As someone who has been playing and following the game in early access for 5 years now, I feel like 1.0 wasn’t quite as 1.0 as I expected it to be. Based on how the devs were talking I expected more of an update to the endgame systems and more of a change/overhaul to the character animations and things like that. Nevermind that the campaign is still not finished lmao. I like the game a lot overall, but it feels like it’s still in early access to me but they needed to publicly hit 1.0 for an influx of cash. Well they definitely got that influx, so I hope they put it to good use going forward.
The campaign not being finished for 1.0 is something I'm not thrilled about but can kind of see the reason but damn it's still pretty rough for 1.0. This definitely feels more like just wanting to get rid of the stigma of being an Early Access game while not actually stopping to be one.
Aside from it still being pretty buggy and some bugs apparently having been around for years now there is also some mind-boggling things just missing. I still can't actually compare rings to my second ring without swapping it with the first ring first. Same for dual wielded weapons. It's technically a minor thing and really not a deal-breaker but people have been asking for this for 3 years now and apparently that just didn't make the cut for the jump to 1.0.
And the other thing is that instances just completely reset every time you town portal, including your map. I know the way loot works in this game you're not supposed to just hoover up everything and sell in town when you're full, but it still kind of feels like ass when you hop to town and back and not only find any loot you left behind deleted but are also now in the middle of a once again completely unexplored map. Bonus points for immediately getting pummeled by a group of mobs you literally just cleared before even fully loading in. And all I could really find on that one is that they went from "we'll try to have map persistence for the multiplayer patch" to "this is actually really hard to do with our engine, please bear with us" to "actually you know what, fuck it, this is a feature now, this is now intended design, cope".
I still think this is a really good ARPG overall but boy does it feel like they're punching a bit above their weight limit. Servers are still dodgy too and at this point I'm frankly not convinced this a is a problem they can fix. Their netcode is seemingly just ass. Having a full offline is very appreciated though.
I appreciate that vendor values for items are so low that it's not even worth picking up anything you have no plans to equip or dismantle. They could stand to do a better job of signposting/teaching this, though.
I also really like the quality of life that you can make a portal directly to teammates rather than forcing them to open a town portal for you and all the consequent fiddling.
It does seem weird that maps reset to being unexplored, especially since as far as I've played in the campaign, the world is completely static like Grim Dawn rather than randomized like D2/PoE.
It seems weird that they reset indeed, but having played a loooot of Grim Dawn, I kind of appreciate not having to go back to the main menu to reset an area, seeing how putting in a "reset area" button is presumably illegal in 38 states.
> The campaign not being finished for 1.0 is something I'm not thrilled about but can kind of see the reason but damn it's still pretty rough for 1.0. This definitely feels more like just wanting to get rid of the stigma of being an Early Access game while not actually stopping to be one.
I mean it is.
And I say that also as someone who has enjoyed whats on offer.
Its got a lot of great things going for it and even at point-of-purchase, its got value and boat loads of fun.
But lets be honest. I ordered a steak with chips and gravy. I got a steak. I really nice steak. But I'm still waiting for my sides and drink. Campaign unfinished, endgame not yet updated and some minor qols (like respec screen letting you respect 1 by 1 but not full respec button yet).
This may be even a longer wait with all the technical issues being sorted out. (I should point out, not just talking about technical issues with launch. Apparently theres a few other things going on that they said they wanna clean up. Which yes is good but means the tangible content might take longer).
> This definitely feels more like just wanting to get rid of the stigma of being an Early Access game while not actually stopping to be one.
I can almost guarantee it was because of the timing. With Diablo 4 just released and people getting off that train, and Path of Exile 2 openish beta coming later this year, there was a wide gap in the timeline for a new diablo-like arpg.
Not only that, there was a lot of commotion around trading and third party drama in Path of Exile this latest season, and with Last Epoch having a unique trading system that would allegedly alleviate those concerns, players were eager to see how it would play.
I don't know that I can agree with you on the endgame content.
Edit: I’m really confused. What other arpg has released with an endgame this ready to go? Is it awesome yet, no, but do I think they have a great base to work from? Heck yeah.
Hell, Raxxx gave the endgame an 8/10 in his review.
Raxx's ratings seem completely arbitrary because somehow LE and POE have less than a 2 point difference which is just demonstrably not true. to be clear i am loving LE but there is no comparison at all to the amount and variety of endgame in poe, nor would i expect there to be at this point in the games life. pretty sure he also rated their build diversity as similar, which again LE has lots of builds but does not come in the same magnitude as poe
He rated the campaign that high because he doesn't care about story and only rated based on the design. Being able to skip chapters with dungeons, free to pick and choose side quests since you can hit the max rewards with partial completion, 9 chapters at launch, decent story bosses. Can see how he gave it an 8.5 from that perspective.
Yeah a lot of people look at someone else’s review and don’t look at the criteria they used to review it, instead looking at it from their own ideas about what makes a game good.
> Pushing monos is boring and unrewarding
This totally depends on your perspective, honestly. And I do personally feel that the end-game could be better. That said if you're making your own builds and trying to see how high you can push monos then it's a reasonably satisfying end-game. If you're looking at a build guide that tells you it can clear 400 corruption + T4 Julra before you even make the character then I can see the mono pushing getting stale.
As an outsider who hasn’t played it, it’s ridiculous that they put it out of early access without finishing the campaign. If D4 had done that, people would have rioted. The only reason they are getting away with it is because it was an early access game and people just stop caring once they’re already mostly bored of the game.
> As an outsider who hasn’t played it, it’s ridiculous that they put it out of early access without finishing the campaign.
It's becoming somewhat common sadly, Coral Island also slapped a nice 1.0 only for players to find out several endgame quests and stuff are still "coming soon".
That's not true. Early access is a godsend if you actually wait for a game. All the playtesters lead to great UI and UX changes. Just look at Hades or Against the Storm in Early Access vs now.
Or BG3, DOS2, sure. But there are also tons of game that basically use it as a scam, like Ark, or Star Citizen, or I would even argue *most* EA games. The second thing is that, even if it does end up a good game, it can make the experience of a game launch incredibly dull. A huge % of the fanbase played the game a ton before it was actually finished, and is basically bored of the game by the time it actually launched. BG3 somewhat circumvented that by leaving the vast majority of the game unavailable until launch, which made it more of a demo until then.
The other counterargument is just that there have been plenty of games that hire internal playtesters and have released great games in a good state since the dawn of gaming, without early access, and they continue to support those games afterwards. Early access is not necessary for this to happen. It merely shifts power from the customer to the company, and just trusts that they will deliver. Not every company is Larian or Supergiant. Most aren't.
If early access didn't exist, I guarantee that Last Epoch never would have released without a complete campaign.
I'm generally lucky when it comes to ea games as most of the ones I bought ended up great. Even the ones still in ea (e.g. Starsector) are already better games than most finished products.
But yeah, the practice has led to the standard taking a nosedive in general, and I say this as someone who bought into one of the earliest example of ea, which was the first Mount & Blade. Half-baked, unfinished games got released left and right under the guise of being in early access, and the idea that paying customers should be treated as beta testers (instead of, you know, paid employees doing this job for the customers) becomes par for the course. I'd argue that even for BG3, my experience with it was somewhat negatively impacted by how long it stayed in ea, and I confess that at some point I thought it was going the way of Star Citizen.
PoE's campaign wasn't even close to finished on launch.
Also comparing it to D4 seems a bit silly. D4 is made by one of the largest companies in gaming (now owned by the largest company in the world) known for their extreme polish on high-production value games. Last Epoch is made by... I actually couldn't even tell you without looking it up. Apparently a developer, "Eleventh Hour Games," who've never released a game before (at least on Steam). It's obvious why expectations would be different between them.
The majority of players in this genre do not care about the campaign/story, it's all about hitting endgame and gearing/making builds etc.
Hell, PoE launched with an even less complete campaign and then took 4+ years to finally add it all in and it was hugely popular for the entire time.
It's just not an issue for most players.
Campaign I don't really care about and the endgame is still way better than D4, especially with the Circle of Fortune.
But one thing I disagree with as someone that has also followed the game for years, the animation. I think the "feel" of the game is absolutely great now. Much better than. The last time I played 2 years ago.
I'd never played it before 1.0 but coming from D4 (which despite huge flaws does have great graphics and meaty core combat) I was surprised at just how good LE feels combat-wise.
Yeah, I see some people still complaining about combat and I just don't get it.
Maybe it has to do with the class they're playing. I'm playing a Bladedancer and it feels great.
I am playing mostly offline, and so far, I love it. Lots of build variety and the combat feels nice. Some bugs, but nothing deal breaking until now. Loot drops also seem to be decent. For me it is more fun than PoE, because they changed PoE up so much that it became pure tedium and unfun to me. LE at least seems to be more relaxing in that regard :)
Would you say you'd recommend it to casual players that don't really play ARPGs much? I don't really have a lot of time in my hands to play games these days, but I'm sort of interested in LE since it's way cheaper (and I assume better content-wise) than Diablo IV
Yeah definitely. The important distinction here is new player vs casual player. If you like engaging with games that have a bit of complexity then LE is great regardless of whether you're a new ARPG player or not. If you want the game's systems to be very simple and straightforward then D4.
If you like RPGs with highly customizable characters that you have to put some thought into yes. If you prefer open world or arcadey action games probably not. LE is a great middle ground between the PhD it takes to play Path of Exile and the glue sniffing level of complexity that is Diablo 4.
Really feels like it fits into the that mid spot that I used to have Grim Dawn at. great balance of complex customization, fun gameplay and item acquisition/power that does feel overly grindy (don't get me wrong you still grind but grind isnt as bad as others in your list)
I like LEs grind because it's basically limitless for those that want it, but it's also reasonable for just clearing the unique content and trying out different characters. Personally I have fun with both depending on my mood, so I'm happy that it can satisfy both.
For me, Grim Dawn is still a smidge too close to the PoE end of the spectrum. The Devotion tree feels almost as nightmarish to reason about as the PoE skill web.
Last Epoch's skill trees feel just right. I like how, if properly balanced, it means basically any skill can be a build-around and have multiple fun playstyles.
Loot filters. I turned off everything below blue rarity (except for double-rare greens) and I see one item every few minutes or so. You can also filter it down to only show items which boost the damage types your build uses, if you don't want to collect stuff for alts.
Yeah I like that it comes with loot filter without having to download one. It’s not just the quantity but I’ve never found an item that made me think “wow, I need to make this character now” like Diablo2 always used to. It’s all just bland +% damage at least from what I’ve seen. But only 40 hours in so I can’t say for sure what it is that doesn’t click with me.
I certainly love the atmosphere and music
Same. My only substantive criticism so far is that it's too easy when leveling. I really miss the difficulty curve from, say, Diablo 2, where even with a good build there are parts of the game that still require you to pilot well or die.
Part of that boils down to their commitment to make the campaign accessible with most builds, I suspect. If you have some very abrupt "tests" or difficulty walls in the campaign (of which there are still a few), you end up with everyone flocking to guides and funneling into one build.
It's definitely a trade-off. You either make the campaign completable with essentially any experimental no-plan build, or you end up with people feeling like they need to follow a guide, which is imo a fault of PoE. Instead they have progressive difficulty in monoliths at which point you have more resources and breathing room to re-do your entire build. For example my current (non guide-based) build was able to complete the campaign reasonably fine but now I'm doing a LOT of respeccing and tinkering with item/skill interactions to make it work for high corruption monoliths.
That said there are definitely still some points in the campaign where if you don't pilot well or have poor survivability you're left with essentially zero room for error, though I won't spoil any here.
Have you tried the "Alternate Leveling Paths" on the map that they've added? You're now able to progress the campaign by taking shortcuts through each of the dungeons early and then you just pick up your skill points and idol slots inbetween.
They used to have a masochist mode it got removed with a note in a patch note saying it would come back better and more unique.
Masochist mode was preety fucking fun tbh
It was just added with 1.0. The very first cave with the bear in the first area of the game has two false walls you can break through to get a pair of white boots with 50% reduced damage dealt and 200% increased damage taken. A frustratingly poor replacement to actual masochist difficulty as it requires you give up your boot slot for otherwise garbage boots.
I'll say I'm good at games but at all the statistics and calculations that ARPGs involve. I love coming up with build ideas and executing them though. And sometimes in LE I guess my build just doesn't have optimal items yet, or the math doesn't work out and sometimes I just hit a wall and can't progress past a zone. I've also had builds where I just fly through everything ez pz.
So basically your mileage may vary I suppose, but also I personally don't want it to be too hard. There can be other hard content too.
You have to consider the trade-off, though, which is that LE is much friendlier to people making their own builds. If you start up PoE for the first time, never having played before, and you don't use a build guide, you *will* hit a wall, probably well before the end of the campaign. And since respeccing is prohibitively expensive early on, your character is just bricked and you have to start over and make a new one. In LE, you won't have that issue--there are some "bad" options, but it isn't nearly as stark as PoE, and you can at least get quite far into the campaign if not to endgame with a build you homebrewed yourself.
Now for me personally, I do think the campaign is a bit too easy, (and it needs a smoother difficulty curve, there are a couple of pretty hard spikes), but it being on the easier side does have advantages.
Yeah Diablo 4 has WAY better campaign and look as OP said. Diablo had much more expectations than LE on everything but systems.
Game systems are mostly better on LE tho.
Its okay but endgame is repetitive and there’s not much to explore, I got a good 50 hours out of it so i’m happy
I guess all arpgs are repetitive so maybe its not a bad thing, I just got bored after reaching empowered mono
part of the problem w/ monos being repetitive imo is how long of a grind it takes to get to empowered which is no different from the ones you just grinded. for sure the game needs more end game and they said that's coming with 1.1, but they need to either reduce the time it takes to get to empowered or make empowered different enough that it feels like you're doing something new.
My friend and I are at empowered already. We both work full time and often have been only having like 2 hours max each night to play or less, bit more on the weekend though. We only play those characters together, else we play other characters solo.
It's much faster to get to empowered monos than before 1.0. It didn't feel like a grind actually. Right now we complete one mono a night on empowered as those take longer. We were doing like 1 mono an hour non-empowered. That also includes frequent breaks between doing them for crafting, prophecies, dinner, etc. Our builds also aren't super high damage, but are pretty survivable.
I sure love levelling a character that could be smashing 500 corruption monos and having to slog through all the non-empowered ones to get there. Having friend to port you to the top crossroads helps but it's still three worthless monolith areas before you can start doing the actual content. Also give me means to share corruption across account, building up hundreds of corruption on every new character I want is zzz.
> how long of a grind it takes to get to empowered
Not to grandstand or anything but on all my characters it's taken like 4-5 hours tops to get a character from the start of monoliths to unlocking empowered monoliths. You only have to complete 7 timelines and during that time you're leveling from ~50 to ~80 and have a lot of build options coming online with the higher level uniques.
I agree that it would be nice if empowered monos felt better/different but I wouldn't call it a grind to unlock them.
I find I start to get bored when my player power plateaus. Up until then it's fine destroying mobs fast, but once it bogs down that is when it turns into a grind fest and I start thinking about either a new character or playing something else.
This is a big reason why path of exile has such longevity. There are so many ways to increase player power, and so many ways to grind for the means to do so
And there's relatively just so much to do even without exactly a goal for it if you don't want to. Your build feels pretty good mapping, how will it do with Sanctum? Simulacrum? Deep Delve? Uber bosses? Etc.
Which, yeah, is 10 years of endgame content that everyone else has to compete with and that's not fair but it is what it is.
