Last Epoch

Caliane said:

redoing the mainquest over and over for alts sucks real bad.

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I hated this the most about PoE. I don't care how fast you can go through the plot quests; I don't need to see it for the 50th time.

Caliane said:

they might be hyping this up a bit too much. its a decent game. but, it is 100% an indie game. it does not have the budget of diablo or lost ark and it shows.

Some people like the deterministic crafting. I'm not sure i could really point to anything that really stands out as brilliant design. unlike PoE.

storyline is a mess. And, redoing the mainquest over and over for alts sucks real bad.

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It does nothing that stands out like you said. But it does everything well. From the inventory management, to stat explanations to the gear upgrades. It's just clean. That's all I ask for.

That said...Confusing as fuck story and progression later. They just need to tell you in a giant window that you need to head to THIS timeline for bear asses. Endgame they REALLY need to explain the monolith progression. Or at the least hold your hand step by step. Haven't made an alt yet...But fucks sake, going thru the MSQ everytime? WHY the fuck do designers do this shit to us? Screams lazy.

I do think that is one thing D3 got right, and that was Adventure mode.

I enjoy playing alts, but I don't enjoy running the same storyline multiple times.

The game is like a very polished B+ type of game. There's nothing driving me to play more after getting to empowered monoliths currently. Every build seems viable. Gear is so craftable and fixable there's very little excitement on finding a "good" item. Definitely a solid game and seems great for the non-poopsocker who just want an ARPG to play when they want and fuck around with as they'd like. No majorly penalizing systems, defenses are just a matter of dumping shards onto your suffixes, and very few if any builds are locked behind hard to find uniques.

Something about it just doesn't give me that feeling of wanting to play. Like PoE is hated for it's RNG and grinding style, but there's always that carrot. This game has no carrot for me. Everything just always worked and there wasn't any game-changing item for me to grind. I know there's that neck to grind at 200 corruption or whatever, but does it really matter THAT much? It's just more damage it's not changing anything for my builds personally.

If they figure out a more indepth, more grindy endgame with better goals it could definitely gain more popularity. That said I think it's a great ARPG to recommend for people over PoE who are looking for an ARPG to play. PoE is just too convoluted and complicated for the common noob who isn't willing to put off-game hours in learning. Some people like me LOVE shit like that, but for most it's a chore.

And hot take: I didn't like the crafting system. It felt like all the gear was more or less guaranteed and RNG had nothing to do with it, just time. Especially with the very basic way their affix system works you're basically just looking for one good prefix and that's all you need. It was almost a hex editor and felt like it wasn't even worth looking at most stuff even with a filter on after a very short while.

While some may disagree, I feel like it's a good time to be an ARPG fan. Everyone has their personal favorites for whatever reason.

What I am excited about is that you have several great quality arpgs out there now and none really seem to be trying to compete with each other. No matter what type of arpg you like, there is a game for you.

PoE - for those that like super complex mechanics and require 3rd party tools to successfully navigate trading. This is the game for you.

Diablo 3 - for those that like a fairly well polished arpg with constantly resetting seasons - here you go.

Lost Ark - probably the best combat and variety of any of the arpgs right now, but a ton of weaknesses elsewhere -

Last Epoch - solid combat / graphics / sound / developer that listens and responds to feedback - simple, easy to understand crafting system. Very accessible to new players and deep enough for older ones.

D4 - no experience with it yet, we will see.

Great time to be a fan of the genre. Each game is solid in its on right and there is enough variety of games that no matter what side of the arpg fence you sit, there is something for you.

Xevy said:

The game is like a very polished B+ type of game. There's nothing driving me to play more after getting to empowered monoliths currently. Every build seems viable. Gear is so craftable and fixable there's very little excitement on finding a "good" item. Definitely a solid game and seems great for the non-poopsocker who just want an ARPG to play when they want and fuck around with as they'd like. No majorly penalizing systems, defenses are just a matter of dumping shards onto your suffixes, and very few if any builds are locked behind hard to find uniques.

