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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
I would love if they let you hybridise the classes a bit more. the game feels a little too constrained in that although there are a lot of builds they feel very intentional and designed for and opening up that kind of titan quest style mix and match would be fun
the damage scaling being more constrained than many arpgs also makes that kind of thing less of a risk I think
or just add female versions of every class that would be good too either or
I really love the strong class themes of the game. I love that you can do wacky shit in PoE, but I'm also sad that the current meta is like all wacky thematically incongruent stuff.
I love that this one has some druidey ass druids, and necromancers that are actually good at summoning undead relative to other classes. There was a time when PoE had strong class themes, but they switched gears on that and I miss it.
there are a few big issues with the endgame grind tbh; one is that it's just very repetitive. That's part and parcel of ARPGs obviously, but I think the core loop needs a little more variety. If monos were even a little more diverse that'd help, so maybe the new stuff will make it feel better.
the other thing that really bugs me is that your gear kinda hits a wall after you start to get exalteds and your intro uniques; at that point you start to need LP items to upgrade your stuff, but items with more than two LP (or even one for higher-level uniques) are way too rare. If they were more common you'd have more chances to imprint and it might feel like there was more of a process of upgrading gear, rather than crossing your fingers for a 3LP item forever and then hoping you don't brick it
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
there are a few big issues with the endgame grind tbh; one is that it's just very repetitive. That's part and parcel of ARPGs obviously, but I think the core loop needs a little more variety. If monos were even a little more diverse that'd help, so maybe the new stuff will make it feel better.
the other thing that really bugs me is that your gear kinda hits a wall after you start to get exalteds and your intro uniques; at that point you start to need LP items to upgrade your stuff, but items with more than two LP (or even one for higher-level uniques) are way too rare. If they were more common you'd have more chances to imprint and it might feel like there was more of a process of upgrading gear, rather than crossing your fingers for a 3LP item forever and then hoping you don't brick it
Part of that gets solved a bit with the factions, you can either fish for the item type you need and get multiple drops/rolls with the Circle or you can just find what you need in the bazaar and buy it. It's not perfect but thematically a good reason to grind. I think they are getting there but need a little more endgame treadmill that encourages you to rotate the different activities. Right now it's mono to farm keys, then arena/dungeon, and back to monos. I think there should be something that dungeons lead to, maybe the dungeon chests could drop tokens that can reroll monolith nodes or something so you can tweak your mono farming experience a bit. 🤷♀️
I really wish 'who cares you're not looking at them and they're covered in particle effects quit whining' weren't the dominant opinion on ARPG characters and that we got, if not full character creation, a few options for how characters look.
At least transmog is in the cards, but it's still what, 9-12 months out on the roadmap? 1.4?
I'm not sure I can muster my enthusiasm to play another acolyte or ranger that looks like every other acolyte or ranger except for the build-defining unique that's so ugly I don't want to play them anymore...
I'm cool with running the campaign, but it is always a bit of a shock starting over with no items (especially when I love giving my alts OP items so much).
The good news is that the Nemesis stuff seems to throw quite a few uniques at you, pretty early on. Getting a decent one can initiate turbo mode pretty quickly.
I really wish 'who cares you're not looking at them and they're covered in particle effects quit whining' weren't the dominant opinion on ARPG characters and that we got, if not full character creation, a few options for how characters look.
At least transmog is in the cards, but it's still what, 9-12 months out on the roadmap? 1.4?
I'm not sure I can muster my enthusiasm to play another acolyte or ranger that looks like every other acolyte or ranger except for the build-defining unique that's so ugly I don't want to play them anymore...
d4 character creator was actually good
characters had class identity but you could customise enough they felt like your guy/girl
unironically the best part and the default non-mtx armours were tasteful and u had dyes
poe2 has gender locked classes and its incredibly annoying because its like... why. d2 did that because it was 2d and the 18th century just let everybody be a wide woman barbarian its what the people WANT
ill give the new league a go but i hope they have added a LOT of carbonara to this spaghetti
People have been asking to skip campaign since the beginning of time. It is no less warranted here. What a slog. Steal friggen Grim Dawn's arena thing or something. This is dumb.
Dunno how long the league mechanic will keep me in the game. Depends on if the end game changes are ok enough. But I do not think they will be. But it still has me for now. The mechanic is fun when it has good stuff in it. Getting LP items for "free" rolled could be really sweet but dunno if my rng will give me anything good heh.
Yeah Last Epoch is definitely lacking on the Fashion Souls component. I am the person who barely used transmogs in D4 though, so it's low on my list. I get it's a huge deal for a lot of people though.
