I wanted to share some feedback about the game’s difficulty—or rather, the lack of it. This is my first playthoguht of this game and right now, Last Epoch feels way too easy, to the point where it’s making the experience uninteresting and dull. There’s no real incentive to learn the game’s mechanics or improve my character.
I leveled up as an Umbral Blade Rogue and reached level 71, which I assume is the start of the endgame. I’ve now switched to a ZHP Ballista build, and running Monoliths feels just as easy as the campaign did. I followed a guide for Umbral Blades and was able to demolish everything in my path with little to no effort.
The issue is that this lack of difficulty removes any motivation to engage with the game on a deeper level. I don’t feel the need or see any short term incentives to understand my class, optimize my gear, or learn the systems. It feels like I’ve been playing a prolonged tutorial—just clicking buttons without much thought and watching everything on screen instantly die.
Right now, it’s giving the vibe of a Diablo II campaign on a private server with massively boosted stats and drop rates. I know I’m supposed to explore Monoliths and engage with the endgame systems, but honestly, I don’t care—because nothing has pushed me to. If I can just faceroll content without engaging with any of those systems, why bother?
I’ve been told the difficulty picks up only after completing all the Monoliths, but that feels so far away I’m not sure I’ll stick around that long.
Maybe making the game this easy is a conscious design choice to appeal to a broader, more casual audience—and that’s totally fine. But I still wanted to share my perspective. In short: the game doesn’t incentivize me to engage with its systems because there’s no need to get stronger sooner.
Problem is that everything prior to empowered monoliths is effectively the tutorial, much like the campaign for POE1…except the “tutorial phase” of LE lasts way too long.
The content in endgame (empowered monoliths) is as hard as you want it to be. Just raise corruption and it will become challenging soon.
Some builds will feel more challenging sooner than others, but with infinite (not really, it’s still a variable, but infinite enough for our purposes) scaling, you’ll always reach a stage which you can’t handle.
So just focus on raising corruption until the content is hard enough for you.
I understand, but it will also depend on your build and whether or not you’re doing your own build or following a guide.
Like I said, some builds have an easier entry point and will take longer to get challenged. Yours is one of them.
Using a guide also means that your build is mostly optimized by the point you reach empowered monos, so the challenge is lessened as well.
If you made empowered monoliths challenging for a strong build using a guide, then it would be almost impossible for any player doing their own brewed builds to enter it.
Remember that the corruption goal for a decent build is 300c, at least. And if you want to kill Uber Aby, you’ll likely need to reach 700c+.
Bro, you reach a level 71 and are complain that is too easy?
Did you reach corruption 500?
When you reach that corruption, go back here and we’ll talking about game difficult.
I get that. Ultimately my real problem is just the time it takes to get to empowered mono’s in the first place, which is basically the equivalent of hitting white maps in POE, and takes longer than POE’s campaign. Too many boring hoops to jump through with a convoluted story just to get to the “meat” of the game.
I’ll probably get flack for this, but I wish we had something similar to D3’s “adventure mode” where once we had done the campaign, we could skip it completely for the rest of time and just go straight to mono’s(maps) at level 1.
You can use glyphs of envy to immediately jump to the boss in a normal mono and skip the whole thing.
Also, for alts, you only have to do one of the level 90 monos, you don’t have to do any other if you don’t want to.
But your issue is mainly that you’re using a strong build guide, so the challenge will come later. If you had tried to make your own build, things would be more challenging sooner.
Don’t get me wrong, but I’m so glad we’re seeing no many posts saying the campaing is too easy… Does it mean we won’t be seeing all those “lagon is too difficult” threads all over anymore? Geez, thank you EHG.
But I’m also not so sure about this, because just this morning I’ve seen people asking for help to kill Lagon in the campaign in the global chat.
Difficulty at any stages of the game has never bothered me before, and it’s not bothering me so far either.
So, I don’t really know about this whole discussion, as it doesn’t matter at all to me… The campaign IS SUPPOSED to be easy, otherwise it will just drive newcomers away before they can even start the real game.
I personally didn’t like adventure mode in D3. That is because I like running the campaign (yes, even on the 100th time). I’m not against a campaign skip of sorts, or alternate leveling mechanics, I just don’t like it when they’re so efficient that I feel “forced” to use them.
Adventure mode in D3 got you to level 70 in 1-2h. Campaign was 8-10h. That is a huge difference and it made me always skip the campaign, even though I enjoyed it.
If the difference wasn’t as big, I wouldn’t have minded it.
So my stance is:
I’m fine with alternative ways to level, as long as they’re not so efficient that they make using them almost mandatory.
And, as a sidenote, you can use the dungeon campaign skips already and skip most of it. It’s even easier now that dungeons also give you passive/idol slots.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that I was satisfied with the block of time required to complete the initial phase of the game with the “skips” already in place. I would be perfectly happy running mono’s from level 1 for the same amount of time.
Once you have got a toon to low mid 20s you can jump into maps, there is nothing stopping you once you get your the point you choose your ascendency instead of doing the story line you can just go straight to monoliths - usually this about level 22-25 and first monoliths are about level 55 so offers more challenge, but to get to this point, takes about 30-60 mins from starting a new toon, even quicker if you have already got some levelling gear for alts from your main character
Nonsense. How long does it take to get to corruption 500? How many dozens of hours for a casual? Casuals are rightfully complaining about how easy the campaign is. Most bosses you can just stand still holding one skill button and everything dies.
this is your 175th post and you’re using it to bring another brother down?
What has the LE community come to? This didn’t happen back in the 1.2.0.1 forums.
To be honest, if you play an OP meta build and expect a challenge, you’re at the wrong address. Try making something original work and then you’ll see some challenges.
I’d like to see an alternate campaign that is far harder but takes you straight to empowered monos without having to go through the regular monos. People want to skip the campaign because the campaign is way too easy, but if it took you straight to 100 corruption I think it would feel a lot better than having to go through the non empowered monos.
My thought is that it would just be a checkbox you select when creating a character. The difficulty in each zone would scale up far faster than it currently does and you’d fight a harbinger after killing majasa just as you do atter completing the 3rd level 90 mono. I see so many people complaining about how easy the game is early which is why I think it would be great to have an alternative way to reach empowered monos that was actually difficult for those who want a challenge. The difficulty should be enough that you can’t just run past everything and would have to craft gear etc, so it would take more like 6-8h and then you go straight to empowered monos at the end.
I do think it is important to have an easy default version of the campaign for new players.
