Hello Travelers!
With the Imperial forces gaining strength and ready to begin their siege of Eterra on September 19th, we’ve been preparing several buffs to help you Travelers rebuke them.
Event Modifiers
Throughout the event from September 19th, to October 20th, you’ll receive greater rewards to help get into the refreshed Cycle, or continue gaining strength on your already legendary characters. These modifiers will be active on Cycle and Legacy, both Online and Offline. You’ll not only find more gold and Unique items, but both Merchant’s Guild and Circle of Fortune are offering their aid to the effort.
While the war rages with the Imperial armies, you will be bolstered with:
- +50% More Favor Gain (Added with community feedback)
- +50% More Reputation Gain
- As Reputation is gained from earning and spending Favor, this means you’ll be receiving a total of 125% more Reputation
- +50% More Gold Drop Rate
- +50% More Random Unique Drop Rate
If you’re deciding to start anew with the cycle refresh, the large Favor and Reputation Gain buffs will help you quickly climb the ranks with your Item Faction, and either commence more trades, or acquire and fulfill more prophecies.
Event Details
The Immortal Uprising will be our latest event for 1.1. During the event, all modifiers, as mentioned above, will be put in place. The Immortal Emperor’s influence has grown too strong, and Eterra now turns to you to fight back. From the depths of his army, one voice has reached our ears and it calls to you for aid. Work alongside this liaison within the immortal forces and cull the undead army before it can grow to full strength.
Travelers need not apply to join this event. Simply logging in and killing skeletons in all forms will be enough to earn your spot among the uprising.
Your efforts will not go unnoticed; a reward will be granted to all who participate. Though the contact has yet to tell us what they have in store, we do know it has significant value to the Immortal Emperor.
Keep your eyes on our Social Media for updates and information regarding the efforts of your fellow travelers.
Expanded Imperial Forces
With the event, Imperial forces will also be bolstered throughout the Monoliths. These undead enemies are in addition to the usually spawning enemies. This means more enemies overall, including in echoes which wouldn’t usually spawn undead enemies. Within every echo, you will encounter packs of Loyalist Undead.
These Loyalist Undead packs contain a rare leader and a group of magic followers. Each pack will have a new special mod from a pool of seven enemy modifiers shared with all members of the pack. Loyalist Undead modifiers may include throwing acid traps when using an ability, or teleporting near the player when engaged.
Beware of the leaders in particular, as the mod effects will be much stronger for them than their followers.
Loot Lizards
The Imperial Uprising Event will also introduce Loot Lizards. These new creatures are veritable loot goblins in their treasure hoarding ways. When the Lizards were first hired, they were supposed to bring loot to you, but let’s be honest, anyone familiar with lizards knows there’s nothing happening behind those eyes. They’ll simply flee at the first hint of any danger.
If you manage to chase them down and drop their health, you’ll unburden them of their luggage, allowing them to make a quick getaway. That luggage is then yours for the taking. You’ll encounter five different types of Loot Lizards, each offering different loot pools. However, keep in mind that if left alone for too long, they will still manage to find an escape by themselves.
These Loot Lizards will still be sticking around after the event as a new part of the Eterran Fauna.
New Shrines
Also introduced with The Imperial Uprising are 28 additional new Shrines to find and activate in Eterra. Some of these new Shrines you’ll encounter will automatically cast player abilities, such as Hammer Throw, Chaos Bolts, Warpath, Shadow Cascade, or Flame Reave. There is a total of 15 of these ability shrines you can encounter. These skill shrines also come with added bonuses, such as additional attributes or increased area for skills. In addition, encounter a shrine for a skill you have specced into, and it will use your skill tree for an even greater effect. While these Skill Shrines can be quite powerful, they also don’t last forever, so take advantage of their power while you can.
As well as the new Skill Shrines, there are also several buff shrines. Among these, you will find shrines that cause meteors to rain from the sky on your enemies, call forth a phoenix to burn enemies in front of you, reduce damage taken from distant enemies, or the all-powerful new Rainbow Shrine.
You may also encounter a Shrine that generates a number of Loot Lizards, which immediately scatter upon being seen. So keep an eye on those shrines to unburden as many lizards as possible before they make their escape.
Like Loot Lizards, these shrines will continue to stick around after the event.
Stash Tab Priority
A core game feature being introduced at the same time as the event is the new Stash Tab Priority system. This powerful Stash feature allows you to set a priority configuration for any of your tabs in your stash. With your tabs configured, quickly moving an item into stash (shift + right click or X / Square on controllers) will deposit the item into the tab matching the item’s properties, regardless of what tab you currently have open.
You can even have multiple tabs with the same conditions. In this case, the tabs will be filled from left to right. If an item does not match any tab priorities that have enough space, it will be moved to the currently open Stash tab.
