agree! looking forward to broad reworks of skills and class talents, so that we can actually play them. also they need to simplify / condense the itemisation a bit, especially because we get so much random loot for ALL classes, instead of our own.
@@CatalysedCat Agree on the skills, disagree on the itemisation. The fact that 99,9% of loot is for class/mastery you are playing in other arpgs is in my opinion limiting and you don't get that good experience when you are playing one class and something drops and you are: Wow, now is time to try some new build with different class. It was the same in Diablo 2 and in my opinion one of reasons why it was such great game. In D3 and D4 totally missing and I am glad that LE has it. But maybe I don't mind that because I like to play and optimize/color code my loot filters and instead of loot simplification I would rather have more in depth options (and more colors/highlighting options) for loot filter.
Completely disagree. The grind and hopelessly powerful enemies are what makes games like this fun. If you do not like that then you are not a fan of this genre. Diablo 2 was the last good game of this genre. Diablo 3 sucked, this is why i refused to play diablo 4 or diablo 2 resurrected. It was way too easy, throw diablo 3 in the trash. Your complaints are probably why i will go buy this game.
@@freedommaverick8171 Thanks for watching, consider buying it from my Nexus store: www.nexus.gg/gav It's a fantastic game, with a few solid patches it will be even better :)
@@freedommaverick8171 hey, i have no objection to the difficulty, that's the only reason i play the game, i like dark souls type games, and how this and the 1.1 content has new versions of that, My current grip is the actual itemisation system being annoying to work around, and even with all the empowered monolith loot buffs, it still feels like 75% of loot that drops is for other classes. This is someone with level 100, reaching 500 corruption and slaying all harbingers & Aberroth. my comment(s) were directed to the fact that i want to play the actual game, not get stuck behind configuring inventory, loot filters, and sorting through crafting for what feels like equal amounts of time to fighting e.t.c, and if you try to skip configuring stats, you are left being powerless. In essence I'm agreeing with the author of the video talking about ACESSIBILITY.
I think what put me off the game is actually an unpopular opinion.. I don't think items matters much before you hit the late late end game, progression feels like slug for the majority of the play through, and when I get to where it begins to matter, I'm already pretty burned out
@@GavrynGaming yeah, I don't mind the grind, I just want to feel the progression :) Path of exile is a good example, knowing how to craft gear works at every level, and finding an early 3-4 link can completely change your gameplay early on.. Getting life and resistances actually matter aswell, or getting a +1 minion or +1 fire gem on a raging spirit character and so on.. While it changes a bit in last epoch, it doesn't nearly have the same impact and therefor it doesn't feel exciting for me
OMG you are so spot on 19:20. I'm not a casual player, I've sunk hours in this game and it's so difficult to try again after my build proved not to be strong enough, it's soul crushing. Thank you for this video, awesome work.
Another great video! One of my biggest gripes with the game is that early respec costs such a long time to level back up, but late game respec would be maxed in a single map. That's really backward cuz usually new players would love to experiment and change skills around all the time. Also the devs have a lot to catch up with games like PoE. I've been playing the new league and there's so much content compared to LE. I understand PoE has been developed for much longer but LE still feels unfinished (story, skills, endgame content)
@@thenguyen5396 Thanks!! Yeah 100% they have a lot of work to do with LE, I trust they're up to the task though for sure! Glad you're enjoying PoE, I'll be checking out PoE2 when it's out without a doubt!
I started the game with 1.1, I've done a Forge Guard as my first character playing mostly blind, and my build was not good enough to pass the Monolith with Lagon, not enough DPS and i got one shot by multiple abilities from the boss. Then I started a new character with the Frost Claw sorcerer, nice build, but to be able to really push corruption, it require to many hours to build the stuff for me, and now playing a trap marksman, but I don't think I will have the will to push all the way to the Harbinger. Most annoying thing for me is Glyph and Rune to pick up, it should be like gold, auto pickup directly in the crafting stash. Some rules to sort the chest automatically would also be nice.
Thanks for watching and sharing! Saving that extra click or two for crafting materials would definitely be nice, there's rarely an instance you leave them on the ground 💯
This is been discussed by many n EHG mentioned coming future patch will change the shards , runes n glyphs would be auto picked n straight to forgery without clicking again
Great Video. I agree on your point about skill balance to avoid new players setup themselves up for complete failure. However when you state ''a new player should be able to piece together a succesful build on any class with any skill'', while i agree on paper, my biggest fear is that it would come at the cost of trivialized progression and content. Buffing/reworking some skills and masteries is crucial, but it should still take time, learning, failing and experimentation to piece up a succesful build: its what makes these types of game fun and enjoyable in my opinion.
Thanks so much for watching! I mostly just meant that the skills and masteries should be balanced in such a way that you can make "anything" work given enough commitment to building it out, further understanding of the game as you play more etc. That's definitely not how it is right now which will just take time to sort out. The gameplay loop of iteration and experimentation for sure needs to remain intact but you shouldn't be setup for failure from the get-go just by choosing Cinder Strike or insert any other underwhelming skill. The ability to stumble into these pitfalls is too great and the "experimentation" aspect takes too long. You aren't really limit testing a build until you're in empowered monos or beyond which is the latter half of spinning up a character. There's not much if any difficulty in the campaign or normal monos which basically just strings along a bad build lol
I share the frustration. As someone who had 200+ hours from early access times, I feel like I understand the game mechanics well enough. So I went with self made build, making choices that "made sense" to me (using things that should work together well). Breezed through the normal monos and first few harbingers, but around 200-250 corruption the build just bricked. Apart from finding things with 3LP, there were no more improvements to be made... I either had to toss it in the garbage and start a new character or look up a "pro" build. Considering the time constraints I ended up copying a build off a website. Got me unstuck, yes, but its much much less fun now. I usually like to make builds because some unique item that looks cool, the fact so many skills are non-viable results in a situation where a seemingly build-defining unique item can essentially lead you into a trap...
Wow I found myself nodding in agreement to literally every sentence you've written here! I've looked and compared on LE Tools to get ideas or see if what I'm doing is correct etc and I like you felt my knowledge of the game was solid. I had been self-crafting builds since I started playing (I love RPGs). But yeah at a point even a well crafted build can just fall apart and it might not even be fixable, it's completely out of your control, because the skill is detrimentally bugged or bad (undertuned or needs reworked entirely). It feels like a trap. Like it's an ARPG, not every build will work or be 100% viable I get that. But every skill and mastery should at least have a shot or a pivot option. If you pick Marksman and Flurry or Cinderstrike, you're toast, you're gonna have a bad time 😂
@@deathblowcoL It's one of the reasons I stepped away from PoE until PoE2. You couldn't be very creative and were nearly required to follow if you wanted to do the end-game content without hindering yourself. That and the fact that in PoE respeccing is costly so you're even more disincentivized for experimenting.
@@GavrynGaming Same here. The process for me is - try build on my own - get to around 200-300 corruption and find out if it works (so far 2 out of aproximately 25did) if not try to find something simillar on internet - if there is something, maybe it was only missing unique i didn't find yet, maybe I didn't see some pasive or skill combination which gets it through the roof, sometimes it is just sad realising that primalist is outdated and most builds just wont work for him no matter what ... if build can be fixed next step is gettiing it to work and finding missing pieces during which I usually drop something that makes me think: Wow this item seems really cool for this class and this skill, lets try it and going back to new build. I have around 700 hours from beta and only around 100 in newest cycle (didn't have time) now going for harbringer number 6 if I can keep myself from creating new alts and focus on one character and progressing.
@@ondrejmaly7337 2 out of 25!? My god you're relentless lol I love it. Yeah it's hard to fully trust the tooltips and interactions right now with the amount of things to avoid (undertuned skills, bugs, poor interactions etc) it's difficult to feel like you're even being creative 😂
thank you for your insight! as a longtime D2/D2:R/PoE/Titan quest player, last epoch for me sits just at the right spot. a new league with interesting mechanics in PoE i will always try out,play it intensively for 2 weeks and get burned because the sheer amount of stuff you can do (but really need to know the mechanics for them to make a profit...looking at you crafting system) i usually then go back to D2:R,its got (offline) mod support at this stage and nothing really hits like a good few hrs session in sanctuary. bought LE yesterday after eyeing the game for quite a while...and i love it. i have yet to reach endgame content but from what i have seen so far iam excited to add LE to the games i will come back to. especially now knowing that EHG listens to community feedback. a sub well earned :)
Really good vid. Agree with the gripes. Especially hitting that wall around 300. I've done homemade builds only but very much hit a hard wall around 300. You hit a lot of good points
Excellent video. Yes, most of your points resonated with me. I didn’t down Abberoth, only ONE harbinger and I played…a lot. I am optimistic about the future of LE, however, it needs to bring in new players. As PoE2 enters the scene, it’ll battle not only with poe/d4, but that game…and that’ll be hard to match, truly.
If you wanted help with them I could but only to a certain point as I've only taken 7 or 8 of them I think. I'm in the OCE region (Australia) so ping could be an issue though but not too big of a deal.
Hey Gav, another amazing and high quality breakdown, keep up the great work! Some thoughts / additions; 1. 09:36 - I feel like enough time has passed to clarify that the 1.0 gold dupe mentioned was not something players could stumble upon by accident, it required memory editing, which bad actors often do using a 3rd party tool called Cheat Engine. That isn't to justify what happened, and is firmly against ToS, I am more just providing extra context as I was intentionally vague with my explanation at the time while EHG was handling the issue. 2. 16:28 - All valid points but I do think it's important to be careful when comparing player counts between cycles when one of them is the official 1.0 launch. It is completely expected that after years of beta, the 1.0 of LE which also had significant promotions, marketing, and people seeing the game for the first time, that the player count would be disproportionately large. In my mind that speaks more of how excited people were for 1.0 rather than "how much LE has fallen off in 1.1". From some talks I've had it seems like EHG was fully expecting 1.1 to have much lower player count than the outlier that was 1.0. I am much more interested to see how 1.1 player counts compare to 1.2 player counts, as this may be a better indicator of whether or not there is a trend. 3. 18:20 - Abberoth is a pretty divisive topic in the community right now it seems, I've seen a lot of people saying they should get free attempts, make the boss get easier, etc. and other folks on the complete opposite side of the fence saying it is way too easy. I'm (obviously) biased here but personally I'm pretty happy with where it's at as a completely optional "pinnacle" boss. As it stands, there isn't really any content gated behind Abberoth minus a few niche items that could offer improvements to some builds but aren't mandatory at all for end game. It's kind of like how the hardest dark souls bosses are often optional. My only gripe here is that some of the visual aren't really super clear, a lot of the attacks are just "clutter" (don't do much damage but look as scary as some of the actual deadly attacks), or lingering ground visuals that don't actually damage you (some purple stuff iirc). Regarding the grind towards Abberoth, I'd argue you don't really need to beat Abberoth for the build to be a success. 4. 19:26 - "the journey forward isn't even a guarantee, your build might just suck" - IMO this point that you briefly mentioned at the end of the Abberoth section to me feels like one of the biggest problems right now. When you are theory crafting a new build in LE you don't really have a clue whether it will work, or how good it will be. It's extremely common to cook up a build using some insane interaction in the planner, only to find out it doesn't work in game because of some bug or inaccurate text. Over time this has bred a serious mistrust for tooltips, and in game descriptions. Players are afraid to invest time into a new untested build idea when it could just fall completely flat, which is normally expected for ARPGs, but not when it is due to bugs. Lately I've been resorting to testing out builds in offline before making them, which prevents me from getting burned but also removes a lot of the mystery and thrill of discovery. We also don't have a Path of Building equivalent (yet), which makes the theory crafting process pretty challenging and with a lot of guess work (or insane spreadsheets). 5. 20:30 - DoTs, yeah 100%. EHG has been making adjustments the last couple patches though which absolutely have been improving the consistency. 6. 23:07 - Build diversity / copying builds - I don't disagree with you that just copying builds isn't necessarily fun, but most of the "4D Chess" builds you referenced me putting together are a community effort. Even the original FC build I did in 1.0, I started with a guide initially until I had enough knowledge and context to begin making improvements myself. This season I theory crafted the FC starter using my knowledge from 1.0, then continued to fine tune / min-max the build through trial and error, and with the help of my community. I'm not writing this to say you shouldn't home brew your builds from scratch, I'm just saying that many of the "BEST" builds being used as a benchmark are on their 20th+ iteration, and contributed to by dozens of players. Once we cook up these OP builds though you are 100% right, it just dominates the meta and there are very few people trying different things. I won't speak for the other creators but I can't reliably pull s-tier builds out of my pocket either, it's a real challenge. Also great points about the build / skill disparity being huge. I often find myself trying to cook up a new build only to end up comparing it to an existing S-tier and getting discouraged, sure you don't need to only play S-tier builds, but it feels bad when the difference in power vs off-meta builds is like 10-100x instead of a more reasonable +/- 50%. 7. 26:20 - Ease of Respec - Yeah this is a huge pain-point, especially as CoF as you mentioned and is often why I often play builds that require similar gear to what I've already crafted. If you want to min-max to any meaningful degree you really need a HUGE stockpile of uniques, exalts, etc. It's just not feasible. Just consider how many affixes there are in the game that you may decide to build around, then consider you will probably need quite a few multiples of each. It would be nice if we had some way to generate exalts using shards or something, like insert 50 int shards and get a random T7 int armor piece with a type of your choosing, rather than storing so many copies just to slam in temp sanctum.
Hey Frozen thank you!! And wow I love the feedback and banter here. I first want to point out that this wasn't a hit piece by any means and I did not want to paint EHG or the game in a bad light so I hope it didn't come off that way! I want this game to be successful too 100% 1) Thanks a ton for the additional context, yours was the ONLY quality and trusted coverage on the 1.0 dupe event I could find after it all went down so thank you! 2) I was definitely not intending to imply or draw any conclusions here that 1.1 numbers should be anywhere near 1.0's. Simply that with over 1 million sales pre-launch and over a quarter of that online concurrently during 1.0 as well as how well 1.1 was received, that just under 30% retention seemed low to me (and made me curious about how many of those players were new or returning). I don't know for sure what EHG was forecasting here. This definitely isn't enough data points to draw any real conclusions yet it was just an observation! 3) I think a lot of this stems from which skill/mastery folks choose honestly. The bugs and balance differential is pretty massive depending on which combination you go with. Once those are balanced better that feeling will be lessened I feel. I'm certainly not advocating for a free kill at all! I think the issue is further exasperated by the fact that it's not just optional, Abby and the harbies are THE content right now outside of monoliths. It will get better with more diversity in endgame activities for sure. I'm glad I wasn't the only one suffering from the visual clutter, it's definitely a problem in a mechanically intensive fight. Is the measure of a successful build still just 300c+ empowered monos? T4 Julra? If they wanted Abby to be a Dark Souls final boss that's fine, but it's so engrained in your monolith experience now that it feels like it should be the benchmark but that's just me! 4) Very veryyy good point on the mistrust for the information provided, that's a psychological phenomena that's occurred over time as this issue has continued (and in some cases worsened). That was exactly my point, the success of your build might be entirely out of your control due to balance/bugs and you'd be none the wiser without extreme experimentation unless you're actually consuming YT/Twitch content (which isn't most people). Testing in offline is smart and would eliminate a lot of the frustration but yeah that feeling of discovery on your own (casual or not) is one of the greatest feelings an ARPG can offer outside of phat loot. 5) 1.1.5 were fantastic adjustments, mostly for patriarch's new fat avalanche being tuned down 😂 it'll continue to get better but I had to point it out ofc! 6) Thanks for the insights here! I think my biggest problem here on the build creation side is the same as #4 where we talked about the mistrust in choosing a skill or mastery etc. Right now you aren't even gauranteed to land on that v1.0 of the build in the line of iteration because of a detrimental bug or skewed balance issue. It makes the gameplay REALLY difficult to obtain a good frame of reference from (unless you've played for awhile) to compare/contrast/iterate and experiment. I don't want to be able to craft an S tier build right off the bat but it would be nice knowing that given a certain mechanical knowledge/skill level you can make things work baseline and iterate from there/learn further. Not everyone will be able to do this and some enjoy finding inspiration or straight up copying others lol and that's fine! The player should be the reason for failure, skills/masteries themselves shouldn't be the detriment. 7) And this is coming from you who's a CoF grinder and mad man at 1k+ corruption lol yeah it's borderline "free" to respec but having the gear for that respec is an entirely different issue. Kind of circles back once again to the balance disparity. As better balance is introduced, the opportunity to pivot or scale differently becomes available for your build rather than being completely back to the drawing board and with no gear/build to swap to. Thanks a lot for taking the time to not only watch my video but to write up your feedback Frozen it means a lot!
@@GavrynGaming great points and agreed. I wasn't implying you were hating on EHG or LE, or disagreeing with your points, just adding some of my own thoughts in addition as someone who plays way too much. To be fair to #7, I think it's technically "worse" for me specifically as a min-maxer because my standards for gear are so high that I can't transition without an ungodly stockpile of slam components. I put an absurd amount of time in, but that just means getting another build up and running to a similar level also takes an absurd amount of time.
@@FrozenSentinel Trueeee, you've seen the peak, getting back there on something new and having that comparison will always be in the back of your mind 😂
As someone who really loves this game, I can definitely agree with many of your points. I dare to challenge that this game is (easy) to re-spec though. Changing skills means abandoning your levels with your currently skills so there is not fast swapping back. As you mentioned, trying to prepare gear for other builds is also really challenging if you don't have the foresight to do so. And most of all, the prospect of having to make an entirely new character just to try another spec AND class is super daunting... as all together that is up to 15 characters, which is just an absurd amount to grind out. I Think they need a system that allows you to save between 3 and 5 character builds per character. not only if your skills and their levels then maintained if you want to swap back, but your gear can automatically be stored and ready for play on return on a moments notice. To top it off, they should let you change your specialization freely instead of being locked into only one per character, and this system would allow you to swap to a new build on a new specialization to try it out without having to roll a whole fresh character. It won't let you try other classes of course, but just this already drops needed characters to try all the masteries from 15 to just 5! And if they add a new class, you just need 1 new character.... not 3. Just going to say I find little to no joy in leveling characters up. It's a slog that I have repeated too many times. I also dare say that the sheer amount of RNG with crafting just is not for me. There is so so so so so many levels of randomness to try and get an excellent item. Need to find one with a Tier 7 Affix/Prefix. need to try and smartly use the crafting system to get other Affixes/Prefixes you want. If you mess this up, that's it the item is bricked here as you have limited crafting potential and how much is used is also semi-random. Finally have that nice item with a T7? Well, now you have to consider finding Unique with Lego crafting potential. And unless you are super lucky or just rich, getting one with 4 is very rare. So now here comes yet again another layer of RNG as now we gamble our ideal T7 item away in hopes of getting at least an ideal Lego item. Personally I would love to have some of this can't go back mentality with crafting lessened. Let us regain the crafting potential the item had that we spent adding something whenever we strip away an affix/prefix. Let us at least lock down a T7 so it is not RNG removed... Let us retrieve the base item we tried to slam into a Unique at the cost of crushing the unique... so at least our base is spared for a future attempt. Between the sheer volume of RNG and grind needed to walk back MOST aspects/decisions of any character should you not be happy with it, I just could not motivate myself to continue playing. As fun as I find theory crafting builds in the build planner is, imagining builds and actually trying to bring them to fruition just in the HOPES it is as fun and powerful as I am imagining it would be is quite the different prospects. And just as you pointed out, if it suddenly just doesn't cut it... well, that's no small investment lost.
I just messed around the first time creating my build, not following any guide and loved it. Then I switched and followed a build plan and loved it. I'm looking forward to the next cycle.
Ok, you asked the question, so I got the answer. I've killed Aberroth multiple times on multiple builds. I think the feeling you got is valid. EHG wanted to add some true aspirational end game content beyond pushing corruption to insane numbers. So, they did it, and unfortunatly, it is the only real activity in the game at the moment beyond arena and pushing corruption. (Do dungeons even count?). I think after a few more updates, there'll be enough varied activities for everyone to hopefully find a place.
Thanks for taking the time to respond and I love the streams and your energy! I completely agree, I'm very hopeful for future cycles and further balance, I know EHG has it in them and the game at its core is amazing!
