Last Epoch: Shattered Omens Patch Notes

Patch Notes
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This is true speaking from personal experience. I quit at around 700 - 1000c every seasons because I get bored repeating the content over and over again for minimal character progression. I’m not playing for the corruption numbers but to “finish” builds. If I feel my character is/characters are done, I’m fine with stopping for this season.
I reach this point in the week we see the player drop, if I’m only playing a single character and happen to have the time to play.

So first of all, no not only “average” players are quitting at this point.

I said before that LE needs 2 additional endgame systems. Monos (endless scaling), Dungeons (roguelike elements) and a handcrafted experience (reusing the campaign). Each with their own goals to achieve.

This would increase longevity for players like me a lot.

You are conflating two things. Easy =! boring. And hard =! fun.

The process of scaling it gets boring quite fast. The game needs variety. And a more guided experience before people reach the point of scaling corruption in the first place.

This is where I disagree. EHG so far have always put season mechanics (as in additions to base game stuff) into the campaign. The gameplay of those mechanics does not change meaningfully in monos. An average player spending like 14 hours in the campaign doing all the stuff getting into monos first realizes that stuff is the same. But they have a clear goal. Reach the highest monos.

Now they reach the end and… a glowing orb appears and they see they need to do it all again. But for what? They don’t know what Abberoth is. They only know stuff in the monos was about the same.

This is a major hit to motivation. There is no clear goal or easy to understand like map tiers in PoE. There are a lot of corruption numbers that don’t yet mean anything and the information about Aberroth is hidden behind several UI screens.

On top of that those with bad builds or gear get punished due to the difficulty spike.

So I disagree. There are several reasons and each reason hits differently for different kind of players.

  • Difficulty Spike to Empowered Monos and also needing to do Julra at a certain tier (depending on build and gear)
  • Demotivating design of “re-do it all” instead of obvious cool new stuff
  • No meaningful changes to the gameplay feel of seasonal mechanics (mostly just more and better - no progression though they are doing better the next season with the new boss and echo chains)
  • Heavy RNG with Blessings (enforces the “oh really I need to do that AGAIN?!” aspect)
  • Performance (that was a problem for people with machines that were on the weaker side - campaign was fine but in monos the game started to slow down a lot)
  • Slow corruption scaling (got better) and no new stuff after 300c (or whatever some of the weavers echoes need). It starts with stability. Gathering stability on low corruption is so freaking slow. And now you need like 800 instead of the 400 from before. Feels bad.
  • Can’t say much about MG (I’m a solo player and hate trade) but CoF gets bogged down a lot with UI rerolling. Not exactly engaging gameplay to get the good loot. MG probably has inflation problems that hit around that time (1 week in) but I can only specualte about that.
  • Dungeons are not exactly fun. The bosses are fun, but the dungeon run itself and the need to do all the lower difficulties once not so much. All my friends only ever engaged with them at a point where the first levels are a joke difficulty wise (i.e. at the start of emp monos) and the reward (except Julra) gets outscaled by monos. Another let down moment. Even with portal charms.
  • Bugs. Stuff not working as intended thus destroying a build idea and all the motivation with it. Monos into Empowered Monos is the point where most of my friends took a good look at their build and started to think more about what they wanna do. So bugs are gonna come up.

There are probably a few more reasons that could make a player quit. But those are all I could come up with quickly.

1 Like
224

All I know is each season the whole way through you see people in chat “does this game get any harder it’s too easy” everyone asks “what corruption are you on?” “whats that?” then they finally get there and it becomes too hard. You can’t please everyone but this game compared to other ARPGS has the best opportunity for casual players to get good gear especially via CoF and Nemesis so its not on EHG to make it easier or harder it’s on the player to be better and focus on what the build needs or shit, just play a different class.

I mentioned in an earlier post directed at @Elhazzared he’s been playing 7 years and never made it to 100. That’s a huge skill issue. You can get to a 100 on 100 corruption, it’ll take a lot of time sure but you can. You can ask to leech experience in game from others. You can ask others for help to kill bosses if you need or want there gear. So it’s even more wild you’re saying there’s 10 people just like you and you can’t group up together and run monos successfully while getting gear together/sharing while popping prophecies or farming gold to buy items. Nah mate, sick of the whinge. Take it to the feedback section. You need to learn to play. I’m almost 50 years old. I have no reactions left. I stand and hack because jumping around the screen gets me killed but even at my age I can follow a guide or build my own guy and run decently high corruption. It takes half a brain and no “grand blessings” are blocking builds. Unreal mate.

