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I've been playing the current patch for around 2 weeks now, and I feel like I have some constructive thoughts and feedback I can provide regarding the current patch, so I felt it was a good time to do so.
Before I get into that, just a bit of background: I've played Last Epoch at three distinct points now: once in 2021 on the "Act 9" patch, once in 2022 after the Temporal Sanctum patch, and a third time on the current patch.
Overall, I do think the game has improved quite a bit over the time since I first played. To put it bluntly, I was not too impressed when I first played the game in 2021. While the game leveling through the acts and into early monoliths was okay, the crafting was very uninspiring at the time; not a single piece of gear equipped at the time I stopped playing was looted. I bought bases from the gambler until I got a good roll on a good base, then full crafted 4x tier 5 stats. No uniques or set items I found were worth equipping, and no exalted items I dropped at that point in progression were better than the crafted items I found (having a t6 stat didn't make up for generally being on bad bases).
Itemization has since improved a lot; the basic crafting is much more balanced and made early gearing/picking up items more fun, and the legendary potential system is fairly interesting/compelling. I'm personally someone who enjoys trade quite a bit in ARPGs (not necessarily due to item acquisition per se, but because it makes drops more exciting, especially as someone who doesn't play a whole lot of builds at once), so while drops in the current version of Last Epoch still are a lot less exciting for me than drops in say, PoE, I'm hopeful the planned addition of the trade system will help improve the feeling more.
I have one gripe with the current itemization system that I feel is easily articulated and, given the current implementation seems at odds with other design choices the devs have made, seems like something that is a good topic to give constructive feedback on. Specifically, my issue lies with the dungeon thresholds that are required for making legendary items and how those translate to impacts on how drops feel as well as the balance of legendary items. For those unaware, the tier of Temporal Sanctum you run impacts what items you can make legendary. Practically speaking, it seems like tiers 1, 2 and 3 are all relatively easy even as someone just winging a homebrewed build, but tier 4 is a pretty huge step up; practically, than means that any drop I get with LP that has an equipment requirement up to level 75 I can make into a legendary, but anything that requires 76+ to equip, I probably will not before quitting the current patch. Now, if equipping level corresponded to unique power level, that would be fine--but it clearly does not, even as recognized by the developers, given the "effective level for legendary potential" value that many uniques have if you go to one of the item detail sites that exist for the game. This results in situations where you can get a very powerful, endgame viable item (e.g. Titan Heart) with as many LP as you want, and you can make it into a legendary in an utterly trivial dungeon. But if you get a mediocre item that happens to have a 76+ equipment level, even if it just has 1 LP, you have to wait until you can beat one of the hardest static encounters in the game to improve it.
A good example of this that I have encountered on the current patch while farming the Black Sun empowered monolith is The Confluence of Fate. This is not an item I would equip to my character with 0 LP given the steep defensive downsides and lack of defensive affixes, but I got one dropped with 2 LP which I'd at least consider crafting and using if I hit 2 good affixes. When you go on one of the third party sites, you can see this wasn't even that unlikely--it only has an effective level for legendary potential of 50, meaning it has a much better chance to roll LP than a lot of other uniques that are considered powerful, presumably because the devs realized it is not as powerful as it's 81 requirement might have you believe. However, it requires 81 to equip, and thus I cannot make it legendary without doing t4 temporal sanctum (which is very much impossible for my current powerlevel).
My suggestion on this front would be to make Temporal Sanctum tier limit the amount of LP you could imprint on to an item, instead of using it to limit the equipment level. E.g., tier 1 temporal sanctum would allow you to use only 1 LP uniques, whereas tier 4 would allow you to go all the way to 4 LP uniques. This seems like it would allow the system to much more logically gate actual power behind dungeon completion ability. As it is, most uniques I want to use for my build I can do in absolutely trivial t1 or t2 dungeons, even if I somehow lucked into getting the items with 4 LP, which seems very counter intuitive. The devs have already implicitly recognized that equipment level doesn't correspond very well with unique's power level given the effective level for legendary potential stat, so this seems like a logical change to make.
