I’m not sure what the answer was on the dev stream, but I have read through most of this thread, and I still think that player stuns are an important aspect of gameplay. However it definitely feels like stun avoidance is in a bad spot and that results in a sense of frustration as there’s no effective way of countering these stuns through your build.

The original goal with stun avoidance was to create a stat specifically aimed at mitigating stun beyond just acquiring more health and mitigation. The intention behind it being additive with health was to make it particularly useful for characters with worse defenses to help prevent them being stunned too often. At the moment it’s just very underpowered. This may be a numbers thing, especially as there has been a general increase in the maximum health of most characters. However even before this occurred it never really felt compelling as a stat, and I doubt the low defense characters for whom it was designed ever really considere...

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We’ve investigated this further, tried a few things, and have a solution internally that seems very promising. This will likely be included in 0.8.4.

Maul counts as a movement skill, so it does work with Bhuldar’s Wrath. It won’t be as crazy as old EQ Werebear unless something goes very wrong though.

There are ice golems as well. Both those and moss trolls are holdovers from before alpha and will be removed before long as they’re not up to our current standards. They’ve only been kept in this long in order to bolster enemy variety.

Not a lot would change if these skills unlocked with character level instead of points in the base class tree. The reason why they’re unlocked the way they are is to introduce the mechanic earlier and because it provides an extra reward or motivation for reaching that tier of passives.

I am assuming the rest, instead of just having fewer skills than other classes, are simply not in game yet.

This is correct, the current plan for release is to have 12 skills for each base class and 5 for each mastery.

I think most people would prefer 4 more skills instead of some text and a line

Adding a skill takes a lot of work. The main thing preventing us from adding 20 new skills (4 for each base class), is definitely not the existence of that text and line. In future, when we want base classes to have more than 12 skills, we will simply adjust the skills panel UI to fit them.

Not sure if there are currently ways to make it viable at its current power level, but it definitely seems underpowered in most cases right now and will be buffed in a hotfix.

It would also be good to know people’s opinions on whether we should make changes to the tree that would cause a respec (i.e. anything that makes any existing tree layouts invalid), and how disruptive that would feel mid patch cycle. It’s normally something we avoid where possible in hotfixes, but it would allow more flexibility for tree changes that might otherwise need to wait for 0.8.4. We would still buff the base skill either way.

Thanks for the detailed write up. Before reading this we already had changes planned for a hotfix for Consecrated Ground and healing effectiveness scaling DoT paladin in general.

These mostly stemmed from Holy Trail scaling with added spell damage. This was a result of a miscommunication late in the skill’s development and was not intentional. The healing effectiveness scaling from the Path of Judgement node is meant to act as a replacement for added damage scaling, like it does for Consecrated Ground. The fact you can scale it with both, and they’re multiplicative means you can extremely high damage. If you have 100 adaptive spell damage that’s a 6x damage multiplier, which is fine on its own. If you have 500% increased healing effectiveness, that’s also a 6x damage multiplier which is fine on its own. However if you have both that’s a 36x damage multiplier, which is not fine.

Despite this being a mistake it has meant that healing effectiveness scaling damage over tim...

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The issue wasn’t so much with the core power of Wandering Spirits. It was strong, but not necessarily over the top. However it did have several issues that prompted us to rework it.

1. The number of spirits it kept up on average caused a lot of visual noise, especially in multiplayer, and especially with the spirits all casting Spectral Putrescence. This was particularly concerning in a class that also had other visually noisy options that could be used at the same time, such as large numbers of minions. We have to take edge cases like that into consideration, even if they’re not necessarily popular.

2. Because it could keep generating spirits constantly if used whenever it came off cooldown, it was often best to use it just press the button whenever it came off cooldown, or auto cast it. We prefer active abilities that go on the ability bar to either have an active component where there’s some decision making that goes into when or where to use it. Othe...

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Enemies gain 1% penetration per level up to level 75. Extra resistance above 75% does not have any effect against this.

That means for level 75+ you take 75% more damage at 0% resistance and 0% more damage at 75% resistance. The purpose of this is to make it less punishing to be slightly below capped resistance. For example if you have 50% resistance (25% below the cap) you only take 25% more damage, whereas in a standard resistance system without this scaling penetration you would take 100% more damage.

The only use for resistance above the cap is to counter debuffs that reduce your resistance such as resistance shred and the Mark for Death curse.

