I wanted to share my thoughts after spending some time with the new season. Initially, I was really excited to dive in and test out new builds, explore the fresh content, and see what the devs had added. However, after reaching endgame and encountering Uber Abberoth, my motivation took a serious hit.
It feels like the best-in-slot items are effectively locked behind Uber Abberoth — an incredibly difficult boss that not only requires a perfectly optimized build, but also a significant time investment just to reach reliably. For players like me who enjoy experimenting with different builds, this creates a huge wall. It’s discouraging to try out off-meta or fun builds when I know they’ll just hit a hard stop at Uber Abberoth, making the journey feel unrewarding.
I get that there should be aspirational content for high-end players, but right now it feels like the gap between “fun build” and “Uber viable” is too wide. It’s made me shelve the game for now, even though I was really enjoying the early and mid-game.
I’d love to hear how others are feeling about this. Are you finding ways to make more creative builds work? Or are you also feeling pushed into a narrow meta to progress meaningfully?
Would appreciate hearing some perspectives — maybe there’s something I missed or ways to approach this differently.
I felt similarly for the first week when I played homebrew fissure smite VK - I was having fun with all the content in high corruption, but no way was I going to beat uberroth. I decided to respec into erasing strike, farm some gear and finally managed to kill him.
Now I view it strictly as an optional content - uniques are powerful, but in no way necessary for destroying the rest of the game. I am going to play some new fun builds as if uberroth didnt exist.
IMO best balance the game could get to would be that only characters that are specifically built to kill uber bosses would be able to. And that they would need to sacrifice something e.g. speed clear to get there. Ofc RN there are a couple of overtuned builds that can do everything.
Why? If Uberroth is intended to only be doa-able by a relatively small handful of players with good builds, why does knowing that you may not be able to do the most difficult content in the game make the journey feel unrewarding? Does knowing that your fun build isn’t going to be able to do 1-2k corruption make it less fun? I know I’m not going to be able to do Uberroth, but that doesn’t mean I stop enjoying the rest of the game while I’m playing it.
What do you classify as early to mid game? For me that would be the campaign and normal monos respectively with empowered being endgame.
Uber Abberroth doesn’t just challenge build optimization — it severely punishes anything even slightly outside of the meta, to a degree that feels creatively restrictive. The problem isn’t difficulty per se, it’s the type of difficulty. It’s not “hard but fair” — it’s mechanically one-dimensional (extremely high DoT pressure) in a way that invalidates build diversity.
In a game that prides itself on deep customization and multiple viable paths, it’s disheartening when one encounter serves as a hard gate that filters out 90% of builds, not because of poor design choices by the player, but because the fight disproportionately favors a narrow range of defenses or archetypes.
I’m all for tough content. I’ve beaten Uber bosses in other ARPGs with off-meta builds — but those fights allowed for creativity and adaptation. Uber Abberroth, right now, doesn’t. It’s not about “not min-maxing,” it’s about whether the game respects experimentation at the highest level. Currently, this boss doesn’t.
If the goal is to reward only the top 0.1% of builds, that’s fine — but then we shouldn’t pretend it’s a broadly accessible or well-balanced endgame challenge. It becomes more of a gear and build check than a skill test, and that’s a missed opportunity in a game as promising as Last Epoch.
I’m not telling anyone what to do or how the game should look like. I’m just sharing my opinion and explaining why I personally dropped out. Looking at the charts, I can see a significant drop in retention after a very strong initial few days. Maybe there are more people like me?
Considering Karv (an EHG dev very likely involved in Uby design) said that only 1% of the people that kill Aby will be able to kill Uby, i don’t think it was ever announced as broadly accessible. Quite the contrary.
Uby is supposed to be the toughest content you have in LE. It’s supposed to only be accessible to the top 1%. And while he has great gear that is BiS for many builds, he doesn’t have any that is required. Nor will any build become magically good using a Shattered Worlds. It will be better, certainly, but not by that large a margin.
Eventually, with more stuff added to the game, Uby will become easier and more accessible to more players, like what happened with Aby. At which point a new pinnacle boss (Hyperroth?) will likely come to the game.
In my opinion…that is the point of an uber boss in any game. The bosses challenge the builds their uber version should challenge almost perfection. Otherwise they wouldnt be ubers they wouldnt have that high difficulty and their loot should be a matchstick.
I see what you mean and everyone is entitled to their opinion and in mine uber bosses should be the absolute worst to fight and only for people who have really good optimized builds either meta or not. You use that quirky build that requires mana? Well you better have about 2k of it if you wanna fight it and such.
I for one managed to defeat normal Abby then got to 500+ corruption on my build and decided to fight U Abby. I got him down to 97% a few times so…close enough. Now that gives me motivation to farm and progress further with my build. Gives me a reason on why I farm the same item but with 1 more LP than the one I am using.
