Meaty Feedback after 70+ hours (Arena, Skills, Monolith, Items, Monsters, wording, bugs, respec costs)

Feedback and Suggestions
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Straight to the point

Active Skills / Skill Bar

There should be more than 5 for sure. At least 7. 5 just do not even do justice, considering how much auras/ movement skills / debuffs we have. Necromancer can’t even use a movement skill AT ALL because priorities are extremely, stupidly tight.

Passive /Active Skills Respec / Despec cost

Overall i see no problem with high costs of respeccing. It allows you think ahead more about your build. It will also exhaust the game potential slower. If you give people an option to respec cheaply they will quickly find that "one meta" skill tree and everyone would be following it for ages till major rebalance hits again.

It needs to be streamlined with lower costs though. Currently it’s going WAY TOO expensive if you respec a couple of times. Next to impossible to respec at certain point, cause prices are becoming ridiculous.
Needs to be cheaper to start with and have fixed, CAPPED costs after a certain amount of respec attempts.

What i propose is a free respec once every major patch. Just like PoE does.

For the active skills though, it needs a big fine-tuning. But i know you are already doing that. We should be able to despec little by little, not drop all 20 points entirely. Just not right. You are running naked with no damage or defense and it’s no fun.

Classes

Classes disparity is also huge for now. Some classes have no defense because they need to stretch out and stack damage as well, some classes are ridiculously overpowered in both defense and offense. Some have no movement skills because NO SPACE ON SKILL BAR. I know it’s very early for this, but never allow one class to be much stronger than the others. PoE fought this issue for years, and still does major ascendancy rebalance once in a while.

Skill Wording / Transparency

Wording and descriptions need to be fixed on a lot of skills, since it’s hard to tell what scales what. Like if this debuff affects all damage or it only for this skill… It’s very hard to tell what effects this or that. Literally we are walking blind in most cases.

You have damage numbers and tell us what kills us, it’s already HUGE thing. Thanx for that. Keep going.

Another thing is lazy wording: sometimes i noticed "regen" , sometimes "regeneration". Just make it all unified. Don’t be lazy folks. I know you are super busy. But proofread your stuff.

Monsters & One-shots

PoE suffered from volatile for years, till it was reworked into a physically avoidable, more transparent thing.

Currently there are TOO MUCH unavoidable one-shots, where you literally can’t do anything, can’t see anything, and then you are dead. It does not matter how much toughness you have. You just die. So, literally it’s not really about the amount monsters and how much you have around them, or your mitigation. It’s about one attack that hits you and you are dead in an instant. Meteor Bear, Glacier Bear, Death Screech, Abyssal Sundering. It’s impossible to avoid it and toughness does not help at all. Not to mention some classes just don’t have Forge Guard toughness. Necromancer is squishy, so if he gets hit by anything he just dies. Fine-tune that stuff. 99% of deaths are one-shots from offscreen.

Unique Items

There should be unique items supporting every type of skill, hopefully. Currently there are some weird contradicting items like this: Reach of the Grave - Official Last Epoch Wiki

While it buffs skeleton archers and mages, it does nothing for skeleton warriors, making them entirely useless. If there is such an item, there should be another unique item buffing just the warriors instead. Otherwise it literally makes an entire part of that skill tree useless. Just an example.

Monolith

I think it’s a great idea with stacking mods and stacking rarity. Although RNG with the mods needs to be fine-tuned. Like for example sometimes you see 25% increased health and 90% increased health for same price.

There is one major problem though, once you stack a lot of mods it is becoming pointless to kill any monsters. Not only it takes too much times for some builds, but it is also incredibly dangerous to catch some Meteor Bear or VOID BROS to one-shot you from offscreen. A lot of fine-tuning needs to be done here. Some one-shot mechanics intensify on highly modded areas.

So, in general ,you just run to the boss as fast as possible to get your fat loots and chain 5+ more monoliths to get arena key. That’s it.

Arena

Always needs to start at your level. Simple as that. Nerds will still go high no matter what, but more casual bros need help to maintain sanity.

