I’m sure I will get plenty of negative responses, downvotes, trolls and what not but, you know… I don’t really care. i won’t be reading any of it anyhow.
Having said that… here’s my thoughts in Last Epoch now that I’ve decided to quit playing it for good. Or, at least for a couple of years.
The game has tremendous potential, no doubt about that. And, the story is captivating, if a bit generic. But, still… there’s a lot of things to work with here and I honestly hope that EHG continue developing it further. There’s a lot of people that love Last Epoch and, well, I can’t nor won’t fault those people. So, they deserve that the game be turned into everything it can be.
But, for me… this is the end of the line. Why? I can’t quite put that into a few simple words other than the incredibly generic – It just does not feel quite right. There’s just too many little issues I have with the game, in every class, every mechanic, every mastery, every skill, every item. Everything about it just does not feel quite right. In 400 hours of playing it and playing just about everything that even remotely appealed to me, I found literally not a single build, on a single mastery, that I would like to take into the eventual seasonal gameplay that will arrive with the release of 1.0.
Still, as implied… continue loving the game. I will not fault you for doing so. In fact, I envy you. I envy that you, the reader, found something in the game that you truly love. I wish I could be you. So I could enjoy the game as much as you do. But, I can’t be you… so I won’t be enjoying it.
And, to get back to my initial disclaimer – Do not even bother trolling me. No response will ever be read by me.
Well it’s not worth answering to a thread that isn’t read anyway normaly but this statement is something I’d love to talk about because it hits home. I think LE has a lot of little issues that add up rather quickly. To me the clunkyness of the game compared to other titles is a downer. The repetitveness of the game feels meh. Even running the same content and maps with my RF build in PoE feels more varied then pressing 5 buttons in LE.
I realy want to like LE but there are so many issues for me as well i can’t put my finger on that dimish the fun I get out of the game. Sadly negative feedback is talked down so people who have issues might never figure them out clearly by talking with each otherwhat leads to “Don’t bother to answer, wont read anyway!” posts in a place made for discussions .
I forgot to disable notification so I was alerted to your response.
OK, here’s my list then:
Dynamic Damage Reduction on bosses: This just needs to go, full stop. No questions asked. It just needs to go. The problem with it is that it pigeonholes you down to a single arche-type: Ailment + Damage over Time. Nothing else will get through it. LE is not about doing big hits, it’s about doing an obscene amount of very small hits that this dynamic damage reduction mechanic cannot completely halt. I ran an Abomination Necro for a while and, well… I never had Shade of Orobyss encounters as smooth as that. Abomination will just pummel the shade like it’s nothing. But then, when I take him out to a Monolith end boss… he will literally be there wailing on the final 5 - 10% of the boss for what feels like more time than he spent absolutely destroying Shade. When the first 90% of the boss went by in a heartbeat. This feels very… off to me. Clunky. Artificially ensuring that people have to do mechanics. If the issue is builds being too strong, fix those builds. Don’t punish literally every build if just one or two of them are far, far too powerful for the content. Or, give the bosses a flat massive HP increase.
Ward: This whole system needs to be redesigned from the ground up. Ward Retention is a solution looking for a problem. Guess what, there actually was no problem. Path of Exile’s shields? They don’t diminish over time. They grow over time. D3’s shields? Cooldown based. Far more straightforward, intuitive and, incidentally, computationally lighter mechanics. Naturally decaying shields which involve a complex computation to determine how much shield you lose every second, which obviously has to be re-evaluated for each and every single change to your character’s state, from one frame to the next… really is backwards thinking. It’s an over-engineered nightmare. Absolutely trash mechanic. Really, needs to go. I’d replace Ward Retention with Ward Effectiveness. So, go about it in reverse. Make how much ward you get from any source of Ward a metric.
Passives: Honestly, from personal experience… I’d just like to remove the whole system, entirely. Because, well, the way the endgame is set up, with hard hitting near one shot mechanics, you have only one way to play – Spec for pure defense. Take all the ward, all the health, all the resistance you can get from your passives. Making 99% of the rest of it entirely pointless. So, why even have a passive nodes system in the first place if all you demand of your players is hard defensive spec anyhow? What’s wrong with glass cannon builds, EHG? Why do you hate glass cannons so much?
The crossrealm/interconnect server issues: These past few days, the crossrealm/interconnect server has been behaving so poorly, I would be fine playing by myself, just running my monos. No latency whatsoever but I go back to town for whatever reason, boom, lagging out. In town. Doing nothing. This is just… ridiculously bad net code on the server side. No two ways about that.
