Last Epoch

Def liking the rogue. Having a real hard time deciding on a build.

Wolcen and this patch both hit at the same times.. I tried to give wolcen another shot. its so rough.. so many bugs. Such a real shame. hate to see a team try and fail so badly. Seems officially a Starbound. the team just does not have the ability to fix that game.

Last epoch here is not very pretty. But, the systems are much much better. there are some bugs still though too.

I've often noted PoE as being the only arpg that got attributes right. I keep forgetting about this. It also does not have attributes per level. They are in the passive tree as well.
Its passive tree is a bit more like a classic one. Fill up a tree, with a number of choices. new passive lines and skills are unlocked as you add total points to the tree.

The real depth in skills comes from the skill passive trees. they too have passives. And, you are limited in how many skills you can unlock the passives in. meaning, you have access to like 20 skills for a class. then can slot 6 of them in your skill bar. then, can only unlock passives in 6 skills over the course of leveling. (less as you start even)

Rogue so far seems like their best design. I haven't played them all... but what I did of the others I didnt quite see this level of interactions.

Rogue shuriken:
Starts out as a basic EK. throw 3 shuriken in a cone. (doesn't shotgun)
you can passive it, to 5. you can passive it to throw in a line, in succession, so it barrages. you can passive it so it throws out in a nova, instead. you can passive it so it spins around you, like blade vortex. you can passive it so it peirces. (makes the blade vortex very strong. 5 peircing shuriken, which circle around hitting any 1 target repeatedly.) or you can passive it, so it changes to 1 large chakram which pierces, and returns. or you can passive it so they richocet...

now, first off, most of those work WITH each other. you can blade vortex the chakram. you can richochet the chakram, etc.

Second, it interacts with OTHER skills.
evade:
is a teleport/dash. it can be passived to throw 1-5 shuriken when you teleport. Any ^ shuriken passives apply to the Evade shurikens as well. instead of 5 shuriken.. it'll throw that blade vortex chakram.
it can spawn "shadows". shadows echo a shuriken, shadowblade, or acid flask attack, when you do one. again, they echo your passived shurikens..

its a pretty interesting class.

started off, relying on flurry. not loving shuriken. using acid flask off and on.. started leaning into shuriken to get that blade storm. once I had pierce and blade shield.. was pretty solid on that.. but, then was real tempted by ballista. which was real solid right away.
chakrum was not very impressed with. But, having unlocked blade dancer. and the bladedance... now, thinking whelp... thats pretty great.

I finally got around to trying this game. I'm only about 3 hours in but I am impressed. The game is fairly intuitive. Unlike PoE, the game doesn't ignore most norms and conventions from MMO/ARPG/RPG genres. I went in blind and I feel the build I'm hobbling together is decent. I'm playing an acolyte focusing on the physical and lifetap spells.

Sure, I haven't played much yet. But, so far, it doesn't seem that this studio has even a shred of GGG's old-guard, 2013 PoE mindset.

Bought it last night. Dunno if it has friends list or guilds yet? My buddy that plays Poe with me bought it too. I’ll play it this weekend some.

mainly the Poe approach is not working for my free time goals. The league and economy approach makes me feel I gotta constantly play to keep ahead.

This game has real potential. Is it a POE killer...not by a long shot. But with QoL improvements (e.g. actually telling you what killed you), a pretty in depth class/build options, the makings of a decent end game system and most of all the fantastic DETERMINISTIC crafting system they have built in it's worth a buy if you like ARPGs.

Yeah. But come on. It’s easily on par with 2013 Poe at the same stage of development. ARPGs are treated similar to mmos now with ever growing content. If they pull off launching some leagues and expand the endgame as Poe has...could be special.

Hubris will “kill” Poe just like it has WoW. I’d be willing to bet they sit around and laugh at other arpgs, but there will always be another hungry young studio to come along.

Caeden said:

Yeah. But come on. It’s easily on par with 2013 Poe at the same stage of development. ARPGs are treated similar to mmos now with ever growing content. If they pull off launching some leagues and expand the endgame as Poe has...could be special.

Hubris will “kill” Poe just like it has WoW. I’d be willing to bet they sit around and laugh at other arpgs, but there will always be another hungry young studio to come along.

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I always laugh at developers that "stick to the vision" of their games going on a decade. If you are lucky enough to have a game that has an active, and even growing, playerbase after 5 to 7 years then you should be aggressively researching the market to scout out competitors and integrating the best features they have into your title so that you don't give your players any reason to look elsewhere. Your "vision" might have been great back in the day, but it doesn't stand the test of time. None of them ever do.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the difficulty of path of exile is my sweet spot but I find the crafting to be annoying (maybe not even crafting?) and I really do not care for playing the economy.

but shit like The Feared and Uber Elder is amazing. Last Epoch should study the mapping endgame and Poe boss fights because that’s a master class in addictive looping and taking WoW style raid encounters to arpg.

