Is Last Epoch mechanically to difficult?

[Heavy]

You brought up some very good points.
On some i agree, on some i disagree and some are jsut things that most likely will change.

@Sagidu

Just before finding that topic - i did kill Abomination at lvl 50. With zero resistances (some were negative even), zero defensive passives and level 30 weapons. My only defenses were like 10% dodge and armor and around 500 hp.

That’s one thing, alot of the MoF Bosses have in common, especially the ones pre 0.8.1
They solely have telegraphed abilities and no unavoiadable damage.
You can literally do them naked.
This already was a complain, when the first MoF update was released a few patches ok.
If this is fine or not, is a completely different discussion, BUT:
All 3 new bosses (especially the Spirits Of Fire one) have alot of stuff going on, that is still “avoidable”, but you will get hit eventually when you want to do dps.
This leads to some minor “gear check”.
It is not as prominent on normal timelines, but especially on the new empowered timelines, when you have some damage modifers, some of those mechanics do hurt a little bit, but if you are tanky enough you still can ignore them. And that’s a good thing.

@Sagidu

I wonder more what Evo was doing to be level 84 BEFORE fightning FIRST boss in Monoliths.

We don’t exactly know, but i thought he did play a “old” character, from a few versions ago and jsut jumped back into so game, hence he had to play MoF from the start.

@Sagidu

Also Heavy you wrote ‘‘The level of your character and the area level does make a small difference (in terms of enemy health mostly), but still it’s a very mechanical fight.’’ That is completely silly since in reality it means you have 30 levels of passive points more and all skills should be max lvl too.

I admit, i phrased that a bit badly.
What i wanted to say with this: The enemy level does only have a noticable difference in how much health they have, and that difference is not even THAT high.
Of course does player level matter alot (espeically 30 level are alot of base hp + those passive points you mentioned)

@Sagidu

If anything - boss is too easy (which is ok since it’s the first boss of Monoliths). Though difficulty does not really change the further you go but that is another issue.

Completely disagree. Even the normal" monoloith timelines get gradually more difficult, they are still pretty easy, but the difficulty curve up is fine i think.
Also the boss fights do get more difficult, by bosses getting more different mechanics or you need to have quicker reaction times to dodge mechanics.

@Sagidu

To me it’s absolutely crazy you can stop doing Campaign (which also is an absolute faceroll, mobs are made of paper; diffuculty of bosses is just right perhaps they have a bit too much hp) and around level 40 (maybe even earlier why not) just start doing current endgame. XP in lvl 55 Monolith seems to be like 5x faster than in Campaign yet you pretty much also 1 shot everything and cannot die or get hit even.

I might be mistake ( i think they changed this). It was not possible to do that when the system first released. I do think it is meant to only be accessable, after you finished the story.
I hope they change MoF, to be not accesable before finishing the story.

@Sagidu

All of that with 0 resistances and fully glass cannon builds. Imagine going into Maps in PoE (where end game starts) and having zero resistances. Ye you can do it but it’s not recommended and probably will be painful.

While i already briefly talked about the “you can do bosses naked” aove.
LE is just so different than PoE when it comes to building defenses. There are many viable defenses in LE and having 0 resistance doesn’t mean your character is “glasscannon”.
This is just due to the fact how the resistances work in LE and you can’t compare that with PoE.

@Sagidu

My point is - in LE I will never have to go to some website/youtube to read and watch about boss strategy. They are just not that complicated and quite straightforward. Abilities and what you have to do are telegraphed well enough. Unlike lets say bosses in PoE where there is a serious visual clarity issue for years now.

Completely agreed. All bosses boss mechanics are pretty straight forward and greatly explained to the player by telegraphs. Visual clarity in LE is top notch.

@Sagidu

The whole gameplay loop of just zoom zooming from one boss to the next hoping for Quest Echo - is not that exciting. Especially if the game and bosses are so easy that you do not need to even cap your resistances.

Doing MoF is not only about zooming through and killing objecties and bosses as often as possible. On they first few runs of a given timelines yo udefinitely want to finish them asap, to get decent blessings, because they grant great power to the player.
Also you might want to target farm a specific boss, for it’s unique drop.
But those are only 2 of 4 reason, why you play MoF.
The 3rd and 4th option would be gear and exp. (Yes i know arena gives way more exp).
For both of those option you want to kill many monster.
The chest at the end of each timelines does scale greatly, with the amount of mobs you killed.

