Hi everyone
I recently got own copy of Last Epoch, finished the story, and made dozens of Monolith and one Arena runs.
I played a Cyomancer Mage, based on converted to cold, optimized for single target Lightning Blast and Glacier against crowds, and it works really well.
Based on my experience playing the character I’m going to give you feedback in different game aspects.
General feelings
I see heavy inspirations on Path of Exile, Titan’s Quest/Grim Dawn, and Diablo, up to the point of copypasting stuff - like rays indicating unique items drops like in D3, current edge in the map and map mods like in PoE, world map graphic style like in TQ/GD, but hey, it’s nothing wrong with that - if to imitate then only the best.
The game play was very nice and absorbing - I liked very much rather slow pace of the game during campaign and Monolith runs, opposite to crazy run speed in PoE. Also I must congrats you your music artists, they made a damn good job - often I just stopped here and there just to listen; for example in Path of Exile I noticed music only “it is present”, nothing thrilling, except Grand Arena theme. Graphics I found rather basic, raw even at the start, later on it got better - but in a way I liked it more than colorful fireworks from D3/PoE whose cover whole screen.
Classes and passives tree are similar to what TQ/GD has, but it’s a nice change to get new skill automatically, once you’ll get high enough level in a class.
Quests are rather typical to the genre, the only positively surprising exception was getting access to Great College, which required time travel to ruined era to obtain key from dead officer - please add more of such!
Btw, I don’t know I just wasn’t lucky/mindful, or Eternity Caches are simply not yet present in game, but I’ve found none.
I greatly appreciate a gamepedia introduced in 0.7.8 which explains all stuff seen in game, but some topics are still missing, ex. Shock. I hope it’ll be completed each patch.
What else I enjoyed is the fact that freezes, stuns, shocks etc. do work on bosses reliably, a big upside compared to PoE.
It seem core ideas like class development, skills trees, crafting, endgame just work and are generally right, with a need only to polish a bit here and there.
Skills
Looks like the idea to give each skill separate specialization tree was a right one, as it allows to vary the skill in many, interesting ways while being rather easy to understand. Anyone who looked even once at Skilldrassil in PoE knows what I mean.
An interesting concept here is that some nodes allow to cast other skills, like Superconductor node in Arcane Ascendance skill; I’d expand that possibility by leaving a slot here, which would be filled by players, ex. for the mentioned:
Superconductor
While Arcane Ascendance is active you automatically cast selected lightning spell when you hit an enemy. The spell uses its skill tree and costs mana. This effect has 2s cooldown.
5 specialization slots seems a bit too low, though. Diablo 3 has 6 active + 4 passive, Path of Exile up to 8, though usually 1 is used for free movement, Grim Dawn I don’t remember, but close to 14. Last Epoch looks here a bit poor compared the competition, especially accounting that only skills in slots can be leveled up. Another issue with this system is changing skills later on, to try newly acquired ones - losing all advancement in current skill is harsh, and discourages trying new combinations of skill, severely lowering fun in game. Same about respec point in tree of a skill, losing a level is too much punitive. This is especially bad for new players whose have no idea what skills combines together well, and what skills will suit their play style.
How to correct above issues:
- increase specialization slots up to 6-8, and available slots in GUI for active skills to 6.
- keep current development of a skill when removing it from spec slot.
- allow to respec last 5 points invested in skill tree without losing level of a skill. 5 points is enough to try a branch and see if you like how the skill works with these changes.
There are also some minor flaws in the trees like Lightning Aegis for cold-based Lightning Blast:
Lightning Aegis + conversion to cold - #6 by MasterBLB
Classes passives trees - Mage
They are way more simpler and easy to understand than TQ/GD counterparts, not mentioning Skilldrassil from PoE, thanks to moving skill-specific stuff into separate trees of skills. Also, as I see in Last Epoch you rather avoid “X% chance for ‘something’ when ‘something’”, so common in TQ/GD. Haven’t tried other classes than Mage yet, but what I can say about the character - its passives tree looks decent, and allows to specialize in fire, cold, or lightning, contains some stuff for ward defense, crit chance, or mana/intelligence. Perhaps I’m too inexperienced in Last Epoch, but so far it seems a player is not forced to invest heavily in defense (like in PoE, where +160-180% increased life was a must have) which is good. Also, it looks like there are no useless passives, each seem to be viable. Mastery classes are also very nice; I’m looking forward to see Warlock and Runemaster.
However, Mage class has a flaw related to regain mana. There are no sources to reliably gain mana for these expensive spells so a player is forced to use skill Focus with tree specialized in largest possible mana regeneration, which effectively lowers skills slots by 1. This issue is especially visible in Arena, where you simply don’t have time to wait a bit for mana to regenerate.
Sorcerer mastery class could definitely use some passives for increased area of effect for spells, +flat mana regeneration, mana leech, ward per second, ward on spell hit, cooldown reduction on crit/some amount of mana spent etc.
Btw, cooldown recovery speed affix should affect passives and tree nodes.
Items
Items have interesting bases (and related implicits), only that tome which gives negative health regen seems kinda suck. Also, Skulls with +int/+ spell crit implicit make Catalyst with only +int rather redundant.
I was surprised there are no int/dex/str requirements to wear an item, but after a while I liked this design.
Existing implicits, affixes and prefixes also seems okay, I wish only to have some +flat mana regen, and implicit for flat lightning and cold damage.
Unique items - well they seem a little bit under-powered and often have unnecessary downside which is hard to put into merit, but an upside is you try to give them really unique abilities. They look very nice though.
In time, with introducing more base types and legendary items, fine-tuning uniques, and more affixes this part of the game will become even better.
