I saw this in the 1.1 patch notes, and got very excited:
Added a waypoint to Sanctum of the Architect so that if you die, quit, or disconnect during the Liath or Lagon fights you don’t have to rerun the whole Temple of Lagon and Temple Depths zones.
Would you consider adding a waypoint to the Julra fight, as well? I (and surely many, many other people) have spent a lot of time dying to Julra in the interest of smashing a legendary, and while I’m not asking you to change the fight or make it easier, it would be really helpful if you could at least make retrying it after dying (many, many times) a whole lot less tedious.
Given that Julra is a dungeon and dungeons are one-try mechanics which have the spirit of a perma-death or HC style game-type I don’t think that’s something which will be taken into consideration.
Albeit it would be fairly good if there’s some mechanic for disconnect or logoff to keep you inside at least, for example making the rest-areas after the 2 levels of the dungeon a distinct zone which lets you log off and on freely.
Still wouldn’t cause any changes for a DC during one of the levels or Julra herself but at least take a bit of the problem away.
I can’t think of another way to uphold the current thought behind the mechanic while also taking care of issues like disconnects.
That’s not going to happen … You are supposed to restart the dungeon when you die to Julra… But if you know the path thru the dungeon, you can get to her in like … 10 mins.
I understand. I just feel like that having to redo an entire dungeon to return to the boss after dying during the boss fight feels like my time isn’t being respected.
This is precisely what happened to me in patch 1.0; I was finding it really hard to get a good rhythm going for the Julra fight, and each time I died, by the time it took me to fight through the dungeon again to get to the boss, I had lost that rhythm, and had to restart the dungeon (and attempt, from scratch, to get the fight’s rhythm correct).
I went through dozens of keys, was unable to beat the boss, and lost my motivation. And it’s not even that my gear was weak. I just kept flubbing the timing or positioning.
So, even though I enjoyed all other aspects of the game, I quit playing, because I felt like it simply wasn’t worth my time to grind for keys and dungeon runs, only to keep dying and be unable to create the legendaries I wanted.
Now, granted, I was avoiding using OP / cheese builds in 1.0. In 1.1, I’m just going to look for the most overtuned build I can possibly get and try again. But I’d really rather not feel like I need to resort to this, I’d like to play a more average build and just not feel quite so punished.
We all have different ability levels and tolerances for feeling like our time is respected, so I completely understand if others disagree with what I’m asking for. I just figured I’d ask in case my request resonated with anyone on the dev team.
Well, it’s a ‘one off’ mechanic and actually entirely fine ‘as is’. But I also don’t want to de-value your argument there because it’s a viable one so hear me out on this.
The Julra fight is similar to a peak boss in other games of the genre, for example… like the Shaper/Elder/Sirus fights in Path of Exile, which need extensive amounts of time investment to get a singular try.
There it’s the need to do 4 full scaled maps before you get a singular try for the boss, one which often is as deadly as Julra since there’s also one-shot mechanics, albeit those can be cheesed that’s commonly not the case.
Last Epoch on the other hand trivializes the access to keys, before long you’ll have 10… 20… 30 of those available, which means a good amount of tries.
Also unlike in Path of Exile - for example, Torchlight Infinite also does that same thing actually - the time-gate there is to move through the 2 stages before the boss, this is a simple design decision.
It makes it harder to ‘adjust’ to the fight since the downtime in-between is higher but overall it allowed more tries in the same amount of time in comparison to the competition. I would say that’s a viable trade-off for it.
Which leads to the next part:
Which is utterly understandable!
I recommend making at least a ‘mediocre’ build, hence one which can kill T4 Julra reliably… and then start with T1 Julra for the mechanics. This way you’ll learn the mechanics and only have to watch out for the one-shot situations, hence timeline switches, the puddle and the lasers, everything else will be survived without issue… unless your gear is actually atrocious.
This is the way to learn the mechanic.
I hope this helps along a bit, it would be a shame if that is the deal-breaker since it can be circumvented. If such situations of ‘getting stuck’ because of personal skill limitations like reaction times - or the build simply not being up to par - is the case though… LE is working towards becoming more mechanically heavy in terms of bosses. Should it stay the same then it’s unlikely you’ll be able to enjoy the game for long-term into the future.
LE is made in mind to provide an environment which is less severe in demanding player-skill compared to PoE but needs a largely higher amount of skill then D3 or D4, this is their positioning which wasn’t filled from the market yet, otherwise demanding for them to compete with already established games without pulling in a core audience which feels ‘at ease’ exactly here instead of those other games. Hence it’s very unlikely to change.
