I miss playing Last Epoch. I used to spend hours in the evening theory crafting, and couldn’t wait to try out a build the next day to see whether the interactions behaved the way I expected.
There were two things that eventually drove me away. First, the bugs. There are so many skills that do not work as intended, so many interactions that don’t make sense or follow a pattern, that I began to expect that builds I was developing wouldn’t work. That makes it hard to get excited about a new idea.
The other issue was the balance. I don’t inherently mind playing a shaman while falconer exists. I want to be alright with them getting the first kill on Aberroth from the next time zone as long as I can eventually get there with my shaman. The issue is that in many situations I couldn’t. The power of some classes was dramatically higher when they were introduced, and the difficulty of the endgame content has increased (consider the hit points of bosses). Alright, but that means that builds that could do all content before no longer can, and that an appropriately-balanced skill like Gathering Storm cannot be the cornerstone of a build (without abusing Tornado or Storm Totem).
Remember Vinebear? Has anyone ever played an appropriately-balanced locust build? Why are these in the same game as Static Orb builds that one-shot Aberroth?
Which brings me to my one request. Please put a structure in place to help you do preliminary balancing of new skills, and to fix old skills that are broken or underpowered beyond use. There is plenty of amazing content already in the game, or there would be if the bugs were chased down and the skills were balanced. At least I would not have walked away.
Is some new end-game content involving the Weaver going to bring me back? No, not if the game continues in a state where four-fifth of my build ideas are bugged or so underpowered that they can’t reach the new content.
I don’t. But I’m using vines as rage source for my wolfpack werebear and it is OK (https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QWvjPg2A
playable at 500 corruption, able to kill t4 Julra). A lot of builds and skill combos are way more underperforming. Crappy quivers and invocations, broken dot from freeze rate node in Frost wall skill, VK echoes w/o buffs of original hit and many others
A lot to fix and balance
The issue with this is that balance in most games is a matter of quickly nerfing overpowered skills and slowly buffing underpowered skills. This could work in Last Epoch, but right now EHG is just too slow - gradually buffing skills only works when we have multiple updates per year, instead of the drought we’re in right now.
The balancing is ‘off’ still, and by a lot as well. A proper baseline of ‘viability’ hasn’t been established well to be able to be worked with it seems and a good chunk of masteries and skills are not updated since a while.
Sure, a few do with major patches… but currently we don’t see them in the cadence needed to make it viable to ‘just return when the pastures are greener’.
There’ll always be under- or overperforming builds, but if those skills are set up being the majority it tends to cause people to be frustrated, especially when other builds are 20-50 times stronger while you can’t handle the baseline content with yours despite being a decent player.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Basic skill interactions need all to be up to par to at least be ‘viable’. Last Epoch doesn’t have the sheer amount of uniques in the game yet to make build defining uniques (Like Jhelkor’s for example) be allowed to be underperforming if you go into them with a straightforward build without having to focus on auxiliary setups to make them work (Traps in that case).
Also the variety of skills presented in the game isn’t high enough to allow any major ones which are seemingly viable to be used as a main skill to underperform yet.
Which is why:
I sadly have to agree with that.
Non-interference during Cycles is all fine and good… but for that we need a distinct and solid timeframe for those Cycles. Having 6+ month long cycles without interference happening isn’t good. It can happen once… as a outlier, but it can’t be the norm.
The pace is too slow and needs to increase substantially… or the baseline balancing needs to be in a vastly better place to allow leeway on not doing any major further passes for a bit.
Thank you for vocalizing what I couldn’t quite put into words. The problem is that there is no well-established baseline. I am not asking for every skill to be viable for an endgame build, more just for a way to clearly identify when a skill or a build is overperforming or underperforming. At least then new players will know which skills they should not touch.
It is not even that some skills are outdated. Serpent strike just received a (partial) rework, and due to an oversight there was a Aberroth-breaking bug with the Shattered Immunity node. As soon as that was fixed the skill returned to just five of the nodes being useful, and then just for a very specific swarmblade build. Or the recent buff of Upheaval, which is a skill that is so underpowered to begin with that precisely nobody paid attention to the change.
Why is the process of reigning in overperforming skills and strengthening underperforming skills so achingly slow? Surely some of these issues could have been anticipated.
Well, I stopped playing my 1.1 vinebear at 250 corruption because I get bored to death after that many monoliths.
With really, really bad gear (SSF) it was still deathless and having a super easy time. The first five harbingers were a joke.
No idea how far the vinebear can go with decent gear, and no patience to test. But it is highly viable. 500 should be no problem at all, probably quite a bit higher.
For anyone who finds this thread in the future, here is a video that Dread made where he vocalized nearly all of the same concerns (in the second half):
Ah ah, at the moment, neither, my gear is way too low to consider that.
The target would be crit to push higher, but right now I don’t have a lot.
Just plain minion spell damage is easily enough to reach 300 corruption.
And to link with the topic of the thread, I believe vinebear could be stronger than it used to be in 0.8. What people think was a nerf might actually be a buff in disguise.
Some skills have been replaced by a unique, which is always sad, but it is a strong unique, and having it frees some skill points and passives compared to old versions of the build, which translates into more damage.
Edit: we also got new “Immune while Leaping” and “Cleanse Ailments When Landing” nodes in Fury Leap, which are huge for this build.
About buffing weak skills - the issue is that the developers are never certain they have caught all interactions a skill could possibly have. So, whenever they buff something, they risk making a small chance that gets amplified by a bunch of hidden mechanics, and, as soon as a player finds out about it, it will become widely known and so a new overpowered build will be born.