Something about it just doesn't give me that feeling of wanting to play. Like PoE is hated for it's RNG and grinding style, but there's always that carrot. This game has no carrot for me. Everything just always worked and there wasn't any game-changing item for me to grind. I know there's that neck to grind at 200 corruption or whatever, but does it really matter THAT much? It's just more damage it's not changing anything for my builds personally.

If they figure out a more indepth, more grindy endgame with better goals it could definitely gain more popularity. That said I think it's a great ARPG to recommend for people over PoE who are looking for an ARPG to play. PoE is just too convoluted and complicated for the common noob who isn't willing to put off-game hours in learning. Some people like me LOVE shit like that, but for most it's a chore.

And hot take: I didn't like the crafting system. It felt like all the gear was more or less guaranteed and RNG had nothing to do with it, just time. Especially with the very basic way their affix system works you're basically just looking for one good prefix and that's all you need. It was almost a hex editor and felt like it wasn't even worth looking at most stuff even with a filter on after a very short while.

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Yea the crafting has really put me off in the endgame. You have such an insane glut of runes/shards and bases to work with that's basically an item editor. There's the legendary uniques even to add affixes to those, but to what purpose? A random setup of rares that you upgrade to t5 and your one unique that allows your build to do some specific thing is enough faceroll the entire game.

The game is just not very difficult. Part of this is because of the crafting I'm sure, but I've never been in a position where I had to slow down even slightly, much less sit and farm or respec or something to try and climb to the next level of progression. I was just blasting away at the level 90 areas at level 75 and they didn't really feel all that different from the level 50 areas or even the campaign.

They definitely need to up the difficulty or have an option to toggle a harder mode.

I know they said they have plans for procedurally generated levels and some other stuff they are keeping under wraps. I look forward to see it develop further.

Caliane said:

they might be hyping this up a bit too much. its a decent game. but, it is 100% an indie game. it does not have the budget of diablo or lost ark and it shows.

Some people like the deterministic crafting. I'm not sure i could really point to anything that really stands out as brilliant design. unlike PoE.

storyline is a mess. And, redoing the mainquest over and over for alts sucks real bad.

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I'm not sure how the level cutoff works exactly for alts. But once you get to ~50? you can just do monos for the alts and skip the story. The snake lady gives you an all stat boost +1, but you can generally get all the idol unlocks done way before.

Just as a gut check, if you have any concerns about the game being to easy and haven't done T4 dungeons and 400 corruption you may want to push a little further. Pretty significant jumps from face rolling non-empowered mono's to 400 corruption+ empowered mono's. J4 is extremely punishing as well.

They still have further plans for additional end game content but outside of some of the higher end builds the game is not just "too" easy once you start pushing abit.

Hateyou said:

Can’t you do arena really early once you’ve unlocked it on one character? I thinks it’s pretty viable to skip most of the campaign by doing arena then monoliths. Been a while since I started an alt though so not sure how much of it you can skip.

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You can skip the campaign but the dumb thing they did was put +15 passive and +8 idol slots tied to various quests in the story. There are more passive/idol skills then max so you can just hit some of them but its spread out enough that you have to waste a decent amount of time to do the campaign portions to get them. I use every chance I get in chat with their CEO to bitch about this to be honest, they just need to make dungoen lvl 1,2,3, and 4 completes to give passive & idol 1 time rewards so you can use them as alternative lvl'ing options which they said was a viable path.

Alternatively if you have a friend or wife, you can do what I do and just have them teleport you around to the key parts of the campaign to get all your passive/idols and + 1 boss bonus. We have it down to probably an hour (?) of running around to get that and about 19 lvls of exp just porting around.

Gonna give this a try again. Looking at the cold dot werebear buil. Anyone recommend what build I should level with as a druid before I make the transition to cold dot werebear?

Nola said:

Gonna give this a try again. Looking at the cold dot werebear buil. Anyone recommend what build I should level with as a druid before I make the transition to cold dot werebear?

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Guildmate did this and then went werebear cold dot and crushed it at both ends.

I like experimenting with different build ideas in this one. So many combinations.

