Massive Feedback Thread from a Tree (Enemies, Dungeons, Items, EVERYTHING!)

General
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Let me preface everything below by saying I love Last Epoch. I absolutely love it. I love the skill trees, the passive system, and just how much care you put into the world (I know a lot of systems are taken from other games, but it never feels it was just hacked on without thought). I have roughly 1,500 hours in Grim Dawn (the only other ARPG I’ve played), and I will easily surpass that with this game (though it will take years and mostly because there’s no GDStash equivalent where I can simply gear up and test a build to see if it’s viable without going through a lot of effort leveling multiple characters up). I am super happy that I got to support this game and I genuinely wish the best for the developers, coders, and their families.

That being said, I have a lot of feedback. A LOT. As of now, I have 3 high-level Primalist characters and 1 high-level Necromancer. I love having pets. I love whacking things with big sticks while having pets. Build wise, this game is perfect in letting me carry out my fantasies. I do not follow other builds, because then I don’t feel like I’m playing my own creation. I’m slowly learning what it takes to make a decent build in this game. I die. A lot. And that’s okay, because most of the time, it’s a learning experience. But there are some deaths that make me actually angry in a way that Grim Dawn never evoked in me. I’ll explain these as I come to them.

Dungeons

10 barriers all clustered together to block every conceivable path where you have to make a giant loop around make for fun and engaging gameplay. /sarc

Dungeon system. I love Temporal Sanctum as Legendary Unique affixes are a really fun way to make more unique build ideas (Yeah, I know a lot of people complain about slamming a +4 Frost Claw to a hyper-rare boss unique, but that just sounds so needlessly specific and outside what the devs intended this crafting system to be). Soulfire Bastion and Lightless Arbor have some neat ideas, but their payouts don’t give nearly the same amount of joy. Anyway, let’s go through all of these specifically:

Temporal Sanctum: Maybe it’s me specifically, but I have this feeling that the Void Husks in the “ruined” timeline are much more dangerous than anything in the “divine” timeline. I’m talking about the little snake dudes that have this Void tether. So unless I happen to see a Chest or an Exiled Mage, I’m sticking to the Divine timeline unless it’s absolutely necessary to time swap, which defeats the purpose of time swapping in the first place.

Then there’s the boss fight, where you first have to swap from ruined to divine, then you fight the totems that pop up. Julra uses her time bomb to try and force you back to the ruined timeline, but if you do that, she’s often combining her void puddle with one of her other major attacks like the Cold wave. Not to mention that her totems are immune in the ruined era. It’s much safer to time the portal so that you swap era to avoid the bomb, then swap back so she’s still in the divine era. Which again nullifies the point of having 2 eras.

Soufire Bastion
This one is the same as Temporal Sanctum in that you have two options, but sticking with one option the whole time is just better. You pretty much never want to let go of Fire immunity because you have Flamethrower skeletons, massive Volcanic boulder guys (the mini-boss from the fire monolith), and generally fire spitting everywhere. Necrotic immunity? The Watchers are irrelevant (maybe the laser attack hurts a but in stage IV, but you’ve learned in the campaign not to leave them alone and have them explode), Skeletons and their Mark of Death are meh, they have no heavy hitters. Even the Siege Golems, yeah they hurt a lot, but you’re able to take a hit and have the time to react to them.

But the Possessed Constructs, those little critters, they just ruin your day. They have two blasts that come side by side, but the first hit always stuns, so if you get hit by the first blast, the second blast finishes you off. So every Soulfire Bastion run ends with you either trivializing the boss or you didn’t see the Possessed Construct spawning behind that massive pillar and it shot you and now you’re dead.

Lightless Arbor
In terms of mechanics and enemy design, I love the layout of this dungeon the best. Darkness is a fun mechanic to build around, and I always feel like there are enough Ambers to fill the gauge back up before the real dangerous parts come about. The boss fight is mostly engaging; I sometimes get real annoyed that I thought I placed my beacon to burn the branches, only to realize after dodging 2 waves that the beacon wasn’t burning anything at all, but other than that, I really like it.

I do have one request for this boss fight, though: can the tentacles that come up during the Mountain’s second phase (after you burn down one segment but before you burn down both to fight the heart) count as a rare / boss enemy like Lagon’s tentacles? I have at least one Druid transformation build that relies on killing enemies / hitting boss enemies to keep my Rage up (as I don’t have the passive points to use the Rage on Crit mechanics), and this specific fight, with all the “normal” enemies just kills my Rage upkeep. I can maintain Rage in every other Monolith / Boss fight except this one, so would you help me out here?

