[Unofficial] Roadmap to 1.0 and Beyond

ffioriti · September 5, 2023, 9:28pm

Thanks for this post! Holy moly.

AndrewTilley · September 6, 2023, 8:15pm

Here’s two recently released interviews; one between Rhykker and Judd, and the other between most of the LE Maxroll team and Judd, Mike, and Karv from EHG.

Also, here’s the official Maxroll news article where the video above was originally posted.

AndrewTilley · September 13, 2023, 3:20pm

I’ve updated the following sections of this thread. I’ve included all the updates in this post so that you don’t have to go hunting around all of the sections to find the new stuff.

This update contains plenty of new details, mostly thanks to McFluffin, LizardIRL, and Terek for asking some great questions which EHG were happy to answer with new information. If you’ve already watched both of the videos posted above then not much else is new here.

Unfortunately I’m running out of space, apparently poor planning on my part , so I did have to shift two sections (Dodge-roll Mechanic and Passive Tree Mastery Bonuses) out of Classes, Skills, & Passives and into Miscellaneous. Future updates to this thread will likely be more sparse as I’ll only be including new information rather than almost everything that’s said about a topic. The Roadmap to 1.0 and Beyond section is unaffected by this as it still has plenty of space available.

If I’ve missed anything or you find any errors please let me know. Thank you!

We also got another news article from Gamescom.

PCGamesN

Release Date

Cycles

September 6, 2023
Rhykker: When you’re going to be doing your content rollouts, is that going to be with your cycles?

Judd: Yes, yes. So cycles in Last Epoch – and I know a lot of people have a lot of questions about cycles in Last Epoch so maybe I’ll talk to that for just a second. Cycles in Last Epoch will be very similar to what you might see in Diablo with seasons or Path of Exile with leagues. So we’ll be releasing cycles with a large amount of content additions which will come out, you know, every three to four months and what they’ll do is it’ll introduce fresh leaderboards and a fresh environment for characters to start on an even playing field. We will take existing characters and we’ll put them into the “legacy mode” so characters won’t be wiped or anything like that, you’ll still be able to access your characters of course.

I guess another thing to touch on here is that we have so many things that we want to add to the base foundation of the game. So with these cycles we’ll be adding a number of things to the endgame systems and skills and masteries and stuff like that and we won’t be getting to things like temporary cycle mechanics that we’re just going to utilize and then throw away afterwards. It is very likely that we do temporary cycle mechanics in the future – I would say maybe even the more distant future but there’s so much that we want to add to the base game still that we’ll continue to do that through the cycle releases and the patches.

Rhykker: Okay, so if I’m understanding this correctly, at least for the first few cycles if someone doesn’t want to start a new character from scratch whatever content rollouts will still be coming to, you said, whatever the non-cycle will be?

Judd: Yes, yes…absolutely. Yes.

Rhykker: Okay, gotcha.

Source: YouTube Link

September 6, 2023
Terek: So is 1.0 the first cycle?

Mike: Yes, 1.0 is the first cycle. We’ll be adding in new content with every single cycle that comes along and initially those cycles will be included in our base mechanics as well. Everyone who’s playing on the cycle when a new one starts will have those characters transitioned into the legacy system where they’ll be able to keep playing their characters, keep interacting with the new content and keep having fun. However, anyone who wants to engage in the ladder and compete with other players will start over from scratch. This will provide, especially for people who are playing in Merchant’s Guild, this will provide an economy reset so they’ll be able to start from scratch and really have a lot of fun with a fresh economy.

Source: YouTube Link

September 8, 2023
Q: Why should players who do not care about ladders play the cycles if there will not be an exclusive cycle mechanic and all content will also be available on standard servers?

Mike: So the plan, at least initially, for cycle content is to have that be released everywhere simultaneously. It’s possible that we may make certain – like maybe there’s a unique item or something that’s only craftable if you’re on the ladder. For example, maybe Fractured Crown can only be found when you’re playing a cycle or something like that. Or maybe there’s like a race event and the first thousand people to get to level 90 or to beat Lagon in empowered, I don’t know what, but they get some sort of bonus and maybe that’s like an item in game…though it’d probably be a cosmetic. It’s possible there could be some small things, initially, that would be a reason to play cycle if you’re not interested in the ladder.

The primary reason to play cycle, initially, is going to be that you’re interested in the ladder and also an economy reset. So with the Merchant’s Guild coming out there’s a huge economy paradigm shift that’s going to happen. Having that be an economy where people who have been playing for thousands of hours just drop and immediately be able to list things, well after they’ve earned the favor, that are significantly better will make things a little weird initially. So I would recommend starting 1.0 in the new cycle but you don’t have to.

Source: YouTube Link

Server Performance/Stability

September 6, 2023
Terek: So with 1.0 getting closer than ever, is there going to be any improvements to multiplayer?

Judd: Yes! [laughs] Yes, absolutely. So this is actually the number one priority within the studio – is to make sure that all of our multiplayer features and all the server performance is improved. This is something that the playerbase will be seeing throughout the next many patches. Patch 0.9.2 comes with a lot of improvements. We have a lot of stuff slated for 1.0 but things like reducing the time between loading scenes and making it so that when you have four Necromancers in endgame with a hundred skeletons a piece isn’t making servers light on fire. Doing things like the social features, making sure that those update more quickly when you’re interacting with those. Those are all things that we absolutely know need to be improved and are actively working on.

Source: YouTube Link

Character Creation Options

September 6, 2023
McFluffin: We used to have a lot of community events earlier in the development process which was kind of the way we made our own sort of seasons while we were waiting for the development of the game. VisionGL was running tournaments and there was lot of cool stuff that we were able to do. Unfortunately some of that stuff hasn’t been able to be done lately with some of the changes, especially to multiplayer. Do you all have any plans to address that and bring that stuff back so the community can start to do some cool things again?

Judd: We do. I think Mike actually has a good answer for this one.

Mike: Yes, we are definitely looking to bring that type of interaction back with our community because this was something that I really enjoyed watching myself. Watching those races it was just a ton of fun to see and the restrictions that were put on those characters and how people adapted to those situations to make cool new builds and things. So those were events that we really enjoyed watching ourselves. With the changes that were required to come with our initial version for account found instead of character found solo versions, we are going to be adding back in “Solo Character Found” options to multiplayer. So this will re-enable the ability for people to have completely fresh starts where there’s no interaction from previous characters, not just your own things you’ve found.

Source: YouTube Link

Character Limit

Dungeons

Monolith of Fate

September 6, 2023
LizardIRL: Talking about the monolith, a lot of people have been asking for a faster way to progress towards monolith, especially with second characters – how to get too empowered faster, especially if you’re a bit experienced. Is this something that EHG is considering?

Mike: Yeah absolutely. We’re pretty happy with how the first character experience is when you first get into the monolith and you’re still learning how things are going or you’re at the start of a cycle start and your character doesn’t have any gear that it’s relying on from previous characters you’ve been playing or you’re playing solo or something like that. So we’re pretty happy with how that progression and pacing is going. There’ll be some changes there but we’re really looking at targeting changes on follow-up characters, like you said, where you already maybe have a bunch of gear stashed and you don’t need to grind at all for some key pieces for your build and you’re already up and running and online. So you’re maybe a little bit more powerful than you would be if you were going through for the first time.

So these follow-up characters, we’ve got some changes planned and they’ll be coming in 1.0 primarily that will help with these secondary characters getting to empowered faster and really just staying challenged is really the important part. It’s so you’re not feeling like you’re going through stuff that you’re maybe over leveled or overpowered for and you still feel like what you’re doing is progressing your character and not just getting through some checkpoints.

Source: YouTube Link

September 6, 2023
Terek: Currently, the way corruption and echo modifiers interact between each other can create unpleasant difficulty spikes. Are there any plans to address this?

Karv: Absolutely. So currently there’s a bit of a problem where you can have a 200 corruption echo with a lot of modifiers and because the modifiers scale with corruption they can be way more difficult than say a 400 or even a 500 corruption echo that has no modifiers. So we want to change it so that corruption is the primary way to, I guess like, check your builds power and what the difficulty is so that it’s way easier, especially for the community, to discuss build power. This is so that you don’t just randomly see people making videos or talking about how their build is so good doing 600 corruption without modifiers and then you have people struggling with the same build trying to follow it doing crazy, crazy modifiers on like 300 corruption. Obviously we have other changes like Judd mentioned about expansions to the monolith that we want to do that are different, but the corruption changes are definitely coming.