Ladder

Ladder wipes are mandatory after every patch. It allows you to inspect viability of different classes, balance, as well as observe and discover exploits. I’ve seen you did that already. GOOD!

Crafting

I honestly like crafting and i think it’s in a good spot. Simple and affective. While there’s a lot of rng it’s overall in good standing. Some bases are hard to get and some tiers are hard to reach. I think it would be good to see tier ranges though

Ward vs. Leech vs. Life Regen

Life Regen is in terrible state for both you and minions. Flat values on character and minions are ridiculously low, that’s why most classes can’t spec into regen as it’s worthless investment. Leech is working great and ward is just INSANELY powerful on some out-of-tune sorcerer teleport builds. Literally thousands of ward against hundreds for other classes. Balance needed, as disparity is dramatic.

There is life potion but no mana potion

At first i was bamboozled by this design idea and still i am. I know that you guys wanted to be original, but it does not really synergize well with the game flow. Running around like idiot for several seconds with minus mana, waiting for your mana to regenerate is just not how action rpg should be played. Don’t look at Diablo 3. They had to stack 90% less resource spent and buff resource generation through the roof on most skills to counteract that issue. It’s like they tried to "fix" flawed design with insane amount of numbers. For example , you give us skill that uses 50% of mana. And then you realize that in REAL situation people can’t use it as much as ythey want to, and then you start creating retarded uniques like "mana cost decrased by 90%". This is just terrible design to start with. Don’t do this. Be smart.
And i am not saying that mana potion is needed. It’s not! But at the same time it’s a slippery road and currently a lot of skills need their mana costs rebalanced.
Like for example Shield Rush costs 50 mana and is pretty pointless in comparison to Lunge which costs 1.
PoE has mana potion, and while not many people use it in end-game, it still has some use for some intense skills and Mind Over Matter. So throwing away mana potion entirely was a brave decision from my point of view. And i really hope it was worth it in the long run. Cause it would be harder to implement later on, when things will be faster than they are now

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The idea is to make mana cost a real counterbalance to skill power and making the game more than just a single skill spamming (by forcing the choice of a mana heavy skills to be paired with a free skill which can be used while mana is regenerating). Having mana potion completely negate that like every other ARPGs out there.

I would give it to you that this concept isn’t very well executed in the game currently though.

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Again on the mana potion i agree with jerle. A lot of the skill trees are balanced around giving you an actual choice of mana efficiency vs power vs utility vs aoe (and even base damage). Not saying it couldnt be better but making a build and actually thinking of getting mana regen or mana efficiency on gear is at the very least a very interesting idea.

On another sidenote, lich can also achieve very high ward levels. Not saying mage teleport isnt a problem (havent tryed it but i’ve heard of it) because of the amount you regain, but it’s not the only one capable of reaching very high levels of ward. For life based characters i think the idea is you always go leech + l,ife on hit or potion chance+potion heal if you wanna survive. The regen seems to be just a plus and not a standalone sustain mechanic (maybe not by design choice but it seems to work :p).

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I can’t remember any %mana regen affixes on items btw. Are there any? Maybe i am selling them all and never noticed

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Mana costs need to be rebalanced. Like for example Shield Rush costs 50 mana and is pretty pointless in comparison to Lunge which costs 1.
PoE has mana potion, and while not many people use it in end-game, it still has some use for some intense skills and Mind Over Matter. So throwing away mana potion entirely was a brave decision from my point of view. And i really hope it was worth it in the long run. Cause it would be harder to implement later on, when things will be faster than they are now

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For sure. And I think you brought up plenty of great points which forces the devs to examine their implementation vs their big ideas for skills and system. I think this beta launch has given the devs much food for thought on implementation details with alot more players stress-testing the current designs.

Let’s see how long the devs would take to address these feedback :wink:

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I’m just leaving it here - mana regen shard on wiki.
Urzil’s Pride is another example.