More down below

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I’m pretty sure you can edit your offline character for that, even if there are no mods that do that.

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ENEMIES
Okay, so I like the Monolith system. I like the vision of branching out into an ever expanding unknown and seeing all the nodes on the way. I don’t like that Shades of Orobyss reset the monos so I’m back to only having 2-3 options again. I don’t climb corruption, but rather want to test my mettle by seeing if I can beat the T4 dungeons before starting the Monolith climb. Anyway, here are my gripes about specific enemies:

Drowned Husks: Okay, so I also do Arena for prophecies that come up, and for some reason, these specific Void enemies take FOREVER to get to center stage. Like 30 seconds will pass and I feel like the wave is bugged, but no, this specific group started on the further spawn point and are now just coming in.

Speaking of Arena, if you do the Tiers I - IV and you have Potions on the ground that aren’t picked up by the time you get to the next 10 Waves, they just stay on your screen. Forever. You can’t interact with them, and if you do Monoliths after, the icons will still be there. This is a particularly annoying bug to the point where I just swap characters if I do an Arena run.

Scalebane Saboteurs: The dudes on the mammoths that just rain exploding spears upon you? Yeah, those guys. I know some people hate the Embermage dudes that send down meteors (props to the one thread that called them “Eagleman”), but honestly I don’t mind them - they’re nearly always visible enough that you can charge to them and beat them down before they know what’s coming. But these spear-throwing bandits? They have like 10X the health and are just as dangerous close-up as they are far away. And sometimes a Monolith will have 5 of them in close proximity, and your whole screen is covered in explosions. Yeah, fun.

Dryad Guardians: These things are just next level-annoying. Just by being near them, you get 3 Chilled debuffs on you and now you feel slow as molasses. And you can’t just purge the debuffs and then fight the Guardians, because they’ll just Chill you again as you’re beating them down. And when you kill one of them, another one seemingly skates in out of nowhere and now you’re Chilled again.

Void Centipedes: You think I’m angry about the Dryad Guardians? These things are actually the worst. Massive health, massive body (so hard to maneuver around), and they have their little feeler attacks that are guaranteed to stun you for 2 seconds. And again, some Monoliths just love putting 5 of them on the same screen. Stun-stun-stun-stun oh wait now I’m dead. A lot of these I’m fine fighting in isolation, but there’s always that one mono where I’m seeing 6 of them in close succession and I know I’m in for a slog.

Spires: So I really like the chests littered throughout the lands. More actually, I really like the Runesmith chest, the Shrine Guardian chest, and the Travelers chest cause I love picking up Runes, Idols, and Keys. The Warrior Chest, the Thief Chest, and the Wizard’s Chest I can do without, honestly, as there’s just too many assortment of items that I assume I won’t get anything good out of them. But I’ll open them anyway and press X to see what drops. What I don’t like is having to run every 5 seconds because of these stupid spires (or just die) when I just want to see the pretty loot that drops. And I’ve also died multiple times because the outline for the Spire attacks blends in really well with certain backgrounds. It’d be impossible to capture that in a screenshot, so I’ll have to just take note when it happens.

Falling Rocks - Whether it’s the Lightless Arbor boss, the Primalist boss in the Arena, or those Wengari Patriarchs - Avalanche is the most unforgiving attack in the game. The boulders come down very quickly and have both high damage and high stun, so if you’re hit by one rock, another will certainly come down and kill you.

Okay, that’s all the negative ones, here’s a positive one:

Void Prophets: Whoever designed these needs a raise. Seriously. I love their Wario-esque laugh. I love their taunts about them coming to learn, and the belly flop attack they do is single-handedly the best enemy animation I have ever seen. I just love these guys so much.

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AFFIXES
I know there are complaints in other threads about certain affixes, so I’ll try to keep this centered on the most pointless affixes.

Anything regarding stun: Things like Stun chance on melee, increased stun duration, or on the defensive side, Stun Avoidance. Yeah, maybe you’ll get an interrupt on a boss battle, but why gamble on that when you can provide more attack speed and more leech while maneuvering to avoid the worst attacks? It just feels like stat bloat on weapons and I disregard any exalted that gives T6 Stun Chance on a weapon.

