[2022] Official Last Epoch General FAQ

Hello Travelers!

As the community continues to expand, we find certain questions regularly come up in game, on our official discord, or in other places. We wanted to provide a centralized resource to find developer responses to these common questions. As more questions commonly come up, we will continue to add to this FAQ.

Table of Contents

1. Multiplayer
2. Game Mechanics
3. Cosmetics / MTX
4. Game Content
5. Future Plans

Multiplayer

1. When is Multiplayer / multiplayer when / mp? / can I group with friends / […]

   We’re working on getting multiplayer out as fast as we can while ensuring it’s as good as possible. We release monthly bog posts on its status. For more information please see the multiplayer FAQ here → https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/official-last-epoch-multiplayer-faq/42036.

Game Mechanics

1. What is EHG’s stance on Auto-Cast?

   This is not an intended feature, but we view its use as reflecting a problem in skill design, rather than a problem with the player using it.

   Last Epoch is built around the limit of five specialized skills with the understanding that this will generally result in five active skills that you use at least occasionally. Skills that are optimal to auto cast effectively take away an active skill, resulting in making it just a passive that takes up a skill slot, and giving that build fewer tools to actively use in combat, and fewer decisions to make. This is true regardless of whether the player auto-casts the skill or just mindlessly presses the button every 10 seconds regardless of the circumstances.

   We aim to rework these skills so that their active portion rewards more situational and reactive usage. In the meantime we will not punish players who choose to auto-cast these skills.

2. Will there ever be auto-pickup for crafting materials?

   We don’t like to say “never”, but our current stance is that this would be a net negative for Last Epoch. The reason being that crafting shards are loot, not currency. The difference being that currency has no individual value: One gold piece is the exact same as any other gold piece. However with shards, there’s rare and desirable shards as there is any other loot such as armor, idols, or jewelry. Having to interact with it gives it meaning, and allows you to see what you get, and appreciate getting rare/desirable shards. One of the biggest things we keep in mind with this is that any changes here are largely a one way road. Regardless of whether adding automation is good for the game’s health or not, players will almost always be happy to be given more automation and power. However if we feel a change has done a disservice to the game, it’s exceptionally hard to go back on without major backlash from the playerbase.

Cosmetics / MTX

1. When are the item creation level supporter packs going to be re-opened for purchase?

   It’s awesome we get so many requests from people looking to support the game to this extent, and we greatly appreciate it. There’s a lot of work that goes into designing and implementing uniques - both mechanically and artistically. We disabled these supporter packs as we currently have a large list of ones to get through. Once we start catching up on that list we’ll look at re-opening these levels of supporter packs.

2. When are supporter pack upgrades going to be made available again?

   Again, it’s so amazing and humbling that we get so many requests for this. Currently supporter pack upgrades need to be manually completed for each request so we had to temporarily disable this as we weren’t able to process the requests in a timeframe we felt was reasonable. We’re working on a system to automate this process and should hope to re-open this option in the near future.

3. Will there be an MTX store in Last Epoch?

   Offering MTX in the form of cosmetics only has always been our plan since our Kickstarter days. This will allow us to keep supporting content for years to come making Last Epoch the game we desire and the community deserves. That being said, as Last Epoch does have a box price, this allows us to not have either power or convenience in the MTX Store. Any features that we will look to add to Last Epoch to enhance the game for convenience or power, such as items, stash features, anything that has in game interaction will be included for free as part of the core game.

Game Content

1. Will there be any sort of price on future Last Epoch content such as expansion packs?

   Our current plan is for future content for Last Epoch is to be included with the box price and will be supported through the optional MTX store. We want to avoid any sort of expansion pack box prices that may result in splitting up players. As such we intend to offer all future content free of charge.

2. What’s with the Bees?
   Bzzzzzzz.

3. What’s the status on set items?
   Set items are a compelling item type that we’ve always wanted to make work in Last Epoch. However they are also a potentially dangerous item type to include in an ARPG. They take up a lot of slots, so they give a build fewer opportunities for customization and upgrades, and if there is a meta defined by powerful sets that encourage specific combinations of skills, it can feel like you’re choosing a kit rather than building a unique character.

   However, since the introduction of exalted and legendary items, the gap between items that are viable in early to mid endgames, and best in slot items has widened. This provides much more space to balance sets in a place where they are good enough to use, but don’t completely crowd out other options. We are in the process of rebalancing existing sets to occupy this space, but it’s not a precise science, so feedback on which sets still feel underwhelming or which, if any, are too powerful is always welcome.

   We also intend to continue to move towards creating more two piece sets over sets with three or more pieces, because the former are easier to balance and we believe the reduction in set size does more to mitigate the negative aspects of set items than it does to dampen the positives.

4. What happens to all the gear I’ve collected if you buff or nerf it?
   The short version is, your gear should be updated automatically, with no need to re-farm any pieces. Here are some more details for those who love details:

   If an item base type is reworked, your items will retain their affixes but become a different base type. Changes to the minimum/maximum of affixes on all item types apply automatically. If an affix is removed, it will be replaced on your items with a different random affix. If an affix is removed from the affix pool of a certain item type, any existing items will still have that affix.

Future Plans

1. Will Last Epoch be available in my language?
   We would most certainly like to support as many communities as we possibly can, and would love to offer localizations - though this is a massive undertaking. There’s many nuances with this style of game that require very specific translations to get right.

   As part of this, there are over 1000 nodes that have individual descriptions, many of them having specific effects rather than just giving stats. These are also changed frequently with iterations in beta. Other descriptions are generated based on their properties and tags, which would often require complicated logic to work out how to handle the spell tag differently in “increased cold damage” compared to “chance to apply frailty on spell hit for totems”.

   So we absolutely want to offer more languages, it will just take a lot to get done right and something we will need to look into as we’re down the road and have the core game in proper order.

2. Will there be character customization or gender options added to Last Epoch?
   Last Epoch is a class based game and we prioritized creating distinct silhouettes, visual themes, and animations for the different classes over the ability to customize their appearance. There is a lot of work that goes into creating a distinct player character, such as voice acting, modelling, rigging, skinning armor, creating animations, and adding character customization would increase a lot of that work, even doubling it in some cases.

   However character customization is a feature that has been very frequently requested, and one that we enjoy from other games. We also have a lot more resources and technical capability than we had when we first scoped out the project, so character customization is not entirely off the table. Those resources are needed in a lot of places though, so regardless of what we decide long term, character customization will not be a feature for the 1.0 release of Last Epoch. As we’re reworking older content of Last Epoch, we’re also keeping this avenue in mind to not make things too focused on the existing pre-set characters to keep things open for this in the future such as cinematics and dialog.

3. When will Last Epoch release?
   To answer this question, we have to first define what qualifies a “release” of Last Epoch, as the game is currently fully playable. This target we refer to as Last Epoch 1.0. However, this is just a kickoff for a game we’ll be adding content to for many years in the future. We currently define 1.0 as when the game is ready to handle a larger load of players with multiplayer, we have all mentioned classes and masteries in game, and we’re ready to support Cycles (seasons/leagues). As the timing for this can depend on how things like multiplayer are received, as well as feedback and balancing we don’t want to be too specific with a date at the current time for patch 1.0.

With the most common questions aside, remember we also have available an encyclopedia in game (by default accessible by pressing “G”) which will answer many mechanics related questions. You can also jump onto our discord at discord.gg/lastepoch to hang out with us, or ask questions you may have to either the community or us directly.

Stay safe Travelers, Eterra holds many secrets yet.