This cry fest in here is sad to watch. Honestly move along.

3 Likes
225

Seeing the constant blabber some of these users have been making about the difficulty of this game REALLY shows that it shouldn’t have released in 1.0.

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The statement was “even before they hit empowered monos”.
Because they are bored out of their minds. They have already seen all there is too see. Except some bosses. They wipe screens of enemies with a few button presses and nothing is dangerous.

Discussion about difficulty, balance and so on you get in every ARPG. If LE didn’t release 1.0, it would never have released.

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Spriggan Form
Thorn Shield grants 40 damage reflected to attackers (from 50) per stack.
Briar Shell grants 20 damage reflected to attackers per point (from 30).

Thorn Shield
Old: 50
New: 40
Change: -10
Percent nerfed: -20%

Briar Shell
Old: 30
New: 20
Change: -10
Percent nerfed: -33.3%

The “of the Briar” suffix on small Weaver Idols decreased damage reflected to attackers from 50-150 to 50-100.

150 → 100
Change: -50
Percent nerfed: -33.3%

Thornshell now grants 3-6% increased flat damage reflected to attackers per Attunement (from 5-9%).

Before: Each point of Attunement gave +5% to +9% increased flat reflected damage
After: Each point of Attunement gives +3% to +6% increased flat reflected damage

Percentage-to-percentage nerf of roughly -33% to -40%, depending on the roll.

Thicket of Blinding Light’s damage and blinding effect now has a maximum range of 8 meters (from 12). Its damage is now based on distance, scaling linearly from 10% at 8 meters up to 100% at 4 meters away.

Old: 12 meters @ 100%
New: 04 meters @ 100%
Change: -8 meters
Percent nerfed: -66.7%

Estimated overall build change:
About a 30% to 50% damage nerf overall, even before factoring in the range/falloff change.

GUTTED! :dizzy_face:

Maybe this build could have used a little balancing but instead, in typical ARPG balancing fashion, the devs used an overly heavy hand and completely wrecked it, destroying everything that made it fun.

I guess I’ll keep playing Path of Exile, and try out the new Blade Vortex Minion Pact build, or stick with a Righteous Fire build for this kind of build.

On the bright side, the $90 I spent on a PoE supporter pack feels more worthwhile now, and it saved me from spending more money on supporter packs here.

Maybe Season 5 will look better… a year from now.

2 Likes
228

But the discussion here started because someone complained about the imprint nerfs. And it might as never given how slow the content rollout is, and that also includes balance and difficulty changes.

229

Any word on transmog?

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If you can’t get to empowered monos you’re doing something wrong. Either look for a guide or adjust your build on your own, because that is a barrier everyone can overcome. I know there are always exceptions, but if you play endgame in poe, you should know how an arpg works and be able to get to ngame in LE.

Yes, most people give up once they reach endgame because they are bored and not engaged. Because you know, with INFINITE scalable difficulty, clearly the problem is that they are bored that the game is too easy… Or maybe, you know, you use common sense and realize the problem is precisely the opposite, they cannot get past that specific spike in difficulty.

Yes, most people give up once they reach endgame because they are bored and not engaged. Because you know, with INFINITE scalable difficulty, clearly the problem is that they are bored that the game is too easy… Or maybe, you know, you use common sense and realize the problem is precisely the opposite, they cannot get past that specific spike in difficulty.

If only the best players are able to complete the game in a week having done all minus maybe Uberroth.

I’m not a great player, and I can beat everything except Uber in a week.

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If people are getting to empowered with low hp & low resists then they’ve been actively ignoring gearing or actively choosing to go with gear that has offensive affixes rather than defensive affixes & are either unable or unwilling to fix that.

234

What time is the new season? It says 4:00 pm
UTC? Never heard of that before… conversion says 11:00am central time? Does that seem right

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We see a huge player drop after the very first week so if you are reaching 700-1000 corruption you are one of the better players in LE. We are talking 0.1% range at bare minimum. That is so far above the average that comparison isn’t even possible by any degree.

