In all arpg games players gain their power from 2 sources:
skills/ passives
gear (of course also player skill matters but lets forget about it in this thread).
The balance of those things is very important.
I think this balance in Last Epoch is greatly shifted towards skills.
If you have right skill setup, you can run content pretty easy, almost independent on gear
you have.
We want to be OP , we want one day one shot early bosses, but we want to work hard to
achieve this goal. And the single way to do it is to farm good gear.
Encounters must be also gear check, so people with no certain level of gear cant beat it.
No need to nerf some skills or skill combos. Just transfer some of their power into gear.
Farming for gear taking time and can be natural limit for players to not be able finish content, they are not geared for.
Now all gear optimization can be described in one sentence: get glancing blow cap, get critical avoidance cap, get 50%+ resist or 50% dodge (ward players) and finally get some damage on weapon.
From my point of view theory crafting must be much deeper then this.
I must know exactly what Iâam aiming for, with much more options to consider.
(Of course loot filter and skill tooltips can greatly help in this process. )
Core of your message is right, but it is indeed i little bit deeper than that. Why all people tend to neglect health in this game? Especially the âpercentâ value of protections in this game has no real value without knowing how much health your character/build has.
From my point of view it is ok that some stuff is beatable with (almost) no gear. But some of the really really hard stuff should have some kind of gear check, either defensive or offensive or both.
Agreed, especially for the later part of endgame, but gearing towards health is less tedious at the start of mid-/endgame. I tend to go for health first on all chars and then transition into protections as i go along and get better gear, since health protects me from everything.
And i do hate swapping out items in low/mid level part of the game and always stat juggle with different protections. Already hate that in other games. I am so glad that LE has an adequat system that allows you to go for a different route.
Iâm still trying to understand better how the offense scales in this game.
Since we still donât have tooltips its hard for me to gauge how much of my âpowerâ comes from gear, and how much from skills, specially since I think abilities donât scale themselves with the levels , but they do indirectly with the skill point choices you get.
I found without tooltips or character planners is hard to estimate, but I feel that gear is less powerful in this game than in other ARPGâs. So its probable that with the right combination of abilities, and of course skill , that we may keep seing naked kills , until they finish polishing the game and do some balance passes on it, specially on fights with a lot of avoidable spiky damage.
I think people are missing the point. Sure, you can perform a naked boss kill with good micro and understanding of the mechanics, but that is a good thing. I assume you are not doing 30+ MoFs naked. I assume you are not doing naked arena and pushing high levels.
Making a boss fight into an item check is one way the game can be developed, but why does it need to be like that? Just because it suits your tastes better? Getting to a boss is a time consuming grind and the boss is your reward for that grind. Other games approach this the same way. Look at the Shaper fight in PoE. You can easily beat Shaper without getting hit a single time if you are good at the game and understand the fight mechanics. That doesnât mean the fight is poorly designed.
I find it laughable when people complain that using good micro and understanding a fight somehow means the fight is poorly designed. Quite the opposite, if you can beat a boss with weak itemization because of your execution and game knowledge then that encounter was well designed.
Honestly, if you think this game is too easy then play on hardcore or masochist modes or better yet play hardcore + masochist + naked. The developers gave you the tools to make this game as hard on yourself as you want it to be.
Correct, the only increase in power a higher level skill gets is due to the increase in points available for you to use, theres no hidden damage modifiers based on skill level. Though the damage modifiers on a skillâs tree are âmoreâ modifiers rather than âincreasedâ which means they are summed up and applied separately to all the modifiers youâre getting from gear and passives (which are all summed and applied together).
What Iâm not sure about however, is whether two separate more modifiers in a skill tree would be summed up and applied together or applied separately (like PoEâs support gems). Is it
total = base x more1 x more2 x (sum of increased) or
total = base x (more1 + more2) x (sum of increased)?
or you can do the boss with good gear and not so good skills
Currently people have no choice. They have to be good in micro managing their toons to beat a boss, no matter what gear they have. This is a. issue and nothing that is laughable.
Nobody is complaining that bosses are no gear check. People are complaining that bosses are a skill check with no workaround.
Mainly I want to say that overall I really like the fact that gear is overall less impactful than is typical for an arpg, and that skill and passive choices and player skill can take you through a significant amount of endgame content. As someone who mostly likes the leveling and progression phase and usually plays solo self-found, I hope that to a certain extent this remains the case in the future as well and that most of the endgame content isnât gated behind repetitive grinding.
On the other hand, of course, stricter gear requirements demand more interesting decisions. But Iâm not sure the gear system is there yet. Once there are more interesting choices to make, we can expect the game to require us to make them.
âNobody is complaining that bosses are no gear check. People are complaining that bosses are a skill check with no workaround.â
Bosses should be a skill check otherwise the game is without any skill checks. If people want a game without skill checks then maybe they should try a new genre (i.e. not ARPGs) or they should avoid bosses altogether. This game doesnât even make you fight a boss. You can literally always choose the other non-quest timeline.
I can already see the response to my post âbut we want to be able to do the higher level MoF timelines without having to beat a skill check bossâ. Sorry, you have to earn it at least once. No one says you have to beat the boss more than once, but you gotta do it once. If you are unable to beat the boss in this game then my guess is you are not using any mobility skills or items - try getting some move speed boots/items and a movement skill and you should be fine.
We seem to have a different understanding of the term âARPGâ. Would you please show me all the other competitors where it is possible to kill the bosses naked with not even a skillpoint spent in your skills?
I would argue that the ARPG genre is known for skillful gameplay mechanics. Maybe youâre mixing things up here?
I also donât need advices like âuse a movement skillâ or âcraft movement speed on your bootsâ. But thanks anyways.
My failures at the bossfights are a combination of bad luck, bad timing and inexperience with the boss mechanics. I would gladly compensate the inexperience with more practice. But thatâs not possible, because itâs still a lot if time needed to fight my way back to the boss stage.
I see that you just canât empathize with people that struggle with the current boss mechanics because you donât have any problem.
But there are a lot people here that struggle and an advice like âplay other games if you donât like itâ is not helping anybody.
@Thyworm made a very nice video about the new monolith that is so on spot.
The answer is not âmake the game easierâ because a few people canât beat a boss on their first few attempts.
Also, proper itemization, skills, and skill tree choices make a huge difference in clearing these bosses. With the right prioritization of affixes and skill decisions you can make many mistakes during a boss fight in LE and still survive and clear the encounter.
Do you have a good understanding of how the math works in LE? It is very similar to PoE with respect to âlessâ and âmoreâ and âincreasedâ modifiers and diminishing returns. If you are struggling to clear bosses in LE then I suspect you are not optimizing your build properly.
Are you trying to clear a boss as a glass cannon? If so, it is obviously going to be much less forgiving than if you attempt the fight with more eHP. The current state of this game seems to encourage a defensive focus for itemization over a damage focus.
Are you taking advantage of âset affixesâ for âset dodgeâ and âset glancing blowâ?
Do you have crit avoidance and glancing blow at 100%?
Do you have a reliable form of health/ward recovery (more than just potions)?
I have made plenty of mistakes during boss fights in LE but still won the fight most of the time. This is because if you stack defenses properly you can live through just about any single attack except for perhaps the highly choreographed dragon blast that you have a solid few seconds to react to (although even this I am pretty sure can be âdodgedâ).