Moving on from itemization to endgame gameplay loops, I also feel like these have improved a lot. I was not particularly impressed with either monoliths or arena in either 2021 or 2022, and Temporal Sanctum was interesting when it was added in 2022 but was hardly enough to carry by itself. Now, in 2023, I think there have been some improvements; the 2 additional dungeons add a bit more spice, and Lightless Arbor adding an exciting gold sink really makes gold throughout the endgame more exciting, which in turn helps monoliths feel a bit better. Arena also feels nicer with the Arena Champions modes (though still feels a bit lackluster, especially compared to the dungeons). Monoliths definitely feel better with the elimination of the need to do the 2 boring "filler" quest echoes every boss cycle in empowered monoliths as well as the bonuses for killing mobs. It also seems like pumping up corruption levels in empowered monoliths is way easier (if that is your goal). Monoliths still have a long way to go to be particularly engaging, but my impression is the devs are working on that already and I'm not a game dev, so I'll leave that to them without any specific feedback on improving the general entertainment/engagement.
That being said, what I would like to provide specific constructive feedback on several pain points that I feel could likely be (relatively) easy to change and hopefully not very controversial.
The biggest one and one that I think actually surprisingly has gotten worse is how easy it is to bite off more than you can chew and then get effectively stuck. This appears to be due to one of the items that was nominally an improvement to monoliths--the ability to quickly pump up corruption in empowered monoliths due to Gaze of Orobyss. While this is obviously a great feature if you can handle the corruption level you are aiming for, it is very rough if you overshoot. Using my own experience as an example, I can at the point I am at now fairly easily clear around 200 corruption in any of the empowered monolith timelines I have tried farming unless I pick up exceptionally stupid sets of mods. So while I was farming the Spirits of Fire timeline a bit over 200 corruption and exhausted the web I had at the time, I figured I could afford to pump up the corruption a bit and jumped up to around 250 with the gaze of orobyss stacks I had picked up from the boss kills I'd had at 200. Now, at first, this didn't seem too bad--I definitely could handle 250 corruption at a baseline, including with 1-2 damage mods. However, I quickly got overwhelmed, with every pathway available to me stacking up 5-6 duration synergistic damage mods that were absolutely wrecking me, like ~100% elemental damage, ~45% hp+damage, and ~125% armour shred. I could barely even progress, nonetheless get to a shade of orobyss to lower corruption a bit, given a single death means you start over, and every path available to me just had even more damage mods on it. I finally manage to corpse drag myself to a shade of orobyss and kill it, and I only knock off 7 corruption, and the power level of the new web is much closer to the 250ish that was wrecking me than the 200ish that I was steamrolling through. I end up just abandoning the timeline to farm elsewhere, even though I still wanted to farm boot nodes and a slightly better fire shred blessing, because it is just too much of a headache to painfully grind through echoes with a bunch of stacked 6 duration juiced damage nodes to try to painfully get the timeline back down to a level I could farm it effectively in.
Basically, I feel like if we have a way to easily and accidentally juice the corruption level past the point where we can handle it (which Gaze of Orobyss definitely enables), we need some sort of mechanic to quickly bring it back down. If I can accidentally juice up a timeline 50 corruption, I shouldn't need to spend hours painfully grinding through it when I realized I went too far to slowly bring it down like 7 corruption at a time. I'll leave it to the devs the best way to effectuate this--maybe they want to implement a cost or something--but there needs to be some way to quickly lower corruption when you f*ck up due to Gaze of Orobyss stacks.
Perhaps on a related noted, it feels like a lot of the "specific damage type" nodes are way overtuned for monoliths, given how common they are. In many cases, they just become effective dead ends, and don't really seem to serve much of a purpose aside from making you very, very miserable for 3-6 echoes if you choose one (or, occasionally, run into a situation early in a web where you have no choice but to choose one). E.g., I'm farming Black Sun timeline at 200ish corruption, absolutely blowing through most mods, but then there are randomly nodes with 130%-160% increased damage for void enemies (which almost every echo has, more often than not as the dominant mob type of the echo). These nodes may as well just be dead ends, because if I take one, I go from effortlessly destroying everything to just getting randomly 100-0'd, even with a bunch of otherwise easy mods. While some variation of danger in terms of echo mods make sense, all the specific damage type or mob type mods (except perhaps the Undead one, which splits it's power between damage and HP) provide such HUGE power spikes to the mobs and/or damage types they buff that their danger level is absolutely absurd for how commonly they show up. I'd say maybe moving the power on these to a non-offensive stat would preserve some of their fantasy--e.g., you want to super-buff void mobs, then buff their damage+hp by more reasonable amounts, instead of just their damage mods to one-shot values. Or at the very least, make them less common.
Hopefully this feedback will be of use; I do feel like this game has promise and has grown a lot since I first purchased it, and I look forward to trade being implemented as that will add a lot of excitement for drops for people like me!
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