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I bought Last Epoch back during 0.7. I played the game for maybe 1-2 weeks a year during early access, not wanting to dive too deep into it until release. I'm also a long time ARPG player, having played Path of Exile, D3, D4, and a bit of Grim Dawn. Generally, I'd say I play at a Medium-Core level. I like to go out of my way to study the game and learn how to do things well, but I'm also a bit of a casual in other aspects and don't participate in the kinds of things that very hardcore players do.
Just wanted to get all that out of the way to provide some context to my feedback.
First off, I'd like to say that for a 1.0 release, I'm very happy with the game. Whenever I talk about this game with any of my friends they seem to all agree that even though there are many things we'd like to see improved, the foundation of the game is very solid and there's a great skeleton here to build off of. I want to focus my feedback more on what I'd like to see improved, but I don't want that to indicate my lack of enjoyment towards this game. I love the crafting system, the loot filter, the echo system (it has flaws but I enjoy the concept), the idols, the legendary system (genius design imo) etc. But most of all I love the design philosophy of the game. I've been following the devs for a while now and I think they're doing a really solid job of communicating with the community and actively trying to respond to feedback.
Now, with that out of the way, my complaints:
Blessings: I love the concept of the blessings, but the execution of it is off. I think it sucks that when I want to change up my blessings to accommodate a gear change, I have to farm stability in some other timeline that is much lower in corruption to replace it. Honestly though, I think that would be acceptable were it not for the fact that I also just lose my old blessing. It feels like blessings are supposed to "fill in the gaps" for our defenses, much like how idols can get used, but they don't have the same convenience. If I was able to store the highest value of any individual blessing I choose on my Blessings tab on my character sheet and freely interchange them, I wouldn't mind having to take the time to farm them.
Dungeons: I'll be honest, and if people disagree with me that's fine, but I hate doing dungeons. I feel like every time I go into a dungeon, it's for the explicit purpose of getting something specific out of it (either a boss drop or legendary crafting), but in order for me to get to that something I have to wade through a bunch of mobs. I just find it kind of cumbersome. Not that I want this game to necessarily be more like PoE, but I do enjoy that in PoE many of the bosses that drop uniques that you want are just simply boss fights. You just put the thing in your device and go straight to the boss arena. I often find myself wishing the dungeons could be that. But I could be in the minority here.
Legendary Crafting: I LOVE legendary crafting in this game. Absolutely love it. I think it's such an interesting form of design for the genre and would love to see future ARPGs take inspiration from it. However, I HATE with a passion that to craft my legendaries I have to go through a whole dungeon to craft just a single one. I feel like I want to interact with this mechanic so much more, just casually picking up random things and slapping them together to see if I can make something interesting, but because it's such a time sink to do so I only do it with uniques that I am actively using on my build. I feel like the legendary crafting system needs a rework of some kind; not in how it functions, but in how you access/interact with it. (If dungeons were reduced to simply a boss encounter, that would also be a big improvement imo)
Stash Tab Affinities: I've already seen this mentioned so I won't beat a dead horse. This should probably be a priority. I waste way too much time doing manual sorting of my gear. The faster I can dump my gear, the more likely I will be to stick around a couple extra days in a cycle.
Campaign Skipping: This was my first time using the shortcuts to skip the campaign and I found it... kind of confusing? I'll be honest I didn't look up best strategies on how to do the campaign skip, but I didn't think that I had to. Additionally, on one of my characters I found myself finishing the campaign with my last Idol slot missing and it was frustrating trying to find the quest that I missed for it. Obviously it's on me for not being on top of doing the quests, but if it happened to me it likely also happened to other players. I don't have any specific suggestions on this, just wanted to describe how I felt about my experience.
