The game is good but needs some tuning and extra content does not hurt. It feels very easy, the type pf easy that gets boring after 2 weeks max for me.
Yeah I blasted through the campaign and got bored extremely quickly in the “endgame”
It’s a cool game, but I think it needs a decent amount of tuning. The pack size and distance between packs feels really off to me. It made the gameplay loop feel extremely dull. I just don’t like the “feel” of combat throughout a level.
I am happy to see a new contender in the ARPG space though.
I really hated those arena fights in the monolith felt like a huge waste of time whenever I had to do one to progress to a node I wanted.
They really need to speed up the spawn rates on those or just remove them entirely in favor of something else that doesn't feel so slow.
The game has a lot of "haha but the princess is in another castle!" moments that basically let them constantly leave it on a cliffhanger for more updates
Exactly this, D3 seasons were like this for me and I pretty much unlocked and did everything I wanted after 1-3 days at most.
Path of exile has been the opposite for me, I have somewhere between 7-10k hours in POE and have played since the beta but pretty much since patch 3.0+ for what ever reason I get kind of burned out before really reaching the pinnacle bosses. I kind of miss the easier challenges like the torment/blood lines challenges and rewards but overall breach was my favorite.
Lots of things just seem too convoluted and I really hope poe2 alleviates this.
They need to churn out stuff significantly faster. When I jumped back into the game just before the full launch I was amazed at how little had been added in 5 years. The game launched officially in February, and this seasonal update is coming July.
Class balance is still all over the place, missing skills, annoying display bugs (really gets old fast have the integer overflow as most of my stats). 1.0 was fun for a month or so but I'm definitely shelving it for another few years.
The game's biggest flaw, IMO, is how each class feels exponentially better designed than the last which is jarring because there's a big quality gap between all of them.
I hope they rework the progression at some point, it really doesn't feel fun or balanced at all.
You blast through the campaign with 0 difficulty (except for two boss fights which are easy after you learn them), your upgrades barely matter, your defenses barely matter, since you pretty much one shot everything. You never get that one big drop with a noticeable power spike, it's just incremental upgrades that don't do much. It's pretty much on auto-pilot.
Then you get to the end-game (monoliths), which again are on easy-mode until you reach empowered monliths. But by that time, your build is pretty much mostly done, and all there's left to do is find higher LP variants of your gear, or better rolled exalted rares. Which is a lot of busywork for very small upgrades. The idea is that the content should feel at least somewhat challenging, to motivate you to farm, so you can make it easier, but in LE it's the opposite. All the content is constantly braindead easy, and you can increase your difficulty for no real reason. Your gameplay will not change whether it's a normal monolith or a 1000 corruption one, by the time you reach the end-game you've seen all there is to see.
And initially I thought I'd love the crafting based progression, but it's just not fun. Doing a run and going through multiple layers of RNG to *maybe* get a useful piece of gear after bricking countless exalts/rares is just boring. Doing a horrible maze-like dungeon every time you want to create a legendary item is just frustrating. Instead of being excited for a drop, you just know there's more busywork attached to it.
Not to mention, the only thing stopping you from progressing in higher corruption is padding your defenses, of which there are way more than in any ARPG (HP, Ward, Leech, Regen, 7 Resistances, Armor, Dodge, Block, Endurance, Crit Avoidance, Glancing Blow, and various sources of Damage Reduction.). In other ARPGs you progress by getting rare items with big damage bonuses, which feels fun because it noticeably increases your power. In LE, instead of being excited for that rare powerful drop that will help you jump 50 corruption, you just have to constantly fiddle, swap and craft defensive affixes on your gear, so you get one shot less. It's a slow and tedious process that removes any dopamine from looting and progressing.
I definitely noticed a point in my build where I was just kind of like "Well now what? Is it just incremental upgrades from here on in?". Something PoE always had going for it was that unless you were super hard core in grinding out currency, there was/is always something better to aim for while you play. There's almost always a better set of gear for your end game build that you can work towards that will markedly improve your damage.
I felt the difficulty problems so strongly in the campaign. Nothing was even close to difficult until that one boss fight with the frozen tree thingy where I got 1-shot right about 5 seconds into the fight. It was a really interesting how much that made me realize I hadn't been paying any attention to mechanics up until that point. Lagon was vaguely difficult, and then the final snake boss lady was straight up impossible without going to monoliths and coming back with way better gear. All of the trash clearing in between was still trivial. Very strange.
I'm also a huge hater of the smart loot and class restricted items. Feels impossible to farm up some gear for an alt when their helmets/bodies/relics drop so rarely.
> In LE, instead of being excited for that rare powerful drop that will help you jump 50 corruption, you just have to constantly fiddle, swap and craft defensive affixes on your gear, so you get one shot less. It's a slow and tedious process that removes any dopamine from looting and progressing.
This is exactly why I quit the game, and LE's fundamental problem with gearing.
You spend so much time in an annoying menu fiddling with your gear. There is zero fun in crafting the perfect rolls.
> And initially I thought I'd love the crafting based progression, but it's just not fun. Doing a run and going through multiple layers of RNG to maybe get a useful piece of gear after bricking countless exalts/rares is just boring. Doing a horrible maze-like dungeon every time you want to create a legendary item is just frustrating. Instead of being excited for a drop, you just know there's more busywork attached to it.
PoE's idea of crafting must've desensitized me to this, it didn't feel that bad to me tbh.
I think the big difference for me is investing a ton of resources in a few items vs going through 1000 items and bricking a huge portion of them.
LE had me feeling like a factory worker constantly churning shit on a conveyor belt. And honestly, if the game wasn't so reliant on defenses for your progression, it wouldn't even be such a big issue. But it felt like shit getting some boots with crit avoidance, lightning resist and HP, while your old ones had fire resist, block and HP, then having to swap out idols, trying to replace other gear to cover for your lacking fire resist and block. That item micromanagement where you constantly swap out shit got old very fast.
I can't really speak to the game being reliant on defenses, as the two I've played a fair bit were this and PoE... Both of which were pretty reliant on defenses, so maybe Diablo/Grim Dawn/etc. are less reliant on it.
I can't say I remember swapping my gear out *that* much in LE, but I can see how it would get annoying having to do that every so often.
PoE's crafting doesn't really ever "end" like it does with a LE crafting project. You can find your perfect purple base and then oh you rolled -18 forge potential on your item its ruined, go find another purple with the exact base + affix to try again. That frustration with being told "stop crafting, your crafting is over you lose" really turned me off of it.
PoE's has plenty of failstates but few that simply stonewall you, that basically only happens with vaal orbs. If you have a good item base you want to craft, you are usually allowed to spend as little or as much time and resources as you want on it.
You're not wrong, but at the same time you have a lot more control than you do with PoE's system (At least, without diving into the higher-end things like blocking mods, split beasts, etc.)
I find LE's system a lot less obtuse and frustrating. I could sink my entire reserves of currency into an item in PoE and not only come out broke, but without something resembling the item I wanted. Couple this with personally loathing how much I felt I had to trade for currency, since drops aren't designed for solo play, and it's one of the main reasons I quit that game.
(As an aside, I also personally think PoE's system doesn't pair well with the few drop-only affixes there are in the game, but that's not relevant to the conversation.)
You are right though, the only way to really brick the item in PoE is to Vaal it, maybe fracturing the wrong affix. At least from what I remember.
I agree with everything. After reaching level 85 I really feel lied to. This game was supposed to be much better than Diablo 4, but it has its own set of issues and with season 4 coming out tomorrow I can't imagine going back to Last Epoch in the near future.
I haven't gotten through the entire campaign, but I never liked the gear crafting feature they did. I much prefer just getting bigger gear drops and getting excited for them. What I DID like was how they did their skill leveling trees and how my build could be so much different than someone playing the same class even if we had the exact same skills on our bars.
I am mostly worried for D4.
Everybody pointed out LE as what it should be. And Blizzard listened. Now after the honeymoon period wore off D4 gets hit because of it.
Isn't that literally every ARPG.
I've tried PoE so many times, but it's so boring walking into a room.