Anything regarding reflect: I guess you have rose-colored glasses from D2 Paladin (note, I haven’t actually played D2, but I know reflect builds love the nostalgia), because reflect just really doesn’t work. When you have 3,000 Health and the boss has 300,000 health, how is 30% damage on you reflected back worth a T6 slot? Then you put in on things like Spriggans and Skeletons, who really aren’t meant to take hits in the first place? I don’t know if you’re going for something like “Skeletons take 100,000 damage and do a big reflect back before they explode” kind of thing, but yeah, I’m not seeing how Reflect sees any play in this day and age.

This also rings true for the “300% Damage Reflected” shrine. It just feels like a waste of space. While I’m on the topic, it’d be really nice if the offensive shrines were colored green, defensive shrines in red, minion shrines (those ice beetles, and the bees!) in blue, or just some way to distinguish one type of shrine from another. I very much don’t want to play a melee build, get distracted by a shine, and get disappointed that it’s an ice beetle shrine that scales off my 5% minion damage.

Humble Idols that give you like 5% Void damage and 5% minion Void damage instead of giving 5% Void Resistance: You know that we’ll be scaling damage far more than we’re scaling resistances, right? And that idols that give resistances are very helpful so we can stack more health on our characters, right? So why are the damage numbers the same as the resistance numbers?

Resistances while Channeling: This one is just the most confusing one. We never want to be caught with our pants down getting hit without having these resistances, so we naturally want to make sure they’re capped at every moment to moment gameplay. But there’s no real benefit to overcapping the resistances either since you generally don’t want to be standing still if an enemy is about to use a resistance-shredding attack. So what purpose does this affix serve? Same with the 4-second resistance buffs like the one given to Eterra’s Blessing: nobody wants to be spamming a heal skill on yourself every 4 seconds just so the resistance numbers go up.

I’m pretty sure that’s all the things I want to go over. I will most likely not be able to level up all the Primalist builds I want to by the time the new update goes live, but trust me, I have A METRIC TON of things to say about Primalist passives and companion skills.

**Sorry, I forgot one thing: there are staves that have +melee crit chance. There are staves that give +1 to melee skills (the Bladed Staff). Do you want to know what staves don’t have? Melee Attack Speed. That makes me a sad Tree.

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I appreciate your feedback. I think the major negative about all three dungeons is backtracking. Echoes do such a fantastic job of avoiding it (looks like they spawn your target on the fly based on where you are), that dungeons feel extra tedious.

I’m also not a fan of the labyrinth mechanic in that you lose your attempt on death. Would rather restart the floor I died on, even at the cost of another key and with a limit on how many keys may be used (in PoE we got 6 portals, at least when last I played).

Can’t really say anything about mob types, that’s what I appreciate most about your feedback. I have to admit that I mostly play meta builds to experience them while they are OP, so it’s hard to tell what certain mobs do. During campaign those snakes with the sand whirls feel the most dangerous, those that you consider easy in Temporal Sanctum. In general, players tend to agree that dots are overtuned.

Regarding bad affixes (stun etc), I would simply say that we need bad affixes too. Otherwise there wouldn’t be good affixes. Also you’d be surprised how many ways there are to utilize certain affixes. For example Warlock can scale damage with necrotic resistance.

You’re right about reflect being pointless in a pve setting, always has been. It would take flat damage numbers and would have to extend to minions to see any use.

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I’ve been leveling up different builds, hoping to get one of them to be strong enough to showcase. As I play different play-styles, certain things become more apparent that I want to share.

  • I mentioned Spires in one of my initial posts, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems that spires are doing a better job of noticing when the player’s not in combat so they don’t rain down projectiles when you’re just trying to look at loot. They still have a tendency to blend in really well with the backgrounds which makes it super difficult to see where the projectiles are going to land. It’s particularly egregious with the Poison Spires as the murky green outline easily meshes with certain stages and they can do serious DoT damage if you don’t gear specifically to counter it.

  • I’ve played several Acolyte builds that really love using Ghostflame, especially with the 40% damage reduction to burned or damned enemies. However, there’s something I didn’t plan for: Lagon and the Lightless Arbor first-phase boss can’t be attacked directly and have ailments placed on them. Yeah, they’re damaged by their appendages, but the appendages aren’t attacking much, the bosses are (yeah, the new evade mechanic will help a lot for these fights, but Arbor’s falling rocks are attacking at full strength and they fall in quick succession). That makes these fights hard-counters to players who rely on “damage reduction applied by ailments” strategies.