Source: YouTube Link

September 6, 2023
McFluffin: So sticking with the monolith, another topic is blessings. So I personally really like blessings. I love that they’re target farmable and I can continue to farm the same boss until I get the blessing and the roll that I want but one pain point for a lot of players is that if you have a good blessing and you decide to replace it and then want to go back later you have to do the process all over again and that isn’t always necessarily the most fun thing to do. Do you all have any plans to address that?

Judd: Uh, yes. No, we completely agree with you. So we are making a change there, and I believe that this is new information. Whenever you obtain a blessing you will actually be able to store that permanently and then you’ll be able to swap between the different blessings that you have. Also, when you obtain the blessings and you swap between them they will retain the roll in which you receive them. The mechanic in which we are going to allow players to swap between them is not completely defined yet but we don’t believe that’s going to be a hard thing to figure out and so this will be coming in the future.

Source: YouTube Link

September 8, 2023
Q: Do you plan any endgame content for monolith for the next patch?

Mike: We do have some plans for things to do with monolith next patch. Nothing on the same scale as like a new dungeon system. Nothing on that scale, but there’s some. This patch had a bunch of little tweaks and changes to the monolith system and next patch will have tweaks and changes to the monolith system too. Maybe something a little bit bigger, I don’t know yet. The main focus is not specifically on monolith changes. I think the monolith is in a really good spot.

Oh there’s, okay, what am I’m talking about – there’s definitely a change to the monolith coming because it didn’t quite making into this patch, though I thought in my head that it did. Yeah, there’s stuff coming – mechanical changes that will affect everyone. For example, there are changes to the blessings and how they work that are coming. So you’ll be able to switch blessings a lot easier than now for ones you’ve already earned. Also, we’re improving the unlock time for empowered monoliths for follow-up characters after your first playthrough in any given environment – so ladder, non-ladder, or whatever you want to call it. So yeah, there’s definitely room for improvements and there are things planned.

I still really want to add like a – monolith is really hard to add a pinnacle boss to because it has infinite corruption scaling. There’s always a situation you can be in where some boss is better than the uber boss of the monolith. So if you put a boss in the monolith that says like you have to beat every timeline in empowered to even attempt it, or maybe you have to find some specific item to even attempt it – if we were to hypothetically do something like that there’s always the potential for the Shade of Orobyss to be harder to fight based on corruption.

We’re also putting more weight behind corruption in the monolith as well, just so that you don’t get into situations where you’re like this build is a 6,000 corruption build but can’t do certain 200 corruption areas, you know, that sort of thing. I’m being a little hyperbolic but you get the idea.

Source: YouTube Link

Future Plans

September 6, 2023
Rhykker: We got a lot of different skills, there’s roughly about 120 skills in the game?

Judd: Yeah, there’s a 119 skills in the game currently with skill trees, which is awesome. Tons to play with there. We are going to be continuing to implement more skills in the future, of course, like we had talked about. We’ll also be revisiting old skill trees in the game as we continue to produce new tech and we and the community have new awesome ideas that we’re excited about putting into those. So we’ll be continuing to add skills and then go back and iterate on them as we have new and cool ideas.

Rhykker: When you say adding new skills, do you mean just for new masteries and new classes or also for existing ones?

Judd: Yeah, so we actually do have plans to add more skills to a number of base classes and masteries into the game but, of course, also the new masteries, yes.

Source: YouTube Link

September 6, 2023
McFluffin: Could you guys tell us a little bit about your plans going forward for endgame?

Judd: Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot. Endgame is of course extremely important in these games. The vast majority of time that people are going to spend in an ARPG and Last Epoch is in endgame so we’re going to spend a very disproportionate amount of time investing in the endgame expansion. To give you a couple examples here we have multiple endgame expansions for the Monolith of Fate already planned, another one kind of stirring up already in addition to that – some fun stuff coming there, and we’re going to continue to implement dungeons. We like dungeons because they’re a curated experience where we get to implement new mechanics and have these pinnacle bosses with these cool unique rewards. So we’re going to continue to do those and invest in those higher tier dungeons that players can really sink their teeth into.

We’re going to continue to implement more random events and encounters so that as you’re traversing through these endgame areas, especially in the Monolith of Fate, it stays fresh and exciting and you don’t know exactly what’s around the corner. Another one is that we want to implement some pinnacle uber bosses that are more static in scale so that you can really gut check your gear and your build amongst the community.

So those are just a few of the things that we have coming for endgame but there’s going to be a lot of really great stuff coming here and as we are continuing to develop the game for many years into the future you can absolutely suspect that much of that will be going into the endgame portion of Last Epoch. It’s very important.

Source: YouTube Link

Balance

Boss Mechanics

September 6, 2023
LizardIRL: Boss damage reduction has been quite controversial since its release and we’re wondering what you guys think about it and are you guys looking at it? Please help.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. Adaptive boss damage reduction is not achieving the goals we want the system to achieve right now and we definitely have some plans to shake things up there. We really want to have something in its place that’s going to allow both first-time players and veterans to really just have a much better experience with it. There will still be a system in its place, so it’s not just going to be removed completely but it’s going to be a lot more fun to interact with and something that you can play with and not just smash your head against.

LizardIRL: Okay…I’ll take your word for it and you’ll hear us. [laughs]

Mike: I expect so. [laughs]

LizardIRL: Of course.

Mike: Yeah we really like designing engaging boss fights and it’s something that we really want to have be a highlight for players experience as they’re playing the game. We know that the current boss adaptive damage reduction system can be a little bit frustrating for players and we’ve got some new plans in order to make it an interesting mechanic to play with instead of something that you’re just fighting against.

Source: YouTube Link

Zone Save State

Weaver’s Will Uniques

Gear Progression

September 6, 2023
Terek: How does EHG feel about the current gear progression? You were talking about trade, so how will Item Factions affect it?

Karv: Oh yeah, so of course you’re going to be trading so you’re going to have access to better items faster than before so you’re going to be able to destroy your enemies way faster. Also, the Circle of Fortune guys, like myself, can boost their item drops through prophecies to be able to target farm more and they’re also going to be getting better gear. So our power is going to be higher than the enemies would normally be. We have a bit of a low point in the early endgame where we have a bit of a plateau when it comes to the gear progression. So obviously the ceiling is going up now as you’re going to be able to trade for items so the plateau is like way up there now, and the same goes for the Circle of Fortune.

So that means that there’s going to be power creep – so the players are going to be stronger than the enemy so we have to understand that. So we have two things; one thing that we’ve already been doing, which is whenever we have a major patch we are increasing the monster health and damage. You can see this in the patch notes if you go way back. The second thing we’re doing is we’re making better monsters that are smarter, have cooler abilities, they’re way more engaging, and we’re reworking old and kind of bad monsters into way better ones as well.

Source: YouTube Link

Class Design

September 6, 2023
Rhykker: Amongst those 15 current masteries, each of them seems to fill some unique niche. How do you manage to keep adding more and make them all remain distinct?

Judd: Yeah, that’s a great question. So going into the design process of that a little bit you, of course, start with defining a strong class fantasy for a class when you’re working with the team there. You look at maybe what doesn’t exist in the game or what might be lacking or if there’s an element that might not be utilized enough in the game. Another tactic we use is making sure that we define what a class is not going to have. So, for example, the Mage class does not have minions and will not have minions and that keeps it from being so that the classes end up being homogenized in a way that we don’t want to end up having.

Rhykker: That’s very interesting. So for every class you kind of have like a “is not list” on it?

Judd: We do and it’s not always, you know, minions or something like that but there will usually be things that we say like this class isn’t going to have this type of element associated with it or it won’t have this mechanic or something like that. It does help us keep them differentiated.

Source: YouTube Link

Remaining Masteries

September 8, 2023
Q: The only disappointment in minions I had was that Warlock will not get cool demon minions.

Mike: Yeah, this goes back to keeping the classes distinct and interesting. So with Necromancer one of the biggest things they have in their arsenal, the main defining thing, is that they’re a summoning class. That’s like the big thing about them and if we did Warlock as a summoning class too then there’s not really a lot of room for anything else in that mastery because you’d have two summoning classes and then one non-summoning class and you’d go okay, well the majority of the class specific stuff has to be minion builds and that’s really narrow for a lot of people. That’s not to say that we won’t eventually make a fourth mastery that has minions involved in classes that have two masteries already, but it just wasn’t time to add a second minion mastery to Acolyte.