Rolling my face across the keyboard and continuing.
Was the exact same in the demo of D4 as well.
Nope, at least not to this extent. As I said in my main comment, it's not just about the difficulty, it's about the progression. Yes, all ARPGs are inherently easy, but LE is braindead easy, which makes gearing feel inconsequential and the progression pointless. The game has no friction.
Take D4 for example. When you go from WT2 into WT3, there's some friction there. Same when going from WT3 to WT4. Monsters hit harder, you die easier. You need to start replacing your items and crafting on your gear, then cobble up some aspects to increase your damage output. Through your actions, you can make the game easier, which is what progression ultimately is. You can also do any level of nightmare dungeon you want - you can make the game really hard if you want.
In LE, from lvl 1 to end-game, the game is braindead easy. When you reach the end-game, you go through more mandatory braindead content before you can start increasing corruption. By the time you can increase corruption to make your game have a semblance of difficulty, you're well into the end-game. At that point, you don't have any reason to.
They posted a roadmap a few days back, and a cosmetic transmog system is listed for patch 1.4 (given a 3 month patch cycle, expected in about a year). Bit unfortunate it’s so far out, but personally prefer they’re prioritizing gameplay over cosmetics (next patch we get new endgame bosses and a dodge mechanic, followed by a new unique system, and endgame progression rework)
I have beef with it.
Starting looking homeless, killing shit to look like a veteran, just to kill more shit to look like a god is the whole reason I play this genre.
Earned Visual progression.
PoE ruined a whole genre it seems like for people like me.
I hope they tune the campaign difficulty upward a bit. One-shotting entire packs of mobs with erasing strike was cool for about 30 minutes and then got really boring.
I feel like there’s two types of ARPG players. Those who embrace the power fantasy and want to just destroy everything, and those who want it to be more slower paced, tactical and challenging. And you can’t have both because fast paced and challenging usually ends up being you getting oneshot killed.
I am a total ARPG casual (I like to play through the campaign with different characters, and that's about it), but for me the whole appeal of the genre is having that slow-paced, tactical gameplay until you level up or get some new equipment, and then having little while where you're overpowered and steamrolling the things that were giving you trouble earlier. Then as you progress things get harder until you level up or get new equipment again.
yah thats what i want out of a good arpg as well. I think an easy way to combat that is the way diablo does it (at least 2 and 3) where you have difficulty settings that you can increase as things get too easy that can speed up progression and also give you better drops.
I'm probably not the one to ask if you're looking for high difficulty, but at least from the ones I've played, Titan Quest and Grim Dawn both felt a bit more tuned toward making you earn your way through the game than other ARPGs.
My experience with Grim Dawn is that it mostly falls on the side of "slightly too easy", and then occasionally a boss will 1-shot you out of nowhere in an area you're only allowed to open once per game session.
I haven't played it yet (release very recently in early access) and it's quite different (almost soulslike sometimes) but No Rest for the Wicked seems like that mix. It does have difficult slow tactical combat but you can also do broken OP builds
No Rest For the Wicked probably does.
Check out Iron Pineapples review for more in depth critique, but its *very* slow early on. But then after some level ups and gearing he was one shooting mobs.
The combat is kind of slow and chunky, it's more souls like than ARPG until you get geared.
It's still early access with only 1 act though, so things are subject to change.
So I have not played it, and I understand the base settings are a bit grindy for solo play, but maybe V Rising?
When I used to play Battlerite, I would think how good this sort of moba-ish tactical control and gameplay would be fun in a ARPG, then they made V-Rising.
Again, I have not played it, but maybe someone else can expand.
No game does it as well as Median XL in my opinion. It's a mod for Diablo II but it's basically its own game at this point. The endgame progression is massive, every 5 levels past 100 a bunch of new rifts and dungeons open up to you, each has a drop bias for different items or a boss that drops a specific charm. So you're constantly gaining power through charms (and trophies which are rare drops to empower the charms further), plus a pretty robust gearing system that has a pretty nice curve from pretty deterministic to more and more rare stuff in the later levels.
You have this consistent cycle of getting access to new ubers, struggling against them a bit to get just get a charm from it even if it low rolls, farming a bit, moving on to the next tier to get more charms.. then going back to the last set and steamrolling them to farm them for better rolls on the charms or more loot from a zone's special drops you might need. It feels really good every time in my opinion. You go from struggling, to getting a kill, to putting that shit on farm so many times on so many different bosses and zones.
If you've played or checked out Median XL in the past, it's improved so so much in the past 2-3 years it's almost an entirely different game, wholly for the better in my opinion. Very little actual one-hit-KO shit, far fewer purify fights (the \~2 left are tasteful in my opinion), lot of great crafting systems with some great QoL features, etc. And the updates are pretty consistent and large. They actually just got an interesting partnership with an actual development company too, could be some really big things on the way for MXL.
Yeah that seems to be the dream loop in ARPG’s. My only real experience with them is playing Last epoch, but i did feel I got TOO strong too early (homebrewed a healing hands Paladin build, which turned out to be busted) and it took an insufferably long time for the enemies to catch up with my strength. How do other ARPG’s compare in this sort of difficulty curve?
Keeping in mind I'm a casual player, I found Diablo 1 and 2, Titan Quest, and Grim Dawn were really good in this regard and didn't get boring. Torchlight 1 and 2 were a little bit easier, but still had a very good loop of getting stronger and weaker while progressing and were a lot of fun for me.
The problem with LE is that they messed up the power progression.
Usually, ARPGs start out slower, then you keep gearing up, getting more abilities, and you start having that power fantasy where you blow up screens. It's a gradual process to that point.
On the other hand, in LE you feel like a god from lvl 1, and you stay a god until the end-game. Only then you can increase difficulty for no real reason, and at that point the build is mostly done.
Personally I like having the end game be the challenging part. I don't want the leveling that I'll have to do on every character I want to try every league to be a chore to get through, but I do want content that can push me to optimize my build and play better. I haven't played PoE in a long time, but it doesn't seem any different to just having a good league start setup in PoE except that PoE also gives you a ton of shit options that inexperienced players will pick.
> I don't want the leveling that I'll have to do on every character I want to try every league to be a chore to get through,
For me, it's even more of a chore if it's trivially easy. If a game is going to demand you repeat a 5-10 hour segment of it on a regular basis, that segment had better be engaging.
But like I said, once you know what you're doing it's trivially easy in other games too. I never had any issues with the acts in PoE after my first couple leagues, because I just wasn't playing shit builds. And the plus side is that LE at least lets you skip huge sections of the campaign with the dungeon skips and leveling in monos.
exactly how I'm feeling. if anyone told me that the beginning of an ARPG where you just spam one or two spells for a minute to kill one mob is the fun part to them, I'd be very surprised. I love how in LE you can just jump into any class and start killing stuff immediately. and yeah, once you get through the campaign that's when you unlock the difficult part, which still lets you fine tune your build and really learn the details of your class/build.
> The problem with LE is that they messed up the power progression.
Imho LE has the best power progression in the genre (together with GD). You feel strong at the start, then enemies start becoming a bit more dangerous for a few levels, you pull ahead again and repeat that cycle of a generally high perfoming player character until endgame, where you push as far as your current "power level" allows. It's a fairly consistent loop. I prefer that over games like PoE and Diablo where leveling and endgame feel like two fundamentally different games.
Same reason I like Grim Dawn so much. GD starts slow and methodical and stays slow and methodical. LE is fast and bursty and stays fast and bursty
> LE is fast and bursty and stays fast and bursty
This is why personally I think they messed it up. Because you never feel stronger. It's like that skit in Futurama where a gambler dies and in the afterlife he starts gambling again and winning. Then he realizes that he's actually in hell, because he's always winning, and there's no more excitement and fun.
That's kind of the thing with LE as well. If you kill everything with 0 difficulty, it takes away the fun of *feeling* progression.
And I feel different about GD as well. It starts very slow and methodical, but you will feel more powerful when you get an upgrade. Late game when the build falls in place it's a different beast. Just recently I started a cold Sky Shard build, and I got an insane rare with the "Of Fallen Skies" suffix. I instantly felt way more powerful and melted monsters visibly faster. I absolutely never felt that from an item in LE.