  • Soulfire Bastion: This is more of a personal quip, but I organize my inventory a specific way, and when I get an interesting item from the Soul Gambler, I take a minute to discern its usefulness in any one of my multiple builds. Sadly for me, that means I have to hear “FANTASTIC WORK!” ten times in quick succession when I just want to look at my soul-gambled items. Is there a way to disable the voice-acting after the first or second time you open the window so my ears don’t feel barraged?

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If a conditional debuffs on the enemy is all or most of your DR, that is a flaw in the build.

It is totally expected for certain parts of any build to not work or partially not work against certain enemy types or in certain scenarios.

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I don’t agree it’s a flaw in the build, I’d rather say some builds are better at one thing and other at another thing. And in general that is a good thing - including hard counters.

There is one scenario though, in which hard counters are a problem: CoF. In MG you just do what you do well and purchase the rest - like in real life.

I tend to have multiple characters so I can do every content myself, but what I can’t do (unlike in PoE for example) is clear echoes with one char and the boss with another.

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Especially in the defensive department a builds tanky ess is decided based on multiple layers.

If you have too few layers, so that if 1 or 2 of these layers donvt apply, that is a flaw in the build.

It is totally fine if that build is worse at doing certain things, but relying on multiple debuffs on enemies to take less damage from them without other sufficient defensive layers is a clear flaw.

Enemies can attack you before you apply debuffs, bosses that you canvt apply those debuffs too. Those are things you need to account for and if you didnvt that is a flaw in the build.

It is not that this is some super hyper specific thing. A build relying on that too much is bad in many situations and overall not a good builds, defensively speaking.

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Mind you, this isn’t a complaint in the sense of “OMG this is bad design bad game fix it now!” but it was something I wanted to bring attention to as it definitely surprised me and other players are going to be surprised too and complain “OMG why is this boss so much harder than the others?”

It doesn’t help me that I like to build offensively first to see if any of my builds do enough damage for me to have fun with them, and then figure out the defensive layers later. Yeah, it causes a lot of deaths, but that helps me be realistic with what builds are capable of what (and helps other players so that they don’t die as much as I do).

In terms of enemy and level design, my two biggest gripes that seriously need to be looked into are spires that blend too well with certain levels and monoliths that spam a single enemy like crazy. I was trying a monolith with a build that does comparatively much lower damage than I’m accustomed to, but has great defenses to offset that, and the monolith gave me like 20 Void Centipedes in a 2-screen area. It was absolutely torturous to slog through and the constant stuns eventually overwhelmed the build. Definitely an outlier in terms of monolith design, but man was it crazy.

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These feedback threads are fascinating to me (I mean this earnestly!), going to prove how many different ways of playing/experiencing a thing there are.

I have so little cognition of enemy types in these games (and certainly would not be able to name barely a single enemy) because of how I play. The builds I’ve played are typically offensive enough to speed through most enemies before really getting to know their mechanics, and defensive enough not to care too profoundly when I do get hit.

This guy is playing a whole different game - it’s amazing how much power level affects experience. He’s getting to know mechanics, enemy types, their attacks. It’s slowed down to the point seems that there’s this whole other level of mechanical strategy, he’s even appreciating the mob’s sound effects and animations and getting to know them on a personal level!

It’s really interesting, and tough, balancing these things because of this. One player’s style can be so distinct from another. The player running fringe experimental builds with a lower power level who has to spend their time working closely with different mob encounters and mechanics. Another who only looks at meta build guides and oneshots Lagon the first time and comments in global “what? Lagon is easy.” Important to hold it all in the mix.

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That was my experience for the longest time as well, but I suppose every (at least most) build will reach a point at which you remember enemy names…

Bitterwing, Scalebane Saboteur, Undead Hydra…

I would name the poison puddle plants, but since I don’t remember their name, they’re probably not that deadly after all.

Also, getting ambushed by two Forged Soldiers works as a big “oh shit” experience instead of “oh cool, I don’t have to find the objective anymore”.

And the bane of looting: Lightning Elementals and spires.

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That really depends on the type of player you are. As an altoholic, I very rarely push the limits of the character. As soon as it’s working properly in empowered monos I have an urge to make a new one.

Pretty much the only mobs I know the name of are the objective ones and the CoF ones. Everything else is “something to kill”.