We need a PoB alternative for Last Epoch

Feedback and Suggestions
3

First time I’ve heard of that, dunno where you found that plainly spoken.

Especially given it’s a loot-based ARPG in the style of diablo. Numerical precision has been since a decade a prime premise of the games in the genre and people generally understand that pure numerical superiority doesn’t account for damage uptime or gameplay feel.

We solely don’t have one since nobody has sat down and wanted to input the large database it relies on. Complexity is not the issue, quite the contrary, it’s fairly much child’s play to implement the proper formulas (as they’re known)… what’s not child’s play is sitting for tens of hours to transfer data the first time painstakenly.

Also not true.
PoB makes it easy to see differences, the meta builds are primarily played because well known streamers present them… they look good… and the complexity to creaty a build on your own is massive, so not something many players undergo commonly.

How do you do that? Pencil and a sheet of paper, calculating it personally? :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s what the tooltips are for after all, to give the player the proper feedback for a baseline amount of DPS. It’s not even baseline when there’s no major complex changes happen in a build but you do 3 attacks per second each doing 20k damage while your tooltip shows 5k DPS… that’s just laughable.

Or minions not even showing any form of damage properly. Could be 1… could be 100k… who knows beforehand! I still to this day don’t know if my skeletons are better off being baseline, melee or ranged purely dps-wise, no friggin clue… and I played primarily a zoo-build before 1.0

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POB is a great TOOL first and foremost.

I use it extensively back then. In LE, i use LETools instead. which technically IS LE’s POB at this current point in time.

Personally, i feel any pushback against tools like POB/LETools planner is futile. players WILL find a way to calculate and optimize.

The bigger issue is NOT that the tool exists.

I feel “encouraged” to use it. Why? because theres no easy way to gauge my DPS increases by comparing items.

my DPS mainly comes from harvest. where do i check harvest? i need to slap S, pull up the screen, mouse over the skill to see the DPS tooltip. hit I, swap to a different weapon, the check the harvest DPS tooltip again (have to hit S again if it was closed).

its annoying. its tedium.

if the game makes it easier for me to see what i get for changing an item, i wouldnt need to even want to check LETools.

@Kulze there is a number of people who actively think POB is bad for POE. they exist. the numbers are small but they definitely exist.

i understand them and to me i get it. they dont want players to just quickly solve the game and have metas sprout up too fast.

to a certain extent i agree that POB can be “bad” for the game. but imho the cats out of the bag. the ship has sailed.

and to be real. POB is NOT the issue. the real issue is players feel like they dont have enough tools to gauge changes in their gear IN GAME. i usually always try to do everything in game as much as possible. this is an issue that game devs will always have problem solving. i m not going to make any suggestions for this either.

the other issue is if the “minimum viability requirements” are too high, then players will feel forced to use tools to optimize their build.

one thing i currently love about LE is that uber abboroth feels totally optional. i havent fought regular abby yet. but as long as its optional, players dont feel forced to get up to that point.

hence the MVR is not too high. players are not forced to engage the harder content. hence they dont need to optimize that badly.

this is not true in POE, where very powerful bonuses and jewels are locked behind the toughest content. thus the MVR in POE is very high. build enabling uniques are gated behind uber pinnacles too.

tho i do see this leaking into LE, where some of the end tier player bonuses are gated around corruption 300. tho i believe c300 is a good number for all players to eventually achieve.

and if i m being honest. if EHG walks the same path as POE, where they just keep adding aspirational content which gates bonuses/gear that feels too good not to get. i’ll probably get to the point of quitting the game.

the entire reason why i m ok with uber abby is it really feels optional. even tho his drops are stupid good, we can farm up LP2/LP3 or even CRAFTED gear that can be quite strong or give other desirable stats that theres no FOMO.

in poe, uber elder can drop double curse impresences as well as triple mod watcher’s eyes. which are all drop exclusive. regular elder only gives single curse variant or double mod. the item become BIS.

this also means that participating in trade becomes a requirement. if you’re a newer/weaker player, if you cant access this boss/cant kill it. the only way to get the reward is by trade.

its also one reason why i m now SSF in LE. i researched and saw nothing too exclusive from uber abby. everything else i could farm on my own.

sorry if i sound like i m digressing but its very crucial to why POB is NECESSARY despite any group of players pushing back. the MVR is simply too high for a regular person to theory craft in their head.

