Hello Travelers!

Today’s blog is a little different from our usual fare. As most of you know, Last Epoch launched on February 21, and the reception has been amazing. In the first week after launch, over 1.4 million of you logged in to play Last Epoch. At our peak, we had just under 265,000 players all roaming Eterra simultaneously. That’s good enough for the 39th highest all-time concurrent player count recorded on Steam, and we’re humbled by your support and enthusiasm for the game.

There’s plenty of cause for celebration, but let’s not ignore the obvious: Last Epoch’s launch was pretty rough for the majority of you who play online. Your patience and positivity have been amazing, but it was obviously not the launch experience that you or we had hoped for.

Now that the initial launch woes are behind us, it’s time to reflect on the experience. What happened? We put a strong emphasis on testing our servers and infrastructure ahead of time, so what did we get wrong...

This sounds quite similar to the issue Warpath->Rebuke was experiencing. Is this still occuring after the patch where we fixed this interaction with Warpath and Rebuke?

We have nothing against power leveling your friends - it’s why you can skip straight to monoliths in a party, or to get your mastery. Quests have no level requirement at all for this as we want players to be able to group up and play together as smoothly as possible. However gaining experience for being in a particular zone without “being in that zone” as you were immune is not an intended part of playing, and was resulting in power leveling being a bit too strong. You can still power level your friends - just can’t be AFK for it.

If you’re connected to an old server, such as a pre-existing town, or joining a group which has the same monolith server from before the patch, it can cause these kinds of mismatches to occur for a short while after the patch goes live. The servers should cycle out over the next hour resolving these few discrepancies of old data / stats not displaying correctly. If you go into a new area, everything should be up to date immediately as it requests a new server (this is not the case with entering new echoes in monolith of fate, all of monolith of fate is one server).

Changes

• Players can no longer stun themselves. An example of this was by using the Signet of Agony node in Bone Curse
• Replaced the XP Tome sound effect in Echo of a World
• Flagged more prophecy rewards as “rare/valuable” (which animates them to rotate and makes them slightly larger than other stars in the Constellation)
• Increased the favor cost multiplier for Glyph of Despair Prophecies
• You can no longer gain experience while in the grace period (the period of invulnerability after arriving to a new area)
• Added missing name in Graveyard
• Overhauled terrain, spawners, and shrines in the Hidden Oasis Echo Map to both improve visuals, and performance, and fix hideable issues with palms
• Overhauled visuals ...

For clarity: We have a very strict rule about not moderating dissent - and we actually have this discussion often when reviewing cases to try to ensure we don’t come off that way, that the rules being broken enough are serious enough that we need to act, even if the core content was feedback about us.

We do not remove comments, or action users just because they’ve spoken poorly about EHG or our actions. We, and our community moderators should only act when it breaks a rule of the Code of Conduct, or Terms of Use, such as excessive profanity, harassing/targeting other users, refusal to remain civil, or other disruptive or harmful behavior.

It’s our stance that using power to “silence” is not only bad from a moral standpoint, but it ends up hurting us, because we only improve and get better by listening to our players. That anger comes from care - generally, there’s good reason for people to be saying negative things about us and we want to change that, not hide it. We a...

It results in what’s called a “burden of optimal play”. This is a scenario we try to remain very vigilant about in which if there’s a method of play which offers significant bonuses over standard, even if it’s unfun, players will feel the need to do it.

eg. if we introduced weapon swapping, there would be a necessary tactic to have a Last Laugh in your swap to cull bosses (or some similar meta) defeating the true purpose of the mechanic. Respeccing on the fly would create a burden of optimal play in changing skills before bosses to go from AoE to single target, or to swap specific resistances for different content. Not fun mechanics, but because they would be the optimal strategy, people would feel the need to do it.

It’s the same thing with swapping factions - having both maxed to get the best of both worlds would be such a significant advantage that players would feel demanded to max both, and keep swapping between them instead of picking the one that matches their p...

1.) if you were allowed to keep equipped gear from the other faction when changing, this would demand that you max both factions to get the best of both worlds and keep changing back and forth to optimize gameplay, and would also require a lot of third party guides on what the strategies are regarding it.

2.) If you were allowed to swap very freely, but not keep equipped gear, this would result in needing to be specific factions for specific parts of leveling, again utilizing third party guides for strategies on this.

The idea for the factions is that you chose the faction for you - and you stick with it. Item Factions should not be related to a build, they should be completely based on your preferred method of item acquisition. Trying different builds shouldn’t be related here.

The cost is low enough, particularly early on, that you can try both at minimal cost. For when you have multiple characters, you should already know what each offers. If it’s your second...

They can, to a limit. Items which the MG character found, not bought can be equipped by the CoF character. And items the CoF character found that were not influenced by the CoF bonuses can be equipped by the MG character. These limitations are to prevent you from taking advantage of both factions at the same time one one character, making this the necessary way to play.

I’m not sure what you mean here. They aren’t detrimental to each other. I understand there’s more stash organization required if that’s what you’re referring to as a detriment? Of course favour is lost from all characters of that faction when you change ...

I’m not sure what node you might be referring to, sorry.

There’s “Spirit Shards”, which causes you to gain a spirit shard on hit up to a total of 13 shards. When you have 13 shards, your next harvest use consumes all shards to grant more damage, and mana.

So it’s not mana on hit, it’s shards on hit, and at full shards get mana when you use harvest.

There’s also the Chest affix - gain mana when you directly use harvest. That’s not on hit, you only get it once per skill use as it’s “on harvest use”

Swapping factions is not something you’re intended to regularly interact with. Rather it’s a failsafe. If you chose a faction, find that faction really doesn’t match your playstyle, you don’t have to re-start from scratch with a new character, you ‘can’ swap. You’re not intended to go back and forth.

Hello Travelers,

We have an advance notification regarding an upcoming bugfix currently planned for next week, in this case Ballista. As per our recent discourse regarding mid-cycle balance changes, the result concluded that if an item, skill, or build is highly overperforming due to a bug, that we should be issuing a fix for that bug.

As many of you may be aware, Ballista has the node “Armed Construction” which causes the Ballista to explode when it expires or is destroyed, with the explosion gaining more damage and increased area with Dexterity. Upon investigating the reports of how this was scaling to a point well beyond our normal stance of “not clearing an entire screen with a single button press”, we found a bug with the node causing it to scale radius instead of area.

The bugfix we will be releasing is the following:

• Fixed a bug where Ballista’s Armed Construction node was giving 1% increased radius per Dexterity instead of its listed 1% incr...

Please post your log files https://support.lastepoch.com/hc/en-us/articles/1260805192629-The-Game-s-Log-File

Are you playing offline?

Sorry, are you saying you believe making changes/bug-fixes which result in a buff mid-cycle would be controversial and should be surveyed?

(this wasn’t covered in the survey because as mentioned, our stance is to continue making changes/bug-fixes mid-cycle which result in a buff, and we didn’t think that would have much opposition)

We will continue to make changes and bug-fixes which result in a buff.

Because we don’t like promising things we haven’t started to look into yet so don’t know enough to say if it may even be possible.