my advice is to never forget your resistans. always try to focus on it to have the caps at least. bigger damage numbers are always fine, but dieing every 2min sucks. i feel it was a good option that the abo drops a unique item, that gives you 100crit avoidence, cause that what the most people lag when they start with monolights until they reach 70 for the helmet and chest. prio #1 is res and a good hp pool, crit avoidence and endurance should be the next. dont forget that the enemies dont have enrage timer, so you have all time in the world to kill them. when you feel ok, you cant start min max your gear for dps 
While i agree with your overall statement, that defense is important.
Resistances in LE are not as superior as in other simialr games.
Resistances are just another defense layer.
Getting some resistances is definitely very good and usefull, but you don’t even have to cap them to make them good.
In fact, more often than not, focusing on other defensive layers is better when you already have some resistances.
Resistances are just one of many defensive layers.
Having very good dps, can be “saver” in alot of situatiosn though, especially when you get overwhelmed by alot of mobs.
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i only want to say with that, you dont need to play a class canon to one shoot everything. you also can play it normaly
I get that, but i am a bit disappointed, that most players try to explain other players with the “cap resistance example”…
New players can easily get the impression that resistances are the most important defense layer, which is simply not true.
This game gets compared so much with other similar games and people assume stuff works the same in LE, than in other games, but that’s not the case.
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Even if that’s good advice, it’s not what I was talking about.
Of course my resistances are capped. And my endurance is relatively high, with a comfortable threshold most of times. Stats and resistances have very little to do with poor reflexes. A hit that we avoid is far better than a hit that we mitigate.
And also, the resistances, endurance, etc, have nothing to do with the capacity to see the synergies between skills and passives, the ability to understand/calculate which nodes will be worth investing and which ones won’t, and so on.
Reducing the game to “be protected” is somehow leading people to forget all the rest and to forget than Last Epoch is about creating efficient builds more than about being a damage-mitigating punching-ball.
Yeah I didn’t realize this at first, and found it super interesting when I looked into the math of resistances in LE vs PoE. I’ll use an incoming hit of 1000 and contrast 50% vs 65% vs 75% resistances in both games to attempt to demonstrate.
- If we look at PoE math first:
1000 * (1 - 0.5) = 500
1000 * (1 - 0.65) = 350
1000 * (1 - 0.75) = 250
The interesting thing with this kind of math is that although each % point mitigates the same amount of damage, the % difference of each additional resistance point to the final damage taken increases as you get closer to 75%.
350 / 500 = 0.7 = 30% less damage by adding 15% resist = 2% less per resist
250 / 350 = 0.714 = 28.6% less damage by adding 10% resist = 2.86% less per resist
With LE, each resistance point added has a much more linear effect on damage taken, because of the resist shred done by enemies.
At enemy level 50: 50% = 0%, 65% = 15%, and 75% = 25%
At enemy level 75: 50% = - 25%, 65% = - 10%, and 75% = 0%
- Level 50 enemy doing 1000 damage
1000 * (1 - 0) = 1000
1000 * (1 - 0.15) = 850
1000 * (1 - 0.25) = 750
850 / 1000 = 0.15 = 15% less damage by adding 15% = 1% per resist
750 / 850 = 0.882 = 11.8% less damage by adding 10% = 1.18% per resist
- Level 75 enemy doing 1000 damage
1000 * (1 + 0.25) = 1250
1000 * (1 + 0.10) = 1100
1000 * (1 + 0) = 1000
1100 / 1250 = 0.88 = 12% less damage taken by adding 15% = 0.8% per resist
1000 / 1100 = 0.909 = 9.1% less damage taken by adding 10% = 0.91% per resist
I still tend to max resists, perhaps just out of habit, but the math really highlights why it is not as important in LE as some other games.
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I really liked your post and i agree with you that every individual has their own feeling and perspective to the game.
No one should feel small or bad, everyone has different gaming backgrounds, strenghts and weaknesses so its not same line to all.
We have nice community where is these very talented players who help us if we ask help.
My tip;
But overall i try to get knowledge beside just playing Epoch. I just found out that every defensive mechanic (i apologize if its wrong term) is good and its best to have many as possible and work on your character/Build strenghts. Dont just focus on resistance or only Ward, its meant to have many as possible and high as possible. And i personally just tried figure out my build/character weakness and piece by piece tried get better defensive value to that spot which was lacking. Worked for me. 