The gender locked classes thing is interesting, because I do like having ARPG classes that are characters, similar to D2 and Path of Exile. Last Epoch is aiming for the same thing with their reaction lines. Like, the witch is awesome in PoE because of her voice actor and her individual personality. In d4, all of the character voiceovers are incredibly boring and lame. I don't sound like a necromancer or a sorcerer -- I just sound like some moody guy reading lines off of a sheet of paper. I don't get "How does a Necromancer view this crazy thing that is happening in the campaign?" similar to D2 and PoE.
Now it's not impossible to make a good character with gender options or anything, it just seems to always fall off when they do. It costs extra money for the voice acting obviously, and it seems like people just go with "eh we got body types, we got two voices, we're not even going to try to have them be characters" every time it happens. You're dealing with # of classes x 2 instead of just two voice actors in a Mass Effect or something, but I really have no idea how cost prohibitive that is at the end of the day. I would love to have the best of both though!
I think they need to have class-specific quests or something if they want each class to feel like a particular character. I'd almost prefer a Commander Shepard stand-in for that sort of thing. They already have the timelines thing going on, every PC can be the same dude.
Yeah I don't think they've succeeded at it yet, but it's an idea that I like when done correctly.
I'm doing Primalist with the voice actor on and there have been some good lines, but it's not like D2 Necromancer or PoE Witch level cool yet.
Class quests are good, but only when paired with the convincing voice acting or writing. D4's class quests are neat thematically, but again the voice acting is barely used and it just feels like you as a player running Druid themed quests. I never felt like my Druid was a character with thoughts and feelings on anything going on from a "druid perspective", so that's a little bit different from what I'm describing.
I cut these guys a bit of slack compared to PoE or Diablo since they have a much smaller team and budget to work with. I believe they said gender swapping was something they were interested in implementing down the line, but who knows when that could happen given the rate of major updates. I also wish they would finish the goddamn story, wtf.
Butter smooth play but then looked at player count. Know its mid week but damn there were more people watching on twitch during 24 peak than playing.... heh. Good ol twitch drops that no one uses most of the time.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
the big problem with the early game is that some classes literally melt bosses and just walk through the campaign, and others decidedly do not
early game numbers are all over the place and while it definitely evens out in monos, it's kinda still really rough to get there sometimes
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
I haven't really experienced many classes that struggle super hard early on relative to others (I know Forge Guard pre patch was pretty lame but I never played it). Like, the first 10-20 minutes, if you get 0 gear for what you're doing, yes.
And if you're trying to play a specific playstyle very early on, before RNG balances stuff out, sure. Like I wanted to be totem guy last night, and it's just a bit more of a niche damage source early on. Before too long you have a ton of +minion +totem stuff, but a good % of the early game drops are spell damage and melee damage and those don't help you out. Totems are stronk after a few points on the tree, so I pushed through.
In general I think if you're willing to be a bit flexible with your build early (which isn't going to punish you long term), every class has a good way to clear the story bosses. I got plenty of melee damage and spell damage stuff, and some uniques that would give me big boosts if I just spot switch to using skills that benefit from that.
Outside of "okay I'm going to use this one skill no matter what, even if early drops don't RNG my way", it seems like there are strong options for every class to get through early bosses. I should mention that the new dodge roll helps a lot with that now too. There were some early bosses in 1.0 who were surprisingly tough on my freshly rolled no gear guy, but it was largely due to not having my movement skill yet and being unable to avoid the big telegraphs. The dodge roll has made it much easier to avoid that stuff in the early game. By mid game, you typically have enough shards to slap on your gear to make pretty much all damage sources viable.
All of the new stuff should be available on non-cycle characters if you're just wanting to do that.
And once you've gotten to monoliths once in a league you can skip like 50%+ of the story on new characters.
Aaand if you run it on a alt with a bunch of fancy gear from your main, that other 50% of the story takes like 3 hours total and you'll blaze through it.
Last Epoch's story has always been the easiest cruise to me -- it gives you waypoints to where to go. Turn off brain, go go go, kill kill kill. Not really too different from Monoliths if you let the waypoints guide you, aside from a few loading screens and some towns to run through.