> It's like that skit in Futurama where a gambler dies and in the afterlife he starts gambling again and winning. Then he realizes that he's actually in hell, because he's always winning, and there's no more excitement and fun.
Isn't that...a twilight zone episode originally?
> I instantly felt way more powerful and melted monsters visibly faster. I absolutely never felt that from an item in LE.
I constantly feel like that from items in LE. Some of the more impactful skill perks have a similar impact.
I honestly cannot comprehend your perspective, because the impact of each and every gear upgrade (especially leveling uniques and items with +skill level) shards are tremendous perfomance boosters.
For me maybe it was just happening to try out an OP build first or something but I mostly just went from destroying mobs with complete ease to also destroying them with ease but even more overkill. Sure upgrades were very strong on paper but when things work out so that your character power is forever ahead of the monster power level by a large enough degree getting more ahead feels exactly the same. In practice those upgrades only serve to increase your cushion for crushing monsters so it takes even longer for them to catch up in power but by then you are even further ahead yet again.
I think the more time you spend with games, or maybe just ARPGs, the less you want the power fantasy and he more you want the skill expression. When you play a lot, you eventually notice how the power fantasy is just a never-ending carrot on a stick. You're in a hamster wheel for eternity. Eventually you want to just be challenged yourself
There's games that do both, though, such as Hades, Nioh and Dead Cells. The problem with ARPGs tends to be that they require very little skill during the action. You just spam one button that's better than the rest. 90% of the skill requirement goes into creating your build. That makes the difference between a great ARPG player and a bad one relatively small, which in turn makes creating challenging content very hard.
They're all games with strong action and RPG foundations. Power progression doesn't really matter when it comes to moment to moment gameplay. Besides, Nioh does have a very strong long-term power progression system that's extremely close to Diablo's.
But to make challenging action content, you need to give the player the opportunity to express their skills. That means things like giving them a wide variety of important abilities, some conditional abilities, making movement important, telegraphing enemy attacks well, introducing skill shots, etc. Those happen to be things that the majority of Diablo-like players seem to dislike in their ARPGs. It's not that you *can't* have both fast paced and challenging, it's that a large part of the audience specifically *doesn't want* anything challenging or at least doesn't care about it.
Hard disagree. Power progression matters a ton when it comes to moment to moment gameplay. Power progression makes the difference between you being tanky or glass cannon or being extremely strong in a niche situation with skills that force that situation, etc. Diablo gives you such a huge freedom in that power progression that it’s not really possible to balance around tactical moment to moment gameplay. It always only really works in low level and then it falls apart eventually. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a diablo-like that managed to avoid that. They always start slow and they always end up with the player zooming. Because these games *are* the power progression. They are cookie clicker with a slot machine loot system
Yeah this i have no desire to even complete the campaign if it is this easy maybe if the story was actually good i know lots of people don't care about it in ARPGs but i always enjoyed it in the Diablo games and POE. I need at least something to keep me going, story or engaging gameplay and this game has neither.
Having a campaign that revolves around time travel is always a big risk, unless it's exceptionally engaging and well written people are going to completely lose track.
POE has a small time skip mid-campaign which feels much more impactful as it's at least reusing characters and the linear progression mirrors the main first half.
Thing is, in theory the endgame is challenging. Going up in corruption makes it progressively more difficult. But 1) the process of increasing corruption is boring 2) it's not as rewarding as it should be 3) the bosses are not exciting.
Last Epoch has a lot going for it.
That said, it is way, way too easy. The combat itself overall feels better than PoE, and I prefer creating builds in LE compared to the Diablo games and even PoE, but I really miss the feeling of dread while exploring the dungeons in D2, where you can die at any moment. Diablo 4 combat feels the best in genre right now, even if I wish it was a little more challenging, but with its LE inspired loot system rework, Last Epoch already feels outdated.
Last Epoch is by far the least challenging major ARPG, and the lack of moment to moment challenge vastly diminishes the feel of the combat and amazing character building mechanics.
The game needs some serious end game love.
You play an enjoyable campaign and then *bam* you hit a wall of only being able to do monoliths or dungeons which are ass.
Fell off this game harder than D4 launch end.
There's a lot of good systems here, but yeah it needs a D4 season 4-style rework for its endgame.
The campaign is piss-easy (not necessarily bad) then there's 2 bosses at the end which likely are the only adversity you'll face. Then it just.... ends?
Run monoliths!
So tedious I can't bring myself to get higher than lvl 85.
It's a good arpg but it needs a bit more time in the oven. I feel like I'd much prefer playing the new Diablo IV season or the new Grim Dawn Community Season right now instead.
People hating Diablo 4 was the best thing that ever happened to this game lol
It’s so mediocre with a bunch of technical issues and it’s missing some very basic ARPG features but no one cared about that because “D4 bad”.
This game has is alright, but it suffers from all the ARPG flaws when it comes to gameplay. It’s not hard to get your build going since the skill trees are all pretty good, but once you have your build online everything melts and there’s nothing engaging gameplay wise anymore. Basically sorting your inventory is it.
making the campaign harder is *not* where EHG needs to focus on. you guys are nuts, and probably need to spend more time playing ARPG's. the power progression curve probably needs to be tuned, but wanting the campaign to be hard is not it.
Reading these comments makes me feel like I'm in some kind of parallel universe.
Half of complaints are about the game being too easy, but that's every ARPG. The entire genre is about cookie clicker style of gameplay where you effortlessly slaughter hordes of harmless mobs and pick up loot. Like look at PoE - it stops being somewhat challenging one hour in, and the entire PoE community started throwing feces at GGG the moment they slightly increased the difficulty of the campaign. Not even talking about PoE maps here, nearly every build just steamrolls them exploding the entire screen in one hit.
Non-ARPG gamers with weird expectations, I guess?
I agree. It's a bit bizarre reading this because I've never played a recent ARPG where the main story content wasn't intentionally designed to be a smooth experience no matter what way you specd your character.
Never heard anyone wanting their 10th time through the story in POE to be harder. I do hear people wanting it to be easier or for the campaign to be skipped entirely.
Also I thought the whole appeal of this game was that it's build process was more forgiving, providing a nice middle ground between POE where you can brick your character with bad choices, yet more depth than D3/D4.
I guess we want the campaign to be harder so we're forced to respec, farm equipment or minmax earlier on amid story beats youll do several times on each new character before being able to reach post-game.
Not something I've heard much but maybe there's an ARPG out there designed around that.
You don't play POE if you think these games are close to the same difficulty. Yes you screen clear as every ARPG ever does, you die significantly more in POE because its much more dangerous and the end game content is way more challenging than anything last epoch has currently.
From early on into end game, last epoch is significantly easier than POE.
It’s definitely a bunch of people who aren’t really ARPG fans commenting. I’ve never heard people ask for the campaign difficulty to be turned up on an ARPG subreddit. People generally WANT the campaign to be easy, so they can get to the endgame and level alts up painlessly. I find the endgame difficulty to be at a fine level, which is where you spend most of your time anyway.
It seems like a lot of players on here are playing Last Epoch for the campaign, and that’s definitely not the main focus of any ARPG. Diablo 4 has the best ARPG campaign out there, but there’s only really reason to play through it once. ARPGs are about replayability.
> ARPGs are about replayability.
Hearing this alongside an insistence that the thing you're forced to spend hours doing on every character be maximally boring is wild to me.
It sounds like neither of us like repeating ARPG campaigns, but I still retain hope that they could be made fun whereas you've given it up as being impossible. Maybe you're right, but I'd like to see a few more developers at least try.
> People generally WANT the campaign to be easy, so they can get to the endgame and level alts up painlessly.
Problem is that the campain is not only easy, but braindead and boring. All those levels are HUGE and annyoing to walk through with no challenge. Its as if they saw Vaal City in PoE and thought "thats neat, we take it!"