As for getting bored of doing the same thing over and over again for minimal progression, I can understand that to a degree but to me that point is mostly valid when it’s almost impossible to get upgrades or early one when no gear drops in normal monos.

I am saying what the people who want a harder game say specifically here and that it is wrong. The game is boring because it’s too easy and it would be more fun if it was harder which is something I disagree with and the fact that you can infinitely scale it.

The people who also say this do everything to trivialize every game including PoE and you hardly see them complaining elsewhere so clearly the easy = boring is not true. We are both on the same page.

To put it into perspective, I played till I got to empowered monos last season which again is exactly where I quit and most people do. I did engage with the new content but up to this point there wasn’t much exploration of that, a little bit, I got to see how it works but only somewhat. It takes a lot more time to fully explore the mechanic and it’s still one more being added to the game so it’s more content still.

As for there being no clear goal. That is actually the point. Is there a clear goal in PoE? No! Is there a clear goal in D4? No. Heck, even in Grim Dawn there is no clear goal because the goal is not beat the campaign or beat a specific boss, that’s not what infinite repeatable ARPGs are about. There is kind of a goal but it’s a somewhat floaty goal which is get stronger. Get better gear and become even stronger than you were before.

Yes, it’s a hamster wheel but you only jump into the hamster wheel called ARPGs if you like that!

I don’t think Julra is too bad because you can do her at lower level unless you need to farm her for a drop, then yes. The difficulty spikes are indeed a killer.

What you call demotivating design is literally the core component of any ARPG and most games (not all of course) which are infinitely replayable.

I agree with no meaningful change but even in PoE a lot of the new content isn’t that meaningful or that deep either especially their earlier leagues and no one complained about that. In fact one of their most successful leagues and my personal favorite was harbinger and all it did was put a blue guy that summons a bunch of easy monsters for you to kill and gave you loot at the end. It was brain dead easy and again, one of the most popular to this day.

Heavy RNG with blessings I agree entirely. I’d have redesigned blessings to be not have a normal and a grand variant. Instead when they do a boss they automatically unlock all blessings at the lowest roll and then on normal monos they do 2 rolls on the bleesing they want and get to keep the highest (or chose a specific value between minimum and their highest roll. At 100 corruption they do 3 rolls, 4 at 200 and 5 at 300. This would make blessings still have an RNG components but wouldn’t be egregious.

Performance isn’t really an issue of people quitting early so much as they quit soon after booting up the game. Is it an issue, to a degree but at some point you are also going to have to accept that in order to have decent graphics a higher end machine is going to be needed. I don’t mean a great computer but some who complain have actual potatoes.

Corruption scaling being slow I can’t agree. If people are getting to 1000, I think the fastest is 1200 in a week, that is very fast to get to a point where most builds can’t handle no matter how good a gear you put on them. It’s only extreme edge case builds that handle that which is to say, at this point, even though people complain it’s easy, I’m sorry but it isn’t. I’m sure they are making do because they have great reactions and can almost always attack before being attacked and with tremendous leech or ward gain they become immortal but if they were to get hit first they would likely die instantly. Playing rocket tag isn’t what I’d call easy.

Both guilds are in bad shape i agree. CoF needs less need for interaction (what I mean by that is less clicking) but above all it needs much more powerful target farming. MG needs to have actual caps on how expensive something can be sold. Both need to entirely lose the leveling up system as it is holding the guild from being useful by so much that using it becomes a joke.

I agree dungeons are not good but I’ve said so from the start and I see no practical solution for them either way.

Bugs happen but to be clear, if we discount the 1.0 release bugs (because it was massively rushed) I’ve actually never ran into bugs. Bugs mostly happen with co-op from what I normally see and it certainly is a problem but it’s not a quit the game problem in my opinion.

I’ll say it again, the major reason is people spending an entire week playing to unlock the empowered monos where they can finally start farming the gear they need and the empowered blessings they need and then dying half the times they enter a new instance.

Between dying a lot which is enough to get most people uninterested in playing due to a poorly designed system and the added frustration of both timeline and gear rewards loss, players lose the will play the game. Like I’ve pointed out before, I myself grew so tired of this that sometimes all it takes is a single death for me to turn off the game. This system is horribly designed, i don’t want XP loss like PoE but I’ll tell you, it’s a lot better than reward loss.

