I really enjoyed this game in the past (I started playing a little before 0.9). What brought me in and kept me playing was that there were so many viable builds. Almost every skill suggested two or three build ideas, and if the mechanics of a particular build didn’t appeal to me all I needed to do was to open up the planner and look at the skill trees and find something else to try. New items were exiting because these were pieces of a puzzle that I didn’t have the ability to complete before they were introduced.
Every patch since the introduction of Uber Abberoth has narrowed build options. This is not just because of the absurd amount of damage and survivability required for pinnacle bosses, but because every new mechanic introduces additional difficulty spikes. A character who easily handles normal mobs and timeline bosses at 300c can get destroyed by a few particular possessed champions or by a rift beast with DOT abilities. Individual champions in the omen windows seem to have as much HP and do as much damage as timeline bosses. Rolling through an echo and getting unexpectedly one-shot by a poorly rolled champion encounter feels awful. The result is that characters need to be built for the highest difficulty spikes and nothing else.
It is possible that the developers want to recalibrate the expectations and make the build variety and power for sentinel the norm among all of the classes. Alright, but 80% of the skills and gear have hardly been touched from when they were introduced and are now completely meaningless with continually increasing expectations. Touching up a few damage multiplier nodes once every nine months on patch release is never going to result in a balanced game, especially if each patch just introduces new mechanics that make the difficulty spikes worse.
A viable build has at least 60% increased movement speed to get through echoes quickly, enough AOE to clear white mobs, and needs to do several million DPS to even access most of the new content. Adding in the impossibility of manually dodging all of the nonsense that happens in omen windows, you need to find some way of building at least 20k EHP as well. This apparently means that you just don’t play druid, sorcerer, forge guard or marksman (check the corruption leader boards on Last Epoch Tools). I have 12 complete build planners for this patch, and there is really only one that feels remotely viable. And now that I have played that to L95, and I don’t want to play one of the 12 suggested Maxroll builds, I don’t really want to do anything more with this patch.
I really miss the Last Epoch of the past, but I think that I am done with the game for now. And I am not the only one if you look at the player numbers. The approach that the developers have been taking since 1.2 is not a popular trajectory with the player base.