I don’t think it’s too mechanically difficult.
Some things take time getting used to, but if you’ve played multiple ARPG’s then the mechanics should be okay to get used to.
Not saying that some boss fights are easy, they can be difficult, but they’re not impossible.
THIS, SO MUCH THIS
Hi
I’m happy as things stand at the moment. I would not call myself an expert gamer and I am nowhere near the ranks of the ahem more “elite” players (I am pushing 60 now so everything is starting to slow down!!!), but I play all the current ARPGs and I really think Last Epoch is well balanced and has an acceptable learning curve when it comes to MoF boss mechanics.
I die to bosses, sometimes more than once or twice (!), but I get there after a few attempts, and speaking personally, I would much rather feel the satisfaction of fist pumping the air and shouthing “YESSSSS” after a boss fight, than just shrugging my shoulders and saying “OK another one down, on we go yawn”
I can understand new player frustration too, but seriously I don’t think just making the first one or two bosses easier is the right way to go - as others have said here, there is a lot of resource online for the game, a lot of experienced players with some good tips and advice, and that can often help if you feel you are hitting a brick wall. If there were something OP in the campaign that was preventing progress, I would agree it may need to be looked at, but we are talking about end game now, and I do think that most players want to be stretched a little by that stage.
I think a lot of issues and concerns like this may well disappear once Multiplayer is dropped in, and people can buddy up. I remember also failing at the firt MoF boss several times, and I hadn’t realised for the first couple of attempts what I had to do FIRST, until I realised I had already seen similar structures in the campaign earlier 
TL;DR The Devs have done amazingly well with this game, everything feels pretty much just right, the balance is great, there doesnt seem to be any one class that is overpowered, and the bosses can sometimes be a pita and take a few attempts at, but overall I think the difficulty is sitting nicely dead centre 
Stay safe
Keys
no, the fights aren’t too difficult in my opinion.
You want a bit of a challenge otherwise its just another walking lump of exp and items.
Bosses are always hardest the first time you come across them but soon enough they’ll be easy, that said this is an ARPG and shouldnt go too far down the line of complicated, multi-phase bosses that require specific builds or combinations (for when there is MP) and I think all the content should be casual friendly in the end.
This is a hacknslash ARPG not an MMO raid afterall.
and @Llama8 i’ve seen you play this game, you still stand in crap a lot 
but glad you learnt somethings after years of me badgering you in raids!
Some of it had to sink in… If I’m not moving out of the way of stuff, it’s because it’s not dangerous enough to require moving out the way of.
and in terms of mechanics i think thats about the right point - after you know a fight and have the right build you can stand and face tank it a bit but that first time you come across a boss you’re not likely to do that.
It also depends on the character and build you’re running. Mechanics should make a fight different from just trash but not stop normal players from enjoying the game and seeing the content.
Lets not see content locked behind “hard mode” fights
Blockquote Llama’s totally non-hipster Terror Mace Flurry Bladedancer
Nice.
Also, to chime in. I am a pretty low skill player myself and have found the damage mechanics for players to be so generous I have a lot of wiggle room with defense stats. With some of these Lich builds out there you can really tank a lot of damage to the face. I have a much harder time in PoE.
Its interesting this topic came up, I havent played LE in a while and havent seen any of the recent bosses and currently playing PoE - they just released a new boss and one of the mechanics is a memory game to step on tiles in the right order and if you screw up you basically die extremely fast
In the final phase of fight you have to do the memory game while rotating laser beams spin around and if you get hit you take damage and lose all form of recovery for 10 seconds, while there is also potentially patches of degen on the ground that slow you, she does the memory game multiple times in the fight - took me about 5 tries to get better at it - its actually stupid and has no place in an aRPG but you just get over it and learn to win but I am the type of person who isnt going to be defeated by a game boss by giving up
The bosses in LE are easily able to be countered with certain defences, most you can just life steal through all their shit. I only had an issue Rahyeh on my first 2 fights as I didnt realise he did so much damage and tried to just tank it
I disagree it being mechanically too difficult however I feel like the campaign doesn’t do a good enough job to teach you.
Now i am all in for reducing the difficulty of normal timelines if people struggle with it but empowered should not be reduced at all unless new difficulty is added that is a lot harder than current empowered timelines.
Great content guys,
this might be my favorite discussion of recent times.
Big thank you to all the player coming in and expressing their feeling, and being honest about stuff.
Dying in an aRPG is part of the learning curve and from what i gathered even some of the players here, that are admittedly on the “lower skill end”, do find it ok.
I think one of the most important points is, that the boss fights are very well telegrapohed and usually you will see, from what you died.
Even if you are not fast enough or don’t know how to react to stuff, when you are encountering it on the fly, the first time fighting the boss.
You learned something and will know 1 more thing, when fighting the best, the next time.
Some players mentioned, it feels very punishing, after dying to a boss, that their echo progress is resetted so far, that they can’t do the boss immediately.
I think this is also one lever EHG could change, to make the difficulty gradually increase.
If the amount of echoes, that you lose, when dying would start lower and ramp up from timeline to timeline to timeline, this could be a way to make the game feel less punishing at the start of a players journey.
Currently you lose 2-4 echoes. With my idea i was more talkign about losing 1-3 echoes in the very early timelines (maybe the first 3-4 timelines). Then slowly increasing to 2-4 echoes.
And for the later timelines it could be maybe even 3-5.
And when it comes to empowered timelines, this could be ramped up even more.
This would not the difficulty directly, of the boss fights, but would still contribute to the overall difficulty of the game.
I like this idea a lot but feel 4 should probably be the max otherwise the loss of progression might be enough to make some players give up. Maybe I’m unlucky but I always seem to lose 4 echoes and I die to the bosses a lot so it does become a little frustrating. You can put me in the group that doesn’t learn mechanics well and after a few deaths I still haven’t learnt them yet.