So when you want to farm a blessing or unique you will most likely not care too much about making the chest at the end of each timeline as good as possible, but still you can do that.
And after getting decent blessings and/or the uniques you will defintely want to start pushing high echoes. And as soon as you solely do MoF for the gear, zooming through the echo just to kill the objective is no longer the best strategy.

Also with the new empowered timelines, just zooming through the echo and not killing everything, can become very dangerous very quickly. Depending on how deep you are, even with some of the strongest builds you will get in trouble if you have certain mob combinations stacked too much.

@Sagidu

Unless the intended role of entire Monolith system is to be like regular Rifts from Diablo 3.
In that case i would have no problem with that (though still kinda disappointing you can just skip everything and rush to the boss at the end).

We will have to see, but i think Monolith is meant to be one of many other endgames modes.
We still missing alot of things to the the whole picture, but i am very excitied to see what EHG has in store for us.

[Heavy]

@Shrukn

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 woudl agree, that it’s not the most exciting boss, especially for being “the last boss” for a long time. It has very few insanely powerful and punishing mechanics that are not super interesting.

But where he stands, or if you can escape it or not or how fast he casts it. Is in players hands.
There is so much you can do to counter it. By taking certain affixes or avoid certain MoF modifers.
Also where the boss stands and if you are able to escape the circle is in the players hands.
Sure that is stuff a new player will not be able to do at first, but dying to a boss and learnign is ok.

@asdfractal

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.

Sentinel definitely has the hardest time against this, because sentinel can’t reach 50-60% movement speed easily. (The amount of movement speed you need to escape the big aoe circle without ninja reflexes).

But the Sentinel does have some tools. You would not need to spec into rebuke, just replacing it with on of your utility or target movement skills would be enough.
Or you could go for a non-target movement skill.

[Evok]

@Heavy

We don’t exactly know, but i thought he did play a “old” character, from a few versions ago and jsut jumped back into so game, hence he had to play MoF from the start.

Exactly! The game reset all my progress and many skills and passives ofc. I am also feeling like the xp gain has really slowed after 60. IE: I set up a Druid I had leveled to 59 last night with one of BM21’s latest updates. I’ve been playing him literally for hours including finishing the new parts of the story including Lagon, which didn’t take long , and I’m still only level 63. My skills are only back up to level 17. Don’t mean to derail here but the xp gain seriously needs looking at as well.

[Heavy]

@Evok

My skills are only back up to level 17. Don’t mean to derail here but the xp gain seriously needs looking at as well.

They changed the exp curve dramatically, since the endgame content is longer strechted out now and respecing and releveling a skill will lead to that skill catching up significantly faster now.
You will unlock lvl 20 skills in your mid 70s now.

[Llama8]

@Heavy

Sentinel definitely has the hardest time against this, because sentinel can’t reach 50-60% movement speed easily. (The amount of movement speed you need to escape the big aoe circle without ninja reflexes).

Nah, you can run out of the circle if you have 20-30% movement speed, you just can’t hang around. And you could always take Shield Rush.

[Heavy]

I know, that’s why i said without ninja reflexes^^ With 20-30% MS you need very good reflex and start moving out instantly.

Shiled Bash is just another one of those tools i mentioned.

[Llama8]

I don’t have ninja-reflexes. There is more than enough time to move out of the way if you react to the telegraph in a timely manner. You really don’t need “ninja-reflexes”, that’s (IMO) an attempt to justify “but I wants to spend moar times deeps-ing the boss”.

[Heavy]

Well, some of those things are very subjective. Maybe “nina-reflexes” is abit of a overstatement.

But if you do not slow the boss down in any way (chill or time rot) 20-30% MS is not enough time to run out.

[Llama8]

And if you pick a haste/frenzy/cooldown/enrage effect on your timelines that affect the boss you won’t have a fun time either. But IMO, that’s something that you learn to deal with (if you do pick one of those mods & the 3rd quest echo appears, you should probably keep going until the mod times out).

Should those mods be removed from the pool?

[Heavy]

I already pointed out above, that i like it, since it’s in the players hand.

And yes, in case you picked a bad modifers, you can always postpone doing the boss echo.

(Also cooldown recovery can’t affect the boss)

[Llama8]

@Heavy

(Also cooldown recovery can’t affect the boss)

Well, they need to fix that glaring oversight.

