It sounds like this may possibly be the result of character save file corruption. The two most common causes for corruption is the game being closed unexpectedly while saving (such as a power outage or alt+f4), or by somehow being modified by a third party program.
As the character was offline we would not have it stored in our online database. However, you should still be able to find it! Firstly, please turn off the Steam Cloud Sync in Last Epoch before doing these instructions!
You can go to this area:
Windows: C:\Users[your_pc_account_name]\AppData\LocalLow\Eleventh Hour Games\Last Epoch\Saves
Linux: Steam games files can be found in the “~/. steam/steam/SteamApps/common/” folder
SteamDeck: Saves will be located in the home directory. There is no fixed place where native games store their data, it may be under .config/, .local/, or in a private directory. Proton saves are stored under .local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/
Note: In order to see the [AppData] folder you must have "Hidden Folders" visible
And there you should be able to see all of your save files (sort your files by Date Modified to make identifying the culprits a little easier). These files can be opened on notepad and there you'd be able to see the character name/level/etc. There are backups of each save file with the ending [.bak] extension. If you can find your character in one of those save files you can restore it by simply removing the [.bak] extension [do not delete the entire file - only the extension]!
Chances are good that one of your Stash files (e.g. STASH_CYCLE_2_0) or Character files (e.g. 1CHARACTERSLOT_BETA_4) got corrupted. Start by opening the most recently modified files in a text editor (Notepad is fine, Notepad++ is better) until you find the first file with data that is obviously corrupt and looks quite different from the rest of the files. Most likely, if you're using Notepad, the file contents will appear to be blank, and if you're using something like Notepad++ with the show all characters option enabled, the file will show something like "NUL NUL NUL NUL NUL NUL NUL NUL NUL NUL...". In the event that the corruption occurred as a result of the file being modified, it may be harder to identify, and will require process of elimination.
Now that you've identified a corrupt file, go ahead and delete it (you're welcome to make a backup copy first if you like). For whatever that file name was, there will be a corresponding .bak copy - make a copy of the .bak file, and rename it to whatever the name of the corrupt file was, i.e. if your corrupt file was called "STASH_CYCLE_2_0", you would delete STASH_CYCLE_2_0, then make a copy of STASH_CYCLE_2_0.bak, and rename the copy to "STASH_CYCLE_2_0".
Run Last Epoch, either in full offline or online mode (just select Offline Mode in-game), and check if you can successfully log in with your existing characters. If not, check for more corrupt files and repeat steps if you find any.
If the backup files are missing, or also corrupt, you can try downloading historical saves from Steam. This requires that you have Steam Cloud Saves enabled for Last Epoch, and that Steam has had the opportunity to upload previous save states. In order to restore from Steam Cloud, you can download the replacement save files at the following URL: https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage
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