This allows for easier management of your stash and quicker drop-offs to get back into the action faster.
In the Stash Tab Priority system, you can define:
- Item Type (for example, Boots)
- If only one selected item type, then you can also specify Sub types, such as Citadel Boots
- Rarity (this is also where you can choose Keys)
- If you choose Unique, you can also then specify Legendary Potential and/or Weaver’s Will
- Class Requirement (For example, Mage)
- Level Requirement
- Item Faction Requirement
Bazaar Improvements
For all the Merchant’s Guild players out there, there are also several improvements to the Bazaar being added on September 19th. These changes include UI improvements to help make the Bazaar easier to navigate and improve the search functionality to increase the search power to find the items you want more easily.
New Affix and Subtype selection
We’ve reworked the Affix and Subtype selection panels for more refined searches. With these new panels, you’ll now be able to define “must have”, and “require one of” affixes, as well as a minimum required tier, and minimum roll within the tier. With the Item Subtype selection, you can specify a minimum implicit roll. These fields can, of course, still fulfill their prior basic functionality and are fully controllable with a gamepad.
With the increased complexity of the bazaar queries, there is a limit of 5 required affixes and 10 “Require One” affixes to prevent illogical or too complex of searches that would take a long time to query.
Another request we’ve often seen regarding listing items is listing directly from your Stash. This functionality will be added with the event patch, increasing the efficiency and ease of finding the right item to list.
Alongside these more significant improvements, you may also notice a number of smaller improvements, such as your Favor updating immediately when listing an item, icon improvements, listing sealed affixes, and more.
Cycle Refresh Poll Results
On Tuesday, we released a post covering the 1.2 timeline and a Poll on the planned Cycle Refresh. If you haven’t had a chance to read that post, you can do so here: Patch 1.2 Timeline, 1.1 Event Updates, and Cycle Poll. With the poll, we wanted to gather some direct responses regarding whether there should be a Cycle Refresh corresponding with the Imperial Uprising Event.
We want to thank everyone who turned up and voiced their opinions in the poll. Though it was only open briefly to provide enough time if we needed to change our plans, we had a much better turnout than expected. We understand this poll wouldn’t reach everyone in the community, such as players who had already wrapped up their characters for the existing cycle. This means we also need to consider what community members this poll wouldn’t reach and what their input would most likely be.
The poll, though, still had a very large turnout and also had very strong results for what the community desires in regards to the Cycle Refresh. You can see the results for the poll below:
The answers to question #2 are something we will continue to look at (alongside discussions across our platforms) to determine how we can focus on improving the Legacy Migration experience in the future. One of the big things here we want to dive more into is why players feel their characters become irrelevant when transferring characters to Legacy, and what we can do to alleviate that feeling. With the decisive result of over 75% responses in favor of continuing with a Cycle Refresh, we will continue with our original plan of having the event kick off with a refreshed Cycle.
This means that when The Imperial Uprising begins on September 19th, existing Cycle characters will be migrated to Legacy, and there will be a fresh Cycle, starting with new Leaderboards and a clean economy. The event bonuses will also allow you to progress through the Cycle much faster during the event for those starting in the Cycle, or achieve the long-term goals of your character if continuing on Legacy. We once more want to re-confirm that aside from the Leaderboard; there is no content difference between Legacy and Cycle. Legacy and Cycle have access to all the same mechanics, encounters, systems, and events. (eg. The newly introduced Nemesis encounters and Harbinger system are fully available in Legacy, as well as the upcoming Imperial Uprising Event modifiers and other additions coming with the event).
Steam Deck Updates
As a part of our announcement for the Sept event, we were excited to announce our work towards Steam Deck verification. However, many of you in the community were quick to share some new concerns, which caused us to pause and audit the current situation regarding the performance of Last Epoch on the Steam Deck itself. After this audit, we were able to find several places where we need to improve, which will cause us to push back the release of our Steam Deck announcement and sale.
We feel it’s important that when we say we are Steam Deck verified, players can trust that the experience they will receive on the Steam Deck is up to snuff with our expectations for player experience. We want you to enjoy Last Epoch while on the go, and we do not want players to feel they have to compromise their experience or utilize third-party tools/adjustments to do so.
There is a silver lining here: We want to ensure that we continue to support the handheld space, and for this reason, we aren’t going to delay the updates we already have planned for the Steam Deck. We are still planning to push the support and updates we originally planned; we just want to spend additional time tuning the player experience, receiving feedback on the current status, and improving where possible.
Closing
Whether you’re participating in the cycle refresh, or continuing in Legacy, these modifiers in addition to increased enemy counts, and the new Loot Lizards, there’s never been a better time to hoard loot and slay enemies.
We’re looking forward to sharing all of the patch details and notes on September 17th, and hope to see you join us in this fight against the Immortal Empire September 19th.