Runemaster: Clearly, the Runemaster is somewhat OP right now and there’s nothing wrong with needing things to be balanced after they’ve been introduced but the degree to which it is overpowered, especially when comparing it to other masteries which were in the game for quite some time now is … bizarre. Currently, almost all RM builds play like you’re playing a D3 TR Meteor Wizard with full primals and with full GR150 augments on everything. And it plays like that… from the moment any of its builds come online even remotely. It needs to be nerfed today. There is literally no reason to play anything other than a Runemaster right now. Which incidentally also is a reason why I did not opt for that. FOTM? No. That’s just not my thing. I like to be creative with a game. Not just do what everyone else is doing.
The leveling experience… or, rather, the experience to level. There are certain key build defining items (the Scurry helm, for one) that have a level requirement so high, you need a full day of gaming (or multiple more normal game sessions) to get there. Or be boosted there. Because the level requirement just scales so hard beyond a certain point, it’s not even sane anymore.
Following above point – Firestarter’s Torch, Mad Alchemist’s Ladle. Build defining items that are accessible from a very early stage of the game on and can and are used even into the very latest of endgame by people. Why this disconnect from one mastery to the next? Was this a conscious effort to push Runemaster as much as possible? To force as many people as possible to play it? Just because, well… the uniques are there. Heck, grab a Calamity while you’re at it. Now you’re level 7 and you have 2 ridiculously strong items (Firestarter and Calamity) which will see you complete the campaign without much of a hassle whatsoever. Because they’re just that good by themselves. And the poor Beastmasters? Let’s just leave those guys leveling all the way to 76 for their squirrel helm. The disconnect is… bizarre. How the objectively strongest Mastery in the game gets to be like that from the start of the game on and how one of the roughest Masteries of the game to level to 76 (what are you going to play, Wolves?) gets to bang its head against a brick wall for days.
I could go on for hours like this but, I’ll summarize it like this:
Last Epoch is a game which exists in a state which makes it incredibly hard to define. What do the developers want the game to be? Another D3? Another D4? Another Path of Exile? Currently, it tries to be all of those things at once. And failing to do any of it to any degree of actual success. Really, I feel like the developers just randomly keep tossing up ideas between themselves and adding those ideas in without much consideration whatsoever about the consequences. Last Epoch is a random collection of individually great ideas that compounded on top of one another just leave it in this weird, disjointed and clunky state that genuinely really does not feel fun to play in the long run.
It’s fun for maybe a week or two but after that it’s just… more annoying than anything. It needs so much work. And I fear that Feb 21st 2024 (the date set for 1.0) is far too soon to see all of its issues being fixed. It will launch in a similar state to D4 – A mess. Which will take months or even years to correct. And by then, the damage will have been done. Look at D4 now… half a year since its release, it is mostly considered a joke. That is where LE is headed as well. Guaranteed.
That’s not actually true. The damage reduction doesn’t know/care about how the boss looses life “too fast” only that it does. If you could do enough dot damage quickly enough then that would trigger (multiple stacks of) the damage reduction.
The devs are also aware that it feels bad & that it’s not effectively achieving it’s desired aims, so I’d expect a change to it when they can figure out a better way of having all builds be able to see & interact with boss mechanics.
Which is what they don’t want to do since that would make every build that isn’t OP feel bad & push people towards playing the OP builds because the bosses don’t take an obscene amount to time to kill.
This problem is not a trivial one to solve, even “just fixing” the over/under powered builds isn’t an easy solution (though it probably is the best one).
This I disagree with, I like that its different to the other games.
I’d refer you to my previous reply, I like that it’s different. If I wanted to play a game where glass cannon was the best way to go, I’d play PoE. But I agree that it’d be better if things were balanced better so that glass cannon were less unviable.
Runemaster, yeah, new masteries do usually take a bit of time to settle down to a more balanced state. Though I’d argue that part of it is that EHG are just more experienced in making skills and passive trees now than they were 4-5 years ago, which is to be expected. I’m sure when they have more time (not implementing MP or new classes/masteries), they’ll be able to update the existing ones to a similar quality level as the new ones.
Nope, those items have been around way longer than the Runemaster, but they suit specific builds very well.
They want it to be its own thing, not a clone of the other big games in the genre.
I totally see where you are coming from. I am very much the same in a lot of otehr games, that I really want to like but I can’t quite find the right character/build to enjoy it enough to keep playing. I don’t have this wiht LE, but with a lot of other similar games.
But from the list of specifics you did in your 2nd post those are rather generic points of feedback, that don’t have much to do with most builds, but rather core systems of the game.
Also there are a lot of thigns I disagree with or that are already confirmed to change.
The devs already recognized this as an issue. The goal of the system was and still is good: Make bosses meaningful.