“POB” for LE is still unnecessary. as the MVR can be said to be some where at what?

capped res
2K-3K HP/ward
100% crit avoidance/reduction
maybe 30% movespeed
50-100k dps?

POE requires overcapping res, a gazillion MS, and 1-3 million DPS at minimum.

in any case. i wouldnt mind POB for LE. in fact i m already using LETools planner but even then not too much.

and back to what OP is asking for. i want to ask for the opposite. i want LE to have more in game tools to easily see my changes in game.

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Uber Elder also is a very easy fight nowadays with the power creep the game has gotten over the last… dunno even how many years that’s now, a lot simply.

It’s basically a 300c Lagon fight in comparison. Annoying and dangerous but doable for the general playerbase by now.

I agree with specific uniques from bosses though, but that is mandatory and will stay, otherwise why attempt harsher content if no rewards are given which are valuable enough to warrant it?

Also a part which simply can’t be solved though.

Either you provide only easy enough content for everyone to solve (no challenge hence) or you make it so people which lack the ability need to divert over to getting it in some other way.

That’s the function of trading after all, that’s why it’s implemented into games… to allow another venue to access those things.

An alternative is to provide players with another way to procure those special outcomes from bosses. Like we currently have with the weaver web and boss-drops being able to be dropped in echos.
The downside? Timeline stability has lost any meaning beyond progressing corruption quicker, the bosses have as well. I haven’t killed a single boss realizing that and probably won’t do that in empowered monoliths anymore going forward as it’s simply not needed. They’re now hence ‘dead content’, much like the portal charm made dungeon floors ‘dead content’.

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I’m with Kulze on this one. They might exist, but not here on the forums. Maybe in other platforms.

What players have spoken against before on the forums is a DPS meter in-game. And, in fact, many replied that that should be the job of a PoB like tool instead.

Anyway, I think Dammit is slowly improving the planner to account for this. He already added a few skills to the calculator. I’m pretty sure he has to do them one by one because of all the transformations possible.
So it will eventually come, it’s just hard (unpaid) work.

This will always be an issue. Even PoE1, that has great tooltips, still needs PoB. Why? Because there is no way to actually measure your damage under different circumstances.
Is the enemy chilled? Is he slowed? Is he at high health or low health?
Are you buffed with haste/frenzy? Are you cursed with damned?

All of those things can affect your damage wildly and there’s no way the game can show you properly in-game. I have an option to have more damage if I blind them or if I slow them. Which is better? How can the game tell me that.

I’ll grant you (and the devs have agreed often enough) that LE’s tooltips aren’t in a good spot. A lot of things should reflect in there that doesn’t right now. And I’m not even talking simply about minions. Conversions are spotty, skill modifiers (like turning into channeling vs casting) are even worse.
A lot could be improved there and I’m sure it will with time.

But you’ll still need a PoB tool to have a real measure of the damage output you can dish out with all the different buffs/debuffs/etc that can happen in a game like this.

This isn’t really true though. There isn’t much difference between both games in this regard. Some of the best items in the game, like Nihilis and Shattered Worlds, are gated behind Aby and Uberroth.
I’ll grant you that those aren’t build enabling (and the ones that are can drop from harbingers as well), but they are BiS items to make your build better.

The main difference is that PoE is built in a way where you can simply skip them entirely and just buy their items, whereas in LE that is only possible for MG. CoF has no choice but to engage in that content if they ever want those items.