As a ARPG fan i played Diablo 1, 2 and 3 a lot! Then i started with POE but couldn't continue because i thought it was too much. Now im back in the ARPG i started with Diablo IV hoping that it was good, story wise it was but end game content and the gameplay i felt my characters was "heavy" and it wasn't nice to play. So i bought Grim Dawn and this is one of my top 3 ARPGs of all time. This week i bought Last Epoch cause i wanted something to play online while i wait for POE 2 (i think it will be easier to start on 2 if i start in the first season so i can learn while the game gets content) and i really liked Last Epoch! I played for about 2 hours every day and it felt really good. Better than Diablo IV and a game that can compete with POE if the developers continue to listen us. I hope that the game gets even better xD thanks for your video, it was really good
Well explained, I would say game progression is all over the place, in addition of what you mentioned about empowered later harbingers, not few players abandon the game after a few hours of how ridiculously easy it is. Balance and bugs are rampant in this game, they opted to ignore so many bugs, I am not playing again until they take care of those bugs.
Thanks a ton for watching! Merited 100% it's not early access anymore, it's a fully released product. The bugs are too much right now. I didn't want the video to seem too negative as I truly am hopeful for the future!
I played a ton of the EA, and actually, for reason I'm not even sure of (I think I was too obsessed with a different game), I skipped the 1.0 and 1.1 launches. Got back into it just a few weeks ago and have been having a blast. Still love the game, LOVE the Nemesis system, love the Harbingers, loved the Aberroth fight (though I agree with your complaints about it, especially for casuals). I've mostly ignored but am interested in the lore, so I definitely need to go check out your vids on that stuff. Build diversity feels better to me now than it ever has, but... You do kind of need a guide or giga huge brain if you plan on downing Aberroth or pushing beyond 200-300 corruption. I'm very excited for the reset on Thursday, I plan to go hard and try out MG for the first time, and hopefully the economy doesn't crash immediately. Edit: Oh, and 1000% agree on the DoT dmg and spikiness of some incoming blows. Many of my favorite builds are those that can get around those by default (with either insane ward gen or ready access to cleanses or both).
Thanks for the detailed response here! The reset and event Thursday definitely looks fun, unfortunately I'm neck deep in a Path of Exile lore series or I'd try it out! I think I burnt myself out a bit playing the entirety of 1.0 as well which contributed to my quicker disinterest this cycle :/
@@BrigsMaroon Thanks so much for watching! Don't let me deter you from continuing this great game, I'm just taking a brief hiatus after hundreds of hours of enjoyment, I'll 100% be back :) The content will keep coming as well, next up I'm working on a video documenting the rise of Grinding Gear Games from Chris Wilson's garage to the titan in the industry they are now!
After watching your video, you definitely have some great points. You conveyed your thoughts are very organized and clear, and I think your presentation overall is really good. There are several areas I agree with you and several that I don't which I will detail. I am a former PoE player 10 years under my belt, and I stopped after Sanctum league. I currently have 1500 hrs invested in LE. First, your recognition of incoming damage received is spot on. Dot damage is too high, and even with investment it can be difficult to control unless you have a high EHP pool. And this is not something that your everyday gamer would recognize and be able to solve. I also agree that the transition from Regular Monos to Corruption is not smooth, and this is something that EHG needs a better process for facilitating. However, I do not agree with the idea that every skill should be usable to do Pinnacle content. Maybe that's my Bias coming from 10 years of PoE, since in that game, some skills are just used to get off the ground, you farm currency and gear, then reroll into something that then clears all content. If you're trying to do all that, without changing your skills AND without looking at guides, I don't think that's a fair expectation to place on the game. You've opted into handicapping yourself, because you've denied yourself access to knowledge that would faciliate your success. Idk if it's a pride thing to not use a guide or whatever, I don't want to assume, but the result is the same regardless of the reasoning. And I guess what I would highlight is, I understand the principle that the game should give you all the tools you need to play the game, and if we're talking about accessibility, the game has done that. The game tells you all the scaling formulas in the guide, explains the mechanics, etc. You've exceeded that benchmark, so this is not an accessibility issue for you. You made it to the Pinnacle boss, blind. So talk about that point. You said you made it all the way to Abberoth before getting stomped. That is the PINNACLE boss. EHG created that boss to be the most difficult thing to do in the game currently. Which means again, I think your expectations of being able to clear the PINNACLE boss, with no outside knowledge, no guides, no optimization or willingness to grind (more?) is not a reasonable expectation. You're calling yourself a casual gamer (totally fine), but you are attempting top 10% player stuff. Pinnacle bosses require Pinnacle builds, and that can be whatever the lowest common denominator for completion is. But you're not gonna get a pinnacle build without grinding, which is what the genre is founded on, or some extra knowledge of build creation and testing. This is also not a dig on you, but you are playing Falconer, which is still top 3 strongest classes in the game, and didn't get the job done. I would encourage you, as someone who has invested a 1k hours into the game, to just take the extra step to really learn what makes a good build good, and beat the boss. You're right there! If you grinded to 400 corruption, you have plenty of access to strong loot, and the rarity scaling diminishing returns drops off right at that point. People at 800 corruption aren't getting much better loot. It's not like PoE where you have sacrifice your whole life to get a mage blood farming T16s, but if you can clear a T17 you get 3 of them a map. And, I would also discourage you from calling yourself a "casual" player when you're knocking on Abberoth's door, cause that's not really indicative of your skill. You're RIGHT there, which means you're better than you're average player now. You're more invested than an average player now. And I think your video, trying to advocate for the average player experience when you're not longer average, is a bit misleading. But with all of that said, you did a great job on the video and I wish more people had constructive criticism to offer about Last Epoch. If you look at the reviews, it's getting bombed right now, by actual casuals with sub 50 hrs. You can't do anything meaningful in an ARPG in sub 50 hours, that's just not the way the genre is designed. But unfortunately, those players are reviewing something they don't understand and LE is suffering for it. As for you, I hope you run it back with Abberoth, you have plenty of time. I'm sure a few tweaks to your build idea and additional 5% of your current investment would reward your efforts.
Wow thanks so much for the kind words and write up here! I tried to set my bias aside with this video but you can see on my channel, I've invested several hundreds of hours into lengthy campaign runs in order to present the entirety of the game's lore, I'm a fanboi. But my 1k hours is likely more akin to 400-500 and a lot of it was spent logged in AFK or otherwise, it's skewed for sure. In any event, I'm likely not a "casual" and I like to think I'm good at video games, I raid at a mythic level in WoW and have played literally since I could hold a controller (I'm a 33 year old dad gamer now). I even admitted to most likely playing more than the average player. It's the casual audience and average players that are currently bouncing off the game that will inevitably keep the game and EHG running financially. The retention right now appears to be the hardcore, well en-franchised audience for the game and those that just REALLY like grinding. And don't get me wrong, I love this game as much as the next guy, but as my playtime has diminished (work, IRL, etc), I no longer felt like my time was respected in the game and it opened my eyes to these problems that the average or more casual player might experience, with my biases set aside while still trying to not be overly negative. I must not have conveyed it well enough or my frustrations during the writing of this script sent me into hyperbolic territory, but I think every skill or mastery should indeed have a shot given the right operator and build, right now that's 100% not the case. As for me playing Falconer, this was my 3rd toon after leveling a Marksman to 97 and a Bladedancer to 90. The Falconer worked the best for obvious reasons (it's still slightly overtuned and made within the last year) so that's what I could actually make it there with for footage and a well rounded review. My point in that section of the video when stating every skill/mastery should AT LEAST have a shot at the end-game content is still something I believe firmly. There aren't even half as many skills as PoE and the skill system and their balance of them in LE works differently as well. It's not an apples to apples comparison. When you choose a class, you're choosing your skillset, passives, everything but equipped items. You're locked in essentially, weapons have restrictions as well. PoE has an open skill tree for all classes balanced around the starting location of the tree, and no weapon restrictions for classes (you know all of this with the amount of PoE you've played, it's just to get my point across). None of Last Epoch's skills should be duds for that exact reason, it's a LOT more rigid than PoE's system(s) and when you're given a set amount of skills and can only potentially use a handful of them that feels terrible. Not every player will have the skills, RPG experience or even the will to grind to even make it to Aberroth and that's fine. But currently balance, bugs and un-intuitive interactions that aren't explained or found in the game-guide (which is awesome that they have this btw and I've stated so in the past) are detrimental and unforeseen pitfalls that a new player can fall into and that's on the devs to fix. The blame shouldn't be placed on the player for not watching X amount of hours of UA-cam videos or having LE-Tools and Maxroll bookmarked in their browser. They shouldn't need to have played 1k+ hours because "then it gets fun". That's a gatekeeping mentality and trope of players that HAVE sunk that amount of time into the game and feel that new players should "pay their dues". That's not going to keep players around, they'll just go elsewhere if they have a bad experience or don't see the point in continuing (and they aren't experiencing the sunk cost fallacy that many veterans are). You shouldn't be allowed to fall into a trap they didn't know existed yet either (Marksman and its abilities minus maybe multishot). If EHG wants this to be a grindy, hardcore game, that's completely fine and I don't expect them to deviate from their design philosophies on my account. If having some symbiotic relationship between new players and external resources is required in order to learn the game fully, that's fine too. But that type of game seems to run contrary to the accessible/less player friction vibes the game gives off and I don't think that's their aim. Only time and future patches will tell! I love the game and EHG and will return for every solid patch but I'd be beside myself if I didn't let my frustrations as someone that can't play as often known.
@@GavrynGaming I 100% agree with voicing the concerns, and as I previous stated, they were well articulated. You make a very good point about LE skill system vs PoEs, which I had not considered at the time of writing. PoE's is more flexible via the tree, and they make 20+ new skills every other league or so, so that would allow more "Room to fail", because you opt out if it's not working. So do agree on your stance about the skills. I purposely didn't mention bugs and interactions, because I don't think you mentioned any specifically. Obviously, I know some that exist, and in principle I agree that bugs and unintended-interactions are not on the player, it's the devs, but since idk what we're talking about specifically for this point, I chose not to comment. Also, I am certainly not suggesting that a player needs a guide or a video to interact with the game, and if we're only talking about campaign completion and clearing some monos, I don't think the game fails anyone in that regard. I'm also in my late 30's, so I relate to responsibilities that eat up game time, but I think the phrase "Doesn't respect my time" is a bit contentious. I wouldn't consider new content and difficultly something that doesnt respect your time, The bar has been raised and unfortunately, is just inconveniencing you. Things that don't respect a player's time are usually system or mechanical changes, like lowering drop rates, slowing down exp gains so leveling takes longer, that new atrocious shield that spawns at Hp thresholds, or not being able to change your mastery, forcing you to level a new character (I hate this one personally). They are hollow changes that only artificially extend the game's life, but I don't think the addition of pinnacle content fall under that. In fact, summoning Harbingers is optional as you mentioned. That is actually respecting your time, cause if you don't want to fight them, you don't have to! It would be worse if there was no toggle for it, and getting your mono-boss loot was tied to a double boss fight, with 3x the EHP cause of those shields. I hope they remove them... And Lastly, I can tell you take pride in your ability to game. You may not have the time you would like to game, but clearly you're not a weak gamer. We don't have to agree, and I'm not trying to forcefully change your mind, but it seems like "average players" in this game, are not nearly as impressive or enfranchised as you're thinking. A large majority of people who play stuff are actually just terrible... that is the main reason they quit and move to other games quickly. It's not bugs and their builds not working, that's giving them too much credit. And It's not gatekeeping either, cause in order to "Gate keep" something, you have to be able influence the thing being Gate-kept. There is no one here stopping anyone from participating because their gear score is too low. The truth is, they gear poorly, they spec poorly, they reroll 4 alts before deciding they want to complete the campaign. Just look at the negative comments on steam. It's not indicative of all players, but the reasons they leave negative reviews, coupled with the pitiful amount of hours they've invested are very telling. No, the game doesn't tell you how to make a broken build, with multiple layered skill interactions, using a heirarchy system for sub-skills that scale with more multipliers. But you know what, fight games don't teach you the best combos, MMOs surely don't teach you optimal rotations, Shooter games don't teach you how to quick scope and head peak.... I'm sure you get my point.
@@Count_Virgil Truly appreciate the civil banter here and I appreciate the points you've made. At this point I just hope EHG sees this video and the plethora of comments here, there's a lot of feedback to gather and sift through! Have a great weekend Virgil!
@@GavrynGaming I hope they see this as well, they have a lot of work to do. I value their commitment to making a game for gamers, and I also appreciate the exchange we've had. I hope you enjoy your weekend as well, and good luck on your Abberoth kill. I know you'll get it!
Great review of the current state. I can confirm, I had a homebrew build that was absolutely smashing all content including Harbringers and +300 corruption and Aberroth was my wall. My gear wasn’t perfect but it requires way too much effort and I gave up. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. A real feel bad moment because to me the build would be complete with downing the pinnacle boss but now I’m left feeling like my build failed.
Yeah, I don't feel every build should be handed the boss kill if you reach it, but the difficulty was a stark contrast to the harbingers I had been beating up. I just want the difficulty curve from Normal Monos to Aberroth to be smoother and for your build's weaknesses to shine through more BEFORE the pinnacle boss! Thanks a lot for watching
I have been a really casual player since beta 0.8 days and LE is my favorite action RPG to play since then. I gotta say that the difference in game feel, balancing, graphics and overall polishing of the game is huge compared to that version. But there are a lot of things left to do, and I know for a fact that EHG is completely capable of delivering it, but my concern is if that they can deliver it in time, before all player base diminishes (specially with PoE 2 in the future). Great vid btw!
We all have faith in the company behind the game and the game itself has SUCH potential. I sincerely hope they can pull it off before PoE2 and others are in full swing. I'll be back for cycle 1.2 for sure, it better be a banger, early access for PoE2 is ~November I'm hearing!
I basically agree with everything in the video. Although I'll add one side thing before talking about the main stuff: I actually did have severe bugs with evade, although from what I've read it might be an offline specific issue. For me, evade would occasionally snap me back to my starting location, which as you can imagine, would often be right into an enemy AoE I was dodging out of. This made Aberroth and a few specific timeline bosses extra frustrating because I couldn't rely on the movement mechanic they were balanced around. On to the main points: I've been playing since sometime before act 9 was added. Like you said, the game has a really solid core and design philosophy. It's contrast to PoE is what brought me to the game. The crafting system and the unique target farming made it seem like the game was going to be built to be accessible to SSF as opposed to PoE where you're just shit out of luck if you don't trade. Even when they brought in trading, I was impressed with the faction system they made as a solution to separately balance progression for trade and non-trade. In general it feels like when they set out to address a specific issue, they have good ideas for solutions, although the execution often isn't there. The overarching problem right now feels like one of limited resources, bad prioritization, and tech debt. I understand that they're an indie studio. They only have so many resources they can put into the game. But that's all the more reason why they need to plan and spend those resources wisely. The game SHOULD NOT have gone to launch in the state it was in. It was buggy, still missing key content, and it had a bunch of systems that were sorely in need of an update. I was happy to give them the benefit of the doubt while the game was in early access. They could take their time fixing stuff and I'd come back occasionally to see their progress. But once they put it out to the world and said "It's ready!" Suddenly all these things to work on became problems. And now they have themselves on this timetable of releasing new cycles. Since they started behind, they're gonna keep getting further behind as they add more stuff so they need to work on the stuff that was broken or outdated before and the new stuff will also likely need adjusting and then they have to work on future content. As for prioritization, I feel like the stuff they've added since I've started hasn't really enhanced the experience or addressed any of the issues I had with the game. There have been a lot of bugs I reported ages ago that still weren't fixed for launch and then they made some changes that introduced even more bugs to core systems and UI on top of all the build specific bugs. With class balance, they spent a bunch of time on two new over designed masteries while leaving a lot of the older masteries and abilities in a bad state. For 1.0 we got no new content and in 1.1 we got new bosses, which was cool, but we still have the 3 dungeons that are generally agreed to be pretty unfun. Two of those people have almost no reason to run and Temporal Sanctum is a required piece of item progression that is also the oldest, buggiest, and least fun of the dungeons. The grind is definitely still the biggest gameplay issue though. The systems that have been added to the item grind, experimental affixes, legendary items, sealing, and nemesis empowering have all added more potential power to the game, but haven't made it any easier to actually hit the items you want. It's still all just slot machines on top of slot machines. You could potentially play forever and not hit what you want to get. The crafting system only takes you so far. CoF looked like it could be a good solution for SSF, but in practice it just gives you more pulls at the slot machine without much guarantee that you'll ever see what you're after. Plus it butts up against the content systems in the game, but more on that later. The thing that most consistently kills my enjoyment with the game is when I play a character and just go a while without upgrading my gear. Between the randomness of the drops and the need to balance out so many cap stats, it can be really hard to make changes to your gear after a point and then you just run up to a wall in progression. Then there are the endgame content systems. Besides being a bit too samey, I think the big problem with them that makes the grind feel worse is that the monolith systems is built in a way that wants you to commit to it a lot, but then there are other necessary rewards in other systems that you kind of have to go to at some point, but it stalls out your main progression mode. To push corruption, which is necessary to get more xp, find better items, and now get to Aberroth, you need to build up one timeline's corruption. But you kind of also need to do the other timelines to get your blessings, and probably more than once since the blessings are another slot machine. This makes it so that if you want to get all the blessings or farm for some specific items, you have to do it at the detriment of progressing corruption. Same thing with going to dungeons or arena. Even within the monolith you pick, because you get more stability and get closer to Shade echoes by bee lining it straight away from the center, the game discourages you from going after reward nodes that you might want but which are out of your way, which kind of defeats the purpose of having those for target farming. Also these seem to only really appear farther away anyway, so often by the time you see some you're probably just going to be resetting anyway. Some of these issues have been made better by the addition of Glyphs of Envy and that corruption catchup mechanic, but it's still not great. Like I said earlier, CoF kind of butts up against this problem with content focus. It sends you all over the place from high corruption content you might not be able to do yet, to doing campaign bosses you have no reason to go back to. Some stuff I can't even do easily because of the campaign skip stuff. I end up not having any act 8 waypoints, so going to do an Architect Liath prophecy would involve wasting a lot of time first just to get there. Same thing with dungeons and arena. If I have a prophecy to go do say, T3 Soulfire Bastion, but I haven't actually been there yet on this character, either because it's new or because it's a legacy character so old it was around before soulfire was there at all, then I have to go unlock the waypoint, then do T1 and T2 before I can even start progress on the prophecy. All this time could have just been used to push corruption and get more xp and higher quality loot on average. Continued in comment:
Continued: As far as the spikey damage and DoTs go, I hate it, but I'm not really sure what to do about it. This is a problem in all of the ARPGs I've played once you go to a high enough level. The issue is these games want to have sustain as a build mechanic, which means players can infinitely sustain through any damage that doesn't kill them. Combine this with players killing most enemies in a second or maybe a few seconds, and now the only way to kill players is through bullshit one shot abilities. If the games were built more around limited resource sustain, then the games could use damage in a way to tax player resources rather than just outright kill them on the spot. But that would be a very different game and I'm not sure if I'd like that any more than this. But it would solve that problem. LE has an added layer to this problem though that I do think they should do something about. As you mention, the way they use DoT damage is just stupid. It's supposed to be damage over time. If it can kill you in less than a second it's not functionally different from a hit, but because of the defensive rules, it bypasses nearly all of the core defenses we have access to. It can't be mitigated by armor aside from getting a handful of mods that partially solve the problem. It can't be blocked, dodged, glancing blow'd, etc. So they use it as a crutch to kill players even when they've built defensively. This patch I played a Shield Bash FG. It was super tanky, but in exchange it's damage was pretty low. Even so, it's the character I have taken further than I ever have before and it crushed echo content without much threat all the way through to like 500+ corruption. I could even just face tank T4 Julra for the whole fight. But run into a DoT puddle? Dead in seconds. And this is with most of the endgame DoT mitigation available. This wasn't really an issue in monos, but Aberroth has a bunch of bulllshit AoE DoTs that just end my character. Even stuff that doesn't look like it should be a DoT, like that big slam he does that you have to run away from, is just a high damage DoT. So my character that I built specifically to be a super tank, that has to spend many times longer than most builds to kill Aberroth, (even excluding the one shot builds) still doesn't get to tank through the most dangerous stuff he does, basically defeating the point of my build. So I spend several minutes slowly working my way through the fight, (phase zero is such a bore because the double harbingers can't actually kill me, but it takes a long time) only to get to the last phase and die in seconds because it takes me so long to get even a little practice in on it. Add on top of this the dumb decision to make the attempts limited by keys that aren't even a guaranteed drop after the first 10 and it was just a really slow and frustrating process trying to beat him. After getting some truely GG items and optimizing my build, I was just barely able to eek out one kill. Since then I've tried the fight several more times and have not managed to kill him again. Meanwhile there are builds that don't even need to do the mechanics because they kill him so fast. If they can kill him so fast he can't do his mechanics, my slow ass build should be able to tank through most if not all of his mechanics with enough gear. Lastly, totally agree on the mechanical clarity. This is the first time I've tried crafting my own builds and it's just confusing as fuck in some places. Lots of mechanics where you just don't know if they even work the way you think they should. As good of a base as they had in early access, my fear is that now that they botched the launch, there might not end up being enough players paying for microtransactions to keep the development going strong. I can't even support them because I play offline and there are no cosmetics. So I worry if they can't right the ship soon these problems will simply never get fixed.
