[2020] My thoughts after a couple of days of playing.

Either positive or negative comments forward, I don't plan to look at this topic after it's posted, just leaving a snippet for EHG if they're looking for it. I had no previous knowledge of Last Epoch, had no forward preparation, planning, counseling by the playerbase or ever looked up how to do something. The perspective is 100% discovered organically by my own. If it seems I'm missing something or something I list is already dealt with, I will be unaware. Pure uneducated thoughts. I'm going to have a list of pros and cons, and a miscellaneous section for generic unimportant or fluff thoughts. Previous experience in the ARPG space includes the following: D2, Torchlight 1+2, Grim Dawn, Titanquest and PoE

Pros

• Skills are snappy and easy to understand. After taking a minute or two to look at each tree, it was pretty easy to get caught up in thinking about damage conversions and situational uses for skills. Easy to focus on and hone your favorite skills to figure out what you want to do with a character.
• Crafting being readily available anywhere, and being a simple risk reward system for items fracturing vs getting critical rolls feels nice and easy to keep up on gear. Can get a lower rarity piece crafted up in a pinch, or start with a good base to go for higher tiers. Never felt left out of gear.
• Very lenient with build mistakes and felt easy to respec what I needed to if I got a piece of gear that pushed me in a certain direction.
• While at first I thought idols were simply another equipment slot for flavor and being different, I ended up appreciating them. They helped me patch up resistances and stats that were a little low to allow more freedom on my actual character gear.
• AoE markers were helpful for some attacks that don't have a super noticeable tell or pattern, even though I wouldn't typically care for them in ARPG's.
• Even though textures vary in polish, most of the light effects and cosmetic appearances of most skills was colorful and appealing. Particularly fire and necrotic effects from bosses.

Cons

• Most obvious yet inevitable for now, performance. whiplashed from being fine to really big slowdowns. The biggest hitters for me by far were fire effects. Second most common hitters were necrotic projectiles from avian skeletons and wisps.
• Gear seems really boring. I felt like plenty of it was effective enough, just boring. I feel like crafting items could really help here, with really outlandish and cool proc effects on the items and kiss-curse stats. Currently I felt no need to take any risks if I could just pump my main damage type, element, resistances and main resource pool for survival.
• The health curve of enemies in packs seems really off sometimes. It seems like medium size monsters and below explode into gibs instantly, and sometimes I'm left beating on a larger one for what feels like an eternity. It's of my opinion that a big monster in a pack should have a little more health than the base ones, but is way more dangerous in speed and attack pattern. I felt this the most in the mid 30's range of leveling.
• After playing with every class, I can barely remember the appearance of most areas. The void areas are sometimes so dark that I couldn't make out much detail, and the various eras change the color scheme and appearances of the travel points a little too uniformly. All I remember from imperial era is brown colors. I struggle with this in many of the more darker ARPG's though like Grim Dawn, so it's probably just me (The tropical areas with the raptors and the dragon boss was effing gorgeous btw)
• While skills are easy to understand and snappy, easy to theory craft etc. I'd love to see more direct interactions with them. They feel very isolated in their trees, i'd love to see stuff such as "Casting skill X in the AoE of Skill Y has Z effect" Unique interactions between skills in ARPG's is criminally under represented.

Misc

-Holy sh*t I love the leash range of mobs. Being able to run through most of the level and chain lightning the whole map was immensely satisfying. When trying to do this in other games, monsters like to give up chase too early before you can group a metric ton of them in one spot.

-I have no idea how many base types of weapons there are for each kind, but it sure felt like I saw the same 5 wands, swords, armors etc. for the classes. Assuming this will be expanded on. Or maybe I didn't find those other base types idk.

-I did find out pretty quickly but figuring out how to unlock the subclass at first made me really panic that I missed something but turns out I just didn't get far enough into the campaign. Perhaps in the passives screen there could be a footnote about 'Clear X quest to unlock this subclass' when you mouse over them

-Character customization would be nice, but obviously a ton of arpgs don't do that. But that could be why it could be a good thing here!

-I have no idea how to feel about no mana pots. For some classes it felt like it didn't matter at all, but for the mage It felt like an absolute chore to me. I like the high mana cost, high damage playstyle of the sorcerer and tried to capitalize on it but I wasn't able to get enough mana regen to not have to use focus after every single pack of creatures. Even if I had to buy three stacks of potions every town visit, i'd like to control how often I can burst damage. I have a friend who got the game with me and hates the no mana pots even more than I do.

-In the future, upon hitting a certain passive milestone in the class tree, maybe you could have a selection of three skills to choose from rather than one? Obviously way down the road but it would make each character stand out even more.

Overall, I did had a lot of fun. I think I'm going to set the game down for now and come back to it at release. I don't feel the staying power yet, but I feel LE's potential is stupid huge if the cards are played right. I feel the single biggest thing setting it apart is the individual skill trees for altering how a skill works. For now, the biggest negative feels like a lot of other elements still feel industry standard and I'm worried that LE is going to become a pick-and-choose megamix of various ARPG systems and not stand out by itself.

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