[Evok]

Well I am quite disappointed to hear that. Given how long it is taking to add a single level, I don’t know that I have the patience. I mean I can grind with the best of them but this seems way over the top to me.

[Heavy]

I don’t think it’s an oversight. There is just no modifers for it. Since the cooldown recovery can only appear as a “rare enemies” modifer.

@Evok

Well I am quite disappointed to hear that. Given how long it is taking to add a single level, I don’t know that I have the patience. I mean I can grind with the best of them but this seems way over the top to me.

The exp display is a bit misleading sometimes.
When you reach a certain levle threshold, your skilsl start to gain exp more quickly again.
Don’t watch the exp, just play and iwll will eventually unlock your lvl 20 skills.
Also this change was made, because you can now get +1 to skill X very very easily or even +2 with a T5 affix.

The overall progression: Player Level, Skill Level, Blessings got stretched out, but we are significantly stronger now.

Before you finisehd your “main progression” (getting skills to lvl 20) by the time you beat the 2nd or 3rd timeline, which felt bad, because it was too early.

[Zylok]

I found it interesting that there is a cycle that seems to exist regarding MoF bosses. A new player gets to the boss and says its too hard , and several experienced players come and defend the system, saying thats not true, that the bosses are really too simple, that you just need to put the time and you’ll get them.

I simply think that having more chances (something like PoE portals) on bosses could be a nice compromise, making the progress a little less harsh for newer characters or players. Maybe once you get to the empowered versions you could get less portals , and some of the harder ones have only 1 “portal” , that way players can learn at their own pace. You can even decrease the rewards per portal used , making players try to do it right and not zerg bosses.

I love the LE community and its discussions, and like how for a game that has not even release there are many passionate players here, but I think one of the dangers of an extended EA with few players is that most of the opinions developers are getting are from a group of already invested fans.
I hope this game is a huge success, but for that it needs to cater to a wider audience.

[Heavy]

@Zylok

I found it interesting that there is a cycle that seems to exist regarding MoF bosses. A new player gets to the boss and says its too hard , and several experienced players come and defend the system, saying thats not true, that the bosses are really too simple, that you just need to put the time and you’ll get them.

This does sound very negative and if there are “sides”. We are all here together to give our personaly feedback and we all try to make this game the best it can be.

Also the majority of people never say that the bosses are “too simple”. Most of the experienced player just assure the unexperienced players that they will learn to fight the boss. It’s a learning curve.

I am pretty neutral on the idea of giving the player multiple tries to kill the boss.
The only thing i would want, if the player dies, the boss get’s healed to 100% again and all mechanics reset, so you have to fight the boss completely “fresh” everytime you fail.

@Zylok

I love the LE community and its discussions, and like how for a game that has not even release there are many passionate players here, but I think one of the dangers of an extended EA with few players is that most of the opinions developers are getting are from a group of already invested fans.

That’s part of the devs job, to “seperate” feedback from different type of players.

@Zylok

I hope this game is a huge success, but for that it needs to cater to a wider audience.

And here comes the danger. By cater to a “wider” audience, you might alienate other player, that liked the game, because it was not catered towards the “broader” player.

We already have plenty of games that are cater to an extremely wide audience.

[Sagidu]

@Heavy

Even the normal" monoloith timelines get gradually more difficult, they are still pretty easy, but the difficulty curve up is fine i think.
Also the boss fights do get more difficult, by bosses getting more different mechanics or you need to have quicker reaction times to dodge mechanics.

Certainly not the feeling i got while clearing every Timeline before patch. Especially last boss which has like two relevant mechanics and gives you plenty of time to step away from a big ass telegraphed circle (which also is a mechanic of every dragon in this game starting in Campaign). You could shuffle the bosses between timelines and shuffle lvl of timelines as well and i would not be able to tell if this is ‘‘higher’’ timeline boss - hence more complicated mechanically. For sure i never got the feeling about quicker reaction being required as i was climbing up the Monolith system.

Also can i just point out that last boss of campaign actually has more mechanics than most Monolith bosses - pretty distinct phase two that requires you to do something different and well it is very easy to actually die on this boss (especially with 0 resistance to its respective element). For sure Lagon is harder than Abomination imo.