Wow thanks for taking the time to provide all this feedback, I truly hope EHG sees it as well! That evade bug sounds absolutely cursed, I would be pulling my hair out. I agree with so many of your points as well, I was brought to this game from PoE because I was tired of following other people's builds and this was made out to be an accessible yet deep ARPG, the systems were amazing and I could play SSF for the first time and not feel punished (CoF) after being annoyed with trade in PoE. Looking back and becoming aware of just how many bugs were out there in 1.0 I completely agree I think it was rushed out for some reason (the timing was very good tbh, but the game wasn't ready fully). As soon as you remove that "Early Access" badge, your game is put under a microscope, quite literally. The DoT mitigation (or lack thereof) and the vast amount of sources of incoming enemy DoT damage that isn't cleansable is the problem 100% yeah. Would making all of those abilities (outside of the core DoTs WE have access to) hits help? I'm not sure. The limited resource to fight Aberroth (especially if it's not 100% omg I didn't know that) is a bit over the top and merely adds to the already vast grind. Congrats on your Abby kill thought for real that's an achievement not many can say they have this cycle! They still have content and actual game additions (fleshing out end game further) to add but still playing whack-a-mole with bugs and balance. I love EHG, truly, which is why I tried my hardest not to be too negative with this video! I believe in them, I just hope (like you) that they have the business model to support their continued development. It needs more time to bake, but god damn the crust is looking amazing 😂 You can only launch your game once however, getting that hype back takes a lot.
With 1.1, the build on my main character was nerfed in five separate ways. So I wasn't sure what to expect going into 1.1. I beat all of the harbingers easily enough, but had to be careful because they did deal a lot of damage and could quickly kill me if blundered. Died to Aberroth right away and couldn't even really understand what was going on. I think I might have eventually been able to beat that fight, but I was burnt out at the time and after using most of the "harbinger eye" tokens needed to access the fight, I decided that I wouldn't come back to it until I figured out how I might upgrade my build. Still haven't done that. Having some time to think on it, I'm frustrated with the Aberroth fight for five reasons... 1. I think that it is a mistake to lock a boss behind a door that can only be opened with some token earned elsewhere, particularly if dying to the boss consumes the token. My character was doing appreciable damage to Aberroth. So the fight felt viable (I made it through most of the phases), but I have no certainty when it comes to how many attempts it would take me to learn the boss mechanics and actually win. Farming for the tokens feels super grindy, and I'm not even sure where my target is. 10 more tokens? 50 more tokens? 100 more tokens? I have no idea! I wouldn't want to get a lot of practice with the boss, get close to success, then run out of tokens! This sucks. 2. The initial fight against two harbingers is relatively easy, then Aberroth does his whole arena swap and big leap thing. Takes a bunch of time that's spent not fighting him. Boring, especially after losing to him several times in a row. Feels like the game is doling out some petty additional punishment for dying to him, but the punishment is just wasting my time. 3. The first time I fought Aberroth, as soon as I saw him doing some big move that was seemingly pulling the whole galaxy into him or whatever, I immediately transplanted out of it and ran as far as I could, figuring the middle of that sinkhole was going to kill me if I touched it. Turned out that it was the only safe place in the arena and that moving away from it was killing me. Aberroth has A LOT of mechanics, and some of them are counterintuitive. 4. This fight really is a huge spike in difficulty compared to everything else. I went back to pushing corruption on monoliths, but there doesn't seem to be any way to prepare for this fight. I burst down all the T4 dungeon and T4 arena bosses before they have much chance to hurt me. Timeline bosses and Shades of Orobyss go down easily. Harbingers are slightly more dangerous than those, but also fall with little trouble. What's with the giant gap? 5. I don't know who started the trend of ARPG bosses painting the ground with various damaging (or worse yet, one-shot) effects so that the player has to also play a rhythm game while trying to kill the boss. Please stop?
well put together! from the pov of an above average gamer (as well in time as in competitiveness), last epoch hit the spot for me, between diablo and path of exile, and i will re-visit it every time they drop a new cycle. i hope they can evade blunders like those trade bugs and can flesh out the endgame a bit more, i am very optimistic about it indeed. the best thing about that team is that they indeed react to feedback :) cheers
The game and community, their vision for the next great ARPG all of it is literally what prompted me to start this channel 😂 I never had any mal-intent with this video so I sincerely hope it didn't come off that way! I have the utmost confidence in EHG but I'd be beside myself if I didn't voice some frustrations with the game, I thought critically on my main gripes for quite awhile before the writing of this script. Thanks so much for watching ❤️
Got back into the game recently and made it to Aberoth and getting one shot several times, the balance is not there, and feels like the developers just rushed and released an alpha version again. Good potential this game used to have and I feel like they are heading towards the wrong direction, being more grindy and POE like is not the way. I have 12k hours in POE since early release and last epoch used to feel so much more friendly to time poor players and respect of our time. This is no longer the case. Great video, thanks for making it and I can feel your passion for the game.
Nice Video. To answer your question, no I was not able to kill Aberroth. I was following a shadow dagger blade dancer guide and I have pretty good gear. The fight is insane! I tried about 16-18 times and the best I can do is get him to 20% health. After that the screen just gets cluttered with lasers, there so much stuff to avoid it's crazy. I am a normie like you, got 300 hours on this game, but this boss fight is too much for me.
The visual clutter is nuts right!? Shadow Daggers is actually really good from what I've heard so I imagine your time outside of Aberroth was fun? But yeah that fight is just crazy for the average player! Idk I thought I was halfway decent at the game and I got my ass beat 😂
Recently I hit around 100 hours in last epoch and am really digging it. I mostly do HC SSF push as far as I can with no guides. I personally think epoch is great and want to see to change. I have close to 1k hours on poe and still like playing it in rotation.
I loved this video. I have a lot of hope for this game. Maybe the cycle has been a bit short... not that the 3.25 POE announcement helped much either. I'm really looking forward to the cycle where they rework the monoliths, then we can see if the farm and grind will be worth it or not. Keep up the great work!
Hi Delfos! Thanks so much for watching, PoE having their BEST league in quite awhile definitely didn't help 😂 GGG broke their own previous peak concurrent player numbers this league! The base game of Last Epoch is definitely there, EHG just needs more time to cook, I have faith they'll make it right 👍
Quality content here ! well done ! Semi-casual player here, I've beaten aberath after 1 month playing only 1 char. i've worked a lot to min-max my build though. I agree on most points except 1 : I like the pinnacle boss being so hard, the game definitely need a end goal. As for the grind needed to get there, you could tell the same about poe, who can retain more players. the main problem is the lack of content compared to poe. I love this game but it needs more, i'm very hopeful !
Thank you! I agree, I don't want the pinnacle boss to be easy (though ground DoTs are still a bit much), if they balance all of the skills for each class more equally and lessen the margin for error due to unforeseen pitfalls (poorly tuned or bugged skill, unintuitive interactions etc). Keep the difficulty the same, the grind does need some more content diversity and it'll be fine I agree there too, that will just take time and several cycles. I'm hopeful as well that EHG keep innovating and listening to their community!
Early Blizzard and the rise and fall of Star Wars Galaxies are on my list! I would love to take a look at the early early days of Diablo and D2 and I already did one on the founding of Eleventh Hour Games and Last Epoch on my channel if interested! It was the very first video on my channel back in February: ua-cam.com/video/JjVDwChiJdc/v-deo.html Going to dive into the Path of Exile lore leading up to PoE2 though I think for the next several videos :)
I thought of this game as "perfect". Not dumbed down like D4 and not that complicated as PoE where you have to watch hours of material to figure out a build that could do red maps easily with an option for ubers. It turned out the same as you point it out - play by yourself and hit a wall with time expensive do-over for different skills. This makes D4 easy - if skills don't work it's 10 minutes and have new set and try something new that may work, not 100s of hours like in PoE, and it looks like in LE too.
Yeah the unfortunate part is the balance of skills, you don't know whether or not the skill you're picking even has the right amount of damage nodes and damage effectiveness to make it good while others are absolutely busted. Unlike other ARPGs, you're locked into the skills your class and mastery options have, there's no class crossover so you're limited to ~8 usable damage skills on average per class/mastery option and due to that, the balance needs to be a LOT tighter
Really like the game and will keep coming back for seasons. Due to lack of time, played both seasons casually doing 1 character, no alts using guides. Have a few issues including * Moving from normal to empowered monos in that normal is easy but empowered is too hard with some below aspects preventing me from making the jump. * The loot filter is great but needs too much time to learn for casuals. It's also required to play with so many drops. My current build is stuck because I use a premade for my build but see almost no useful drops. It's likely too tight for where I'm at but I don't know where to adjust it. I'd still be playing if I could get some gear and progress to empowered monos. * I play CoF and feel like I spend most of my points rerolling to get an item type I want and often I have to go hunting to fulfill it even with lenses to avoid stuff I don't want to run. Faction levelling still feels slow too. * Trying to target farm specific loot in monos feels bad. I'm in the right mono but often barely find the nodes that I need and are supposed to spawn often in that mono. So yeah casual trying to be a good player till I have time to get into the game more but a few pain points and more friction than there should be in some systems have been holding me back or ending my seasonal play earlier than I want. I still want to go back to my Warlock this season but I feel like I'm just stuck and don't want to do a pointless grind for nothing.
Yeah the grind might get better (or be less noticeable) with more content perhaps? Also I'm starting to wonder if MG might be better than CoF for us casuals to more reliably pick up gear we need (off the bazaar) but I prefer the solo mode 😞 I'll also be returning each cycle to try out changes EHG makes, I want this game to be great!
Mana management is a big issue for many skills/builds that I would love to try out. If EHG decided to make mana restoration better, that would help a bunch
I have played a self made void knight build and I've stopped two days ago after getting some echoes to lvl 100. Bosses had one shot abilities for a while now but after the level 100 echoes random mobs started to regularly one shot me too and I haven't found any fitting gear for hours at that point so I stopped and started playing poe with a guide now since I never really got into it. Also leveling feels way to slow for me after reaching the echoes. I really hope they fix those problems because I really like last epoch it's the first arpg where I finished the story.
During 1.0, I was in Mike's dev stream and asked whether, in light of the dupes and bugs they planned to change their approach to testing. He laughed and said "No", like it was a stupid question. That was the beginning of the end of my interest in Last Epoch. Played 1.1 a bit, but then Settlers of Kalgurr brought relief.
Feelsbad, yeah their next league has to be insane to maintain relevance and the close to November they release 1.2, the worse off the cycle retention will be once PoE2 launches
@@GavrynGaming yeah, i have faith in this company somehow, for the points you outlined in your (solid) video. Well made, hats off. I can learn a thing or two from you about making vids for my own channel (centered around warframe, but considering making game reviews... just about to pass 1k subs, i wonder if you'd partner up on a project ? maybe something similar when 1.2 rolls around).
For me, all they have to do is create a system where the player can much more easily visualize the gear upgrade path and also where to go/what activities to do to get that gear. The COF and Merchants guild are amazing but I think they need to do more. I just want to say it again though about COF and Merchants guild. Those systems are really cool. I love how they work.
I agree with most of what you said but I want to add some suggestions 1. EHG has to add options to tone down visual effects on the screen. Sometimes there's just too much going on on screen that you loose focus. Part of what excited me about POE2 is that the devs had reduced visual clutter on screen 2. EHG should work on fixing bugs that are reported as fast as possible 3. EHG should add an info death screen which shows what attack killed you and the damage it caused to make planning for Pinnacle boss easier. 3. Just buff some lower level skills. Not every rpg needs to be like WOW where every build and skill is good but EHG should just buff some lower level skills to make levelling easier. EHG should learn from POE, D2, Titan Quest & Grim Dawn and make more fun end game activities. In my opinion Last Epoch is a good game at its core (the offline campaign mode is really appreciated) , it just has some issues to fix but I have more faith in EHG to work on those issues than in Blizzard
I agree, the skeleton of the game is really good, a solid foundation to build onto and really make this game stand out in the genre (it already is in a lot of ways). I have faith EHG can pull it off as well!
I played blindly, actually by recommendation by many UA-camrs. Which I was excited for. Played a sorcerer build and switched my skills up as I went. I didn’t even make it to empowered mono. By the time I was that far, my build was falling off and I had to then use a guide for fireball sorcerer. The endgame was ok, but by that time of “the grind” I ended up playing POE for my first time. That game is an entirely different animal. Holy shit you have to spend equal time studying mechanics as playing the game. But I’m back again to last epoch to try a Void Knight after hitting a wall with a POE build. It’s a good game, because I didn’t go back to Diablo 4 as the next choice.
I know it's a meme to say "D4 bad", but Diablo 4 also ate into Last Epoch's numbers. ARPG's are in a good place when three games are concurrently improving. Last Epoch gets so much right that the other two continue to not address. The foundation of Last Epoch is solid, it just keeps a compelling endgame hook and flesh out its story so it isn't such a disjointed mess.
The Loot Reborn patch did seem fairly healthy yeah with an xpac soon (paid but maybe solid I'm not up to date on Diablo) The foundation and "core" of Last Epoch is SO damn good and a lot of their systems are genius (crafting, loot filter, Nemesis now etc). More endgame, a finished story, better balance and further additions are all needed for sure! I feel like EHG is still plaything catchup to the other titans in the genre, as long as they can sustain until then and maintain community trust.
Solid video, I agree. I love this game I need more of it and in a manor that keeps me playing. I lasted barely I week in 1.1 despite my hype for it. Maybe timing of 3.25?
I played from the official launch, until my ice treant build was unable to progress. I needed some uniques to drop, and I don't even know if I was at a level that they would start appearing. Also, I found that the treant/totem style of character was HIGHLY discouraged by game mechanics... the "ground is LAVA!" mechanic is EVERYWHERE, and without a movement skill, and with reduced movement speed (because I didn't like the movement options available to me), made a lot of encounters, especially bosses, exercises in frustration. I may have played longer if the game was either optimized better to accommodate lower end PCs or I get enough money to upgrade my computer (my gaming laptop was good when I bought it within 5yrs... but I don't have a good graphics card in this thing according to today's standards.) So, it took WAY too long to load up the game (once I was IN the game, it ran fine... though loading between maps was another elevator wait.) (I don't have expendable income at the moment, so that's next year's tax refund at the earliest.) The updates in 1.1 looked good, but not enough for me to start an entire grind over again for a new character. I'm FAR more likely to continue playing characters I already created, in the NON-LEAGUE area of the game. I'm not a fan of creating characters for new leagues... I like perfecting single character builds at a time (in PoE, before I quit for good, I was the same way.)
We have the game for the entirety of its life and development so that's one huge positive for Last Epoch! I hope they can continue to thoroughly improve the game from optimization to skills/balance/bugs etc. I think they have a lot of players waiting for the right patch to return. I wish you luck on a nice PC/Laptop in the future!!
@@GavrynGaming only if they added some real endgame content and better high tier loot drop options. I like minmaxing but the endgame loop and just lame LP drop rates / options to make stuff the best it can be just got old and boring. Also builds just feel meh, like there’s so much that underperforms and they just ignore it.
Last Epoch has a lot of potential to be the best middle point between POE and D4. With a few more cycles worth of content I think it’ll really find its footing.
I'm really hopeful as well. I'd have to find the exact quote or clip but Judd or Mike or both have stated that 1.3 will be the sweet spot for content additions and game state. I just had to get this out there because I know EHG is listening! Thanks a lot for watching 🙏
@@GavrynGaming games like this take years of iteration, feedback, and experimentation to come into their own. EHG has proven to me that they listen to feedback and they are passionate about making a great arpg so I am excited to add this game to my seasonal rotation and see how it evolves over time.
Agreed, I really feel like the vast majority of builds are suffering due to bugs or hidden interaction cancelling, I try to do the math on my builds and just become really surprised at how little damage I do in between builds to the same enemy. Also this game is way too overwhelming when it comes to the AoE of bosses, I play online with friends and have a 50ms latency, and as a melee it is just way too hard to dodge or sometimes I even find myself cornered and have no way to escape with the unbelivable amount of aoe bosses put out.
Man, I bought this game at launch and have played it for about two hours. I was just wondering if it was any good, and yours was the first video I watched. Thanks. I think I'll fire it up.
PoE1 I highly suggest a build guide, it's really difficult to get a feel for how to build a successful character on your own at this stage. PoE2, I'm going in blind!! Most importantly, enjoy this great game :)
I like EHG and think they’ve achieved something amazing for such a small team. However the game never clicked with me and I don’t really know why. The foundation is pretty good but I get bored after a week or two. I have about 10K hours in PoE and I last two months every league before getting bored. Maybe LE just need more content, but then again I only experienced a fraction of 1.1 and still got bored after 10 days or so. I wish I could fall in love with the game. EHG is a great team of passionate people and I really want to support them, but it’s hard to justify doing so when I play as little as I do. I’m cautiously optimistic about the 1.3 patch. It sounds like it could bring me back to LE and hopefully keep me playing.
Yeah I sincerely hope their continued development brings the game up to the standard we all know the game can be, I'm a big fan of the company as well!
i agree with you 100%, still love the game and have alot of fun. But have like 5 sentinells that i stopped playing around 200 corruption since my own build just got bricked at that point. And copying some pro build just feels like soulless playing
Thanks a ton for watching and taking the time to respond! 100% agree, if we wanted another Path of Exile and Path of Building esque build creation, we have that already. Last Epoch's true strength is in its accessibility and opportunity to succeed on your own!
Yeah super unlucky! Frozen was still leveling so he didn't have 100% crit mitigation or avoidance 😔 he goes over it in more detail and how it's very spikey due to the wide damage ranges that exist, even non-crits, endurance helps slightly to provide that low HP buffer but that doesn't help against DoTs or 1 shots.
I think the 1.2 update should focus on new skills, perhaps a new class, idol rework, set rework and buffing some (since they cant carry LPs) the factions non mutually exclusive as it makes no sense for non hardcore players perhaps introduce item fusion to make use of like 1000 of the same uniques forming a lp unique or improving one. Making the coin system more beneficial wheras it wont be used only for lightless arbor and the market/trade system. And some more damage conversions for skills to improve replayability.
This was like reverse PoE for me. I was in the closed tests for PoE and had early access for Last Epoch since it became available. I'm just a stupid player so I have no idea where they should go, but I had measured expectations and even they have not been met. Hopefully they find some footing down the line!
One major omission from that timeline was how popular D4 S4 launch was and how unpopular Necropolis was. Loot Reborn was very well received in D4 and still had high player retention a month after. S5 has been good as well and the first expansion isn't far off. Necropolis was one of POE's least popular leagues and had very low player retention in that time frame. POE did recover with their current league with the highest numbers they have seen yet. And of course POE2 is going to blow it up when that game finally launches. LE is going to have a tough time competing regardless of what they do because casuals and new players are D4's audience and POE is for the audience that hates D4 and wants a more deep, complex game.
@@ktanner3 Thanks for the clarity! I played D4 for the first season and completely bounced off so I'm definitely not as in the know with that game. I have heard the buzz of Loot Reborn and S5 though so you're definitely not wrong, D4 is siphoning off players as well and even I might give it another go now that it seems more respectful of your time! Does D4 publicize their number anywhere? That would be useful info to have for future videos potentially! Steamdb charts for Path of Exile is slightly skewed as well, most players use the PoE client to launch/play the game so only a percentage of their playerbase is on steam (and no one knows what percentage). But I agree with you 100%, the competition in the market is getting fierce and timing is everything with each patch!
My only gripe with the game is that the skills felt light weight. The sound and visual design for PoE and Diablo are meaty and damn satisfying. It might be a superficial complaint, but Last Epoch feels extremely "floaty" to me
Great video. The build 'bait' that you describe when finally reaching empowered is the reason I've stepped away from this game. There is no difficulty curve at all between normal and empowered monos.