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Except it’s not on the player because them playing meta builds ends up with the exact same results. CoF isn’t going to do anything, you don’t have it leveled up by that point and even if you had you can’t properly target farm with it anyway. CoF needs to be able to target not only what specific affixes you want on exalted gear but also what bases you want and that is just one of the things it needs to do because it needs to do A LOT MORE than just that.

Do you know how long it takes to get to 100 in 100 corruption? There was a guy who was playing the game for like 3 months and he wasn’t anywhere near getting to level 100. You need to aggressively scale corruption to be able to realistically get there.

The only character I had that was close to that got destroyed by EHG when they removed all double resistances from the game and soon after made minions a lot worse. The character became unplayable overnight.

After that with the changes to corruption getting past empowered is not really possible for the average player so why would I reach 100 when I don’t play any longer than a week since I get progression blocked.

If anything it should show to serve the state of the game.

And no I’m not asking anyone to carry me. I play the game alone and that’s how I like it. Not everyone is trapped into the I have to play with friends to have fun kinda deal and if I was going to play with friend it would be exactly that, with friends, not with people I don’t know or care about.

Also age isn’t an indication of how good you can be at something. Some people are older than you and play better than you I’m sure. In fact I’m also sure that despite all that BS about your age you still play better than 99% of the player base of which most are also younger than you.

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Pretty sure it was when they reach it and no, it’s not because they are bored. Are you the type of player who gets bored of playing a game as soon as you boot it up? Because that’s what you are saying everyone is like. Stop being disingenuous.

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At the very top of the post it shows the time in your local zone.

1 Like
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The game has a very long item grind and you really need to get multiplies of items to really get a pretty decent setup. I played several hundred hours last season and still had plenty more to grind for to try and get to get a single character to a level that I would have considered close to complete.

That change alone looks like a step backwards and a corruption system just adds another layer of gambling where you will then have a lower chance to get the item back up to the same level or another “chance”.

I think this is a pass for me. I wasnt really bothered by yall going back on your pay for more content decisions, but this patch feels like several steps backwards from this season.

I think I will pass on this one.

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A huge drop can be explained with various reasons, namely some (none exclusive, in any order):

  • Another game launches their season shortly after. Lets say LE launches season 3 on the 21.08.2025 and PoE2 on the 29.08.2025.

  • A returning player picked a “new” build or one of the new skills. They level their character in a few days. They try the new season content. They already see it in the campaign. They buy the primordial item. They realize that there’s nothing else that is new: They already wipe entire screens, they run mono’s as they have done so for years, they kill Aberroth in under a minute at this point… They are done. No point in chasing items. Uber Aberroth would be the only thing that would pose a challange at this point. Pushing corruption higher and higher doesn’t give a different gameplay as what you’ve already done for years. He quits.

  • A new player has no clue how to play LE. He might like the genre or he plays similar games. He wipes the floor with everything in the campaign because he doesn’t speedrun. He’s bored after hours of the same. He quits.

  • A new player has no clue how to play LE. He might like the genre or he plays similar games. He struggles in the campaign. He dies a lot. He barely makes it to normal monolith. He sees that the struggle is even worse and he dies even more often now. He quits.

  • A returning player knows a bit about LE. He still struggles in the campaign. He dies a lot. He barely makes it to normal monolith. He sees that the struggle is even worse in the endgame and he dies even more often now. He quits.

All 5 of these reason are valid and each of these type of players exist. We have proof for that. Only EHG (hopefully) knows which of these reasons is the majority and acts accordingly with which priority. In my opinion, solutions are not mutually exclusive.

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241

Yeah i mean thats sorta what corruption exists for, you can farm whatever level you feel gives you the most bang for your risk.

They just need to add “hard mode campaign for giga chad gamers” but tbh people say they want this, and unless it gives extra rewards no one is gonna pick it.

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242

Not even 23hours to go, I am hyped. Looking forward for season 4 :smiley: thank you EHG! :heart:

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243

I’m probably an idiot and have nothing better to do, but I was curious to calculate the damage of the mage’s skeletons, and I have a feeling it wasn’t exactly 0.14, but 0.14106059039.
Is this theoretically possible?

244

Considering how low their damage is baseline, this could easily just be due to rounding, or if damage variance still happens on dummies (can’t remember if they removed damage variance on dummies or if it was just a suggestion) then due to just randomness.