Last Epoch Dev Tracker

Nice write up Mike!

Most of the nodes on the Passive Grid are placeholders because we haven’t finished developing the systems for more complex nodes. We definitely agree that making the nodes interesting in their own right is important!

We also have lots of UI improvements and explanations coming up which should help explain this and other systems more fully. And there will certainly be more dev blogs coming, stick around!

This was definitely our most intensley debated system internally and I was afraid that we wouldn’t come to a conclusion that all parties agreed on before this. Very happy with the positive feedback we’ve received from this version of the passive system so far and with the improvements around the corner I’m confident we’ll have a system ARPGs players can pick up quickly, has depth and interesting choices, and allows for very distinct playstyles. Great writeup, Mike!

Passive Skill Systems have been an integral part of many of our favorite video games over the years; it provides a method for you to customize your character as they grow in the game world. Currently in the ARPG space we have passive systems such as: Diablo 3’s Pick 4, Path of Exile’s Massive Passive Web and Grim Dawn’s Constellations. Each of these play to different strengths in their respective games, but we felt they all had some room for improvement. I’m going to walk you through the process that we went through to make our passive skill system and go into some details on how it works.

Creating our Passive Grid was a very long process and it is still going through minor evolutions to this day. We had many long discussions about every aspect of it and I’m very happy with the result. Since we already have many skill trees to play around with in the game, we wanted to avoid the classic WoW style talent trees. We needed something that would work well with our class evolution ...

An echo spell, that repeats what was cast… (get it?)