Im slowly getting worried about progress and updates of the game but Im generally positive about the game and Im having fun even though not as much as I wish too. Im mostly waiting for some monolith changes so they are not as tedious as they are right now. I enjoy the campaign, different builds up to lvl 85ish, crafting equips and thats pretty much it. Less demanding PoE as I would say.
I view Last Epoch as the bridge between Diablo and Path of exile, and I find this middle ground an excellent balance. I find the game very enjoyable to begin with. The music is excellent and the scenery is immersive. I had fun during the campaign. The item system is incredible. i found COF fun to work towards. My biggest issue is the endgame system. This cycle, I killed my first two harbingers and saw the amount of corruption and grind I needed for the next one. I instantly quit right after. Monoliths are dry. The game play for me is rush through the instance until the objective spawns. Arena monoliths are awful. This makes the grind for corruption harder to work towards. I cant see myself coming back until monoliths are changed. Hunting for a build-enabling item helped me play through these negatives however. It helped having a goal to work towards. I could see myself doing the same for other potential characters, or building a character around the new rare item that dropped whilst I was hunting another item. I would like to see a challenge made by EHG for completing a certain level of content on X number of classes for a handsome reward (e.g cosmetic). This would help enhance the end game grind with there not being much to do at the moment. I feel this is very well done with Path of Exiles challenge systems, where completing them is difficult but rewarding.
killed abaroth, was a good challange and was fun to create builds for. did it on both Falconer and sorcerer. falconer on my own created build, which was tough but doable (ligthning shuriken) and on a meta build as sorcerer. which was significantly easier.
Biggest problem with dot is it forces you to build you defense in one very specific way-armor stacking armor plus hp/ward. Almost all my builds mindless run eternal gloves + armor applies to dot prefix lol. And I don’t think it’s that hard of an issue to fix, just make ailments the only source of dot damage and turn all current dot skills into hit skills that apply a bunch of ailments on hit. In the meantime, you can nerf the ailment cleansing a bit so dot doesn’t get completely trivialized.
Yeah DoT it became even more of a detriment in my eyes when I realized "Oh... these fire dogs and ice wolves breathing on me is a DoT too..." among MANY more enemy skills like that. There's too many DoT sources and not enough mitigation you hit the nail on the head that's the biggest issue right now. I agree, if abilities should be counted as hits and properly mitigated that would make them feel a lot less punishing!
@@GavrynGaming the game really could use a test server to try out some different ways of balancing things. They also don’t need as many mid season bug fixing if players can find out those bugged interactions before hand. But maybe the player base is not large enough to justify one
@@rayzhang7591 They do have a closed PTR where community testers under NDA and employees of EHG test the game fully. The issue is some of these bugs have existed for awhile and have been reported. The list is just lengthy to hammer out and new patches introduce new ones or break old ones that were fixed etc. It's whack-a-mole right now 😅
I totally agree with most points except your outlook. LE embodies everything that’s wrong with ARPGs. 1. The base game is irrelevant, all that counts is the endgames but it’s repetitive as hell. The campaign was by far the worst story in an ARPG I’ve ever played. So I doubt EHG’s ability to make creative and engaging endgame content. 2. The eternal grind for better gear so you can farm better gear. I remember when people complained about dailies in MMOs, but LE is doing nothing but dailies without calling them that. 3. The illusion of build choices. There will always be metas and builds that suck balls. 4. Content for content creators. You‘re a casual? Well, too bad. The content creators complained that the game is too easy, so we have to please them or they won’t promote the game anymore. So, no, I don’t think they will fix these issues. After five years of development they still have to figure out
@@timbier4523 Time will tell for sure whether or not they can right the ship! I appreciate all the feedback here, I hope they see it! What ARPG/game has you hooked right now?
1. There will always be parts of any game that become irrelivant ... that isnt an arpg problem thats a gaming problem 2. I mean your playing an arpg, the gear treadmill is to be expected ... the best part about LE over any rpg is that getting early/midgame gear isnt a slog ... endgame gear being a slog is fine because its mostly just flexing at that point (expecially with nemesis rn its super pog) 3. At least the nonmeta alternatives are still actually competent ... in poe thats supposed to be the peak of arpg gaming most skills are just abandonware 4. content creators being content creators kekw
I'll preface by saying that I have 1.8k hours and played since 0.8.1. I agree with most things, especially regarding skill and class balance. The only thing I took issue with is the Abberoth difficulty. It is the kind of content that has been missing the most imo (I killed him with homebrew+CoF on VK and Spellblade before starting 3.25). Fun fight, imo. How many people have killed it doesn't feel relevant (Unless it is extremely low like ~0.5%, remember only ~2% of PoE players have killed Maven on steam). I think the system "feels bad", just like many LE systems, because it is empty/not fleshed out. PoE has 7 (more if you count Cortex, infinite hunger/blackstar) non-uber pinnacle fights, and ppl can feel satisfied with not getting all of them. Once LE has some kind of equivalent to quest Eater/Exarch or a choice between bosses, it will feel a lot better. The grind of getting to there might need adjusting but I'd need to try it more times before I could agree or disagree. tldr: Good video. Abberoth is not too hard, there is just not enough content so the gap gets jarring. (I'm also very hopeful for the future)
@@johlargames Thanks so much for watching and the kind words! Yeah I think that's the crux of the issue, they need more content, more time to cook and more time to flesh out their systems. On top of all of that, bug fixes and balance changes/reworks for classes/masteries/uniques is critical to allow for actual build diversity and to re-establish trust with people like me and others who aren't sure if the build they've put together is bad because it's undertuned or bugged or it's just bad lol. With set classes and set skills for each class/mastery compared to path of exile with over a thousand skills that you can choose from and any class can use literally any of those 1k+ skills. The skills in LE need to be balanced better for this reason primarily and given the proper skill (player skill and performance)/investment, any skill should be able to kill Aberroth NOT any player, any skill. I'd love to see the Marksman that kills Abby with Flurry or Cinderstrike right now 😅 This is way more rigid of a skill system and having only 2-3 good skills per class to choose from just feels too limiting. They have the knobs to adjust/balance them properly (skill trees and passive trees), it'll just take time. I hope they have the sustainability and profitable player counts to allow them that time!
@@GavrynGaming Yeah, the number of subpar skills is just way too high, and the only way to not fall for one of those "traps" is time investment. I don't I agree on only 2-3 good skills per class, I'd say roughly 5 garbage skills per class (i.e Frost Claw and Static Orb being super-giga-strong doesn't mean that ALL the other mage skills are bad). Rogue is probably in the worst spot in regards to this, so if the bulk of your playtime lies there, I get it. Depends what the criteria is I guess. Atleast it is moving in the right direction, cause it was way worse overall in past patches. Aberroth kinda highlights the problem too since it is much more of a "hard stop" than a random, arbitrary corruption number. Hopefully they get into a good groove and speed up a bit cause if they fix ~5 skills per patch, it's going to take like 5+ cycles to get there which would be like ~18months :/
I played the game a lot during Early Access (almost 400 hours), and i think the game has so much potential that is being squandered. Unfortunately it still does not feel like the devs really know what direction to take the game, and their update cadence is so slow. I know their team is much smaller than their contemporaries but it's difficult to get excited for this game when the same issues that have been there since Early Access are STILL present.
I agree wholeheartedly! The base game is amazing. It is indeed early and I hope the next few cycles are bangers and a lot of the issues (mostly balance and bugs) are addressed!
When the hp/mana bar over player option was bugged for 3 months I gave up after reporting bug and posting about it on the forums with no reply or any indication that they were gonna fix it, by the time it came around I was already done.
Has EHG fixed how sludgy melee combat is yet? The thing that happens if you're trying to scoot around mobs slowing you down to like 10-20% of your normal movement speed because you're colliding with them.
No unfortunately, melee is not only punished heavily and often undertuned, the collision still exists, you can see it a bit in this video actually when I'm fighting Argentus (big bird dude lol) trying to rotate around him.
@@GavrynGaming Oof yeah that is the biggest factor keeping me away from last epoch at the moment. Nothing feels worse than believing you were perfectly capable of dodging an attack or avoiding getting trapped only to get told by the game engine "nah you were trying to move AROUND that guy? Get fucked."
@@CheezitNinja Add to that the lack of precision that you'd have with WASD (I'm an MMORPG guy originally) and yeah it feels pretty bad to try and position for some of these mechanics, melee is too heavily punished in most games sadly.
I'll just add to this. I was a MASSIVE melee player. Most of my characters that are self-made were melee based. 1.1 brought the Evade mechanic. I was originally a skeptic, but this one simple mechanism did SO much for melee style play it was fantastic. Melee is still definitely much harder (as many who've already commented) but my FG for season 1.1 was so much melee fun to play.
Nemesis? Yeah it should be every echo I agree! They have already upped the spawn rate earlier on in the cycle but it still feels intermittent to find with how big some of the echo map tilesets are.
I'm a casual, 70 hours in 1.1, 200 in total. I've killed two harbingers. Love the game will keep coming back to it. But I just wanna know how i died in 0.1 seconds. Give me more (all) data and let me figure out how to solve the problem. I think this would improve the game substantially and solving the problem would mean crafting. Which is LE's greatest strengths. Not sure how... maybe death log stating what happened in the last 1-2 seconds... Got no idea how much data this, just an idea.
i was in anger with last epoch because they removed the offline game mode when online came to it and i loved playing it on my Steam Deck. Now that the real offline mode is back it is with Grim dawn one of the best ARPGs for solo/Offline play.
They literally nerfed ward badly and gave it to monsters to make them stronger But nothing's worse than their trash RNG system, you can waste days grinding for the jtem u want and later u get a horrible slam which makes it useless Luckily i kept 1.0 game files and i can still play it with some tools to get all 4LP and all T7 skills to avoid trash RNG
Yeah over the last 2 cycles I've learned if I want to experiment, I should just go Merchant's Guild to buy all the gear I need/want for a new build I want to try. CoF isn't meant to compete with a full player economy, but it might still need some adjustments!
@@GavrynGaming yeah on 1.0 i was COF until lvl 100 then switch to MG, u can basically get any common unique 0LP for free to run your build, it was better than COF but u have to grind for rare item which will come eventually then sell them so u can effort better stuff (MG most valuable items to sell loot filter will help tons) These days i play offline with a mod to force drop any unique with 4LP directly to avoid RNG drama
I think it's fine that a build a new player puts together might not be able to kill the pinnacle boss. A casual player probably just wants to play a new build, put together whatever they want, then be able to play a good chunk of the game and then maybe give up before they even hit 100.
That's completely fine if that's how they enjoy playing the game! My core issue in that section was the false sense of build diversity given off with the imbalanced skills/uniques/masteries and plethora of bugs that are detrimental to your experience (they don't work or are completely undertuned). That's a pitfall that's completely out of the player's control and feels bad, to everyone trying to experiment and have fun, not just casual players.
the problem is in PoE just putting something together most of the time cant even clear act 5 ... and definately wont get very far into maps when it does ... thats nowhere near pinnacle bosses
It might sound braindead and false at first, but I can confidently say that the impact of seasonal cosmetic rewards is something that drives the players through the grind with more enthusiasm. Even when I beat all the pinnacle bosses in POE and feel a bit burned out , knowing that there's something to achieve and do, something nice that you can keep as a souvenir just makes me stay a lot longer than I otherwise would. When I played Last Epoch (this season for my first time ever), I had a lot of fun, but once I started hunting the Harbingers and the first burnout started kicking in, I didn't feel like there was an actual reason to stay and do it. I have had my fun and that was it. Waiting for the next one.
Very interesting thought, I don't think it's braindead at all! Having the achievements and additional extrinsic reward is just that extra oomph to stick around once you've completed the content and fun as well! I got the same feeling of "why am I continuing to grind" at many points throughout monos but I pushed through to at least see Aberroth. I hope EHG can find something like this as well as more endgame and balance etc. They're still in their infancy technically
Truth be told i didnt kill Aberoth yet and thats because i havent even killed the Harbingers yet. In 1.0 i got past 300 corruption with ease with multiple builds and i would do so now aswell however i dont wanna play builds i already played and as you said some build will fail by default. And by now i am exhausted. I will maybe try like 1 more build i come up with and then call it a day till 1.2 The Harbingers and Pinacle Boss didnt make that much of a difference its still pretty much 1.1 just with extra Bosses. Thats also high likely why the player count is so smal because many people feel like the difference between 1.1 and 1.2 is minimalistic and they get burned out before even reaching the Pinacle Boss.
I got to the tenth harbinger before my build bricked and felt all my efforts became worthless. I jumped out of the game but would return if the plethora of skills became meaningful.
With the limited amount of abilities to play with when you choose a class (unlike other ARPGs where any class can use any skill), the balance needs to be a lot tighter and the bugs need addressed permanently. Until then yeah it'll just feel like you're spinning the wheel with your class and skill choice before you even begin. When you cruise through the entirety of the game and your build fails like that when it finally meets a challenge just takes all the wind out of your sails.
What keeps me playing a arpgs is what us exiles call t0 unique unique items that only the upper echelon of exiles well get their hands on for instance i have a mageblood awakened lvl 6 multistrike i have a perfect katabasis claw. These are types of things that keep me playing.
there's items in LE that are way rarer than a mirror, let alone a T0, but they are just LP versions of very achievable unique items which doesn't sound impressive or that rare at first glance. In PoE rare stuff is more defined and clear
@@davidduarte1269 good sir go back to your game that came out this year I'll continue playing mine that came out 15 years ago with more depth than your mother's pu....
the problem with most casual builds is they don't consider enough of the item pool to achieve greatness. if we tune down content to suit people that don't understand the loot pool enough then choices don't matter because all of them end up the same. there is no reason to play this or that or pick this choice because it all results in the same thing. this gameplay loop doesn't reward players for finding strong synergies either through gear or skill trees.
Thanks a lot for watching! I agree, I don't want the content tuned down to suit bad builds, at all. My core point in that section was that you shouldn't be setup for failure just by picking X or Y skill. Take the powerlevel of Cinderstrike vs Frostclaw right now. There are some skills and uniques that are just complete duds with no options to scale them appropriately or pivot (nothing will make Cinderstrike very good, especially in pinnacle content) and as a new player that's a pitfall you shouldn't find yourself in if you're putting in the time to read the tooltips/game guide and understand the game. You shouldn't have to be aware of every potential item/combo and be considering every affix pool as well as know every bug/balance issue with every skill in order to build out a mildly successful build yourself. Don't make the game easy, make the ability to craft your own build and actually play with every skill/unique a possibility given the proper operator and build/combo. If they want to bring in new players and actually keep them, these frustrations need addressed for sure.
Precisely this. If EHG let us respec masteries that'd be a literal perfection of a game. If you're really efficient with your time and learned the game to a certain degree you can kill Abberoth in less than a day - even if you have 3 wives, 12 kids and several jobs you can probably manage that much in a span of a cycle. Just more things to look forward to.
My biggest frustration is how in pre access it ran 10x better on my Steamdeck than it does since the official release. It almost never lets me play for longer than 20 minutes before crashing my entire steamdeck
They made a lot of visual updates and improvements to the game in 1.0 so that tracks perfectly sadly. I don't have a steam deck but this game would be REALLY good for it, I hope they improve the performance.
I don't entirely agree with you. Accessibility does not mean anyone can clear all of the new content with any build. This would lead to a boring game with no real achievements. Why would I care if I killed the pinnacle boss when anyone can do it? The fact that you made a build on your own that cleared everything except for the pinnacle boss is an achievement on its own and speaks for the accessibility of the game. If a casual player wants to put together a build on their own then that is perfectly fine and they will likely make it to empowered monoliths with a coordinated build, however, that casual player cannot expect to be able to complete high endgame content just because they think their build is good enough. There has to be some content in the game reserved for people that want to put in the time and effort to optimize their builds to complete.
I 100% agree with you and we're fighting the same fight here! I'm not asking for the game to be easy or for anyone that logs in regardless of skill level to be able to throw a build together with zero thought and down Aberroth. By accessibility I meant every skill should be balanced as evenly as possible to allow for the possibility for any skill/mastery to succeed given the right operator and build idea. Right now for example if you have 2 players and new player A that picks sorcerer and new player B that picks marksman with zero outside information and equal skill level and RPG experience, those 2 players will have wildly opposite experiences in the late game all due to the class they chose when they first booted up the game, an unforeseen pitfall. That to me isn't an accessible/equal opportunity for new players and it's no fault of the player. The bugs need fixed, skills and uniques need appropriate balance and when possible reworks to modernize the 2-3+ year old skills and masteries, otherwise the new player and by extension the casual/average player experience is skewed. Anyone not in the know (through external resources) or deeply enfranchised in the game (which is the bulk of any playerbase today), will be potentially setup for failure as the skills and balance stands right now. The example I've been using is Cinderstrike vs Frostclaw as they stand.
I'm hopeful for patch 1.2! Did you agree or disagree with any of my frustrations with the game?
agree!
looking forward to broad reworks of skills and class talents,
so that we can actually play them.
also they need to simplify / condense the itemisation a bit, especially because we get so much random loot for ALL classes, instead of our own.
@@CatalysedCat Agree on the skills, disagree on the itemisation. The fact that 99,9% of loot is for class/mastery you are playing in other arpgs is in my opinion limiting and you don't get that good experience when you are playing one class and something drops and you are: Wow, now is time to try some new build with different class. It was the same in Diablo 2 and in my opinion one of reasons why it was such great game. In D3 and D4 totally missing and I am glad that LE has it. But maybe I don't mind that because I like to play and optimize/color code my loot filters and instead of loot simplification I would rather have more in depth options (and more colors/highlighting options) for loot filter.
Completely disagree. The grind and hopelessly powerful enemies are what makes games like this fun. If you do not like that then you are not a fan of this genre. Diablo 2 was the last good game of this genre. Diablo 3 sucked, this is why i refused to play diablo 4 or diablo 2 resurrected. It was way too easy, throw diablo 3 in the trash. Your complaints are probably why i will go buy this game.
@@freedommaverick8171 Thanks for watching, consider buying it from my Nexus store: www.nexus.gg/gav
It's a fantastic game, with a few solid patches it will be even better :)
@@freedommaverick8171 hey, i have no objection to the difficulty, that's the only reason i play the game, i like dark souls type games, and how this and the 1.1 content has new versions of that,
My current grip is the actual itemisation system being annoying to work around, and even with all the empowered monolith loot buffs, it still feels like 75% of loot that drops is for other classes.
This is someone with level 100, reaching 500 corruption and slaying all harbingers & Aberroth.
my comment(s) were directed to the fact that i want to play the actual game, not get stuck behind configuring inventory, loot filters, and sorting through crafting for what feels like equal amounts of time to fighting e.t.c, and if you try to skip configuring stats, you are left being powerless.
In essence I'm agreeing with the author of the video talking about ACESSIBILITY.
I agree with 98% of what you said. False build diversity, spiky damage and slow updates is what is killing my enjoyment from game right now.
They'll get more agile I'm sure but the competition is heating up in the ARPG genre!
@@GavrynGaming PoE 2 is around the corner and even D4 is more appealing to casuals. I hope for best!
@@wojciechgiza9277 Agreed, and PoE2 is putting in a LOT of legwork on the tutorialization and new player experience!
there is at least 3-4 builds for each class to kill the new boss. has way more variety than d4 trash
@@addictedplayer4453 D4 is not good baseline to compare 🤣
I think what put me off the game is actually an unpopular opinion.. I don't think items matters much before you hit the late late end game, progression feels like slug for the majority of the play through, and when I get to where it begins to matter, I'm already pretty burned out
It's quite a grind and I agree! Not much matters until empowered monoliths 😞
@@GavrynGaming yeah, I don't mind the grind, I just want to feel the progression :)
Path of exile is a good example, knowing how to craft gear works at every level, and finding an early 3-4 link can completely change your gameplay early on.. Getting life and resistances actually matter aswell, or getting a +1 minion or +1 fire gem on a raging spirit character and so on.. While it changes a bit in last epoch, it doesn't nearly have the same impact and therefor it doesn't feel exciting for me
I agree totally
@@Vradica PoE still sucks.
@@_Shadoh_ objectively false. Just say you aren't smart enough to appreciate it :P
OMG you are so spot on 19:20. I'm not a casual player, I've sunk hours in this game and it's so difficult to try again after my build proved not to be strong enough, it's soul crushing. Thank you for this video, awesome work.
Another great video!