I really think Warlock’s going to be awesome. I’m excited for it and work is well underway. I think Justin said he completed one of the mutators yesterday or the day before and there’s another one that’s well underway too, it’s great.

Source: YouTube Link

Missing Skills

September 8, 2023
Q: Are there any plans to add one more skill to classes that only have 4 skills or are you happy with their current skill selection and don’t feel like any class fantasy is lacking?

Mike: So one thing we did decide this patch recently – so previously in the past I’ve always come into to the skill trees and been like, and lets just pretend that Frost Claw doesn’t exist and there’s this perfect grid of all of them, and I’m like see how they all fill up nicely. [Mike has the Skills & Specializations window for Mage open] It’s perfect and everything, great. Yeah they’re all going to be like this. Well…we decided that, why are we making them all the same anyways? Is it just for symmetry? Just so that it looks nice, like what’s the deal? Why are we even doing this? Um, and we couldn’t really come up with a good answer other than that it looks tidy and you don’t have people asking if there’s more skills coming or something like that.

There’s always going to be more skills coming and as soon as we start adding more skills it’s going to be off anyways so we figured hey, let’s just start putting it off now. This is part of the justification for adding Frost Claw because this does put it off from every other class immediately. So yeah, every class and every mastery will not have the same number of skills and the same skill complement as each other at 1.0. Maybe some mastery gets a sixth skill, probably not. Maybe some mastery launches with only four skills, you know, that sort of thing. There will be some slight variances in the number of skills that you see but it’s mostly just because we’re not using that as a constraint anymore.

Source: YouTube Link

Skill Updates

Chapters 10-12

September 6, 2023
Rhykker: Is the campaign something you plan to expand upon with future either cycles or expansions or anything?

Judd: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ll be continuing to add more chapter content to the game. There’s a lot of story that we intend to tell with Last Epoch and we’re not trying to rush a number of these story arcs. So the story of Last Epoch will continue to evolve and be told for many patches into the future, absolutely.

Rhykker: Now you guys have the whole time travel element to the story. I feel that kind of gives you a lot of leeway in being able to continue the campaign in interesting ways by well, go back in time and something else happens.

Judd: Absolutely. Yeah, time travel is going to enable us a lot of great things, it already does, but for the future development of the game 1.0 is just kick off and the things that we’re able to do with time travel are going to be really, really awesome. Also, it lays a really great foundation for endgame because we get to go and tell the stories in different timelines and realities of what could have been and that gives us this foundation to just expand upon forever. So if we’re developing the game for many, many years into the future this does really good stuff for us.

Source: YouTube Link

Campaign Skip

September 6, 2023
Rhykker: When we’re looking at the cycles, do we replay the campaign every cycle or do we have an option of skipping the campaign?

Judd: Yeah, good question. So we do think that the campaign is an important part of the experience of creating a new character and so we intend for players to play the campaign. Now there are things like dungeons in the game which can help you skip a swath of content especially if it’s your second character in a cycle, it’s an alt, and you have these dungeon keys. So there are ways to speed up that progression but yes, we do feel it is important to make sure that players get to experience the campaign when they go into a new cycle. Also, we’ll be continuing to add cool stuff and random events and things like that so that it’s not just the same exact thing every single time.

Source: YouTube Link

Marketing

Achievements

Cosmetics

Controller Support

Transmog System

CaiusMartius · September 13, 2023, 3:53pm

New content with every single cycle. Love the ambition.

YES!!!

Excellent to hear, even though I already suspected this would be the case.

Llama8 · September 13, 2023, 6:27pm

That is kinda the point with seasonal content, don’t let D2/3 teach you otherwise.

tny · September 24, 2023, 3:50pm

This is great, thank you.

AndrewTilley · October 13, 2023, 5:07pm

Below are the latest updates for the sections of this thread I’m currently tracking. If you’ve already read my transcription of the September 29, 2023 Dev Stream then you can skip those quotes if you’d like.

Outside of the roadmap section, the majority of this information hasn’t been added to its relevant section of this thread due to limited space. Similarly, this update is spread across two posts as it exceeded 50,000 characters.

If I’ve missed anything or you find any errors please let me know. Thank you!

Post 1 of 2

Roadmap Discussions

Release Date

Item Factions

September 15, 2023
Q: Can you say at which point during the game we will unlock the factions?

Mike: I don’t know specifically, but I should know this. We have decided at what point specifically they will be unlocked. The first time a character goes through the campaign it will be a little bit later than follow-up characters. So follow-up characters will gain access to turning factions on earlier than the first character of that cycle.

Where will it be? It’ll be in the campaign. There’s a thematically appropriate point at which you’ll encounter a character that will be related to the theming of the Bazaar that will help you get that quest rolling because it’ll be a little side quest – it may actually be inserted into the main quest line. I’m not sure which era it’ll be in either, but it’ll be in Maj’Elka in either the Imperial or Divine era I’m pretty sure. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

September 29, 2023
Q: Will the Circle of Fortune and Merchant’s Guild be the only factions at 1.0 or are there plans for more?

Mike: Yes, it will be the only one at 1.0 and there plans for more after 1.0. It’ll be really obvious in the UI, once you see that, that there will be more factions that’ll come later. There will be multiple independent mutually exclusive sets of factions. So what does that mean? [Mike opens MS Paint and starts drawing] It means that there’ll be an A or B option and that there’ll be, at some point, another that’s 1 or 2 and you can be an A1 or an A2 or a B1 or a B2. So you can mix and match those but it’s one from this one and one from this one type of system. This could be extended to be – maybe one of them has three options and another one has two options. So it may not be just pick one of two, some of them may be pick one of three…who knows.

However, initially it’s just going to be the Item Factions. It’ll just be Circle of Fortune and Merchant’s Guild as your only two options to pick from, but down the road we will add more factions into the game. They’ll have their own purpose and they’ll have their own challenges and rewards and content and all that sort of stuff that goes with that, but the initial goal of the faction system is for Item Factions. Goal is probably the wrong word, the initial purpose we’re using it for.

These factions were not intended to be the original two factions. We didn’t actually have a set of like ‘Okay, these are going to be the first two factions that come out’ yet, but as we were looking at the trade system and what to do with it we thought ‘Hey, well we’re going to have to give players a choice at some point between these two options. How do we that? How do we give them that choice? How do we split those up with an in-game way of doing that?’

Kain: At 1.0 those will be the only Item Factions.

Source: Forum Link

Cycles

September 15, 2023
Q: Is there anything you can share about cycles or is nothing set in stone yet?

Mike: I mean the basics for cycles we can talk about. So it’s going to be pretty similar to the sorts of things you see in like Path of Exile, and I don’t want to say D4 because I haven’t really paid attention to some of the specifics there and I might shoot myself in the foot a little bit. Initially it’ll feel like Diablo 2’s resets, or leagues, where it’s just a new ladder basically and then it’ll start to drift further and further towards like what D3 did or what PoE does – where there’s new mechanics that show up or there’s new content that shows up and that sort of stuff.

We really don’t want to maintain two versions of the game as much as possible. So we want to keep most of that content universal; cycle/non-cycle…cycle/Legacy is what we’re calling it. However, there might be some little things – like maybe there’s an item that we’re not sure is going to work and we’re like ‘all right, this one’s available for the cycle but it may or may not ever go to Legacy. We’re not sure yet.’ Something like that, you know. All of these things are very subject to how it feels. Did it work? Did we try it? Did it go well? Did it fail? Did people tell us it was awesome? Did people tell us it sucked? We’ll definitely be evaluating how well the things we’re doing are going and then correcting as needed.

Source: YouTube Link

Ladder

Matchmaking

September 22, 2023
Q: Will there ever be matchmaking?

Mike: As far as matchmaking that you’re probably talking about, which is join into an automated multiplayer party creator type system – we do want to add more ways for people to play multiplayer with each other and more social features for getting connected with people automatically if you don’t like sit down to play with someone but you still want to play with someone. We don’t have that planned to be available at 1.0. If there wasn’t this painful problem with the zone transitions it might have gotten in at 1.0.

Kain: [In Twitch comments] It depends to what extent, but certainly possible. Just hitting a button to “drop into a public party” like D3 is less likely than something like a group finder board. It’s something we’re still looking into and discussing.

Source: YouTube Link

Arena

Dungeons

Monolith of Fate

September 29, 2023
Q: Are you guys hoping to expand the monolith system more after 1.0 or are you hoping to maybe branch out to separate endgame systems?

