I agree on most of it except requirement to wear items. That’s the thing I hated most in D2, wasting attributes just to use my items. Its fine the way it is now with lvl requirement.
1 Like
I am glad we agree on most points. The reasoning for the requirements on the heaviest armors is that it doesn’t make sense for a 90 lb necromancer to wear the heaviest 200lb armor without any investments put into strength from an RPG standpoint, atleast that is my take on it.
Nice post, I find almost all of your points agreeable. Especially your comments on elemental resists, way too complicated with no payoff in my opinion.
1 Like
The problem with adding element resist % on items is the fact the % changes based on how much life your character has, since thats how the formula works. Would have to be a floating % on items that changes as your health changes, idk if that works.
And since ward counts as health, the more ward you have you will notice your % resist drops, so again floating % number on items…
In poe its different, 5% is 5% and has no other influences.
Elemental resist should be based on a % overall, which is different from wards @Boardman21. Wards can resist damage up to a flat value, which is fine, however resists we get from gear, items etc… should be based on a flat %. Ward basically acts like a temporary energy shield from POE. This is a different mechanic than innate elemental resists of a character.
one of the best reviews anyone has ever done …
1 Like
thank you for the kind words @lazaro. I’ll keep playing and adding if anything significant comes to mind.
1 Like
Welcome to Last Epoch! I, too am a veteran gamer and have beta and alpha tested many game incl. WoW and D3. You have made some very insightful suggestions yet I feel like this is an in depth dissertation on how to make a Diablo clone. Last Epoch is one of the most innovative and groundbreakin ARPG’s to hit the marketplace and I don’t feel that the developers need to, or should kowtow to Diablo, PoE or GD. Let’s keep the growth of Last Epoch going strong and in a fresh direction. Don’t forget that this is early release beta and the dev’s are constantly improving and tweaking gameplay. < sorry for the edit- cat on keyboard interaction!>
1 Like
Hello @dharma! Welcome to the discussion. I feel there is a fine line between making a clone and just using proven systems that work in an ARPG. Last epoch already has a skill system that is very unique to the genre including the whole time travel esque story arch. I’m proposing tidying up some of the foundational aspects of their game which would make it a more solid ARPG not necessarily a clone. Look at path of exile, no one claims its a d2 clone and yet it uses so many of the foundational systems that made d2 as good as it was. It’s the same principal I would like the developers to apply to last epoch. There are many facets to make a game unique and stand out. However, as listed above, those systems are tried and true and would, in my opinion, objectively make this a better game.
Thanks, @manoka. I am still of the mindset that the Last Epoch developers should focus on innovation, not imitation. I’m sure they can “tidy up” the game without having to dig too deeply into previously marketed product. They have been the most approachable and community involved dev team I have had the joy to interact with, and I see them hearing and utilizing much of our input. Let’s give them a chance at not having to pay homage to other ARPGs in an imitative fashion. Go, go Gadget-EHG!
Most of these I agree with. I’ll outline the few I disagree with/have hesitations about below, but I first want to complement you on your write up, it’s very well thought out, constructive, and incredibly clear in the positive direction that your ideas take in improving the game. As with most continuous development in games there’s a lot of negativity thrown around every time something changes so this is a refreshing read.
Onto some notes from your points (these are mainly in the Lesser Gripes section):
- Monsters Using Too Many Skills.
I actually like the fact that enemies can use different skills than the player can. For me, it feels immersive that a giant poison plant can lob blobs of poison to kill me, or a necromantic minion can use a soul breath or death aura. It shows that the creatures in the world around us the player have developed abilities or created abilities that fit their natures. That doesn’t mean I want the plethora of instakill AoEs you mention here:
Getting off screen 1 shot by the 300th version of a different telegraphed AOE spell that a monster can use.