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Great post! I can agree with almost all of your points here but there’s a couple I’m not with you on and maybe you can hear me out or convince me otherwise, namely on arena/skills.

Active Skills - I could see adding at most, 1 more skill to the bar. Every build will soon be boiled down to 1 damage skill, 1 movement, and damage/defensive supports to that as in PoE, but most builds can’t even use a full skill-tree setup yet as half of them aren’t finished yet.

Respeccing - Perfect solution is the free respec on major patch content AND adding a couple freebies throughout or early in the storyline so newer players can fix mistakes and be introduced to the system. If someone get to end-game and can’t afford a respec then gasp maybe they should grind some gold for a little while and learn to plan ahead on their next character. That said I could get behind cheaper/reduced prices during the beta while everyone is testing everything.

Classes Not even going to touch this one. It’s a beta and we’re missing ascendancies and entire archetypes and half the skill trees aren’t finished. While it’s definitely a valid concern and something I’m sure is on everyone’s radar. Ultimately there will never be total balance though, certain class skills and archetypes will always excel in certain aspects of the game, which is totally okay. I can have an Arena pushing sorc, a speed-mapping Forge Guard, and a Acolyte Bosser and not expect every character to the best at every type of gameplay. Class Balance is always one of the biggest corner stones to any ongoing arpg development.

Skill-wording- I was confused by a lot of the affix wording too, even as a looooooooongtime ARPG player, until I sat and tried on a bunch of pieces various with my stat sheets open testing what actually increased things and what didn’t. Once it clicks it clicks but maybe some more specific/in-depth wording when you mouse-over the stats in your char sheet or press-alt on an item would help?

Monolith - I’d like to see way more mods in the pool, and to let the progress be saved when you leave (or crash) the game.

Arena - Disagree here but I am probably in the minority on my opinion. I like the gatekeeping of having to grind out those lower waves, primarily because I think it keeps inflation of ladder wave #s down by acting as a barrier of entry due to time/annoyingness/etc. after a month using the level-wave system every arena rank would be the same as it is now +100.
my solution would be to see the difficulty scale up even faster though. much faster. if the #1 run was only ~100 waves it wouldn’t seem so out of reach, or take 9 hours and a piss jug to beat.

Ladder
Agreed and I’ve read they play on doing seasons/leagues called Cycles which would have their own ladders. The dream would be a character/passive inspection system tied to the ladder sort of like PoE/D3/WoW armory-style. Maybe one day if/when we get character customization.
Crafting
Would like to see a few more affixes – like mana regen! but otherwise agree it is in a good spot. I would love to have a way to check the tiers on affixes without having to put the item in the crafting window though! Maybe when you press alt for detailed info on an item it can display the tier next to it?

Potions
Agreed. I am alright with the 1 potion button system but it’d be nice to have a choice of different kinds of potions which you can pick depending on your setup, many would forego a healing pot altogether for mana or temporary speed boost or 3 second invulnerability etc. Opens up a whole avenue of build and gameplay design.

There aren’t any, all I’ve seen is flat +mana. ---- Edit: incorrect.

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Apparently I’m mistaken!

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Active Skills / Skill Bar

I think the current number is fine, a lower number of active skills means each one can be more meaningful. If you start adding more buttons, the rest have to be watered down. Maybe if those extra buttons are interesting to push, but I don’t want an extra two slots just to fit in another 2 passive auras.

If you give people an option to respec cheaply they will quickly find that “one meta” skill tree and everyone would be following it for ages till major rebalance hits again.

That’s simply incorrect, the more punishing respeccing is the more often people will just find a build online and follow it instead of experimenting on their own.

Classes

Agree, I attribute most of this to being early in development, but doesn’t hurt to call out that a lot of still needs to be done.

Skill Wording / Transparency

Agree again, hopefully we can get some better tooltips in the future.

Monsters & One-shots

Mostly agree, and I think this is largely due to the leech mechanic. Which forces very high incoming damage to offset high leech values.

