Whats missing?

Feedback and Suggestions
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I have played Last Epoch a bit when it first came available, then been away from it for a long time and now played it a bit again. Currently i have a level 76 character doing the level 85 echo’s. I have to admit i am starting to get a little bored. So i am now thinking about what am i missing.

First of, the game has come a long way since my previous play. It looks good to me, it seems to work fine technically. (which absolutely wasn’t the case in that first itteration back then), there’s plenty classes, skills, builds and a campain that seems complete. While i do feel i am missing things, i also think the game is moving forward and has great potential. It is currently only a beta after all, so its not strange to be missing things.

Now i hate the global chat constantly talking about how sucky or great other games are and i don’t want to turn this into that, but well, other games is what i have to reference to, so i am going to use that reference anyway.

Back in the day when d2 was all the hype, people were complaining that everyone is wearing the same items. Games have been trying to remedy that ever since. And i have mixed feelings about this.

In d2 i always have a goal. I start building my sorceres like every season and i start working on that ultimate end goal: a true end game build for a different class that sucks too much to farm it him/her self. Now surely that last sentence doesn’t sound like a positive one for the game and it isn’t, but at least i have this goal. I am working on getting those high runewords that enable something for me. It enables a character build to be viable. It may even be a build for the sorc itself, whom, while she does perfectly fine farming all content on a budget, is not truly OP on that budget build. The true end game build, with infinity and enigma or coh is indeed something entirely different and worthy of being a goal even though you have a functioning sorc. It does enable something i am not able to do with that budget build: killing things fast and in an 8 player game instead of just focussing down a few bosses in private farming games. And when i find those high runes, or even a soj, that exhilarating. Thats what i am playing the game for. If i find simple shakos, stormshields and ist runes, that still exhilarating because its a trading game and i am building my fortune.

In PoE, i also have these lofty goals to keep me going. I have studied for 2 weeks on the awesome build that will be able to beat all content, but it costs 2 mirrors worth of gear. I work to get this gear and build that char. By the time i’m done, the season is over.

Last epoch is like D3. You get a working build in no time at all. After that you can just improve it. D3 offers you ancient and primal ancient versions of the same, last epoch offers you yellow items with better stats. In both cases, getting trough the game’s content is extremely easy and all this improved gear does is enable you to increase the level of rifts or corruption you can beat. It is not enabling new things.

And that is i think where the problem is and what i am missing. Min maxing your gear to keep doing the same but with more damage and more hitpoints on the mobs is simply not really interesting. I do know how many people are complaining in PoE that they can’t beat all content, and i understand them all too well. I am not playing PoE because i played it during times i didn’t have a job, i do have one now and the game is simply not suited for casual play. Or how people in D2 are complaining non-sorc chars suck at farming their end game builds and they are right too. So yes there are downsides, but making all content easy and then hoping the player remains interested just increasing some number representing the difficulty level is imho not the answer, or at least not by itself. Because in the end, sorry to say, D2 and PoE kick ass, and D3 does not.

So i hope you will find creative ways to avoid the pitfalls of both D2 and PoE, but i hope you very well recognize the pitfall of D3 as well, as it seems to me thats where we are now. Looking forward to give it another try in a year or so and see how the game will have developed by then.

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As a general statement: There are definitely builds in LE that require certain items or item combos to function in LE, and there also definitely builds in D2/POE that do what you don’t like - they come online very early and ramp up only in terms of “numbers go up” as gear improves. I would also agree that - in my experience - the build distribution in LE does seem to skew more towards the “come online early and grow in power” type (which I think is a good thing).

Given that - comparatively - POE and D2 are both very old, extensively theorycrafted games that you have built up a lot of knowledge and experience with… Have you considered that maybe you just aren’t yet aware of what build enabling items there are in Last Epoch, and what builds can be made with them? After all, a single level 76 character wouldn’t have exposed you to the full breadth of gear available to base a build on.

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I actually agree with Alchemist. Builds are far too easy to get to “complete” and most of the grind comes in the form of very minor incremental improvements. Real goals seem to be lacking.

The only solution I can think of would be aspirational gear that can be pieced together over time, making them inevitable but extremely time consuming. This is something Guild Wars 2 does FANTASTICALLY with the Achievement system. They have some achievement chains that could take months to complete, but you are rewarded with BiS type items.