@Heavy

LE is just so different than PoE when it comes to building defenses. There are many viable defenses in LE and having 0 resistance doesn’t mean your character is “glasscannon”.
This is just due to the fact how the resistances work in LE and you can’t compare that with PoE.

Hard disagree. There are fewer defenses to build in LE. Those that are here to build though - very similar to PoE defenses. You have Block that reigned supreme pre patch, Armor, Dodge, Ward. I do not want to get technical with formulas etc - but for the average player and for purpose of normal gameplay - they do more or less exactly the same as Block, Armor, Evasion, Energy Shield from PoE. Energy Shield alone has more depth than all LE Defense system combined. Which is fine - there is only so much you can with defenses in this genre. And yes I understand Resistances in LE do not punish you as much as resists in PoE or other arpgs. But you made it sound like I danced masterfully around every telegraphed attack from Abomination hence if you know how - you can do the boss ‘‘naked’’. That is absolutely not what happened. I was getting hit constantly.

Imo if you have no resistances, no block, 0 vitality on gear, meaningless 10% armor just from the gear you have to wear, meaningless 10% dodge which again is naturally on gear, no blind or some sort of invulnerability and all your passives are pumped into offense - that is a definition of a glass cannon. Oh and you dual wield on top of all that so even more damage taken. Yet i could get hit all the time and complete the fight no problem. Why? Damage taken is just too little. You leech all lost hp back within 2 seconds or just potion and wait for more potion charges (which i am not sure how that exactly works).

@Heavy

The chest at the end of each timelines does scale greatly, with the amount of mobs you killed.

Had no idea about this. Probably should be mentioned somewhere in the game. Or maybe it is and i missed it idk? For a player like myself in this stage of the game development I would not clear Monoliths just for a chance at different blessings. And well my entire issue is that the game is too easy atm - it does not test you and does not require perfect or even good gear. So running Monoliths that i already completed just for possible gear upgrades is not something i would do either. Because the average gear i collected on the way - seem to be just fine for clearing almost everything.

And about targeting bosses for unique drops - i feel like unique drop rate is very generous. This certainly would not work as main incentive in the seasonal format which i believe LE will be.

I strongly believe entire system would be better off if you had to fill the bar of some sort by killing trash mobs - and only then boss at the end could spawn.

It works in D3. It works in Wolcen.

It would fix the exp issues - so i wouldnt be always -10 lvls under Monolith lvl. It would make it so I dont feel it’s a waste of time to kill ANY trash mob that is not on the way (right now it is waste of time). This applies when trying to spawn Quest Echo and complete the Timeline to unlock another Timeline and get a blessing. Which is what most people will be doing once game releases. And that also is fundamental function of entire Monolith system.

[Heavy]

I agree that the last boss of pre 0.8.1 (Emporer Of Corpses) is a huge let down, because he has the most deadly, but also the fewest mechanics.
It does not feel like a “advanced” fight.

I personally think the “hardest boss” from a mechanical standpoint is Void Rahyeh (The Void Bird from The Black Sun Timeline). His mechanics are quiet punishing if you don’t know them at first.
And some of them require pretty precise movement (Most notebly the “Cake Slices” and raining meteors)

I also agree that Lagon is harder than Abomination. I already suggeested this a cuple of times, i would want Lagon in MoF to be slightly different (and harder) than the story version.
But the Story version might need some tweaks, because the difficulty gap between Lagon and Abomination is just not right. Maybe tweak Story Lagon a bit and on top fo that make abomination slightly stronger.

@Sagidu

Hard disagree. There are fewer defenses to build in LE. Those that are here to build though - very similar to PoE defenses.

I agree that defenses are similar, some nuances are just different.

But if you take all possible defence routes, PoE And LE have roughly the same amount of possibilities. Of course PoE already has very established and advanced things, with some crazy keystones or uniques. But i am sure LE will come to this point to.
But the base mechanics offer pretty much the same depths.

@Sagidu

Imo if you have no resistances, no block, 0 vitality on gear, meaningless 10% armor just from the gear you have to wear, meaningless 10% dodge which again is naturally on gear, no blind or some sort of invulnerability and all your passives are pumped into offense - that is a definition of a glass cannon. Oh and you dual wield on top of all that so even more damage taken. Yet i could get hit all the time and complete the fight no problem. Why? Damage taken is just too little. You leech all lost hp back within 2 seconds or just potion and wait for more potion charges (which i am not sure how that exactly works).