Unique Items

What? No. That item rewards the use of the ranged skeleton variants. It shouldn’t buff melee because you want to spec the tree into pruning warriors out. If you really want to use warriors, use a rare weapon.

The rest is all simple one liners and not really worth commenting on. The major gripe I have is the respec issue. This whole idea of dragging out gameplay by forcing players to re-level or grind out insane to me. It’s like old arcade games being crazy hard just to suck quarters out of people. It’s outdated design. The ability to swap easily adds way more replay-ability for me, as I can continue to experiment and tune a build without wasting a ton of time on pointless respec costs or character leveling. Were also already releveling everything every season anyway. People also always conveniently forgot other necessities when making build changes like gear and skill-respec. I can’t just swap from void hammers to warpath paladin and be as effective without major gear changes.

And if you do finally tune your build 100% and decide you are finally done, guess what? You got 4 other classes to try, not even counting the other spec options within a particular class.

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Apparently me too! lol. I saw these for sure, but never “noticed”

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wands up to 25% (from 10>12)

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Feedback like this really highlights how you have to take every feedback with a grain of salt.

Like the dude you replied to said, adding mana flasks would completely destroy the way player resource is managed in this game. You aren’t supposed to be able to spam meteors or other high cost skills. That’s why they have a high cost. If you invalidate that cost with pots or leech then you have to gut the damage or add a CD, which is effectively the same thing.

The only thing terrible here is your overly opionated comment without even trying to understand the design intent or the actual pros and cons of the system.

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I don’t agree with these suggestions almost at all. Plenty of these are suggesting to make Last Epoch more monochrome with the ARPG scene. Things that I do agree with are pretty much obvious and not sure if any feedback is needed on things which they are actively working on and need time with to get them right / fix them.

Skill bar

I don’t agree with this at all. This restricts the impact of your skill choices and all builds will be even more similar than what they are right now. Having everything is bad. Skills, like everything else should be a choice between strengths and weaknesses. As an example if I would have 7 skills, I would not have to choose between any skills for Void Knight - right now 7 would make all useful skills available for me, but currently I have to choose between 3 in order decide my last skill, depending on the scenario and at what pace I want to play. A very solid design choice!

Classes

That’s all about balancing which takes time and testing, which they are doing anyways.

Skill wording

Completely understandable yet again, all games / products / services have grammar mistakes once in a while, even the absolute giants. This is nothing which is being ignored; trust me, they’re not lazy.

One-shots

My only problem was the highland bear, which was already nerfed; everything else is acceptable right now but of course will be tuned.

Unique items

Why does every skill have to have uniques? If anything I’d claim the absolute opposite, the skill tree and passives are the only uniques which you should ever need.

Monolith

I agree and already has been slightly buffed, definitely needs more.

Ladder

Not sure if every patch now. There have been 3(?) patches in 2 weeks.

Ward / Leech / Regen

Again, just needs time and balance. You cannot possibly assume that they’ll leave some mechanics intentionally worse.

No mana potion

If you don’t want to run around like an idiot, then manage your resources better and optimize your build according to your playstyle?
I think it’s currently completely fine and I probably play the most mana-hungry build in the game, eating ~ 180 mana per second. For me it’s very refreshing to see mana as an important part of the balance. What you’re suggesting is generally making the game like Path of Exile where everyone has everything all the time and mana is just a nuisance early game with it being irrelevant after the first 2 hours.

What you also did not mention or don’t understand is that 0 mana skills exist which null the problem of not being interactive with your class on negative mana, at least for the Sentinel class.

I also don’t understand why are you calling them dumb( by saying they should be smart) for as you mentioned “original” ideas?

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Good points all around, I agree with the the lion’s share here.

Active Skills / Skill Bar
I think 5 active skills to a build is fine, but maybe adding a 6th slot that was exclusive to movement skill of choice (that could not be specialized into) would allow each class to make a choice on one for mobility without sacrificing active skills.

Passive /Active Skills Respec / Despec cost
Instead of a cap, rather see a decay over time. Probably realtime played on that character.
Still incentivizes good planning, but changes wouldn’t be a permanent negative factor for experimenting on one specific character.