Circle of Fortune: I only played CoF this Cycle so I don't have any MG feedback. Overall, I enjoyed CoF. Coming from PoE, I didn't expect to enjoy SSF as much as I did, but this faction really sold me on how fun SSF can be when you're given extra tools to make it more controlled/targeted. With that said there's a few issues for me. Upgraded Rune of Ascendance feels bad due to the CoF requirement on the gear. I am often finding myself turning off my loot filter to look for gear pieces that have a CoF requirement, and there are surprisingly fewer of them than I'd expect. I think that either the CoF requirement needs to be removed, or the loot filter needs to be able to filter for items that have a CoF requirement so I can easily identify those to upgrade with my runes. Full Set Drop feels awkward as a Rank 9 reward, especially with how weak sets are. It was not fun working towards that as my next rank, and it kind of killed the excitement of progressing within CoF. Also, I don't necessarily hate the campaign required prophecies (especially as they can be filtered), but we should not be forced to engage with cutscenes after we've already witnessed them once on a character. I would frequently see a good reward for the Majasa fight and pass it up because it just wasn't worth it to me to be forced to watch that cutscene again. Lastly, and this one isn't a huge deal, but I think we should be allowed to pick our faction in Chapter 1. Even if we don't get to select any prophecies until 9, I think it would just feel nice to start getting some favor/reputation early on (again though, not really a huge deal)
Set Items: These have been talked about before but it's very unfortunate how underwhelming they are. I hope to see an improvement soon that doesn't turn this game into D3 where sets are effectively required on everyone. I'd love to see a world where 10-30% of the meta builds are generated through interesting set effects.
Corruption: I'm am generally in agreement with the sentiment that corruption right now feels kind of bad. I think the mechanic itself and how it affects enemies/rewards is good, but it just feels like such a grind. I especially hate how all my timelines are on different corruption levels so when I need to go farm a different blessing I am effectively just being punished with worse loot during that process. The catchup mechanic helps but I don't think it's enough.
Normal Monoliths: I've seen this complained about forever so I won't say much. But I definitely think that if my alt characters shared my blessings and my monolith progression, and they could skip normal monos due to my main char having cleared them, I'd be much happier and would probably attempt making a bunch of builds every cycle. The ramp up into end game really ruins any excitement I have towards rolling new builds.
Rerolling Characters: I love the build diversity in this game, and I love how I just see random uniques that make me go "I bet it would be fun to make a character with this in mind". Especially if it drops with LP. But following up on my previous point about the monoliths, it just feels like there is too much barrier to entry. I don't want to have to regrind blessings/corruption/empowered on every single character. I understand that the end game is a little lacking right now and that this effectively reduces that end game slightly further, but I think the reward is that players would become far more interested in rolling new characters, which would likely result in longer-term engagement in any given cycle.
Loot Filters: I think the loot filter system in this game is fantastic, but needs upgrading. I would love to see the following: Filter by item's Faction Rank, legendary potential, and specific rolls on affixes. I know that there is a design philosophy where EHG wants us to look at the loot on the ground and not just filter out 99% of the drops, but I personally don't agree with the philosophy. Every time I hover over something that I don't want it feels like a bother. I don't think it's a good move to force a gameplay philosophy like this on your players. Let us have agency over how we want to experience this game. The players that like to see giant lootsplosions can make their filters less strict and hover things as per EHG's intent, the players that don't want that can have a tool to make their lives easier. I hope EHG reconsiders their position on this one. Additionally, when I select Item Type: Helmet as a condition, and then search for affixes to filter on that helmet, it would be really nice if the only affixes that showed up were ones that are actually possible for that helmet to roll. Additionally, and this one is more of a "nice to have", but I wish there was a non-third-party method to see the rarity of the affixes. Obviously as I play the game I learn over time, but I think that especially for players that are newer and also in MG, being able to see which affixes are rare somewhere in the game would allow them to identify potentially valuable pieces of loot (e.g: I set my loot filter to look for any rare/very rare affixes that rolled T7). I can theoretically do this by the assistance of third party tools, and by EHG's philosophy of not wanting players to have to rely on third party tools, I can't help but feel that this decision would be in line with their principles.
Experimental Items: Generally I like the system and only have one standout complaint. I don't think Glyphs of Insight should drop from using Runes of Creation. I think you should just have them drop from the Exiled Mages at 45% of the rate in which Runes of Creation drop. I find myself picking up random experimental items and using Creation on it to generate my Insights. It's just an annoying system that doesn't seem to add any value to the game outside of wasting my time.
Random Extras: There's definitely bugs, the endgame is kind of empty, classes are imbalanced due to the nature of the newer ones being better designed. All of these things I am confident will improve with time so I don't feel the need to give any detailed feedback.
Overall, I'm very impressed with the game considering it's 1.0. I think that this game is exactly what I've been looking for as someone that feels like PoE is a little bit too much, and D3/4 way too little. There's enough here for me to want to sink my teeth into it and learn about the game's depth and mechanics, but not so much that I feel like I need to effectively study a PhD to understand what's going on. Despite the rough launch I am happy to see the game doing so well and I have high hopes/confidence that as long as the game continues to get quality updates/content and the bugs are resolved, this is going to be a staple in the ARPG scene.
Thanks for reading!
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