Either way at the end of the day it is all about having fun and Im sorry this kind of ruins that for you. Maybe a middle ground can be found or something.
I think uber aberoth currently is simply overtuned.
For example my build literally is able to afk 800c emperor of corpses I can eat his necro explosion, and I can also face tank anything normal abby does.
I literally cant even scratch uber aberoth.
1000c is not even touching uber aberoth, Builds ive seen literally 3 tapping 1000c harbingers are still not quite hitting uber abby clear. the amount of damage/tank you need is world gaping its quite insane.
its to the point the number of builds ive seen that clear it is single digits. its not just players, its straight up you can have 4lp in every slot, and your build simply will not be uber abby viable, thats how tuned it is.
Frankly its missing the mark imo, abberoth feels like “I can gear up more and beat this” when you cant do it, uber abberoth isnt something to strive for by getting more gear, its currently a “let me reroll to a build that can even clear it possibly”
I think it should be ultra hard but yeah its kinda lame. I’ve watched one video of it - Volca on a judgement pally, I think the healing phase is stupid in ANY boss fights and ANY games, like, honestly piss off with that shit its bad enough they have a secondary shield phase… but the amount of animations/shit on ground/lazers - if he wasnt using a pally self healing every attack + ward then yeah, dunno. I will never beat this boss because I don’t play the builds with ward/healing that are able to beat him ALSO I’m not that good of a player but I accept that I struggle with normal Abberoth. If there are videos with dudes beating him with other classes I’d love to see it haha.
I think when a game makes a new boss and just chucks “uber” in front of it, it’s really just lazy. The boys took a year or something (apparently) to release this season and all they did was up the hp and attacks? Thats straight up lazy af. It’s basically just Poe1 with its uber elders and uber mavens, just be creative, make a new boss, give it new attacks, make it hard, dont give it fkn self healing. Don’t be wanky lmao.
To be fair to the devs actually, uber abberoth patterns are vastly different then normal. normal is lethargic compared to uber. Uber is a much harder position check for the player. His hp is just too high. His damage is mostly okay, people shouldnt be tanking his slam for example or standing in void puddles lol.
Haha well the 10 minute fight I watched a bunch of times it looks pretty much the same movement patterns but just a whole lot of extra animations, I would get fucked up for sure, soon as something fires out my hands shake and I panic move into it not away from it lmao
Even with new patterns - it was a year between haha if games just add ubers then I’m gonna lose interest 10000 percent ( not that anyone cares or asked )
DJ here is Volcas, I’ve been using a few of his builds this season (not judgement yuck)
10 mins vs that falconer HAHAH and people freaked out they nerfed it? LOL
thanks for those links, watching them all now
At first glance did you notice the only non-ward is falconer? I’ll never play a ward build guess I have to make a bird haha
Also its funny in global everyone saying “nerf pally, nerf void knight” lol these videos are wicked, gives me so much motiviation when I see good builds / good players
This I disagree wit hbecause these kind of rewards are exciting and give motivation and are not necessary to defeat him.
I am torn on this but I feel somewhat the same.
I tried two builds so far on Uber ABerroth, both of which I can very likely still improve with another few dozen hours playtime and mayb, just maybe I could defeat him.
But as of right now I don’t see me beating Uber Aberroth with how I am making builds, because theme, playstyle and my personal preferenace will always go over raw power and obejctively good stuffto pick for my builds.
U agree and I think right now this is also skewed because some of the incredibly meta builds have such a easy time killing them it feels like “the boss is not hard”, simpüyl because they can ignore virtually all mechanics and facetank everything.
We need to come to a point of balance where there are very few or none builds that can facetank him.
I wouldn’t say punished and I am not qutting the game over it, but I defintiely hoped for more motivation to put more time into characters into the top end.
But as of right now Uber Aberroth is so far out of reach, that it doesn’t do that for me.
Now for my more specific feedback:
I think the dual-sided laser from the middle are a bit overkill. There are many situation because of other overlapping mechancis where you just can’t perfectly place these and if you don’t have insane DPS these will lead to the whole arena being full of them eventually.
From my roughly 100 attempts I think I managed to have them in a <15° cone and the rest when very bad. This gets worse once you get into later phases.
I think increasing the frequency of them but not making them double-sided would be sufficient to incentivice good palcement without forcing super high dps builds.
The Void Balls that go through the arena from left to right an right to left, that leave the Void Puddles are a bit too fast. Even with my Warlock with essentially permanent Haste (with %inc effect) sometimes you can’t avoid them when you have to deal with other stuff as well. I think they could move a bit slower to give more room for reactionary gameplay.
Those are the two mechanics that I dislike a lot combined.
They make the fight very unfun because they will overwhelm you eventually without insane DPS or a build that can ignire them almost and facetank them.