So buffing is always slow. A small increment here - did it break anything? No? Good. Another little increment there - now did it break something? Still no? Good. And so on, until either the skill becomes useable or it actually breaks something and becomes overpowered.
Oh thx, this one is pretty close to my bearform druid, but I’m playing with melee fire dmg and 4 wolves, not with spriggans (linked build in my previous response). And it is red as hell in terms of equipment also I got vid for this build, but it is not in English
OMG where is your rage from vines node?
About season 2. Mike said, that new content will be added at 100-300 corruption in monos
Yes, you are right. Something is coming for archery, because it is obviously underperforming gameplay with a bunch of crappy bows and quivers. Gap between trappy marksman and arrow shooting marksman is huge and mastery killing
As usual, I disagree with Dread’s reasoning on something or other. In this case, he says that because your character grows in power and you go up in corruption, you still kill the boss in the same amount of time. Which is a ridiculous premise. If you don’t raise corruption you kill the boss faster.
It’s like saying that PoE also doesn’t fulfill the power fantasy because as you advance you take the same time to finish a red map as you did to finish a white map when you were weaker.
As for balance, no one disagrees with it. Not even the devs. Like Erasculio mentioned, buffing weak skills is something that is done slowly. Otherwise you get rampant power creep right away.
A good example of this is D3. They usually bumped underperforming builds in huge steps, letting it become OP right away, which leads to ridiculous numbers and the need to add several torment levels of difficulty because everything becomes irrelevant.
Like Mike mentioned in the last stream, the objective is to make the gap between the underperforming skills and the overperforming ones smaller. And to let you do all content with any skill.
Which by itself isn’t easy. Just looking at PoE (which is always the go-to comparison), after several years of balance all over the place, they’ve tightened balance where it feels good to play with almost anything, but even PoE has skills that are just pure trash.
That is not only because you need to buff stuff slowly, but also because buffing one skill can lead to a separate skill to suddenly become OP due to their interaction. Moreso in LE than PoE, but true for both.
Balance is one of the hardest things to get right in a game this complex. 1.1 balance was a lot better than 1.0. I expect 1.2 will also be a lot better than 1.1. Sentinel is getting a rework, Lich is getting some love (including a new skill), Marksman is also getting some love.
But I don’t expect 1.2 to get balance right yet. It will still take some more major patches until it’s tight enough to please players (and devs).
Unlike what Dread said, it’s not just a matter of adding “more” multipliers to skills. A skill can have less of those multipliers and still scale well in endgame. For example, by having a higher base damage or a higher damage increase via their scaling tags.
Because with DR you definitely couldn’t feel any substantial difference between having very low DPS up until the point you got very high DPS, the middle-ground was absolutely and utterly screwed in terms of perceiving progression. It was bad.
Now you do feel the difference, better!
But instead of the one mess they switched it to another. Because as the video also highlights through a Reddit Poster (which yeah, got the reasoning wrong but the feeling it gives right) which showcased that now instead of feeling no progression you instead don’t even feel the urge to hit the boss during his ward phases.
Yeah, sure, it’ll reduce the time needed to kill the boss by a few seconds… but plainly spoken that’s meaningless for low DPS builds, and having to focus on attacking and positioning at once is a lot harder then just positioning your character.
But… it distinctly is a difference there. Also in Torchlight Infinite, it’s handled better.
A endless scaling mechanic which gradually increases doesn’t give distinct differences to lean onto mentally. If you go from T1 to T2 you feel a specific amount of difficulty increase, if you go up the levels in the end-game of Torchlight Infinite you do the exact same. PoE has 16 stages, Torchlight has 8 stages… those are it. That’s far easier for the brain to wrap around on the go then having a gradual scaling from 1 to 1000 (if we would take that as a relevant end-point even, there’s builds going past).
I’ve critized this system whenever it came up and I’ll repeat to do it. It provides a convenient excuse to say ‘but it does’ when in reality it absolutely does not do that job properly and never did. Not only makes it balancing harder (which already is a mess) but it also doesn’t allow distinct clear-cut baselines to be established easily on what power level enemies and bosses need to have at specific stages of the game starting at empowered monoliths.
Is the difficulty curve still applying properly by that time or does the math need to change for enemies and bosses there? Well… who knows since we can’t even discern if a build works decent because people complain about specific bosses but many times not at which exact corruption level they feel it already becoming a chore, usually people push a bit further until they feel like they hit a wall but the issue arises earlier.
Yeah, but some don’t scale well overall, and others scale through basically every measure at once in the game.
Those are the absolute baseline aspects and they’re already an issue… we’re not even talking about gameplay feeling yet but solely and utterly about the mathematical aspect still. And that in itself should be possible to be handled. The issue with balancing happens when on paper skills are roughly in-line but because of cast-time, positioning needs, targeting or whatever else they add extra layers of complexity which can’t be as easily put into direct numbers.
As we’ve already discussed in some other thread a long time ago, there is no effective difference, in this regard, between monolith corruption and delve depth.
The only difference is that after a couple of years power creep allowed you to reach the “end” of delve, whereas monolith corruption currently doesn’t have it.
Why would it make it harder? If anything it makes it easier. You have clear numbers which you can use to base your balance with. Build A does 1k corruption, build B does 500c. It’s very clear where each build lands on the balance scale.
Certainly easier than using metrics like “Build A kills the boss in 55 seconds and build B in 65”.
Obviously. No one is disputing this. That’s the problem of balance we currently have. And the devs are addressing this. Slowly, because of the reasons already mentioned in this thread. Otherwise we get another D3 with damage in the trillions and having to add lots of difficulty levels just to address this.
also I got vid for this build, but it is not in English