Crafting system
Very good idea, and similar to what I’ve proposed once on Diablo 3 forum. Nice to see it got some use finally 
Although some polishing still needs to be done.
1st, the chances are weighted towards failure/lower rolls for affixes. I observed many times that say 90% chance to craft something ended in fracture, or near to lowest value of the affix, way more often than expected, or during attempt to shatter T4 affix you’d more likely obtain 1 shard rather than 4. This is very annoying. I’ve seen on this forum very good suggestion which would make crafting T1-T3 affixes a bit easier, so it should be implemented.
2nd, while runes are good idea it should be extended a little, my idea is to allow to spend more than one rune for better effect:
- Rune of Shattering - one works as usual, two guarantees to get at minimum 1 shard of each affix or for single affix at minimum affixTier/2 shards rounded up, four guarantees max number of shard from each affix.
- Rune of Refinement - two would guarantee to do reroll in <0.25max, max>, three in <0.5max, max>, four would work similar but in <0,75*max, max> range + if the roll is lower than current value the roll is discarded.
- Rune of Removal - two would present choice to remove either a random prefix or a random suffix (divide the “Remove an affix” button to two in GUI), four would allow to select an affix to be removed.
- Rune of Cleansing - two would set instability between 2 and 7, three 1 and 4, four 0.
Also it’d nice to introduce new, rather rare Rune of Reinforcement which would decrease instability by -10 to -20. Four of these could repair minor fracture in addition to removing instability.
3rd, I’d love to see some system to convert shards into another shards - I struggled practically all the time to get intelligence shards while having tons of useless for me strength/dexterity/attunement/vitality shards. Would be nice to be able to convert these to int.
That was true at early game, now my Sorcerer reached lv 76 and I no longer experience issues with lack of stats shards.
Monolith of Fate
I like the idea in general. It has no downside like map system in PoE, which is sustainability of high-tier maps, the Monolith is always there. Also, it requires to deal with boss of the timeline, which is very good compared to PoE where usually it’s better to skip the boss. However, it’d be nice to introduce some “save points” so in case of death you didn’t have to start from the very beginning.
As I read in roadmap the Monolith is going to be reworked, I’m curios what the devs will come out with. I hope for some story involving, more or less like in PoE which has Shaper/Elder stuff.
Monolith could definitely use procedurally generated locations, after few dozen runs it becomes a bit boring to see exactly the same maps over and over again.
Also I’ve found very annoying automatically showing “Open Portal” button after killing the boss of the map, as it covers part of fight - it should be changed to simple information message “Timeline cleared/conquered, open portal to leave it.”
Arena
This part I rather don’t like, however it serves nicely as “stress test” of a build. Would be nice if each 10 survived waves give some substantial reward, as gameplay in the Arena is so boring and pointless. The Arena as I found out provides pretty nice EXP for leveling.
Also, the Arena is plagued by severe performance drop, and some of them, like Magma Arena, are too dark - some enemies are not even visible there.
Balance of enemies
After few dozen Monolith runs it became clear that being oneshooted issue is even more severe than in PoE, and not the strength of an attack itself, but it’s often kinda “invisible” - all is going well, you have almost max health + some ward, then out of nowhere a death screen. Especially Lightning Elementals are likely to make surprise, offscreen oneshoots, but also rare Sholars.
Infamous Siege Golems so far weren’t an issue, as their attacks though so damn powerful are also clearly telegraphed, with enough time for a player to react.
Shops and gambling
In earlier that 0.7.8 patches it was nice to be able to buy idols and sometimes uniques from merchants, and to see exact implicit value at gambler. Sadly, that possibilities has been taken away in 0.7.7; I see is as a very bad decision, please revert shopping/gambling to pre-0.7.7 state.
What I've found annoying
- Hitboxes of portals to next locations/town portal/time travel are too huge, and tooltips where it leads show too late which results in being sucked into the portal unintentionally when moving near them. Reduce the hitboxes by half.
- Buying/selling stuff by SHIFT+LMB is annoying, why on Earth you can’t use standard RMB click?
- Respawning of all monsters after using town portal to sell stuff, especially annoying as bosses are also affected, and it’s easy to be moved to next area due to hitboxes of portals.
- Tooltips informing about passives to distribute should not vanish.
- A huuge FPS drop after teleporting to Council Chambers.
- Dropping items from inventory onto ground also causes movement to that location. Yepp, again especially infuriating with hitboxes of portals.
- Tooltips which explain game mechanics should also stay till read - but this downside is already addressed by introducing in-game manual.
- While speaking with Sane Cultist I was attacked by mobs and I couldn’t cast spells to defend myself, I was forced to instantly click over dialog options so I didn’t read it.
- Inability to use Rune of Refinement for uniques is a bit annoying.
- Frame rate drop in Ancient Forest, during fight with some kind of rare bug, and during poison spit attack of Overgrown Husk.
- There is no possibility to see how much damage exactly our skills deal.
- Clones created by Teleport/Decory Position/Unexpected Copy have very bad AI, they do nothing few seconds after summoning, and start to attack usually only if a monster will accidentally hit them. Should be changed to attack/taunt immediately.
- Lack of tooltips with names of characters whose have big question/exlamation mark over them.
- Annya in The End of Time is a bit too far from the place where Town Portal exit appears
- Town Portal summoned in Imperial Welryn leading to The End of Time disappeared afer going back to Outcast Camp then back to The End of Time.
- Poor visibility of full*screen map in snow areas (Thundra, Temple of Heorot etc)
- Chain Lightning should be able to break all crates in proximity.
- Small character inventory; please add a possibility to buy another stashes for inventory.
- Stash tabs are unmovable.
I hope 11th Hour Games devs find the feedback valuable.
Kind regards,
MasterBLB