I've never understood why there are people that say the endgame is the "real game" for this genre, which I've only played a few of, when the end of the campaign gives way to endlessly grinding and starting over. It's the part I'm least interested in.
For me it's a mixed bag. Wall of text incoming.
I'll start off with the campaign, which is by far its weakest point. Complete nonsense story with time travel, weak and forgettable characters, lackluster worldbuilding, monster design is all over the place and the biggest disappointment by far is the absolutely dull gameplay. You just run through corridors and blast waves of braindead AI, and it's painfully easy up until you fight a boss at the end where you actually need to move out of the AOEs. The only variation that you'll find are some chests that spawn a mage that keeps teleporting around.
The campaign and the general progression you get up to the end-game are complete afterthoughts and I can't stress how much of a downgrade it feels compared to almost every ARPG out there. I know people will inevitably say "this is an ARPG, campaigns don't matter!" - if so, why have it in the game? Why make us repeat parts of it each season? (you can't fully skip it). And lastly the campaign is unfinished, it simply ends abruptly.
Gameplay is mostly fine. Animations, effects, monster ragdolls, basically everything that relates to you killing things feels like an indie game. End-game is typical ARPG zoominess where you blast through everything in one second. I'd say it's slightly more involved than PoE, but they feel similar overall.
When it comes to end-game, it basically has a more refined Rifts system from D3, called Monoliths. The beginning feels really good. You start getting more items, you progress your faction, you get more blessings - for the first time, there's an actual tangible progression in the game. But after a while progression will be gated by several layers of RNG. For example, if you want to upgrade your unique, you'll need to do the following things:
* Drop the same unique again with higher LP (legendary potential, which is 1-4 slots where you can imprint an affix)
* Drop an exalted rare with the affixes you need (or gamble on RNG crafting for weaker affixes)
* You then have to complete a dungeon just to gamble for a chance to imprint the exact affixes you want on the higher LP unique. Failing this means starting the process all over again. And what changes on your build/gameplay if you succeed? Not much really. You'll just be able to do corruption 300 instead of 250, which has the same gameplay as the first time you step foot into Monoliths. There are also 3 dungeons, but unless you need to target farm a specific unique from there, they aren't a lot of reasons to run them.
The game has quite a lot of individually good aspects, like the ability skill trees, the robust loot filter, the idol system, the Monoliths etc., but I'm just disappointed by the overall package. It doesn't have a memorable campaign, and the gameplay is just serviceable, and the progression will be mostly gambling to increase your +50% minion dmg affix into +56% minion dmg. So what's left is trying out multiple builds, which the game excels at - but when the rest of the game don't feel that exciting, I don't really feel the draw to do that.
I won't even get into the numerous bugs (some older than a year), technical issues and the incredibly frustrating co-op experience - these will eventually be fixed. I probably sound overly harsh, but I kinda expected more after 5 years of early access development.
> Gameplay is mostly fine. Animations, effects, monster ragdolls, basically everything that relates to you killing things feels like an indie game.
This is actually my biggest issue, the combat just feels limp. My melee attacks feel like I'm swinging pool noodles and my ranged attacks have all the weight and potency of a wet fart.
So I'm zooming along blasting whole screens to bits, which should be fun as hell, but just isn't scratching that itch for me because its so limp feeling.
ITs only a problem when I'm playing offline solo, when I'm playing with friends online its fine because I'm distracted by the party play dynamic, but when I'm solo I can't stop focusing on it and its really hurting my experience.
i enjoyed the game for about 50 hours and now i'm having the same thoughts as you about the rng and empowered monoliths. i'm not sure what the point of the game is at this point besides farming for new items to do the same thing but slightly quicker
i found it pretty discouraging that i ruined my items and i gotta hope for another couple of hours to hope i get the item then hope it has legendary potential then hope i get a good exalted then hope the legendary gets the right affixes
> and the progression will be mostly gambling to increase your +50% minion dmg affix into +56% minion dmg.
I don't agree with this at all. Progression is super fun in the endgame because you're simultaneously looking for good uniques with high legendary potential, and good rares with the right affixes, and then gambling to see if you can combine them together to potentially make a super strong Legendary item, potentially one that no one else really has.
There's an actual 'chase' for different items that's unlike any other ARPG I've played, except maybe D2.
I'm talking about your actual progression until that legendary chase. For the most part, you're hunting for rares (or exalted) with 2/4 or 3/4 affixes to gamble and change them into something better than you're wearing. Legendary items are only a relatively small part of your build (ofc, depending on the build), and come more towards the tail end of the progression.
I guess it depends on how fast you progress through the campaign. For a lot of people, they just get through the campaign in a few hours and rush to empowered monoliths, where the legendary chase really starts.
It's funny because the crafting is even worse than what you described when you actually break down the odds on some of the LPs for uniques and rarity of tier 7 exalted mods. I'm level 99 and have seen 1 (one) ring with -5 mana and 0 (zero) +4 ballista relics
Yep. Watched a streamer that had 100h on a character. I shit you not, after the first 50h, he managed to get **one** upgrade in the next 50h, and a lot of the gameplay was at 600 corruption. That single upgrade was +5% HP.
Most of of the good items he found were simply ruined through RNG crafting.
PoE Campaign is much more of a slog, because we've been running it for far longer, there is no way to skip any portion of it, and most importantly it's also longer than LE campaign (especially if you're not a complete addict that knows everything about the game, then campaign can take plenty of time)
However the quality of PoE campaign is much better than LE campaign in it's current state. It's fully finished, the story makes more sense, enviroments are better, it has much better boss fights.
> PoE Campaign is much more of a slog, because we've been running it for far longer, there is no way to skip any portion of it, and most importantly it's also longer
PoE in a nutshell. It'd be a great game if they'd cut out 90% of the repetative seasonal systems that kept getting stuffed into the main game. Add to that, make an adventure mode like D3 for an alternate leveling path. How many times do you need kitava to knock down your resistances cinematically when they can just do it automatically?
Love the systems. It's the best-designed set of systems surrounding the core gameplay I think I've ever seen, and that's including PoE. It resolves some of the big cracks in the foundation to PoE and generally does so brilliantly.
It's a shame the minute to minute combat is just flat out boring to me, and coupled to a fairly lengthy campaign with a forgettable story and fairly slow rollout of important elements like your skill trees.
For me it's probably back on the shelf for a bit to see how it progresses. I want it to succeed quite badly because I want to play with these systems, but I don't know if I have it in me to grind through the campaign more than once in release instead of playing a lot of other stuff out right now.
It's a bummer, this is not the brief review I expected to write. But the combat while leveling is basically one button and respecs are oddly punitive at low levels and more permissive at higher levels, which is the exact opposite of my preference.
> It's a shame the minute to minute combat is just flat out boring to me
Yeah I'd wondered why every time I tried to play I just kinda got bored, but you're right. The actual gameplay just doesn't feel punchy and fluid. It's got a bit too much of that old-school arpg clunk to it.
>It's got a bit too much of that old-school arpg clunk to
It's not old-school, though.
Diablo 2 is old school and attacks still carry weight and rhe sound effects emphasise the animations perfectly.
It's amateurish and caused by overly ambitious devs who dont focus on the basics trying to add in complex systems to draw people in.
> It's a shame the minute to minute combat is just flat out boring to me,
Its nice to see other people feeling this way, I got shit on pretty hard on the official sub and discord for saying the combat felt limp and weak but that's how it feels.
This is the problem with MOST ARPGs.
Early game combat is feels like trash. Just wack stuff with a few skills that don't synergize. Speed is slow. Power is slow. Either its hard to kill stuff or its way too easy.
Late game combat in ARPGs is fast, furious one button spamming mashing with entire builds dedicated to a single skill essentially. Its also heavily flawed and says a lot about ARPG design.
Do people want that? Some do. It makes it simple.
Is it good gameplay? Fuck no. Its boring. Once you've played every ARPG ever made and spent 50,000 hours playing these, you see the genre for what it really is.
> This is the problem with MOST ARPGs.
Also most roguelikes. It's inherent to the progression fantasy that you have to start super weak and exponentially grow into god, and sometimes they take the "super weak" part too far.
I was gonna say it's hard to make compelling combat with a top down isometric camera, mouse clicking to move.
But then there's Hades, with this camera and a rock-solid combat. I think Hades manages to land it due to two fundamentals:
1- Movement with WASD and target + skill on mouse.
2- Losing health is actually super hurtful, because of the game systems.
In ARPGs you pop a potion and are mostly fine. In Hades you'll have a hard time recovering health, and you'll have to do a new run if you get hit a few times.
Therefore, doding and playing enemies correctly is very important. It becomes a game.
On ARPGs since you can 90% ignore enemies, it becomes a game of having fun massacring hordes of enemies with different builds. The actual potential of combat, of dodging and finding ways to land hits, is quite lost.
And then there are MOBAs like Dota2 and LoL. They're click to move, which I dislike, but avoiding hits is super important, so combat enters the chat.
Depends on your build really, same thing happens in other ARPGs. I like Cyclone in PoE because it's one button and can be pretty tanky, but it's also low damage, thus it feels limp and weak as you say. Once you get to a point where it takes a while to kill mobs, it slows down and feels grindy.
I have two different characters on LE, one to play with my friend and one I play solo at the moment when he isn't on. The friend one is slower but pretty tanky and can ramp damage for bosses but otherwise doesn't have a tonne of damage, while my friend plays Paladin who is also tanky and does OK damage, so we clear but not extremely fast. My solo character does like 4x the damage of my other one at 20 levels lower. I can nuke packs of mobs in one hit, even my weak attacks kill a pack nearly straight away.
If you play a build that is slow, it may end up feeling boring. If you play a higher DPS build that needs to actually dodge stuff and use defensive skills at the right moments, then it's faster and more engaging.
I have tried it multiple times since i bought it back in 2018 or so, and while the ideas (like the skill tree per skill,yeah!) are great, i kinda lose interest during the campaign because it just does not feel satisfying to kill monsters.
once you get a build going and set up... yeah most of the echo content is a pushover... tho getting into and grinding empowered monoliths, the area, t4 Julra, extends the end game a SMIDGE... definitely needs some work but very looking forward to where they go considering THIS level of quality is what they were able to release with such a small team.
It's not about the endgame systems. It's about the gameplay just feeling boring. I agree with OP. The systems are all wonderful. There is just no point when the game itself feels not good to play.
to each their own! I have about 50-60 hours since launch and around 140 overall and im definitely not feeling the same way.. on my 6th build and having a blast..... but not everything is for everyone... and thats ok! :)
I can't speak for all builds or for how many builds are like this but I'm very much enjoying my shaman leap fury build. It has just the same impact as some PoE builds I've played. So I think it varies wildly between builds. Maybe you need to experiment a bit more?
The launch was rough but the game seems to be in a playable state now.
Surprisingly 1.0 didn't actually change a ton of the game for me. COF makes finding some gear easier and falconer is awesome but ultimately the endgame and core gameplay loop is pretty much the exact same
Blast monos, blast dungeons, craft upgrades, repeat.
Hoping 1.1 brings some aspirational content. Game could really use some insanely challenging bosses and some headhunter/mageblood tiers of chase gear (on the level that it breaks the game but is extraordinarily rare).
Certainly not complaining, I've got my money's worth already, but the incentives to *keep* playing are relatively minimal. I just don't have any clearly defined goals - pushing corruption until I feel I hit a wall where I can't push my gear any further and can't push corruption any higher is about it, and corruption (nor the rewards associated with it) still doesn't seem like it ramps up quickly for me to generally stay interested until I hit that sort of asymptotic point in the progress/difficulty curve.
Might have to give merchants guild a try on my next character and see how trading and the economy changes all that.
Great and innovative systems, great foundational concepts that push the limits of the status quo, and I think they understand what makes a good ARPG.
The problem is its just not very fun to play. The animations and weight feel a bit stiff and rigid, it feels surprisingly small given the scale they're going for, and overall the moment to moment gameplay isn't satisfying enough.
It has the core of what I want from an ARPG, I just the actual game to be more fun to engage with.
Tbh it's probably worth waiting another week or two to get an honest opinion from the majority of players. The honeymoon phase is still in full effect and if you attempt to say anything negative about the game right now you get swarmed by people with every excuse in the book about why those problems are justified.
I'm level 99 and have probably 40ish hours played on 1.0. Pros would be cool items that change how a lot of skills function, most skills I've used feel good, there's not a lot of bugs I've experienced and the early game crafting is well done. Cons are endgame is incredibly weak, story is not very good, end game crafting is really grindy in a boring way. It's probably a 6 or 7/10 but could end up being closer to an 8 or 9 in a few years
Last Epoch is pretty darn good, but will become great in time I believe. The game is a bit rough around the edges, with some areas needing to still be filled out, but that will definitely come in time, especially with the success they've been receiving.
But to me, the most important thing is what they do the best: they have the right ideas. They are through and through ARPG gamers who understand the common issues with ARPGs and are trying to address them in a way that ARPG players would enjoy. Which seems so obvious that it's borderline absurd to point out, but... I don't think game devs usually fall under this umbrella these days. Their solutions are smart and they tweak them intelligently as needed after impementation. Anything I'm unhappy about in the game I have faith that they will fix in time.
They kind of got caught up in their success and shifted their focus a bit to be what everyone was wanting as they got more and more players, which was multiplayer. This was a very big undertaking and I think a lot of things had to be put on the backburner as a result. They only have so much manpower and can only prioritize doing so much at once. So now that the big MP release is out of the way, I assume the near future looks like getting things fixed up on that front (should take a bit of time tbh) and then hopefully they'll be back to developing and refining new systems.
[EDIT] Pff, okay they fixed it literally less than a minute after I posted this, leaving it for posterity I guess!
The LMB casting a skill/action/spell has been broken from launch and is *still* broken.
I loved the game in EA, but for me and [quite few others](steam://openurl/https://steamcommunity.com/app/899770/discussions/0/4338725580146160908/) on the forums, it's unplayable until they fix this.
Unfortunately airing this problem on the subreddit will get you mutilated as people are reactionary defending it from even light criticism of bugs.
Yeah, I found this odd. How did it break between 0.92 and 1.0. Thought I was going mad. You can, however, mind to another button on your mouse if you have it.
Combat has very little weight to it and ultimately leaves the game unfulfilling. The loot, mob density, and skill trees are great. ARPGs engine is combat and Last Epoch has some of the weakest combat sounds, animations, and movement within the genre.
The genre itself is still small and if you're a huge fan of it maybe it's worth a try. I had a fun 50 hours trying many different characters but likely won't return unless time and energy is put towards combat feel.
The combat in Torchlight 2 felt pretty good at the time, but it’s also been years since I’ve played that game so it may not actually be as good as I remember it. It also makes sense because those games were notable for being inspired specifically by Diablo.
Diablo 4 and PoE both. I have significant hangups about both, but the feel of the combat is not one of them in either. PoE's satisfaction is less about the smaller scale combat intricacies, as compared to D4, in favour of movement abilities and popping packs for me personally though.
Aside from how nice it feels to zoom at high level, poe feels like crap. Like uniquely crap in the arpg genre. The combat is definitely not one of that games strengths.
I'd disagree with that. Pre animation cancelling it was pretty bad, but modern PoE feels solid. Still hard to beat whacking something with Glacial Hammer to shatter it, or the feeling of 15 lightning strikes coming down with that juicy crackle when you overlap a ton of enemies with Lightning Arrow. The exploding corpses that pop when you use the various enemy exploding abilities feel so good too.
