Problematic Mechanics

Feedback and Suggestions
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I played a good 45-50 hours back in the early days of Last Epoch, I remember very little other than the Viper Tail, and rushing things then spamming monoliths till I moved on.
The game had promise, and my friend and I were looking forward to Multiplayer.
Now that we are here, I have played another 80 hours the past week, mostly with my friend and things for the most part were enjoyable, until I decided I would start to grind some solo play/monoliths.

I understand there’s the pinned topic for “poorly telegraphed enemies” but i cannot be bothered to get specific enemy names at this point.

I am starting to hate, this game. (at least solo)
Pros:

  • Overall Gameplay, ( I enjoy as I do most ARPGs )
  • Loot design,
  • The Filter is great (took a lot of tinkering but I figured it out - for my purposes.)
  • I like the replay cycle- grinding better affixs from the monolith bosses and trying to get that 3 or 4 LP Unique.
    Overall the game seems to be great…
    However

Cons:

  • Enemy Damage is an issue
    and not just hard to react to attacks, some enemies scale too hard (most notably the Avians that yell FOR RAYAE, their Melee hits hard, some of them have Burns, and others use the Aoe Nuke that stuns you which leads con2-
  • Enemy Group/Clumps
    Certain Enemies should not be able to Swarm in the same area… which causes you to get 20 Stacks of poison or Bleed or… Stun Locked leading to con3
  • Stuns
    I understand there’s Stun Avoidance… but there are only so many stats we can feasibly RNG/slot or Minmax onto Equipment. I Like the somewhat realistic aspect of a Large hit Stunning you because it’s logical, but- nothing else in the game is - realistic, this needs fixed… or we need an easier way to obtain stun immunity because Stun Avoidance + Health aren’t stats Damage/Glass characters want to obtain.
  • Off screen targeting
    Simple and annoying for everyone
  • Damage Over Times…
    Whichever the Desert area is in the story is where many players discover poison on the player is over tuned. Especially Melee players trying to enjoy the game, and gets 10-15 stacks of poison just … trying to kill something, which leads to death AFTER the enemy is dead, but this leads to Monoliths where poison enemies get stacked together with a High Damage Bleed animal and life regen just cannot keep up.
  • Certain Bosses are far over tuned
    Lagon, you could cut his damage in half, keep the moon blast damage, it would still be a challenge, and the fight would be better.
  • Certain Unique/Sets are too hard to find. (I just spent 4.5 hours trying to find 1 Set item within the monolith it’s supposedly higher rates in… not a single 1)
  • STUNS
    Look this mechanic alone is the whole reason I am here making my opinionated feedback post … perhaps the 1 second immunity between stuns needs to scale with how often you have recently been stunned? So if you get chained twice you now have 3 seconds… or 5, then if stunned right after that, you get 5 or 7 seconds, which would fix being locked for 5 stuns in a row.

The more I try to enjoy the game, the less I do… and I feel like that’s not a forgiving model.
I have nearly 115-150% resist all, respec’d passive points into Ward/Defensive passives… and I am still struggling to survive the base 100 corruption. I even tried a shield which seems to have lowered my damage too much with most of my passives being defensive now. -and then I run into perpetual stuns, which makes it Another stat I need and yet cannot obtain without sacrificing Resist caps, or even more damage… its just not fun… again I love the loot design, and I have plenty of “near perfect” pieces… I just cannot see myself playing this on every Cycle now like I had hoped…
Lastly- Nothing in this game should ever 1 shot you while you have 150% Resist (I understand now 75% is hard cap minus SHRED, and not Pen) and are Full Health without a valid telegraphed attack or it’s their whole shtick to shred more than the usual -75% areaPen. This Stacked with Stuns, just makes it unplayable alone, without the split AI Targeting/Focus.
I appreciate it if you read this mess.
Also- sure there are bugs and exploits, but they are being fixed and won’t be a problem in the future, hence why I left those out of my list.

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I’ll get into the cons solely here:

Enemy damage: Yes, some mobs need some rebalancing still. Agreed. Mostly they’re fine or simply specific.