Would “increased bleed effect” Sentinel affix from body armor now apply to Electrify on Javelin?

It would not. The conversion just affects the chance.

Is this “increased bleed effect” basically just more damage over time?

Increased effect of an ailments multiplicatively modifies its damage and debuffs. In the case of bleed it’s just a multiplicative modifier to its damage. Multiple sources of increased effect are additive with each other, but they’re multiplicative with increased damage.

• Would the “Increased Physical Damage and Bleed Duration” on body armor now make electrify last longer (but not get a damage boost from physical)?

It would still have no effect on electrify. Generally when you convert an ailment or damage type in Last Epoch, none of the old modifiers will apply to it.

It’s an additional lightning ailment and will only be present on holy lightning themed skills and conversions, while regular lightning themed skills will still just utilise shock.

One skill point reward will be moved to Chapter 9. A few of its side quests will reward idol slots, but the number of idol slot rewards required to unlock the full idol inventory will not change, so it will go from being able to skip one idol reward quest to being able to skip four idol reward quests. In future we plan to introduce a similar system to passive point rewards, so that there’s a cap and you don’t have to do all of the passive point quests to get all the points.

You mean from Calamity (the fire skill chance), it does get from Pontifex (on hit).

Yes, thanks for catching that. I’ve edited my original comment.

I don’t want to spoil everything about the new trees

The value shown on the character sheet is just generic ignite chance that applies to all skills. That’s the 153% + 8% granted by Torch of the Pontifex and the idol. Calamity’s ignite chance only works with fire skills, so it doesn’t get added to the total shown there. Similarly Sunwreath and the passive only apply to melee attacks.

When we update the character sheet we plan to make it possible to check stats like “chance to ignite with fire melee attacks” which would show your total ignite chance from all those sources.

Warparth is a melee attack, so it benefits from Sunwreath and the Majasa Firebrand passive, but it is not a fire skill, so it does not benefit from Torch of the Pontifex. However its tree is being reworked in 0.8.3 and the new tree will include a node that converts it into a fire skill. If you take that node then Torch of the Pontifex’s Calamity’s ignite chance will apply to it as well.

If I recall correctly, this bug specifically occurs when you use a base item that dropped in a previous session rather than the current one.

In general we want to move away from or adjust skills that just feel like they need to be clicked every periodically to maintain a buff. If people feel that they need to autocast a skill, that’s a design failure on our end, because we’ve given them an active skill that’s taking up one of their active skill slots, that’s effectively just a passive skill. Sentinel unfortunately has quite a few of these.

Skills like these aren’t always easy or quick to fix though. We have plans for how to do it, but they won’t all be implemented soon, so please have patience while we address it. In the meantime I’d like to confirm that you are allowed to autocast skills with numlock, the fact that that can feel necessary is our problem not yours.

It does not. That is a separate modifier that applies at all levels. This is an update to the existing minion power scaling, that currently scales up to 40% less damage taken at level 100, and now scales up to 45%.

0.8.3 Necromancer Updates

Going into 0.8.3 Necromancer has several issues mostly centring around its class specific skills, Dread Shade, Summon Wraith, and Assemble Abomination. All of these skills are receiving changes to their base functionality and moderate changes to their trees. These are intended to curtail overpowered or problematic abilities, provide more opportunities for permanent minion playstyles, and add more synergy with the newest Acolyte minion, Volatile Zombie.

Temporary Minions

There are specific issues that we're solving for each skill, but first we want to address a more systematic problem that disappoints a lot of Necromancer players. That is the fact that all the necromancer specific skills are either temporary minions or Dread Shade, which is not only a temporary buffs that has to be repeatedly recast to maintain, but also drains the minion it's attached to, effectively making it temporary.

One of our goals with the Necromancer was to ...

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Falconer is planned to have more throwing attack support than Blade Dancer or Marksman and will be the natural choice for most throwing builds for Rogue.

Blade Dancer and Marksman are supposed to still be options and quite a few of their nodes work with throwing skills even if they don’t specifically mention them, but once Falconer is released even Blade Dancer and Marksman throwing builds will probably want to dip into the lower part of the Falconer tree. Given the lack of that option, throwing builds currently feel quite restricted for Rogue. We’re aware of this issue, but any fix we implement now would likely just be a placeholder until the Falconer is released, so we aren’t prioritising it.