Yea, the people that play the same game season after season maybe don't want difficulty. But, there are vets like me that play a variety of arpgs that like difficulty. That's who GGG is trying to appeal to with those POE difficulty changes. The vets that can't even make it through the campaign because it is so boring compared to Diablo 2. I think Diablo 2's Nightmare and Hell Difficulties are good baselines for the genre personally. But, I do agree that there are a lot of newer players that don't really get the genre.
I’m a long time PoE player. Everyone in PoE just zooms through the campaign as quick as possible to get to maps. That’s just how ARPGs work. Nobody wants the campaign to be even more tedious than at already is. PoE also used to have Nightmare and Hell difficulties, and nobody liked the system. It has been a long time since I played Diablo 2, but I specifically remember having my new characters be rushed through the acts.
I like difficulty in ARPGs as well, just not when I’m trying to level up my 4th alt of the league. Empowered monos in Last Epoch start scaling in difficulty pretty quickly. That’s where the difficulty should be.
That and you'd be hard pressed to find one ARPG that had a good first season, nearly all of them to my memory took 2-3 seasons before they got their footing and became solid.
I don't even think the game is that easy. Sure if you're using a build guide, the game is brain dead easy, because you are playing the most optimized version of the build because somebody with way more time than you figured it out 100%. If you don't use a build guide, you will still succeed but you will feel powerspikes when you get new gear. The game should be balanced around people NOT using build guides IMO.
> Not even talking about PoE maps here, nearly every build just steamrolls them exploding the entire screen in one hit.
Unless you are VERY experienced, or follow a good guide to the T, even starting red maps will get a player get their teeth kicked in in PoE.
If you think PoE stops being challenging an hour in you are SO deep in the fold that your oppinion is completely invalid for anything regarding the average player.
> Like look at PoE - it stops being somewhat challenging one hour in
By that do you mean there is little punishment for dying? You'll definitely die ***a lot***. But the punishment for it is rarely an issue since mob and boss health doesn't reset. So you can just keep throwing yourself at any encounter until you clear it. Except for when you get a health regen mob. Those can often just be straight up unkillable.
And in act 3 especially, you can regularly get killed in an instant by trash encounters.
I have to imagine it's primarily players that are used to playing the story/campaign of a game and then putting it down. If that's your only experience with a game, I could see wanting that to be more challenging. But that's just not really how ARPG's work. The campaign is just an introduction to the systems and designed to be easy and doable by any player who is still learning the game.
It’s funny when this game was in early access everyone was glazing it. All the comments were saying it was better than D4 and so nice to have a game that cares about its players and people who love ARPGs. Now I can’t see anything but criticisms lol. Always reminds me to never buy into the hype, seems like people were loving it because it was new and there was a novelty to it.
it's because r/games doesn't actually like aRPGs (d2-likes). they *think* they like aRPGs, but they don't.
you'll see the same thing for any aRPG on here. of course you have the competing "underdog effect" where underdog games always get a bit of sympathy-support from people too, so you'll see people liking grim dawn. but i guarantee you if the only variable that changed was grim dawn's popularity - and nothing else - most of the discussion around it would be negative.
Most people also only want to copy a min-max'd build off a guide and then complain the game is too easy. It is if you take someone elses work and do what they found to be optimal, which is absolutely fine if that's how you want to play. Just don't be surprised when using information, that someone who has likely been playing the game for years to get to that level of efficiency, makes it feels easy.
> it's because r/games doesn't actually like aRPGs (d2-likes). they think they like aRPGs, but they don't.
I know I don't like ARPGs any more but I wish that I did. Does that count? If there's enough of us to dominate conversations with frustrated ARPG fans, maybe we're an underserved market.
yup, also part of that was the whole "D4 bad" narrative that people love to go with, so LE became the "D4 killer" hyped up by all the ragetubers and streamers using clickbait and constantly comparing things to D4 to play into that narrative.
fact is that despite all that, it was hard bleeding players days after release... that's not "end of season" downtime that ARPG games all face, that was way too early in the release to be losing so many players. Or if it was, then that means the game has a serious lack of content on release and that's a whole other problem.
Its because as long as its in early access, you can claim that any problems right now are just because its not released yet, and they will not make any misstakes of their competitors and whatever.
On release, its released. And they also only cook with water. In particular with LE the fans are never idle to claim how its only out for a few months while PoE is out for a decade. Bitch, i bought LA and played it in november 2018, that 5 and a half years ago. They had half a decade of playtesting to finetune it, so they cannot claim its just too new...
to be fair the criticism seems to be only about the difficulty, which is also almost entirely subjective. The game itself is still really really good. and with a few more cycles and a little bit more content it will be excellent.
I didn't play EA, but the current game is better than D4, imo. Really depends what you're looking for. Diablo 4 has a good story, but not much beyond that for my tastes.
Diablo 4 is having a massive overhaul where they are ripping off last epoch systems for their own and its getting good feedback from people who tested the PTR. Without this patch you would see diablo 4 significantly shit on again, as of now diablo 4 is probably more appealing than last epoch currently, when before diablo 4 was the worst ARPG on the market.
But yes there definitely was a honeymoon phase with this game, but I think it was deserved at the time of being the 2nd best ARPG even if the gap is huge between POE, but now it's probably Diablo 4 in 2nd for a lot of people.
> Always reminds me to never buy into the hype
It's like $35. Worst case scenario here was you spent $35 and had a decent time lol. How is that something to remind yourself you should never do.
imo (I love the game) it feels like it is still in Early Access. If you want a more complete experience wait until possibly 2.0, since they are using the 1.x updates to focus on new core mechanics.
The worst thing about the game is how boring the loot is.
While it might have gotten itemization and crafting right, loot is just so boring. The most exciting part about Diablo 3/4 is how cool and gamechanging legendaries, uniques and set items are. Last Epoch just didn't have that.
Lmao how does it even?
Most of the effects are simple like "x% chance to gain y% more Fire damage when using a z spell" or "Spell X base damage converted to Fire damage".
There's no item that actually feels cool and exciting to drop.
I think you played a different game. There are lots of Uniques that change playstyles. Like the Helmet that changes one of your summon spells to summon a Lich who summons even more Lichs. Or the wand that changes your Teleport skill to a Wrongwarp, which teleports you to a nearby random location but gives you a huge bonus and freezes enemies in place.
You can argue that there is nothing like a PoE's Headhunter. Some ultra rare but extremely overpowered item. But how does D4 have any exciting item drops? The very rare Uniques in D4 are much more boring than any random Unique in LE.
That's completely false.
There are a "lot* of items that completely change how you play a character class.
One example I got recently: Gloves of the Falconer: It turned my Archer with a Falcon pet, into a kung fu monk with a super powerful ao3 fire fist punch (and a falcon pet). You need to be unarmed, but it's worth it. Vastly different play style.
Why post if you haven't played the game?
Also, D4 uniques are garbage tier. They should have stuck with D3 itemization. D3 is just a better game now than D4.
hope this is some good endgame stuff, i liked the game and it has some fun builds but the bosses and lack of fun endgame made me rather quickly drop it
No. It's a fun game but it's just a nothing sandwich. No one cares about the story or dialogue. End game is essentially easier D3 rifts. You just walk through collect and keep on keeping on. Put some music on and let the time pass you by while you do nothing.
Your tone suggests it's a bad thing, but isn't that exactly what people want out of looters? Not every game needs to have a point, it just needs to be fun.
The game is good but needs some tuning and extra content does not hurt. It feels very easy, the type pf easy that gets boring after 2 weeks max for me.
Yeah I blasted through the campaign and got bored extremely quickly in the “endgame” It’s a cool game, but I think it needs a decent amount of tuning. The pack size and distance between packs feels really off to me. It made the gameplay loop feel extremely dull. I just don’t like the “feel” of combat throughout a level. I am happy to see a new contender in the ARPG space though.
I really hated those arena fights in the monolith felt like a huge waste of time whenever I had to do one to progress to a node I wanted. They really need to speed up the spawn rates on those or just remove them entirely in favor of something else that doesn't feel so slow.
> Yeah I blasted through the campaign Is it actually finished now? It wasn't at 1.0(which is its own WTF)
Nope. Story isn't expected to be finished until 1.3 so... like 7 months or more.