Enemy groups: walk in a circle towards them, not directly. This causes all attacks to automatically miss.

Stuns: You cannot be stunlocked. You have a short stun immunity after getting stunned. Also it’s a mechanic existing in several other ARPGs, it’s a staple. You never need stun avoidance, solely health and defenses to avoid getting lots of them in a dangerous measure.

Off screen targeting: yes, that needs to go, outside of specific enemies like the mortar flowers and spires since they’re designed specifically for it.

DoT: Get the affix for the belt ‘clean aiments on potion use’, Tier 1 suffices for it. It becomes mandatory unless you have another mechanic taking care of it. Then it’s no issue anymore and several other ailments during monoliths.

Overtuned bosses: Lagon is the first difficulty spike. Unlike the other fights he’s the first highly mechanical one, several more follow after but he’s clearly one of the harder ones. But overall in line with boss fights from then on. He’s a clear hurdle but definitely doable.

uniques/sets too hard to find: they’re rare drops, some sets/uniques are more powerful from the get-go. It’s intended there.

Stuns: No, extra immunity is not needed. There’s rather issues with your build that can be used to alleviate that, which I’ll go into right away

Cut that down to 75. 75 is cap. Everything beyond is wasted and could be used for other affixes.

Nigh every build can reach 300 corruption and run it in a half-way decent time, many much much more.
If you provide your build via the build planner then I can take my time to look over it. Make sure to tag me via a reply or quite for it so I see it simply.

Resists are capped at 75, so ‘150’ has no meaning. Also enemies penetrate 75 resist in empowered monoliths.
So you at best have ‘0’ resist.
Extra shred doesn’t go beyond 20% I think for players, so at most you gain 20% more damage.

Overall it seems you’re mostly in a position that you’re frustrated, if you’re up for some help with your setup then I can provide that surely. Outside of that it’s remembering the attack patterns of enemies and realizing which are dangerous. Takes a little but becomes second nature before long, trust me on that… we’ve all been through it :stuck_out_tongue:

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I second that, in both direction. Nobody should deal damage to anyone outside visual range.
Maybe a very few exceptions, like the siege golems.

I dislike that, when I want to play a projectile build, I miss half the action because I accidentally killed enemies I didn’t even see, yet.

Too much, imo, except you have certain item or skill interactions. Poison with the innate resistance shred can be a bit higher, the rest is fine at 75%. More than 75% only affects resistance shred, not resistance penetration.

You barely have armour, your poison and void resistances are at 35 and 16%, you have 1.1k health. Not sure how much ward you have before engaging with an enemy group. But I would say, your overall effective health pool is dangerously low.

You only have 67% critical strike avoidance and 18% less damage taken from crits - this becomes a problem in empowered echoes. Get 100% crit avoidance or this layer of defence is unreliable. Crit damage reduction is more forgiving if you have a high value but not 100%, and the affix provides additional armour.

42% block chance doesn’t give you protection against one-shots, either. Well, only in 42% of the cases.

I hope this information can help you to improve your defences. My experience with spellblade isn’t great, but from what I heard, most people share the sentiment that it is a bit more challenging to play.

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So am I wrong to assume 150% is hardcap and 75% is softcap? They implied with the area pen being 75% taking you to effectively 0, that in order to properly cap resistances you need 150%… So when it pens 75% you still have 75% no? o.0

There was many Specifics I did leave out, but If the resistance is literally capped at 75%, then yea I need to situate stats for sure.

Thanks for the reply, I honestly resorted to just playing coop with my friend as a Paladin which makes it harder to die anyways…
as far as my build I can set that on the planner later, should I just reply here with it?

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Yes, you’re right in that you’re wrong there.

No, that’s not the case.
Your personal limit is 75.
Enemies hitting you penetrate through 75 of that, everything above is not affected since it’s penetration, not shred.

Shredding means removing it from your character, this means it can be countered. Penetration means you keep it but it’s just not counted.

