General Feedback

[dictan]

I’ve been playing Last Epoch on and off for quite some time now , but never got to giving feedback. Thought I would hit some points on that have stuck with me so far.

Story and Music:

Put simply I like the story and music a lot. The story makes sense and has good overall progression. I don’t feel stuck in one area to long and I get to experience different environments fairly often. The music is so good I sometimes leave the game on in the background just to listen to it or pull up the soundtrack while I’m doing something else.

Gameplay:

Combat and movement feel good. While there are some performance issues when I start using a lot of minions(20+) I know those are being worked on. The pacing is also great. Damage feels far less spikey than it was when I started playing and time between packs is just right. I also like not having a timer hung over my head every time I try to do something rewarding.

Passives Trees:

I think there are still to many open ended point sinks in the passive trees. It is my opinion that power should be consolidated early and more spread out at higher levels. Passive limits should be split into 3 categories of 1 +4 , 5, and 10. Why 1 + 4 , 5, and 10? Because they are easy to understand power wise. Passives that are at 3, 8, etc are much harder to gauge and often have you splitting points for little gains.

All early passives should be 5 pointers( acolyte base tree and the early nodes on each specialization), all middle of the tree passives should be 5 or 10 pointers, and all end game passives should have 4 pointers capped with a 1 pointer.

Early game you have less skill and gear that’s why the first set of passives has feel really impactful and focused. A 5 pointer is fairly rigid, giving you 20% of a passive’s power while also unlocking a new part of the tree when completely filled. The 8 pointers we have now don’t feel like this. Instead I feel like I’ve left power behind while moving on to the next thing.

Middle of the tree passives should be a bit more flexible. 10 points allow you take a passive at about half power before moving to the next ring or full power if you don’t like whats waiting for you on the next ring.

Towards the end of the tree you need to unlock something big. That’s why the last row should have 4 pointers connected to 1 pointer capstones at the end.
A 1 pointer is going to be really powerful with 100% of its power being given for 1 point. 4 points gives a solid 25% power per passive power before tying off into a capstone passive.

Potions:

I don’t like potions and potion effects in this game. Limited consumables that heal poorly and only have a chance to drop are bothersome. Affixes that hinge on potions are even worse. The affixes are either broken enough to support the inconsistency of potion drops and usage or they are never used because they are low power paired with unreliability.

Path of Exile takes this a bit to far as they have a multitude of potions that have to be cycled while also doing everything else your build wants to do in a fight. It has also crippled boss design in a sense because every boss fight has to have adds to refill potions.

Diablo 3 feels like the much better middle ground. You get one potion on a timer that did % hp healing ( always effective). Later on you could get unique potions that healed and did something unique for a set time.

I would much more prefer the approach of one or two potions ( one hp and one unique / buff potion) that refilled over time rather than a multitude to spam after kills, or gaining them from drops. The added reliability allows for potion affixes to become much more appealing as they can be stacked together for hit and run gameplay where you focus on windows of power.

Crafting:

I love every part of it. I couldn’t find a single flaw in the design. I would much rather hunt good bases and have a decent chance to craft a powerful item than have tons of good bases with a crappy chance of getting something I’m satisfied with. Really hit the sweet spot on chance to get t5 rolls and good gear in general.

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That’s about it. I have more to say about acolyte, but I’ll save that for another time.

[Sarno]

Thank you very much for the in-depth feedback!

It’s quite late here so I hope you’ll forgive the brevity, but to touch on your points briefly;