One of my biggest gripes with the game is that early respec costs such a long time to level back up, but late game respec would be maxed in a single map. That's really backward cuz usually new players would love to experiment and change skills around all the time. Also the devs have a lot to catch up with games like PoE. I've been playing the new league and there's so much content compared to LE. I understand PoE has been developed for much longer but LE still feels unfinished (story, skills, endgame content)
@@thenguyen5396 Thanks!! Yeah 100% they have a lot of work to do with LE, I trust they're up to the task though for sure!
Glad you're enjoying PoE, I'll be checking out PoE2 when it's out without a doubt!
I started the game with 1.1, I've done a Forge Guard as my first character playing mostly blind, and my build was not good enough to pass the Monolith with Lagon, not enough DPS and i got one shot by multiple abilities from the boss.
Then I started a new character with the Frost Claw sorcerer, nice build, but to be able to really push corruption, it require to many hours to build the stuff for me, and now playing a trap marksman, but I don't think I will have the will to push all the way to the Harbinger.
Most annoying thing for me is Glyph and Rune to pick up, it should be like gold, auto pickup directly in the crafting stash. Some rules to sort the chest automatically would also be nice.
Thanks for watching and sharing! Saving that extra click or two for crafting materials would definitely be nice, there's rarely an instance you leave them on the ground 💯
This is been discussed by many n EHG mentioned coming future patch will change the shards , runes n glyphs would be auto picked n straight to forgery without clicking again
Commenting for the algorithm - you make excellent videos man, keep it up!
That means a lot as a new guy to YT for real thank you 🙏
Great Video.
I agree on your point about skill balance to avoid new players setup themselves up for complete failure. However when you state ''a new player should be able to piece together a succesful build on any class with any skill'', while i agree on paper, my biggest fear is that it would come at the cost of trivialized progression and content. Buffing/reworking some skills and masteries is crucial, but it should still take time, learning, failing and experimentation to piece up a succesful build: its what makes these types of game fun and enjoyable in my opinion.
Thanks so much for watching! I mostly just meant that the skills and masteries should be balanced in such a way that you can make "anything" work given enough commitment to building it out, further understanding of the game as you play more etc. That's definitely not how it is right now which will just take time to sort out.
The gameplay loop of iteration and experimentation for sure needs to remain intact but you shouldn't be setup for failure from the get-go just by choosing Cinder Strike or insert any other underwhelming skill. The ability to stumble into these pitfalls is too great and the "experimentation" aspect takes too long.
You aren't really limit testing a build until you're in empowered monos or beyond which is the latter half of spinning up a character. There's not much if any difficulty in the campaign or normal monos which basically just strings along a bad build lol
I share the frustration. As someone who had 200+ hours from early access times, I feel like I understand the game mechanics well enough. So I went with self made build, making choices that "made sense" to me (using things that should work together well). Breezed through the normal monos and first few harbingers, but around 200-250 corruption the build just bricked. Apart from finding things with 3LP, there were no more improvements to be made... I either had to toss it in the garbage and start a new character or look up a "pro" build. Considering the time constraints I ended up copying a build off a website. Got me unstuck, yes, but its much much less fun now.
I usually like to make builds because some unique item that looks cool, the fact so many skills are non-viable results in a situation where a seemingly build-defining unique item can essentially lead you into a trap...
Wow I found myself nodding in agreement to literally every sentence you've written here! I've looked and compared on LE Tools to get ideas or see if what I'm doing is correct etc and I like you felt my knowledge of the game was solid. I had been self-crafting builds since I started playing (I love RPGs). But yeah at a point even a well crafted build can just fall apart and it might not even be fixable, it's completely out of your control, because the skill is detrimentally bugged or bad (undertuned or needs reworked entirely). It feels like a trap. Like it's an ARPG, not every build will work or be 100% viable I get that. But every skill and mastery should at least have a shot or a pivot option. If you pick Marksman and Flurry or Cinderstrike, you're toast, you're gonna have a bad time 😂
That is the same issue in PoE, btw. If u making a build and turn out it not good, you gonna throw it in the dumpster.
@@deathblowcoL It's one of the reasons I stepped away from PoE until PoE2. You couldn't be very creative and were nearly required to follow if you wanted to do the end-game content without hindering yourself. That and the fact that in PoE respeccing is costly so you're even more disincentivized for experimenting.
@@GavrynGaming Same here. The process for me is - try build on my own - get to around 200-300 corruption and find out if it works (so far 2 out of aproximately 25did) if not try to find something simillar on internet - if there is something, maybe it was only missing unique i didn't find yet, maybe I didn't see some pasive or skill combination which gets it through the roof, sometimes it is just sad realising that primalist is outdated and most builds just wont work for him no matter what ... if build can be fixed next step is gettiing it to work and finding missing pieces during which I usually drop something that makes me think: Wow this item seems really cool for this class and this skill, lets try it and going back to new build. I have around 700 hours from beta and only around 100 in newest cycle (didn't have time) now going for harbringer number 6 if I can keep myself from creating new alts and focus on one character and progressing.
@@ondrejmaly7337 2 out of 25!? My god you're relentless lol I love it. Yeah it's hard to fully trust the tooltips and interactions right now with the amount of things to avoid (undertuned skills, bugs, poor interactions etc) it's difficult to feel like you're even being creative 😂
thank you for your insight!
as a longtime D2/D2:R/PoE/Titan quest player, last epoch for me sits just at the right spot. a new league with interesting mechanics in PoE i will always try out,play it intensively for 2 weeks and get burned because the sheer amount of stuff you can do (but really need to know the mechanics for them to make a profit...looking at you crafting system)
i usually then go back to D2:R,its got (offline) mod support at this stage and nothing really hits like a good few hrs session in sanctuary.
bought LE yesterday after eyeing the game for quite a while...and i love it. i have yet to reach endgame content but from what i have seen so far iam excited to add LE to the games i will come back to. especially now knowing that EHG listens to community feedback.
a sub well earned :)
It's definitely a great game foundationally and EHG is always listening! They just need time to make it even better
This video is so well done! Keep it up! 🎮
glad to see google recognizes "hobo oil" as jojoba oil. I would've been confused otherwise
Nicely done as always, mate. You already know my thoughts.
Cheers for all the help 🍻
Really good vid. Agree with the gripes. Especially hitting that wall around 300. I've done homemade builds only but very much hit a hard wall around 300. You hit a lot of good points
Excellent video.
Yes, most of your points resonated with me. I didn’t down Abberoth, only ONE harbinger and I played…a lot.
I am optimistic about the future of LE, however, it needs to bring in new players. As PoE2 enters the scene, it’ll battle not only with poe/d4, but that game…and that’ll be hard to match, truly.
@@TalkativeTri 100% the market is as competitive as ever! Thanks so much for watching Tri it means a lot man
If you wanted help with them I could but only to a certain point as I've only taken 7 or 8 of them I think. I'm in the OCE region (Australia) so ping could be an issue though but not too big of a deal.
Super great vid, opinions and info ! Thanks > No I didn't kill Abberoth in Epoch but I did in POE many many times :(
Hey Gav, another amazing and high quality breakdown, keep up the great work!
Some thoughts / additions;
1. 09:36 - I feel like enough time has passed to clarify that the 1.0 gold dupe mentioned was not something players could stumble upon by accident, it required memory editing, which bad actors often do using a 3rd party tool called Cheat Engine. That isn't to justify what happened, and is firmly against ToS, I am more just providing extra context as I was intentionally vague with my explanation at the time while EHG was handling the issue.
2. 16:28 - All valid points but I do think it's important to be careful when comparing player counts between cycles when one of them is the official 1.0 launch. It is completely expected that after years of beta, the 1.0 of LE which also had significant promotions, marketing, and people seeing the game for the first time, that the player count would be disproportionately large. In my mind that speaks more of how excited people were for 1.0 rather than "how much LE has fallen off in 1.1". From some talks I've had it seems like EHG was fully expecting 1.1 to have much lower player count than the outlier that was 1.0. I am much more interested to see how 1.1 player counts compare to 1.2 player counts, as this may be a better indicator of whether or not there is a trend.
3. 18:20 - Abberoth is a pretty divisive topic in the community right now it seems, I've seen a lot of people saying they should get free attempts, make the boss get easier, etc. and other folks on the complete opposite side of the fence saying it is way too easy. I'm (obviously) biased here but personally I'm pretty happy with where it's at as a completely optional "pinnacle" boss. As it stands, there isn't really any content gated behind Abberoth minus a few niche items that could offer improvements to some builds but aren't mandatory at all for end game. It's kind of like how the hardest dark souls bosses are often optional. My only gripe here is that some of the visual aren't really super clear, a lot of the attacks are just "clutter" (don't do much damage but look as scary as some of the actual deadly attacks), or lingering ground visuals that don't actually damage you (some purple stuff iirc). Regarding the grind towards Abberoth, I'd argue you don't really need to beat Abberoth for the build to be a success.
4. 19:26 - "the journey forward isn't even a guarantee, your build might just suck" - IMO this point that you briefly mentioned at the end of the Abberoth section to me feels like one of the biggest problems right now. When you are theory crafting a new build in LE you don't really have a clue whether it will work, or how good it will be. It's extremely common to cook up a build using some insane interaction in the planner, only to find out it doesn't work in game because of some bug or inaccurate text. Over time this has bred a serious mistrust for tooltips, and in game descriptions. Players are afraid to invest time into a new untested build idea when it could just fall completely flat, which is normally expected for ARPGs, but not when it is due to bugs. Lately I've been resorting to testing out builds in offline before making them, which prevents me from getting burned but also removes a lot of the mystery and thrill of discovery. We also don't have a Path of Building equivalent (yet), which makes the theory crafting process pretty challenging and with a lot of guess work (or insane spreadsheets).
5. 20:30 - DoTs, yeah 100%. EHG has been making adjustments the last couple patches though which absolutely have been improving the consistency.
6. 23:07 - Build diversity / copying builds - I don't disagree with you that just copying builds isn't necessarily fun, but most of the "4D Chess" builds you referenced me putting together are a community effort. Even the original FC build I did in 1.0, I started with a guide initially until I had enough knowledge and context to begin making improvements myself. This season I theory crafted the FC starter using my knowledge from 1.0, then continued to fine tune / min-max the build through trial and error, and with the help of my community. I'm not writing this to say you shouldn't home brew your builds from scratch, I'm just saying that many of the "BEST" builds being used as a benchmark are on their 20th+ iteration, and contributed to by dozens of players. Once we cook up these OP builds though you are 100% right, it just dominates the meta and there are very few people trying different things. I won't speak for the other creators but I can't reliably pull s-tier builds out of my pocket either, it's a real challenge.
Also great points about the build / skill disparity being huge. I often find myself trying to cook up a new build only to end up comparing it to an existing S-tier and getting discouraged, sure you don't need to only play S-tier builds, but it feels bad when the difference in power vs off-meta builds is like 10-100x instead of a more reasonable +/- 50%.
7. 26:20 - Ease of Respec - Yeah this is a huge pain-point, especially as CoF as you mentioned and is often why I often play builds that require similar gear to what I've already crafted. If you want to min-max to any meaningful degree you really need a HUGE stockpile of uniques, exalts, etc. It's just not feasible. Just consider how many affixes there are in the game that you may decide to build around, then consider you will probably need quite a few multiples of each. It would be nice if we had some way to generate exalts using shards or something, like insert 50 int shards and get a random T7 int armor piece with a type of your choosing, rather than storing so many copies just to slam in temp sanctum.
Hey Frozen thank you!! And wow I love the feedback and banter here. I first want to point out that this wasn't a hit piece by any means and I did not want to paint EHG or the game in a bad light so I hope it didn't come off that way! I want this game to be successful too 100%
1) Thanks a ton for the additional context, yours was the ONLY quality and trusted coverage on the 1.0 dupe event I could find after it all went down so thank you!
2) I was definitely not intending to imply or draw any conclusions here that 1.1 numbers should be anywhere near 1.0's. Simply that with over 1 million sales pre-launch and over a quarter of that online concurrently during 1.0 as well as how well 1.1 was received, that just under 30% retention seemed low to me (and made me curious about how many of those players were new or returning). I don't know for sure what EHG was forecasting here. This definitely isn't enough data points to draw any real conclusions yet it was just an observation!
3) I think a lot of this stems from which skill/mastery folks choose honestly. The bugs and balance differential is pretty massive depending on which combination you go with. Once those are balanced better that feeling will be lessened I feel. I'm certainly not advocating for a free kill at all! I think the issue is further exasperated by the fact that it's not just optional, Abby and the harbies are THE content right now outside of monoliths. It will get better with more diversity in endgame activities for sure. I'm glad I wasn't the only one suffering from the visual clutter, it's definitely a problem in a mechanically intensive fight. Is the measure of a successful build still just 300c+ empowered monos? T4 Julra? If they wanted Abby to be a Dark Souls final boss that's fine, but it's so engrained in your monolith experience now that it feels like it should be the benchmark but that's just me!
4) Very veryyy good point on the mistrust for the information provided, that's a psychological phenomena that's occurred over time as this issue has continued (and in some cases worsened). That was exactly my point, the success of your build might be entirely out of your control due to balance/bugs and you'd be none the wiser without extreme experimentation unless you're actually consuming YT/Twitch content (which isn't most people). Testing in offline is smart and would eliminate a lot of the frustration but yeah that feeling of discovery on your own (casual or not) is one of the greatest feelings an ARPG can offer outside of phat loot.
5) 1.1.5 were fantastic adjustments, mostly for patriarch's new fat avalanche being tuned down 😂 it'll continue to get better but I had to point it out ofc!
6) Thanks for the insights here! I think my biggest problem here on the build creation side is the same as #4 where we talked about the mistrust in choosing a skill or mastery etc. Right now you aren't even gauranteed to land on that v1.0 of the build in the line of iteration because of a detrimental bug or skewed balance issue. It makes the gameplay REALLY difficult to obtain a good frame of reference from (unless you've played for awhile) to compare/contrast/iterate and experiment. I don't want to be able to craft an S tier build right off the bat but it would be nice knowing that given a certain mechanical knowledge/skill level you can make things work baseline and iterate from there/learn further. Not everyone will be able to do this and some enjoy finding inspiration or straight up copying others lol and that's fine! The player should be the reason for failure, skills/masteries themselves shouldn't be the detriment.
7) And this is coming from you who's a CoF grinder and mad man at 1k+ corruption lol yeah it's borderline "free" to respec but having the gear for that respec is an entirely different issue. Kind of circles back once again to the balance disparity. As better balance is introduced, the opportunity to pivot or scale differently becomes available for your build rather than being completely back to the drawing board and with no gear/build to swap to.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to not only watch my video but to write up your feedback Frozen it means a lot!
@@GavrynGaming great points and agreed. I wasn't implying you were hating on EHG or LE, or disagreeing with your points, just adding some of my own thoughts in addition as someone who plays way too much.
To be fair to #7, I think it's technically "worse" for me specifically as a min-maxer because my standards for gear are so high that I can't transition without an ungodly stockpile of slam components. I put an absurd amount of time in, but that just means getting another build up and running to a similar level also takes an absurd amount of time.
@@FrozenSentinel Trueeee, you've seen the peak, getting back there on something new and having that comparison will always be in the back of your mind 😂
This is well made and well researched. Liked and subbed!
As someone who really loves this game, I can definitely agree with many of your points.
I dare to challenge that this game is (easy) to re-spec though.
Changing skills means abandoning your levels with your currently skills so there is not fast swapping back.
As you mentioned, trying to prepare gear for other builds is also really challenging if you don't have the foresight to do so.
And most of all, the prospect of having to make an entirely new character just to try another spec AND class is super daunting... as all together that is up to 15 characters, which is just an absurd amount to grind out.
I Think they need a system that allows you to save between 3 and 5 character builds per character.
not only if your skills and their levels then maintained if you want to swap back, but your gear can automatically be stored and ready for play on return on a moments notice.
To top it off, they should let you change your specialization freely instead of being locked into only one per character, and this system would allow you to swap to a new build on a new specialization to try it out without having to roll a whole fresh character.
It won't let you try other classes of course, but just this already drops needed characters to try all the masteries from 15 to just 5!
And if they add a new class, you just need 1 new character.... not 3.
Just going to say I find little to no joy in leveling characters up. It's a slog that I have repeated too many times.
I also dare say that the sheer amount of RNG with crafting just is not for me. There is so so so so so many levels of randomness to try and get an excellent item.
Need to find one with a Tier 7 Affix/Prefix.
need to try and smartly use the crafting system to get other Affixes/Prefixes you want. If you mess this up, that's it the item is bricked here as you have limited crafting potential and how much is used is also semi-random.
Finally have that nice item with a T7? Well, now you have to consider finding Unique with Lego crafting potential. And unless you are super lucky or just rich, getting one with 4 is very rare. So now here comes yet again another layer of RNG as now we gamble our ideal T7 item away in hopes of getting at least an ideal Lego item.
Personally I would love to have some of this can't go back mentality with crafting lessened.
Let us regain the crafting potential the item had that we spent adding something whenever we strip away an affix/prefix.
Let us at least lock down a T7 so it is not RNG removed...
Let us retrieve the base item we tried to slam into a Unique at the cost of crushing the unique... so at least our base is spared for a future attempt.
Between the sheer volume of RNG and grind needed to walk back MOST aspects/decisions of any character should you not be happy with it, I just could not motivate myself to continue playing. As fun as I find theory crafting builds in the build planner is, imagining builds and actually trying to bring them to fruition just in the HOPES it is as fun and powerful as I am imagining it would be is quite the different prospects. And just as you pointed out, if it suddenly just doesn't cut it... well, that's no small investment lost.
I just messed around the first time creating my build, not following any guide and loved it. Then I switched and followed a build plan and loved it. I'm looking forward to the next cycle.
Ok, you asked the question, so I got the answer. I've killed Aberroth multiple times on multiple builds. I think the feeling you got is valid. EHG wanted to add some true aspirational end game content beyond pushing corruption to insane numbers. So, they did it, and unfortunatly, it is the only real activity in the game at the moment beyond arena and pushing corruption. (Do dungeons even count?). I think after a few more updates, there'll be enough varied activities for everyone to hopefully find a place.
Thanks for taking the time to respond and I love the streams and your energy! I completely agree, I'm very hopeful for future cycles and further balance, I know EHG has it in them and the game at its core is amazing!
they need to rework dungeons they could be a lot better and are cool in theory
"after a few more updates" heard that since LE day 1 400 years ago
As a ARPG fan i played Diablo 1, 2 and 3 a lot! Then i started with POE but couldn't continue because i thought it was too much. Now im back in the ARPG i started with Diablo IV hoping that it was good, story wise it was but end game content and the gameplay i felt my characters was "heavy" and it wasn't nice to play. So i bought Grim Dawn and this is one of my top 3 ARPGs of all time. This week i bought Last Epoch cause i wanted something to play online while i wait for POE 2 (i think it will be easier to start on 2 if i start in the first season so i can learn while the game gets content) and i really liked Last Epoch! I played for about 2 hours every day and it felt really good. Better than Diablo IV and a game that can compete with POE if the developers continue to listen us. I hope that the game gets even better xD thanks for your video, it was really good
Well explained, I would say game progression is all over the place, in addition of what you mentioned about empowered later harbingers, not few players abandon the game after a few hours of how ridiculously easy it is. Balance and bugs are rampant in this game, they opted to ignore so many bugs, I am not playing again until they take care of those bugs.
Thanks a ton for watching! Merited 100% it's not early access anymore, it's a fully released product. The bugs are too much right now. I didn't want the video to seem too negative as I truly am hopeful for the future!
I played a ton of the EA, and actually, for reason I'm not even sure of (I think I was too obsessed with a different game), I skipped the 1.0 and 1.1 launches. Got back into it just a few weeks ago and have been having a blast. Still love the game, LOVE the Nemesis system, love the Harbingers, loved the Aberroth fight (though I agree with your complaints about it, especially for casuals). I've mostly ignored but am interested in the lore, so I definitely need to go check out your vids on that stuff. Build diversity feels better to me now than it ever has, but... You do kind of need a guide or giga huge brain if you plan on downing Aberroth or pushing beyond 200-300 corruption. I'm very excited for the reset on Thursday, I plan to go hard and try out MG for the first time, and hopefully the economy doesn't crash immediately. Edit: Oh, and 1000% agree on the DoT dmg and spikiness of some incoming blows. Many of my favorite builds are those that can get around those by default (with either insane ward gen or ready access to cleanses or both).