Yes, that’s the case, highly recommended. You’ll not be in trouble anymore assigning proper stats with that.

Sure, go ahead and tag me with it simply, I’ll go over it with a reply. Either quote something or directly answer to one of my posts.

1 Like
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Here’s what I am working with atm
Build

Using the Shattered Lance and minmaxing Health Regen atm. since the realization with resistance caps, i have adjusted my idols to fill my weaker resists.

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Yes, we can post links.
So be free to provide the direct link to it since I have actually no clue where to input the code :stuck_out_tongue:

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edited last post :+1: I do use a Weavers will shield when solo when I want to have block. but I lose a lot of Damage from the base crit dagger. So It’s not ideal.

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There is a specific mobtype which is a BAT and i dont know why but these fuckers are insane, they deal outlandish damage compared to the rest.
at 500c 3 Bats (Normal type) almost kill me with 3k hp 45% armor full res.
I dont know why this is but they are totally crap.
And dodge doenst wort against them for some reason probably they use a spell or smth…

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Ok, so:

First off, quite the interesting setup I see there, definitely a bit to talk about.

As for the build stuff itself I’ll go through everything one by one, seeing as you’re playing a spellblade which I imagine has as a base attack (or at least as often as possible used) shatter strike?
So if I see it right you’re using Mana strike as a generator to allow it to be used more often. If I got that wrong go ahead and tell me, I’ll base the suggestions on that here after all.

So, your main scaling attribute is actually Dexterity and not Intelligence. Intelligence creates % cold damage + freeze multiplier for Shatter Strike. Dexterity on the other hand does % cold damage + 1 flat Cold damage. That’s a lot stronger for direct damage at the cost of CC. Something to take into consideration. Albeit Int scales with the Flame Ward.

You’re leaning heavily into life regen because of the lance set. I can’t quite recommend it as there’s other options for the build which will provide more options to survive while also dishing out good damage, I’ll get into them.

Also I’m not sure what your mean method of EHP is supposed to be, I’ll go over them for both life and ward hence where applicable.

Next up. What traversal skill are you using? I recommend heavily into having one, I don’t see how you’re traversing right away so if there’s none then dropping Glacier in favor of that is very recommended.

Gear related:
Helmet:
I recommend using a ‘Prismatic Gaze’ if you can get your hands on one, it synergizes well with your build in terms of crit as well, allows leech and also has a better defense then ‘Peak of the Mountain’.
Alternatively a ‘Boneclamor Barbute’ is also a very strong one if you should go into ward, and a ‘Snowblind’ would also be a very viable option given the defensive measures it offers, though the last clearly at the cost of offensive power.
Amulet:
A cast speed base is not a good one for you, you’re not scaling well with those. As for recommended affixes - Cold damage/Dex(/Crit maybe) and Life/Res/Critical strike avoidance (You need to cap the last one somehow, it’s really important)
Armor:
Your main affix there is ‘Level of Shatter Strike’ there. As a second Prefix Dexterity. Suffixes are %health and Hybrid health if you can manage it. For ward it’s still one of those and the other ‘Ward per second’.
Gloves:
The best thing to have is Experimental gloves with Armor+armor affecting DoT damage for you. Optimally on the base double-dipping into it, a very very strong affix. If you go ward then ward for health there. Outside of that melee damage leeched as life and if you manage to seal the experimental then melee attack speed on top. Suffixes hybrid health/armour shred/crit avoidance/res, whatever’s most needed.
Belt:
Also experimental, reduce traversal cooldown on potion use. Sounds useless… helps sometimes. Prefix cleanse on potion use/Cold damage, Suffix Hybrid health/health/res/crit avoidance
Boots:
‘Snowdrift’ work fairly well with your build. Extra frostbite, cold pen, flat cold damage and a decent chunk of movement speed through attributes.
‘Vaion’s Chariot’ if you can stomach Arena, never hurts to have all res, laods of armor and a bit extra damage.
‘Last Steps of the Living’ if you go ward
If none’s available rares with Movement speed/Dexterity and hybrid health/crit avoidance/res

Now the stuff related to your set and other pieces in those slots:

Weapons:
Yours is fine to keep definitely, decent one if you want to have a off-hand for defenses.
Otherwise if you find a ‘Merophage’ and get some good two-handed swords with the right affixes on it… try to shatter until there’s a good outcome on it.
Also viable is a ‘Morditas’ Reach’ Since it gives cold pen, leech, loads of frostbite chance, flat damage and stats.