Mike: I love being able to answer either/or answers with one word – yes. Um, I will expand on it though. Yes, we are looking to expand the monolith more through several different ways. For example, the Exiled Mage’s in the Rune Prisons is one style of way we are expanding our monolith system. You know, just having that treasure goblin style of content – something small that happens inside the same play space. We’re also looking at having, and I’m going to use PoE as an example, like you find a map device in the middle of this map and it’s like a map within a map type thing – that sort of here’s a new zone to explore that you weren’t expecting to explore. Maybe it’s some cave or some mini little challenge area or something that because you found this it’s different than what you were expecting. These are all the styles of things we’re looking at, which is basically just everything.

We’re looking at different ways to improve the timeline interface. So this is when you’re looking to select which echo to pick – how you traverse through that system, what options are available to you there, and all those sorts of things are stuff we look at frequently because the monolith is our rift system, it’s our map device system – it’s that core backbone of our endgame. It’s got to feel great and there’s room to expand it a lot and to build on what we’ve got there, which is something we are planning on doing.

At the same time we are also looking at new systems. So like adding in new dungeons, and also adding in new systems altogether that aren’t either one of those things. So we kind of take a pretty broad approach to what we’re looking to add and how we’re looking to add those things.

Source: Forum Link

October 6, 2023
Q: I think I remember maybe in one of the interviews someone saying that the echo modifier/corruption system wasn’t really where you guys want it to be and that you planned on making corruption itself be the main stat enhancer, do you think these changes will make it for 1.0 or will it have to wait until after?

Mike: They should be there at 1.0. [Mike gets distracted by a subscription to the channel] Alright, what I’m talking about? Corruption. Yes, so that’s what I was talking about earlier where there was a mention of a build that was very high tier. We are really looking to have corruption be able to – okay, how do I rephrase this, right now you can have a build and you can say, ‘This build can do a thousand corruption’ but only if you take very specific and careful things in the monolith to make it just barely work at such high corruption, you know.

We really want you to be able to look at a build and say, ‘Hey, this build can do 400 corruption’ and have a good sense of how powerful it is right away. One of the main ways we’re looking at doing that is by putting more difficulty emphasis on the actual corruption itself than the modifiers that are going into it.

Source: YouTube Link

Pinnacle Bosses

September 15, 2023
Q: Any aspirational bosses coming with 1.0? Or things that make grinding worth it?

Mike: So endgame content, in general, is definitely missing like a capstone boss – like here’s Diablo, here’s any pinnacle boss type thing, or here’s the “oh did you beat the game?” It’s kind of grey what that is right now. We really want to make sure that whatever the first version of that is, because there’ll be lots of those things over the years, but whatever the first version of that is we want it to be a complete system and to feel special and to feel fun.

So I’m not sure if that’s actually going to make it into 1.0 or not – like an actual singular capstone/pinnacle boss. However, there will be lots of changes to endgame coming but it just might not contain that one specific change.

Source: YouTube Link

October 6, 2023
Q: I have a level 100 character with good gear and I can clear T4 bosses and 600 corruption. I love the game but I don’t feel like playing more, I need a challenge to aim for. Is there something in mind for players like me?

Mike: Well, you are basically – yeah, you’re at the top end of content that’s available right now. We are restructuring the way corruption works a little bit which may have zero effect on your build or it may devastate the corruption you can go to. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell. Most builds it doesn’t really change it that heavily. It’ll give better benchmarking capabilities so that a corruption number means more, is what I’m trying to get at. Though, I think what you’re actually looking for… [Mike gets distracted by a 2LP Woven Flesh drop]

Oh yeah, pinnacle bosses. Sorry, I was answering a question about like mega-endgame uber boss type things. We do have plans to include a very significant pinnacle boss system that will include… [Mike turns his focus to talking about a build contest]

I’m still answering this like uber pinnacle boss content stuff. Yes, we are designing pinnacle bosses. They will not be available at 1.0. They will be available after that, hopefully very quickly after that. It will be static difficulty content that is very, very difficult – so ways to benchmark how much you’re actually doing. It’s the sort of thing – like people quite often ask like, ‘Is this build viable?’ and it’s a very difficult question to answer because we have so little static difficulty content, but this will help with that. This will solve that completely.

Source: YouTube Link

October 7, 2023
Q: In the dev stream today, Mike responded to a question about pinnacle bosses. He described “static difficulty content” that provides “ways to benchmark how much you’re actually doing”. Mike went on to say that people often ask “is this build viable”.

Given EHGs prior stance on balancing around corruption item drop breakpoints, will the pinnacle content be within those existing breakpoints, will we see an extension of balance breakpoints, a rebalance of the corruption system more generally to suit this content, or something else?

I assume mechanical knowledge will be important. But, to what degree will viability be focused on character build (cognitive skill) VS gearing (time investment) VS players dexterity (as determined by practice and to some degree genetics or natural limitations such as disability)?

Mike: Little bit of it all really. The absolute hardest content will continue to be one more corruption than anyone has done. Pinnacle bosses will be aimed at very high corruption (after the corruption rebalance that will happen in 1.0). Similar to T4 dungeon bosses are now in a way but harder.

With regards to the combination that will go into being successful in said boss fight. An extremely skilled player with a lower quality build should be potentially able to do it if they really execute perfectly. A lower capability player should be able to complete it with a very high quality build. So player skill should be able to make up for some gaps in builds with skill. Some minimum build quality will be needed.

I think a good example of what I mean is that there is a video out there of a guy doing chaos tristram (the hardest content in D2 by a lot) with a level 20 something character. The list of people that can pull that off is probably pretty short.

Now, people with a kitted out max level pally and godly gear can do it with a little practice. But a noob with crap gear will get their ass handed to them every single time. I feel like this is super obvious stuff but it seems relevant.

Source: Discord Link

Future Plans

September 21, 2023
Judd: Thanks for the kind words. It’s awesome to hear that people are enjoying it as much as they do in early access. Once we’re around patch 1.3 - 1.4 I think we’re going to have something that is truly truly great.

perrythepig: Judd, can I get some insight as to why 1.3 or 1.4 are going to be big milestones in your eyes? I’m surprised to hear that 1.0 isn’t the milestone you’re commenting about, pushing for it to be “great”.

Judd: Hey Perry - Imagine D2 when they brought out LoD. D2 base was amazing and LoD is the point where it became the GoaT. I think what we have in store for the 1.x series is going to be our LoD and take our very strong base at 1.0 and elevate it substantially. My heads on what’s coming later as my role is planning a lot of it of course! After 1.0 we’ll be bringing back our roadmap/forecast so you guys have a bit more insight into what’s to come.

Source: Reddit Link

Minion DPS Tooltips, Stances, and AI

September 22, 2023
Q: Will there be more ways to interact with your minions beside the attack/move command? Like Grim Dawn’s stances for example.

Mike: We’ve toyed around with the idea of stances for quite a while now. It’s one of those things that we keep saying like ‘yeah, we should probably do that’ and like ‘how do we make it play nicely…like how does that interface look nicely and all that sort of stuff.’ We haven’t quite got it to where we want it to be before actually implementing that. I think that there’s a good chance you’ll see something like that in the game within a half dozen patches of 1.0. I just don’t know when but I’d be surprised if that never makes it in.

There’s other ways to interact with minions too, like with Sacrifice as an ability that’s a way to interact with minions. So we do try to build in skill interactions with them as well. There’s sort of a limit to the amount of control we want to give to minion builds, like control over the minions themselves, because at some point when there’s enough manual control over a minions actions in the field it almost feels more like you’re playing a party instead of a character that has minions. Being able to set a stance like offensive, defensive, hold ground, etc. – the basic stances are kind of the limit I would say, probably.

I think the next step from that is you start looking at Final Fantasy 12, fantastic game, but you would have like an AI that you would build out for your party members where you could say like ‘okay, if someone in the party is below 35% health then use heal on them. Okay, if there’s an enemy that’s within range 10 cast Fireball on them’ – that sort of stuff. We don’t want to get that granular with it. The times that we’re giving you ways to control at that level of granularity is usually when we’re allowing you to add and remove abilities from the menu itself and that kind of does that automatically, but it’s kind of a preset order that they add in.

Source: YouTube Link

Stun Mechanic

Bug Fixes

Weaver’s Will Uniques

Idols

September 15, 2023
Q: Are there any changes or more options to idols planned for 1.0? Something like Singularity.