But the application is frustrating and annoying, the devs recongizned that and they will change the system eventually. But its not easy to come up with a system that fulfill this goal.
I absolutely disagree, while the ward system is more complex and has a lot mroe nuances than most other “shield” systems, I really really like it.
Because it forces you to be active to regenerate your shields. A lot of the uniques and interactions kinda are semi-passive once established into the build, but generally if you stand still or run around without hitting anythign you generate a lot less ward, which I quite like.
While passives do have defensive options there are a lot more interesting utulity, build defining or offensive options in there as well.
I am not sure why to connect the passive system with speccing pure defensively.
Also I disagree that you ahve to go full defense to survive the one-shots. Yes you kidna do, but you can also mvoe out of these, because the vast majority of “one-shot mehcanics” are telegraphed nad/or avoidable.
If you want to push a character really high into the endgame, like multiple hundreds of corruption you definitely need a lot of defense, no doubt about that, but the “one-shots” are not coming from regular incoming damage, but from enemy telegraphed skills.
Agreed and they are constantly working on it. The previous major patches 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 were a lto better for me than the latest 0.9.2 patch. I hope they can improve on this massively with 1.0 to a degree where this is no longer a major concern.
I totally can live with minor bugs still nto being fixed in 1.0 and some occasiponaly dc’s are osmething I can lvie with as well.
But constant dc’s, party issues trying to get into the same zone are something that should not be a thing for a released game.
I absolutely disagree here. You literally picked one of the very few build enabling uniques that are very rare and only target farmable in very late endgame. Generally most build enabling uniques are way easier and earlier obtainable.
Regarding the level requirements beyond a certain point beign too high. I am of the opposite opinions, those last few 5-10 levels should be precious, because they are not requried to many any build functional. EHG just recently increased the time it takes to get to those later levels, which is a good step into the right direction for the longyevity.
While I certainly don’t want to troll you, I don’t know why you would not want to read responses?
Having your own opinion and putting it out there is fine, but especially for opinions that are considered feedback towards the devs I personally find it very interesting what other people thing about it.
Just to give you a perspective.
Something that you might find 100% “wrong/bad” might be something another person absolutely loves about the game. And without reading the responses you will never know this.
For you everything might be black and white (bad and good), while in reality soem of those points are rather grey and it is nto as one-sided as you thought.
I think I’m in the same boat as the OP. LE is a great game, but it’s just missing in so many little places that, if were isolated incidents wouldn’t matter, but all added together make things feel…‘off’. And, if LE were the only game I had access to, it would build up and eventually make me quit altogether. But, I just find that going out a playing something else for a few weeks to so, resets the frustration meter back to 0, and I can get back to enjoy the good things LE has, without focusing too much on the things that are nipping at my toes… so to speak.
I think we have to take into account that LE is still in EA. PoE 1.0 didn’t feel good when it launched. They just built on it and consolidated their gameplay and became one of the best ARPGs. We need to give LE the same chance. If we compare LE 0.9.2 with PoE 1.0, LE is better.
A lot of things will be fine tuned, fixed and/or balanced over time. I expect 1.0 will bring a whole bunch of bug fixes and performance fixes as well, so it will likely feel a lot better by then. Not to mention the monos rebalance that was already announced.
100% agreed. I remember POE during Open Beta and 1.0 release very clearly. It didn’t have half the level of the cool, fun stuff that LE does, its accessibility and QOL were an absolute dumpster, and it was so unforgiving and punishing that I honestly think if old school D2 people weren’t so pissed off at D3 it wouldn’t have done as well.
I understand it’s still in EA. I’ve been around forever. That doesn’t change anything I said. Being in EA doesn’t make the little issues any less issue-y. It doesn’t make the lag, any less lagg-y. And it doesn’t make the RNG any less RNG-y. Sure, things may change in 1.0, or they might get worse. There’s no guarantee either way. It’s 50/50… either it will get better, or it won’t.
Now, just because some people see “I have this issue with LE”, and immediately jump on their horse and charge into battle, wearing LE’s charm on their wrist, I admitted there was plenty to like, and plenty to keep me playing. But… that doesn’t make any of the issues any less so. And, over time, they add up. So, being able to step away from time to time, and play another game, has allowed me to stick with LE through all the issues, through all this time.
I’m not calling doom and gloom, or Dead in teh Watur™ at this moment, so there’s no need to call for a Crusade at this juncture.