Fiatil on
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Acolyte is weird in that it really sucks and then you hit like level 8 or 12 and actually get a decent skill and it's suddenly very very good. Early mage is pretty similar. Unspecialized lightning sucks, fireball has a tiny AOE then once you get elemental blast you're golden.
it seems like mostly a leveling item unfortunately, though I did also drop the aaron's will that evaded me all last seasons so maybe I'll give golem necro a shot again
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I like that they got a little weird with the dodge roll and used it for uniques. Though the crab summon itself is mostly memes, that item works to being "Okay I'll trade my dodge roll for some passive movement speed", which is a great way to handle the system for people who don't need/want the dodge roll as much.
I got a unique that casts static orb on evade last night, which is tempting! It's cool that they've integrated it mechanically into the loot like that -- I don't dodge roll a ton yet, but definitely would a lot if it's spamming species up static orb.
I found a pair of boots around level 20-something that converts Evade into an AoE fear skill called Terrify and gives you bonuses against feared enemies, it was neat but really frustrating for a melee character lol
Despite totem life being very effective, I have returned to my love of trying to be the best ignite fireballer that I can be after getting close to empowered monos on my totem guy.
The sorc buffs seem cool and I hear mana tanking is sweet now, so may as well go for it.
It's also crazy how huge the patch is -- I didn't follow all of the notes blow for blow, and feel like I notice a big new feature every time I log back in. I finally sat down and read why bosses get ward now -- they got rid of the old damage reduction/throttling system that caused a lot of grumbling and replaced it with the ward thing, which makes a lot of sense now that I look at it.
And I totally missed that there's a new glyph that starts to drop in empowered monos that lets you pump up stability in monos on alts -- aka the long requested "please let me get to empowered monos faster on my alts" feature.
Despite totem life being very effective, I have returned to my love of trying to be the best ignite fireballer that I can be after getting close to empowered monos on my totem guy.
The sorc buffs seem cool and I hear mana tanking is sweet now, so may as well go for it.
It's also crazy how huge the patch is -- I didn't follow all of the notes blow for blow, and feel like I notice a big new feature every time I log back in. I finally sat down and read why bosses get ward now -- they got rid of the old damage reduction/throttling system that caused a lot of grumbling and replaced it with the ward thing, which makes a lot of sense now that I look at it.
And I totally missed that there's a new glyph that starts to drop in empowered monos that lets you pump up stability in monos on alts -- aka the long requested "please let me get to empowered monos faster on my alts" feature.
what's the idea of the ward - just extra hp for bosses that scales inversely with your dps?
I think it's got multiple benefits, it adds more effective HP but still lets the bars move in a perceptible manner. It also prevents mega one shots since I think a broken ward negates the remainder of damage from a hit (this is only a guess). It also gives more benefit to skills that do more damage to full health or low health enemies since you sit in those regions for longer.
Despite totem life being very effective, I have returned to my love of trying to be the best ignite fireballer that I can be after getting close to empowered monos on my totem guy.
The sorc buffs seem cool and I hear mana tanking is sweet now, so may as well go for it.
It's also crazy how huge the patch is -- I didn't follow all of the notes blow for blow, and feel like I notice a big new feature every time I log back in. I finally sat down and read why bosses get ward now -- they got rid of the old damage reduction/throttling system that caused a lot of grumbling and replaced it with the ward thing, which makes a lot of sense now that I look at it.
And I totally missed that there's a new glyph that starts to drop in empowered monos that lets you pump up stability in monos on alts -- aka the long requested "please let me get to empowered monos faster on my alts" feature.
what's the idea of the ward - just extra hp for bosses that scales inversely with your dps?
Essentially they want bosses to have time to actually do their abilities; previously they used a scaling damage reduction as they got lower health, but people hated that apparently, so now we have the ward bursts
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Yeah the big change with ward on bosses vs. DR is that you can wait it out. The formula is different than normal ward; with bosses, they get a big burst that decays at an increasing rate as time passes.
So the bosses get time to do their abilities just like with the DR system, but instead of just having to do more more DPS to get through it, you have the option to run around and focus on dodging and such while the ward ticks down too. You can still just burn through the ward if you want, but it gives you an alternative to play more defensively and then turn on your DPS again after the ward is gone.
It's also just substantially more transparent to be able to see the ward they get vs. some % of damage reduction.
So there's a fancy event going on now, with a new league start alongside it (as of the 19th) -- apparently there was some gold dupe stuff going on last league, so they went for new league in between patches.
The main theme of the event (The Imperial Uprising) is skeletons everywhere, so there are fancy packs of champion skeletons running around. But the bigger thing is probably the sweet bonuses we get while it's ongoing:
and hey who doesn't love some boosted rates. I only play Circle of Fortune, so wasn't sure if I would go for the new cycle, buuut the urge to play got to me and I decided to roll up a fresh character for it despite not really caring about the gold dupe economy reset.