I am not sure if we playing the same game. Sure leech is pretty powerful, but with your described defense setup there is more than 1 ability from Abomination that will One-Shot you.

@Sagidu

Had no idea about this. Probably should be mentioned somewhere in the game. Or maybe it is and i missed it idk?

They changed that on some of the older patches, but eah it does not ahve very clear explanations avaialble ingame.

The MoF Game Guide should definitely explain this and you should get some more prominent turotial pop-ups when engaging with the MoF systme the first time.

Just to build on this. The loot that you get additionally from clearing a great bunch of the echo (you don’t need to completely clear it, just kill literally everymob you encoutner, without backtracking) will significantly boost the loost of the chest, especially at high echo counts (like 20, 30+).
The loot will literally explode of the chest over the course of several seconds. Even with a pretty strict filter you will have a couple of items in those chest usually.

@Sagidu

And about targeting bosses for unique drops - i feel like unique drop rate is very generous. This certainly would not work as main incentive in the seasonal format which i believe LE will be.

Yes, since the bosses drop 1 of their unqieus guranteed. it is prety generous, but also some of their uniques only drop in their empwoered version. Also the different uniques have different drop weightings, which means you literally need to farm them a dozen times sometimes, which takes some time, when playing mpowered. But that is ok.
Generally LE values the time a player invest into certain things way more than PoE.
PoE’s endgame grind is on a completey other level. In LE you can achieve alot of stuff with dedicated farming within a few days, which is fine.

We just need more endgame modes and more timeslines etc. So you can’t literally “finish/achieve” everythign within a few days, but you need to focus on what oyu want to du. But the thing you want from given content is within reasonable “reach”.

[asdfractal]

@Llama8

Nah, you can run out of the circle if you have 20-30% movement speed, you just can’t hang around. And you could always take Shield Rush.

I don’t have ninja-reflexes. There is more than enough time to move out of the way if you react to the telegraph in a timely manner. You really don’t need “ninja-reflexes”, that’s (IMO) an attempt to justify “but I wants to spend moar times deeps-ing the boss”.

My experience was it’s not enough. I’m fairly sure I had around that much MS, but I was also usually slowed. Also the boss animations on a lot of attacks are very clunky, it skips the transition between where it currently is and the starting channel, so for this boss it could be doing a physical attack then suddenly teleport animation to channelling.
Due to being in melee, and using Erasing Strike which has a big time commitment when you use it, there were times when I might have just pressed ES and it started channelling, which means I lost a second from recovering from ES, on top of being slowed, and having to run almost the maximum distance. As I said I also tried to predict the move coming and start moving early and still not make it out in time. I was absolutely not trying to spend more time dpsing, in fact the opposite.

This could all happen multiple times in the boss fight so even if I managed to get out once or twice I could still die on the next time. The thing is it’s not a hard mechanic, or hard to see, but you still died for reasons like above. This isn’t fun or interesting gameplay.

On the other hand, I just did Heorot in The Age of Winter for the first time and that was imo a very fun fight. Lots of mechanics and things to keep track of, but I didn’t feel like I had to change my build because of a silly mechanic. I one shot that boss, and I wouldn’t say it was super easy but also not extremely hard either.

I also one shot empowered Rahyeh. I’m not mentioning this as some sort of brag but to illustrate that I am skilled enough to do this and emphasize what I said about Emperor of Corpses.

[Zylok]

@Heavy

And here comes the danger. By cater to a “wider” audience, you might alienate other player, that liked the game, because it was not catered towards the “broader” player.

We already have plenty of games that are cater to an extremely wide audience.

I agree its a risk both ways , try to cater to everyone and you might end catering to no one. Right now (still in EA i know) there are few options and things are too binary, I just hope they find a way to expand their choices without alienating the current base.
Its possible to cater to different groups and some games do it better than others , having something for casual , intermediate and hardcore players , lets hope they find a good balance.

[asdfractal]

I think obviously similar games are going to be compared, and LE is clearly influenced by PoE. But let’s also remember how long PoE has been out to establish all their end game content and bosses. Were any of these in the game at release or pre-release?

Labyrinth and Ascendancy classes were introduced in Version 2.2.0, over 2 years after release. Sirius and the Atlas two patches after that. A vast majority of the deep systems people praise PoE for took many years after release to develop and even longer to refine.