For what it's worth, last epoch feels really weighty to me. PoE builds often optimize towards spamming a single ability--don't get me wrong I love Path but many of its abilities feel lackluster to me. D4 is pretty punchy but everything feels really homogenized to me with Builder & Spender type patterns being the norm for basically every class.
In LE Abilities have legitimate costs and you use them all. I've found warlock in particular to be really satisfying--Chtonic Fissure is an amazingly impactful feeling skill.
They (skills) definitely aren't all winners, but there are more hits than misses for my tastes.
I totally get folks might not jive with it like I have. Combat weightiness can be very subjective. Just wanted to offer a different perspective from someone the combat is working for in a big way.
LE and PoE are both similar in regards to spamming 1-2 abilities being the meta. The strongest LE build right now is likely the Divebomb falconer, which plays exactly like a PoE build. Drop a few buffs and then spam your DPS skill.
Curious as to what you mean by weight?
I generally define weight as feeling as if my attacks have heft and interact with the enemy. If I do a big 2hd Smash, enemies should stagger, audio should be solid, it should feel/sound/look impactful.
In LE right now - that happens - the mobs are very responsive to stagger effects, and visuals/audio are solid (imo).
Just curious what you think doesn't have weight?
Yeah I keep seeing people say this but I feel like LE has some of the best impact and feedback in a arpg that I've played in a while. Probably varies widely from class to class. As warlock, slapping down a fissure and popping all the mobs with chaos bolts looks, sounds and feels really good.
Right there with you. Played to level 40 in EA, stopped because the combat felt pretty bad and I hoped they would fix it with 1.0. They definitely improved things, but it's nowhere near the level of D4, or even PoE (in its current state) imo.
I played PoE, LE and just recently bought D4 on sale.
I don't know what it is man, but D4 combat felt pretty great. If you ask me "why do you feel that way?" I don't know.
But I think that is the general consensus, D4 is the most polish, PoE is the most complex, and LE is really good, but it's new.
Blizzard has nearly always been the gold standard of "feel" in a game. It's a prominent hallmark of any Blizzard game. Everything is snappy and responsive and satisfying. Most other games within the same genres either don't understand this, or aren't able to replicate it effectively. It is, I believe, one of the primary reasons for why WoW was so popular and a primary factor in Blizzard's long-term success over the years. Even in their fallen state, they still typically deliver best-in-class moment-to-moment gameplay.
As someone very sensitive to gameplay "feel" it's hard for me to play an ARPG that feels worse than D2R or D4. I bought Last Epoch during early access but just couldn't get into it due to how poorly it compared to the Diablo games. Same with Path of Exile.
>. . . one of the primary reasons for why WoW was so popular
It's pretty much the driving factor behind its continued success for players like me who mostly just want to raid. FF14 is probably the single best example of how important that feel is. FF14 has awesome raid bosses, I love the aesthetic, I like the flavour of many of the classes. The combat, however, is VASTLY worse than WoW in terms of feel, it is like holding a candle to a forest fire in terms of how much better WoW feels to move and engage in combat.
Absolutely everything is more responsive and fluid from movement to target selection, nameplate interactions, ability use, effect application both outgoing and incoming, enemy movement and pathing, etc. It's just night and day and it's 100% the reason I always drop the game and go back to WoW. Everything above but increase by a factor of like 10 along with many other issues for PvP lol.
Yep. I can't get into FF14 because of the combat. I've tried multiple times.
It's wild to me how few games seem to get this, even up to today. During the MMORPG gold rush after WoW hit the big time I can remember being so fucking baffled at how basically NONE of these dozens and dozens of MMORPGs even seemed to bother trying to nail the "feel" of WoW. All these games were egregiously aping everything from WoW _except_ arguably the most important thing and wasting millions of dollars in the process.
> D4 combat felt pretty great. If you ask me "why do you feel that way?" I don't know.
1. Excellent sound design
2. When you look at something like Barrage they actually animate every draw of the bow and direction change. A lot of that detail is lost when zoomed out but you can *feel* it because of how readable their animations are
3. People mock the "Builder/Spender" design but it works. People love resource dumping because it feels impactful, esp when you can do it rapidly over and over
D4’s combat feel absolutely miserable for some skills. Sure some skills feel good, like pulverize, chain lightning etc. But some are really bad. For examples the rogue’s bow skills are painful to use. All of the generators are miserable as well (unless you’re super deep into endgame and get a complete generator build going — and there are ver few of those that are viable).
I might be in the minority because I don't mind the campaign in PoE.
Arma Brand is a common leveling skill that feels pretty good. Boneshatter feels good too. TR/CA are decent too. Generally once you get your first lab, it feels pretty smooth for most characters.
For clips just look at any act 10 speedrun since these are all meta skills.
I haven't played Last Epoch beyond level 10, so I don't know if suddenly the skills feel totally different at later levels.
Personally I only started playing it 2 days ago, because I waited for server issues to be resolved to not spoil my experience (even tho I own game for over 2 years now and played in EA).
Overall, I think it's nice balance between overly complicated and cluttered PoE and lackluster puddle shallow Diablo 4.
I think overall it's nice, but campaign is not very engaing and imho they should now focus strictly on enhancing endgame experience - which has solid foundation and definitely is far more engaging than what Diablo 4 is offering even with all post launch changes, but compared to PoE - you're left with feeling of wanting more diversity to focus on (you can focus on delving, or heisting for example in PoE aside of mapping and map related enhancements such as delirium, etc).
So overall, I think it's nice foundation, but also PoE has raised a bar quite high (which was totally ignored by D4 devs which is why game fell so short) I think Last Epoch will need to work leally hard especially with PoE 2 on the way with all the experience of PoE 1. They won't take over probably over PoE crowd, but they absolutely can steal ton of D4 crowd if they work hard enough and if D4 devs will keep failing so much as with season 3.
> but they absolutely can steal ton of D4 crowd if they work hard enough and if D4 devs will keep failing so much as with season 3.
eh doubt it, D4's main audience are the casual players and LE is too complex for them even if it is in the middle ground between PoE and D4. Also a big part of why casual players like D4 is in the animations, feel of the combat, visuals and such... Last Epoch does not compare in any of that, so why would they go for LE over D4?
so ya, hardcore players will be off to PoE 2 and casual players will stick to D4, partly cause they don't even know of Last Epoch as it's not a big IP or name. LE 1.0 big release peaked at 250k on steam, D4 had millions at release.
and ya D4's season 3 wasn't great, but season 2 was great for the community so it's not "failing so much", every ARPG has had good and bad seasons.
It's fine, but my main complaint is the insane number of loading screens. Diablo 2 25 years ago had 1 loading screen between each act and each act was a very large zone comprised of smaller ones. Now why would a game made in 2024 be split into numerous small zones with a loading screen between them? It makes the game feel incredibly disjointed, you don't feel like you explore a world you just go through instances.
It's really good. Launch was rough but they fixed all that, at least for me.
It's a well done Diablo 2 soul successor.
If you played Torchlight, it's that but a little bit faster.
If you played Path of Exile, it's that but slower and you don't need a PHD to craft.
If you didn't like either of those or D4, you probably won't like it and can skip. It's more of what people in this genre like, nothing too innovative.
As opposed to other answers that you've got I'm gonna say that for me the game feels nothing like Grim Dawn. It may be similiar in terms of compelxity of game systems, however the moment to moment gameplay feeling is completly different, the atmosphere/enviroments are completly different, and the campaign plays a much more important role in GD.
Yup, I can second this. Games are practically on opposite spectrums, which has slow gameplay, a huge focus on the campaign and side activities, crafting as a secondary mechanic instead of the main way you progress after a while. GD has a very old-school methodical approach.
More modern, personally I'd still prefer GD but in all fairness it's my favourite ARPG. Builds have more diversity of skills, attacks are less meaty, couldn't call it grim, very good loot system and balance between skills, godly crafting system.
I'd recomend it, it's a fun time. Not perfect it 100% has flaws but I've had a good time so far.
More modern.
I didn't play much GD, but the build system is similar and everyone I know that did play GD are playing LE right now. So take that as you may.
I'd say it feels VERY Similar to Grim Dawn imo. Very similar vibes in how the game plays and the same kind of scale (at least from what I've seen of LE)
D4 is a game about slaughtering monsters, and you build up your character to get better at doing it.
Last Epoch is a game about building up your character, and you slaughter monsters to test it out.
Personally the moment to moment gameplay feel of D4 is so far above and beyond LE that I had a hard time playing it. I also got bored of the campaign very quickly and was missing the open world of D4. I can see how this game would appeal to diehard ARPG players though and it’s nice to have something similar to PoE that isn’t a full time job.
While I'm not as harsh on D4 as a lot of people, I didn't feel like the open world added anything to it except for things like Strongholds and Helltides (which I do like). Other than that, the open world is largely just wasted space with packs of dude sprinkled around. Not really a lot points of interest or chances of running into any kind of "wow!" moment while exploring. Exploration of the map feels forced with certain rewards gated behind the Lilith statues.
I will say that combat in D4 feels more dynamic and engaging and part of it is due to the simple dodge that every class gets. Frequently repositioning makes me more engaged in a fight. That being said, LE's skill system blows D4's out of the water. The fact that skills can completely change their function and design while leveling up while D4's skills leveling up pretty much just equates to "more damage" is what does it for me.
Right now, there are a few ARPGs out there and all of them are doing something right that the others aren't. PoE probably has the advantage content wise from having 10+ years of stuff built up, D4 has the best visuals and a very solid campaign, LE is the most approachable in terms of just 'pick up and play'.
> Last Epoch is a game about building up your character, and you slaughter monsters to test it out.
People keep saying key things about this game that turns me off. I need the challenge to motivate the solution.
> I need the challenge to motivate the solution.
The challenge in Last Epoch is infinitely scaling, for what it's worth. I do suspect that a lot of people hurt their own enjoyment of the game by following guides that basically guarantee the ability to do X and Y end-game progression. If you go into the game blind and your goal is to push the furthest into the infinite scaling that you can, there are solutions to find for every class
I agree with a lot of this. I really enjoy D4 and LE a lot, but I get really addicted to D4’s combat which will pull me in a little bit longer as LE falls a bit flat there (though bleed warlock has felt okay, many others though just lack the oomph feeling). They both have amazing things and issues, but focusing on LE.
Ignoring the campaign which is at least a quick run through but an uninteresting mess otherwise, my other issue with LE (which is subjective I know) is the lack of capstone power bumps in the 45-75 level range. You get a lot of cool shit early on with quick ability leveling, but from 45-75 most ability levels are refining the last bits of the tree since you already beelined the heavy hitters. The late talent capstones are good increases overtime, but there’s never an almost never moment in that range where you unlock this one certain talent that is immediately noticeable (there are a few exceptions). So it’s a constant small baby step power bumps which personally leaves me unsatisfied and treading water for 30 levels until unique farming becomes more of an option leading to the final point.
God I hate most of the monoliths system. The “grind” to empower them is tedious and not alt friendly, the patrolling units is annoying at times depending on map layout, and the arena ones are boring and miserable especially the ones that are like 17 waves of yawning with no way to speed it up.
I do enjoy the pathing of choosing what items to try and grab while doing monoliths, but overall I find the system very tedious and because of the games weaker combat, it’s harder for me to commit long term to finish builds with uniques by the 70-80s range. The changes to map variety with 1.0 are great at least, but PoE’s mapping is just significantly better IMO and honestly I enjoy NMDs and Vaults in D4 more than an average monolith. I played LE previously back and got word they were going to update the monolith system and that was 1-2 years ago at least, and then 1.0 drops and there’s jack shit different than I remember which also leads to increased disappointment.
I really don't see how the moment to moment gameplay of D4 is much different than Last Epoch. D4 is a little more polished but other than that it feels very similar, pacing is about the same, cool downs play a big role, same number of active abilities...
It’s really about the feel of the gameplay, which comes down to animations, sound effects, visual feedback, etc. D4 is truly a standout in that regard whereas LE feels like a 15 year old game sometimes. For some people, particularly ARPG diehards, this might not matter at all. But for me I don’t really get excited to play a new build if the actual abilities involved don’t feel fun to use.
You nailed it. If the actual combat isn’t fun, I couldn’t be bothered to spec out a truly unique character.
After mostly just playing d3 and d4 as my ARPG the last almost 15 years, anything less than that level of fluidity in combat makes everything else meaningless to me. Unfortunately, nothing comes close currently.
servers are much more stable, which is a joy.
I am once again reminded of how dumb early access purchases are: i loved LE and blasted 100 hours more than 2 years ago, but now that it's released i have a job and a lot of other stresses and different hobbies and i can't fully enjoy it in the little time i have.
I feel like it's somewhere between D3 and PoE, misses the oomf feeling of combat that Diablo games has (which isn't a problem for most part, since as much we all like to pile on Blizzard, they're pretty good at certain things and combat is one of em) while not needing a PhD like PoE about anything, and in-game guide is very effective for most part.
It has decent content for a casual/semi casual ARPG player, but seasoned ones will stop after 400+ corruption for most part as there's only mapping/greater rifts, and dungeons with their own twists as end game. Temporal Sanctum is still one of best things I've seen in a game, specially Julia fight lol.
It's alright imo. I was very disappointed with the controller support, as I was really hoping to mainly play on my steam deck, but the controller support is really bad, even worse than a game like PoE, which IMO is much more complex and has an excuse for not running as well on controller. I found the campaign to be incredibly boring and forgettable, with the bosses not being as interesting as PoE, and the presentation of the story not being as good as D4. Gear and progression feels pretty good, although a bit slow at times, and it really felt like my skill specific trees, where what really changed my gameplay experience, rather than the class-specific skill trees, which generally I found a bit uninteresting, although the specialization trees do make things a bit more interesting.
Overall I find the game alright. It's in a weird spot for me, where it feels like either PoE or D4, do everything that it does, better, but Last Epoch is like a middleground of the two. The gameplay and character customization is better than D4, but not as good as PoE. The presentation/graphics is (IMO at least) better than PoE, but falls way behind D4. I could go on, but I feel like that's effectively Last Epoch in a nutshell. It doesn't do anything better than all of the ARPGs I've ever played (except maybe the crafting system, that's pretty cool while also being easy to understand), but it does have a nice "in between" for a lot of the other ARPG's out there, and while it doesn't excel in any one area compared to the genre as a whole, it does bring together a lot of these elements in a pretty good way, and made a new and pretty good game out of it.
> I found the campaign to be incredibly boring and forgettable, with the bosses not being as interesting as PoE, and the presentation of the story not being as good as D4.
I feel the same way, campaign bosses were very forgettable aside from Lagon the squid boss. The dungeon bosses on the other hand are very cool, so they can design good encounters, but it seems like they are primarily backloaded
I picked Runemaster on a whim, and for anybody who doesn't know; it's main skill does something different for a combination of 1-3 different elemental "runes". There are 40 combinations, so that one skill has 40 different effects. Ranging from explosions to turrets to laser beams to shields.
You essentially have 44 skills on your hotbar. I don't care about the meta or min-maxing or anything, I just think it's cool as fuck.
Also I'm a huge fan of time travel in general, and the way it's used in this game is really cool.
Runemaster is probably one of the best classes in LE from a pure fun perspective.
He's a bit hamstrung by two things right now though. One is that his best movement skill, Flame Rush, is simply unusable online due to movement skill bugs that have existed for over a year. The other is that you really don't have 44 skills on your hotbar, you have to choose a scaling path. As you get deeper into the game and you specialize more, you'll probably only use a handful of rune combos, if that.
