Last Epoch Dev Tracker

All I can really say is that there are a ton of balance changes coming.

I don't think that the perceived issue is quite as simple as ward good, hp bad. There are extremely powerful hp builds out there too. The power curve of each puts a large percentage of the community in a position where the point on those progression curves that they get to, ward is significantly better and that makes the issue feel like the solution would be to just buff hp and nerf ward.

Yup, that's why I think we would have to do 3 major things. 1. Make respecing more flexible, possibly allowing mastery switching. 2. Have the balance patch date publicly set in stone when the season starts. 3. Reset the ladder but not actually rotate characters.

Just to be clear, we don't have plans to do this, just what I personally think would need to be done to make a hypothetical mid season balance patch be accepted by the most vocal portion of the community.

Well....I did already spoil this on stream about a month ago, so yea sure. Well, kinda. It won't be on a new mastery but spear and shield will work in 1.2 for javelin with 2H spears.

Sorry, got mixed up with another person, it did include buffs but I do agree that it should have included nerfs too.

I mean, that's essentially what we just did this season and it doesn't even get acknowledged as a thing we did.

Yup, I was playing it on the test servers.

I was doing my best samurai impression possible with a 2H odachi bladedancer at the 0.9 patch last year on stream for months.

That was probably me and to be clear, I always say that what the 4th primalist mastery ends up being is not announced. Barbarian is the community speculation and had never even been remotely hinted at as the planned 4th primalist mastery at all. I do not know what the 4th primalist mastery will be.

I agree that the range is bigger than 80-200. I don't really like putting specific numbers on it. More just trying to illustrate that given the current expectations, most of the really dramatic outliers are too high.

And yea, I'm not suggesting that 1-2 balance passes a year is enough at all. We never planned for that. I'm very much in agreement on having a mid season balance patch that includes buffs and nerfs being forecasted and expected every season. That was an option we debated before the survey on the topic went out. I kinda wish we never did that survey because I think I was gaining traction on that idea.

It's a tricky thing to get into details about it without a clear 100% mark that we can agree on. I'd suggest that we have pretty different ideas on where that line is or should be. I don't know where the lowest skill actually sits as a % off the top of my head, that's why I said the numbers were arbitrary. More just trying to suggest that we might have different ideas on it.

Achieving balance is also a concept that needs defining. I think it can go too far. As I said, we do intend to have more frequent balance updates and I'm not sure if you count minor patches near the release of a major patch or not but if you do, we do more than that already. Personally, I am in the camp of even more frequently but not necessarily with the goal of perfect balance. Not that you said it had to be perfect, just another thing that might not be looking up with expectations. I also just like it when the landscape changes. That probably requires more freedom in respecing though if it could happ...

It's a tricky situation for sure and when we said we wouldn't do the mid season balance update, a major patch was planned for months less than what is going to happen. (As an aside, saw you mentioned a year between seasons in a comment, I think it's going to end up being 9 months, which yes is too long but 0.75 -> 1 is a big amount to round)

I think the issue is also a little skewed because some builds are very excessively way mega OP. So if we make up some rough arbitrary numbers, we've got some skills at 80% power and some skills at 200% power so the 80%ers look way crazy low and a straight 2x seems reasonable.

Because essentially nobody gets mad at their build being stealth buffed, we could probably get away with a pure buffing mid season balance patch. However, when 1.2 comes out, it would then be full to the brim with nerfs at every corner. If we are trying to get as many eyes on the game at that time to see the cool new content, all anybody would see is nerf c...

The classic solution to this problem has been to change audio devices or unplug your headphones before entering a zone that you expect to cause a crash. This usually solves it for the whole session and you can go back to the previous audio device after 1 transition. I haven't heard this issue in quite a while but it tracks that changing that bios setting helped.

Given how a character gets moved from seasonal to legacy and when that message gets displayed, that makes way more sense to me. I am expecting the support ticket I suggested they open to come back and say that the character didn't actually get moved.

This is the second time I've seen this now. The first one I thought was just a mistake of how it was created but 2 in a week makes me think there might be some bug happening. Make a bug report using the in game tool and open a support ticket on the support site if you'd like help with it.

It sounds like you're describing how it was back in 1.0. Since then we have reduced the size of the player actor on the navmesh and added an evade button that let's you move through enemies in any direction. You still can't just walk through enemies though.

We actually have a WASD prototype on another branch. Thing is, to make it where the characters strafe, remain looking at their targets, etc. which we believe people may expect now is much much more resource intensive to create than something like this. I’d be interested to see what people think of OPs script

Press G in game to open the game guide to look up a term if you aren't sure what something means.

It's easier to share gear if you are both in the same item faction but it doesn't affect if you can play together at all. Press Y to open your faction menu. You can switch factions. You'll get a chance to join them a little later in the campaign.

Well, we are replacing the targeting method for every ability and every combination of specializations for every ability with context specific targeting methods for controllers so it feels a lot better to play because you aren't constantly asking "why did I shoot that way?" It really makes a huge difference with kiting on ranged charges.

Yes but it's not as extreme as in Diablo. You can just join a party with someone and warp to them at the end game.

There is an xp penalty for being severely under leveled though. There also isn't an xp bonus for being in a full group. Worst case penalty applied, you're gaining xp as though you're in a zone which is exactly appropriately leveled for you.

The first monolith has a reward which can be an XP boost.

You can also select echo rewards of XP tomes.

Just like Diablo, there are some quest rewards that you'll want to get but you don't have to do any specific quests because there are multiple quests that give the same rewards. This is also changing in 1.2 I'm April so you can also earn those quest rewards from end game.

It's also really easy to make extremely good leveling gear. To the point that it can actually be faster to level "normally".

Lots of work going into performance and memory reduction