Mike: For 1.0 we don’t have any specific anything specific planned for idols – like major overhauls or anything like that. However, there will be more idols coming. There will at least be more magic idols, like normal idols…like these teal type idols. [Mike hovers over a Stout Idol] There will definitely be at least more of those coming in 1.0. More unique idols coming in 1.0? I don’t know, maybe. I think it’d be pretty cool.

Speaking of Singularity though, there are more things planned for making non-crit hit builds more viable and more fun and more interesting. It’s really hard to make non-crit builds be viable for hit without just like ruining crit as an option and if we have to pick between the two of being more prevalent then crit is likely going to stay more prevalent than non-crit hit style builds.

Source: YouTube Link

Gear Progression

September 22, 2023
Q: Do you think gear progression in the game is currently too fast?

Mike: I think that there are points that it’s too fast and points that it’s too slow.

Q: It might be just me, but I hit a point where I just hunt for a perfect base Exalted with like 3 mods which happens quite rare. There isn’t a “ladder” of gear progression like in PoE for example.

Mike: Yeah, I think that’s a good description of most situations. It kind of makes sense that as your gear gets better there’s less room for improvement on it and usually you have smaller gaps between it right? So it can be tricky to find upgrades. Then, the base crafting system is so strong, you can sometimes end up with like 80% of your gear a lot faster than 80% of the way through the grind. On top of that there are items that exist, and this is still something that I don’t understand fully and I don’t know if I ever will because it’s just such a foreign concept to my brain that I don’t process it right…I just don’t know what to do about it – it’s like the existence of items that are technically possible but practically impossible breaking the distance of that curve.

Let’s draw on the screen a little bit here. So what am I talking about? So this is your time playing the game and this is your overall gear power. So your gear starts out pretty slow and then you start getting into crafting and it starts to progress faster and faster and then it kind of plateaus here. This is that like 80% quality gear from what we’re expecting people to have for super endgame stuff and then you still slowly get upgrades but it’s really not much in comparison to what you were getting before, as far as upgrades over time.

Graph Mike Drew

I think part of the problem is that there’s this gap of gear in here, where this is like the 4xT7 gear that doesn’t exist, with these pieces of gear that are just so unbelievably rare that for all intents and purposes might as well not exist. I don’t know what it is but the existence of this gear just even being possible in some database that you can look up, even if this is like the practical peak for your gear, it makes all of the gear that’s below this line here that everyone sees as their potential cap and they’re like, ‘Okay, well I got through the first half of the gear but how do I get into this like mythical top half of the gear?’ This mythical top half of the gear doesn’t really exist but the fact that it technically exists, I think, makes it tough for a lot of people to enjoy getting to this point. So I don’t know the way to fix that.

Also, I don’t know if this assessment of what’s going on is even remotely accurate either. This is me making wild assumptions.

Source: YouTube Link

September 22, 2023
Q: What I mean by “ladder” is - I have a rare in say weapon slot, and then I seek to craft really one step upper item, not just same mods with higher tiers, but like half of the affixes are different and those points are plural for each slot pretty much. In LE I just seek the same but more.

Mike: Yeah I think you – that is one of the downsides of having a system that is so powerful, and this is what I was talking about with the graph, is that you can so easily dictate which affixes are on your items. It’s fantastic as far as like getting your build set up and working and at least starting to experiment with it and that sort of stuff, but it does have that effect that you’re talking about, for sure.

We’re still experimenting with how we can shift that curve, and there’s secondary things that we can do to affect that as well. For example, one thing we’re looking at targeting which is related to items, technically they are items but we don’t present them as items, is blessings and being able to select previously encountered blessings at the roll they were encountered at. It’s something that we think will make having those wholesale changes with your gear a little bit easier.

Source: YouTube Link

AndrewTilley · October 13, 2023, 5:07pm

Post 2 of 2

Remaining Masteries

September 15, 2023
Q: Can you tell us if the falcon for the Falconer class is a minion? Is there any other minions in this class?

Mike: So I don’t have a ton of details that I can share about how exactly the Falconer is going to work or anything like that. I can basically just tell you what’s already been said. The Falcon will scale with minion stats. So if you want to focus on your Falcon as your primary damage source you’ll want to get increased minion damage for that. You won’t need the increased minion health stat as a Falconer. There might be ways that that can be used to scale things with the Falconer but barring other unforeseen things you won’t really need it as a stat. So yes-ish, it’s a minion-ish. Kind of, so to speak.

If you were to ask me if I think Falconer is a minion class I’d say yes. I know people would disagree with me. I know other people would very strongly agree with me because we’ve had this debate internally a few times – if it counts as a minion class or not. [Mike laughs] Generally I think it does count.

Source: YouTube Link

September 29, 2023
Q: I noticed today that Warlock was one of the original 10 masteries, yet it’s still not in the game even though later ones are there.

Mike: Very true.

Q: Is there something that held that mastery up?

Mike: Yeah, there is actually. We had a mechanic planned for the Warlock as it’s like keystone mechanic. If I talk about Runemaster then Runic Invocation and that combination of abilities is its keystone mechanic. If you look at Druids then shapeshifting is their keystone mechanic. So we try and – we don’t necessarily have one specific keystone mechanic for every single mastery. Sometimes there’s multiples, and all that sort of stuff, but the one that we had primarily planned for Warlock was one that we were not capable of doing at the time and we really wanted to do it. So we wanted to look at ways that we could get that into the game. Unfortunately, since then we’ve realized we can’t do it, or that we still don’t have the ability to do it. Maybe it’s possible eventually but we still don’t have the capabilities of doing it right now.

So, in order to try and fix that – we tried a lot of things trying to fix it but we were unable to. So we redesigned the class, approached it from a different angle, and I think it’s way better now…which is funny. We worked in a couple nods to that original thing but I much prefer the way that we went, which is great. Maybe that type of mechanic can show up later on a different mastery or something like that, but that’s mainly why it got delayed so much. Our inability to complete our initial vision for Warlock, I think, is one of the driving factors as to why we went to a three mastery system originally. That was a big contributing factor for it.

So yeah, we were just incapable of completing it. That’s what held it up, but it’s good. It’s one of those like happy problems, I think, in the end because we’ve ended up with something that I think is more fun. The other one it trampled on, I think, Necromancer a little too hard. It’s funny, it’s actually a similar problem to – like problems you can actively see in other ARPG’s and how they’ve solved them and things like that and given how it’s not really been solved in other ARPG’s very well in the last decade I think it’s unsurprising that we weren’t able to solve it either. [Mike laughs] Sometimes we can get in front of things but not this time.

Source: Forum Link

September 29, 2023
Q: How are the implementation of the new masteries going, have you worked on any?

Mike: Yes.

Q: Also, are the uniques for the new masteries being worked alongside or are they done after the masteries are finished?

Mike: Usually the unique items get added after the mastery itself gets completed just because there’s more quality checks that need to happen for a skill than a single unique and quite often the uniques will rely on code that the skills have created as well. So we usually get the skills in first and the uniques in after.

Warlock first pass implementation is done and we’re just starting to implement the skills trees for Falconer right now. I just created the mutator for the main passive – like this equivalent ability [Mike hovers over each mastery skill for Sorcerer (Meteor), Runemaster (Runic Invocation), and Spellblade (Shatter Strike)] for Falconer yesterday. I almost said the name of it too. [Mike laughs] It’s just called something generic – the Falconer gets Falconry! [Mike laughs] There we go, I’ll just call it that. That way I can’t spoil it.

Source: Forum Link

September 29, 2023
Q: Will Warlock have minions?

Mike: Um, the primary minion class on Acolyte is the Necromancer. One of our core game design pillars is class identity. The Necromancer maintaining its identity as the minion class on Acolyte is really important to us. You technically do have access to minions on Warlock because there are minions on Acolyte. So yes, kind of. None of the skills we’re adding for Warlock have the minion tag, I can tell you that.

However, that doesn’t mean that a minion centric build is not viable on Warlock. I’m sure someone will come up with a minion centric Warlock build and it’s going to be awesome, but it’s going to be heavily specialized into Necromancer. Because you can do a minion Lich but I don’t think Lich has any abilities that are minion tagged. Does it? Let’s go check. Shout-out to Dammitt. Lich does not have minion tagged skills on it but you can still make a minion Lich. So I’m going to say technically the answer to your question is yes, but functionally the purpose of your question the answer, I think, is no.