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hmmmm i initially wanted to write a long ass response. but i wanted to educate myself,

previously when i came back to LE, my idea was abby gear was gated behind abby and uber abby simply gave better droprates.

after you guys pointed out that it did make my entire outlook on LE sour.

one reason why i rolled SSF was during the time i rolled SSF i had the idea i would be able to farm everything myself.

having ubby have exclusives that abby doesnt. really makes the content feel compulsory rather than optional. i had a look at shattered worlds omfg. thats just so good. and you could reasonably farm 1-2LP version if you’re strong enough.

this reminds me of POE. if you’re not strong/refuse to go meta, the best way to play and get certain drops is just by trading for them.

knowing this exists exclusive to ubby, kinda dampens my enjoyment and hype for EHG.

i do agree with kulze tho when saying that there needs to be rewards to warrant players doing the content.

but when its so good that its simply BIS. that just means it went up from being optional to compulsory.

ah fuck. i find this so fucking tragic. LE is just gonna be another POE.

i m want so much to play a solid diablo like that encourages solo play and discovering your own builds.

the existence of ubers that are beyond the grasp of most players necessitates builds and is indirectly a huge buff to trade.

i really dont have much to add anymore on LE in general. its just so sad to realize that all diablolikes end up doing the same thing.

EDIT: just wanted to add. right up before S2, there was no ubby. LE was more or less the best diablo like that had everything i wanted. more or less perfect (graphics can be improved) but beyond that it was perfect.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/12mhvzh/dummy_damage_meter/

And even some of the comment here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/1bu2rbs/path_of_building_for_last_epoch_v010_first_early/

There is a git hub project that literally extract the all of the data.

The formula are simple, but the quantity of passives and unique that change the way skills function makes it very tedious.

I definitely agree that content creators are the most important factor in shaping the meta. However, I’m suggesting that if players had access to precise damage numbers, they might simply default to the highest-DPS builds from content creators.

I use R, a data science programming language, to simulate my builds. For some builds—like single-stack DoT or simple attack-based setups—the calculations are trivial. However, more complex builds require deeper analysis, especially those with ramp-up mechanics, conditional skill interactions, or dynamic mana management.

Take the Warpath Void Knight, for example:

  • It ramps up a damage multiplier over time, but the mana cost also increases per second.
  • This means your damage output depends on how long you can sustain the channel.
  • To model this, I first need to determine how long the skill can be maintained before mana depletion.
    • The Void Knight regenerates 30% mana upon hitting zero—but only if it has 3 Void Essences.
    • So, I must simulate whether mana runs out before the essences replenish.
  • Once I determine the maximum sustain time, I then model the ramping damage function over that duration.

Like I said earlier tooltip can only work for build with very basic interaction.

Just to finish, I think before season 2, a tool like POB was not needed. But since they added uber, and the fight feels like a dps check, or at least the fight is so much simpler with very high dps. I agree that it would be nice to have tool to easily measure dps.

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I would wager this is a very unpopular opinion. Hell I would be willing to put money on the outcome of this if EHG decided to poll the community on this.

I’ve been strictly playing CoF, my only interaction with online has been helping friends level. I get absolutely no benefit from having the most meta, strongest build available. Yet I still want a tool like this because I want to know that what I’m building can scale and will be good.

For example, I made a Lethal Mirage Bladedancer, for context, this is the popularity of Bladedancer right now. 0.5% of the playerbase plays it.

https://i.imgur.com/LKGR0fM.png

At level 90 I realized I hit a wall at 300 corruption because I can’t scale the build anymore. That is something I could’ve realized had I had some sort of tool to do the math on my DPS.

It feels bad that I don’t get to play a build I find really fun anymore.

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You are probably right, however that is not the feeling I had when I search for it. Look at the link I sent in my previous response, I found a lot of people not happy about such tool.

I completely agree with you, I think you start to realise the balance issue I came up with when I started calculating the meta builds. As I said previously, some skill can be scaled much much more than other. Most skills can barely be scaled, while others can be almost infinitely scaled. You will also realise that tanky class are not doing less damage than glass canon, in fact in season 2 it is quite the opposite. I still did not manage to come up with a build that would much pump more than what void knight or pal are capable to do while being near immortal. I think people believe that balance is fine and that “everything is playable”, but when you look at the number it is clearly not equal.

