I bought the game a few weeks ago. I’m not someone who is minmaxer or follow guides to optimize everything. I also don’t play much of the endgame. All these characters and anything I say is from such gameplay. Completely casual, basically no end game.
Having played all base classes through the currently available story, I decided I’d give some feedback of my experience.
- Classes.
I started with primalist that I made a druid. It was the easiest experience of all the clases I played. In fact, I could facetank anything without fear of dying. Basically that is. I even face tanked the snake boss at the end of current available story which basically annihilates all the other classes I played.
This is also the reason I didn’t play the end game much with it until I wanted to try something else. It was extremely easy and I wanted to try something else.
It seems this is outlier in my experience. I went with Accolute(Lich) next. It was not as fun experience. I also noticed during this playthrough that there is a lot of burst damage that can annihilate me in moments. I could refil my life with a single cast on some random map trash like barrels with drain life. Yet, I could be destroyed or killed so quickly that I wouldn’t have time to cast the spell. In general damage was far higher this time, though.
Then I tried Sentinel (Paladin). I wanted to try something else this time since I had a legendary spear drop. I made the sentinel to throw javelins. It was … not fun. To me it felt the passives nor the skill trees really supported it as much more than an afterthought. I agree I may have built it badly, but that playthrough was stressful and annoying. I took a lot of damage that I couldn’t heal easily and quickly. In fact I resorted to use the ground aoe from one of the skills and sit in it to heal, but this was deadly in some cases. I nearly wasn’t able to pass Majasa where I died many times.
Mage (Sorcerer) was pretty fun, but I chose fire. I got the similar feelings as I did with the sentinel. I thought fire would be pretty basic, but I felt other elemental types had more fun effects to them. It wasn’t as bad as Sentinel and I had more fun. Mana usage was weird, though. At first I tried to get high mana regenration, but found that even if I wasted item stat slots for it, I wouldn’t achieve much. Focus feel pretty clunky and I felt some stress when I had to stop to use Focus during combat, but I guess its ok.
I made another Accolyte (Necromancer) since I was interested in the minion gameplay in Last Epoch. It was very good, but I discovered minions work in strange way in this game. Annoingly so. They seem to target enemies far beyond what player can see. Sometimes I could watch one of my skeletons basically run away and drag more mobs to me. In fact, it was often hard to stop combat since my minions were running off to agro more enemies. Does there exist some mechanism to adjust how agressive your minions are? If not, I would suggest such a thing.
Then I made Rogue (Bladedancer). I was surprised to find that I could have more miserable experience than the Sentinel I made previously. At all times during the playthrough I was in near death situation. While I didn’t die more than a several times “randomly”, I felt extremely fragile.
Summary.
The druid was just simply the best experience. The others were from good but clunky to acceptable to annoying.
Druid >> Lich/Necromancer > Sorcerer >> Paladin = Bladedancer.
- Mechanics and gameplay
I already noted earlier how minions work in Last Epoch, but I put it here separately. I feel like their behavior should be adjusted or be possible to adjust. Player should be the one who decides where to go or what to pull. The minions seemed to choose this for me.
Some class passives in general felt to me to be designed for some way of playing while some other ways were considered minor. For example how long druid stays transformed was weird. The amount of rage you spend basically takes you out of it very quickly, if you choose the more interesting playstyles, but I liked to stay transformed longer. Suddenly I had to discard large amount of choices, if I wanted this. At the end I was able to make a working build without much effort, but I were to make another druid with similar playing intentions, it would always be basically the same without any variations while other methods would likely result to more varied end results. Not sure if this is intended. I may have just picked the build as intended and no more should be expected to exist for it?
Still returning to that druid that was extremely easy and fun to play. It felt ready to use very quickly. Then for example that Lich I made afterwards felt very weak until much later. The Reaper ability didn’t even offer much interest unlike werebear for druid. I believe this might be that the druid was reworked recently(?). It was the only class I found this. All the other classes didn’t feel “ready to play” as quickly as it did. Many of the more useful skills were only accessible later in the game rather than basic set of skills immediately.
Summary.
In general things felt relatively ok, but there were some things that made me frown such as the minion behavior.
- Nitpicks
Personally I dont like how the loot filters work. I had to look up a guide on how to set it up when I started to play. Still there are some limitations on how it works. Like if I want a subclass of item, I need to make separate filter for that item type.
Lagon cant be hit properly with many skills. Like with teh bladedancer I had to target the floor in front of him since, I dont think any of the skills I had, could directly target him. This is probably a bug, though?
Majasa is extremely difficult. At least feels more difficult than anything else so far. With exception of that druid which I could basically facetank the boss all of my other classes were constantly in near death situations or even repeated deaths. I’m not sure if it is by desing. The newer zones and the bosses feel very different to the older ones are more difficult too. In this case I would assume any bosses to be harder too?
Summary.
Some personal feelings that may be just game design that I don’t like, but are probably working as intended
- Bugs
Wont go far into this. Bugs are supposed to be reported elsewhere? At any rate, I didn’t run into any gamebreaking stuff. My black holes on sorcerer floated underground, the smoke clouds on bladedancer appeared sideways sometimes, etc. Very minor things that I expect to be noticed by anyone and be fixed eventually.
Hope this is useful casual feedback. I still repeat, I’m very casual and don’t care much of the endgame.
I wonder if its readable. I basically just started writing all the things I remember and then tried to put it in some order.