Wildly unbalanced, skip this season?

General
1

Im a new player and im feeling discouraged by the widely unbalanced leader boards. Last Epoch Ladders

I have a paladin and the best performing paladin is hitting wave 700 however Falconer are hitting wave 3000+ and Warlock 2400+. So I kind of feel like i rolled a handicapped class. I’d consider rerolling but i understand nerfs are coming. It would really suck to invest in a better class just to be nerfed into the ground. Im thinking maybe ill put this game on the shelf until the Endgame is somewhere close to being balanced.

What do you guys think?

2

From what I gather from your post is that you realised you had chosen an underperforming class. You wish the league had been balanced from the start but in the absence of that you would have agreed to play the game anyway. The only thing holding you back from starting it is a lack of stability that could cause a nerf to your chosen build that would negate all your efforts.

At this point you would rather not invest any time in the cycle.

If this is your point of view, I fully share it.

3

The nature of these games is that your chars are ephemeral anyway. If you’re going to play on the Cycle, the chars don’t last more than a few months anyway before they get moved to Legacy and the next Cycle, with its new builds and metas, starts anew.

Class balance is a moving target, since the skills and builds and items will keep changing over time. Every Cycle will have its own meta and leaderboard to match, and if you want to chase that, well, you just have to keep rerolling as people discover new synergies and broken builds. And also try to keep up with the RMT folks, which is probably impossible as a regular player anyway.

I don’t think the endgame is ever going to be balanced and static, because at that point people would lose interest as the game becomes stagnant. PoE has been changing up its meta for a decade now, by purposely altering class balance all the time.

If you want something truly static, just play on Legacy, and your one char will slowly change over time as patches get absorbed into it. The whole point of Cycles is to keep things ever-changing and unpredictable.

IMHO it’s better to just play the game and never worry about other classes or the leaderboards. Don’t even look at it unless you want build ideas for your own class. It’s not like it’s a PvP game anyway, so their standing on the leaderboards have no bearing on your gameplay, so why be envious…? It’s like comparing yourself to the world’s richest people or top athletes. Doesn’t matter what they do, you just live your own life and play your game your own way and enjoy the ride :slight_smile:

4

I think that’s a really healthy attitude. Its just important to me to have value in group play and to be efficient in single player. I dislike the idea playing a class that is a burdon when playing with friends or randoms.

5

Maybe he likes some kind of consistency during the cycle duration and doesn’t care when the cycle is over.

6

Same here! I find it pretty normal to try to look at builds that are strong, having an aspiration goal of getting the items to play that class/build which seems strong, has good clear/defense/pushing capability etc.

EHG has amazing ideas, extraordinary potential…But they are still only a handful of people…
I think this game will be amazing at some point, just…not now…

Will be back after some time to check out the game, when these kind of changes are an exception, not a weekly thing…

1 Like
7

For what it’s worth, I started as a pally too, and yeah, they do seem a bit gimped, but it was still fun! I rolled another Wraithlord after that, and yes, it’s much more powerful… but a lot less fun, with not much challenge or tactics. I stopped playing that and rolled more gimped alts instead, just to see what fun off-meta things I might find.

The “broken” builds only matter if you’re chasing the meta, but that’s a very different kind of gameplay anyway (continuously optimizing every minor stat, spending hours reading guides and analyzing affixes and DPS/defense formulas, spending forever in the bazaar, playing thousands of monos on repeat…). And even for those classes, there is usually only a specific build – some combination of mastery, passives, skills, uniques, affixes – that enables such a build, not just that one base class is better than another.

That’s the sort of thing that can easily change every season. One unique and some unpredicted interaction later and a new broken build is made… there’s only so much they can catch in pre-release testing vs the hordes of real players, streamers, gold farmers, etc. trying every possible new combo.

Anyway, correct me if I’m wrong here, but that doesn’t sound like the kind of experience you’re after anyway…? That’s more like high-speed spreadsheeting, which is fine for some people, but if you just want to be able to enjoy the game as it was intended, I’m sure your pally would do fine. Even 700 corruption is a lot more than most people would probably get to in any reasonable playtime.

If you’re playing with friends, it’s a cool opportunity to develop multi-player synergies that might not otherwise exist! (Like an actual support pally, focused on tanking or buffing/healing the other player)

If you’re playing with randos, well, there’s not really bonuses to partying anyway, just additional enemy health, so in that sense every party member is already a “burden”. And by this point in the Cycle, many people are already well into the hundreds of Corruption, so likely one of them will just be carrying the others anyway.

I miss the old days of cooperative MMO grouping where every member actually mattered :frowning: Now it just seems like you group mostly just to get powerleveled or with help with some boss or something.

If you actually have a friend group to play on a more casual pace with, lucky you! I wish I did :slight_smile: Just enjoy the ride and don’t worry about the endgame, there isn’t much there anyway… after a few hundred monos, they all just blur together lol, and the leaderboard will be completely forgotten in a month or two.

8

I like that too, and voted against mid-cycle nerfing even for bugs, but alas that’s not what the majority wants.

But regardless, every Cycle is going to have some class or another that’s unbalanced. Their whole point is to shake things up, which is the opposite of long-term class balance afforded by traditional RPGs (or Legacy).

9

Yeah, and i would like to play that classes. Unfortunately, I will not play at all for the reasons explained by myself and other players above.