This is an enjoyer post just to share what I LOVE about Last Epoch Season 2. I started very late in Season 1 (november), and played to empowered monos but not much past that.
What I want out of ARPG is: speedrunnable intense APM scaling challenge, and Last Epoch delivers that in SPADES. I know many people enjoy low-attention background gatcha tamagotchi gameplay, I don’t. Here is a breakdown of what I’m satisfied by:
- Speedrunnable - I want my skill to be the limit to how fast I can progress the game… not some arbitrary time-locked “vision”.
- intense - I want to have to make constant tactical choices to beat mobs, by seeing their stuff and reacting to it - if I can push one button and delete the screen, then i’ve overpoweed the content and i want to be able to speedrun to where there is challenge
- APM Scaling - I want the game to scale up the amount of APM and reactivity required from me as I progress, so I feel more and more “in the zone”… faster movement and faster enemies can do this but ONLY if I still have to REACT
- scaling challenge - i would like to be able to control the challenge enough that I can always scale it to be harder and give me more wards. (i want to get better loot through pushing content above my current power not through magic-find)
Last Epoch nails ALL these points, not only better than other APRGs like POE1/2, D4, Warframe, and even No Rest For the Wicked, but in totally original and interesting ways!
Sidenote: *Contrary to popular opinion, I do not find POE2 or NRFtW “hard” unless playing hardcore, and I only play SSF. PVE games only feel difficult until you understand gearing power and enemy behavior, and then they all become easy… and so the only way to retain any sense of engagement challenge is for the game to let an overpowered player choose to engage harder content. LE is one of the best at this, comparable to D4 and VRising. Games like POE1/2 and Warframe leave me hoping someday it will get harder, while actually getting easier (and more boring) the longer I play."
A few finer points:
- LE campaign is mega speedrunnable (unlike “the vision”) with many layered systems to learn in order to speedrun faster
- ENDURANCE is the best addition to ARPG ever, as it allows you to get tanky enough to take a single big hit and not get “randomly killed by small junk” without being able to take two big hits
- each zone has telegraphed enemies that will kill you, requiring mental choices and actions to position to take them out without dying… in POE2 I just keep tapping ice-strike (or lightning spear, etc) and delete the whole screen, at least in POE1 I might have to teleport occasionally
- crafting has challenges, but also gives us tools for determinism, instead of being an RNG grind fest
- CoF is super-fun (maybe too much loot, but still fun)
- The LE skill system has depth, and does not punish your main skill power by having utility skills, this helps enable engaging combat and keep builds better balanced. To make a comparison, POE1/2 have crazy flexibility, but that flexibility effectively forces players into putting their entire power budget into a single skill to be the strongest, so we get 1-button lightning spear, 1-button lightning strike, 0-button rightuous fire, etc… I think POE1 has more interactive endgame because of easy acces to teleport, but it makes different builds all feel very similar to me (damage button plus teleport)… Last Epoch builds have utiltiy, movement, defensives, and they FEEL and PLAY differently. By having less, LE has more.
As for Seaon 2 specifically:
- I love the addition of one deterministic affix in the Eternity Cache… it took LP1 items from useless (not worth the time to run Santum) to the defacto way to make builds work, elevating the utility and engagement with Temporal Sanctum.
- WASD movement feels SO good (aside from the inability to left-click interact… I’d like to see a POE-like “hold interact key and left click” rather than just using a separate interact key)
- Spawning weaver echos into a timeline is such a cool mechanic.
- sharding set-items made these items have much more utilty, and brought yet another axis to the build system
That said, there are always things LE could do to improve. Here is a very short list:
- Separate “Solo” split of the ladder, or at least a filter for Solo players (combining SAF/SCF is fine to me)
- /played per character… even more amazing would be a speedrun ladder
- stash-sort should stack 2-wide items first, then 1-wide items
- dps meter somewhere (on ubber aberoth healthbar would be modest compromise)
- give Loot Filters indpendent control of border/fill/text color, and an icon, so we can “emphasize” loot in more ways without overwriting rarity colors…
- hover tooltip dps-estimates for pets (attacks and skills)
- remove pet power snapshotting (or make a gearset/swap mechanic)
- optional small “mana ball” on right side of above-character-mini-healthbar
- Arena “dungeon hotkey” to immediately spawn next group (so we dont have to sit bored at low levels)
- key storage for harbinger needles
- stash simple search expressions (lvl<30, lvl>30, LP>2)
- more female character esthetic MTX (Necrotic Shroud is AWEFUL and has stubble male face even on female, and all bulky shoulder armor makes females look like men)… and show both male and female previews of MTX!!
- way more skill MTX! (druid form skins, minion/pet skins)
- armor MTX with many more visual “themes” (current armor MTX to me are all the same - “boroque gawdy colors”, and don’t even seem to lean into any given class fantasy)
- armor/weapon “imprint” MTX that lets us imprint any item style in the world