Things I'd like to see that may, or may not, warrant dev attention

Feedback and Suggestions
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After a couple hundred hours I’ve noticed some things that I would like to see changed in LE. Pretty much all of these are QoL issues and potentially a little nit-picky, but I’m hoping at least some of them are things that the devs have plans to improve.

Inventory management - While Shift + Right Click will transfer an item from one open panel to another, I find it somewhat clunky. Perhaps I just need to get more used to it, but I don’t care for it. Relatedly, click and drag seems incredibly unresponsive. More often than not when I click on an item in my inventory or stash and attempt to drag it to the other, my character simply runs away from the stash, forcing the window closed. This is incredibly annoying to me.

Crafting - I know it’s getting an overhaul in the next update, but please EHG, for the love of all that is holy, do something to make starting from scratch with a normal item anything but foolhardy. Even if doing so limits the potential final power of an item, not having to wait until an item of the right base type with one or two high tier mods applicable to my build happens to randomly drop would help fill what I believe is a large gaping hole in the crafting system.

Target farming - This one may ruffle a feather or two, as it may be me wanting to have my cake and eat it too. When defeating a timeline boss, I would love to see a buff that increases stability gain while in that timeline. Such a buff should last ONLY until I leave that timeline, but would help make target farming less tedious when it takes 650 or more stability to unlock the boss encounter.

Blessings - I would like to see the ability to use non-empowered blessings as a buff for new characters, even at reduced efficacy. Unlocking empowered timelines opens the option to apply the currently selected blessings to subsequent characters as a way to help alleviate the feeling of tedium and grind after having done the story repeatedly, and bolster the feeling of getting to the “meat” of the game faster.

Just a couple of thoughts off the top of my head. I readily acknowledge that any and/or all of these may simply be ridiculous things to ask the devs to focus on, but as I’m no game designer, I can only hope that something here leads to “Oh yeah, maybe we should look at that”.

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Agreed, if you want to transfer multiple items within a short time, sometimes it feels like the system does not recognize you clicking.

What is the expected power you want from starting with a white Item?

Because it’s already very possible to craft Tier 10-15 Items from a white Item, obviously there is still RNG involved and sometimes the Item does fracture earlier, but it’s very possible.

This is already the case, the longer you stay in a given timeline and the more you uncover the echo web, the more echoes far away from the starting point become avaialble, and those are twice to thrice as strong in terms of timeline stability gain.

Also if you know you want to spend a long time within a given timeline, pushing the corruption in that timelines further increases the timeline stability gain.

Having normal blessings or not, would still requrie you do go through all the normal timelines.
And from a difficulty perspective it’s not really necessary.

The concern of bringing multiple characters through the MoF system after finishing the story has been brought up a number of times, but I don’ think that giving characters lesser versions of normal blessings would sovle that specific issue.

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Possible, yes. Can you really tell me that in the later stages of the game that starting from a normal item isn’t foolish? With how rapidly instability can ramp up I can’t imagine it being anything more than a waste of materials attempt to craft on anything that doesn’t have at least 1-2 desirable affixes at T4-T5 already.

Sure, knocking out a T10-12 finished item is entirely possible and can help get you over some early to mid-game build deficiencies, but after that it becomes an exercise in futility and frustration, in my view.

As for my power level expectations, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t want to see crafting buffed to a point of supplanting the loot hunt, but I think that in the late game we need something to gain some measurable improvement without potentially spending dozens of hours hoping that the right base with the right affixes drops and doesn’t fracture with a 92% chance of success. On my highest level character (89) every piece of gear she is wearing is fractured and I haven’t seen a base to build from that wouldn’t require replacing multiple other gear slots since around level 65. I’m stymied right now just starting empowered monoliths because replacing one piece of gear means losing a lot of something that I cannot make up without having to wait for 2 or 3 other “just right” crafting bases.

A fair point. This is likely a matter of the strategy I employ in monoliths then. I tend to hit up the Shade nodes when the path I’m working down leaves me only with modifiers I don’t want to deal with, so I find myself staring at low stability options. Perhaps the shift here needs to be in my own perspective, which I’m good with.

Another fair and reasonable point. I admit that, beyond the crafting stuff, these were off the cuff remarks that I hadn’t put a great deal of thought into (hence the “may not warrant dev attention” part of the title).

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What would you suggest otherwise?

If it were easy to craft up to t20 from a white base, then what would be the point of drops?

There is one already, it’s called Corruption & you get it from killing a Shade of Orobyss. If you kill the Shade once the stability you get from completing monoliths is doubled (from 10 to ~20 at the start of a mono web). And that’s ignoring the amount of stability you get further out in a mono web.

