Last Epoch, a retrospective

Feedback and Suggestions
21

Well, that’s debatable. If you look at D3, the game is a live service but it was pretty much complete after the expansion. Every season after that had minimal changes and barely any new mechanic, if any at all. It was only the last few seasons before D4 that they “woke up” and decided to do something right.

So being a live service doesn’t necessarily translate into continuing development. And even more “extreme” example of this is D2, where you’ve had seasons for years without any changes in the game. (Basically, Blizzard is lazy :stuck_out_tongue: )

But the point I was making is that, with 0.9.2 the devs are saying: “This game isn’t ready to be released. We want to do more in the game before it’s ready for the general public.”. And once they release 1.0 they’re saying: “Ok, we will get more things in over time, but the game is now ready for the general public”.

For players, there isn’t much difference between playing EA or public release, other than maybe the tolerance for bugs/features/whatever.
But it’s a threshold that the devs choose for announcing that their game is ready enough for public release.

22

This is still a deeply, deeply painful thing for me. What that game got right it got right sooooooo frigging well.

If LE could take one single clue from Wolcen it would be the combat. I still think it’s been unmatched in how awesome it feels.

23

I recently bought the game on the autumn sale for 3€ and I tried it for a few hours. The game still feels bad to play for me. There are many small things that are aggravating, like placing the minimap in the center but every time I open character, inventory, skills or passives, it will place it back in the top right.
There are also many more severe things. After the game crashed on me for the 3rd time in a day I just quit it and I guess I’ll wait some more months/years until the game is playable.

I can’t really speak to the quality of the combat, since I was doing mostly summons. And I couldn’t be bothered to keep playing with all the problems the game has.

24

Yeah, painful here as well. I pitched in during the kickstarter days when I think lvl 15 was max, there were 3 skills and only 1 dungeon. But the graphics, animations and combat were so far ahead of anything else I’d played I seriously wanted it to go far. Then they went through 2 or 3 complete revisions, and we ended up with the Frankengame we got at release. While still fun for a day of playing, was so frustrating that I quit, regardless of how much I wanted to like it.

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25

I mean, sure, if I were trying to compare game ages then you’d be right. But I’m not talking about just simple age, I’m talking about the total amount of time the devs have had/used to design, test, and iterate on the game. You have to include Early Access/Open Beta because otherwise it makes no sense. If we wanted to compare dev time between LE and POE, and we just ignored anything before a 1.0 release, then POE has had 10 years of dev time and LE has had… -2 months of dev time?

Any slowdown because of technological advances is likely close enough to being balanced out by other technological advances that speed it up that it’s not a significant factor to consider, IMO.

26

I mean, like I said, it’s all relative and opinions differ, but yeah. LE hasn’t launched yet. Just because you can play around with an incomplete game doesn’t really matter to me. Just like if I play a demo of a game I don’t count that either. What counts is when the product is ready for release and the subsequent development it receives.

When you look at Cyberpunk 2077 do you take into account the time it took them to develop the game or just the time between the clusterf*** that was the release and the point where it is now?

Games in EA are still being developed. EA is just so they can tweak some stuff, but the development would still occur at a similar rate without EA. Once a game is released, it’s not actually being developed, it’s being expanded upon.

EDIT: to clarify: to me, PoE was developed for 5 years and then it was expanded upon for 10 years. They are 2 different things to me.

Not really. You just need to compare the steady increase in development time over the decades. This is mostly because technology now allows games to be massive, so most games are massive. That means it takes a long time to plan, design and then develop them.
And even indie games these days are massive compared to games in the 80s and 90s.

Not to mention that player’s expectations are much higher now than they used to be. So if a game doesn’t have all those things the other games had, the game is a flop (exaggerating, of course, but the point still applies).

27

If you consider design a metric in a games age the bigger question is if you take the core material from the 80s as the starting point of the development begin of CP2077.

I know someone who made a little handy game he was talking about since he was 8 an this was 20 years ago… is the game in development since then because there were additions made to the base idea of the game?

I don’t know I know only one thing: There is a release date and that is day 0 for me outside of some games that are in EA for years now.

28

You can compare anything to LE that competes for players time. Because in the end we can choose to play ARPGs with 10 year of polish, or from a formerly renown triple A studio. So EHG needs to give me a reason why I should spend my time playing LE over anything else. This is why I always say that LE should not simply copy other ARPGs. Then I can play the others to begin with.

Also, why should I play LE over watching Netflix? The game needs to reward my time playing it because there are plenty of things out there competing for our free time.