It's been a ton of fun! I wound up getting uniques to run dual wield fire Warpath on my leveling paladin -- the intent was to go smite earlier, but the unique synergy was so damn good I wound up going Warpath until level 50.
There are also several new features since the start of last league with 1.1 too -- stash tab affinities, yesssss. And they added loot goblins (lizards in this case), that actually give a lot of really nice loot and shards. Also something like 50 new shrine effects which has really spiced that up and I make sure to activate them in every area now. As always a lot of really smart implementations of ideas in other ARPGs, it's been a lot fresher than I expected coming off doing a fairly recent league start with 1.1
Posts
the damage scaling being more constrained than many arpgs also makes that kind of thing less of a risk I think
or just add female versions of every class that would be good too either or
I love that this one has some druidey ass druids, and necromancers that are actually good at summoning undead relative to other classes. There was a time when PoE had strong class themes, but they switched gears on that and I miss it.
It would be cool to get a mix of both though!
the other thing that really bugs me is that your gear kinda hits a wall after you start to get exalteds and your intro uniques; at that point you start to need LP items to upgrade your stuff, but items with more than two LP (or even one for higher-level uniques) are way too rare. If they were more common you'd have more chances to imprint and it might feel like there was more of a process of upgrading gear, rather than crossing your fingers for a 3LP item forever and then hoping you don't brick it
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Part of that gets solved a bit with the factions, you can either fish for the item type you need and get multiple drops/rolls with the Circle or you can just find what you need in the bazaar and buy it. It's not perfect but thematically a good reason to grind. I think they are getting there but need a little more endgame treadmill that encourages you to rotate the different activities. Right now it's mono to farm keys, then arena/dungeon, and back to monos. I think there should be something that dungeons lead to, maybe the dungeon chests could drop tokens that can reroll monolith nodes or something so you can tweak your mono farming experience a bit. 🤷♀️
I wasted so much time at work not planning my build today!
At least transmog is in the cards, but it's still what, 9-12 months out on the roadmap? 1.4?
I'm not sure I can muster my enthusiasm to play another acolyte or ranger that looks like every other acolyte or ranger except for the build-defining unique that's so ugly I don't want to play them anymore...
fuckin hell just put me in monoliths already
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
The good news is that the Nemesis stuff seems to throw quite a few uniques at you, pretty early on. Getting a decent one can initiate turbo mode pretty quickly.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
d4 character creator was actually good
characters had class identity but you could customise enough they felt like your guy/girl
unironically the best part and the default non-mtx armours were tasteful and u had dyes
poe2 has gender locked classes and its incredibly annoying because its like... why. d2 did that because it was 2d and the 18th century just let everybody be a wide woman barbarian its what the people WANT
ill give the new league a go but i hope they have added a LOT of carbonara to this spaghetti
Dunno how long the league mechanic will keep me in the game. Depends on if the end game changes are ok enough. But I do not think they will be. But it still has me for now. The mechanic is fun when it has good stuff in it. Getting LP items for "free" rolled could be really sweet but dunno if my rng will give me anything good heh.
The gender locked classes thing is interesting, because I do like having ARPG classes that are characters, similar to D2 and Path of Exile. Last Epoch is aiming for the same thing with their reaction lines. Like, the witch is awesome in PoE because of her voice actor and her individual personality. In d4, all of the character voiceovers are incredibly boring and lame. I don't sound like a necromancer or a sorcerer -- I just sound like some moody guy reading lines off of a sheet of paper. I don't get "How does a Necromancer view this crazy thing that is happening in the campaign?" similar to D2 and PoE.
Now it's not impossible to make a good character with gender options or anything, it just seems to always fall off when they do. It costs extra money for the voice acting obviously, and it seems like people just go with "eh we got body types, we got two voices, we're not even going to try to have them be characters" every time it happens. You're dealing with # of classes x 2 instead of just two voice actors in a Mass Effect or something, but I really have no idea how cost prohibitive that is at the end of the day. I would love to have the best of both though!
I'm doing Primalist with the voice actor on and there have been some good lines, but it's not like D2 Necromancer or PoE Witch level cool yet.
Class quests are good, but only when paired with the convincing voice acting or writing. D4's class quests are neat thematically, but again the voice acting is barely used and it just feels like you as a player running Druid themed quests. I never felt like my Druid was a character with thoughts and feelings on anything going on from a "druid perspective", so that's a little bit different from what I'm describing.
early game numbers are all over the place and while it definitely evens out in monos, it's kinda still really rough to get there sometimes
which classes are felt to do badly early on?