Off-Hand:
Opulent Focus with Critical Strike chance/multiplier/cold damage and ward per second/res.

Rings:
‘Siphon of Anguish’ for leech and movement speed. Optimally with LP but a base one suffices.
If you got another reliable leech source then dex/crit chance/cold damage and health/res/crit avoidance

Relic:
Scrying eye with cold damage/dex, flame ward also doesn’t hurt if you get one. Suffixes health/res

Idols:
Your idols are a bit ‘all over the place’. I recommend using that space for %health/flat health ones as much as possible.
If you want to go ward… still do that as there’s easily available items which scale off your life and hence your leech, potions… whatever you use.
The only viable idols to use otherwise are ones specifically increasing crit or ward retention ones. Res should be somehow fixed through gears and blessings if possible.

Blessings:
Spirits of fire: If you go life use armour, if you go ward use fire res. Endurance doesn’t scale with low life and the armour will do probably more given with the suggestions above you’ll have it scale to dots as well.
Ending the Storm: Lightning res is the best choice there.

That’s the majority of stuff I’ve found right away.
Overall it’s simply that you’ve leant into a stat which is sadly quite underpowered, health regen won’t help a lot.
The idols work counter to your build currently, they definitely need a bit of work.
If you go ward then you can ignore endurance completely. With life… see when it feels like it’s paying off. Don’t attempt it before at least ~2000 base life though, it just needs too much investing then.

I hope I could help a bit! I know the suggestions there are rather vast and a lot to switch around, but it should alleviate the main issues you’re facing hopefully.

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Yea I was attempting to shift most the Int to Dex, my friend led me astray and I only checked the Scaling tags till a few days before the post. Thanks for making note of that though.

Correct, and at 750 health regen, I am getting 1,125% increased melee cold damage, which is where my damage is from right now, Honestly where players normally put cold damage, i put health regen, I feel it works -for now. If need be I can rotate to other stats.

Ward heavily, I have a ton of Ward on melee hit, I sit default at about ~1200 ward ~1050 health, and it gets stacked upwards to 3-4k during prolonged combat. I noticed my ward decay threshold is lacking, but I have a lot of per second from passives, and retention itself which seems to prevent the low threshold anyways.

Actually using ‘Glacier’ itself with the teleporting traversal trait. Works far better than ‘Surge’ imo, and I also get a small bit of Global Freeze rate from the Rime trait as well.

As far as Armor, I do think I have a random ‘Prismatic Gaze’ lying around I will have to give it a go, but the ‘PeakOTM’ crit has my melee crit at… 53% CritChance which is hard to pass.
‘Boneclamor’ ill look into, and ‘Snowblind’ definitely lacks with tests.
I do need to get some better Individual slots for sure, and the Experimental Armor+DoT is for sure a Staple item.
Snowdrift actually doesn’t help my build too much because my frostbite is terribly weak, and I don’t stack enough freeze rate to amplify the FR to Pen effect. but ‘VaionsChariot’ or ‘LastSteps’ ill look into.

Weapons:
I do have a few ‘Merophages’ around, haven’t got any good 2h sword to smash onto it yet(for this build) but Filter is set just in case i stumble upon it. Also I did get the ‘Morditas’ which has Significant potential for use, which would make ‘Snowdrift’ useable as well, but it’s all about that LP first. -always watching for it just in case though.

Jewelry is on the to-do list.

Idols: interesting take, I do have Ward Ret. as one of the idol affixs on my filter, but I’ll look into fixing those when I can manage the Res on my armor.

