My Review after 160h - LE feels like a love letter from devs who love their game to ARPG enjoyers. Congrats to EHG & here’s some unfiltered feedback [Write-up mode]

Feedback and Suggestions
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These are my thoughts & feedback on LE’s S2.

Can’t remember the last time I had so much non-stop pure fun from start to end in a game/season. This LE update took me by surprise and I found myself enjoying every. single. second. of the 160h I’ve put into the season until now. Thus far I’ve 3x100 Chars, 160h played, 500+ monoliths & Uberroth all in CoF.

Structure for feedback:

  1. Highlights & Key wins;
  2. Lowlights & Key challenges;
  3. Progression System & Difficulty (Campaign to endgame to uber endgame);
  4. CoF & MG;
  5. Weaver System;
  6. Class/Build Balance;
  7. Drops & Itemization;
  8. Bosses + Challenging content;
  9. What’s missing (IMO);
  10. TL;DR & EHG Shoutout.

1. Highlights & Key wins - Top5:

  • LE has almost perfectly nailed the balance between ease of access, amount of content, item diversity, build diversity, power fantasy, endgame & uber endgame chase.
  • Campaign is accessible, easy to run (both in time & difficulty) for us to make alts & experiment! Also, every step of the way from lvl1 has surprises which keep you hooked for the next one (I.E. Nemesis gives you a brutal weapon during early levels that enables your power fantasy from minute 1 or a loot lizard drops something to use there & then).
  • Classes & skills are beautiful and have a uniqueness to them that’s hard to describe. Erasing Strike feels like you’re an Axe Master smashing down monsters while speeding through maps, an agile Rogue with a Falcon raining down powerful strikes, a brutally tanky Paladin with Holy Auras.
  • EHG are not afraid to let players feel powerful with strong builds while at the same time adding extremely difficult content for those builds to chase with a huge amount of player agency on when & how to get to that end goal via various systems like accessible Crafting, a variety of item/build options, Re-speccing, etc.
  • CoF is absolutely fantastic. Absolutely genius way to solve SSF which makes it so you define your experience. I always consider a game to be only as good as its solo experience. The Crafting system combined with the itemization provided by CoF & the new Weaver tree makes for an absolutely phenomenal gaming experience.
  • Bonus: The fact the MTX Shop was absolutely empty in a release like this after a year of development should tell us absolutely everything about EHG’s prio’s & mindset: That players enjoy their game.

2. Lowlights & Key challenges - Top5:

  • No one should have access to the game or seasonal changes before launch. Not gonna go deep into this & its biggest offenders, but it draws from the magic of the launch itself seeing everything tier-listed weeks in advance.
  • Combat flow feel & graphics can improve from the current Arcade/D3 like combat to something a bit more polished. I personally enjoy it like this, but with the current tools out there, I’d be curious to see what LE would look like with an update.
  • There are several small things missing which alone are not noticeable by themselves but when combined make the game a whole different monster. These include: Hideouts for players, Sounds for loot filters for that ‘ding’ when a double T7 or a Red Ring drop, Spoken text popping up over players heads for a community feel, a Grand-Exchange like city with multiple features like MG/CoF/Vendors, Transmogs for fashion & character customization, More MTX (I’ve always been on the side of shops with cheaper but more quantity of MTX), etc. These are things that alone are not thought of as prio but together signify a large time sink that gets people engaged & playing around with the world they build in Last Epoch. I can already imagine an Aberroth Arena hideout with large void orb decorations.
  • UI changes are needed in MG menu & CoF prophecies. Also RMT/Dupping is a bit rampant, despite the team clearly being on top of it. I’m sure you guys are thinking of it already so no point going into it, just wanted to highlight it as it messes with MG’s player experience.
  • Would be good to see roadmaps with updates you guys are thinking of doing & when. Not only through seasons but yearly, maybe a stream in January like Epoch-Con where you show us a teaser trailer and your tentative timeframes.
  • Bonus: Can we stop having large unscheduled game updates or maintenance during prime-time, please?

3. Progression System & Difficulty (Campaign to endgame to uber endgame);

  • A REALLY well thought out part of LE is the pacing & sequencing layers of complexity. Campaign start > Class in A2 > Moving through class tree from A2-A7 > Lagon > Majasa > Monos for loot > Dungeons & Legendary crafting > Harbinger x10 quest > Target farming uniques > Corruption push > Aberroth > Double exalted Legendary Crafting > Higher corruption > Ubberroth > Limit testing your build vs Corruption. All of this together with Weaver tree progression, CoF ranks+prophecies is an extremely well thought out layered game that makes it so you always have something to do & look forward to or even strategize around (I.E. imprints, etc.).
  • The pacing of the game is spot on as is. The game isn’t easy, at all, especially when you get to the endgame where you get stronger & power fantasy kicks in getting great loot, which is what an ARPG is all about. It seems like the vast majority of people saying this didn’t make it to empowered monos, Harbingers, beat Aberroth or much less make it to high corruption & Uber Aberroth. The game does exactly what it sets out to do and the player has agency from minute 1 to define the complexity of their experience vs insanely high levels of difficulty if they want.

