After nearly 2,000 hours, I need to write a bit about the game’s current state. Before those 2,000 hours, back in patch 0.4, the game focused more on crafting; items were harder to find (which was a big plus), and the gameplay was addictive—you wanted to keep going, hoping to drop the unique item you were looking for, and so on. Now, having basically always played hardcore, I feel like I’m playing a game on easy mode—items are dropping by the dozens or hundreds on a single map, which is excessive. Currently, I don’t feel even the slightest challenge on hardcore when it comes to items; for several seasons in a row now, right from the start, opponents deal insane damage, and then it takes + -2 weeks to detect and fix it… Since patch 0.6, I feel like nothing in the game has changed. As far as the endgame goes, it’s still the same, and the addition (new content) is just more items and a 30-second event on the map—it doesn’t improve my experience of the gameplay, because seeing the same routine as the map I finish in a few seconds just makes me shrug. Character balance since patch 1.0 has been terrible—I’ll explain: the constant top picks are PALADIN, VK, FALCON, and BLADEDANCER—and let’s throw in 1 mage and 1 beastmaster.
The skills that were supposed to be reworked aren’t really working out—the first examples that come to mind are Disintegration, Avalanche, and many more. For months, I’ve been hoping that the loot system would be changed—that significantly fewer items would drop from enemies—so the game would become more challenging and crafting would regain its momentum like it used to, rather than how it is now: either we make an Exalted item and convert it into a set piece, or we take a Unique item and turn it into a Legendary. As for the endgame in Aberoth, it totally doesn’t work—there’s nothing here to keep a player engaged for long. The combat itself is okay, but it’s the same thing over and over every season; it doesn’t make sense. And examples of a poor approach to the start of the season include the loot filter we get the moment a new season starts on the server, which is strange to me because the servers are down 24 hours before the new season starts anyway—so what’s the problem with making that loot filter available one day earlier so we can calmly implement changes? I’m hoping for major changes and a “seismic shift” in Last Epoch because, looking at people’s interest in this title, it’s declining, and I don’t want that to happen because I really like this game and the people working on it, but things aren’t going in the right direction.
