I’ve been playing Last Epoch with my son for nearly a month now and we’ve come to realize is that, generally, knockback is undesirable. Most builds prefer to group enemies up - and not spread them out.
Sure, I can see how Knockback would be useful in some emergency skills but given that we only have 20 points in each skill, I’m willing to bet that knockback nodes are some of the least utilized nodes in any given skill. Additionally, some of the knockback nodes are gated behind contradictory nodes. Perfect example of this would be Mana Strike’s Repulsing Strikes behind Sprite Blade. If I’m investing points into AoE increases, it’s because I want to hit more enemies at the same time - why would I then go and spend 3 points to consistently knock them out of range…?
I’d like to see knockback turned into knockdown/stun. That would be significantly more compelling.
I feel the same. Just can’t find a good purpose for knockback. I tried the knockback on RoS on my Forge Guard but it did not do much so I took the skillpoints out again.
On Snap Freeze it gives a bit more of utility because it also freezes the enemies after knocking them back. This way you can add a small distance and back off. But it’s not that meaningfull imho.
The combat is very fast paced. The CC effects are relatively short and enemies recover very fast. Summed up in the combat (e.g. arena) where you micro stun/freeze/knock/blind enemies this may add survivability at the end. But this is nothing you actively can utilize in terms of a skillful combat. It’s there. It does something. But it mostly has no impact in you play style.
agreed. I only like it on Teleport I think it is, because that’s when you’d want enemies to get away from you. At least I do, it’s my escape tool for mage usually.
Disclaimer: We have a small team working on game, it’s different style of game, but it has combat. However, what works for us may be completely irrelevant for LE.
Recently we were also discussing knockback issue, that it feels useless 99% of the time. Conversion into stun or knockdown was first idea but we tried something else. We added several effects onto knockback, like knocking back enemy into another enemy will stagger both of them, knocking back against wall will cause longer duration stun, knocking down from the ledges instantly kills them etc. This allowed us to add more flavor to our maps, like different damage zones (spikes on the walls dealing additional damage, or zones instantly freezing when enemy is knocked into them etc) or even added killzones, like knocking back against pillar will cause pillar to collapse and kill enemies around etc.
Of course, instant kill can be too powerful effect, so we added trait to some type of monsters, which can’t be knocked down from the ledges or be killed by killzone and for now, after few days of testing, it did not trivialize any combat encounter and knock back skills suddenly became interesting choice. But again, this may not work for LE.