I think it was not a problem before, but now that uber abby is here we start to see it.

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I know we don’t necessarily agree on things, but I love you for this…

That’s the % of builds LETools has scraped, not the % of people playing it or even the % of people with a character of that mastery at a particular point of the game.

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Im not opposed to a 3rd party tool.

I am opposed however to a ingame dps dummy that spits out numbers. the two get lumped together sometimes in discussion.

I argue reality is somewhere in the middle. PoB has done wonders for the speed at which the game/builds are optimized streamers help push that forward. without pob, streamers would still present good builds and set the meta, but pob helps them do that to a massive degree.

At the end of the day the reason we dont have a tool is because hte game is frankly small still. While its growing and its space in the genre is ramping, its no poe yet. pob wasnt there for the first few season either, you just had tree planners like letools that just let you plan out builds and share them.

My biggest issue isnt with the tool, its with how people use the tool, but we already see this on maxroll and in build planners. people set up the build with 2lp in every slot, then quickly flounder before they even hit half the gear.

its very similar to tierlists. people dont understand how tierlists are simply a tool and if used objectively with several metrics, can help you pick a build/character that fits your needs. just going “not S rank, its shit” is a terrible way to use a tierlist.

Tierlists came from the fighting game world, and if you think you cant win by playing a Btier character you are just shit. And hell sometimes you win because no one has match up knowledge vs your shithead b-tier character haha.

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I did, I could also probably find an equal if not greater amount of people seeking some form of PoB for LE.

We’re not impartial to this issue. Combine that with some reddit threads and we dig in our heels. We’ll never be objective on this topic.

That’s a pool on this matter would be very beneficial.

While that is true, it’s indicative of the greater playerbase at large.
This is very simple statistics. Literally high school level. Come on now.

You can determine the outcome of an election by polling 1-2% of the population. LETools has scraped a whole lot more than 1-2% of the playerbase.

The numbers are probably within 0.1% accuracy of the actual number.

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Love to see other people doing fun stuff like that! :smiley:

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It is, but not necessarily of what you’re saying it is. It’s likely indicative or directionally correct, but if you think that 0.5% of the playerbase are playing a Bladedancer you’re probably wrong, or at least not thinking of the right question. If I have 5 characters in a league, one for each class, am I “playing a Sentinel” or “playing an Acolyte”, etc. It’s not like poe ninja that tallies actual characters.

I doubt that, especially at the more popular end.

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You’ve made a fair point, and I think you’re right about the data’s scope. I checked, and it seems LETools specifically scrapes the top 10,000 characters by level unlike PoE Ninja. So, that 0.5% figure for Bladedancer really only reflects its popularity within that specific top end, not necessarily the entire playerbase. It’s quite possible the overall percentage playing Bladedancer is higher, they’re just underrepresented in the top 10k since the class struggles.

With that being said. This just highlights the need for some kind of PoB. So people don’t make the same mistake I did.

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Not the same thing. In Reddit they might do that, but not in the forums.

Not really. LETools only collects build guides from youtube (and their own internal build guides). So that’s only indicative of what content creators use.
Content creators most tend to follow the meta, since that’s what gets them the most views. The amount of them that try the underpowered builds is much smaller than it is for the playerbase.

If it’s a truly random poll. If you only poll the politicians, the results are then heavily skewed.

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That’s a DPS meter, not a PoB, entirely different concepts.

DPS meters are a detriment. PoB style programs have never been an issue.

On the other hand the existence of it solely during training dummies has also not been pushed away, actually people have actively urged to increase the functionality of the dummies for a reason.

Yes, they do.
Like in all other games, in general.

