My feedback after 50 hours of Void Knight gameplay until level 95

Feedback and Suggestions
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To start off, I have to admit that the game was way better than what I expected it to be and it didn’t feel as unfinished or iffy as plenty claimed to be. I managed to level my Void Knight to level 95 and greatly enjoyed the experience up to level 75. I enjoy ARPGs endgame, beating difficult( not time consuming) content and leaderboards. I’ve made plenty of builds in ARPGs / MMORPGs which have reached millions of views and I’ve been in top of the leaderboards in most of the popular games. I’m giving you feedback because I see plenty of potential in the game and seeing you actively work on it while listening to feedback gives me hope!

I’ll be starting from what I think are the most important changes needed.

  1. Main skills animations need to be upgraded as soon as possible

I honestly believe that if you make the most popular skills visually as effective and awesome as possible, people wouldn’t care to even kill moving boxes for 100s of hours. I’d take the top most played skills and do extra XXL work on them so streamers and other players could leave a positive impression of the game for their curious new viewers. This was also the reason why I chose Erasing Strike as my main skill - it seemed to be the most fluid skill.

  1. Lack of challenge / endgame content

While Arena does provide challenge, there is no real reason to be there unless you’ve reached your peak. In order to max your gear you need to mindlessly grind Monolith which I don’t like at all. If I wouldn’t have wanted to create a build for Erasing Strike, I would have stopped already at ~20 hours. I had no problem going to 30+ monoliths already from the beginning. I stopped playing eventually because after 5 hours of boring grinding, I found only 2 barely acceptable items to attempt crafting with although my gear is mid-tier.

  1. Awkward Crafting

The crafting surely is unique but it has too much RNG attached to it. I’m not talking about the fracturing; I’m talking about the glyphs, runes and bases. I was somewhat frustrated when I did early game crafting and Rune of Cleansing just didn’t drop. Went 3 hours without one, while being loaded with all other runes. Now in endgame I don’t need them at all but I’m completely starved on Glyph of Stabilities and have 100s of other rare runes which I will never use.
I would highly suggest some trade system or make Runes / Glyphs available in shop for lets say 50K each, so the gold would actually have a value and make focusing on farming a single type of crafting currency less frustrating.

I also don’t see how this crafting system would survive in a multiplayer environment for players who want to dedicate hundreds of hours on a single character.

  1. Imbalance in monsters

Again one of the main reasons why I stopped grinding arena. There were too many scenarios where I felt like I got cheated and was simply unlucky with the spawns. I can reach 150+ consistenly if I put effort into it but if I get off-screened by a bear / a single projectile on wave 70, it feels like I got trolled. My will to do Arena was also greatly decreased because of that, especially because of the Highland Bear’s Meteor / Avalanche.

  1. Rare monsters

Rare monsters are currently not worth killing anywhere at any stage because they don’t drop any better loot, not to mention almost half of the monolith modifiers are for rare monsters. An efficient Monolith run is simply running past all mobs, except grouped normal ones, destroying barrels, opening chests and grabbing the final 2 loot explosions. I would also greatly nerf the health affixes of rare mobs since these push the monsters health to tedious levels.

  1. Bosses too weak

Bosses are in no way difficult or challenging or unique. Half of them are even squishier than rare monsters and even the strongest ones can be killed by standing still and using your skills when they’re off cooldown - this is not engaging at all.

  1. Respeccing

I’m sure you have got plenty of feedback on that already, but I’d like to add up that the gold cost for passive points is a very bad idea. It feels terrible to play a build worse than which you have in mind, only because you need to farm gold to respec it. If you do not want to change that, at least don’t increase the gold cost. It takes me already 1,000,000 gold to fully respec my character which I obviously can’t do. This is extra bad because most of my playthrough half of my passive points were bugged, probably a quarter of them still are.

Bonus point: The claim is that you don’t want people to swap skills easily for bosses but this game NEEDS boss killing in all of it’s content, so I don’t see the logic here.

  1. Text scaling / Quest text

I use the global chat a lot in every game that I play and without it I get tired of the game very quick. Using global chat unfortunately is quite tedious in this game and definitely should have at least some minor improvements done asap. Starting from being able to scale the text size and moving the chat box around would be enough. A second look on the word filter would help greatly as well!
I also think that the reason why I did not care about the story at all was because the text wasn’t as comfortable to read as in other games. I do know that as an example in Path of Exile there are specific dialogues which I listened or read multiple times just because of how good they were.