Source: Forum Link

Missing Skills

Skill Updates

Passives

September 8, 2023
Q: Is there going to be any changes to Sorcerer to redefine or clarify its class fantasy now that it’s not the only elemental spellcaster for Mage?

Mike: Yeah, I mean, we did make some changes in Sorcerer already. [Mike hovers over three passives for Sorcerer; Dragon Mage, Dragon Breath, and Mirror Breath] Never mind, these nodes are still here. These nodes are going to go and new cool stuff will be put in their place. So yes, there’s stuff happening for Sorcerer still to help it fit a little bit better.

I think there’s definitely room for two elemental spellcasters, and even on the same mastery. Runic Invocation alone is such a huge change in how gameplay works that like – yeah, there’s not some big mechanic like that on Sorcerer but because they both exist as a Mage mastery class the big thing on Sorcerer is it doesn’t have this mechanic to monitor and to interact with. A lot of people don’t want something that complex and we know that they don’t want something that complex, which is part of the reason why we’ve added it here is because it’s very much an opt-in situation.

Source: YouTube Link

Chapters 10-12

September 15, 2023
Q: When will we get more story content? It cuts off at the last area but it’s obviously not done yet.

Mike: That’s true, it’s not done yet. There will be more story content added post 1.0. It’ll start pretty quickly post 1.0 and there’s still three chapters left to go. The story content won’t be completely done after that, that’s just where the campaign will stop. That’ll be the end of what we had mapped out as the main primary story arc and then there’s still room for more stories. It’s a time travel game. There’s room for other stories to happen really easily where you can just be like ‘well, you pull someone out of the storyline at this point and have them go do an adventure and then come back at the same point and it’s like they never left’. That sort of thing is really easy to do. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s plenty of room for future cycles to add on story content through endgame systems where it doesn’t extend the campaign but it still expands on the story in the world as a whole.

A lot of people have a big problem with a long campaign so in the future we don’t want to be just adding chapters onto the campaign because it can get really bloated. Maybe we introduce something like alternate chapters. I know that’s something people have talked about a lot where the storyline can branch and you can pick a different chapter to go do. However, there’s some tricky problems with that because say you’re part way through one side of that and then go play multiplayer with someone and they’re on the other side of it. How does that work? Yada, yada, yada. So it can get messy, but we really want to explore the options we have for expanding the storyline as a whole without necessarily bloating the campaign.

Source: YouTube Link

Campaign Skip

UI Changes/Updates

Stash

Passives Reset Button

Blessings

Player Power

September 29, 2023
Q: What’s your current view on balance of player power coming from 3 sources - skill trees, passives, items? Are there any plans to maybe shift that around in any direction?

Mike: Um, so there’s also Blessings which are kind of pseudo items/passives – it’s kind of hard to describe what they are, but there is that fourth source as well. I think it’s not really a secret, I think if you’re asking this question you probably agree with what I’m about to say, is that it’s too heavily skewed towards the skill trees themselves for raw damage power and that we need a way to take some of that power and at least anchor it to items a little bit better.

Generally a pretty key way of doing that is by having a node scale off of an attribute. So where’s an example of that? [Mike opens the Skills & Specializations window and selects the Runic Invocation skill] Okay, so this Cosmic Mind node – so this is defensive not offensive but it’s the same idea. So when casting an invocation using a sequence of three different runes you gain ward per point of intelligence. So this node can be really powerful. Maybe you can say it does 10% more damage per intelligence or whatever…per three points of intelligence or whatever. The primary way you get intelligence is from, well your passives, but also from items. So this anchors the power of this node relative to your items and it means that, without changing your skill at all, you can get more power out of your skills by upgrading your gear as well. Here’s the actual node, Elemental Lore, I should have been using as a reference because that’s a perfect example right there. [Mike laughs]

So yeah, we’ve started to try and increase the emphasis on power from gear and one of the ways we’re doing that is through nodes like this. I’d say that more nodes like this are going to be finding their way into skill trees, and it’s not strictly intelligence – it can be all sorts of things. Trying to tie that a little bit more to items themselves I think is really important and then you’ll also just see more power coming from items in general as item acquisition becomes more consistent, which will happen as soon as you see the Item Factions get added. So there’s little shifts like that which are happening. We’re also just toning down some nodes and how much power they give on skill trees and toning up some items and how much power they give. So I guess you could say that we’re trying to take a multipronged approach to it and I think it’s going to be good.

I don’t think you’ll see a huge, like some patch note that’s weirdly short but has gigantic implications where it’ll be like – I don’t think you’ll ever see a patch note that says something along the lines of something like, ‘Rebalanced every skill in the game to increase the damage percentage required through items’ or something like that. I don’t think it’ll be some big sweeping thing like that. It’ll be, and has been, kind of smaller changes that’ll keep getting improved.

Source: Forum Link

Dodge-roll Mechanic

September 29, 2023
Q: Have you discussed implementing a dodge-roll or something similar? What is the general stance on that kind of thing?

Mike: We’ve discussed it ad nauseam. We even implemented it at one point, internally…briefly. We’ve looked at it many times. We’ve looked at having it be its own ability, having it be one ability for every class and then have each class have ways to augment it individually, we’ve looked at it where every class has the same way to augment it collectively, we’ve looked at it as having items to augment it, we’ve looked at giving it a skill tree, giving it a skill tree per class, we’ve looked at giving it a single skill tree with specific nodes per nodes. Yeah, we’ve talked about it a lot.

One of the big problems – one of our primary design pillars is class identity. We do everything that we can to make every class feel and play and look and all that differently than every other class. That’s not just like we want Mages to be different than Rogues. We want the Bladedancer to be different than a Marksman. So there’s a lot there that we do to try to keep everything unique and distinct and interesting. Having the same dodge-roll on every class kind of undermines that. A generic dodge-roll also undermines movement abilities that are already around. I’m not saying all of this to say that it’s never going to happen, but this is kind of why it hasn’t happened.

I don’t know if we’re going to add one or not at this point. There won’t be one for 1.0, I can tell you that much. 1.0 is coming sans a generic dodge-roll. So it’s not something that we’re planning on adding right now but it’s not something that we’re 100% forever against. I hope that makes sense.

Source: Forum Link

Marketing

Localizations

Controller Support

UI Scaling

WASD Movement

Player Housing

API

Console Port

September 29, 2023
Q: I’d love to play this on my PS5, any plans for it?

Mike: Yes, we will be going to console eventually. These are very long-term plans. We do not have any specific timeline on when we’ll go to console. We are looking at both Sony and Microsoft for console releases. This is not something that we’ve started. It’s funny, there’s a few Reddit posts out there that I’ve left feedback on the topic and they really frequently get necro’d with someone being like, ‘Oh my God, I want this! Any updates on this?’ or something like that. I’m like, ‘Nope, no updates. Sorry, it’s still long-term plans.’

So we know there’s a market out there for it but we’ve just really got to get the game out the door at a high quality and if we were to try to tack console support onto that right now it would do one of two things; it’d either tank quality or it’d cause a big delay. We’re not prepared to have either of those two things happen so we’re not prepared to include console support right now. We haven’t started talking to Sony or Microsoft about getting onto their consoles at all. We don’t have any internal roadmap for who needs to do what to make that happen.

We don’t even know the requirements we need for it yet. It’s a long-term goal. It’s something where we’re like, ‘Hey, yes we want to do that. We want to get it onto console. We’re going to completely ignore it until we’re past 1.0 and then we’ll start figuring out what we need to do.’ So it’s long-term plans. We are planning on doing it. It will not be available by 1.0. After 1.0 and it’s stable and we’re happy with it then we’ll start to look at what we need to do to add it. It’s a ways off. The biggest thing is controller support, which we’ve been doing the whole time, and being in an engine that can then port to those consoles, which we are. So the major things are there, but there’s a few things I know we’re going to need that we don’t have yet.

Kain: We’ll likely introduce console at some point, but not currently in the works.

Source: Forum Link

AndrewTilley · October 18, 2023, 4:46pm

Below are the latest updates for the sections of this thread I’m currently tracking, and some that aren’t listed in the ToC. None of these topics have been added to the relevant section of this thread where they reside due to limited space (poor planning on my part).

If I’ve missed anything or you find any errors please let me know. Thank you!