People are overall sheep and not many go against the mainstream, or the directly presented path. That’s why game design is so important after all :slight_smile:

And mind you… that’s also not a bad thing as long as alternative options are available when diverting from the mainstream… but if nothing else seems even remotely viable because the mainstream visible thing is just 10-20 times more effective then… a game has a problem, those things simply shouldn’t happen because then people are pushed away because playing something else feels ‘useless’ in comparison, making people quit.

The same goes for extremely weak build, unable to remotely reach the baseline others deem as ‘normal’, that’s also very off-putting and makes people quit.
PoB for example is a great way to showcase that a build works inside the parameters in general. And as you said:

Which is absolutely true. Often it comes down to ‘gameplay feel’, which is a complex topic.

Because while you math out the sustain time with your build it also needs to take into consideration damage uptime. How often do you need to interrupt because of attacks? How long does the repositioning take compared to the active usage of the ability? How long the recovery of mana?
And so on and so forth.

And that is really hard to quantify, but it’s the place where balance needs to happen.

If a Hack’N’Slash already fails at the easy part (which is solely numerical) then that’s a extremely bad state to be in. And LE sadly does fail often in numerical ways… PoE 2 does as well.
In comparison Torchlight Infinite and PoE 1 did do that work, and even D4 did… which was the only reason that game was even baseline playable. It’s such a fundamental process to do for the developers after all.

It can do a lot lot more. It’s just not done in LE.
It’s the state of ‘how far away’ it is from that baseline.

The example given there was not about the tool, it was about the inability to progress.

That’s not the tool’s fault, it’s a balancing issue. The tool is the messenger… don’t kill the messenger.

It was a problem before.
It just never got fixed.

It has been a problem since years, EHG is really bad in balancing simply.

Why so?

It’s been surprisingly sizeable since years, vastly less known games with a heavy complexity also get tons of tools or mods for them, at times a lot more complex then a PoB for LE would be. It’s simply circumstance that nobody sat down and did it.

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I’m not looking at build guides, I’m look at the ladder.

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you failed then. because there are builds around which never be on arena. but they are able to push 10k corr and kill uber. arena is very niche.

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That’s even worse. You’re looking at a small percentage of people that are competitive by nature and that will more heavily lean into the meta builds.
A competitive player won’t play an underpowered build because they can’t compete with it. A regular player will still play it as long as it’s fun and is good enough to do content.

So your perception of this is very heavily skewed.

Only a tool like poe.ninja can give you the real numbers, since they just collect real builds from everyone from the game via API.

22

And here comes the balancing into play.

If core content is available then all core builds need to be able to deal with that. And here is where I agree with you that both PoE 1 was and LE is failing in providing a proper option.

That’s been a discussion already about availability of content depth and content width. It’s not fine if content becomes deeper through expanding it forward… and builds loosing the ability to do said content. Abby never was ‘optional’ and never will be either as long as drops are hidden behind it. Much like in MMO’s raids have never been optional as long as the best gear is behind it.

That’s why specialized builds became a thing… and why ‘character based SSF’ is not a feasable challenge, account-based on the other hand is.

EHG is still ‘stuck’ in the ‘all characters need to do all content’ mentality, which is already breaking apart, something I mentioned especially much after release that it’s a non-feasable way to create the game, specifically for the situation we already see.
Hence allowing builds to be more specialized towards some tasks and performing very well is the prime option to solve this. This enforces several characters per player usually, and yes… is a net-negative for ‘single character players’ but not really avoidable. On the other hand when your character can’t deal with some specific content… you can make one. You’re not ‘barred out of it’.
Currently this includes solely meta builds, and that’s obviously bad. With the spread of content it enforces instead variety, and that makes everything valuable for ‘something nice’ and hence removes the direct comparison as well. Meaning a vastly larger swath of builds becomes ‘viable’ suddenly.

Well, the issue is that… Top-end content simply needs to provide chase items. Because otherwise the difficulty is not coherrent with the rewards again. So why try it when you can get better stuff otherwise?

It’s a massive conundrum for developers, but there’s solutions available.