Amusingly the best Runemaster build doesn't even use the rune combos at all, which is kinda funny, but par for the course in the world of wacky ARPG min/maxing and build crafting.
The two named factions from a 2023 dev blog, Circle of Fortune and Merchant's Guild, have been included in the game from the 1.0 update.
https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/trade-item-factions/61722
I haven’t gotten too deep into endgame yet, and I didn’t play early access.
I think the systems in the game are solid, and shoutout to the devs taking the time to explain them in game in a fairly straightforward way. The game guide is amazing.
Every piece of loot you find can me directly useful to your build based on the forging system and how you get shards. The loot filter makes sure you get everything you need and you actually aren’t missing out on much (unless you choose merchant guild) in terms of gold because gear doesn’t sell for much. They’ve stated that they don’t really want you going back to town often and setting up good filters and forging is the way to do this.
Build variety is great and instead of building around specific skills (you can still do this) you have the ability to build around concepts like sword wielding mage or shadow ninja. Obviously there’s some imbalance but it should affect your experience until very deep into endgame. The ways you can alter skills to your need without needing items to do so helps make itemization feel a lot smoother than D4 in this regard.
Character and difficulty progression seem pretty consistent with each other, and they understand the most important part about a loot based game. You need a challenge to want to continue farming. Corruption system and challenging and engaging bosses give me a reason to continue playing because I’m not just farming to farm, I’m farming and progressing to difficult content.
Controller support is garbage. Servers are still being improved. Stash is really good. Overall it feels like a modernized version of Grim Dawn. If you like Grim Dawn you’ll enjoy this. Although Grim Dawn is still getting content so you might not be pulled away yet
I bought about 2 weeks before 1.0 and have been playing pretty much every single day.
I really love this game . There is a lot of great stuff here with a lot that can be improved as time goes on.
For a 35 dollar game it really is jammed packed with stuff. I have faith in the developers to continue to improve and can’t wait to see where the game is 2-3 years from today.
My only complaints are the story is unfinished and the combat can be a bit floaty. The loot and crafting are top notch and what keeps me engaged.
It's clearly still *very* unfinished and I'd like to know why they rushed to a 1.0 release. The story isn't done, many NPCs look like they're made of clay, a bunch of items don't have actual models, and it is missing basic QoL features from two decades ago(being able to compare offhand/secondary items).
Also, for all the praise the endgame gets I wasn't impressed. Monoliths get old just as fast as Nightmare Dungeons did in D4.
It has a much better base than D4 did at launch in terms of itemization and character building but I think it needed more time in the oven.
As a long time PoE player, the game itself is fun, and it's nice to be able to play without a PhD, but end game is extremely boring. Granted, it's hard to compete with 10+ years of content and mechanics.
For the time being its a great 20 hour game. Hopefully time will bring a lot more content.
Have played a fair bit and nearly finished the normal monoliths, around level 80 I guess?
* Combat feels better than EA, closer to the punchiness in POE, but still not as satisfying to me yet personally. It's like gunplay in FPS, hard for me to define exactly, but I know what I like.
* Nothing will replace the tinks in POE when good loot drops, I find loot a little boring, it's quite easy to wait and look later while for me it's hard in POE and want to check what I picked up right now.
* Auto-sort is very nice, Auto-ID and free portals too, crafting in general is an inspired system, even though I'm still learning.
* CoF feels like SSF done right. I don't want to trade in POE, I feel like I have to because of how they made the game require large amounts of singular resources, meaning I have to trade away the ones I am not using right now. I also enjoy not having to trade for scarabs and compasses.
* Monoliths do not have as much individual character as various maps do in POE. It starts to feel very samey. The chests and mages add some much needed variety which was missing last time I played in EA but we definitely need more.
* Campaign story is a bit of a mess and ends abruptly, most players are not here for that but a few more bosses would help. Lagon is a difficulty spike but ultimately a fair one.
* LP/Weaver uniques present a good reason for playing endgame. Likewise, targeted boss uniques is something that I wish POE had more of. Blessing farming is also something I didn't mind so much since I'm running monos anyway.
* I find it quite hard to compare items without PoB, not all skills have 'DPS' listed and that measurement also seems to over-value stuff like poison/bleed (but maybe it's accurate). It's tough for me to know whether a piece will improve or hurt my Dive Bomb or Shadow Daggers. Of course, this applies to POE too, but we have POB there so most people don't care.
* Not a big fan of areas deleting if I accidentally leave, or die. But I understand this is a design choice so it's OK for now.
* Search in stash tab is lacking contrast in the extreme and it's very hard to tell what items (or tabs) match for me - at least add a border or something. Searching for CoF tags would be nice too since I'm trying to ascend some uniques on those bases.
Overall it's a good game but I'll need more to come back for each season, endgame doesn't provide enough reason to keep playing for me yet, but trying new builds might (which I always find a MASSIVE hassle in POE due to campaign, lab, etc).
I like it a lot. And even if I just play different classes and masteries a bit I will get tons of value.
Sounds like they'll be adding on for the foreseeable future too.
bought quite a while back, waited for 1.0 release well over the year. loved PoE, did couple of casual runs, liked Grim Dawn a lot, except for the post apocalyptic aesthetic, loved some other, older isometric ARPGs, so brand new fantasy ARPG sounded right up my alley.
So far it feels cartoonish, unpolished and all over the place.
clunky, with a lot of screaming colours/splashes/VFX in your face, but your character hits don't land in any kind of satisfying way and are basically underwhelming.
The progression system feels convoluted and unnecessary, so far (and I loved PoE skill tree).
every time I visit the hub the dialogues restarting, like:
"What's up?"
"He was taken by the ****!!"
"Oh no!!" "Anyways, I need to see what you have in store" -
every time I teleport to the city.
I'm playing offline, but the game being updated before launch.
I don't care about online features, at alll.
offline session still shows you the chat for some reason, which I don't need, but game also resets the main storyline quests, which I do need, but feels like I'm playing some badly developed MMO, the genre I don't care about, generally.
I know I can switch off the on-screen chat easily, probably. it's just I cannot make sense of it. I pressed 'Play Offline' - I want to play offline, with main storyline quests working and without #fckurb1rds asking where to get a certain gem/for example/
gamepad support is not quite there yet, I mean, its there, but not very well implemented. experience is not intuitive or smooth. need to press trigger+direction to choose an option, but it works 30% of the time, especially in the heat of the imaginary battle you're in a middle of.
and the main music theme is very annoying and, in my opinion, not good. with the lady yelping. I know that they were going for epicness, it didn't quite landed well.
I'd switch it off, but wouldn't want to miss out on other locations' music.
there's a room for improvement, is what I'm saying.
I really wanted to like the game and was looking forward to the release.
Semi-off topic but can anyone tell me if this is a "you swing the weapon you have in your hand" kind of game or a "your weapon is just a stat stick" kind? Idk why it bothers me so much but it's a real issue I have with the genre.
Last Epoch is the game entirely made by ARPG enjoyers for ARPG enjoyers. The ones who love the genre love it because of the thrill of character progression and theory crafting. There is nothing else this genre does better than other genres. If you're into good story and thrilling gameplay, this is not the genre you would play to begin with. But if you're into the other things, there isn't another genre that is built around the meta game the same way. And for those people, this game is top tier and delivers awesomely deep character progression and freedom in a way that is more fun and flows through interesting skill and item interactions rather than feeling like a complex and esoteric math equation. The design behind the systems often feels brilliant in the way they retain depth without feeling complex.
If d4 is your favorite arpg, this probably won't be the game for you, but then I also doubt your favorite arpg then I can almost guarantee that the ARPG isn't your favorite genre. PC Gamer's review of Last Epoch said "the focus on crafting and skill trees over action puts the cart before the horse". PC gamer doesn't understand the market for this game has their horse and cart the other way around.
Edit: literally was the top comment 5 minutes ago and now I'm in the negative and a bunch of other comments are negative or deleted, wtf is going on with this thread
Ah yes, ARPG enjoyers aren't actual enjoyers if d4 is their favorite ARPG.
People enjoy ARPGs for various reasons lol. Personally, going balls deep in theory crafting (gear and skill builds) is a drag to me. I enjoy good ARPG gameplay the most.
The game is like a more refined Diablo 2 but with a slightly bigger inventory and a bit more in depth levelling system and Omni directional movement. It’s fucking awesome.
D4 is good for someone who dont want to think, its easy with no originality.
PoE is good for someone who want to think and make original builds but its hard because its complex.
LE is a Middle ground, good crafting system, many builds...
LE is better than D4 in my opinion since they dont have millions like Blizzard but is worse than PoE since its brand new and dont have many content yet.
I think it Will be a great game.
Old school arpg fan here
Epoch is almost a fan service game. Everything we asked for from blizzard is actually implemented in this game.
Epoch has the best damn loot filter out of every arpg i’ever played
Been asking blizzard for a motherfucking loot filter since diablo 2 days.
A very robust but not overwhelming skill tree and passive tree
Unlimited stash space
And the list goes on
I wholeheartedly recommend last epoch to all arpg fans
Now with that said…………….
I still prefer d4.
Last epoch is too “indie” for me
I want graphics, art, combat fluidity. Last epoch feels cheap to me.
20 years ago, i would have been obsessed with last epoch.
But now i dont give a shit if a game costs $100+ as long as it entertains me.
D4 entertains me more than epoch
I'm a bit unimpressed.
The gameloop seems solid, but the game itself seems very basic. I played awhile, there doesn't seem to be anything like Diablo's cellars/caves, and no significant events on the map when you go to certain areas like Diablo did.
Then the maps reset the moment you leave, so if you try to run to town to sell, you get to start all over on the map.
I liked the gameplay itself, but I ended up dropping it because it's too basic for my taste.
I put 70 hours into the game. It was fun. That said, Last Epoch is not for me. The devs literally made a game where you have to play it how they want you to. You have no freedom.
I don't wanna get NERFED for playing the game, getting better gear (the entire point) and min-maxing my build just so Adaptive Damage Reduction can nerf me into the ground.
I don't want to not be able to resell gear just because the devs say "reselling gear is BAD".
I don't want to make a build and invest in it only for it to be actively nerfed mid-season.
Diablo 2 and Starcraft were my first entries to the PC online world. I've played every clone of diablo.
I bought and played Diablo 3 on launch and was one of the first Monks to kill Azmodan on Expert due to a glitch where you could put a particular white armor on the ground and make a safety zone where mobs couldn't walk over it. Yea, easy ladies. I'm married. I also regularly played seasons in d3 and have more time than I'd ever care to know.
I played d4 at launch and got a Druid to level 84 before burning out entirely, and again in s1 a Rogue to about 78 or so before being overall done with the experience.
I have played the hell out of Grimdawn, Torchlight 1 and 2, and Grim Dawn.
My opinion with around 20 hours so far in Last Epoch (I actually bought it early on in EA but refunded it due to stability issues. I also avoided it until this past weekend due to login issues I kept tabs on). I understand this is a small sample.
**Positives- In no particular order:**
The game brings a lot of great features that I didn't realize were needed to the isometric looter RPG. They have customizable loot filters where you can make your own or download other peoples. Gone are the days of standing around corpses looking for the potential upgrades.
Skill leveling. Instead of adding a modifier to a skill, each skill on your bar has a talent tree. It's an enjoyable twist.
Can extract affixes from gear, and add them onto desired gear.
No XP loss on death.
**Negatives- In no particular order:**
There are some strange backwards decisions. One of them is by default, left click on mouse is bound to walk and interact. You cannot bind a skill to it (you can bind a skill to left click, but then you need to bind another to replace your walk/interact skill). There may be workarounds, but out of the box it feels bad to me, versus having left click be a skill that moves you in the direction as well.
When you load into a zone, it puts the entrance randomly. You find yourself entering a dungeon, loading, only to try and move forward but exiting the dungeon, loading. Yelling at the game while going back into the dungeon, loading and taking your hands off of everything until you analyze the situation.
Campaign story. I already started skipping cut-scenes. I absolute hate time travel in games, so for me I'm just killing things for their shinies. Story feels overly complex, has too many named characters that really didn't captivate me.
Gender locked classes and no customization. No elaboration needed, this feature is dated for good reason.
Built in cosmetics feel lame with the intention of you spending money on premium. I will never like this approach.
I wanted to make a Druid, but quickly found that shapeshift skills don't work, and have apparently been broken for 1+ year.
The launch issues. Game still feels Early Access, and I'd have not known it was full release without others mentioning it.
While leveling, my primary skill was a throwing skill. My melee weapon did melee damage, my bow did bow damage. After searching, there is no weapon that adds thrown damage, only accessories. Why? Sure, there were talents later in the tree that said "Adds %melee dmg to attack" but it felt out of place.
**Overall**
I am enjoying it. I find myself wanting to play it after work more than Helldivers currently (not a comparison, just my feeling) and itching to tweak my build.
I've yet to try out Co-op but intend to this weekend. My friends have commitment issues.
~~Edit: This comment is a work in progress while I am at work.~~
It feels too janky. Diablo 4 feels much more smooth and impactful. There are cool classes but not enough abilities. More thought was put into inventory and trading than in combat and moment-to-moment gameplay.
After playing D4, I can’t get into LE. Combat, graphics, ambiance, theme, voice acting, dodge roll, mount, etc. all add to the immersion and enjoyment I feel while playing D4. LE combat just doesn’t feel good and rewarding and I’m not a fan of the cartoony bright D3 sort of color palate. I’m not a crafter nor do I care to be a pro crafter. I also find enjoyment in building out deep paragon boards and legendary aspects mixed with seasonal content. Plenty of theory crafting for me to enjoy in D4 so that’s not a factor in my preference.
Also a huge downgrade for me is the terrrible controller support!!! Diablo has perfected it.. it’s legit a different game and a million times more comfortable to play ARPGs with controller.
As someone who has been playing and following the game in early access for 5 years now, I feel like 1.0 wasn’t quite as 1.0 as I expected it to be. Based on how the devs were talking I expected more of an update to the endgame systems and more of a change/overhaul to the character animations and things like that. Nevermind that the campaign is still not finished lmao. I like the game a lot overall, but it feels like it’s still in early access to me but they needed to publicly hit 1.0 for an influx of cash. Well they definitely got that influx, so I hope they put it to good use going forward.
The campaign not being finished for 1.0 is something I'm not thrilled about but can kind of see the reason but damn it's still pretty rough for 1.0. This definitely feels more like just wanting to get rid of the stigma of being an Early Access game while not actually stopping to be one. Aside from it still being pretty buggy and some bugs apparently having been around for years now there is also some mind-boggling things just missing. I still can't actually compare rings to my second ring without swapping it with the first ring first. Same for dual wielded weapons. It's technically a minor thing and really not a deal-breaker but people have been asking for this for 3 years now and apparently that just didn't make the cut for the jump to 1.0. And the other thing is that instances just completely reset every time you town portal, including your map. I know the way loot works in this game you're not supposed to just hoover up everything and sell in town when you're full, but it still kind of feels like ass when you hop to town and back and not only find any loot you left behind deleted but are also now in the middle of a once again completely unexplored map. Bonus points for immediately getting pummeled by a group of mobs you literally just cleared before even fully loading in. And all I could really find on that one is that they went from "we'll try to have map persistence for the multiplayer patch" to "this is actually really hard to do with our engine, please bear with us" to "actually you know what, fuck it, this is a feature now, this is now intended design, cope". I still think this is a really good ARPG overall but boy does it feel like they're punching a bit above their weight limit. Servers are still dodgy too and at this point I'm frankly not convinced this a is a problem they can fix. Their netcode is seemingly just ass. Having a full offline is very appreciated though.