I wish it would for me, but most of times I can’t even find a build that has real strengths. ^^’
lol. Really bro?
I wouldn’t say “as many as possible”, but you will try to invest into 2-3 different defensive layers for most builds.
Id say the campaign and normal monoliths with the exception of 2 or 3 bosses are fairly easy/straight forward for alot of builds BUT;
Its like POE, you can only do the endgame with a handful of builds b/c the rest get absolutely destroyed in empowered timelines with multiple nasty modifiers stacked.
Ive only enjoyed empowered timelines on 2 builds myself, 1 of Lizardirl’s Paladin builds, and the super meta Novaboy Mage build. Every other character ive tried them on has been a horror show.
It’s definitely more tricky to get builds to work smoothly in empowered monolith, if you don’t have enough experience and empowered monolith is definitely meant to be difficult.
But i think neither PoE nor LE are they way you describe.
Even in PoE, you can make everyskill run smoothly on almost any content, it’s jsut that people want the top of the top builds… even though that’s not necessary.
But IMO LE is way more balanced in terms of best vs. worst skills.
LE is very good balanced, you can make everything work.
Thats one way to put it.
Yeah, i think Resistances are easy to focus on because in other games they are like most important thing. Dunno why other defensive layers dont get so much visibility. And i dont mean that they are hidden or not explained. I liked when i figured it out, it was “lightbulp moment” and it felt good. 
The experience you describe is so similar to mine.
You can read tooltips, figure out synergies between skills and passives and so on. At one point you hit a wall and think “wtf! why? it was all going so well until now!”
It’s not only to figure out synergies but also to get to know how to use these synergies efficiently. The sweet spot is important.
For example it is one thing to know how to scale bleed damage. Its:
- bleed chance
- bleed duration
- bleed efficiency
- physical damage increase
- attack speed
But with limited stat slots what is the best way to scale it? Focus on all stats equally? What’s the most important stat? Is AS more important than bleed chance? How impactful is bleed duration?
The ‘pro players’ have figured out all this stuff. They did the math in theory and tested it ingame. Without that knowledge you can still build a good bleed char that can get through most monos. But at some point theres a wall (more or less hard) that you can only overcome with tweaking the max out of your synergies.
I played ward builds in my starting time when it was op and Lizard dominated the ladder with a Soulfeast Ward Lich. I can’t recall correctly, I think the could have about 80k ward. My Lich lvl 70 could barely generate 3-4k ward and it was just pure rocket science for me how to get that amount Lizard was able to get.
With all the synergies of different stats and mechanics there are also certain thresholds that start to take off only if you can get certain amount. The damage scaling is not linear during your character progression. Early levels everything you do has little impact to the damage. It feels like doing more because the content is scaled that way. But the further you go the higher all those numbers get when the flat values get higher and the increased and more modifiers get more impactful.
I’ve seen a lot of people struggling with their damage output because they had massive modifiers but were using a lower level base weapon without flat prefixes. It’s obvious that you need flat base damage to scale your damage with increased and more. But LE surprises people (also me when I started) with how important the flat values are, due to the skills base damage being so low.
TLDR: It’s not only about ‘knowing’ how things interact and synergize, but also how the synergizing stats are weighted. Without doing the math, you need a lot of trial and error. Or you strictly follow the build guides of people that have figured out stuff, already (or copied it from others that did ).
I 100% know how you feel 
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Agreed! It won’t solve the slow reflexes, but that will surely help for the knowledge of the game.
That is good if you learn from it. I see build guides like this: a very good base that you can use to learn the mechanisms and see examples of what works. 
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A good build guide will help you understand WTF is happening & why so that you can successfully tweak the build to achieve whatever aims you want.
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I cannot believe how many replies this post is receiving.
Here is what none of you are saying:
You have played 600 hours since joining in January. That’s 150 hours per month bro. That’s 5 hours PER DAY bro. That is A LOT of playtime.
You have leveled 30 characters? You still cannot figure out how to make a build that dominates even after all the respecs, tests, questions, advice and help?
Oh AND you are 130+IQ???
Cmon people, this dude seems to be a troll who is just not as good at this game as he wants to be.
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A troll? No. Bad? Yes, I can admit that.
And you forgot one point: I insult nobody. I would appreciate if you could do the same.
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Hope you can work things out.
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