Runemaster

October 13, 2023
Mike: I’ve been struggling a little bit with – so as I’ve been playing more and more Runemaster, we played a lot leading up to the patch…that’s all we played, but like this build in particular is the first time I really experienced this. I’m really trying to get a, and this is something that we’re looking at addressing, I’m really trying to get that cold, fire, fire invocation [Igneous Rain] ability as like my main damaging invocation. That’s the one I want to get, but I find sometimes that I don’t necessarily want it.

So I don’t want to lock it in all of the time but I do know sometimes that I’m going to try and get one and so I start with the cold rune and I try and get up to two fire runes. However, sometimes I accidently hit a third fire ability like Flame Ward or Flame Rush and I lose that leading cold rune. So I find myself popping off a fireball, which isn’t the end of the world and you go about your day and it’s fine.

That said, I’d love for there to be a way to – like once you get to three runes to just stay at three. I mean, I know there’s ways to force specific stuff as well but I don’t want it to always force it, is the problem for me right now. I’ve seen some suggestions to help remedy things like that recently. So I’m hoping we’re going to get that in. I literally just did it. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

Cycles

October 13, 2023
Q: How long will cycles last & how many do you already have planned out?

Mike: How long they last exactly will depend quite a bit on feedback we get from doing them. It will depend quite a bit on what else is happening in the ARPG space at that time, like is there another game that’s going to come out with their leagues or seasons and do we want to adjust things forward or back to avoid that type of thing. So the time for each will fluctuate a little bit here and there depending. I think that they’ll be roughly similar to what you’d expect from other games in the genre and what our patch cadence has typically been. Those numbers average out to roughly somewhere in the general range of 3-ish to 4-ish months.

Hopefully that was noncommittal enough because I don’t know exactly how long they’re actually going to be. [Mike laughs] And that could change. Maybe we get a whole bunch of feedback from people that’s like, ‘We desperately want it to be 6 months’ or ‘We desperately want tiny ones that are every 2 months’ or ‘We desperately want one big one and one small one alternating.’ There’s all sorts of things we can do to adjust that.

How many do we already have planned out? I’ve seen the plans for three of them with like – I’ve seen the plans for three specific ones and I’ve seen plans for many more that were not like, ‘This is going to be 1.1, this is going to be 1.2’ type specific. However, higher level planning stuff happens without me, as it should, so I’m sure there’s even more stuff…stuff that I don’t know about.

Source: YouTube Link

October 13, 2023
Q: Are you planning paid expansions like D4 or free leagues like PoE or no seasons at all?

Mike: So we’re doing our own thing, we’re calling them “cycles”. They will most similarly resemble Path of Exile’s leagues. PoE leagues will be the closest thing to Last Epoch cycles. They won’t be exactly the same. PoE is incredibly good at cranking out cohesive content with a storyline, tons of amazing artwork, and all of this stuff so the scale of a PoE league will definitely be greater, especially initially, than the ones we can deliver on probably. However, that’s all the sort of stuff that we’re going to like – we’re taking a lot of steps now that will have very positive cascading effects as we go on and get us in a situation where we’ll be able to deliver very frequent really awesome updates that’ll be a little more juicy than what we can do initially at least.

Also, on top of that, there’s a lot of things that are coming in early cycles that are kind of more like “core” to the game itself than sometimes you see in leagues. For example, the Item Factions or the Falconer and the Warlock. These things are not really – they’re kind of different from what you’d see in most leagues or seasons. These are systems that we always plan to have be part of the core game going forward and not be something that you conditionally interact with. So the first few cycles are more ubiquitous content at least and then we’ll start to branch out into, I guess, more self-contained experiences. That’s not a bad way to put it, yeah.

Another thing I want to mention is that all of the stuff we’re going to do, like how we’re releasing cycles and how we’re going to be delivering on that content, is very much subject to change based on feedback, as is basically everything else we do. We really try to listen to what’s going on and how we can improve it based on that feedback. Our favourite feedback comes in the form of, ‘When X happens I feel Y.’ Just in case anyone’s wondering, no reason. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

Monolith of Fate

Endgame Activities

Boss Mechanics

October 13, 2023
Q: I heard bosses have some sort of dynamic damage reduction which causes your DPS to be very low in comparison to other enemies, how does this work? Is this going to be changed/adjusted because it seems to break power fantasy?

[Mike answers this for 10 minutes but I’ve only captured the final few minutes of it here as I felt it contained the most relevant information]

Mike: So yes, we are looking at a way to still have a mechanic in boss fights that does have a similar normalizing effect on boss kill times, but less extreme than what it is now. That is one of the pieces to the whole puzzle that we are trying to do, is a slight normalizing effect on boss kill times. However, the really important part about it is not that it’s normalizing boss kill times but that it’s giving something fun to interact with. So the way that we’re going to do this is going to be a system that you can interact with.

Right now, the way adaptive boss damage reduction works is there’s no counterplay – the fastest way to kill a boss is to do the most damage as fast as you can and what the adaptive damage reduction does is it just reduces that speed and those numbers by an amount. If you know how fast you’re going to kill them it’s actually a fixed amount, and any attempt to like slow your DPS to let those numbers go back up and all that sort of stuff, yada, yada, yada…it doesn’t work. The fastest way to kill a boss is to kill it as fast as you can, which is great and should still be the case that you can kill a boss faster by doing more damage to it. Yes, you should be able to kill a boss faster by doing more damage to it. I know that sounds like the opposite of what I’m kind of talking about here but it’s not true, it’s not the opposite.

I know I’m being super vague and not really talking about it because the system we’ve planned isn’t implemented, tested, yada, yada, yada, but I’m talking about the goals and what we want to achieve here for it. Also, it may not be something that we fix right away. It may be something that needs more feedback and more iterations, but I think the next version is going to give ways to have counterplay and have more interesting decisions in how you want to approach the boss fight, as well as be more intuitive.

One of the big problems with the system we have now is that it’s very black boxy feeling, where you don’t really understand why it’s happening until you go into the game guide or the forums or you come here and ask about it. So we need the system to be more obvious what’s happening and be intuitive on how to interact with it to make it advantageous for you to be more successful than if you just held the DPS button down, possibly. Though, in some situations, if you get your DPS high enough just holding the DPS button down will still be the best way. So it’s that dynamic nature of that boss fight and being able to improve your character’s performance through strategy rather than not being able to do that is important too.

We’ve got some vague plans to improve it that will hopefully not impact your power fantasy but will hopefully enhance it actually. I think it’s going to be sweet. It’s a very elegant solution, very simple.

Source: YouTube Link

Bug Fixes

October 14, 2023
Q: I love this game but how can I recommend Last Epoch to my friends risking that they will encounter the same issues I do (e.g. terrible online mode and bugged offline)? Who will they blame? Me. On top of that they’ll most likely never run LE again and spread comments about how bad it is.

Judd: We hear you loud and clear. Before 1.0 we’re going to smash a serious amount of bugs and polish a ton.

The switch to server authority introduced a lot of issues. When LE is out of early access we’re going to hold ourselves to a high standard in terms of being bug free, and we know you all will too - but talk is cheap and that will be on us to prove. Thanks for your patience while we’re still working towards this and I’m glad to hear you’re still enjoying the game even with the issues there are to fix.

Q: Thank you for your reply. I am super happy with the directions you took while designing the game. If not for the bugs & server/client issues, you could easily say it’s a full released project and classes/trade will be coming in next “expansions”. I believe 90% community wouldn’t mind it at all.

Judd: And thank you for your feedback. I can’t promise we’ll never make mistakes or our servers won’t catch the occasional fire but I can promise we’ll always listen and prioritize communication - and of course fixing things that go wrong as quickly as possible.

I suppose I’ll use this opportunity to plug our new bug report tool as well. It’s seriously helpful to get in-game reports this way with attached logs and allows us to find and fix issues so much more quickly. Thanks for all the reports you guys have been sending in since 0.9.2 launch.

Source: Reddit Link

Set Items

October 13, 2023
Q: Is the planned update to set items something that’ll arrive with 1.0 or afterwards?

Mike: So I just want to be super clear because the way I’ve recently… Oh, Andrew it’s you. Okay great, let me put this on record. [Mike laughs] The way that I last – however I said it last time… Where was that? I just want to go read that out because I worded it really good last time. I think it may be on the Discord. I’m not going to find so I’m just going to redo it.

