE and LE.
I think one of the single biggest reasons, why trade is so popular in PoE, is that it is virtually impossible to target farm some uniques, that are build-enabling.
Even some uniques in PoE, that have dedicated divinations cards are pratically impossible to get as a solo player in a reasonable amount of time.
Even some of the “worst” target-farmable items in LE are obtainable within 1 or 2 weeks of playing the game at maximum. (at least of the ones that are “build-enabling”)
With all that being said, the main question I wanted to ask here:
What do other people think about Last Epoch in terms of the ability to play whatever build they want on their own terms without relying on trade or extra-ordinary luck?
EDIT: I did not gave my personal concrete opinion here, as I would not want that to be the main focus point of the discussion. I hope we will get some opinions in here and then I am willing to share my own opinion.
), but that’s just down to differences in games. And it’s grown on me tbf.