-
Requirements to Wear Armor
I’m about 50/50 on this one. On the one hand, it does make sense that full massive plate armor would be heavy and require strength, or that a mystical diadem infused with arcane energy requires a magical statistic, i.e Intelligence or Attunement, to use properly. On the other hand, the way the stat system is currently implemented it’s not only difficult to gain certain stats on certain classes (like strength on Mage or Acolyte, or Int on Sentinel), but it would be a waste of potential on a character that would otherwise be fine. Stats in this game aren’t like normal RPGs where almost any character can benefit from any stat, and that may or may not be a failing of the current stat implementation. A Sorcerer has quite literally no ways to gain Strength without investing an affix tax on his equipment, so that would be gimping that potential character just to equip items. -
Too Many Elements
I agree for the defensive side of elements for right now. Last Epoch runs the side of Grim Dawn on this, but lacks the ability to shore up these defenses as thoroughly. In GD, not only could items roll with protections, but you could craft with both components and augments to further increase them, letting a build pretty easily cap your resistances even with the difficulty change reductions. In LE, it isn’t really possible to “cap” your resistances per se, but even with that it feels lackluster to invest into defenses outside of certain fringe cases (like Aura of Decay and Poison Resist).
For offenses on the other hand, I heavily enjoy the breadth of choice offered to me both thematically and gameplay-wise. Difficult line to tread there. -
Crafting
This is a pretty difficult topic to discuss because technically, the crafting system isn’t even fully implemented yet. From what the developers have discussed, they intend to add some sort of socketing method and/or rune type system, on 04/25/2019 Hackalöken stated :
“We don’t have a system exactly like runes/runewords planned but we definitely want to provide that sort of experience in game, we really like the idea”.
I have no further concrete details on that. The Eternity Cache system, per the website here supposedly is another method of crafting items, some sort of item synthesis.
I will note, the reason most ARPGs don’t have runewords is one of 2 reasons:
- They don’t want to be criticized for copying Blizzard, being directly compared to Diablo 2, criticized for not innovating, etc.
- As great as runewords were, it was somewhat poorly implemented, with some being near impossible to find, others being as close to mandatory as you could get cough Enigma cough
All of this said, your feedback does have incredible merit and I do hope that EHG keeps an eye on this thread for future implementation of features, improvements and fixes.
4 Likes
great analysis too. It will make sure that the developers pay special attention to your super constructive suggestions and criticisms! and please just see me as a moral supporter here, I work a lot and I don’t have much time to set up a detailed analysis of the LE but we have you, who are veteran players with good gameplay perceptions. please SARNO have a special affection in these analyzes.
One thing about this section. I get your point of view but without restrictions or benefits noone want to miss everyone will most likely use the item with the most armor in every slot. Sooner or later everyone will look the “same” so to speak. I realy think there should be some kind of method to vary item useage per class but somehow I doubt this will happen and we’ll end up with monotony. I don’t have an idea hoe to fix this to be fair outside of making light armor more beneficial for spellcasters or something arround this lines I don’t know.
1 Like
edit: added some pretty significant additions to bottom of my original post
That’s where I think it’s more of a stat implementation problem than something I would rule out entirely. I like the concept in point, PoE uses it pretty well for example. Just difficult for LE to do in the current portion of development.
Stat implementation might be flawed. First of all we don’t know if the highest tier of aromer chestplate is wearable with 0 STR for example. We don’t know what materials are used and so on and so forth.
If they implement attribute requirements how do you want to balance it? 0 STR for cloth and then already 3 for leather because leather already is coumbersome? I think the attribute requirements would be all over the place or meaningless.
I still think armor choice should have pros and cons that come with it. Like plate armor is bad for magic users and only offers physical protection. Leather is benefical for attunment casters with medium armor and cloth just offers imense benefits to int casters. Sure everyone would still wear the “best” armor for his build but you could still see Spellblades in plate for example if they don’t use spells or Primalists in plate if they don’t use spells and so on and so forth. It’s a bit of class idendity vs a completely useless itemasation choice because right now, outside of uniques, everyone is wearing the item that offers the best defensive stats for the build played without a second thought because there are no downsides when it comes to armor.
