Hardcore players with exceptional twitch skills who look up Meta Builds to pwn the game with are OF COURSE going to find the game easy.
I’m skilled but old. I don’t have those kinds of twitch skills anymore. AND I enjoy the challenge of trying to take a GARBAGE build and find a way to make it as stronk as it can be.
You can make the game as hard or as easy as you want it to be. Complaining about the general difficulty or lack thereof is a personal issue that you have chosen.
Want the game to be harder? Play a Forge Guard and only use Forge Strike, Ring of Shields, Sigil of Hope, Manifest Armor, and Smite. Play a Totem-based Druid. Play an Ice spell-focused Sorceror. Go through the forums and pick a build that is considered to desperately need a glow up (that’s a term from the devs) and see if you can build it in a way that makes it semi-viable.
There will never be a challenge when you focus your time on conformity with the Meta. Nobody ever found the “New Meta” by watching a build guide on YouTube.
You are telling me that if I find the game too easy I should handicap myself??? How about the devs actually do their job properly and add real difficulty to the game. I went into last epoch blind and I had no issues making a build that doesnt suck.
To be frank, you are by far the minority, the bottom % of bad players…
It’s very funny seeing people just jump to an argument of ‘well you only played x hours’, after seeing a number of us who have played hundreds of hours make this same point about the game in the past.
Realistically people arent arguing out of anything but them liking where the difficulty is at, and thats fine, we can want different thigns from our video games. But goddamn ya’ll, you come off real bad in these responses. 18 hours is a lot of time to put into a game to gauge difficulty, people dont need to play every mastery to x point to get a feel for that lmao. Heck I’ve not even played every mastery to t4 dungeons and i have over 1k hours.
The only cringe thing here is your personal attack, which is exactly what I expect from someone who feels Entitled to “devs doing their job properly”.
So let’s take your argument point by point:
No, I’m not saying you should handicap yourself, only that you have the choice of handicapping yourself.
The point I was making here, which you clearly missed, is that what is difficult for you may be impossible for someone else. Or, maybe you’re not as good as you think, and what is difficult for you might be terminally easy for someone else. Difficulty is an individual metric, not an absolute fact.
I agree, it is not mentally taxing to create a build that doesn’t suck.
Perhaps you should focus on suggesting solutions instead of complaining about the game and the people discussing the topic.
Mostly, I share your feelings.
The skill trees and the vast amount of fun builds are amazing, in my opinion the best of any ARPG.
But yes, campaign and normal monoliths are extremely easy, even compared to other games (yes, all games start easy, but you usually get some challenges way faster than in LE). And I play solo, can’t even imagine what a stroll it must be in a group…
However, these two facts put together don’t “kill” the game for me, they just change my perspective.
I have created more alts in LE than in any other arpg. The lack of difficulty encourages me to experiment, even if a build seems “bad” I can still progress and try different things.
In other words, I see LE more like a rogue-like than an arpg: quickly create a character, try a different skill or path, run him/her through the campaign and a few monos, forget him/her and restart with another one.
By contrast, in Undecember, where the campaign is very long and the bosses REALLY strong, I only have one character in endgame.
It took me so long to make my build, adjust it dozens of time, work on my gear just to be able to beat the campaign, that I now feel really attached to the character, I want to see her progress and don’t feel like starting again with someone else.
In conclusion to this too long post: no game is perfect for everybody. Maybe LE, in the long run, is not for you, and this is fine. Enjoy the parts that are enjoyable (for you). For me, it is a game I like coming back to for 2-3 days every few months, but not more.
Not everything is a personal attack. Nothing of what you have said is even close to being relevant. You can enjoy the braindead easy gameplay all you want, I couldnt care less.
As it stands, Last Epoch will never be a good game (objectively) unless they add some real challenge. The game is simply not stimulating enough for people who have at least an average IQ score.
Played more.
After getting to 70+ monoliths the difficulty is fine.