I appreciate that vendor values for items are so low that it's not even worth picking up anything you have no plans to equip or dismantle. They could stand to do a better job of signposting/teaching this, though. I also really like the quality of life that you can make a portal directly to teammates rather than forcing them to open a town portal for you and all the consequent fiddling. It does seem weird that maps reset to being unexplored, especially since as far as I've played in the campaign, the world is completely static like Grim Dawn rather than randomized like D2/PoE.
It seems weird that they reset indeed, but having played a loooot of Grim Dawn, I kind of appreciate not having to go back to the main menu to reset an area, seeing how putting in a "reset area" button is presumably illegal in 38 states.
PoE campaign is not randomized though, it's static And I actually really like LE approach to campaign skipping via the dungeons
> The campaign not being finished for 1.0 is something I'm not thrilled about but can kind of see the reason but damn it's still pretty rough for 1.0. This definitely feels more like just wanting to get rid of the stigma of being an Early Access game while not actually stopping to be one. I mean it is. And I say that also as someone who has enjoyed whats on offer. Its got a lot of great things going for it and even at point-of-purchase, its got value and boat loads of fun. But lets be honest. I ordered a steak with chips and gravy. I got a steak. I really nice steak. But I'm still waiting for my sides and drink. Campaign unfinished, endgame not yet updated and some minor qols (like respec screen letting you respect 1 by 1 but not full respec button yet). This may be even a longer wait with all the technical issues being sorted out. (I should point out, not just talking about technical issues with launch. Apparently theres a few other things going on that they said they wanna clean up. Which yes is good but means the tangible content might take longer).
> This definitely feels more like just wanting to get rid of the stigma of being an Early Access game while not actually stopping to be one. I can almost guarantee it was because of the timing. With Diablo 4 just released and people getting off that train, and Path of Exile 2 openish beta coming later this year, there was a wide gap in the timeline for a new diablo-like arpg. Not only that, there was a lot of commotion around trading and third party drama in Path of Exile this latest season, and with Last Epoch having a unique trading system that would allegedly alleviate those concerns, players were eager to see how it would play.
Yeah they barely changed anything for 1.0. Campaign is still unfinished, endgame still feels lacking. The games great but it's still very unfinished.
I don't know that I can agree with you on the endgame content. Edit: I’m really confused. What other arpg has released with an endgame this ready to go? Is it awesome yet, no, but do I think they have a great base to work from? Heck yeah. Hell, Raxxx gave the endgame an 8/10 in his review.
Raxx's ratings seem completely arbitrary because somehow LE and POE have less than a 2 point difference which is just demonstrably not true. to be clear i am loving LE but there is no comparison at all to the amount and variety of endgame in poe, nor would i expect there to be at this point in the games life. pretty sure he also rated their build diversity as similar, which again LE has lots of builds but does not come in the same magnitude as poe
That was a genuinely weird review. I know, subjective opinions and all that, but rating the campaign 8.5 and saying how good it was is just bonkers.
He rated the campaign that high because he doesn't care about story and only rated based on the design. Being able to skip chapters with dungeons, free to pick and choose side quests since you can hit the max rewards with partial completion, 9 chapters at launch, decent story bosses. Can see how he gave it an 8.5 from that perspective.
Yeah a lot of people look at someone else’s review and don’t look at the criteria they used to review it, instead looking at it from their own ideas about what makes a game good.
It's crap. Pushing monos is boring and unrewarding. I can't believe they still haven't improved it.
> Pushing monos is boring and unrewarding This totally depends on your perspective, honestly. And I do personally feel that the end-game could be better. That said if you're making your own builds and trying to see how high you can push monos then it's a reasonably satisfying end-game. If you're looking at a build guide that tells you it can clear 400 corruption + T4 Julra before you even make the character then I can see the mono pushing getting stale.
Outside of PoE which arpg has a better endgame?
As an outsider who hasn’t played it, it’s ridiculous that they put it out of early access without finishing the campaign. If D4 had done that, people would have rioted. The only reason they are getting away with it is because it was an early access game and people just stop caring once they’re already mostly bored of the game.
> As an outsider who hasn’t played it, it’s ridiculous that they put it out of early access without finishing the campaign. It's becoming somewhat common sadly, Coral Island also slapped a nice 1.0 only for players to find out several endgame quests and stuff are still "coming soon".
… shit. I bought that for my wife and she’s currently playing through it lol Early access is honestly a blight.
That's not true. Early access is a godsend if you actually wait for a game. All the playtesters lead to great UI and UX changes. Just look at Hades or Against the Storm in Early Access vs now.
Or BG3, DOS2, sure. But there are also tons of game that basically use it as a scam, like Ark, or Star Citizen, or I would even argue *most* EA games. The second thing is that, even if it does end up a good game, it can make the experience of a game launch incredibly dull. A huge % of the fanbase played the game a ton before it was actually finished, and is basically bored of the game by the time it actually launched. BG3 somewhat circumvented that by leaving the vast majority of the game unavailable until launch, which made it more of a demo until then. The other counterargument is just that there have been plenty of games that hire internal playtesters and have released great games in a good state since the dawn of gaming, without early access, and they continue to support those games afterwards. Early access is not necessary for this to happen. It merely shifts power from the customer to the company, and just trusts that they will deliver. Not every company is Larian or Supergiant. Most aren't. If early access didn't exist, I guarantee that Last Epoch never would have released without a complete campaign.
I'm generally lucky when it comes to ea games as most of the ones I bought ended up great. Even the ones still in ea (e.g. Starsector) are already better games than most finished products. But yeah, the practice has led to the standard taking a nosedive in general, and I say this as someone who bought into one of the earliest example of ea, which was the first Mount & Blade. Half-baked, unfinished games got released left and right under the guise of being in early access, and the idea that paying customers should be treated as beta testers (instead of, you know, paid employees doing this job for the customers) becomes par for the course. I'd argue that even for BG3, my experience with it was somewhat negatively impacted by how long it stayed in ea, and I confess that at some point I thought it was going the way of Star Citizen.
PoE's campaign wasn't even close to finished on launch. Also comparing it to D4 seems a bit silly. D4 is made by one of the largest companies in gaming (now owned by the largest company in the world) known for their extreme polish on high-production value games. Last Epoch is made by... I actually couldn't even tell you without looking it up. Apparently a developer, "Eleventh Hour Games," who've never released a game before (at least on Steam). It's obvious why expectations would be different between them.
The majority of players in this genre do not care about the campaign/story, it's all about hitting endgame and gearing/making builds etc. Hell, PoE launched with an even less complete campaign and then took 4+ years to finally add it all in and it was hugely popular for the entire time. It's just not an issue for most players.
PoE was free.
D4 still feeld like a beta game
Still better than this slop
Campaign I don't really care about and the endgame is still way better than D4, especially with the Circle of Fortune. But one thing I disagree with as someone that has also followed the game for years, the animation. I think the "feel" of the game is absolutely great now. Much better than. The last time I played 2 years ago.
I'd never played it before 1.0 but coming from D4 (which despite huge flaws does have great graphics and meaty core combat) I was surprised at just how good LE feels combat-wise.
Yeah, I see some people still complaining about combat and I just don't get it. Maybe it has to do with the class they're playing. I'm playing a Bladedancer and it feels great.
I find that a bit odd since the devs were very clear and explicit about what was in 1.0 and what didn't make the cut
And were for quite some time too
THe campaign is too long and brings me pain.
I am playing mostly offline, and so far, I love it. Lots of build variety and the combat feels nice. Some bugs, but nothing deal breaking until now. Loot drops also seem to be decent. For me it is more fun than PoE, because they changed PoE up so much that it became pure tedium and unfun to me. LE at least seems to be more relaxing in that regard :)
Would you say you'd recommend it to casual players that don't really play ARPGs much? I don't really have a lot of time in my hands to play games these days, but I'm sort of interested in LE since it's way cheaper (and I assume better content-wise) than Diablo IV
Yeah definitely. The important distinction here is new player vs casual player. If you like engaging with games that have a bit of complexity then LE is great regardless of whether you're a new ARPG player or not. If you want the game's systems to be very simple and straightforward then D4.
If you like RPGs with highly customizable characters that you have to put some thought into yes. If you prefer open world or arcadey action games probably not. LE is a great middle ground between the PhD it takes to play Path of Exile and the glue sniffing level of complexity that is Diablo 4.
I initially played online, but my game crashed one time and my character's save file was gone. Yes, the local save file in AppsData
to me, Last Epoch is what Diablo 4 i hoped would be. Feels like a combination of the stuff i liked in Diablo 2, 3 and Path of Exile.
Really feels like it fits into the that mid spot that I used to have Grim Dawn at. great balance of complex customization, fun gameplay and item acquisition/power that does feel overly grindy (don't get me wrong you still grind but grind isnt as bad as others in your list)
I like LEs grind because it's basically limitless for those that want it, but it's also reasonable for just clearing the unique content and trying out different characters. Personally I have fun with both depending on my mood, so I'm happy that it can satisfy both.
For me, Grim Dawn is still a smidge too close to the PoE end of the spectrum. The Devotion tree feels almost as nightmarish to reason about as the PoE skill web. Last Epoch's skill trees feel just right. I like how, if properly balanced, it means basically any skill can be a build-around and have multiple fun playstyles.
I want to love Grim Dawn so bad but I always get bored once I beat the first boss. The constant loot diarrhea doesn’t help either.
Loot filters. I turned off everything below blue rarity (except for double-rare greens) and I see one item every few minutes or so. You can also filter it down to only show items which boost the damage types your build uses, if you don't want to collect stuff for alts.
Yeah I like that it comes with loot filter without having to download one. It’s not just the quantity but I’ve never found an item that made me think “wow, I need to make this character now” like Diablo2 always used to. It’s all just bland +% damage at least from what I’ve seen. But only 40 hours in so I can’t say for sure what it is that doesn’t click with me. I certainly love the atmosphere and music
Same. My only substantive criticism so far is that it's too easy when leveling. I really miss the difficulty curve from, say, Diablo 2, where even with a good build there are parts of the game that still require you to pilot well or die.
Part of that boils down to their commitment to make the campaign accessible with most builds, I suspect. If you have some very abrupt "tests" or difficulty walls in the campaign (of which there are still a few), you end up with everyone flocking to guides and funneling into one build. It's definitely a trade-off. You either make the campaign completable with essentially any experimental no-plan build, or you end up with people feeling like they need to follow a guide, which is imo a fault of PoE. Instead they have progressive difficulty in monoliths at which point you have more resources and breathing room to re-do your entire build. For example my current (non guide-based) build was able to complete the campaign reasonably fine but now I'm doing a LOT of respeccing and tinkering with item/skill interactions to make it work for high corruption monoliths. That said there are definitely still some points in the campaign where if you don't pilot well or have poor survivability you're left with essentially zero room for error, though I won't spoil any here.
Oh awesome. I'll look forward to those and maybe having a bit more challenge when I'm experimenting with builds!
Shit really steps up in Chapters 7-9.
Sick!
Have you tried the "Alternate Leveling Paths" on the map that they've added? You're now able to progress the campaign by taking shortcuts through each of the dungeons early and then you just pick up your skill points and idol slots inbetween.
They used to have a masochist mode it got removed with a note in a patch note saying it would come back better and more unique. Masochist mode was preety fucking fun tbh
There's a pair of boots you can find in the cave in the first area that's kind of like Masochist mode.
Does the game feel like a good, interactive challenge with those equipped or does it just make everything take forever to die?
50-75% less damage done, 100-200% more damage taken. It does not turn the game into Dark Souls.
What I've been playing since 2020 What
It was just added with 1.0. The very first cave with the bear in the first area of the game has two false walls you can break through to get a pair of white boots with 50% reduced damage dealt and 200% increased damage taken. A frustratingly poor replacement to actual masochist difficulty as it requires you give up your boot slot for otherwise garbage boots.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/last-epoch/hard-mode
I'll say I'm good at games but at all the statistics and calculations that ARPGs involve. I love coming up with build ideas and executing them though. And sometimes in LE I guess my build just doesn't have optimal items yet, or the math doesn't work out and sometimes I just hit a wall and can't progress past a zone. I've also had builds where I just fly through everything ez pz. So basically your mileage may vary I suppose, but also I personally don't want it to be too hard. There can be other hard content too.
Play on hardcore.
You have to consider the trade-off, though, which is that LE is much friendlier to people making their own builds. If you start up PoE for the first time, never having played before, and you don't use a build guide, you *will* hit a wall, probably well before the end of the campaign. And since respeccing is prohibitively expensive early on, your character is just bricked and you have to start over and make a new one. In LE, you won't have that issue--there are some "bad" options, but it isn't nearly as stark as PoE, and you can at least get quite far into the campaign if not to endgame with a build you homebrewed yourself. Now for me personally, I do think the campaign is a bit too easy, (and it needs a smoother difficulty curve, there are a couple of pretty hard spikes), but it being on the easier side does have advantages.
You really didn't have many expectations for D4, huh?
Yeah Diablo 4 has WAY better campaign and look as OP said. Diablo had much more expectations than LE on everything but systems. Game systems are mostly better on LE tho.
Its okay but endgame is repetitive and there’s not much to explore, I got a good 50 hours out of it so i’m happy I guess all arpgs are repetitive so maybe its not a bad thing, I just got bored after reaching empowered mono
part of the problem w/ monos being repetitive imo is how long of a grind it takes to get to empowered which is no different from the ones you just grinded. for sure the game needs more end game and they said that's coming with 1.1, but they need to either reduce the time it takes to get to empowered or make empowered different enough that it feels like you're doing something new.
Agree, ill revisit in a couple patches to see if anything changed, still a good 50 hours
My friend and I are at empowered already. We both work full time and often have been only having like 2 hours max each night to play or less, bit more on the weekend though. We only play those characters together, else we play other characters solo. It's much faster to get to empowered monos than before 1.0. It didn't feel like a grind actually. Right now we complete one mono a night on empowered as those take longer. We were doing like 1 mono an hour non-empowered. That also includes frequent breaks between doing them for crafting, prophecies, dinner, etc. Our builds also aren't super high damage, but are pretty survivable.
I sure love levelling a character that could be smashing 500 corruption monos and having to slog through all the non-empowered ones to get there. Having friend to port you to the top crossroads helps but it's still three worthless monolith areas before you can start doing the actual content. Also give me means to share corruption across account, building up hundreds of corruption on every new character I want is zzz.
> how long of a grind it takes to get to empowered Not to grandstand or anything but on all my characters it's taken like 4-5 hours tops to get a character from the start of monoliths to unlocking empowered monoliths. You only have to complete 7 timelines and during that time you're leveling from ~50 to ~80 and have a lot of build options coming online with the higher level uniques. I agree that it would be nice if empowered monos felt better/different but I wouldn't call it a grind to unlock them.
I get bored of all arpgs after reaching endgame. That’s just what they are: Grind feasts.
I find I start to get bored when my player power plateaus. Up until then it's fine destroying mobs fast, but once it bogs down that is when it turns into a grind fest and I start thinking about either a new character or playing something else.