• Glad to hear you like our soundtrack and level design! During our internal playtesting we often focus on whether we’re in a specific area for too much time, and we have in the past removed zones, shortened zones, and broken zones into multiple smaller ones due to our own thoughts and community feedback. Whenever we add a new Chapter to the game, it’d be great to see feedback on this in particular.
• Appreciate the kind words on combat and movement - though we definitely have some distance to go here. With combat we’ve been iterating over animations & visual effects, improving our sound effects, and working on both screen shake and on-hit visual effects to have combat feel more satisfying. We’re not there yet, but we’re making progress! We have been working on both the pacing and enemy balance, so I’ll pass on your positive feedback to the team so they know that the changes are well-received.
• I’m not sure how much I agree with you with regard to passives. You raise a good point regarding the ease at which the relative power of a passive can be gauged, and I can see your numbers being a good ideal to aim for rather than a rule to be adhered to. There will always be some passives which can be powerful and distinctive passives at, say, 3 points but at 5 would be either overpowered or too weak per point, and at 1 would be far too strong. We’d definitely want to retain the flexibility to make the best passives possible.
• I’ll be honest and say that, speaking as an individual, I do agree with you regarding potions. Earlier in development we reworked potions in Last Epoch, and I personally preferred the previous iteration of potion design. Their utility does vary based on both how much you invest into them and whether you’re an Intelligence class with a lot of Ward or someone who typically has less Ward and focuses more on Health. I’ll raise the comparison with Diablo III’s Legendary Potions in a meeting and see where that goes.
• Delighted to hear that you enjoy our crafting! We’re really happy with it, too!

…hrm, so much for brevity.

[khaosshinobi]

I should have posted my general post into feedback, but i also agree with the passive tree changes.

This is going to be a bit of a lengthy post, discussing a lot of the issues I have with the passive skills available for classes. In this situation I’d like to discuss this issue on the side of necromancer, as I think it will serve the purpose of my argument reliably.

"I personally love the passive tree system. It’s very easy to pick up and understand what’s happening. However, I’d like to talk about what ultimately hurts my enjoyment of this game. The game has its quirks, it’s bugs, complicated crafting, that’s all fine. The issue I have are the passive trees and how it feels like your character “never feels right”.

I touched up on this awhile back, but I’d like to talk about it. Let’s start off with the first row of the Acolyte tree. Your first three points available are either Blood Aura (You and minions deal 6% increased damage), Bone Aura (grants you and your minions 15 armor), and Forbidden Knowledge (1 intelligence and 15 necrotic protection).

At a first glance, You are immediately drawn towards either FK or BA, while they’re both strong, choosing one of them is always a trap. Say you take BA, this increases all damage you and your pets do, that’s great, you do more damage, now you suffer from taking a lot of damage if you take a hit. Then because of not having a certain amount of armor or hp based on the damage you take you’re more prone to stun… which is another stupid mechanic that shouldn’t exist, but that’s for another time. If you take FK, you’re then choosing a node that also doesn’t help protect you from damage, and doesn’t give as much damage as much as taking BA, but it makes your pets have more health. That’s fine and all, but what purpose is that? I’ve tried running tanky pet builds and it’s just terrible, you can’t deal any damage at all, You have no ability to kill things because pet hp means nothing if they can’t kill. So then your third choice is bonus armor… again, another trap. You take less damage, probably don’t get stunned when playing a necromancer… but your pets no don’t do any damage now.

I get that each talent is supposed to have this rewarding feel about it, but ultimately it feels like no matter what build you take, no matter what choice you make, you’re making the wrong one. Let’s look at another example…

In the new necromancy tree, you’re given the choice to go left, up the middle or to the right. The left caters towards ward allocation, and crit reliant builds, similar to frost archers with the new skeleton rework. the middle is just pure damage and armor shredding, while the right is all about increasing yours, and your minion’s, max hp, and getting more skeletons as a result. I took the right side because i wanted to try building into a pure skeleton build. Guess what, taking all these health nodes was a waste of time. I possess no damage despite having minion damage on most of my gear. Having +1 to skeletons doesn’t do ANYTHING if those skeletons are worthless to begin with. These talents are just traps. Nothing on the right side provides bonus damage, outside of +1 skeleton. So what’s the point of this entire side of the tree. If you try to play a blood wrait build of some kind, it feels terrible because even though they last for so long, they don’t do enough damage to warrant not building into damage.

I love the passive tree ideas and systems, I hate that the choices you make feel punishing 90% of the time. Very rarely has a choice felt 100% rewarding."