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Crafting:

Starting from a white item is not “foolish”, it just depends on what your expecations from this method are and how many ressources you have avialable.

If you have hundreds of affix shards and glyphs it’s somethign you can try.
But not succeeding with this method will be very likely.

You don’t need Items with 2+ desired affixes already to be a good crafting base.
It’s all about setting up a proper loot filter and trying to craft items that are a potentially good base.

If an Item has 1-2 desired affixes, but 1 undesired affix just try a rune of removal.
If an Item Only has one desired affixe Tier 2 or 3, that’s not a crazy good starting base, but still a much better one than startign from a white item.

I really don’t know what you expect, but it is to be expected, that starting from a white base item should become less and less optimal the further you are in your Item progression.

I don’t know what your criterieas are, to even attempt crafting on an Item. But my guess is, you are aiming for already too good Items, as a starting base.

Making your loot filter and expecations, for what Items you even attempt crafting on, too high, can impact your experience negatively.

2 Major parts, that I often see people doing:

  • Loot FIlter too strict, too early
  • Not trying to craft on Items with undesired affixes

Depending on your build, sometiems you really don’t need 4 optimal affixes at your current progression. If you ahve a Item with 2 desired affixes and 1 undesired affix you coudl still try and craft this Item to a T15 Item with 3 desired affixes.

You could also just try Rune Of Removal.

If the wrong affix is removed, trash the Item and move on.

The lower your starting point for attempting to craft is, the more you craft, the more chances you have to succeed. Yes this method will lead to even more fractures, but overall you will have success, I promise.

If you only nitpick the Items that are already clsoe to perfect, fracturing them feels really bad.

But if you try crafting on a lot of mediocre Items, with a little bit of luck they still can turn into T15+ Items.

I can understand this, but this comes also to planning around certain base types and affixes.
Sometiems you need to make a sidegrade or a slight downgrade to finally be able to get upgrades in other slots.

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Maybe I am setting too high a standard, I don’t know. My goal hasn’t been a perfect base. It has been “is this going to force me to give up too much of something that I don’t have room to make up elsewhere and, if so, can I afford to lose it?” When my fractured chest piece has over half of my total of 2 different resists, I’m finding it incredibly hard to justify replacing it with anything that doesn’t have those same resists, or room to add them because I cannot make them up anywhere else.
It’s also entirely possible that I’m approaching my use of glyphs poorly. At what point to you shift from using glyphs of stability to guardians? Maybe I’ve blown through far too many guardians too early (I find myself running out of them frequently).

I will also freely admit that I still have a crap ton to learn about the systems in this game and it’s entirely possible that all of this is simply my ignorance making itself known.

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I also often gather gear, that is really good, but that I currently cannot equip in my stash, sometimes even leaving suffix slots open, to adjust resistances later, when I find other gear pieces.

Gear is like a puzzle.

This is a really good question and there is no universal solution for this.

It really depends on how good your currently equipped Item is.
Don’t aim for a T20 Item all the time, so switching to glyph of the guardian early, to at least get a +1 or +2 T upgrade is really good.

But you always should craft a couple of early crafts with glyph of stability.

One big tip here:
Low Tier crafts naturally have a higher chance of suceeding, so you should use all your glyphs of stability on T0->T1 or T1->T2 crafts and then switch to Glyph of the guardian for the crafts that aim to get to T5 on a given affix.

Usually I craft all Affixes to from T0->T1 with a glyph of stability and then depending on how high I want to reach with a given Item i continue using glyph of stability until I reach 60-70%.

if you currently equipped Item is not suepr good already, you could even start using Glyph Of the Guardian already at 80-85% chance.

And that’s the entire point of this discussion here.

Giving you perspectives of different players.

Everythign you said here is totally valid, and feedback about how you feel about stufdf is already great.

But if you are willing to learn more about systems and maybe see thigns from a different perspective, that’s also great!

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One way to move forward with your gear (assuming you’re powerful enough) is to farm resistance blessings (empowered or not).

Having innate resistances frees you up to use some different affixes on your gear without losing your survivability.

Another thing I always do now (and I don’t necessarily like, but don’t have an alternative solution) is plan out my gear before and after blessings using Dammit’s build planner. Last Epoch Build Planner

You don’t have to “pre-plan” everything, I’ll do passives, blessings and resistances (I also do health sometimes), this helps me to keep my survivability in check while using the best prefixes I can find.

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Also another thing regarding resistances:

Don’t focus too much on just resistances, yes they are strong and yes they are easy to grasp, because you have some clear goal.

But having 50-60% resistance is totally fine. you don’t need to cap resistances like in GD or PoE.