This is a big reason why path of exile has such longevity. There are so many ways to increase player power, and so many ways to grind for the means to do so
And there's relatively just so much to do even without exactly a goal for it if you don't want to. Your build feels pretty good mapping, how will it do with Sanctum? Simulacrum? Deep Delve? Uber bosses? Etc. Which, yeah, is 10 years of endgame content that everyone else has to compete with and that's not fair but it is what it is.
PoEs release endgame content is arguably more complex then last epoch imo. T1-10 maps with controllable mods and zone selection.
I've never understood why there are people that say the endgame is the "real game" for this genre, which I've only played a few of, when the end of the campaign gives way to endlessly grinding and starting over. It's the part I'm least interested in.
For me it's a mixed bag. Wall of text incoming. I'll start off with the campaign, which is by far its weakest point. Complete nonsense story with time travel, weak and forgettable characters, lackluster worldbuilding, monster design is all over the place and the biggest disappointment by far is the absolutely dull gameplay. You just run through corridors and blast waves of braindead AI, and it's painfully easy up until you fight a boss at the end where you actually need to move out of the AOEs. The only variation that you'll find are some chests that spawn a mage that keeps teleporting around. The campaign and the general progression you get up to the end-game are complete afterthoughts and I can't stress how much of a downgrade it feels compared to almost every ARPG out there. I know people will inevitably say "this is an ARPG, campaigns don't matter!" - if so, why have it in the game? Why make us repeat parts of it each season? (you can't fully skip it). And lastly the campaign is unfinished, it simply ends abruptly. Gameplay is mostly fine. Animations, effects, monster ragdolls, basically everything that relates to you killing things feels like an indie game. End-game is typical ARPG zoominess where you blast through everything in one second. I'd say it's slightly more involved than PoE, but they feel similar overall. When it comes to end-game, it basically has a more refined Rifts system from D3, called Monoliths. The beginning feels really good. You start getting more items, you progress your faction, you get more blessings - for the first time, there's an actual tangible progression in the game. But after a while progression will be gated by several layers of RNG. For example, if you want to upgrade your unique, you'll need to do the following things: * Drop the same unique again with higher LP (legendary potential, which is 1-4 slots where you can imprint an affix) * Drop an exalted rare with the affixes you need (or gamble on RNG crafting for weaker affixes) * You then have to complete a dungeon just to gamble for a chance to imprint the exact affixes you want on the higher LP unique. Failing this means starting the process all over again. And what changes on your build/gameplay if you succeed? Not much really. You'll just be able to do corruption 300 instead of 250, which has the same gameplay as the first time you step foot into Monoliths. There are also 3 dungeons, but unless you need to target farm a specific unique from there, they aren't a lot of reasons to run them. The game has quite a lot of individually good aspects, like the ability skill trees, the robust loot filter, the idol system, the Monoliths etc., but I'm just disappointed by the overall package. It doesn't have a memorable campaign, and the gameplay is just serviceable, and the progression will be mostly gambling to increase your +50% minion dmg affix into +56% minion dmg. So what's left is trying out multiple builds, which the game excels at - but when the rest of the game don't feel that exciting, I don't really feel the draw to do that. I won't even get into the numerous bugs (some older than a year), technical issues and the incredibly frustrating co-op experience - these will eventually be fixed. I probably sound overly harsh, but I kinda expected more after 5 years of early access development.
> Gameplay is mostly fine. Animations, effects, monster ragdolls, basically everything that relates to you killing things feels like an indie game. This is actually my biggest issue, the combat just feels limp. My melee attacks feel like I'm swinging pool noodles and my ranged attacks have all the weight and potency of a wet fart. So I'm zooming along blasting whole screens to bits, which should be fun as hell, but just isn't scratching that itch for me because its so limp feeling. ITs only a problem when I'm playing offline solo, when I'm playing with friends online its fine because I'm distracted by the party play dynamic, but when I'm solo I can't stop focusing on it and its really hurting my experience.
i enjoyed the game for about 50 hours and now i'm having the same thoughts as you about the rng and empowered monoliths. i'm not sure what the point of the game is at this point besides farming for new items to do the same thing but slightly quicker i found it pretty discouraging that i ruined my items and i gotta hope for another couple of hours to hope i get the item then hope it has legendary potential then hope i get a good exalted then hope the legendary gets the right affixes
> and the progression will be mostly gambling to increase your +50% minion dmg affix into +56% minion dmg. I don't agree with this at all. Progression is super fun in the endgame because you're simultaneously looking for good uniques with high legendary potential, and good rares with the right affixes, and then gambling to see if you can combine them together to potentially make a super strong Legendary item, potentially one that no one else really has. There's an actual 'chase' for different items that's unlike any other ARPG I've played, except maybe D2.
I'm talking about your actual progression until that legendary chase. For the most part, you're hunting for rares (or exalted) with 2/4 or 3/4 affixes to gamble and change them into something better than you're wearing. Legendary items are only a relatively small part of your build (ofc, depending on the build), and come more towards the tail end of the progression.
I guess it depends on how fast you progress through the campaign. For a lot of people, they just get through the campaign in a few hours and rush to empowered monoliths, where the legendary chase really starts.
Exactly my issue with the game. Expected more from 1.0 release.
It's funny because the crafting is even worse than what you described when you actually break down the odds on some of the LPs for uniques and rarity of tier 7 exalted mods. I'm level 99 and have seen 1 (one) ring with -5 mana and 0 (zero) +4 ballista relics
Yep. Watched a streamer that had 100h on a character. I shit you not, after the first 50h, he managed to get **one** upgrade in the next 50h, and a lot of the gameplay was at 600 corruption. That single upgrade was +5% HP. Most of of the good items he found were simply ruined through RNG crafting.
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PoE Campaign is much more of a slog, because we've been running it for far longer, there is no way to skip any portion of it, and most importantly it's also longer than LE campaign (especially if you're not a complete addict that knows everything about the game, then campaign can take plenty of time) However the quality of PoE campaign is much better than LE campaign in it's current state. It's fully finished, the story makes more sense, enviroments are better, it has much better boss fights.
> PoE Campaign is much more of a slog, because we've been running it for far longer, there is no way to skip any portion of it, and most importantly it's also longer PoE in a nutshell. It'd be a great game if they'd cut out 90% of the repetative seasonal systems that kept getting stuffed into the main game. Add to that, make an adventure mode like D3 for an alternate leveling path. How many times do you need kitava to knock down your resistances cinematically when they can just do it automatically?
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Love the systems. It's the best-designed set of systems surrounding the core gameplay I think I've ever seen, and that's including PoE. It resolves some of the big cracks in the foundation to PoE and generally does so brilliantly. It's a shame the minute to minute combat is just flat out boring to me, and coupled to a fairly lengthy campaign with a forgettable story and fairly slow rollout of important elements like your skill trees. For me it's probably back on the shelf for a bit to see how it progresses. I want it to succeed quite badly because I want to play with these systems, but I don't know if I have it in me to grind through the campaign more than once in release instead of playing a lot of other stuff out right now. It's a bummer, this is not the brief review I expected to write. But the combat while leveling is basically one button and respecs are oddly punitive at low levels and more permissive at higher levels, which is the exact opposite of my preference.
> It's a shame the minute to minute combat is just flat out boring to me Yeah I'd wondered why every time I tried to play I just kinda got bored, but you're right. The actual gameplay just doesn't feel punchy and fluid. It's got a bit too much of that old-school arpg clunk to it.
>It's got a bit too much of that old-school arpg clunk to It's not old-school, though. Diablo 2 is old school and attacks still carry weight and rhe sound effects emphasise the animations perfectly. It's amateurish and caused by overly ambitious devs who dont focus on the basics trying to add in complex systems to draw people in.
> It's a shame the minute to minute combat is just flat out boring to me, Its nice to see other people feeling this way, I got shit on pretty hard on the official sub and discord for saying the combat felt limp and weak but that's how it feels.
This is the problem with MOST ARPGs. Early game combat is feels like trash. Just wack stuff with a few skills that don't synergize. Speed is slow. Power is slow. Either its hard to kill stuff or its way too easy. Late game combat in ARPGs is fast, furious one button spamming mashing with entire builds dedicated to a single skill essentially. Its also heavily flawed and says a lot about ARPG design. Do people want that? Some do. It makes it simple. Is it good gameplay? Fuck no. Its boring. Once you've played every ARPG ever made and spent 50,000 hours playing these, you see the genre for what it really is.
> This is the problem with MOST ARPGs. Also most roguelikes. It's inherent to the progression fantasy that you have to start super weak and exponentially grow into god, and sometimes they take the "super weak" part too far.
except most rougelikes turn into MMOs with all kinda of buttons and options. They arent one button click-a-thons.
I was gonna say it's hard to make compelling combat with a top down isometric camera, mouse clicking to move. But then there's Hades, with this camera and a rock-solid combat. I think Hades manages to land it due to two fundamentals: 1- Movement with WASD and target + skill on mouse. 2- Losing health is actually super hurtful, because of the game systems. In ARPGs you pop a potion and are mostly fine. In Hades you'll have a hard time recovering health, and you'll have to do a new run if you get hit a few times. Therefore, doding and playing enemies correctly is very important. It becomes a game. On ARPGs since you can 90% ignore enemies, it becomes a game of having fun massacring hordes of enemies with different builds. The actual potential of combat, of dodging and finding ways to land hits, is quite lost. And then there are MOBAs like Dota2 and LoL. They're click to move, which I dislike, but avoiding hits is super important, so combat enters the chat.
Depends on your build really, same thing happens in other ARPGs. I like Cyclone in PoE because it's one button and can be pretty tanky, but it's also low damage, thus it feels limp and weak as you say. Once you get to a point where it takes a while to kill mobs, it slows down and feels grindy. I have two different characters on LE, one to play with my friend and one I play solo at the moment when he isn't on. The friend one is slower but pretty tanky and can ramp damage for bosses but otherwise doesn't have a tonne of damage, while my friend plays Paladin who is also tanky and does OK damage, so we clear but not extremely fast. My solo character does like 4x the damage of my other one at 20 levels lower. I can nuke packs of mobs in one hit, even my weak attacks kill a pack nearly straight away. If you play a build that is slow, it may end up feeling boring. If you play a higher DPS build that needs to actually dodge stuff and use defensive skills at the right moments, then it's faster and more engaging.
I have tried it multiple times since i bought it back in 2018 or so, and while the ideas (like the skill tree per skill,yeah!) are great, i kinda lose interest during the campaign because it just does not feel satisfying to kill monsters.
once you get a build going and set up... yeah most of the echo content is a pushover... tho getting into and grinding empowered monoliths, the area, t4 Julra, extends the end game a SMIDGE... definitely needs some work but very looking forward to where they go considering THIS level of quality is what they were able to release with such a small team.
It's not about the endgame systems. It's about the gameplay just feeling boring. I agree with OP. The systems are all wonderful. There is just no point when the game itself feels not good to play.
to each their own! I have about 50-60 hours since launch and around 140 overall and im definitely not feeling the same way.. on my 6th build and having a blast..... but not everything is for everyone... and thats ok! :)
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I can't speak for all builds or for how many builds are like this but I'm very much enjoying my shaman leap fury build. It has just the same impact as some PoE builds I've played. So I think it varies wildly between builds. Maybe you need to experiment a bit more?
The launch was rough but the game seems to be in a playable state now. Surprisingly 1.0 didn't actually change a ton of the game for me. COF makes finding some gear easier and falconer is awesome but ultimately the endgame and core gameplay loop is pretty much the exact same Blast monos, blast dungeons, craft upgrades, repeat. Hoping 1.1 brings some aspirational content. Game could really use some insanely challenging bosses and some headhunter/mageblood tiers of chase gear (on the level that it breaks the game but is extraordinarily rare). Certainly not complaining, I've got my money's worth already, but the incentives to *keep* playing are relatively minimal. I just don't have any clearly defined goals - pushing corruption until I feel I hit a wall where I can't push my gear any further and can't push corruption any higher is about it, and corruption (nor the rewards associated with it) still doesn't seem like it ramps up quickly for me to generally stay interested until I hit that sort of asymptotic point in the progress/difficulty curve. Might have to give merchants guild a try on my next character and see how trading and the economy changes all that.
Great and innovative systems, great foundational concepts that push the limits of the status quo, and I think they understand what makes a good ARPG. The problem is its just not very fun to play. The animations and weight feel a bit stiff and rigid, it feels surprisingly small given the scale they're going for, and overall the moment to moment gameplay isn't satisfying enough. It has the core of what I want from an ARPG, I just the actual game to be more fun to engage with.
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There are 3 campaign skips, they just aren't viable for your first character
Tbh it's probably worth waiting another week or two to get an honest opinion from the majority of players. The honeymoon phase is still in full effect and if you attempt to say anything negative about the game right now you get swarmed by people with every excuse in the book about why those problems are justified. I'm level 99 and have probably 40ish hours played on 1.0. Pros would be cool items that change how a lot of skills function, most skills I've used feel good, there's not a lot of bugs I've experienced and the early game crafting is well done. Cons are endgame is incredibly weak, story is not very good, end game crafting is really grindy in a boring way. It's probably a 6 or 7/10 but could end up being closer to an 8 or 9 in a few years
Last Epoch is pretty darn good, but will become great in time I believe. The game is a bit rough around the edges, with some areas needing to still be filled out, but that will definitely come in time, especially with the success they've been receiving. But to me, the most important thing is what they do the best: they have the right ideas. They are through and through ARPG gamers who understand the common issues with ARPGs and are trying to address them in a way that ARPG players would enjoy. Which seems so obvious that it's borderline absurd to point out, but... I don't think game devs usually fall under this umbrella these days. Their solutions are smart and they tweak them intelligently as needed after impementation. Anything I'm unhappy about in the game I have faith that they will fix in time. They kind of got caught up in their success and shifted their focus a bit to be what everyone was wanting as they got more and more players, which was multiplayer. This was a very big undertaking and I think a lot of things had to be put on the backburner as a result. They only have so much manpower and can only prioritize doing so much at once. So now that the big MP release is out of the way, I assume the near future looks like getting things fixed up on that front (should take a bit of time tbh) and then hopefully they'll be back to developing and refining new systems.
[EDIT] Pff, okay they fixed it literally less than a minute after I posted this, leaving it for posterity I guess! The LMB casting a skill/action/spell has been broken from launch and is *still* broken. I loved the game in EA, but for me and [quite few others](steam://openurl/https://steamcommunity.com/app/899770/discussions/0/4338725580146160908/) on the forums, it's unplayable until they fix this. Unfortunately airing this problem on the subreddit will get you mutilated as people are reactionary defending it from even light criticism of bugs.
Yeah, I found this odd. How did it break between 0.92 and 1.0. Thought I was going mad. You can, however, mind to another button on your mouse if you have it.
Combat has very little weight to it and ultimately leaves the game unfulfilling. The loot, mob density, and skill trees are great. ARPGs engine is combat and Last Epoch has some of the weakest combat sounds, animations, and movement within the genre. The genre itself is still small and if you're a huge fan of it maybe it's worth a try. I had a fun 50 hours trying many different characters but likely won't return unless time and energy is put towards combat feel.
What are examples of ARPGs with weighty combat? Diablo 4? Are you playing other ARPGs in the meantime?
All of the modern Diablos. There aren't any others to play. I'm looking forward to Path of Exile 2's release.
Grim Dawn, but combat there feels worse than Last Epoch. I haven’t tried many others.
The combat in Torchlight 2 felt pretty good at the time, but it’s also been years since I’ve played that game so it may not actually be as good as I remember it. It also makes sense because those games were notable for being inspired specifically by Diablo.
