My feedback after 50-ish hours as casual player

[Myrex]

Please keep in mind, that these are my experiences and my opinions; I might be wrong/uneducated/not experienced enough in ARPGs to know things that nullify any of my feedback. Also I intend to give this feedback in a constructive manner. Also also English is not my native language, feel free to ask for clarification if any of the points are unclear!

So, I’ve casually played a bit over guesstimated 50 hours and reached around lvl 47 on both a Shaman and a Paladin on normal difficulty.

1. (Obviously having different gear on both characters might be a huge factor, but) in general my "fully offensive"ly built Shaman felt a tad weak, and very squishy, whereas my "fully defensive"ly built Paladin dished out more damage than my Shaman, but still felt squishy for some reason.
2. The minimap in dungeons can’t be moved nor zoomed and that feels bad.
3. Dungeon entrace icons on the minimap in towns don’t show dungeon names when hovering the cursor over them, but it would be nice to see where I’m going beforehand.
4. Please let us choose a different subclass (e.g. Paladin->Void Knight) for a hefty gold price or cash shop currency in the future.
5. Make Shaman’s totem skills attack the training dummy in towns, for obvious reasons.
6. The game closes rather slowly. I know you need to send stuff to the server to save the game, but can it maybe be a bit optimized and faster in the future?
7. The game guide (shortcut G) is really helpful, maybe put more emphasis on it by forcing players to open it multiple times in the beginning?
8. The button “Transfer crafting items” in the inventory is not describing its function well. Maybe rename the button, or make the crafting materials appear in the forge directly after picking them up.
9. The UI portion of the inventory showing the total number of shards, runes and glyphs was a bit confusing for me as a new player. What exactly is the point of showing those total numbers in the inventory? → Remove or move to forge.
10. I’d love a “sell all” button for emptying the inventory when talking to a shop NPC.
11. When pressing enter to open the chat, then pressing the cogwheel on the top left, the pop-up menu doesn’t go away when clicking on the ground, it will even stay after the chat fades out. Would probably be better to make it disappear when clicking anything else than the three options from the pop-up menu. (Not sure if design-choice or bug, tbh)

All the negative things mentioned aside, I also want to take a moment to praise you for the work you’ve done, and appreciate the nice level and enemy design, cool gameplay systems implemented, beautiful art, smooth animations and the simple-but-not-too-simple and pretty background music!

I hope you succeed in your journey to releasing a great game, and wish you all the best,
Myrex

[Heavy]

Welcome to the LE Community!

Good feedback, but I just wanna point out a few things.

@Myrex

(Obviously having different gear on both characters might be a huge factor, but) in general my "fully offensive"ly built Shaman felt a tad weak, and very squishy, whereas my "fully defensive"ly built Paladin dished out more damage than my Shaman, but still felt squishy for some reason.

Would you mind uploading your characters to Dammitt’s Build Planner?
Last Epoch Build Planner (lastepochtools.com)
Top left you can upload characters from save files.

I might suspect you didn’t fully understood how to scale certain skills, but i think all classes are pretty well balanced, especially early on.

@Myrex

The minimap in dungeons can’t be moved nor zoomed and that feels bad.

There is a zoom function for both the minimap and overlap map.
Minimap has 2 buttons on the top right.
https://imgur.com/jf6JX49
Overlaymap is in the options menu
https://imgur.com/vtO6I85

The minimap can’t be moved, but i guess fully customizable UI will take alot of time and work, if it will ever come at all.

The overlap map can be moved using the arrow keys.

@Myrex

Please let us choose a different subclass (e.g. Paladin->Void Knight) for a hefty gold price or cash shop currency in the future.

Respeccing in LE is generally very easy to do and doesn’t cost much effort or ressources.

The mastery class is the only thing that is somekind of weight to it.
This is a very heavily discussed topic in the forum and you can find literally dozens of topics on it.

Besides the mastery respeccing in LE already gotten a lot easier, but i think it is in a really good spot right now.
If masteries are also respeccable it would make you character very repalceable and the difference between a paladin and a forge guard are just a few button presses, I don’t like that.

But wheter they would implement something like this or not in the future, it would never be cash shop related.

EHG has a clear stance in MTX: Not pay for convinient or pay for power, only cosmetics.

@Myrex

Make Shaman’s totem skills attack the training dummy in towns, for obvious reasons.

The trainings dummycurrently is “neutral”, that’s why minions don’t attack it.
Totem’s are not the only issue here, there are plenty of other effects that need a “target” to fully function.

I hope we will see some better trainignsdummy functionality in the future.

Maybe even a room full of different trainignsdummies for different scenarios.

@Myrex

The game closes rather slowly. I know you need to send stuff to the server to save the game, but can it maybe be a bit optimized and faster in the future?

“rather slowly” is very subjective, for me closing the game takes about 2-3 seconds, which is totally ok for me.

Not sure if it’s vastly longer for you, but in case it is, that might be hardware related and possibly could use some further investigation.

The game currently is complelty offline, except the initial login.
There is no communication with any kind of server going on right now.

@Myrex

The game guide (shortcut G) is really helpful, maybe put more emphasis on it by forcing players to open it multiple times in the beginning?

Big point! I did emphaiszed this alot in the past.

Lots of already decently experienced players that found out about this after several dozens of play hours were blown away by this.
It would definitely help eliminating alot of the questions new players have.

[omegaryuji]

@Myrex

7. The game guide (shortcut G) is really helpful, maybe put more emphasis on it by forcing players to open it multiple times in the beginning?

I wouldn’t go as far as forcing players to open/close it, but the game guide is definitely a great feature that should get more attention. I’d like to see it being accessible from the main menu/character select menu and from the launcher, if possible.

8. The button “Transfer crafting items” in the inventory is not describing its function well. Maybe rename the button, or make the crafting materials appear in the forge directly after picking them up.

Shards going to the forge if they’re picked up from the ground would be a welcome change for me, too. There seems to be little purpose in not doing that when glyphs/runes do it. Maybe it’s an issue of making it easier to trade shards in multiplayer? Though I’d think there are better ways of solving that concern, if that’s the case.