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Why shouldn’t it be foolish? A white item is a completely blank slate. You get to pick every affix that goes onto it. If that scenario is at all comparable to starting with an item that came from an RNG source - drops or gambling - it removes significant value and incentive from the item hunt. It has to have a meaningful drawback or white based crafting would outstrip all other crafting below the Exalted affix level.

Now if what you want to say is that with the way crafting is now, white items are weird and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for them to exist, I agree with that completely.

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You’re touching on a useful question/observation, I think. I seems to me like a number of troubles that some people have with the crafting in LE are sourced in trying to approach it in a way that’s simply not compatible with it. In other words, trying to use strategies from other games that don’t really make sense in this system (ex: wanting to start from a white base).

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From my experience people really do different things.

But it’s vital to udnerstand for everybody, that an Item does not need to be “perfect” to be an upgrade.
So many people always aim for the stars and then get disappointed.

You will very likely not jump from finishing the story with T5-T10(desired affixes) Items to T18+ Items.
You will gradually get better and better and better Items.

As soon as you realize that and try to incoperate that in your craftign strategy, evne Items with undesired affixes can be turned in to an “upgrade”.
Those items are not meant to be your “endgoal”, but at a given stage of your gear progression, thsoe items still can be very usefull.

Also people seems to not utilize Ruen Of Removal often enough.
Most commnoly I hear people talking about, they hate the RNG about those.

And I can accept that, but you still should try it.
It’s all about expections, if you find a Item with:
T5 desired
T2 desired
T3 undesired
Open Affix slot

use a Rune Of Removal, if you remove the T2 affix, try another Rune Of Removal, if that hits the T3 affix, the Item is still a really good crafting base.
If you remove the T3 with the first Rune Of Removal, even better.

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Agreed. Probably wildly off topic, but I think that at some point the idea and practice of theorycrafting transformed for many people from being “Here is a methodology I can use to evaluate and improve my character’s power” to the attitude “If it’s not BiS I don’t want it”.

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I sincerely hope I’ve not fallen into that trap without realizing it.

As I tried to acknowledge above, it’s entirely possible, if not even likely, that my issues ultimately come down to my own personal failings. At times I find it difficult to really make that determination withouot an outside perspective :wink:

As for

I admit that crafting, if buffed too heavily, risks making the loot hunt obsolete which is something no ARPG can afford to do to itself (nor do I think anyone who enjoys the genre would actually want). I guess that within the context of this game’s crafting system (as it exists today) there may well not be room for white item crafting outside of getting by for a couple levels in the early game. In the absence of “drop only affixes”, there may never be.

This may be part of my conundrum as well. I’ve been conditioned by 20+ years of these kind of games to think “resists must be capped at all times”. But then, reists in this game work a bit differently than in the others I’ve played (unless I’ve completely misunderstood how things work here. Another real possibility).

Maybe if I take a step back from that I can find more ways to better build other defensive layers. I find I can usually get to 80+ crit avoidance, but only if I eschew building endurance, or vice-versa. Maybe if I take some focus from resists I can change that.

I can also admit that this does desccribe me as well. I do use them, but very warily as I’ve bricked more than I’ve saved with them. I’ve likely grown too averse to using them.

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If you avoid enemy crit modifiers in MoF, you don’t really need critical strike avoidance that much.

I would not try capping CSA before getting a decent primariy and secondary defense, like resistance + health or any other combination of defenses.

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Although your feedback might be valid I see it as 90% consisting of ‘make the game easier’. I don’t like that. I think the balance is there now. If you don’t want to grind why play? Maybe LE should just promote any fresh character to level 90 with all blessings and gear suited for the build? It is not a game like Witcher where you do one walkthrough and you are done with the game and switch to another. This aRPG genre is intended for grinding and farming - items, blessings, levels etc. for hours and days and even months.

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That’s been my approach. Hiding white items is the first filter I set up on every character I made after the first.

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Base stats on items are realy important. An item with good base stats is often time worth more then another one with with high crafted mods. My druid still runs arround with a max rolled base stat Spirit catcher with some cold and necrotic resi rolled on it but fractured while the prefixes are only level one. It still offeres me resi cap on 2 resis. On the other hand I got another one I thought was good because it had the desired affixes on it and still said resis but at the end of the day it was worse because the base rolls on the item were bad.
White items aren’t that unusefull 100% of the time but yeah I don’t look at them in most cases.

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to be honest i think the game in general have issue with clicking… and not just when you want to sort inventory … it happens to me so many times that clicking to activate skills and the skills dont happen…

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Are we talking mouse clicks or skills?

I never had skills not activating in over 2k hours playtime, except, when I was stunned.

Clicking on the other hands, yeah I agree.

When opening a portal after a finished MoF echo, I click the portal and my char moves to it, but then nothing happens.

I need to click again to finally use the portal.

This happens pretty frequently.

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