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29

Uhm… was this aimed at me because if so: I full agree… duh?

30

The thing is that POE was just competing with D3. LE is competing with a much more complete POE and soon POE2 beta. It’s not fair to expect more from LE on launch, but that won’t get people to stick with it if they enjoy what’s already out there more.

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31

Agree, it basically ruins the very point of glass cannons, as unless it is optimised so hard that the FIRST HIT instakills, it will start taking forever for the last few bits of health, there are not bosses with invincible phases after a set amount of damage or any more FUN mechanic to stop instakilling bosses. But instakilling bosses is half of the fun of this kind of game, and it is nessesary for the Glass Cannon builds to exist, as if every build takes around the same amount of time to get a boss kill, then you may as well just go for a tank build.

I agree, it is either not enough to matter or so much that you cannot die.

i think the problem is more that SO MUCH of the other masteries need a buff to the point of a core mechanic that can rival runemaster(as in the starting skill/passive specifically), to my knowledge the ones that need a rework are: Beastmaster(raptor is a useless companion), Shaman(storm totems is ok, but not all to special), sorcerer(the “use lots of mana for a benefit” mechanic is just nowhere near good enough compared to just how hard it is to get mana back in this game, even for the mage and meteor is almost unusable at that cost), paladin(more due to identity crisis, as they are only ran because of passive stat buffs rather than a change in how they play), Forge guard(forge strike needs buff, the defence bonus is not as good as paladin aura and nothing special), necromancer(summon wraith being rather bad compared to other minion skills, even summon volatile zombie, which is a base class skill, also minions in general have allways felt off), Bladedancer(dancing strike needs buff)

But NONE of these are as important as my most major issue - monoliths seem samey due to 1:not having sub-objectives for extra rewards/stability 2:monolith affixes only effect drop rate and rarity in exchange for making enemies statistically harder, none of them do anything particularly interesting 3:There is actually almost no choices in monos, optimal strat is just “keep going down and fight shade for curruption while picking a few nodes on the way that match what you are looking for”, there is nothing ELSE that resets your mono for a reward, or that generates curruption, or that gives a big burst of stability 4: See 3, as in curruption is too slow to farm, where even at the very edge the best you can get is +20 and shades curruption bonus is not effected by the drop rate monolith affixes, 5: non-empowered monos require too much stability to get to the boss, which leads to having to do hundreds of them just to unlock empowered even when your build can handle it.

32

Maybe the devs don’t want glass cannon builds to be a thing like they don’t want passive thorns/reflect builds to be a thing.

It won’t, it’ll just take more than a few seconds. You’ll still be killing it faster than you would be with less damage, it’s just not linear & you’re “forced” to experience the boss mechanics.

Summon Wraith is supposed to be one of the strongest minion builds. Are you sure youre doing it right?

How is that different to PoE though? Some more effects would be nice.

The Vessel of Memory resets it allowing you to redo nice nodes again.

I do agree with this & I assume you think the Gaze bonus is too small.
Also agree with #5.

33

If you look at PoE or GD, glass cannon builds aren’t meant for bosses. They’re meant for quick clearing maps or similar mechanics. You don’t have a single glass cannon build running as a bosser. Even in D2, glass cannons only clear the campaign bosses, not the ubers.

Tipically, the biggest glass cannons are zoomers and struggle even with map bosses. Many times these builds simply clear the map and ignore the boss altogether.
And lately, in PoE, that philosophy has been changing as well, as glass cannons are becoming increasingly rare and any run of the mill build runs multiple layers of defense.

Yes, this is an issue that is acknowledged by the devs. They’re working on getting the last masteries in and they’re buffing shamans for 1.0. After that, it’s reasonable to expect they’ll start working on balancing the other masteries that have been forgotten since.

Technically, you do have a sub-objective: kill more mobs. The more you kill, the more stability you gain and the better the rewards in the chest.

Monos are being rebalanced for 1.0 where corruption will become more important than echo mods. We’ll have to wait for it to see how that ends up.

At earlier game I actually try to expand in a circle while I’m looking for the stuff I’m target farming. I’ll admit that once you have most of your gear your pathing becomes more irrelevant.

Yes, corruption increase is too slow. I don’t know if that’s being looked at for 1.0, but it’s reasonable to expect it will be looked at at some point anyway.

This, to me, is the biggest issue for when you’re making your nth character. Normal monos are much more boring than campaign is. Maybe they could implement something like in GD, where you finish unlocking empowered monos with one char and can buy a consumable that unlocks them for another character. GD has a bunch of those consumables where you immediately unlock all difficulties and get increased faction rewards.