So we want to adjust how set items fit into the overall gearing process for your character. I think a lot of people have interpreted this to mean, ‘We’re changing how set items work or that we’re changing something specific about set items.’ Maybe, but those are not the same thing really and I just want to be clear that those are – I’m talking about how set items fit into the overall picture of…like how they fulfill their role in the overall gearing process and what that role is. We’re going to be updating that stuff.

So it’s less about – because I feel that a lot of people with the expectation that updates to set items are coming are like, ‘What does that mean? Oh, they’re probably going to buff them in some way.’ Getting set items to a point where they are part of the process in gearing an endgame character, the obvious way to do that is to buff them. However, I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing…even though it sounds like I’m saying that but I’m not saying that.

Andrew sorry, but to answer the actual question you asked – after 1.0. The set stuff is not planned to come with 1.0, I don’t think. We’ll see. Part of the problem is that it’s not done yet. We have a plan for it and I’ve seen the plan – it’s a fantastic plan, we’ve discussed it, we’ve talked about it but some things don’t survive implementation so I don’t want to start talking too heavily about it. I’m also being super vague because it could change.

Source: YouTube Link

Weaver’s Will Uniques

Missing Skills

Character Sheet

Blessings

October 13, 2023
Q: Any update on the blessing changes that were talked about in the Maxroll interview? (i.e. being able to more easily switch between previously unlocked blessings)

Mike: Ah, nothing’s implemented but we still plan to. [Mike opens the Blessings window] It’s essentially, it’s not finished yet, but it’s essentially this just being something that you can click on and pick the ones that you’ve done and these, instead of just saying the ranges, will actually have specific values as the highest value that you’ve ever rolled on that thing. Spoiler alert, these are technically items. These are actually items that you have in a special storage. These are as much of an item as these [Mike opens the Crafting Inventory window] and the special storage that they’re in. It’s literally the exact same system, just displayed slightly differently.

Source: YouTube Link

Dodge-roll Mechanic

October 13, 2023
Q: Will a roll/dodge mechanic be added?

Mike: This is something that gets brought up quite frequently. It’s something that we’ve experimented with in the past. It’s not something we are going to include at 1.0, I can say that for certain. Depending on how development of the game goes it’s not off the table for longer-term stuff for us to do and explore. It can be a lot of fun. I think the really big upside for it in my world is that it opens up a lot of things you can do in boss fight mechanics because you can guarantee that players have this reactive fast move limited resource that you can like, ‘Oh, if you don’t use it wisely you’re going to be in trouble’ or ‘If you don’t use it wisely you need to have some other tool to deal with this as well.’ I think it just creates some cool stuff you can do with it that makes the mechanics of the fight more engaging overall.

So yeah, there’s upsides there. Downsides, you know, if you give that level of mobility to every class it takes away a little bit of the identity of each class. The one class that it makes the most sense for is Rogue, and Rogue has Shift which is a very similar ability. It kind of eats into that identity that I think Rogue has as that type of character. We looked into doing all of this stuff. It may or may not come back still but definitely not for 1.0, I can tell you that.

We looked at having skill for it, as basically a dedicated skill tree on your bar with a mini-skill tree that goes with it. We looked at having one central skill tree for the whole skill – like everyone has dodge-roll and dodge-roll has a skill tree but then there’s nodes on dodge-roll that are unique to Rogue, or there’s Rogue specific items that can interact with dodge-roll that give it new special abilities and things like that. So we’ve definitely gone down this rabbit hole pretty hard. There’s a lot of pluses to it, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that can come out it. We even implemented and tried it a little bit. However, it just doesn’t quite fit with what we want to do and so it’s not something we’re putting in right now. I don’t want to close the door on it, but I wouldn’t expect it.

But I will say that it’s a good thing to make a post about on the forums in the suggestions section if you want it, or go find an existing post and upvote them.

Source: YouTube Link

Cosmetics

Offline Mode

Controller Support

WASD Movement

API

October 13, 2023
Q: When will the API become public?

Mike: I don’t know. I know that we’re in sort of a trial phase for it right now. I actually didn’t know it was being worked on until someone said that it was out and I was like, “What! That’s awesome.” So right now it is limited to – there’s two websites we’ve given access to the API for now. This is not a permanent situation. We do plan to give everyone the same access to it. The reason it’s rolling out slowly is just so that we have a chance to make sure that things are working the way we expect them to, that there’s no major problems with it, that it’s not going to cost us an arm and a leg with some sort of extra fees that are being incurred or something that we didn’t anticipate…I don’t know. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that we’re testing out right now with regards to that API system and once it’s more thoroughly tested by having other people use it and give us feedback on it then we’ll start looking at rolling it out on a wider scale. I don’t know when that’s going to be, I’m sorry.

Source: YouTube Link

Audio Source Selection

CaiusMartius · October 18, 2023, 10:13pm

This is a big one for me I’d love to see. There were some runes I really wanted to try but found it irritating to try to get it consistently.

Actually, would you prefer people don’t comment on this to keep it clean? Just occurred to me. I’ll move it if you want, no worries at all.

AndrewTilley · October 18, 2023, 10:45pm

Nah, I don’t mind at all. I’m actually surprised no one commented on the previous update, which arguably had a lot more new and interesting information. But yeah, I also found that discussion concerning possible updates to Runic Invocation to be intriguing. The reasoning is certainly sound.

Llama8 · October 19, 2023, 6:21am

AndrewTilley:

So we’re doing our own thing, we’re calling them “cycles”. They will most similarly resemble Path of Exile’s leagues. PoE leagues will be the closest thing to Last Epoch cycles. They won’t be exactly the same. PoE is incredibly good at cranking out cohesive content with a storyline, tons of amazing artwork, and all of this stuff so the scale of a PoE league will definitely be greater, especially initially, than the ones we can deliver on probably. However, that’s all the sort of stuff that we’re going to like – we’re taking a lot of steps now that will have very positive cascading effects as we go on and get us in a situation where we’ll be able to deliver very frequent really awesome updates that’ll be a little more juicy than what we can do initially at least.

Also, on top of that, there’s a lot of things that are coming in early cycles that are kind of more like “core” to the game itself than sometimes you see in leagues. For example, the Item Factions or the Falconer and the Warlock. These things are not really – they’re kind of different from what you’d see in most leagues or seasons. These are systems that we always plan to have be part of the core game going forward and not be something that you conditionally interact with. So the first few cycles are more ubiquitous content at least and then we’ll start to branch out into, I guess, more self-contained experiences.

What amuses me is that’s what GGG did with PoE. Started with smaller, easier-to-do leagues which became more complicated over time, then once a year they add bigger stuff. Not quite how I’d describe “doing our own thing”…

psychodrive · October 30, 2023, 2:28am

Offhand comparison is pretty huge

StaticYeti · November 10, 2023, 6:24am

Great post! So much useful information and i appreciate it very much!

Khaizen · February 15, 2024, 3:56am

just wanna to play with my friends, with less bugs and mp stability, don’t care about new content for now…

Freedom1 · February 15, 2024, 11:21am

I hope in future EHG will invent something like to skip Campaign / Adventure mode. We don’t wanna another poe style, when you have to do it on every Cycle on every char ;/ My proposition is you still need pass Campaign on every Cycle but just once, on one char enough, it will be fair and good choice. Sry, but besides all bad in D4, Adventure mode is very nice.

fknflo · February 15, 2024, 11:23am

You can do mono’s if you like as soon as you get to The End of Time. I agree tho, a separate leveling method would be appreciated.

DJSamhein · February 15, 2024, 11:24am

You can already skip the campaign. Dungeons work as campaign skips. However, they’re still not balanced so you can do them with a very low level character. Also, you won’t get idols slots/passives. But Mike has said that they’re working on dungeon balance and that, in the future, we might get alternative ways to get the idols/passives.

Freedom1 · February 15, 2024, 11:34am

Ye I know you can do that, after one char to move to Mono and drop keys. But the problem is exactly as you saying idols/passives, which are very important. Maybe just do idols/passives per account - ofc separately beetween Standard/Cycle and modes: SC/HC/Solo Found etc. I don’t say is the best idea, go to do this, but for me just that aspect of game can be rejecting for future playing.

DJSamhein · February 15, 2024, 11:36am

Personally I like the campaign, even in PoE. I don’t mind doing it multiple times because I enjoy the leveling process. I still play D2 and all it has is the campaign.
I agree with having alternative leveling systems. I think EHG is thinking about them and we might eventually get them, though not for 1.0 and maybe not even for 1.1 or 1.2. We’ll have to wait and see.