There is life potion but no mana potion
Here I agree with KISS_ME_QUICK above. Managing mana gives fights a cadence that would be ruined by mana potions and make damage cycles more burst-y in general.
Instead of waiting for mana to regen, you’d just be waiting for potions cooldowns instead.

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I completely disagree.

I think the no mana leech/potion is terrific. It encourages using multiple skills and saving your nukes for smart situations instead of just spamming the hardest hitting ability you have. You don’t even run out at 0 and have the option to overcharge yourself if you really need that big skill. The mana regen is fairly quick as is and spell casters have been given tools to gain more mana back.

The following affixes also exist, albeit rare.

  • Mana regeneration
  • Spell damage/ -mana cost
  • Mana efficiency

Also disagree with shield charge…spec into damage and it will be one of the hardest hitting abilities you have whilst re-positioning. You can also hold the skill down and traverse a straight line faster than any other character.

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I disagree with most of it.

Let’s not make this game such as others… Every game needs to be unique and Last Epoch has covered that well.

The no mana potion is completely intended, And I love it. Needing to watch out on mana reminds me a little of the MMORPG aspect when i played wow. It’s a little skill cap to have to manage your mana wisely.

For the Monolith part i’m not going to repeat “KISS_ME_QUICK” he covered it.

The balancing of the classes will come in time (Please look at other ARPGS for balance) It’s a nice aprils fools joke :wink:

I did not get One shotted yet in the game so i cannot say anything about it (level 65).

The skill customization is enough to make only 5skills viable. Make the right choice point.

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I also disagree with a couple of things you wrote, and this is not supposed to be a dig or insult, but maybe continue playing PoE? You mentioned it quite a lot. You basically want the game to bend to your taste and don’t want to adjust to the game mechanics, best example is the potion complaint. They came up with a great system for health potions, I’m really loving it (and a lot of other people as well), and it was a consciuos decision to not have mana potions, but I am not telling you something new here. If you spend half of your mana for one skill, it is your choice to do so, and if you do that twice and have no mana left, and apparently no other skills that you can use and have to run around like an idiot and wait for the mana to recharge, then you suck at coming up with a good build for this game. It really is that simple. Adjust. And don’t be offended, I usually suck at it too.
I hate the potion system in most other ARPGs by the way, that should be covered by gear or skills, and not drinking potions (which can also have properties) all of the time, it turns into a ridiculous mini-game.
You have every right to criticize this game and give feedback, it is even encouraged, and I have seen threads where people got dogpiled for doing so (unjustly), but please do it in an appropriate manner, don’t say that the developers are lazy and stupid (or insinuate it) or try to tell them how an ARPG should be played. And for the love of god, don’t say retarded. Be better than that.

And by the way, Sarno came up with that unique item btw, and I don’t see where the contradiction is. It’s not supposed to buff your Skeleton warriors. There are pre- or suffixes on gear that boost minion physical damage, but not for spells or bow attacks afaik.

And you do have some valid points by the way; I would like one more skill slot (not 2 or more, would be fine with just one more, and only because I have been playing some hc/solo/maso recently), but if that doesn’t happen, then so be it. Wording on skills could be better and since my hc/solo/maso Sentinel died from a death screech at level 33, I also agree that this should be looked at. Good point about Monolith too.

And @Bonesaw: You are so right about the respec issue. Free respec encourages experimentation, how is that too hard to see? I have even seen arguments in this forum that it drives people to basically net-decking their character, when exactly the opposite is true. If you know that errors in choosing skills or nodes in the early game can screw up your whole build, then you’ll search for good ones before creating them in the first place. And if you don’t know that and only realize it way too late, I think you’re rather pissed about it and not happy that you have to start from scratch. And by the way: you don’t like free respec? Then don’t do it. You can still create a new character if that’s what you fancy. Or as I have said in another thread: make it an option when you create a character, just like hc/solo/maso. Everyon’s happy.

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