4. CoF & MG:

  • CoF is just perfection. We’re missing some improvements like re-rolling prophecies which has bad UI, but the idea behind it is brilliant. Perhaps add more ways to target farm things like Runes of Havoc which will be very needed or even a challenge at 1000+ Corruption that allows you to choose 2 affixes to imprint on an item.
  • MG seems like a bit of a mess right now but the issues are known & it’s being worked on. I’d really like to see a Grand Exchange-like town where people could interact in a grand marketplace. We’re also missing a bit of centralization in the game, you only see a couple other people and can’t even right click them to check out their gear.

5. Weaver System:

  • Absolutely brilliant way once again to tackle exalted target farming via multiple drop boosts (caches, lizards, reward chests, champions) as well as an added way of players to personalize their endgame experience. Some nodes need to be reviewed as they’re far weaker than others.
  • The tree should be expanded to offer more possibilities for specific items with high LP, so players can farm those really perfect aspirational items if they put in the time in the season.
  • Tombs are fun but get old after a bit. The corridors should be larger & the bosses more varied/slightly tougher with better rewards. I found myself only running Cemeteries after about 5 tombs.
  • The mechanic of enchanting idols could be a bit better. Perhaps there could be a node on the tree or a drop from weaver mobs that allows us to choose from 1-3 choices depending on allocated points.
  • The cost-acquisition balance of amber/maps seems a bit off unless you do farm strats, especially early on in the progression of the Weaver levels.

6. Class Balance (Nerfs & Buffs):

  • Classic underperforming skills need to be looked at (squirrels, HS, WP, etc). The balance is quite good, despite there being some builds which will always outshine others either due to their speed or practicality or simply because they don’t require uniques to get going.
  • Mike mentioned that every build should be viable and that they should be as close to ‘OP’ as possible without absolutely annihilating content. I agree with this. Many other ARPG’s currently are getting this formula wrong where any build which is performing well gets put into the ground. LE’s balanced approach to things where player experience is king over some misguided design philosophy is aligned with what players want.
  • Some affixes should be looked at in terms of scaling as well as implicit stats. For example, perhaps block chance shouldn’t go all the way up to 100%, only 95%. Base stats (str, dex, int) should have a higher weight both on drop chance as well as on LP crits (I.E. it’d be more likely to hit dex as a second crit than other stat).
  • Base item implicits are also a bit off-balance. For example, no other helm base compares even remotely to leonine.

7. Drops & Itemization:

  • Loot Filter needs sounds for drops so we don’t miss stuff as well as some presets built in for fast building of the loot filter. Personally as a new player last year I had a bit of a tough time because I just didn’t know what’s good and what isn’t and you’ll get swarmed with loot. Some presets would be great for people starting out, as well as a tutor during the campaign that teaches you.
  • Drops in general are good and plentiful, with good loot filters the experience is once again at the hands of the player, this should stay as is.
  • Caches / Nemesis / Chests feel good. Perhaps there could be tiers of chests (Yellow/Green/Red/Purple/Orange) for each sort of item they reward you with & there would be nodes to pump the % of encounters of a type in the tree.
  • Would love to have a way to reach full 3-4 LP items as long as you put enough time into the season (500h+), or at least the chance of. Current 3-4LP items are extremely rare and it’ll be unlikely to get a couple, much less a full build, especially in CoF. If we were to consider new bosses at higher corruption levels, it would be cool for players to have a way to farm these items at really high difficulties.

8. Bosses + Challenging content:

  • Leaderboards for corruption pushing, # of mono’s completed, # of boss kills, boss kill speed, etc.
  • New & more exciting rewards for monos as they can get a bit stale after you run a couple hundred if there’s nothing extra rare to look forward to. Add stuff like a very rare Mono that drops Havoc runes, one that drops only glyphs, or maybe a Mono that drops LP items (per type of item), maybe one that drops nothing 99% of the time but 1% drops a really good item. Obviously all adjusted for rarity.
  • More random encounters in maps, like Unique Champions, or people we saw in the Campaign that have been corrupted, or even bosses would be cool to make it different.
  • Would be great to see more bosses added throughout the next seasons, especially in higher corruption, so players have an added reason to keep pushing apart from limit testing their builds. These bosses could have a slight added chance to drop 3-4 LP items. Maybe a time distorted version of themselves from some time in the future, coming back to take us down. You made the Uberroth fight so cool, it would be great to have more of that.