They changed Polearms drasticly without even touching the raiders axe just to remove the potency of the weapon but they never changed armor or offered something realy outstanding of an base type that made sence to change highest possible def vs mor offensive options.
PoE is needlessly overcomplicated to offer the players the illusion of choice and is flawed in many ways from my point of view. I don’t think it’s a good idea to take PoE as an example and make more use of well thought trough P&P RPGs out there that offer plenty of ideas starting from materials an item is made of to restrictions that come with certain armor types.
2 Likes
Just wanted to pop in and say the dev team has read this and agrees with the vast majority of it and are discussing others. Many of these are already being worked on and its just a matter of our small team prioritizing what is worked on first.
Thank you for your feedback, we love these types of posts and the discussion that follows.
5 Likes
Just wanted to pop in and say the dev team has read this and agrees with the vast majority of it and are discussing others. Many of these are already being worked on and its just a matter of our small team prioritizing what is worked on first.
Thank you for your feedback, we love these types of posts and the discussion that follows.
Thank you so much for being so open and down to earth with the community. I knew my efforts weren’t misplaced. I will keep updating my original post at the bottom so make sure to revisit from time to time to see what I have added. We will keep a constructive decorum alive as well, since good ideas are forged in the flame of considerable debate.
Thank you again.
Hello @DominicP343, sorry it took me this long to get to your post.
Monsters using too many skills
I am not saying eliminate all unique monster abilities, far from it. It does feel good to see newer skills used from time to time. I repeat I don’t want monsters to only sit back and auto attack, that would be bland and unfun. What I am saying is as the game progresses every monster seems to have an overabundance of skills that are especially dangerous and there should a balance of skills that players can recognize vs every monster having a unique attack that the player must recognize, react, and overcome. In my main argument I propose most of the big unique skills should be saved for the big bosses throughout the story arch.
A good balance would be certain types of monsters using certain types of skills. Lets say you have an archer type mob. Lets give archers the ability to auto attack (obviously), then use maybe a bleed attack and a multi shot attack from time to time. This way wether you are at the beginning of the game or almost at the end, you know archers have the ability to bleed you or do a multi shot that can be dangerous to even summoners as the multi shot might pop you. The joker card here would be that rare archers might gain another random skill which the player would have to watch out for. But what this effectively does for the player is the recognition of the archer archetype and what archers do just by seeing them with a bow in their hand. The instant visual cue is crucial. Currently this game LACKS visual cues on monster archetypes.
Armor requirements
I agree currently the stat system doesn’t really accommodate armor requirements very well. However, if they were to redesign the passive skill trees to remove bloat, perhaps this could be addressed as well, giving classes that don’t typically have access to certain attributes the ability to pay for certain amount of int/str/dex. Items can also roll certain stat attributes and it can be crafted onto items as well, so there are work arounds. However I am not opposed to their way of handling attributes and not having armor requirements, it just needs refinement from the current implementation. I will need more time to think of how best to do this, I am open to feedback.
Too many elements
I think we mostly agree here
Crafting
Good to hear
Runewords
I think copying one of the world’s best ARPGs while giving it a unique spin is a very smart idea. I would gladly shoulder a few criticisms as a developer if it meant that the game was better for it. There will always be descenders in any game that mock it for being “a clone” etc… However as long as it makes the game more fun and gives the player more yield on decision making, such as a runeword/socket system would, it’s a worthy trade off in my book. Again, I don’t know of ANY other game that has tried the runeword system and I just cannot live with the fact that Diablo 2 is the only game that gets to hoard this gem of a mechanic.
As you mentioned the poor implementation of runewords in Diablo, this would be the developer’s opportunity to put a unique spin on it, enhance it, etc… Like I said, runewords were such a phenomenal idea, so take the foundational core of the mechanic and improve on it. Properly balanced there, would be no ENIGMA however the feeling of finding that super rare rune to complete a bad ass runeword has a feeling for an item hunter that can be hardly replicated.
Thank you for your kind words and I look forward to continued discussions.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.