I Have played Last Epoch now in this season for 170 hours. I have been farming up to 800 corruption so far with my Tank shield bash Paladin and have gotten to the last phase of Abbaroth (where I still need practice). I am in the Merchants Guild (MG) rank 12 and Level 100. I have started playing this game with 3 other friends. We are all POE players that have been playing POE with clearing all content and leagues with multiple pieces or mirrored gear and so on. We are well versed in Diablo 2 as well.
My Journey in this game…………
Campaign:
Easy and fun. Learning the game and crafting. Doing the bosses, all is within reason and a new and fun experience.
Choosing a faction by the end of the campaign: I am a POE player that loves trade, so MG (I get back to this subject in detail later)
First 10 monolith before harbingers:
Good to do, not to hard, a good way to level and grow into the monolith thing. Finding some idols to sell helped here to get some decent starting gear.
Empowered Monolith and all the first time quest kill Harbingers:
This is where the first issues are starting to show. I started before the catch up mechanic, so grinding the first 5 harbingers took longer than it would do now. My friend who started sooner had to do all 10 harbingers like that. He already quit before they changed that. So that catch up mechanic was a good change, it came for me during 6th harbinger.
At this point the fact became clear that I was always lower level in the MG than the items I needed to buy to get myself an upgrade. The grinding of endless favour and reputation. Just literally listing and delisting items just to spend the favour to rank up.
Endgame:
During the killing of the last Harbingers and start of farming corruption it becomes abundantly clear that all your progress from that point on out is capped by a couple of components. First you need to find items that are worth hundreds of millions (up to 1.5 billion) to be able to even afford a LP3 item and to buy/gamble/forge a decent exalted item. I found multiple big ticket items that were worth over a billion and multiple ones that where worth hundreds of millions, but I seemed to have gotten a bit lucky as well.
My 3 other friends did not have this luck. I basically failed a lot of temple crafts as well and wasted sometimes literally 1.5 billion in 1 try to get my T7 stat and at least 1 other stat I needed. The feeling you get when it fails is just that of utter disgust, disbelief and a sense of wasted time. For some miraculous reason I pulled it off with 3 stats on weapon, helmet, ring and boots in the end. This whole ordeal cost me billions of gold and failed attempts.
My 3 other friends, however were not that fortunate and failed almost all of their attempts or where not even able to attain anything better than LP2.
Even though it worked out for me in the end regarding my unique items, I still had multiple instances of wanting to quit because of the bad feeling of the forced and failed gamble.
Me and my friends came to the same conclusion that the gambling element in this game is too big. First you are super happy that something big drops. Then you are super happy to finally have sold the item. You buy the ingredients and spend all that gold at once. You already get a knot in your stomach knowing your work could be for nothing. You do the laggy temple and after all the disconnects and misery you kill the boss and you brick the item you have spent 10 hours farming on. If this mechanic does not change, I will NOT COME BACK to Last Epoch.
Then comes the Abberoth quest (the nail in the coffin):
Let me get 1 thing straight first. I really do not mind that the end boss is super hard. I understand that he should not be chain farmed by 1 shot builds and so that farming him has to somehow be limited. This should NOT count for the first time you kill him for the quest.
After 15 tries (with melee it is extra bad to deal with him) I finally reached the final phase. Try after try again I got further and I knew if I kept on, I would kill him eventually. Then I ran out of harbinger eyes…… I just could not bring myself to go and do endless of monoliths, bosses and harbingers in the hope that I could farm some more harbinger eyes.
The first time to try and kill Abberoth for the quest should be unlimited tries. After that, do the eye thing. This is another critical point for me and until they make the first kill free, I think I will not come back. It could also be a solution to be able to buy harbinger eyes or glyps of envy and such on the marketplace. The way it is designed right now is way to grindy and timeconsuming once you run out of the first 10 eyes.
Changes that really are needed for the bazaar and selling items in general:
I learned through my experience and my friends the game is designed to basically put you at rank 12 when you reach level 100 for MG and with COF this can be done a bit sooner. Having a melee char does not help with clearing speed and slows things down significantly I have noticed. Also the bazaar and the ui there is really bad designed. Here is what is wrong with it:
- Stall and auctionhouse should be 1 screen. Now you need to endlessly scout the whole bazaar going from char to char to find out if your items are any good.
- Stall and auctionhouse are not visible or reachable via the monolith. (you cannot even see which item you sold)
- Proper filtering on affixes based on tier and rolls should be applied. Right now for idols or for multiple stats on different tiers it cannot filter. This leaves you scrolling through sometimes 100 pages of items.
- A pricechecker or anything like a quick lookup for the item you want to check the value would be such an addition.
- The max price cap must be removed. This is the worst thing they MUST change. Because the LP3 items usually are already max price now, it does not make sense to sell anything better like lp4 or a good legendary item, since you might brick it when trying to make it better. So better just keep it yourself or do not sell. Not 1 decent end game legendary item was for sale for any build that was really crafted in the temple. There are none (I have not not come across any) LP4 items for sale and for some items even LP3 is sometimes just non existing for sale. I think a big part of this has to do with the max price cap. Why sell something for a max price if it is more valuable? If for example a LP 2 amulet of the bastion boss is worth 1.5 billion. Why sell a LP3 Amu for the same price? Same goes for legendary items with good stats. If just the crafting material LP2 is already worth max price, why would I go to the temple and risk bricking it if I can just sell it for max price already giving the buyer all the gambling risk. So the result of the price cap is that there are no high value items with high LP and no end game finished legendary products that have been crafted in the temple for sale at all. This leaves the buyer with only buying the crafting materials and gamble everything away.
- Not being able to resell items that you buy. I have bricked a lot of LP2 and 3 LP3 items in the temple, since the most important stat kept not coming on. I had to throw these still pretty decent items with 3 stats on the floor, since I cannot use them and not resell. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so I would have loved to get some money back of my failed gamble, but that is not possible. The devs say this is against flipping items, but to my opinion, the favour system already covers this. High LP and legendary items cost a lot of favour, so you cannot be endlessly flipping, since you need to pay favour for listing and buying.
I found 2 other topics with similar opinions, feel free to check those out as well:
Just to clarify. I actually love the game and want it to be better. I would for sure return if changes on these things are made or new ways to improve would get added.
Regards,
Verminrodent
PS: I would love to respond to all your replies and inquiries, but as a new user on this forum i am only allowed 11 replies a day.
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