Greetings!
I am 70h in Last Epoch, mostly playing a level 100 Necromancer with a load of minions. Got to say, loving the game so far, playing offline with Circle of Fortune. Before, I have played the Diablo 2 necromancer, when I was a teenager and that was one of the only games available. More recently, I have played ritualist in Grim Dawn and Necromancer in Path of Exile, due to my love/nostalgia for minion builds in arpgs.
So, onto the feedback. First and foremost, I LOVE the feel of the game. The music/artstyle and time manipulation campaign just feel really good to me, I had a blast, even if most characters and story beats are fairly simplistic. But hey, arpgs aren’t known for dialogue trees or many choices, though I appreciated being given the option, even if I declined it, to lie and claim that the lesser refuge referred to themselves as the rat refuge or suchlike.
The gameplay is smooth. While in Grim Dawn you can set for each minion type individually whether they are offensive, defensive etc, here the default AI seems fairly effective, they might not follow too closely at times, but you can always redirect them with [A], so most minion failures are your failures. Still, the option to have your minions roam more and be more aggressive, or to stick closer to you might be a good option to have.
Minion gearing is fairly fine, love the options for minion health/damage/hp regen/defences/penetration and the likes, but it is a bit of a shame that only uniques can offer additional minions, like the gloves that grant bees on a melee hit, or the boots that cause vines to follow you. On a sidenote, I was dissapointed with the wraithlord from the helmet eating all non-wraiths, was really hoping to add a wraithlord as a general/elite to my army. However, what is a bit lacking is more interesting mods - changing minion damage types, granting minions frenzy/haste, mayhaps giving them some auras or suchlikes? Only Julra’s gloves allows you to give minions some more unique stats, this could be worked upon. Not too big of an issue since for skill minions,. you can modify them a lot from their skill trees, so itemization being a little bit bland is not a huge issue.
What is more of an issue is a lack of revenant/spectre type minion. In other arpgs, you are often able to turn the strength of enemy monsters against them, by raising them to fight on your side. To me, this seems like a brilliant self-balancing move. The more insane monsters get, the more insane player minions get, always giving a degree of balance, with no need to change anything. And it is so fascinating to turn the strength of enemies back at them. However, since corpses and their utilization does not seem to be a thing in this game, might be impossible? Mayhaps a metamorph type minion could be possible, that would copy the first encountered enemy, until resummoned?
The crafting and legendary potential/weaver’s will systems are all fantastic, huge props to the developers for coming up with something so fun and powerful yet fairly straightforward. The factions are a stroke of genius, up until this game I did not believe an arpgs could be balanced for both SSF and trade. I was dreading either diablo 3 style get-geared-in-a-day or path of exile if-you-dont-rwt-dont-bother style, and am extremely impressed by item factions. They allow SSF to be fairly strong, they allow trade and meaningful interactions, but, from what I gather, block flipping or too heavy RWT. As a CoF player my only complaints are the lack of boosts to boss loot. Mayhaps if a boss has a unique body drop, and you trigger a prophecy of unique bodies off from them, they could also roll their boss unique body drops with it?
Also, with my army, I love using dread shade, a fantastic skill. I would love if there were more minion-specific buffs. Since, from my understanding, infernal shade seems more a monster debuff, and curses work for everyone, fellow players included? So such buffs would probably be too weak for minions, which are less powerful than players. Minion specific buff skills seems a great way to have very strong buffs available. More of them, please. Mayhaps as a rare affix, or on an interesting unique, or an unique idol?
Lastly, I love the dungeons with their specific abilities. Not a huge fan of the arena, the waves come a bit too slowly for my taste and you can’t build any towers/otherwise modify the arena. But I appreciate the variety of high-end activities. The only downside is that you must to some degree engage with all of them, since each of them has exclusive rewards. I believe there should be some sort of rare way to access exclusive rewards down the line, when more endgame activities become available.
I believe that covers the biggest topics of feedback I wanted to give. In case any developers read this, I think you have made a fantastic game and I am having a blast! Keep up the good work!