Last Epoch latest patch feels really good

Sweet. I don't show my support tabs but I spent like 700 in this game before I had all the tabs/cosmetics I wanted. Not falling for that again.

One thing the new patch made worse is playing melee. Hooo boy, these new mobs will rip you to shreds if you try to go close combat.

Haven't played much melee in a while. If that's true, I'm fairly confident it will see some reasonable adjustments and rebalancing. They don't seem to be saddled with GGG's many shortcomings in that regard.

There are 2 other big flaws after I played for a bit.

First one is from the campaign. They made the dubious decision to divide the damage types into time periods. And since the later half or so of the game is played exclusively in the divine era that means the enemies will always attack you with fire/cold/lightning and never with void/necrotic, which makes the latter two useless. I don't know how they'll deal with this honestly but it is very annoying to have defensive stats which are worthless for hours of gameplay.

The damage scaling in monolith/arena is so high your character must have 100% glancing blow and crit avoidance. Which means good crafted gear. It wouldn't be that bad if both modes did not rely so much on not dying to progress. It is possible to circumvent this. I managed to bring a Shaman to monolith 30+ and arena 60+ with crap gear thanks to totems and how great they are at taking the heat. Playing a Mage with crappy gear however is next to impossible even with 300-400 ward. You get splattered by blue mops who teleport/leap on top of you. A big problem is once again the division of defenses. The Sentinel, for example, gets everything when it comes to defenses. The Mage gets nothing from his tree. No wonder that everyone has Flame Ward, you must keep it up for as long as possible to not get one shot.

The game looks good, but I'm waiting on full release. I don't like getting in on early access games, and then them nerf a bunch of stuff, because I'm liable to not touch the game again. The potential to spoil the game increases dramatically with early access games.

I'm also not a fan of nerfing/buffing stuff by minuscule amounts like 1-5%. If it got adjusted by such a small amount, then that means it wasn't broken, and if it's not broken, don't *fix* it. To me, that's just changing something arbitrarily just for the sake of looking like you're doing something productive with the game.

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MrSmiley21 wrote:

arbitrarily just for the sake of looking like you're doing something productive with the game.

lmao take a look at PoE's patch notes

I bought Last Epoch yesterday. So far the minion / melee acolyte build has been a lot of fun. How to build it out and scale skills up is, of course, the key question to which I don't yet know the answer. I'll probably go minion / caster mode, when I get a chance, as long as that playstyle is viable later into the game.

POE's repeated use of 3 month leagues means it's becoming more and more of a loosely connected set of mini-games, with all the complexity associated with that and the related problems with finding current documentation and guides. In contrast, Last Epoch seems relatively and pleasantly straightforward, but still with plenty to think about along the way.

Last Epoch moves a bit more slowly than POE, though, which is my main concern thus far. Maybe that gets better after becoming more familiar with the game and after getting skills acquired later in the game.

Last time played about 2-3 months ago, before the recent campaign expansion patch.

I hope there are other ways for damage mitigation in endgame besides Glancing Blows and Crit avoidance.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Its actually sad that the Wolcen developers managed to get away with so much money when Last Epoch's clearly better devs are working their asses off for a fraction. They are getting more and more popular though.

Wait for 1.0... if they can make a good game, and buy THE ENTIRE TWITCH at release, they will probably be rich.

There is a hungry community for good new arpgs.

Big new patch next week, folks. Revamp of the end game. Hopefully it'll be good because currently I do not enjoy the monolith and the arena.