Heh I played this at PAX in....2017? 2016? And it had one class and one area you could run through at the time. It's come a long way since then, and is looking pretty promising honestly, but it still lacks content.

I'm still waiting for them to leave EA before I really give it a go.

They should look at the difficulty of leveling, I was able to face roll through the entire campaign and last boss with minimal deaths and no major attention to gearing/build

AladainAF said:

Game starts off really fun, and immediately fizzled out for me. I just zoom zoomed through the campaign. It's very early, but they got a long-ass way to go with this one.

95% of every map is pointless to explore, just b-line to the quest rewards. Maps were very linear and not very well designed I think. They looked cool though and graphically it's nice. Everything can be facerolled (especially with rogue). Loot is extremely uninteresting. While the crafting is cool and all it causes for a really really boring loot system. The lore was alright. The potential for an amazing and great game is there, but it's not even remotely close to being there yet. Even the UI is terribad, such as automatically opening dialogs and stuff by approaching NPCs and not clicking on them, or having death screen come up while you're still moving and before your HP is actually 0.

While I see a lot of potential here, and I do like a lot of the systems, I can't really see myself playing this much more until its radically improved.

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Surely you’re not suggesting pre-influence Poe loot was “interesting?” It was basically the same thing. Wasn’t until influence that it got interesting in poe.

Early PoE loot was pretty sanitary as well, most GG gear was simply T1 life with Tri Res or T1 ES gear. PoE did have a ton more uniques though that were more build defining.

This game is dank idk what some of yall talkin about

I liked when the whole glancing blow thing was in only because it was different and I had done a fine job of min maxing it with the wearing multi items with affix bonuses

AladainAF said:

No I'm not suggesting that, in fact I don't think I made any comparisons in my post whatsoever to poe.

Loot in LE is uninteresting, in my opinion, because you can get a piece of gear at level 5 in the first area of the game, and continually craft on it and have it carry you the entire game without really needing to upgrade except in the post-game, where you just need to get one piece of gear with 1 pre/suff that looks good and go from there. Yes, you can min/max with exalted items and stuff similar to ancients in diablo, but the power boost you get out of that is neglible at best, at least from what I've seen. Perhaps this changes at the bleeding edge, which I did not play to, so if I'm wrong by all means correct me. But from looking at some peoples builds at the end game, their gear isn't really much different than what I had in the story.

Since you brought up PoE, I've played it since the original closed beta in 2011. I know how sanitary it was. I said LE has a lot of potential and I don't have any doubts that it's going to be a great game when it matures. But right now, it's a fun game to put in 10 hours in and move on.

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Gotcha. Overall I agree. I think they do need to tune crafting some to make it harder, but essentially the best you can craft is T3 while T2 and T1 are drops, so in some ways you still gotta pick up loot and ID it. Also the addition of +1 to skills just went in with the most recent patch, so I think they’re aware. My bigger problem is the lack of endgame shit to do. But I recognize they’re in beta.

Only correction I’d offer is you cannot continually craft an item. They will eventually fracture and be unable to further craft at best or actually poof at worst. I think there’s a third result that actually re-rolls some affixes and acts almost like a vaal but with only negatives. I personally think crafted items should be untradeable given how powerful their crafting is. We’ll see when they put in trade. I fear it’s gonna make it so easy to get gear that there’s no challenge even at the bleeding edge.

I actually haven’t played much at all. Simply going off what a couple friends are saying.

It is way too easy in LP to build anything and steamroll the story, that's a legit complaint. One of my biggest gripes is the convoluted messy story.

The end game isn't very exciting overall, the boss encounters are easy and dull as shit if you're coming from PoE, there's pretty much zero comparison between this and Grim Dawn or PoE which are both much harder games to master if you want to play at endgame.

I like that you're not forced to do the story instantly on every character as you can just jump into Monoliths from very early on if you want and grind loot and exp/points (then easily do story points later). Crafting's nice and blessings are a nice addition.

Overall there's loads of positives for the game and as I've said they are working pretty hard to improve things and listen to complaints on the boards. It's just missing something that makes you go wow right now but Rome wasn't built in a day.

The class system and art feel heavily influenced by Rift. The Lagon fight has a lot in common with Rift's Akylios. I'll definitely give it another play-through after the next big content update. But, I lost interest before getting to the end game.

Some of the uber bosses are great in the end game system. It like the islands and all, needs more of that.