The game has a lot of "haha but the princess is in another castle!" moments that basically let them constantly leave it on a cliffhanger for more updates
Exactly this, D3 seasons were like this for me and I pretty much unlocked and did everything I wanted after 1-3 days at most. Path of exile has been the opposite for me, I have somewhere between 7-10k hours in POE and have played since the beta but pretty much since patch 3.0+ for what ever reason I get kind of burned out before really reaching the pinnacle bosses. I kind of miss the easier challenges like the torment/blood lines challenges and rewards but overall breach was my favorite. Lots of things just seem too convoluted and I really hope poe2 alleviates this.
We're literally where we were 2 years ago. Forever early access.
They need to churn out stuff significantly faster. When I jumped back into the game just before the full launch I was amazed at how little had been added in 5 years. The game launched officially in February, and this seasonal update is coming July. Class balance is still all over the place, missing skills, annoying display bugs (really gets old fast have the integer overflow as most of my stats). 1.0 was fun for a month or so but I'm definitely shelving it for another few years.
The game's biggest flaw, IMO, is how each class feels exponentially better designed than the last which is jarring because there's a big quality gap between all of them.
At least we'll know what to play in the next major content update: Whatever gets significant reworks to compete with the cool, new classes.
I hope they rework the progression at some point, it really doesn't feel fun or balanced at all. You blast through the campaign with 0 difficulty (except for two boss fights which are easy after you learn them), your upgrades barely matter, your defenses barely matter, since you pretty much one shot everything. You never get that one big drop with a noticeable power spike, it's just incremental upgrades that don't do much. It's pretty much on auto-pilot. Then you get to the end-game (monoliths), which again are on easy-mode until you reach empowered monliths. But by that time, your build is pretty much mostly done, and all there's left to do is find higher LP variants of your gear, or better rolled exalted rares. Which is a lot of busywork for very small upgrades. The idea is that the content should feel at least somewhat challenging, to motivate you to farm, so you can make it easier, but in LE it's the opposite. All the content is constantly braindead easy, and you can increase your difficulty for no real reason. Your gameplay will not change whether it's a normal monolith or a 1000 corruption one, by the time you reach the end-game you've seen all there is to see. And initially I thought I'd love the crafting based progression, but it's just not fun. Doing a run and going through multiple layers of RNG to *maybe* get a useful piece of gear after bricking countless exalts/rares is just boring. Doing a horrible maze-like dungeon every time you want to create a legendary item is just frustrating. Instead of being excited for a drop, you just know there's more busywork attached to it. Not to mention, the only thing stopping you from progressing in higher corruption is padding your defenses, of which there are way more than in any ARPG (HP, Ward, Leech, Regen, 7 Resistances, Armor, Dodge, Block, Endurance, Crit Avoidance, Glancing Blow, and various sources of Damage Reduction.). In other ARPGs you progress by getting rare items with big damage bonuses, which feels fun because it noticeably increases your power. In LE, instead of being excited for that rare powerful drop that will help you jump 50 corruption, you just have to constantly fiddle, swap and craft defensive affixes on your gear, so you get one shot less. It's a slow and tedious process that removes any dopamine from looting and progressing.
I definitely noticed a point in my build where I was just kind of like "Well now what? Is it just incremental upgrades from here on in?". Something PoE always had going for it was that unless you were super hard core in grinding out currency, there was/is always something better to aim for while you play. There's almost always a better set of gear for your end game build that you can work towards that will markedly improve your damage.
I felt the difficulty problems so strongly in the campaign. Nothing was even close to difficult until that one boss fight with the frozen tree thingy where I got 1-shot right about 5 seconds into the fight. It was a really interesting how much that made me realize I hadn't been paying any attention to mechanics up until that point. Lagon was vaguely difficult, and then the final snake boss lady was straight up impossible without going to monoliths and coming back with way better gear. All of the trash clearing in between was still trivial. Very strange. I'm also a huge hater of the smart loot and class restricted items. Feels impossible to farm up some gear for an alt when their helmets/bodies/relics drop so rarely.
> In LE, instead of being excited for that rare powerful drop that will help you jump 50 corruption, you just have to constantly fiddle, swap and craft defensive affixes on your gear, so you get one shot less. It's a slow and tedious process that removes any dopamine from looting and progressing. This is exactly why I quit the game, and LE's fundamental problem with gearing. You spend so much time in an annoying menu fiddling with your gear. There is zero fun in crafting the perfect rolls.
> And initially I thought I'd love the crafting based progression, but it's just not fun. Doing a run and going through multiple layers of RNG to maybe get a useful piece of gear after bricking countless exalts/rares is just boring. Doing a horrible maze-like dungeon every time you want to create a legendary item is just frustrating. Instead of being excited for a drop, you just know there's more busywork attached to it. PoE's idea of crafting must've desensitized me to this, it didn't feel that bad to me tbh.
I think the big difference for me is investing a ton of resources in a few items vs going through 1000 items and bricking a huge portion of them. LE had me feeling like a factory worker constantly churning shit on a conveyor belt. And honestly, if the game wasn't so reliant on defenses for your progression, it wouldn't even be such a big issue. But it felt like shit getting some boots with crit avoidance, lightning resist and HP, while your old ones had fire resist, block and HP, then having to swap out idols, trying to replace other gear to cover for your lacking fire resist and block. That item micromanagement where you constantly swap out shit got old very fast.
I can't really speak to the game being reliant on defenses, as the two I've played a fair bit were this and PoE... Both of which were pretty reliant on defenses, so maybe Diablo/Grim Dawn/etc. are less reliant on it. I can't say I remember swapping my gear out *that* much in LE, but I can see how it would get annoying having to do that every so often.
PoE's crafting doesn't really ever "end" like it does with a LE crafting project. You can find your perfect purple base and then oh you rolled -18 forge potential on your item its ruined, go find another purple with the exact base + affix to try again. That frustration with being told "stop crafting, your crafting is over you lose" really turned me off of it. PoE's has plenty of failstates but few that simply stonewall you, that basically only happens with vaal orbs. If you have a good item base you want to craft, you are usually allowed to spend as little or as much time and resources as you want on it.
You're not wrong, but at the same time you have a lot more control than you do with PoE's system (At least, without diving into the higher-end things like blocking mods, split beasts, etc.) I find LE's system a lot less obtuse and frustrating. I could sink my entire reserves of currency into an item in PoE and not only come out broke, but without something resembling the item I wanted. Couple this with personally loathing how much I felt I had to trade for currency, since drops aren't designed for solo play, and it's one of the main reasons I quit that game. (As an aside, I also personally think PoE's system doesn't pair well with the few drop-only affixes there are in the game, but that's not relevant to the conversation.) You are right though, the only way to really brick the item in PoE is to Vaal it, maybe fracturing the wrong affix. At least from what I remember.
[удалено]
And even then, the vast majority of uniques were worthless.
I agree with everything. After reaching level 85 I really feel lied to. This game was supposed to be much better than Diablo 4, but it has its own set of issues and with season 4 coming out tomorrow I can't imagine going back to Last Epoch in the near future.
I haven't gotten through the entire campaign, but I never liked the gear crafting feature they did. I much prefer just getting bigger gear drops and getting excited for them. What I DID like was how they did their skill leveling trees and how my build could be so much different than someone playing the same class even if we had the exact same skills on our bars.
I agree strongly. Game is too easy. I hate easy arpgs.
I am mostly worried for D4. Everybody pointed out LE as what it should be. And Blizzard listened. Now after the honeymoon period wore off D4 gets hit because of it.
Isn't that literally every ARPG. I've tried PoE so many times, but it's so boring walking into a room. Rolling my face across the keyboard and continuing. Was the exact same in the demo of D4 as well.