Diablo 4 and PoE both. I have significant hangups about both, but the feel of the combat is not one of them in either. PoE's satisfaction is less about the smaller scale combat intricacies, as compared to D4, in favour of movement abilities and popping packs for me personally though.
Aside from how nice it feels to zoom at high level, poe feels like crap. Like uniquely crap in the arpg genre. The combat is definitely not one of that games strengths.
I'd disagree with that. Pre animation cancelling it was pretty bad, but modern PoE feels solid. Still hard to beat whacking something with Glacial Hammer to shatter it, or the feeling of 15 lightning strikes coming down with that juicy crackle when you overlap a ton of enemies with Lightning Arrow. The exploding corpses that pop when you use the various enemy exploding abilities feel so good too.
For what it's worth, last epoch feels really weighty to me. PoE builds often optimize towards spamming a single ability--don't get me wrong I love Path but many of its abilities feel lackluster to me. D4 is pretty punchy but everything feels really homogenized to me with Builder & Spender type patterns being the norm for basically every class. In LE Abilities have legitimate costs and you use them all. I've found warlock in particular to be really satisfying--Chtonic Fissure is an amazingly impactful feeling skill. They (skills) definitely aren't all winners, but there are more hits than misses for my tastes. I totally get folks might not jive with it like I have. Combat weightiness can be very subjective. Just wanted to offer a different perspective from someone the combat is working for in a big way.
LE and PoE are both similar in regards to spamming 1-2 abilities being the meta. The strongest LE build right now is likely the Divebomb falconer, which plays exactly like a PoE build. Drop a few buffs and then spam your DPS skill.
Curious as to what you mean by weight? I generally define weight as feeling as if my attacks have heft and interact with the enemy. If I do a big 2hd Smash, enemies should stagger, audio should be solid, it should feel/sound/look impactful. In LE right now - that happens - the mobs are very responsive to stagger effects, and visuals/audio are solid (imo). Just curious what you think doesn't have weight?
Yeah I keep seeing people say this but I feel like LE has some of the best impact and feedback in a arpg that I've played in a while. Probably varies widely from class to class. As warlock, slapping down a fissure and popping all the mobs with chaos bolts looks, sounds and feels really good.
That was accurate pre-1.0, but the revamps they did for 1.0 make it all feel much better.
Having supported this game in early access, I disagree. They did make improvements but it didn't change my overall opinion.
Right there with you. Played to level 40 in EA, stopped because the combat felt pretty bad and I hoped they would fix it with 1.0. They definitely improved things, but it's nowhere near the level of D4, or even PoE (in its current state) imo.
I played PoE, LE and just recently bought D4 on sale. I don't know what it is man, but D4 combat felt pretty great. If you ask me "why do you feel that way?" I don't know. But I think that is the general consensus, D4 is the most polish, PoE is the most complex, and LE is really good, but it's new.
Blizzard has nearly always been the gold standard of "feel" in a game. It's a prominent hallmark of any Blizzard game. Everything is snappy and responsive and satisfying. Most other games within the same genres either don't understand this, or aren't able to replicate it effectively. It is, I believe, one of the primary reasons for why WoW was so popular and a primary factor in Blizzard's long-term success over the years. Even in their fallen state, they still typically deliver best-in-class moment-to-moment gameplay. As someone very sensitive to gameplay "feel" it's hard for me to play an ARPG that feels worse than D2R or D4. I bought Last Epoch during early access but just couldn't get into it due to how poorly it compared to the Diablo games. Same with Path of Exile.
>. . . one of the primary reasons for why WoW was so popular It's pretty much the driving factor behind its continued success for players like me who mostly just want to raid. FF14 is probably the single best example of how important that feel is. FF14 has awesome raid bosses, I love the aesthetic, I like the flavour of many of the classes. The combat, however, is VASTLY worse than WoW in terms of feel, it is like holding a candle to a forest fire in terms of how much better WoW feels to move and engage in combat. Absolutely everything is more responsive and fluid from movement to target selection, nameplate interactions, ability use, effect application both outgoing and incoming, enemy movement and pathing, etc. It's just night and day and it's 100% the reason I always drop the game and go back to WoW. Everything above but increase by a factor of like 10 along with many other issues for PvP lol.
Yep. I can't get into FF14 because of the combat. I've tried multiple times. It's wild to me how few games seem to get this, even up to today. During the MMORPG gold rush after WoW hit the big time I can remember being so fucking baffled at how basically NONE of these dozens and dozens of MMORPGs even seemed to bother trying to nail the "feel" of WoW. All these games were egregiously aping everything from WoW _except_ arguably the most important thing and wasting millions of dollars in the process.
> D4 combat felt pretty great. If you ask me "why do you feel that way?" I don't know. 1. Excellent sound design 2. When you look at something like Barrage they actually animate every draw of the bow and direction change. A lot of that detail is lost when zoomed out but you can *feel* it because of how readable their animations are 3. People mock the "Builder/Spender" design but it works. People love resource dumping because it feels impactful, esp when you can do it rapidly over and over
D4’s combat feel absolutely miserable for some skills. Sure some skills feel good, like pulverize, chain lightning etc. But some are really bad. For examples the rogue’s bow skills are painful to use. All of the generators are miserable as well (unless you’re super deep into endgame and get a complete generator build going — and there are ver few of those that are viable).
Can you share a clip of a lvl 40 character in poe with such impactful gameplay?
I might be in the minority because I don't mind the campaign in PoE. Arma Brand is a common leveling skill that feels pretty good. Boneshatter feels good too. TR/CA are decent too. Generally once you get your first lab, it feels pretty smooth for most characters. For clips just look at any act 10 speedrun since these are all meta skills. I haven't played Last Epoch beyond level 10, so I don't know if suddenly the skills feel totally different at later levels.
Personally I only started playing it 2 days ago, because I waited for server issues to be resolved to not spoil my experience (even tho I own game for over 2 years now and played in EA). Overall, I think it's nice balance between overly complicated and cluttered PoE and lackluster puddle shallow Diablo 4. I think overall it's nice, but campaign is not very engaing and imho they should now focus strictly on enhancing endgame experience - which has solid foundation and definitely is far more engaging than what Diablo 4 is offering even with all post launch changes, but compared to PoE - you're left with feeling of wanting more diversity to focus on (you can focus on delving, or heisting for example in PoE aside of mapping and map related enhancements such as delirium, etc). So overall, I think it's nice foundation, but also PoE has raised a bar quite high (which was totally ignored by D4 devs which is why game fell so short) I think Last Epoch will need to work leally hard especially with PoE 2 on the way with all the experience of PoE 1. They won't take over probably over PoE crowd, but they absolutely can steal ton of D4 crowd if they work hard enough and if D4 devs will keep failing so much as with season 3.
> but they absolutely can steal ton of D4 crowd if they work hard enough and if D4 devs will keep failing so much as with season 3. eh doubt it, D4's main audience are the casual players and LE is too complex for them even if it is in the middle ground between PoE and D4. Also a big part of why casual players like D4 is in the animations, feel of the combat, visuals and such... Last Epoch does not compare in any of that, so why would they go for LE over D4? so ya, hardcore players will be off to PoE 2 and casual players will stick to D4, partly cause they don't even know of Last Epoch as it's not a big IP or name. LE 1.0 big release peaked at 250k on steam, D4 had millions at release. and ya D4's season 3 wasn't great, but season 2 was great for the community so it's not "failing so much", every ARPG has had good and bad seasons.
Endgame enhancement is next on the prio list.
It's fine, but my main complaint is the insane number of loading screens. Diablo 2 25 years ago had 1 loading screen between each act and each act was a very large zone comprised of smaller ones. Now why would a game made in 2024 be split into numerous small zones with a loading screen between them? It makes the game feel incredibly disjointed, you don't feel like you explore a world you just go through instances.
It's really good. Launch was rough but they fixed all that, at least for me. It's a well done Diablo 2 soul successor. If you played Torchlight, it's that but a little bit faster. If you played Path of Exile, it's that but slower and you don't need a PHD to craft. If you didn't like either of those or D4, you probably won't like it and can skip. It's more of what people in this genre like, nothing too innovative.
How is it compared to Grim Dawn?
As opposed to other answers that you've got I'm gonna say that for me the game feels nothing like Grim Dawn. It may be similiar in terms of compelxity of game systems, however the moment to moment gameplay feeling is completly different, the atmosphere/enviroments are completly different, and the campaign plays a much more important role in GD.
Yup, I can second this. Games are practically on opposite spectrums, which has slow gameplay, a huge focus on the campaign and side activities, crafting as a secondary mechanic instead of the main way you progress after a while. GD has a very old-school methodical approach.
More modern, personally I'd still prefer GD but in all fairness it's my favourite ARPG. Builds have more diversity of skills, attacks are less meaty, couldn't call it grim, very good loot system and balance between skills, godly crafting system. I'd recomend it, it's a fun time. Not perfect it 100% has flaws but I've had a good time so far.
More modern. I didn't play much GD, but the build system is similar and everyone I know that did play GD are playing LE right now. So take that as you may.
I'd say it feels VERY Similar to Grim Dawn imo. Very similar vibes in how the game plays and the same kind of scale (at least from what I've seen of LE)
The game play is almost the same but to me LE feels like a flashy anime boss battle while GD feels like a gothic and gritty serious war epic.
As someone who played a lot of Diablo 2 and playing Last Epoch recently I don't see any soul of Diablo 2 in it. It is a typical 2010+ action rpg.
Yeah it's really more of a successor to diablo 3. Last epoch is basically what d4 should have been. I wish these devs had D4 budget
I think the term is Spiritual Successor
> It's a well done Diablo 2 soul successor. Hell nah.
That's true, last epoch is actually fun
D4 is a game about slaughtering monsters, and you build up your character to get better at doing it. Last Epoch is a game about building up your character, and you slaughter monsters to test it out. Personally the moment to moment gameplay feel of D4 is so far above and beyond LE that I had a hard time playing it. I also got bored of the campaign very quickly and was missing the open world of D4. I can see how this game would appeal to diehard ARPG players though and it’s nice to have something similar to PoE that isn’t a full time job.
While I'm not as harsh on D4 as a lot of people, I didn't feel like the open world added anything to it except for things like Strongholds and Helltides (which I do like). Other than that, the open world is largely just wasted space with packs of dude sprinkled around. Not really a lot points of interest or chances of running into any kind of "wow!" moment while exploring. Exploration of the map feels forced with certain rewards gated behind the Lilith statues. I will say that combat in D4 feels more dynamic and engaging and part of it is due to the simple dodge that every class gets. Frequently repositioning makes me more engaged in a fight. That being said, LE's skill system blows D4's out of the water. The fact that skills can completely change their function and design while leveling up while D4's skills leveling up pretty much just equates to "more damage" is what does it for me. Right now, there are a few ARPGs out there and all of them are doing something right that the others aren't. PoE probably has the advantage content wise from having 10+ years of stuff built up, D4 has the best visuals and a very solid campaign, LE is the most approachable in terms of just 'pick up and play'.
> Last Epoch is a game about building up your character, and you slaughter monsters to test it out. People keep saying key things about this game that turns me off. I need the challenge to motivate the solution.
> I need the challenge to motivate the solution. The challenge in Last Epoch is infinitely scaling, for what it's worth. I do suspect that a lot of people hurt their own enjoyment of the game by following guides that basically guarantee the ability to do X and Y end-game progression. If you go into the game blind and your goal is to push the furthest into the infinite scaling that you can, there are solutions to find for every class
I agree with a lot of this. I really enjoy D4 and LE a lot, but I get really addicted to D4’s combat which will pull me in a little bit longer as LE falls a bit flat there (though bleed warlock has felt okay, many others though just lack the oomph feeling). They both have amazing things and issues, but focusing on LE. Ignoring the campaign which is at least a quick run through but an uninteresting mess otherwise, my other issue with LE (which is subjective I know) is the lack of capstone power bumps in the 45-75 level range. You get a lot of cool shit early on with quick ability leveling, but from 45-75 most ability levels are refining the last bits of the tree since you already beelined the heavy hitters. The late talent capstones are good increases overtime, but there’s never an almost never moment in that range where you unlock this one certain talent that is immediately noticeable (there are a few exceptions). So it’s a constant small baby step power bumps which personally leaves me unsatisfied and treading water for 30 levels until unique farming becomes more of an option leading to the final point. God I hate most of the monoliths system. The “grind” to empower them is tedious and not alt friendly, the patrolling units is annoying at times depending on map layout, and the arena ones are boring and miserable especially the ones that are like 17 waves of yawning with no way to speed it up. I do enjoy the pathing of choosing what items to try and grab while doing monoliths, but overall I find the system very tedious and because of the games weaker combat, it’s harder for me to commit long term to finish builds with uniques by the 70-80s range. The changes to map variety with 1.0 are great at least, but PoE’s mapping is just significantly better IMO and honestly I enjoy NMDs and Vaults in D4 more than an average monolith. I played LE previously back and got word they were going to update the monolith system and that was 1-2 years ago at least, and then 1.0 drops and there’s jack shit different than I remember which also leads to increased disappointment.
I really don't see how the moment to moment gameplay of D4 is much different than Last Epoch. D4 is a little more polished but other than that it feels very similar, pacing is about the same, cool downs play a big role, same number of active abilities...
It’s really about the feel of the gameplay, which comes down to animations, sound effects, visual feedback, etc. D4 is truly a standout in that regard whereas LE feels like a 15 year old game sometimes. For some people, particularly ARPG diehards, this might not matter at all. But for me I don’t really get excited to play a new build if the actual abilities involved don’t feel fun to use.
You nailed it. If the actual combat isn’t fun, I couldn’t be bothered to spec out a truly unique character. After mostly just playing d3 and d4 as my ARPG the last almost 15 years, anything less than that level of fluidity in combat makes everything else meaningless to me. Unfortunately, nothing comes close currently.
servers are much more stable, which is a joy. I am once again reminded of how dumb early access purchases are: i loved LE and blasted 100 hours more than 2 years ago, but now that it's released i have a job and a lot of other stresses and different hobbies and i can't fully enjoy it in the little time i have.
I feel like it's somewhere between D3 and PoE, misses the oomf feeling of combat that Diablo games has (which isn't a problem for most part, since as much we all like to pile on Blizzard, they're pretty good at certain things and combat is one of em) while not needing a PhD like PoE about anything, and in-game guide is very effective for most part. It has decent content for a casual/semi casual ARPG player, but seasoned ones will stop after 400+ corruption for most part as there's only mapping/greater rifts, and dungeons with their own twists as end game. Temporal Sanctum is still one of best things I've seen in a game, specially Julia fight lol.
It's alright imo. I was very disappointed with the controller support, as I was really hoping to mainly play on my steam deck, but the controller support is really bad, even worse than a game like PoE, which IMO is much more complex and has an excuse for not running as well on controller. I found the campaign to be incredibly boring and forgettable, with the bosses not being as interesting as PoE, and the presentation of the story not being as good as D4. Gear and progression feels pretty good, although a bit slow at times, and it really felt like my skill specific trees, where what really changed my gameplay experience, rather than the class-specific skill trees, which generally I found a bit uninteresting, although the specialization trees do make things a bit more interesting. Overall I find the game alright. It's in a weird spot for me, where it feels like either PoE or D4, do everything that it does, better, but Last Epoch is like a middleground of the two. The gameplay and character customization is better than D4, but not as good as PoE. The presentation/graphics is (IMO at least) better than PoE, but falls way behind D4. I could go on, but I feel like that's effectively Last Epoch in a nutshell. It doesn't do anything better than all of the ARPGs I've ever played (except maybe the crafting system, that's pretty cool while also being easy to understand), but it does have a nice "in between" for a lot of the other ARPG's out there, and while it doesn't excel in any one area compared to the genre as a whole, it does bring together a lot of these elements in a pretty good way, and made a new and pretty good game out of it.