  1. The sound

This is bearable but often ruins the immersion. Plenty of places feel too quiet without the music, some skills have broken sound levels and a few mobs COMPLETELY MURDER YOUR EARS. The only reason why I kill the machine gun skeleton doom dogs is because of their unbearable AK47 sound effects.

  1. Auras & Skills

I am sort of shooting in the dark here now but if most classes have auras, they should have their own separate skill slot. While I do understand that 20 points limit is made for making the choices more meaningful and balancing easier, it still often feels like too little but at the same time I believe you know better about balancing than I do.

11.( Edited) Monolith layouts

I also didn’t like plenty of Monolith layouts which forced me to do too much running back and forth. This happened often in the layout which has the middle part separated so you had to walk around it for 2 minutes if you chose the wrong side or had two objectives, both on either side. The worst part was doing that monolith for the first time with a single objective where I kept looking for a corner to go around to the other side, realizing that I have to walk back the whole way.
Some bosses were guilty of that as well, where I managed to run to the end of the Monolith only to realize that the boss is somewhere in a way earlier part of the Monolith.
I’ve seen some mentions about decreasing the Monolith size but I believe it’s not needed that drastically if the mob count, rare monster rewards and objective locations are changed.

For closing words I have to say that Sarno is a very useful staff member for this community, I hope you pay him well. I will probably be playing this game again and possibly releasing another build once the multiplayer hits live (:

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I agree on most of your points except on respeccing. And it is for these reasons that I think the game feels unfinished, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that the rough edges are still showing alot of potential.

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I also agree on most points.

Regarding Monoliths, I feel the following things have to be addressed:

  • There needs to be an incentive to kill the trash mobs and to not just skip to the main objective.
  • Monster density should feel equal across all of them. Currently most maps feel rather empty. And/or add monolith mods that increase density.
  • The monster variation across maps is good in its idea, but this sometimes results in maps which I can’t imagine to be fun for anyone. For example, I had one map which only contained those necrotic shooting kraken and turtle thingies. Can’t really skip them because they follow you too far and shoot at you from three screens away and killing them takes ages. There should always be a good “killing flow” in every map, where you also have something which is easy to kill. Stronger enemies mixed inbetween is fine, but nobody likes bullet sponges.

Regarding #6 (Weak bosses):
I have played multiple chars to around 60. Bosses feel vastly different depending on what kind of character you play. Erasing Strike was the one which I found to be more on the ridiculous side because you can kill pretty much any boss with 3-4 hits. My other chars usually take a lot longer, except if the boss has a weakness to the damage type of my main skills.

Regarding Crafting (#3):
On the one hand I like the idea of the crafting system, because it is not as heavily randomized compared to e.g. PoE and rather easy to get the desired outcome. On the other hand, I also think that it will kill the long time motivation of players, especially in online mode. Right now it feels like it is harder to find a good crafting base item than actually crafting it to max T5 mods.

One solution could be to make it harder to reach higher mod tiers, but also add (rare to very rare) runes to recover fractured items (e.g. remove the fracture and decrease one or more mods by one tier, or remove the fracture and reset the item to its naked base item). The more powerful, the more rare it should be. So you need longer/more attempts to get a perfect item, but you don’t need a new base item for each try…

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Respeccing with endlessly increasing price is just bad. If you end up having a hardcore player who ends up having to spend tons of hours to earn money just for respeccing his character, he will either 1) go play path of exile instead 2) rmt 3) create a new character and waste two days of his like. I guess none of the options will appeal to Last Epochs crew in the long run

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Very well written. I am enjoying the game so far. I hope they take your suggestions & implement them.

+1 on the Sarno Comment. He is amazing.

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true
especially for the 1st point, add some flair, something flashy and it will suck up a lot of casual players, 1st skill i think they would do this to is Rive.

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Thanks!
 

Can I check whether you’re referring to animations (e.g. a character swinging a sword), or visual effects (e.g. a Void explosion)? I don’t ask to nitpick; given how well you have articulated your feedback, it would be a disservice to assume you mistyped without asking.