And lastly the ward he gets seems to have almost no or very little decay, much much elss than any other boss. This seems to be completely conterproductive to the reason why Ward was put in place, to avoid strong dps builds cheesing bosses.
It is incredibly hard to judge how far you have come in this boss fight from a phase perspective with these huge amounts of wards that seem to not decay.
TL:DR: I think there needs to be more balance between top builds and non-meta builds.
Make the fight less about facetanking or insane dps.
Yeah, and that’s both fair & fine. Uberroth isn’t meant for us.
They didn’t spend a year (or however long it was) on Uberroth, they spent a year/whatever on everything else in Season 2, the Weaver faction & content, procedural side zones, the additional crafting stuff, woven echoes, new mobs, the mob possession tech. There’s a massive amount of stuff in s2. And bug fixes.
That’s fair. Would just giving it more hp be better/less worse?
Uby is supposed to be the toughest content you have in LE. It’s supposed to only be accessible to the top 1%. And while he has great gear that is BiS for many builds, he doesn’t have any that is required. Nor will any build become magically good using a Shattered Worlds. It will be better, certainly, but not by that large a margin.
Agreed on a most counts but you’re off on a few things here.
If you create a “Pinnacle Boss” that can’t be beaten with any form of Latency or Rubber banding and requires a full defensive build that tanks it for 10min before the boss eventually dies of Boredom then you’ve created a Tanking Training Dummy… Congratulations, WoW done this back in Mists of Pandaria.
Uberoth is literally a Tanking Training Dummy with a Disco going on around him.
As for his drops; Umbral Blades is really good right now, struggles to beat him because of squishyness but gets the job done.
I can’t do it with the class because of my Latancy but still manage to get to the last phase pretty consistently.
Stopped trying because dying to rubber banding was becoming irritating and I’m enjoying the game this time around.
Add 1 simple Trinket from Uberoth and change Umbral Blades to Physical and your damage Sky rockets so high that the Boss becomes a joke.
Saying “Not by a Large Margin” is just plain wrong.
I agree with everything else tho… The Disco Training Dummy should be difficult and tough bosses should have good loot, it’s a Pinnacle Training Dummy so we should be rewarded for time.
And yeah, more power creep will happen and eventually the Dummy will be accessible to a wider audience.
I think it has quite a lot of HP without the self healing by the looks of it, I mean shit Im a normal abby struggler I did it 7 times today with another dude doing most of the work lmao!
I know they didn’t spend a year on “him” but they had a year to work on the game and im sure they had the ideas they worked on prioooor to that year and I mean was it last min “just add some hp and attacks and call it uber?” kind of scenario? I love the fuck out of this game its awesome I just don’t want the bosses to go in the “uber” direction when they could add new ones or even ask for ideas from players (not me) and then tweak them cos some of y’all probably have epic ideas!
Those seem to be contradictory. You say you need a face tanking build but then admit that umbral blades (and dive bomb also and some others I linked) gets the job done, even though they are squishy.
That is a separate issue that isn’t actually related to Uby or his difficulty. If you’re having high latency, that is an issue that should be fixed and that should also affect you with everything else.
And if you do have high latency and can’t fix it, I’d advise you to use offline mode instead to get around that.
They likely did that because that was the spot Aby should have had in the previous season, but they didn’t balance him properly, so lots of builds/people managed to kill him.
So rather than massively buff Aby to the point Uby now is (which wouldn’t be a good feeling for players), they simply made Aby more accessible and made a new version on what Aby should have been to begin with.
I don’t quite get what you mean by this. I don’t think that they ever said that only x in a hundred or thousand players would be able to beat Abberoth though i guess that could be implied by calling him a pinnacle boss. But if Abberoth’s difficulty or lack there of last season, why not just buff him? Wouldn’t that be easier than making a whole new fight? Why nerf Abby then make Uberroth?
Surely the easiest answer to “well fuck, too many people are killing Abby” is “and then we doubled it”?
Because players wouldn’t like it that they managed to kill Aby and suddenly only a few manage it. It’s taking something away from the players, which tends to leave negative impressions.
It would be like making Julra ten times harder. Everyone would complain. It would be better to simply add a new T5.
I think that Uber difficulty in Aberroth is more like a trophy than a difficulty. If you invest time on your build(s) enough you can kill him. If you choose to over exaggerate and complain about it,you waste time from improving and being closer and closer to achieve Uber kill. That’s my PoV at least from what i see and what i learn.
Well, obviously. They are chase items that aren’t required, it is just something you can optimize already decent builds with. Besides if you really wanted to, MG is an option.
I have some problems with that fights visual clarity and it being insanely dot heavy but otherwise I think it’s a great first attempt from EHG when it comes to aspirational content.