I was using the Weavers gloves for the 30% enduranceT7 but I am Ward sooo I should switch I guess. I had JUST got the gloves, and it was better/more dps at the moment since my previous gloves were T6 INT, I am needing to farm a T7 Dex &or Experimental for sure.

Thanks for the Suggestions overall, there are a few pieces i’ll look into and try to get.

The 1,125% melee cold damage from the set is difficult to rework, and the Life Regen is rather helpful against DoTs for obvious reasons lol, -but I’ll have to keep good pieces specifically for a non-shardSet build, before I switch off the set or I would be lacking in some way, but if i get that Decent Merophage I would want to be prepared. Something to work towards at least.

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I didn’t know it either beforehand! EHG needs to put a bit more effort into making those things clear inside the game, it’s a weak point currently of characterization.

Yes, it’s a very decent amount of damage! Can’t deny that at all. The major downside is that you give up survivability for it. Life to tell the tale another day… sure, you’ll take longer to clear things but you then can handle higher content without falling flat onto the ground.
With some alternatives you can go ahead and scale damage through pen and frostbite as well, those tend to make - partially - up for the lost damage. The sheer amount of defensive affixes you leave out is just a bit… much.

In that case ignoring health regen is even more important. Make sure to go for the ward generating stuff, hence invest heavily into conversion of life to ward per second from the gloves with a high health-pool to make it stronger. The extra for that is that you’ll also be more stun resistant because of the higher max pool you have. Leaning heavily into other areas for that as well is the major point.
I have a character which I’m gradually switching over to ward as well, just started off and I get around 8-9k ward during fights with the generation, surprisingly easy. You can say 100% more ward then life to have roughly the same effect. So 3k ward is 1,5k life in value since building it up is harder.
Also the leech is then one of your most important stats in general as soon as you have ward conversion, leech will always heal you since you won’t get to ‘full’ and instead increase your ward massively.

Oh right! I forgot it has that. Too long since I looked over glacier. Thanks for the reminder there!

And I get the crit, crit is nice, loads of damage. And yeah, Prismatic Gaze definitely is superior to Snowblind, go for that since it’ll make your life a bit easier surely.
Since you’re going ward don’t do the experimental mod with armor+DoT reduction but the ward conversion, it’s the only place you can get it without uniques and is a mandatory stat for any ward build. You can actually put the experimental mods onto legendaries as well, upgrading to a decent pair of unique gloves.
‘Frostbite Shackles’ is what I recommend as it has the highest synergy with your build. Boss drop from ‘Frost, Blood and Death’ timeline… so if you’re MG get it from the market, don’t bother farming them personally with minimum 2 LP, you’ll get frustrated. CoF only leaves that choice and boss-drops have seemingly be forgotten to be influenced properly through prophecies in some way.

Yeah, health is your staple, for any build. Ward retention if you can’t fill it up with health.
The only ever time you move away from it is to get crit-chance and multi for some builds (Rogue has options) or to influence existing mechanics heavily (Like wraith-spawn for Acolyte).
For health builds it’s obvious, more health less death + less stun which also is less death :stuck_out_tongue:
For ward… the ward conversion scales off from your max health pool, hence also superior to other options… commonly at least. Retention miiiight outscale health at a specific time, but mathing that out is a nightmare.

Sure thing!

And yeah, the damage output being reduced is a harsh thing, with synergy into frostbite though it becomes decent… and the increased survivability is worth it with a guarantee… after all if you die in a single shot from a boss then you need to play perfect, if you can take a hefty beating you can wittle them down even if it takes long.

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This is such a huge topic and without any details this feedback has too little details.

Games like this need rare items, but if you want to give feedback about drop rates you need to give more details. What item are you talking about? What did you do to try and target farm it?

Your statement has a wrong assumption it it, which leads me to belive you tried farming under wrong assumptions.

The Monolith Timelines do not have higher drop rates for their exclusive items.

They have exclusive echo reward nodes, that can spawn.
You need to try target farm these nodes.

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Pretty spot on feedback - agree with your major arguments.