I lvl'd as cold dot wear bear to open MP and its fine. First 20 lvls of primalist are abit slow going but as a whole it transitions well enough. I hate cold dot wear bear because my egotstical nature enjoys big numbers! I'm refining a self made spell wear bear that should be very strong to 400+ corruption and is the funnest class in the game from my perspective but does suck at J4. Put it on hold until I make a J4 clearing character so i can farm/combine a Bhuldar's w/ LP and also playing with my wife alot so poor druid project is on hold until next week to finish. Think my EQ tooltip is up to 1M for some massive nukes but need to make it abit tankier and redo skills to incorporate a meteor belt to help make clearing even that much more fun. I'll post my build here in a week or so as I haven't seen anything on maxroll or last epoch builds for this one.

I have my squirrel helm and decided to make a beast master, have it at lvl 80 now with some pretty strong gear and got J4 to 30% on my first attempt last night. Not a fan of pet classes but crit build squirrels single target dps is just pure insanity. Started it as i wanted to come up with a build for my wife to compliment it so we both can benefit from some synergies on minion buffs etc. Struggling abit as necro's for the most part are restricted to buffing only their pets. I'd say pali but her main is a pali already so I wanted to come up with something else so she doesn't get bored just on 1 class. Was thinking another BM with a heavy focus on a single target saber tooth build to make our single target that much stronger but will see. There is zero builds leveraging sabertooth at high lvl so abit concerned i'm missing something, spent 3 hours making a full build for her on last epoch builds to follow and synergize with me but haven't got it in practice yet so time will tell.

Really enjoying the game, small part of me is abit scared to see how the trading/self find factions get implemented. I've always been a haggler since the original EQ EC Tunnel's started 23 years ago hah but I don't think she will enjoy so her characters and my main will probably be the self found faction but i'm sure i'll make a trading one as well. Very curious to see how they minimize RMT because i'll be the first to admit if I can pay some 100 dollars for a 3 LP bhuldar's i'd do it in a heart beat.

Hard to tell if the range increase node on melee puncture works just eyeballing it. Fun Rogue build with this mutilate node tho.

I really dislike what this game calls "respec"..its the worst respec system I've encountered. To take a point in your Skill tree(s) from 1 skill to another requires that you give up that 1 skill point and then re lvl the skill to gain a new point to place it where you wanted. That system seems so stupid, I am almost sure I'm misunderstanding how it works.

I've been playing a Warpath Paladin with Smite a s proc on hits, pretty fun. Yet, its the Judgement skill that is the most fun to use, but seems to have a big flaw in its skill try, at least imo. The skill has a direct hit (Judgement) and a lingering AoE (Consecrated Ground). So now to try out different combinations of perks in that tree, I have to take points out of various perks, then re lvl the skill via grinding to those back and free to use, not horrible, but I'd prefer just freely move points however I want.

Zindan said:

I really dislike what this game calls "respec"..its the worst respec system I've encountered. To take a point in your Skill tree(s) from 1 skill to another requires that you give up that 1 skill point and then re lvl the skill to gain a new point to place it where you wanted. That system seems so stupid, I am almost sure I'm misunderstanding how it works.

I've been playing a Warpath Paladin with Smite a s proc on hits, pretty fun. Yet, its the Judgement skill that is the most fun to use, but seems to have a big flaw in its skill try, at least imo. The skill has a direct hit (Judgement) and a lingering AoE (Consecrated Ground). So now to try out different combinations of perks in that tree, I have to take points out of various perks, then re lvl the skill via grinding to those back and free to use, not horrible, but I'd prefer just freely move points however I want.

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Must not have played PoE then. You had to farm currency to remove each skill point.

However, it only takes a handful of monolith or arena runs to get 5 to 6 levels of your skill back. You could probably take a skill from 1 to 20 in 30 mins or so at the higher levels.

Why that mechanic really exists...I'm not sure, but it's quickly trivialize in a relative short time frame.

Ok. Hit level 90 monoliths. Maxxed resists and still getting one shot on aoe!