9. What’s missing:

  • More skills & perhaps different weapons being used by different classes.
  • More Character customization via transmogs, hideouts, MTX to make the character & world building when playing much more meaningful.
  • Larger city areas & re-creating the shops instead of just random NPC’s selling you random stuff. Perhaps review the shop prices / items sold.
  • Deeper filter customization, especially sounds. Presets for newer players + tutorial.
  • Better control over RMT / Dupping, more ban of spam accounts & stricter view of MG / inflation throughout the Season accordingly.
  • Improve UX of CoF prophecies and MG in general. Consider adding a GE-like marketplace for players to gather in.
  • Expand the Weaver tree to personalize the endgame experience with new added stuff you eventually release, making it an endgame design tree for the player.
  • Shake things up a bit in Mono’s with Rare Mono’s that give good rewards out of the ordinary. Perhaps add boss objectives instead of ‘slay mages’ or ‘close portals’ so players have a cool fight at the end.
  • A way to make gear / drops via target farming even better as we scale into the thousands of corruption after dedicating a fair amount of time into the Season. I feel like one of LE’s key traits is player agency and giving the possibility to blast beyond will only keep engagement higher.
  • Seasonal Challenges & Rewards (Seasonal MTX) to drive return on time invested, something extra to look forward to & a completionist feel on the account itself, which is a draw for a lot of players.
  • More classes. It can only get better!

10. TL;DR:

LE’s S2 has been outstanding. Putting together really well thought-out systems like CoF (SSF) and interesting & fun builds that feel powerful as well as a great itemization, drop & crafting systems makes for a great experience for any ARPG fan.

No game will ever be 100% perfect for every player but in the current ARPG market and its identified flaws, LE’s a very big contender and undoubtedly solidified their position.

There are many things still needed to implement to make the experience even better. However, EHG waited a year to push out a S2 based on player feedback on what was missing & what they gave us was just sublime.

I believe ARPG players love to feel like they’re cheating the system by finding broken builds that allow them to smash content. However, there needs to be balance & the game needs to offer challenges that force a barrier to even those builds. Players will then feel like it’s possible, through reasonable time and investment in target farming, to overcome those barriers. If you add to this an ‘endless endgame’ where you can just keep pushing, you’ve nailed it.

I personally think an ARPG is also just as good as its SSF experience and in LE’s case, that experience is great. Simply, great. Looking forward to what else these guys will cook for us all & will be here for it.

PS. Appreciation to the EHG team, especially for being in LE’s Discord nerding out with players since Season start & answering A LOT of questions, fixing bugs, reading & replying to feedback directly, etc. It’s been refreshing to see the comradery, transparency, and straightforwardness from the team. Special shoutout to Mike for being so present all day, every day.

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Yes they should have access to the game or seasonal changes before launch. The game needs to be tested before it’s released to the public. I think EHG should double-down on pre-patch testing, invite even more testers, garner more feedback. This is the cycle of software development, and it is 100% mandatory for a quality product to be available by release date.

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Good, stuff I will not name most of the stuff I agree with, because there is A LOT.

However there are quite a few things, little and small that I disagree with or it seems like you you don’t know the full context.

Please not and if this ever comes in, don#t enable it by default. This looks so bad and I never want to see this

EHG is still very small and while roadmaps are great for the communtiy they are very unhealthy for the devs. It puts a lot of expectance from the community onto them and makes the devs a lot less flexible.

They did roadmaps in the past and then compeltely scrapped them. I think once LE goes into a well established 3-4 months update rhthm we really don#t need roadmaps anymore.

They never did these, except there was something major going on. In the latest example it was because of a exploit giving you easy access to 4LP Unqiues that are otherwise almost impossible to get (like Red Ring). There was very little communication before hand and they just communicated after that, but that is due to the nature of these things.

  • of Corruption is fine, but all these other leaderboards are meaningless and foster a playstyle where you simpyl want to rush without doing any real challenging or difficult content.
    I don’t want 10 leaderboards for the sake of havign 10 leaderbaords, keep it at the few that actually matter

We already got sizeable amount of target farming and implementing systems specificalyl targeting players that are into the 1000’s of corruption should not be the priority, because they can also use all of the systems that we currently have and optimize how they are using them. (Because even with the systems we have right now they is a lot of optimizaion and efficiency possible).
While keeping the super top end players happy is good, I think core systems and features that everybody can enjoy and use are much more valuble. And if designed very well these systems can have a increasingly more impact when you pus higher difficulties.