And if you're trying to play a specific playstyle very early on, before RNG balances stuff out, sure. Like I wanted to be totem guy last night, and it's just a bit more of a niche damage source early on. Before too long you have a ton of +minion +totem stuff, but a good % of the early game drops are spell damage and melee damage and those don't help you out. Totems are stronk after a few points on the tree, so I pushed through.
In general I think if you're willing to be a bit flexible with your build early (which isn't going to punish you long term), every class has a good way to clear the story bosses. I got plenty of melee damage and spell damage stuff, and some uniques that would give me big boosts if I just spot switch to using skills that benefit from that.
Outside of "okay I'm going to use this one skill no matter what, even if early drops don't RNG my way", it seems like there are strong options for every class to get through early bosses. I should mention that the new dodge roll helps a lot with that now too. There were some early bosses in 1.0 who were surprisingly tough on my freshly rolled no gear guy, but it was largely due to not having my movement skill yet and being unable to avoid the big telegraphs. The dodge roll has made it much easier to avoid that stuff in the early game. By mid game, you typically have enough shards to slap on your gear to make pretty much all damage sources viable.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
And once you've gotten to monoliths once in a league you can skip like 50%+ of the story on new characters.
Aaand if you run it on a alt with a bunch of fancy gear from your main, that other 50% of the story takes like 3 hours total and you'll blaze through it.
Last Epoch's story has always been the easiest cruise to me -- it gives you waypoints to where to go. Turn off brain, go go go, kill kill kill. Not really too different from Monoliths if you let the waypoints guide you, aside from a few loading screens and some towns to run through.
Pet and melee classes are pretty heavily gear dependent until you can unlock enough skills and talents to actually do stuff
I don't remember acolyte being so bad but it's been a little while since I played one
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
it seems like mostly a leveling item unfortunately, though I did also drop the aaron's will that evaded me all last seasons so maybe I'll give golem necro a shot again
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I got a unique that casts static orb on evade last night, which is tempting! It's cool that they've integrated it mechanically into the loot like that -- I don't dodge roll a ton yet, but definitely would a lot if it's spamming species up static orb.
The sorc buffs seem cool and I hear mana tanking is sweet now, so may as well go for it.
It's also crazy how huge the patch is -- I didn't follow all of the notes blow for blow, and feel like I notice a big new feature every time I log back in. I finally sat down and read why bosses get ward now -- they got rid of the old damage reduction/throttling system that caused a lot of grumbling and replaced it with the ward thing, which makes a lot of sense now that I look at it.
And I totally missed that there's a new glyph that starts to drop in empowered monos that lets you pump up stability in monos on alts -- aka the long requested "please let me get to empowered monos faster on my alts" feature.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
what's the idea of the ward - just extra hp for bosses that scales inversely with your dps?
Not yet
They have talked about revamping sets in some way but nothing concrete yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Essentially they want bosses to have time to actually do their abilities; previously they used a scaling damage reduction as they got lower health, but people hated that apparently, so now we have the ward bursts
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
So the bosses get time to do their abilities just like with the DR system, but instead of just having to do more more DPS to get through it, you have the option to run around and focus on dodging and such while the ward ticks down too. You can still just burn through the ward if you want, but it gives you an alternative to play more defensively and then turn on your DPS again after the ward is gone.
It's also just substantially more transparent to be able to see the ward they get vs. some % of damage reduction.
The main theme of the event (The Imperial Uprising) is skeletons everywhere, so there are fancy packs of champion skeletons running around. But the bigger thing is probably the sweet bonuses we get while it's ongoing:
and hey who doesn't love some boosted rates. I only play Circle of Fortune, so wasn't sure if I would go for the new cycle, buuut the urge to play got to me and I decided to roll up a fresh character for it despite not really caring about the gold dupe economy reset.
It's been a ton of fun! I wound up getting uniques to run dual wield fire Warpath on my leveling paladin -- the intent was to go smite earlier, but the unique synergy was so damn good I wound up going Warpath until level 50.
There are also several new features since the start of last league with 1.1 too -- stash tab affinities, yesssss. And they added loot goblins (lizards in this case), that actually give a lot of really nice loot and shards. Also something like 50 new shrine effects which has really spiced that up and I make sure to activate them in every area now. As always a lot of really smart implementations of ideas in other ARPGs, it's been a lot fresher than I expected coming off doing a fairly recent league start with 1.1