[2019] Patch Preview: Beta 0.7.4

Overview

Content Patch 0.7.4 focuses on the savagery of the Ancient Era. Dragons, dinosaurs, and… er… plants (they’re carnivorous!) roam the world of Eterra. To help you survive this perilous time, the patch also brings powerful new skills, trees, and improves mastery classes.

We are aiming to release Patch 0.7.4 during mid-November.
 

Highlights

Mastery System Overhaul

Rather than being an event contained entirely within the user interface, mastery classes are now chosen during a quest available at the End of Time. Mastery classes now immediately grant an exclusive skill and powerful passive bonuses when chosen.

Two examples of these passive bonuses include;

• Druid: When leaving a transformed state you gain 70% damage reduction for 2 seconds.
• Void Knight: Your Melee Attacks and Void Spells have a 10% chance to be repeated by an echo 0.5 seconds later (does not affect movement abilities).

Want to learn more? Check out our Developer Blog.
 

Time Rifts

Time Rifts further support Last Epoch’s time-travel centered theme by redefining the concept of side-zones - taking you to alternate versions of the level where the passage of time has resulted in changes to both the zone itself and its inhabitants. This grants Time Rifts greater scope to diverge from their adjoining zone - and they thus contribute to players encountering more diverse enemies.

In future patches, we will expand the role of Time Rifts in Last Epoch so that they also tie into the item hunt and other systems like Epoch’s Call, Lost Memories, and the Eternity Cache.
 

Skills

• The Spellblade skill Static & its specialisation tree are making their debut in Patch 0.7.4.
• The Sorcerer’s Disintegrate and its tree are being added. (We’re beaming with delight!)
• The Primalist is getting Maelstrom and a stormy tree to go with it.
• The Beastmaster is acquiring Summon Raptor and a specialization tree for it.
   

Addtitionally, the following skills are also receiving specialisation trees;

• Enchant Weapon
• Judgement
• Manifest Armor
   

Enemies

This patch introduces a significant number of additional enemies to the game.

• Dinosaurs
  • Archyrean
  • Chyrean
  • Magma Gorn
  • Oasiain Gorn
• Dragons
  • Primeval Dragon (unique)
• Plants
  • Orchirian the Rampant (unique)
  • Hulking Overgrowth
  • Skittering Undergrowth
  • Vinewalker
• Void
  • Idol of Loathing (unique)
  • Lost Eye
  • Void Shifter
  • Voidfire Growth
     

User Interface

We have redesigned our tooltips. We will be gradually updating all specialisation tree and passive tooltips to benefit from these improvements across future patches.

Tooltip_Comparison.png1030×397 440 KB

Items

• Two unique items are being added; one helm, and one one-handed axe.
• Potions are being buffed and their affixes are being reworked.
  • We’ll be posting details of these changes before Patch 0.7.4 is released.
     

Optimisation

As with most updates, Patch 0.7.4 includes optimisations to improve performance.

• Shader improvements have resulted in an average increase of 5 - 10 FPS in most areas. This change was observed across minimum, average, and maximum framerates, on a system running Windows 10 with a Ryzen 5 1600, an 8GB RX 480, and 16 GB of RAM.
• We have rewritten the backend for our graphics pipeline. While primarily done to resolve bugs, we anticipate this resulting in improved framerates in some situations.
  • We are aware that there is a bug affecting Vertical Sync, and this has not yet been addressed. The issue is on our radar and will be corrected in a future update.
• A combination of code refactoring and visual effect optimisations have been implemented to improve the performance of the following skills;
  • Avalanche
  • Entangling Roots
  • Meteor
  • Ring of Shields
  • Sacrifice

 

After This Patch

We’re holding back the implementation of Minion Stances to a later patch as we would not have sufficient time to adequately QA it in time for the release of Patch 0.7.4.

We are rewriting the code related to item storage, and in a future patch we will be adding search bars to stash tabs. This rewrite will also resolve several item-related bugs.

We are preparing to update our game engine. This will take a significant amount of time to QA, however it will bring improvements of its own while also facilitating us making additional optimisations ourselves. We won’t be releasing a demo until after this update, as subsequently updating the demo would otherwise require an excessive amount of work.

What does updating the game engine mean?

We’re moving to a newer version of Unity.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by this. We are working on chapter 7 right now and we plan to release 2 more chapters after that for the base game. We do plan on making more content after release too.

We’re working on it

Because of how modular our skill system is, it is quite difficult to have a generated preview of how much damage a skill will do. We are working on implementing this in a performant way. You’re absolutely right that it’s a necessary feature.

No, they also probably won’t be in 0.7.5 either.

The Rogue is listed in Phase 3 of our Early Access Forecast.
 

The Eras are not Acts. Last Epoch’s campaign is broken into Chapters of the story, and this story involves travelling both forwards and backwards through time. Each of the Eras represents a significant period of time some of the campaign is set in.

This is an important distinction for multiple reasons. One reason is that the game will have approximately ten Chapters at release, and these will be set across four Eras. Another is that unlike Acts or Chapters which are played through linearly - you finish the first before beginning the second - as said above, you move between different Eras quite frequently.