We happen to be working on both - specific examples of which skills you’d like to see worked on could help (though may be overlooked if not posted in a dedicated forum thread).
 

The End Game Systems page has a synopsis of the planned endgame content. The current implementation of the Monolith of Fate is a very early iteration of the system.

We’re currently concentrating on ensuring that the game’s foundation is as solid as possible. While we’ll naturally spend a lot of time working on our endgame systems and iterating on them to improve their longevity, we need to make sure they fit Last Epoch well.
 

While it may feel cheap, I’m inclined to blame some of these on #JustBetaThings™.

We do plan to introduce additional Glyphs and Runes - and it is perhaps unfortunate that the majority of ones currently available incorporate an element of RNG.

Currently the most efficient form of base farming is checking vendors, then restarting the game client to refresh what they’ll have available. This is something we’ll be discussing at tonight’s meeting, though I’m not sure how quickly we’ll be able to address it.

We’ve yet to make a final decision on whether Glyphs and Runes will be tradable, and that will be one factor which helps to determine how we adjust their drop rates in future.
 

We haven’t really given the game a pass where we sit down, look at each boss and try to come up with interesting mechanics yet. For most of the game’s development we’ve been rushing to increase the amount of content available as quickly as possible. Boss encounters will be iterated on closer to release - most / all current boss fights are placeholders.
 

We plan to overhaul respecs for both skill specialization trees and class passives. The current implementations date back to the pre-alpha demos, when “what can we get done today?” was as much of a focus as any design goals we had in mind. Unfortunately as soon as respecs for both were available, work on them was deemed a much lower priority.
 

It would be great to have specific examples in a dedicated thread if you wouldn’t mind taking the time. Our sound team do occasionally play together and go through the game looking for issues (and the rest of try to keep an ear out), but we’d definitely welcome the input.
 

I’ll raise these points with the team.

It’d be good to hear whether the boss arrows are helping at all. It was the quickest way of acting on this feedback which we received both from yourself and from others. :slight_smile:

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Very coherent and satisfying responses as always, Sarno!

Animations

I’m not an animation designer now but I’ll try to give some assumptions / directions / ideas.

The biggest animation problem is the character gliding after animations. There’s often a 0.1s interval where the character’s legs or body doesn’t move at all. Even when the animation is cancelled, there should be some upper body recovery frames, so the character would look less glitchy.

@ 3:47 Erasing Slam
@ 4:22 Rebuke
@ 4:59 2 steps
Etc.

If you don’t see it immediately, watch at lower speeds.

The second main problem is the lack of strong upper body movement, especially on start up and recovery frames. Some have it, most don’t.
The third main problem is when damage and skill effects are applied.
The fourth main problem is the physics and logic of the skills.
The sixth main problem for some is the lack of strong, distinctive SFX

ERASING STRIKE

As mentioned, it’s the most fluid one, but the slam itself does not feel like as slammy as it could be due to it being too smooth.
What could help is extending the ending frames, adding more recovery frames and applying the damage / effects once the weapon has fully hit the ground. Currently it does that when it’s still slightly off the ground, somewhere around 25% before falling animation has completed.

The only slam sound satisfaction which you can get from it is when monsters die, if there would be a roaring slam, it would help a lot.

The void cloud itself around the blue circle should blast outward with more force, not in a controlled, smooth fashion as it does right now.
image

LUNGE

Has only legs moving, the lack of distinctive strong forward body and shoulder movement makes it look very stiff. All creatures need to use their whole body to give them speed.
Having a long spear stick to the side without any motion looks odd as well, if it would move with the body, it would be acceptable. If it would be pointed forward, it would look even better.

REBUKE

Doesn’t have a channeling animation - a simple character up and down motion from knees would probably resolve that. The spear “floating” in the air makes it look extra awkward - holding a two-handed spear in the air with one hand just doesn’t sell it for me. A spear should be held with both hands close to your body.

VOLATILE REVERSAL

No recovery frames, honestly it even sort of ruins my gameplay as it’s hard to read when exactly I used the skill off cooldown, making me mess up my rotations.

CASTING

No recovery frames for the spell, looks very glitchy.