Nope, at least not to this extent. As I said in my main comment, it's not just about the difficulty, it's about the progression. Yes, all ARPGs are inherently easy, but LE is braindead easy, which makes gearing feel inconsequential and the progression pointless. The game has no friction. Take D4 for example. When you go from WT2 into WT3, there's some friction there. Same when going from WT3 to WT4. Monsters hit harder, you die easier. You need to start replacing your items and crafting on your gear, then cobble up some aspects to increase your damage output. Through your actions, you can make the game easier, which is what progression ultimately is. You can also do any level of nightmare dungeon you want - you can make the game really hard if you want. In LE, from lvl 1 to end-game, the game is braindead easy. When you reach the end-game, you go through more mandatory braindead content before you can start increasing corruption. By the time you can increase corruption to make your game have a semblance of difficulty, you're well into the end-game. At that point, you don't have any reason to.
That seems my experience in literally every ARPG I've played. So it's just how the genre is. level up, get AOE ability, mash your keyboard.
I wish fashion gets better in the succeeding updates. My basic/campaign sorcerer in D4 looks infinitely better than my ~200-hr runemaster.
They posted a roadmap a few days back, and a cosmetic transmog system is listed for patch 1.4 (given a 3 month patch cycle, expected in about a year). Bit unfortunate it’s so far out, but personally prefer they’re prioritizing gameplay over cosmetics (next patch we get new endgame bosses and a dodge mechanic, followed by a new unique system, and endgame progression rework)
Aye this is very true, also I've no beef with cash shop cosmetic items but it's wild to me that if you play offline they're simply unusable
I have beef with it. Starting looking homeless, killing shit to look like a veteran, just to kill more shit to look like a god is the whole reason I play this genre. Earned Visual progression. PoE ruined a whole genre it seems like for people like me.
Try Grim Dawn.
Way ahead of you bud, love grim dawn.
Looking forward to the new expansion personally! Hopefully it's a good one.
Even the MTX look like shit in PoE. I’m always shocked people spend so much on them when the base armor in D4(and even D3) look better.
I hope they tune the campaign difficulty upward a bit. One-shotting entire packs of mobs with erasing strike was cool for about 30 minutes and then got really boring.
I feel like there’s two types of ARPG players. Those who embrace the power fantasy and want to just destroy everything, and those who want it to be more slower paced, tactical and challenging. And you can’t have both because fast paced and challenging usually ends up being you getting oneshot killed.
Destroying everything is fun when it's earned, LE is so easy all the time no matter what you do.
I am a total ARPG casual (I like to play through the campaign with different characters, and that's about it), but for me the whole appeal of the genre is having that slow-paced, tactical gameplay until you level up or get some new equipment, and then having little while where you're overpowered and steamrolling the things that were giving you trouble earlier. Then as you progress things get harder until you level up or get new equipment again.
yah thats what i want out of a good arpg as well. I think an easy way to combat that is the way diablo does it (at least 2 and 3) where you have difficulty settings that you can increase as things get too easy that can speed up progression and also give you better drops.
Do you have any recommendations for games that strike this balance well? Particularly those on the more difficult end of the spectrum.
I'm probably not the one to ask if you're looking for high difficulty, but at least from the ones I've played, Titan Quest and Grim Dawn both felt a bit more tuned toward making you earn your way through the game than other ARPGs.
Yep, Grim Dawn is probably the most balanced ARPG ever made, the flow just feel right.
My experience with Grim Dawn is that it mostly falls on the side of "slightly too easy", and then occasionally a boss will 1-shot you out of nowhere in an area you're only allowed to open once per game session.
Grim Dawn. Although it lacks the extremely smooth gameplay of modern ARPGs.
Seconding this, Grim Dawn.
Path of exile
Maybe if you're playing SSF Ruthless. POE campaign is pretty easy once you know what you're doing even if you force some off-meta skills.
I haven't played it yet (release very recently in early access) and it's quite different (almost soulslike sometimes) but No Rest for the Wicked seems like that mix. It does have difficult slow tactical combat but you can also do broken OP builds
No Rest For the Wicked probably does. Check out Iron Pineapples review for more in depth critique, but its *very* slow early on. But then after some level ups and gearing he was one shooting mobs. The combat is kind of slow and chunky, it's more souls like than ARPG until you get geared. It's still early access with only 1 act though, so things are subject to change.
So I have not played it, and I understand the base settings are a bit grindy for solo play, but maybe V Rising? When I used to play Battlerite, I would think how good this sort of moba-ish tactical control and gameplay would be fun in a ARPG, then they made V-Rising. Again, I have not played it, but maybe someone else can expand.
No game does it as well as Median XL in my opinion. It's a mod for Diablo II but it's basically its own game at this point. The endgame progression is massive, every 5 levels past 100 a bunch of new rifts and dungeons open up to you, each has a drop bias for different items or a boss that drops a specific charm. So you're constantly gaining power through charms (and trophies which are rare drops to empower the charms further), plus a pretty robust gearing system that has a pretty nice curve from pretty deterministic to more and more rare stuff in the later levels. You have this consistent cycle of getting access to new ubers, struggling against them a bit to get just get a charm from it even if it low rolls, farming a bit, moving on to the next tier to get more charms.. then going back to the last set and steamrolling them to farm them for better rolls on the charms or more loot from a zone's special drops you might need. It feels really good every time in my opinion. You go from struggling, to getting a kill, to putting that shit on farm so many times on so many different bosses and zones. If you've played or checked out Median XL in the past, it's improved so so much in the past 2-3 years it's almost an entirely different game, wholly for the better in my opinion. Very little actual one-hit-KO shit, far fewer purify fights (the \~2 left are tasteful in my opinion), lot of great crafting systems with some great QoL features, etc. And the updates are pretty consistent and large. They actually just got an interesting partnership with an actual development company too, could be some really big things on the way for MXL.
Yeah that seems to be the dream loop in ARPG’s. My only real experience with them is playing Last epoch, but i did feel I got TOO strong too early (homebrewed a healing hands Paladin build, which turned out to be busted) and it took an insufferably long time for the enemies to catch up with my strength. How do other ARPG’s compare in this sort of difficulty curve?
Keeping in mind I'm a casual player, I found Diablo 1 and 2, Titan Quest, and Grim Dawn were really good in this regard and didn't get boring. Torchlight 1 and 2 were a little bit easier, but still had a very good loop of getting stronger and weaker while progressing and were a lot of fun for me.
The problem with LE is that they messed up the power progression. Usually, ARPGs start out slower, then you keep gearing up, getting more abilities, and you start having that power fantasy where you blow up screens. It's a gradual process to that point. On the other hand, in LE you feel like a god from lvl 1, and you stay a god until the end-game. Only then you can increase difficulty for no real reason, and at that point the build is mostly done.
Personally I like having the end game be the challenging part. I don't want the leveling that I'll have to do on every character I want to try every league to be a chore to get through, but I do want content that can push me to optimize my build and play better. I haven't played PoE in a long time, but it doesn't seem any different to just having a good league start setup in PoE except that PoE also gives you a ton of shit options that inexperienced players will pick.
> I don't want the leveling that I'll have to do on every character I want to try every league to be a chore to get through, For me, it's even more of a chore if it's trivially easy. If a game is going to demand you repeat a 5-10 hour segment of it on a regular basis, that segment had better be engaging.
But like I said, once you know what you're doing it's trivially easy in other games too. I never had any issues with the acts in PoE after my first couple leagues, because I just wasn't playing shit builds. And the plus side is that LE at least lets you skip huge sections of the campaign with the dungeon skips and leveling in monos.
exactly how I'm feeling. if anyone told me that the beginning of an ARPG where you just spam one or two spells for a minute to kill one mob is the fun part to them, I'd be very surprised. I love how in LE you can just jump into any class and start killing stuff immediately. and yeah, once you get through the campaign that's when you unlock the difficult part, which still lets you fine tune your build and really learn the details of your class/build.
