[2023] Last Epoch failing to launch after Runes of Power

Hi everyone, I've been playing Last Epoch for a few months now and I love it. Have about 150 hours and never had any issues with performance/launching the game.

However these past 2 days have been relatively annoying. I've successfully got the game to launch twice and in both of these instances it froze in the middle of a loading screen and crashed. Every other time I try to open the game it launches a screen for about a second and then crashes.

Should I try reinstalling the game, and does anybody know if offline characters are lost forever once you uninstall?

Also was curious if anybody else is having similar issues.