Hope that helps at least a little bit!

Endgame content

I did not even see that page before, looks promising!

Glyphs and runes

I do suggest adding at least some glyphs appear in the shop with the minimum rarity of once per two shop cycles. Currently there is no need for almost anyone to buy Runes of Shatter once reaching endgame so these become irrelevant quick. Glyph of Stability is what the endgame crafting is 100% about. This could encourage players to pick up more items and craft with them as well since you cannot reach 3x T5 with low tier / white items, making you extra picky, even with the best bases.

I’d also look at Rune of Refinement’s instability. Currently it’s not worth using at all due to the fact that reaching 4xT5 is already extremely unlikely. Lowering the instability would increase the incentive to use it more once the most important T5s have been reached on the item.

Bosses

I think the earliest what you could do is increasing SOME damage and tankiness because as mentioned - they are very often less tankier and hit less than the rare monsters.

Respec

I’d just remove the scaling gold for now, I’m sure plenty will be pleased with that!

Sound

I absolutely can help with that!

Monolith layout

I have not played yet, but I do assume it does help a lot. I’m certain almost everyone agrees that the boss quests feel most annoying as they’re the most time consuming exploration wise. Spires were on par with bosses but these at least provided you with a map chest worth of loot + had chests / barrels nearby.

My suggestion for the layout which I described would be to move the southern objective more to the south so the players would not have to guess on which side it is.
Adding a chest near more objectives which are laid out far from each other would improve the satisfaction greatly as well.

EDIT

I played 2 hours of Monolith today to test the changes out and the boss pointers definitely helped a lot! The new extra XP wasn’t anything which I cared about because the leveling is fast already anyways. I’d even nerf the XP. after level 75/80 I went 95>96 in 2 hours of Monolith, would have been 97/97.5 in the Arena.

Did not go past 2 hours because again, from 30 Monoliths I found 2 items which were somewhat almost acceptable to craft with but didn’t come even close to double T5. Currently at something 7 hours of Monolith with no gear upgrades on mostly mid-tier( double T5) gear.
I fortunately had gold to respec my points, but definitely can’t do that anymore at all on that character - 1.2M for 100 points now. I had to spend all my gold because of the Sentinel tree nerfs which were the first 5 points which I put in my tree.

Also I could not reach 90+ rarity because I wasn’t fortunate enough with the monolith modifiers. I always chose the highest rarity.

The shop also seems to be odd. If I check it after every Monolith run, it doesn’t refresh but if I do it every ~5 runs it does.

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The current functionality is that it refreshes 10 minutes after it was last opened.

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Layout

Here’s the layout and objective which I’ve been talking about

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image1901×1079 2.38 MB

+
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image1901×1079 2.4 MB

Almost got baited by this one

The arrow points more to the south, so the logical conclusion would be to go from south but it’s actually in north. This map the worst offender in objectives.

Respeccing

7 hours of Monolith & Arena farming got me enough gold to respec as level 97 and I have a really fast build which kills bosses within 1 second. I still think that this is not acceptable. I think the main logic flaw which you have about respeccing is that players respec the last few points, but considering how many nerfs and buffs are given out every 1-2 weeks per class, most need to respec from complete 0 as plenty of these points are in the beginning. Maybe add a full respec option?
Honestly even now I’d like to respec ~60 points because I’ve realized that 6 points of mine are bugged or inefficient but I can’t.

Monsters

I think that OX affix should be removed from rare monsters. It doesn’t provide any new engaging attributes to the monsters, only wastes your time.
The rare skeleton bird needs to have it’s HP cut at least to half, if not more. Not only does it have the best damage, it also has the highest HP. If you happen to have a high tier arena wave + OX affix, it’s going to take a MINIMUM of 3-5 minutes of only killing that one mob.

Crafting

I still have the same stance as before. Plenty of runes, but not enough stability scrolls to craft less than double T4 blue / rare items and not enough bases to craft consistently( more than once per hour) The problem is that although Guardians & Stabilities should be used equally when crafting; the Guardians come after Stability and most items break already during the Stability phase.

image

I managed to craft 8 items and upgrade 3 slots within 7 hours - these were extremely lucky with the ending instability of 66, 53 & 49.

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