This isn’t true, though. You get 6 portals, so you can try it 6 times. And even when you die and go back, they are still with the same health and at the same phase as when you died.
While it’s highly doubtful that EHG adds a way to skip directly to the dungeon boss without doing the dungeon, they may however implement something like the following that they’ve suggested for multiplayer in a future patch:
So maybe single-player gets a similar option to respawn on death in the future.
True, 6 ‘tries’ for a multi-phased fight with quite a few more mechanics then Julra has. If we wanna go into comparison.
Also 4 maps which each take 10+ minutes each while killing a fairly dangerous boss by itself at the end which each is comparable to a timeline boss in itself. Some of them are actually on the difficulty of Julra herself.
If you want to compare it 1 to 1 then you can use the labyrinth of Path of Exile, which is a pure copy of the system it handles… which has the same boss 3 times, vastly more dangerous traversal through the areas because of the traps and also is a lot larger.
So still, it holds true that the end result is that LE’s Julra is below the difficulty compared to Path of Exile’s system, it’s more simplistic and takes less time investment.
Unfortunately, that’s just how dungeons operate in LE. They are designed to be “hardcore” mechanics and rewards accordingly. That being said, I’ve personally not had any trouble getting through and to Julra, and the dungeon aspect feels more like a time-waster than anything actually substantial. Would it be nice just to be at the boss a little easier? For sure, and I’d personally prefer it. But we do got what we do got.
The build I was playing could actually get through T3 Julra without issue, but I just couldn’t get through T4 Julra. I have a feeling that the reason I was able to get through T3 Julra is that the gear I had was good enough against T3 Julra that it effectively masked any timing or positioning issues with my playing.
To that end, I don’t know how I can learn the Julra fight so that I can beat T4 Julra by fighting T1-T3 Julra, if it’s not going to be a representative experience. It seems like, if I can easily beat T3 Julra but not T4 Julra, my gear is helping me, and that the only way to learn the T4 Julra fight is to fight T4 Julra.
Except I’m back where I started, which is that I want to keep working on beating T4 Julra, but having to fight all the way through the dungeon each time feels extremely tedious. If I was dying to mobs in the dungeon, I’d understand. But I’m not. It just feels like a slog.
Luckily not many uniques even need T4 Julra for the mechanic, so she’s mostly a bonus in the majority of cases. But yes, T4 is a hard fight, she hits hard.
T3 would be a good place then to train, simply to have the mechanics down to the dot. It’s in majority a mechanical fight as the biggest hurdles tend to be the puddles and the lasers. The lasers can be handled without taking a single hit during the fight, reliably… and the puddle can worst-case be fully avoided. Everything else is then leftover and the make or break situation.
Yeah, they’re not meant to be taxing or exciting, which is a bit of an issue, the two stages of the dungeons need a overhaul with more reason to be there outside of the boss encounter at the end… or the end-result mechanic.
The task is simply to be a time-gate to reduce the repetition of Julra. As mentioned in path of Exile GGG focused on the acquisition of access as a hindrance mostly… while EHG with Last Epoch doesn’t go that road and instead focuses on the time-waste inside the dungeon. It’s a flavor situation, both have upsides and downsides.
Personally? I enjoy Path of Exile’s system there more since it can happen ‘on the side’ and when you want to engage heavily with the mechanic then you can.
Also as a last point:
Exactly, using T1 Julra as a ‘target dummy’ is also a fantastic way to handle the situation and get better with it.
Slogging through dungeon trash definitely feels like a waste of time to me, which is unfortunate. But, then again, most grinding feels like a waste of time to me. So, perhaps I’m just learning my appetite for Last Epoch and similar games. I guess I’ll just see how this all plays out for me in 1.1, and hope that the game feels like a good balance between fun and soul crushing content! <3
Well, 10 min is a bit long, but I think the biggest drawback of dungeons is backtracking due to the ever-changing layouts. In echoes it seems like they spawn your target dynamically based on where you go so you don’t have to backtrack at all and that feels so great that dungeons plainly suck in comparison.
Regarding the OP’s wish for a waypoint, I would prefer that too. Could still limit tries somehow, but recreating the PoE labyrinth that everybody (*) hated doesn’t feel like the best idea.
*) only based on my experience, there are probably exceptions