To say it again, I agree with most other stuff or I am neutral about it, so a very good write-up.

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We do have one, currently. Season 2 and Beyond - Closer Look

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We can argue semantics here, but I would not call this a roadmap.

This is “what to expect in the next patch” and some random things that will eventually make it into the game (most of which are very predictable anyway, with soem exceptions).

The previous “roadmap”, was much more a roadmap and what I think of a roadmap.

But as I said once we get int oa more tight patch cycle I feel like these might become obsolete.

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This one’s a bit better I think, even though some things have been pulled forwards and others moved around. I’m very curious to see what Skill Sigils are. I’m all for more skill flavours.

I agree with a lot of OP’s comments, except about scaling into the thousands of corruption. I hope they keep a clear flat ceiling for balance and content availability and let those wanting to go higher just do it for bragging rights only.

Like with Uber Abby, it should not drop BIS gear, just something unique as a badge of honour. Stops the FOMO and ‘need’ to farm him.

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Yes that is the one I was refering to, that they “scraped”. They completely changed most of the points on this and it really is no longer relevant in terms of what is comming next.

Pinnacle bosses need good gear drops. Just a badge or honor is worth nothing. They should be aspired too.

Also BiS gear doesn’t mean you need it to defeat it.
Also there is no FOMO, Uber Aberroth is not temporary.

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The fomo refers to feeling like your builds suck because your build can’t beat Abby and so you can’t get the BIS gear. As I said, it should be unique/interesting gear or cosmetic or whatever, but not something you feel you need to complete most builds.

In saying that, the drops could be something universally ‘useful’ that won’t beat class specific BiS gear, just gotta get that balance right.

Even though that roadmap was scrapped, I imagine some of the ideas are still coming in future while some will/have obviously changed. Especially if the balance ceiling isn’t maintained (with appropriate nerfs) and that pinnacle content moves further away from the average.

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Generally speaking I agree, but specifically on a so hard boss it makes very littel sense to put very niche and specific gear in it. You want to incentive a large array of different buidls to feel like its worth getting to the point of getting this gear. It is something to aspire people.

I think LE already does a very good job of not puting too much necessary gear behind hard bosses.

And every buidl and character will always have a gear progression, just because you can’t get your BiS piece without doing that Uber Pinnacle Boss doesn’t mean there aren’t any otehr strong alternatives. If oyu aspire to the BiS gear, work for it.

Yes none of the ideas got scrapped but the order and if other features come in for the next patch we don’t know and the more recent “roadmap” really doesn’t tell anythign about 1.3, which gives the devs mroe flexibility, which is good.

We will probably get a updated versio nat some point or closer to 1.3 release we will know what it will entail.

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No, they just swapped what was coming in season 2 & season 3, which you can clearly see based on what was listed for season 3 & what we got in season 2.

That’s not fomo.

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A well written and carefully thought out post. I’m not going to nitpick any superficial disagreements I may have because I agree with the core premise, which is that the Devs love this game and it shows. I love it as well.

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Not technically, but it kinda is if you forsake you ideal build to just follow maxroll and beat Abby instead because you don’t want to miss out on that gear (especially as more pinnacle content gets added). It’s a balancing act between making the loot interesting and making it feel mandatory.

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Yeah, i know what you mean. Personally the line for me is that his loot should be good but not build enabling (like the squirrel helm, Smite on throwing hit idols, Spine of Malatros sword, etc) & as far as im aware that is the case with Uberroth?

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There’s already a whole thread about this. But this is not a good idea.
Right now, only a small part of the playerbase will interact with Uby. If you remove the unique drops, then only a small part of that small part will interact with him.
Not only that, but right now they try to kill him over and over again. But with a badge or MTX, they would kill him once and wouldn’t interact with him again, because there would be no point in killing him a second time.

So you’d end up with wasted time/effort to implement a pinnacle boss mechanic that barely anyone would use and that after a couple of weeks no one would be interacting with.
At which point, why bother making pinnacle bosses at all?

Like what, though? As it is, Shattered Worlds isn’t even BiS for all builds. Any build that requires a build defining relic won’t be using one.
Same thing happened with Nihilis and any build that used a build defining amulet.

Reducing the quality of the drops will also reduce the amount of players that interact with it. And we’ll go back to the point above where after some time no one is interacting with the boss anymore and there’s no point in adding pinnacle bosses.