Thanks for the detailed response here! The reset and event Thursday definitely looks fun, unfortunately I'm neck deep in a Path of Exile lore series or I'd try it out! I think I burnt myself out a bit playing the entirety of 1.0 as well which contributed to my quicker disinterest this cycle :/
Appreciate your video. I'm new to the game, so this info got me caught up to speed nicely. Keep makin content!
@@BrigsMaroon Thanks so much for watching! Don't let me deter you from continuing this great game, I'm just taking a brief hiatus after hundreds of hours of enjoyment, I'll 100% be back :)
The content will keep coming as well, next up I'm working on a video documenting the rise of Grinding Gear Games from Chris Wilson's garage to the titan in the industry they are now!
I am you newest biggest fan btw subbed twice. Great content.
Glad to have you ❤️ Next up will be an Enshrouded review and then I may join 3.25 late to try out all the changes!
If they balance the game around lifers, the game would absolutely suck for the avg gamer.
Yep staying in the middle is best ... We get to leech off the jaded Poe and d4 player bases on either extreme xD
After watching your video, you definitely have some great points. You conveyed your thoughts are very organized and clear, and I think your presentation overall is really good. There are several areas I agree with you and several that I don't which I will detail. I am a former PoE player 10 years under my belt, and I stopped after Sanctum league. I currently have 1500 hrs invested in LE.
First, your recognition of incoming damage received is spot on. Dot damage is too high, and even with investment it can be difficult to control unless you have a high EHP pool. And this is not something that your everyday gamer would recognize and be able to solve. I also agree that the transition from Regular Monos to Corruption is not smooth, and this is something that EHG needs a better process for facilitating.
However, I do not agree with the idea that every skill should be usable to do Pinnacle content. Maybe that's my Bias coming from 10 years of PoE, since in that game, some skills are just used to get off the ground, you farm currency and gear, then reroll into something that then clears all content. If you're trying to do all that, without changing your skills AND without looking at guides, I don't think that's a fair expectation to place on the game. You've opted into handicapping yourself, because you've denied yourself access to knowledge that would faciliate your success. Idk if it's a pride thing to not use a guide or whatever, I don't want to assume, but the result is the same regardless of the reasoning. And I guess what I would highlight is, I understand the principle that the game should give you all the tools you need to play the game, and if we're talking about accessibility, the game has done that. The game tells you all the scaling formulas in the guide, explains the mechanics, etc. You've exceeded that benchmark, so this is not an accessibility issue for you. You made it to the Pinnacle boss, blind. So talk about that point.
You said you made it all the way to Abberoth before getting stomped. That is the PINNACLE boss. EHG created that boss to be the most difficult thing to do in the game currently. Which means again, I think your expectations of being able to clear the PINNACLE boss, with no outside knowledge, no guides, no optimization or willingness to grind (more?) is not a reasonable expectation. You're calling yourself a casual gamer (totally fine), but you are attempting top 10% player stuff. Pinnacle bosses require Pinnacle builds, and that can be whatever the lowest common denominator for completion is. But you're not gonna get a pinnacle build without grinding, which is what the genre is founded on, or some extra knowledge of build creation and testing. This is also not a dig on you, but you are playing Falconer, which is still top 3 strongest classes in the game, and didn't get the job done.
I would encourage you, as someone who has invested a 1k hours into the game, to just take the extra step to really learn what makes a good build good, and beat the boss. You're right there! If you grinded to 400 corruption, you have plenty of access to strong loot, and the rarity scaling diminishing returns drops off right at that point. People at 800 corruption aren't getting much better loot. It's not like PoE where you have sacrifice your whole life to get a mage blood farming T16s, but if you can clear a T17 you get 3 of them a map. And, I would also discourage you from calling yourself a "casual" player when you're knocking on Abberoth's door, cause that's not really indicative of your skill. You're RIGHT there, which means you're better than you're average player now. You're more invested than an average player now. And I think your video, trying to advocate for the average player experience when you're not longer average, is a bit misleading.
But with all of that said, you did a great job on the video and I wish more people had constructive criticism to offer about Last Epoch. If you look at the reviews, it's getting bombed right now, by actual casuals with sub 50 hrs. You can't do anything meaningful in an ARPG in sub 50 hours, that's just not the way the genre is designed. But unfortunately, those players are reviewing something they don't understand and LE is suffering for it. As for you, I hope you run it back with Abberoth, you have plenty of time. I'm sure a few tweaks to your build idea and additional 5% of your current investment would reward your efforts.
Wow thanks so much for the kind words and write up here! I tried to set my bias aside with this video but you can see on my channel, I've invested several hundreds of hours into lengthy campaign runs in order to present the entirety of the game's lore, I'm a fanboi. But my 1k hours is likely more akin to 400-500 and a lot of it was spent logged in AFK or otherwise, it's skewed for sure.
In any event, I'm likely not a "casual" and I like to think I'm good at video games, I raid at a mythic level in WoW and have played literally since I could hold a controller (I'm a 33 year old dad gamer now). I even admitted to most likely playing more than the average player. It's the casual audience and average players that are currently bouncing off the game that will inevitably keep the game and EHG running financially. The retention right now appears to be the hardcore, well en-franchised audience for the game and those that just REALLY like grinding. And don't get me wrong, I love this game as much as the next guy, but as my playtime has diminished (work, IRL, etc), I no longer felt like my time was respected in the game and it opened my eyes to these problems that the average or more casual player might experience, with my biases set aside while still trying to not be overly negative.
I must not have conveyed it well enough or my frustrations during the writing of this script sent me into hyperbolic territory, but I think every skill or mastery should indeed have a shot given the right operator and build, right now that's 100% not the case. As for me playing Falconer, this was my 3rd toon after leveling a Marksman to 97 and a Bladedancer to 90. The Falconer worked the best for obvious reasons (it's still slightly overtuned and made within the last year) so that's what I could actually make it there with for footage and a well rounded review.
My point in that section of the video when stating every skill/mastery should AT LEAST have a shot at the end-game content is still something I believe firmly. There aren't even half as many skills as PoE and the skill system and their balance of them in LE works differently as well. It's not an apples to apples comparison. When you choose a class, you're choosing your skillset, passives, everything but equipped items. You're locked in essentially, weapons have restrictions as well. PoE has an open skill tree for all classes balanced around the starting location of the tree, and no weapon restrictions for classes (you know all of this with the amount of PoE you've played, it's just to get my point across). None of Last Epoch's skills should be duds for that exact reason, it's a LOT more rigid than PoE's system(s) and when you're given a set amount of skills and can only potentially use a handful of them that feels terrible.
Not every player will have the skills, RPG experience or even the will to grind to even make it to Aberroth and that's fine. But currently balance, bugs and un-intuitive interactions that aren't explained or found in the game-guide (which is awesome that they have this btw and I've stated so in the past) are detrimental and unforeseen pitfalls that a new player can fall into and that's on the devs to fix. The blame shouldn't be placed on the player for not watching X amount of hours of UA-cam videos or having LE-Tools and Maxroll bookmarked in their browser. They shouldn't need to have played 1k+ hours because "then it gets fun". That's a gatekeeping mentality and trope of players that HAVE sunk that amount of time into the game and feel that new players should "pay their dues". That's not going to keep players around, they'll just go elsewhere if they have a bad experience or don't see the point in continuing (and they aren't experiencing the sunk cost fallacy that many veterans are). You shouldn't be allowed to fall into a trap they didn't know existed yet either (Marksman and its abilities minus maybe multishot).
If EHG wants this to be a grindy, hardcore game, that's completely fine and I don't expect them to deviate from their design philosophies on my account. If having some symbiotic relationship between new players and external resources is required in order to learn the game fully, that's fine too. But that type of game seems to run contrary to the accessible/less player friction vibes the game gives off and I don't think that's their aim.
Only time and future patches will tell! I love the game and EHG and will return for every solid patch but I'd be beside myself if I didn't let my frustrations as someone that can't play as often known.
@@GavrynGaming I 100% agree with voicing the concerns, and as I previous stated, they were well articulated. You make a very good point about LE skill system vs PoEs, which I had not considered at the time of writing. PoE's is more flexible via the tree, and they make 20+ new skills every other league or so, so that would allow more "Room to fail", because you opt out if it's not working. So do agree on your stance about the skills.
I purposely didn't mention bugs and interactions, because I don't think you mentioned any specifically. Obviously, I know some that exist, and in principle I agree that bugs and unintended-interactions are not on the player, it's the devs, but since idk what we're talking about specifically for this point, I chose not to comment. Also, I am certainly not suggesting that a player needs a guide or a video to interact with the game, and if we're only talking about campaign completion and clearing some monos, I don't think the game fails anyone in that regard.
I'm also in my late 30's, so I relate to responsibilities that eat up game time, but I think the phrase "Doesn't respect my time" is a bit contentious. I wouldn't consider new content and difficultly something that doesnt respect your time, The bar has been raised and unfortunately, is just inconveniencing you. Things that don't respect a player's time are usually system or mechanical changes, like lowering drop rates, slowing down exp gains so leveling takes longer, that new atrocious shield that spawns at Hp thresholds, or not being able to change your mastery, forcing you to level a new character (I hate this one personally). They are hollow changes that only artificially extend the game's life, but I don't think the addition of pinnacle content fall under that. In fact, summoning Harbingers is optional as you mentioned. That is actually respecting your time, cause if you don't want to fight them, you don't have to! It would be worse if there was no toggle for it, and getting your mono-boss loot was tied to a double boss fight, with 3x the EHP cause of those shields. I hope they remove them...
And Lastly, I can tell you take pride in your ability to game. You may not have the time you would like to game, but clearly you're not a weak gamer. We don't have to agree, and I'm not trying to forcefully change your mind, but it seems like "average players" in this game, are not nearly as impressive or enfranchised as you're thinking. A large majority of people who play stuff are actually just terrible... that is the main reason they quit and move to other games quickly. It's not bugs and their builds not working, that's giving them too much credit. And It's not gatekeeping either, cause in order to "Gate keep" something, you have to be able influence the thing being Gate-kept. There is no one here stopping anyone from participating because their gear score is too low. The truth is, they gear poorly, they spec poorly, they reroll 4 alts before deciding they want to complete the campaign. Just look at the negative comments on steam. It's not indicative of all players, but the reasons they leave negative reviews, coupled with the pitiful amount of hours they've invested are very telling. No, the game doesn't tell you how to make a broken build, with multiple layered skill interactions, using a heirarchy system for sub-skills that scale with more multipliers. But you know what, fight games don't teach you the best combos, MMOs surely don't teach you optimal rotations, Shooter games don't teach you how to quick scope and head peak.... I'm sure you get my point.
@@Count_Virgil Truly appreciate the civil banter here and I appreciate the points you've made. At this point I just hope EHG sees this video and the plethora of comments here, there's a lot of feedback to gather and sift through!
Have a great weekend Virgil!
@@GavrynGaming I hope they see this as well, they have a lot of work to do. I value their commitment to making a game for gamers, and I also appreciate the exchange we've had. I hope you enjoy your weekend as well, and good luck on your Abberoth kill. I know you'll get it!
Very good video, I think this video is well script and EHG should really watch it.
I hope they see it and I hope it wasn't too negative. Thanks a lot for watching and the kind words!
Great review of the current state. I can confirm, I had a homebrew build that was absolutely smashing all content including Harbringers and +300 corruption and Aberroth was my wall. My gear wasn’t perfect but it requires way too much effort and I gave up. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. A real feel bad moment because to me the build would be complete with downing the pinnacle boss but now I’m left feeling like my build failed.
Yeah, I don't feel every build should be handed the boss kill if you reach it, but the difficulty was a stark contrast to the harbingers I had been beating up. I just want the difficulty curve from Normal Monos to Aberroth to be smoother and for your build's weaknesses to shine through more BEFORE the pinnacle boss! Thanks a lot for watching
I have been a really casual player since beta 0.8 days and LE is my favorite action RPG to play since then. I gotta say that the difference in game feel, balancing, graphics and overall polishing of the game is huge compared to that version. But there are a lot of things left to do, and I know for a fact that EHG is completely capable of delivering it, but my concern is if that they can deliver it in time, before all player base diminishes (specially with PoE 2 in the future).
Great vid btw!
We all have faith in the company behind the game and the game itself has SUCH potential. I sincerely hope they can pull it off before PoE2 and others are in full swing. I'll be back for cycle 1.2 for sure, it better be a banger, early access for PoE2 is ~November I'm hearing!
I basically agree with everything in the video. Although I'll add one side thing before talking about the main stuff: I actually did have severe bugs with evade, although from what I've read it might be an offline specific issue. For me, evade would occasionally snap me back to my starting location, which as you can imagine, would often be right into an enemy AoE I was dodging out of. This made Aberroth and a few specific timeline bosses extra frustrating because I couldn't rely on the movement mechanic they were balanced around.
On to the main points: I've been playing since sometime before act 9 was added. Like you said, the game has a really solid core and design philosophy. It's contrast to PoE is what brought me to the game. The crafting system and the unique target farming made it seem like the game was going to be built to be accessible to SSF as opposed to PoE where you're just shit out of luck if you don't trade. Even when they brought in trading, I was impressed with the faction system they made as a solution to separately balance progression for trade and non-trade. In general it feels like when they set out to address a specific issue, they have good ideas for solutions, although the execution often isn't there.
The overarching problem right now feels like one of limited resources, bad prioritization, and tech debt. I understand that they're an indie studio. They only have so many resources they can put into the game. But that's all the more reason why they need to plan and spend those resources wisely. The game SHOULD NOT have gone to launch in the state it was in. It was buggy, still missing key content, and it had a bunch of systems that were sorely in need of an update. I was happy to give them the benefit of the doubt while the game was in early access. They could take their time fixing stuff and I'd come back occasionally to see their progress. But once they put it out to the world and said "It's ready!" Suddenly all these things to work on became problems. And now they have themselves on this timetable of releasing new cycles. Since they started behind, they're gonna keep getting further behind as they add more stuff so they need to work on the stuff that was broken or outdated before and the new stuff will also likely need adjusting and then they have to work on future content.
As for prioritization, I feel like the stuff they've added since I've started hasn't really enhanced the experience or addressed any of the issues I had with the game. There have been a lot of bugs I reported ages ago that still weren't fixed for launch and then they made some changes that introduced even more bugs to core systems and UI on top of all the build specific bugs. With class balance, they spent a bunch of time on two new over designed masteries while leaving a lot of the older masteries and abilities in a bad state. For 1.0 we got no new content and in 1.1 we got new bosses, which was cool, but we still have the 3 dungeons that are generally agreed to be pretty unfun. Two of those people have almost no reason to run and Temporal Sanctum is a required piece of item progression that is also the oldest, buggiest, and least fun of the dungeons.
The grind is definitely still the biggest gameplay issue though. The systems that have been added to the item grind, experimental affixes, legendary items, sealing, and nemesis empowering have all added more potential power to the game, but haven't made it any easier to actually hit the items you want. It's still all just slot machines on top of slot machines. You could potentially play forever and not hit what you want to get. The crafting system only takes you so far. CoF looked like it could be a good solution for SSF, but in practice it just gives you more pulls at the slot machine without much guarantee that you'll ever see what you're after. Plus it butts up against the content systems in the game, but more on that later. The thing that most consistently kills my enjoyment with the game is when I play a character and just go a while without upgrading my gear. Between the randomness of the drops and the need to balance out so many cap stats, it can be really hard to make changes to your gear after a point and then you just run up to a wall in progression.
Then there are the endgame content systems. Besides being a bit too samey, I think the big problem with them that makes the grind feel worse is that the monolith systems is built in a way that wants you to commit to it a lot, but then there are other necessary rewards in other systems that you kind of have to go to at some point, but it stalls out your main progression mode. To push corruption, which is necessary to get more xp, find better items, and now get to Aberroth, you need to build up one timeline's corruption. But you kind of also need to do the other timelines to get your blessings, and probably more than once since the blessings are another slot machine. This makes it so that if you want to get all the blessings or farm for some specific items, you have to do it at the detriment of progressing corruption. Same thing with going to dungeons or arena. Even within the monolith you pick, because you get more stability and get closer to Shade echoes by bee lining it straight away from the center, the game discourages you from going after reward nodes that you might want but which are out of your way, which kind of defeats the purpose of having those for target farming. Also these seem to only really appear farther away anyway, so often by the time you see some you're probably just going to be resetting anyway. Some of these issues have been made better by the addition of Glyphs of Envy and that corruption catchup mechanic, but it's still not great.
Like I said earlier, CoF kind of butts up against this problem with content focus. It sends you all over the place from high corruption content you might not be able to do yet, to doing campaign bosses you have no reason to go back to. Some stuff I can't even do easily because of the campaign skip stuff. I end up not having any act 8 waypoints, so going to do an Architect Liath prophecy would involve wasting a lot of time first just to get there. Same thing with dungeons and arena. If I have a prophecy to go do say, T3 Soulfire Bastion, but I haven't actually been there yet on this character, either because it's new or because it's a legacy character so old it was around before soulfire was there at all, then I have to go unlock the waypoint, then do T1 and T2 before I can even start progress on the prophecy. All this time could have just been used to push corruption and get more xp and higher quality loot on average.
Continued in comment:
Continued: As far as the spikey damage and DoTs go, I hate it, but I'm not really sure what to do about it. This is a problem in all of the ARPGs I've played once you go to a high enough level. The issue is these games want to have sustain as a build mechanic, which means players can infinitely sustain through any damage that doesn't kill them. Combine this with players killing most enemies in a second or maybe a few seconds, and now the only way to kill players is through bullshit one shot abilities. If the games were built more around limited resource sustain, then the games could use damage in a way to tax player resources rather than just outright kill them on the spot. But that would be a very different game and I'm not sure if I'd like that any more than this. But it would solve that problem.
LE has an added layer to this problem though that I do think they should do something about. As you mention, the way they use DoT damage is just stupid. It's supposed to be damage over time. If it can kill you in less than a second it's not functionally different from a hit, but because of the defensive rules, it bypasses nearly all of the core defenses we have access to. It can't be mitigated by armor aside from getting a handful of mods that partially solve the problem. It can't be blocked, dodged, glancing blow'd, etc. So they use it as a crutch to kill players even when they've built defensively. This patch I played a Shield Bash FG. It was super tanky, but in exchange it's damage was pretty low. Even so, it's the character I have taken further than I ever have before and it crushed echo content without much threat all the way through to like 500+ corruption. I could even just face tank T4 Julra for the whole fight. But run into a DoT puddle? Dead in seconds. And this is with most of the endgame DoT mitigation available. This wasn't really an issue in monos, but Aberroth has a bunch of bulllshit AoE DoTs that just end my character. Even stuff that doesn't look like it should be a DoT, like that big slam he does that you have to run away from, is just a high damage DoT. So my character that I built specifically to be a super tank, that has to spend many times longer than most builds to kill Aberroth, (even excluding the one shot builds) still doesn't get to tank through the most dangerous stuff he does, basically defeating the point of my build. So I spend several minutes slowly working my way through the fight, (phase zero is such a bore because the double harbingers can't actually kill me, but it takes a long time) only to get to the last phase and die in seconds because it takes me so long to get even a little practice in on it. Add on top of this the dumb decision to make the attempts limited by keys that aren't even a guaranteed drop after the first 10 and it was just a really slow and frustrating process trying to beat him. After getting some truely GG items and optimizing my build, I was just barely able to eek out one kill. Since then I've tried the fight several more times and have not managed to kill him again. Meanwhile there are builds that don't even need to do the mechanics because they kill him so fast. If they can kill him so fast he can't do his mechanics, my slow ass build should be able to tank through most if not all of his mechanics with enough gear.
Lastly, totally agree on the mechanical clarity. This is the first time I've tried crafting my own builds and it's just confusing as fuck in some places. Lots of mechanics where you just don't know if they even work the way you think they should.
As good of a base as they had in early access, my fear is that now that they botched the launch, there might not end up being enough players paying for microtransactions to keep the development going strong. I can't even support them because I play offline and there are no cosmetics. So I worry if they can't right the ship soon these problems will simply never get fixed.