I’m probably 50/50 on the question of whether LE is too mechanically difficult. It really depends on what build you are playing and what boss you are fighting. As the game develops more and becomes more balanced I’m sure things will even out.
You the amount of echoes scales, with how deep you are in the echo.
My numbers are probably not 100% accurate, but if you are just like 3-5 echoes in the timeline you only lose 2 echoes and when you are like 6-10 echoes in you lose 3.
And usualy by the time you can encoutner the 2nd quest echo or later the boss(around 10+) you will lose 4 echoes all the time.
It’s not random.
I think having a gradual increase of the echoes you lose within a timeline is also a good thing.
But yeah my initial suggestion was more leaning towards timelines as a whole.
This isn’t really helpful to the discussion and you need to understand that the game has to work for players of differing skill levels. Lots of seasoned players have died to the bosses and I’m sure they wouldn’t call it a baby mode snore fest the first time they encountered them. Doing the new bosses on an existing level 100 character is not the same as a new player doing them for the first time whilst levelling up.
Some of the bosses are very easy to learn the mechanics but others are not so obvious without a few tries at them.
Bosses are always hardest the first time you come across them but soon enough they’ll be easy, that said this is an ARPG and shouldnt go too far down the line of complicated, multi-phase bosses that require specific builds or combinations (for when there is MP) and I think all the content should be casual friendly in the end.
This is a hacknslash ARPG not an MMO raid afterall.
You are right, however I think there is a real place for taking influence from MMO raids and especially WoW mythic+. I often bring this up because I think it has a lot of potential. As someone who enjoys hard (and group based) boss fights, I don’t really think any game beats WoW. I would still be playing it if they didn’t have such terrible design decisions around dailies and gated content - I want to play the game, not work a second job to be able to do so.
My favourite content was by far pushing M+ as high as possible, and if you think about it, that is a very ARPG influenced game mode. Repeating dungeons, packs of trash mobs, increasing difficulty scaling and modifying affixes with interspersed boss fights.
Obviously there is a balance to achieve between keeping the identity of Last Epoch and ARPGs, but to limit something just on that fact could really be missing out on some unique content.
I think everything should be casual friendly at the normal difficulty setting, but there also need to be options for people to scale harder content available. Additional mechanics are one of the best ways imo, as well as adding damage/health. Just damage/health is an artificial difficulty increase though.
we also need to see what MP will bring to the game, having things simple for single player but a harder fight in MP could also be a real possibility. The game is going to have to have some scaling for MP so why not have the boss fights being that bit tricker to compensate for the number of players.
I’m just not a fan of the game or story not being available to casual players because the end boss is just too hard for casual players. Personally I really enjoy hard boss mechanic fights but thats because i’ve got a lot of background in MMO raiding, like you. But casual players are also important and shouldnt feel blocked out or frustrated.
Yea I agree with everything you’re saying. I’d love to see an MMO inspired MP end game section where there are roles and support. Not exactly the tank/healer system because that isn’t exactly how it works in ARPGs, and you can’t really have a class too focused on support and still be able to solo. But I’ve always loved playing utility/support and enabling my team to do things. I think it’s very interesting and could even create some very unique content in an ARPG setting that isn’t locked to archetypes.
Not sure if you played Guild Wars original, but the Mesmer in that was one of the coolest support classes I’ve ever seen. It was like offensive support, so not healing allies but debuffing enemies when they took an action or damage they were punished for it, etc.
I agree all game/story content should be available on the normal difficulty, with the option to scale up if the player wants the challenge. Empowered timelines already do this so I think EHG is on the right track there.
I think the main issue people would get extremely frustrated as you can die to a boss in LE and the whole fight is over, no second chances and have to redo it again.
Even PoE gives you up to 6 tries on any boss, ‘tries’ being re-entering the zone, theres plenty of people with insane characters who may die at least one time to an end end game PoE boss and that would mean their whole run was over…even GGG arent that ruthless
EHG always need to keep that in mind when designing a boss that they could be infuriating a player from one shots
Personally I think the Dragon Emperor in LE is one of the worst bosses in any aRPG ever made due to the fact he can be allowed to enrage or even slow you and its just a gigantic AoE circle - you can survive it or you cant, but sometimes you cant even exit the circle in time even with capped movement and a movement skill because he stands in stupid spots
I agree about Dragon Emperor. As a VK (2H ES) on my first time running that boss, if I wasn’t slowed sometimes I couldn’t run out in time even if I predicted he was about to start channelling… and most of the time I was also slowed.
I had to spec Rebuke just for that fight and just stand there. It’s not even a hard fight but that mechanic is so punishing for low mobility. Or even as you noted you could have a movement skill but he is still in a bad spot.
This is a really good point and is the reason I can get a bit frustrated at times. Perhaps a system similar to the way you get three revives in Wolcen if you die when fighting a boss might help? At least then you might get more of an idea of the mechanic that just killed you without having to lose some echoes.
In Grim Dawn if you died to most bosses they just got rehealed and you could almost immediately try again so you couldnt corpse rush them
I dont remember the game being “difficult” rather mechanically annoying. In that I still completed the entire monolith but if i complained about annoying/unbalanced mobs/mechanics people mistook it for someone who “couldnt complete” the game or kill bosses at all.
For bosses for example you were fighting an harmless big hitbox doing mostly nothing until at some point the boss casts some circle that blapped you in oneshot because you inadvertently pumped too many monolith +dmg modifiers. <- So the answer was: “when in doubt always avoid those circles (even though you could tank them probably)”
Or the plethora of mobs that have a point based aoe around them that hurts only melee (unavoidable dmg for melee) while doing nothing to ranged.