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34

Kinetic Bolt Deadeye. kills everything without giving an enemy much of a chance to do anything. As soon as you can make a build that kills enemies almost isntantly who cares for tank?

Depending on the build you play you are still faster and better of ignoring mobs and doing objectives (+ the mobs you kill going from a to b) instead of killing a lot of mobs in one level.

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35

How is that a glass cannon? I looked at the videos, considering this is the new “meta” people are going crazy about, and the builds that do bosses are face tanking Sirus and Shaper blasts. They have huge defences.
Granted, if you only care about mapping you have more than enough damage to quickly kill map bosses and other small bosses in other mechanics, but for this build to be a bosser, meaning uber bosses, it needs defences. It can’t be a glass cannon. Otherwise any boss hit will kill you.

In LE this is further aggravated by the fact that if you die to a boss you have to start over, you don’t get x portals or x tries to do it (which, in itself, is something that needs to be addressed, but out of the scope of this issue).

Yeah, almost always you’re better off ignoring it. But the sub-objective does exist.

That’s not to say that monos wouldn’t actually be a lot better if you had some sub-objectives you could stategize for. Just using what’s already in place you could have something like main objective being to clear a gate and a sub-objective being to destroy spires, or patrolling monsters. Then you could decide your path and if you actually want to bother with the side ones.

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36

I’m sure I’m not alone in not liking certain playstyles being completely impossible because “we don’t think that’s a fun way to play”. It hovers far too close to the “what, you don’t have cell phones” arena…

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37

Making an entire set of passives, skills and stats irrelevant/obsolete/useless sounds like a reason that EHG might want to discourage people from being inordinately successful through an excessive focus on damage to the detriment of survivability.

Let’s not forget that builds blowing up multiple screens at a time, completely ignoring any and all mechanics, is one of the reasons there’s so much bullshit in POE.

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38

An objective that isnt beneficial is ignored by everyone. They need to tweek it a lot to make it a real objective worth to fullfill. I simply can’t call “Shoot your own foot and get nothing out of it!” an objective.

If seen someone running arround with his toon called screen cancer… I can’t remember the CC name because I was already lost when I’ve seen screen cancer. He had the normal layers of defences everyone in PoE uses but was far away from tanky builds that consodered tanky builds while doing 130+ mill dmg with each projectile. he never facetanked anything because all bosses did tops were 2 skills before beeing dead.

When I watch tanky builds like Phox playing RF then there is a huge difference in eHP while eHP is high on every toon in PoE if the creator of a build uses the normal ways to build a toon. Even old builds considered glass cannon by default are able to get tanky and there are deadeye builds that are tanky af but those are the exeption and not the rule.

I don’t think artificaly decreasing peoples dmg on bosses to keep them relevant for the game will make LE a better more beloved game then PoE it simply will attract different people. I like LE for a more chilled experience that isn’t as braindead as D4 then again I think EHG has a lot to do to blance the game to make it a fair and fun experience.
From my point of view someone who accumulated enough dmg to instagib a boss should not be punished to keep content releavant. There should either be no way to instagib bosses to begin with or it should be possible if the game offers the means to do so.

It’s strange how a game with “so much bullshit” is so succesfull. This proofs one of two things either your oppinion about PoE is bullshit or the game truely has a reason to be the best H&S right now. I personaly don’t like PoE that much for different reasones then again I have to say that it is the best H&S out there even when it’s not for me. Then again it’s a good way to kill time ^^.

39

They are beneficial, they’re just not beneficial enough for some.

Which is why the devs have atated several times that they intend to replace the dynamic DR with something more effective at meeting their objectives (players have to pay the game & can’t just oneshot bosses) without it feeling as bad for the high end builds or penalising the low end builds.

40

And this is something I can’t wrap my head around. I mean, why? If someone min/maxes the hell out of their build… farms BiS items. Why not be able to one-shot? It’s not like their gaming experience was ‘cheated’ in any fashion. I’d argue the opposite, in fact.

And why should poor builds not be punished for being… poor builds? If I pick my skill, item affix and passive selection(s) based on dice rolls, I shouldn’t be killing bosses. And, if some skills are simply under-performing, then they should be brought up, not bosses brought down.

This philosophy just doesn’t make any sense to me. Given the nature of ARPG is to grind, farm, hunt and optimize your character/build into Badass Land, and get hellfire revenge on those lvl 5 rats that once terrorized your lowbie mage.

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