Stuns especially just feel bad and I wish devs would just abandon the concept of stuns in aRGPs. This is not Dark Souls type of gameplay with parries and timed combat input. It’s not PvP arena style of MMOs either. I cannot remember any aRGP in the last 20 years that made players go ''oh wow you can get stunned in this game - this is truly amazing! But wait it gets even better - you can take passive points and affixes on your gear (already low number of 4 base) to NOT get stunned. Indeed we are in for so much fun!

The only ‘‘stuns’’ should come from boss encounters after some attack pattern/hit that you failed to avoid - sort of like the stun during encounter with Lagon (at least I think it’s not a ‘‘normal’’ short stun). That serves as punishment - it might either get you killed due to follow up attacks and it brings your dmg to 0 (on normal build).

Stuns during usual mapping are nothing but annoyance and serve no real purpose. Even worse when you are ‘‘suppossed’’ to itemize or invest into passives to avoid this annoyance.

Not to mention it’s just pain in the ass to balance. Some builds will be never affected by normal stuns - channeled skills make you immune to stuns; minion builds - not such a big deal to get stunned. Can we as players stun bosses? Is it possible to perma stun? If not - whats acceptable then? Do we put some gradual resistance against CC on bosses? Should melee have better ways of mitigating stuns? Just impossible to balance properly.

Not sure exactly how stun formula changed from beta to 1.0 but it feels 10x times worse. To make it even worse - LE opted for pretty annoying and distinctive sound for when you get stunned. The constant diiiing sound and screeching from falcon pet made me turn off sound eventually.

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Yes, max health, which also causes ward builds to rely on health actually.
Also you invest into a bit of armor and cap your res.

Then you don’t get stunned.

Yes

Also yes for many enemies, my detonating arrow build is based on doing that for survival.

How so? If your build is halfway decently set up then you don’t even realize the mechanic exists in the first place. Without a single thought given to any direct stun related affix.

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The bats do dot damage so your armour is irrelevant. But yes, they do have bizarrely high damage.

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That’s why non-ward builds need to get the experimental armour/DoT effect for it and ward builds should have the one for armor affecting DoT as a base.

Then it does and at least alleviated the issue.

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Yea i saw that the only thing that works is probably max res and DOT migation on amulet + armor applies to DOT affix on gloves…
I kinda fixed the biggest problem which was the Amulet i never thought that thos 20% can make this much … it feels like 50%…

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Ach there’s much I disagree with in the OP that I can only be bothered citing one point but it illustrates my general objection with the OP (which is basically just a rant that everything is too hard).

Halfing Lagon damage would not “still be a challenge” because Lagon is currently not a challenge.

Lagon is one of the easier bosses if you actually take the time to learn how to fight him. Haven’t died to him since 2021. The only problem with him is he is a damage spike in the campaign and the first time the new player could realistically be one-shotted. The boss fight itself is absolutely fine, and actually one of the more fun fights.

You know that in general, Last Epoch has a reputation for being far too easy on the whole? And if the devs genuinely think 300 corruption is endgame, you can see why this is the case.

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Lagon only has 3 (potenially 4) trouble areas, and 3 are easily avoided/mitigated… and the 4th is a pure annoyance:
– Deadly/Potentially Problematic–

  1. eye beam – deadly, telegraphed and predictable – easily avoided
  2. moon blast – deadly(ish), telegraphed – easily avoided
  3. phase 2 – wave dmg can add up and cause problems if you lack resist and/or leech – easily avoided if you learn the pattern, or are good with movement
    – Annoying –
  4. ground slam – stun is annoying, dmg can be high if you lack resist

I really don’t see a need to change it. The first 2 can be avoided by just paying attention, while the 3rd comes with a little more practice. I listed the ground slam, because if you neglect resists, it becomes an unnecessary risk area, and the stun is pure annoyance.

Lagon is honestly just a ‘git gud’ boss. Either you pay attention and learn it, as well as utilize basic aRPG tenants, such as upgrading gear, and paying attention to resists, or you die. It’s not the game being too hard. Lagon always comes down to the player not trying and/or being lazy.

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