And, what POE had or didn’t have is kind of irrelevant. Why not compare it to D3? How about D4? Can’t just pick one game and that is the correct comparison. Maybe it’s like Wolcen! shiver Yeah, we don’t want to go there do we? POE is fine, but hardly ‘one of the best’ (besides, that’s subjective as fawk…I’d put TQ and Grim Dawn miles upon miles upon infinity ahead of POE everyday – and 5 times on Sunday)… popularity doesn’t always equal quality; A metric fuckton of people watched all the Transformers movies, but that doesn’t mean any are in danger of winning any Oscars.
I wasn’t actually referring to you, rather to the OP and the whole “LE sucks and I’ll be back in 2 years”, which seems like a weird thing to do after paying for the game (unless they’re playing a cracked version of it).
I just feel that LE should get a chance to be judged on its merits after leaving EA, that’s all.
Obviously there are plenty of things that LE is needing right now, some of which we’ll get in 1.0, some we might and some we won’t. Time will tell. I just don’t think that attitude is warranted, especially when 1.0 is right around the corner. If this post was made after 1.0 it would be fine (other than the pretentiousness of it, but that’s another story).
D3 and D4 aren’t really comparable because both are aimed at the casual player. Nothing in either is really difficult or grindy. And when something is, they implement something that will make it easier again.
PoE and GD (and, by extension, TQ) seem like the most apt comparisons with LE because the game takes a lot of influence from both. And the feel of the game is kinda like in between both as well, at least the way I see it. PoE just seems like a more apt comparison of the two because it’s also a live service with multiplayer and seasons.
And LE doesn’t have enough bugs and frustration to be compared to Wolcen, that’s a completely unattainable level.
Eh, I’m not sure where LE falls, TBH. It has the item grind of POE, with the playability challenge of D4. And yeah, not much has the problem-count of Wolcen.
Sure, not now, but the faction system coming in 1.0 is going to wildly change how RNG-y things are, and also feel. That’s unarguable. I semi-agree with the other bits (even though again, EA = expected bugs and performance issues), but for this point, it’s very important that it’s still in EA because it means we don’t have the full picture or experience yet.
I think it’s very relevant. People keep complaining about LE based on comparisons to POE now and those comparisons are silly at best and deliberate bad faith at worst. You (royal you) can’t compare the state of a game in EA to the state of a game after 15 years of dev and iteration and come out with a valid opinion.
The salient point here is that POE was a shitbox at the same stage in its development that LE is now. LE is a flat out a better game when you compare them at the same point in time. It’s more polished and has more content. A lot of people found the fun in POE at that time despite its flaws, and it’s because we did that it’s had 15 years to become the standard everybody judges ARPGs by. I think LE has similar potential. So it’s kind of tiring and exasperating when bingbongs roll in and unload both barrels like their expectation was that an EA game be comparable in maturity to one that’s been growing for over a decade.
Sure, but if you use that standard then you can’t say that LE is a new game because it’s already being worked on for a few years.
And if you use that standard, then when HL2 came out it was 6 years old.
Even worse, that means that Starfield, rather than being a new game this year, is actually an 8 years old game.
Even EVEN worse, there’s Duke Nukem
I don’t think you can count the EA/development time as a factor in a game’s age. Especially when games used to require a lot less time to release than they do now, mostly due to technological advances.
I’m going to have to weigh in there, while I agree there’s not exactly a 1:1 parity, surely if a game is in people’s hands & “playable” (a very fluffy term that means different things to different people) then there is some level of comparability to other games? Or should we only be allowed to compare games that are “1.0” in a given year (because as you say development time changes over time)?
Well, as with many things, that is entirely debatable and subject to people’s opinions.
My opinion is that, yes, only 1.0 counts. LE right now is NOT a complete game. When 1.0 releases, that’s when the devs are saying: “Ok, we finished this. We will work on it and further improve it, but right now, this is a complete game”.
Counting EA time, even if it’s in a playable state, is like counting a game’s age from the first demo. Many games releases playable demos long before the game is ready. Does that count towards their age?
When games are being developed, very often they’re already playable halfway through the process. In most cases, the studio doesn’t let players have access to it. The fact that they release an EA or a beta or a demo only counts for getting player feedback into account when they do release the complete game.
Another example of this would be BG3. A very similar case to LE, where it was in EA for years. It was also playable and it was also incomplete. Only when they released 1.0 can it be said that the game was done.
That’s my opinion anyway. Other opinions could be equally valid.
But they aren’t saying that. IMO, given how game development seems to be going (extended periods of time in EA followed by “live services”), those games are never done in the way that they used to be 20-30 years ago.
BG3 is a very different type of game though, it’s an SP game that can be said to be done at some point (because it’s not a live service game where the devs have committed to the Sisyphean task of continually adding more stuff to keep players there & playing/paying).
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