The campaign and first tier of monoliths are far too easy, though.
As in they are off putting to new players to the point they’ll quit the game before getting to 70+ monoliths.
Difficulty is always hard - if not impossible to get right because everyone has a different opinion about what makes something difficult and how much of the several things that can make something difficult is needed to make the game “hard” or “challenging” or “easy”. Just look at all those opinions about the Souls games.
I don’t think there is an “objective” answer here that makes the game the best it can be. It is a vision thing and a matter of personal taste.
I would argue that the ARPG genre should combine “easy” slaugthering of a lot of mobs with “challenging” parts in between (boss fights, special quests, etc.), “hard” content (special bosses, certain high level endgame content) and optional “very hard” parts (secret/super bosses, content with super hard scaling).
With that being said, I kind of agree with the OP.
In my opinion any game - regardless of genre - that takes more than 2 or 3 hours to show the player the basic gameplay loop with the easy and hard parts and makes that fun is a failure. “The game starts at the endgame” is a lazy excuse for poor game design.
LE does the “easy” part fine, the rest not so much. They reworked the first act and I think it is in a good spot for the tutorial act. The boss could do a lot more but all in all it is fine I think. The problem lies in what comes after that. The difficulty decreases cause the player power increases way more than the mob’s power.
Normal monos are a joke and I have yet to play a single build that struggles with starting monos while being level 38-45. Like that shouldn’t be a thing at all I think. Being able to do the current monos almost 20 level below area level without any problems on basically any class and mastery with maybe 1 build fitting item feels like it shouldn’t be possible. Maybe with stashed gear and a very good build but not with a normal build and with campaign gear.
I really think the difficulty curve needs adjusting.
And optional, harder stuff in the campaign that you can encounter during regular gameplay would also help. Challenge shrines that spawn randomly, NPCs you can talk with that offer you a blessing that makes enemies stronger for a zone but also increase certain drops (or maybe make them drop a certain currency that can be traded in for class specific shards or something), “monster eggs” that spawn a bunch of rare mobs for you to fight all at once, etc.
These would also help make monos more interesting.
Most of the regulars on here have jobs, don’t live on welfare and heaven forbid even have families.
If you thought the game was too easy after the first 6 hours, you were right, as i’ve said and the devs have acknowledged. Unless that’s just a random strawman.
Probably depends on what you mean by trash build. If it’s anything that isn’t a few handful of overpowered builds, then there’s stuff in-between trash tier and overpowered. And it depends how far you’re pushing empowered monos.
Devs have acknowledged it? Are they planning on fixing it?
As it stands, the game is not even close to being ready for 1.0 and I have no idea how the devs are planning to add 3 more masteries, rework some of the classes, fix the itemization, add an actual end-game, complete the story, fix the horrid dungeons AND completely rebalance the game to make it more difficult… ALL IN ONE PATCH???
That would be why we’re “only” at 0.9. That they are no longer working on building out mp as well as developing stuff for sp, that frees up quite a but of resource.
Why do you think there can only be 1 patch between 0.9 and 1.0? There’s an infinite number of numbers they could use if they wanted to (though it won’t take that long).
With the current pace of updates, game will at best be released in 2028 then…
It really is too bad that people like Zizaran made people think the game is worth buying when in reality it is not even close to being in an enjoyable state, what a waste of money. Early access is trash, this game shouldnt cost more than 10 euros
Hilarious that we get posts like this complaining about how easy the game is at the same time that there are threads complaining about how hard the game is.
In the past, we had to buy games (without demos) based on pictures on the back, or recommendations in a gaming magazine. At least now, people can watch a game being played, on stream, and getting a sense of it. I have very little sympathy for this kind of complaint, however. “I don’t like your game, because it’s not as hard as my elite gaming skills demand! Change it, or I won’t buy it! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Yeah, and chances are he won’t stick around until after the trading faction is released either. So fiddle-sticks there, I suppose… :