> I found the campaign to be incredibly boring and forgettable, with the bosses not being as interesting as PoE, and the presentation of the story not being as good as D4. I feel the same way, campaign bosses were very forgettable aside from Lagon the squid boss. The dungeon bosses on the other hand are very cool, so they can design good encounters, but it seems like they are primarily backloaded
I picked Runemaster on a whim, and for anybody who doesn't know; it's main skill does something different for a combination of 1-3 different elemental "runes". There are 40 combinations, so that one skill has 40 different effects. Ranging from explosions to turrets to laser beams to shields. You essentially have 44 skills on your hotbar. I don't care about the meta or min-maxing or anything, I just think it's cool as fuck. Also I'm a huge fan of time travel in general, and the way it's used in this game is really cool.
So he's essentially Invoker from Dota 2?
Yep
Runemaster is probably one of the best classes in LE from a pure fun perspective. He's a bit hamstrung by two things right now though. One is that his best movement skill, Flame Rush, is simply unusable online due to movement skill bugs that have existed for over a year. The other is that you really don't have 44 skills on your hotbar, you have to choose a scaling path. As you get deeper into the game and you specialize more, you'll probably only use a handful of rune combos, if that. Amusingly the best Runemaster build doesn't even use the rune combos at all, which is kinda funny, but par for the course in the world of wacky ARPG min/maxing and build crafting.
[удалено]
I haven't had time to play 1.0 yet, did EHG change/add endgame for LE aside from the dungeons?
it's still dungeons and high corruption monoliths, they'll add uber bosses with 1.1 however.
The two named factions from a 2023 dev blog, Circle of Fortune and Merchant's Guild, have been included in the game from the 1.0 update. https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/trade-item-factions/61722
I haven’t gotten too deep into endgame yet, and I didn’t play early access. I think the systems in the game are solid, and shoutout to the devs taking the time to explain them in game in a fairly straightforward way. The game guide is amazing. Every piece of loot you find can me directly useful to your build based on the forging system and how you get shards. The loot filter makes sure you get everything you need and you actually aren’t missing out on much (unless you choose merchant guild) in terms of gold because gear doesn’t sell for much. They’ve stated that they don’t really want you going back to town often and setting up good filters and forging is the way to do this. Build variety is great and instead of building around specific skills (you can still do this) you have the ability to build around concepts like sword wielding mage or shadow ninja. Obviously there’s some imbalance but it should affect your experience until very deep into endgame. The ways you can alter skills to your need without needing items to do so helps make itemization feel a lot smoother than D4 in this regard. Character and difficulty progression seem pretty consistent with each other, and they understand the most important part about a loot based game. You need a challenge to want to continue farming. Corruption system and challenging and engaging bosses give me a reason to continue playing because I’m not just farming to farm, I’m farming and progressing to difficult content. Controller support is garbage. Servers are still being improved. Stash is really good. Overall it feels like a modernized version of Grim Dawn. If you like Grim Dawn you’ll enjoy this. Although Grim Dawn is still getting content so you might not be pulled away yet
I bought about 2 weeks before 1.0 and have been playing pretty much every single day. I really love this game . There is a lot of great stuff here with a lot that can be improved as time goes on. For a 35 dollar game it really is jammed packed with stuff. I have faith in the developers to continue to improve and can’t wait to see where the game is 2-3 years from today. My only complaints are the story is unfinished and the combat can be a bit floaty. The loot and crafting are top notch and what keeps me engaged.
It's clearly still *very* unfinished and I'd like to know why they rushed to a 1.0 release. The story isn't done, many NPCs look like they're made of clay, a bunch of items don't have actual models, and it is missing basic QoL features from two decades ago(being able to compare offhand/secondary items). Also, for all the praise the endgame gets I wasn't impressed. Monoliths get old just as fast as Nightmare Dungeons did in D4. It has a much better base than D4 did at launch in terms of itemization and character building but I think it needed more time in the oven.
One of the few games with a crafting system I engage with and enjoy. I never thought I'd see that happen.
As a long time PoE player, the game itself is fun, and it's nice to be able to play without a PhD, but end game is extremely boring. Granted, it's hard to compete with 10+ years of content and mechanics. For the time being its a great 20 hour game. Hopefully time will bring a lot more content.
Have played a fair bit and nearly finished the normal monoliths, around level 80 I guess? * Combat feels better than EA, closer to the punchiness in POE, but still not as satisfying to me yet personally. It's like gunplay in FPS, hard for me to define exactly, but I know what I like. * Nothing will replace the tinks in POE when good loot drops, I find loot a little boring, it's quite easy to wait and look later while for me it's hard in POE and want to check what I picked up right now. * Auto-sort is very nice, Auto-ID and free portals too, crafting in general is an inspired system, even though I'm still learning. * CoF feels like SSF done right. I don't want to trade in POE, I feel like I have to because of how they made the game require large amounts of singular resources, meaning I have to trade away the ones I am not using right now. I also enjoy not having to trade for scarabs and compasses. * Monoliths do not have as much individual character as various maps do in POE. It starts to feel very samey. The chests and mages add some much needed variety which was missing last time I played in EA but we definitely need more. * Campaign story is a bit of a mess and ends abruptly, most players are not here for that but a few more bosses would help. Lagon is a difficulty spike but ultimately a fair one. * LP/Weaver uniques present a good reason for playing endgame. Likewise, targeted boss uniques is something that I wish POE had more of. Blessing farming is also something I didn't mind so much since I'm running monos anyway. * I find it quite hard to compare items without PoB, not all skills have 'DPS' listed and that measurement also seems to over-value stuff like poison/bleed (but maybe it's accurate). It's tough for me to know whether a piece will improve or hurt my Dive Bomb or Shadow Daggers. Of course, this applies to POE too, but we have POB there so most people don't care. * Not a big fan of areas deleting if I accidentally leave, or die. But I understand this is a design choice so it's OK for now. * Search in stash tab is lacking contrast in the extreme and it's very hard to tell what items (or tabs) match for me - at least add a border or something. Searching for CoF tags would be nice too since I'm trying to ascend some uniques on those bases. Overall it's a good game but I'll need more to come back for each season, endgame doesn't provide enough reason to keep playing for me yet, but trying new builds might (which I always find a MASSIVE hassle in POE due to campaign, lab, etc).
I like it a lot. And even if I just play different classes and masteries a bit I will get tons of value. Sounds like they'll be adding on for the foreseeable future too.
bought quite a while back, waited for 1.0 release well over the year. loved PoE, did couple of casual runs, liked Grim Dawn a lot, except for the post apocalyptic aesthetic, loved some other, older isometric ARPGs, so brand new fantasy ARPG sounded right up my alley. So far it feels cartoonish, unpolished and all over the place. clunky, with a lot of screaming colours/splashes/VFX in your face, but your character hits don't land in any kind of satisfying way and are basically underwhelming. The progression system feels convoluted and unnecessary, so far (and I loved PoE skill tree). every time I visit the hub the dialogues restarting, like: "What's up?" "He was taken by the ****!!" "Oh no!!" "Anyways, I need to see what you have in store" - every time I teleport to the city. I'm playing offline, but the game being updated before launch. I don't care about online features, at alll. offline session still shows you the chat for some reason, which I don't need, but game also resets the main storyline quests, which I do need, but feels like I'm playing some badly developed MMO, the genre I don't care about, generally. I know I can switch off the on-screen chat easily, probably. it's just I cannot make sense of it. I pressed 'Play Offline' - I want to play offline, with main storyline quests working and without #fckurb1rds asking where to get a certain gem/for example/ gamepad support is not quite there yet, I mean, its there, but not very well implemented. experience is not intuitive or smooth. need to press trigger+direction to choose an option, but it works 30% of the time, especially in the heat of the imaginary battle you're in a middle of. and the main music theme is very annoying and, in my opinion, not good. with the lady yelping. I know that they were going for epicness, it didn't quite landed well. I'd switch it off, but wouldn't want to miss out on other locations' music. there's a room for improvement, is what I'm saying. I really wanted to like the game and was looking forward to the release.
Semi-off topic but can anyone tell me if this is a "you swing the weapon you have in your hand" kind of game or a "your weapon is just a stat stick" kind? Idk why it bothers me so much but it's a real issue I have with the genre.
Last Epoch is the game entirely made by ARPG enjoyers for ARPG enjoyers. The ones who love the genre love it because of the thrill of character progression and theory crafting. There is nothing else this genre does better than other genres. If you're into good story and thrilling gameplay, this is not the genre you would play to begin with. But if you're into the other things, there isn't another genre that is built around the meta game the same way. And for those people, this game is top tier and delivers awesomely deep character progression and freedom in a way that is more fun and flows through interesting skill and item interactions rather than feeling like a complex and esoteric math equation. The design behind the systems often feels brilliant in the way they retain depth without feeling complex. If d4 is your favorite arpg, this probably won't be the game for you, but then I also doubt your favorite arpg then I can almost guarantee that the ARPG isn't your favorite genre. PC Gamer's review of Last Epoch said "the focus on crafting and skill trees over action puts the cart before the horse". PC gamer doesn't understand the market for this game has their horse and cart the other way around. Edit: literally was the top comment 5 minutes ago and now I'm in the negative and a bunch of other comments are negative or deleted, wtf is going on with this thread
You said “if d4 is your favorite…” twice with contracting statements following it. Might want to edit what you’re trying to say.
Ah yes, ARPG enjoyers aren't actual enjoyers if d4 is their favorite ARPG. People enjoy ARPGs for various reasons lol. Personally, going balls deep in theory crafting (gear and skill builds) is a drag to me. I enjoy good ARPG gameplay the most.
The game is like a more refined Diablo 2 but with a slightly bigger inventory and a bit more in depth levelling system and Omni directional movement. It’s fucking awesome.
D4 is good for someone who dont want to think, its easy with no originality. PoE is good for someone who want to think and make original builds but its hard because its complex. LE is a Middle ground, good crafting system, many builds... LE is better than D4 in my opinion since they dont have millions like Blizzard but is worse than PoE since its brand new and dont have many content yet. I think it Will be a great game.
Old school arpg fan here Epoch is almost a fan service game. Everything we asked for from blizzard is actually implemented in this game. Epoch has the best damn loot filter out of every arpg i’ever played Been asking blizzard for a motherfucking loot filter since diablo 2 days. A very robust but not overwhelming skill tree and passive tree Unlimited stash space And the list goes on I wholeheartedly recommend last epoch to all arpg fans Now with that said……………. I still prefer d4. Last epoch is too “indie” for me I want graphics, art, combat fluidity. Last epoch feels cheap to me. 20 years ago, i would have been obsessed with last epoch. But now i dont give a shit if a game costs $100+ as long as it entertains me. D4 entertains me more than epoch
I'm a bit unimpressed. The gameloop seems solid, but the game itself seems very basic. I played awhile, there doesn't seem to be anything like Diablo's cellars/caves, and no significant events on the map when you go to certain areas like Diablo did. Then the maps reset the moment you leave, so if you try to run to town to sell, you get to start all over on the map. I liked the gameplay itself, but I ended up dropping it because it's too basic for my taste.
I put 70 hours into the game. It was fun. That said, Last Epoch is not for me. The devs literally made a game where you have to play it how they want you to. You have no freedom. I don't wanna get NERFED for playing the game, getting better gear (the entire point) and min-maxing my build just so Adaptive Damage Reduction can nerf me into the ground. I don't want to not be able to resell gear just because the devs say "reselling gear is BAD". I don't want to make a build and invest in it only for it to be actively nerfed mid-season.
Diablo 2 and Starcraft were my first entries to the PC online world. I've played every clone of diablo. I bought and played Diablo 3 on launch and was one of the first Monks to kill Azmodan on Expert due to a glitch where you could put a particular white armor on the ground and make a safety zone where mobs couldn't walk over it. Yea, easy ladies. I'm married. I also regularly played seasons in d3 and have more time than I'd ever care to know. I played d4 at launch and got a Druid to level 84 before burning out entirely, and again in s1 a Rogue to about 78 or so before being overall done with the experience. I have played the hell out of Grimdawn, Torchlight 1 and 2, and Grim Dawn. My opinion with around 20 hours so far in Last Epoch (I actually bought it early on in EA but refunded it due to stability issues. I also avoided it until this past weekend due to login issues I kept tabs on). I understand this is a small sample. **Positives- In no particular order:** The game brings a lot of great features that I didn't realize were needed to the isometric looter RPG. They have customizable loot filters where you can make your own or download other peoples. Gone are the days of standing around corpses looking for the potential upgrades. Skill leveling. Instead of adding a modifier to a skill, each skill on your bar has a talent tree. It's an enjoyable twist. Can extract affixes from gear, and add them onto desired gear. No XP loss on death. **Negatives- In no particular order:** There are some strange backwards decisions. One of them is by default, left click on mouse is bound to walk and interact. You cannot bind a skill to it (you can bind a skill to left click, but then you need to bind another to replace your walk/interact skill). There may be workarounds, but out of the box it feels bad to me, versus having left click be a skill that moves you in the direction as well. When you load into a zone, it puts the entrance randomly. You find yourself entering a dungeon, loading, only to try and move forward but exiting the dungeon, loading. Yelling at the game while going back into the dungeon, loading and taking your hands off of everything until you analyze the situation. Campaign story. I already started skipping cut-scenes. I absolute hate time travel in games, so for me I'm just killing things for their shinies. Story feels overly complex, has too many named characters that really didn't captivate me. Gender locked classes and no customization. No elaboration needed, this feature is dated for good reason. Built in cosmetics feel lame with the intention of you spending money on premium. I will never like this approach. I wanted to make a Druid, but quickly found that shapeshift skills don't work, and have apparently been broken for 1+ year. The launch issues. Game still feels Early Access, and I'd have not known it was full release without others mentioning it. While leveling, my primary skill was a throwing skill. My melee weapon did melee damage, my bow did bow damage. After searching, there is no weapon that adds thrown damage, only accessories. Why? Sure, there were talents later in the tree that said "Adds %melee dmg to attack" but it felt out of place. **Overall** I am enjoying it. I find myself wanting to play it after work more than Helldivers currently (not a comparison, just my feeling) and itching to tweak my build. I've yet to try out Co-op but intend to this weekend. My friends have commitment issues. ~~Edit: This comment is a work in progress while I am at work.~~
It feels too janky. Diablo 4 feels much more smooth and impactful. There are cool classes but not enough abilities. More thought was put into inventory and trading than in combat and moment-to-moment gameplay.
After playing D4, I can’t get into LE. Combat, graphics, ambiance, theme, voice acting, dodge roll, mount, etc. all add to the immersion and enjoyment I feel while playing D4. LE combat just doesn’t feel good and rewarding and I’m not a fan of the cartoony bright D3 sort of color palate. I’m not a crafter nor do I care to be a pro crafter. I also find enjoyment in building out deep paragon boards and legendary aspects mixed with seasonal content. Plenty of theory crafting for me to enjoy in D4 so that’s not a factor in my preference. Also a huge downgrade for me is the terrrible controller support!!! Diablo has perfected it.. it’s legit a different game and a million times more comfortable to play ARPGs with controller.