Wow thanks for taking the time to provide all this feedback, I truly hope EHG sees it as well! That evade bug sounds absolutely cursed, I would be pulling my hair out. I agree with so many of your points as well, I was brought to this game from PoE because I was tired of following other people's builds and this was made out to be an accessible yet deep ARPG, the systems were amazing and I could play SSF for the first time and not feel punished (CoF) after being annoyed with trade in PoE. Looking back and becoming aware of just how many bugs were out there in 1.0 I completely agree I think it was rushed out for some reason (the timing was very good tbh, but the game wasn't ready fully). As soon as you remove that "Early Access" badge, your game is put under a microscope, quite literally. The DoT mitigation (or lack thereof) and the vast amount of sources of incoming enemy DoT damage that isn't cleansable is the problem 100% yeah. Would making all of those abilities (outside of the core DoTs WE have access to) hits help? I'm not sure.
The limited resource to fight Aberroth (especially if it's not 100% omg I didn't know that) is a bit over the top and merely adds to the already vast grind. Congrats on your Abby kill thought for real that's an achievement not many can say they have this cycle!
They still have content and actual game additions (fleshing out end game further) to add but still playing whack-a-mole with bugs and balance. I love EHG, truly, which is why I tried my hardest not to be too negative with this video! I believe in them, I just hope (like you) that they have the business model to support their continued development. It needs more time to bake, but god damn the crust is looking amazing 😂
You can only launch your game once however, getting that hype back takes a lot.
With 1.1, the build on my main character was nerfed in five separate ways. So I wasn't sure what to expect going into 1.1. I beat all of the harbingers easily enough, but had to be careful because they did deal a lot of damage and could quickly kill me if blundered. Died to Aberroth right away and couldn't even really understand what was going on. I think I might have eventually been able to beat that fight, but I was burnt out at the time and after using most of the "harbinger eye" tokens needed to access the fight, I decided that I wouldn't come back to it until I figured out how I might upgrade my build. Still haven't done that. Having some time to think on it, I'm frustrated with the Aberroth fight for five reasons...
1. I think that it is a mistake to lock a boss behind a door that can only be opened with some token earned elsewhere, particularly if dying to the boss consumes the token. My character was doing appreciable damage to Aberroth. So the fight felt viable (I made it through most of the phases), but I have no certainty when it comes to how many attempts it would take me to learn the boss mechanics and actually win. Farming for the tokens feels super grindy, and I'm not even sure where my target is. 10 more tokens? 50 more tokens? 100 more tokens? I have no idea! I wouldn't want to get a lot of practice with the boss, get close to success, then run out of tokens! This sucks.
2. The initial fight against two harbingers is relatively easy, then Aberroth does his whole arena swap and big leap thing. Takes a bunch of time that's spent not fighting him. Boring, especially after losing to him several times in a row. Feels like the game is doling out some petty additional punishment for dying to him, but the punishment is just wasting my time.
3. The first time I fought Aberroth, as soon as I saw him doing some big move that was seemingly pulling the whole galaxy into him or whatever, I immediately transplanted out of it and ran as far as I could, figuring the middle of that sinkhole was going to kill me if I touched it. Turned out that it was the only safe place in the arena and that moving away from it was killing me. Aberroth has A LOT of mechanics, and some of them are counterintuitive.
4. This fight really is a huge spike in difficulty compared to everything else. I went back to pushing corruption on monoliths, but there doesn't seem to be any way to prepare for this fight. I burst down all the T4 dungeon and T4 arena bosses before they have much chance to hurt me. Timeline bosses and Shades of Orobyss go down easily. Harbingers are slightly more dangerous than those, but also fall with little trouble. What's with the giant gap?
5. I don't know who started the trend of ARPG bosses painting the ground with various damaging (or worse yet, one-shot) effects so that the player has to also play a rhythm game while trying to kill the boss. Please stop?
well put together! from the pov of an above average gamer (as well in time as in competitiveness), last epoch hit the spot for me, between diablo and path of exile, and i will re-visit it every time they drop a new cycle. i hope they can evade blunders like those trade bugs and can flesh out the endgame a bit more, i am very optimistic about it indeed.
the best thing about that team is that they indeed react to feedback :) cheers
The game and community, their vision for the next great ARPG all of it is literally what prompted me to start this channel 😂
I never had any mal-intent with this video so I sincerely hope it didn't come off that way! I have the utmost confidence in EHG but I'd be beside myself if I didn't voice some frustrations with the game, I thought critically on my main gripes for quite awhile before the writing of this script. Thanks so much for watching ❤️
Got back into the game recently and made it to Aberoth and getting one shot several times, the balance is not there, and feels like the developers just rushed and released an alpha version again. Good potential this game used to have and I feel like they are heading towards the wrong direction, being more grindy and POE like is not the way. I have 12k hours in POE since early release and last epoch used to feel so much more friendly to time poor players and respect of our time. This is no longer the case. Great video, thanks for making it and I can feel your passion for the game.
Or you just don't know how to gear ... That's like 99% of the problems that people have is just not knowing how to get defenses
Nice Video. To answer your question, no I was not able to kill Aberroth. I was following a shadow dagger blade dancer guide and I have pretty good gear. The fight is insane! I tried about 16-18 times and the best I can do is get him to 20% health. After that the screen just gets cluttered with lasers, there so much stuff to avoid it's crazy.
I am a normie like you, got 300 hours on this game, but this boss fight is too much for me.
The visual clutter is nuts right!? Shadow Daggers is actually really good from what I've heard so I imagine your time outside of Aberroth was fun? But yeah that fight is just crazy for the average player! Idk I thought I was halfway decent at the game and I got my ass beat 😂
Recently I hit around 100 hours in last epoch and am really digging it. I mostly do HC SSF push as far as I can with no guides. I personally think epoch is great and want to see to change. I have close to 1k hours on poe and still like playing it in rotation.
@@sound285 I'm so glad you're enjoying it, you're far braver than I pushing hardcore!! How far have you pushed this cycle?
I loved this video. I have a lot of hope for this game. Maybe the cycle has been a bit short... not that the 3.25 POE announcement helped much either. I'm really looking forward to the cycle where they rework the monoliths, then we can see if the farm and grind will be worth it or not. Keep up the great work!
Hi Delfos! Thanks so much for watching, PoE having their BEST league in quite awhile definitely didn't help 😂 GGG broke their own previous peak concurrent player numbers this league!
The base game of Last Epoch is definitely there, EHG just needs more time to cook, I have faith they'll make it right 👍
Quality content here ! well done ! Semi-casual player here, I've beaten aberath after 1 month playing only 1 char. i've worked a lot to min-max my build though.
I agree on most points except 1 : I like the pinnacle boss being so hard, the game definitely need a end goal.
As for the grind needed to get there, you could tell the same about poe, who can retain more players. the main problem is the lack of content compared to poe.
I love this game but it needs more, i'm very hopeful !
Thank you! I agree, I don't want the pinnacle boss to be easy (though ground DoTs are still a bit much), if they balance all of the skills for each class more equally and lessen the margin for error due to unforeseen pitfalls (poorly tuned or bugged skill, unintuitive interactions etc).
Keep the difficulty the same, the grind does need some more content diversity and it'll be fine I agree there too, that will just take time and several cycles. I'm hopeful as well that EHG keep innovating and listening to their community!
Would love to see more videos on history of other ARPGS. Amazing content. Subbed!
Early Blizzard and the rise and fall of Star Wars Galaxies are on my list! I would love to take a look at the early early days of Diablo and D2 and I already did one on the founding of Eleventh Hour Games and Last Epoch on my channel if interested! It was the very first video on my channel back in February: ua-cam.com/video/JjVDwChiJdc/v-deo.html
Going to dive into the Path of Exile lore leading up to PoE2 though I think for the next several videos :)
I thought of this game as "perfect". Not dumbed down like D4 and not that complicated as PoE where you have to watch hours of material to figure out a build that could do red maps easily with an option for ubers. It turned out the same as you point it out - play by yourself and hit a wall with time expensive do-over for different skills. This makes D4 easy - if skills don't work it's 10 minutes and have new set and try something new that may work, not 100s of hours like in PoE, and it looks like in LE too.
Yeah the unfortunate part is the balance of skills, you don't know whether or not the skill you're picking even has the right amount of damage nodes and damage effectiveness to make it good while others are absolutely busted.
Unlike other ARPGs, you're locked into the skills your class and mastery options have, there's no class crossover so you're limited to ~8 usable damage skills on average per class/mastery option and due to that, the balance needs to be a LOT tighter
@@GavrynGaming That's why I prefer playing D4 - you don't stress so much in that game as in PoE or LE over wrong choices.
@@Faktorekyou sound like 45
@@Productive_Chad I am ONLY 41.
@@Faktorek sounds about right
Killing it!
Really like the game and will keep coming back for seasons. Due to lack of time, played both seasons casually doing 1 character, no alts using guides. Have a few issues including
* Moving from normal to empowered monos in that normal is easy but empowered is too hard with some below aspects preventing me from making the jump.
* The loot filter is great but needs too much time to learn for casuals. It's also required to play with so many drops. My current build is stuck because I use a premade for my build but see almost no useful drops. It's likely too tight for where I'm at but I don't know where to adjust it. I'd still be playing if I could get some gear and progress to empowered monos.
* I play CoF and feel like I spend most of my points rerolling to get an item type I want and often I have to go hunting to fulfill it even with lenses to avoid stuff I don't want to run. Faction levelling still feels slow too.
* Trying to target farm specific loot in monos feels bad. I'm in the right mono but often barely find the nodes that I need and are supposed to spawn often in that mono.
So yeah casual trying to be a good player till I have time to get into the game more but a few pain points and more friction than there should be in some systems have been holding me back or ending my seasonal play earlier than I want. I still want to go back to my Warlock this season but I feel like I'm just stuck and don't want to do a pointless grind for nothing.
Yeah the grind might get better (or be less noticeable) with more content perhaps? Also I'm starting to wonder if MG might be better than CoF for us casuals to more reliably pick up gear we need (off the bazaar) but I prefer the solo mode 😞
I'll also be returning each cycle to try out changes EHG makes, I want this game to be great!
Mana management is a big issue for many skills/builds that I would love to try out. If EHG decided to make mana restoration better, that would help a bunch
Yeah mana in these games is always just a problem to be solved, potions, regen or on hit generation, all of it feels like filler, I agree!
I agree. One if the reasons l transfered from mmos to arogs is build diversity and seeing if l can make things work.
Same here! More freeform build creation and less punishing (at least that's how it should be) I was big into WoW prior to all this
@@GavrynGaming Likewise 🙂
Really nice vid!
@@tristegeneration4997 I really appreciate that ❤️
I have played a self made void knight build and I've stopped two days ago after getting some echoes to lvl 100. Bosses had one shot abilities for a while now but after the level 100 echoes random mobs started to regularly one shot me too and I haven't found any fitting gear for hours at that point so I stopped and started playing poe with a guide now since I never really got into it. Also leveling feels way to slow for me after reaching the echoes. I really hope they fix those problems because I really like last epoch it's the first arpg where I finished the story.
During 1.0, I was in Mike's dev stream and asked whether, in light of the dupes and bugs they planned to change their approach to testing. He laughed and said "No", like it was a stupid question. That was the beginning of the end of my interest in Last Epoch. Played 1.1 a bit, but then Settlers of Kalgurr brought relief.
Feelsbad, yeah their next league has to be insane to maintain relevance and the close to November they release 1.2, the worse off the cycle retention will be once PoE2 launches
yeah really agree with you on your gripes!
Thanks so much for watching! We'll see what 1.2 and beyond brings for LE :)
@@GavrynGaming yeah, i have faith in this company somehow, for the points you outlined in your (solid) video.
Well made, hats off. I can learn a thing or two from you about making vids for my own channel (centered around warframe, but considering making game reviews... just about to pass 1k subs, i wonder if you'd partner up on a project ? maybe something similar when 1.2 rolls around).
Difficulty have to be step by step and feeling of it have to be smooth. This game don't give this feeling, and the frustration is here.
It's not smooth at all sadly, a very jagged difficulty/challenge curve.
whatu are talking about? the game is easy and almost every build can do the entire content.
@@addictedplayer4453 Another PGM ...
For me, all they have to do is create a system where the player can much more easily visualize the gear upgrade path and also where to go/what activities to do to get that gear. The COF and Merchants guild are amazing but I think they need to do more. I just want to say it again though about COF and Merchants guild. Those systems are really cool. I love how they work.
I agree with most of what you said but I want to add some suggestions
1. EHG has to add options to tone down visual effects on the screen. Sometimes there's just too much going on on screen that you loose focus. Part of what excited me about POE2 is that the devs had reduced visual clutter on screen
2. EHG should work on fixing bugs that are reported as fast as possible
3. EHG should add an info death screen which shows what attack killed you and the damage it caused to make planning for Pinnacle boss easier.
3. Just buff some lower level skills. Not every rpg needs to be like WOW where every build and skill is good but EHG should just buff some lower level skills to make levelling easier.
EHG should learn from POE, D2, Titan Quest & Grim Dawn and make more fun end game activities.
In my opinion Last Epoch is a good game at its core (the offline campaign mode is really appreciated) , it just has some issues to fix but I have more faith in EHG to work on those issues than in Blizzard
I agree, the skeleton of the game is really good, a solid foundation to build onto and really make this game stand out in the genre (it already is in a lot of ways). I have faith EHG can pull it off as well!
Death Screen (3.) was added in patch 1.1.3. Showing how much damage was dealt by the killing blow, overkill damage and if it was a crit.
I played blindly, actually by recommendation by many UA-camrs. Which I was excited for. Played a sorcerer build and switched my skills up as I went. I didn’t even make it to empowered mono. By the time I was that far, my build was falling off and I had to then use a guide for fireball sorcerer. The endgame was ok, but by that time of “the grind” I ended up playing POE for my first time. That game is an entirely different animal. Holy shit you have to spend equal time studying mechanics as playing the game.
But I’m back again to last epoch to try a Void Knight after hitting a wall with a POE build. It’s a good game, because I didn’t go back to Diablo 4 as the next choice.
Just played it for 5 hours. Ripping Blood is fun👍
I know it's a meme to say "D4 bad", but Diablo 4 also ate into Last Epoch's numbers. ARPG's are in a good place when three games are concurrently improving. Last Epoch gets so much right that the other two continue to not address. The foundation of Last Epoch is solid, it just keeps a compelling endgame hook and flesh out its story so it isn't such a disjointed mess.
The Loot Reborn patch did seem fairly healthy yeah with an xpac soon (paid but maybe solid I'm not up to date on Diablo)
The foundation and "core" of Last Epoch is SO damn good and a lot of their systems are genius (crafting, loot filter, Nemesis now etc). More endgame, a finished story, better balance and further additions are all needed for sure! I feel like EHG is still plaything catchup to the other titans in the genre, as long as they can sustain until then and maintain community trust.
to be fair on launch LE ate into D4 pretty hard for the first month or so xD
Solid video, I agree. I love this game I need more of it and in a manor that keeps me playing. I lasted barely I week in 1.1 despite my hype for it. Maybe timing of 3.25?
@@matts3756 The timing was abysmal sadly, I know EHG wanted to get it out earlier but 1.1 wasn't ready yet! Thanks so much for watching
I played from the official launch, until my ice treant build was unable to progress. I needed some uniques to drop, and I don't even know if I was at a level that they would start appearing. Also, I found that the treant/totem style of character was HIGHLY discouraged by game mechanics... the "ground is LAVA!" mechanic is EVERYWHERE, and without a movement skill, and with reduced movement speed (because I didn't like the movement options available to me), made a lot of encounters, especially bosses, exercises in frustration.
I may have played longer if the game was either optimized better to accommodate lower end PCs or I get enough money to upgrade my computer (my gaming laptop was good when I bought it within 5yrs... but I don't have a good graphics card in this thing according to today's standards.) So, it took WAY too long to load up the game (once I was IN the game, it ran fine... though loading between maps was another elevator wait.) (I don't have expendable income at the moment, so that's next year's tax refund at the earliest.)
The updates in 1.1 looked good, but not enough for me to start an entire grind over again for a new character. I'm FAR more likely to continue playing characters I already created, in the NON-LEAGUE area of the game. I'm not a fan of creating characters for new leagues... I like perfecting single character builds at a time (in PoE, before I quit for good, I was the same way.)
We have the game for the entirety of its life and development so that's one huge positive for Last Epoch! I hope they can continue to thoroughly improve the game from optimization to skills/balance/bugs etc.
I think they have a lot of players waiting for the right patch to return. I wish you luck on a nice PC/Laptop in the future!!
Got boring and I just have no desire to play anymore.
Feelsbad, would you come back after a banger patch?
@@GavrynGaming only if they added some real endgame content and better high tier loot drop options. I like minmaxing but the endgame loop and just lame LP drop rates / options to make stuff the best it can be just got old and boring. Also builds just feel meh, like there’s so much that underperforms and they just ignore it.
😂😂😂 wait for update Poe also like that when new update people hope in that the game..trust this game maybe they can became next ggg dev..
Last Epoch has a lot of potential to be the best middle point between POE and D4. With a few more cycles worth of content I think it’ll really find its footing.
I'm really hopeful as well. I'd have to find the exact quote or clip but Judd or Mike or both have stated that 1.3 will be the sweet spot for content additions and game state. I just had to get this out there because I know EHG is listening!
Thanks a lot for watching 🙏
@@GavrynGaming games like this take years of iteration, feedback, and experimentation to come into their own. EHG has proven to me that they listen to feedback and they are passionate about making a great arpg so I am excited to add this game to my seasonal rotation and see how it evolves over time.
Agreed, I really feel like the vast majority of builds are suffering due to bugs or hidden interaction cancelling, I try to do the math on my builds and just become really surprised at how little damage I do in between builds to the same enemy. Also this game is way too overwhelming when it comes to the AoE of bosses, I play online with friends and have a 50ms latency, and as a melee it is just way too hard to dodge or sometimes I even find myself cornered and have no way to escape with the unbelivable amount of aoe bosses put out.
Melee suffers sooo heavily right now for the fight designs, 100%
Great video! Commending to help your algorithm xD
I appreciate you a lot ❤️
Man, I bought this game at launch and have played it for about two hours. I was just wondering if it was any good, and yours was the first video I watched.
Thanks. I think I'll fire it up.
PoE1 I highly suggest a build guide, it's really difficult to get a feel for how to build a successful character on your own at this stage.
PoE2, I'm going in blind!! Most importantly, enjoy this great game :)
@@GavrynGaming 👍
I like EHG and think they’ve achieved something amazing for such a small team. However the game never clicked with me and I don’t really know why. The foundation is pretty good but I get bored after a week or two. I have about 10K hours in PoE and I last two months every league before getting bored.
Maybe LE just need more content, but then again I only experienced a fraction of 1.1 and still got bored after 10 days or so. I wish I could fall in love with the game. EHG is a great team of passionate people and I really want to support them, but it’s hard to justify doing so when I play as little as I do.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the 1.3 patch. It sounds like it could bring me back to LE and hopefully keep me playing.
Yeah I sincerely hope their continued development brings the game up to the standard we all know the game can be, I'm a big fan of the company as well!
i agree with you 100%, still love the game and have alot of fun. But have like 5 sentinells that i stopped playing around 200 corruption since my own build just got bricked at that point. And copying some pro build just feels like soulless playing
Thanks a ton for watching and taking the time to respond! 100% agree, if we wanted another Path of Exile and Path of Building esque build creation, we have that already. Last Epoch's true strength is in its accessibility and opportunity to succeed on your own!
Getting crit with both overlapping meteors from Pontifex Aurelus was real mad rng
Yeah super unlucky! Frozen was still leveling so he didn't have 100% crit mitigation or avoidance 😔 he goes over it in more detail and how it's very spikey due to the wide damage ranges that exist, even non-crits, endurance helps slightly to provide that low HP buffer but that doesn't help against DoTs or 1 shots.
I think the 1.2 update should focus on new skills, perhaps a new class, idol rework, set rework and buffing some (since they cant carry LPs) the factions non mutually exclusive as it makes no sense for non hardcore players perhaps introduce item fusion to make use of like 1000 of the same uniques forming a lp unique or improving one.
Making the coin system more beneficial wheras it wont be used only for lightless arbor and the market/trade system.
And some more damage conversions for skills to improve replayability.
@@pietervanderzwaan4295 Combine all of that with massive sweeping balance changes and bug fixes and they'll knock everyone's socks off!
@@GavrynGaming yep and GGG (poe) will have to work harder to maintain its status.
This was like reverse PoE for me. I was in the closed tests for PoE and had early access for Last Epoch since it became available. I'm just a stupid player so I have no idea where they should go, but I had measured expectations and even they have not been met. Hopefully they find some footing down the line!