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TLDR: Last Epoch has got the most fun and awesome crafting system, but it’s missing the exciting loot drop feeling common to arpg’s or atleast something exciting to compliment the crafting system.

Agreed. One of the things that stand out to me is that it really took me a long time to get used to Last Epoch being a crafting game.
Once you do, it’s got the most awesome crafting system in any arpg and it’s very impressive and full of potential, for example I love playing around the crafting system, even having my loot filter set up to scavenge certain shards. Or how I made a BiS slot chest piece when I needed a rare level up shard to glyph of chaos I was missing, and once I did find the shard so I could Glyph of chaos it, I got super lucky and it rolled the exact rare mod I wanted on it for my build, I love those moments!

The downside is there is not a lot of exciting stuff going on any more once you’ve done some crafting, got a character to end-game, or make an alt.

It feels like EHG aren’t a big fan of a paragon type end-game system or maybe I’m wrong about that, but I do feel the game needs something in parallel with the crafting system to make it more exciting. Right now, there is just not a lot of exciting stuff to look forward too when creating a build once you get a idea, a part from the cool crafting moments.

I was thinking about doing something crafty with bases, but doing anything with them would take away from the ‘uniqueness’ of unique bases. I do hope for more variety when it comes to bases in the future, including more or at the least class-specific boots, belts and gloves.

Edit: Let me add to this -

Just like LizardIRL was explaining in his video, changed are needed before 1.0 to make the game more compelling.

One of the issued I have is that a part from crafting, a big part of making a build comes from the skill trees from the skills you’re using. Just like gear it’s like you’re further equipping this skill with more gear as you go, until you got it fully geared up by level 20.

However, by about level 10 of a skill you already have a idea or imagination of that said skill and how you want to it to function, so there’s no fun any more in figuring it out.
So unless you got nothing better to do, by the time you get to monoliths, you’re done with the most exciting, fun and adventurous part of the game and it just becomes a time sink to further work out an idea you already got figured out as you go.

Now you could try out different builds, you could try different skills at this point, but I believe a lot of players will find it quite tedious to completely change their skills around while they’ve been working so long on getting them to completion in the first place and I personally always found it annoying and tedious to have to re-skill, re-gear and re-learn at this stage of the game. It’s more fun to start over and learn a new playstyle, make a new build.

All this is my informative opinion and contribution in the hopes perhaps devs can make use of it.

With that said, in short: I love the early game in Last Epoch, the discovery, the experimentation, the figuring out, the crafting but I’m missing that fun once I get to monoliths, I love a good grind and the grind feels good, the hunt for ultra-rare high LP uniques is awesome and doing challenging content feels good but I’m missing the fun that I have from early-game. Something to look forward to, something to figure out as you go, something to keep my brain interested and excited while I grind, perhaps even something that can completely throw me of my track of how I was playing my build until that point and create a new exciting adventure to explore,…

<3

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There are builds that require certain mid-high level items that you can target farm with another character. Not to mention legendaries. Have you tried farming rare uniques with 2-3 (or RNGezus forgive 4) legendary potentials? Farm exalted items with the right base type with the right affixes so you can make a unique into a truly amazing legendary?

You can set goals and do really painful grinding to achieve those goals if you really want to but in general LE’s strength is that you don’t need to read 200 pages of forum posts and watch 20 hours of build guide videos to get a working build. If you played whatever ARPG before and have a basic understanding of damage multipliers then you can make a build of your own first try. Maybe that’s your problem, you’re so conditioned to failure without guides that you miss that feeling of failure here :smiley:

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what LE needs is map modding to target specific content and integrating the dungeons into monolith system

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Imho, Nah.

The devs have already indicated that dungeons are separate optional content and not part of monoliths.

I am not sure why anyone would want map modding - you can already target content sufficiently for most things in with the monolith bonuses, bosses are targetted for specific drops, monolith for blessings, dungeons for various things like legendaries. Even Arena is a fairly targetted type of content for those that like that kind of thing. Sure there are a few farming related things that have little or no optimal targetting but the game isnt finished so anything could happen. Why make this like PoE?

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What?

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