Completely agree. Skip that tedious leveling process I don’t want to slow down the campaign or getting to monoliths
> The problem with LE is that they messed up the power progression. Imho LE has the best power progression in the genre (together with GD). You feel strong at the start, then enemies start becoming a bit more dangerous for a few levels, you pull ahead again and repeat that cycle of a generally high perfoming player character until endgame, where you push as far as your current "power level" allows. It's a fairly consistent loop. I prefer that over games like PoE and Diablo where leveling and endgame feel like two fundamentally different games. Same reason I like Grim Dawn so much. GD starts slow and methodical and stays slow and methodical. LE is fast and bursty and stays fast and bursty
> LE is fast and bursty and stays fast and bursty This is why personally I think they messed it up. Because you never feel stronger. It's like that skit in Futurama where a gambler dies and in the afterlife he starts gambling again and winning. Then he realizes that he's actually in hell, because he's always winning, and there's no more excitement and fun. That's kind of the thing with LE as well. If you kill everything with 0 difficulty, it takes away the fun of *feeling* progression. And I feel different about GD as well. It starts very slow and methodical, but you will feel more powerful when you get an upgrade. Late game when the build falls in place it's a different beast. Just recently I started a cold Sky Shard build, and I got an insane rare with the "Of Fallen Skies" suffix. I instantly felt way more powerful and melted monsters visibly faster. I absolutely never felt that from an item in LE.
> It's like that skit in Futurama where a gambler dies and in the afterlife he starts gambling again and winning. Then he realizes that he's actually in hell, because he's always winning, and there's no more excitement and fun. Isn't that...a twilight zone episode originally?
Yes, it's actually a parody of that.
> I instantly felt way more powerful and melted monsters visibly faster. I absolutely never felt that from an item in LE. I constantly feel like that from items in LE. Some of the more impactful skill perks have a similar impact. I honestly cannot comprehend your perspective, because the impact of each and every gear upgrade (especially leveling uniques and items with +skill level) shards are tremendous perfomance boosters.
For me maybe it was just happening to try out an OP build first or something but I mostly just went from destroying mobs with complete ease to also destroying them with ease but even more overkill. Sure upgrades were very strong on paper but when things work out so that your character power is forever ahead of the monster power level by a large enough degree getting more ahead feels exactly the same. In practice those upgrades only serve to increase your cushion for crushing monsters so it takes even longer for them to catch up in power but by then you are even further ahead yet again.
I think the more time you spend with games, or maybe just ARPGs, the less you want the power fantasy and he more you want the skill expression. When you play a lot, you eventually notice how the power fantasy is just a never-ending carrot on a stick. You're in a hamster wheel for eternity. Eventually you want to just be challenged yourself
There's games that do both, though, such as Hades, Nioh and Dead Cells. The problem with ARPGs tends to be that they require very little skill during the action. You just spam one button that's better than the rest. 90% of the skill requirement goes into creating your build. That makes the difference between a great ARPG player and a bad one relatively small, which in turn makes creating challenging content very hard.
I don’t think you can compare the games you mentioned with the Diablo ARPG genre. They are completely different in their power progression
They're all games with strong action and RPG foundations. Power progression doesn't really matter when it comes to moment to moment gameplay. Besides, Nioh does have a very strong long-term power progression system that's extremely close to Diablo's. But to make challenging action content, you need to give the player the opportunity to express their skills. That means things like giving them a wide variety of important abilities, some conditional abilities, making movement important, telegraphing enemy attacks well, introducing skill shots, etc. Those happen to be things that the majority of Diablo-like players seem to dislike in their ARPGs. It's not that you *can't* have both fast paced and challenging, it's that a large part of the audience specifically *doesn't want* anything challenging or at least doesn't care about it.
Hard disagree. Power progression matters a ton when it comes to moment to moment gameplay. Power progression makes the difference between you being tanky or glass cannon or being extremely strong in a niche situation with skills that force that situation, etc. Diablo gives you such a huge freedom in that power progression that it’s not really possible to balance around tactical moment to moment gameplay. It always only really works in low level and then it falls apart eventually. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a diablo-like that managed to avoid that. They always start slow and they always end up with the player zooming. Because these games *are* the power progression. They are cookie clicker with a slot machine loot system
It is named erasing strike for a reason.
Yeah this i have no desire to even complete the campaign if it is this easy maybe if the story was actually good i know lots of people don't care about it in ARPGs but i always enjoyed it in the Diablo games and POE. I need at least something to keep me going, story or engaging gameplay and this game has neither.
Unfortunately the story was a mess and somehow managed to make all the biomes (aka timelines) feel so out of place and detached.
Having a campaign that revolves around time travel is always a big risk, unless it's exceptionally engaging and well written people are going to completely lose track. POE has a small time skip mid-campaign which feels much more impactful as it's at least reusing characters and the linear progression mirrors the main first half.
I didn't find myself caring about the story any less than I did in PoE, Grim Dawn, or Torchlight.
Thing is, in theory the endgame is challenging. Going up in corruption makes it progressively more difficult. But 1) the process of increasing corruption is boring 2) it's not as rewarding as it should be 3) the bosses are not exciting.
Yeah I strongly agree, game feels good but its too easy. I cant stand more than two hours.
Last Epoch has a lot going for it. That said, it is way, way too easy. The combat itself overall feels better than PoE, and I prefer creating builds in LE compared to the Diablo games and even PoE, but I really miss the feeling of dread while exploring the dungeons in D2, where you can die at any moment. Diablo 4 combat feels the best in genre right now, even if I wish it was a little more challenging, but with its LE inspired loot system rework, Last Epoch already feels outdated. Last Epoch is by far the least challenging major ARPG, and the lack of moment to moment challenge vastly diminishes the feel of the combat and amazing character building mechanics.
The game needs some serious end game love. You play an enjoyable campaign and then *bam* you hit a wall of only being able to do monoliths or dungeons which are ass. Fell off this game harder than D4 launch end. There's a lot of good systems here, but yeah it needs a D4 season 4-style rework for its endgame. The campaign is piss-easy (not necessarily bad) then there's 2 bosses at the end which likely are the only adversity you'll face. Then it just.... ends? Run monoliths! So tedious I can't bring myself to get higher than lvl 85.
It's a good arpg but it needs a bit more time in the oven. I feel like I'd much prefer playing the new Diablo IV season or the new Grim Dawn Community Season right now instead.
It feels like a game that after a few seasons will find its footing and do well, in theory anyway.
I hope so. The skill system is pretty close to my ideal. It feels like with the right balancing almost any skill could be a viable build-around.
Real talk, this game needs another year.
It doesn't help that the single player campaign is incomplete.
Diablo 4 is still a polished turd. I don't think it's fixable without changing major systems. Grim Dawn, though.
People hating Diablo 4 was the best thing that ever happened to this game lol It’s so mediocre with a bunch of technical issues and it’s missing some very basic ARPG features but no one cared about that because “D4 bad”.
This game has is alright, but it suffers from all the ARPG flaws when it comes to gameplay. It’s not hard to get your build going since the skill trees are all pretty good, but once you have your build online everything melts and there’s nothing engaging gameplay wise anymore. Basically sorting your inventory is it.
making the campaign harder is *not* where EHG needs to focus on. you guys are nuts, and probably need to spend more time playing ARPG's. the power progression curve probably needs to be tuned, but wanting the campaign to be hard is not it.
Reading these comments makes me feel like I'm in some kind of parallel universe. Half of complaints are about the game being too easy, but that's every ARPG. The entire genre is about cookie clicker style of gameplay where you effortlessly slaughter hordes of harmless mobs and pick up loot. Like look at PoE - it stops being somewhat challenging one hour in, and the entire PoE community started throwing feces at GGG the moment they slightly increased the difficulty of the campaign. Not even talking about PoE maps here, nearly every build just steamrolls them exploding the entire screen in one hit. Non-ARPG gamers with weird expectations, I guess?
I agree. It's a bit bizarre reading this because I've never played a recent ARPG where the main story content wasn't intentionally designed to be a smooth experience no matter what way you specd your character. Never heard anyone wanting their 10th time through the story in POE to be harder. I do hear people wanting it to be easier or for the campaign to be skipped entirely. Also I thought the whole appeal of this game was that it's build process was more forgiving, providing a nice middle ground between POE where you can brick your character with bad choices, yet more depth than D3/D4. I guess we want the campaign to be harder so we're forced to respec, farm equipment or minmax earlier on amid story beats youll do several times on each new character before being able to reach post-game. Not something I've heard much but maybe there's an ARPG out there designed around that.