One major omission from that timeline was how popular D4 S4 launch was and how unpopular Necropolis was. Loot Reborn was very well received in D4 and still had high player retention a month after. S5 has been good as well and the first expansion isn't far off. Necropolis was one of POE's least popular leagues and had very low player retention in that time frame. POE did recover with their current league with the highest numbers they have seen yet. And of course POE2 is going to blow it up when that game finally launches.
LE is going to have a tough time competing regardless of what they do because casuals and new players are D4's audience and POE is for the audience that hates D4 and wants a more deep, complex game.
@@ktanner3 Thanks for the clarity! I played D4 for the first season and completely bounced off so I'm definitely not as in the know with that game. I have heard the buzz of Loot Reborn and S5 though so you're definitely not wrong, D4 is siphoning off players as well and even I might give it another go now that it seems more respectful of your time!
Does D4 publicize their number anywhere? That would be useful info to have for future videos potentially!
Steamdb charts for Path of Exile is slightly skewed as well, most players use the PoE client to launch/play the game so only a percentage of their playerbase is on steam (and no one knows what percentage).
But I agree with you 100%, the competition in the market is getting fierce and timing is everything with each patch!
My only gripe with the game is that the skills felt light weight.
The sound and visual design for PoE and Diablo are meaty and damn satisfying.
It might be a superficial complaint, but Last Epoch feels extremely "floaty" to me
Then you clearly haven't used erasing strike or seen a golem punch down on a pack of enemies ... That was insane
Great video. The build 'bait' that you describe when finally reaching empowered is the reason I've stepped away from this game. There is no difficulty curve at all between normal and empowered monos.
Exactly!! The difficulty is as spikey as enemy damage 😅
I got the primalist druid chest armor that turns werebears fur white so i rerolled a druid just to find out the white fur is bugged
Oh no, that's a total bait :(
Im slowly getting worried about progress and updates of the game but Im generally positive about the game and Im having fun even though not as much as I wish too. Im mostly waiting for some monolith changes so they are not as tedious as they are right now. I enjoy the campaign, different builds up to lvl 85ish, crafting equips and thats pretty much it. Less demanding PoE as I would say.
I view Last Epoch as the bridge between Diablo and Path of exile, and I find this middle ground an excellent balance.
I find the game very enjoyable to begin with. The music is excellent and the scenery is immersive. I had fun during the campaign. The item system is incredible. i found COF fun to work towards.
My biggest issue is the endgame system. This cycle, I killed my first two harbingers and saw the amount of corruption and grind I needed for the next one. I instantly quit right after.
Monoliths are dry. The game play for me is rush through the instance until the objective spawns. Arena monoliths are awful. This makes the grind for corruption harder to work towards. I cant see myself coming back until monoliths are changed.
Hunting for a build-enabling item helped me play through these negatives however. It helped having a goal to work towards. I could see myself doing the same for other potential characters, or building a character around the new rare item that dropped whilst I was hunting another item.
I would like to see a challenge made by EHG for completing a certain level of content on X number of classes for a handsome reward (e.g cosmetic). This would help enhance the end game grind with there not being much to do at the moment. I feel this is very well done with Path of Exiles challenge systems, where completing them is difficult but rewarding.
killed abaroth, was a good challange and was fun to create builds for. did it on both Falconer and sorcerer. falconer on my own created build, which was tough but doable (ligthning shuriken) and on a meta build as sorcerer. which was significantly easier.
Very nice!! How long have you been playing?
Biggest problem with dot is it forces you to build you defense in one very specific way-armor stacking armor plus hp/ward. Almost all my builds mindless run eternal gloves + armor applies to dot prefix lol. And I don’t think it’s that hard of an issue to fix, just make ailments the only source of dot damage and turn all current dot skills into hit skills that apply a bunch of ailments on hit. In the meantime, you can nerf the ailment cleansing a bit so dot doesn’t get completely trivialized.
Yeah DoT it became even more of a detriment in my eyes when I realized "Oh... these fire dogs and ice wolves breathing on me is a DoT too..." among MANY more enemy skills like that.
There's too many DoT sources and not enough mitigation you hit the nail on the head that's the biggest issue right now. I agree, if abilities should be counted as hits and properly mitigated that would make them feel a lot less punishing!
@@GavrynGaming the game really could use a test server to try out some different ways of balancing things. They also don’t need as many mid season bug fixing if players can find out those bugged interactions before hand. But maybe the player base is not large enough to justify one
@@rayzhang7591 They do have a closed PTR where community testers under NDA and employees of EHG test the game fully.
The issue is some of these bugs have existed for awhile and have been reported. The list is just lengthy to hammer out and new patches introduce new ones or break old ones that were fixed etc. It's whack-a-mole right now 😅
@@GavrynGaming lol didn’t know that. Yeah, there are way too many “broken” things rn, even the not bugged ones
The only true defense option you have is whether you wanna go glancing blows or block on rogue
I totally agree with most points except your outlook. LE embodies everything that’s wrong with ARPGs. 1. The base game is irrelevant, all that counts is the endgames but it’s repetitive as hell. The campaign was by far the worst story in an ARPG I’ve ever played. So I doubt EHG’s ability to make creative and engaging endgame content. 2. The eternal grind for better gear so you can farm better gear. I remember when people complained about dailies in MMOs, but LE is doing nothing but dailies without calling them that. 3. The illusion of build choices. There will always be metas and builds that suck balls. 4. Content for content creators. You‘re a casual? Well, too bad. The content creators complained that the game is too easy, so we have to please them or they won’t promote the game anymore.
So, no, I don’t think they will fix these issues. After five years of development they still have to figure out
@@timbier4523 Time will tell for sure whether or not they can right the ship! I appreciate all the feedback here, I hope they see it! What ARPG/game has you hooked right now?
1. There will always be parts of any game that become irrelivant ... that isnt an arpg problem thats a gaming problem
2. I mean your playing an arpg, the gear treadmill is to be expected ... the best part about LE over any rpg is that getting early/midgame gear isnt a slog ... endgame gear being a slog is fine because its mostly just flexing at that point (expecially with nemesis rn its super pog)
3. At least the nonmeta alternatives are still actually competent ... in poe thats supposed to be the peak of arpg gaming most skills are just abandonware
4. content creators being content creators kekw
Well put
I'll preface by saying that I have 1.8k hours and played since 0.8.1. I agree with most things, especially regarding skill and class balance. The only thing I took issue with is the Abberoth difficulty. It is the kind of content that has been missing the most imo (I killed him with homebrew+CoF on VK and Spellblade before starting 3.25). Fun fight, imo. How many people have killed it doesn't feel relevant (Unless it is extremely low like ~0.5%, remember only ~2% of PoE players have killed Maven on steam). I think the system "feels bad", just like many LE systems, because it is empty/not fleshed out. PoE has 7 (more if you count Cortex, infinite hunger/blackstar) non-uber pinnacle fights, and ppl can feel satisfied with not getting all of them. Once LE has some kind of equivalent to quest Eater/Exarch or a choice between bosses, it will feel a lot better. The grind of getting to there might need adjusting but I'd need to try it more times before I could agree or disagree.
tldr: Good video. Abberoth is not too hard, there is just not enough content so the gap gets jarring.
(I'm also very hopeful for the future)
@@johlargames Thanks so much for watching and the kind words! Yeah I think that's the crux of the issue, they need more content, more time to cook and more time to flesh out their systems. On top of all of that, bug fixes and balance changes/reworks for classes/masteries/uniques is critical to allow for actual build diversity and to re-establish trust with people like me and others who aren't sure if the build they've put together is bad because it's undertuned or bugged or it's just bad lol.
With set classes and set skills for each class/mastery compared to path of exile with over a thousand skills that you can choose from and any class can use literally any of those 1k+ skills. The skills in LE need to be balanced better for this reason primarily and given the proper skill (player skill and performance)/investment, any skill should be able to kill Aberroth NOT any player, any skill. I'd love to see the Marksman that kills Abby with Flurry or Cinderstrike right now 😅
This is way more rigid of a skill system and having only 2-3 good skills per class to choose from just feels too limiting. They have the knobs to adjust/balance them properly (skill trees and passive trees), it'll just take time.
I hope they have the sustainability and profitable player counts to allow them that time!
@@GavrynGaming Yeah, the number of subpar skills is just way too high, and the only way to not fall for one of those "traps" is time investment. I don't I agree on only 2-3 good skills per class, I'd say roughly 5 garbage skills per class (i.e Frost Claw and Static Orb being super-giga-strong doesn't mean that ALL the other mage skills are bad). Rogue is probably in the worst spot in regards to this, so if the bulk of your playtime lies there, I get it. Depends what the criteria is I guess. Atleast it is moving in the right direction, cause it was way worse overall in past patches. Aberroth kinda highlights the problem too since it is much more of a "hard stop" than a random, arbitrary corruption number.
Hopefully they get into a good groove and speed up a bit cause if they fix ~5 skills per patch, it's going to take like 5+ cycles to get there which would be like ~18months :/
I played the game a lot during Early Access (almost 400 hours), and i think the game has so much potential that is being squandered. Unfortunately it still does not feel like the devs really know what direction to take the game, and their update cadence is so slow. I know their team is much smaller than their contemporaries but it's difficult to get excited for this game when the same issues that have been there since Early Access are STILL present.
Wrong. Poe has hade way less devs the past few years. most of the ppl at ggg has been working on poe2
Amazing game, obviously still early, just v1.1, but its a superb start.
I agree wholeheartedly! The base game is amazing. It is indeed early and I hope the next few cycles are bangers and a lot of the issues (mostly balance and bugs) are addressed!
Agree with all your points.
I`m currently stuck at big Abby. And got no more eyes to try again. F.
Terrible feeling oh no 😞 what HP did you get Abby down to?
@@GavrynGaming Think 66%. Could not figure the fight.
I like the game a lot. But second character should be faster to level up. Else I agree with you. Did stop before the new end boss.
I like the game a lot as well and thank you for watching! I hope EHG surprises us all with 1.2
When the hp/mana bar over player option was bugged for 3 months I gave up after reporting bug and posting about it on the forums with no reply or any indication that they were gonna fix it, by the time it came around I was already done.
Oof, would a killer content patch bring you back to try it out again?
@@GavrynGaming I’ve been thinking about diving back in I feel like it’s been long enough 😁
Has EHG fixed how sludgy melee combat is yet? The thing that happens if you're trying to scoot around mobs slowing you down to like 10-20% of your normal movement speed because you're colliding with them.
No unfortunately, melee is not only punished heavily and often undertuned, the collision still exists, you can see it a bit in this video actually when I'm fighting Argentus (big bird dude lol) trying to rotate around him.
@@GavrynGaming Oof yeah that is the biggest factor keeping me away from last epoch at the moment. Nothing feels worse than believing you were perfectly capable of dodging an attack or avoiding getting trapped only to get told by the game engine "nah you were trying to move AROUND that guy? Get fucked."
@@CheezitNinja Add to that the lack of precision that you'd have with WASD (I'm an MMORPG guy originally) and yeah it feels pretty bad to try and position for some of these mechanics, melee is too heavily punished in most games sadly.
I'll just add to this. I was a MASSIVE melee player. Most of my characters that are self-made were melee based. 1.1 brought the Evade mechanic. I was originally a skeptic, but this one simple mechanism did SO much for melee style play it was fantastic. Melee is still definitely much harder (as many who've already commented) but my FG for season 1.1 was so much melee fun to play.
@@GavrynGaming unless your playing rive then its super smooth because of how the skill works xD
ill always keep coming back. it will never be my main game. But I love it and if they need more money I will give it to them.
Truth is casual "dad" players went to play season 5 of D4 and hardcore ARPG players went to play PoE.
And most of them ended up disappointed and came here jaded for one reason or another
this game is great, my only gripe is the upgrading system. At end game it should be easier to access.
Nemesis? Yeah it should be every echo I agree! They have already upped the spawn rate earlier on in the cycle but it still feels intermittent to find with how big some of the echo map tilesets are.
I'm a casual, 70 hours in 1.1, 200 in total. I've killed two harbingers. Love the game will keep coming back to it. But I just wanna know how i died in 0.1 seconds. Give me more (all) data and let me figure out how to solve the problem. I think this would improve the game substantially and solving the problem would mean crafting. Which is LE's greatest strengths. Not sure how... maybe death log stating what happened in the last 1-2 seconds... Got no idea how much data this, just an idea.
100% I love this game! I want nothing more than for it to succeed. This patch just really had me spinning my wheels!
"Spinning my wheels" is couldn't have said it better.
1.5k corruption atm and killed Aberoth many times but... my main is frostclaw
@@Quivna You're having fun lol that's all that matters! Frostclaw is the standard that they should hold all skills to, it's awesome!
i was in anger with last epoch because they removed the offline game mode when online came to it and i loved playing it on my Steam Deck. Now that the real offline mode is back it is with Grim dawn one of the best ARPGs for solo/Offline play.
They literally nerfed ward badly and gave it to monsters to make them stronger
But nothing's worse than their trash RNG system, you can waste days grinding for the jtem u want and later u get a horrible slam which makes it useless
Luckily i kept 1.0 game files and i can still play it with some tools to get all 4LP and all T7 skills to avoid trash RNG
Yeah over the last 2 cycles I've learned if I want to experiment, I should just go Merchant's Guild to buy all the gear I need/want for a new build I want to try. CoF isn't meant to compete with a full player economy, but it might still need some adjustments!
@@GavrynGaming yeah on 1.0 i was COF until lvl 100 then switch to MG, u can basically get any common unique 0LP for free to run your build, it was better than COF but u have to grind for rare item which will come eventually then sell them so u can effort better stuff (MG most valuable items to sell loot filter will help tons)
These days i play offline with a mod to force drop any unique with 4LP directly to avoid RNG drama
I think it's fine that a build a new player puts together might not be able to kill the pinnacle boss. A casual player probably just wants to play a new build, put together whatever they want, then be able to play a good chunk of the game and then maybe give up before they even hit 100.
That's completely fine if that's how they enjoy playing the game! My core issue in that section was the false sense of build diversity given off with the imbalanced skills/uniques/masteries and plethora of bugs that are detrimental to your experience (they don't work or are completely undertuned).
That's a pitfall that's completely out of the player's control and feels bad, to everyone trying to experiment and have fun, not just casual players.
the problem is in PoE just putting something together most of the time cant even clear act 5 ... and definately wont get very far into maps when it does ... thats nowhere near pinnacle bosses
@toukoenriaze9870 You know that this isn't a POE video...right?
@@waveydude i mean i never said it was
It might sound braindead and false at first, but I can confidently say that the impact of seasonal cosmetic rewards is something that drives the players through the grind with more enthusiasm. Even when I beat all the pinnacle bosses in POE and feel a bit burned out , knowing that there's something to achieve and do, something nice that you can keep as a souvenir just makes me stay a lot longer than I otherwise would. When I played Last Epoch (this season for my first time ever), I had a lot of fun, but once I started hunting the Harbingers and the first burnout started kicking in, I didn't feel like there was an actual reason to stay and do it. I have had my fun and that was it. Waiting for the next one.
Very interesting thought, I don't think it's braindead at all! Having the achievements and additional extrinsic reward is just that extra oomph to stick around once you've completed the content and fun as well!
I got the same feeling of "why am I continuing to grind" at many points throughout monos but I pushed through to at least see Aberroth.
I hope EHG can find something like this as well as more endgame and balance etc. They're still in their infancy technically
Truth be told i didnt kill Aberoth yet and thats because i havent even killed the Harbingers yet.
In 1.0 i got past 300 corruption with ease with multiple builds and i would do so now aswell however i dont wanna play builds i already played and as you said some build will fail by default. And by now i am exhausted. I will maybe try like 1 more build i come up with and then call it a day till 1.2
The Harbingers and Pinacle Boss didnt make that much of a difference its still pretty much 1.1 just with extra Bosses. Thats also high likely why the player count is so smal because many people feel like the difference between 1.1 and 1.2 is minimalistic and they get burned out before even reaching the Pinacle Boss.
@@HansPeter-qh7kl 1.0 with bosses lol basically. Nemesis is a big win at least for sure!
@@GavrynGaming Its a nice addition for Unique farming yes.
I got to the tenth harbinger before my build bricked and felt all my efforts became worthless. I jumped out of the game but would return if the plethora of skills became meaningful.
With the limited amount of abilities to play with when you choose a class (unlike other ARPGs where any class can use any skill), the balance needs to be a lot tighter and the bugs need addressed permanently. Until then yeah it'll just feel like you're spinning the wheel with your class and skill choice before you even begin. When you cruise through the entirety of the game and your build fails like that when it finally meets a challenge just takes all the wind out of your sails.
What keeps me playing a arpgs is what us exiles call t0 unique unique items that only the upper echelon of exiles well get their hands on for instance i have a mageblood awakened lvl 6 multistrike i have a perfect katabasis claw. These are types of things that keep me playing.
there's items in LE that are way rarer than a mirror, let alone a T0, but they are just LP versions of very achievable unique items which doesn't sound impressive or that rare at first glance. In PoE rare stuff is more defined and clear
@@davidduarte1269 good sir go back to your game that came out this year I'll continue playing mine that came out 15 years ago with more depth than your mother's pu....
the problem with most casual builds is they don't consider enough of the item pool to achieve greatness. if we tune down content to suit people that don't understand the loot pool enough then choices don't matter because all of them end up the same. there is no reason to play this or that or pick this choice because it all results in the same thing. this gameplay loop doesn't reward players for finding strong synergies either through gear or skill trees.
Thanks a lot for watching! I agree, I don't want the content tuned down to suit bad builds, at all. My core point in that section was that you shouldn't be setup for failure just by picking X or Y skill. Take the powerlevel of Cinderstrike vs Frostclaw right now. There are some skills and uniques that are just complete duds with no options to scale them appropriately or pivot (nothing will make Cinderstrike very good, especially in pinnacle content) and as a new player that's a pitfall you shouldn't find yourself in if you're putting in the time to read the tooltips/game guide and understand the game.
You shouldn't have to be aware of every potential item/combo and be considering every affix pool as well as know every bug/balance issue with every skill in order to build out a mildly successful build yourself. Don't make the game easy, make the ability to craft your own build and actually play with every skill/unique a possibility given the proper operator and build/combo. If they want to bring in new players and actually keep them, these frustrations need addressed for sure.
To play devils advocate, not everyone deserves to beat the hardest content just for playing the game
Precisely this. If EHG let us respec masteries that'd be a literal perfection of a game. If you're really efficient with your time and learned the game to a certain degree you can kill Abberoth in less than a day - even if you have 3 wives, 12 kids and several jobs you can probably manage that much in a span of a cycle. Just more things to look forward to.
My biggest frustration is how in pre access it ran 10x better on my Steamdeck than it does since the official release. It almost never lets me play for longer than 20 minutes before crashing my entire steamdeck
They made a lot of visual updates and improvements to the game in 1.0 so that tracks perfectly sadly. I don't have a steam deck but this game would be REALLY good for it, I hope they improve the performance.
I don't entirely agree with you. Accessibility does not mean anyone can clear all of the new content with any build. This would lead to a boring game with no real achievements. Why would I care if I killed the pinnacle boss when anyone can do it? The fact that you made a build on your own that cleared everything except for the pinnacle boss is an achievement on its own and speaks for the accessibility of the game. If a casual player wants to put together a build on their own then that is perfectly fine and they will likely make it to empowered monoliths with a coordinated build, however, that casual player cannot expect to be able to complete high endgame content just because they think their build is good enough. There has to be some content in the game reserved for people that want to put in the time and effort to optimize their builds to complete.
I 100% agree with you and we're fighting the same fight here! I'm not asking for the game to be easy or for anyone that logs in regardless of skill level to be able to throw a build together with zero thought and down Aberroth.
By accessibility I meant every skill should be balanced as evenly as possible to allow for the possibility for any skill/mastery to succeed given the right operator and build idea.
Right now for example if you have 2 players and new player A that picks sorcerer and new player B that picks marksman with zero outside information and equal skill level and RPG experience, those 2 players will have wildly opposite experiences in the late game all due to the class they chose when they first booted up the game, an unforeseen pitfall.
That to me isn't an accessible/equal opportunity for new players and it's no fault of the player. The bugs need fixed, skills and uniques need appropriate balance and when possible reworks to modernize the 2-3+ year old skills and masteries, otherwise the new player and by extension the casual/average player experience is skewed.
Anyone not in the know (through external resources) or deeply enfranchised in the game (which is the bulk of any playerbase today), will be potentially setup for failure as the skills and balance stands right now. The example I've been using is Cinderstrike vs Frostclaw as they stand.