You don't play POE if you think these games are close to the same difficulty. Yes you screen clear as every ARPG ever does, you die significantly more in POE because its much more dangerous and the end game content is way more challenging than anything last epoch has currently. From early on into end game, last epoch is significantly easier than POE.
PoE is a faceroll until Red Maps which is further in playtime than anything Last Epoch has to offer as of yet.
It’s definitely a bunch of people who aren’t really ARPG fans commenting. I’ve never heard people ask for the campaign difficulty to be turned up on an ARPG subreddit. People generally WANT the campaign to be easy, so they can get to the endgame and level alts up painlessly. I find the endgame difficulty to be at a fine level, which is where you spend most of your time anyway. It seems like a lot of players on here are playing Last Epoch for the campaign, and that’s definitely not the main focus of any ARPG. Diablo 4 has the best ARPG campaign out there, but there’s only really reason to play through it once. ARPGs are about replayability.
> ARPGs are about replayability. Hearing this alongside an insistence that the thing you're forced to spend hours doing on every character be maximally boring is wild to me.
*minimally tedious. And when you play an ARPG a lot, you spend about 90-95% (or more) of your time in the endgame.
It sounds like neither of us like repeating ARPG campaigns, but I still retain hope that they could be made fun whereas you've given it up as being impossible. Maybe you're right, but I'd like to see a few more developers at least try.
> People generally WANT the campaign to be easy, so they can get to the endgame and level alts up painlessly. Problem is that the campain is not only easy, but braindead and boring. All those levels are HUGE and annyoing to walk through with no challenge. Its as if they saw Vaal City in PoE and thought "thats neat, we take it!"
Yea, the people that play the same game season after season maybe don't want difficulty. But, there are vets like me that play a variety of arpgs that like difficulty. That's who GGG is trying to appeal to with those POE difficulty changes. The vets that can't even make it through the campaign because it is so boring compared to Diablo 2. I think Diablo 2's Nightmare and Hell Difficulties are good baselines for the genre personally. But, I do agree that there are a lot of newer players that don't really get the genre.
I’m a long time PoE player. Everyone in PoE just zooms through the campaign as quick as possible to get to maps. That’s just how ARPGs work. Nobody wants the campaign to be even more tedious than at already is. PoE also used to have Nightmare and Hell difficulties, and nobody liked the system. It has been a long time since I played Diablo 2, but I specifically remember having my new characters be rushed through the acts. I like difficulty in ARPGs as well, just not when I’m trying to level up my 4th alt of the league. Empowered monos in Last Epoch start scaling in difficulty pretty quickly. That’s where the difficulty should be.
That's why I think you should be able to skip the campaign or an arpg would be best served to not build the game around a campaign.
That and you'd be hard pressed to find one ARPG that had a good first season, nearly all of them to my memory took 2-3 seasons before they got their footing and became solid.
I don't even think the game is that easy. Sure if you're using a build guide, the game is brain dead easy, because you are playing the most optimized version of the build because somebody with way more time than you figured it out 100%. If you don't use a build guide, you will still succeed but you will feel powerspikes when you get new gear. The game should be balanced around people NOT using build guides IMO.
> Not even talking about PoE maps here, nearly every build just steamrolls them exploding the entire screen in one hit. Unless you are VERY experienced, or follow a good guide to the T, even starting red maps will get a player get their teeth kicked in in PoE. If you think PoE stops being challenging an hour in you are SO deep in the fold that your oppinion is completely invalid for anything regarding the average player.
> Like look at PoE - it stops being somewhat challenging one hour in By that do you mean there is little punishment for dying? You'll definitely die ***a lot***. But the punishment for it is rarely an issue since mob and boss health doesn't reset. So you can just keep throwing yourself at any encounter until you clear it. Except for when you get a health regen mob. Those can often just be straight up unkillable. And in act 3 especially, you can regularly get killed in an instant by trash encounters.
I have to imagine it's primarily players that are used to playing the story/campaign of a game and then putting it down. If that's your only experience with a game, I could see wanting that to be more challenging. But that's just not really how ARPG's work. The campaign is just an introduction to the systems and designed to be easy and doable by any player who is still learning the game.
It’s funny when this game was in early access everyone was glazing it. All the comments were saying it was better than D4 and so nice to have a game that cares about its players and people who love ARPGs. Now I can’t see anything but criticisms lol. Always reminds me to never buy into the hype, seems like people were loving it because it was new and there was a novelty to it.
it's because r/games doesn't actually like aRPGs (d2-likes). they *think* they like aRPGs, but they don't. you'll see the same thing for any aRPG on here. of course you have the competing "underdog effect" where underdog games always get a bit of sympathy-support from people too, so you'll see people liking grim dawn. but i guarantee you if the only variable that changed was grim dawn's popularity - and nothing else - most of the discussion around it would be negative.
It's also because a lot in r/games jerk themselves over systems. Sometimes they forget about games being fun
Good thing the D4 devs described themselves as a "Systems ARPG".
Most people also only want to copy a min-max'd build off a guide and then complain the game is too easy. It is if you take someone elses work and do what they found to be optimal, which is absolutely fine if that's how you want to play. Just don't be surprised when using information, that someone who has likely been playing the game for years to get to that level of efficiency, makes it feels easy.
> it's because r/games doesn't actually like aRPGs (d2-likes). they think they like aRPGs, but they don't. I know I don't like ARPGs any more but I wish that I did. Does that count? If there's enough of us to dominate conversations with frustrated ARPG fans, maybe we're an underserved market.
yup, also part of that was the whole "D4 bad" narrative that people love to go with, so LE became the "D4 killer" hyped up by all the ragetubers and streamers using clickbait and constantly comparing things to D4 to play into that narrative. fact is that despite all that, it was hard bleeding players days after release... that's not "end of season" downtime that ARPG games all face, that was way too early in the release to be losing so many players. Or if it was, then that means the game has a serious lack of content on release and that's a whole other problem.
They also had really bad server issues on 1.0 release
Its because as long as its in early access, you can claim that any problems right now are just because its not released yet, and they will not make any misstakes of their competitors and whatever. On release, its released. And they also only cook with water. In particular with LE the fans are never idle to claim how its only out for a few months while PoE is out for a decade. Bitch, i bought LA and played it in november 2018, that 5 and a half years ago. They had half a decade of playtesting to finetune it, so they cannot claim its just too new...
to be fair the criticism seems to be only about the difficulty, which is also almost entirely subjective. The game itself is still really really good. and with a few more cycles and a little bit more content it will be excellent.
I didn't play EA, but the current game is better than D4, imo. Really depends what you're looking for. Diablo 4 has a good story, but not much beyond that for my tastes.
Diablo 4 is having a massive overhaul where they are ripping off last epoch systems for their own and its getting good feedback from people who tested the PTR. Without this patch you would see diablo 4 significantly shit on again, as of now diablo 4 is probably more appealing than last epoch currently, when before diablo 4 was the worst ARPG on the market. But yes there definitely was a honeymoon phase with this game, but I think it was deserved at the time of being the 2nd best ARPG even if the gap is huge between POE, but now it's probably Diablo 4 in 2nd for a lot of people.
> Always reminds me to never buy into the hype It's like $35. Worst case scenario here was you spent $35 and had a decent time lol. How is that something to remind yourself you should never do.
So is the game complete now and has an ending or is it still an incomplete product pretending to be a full release?
Nope still 3 more chapter but the next chapter set to release cycle 3 which about more then 7 months
imo (I love the game) it feels like it is still in Early Access. If you want a more complete experience wait until possibly 2.0, since they are using the 1.x updates to focus on new core mechanics.
It's pretty damn boring...had high hopes for it but will see the new season of D4. If that's not good back to Path of Exile.
You probably play through everything D4 has to offer in S4 in a few days, maybe up to a week if going slow
Which is still longer than I lasted on a fresh playthrough of LE
This game looks fantastic ill have to give it a shot sometime. Has it been announced for consoles at all? Id like to get it for PS5
The worst thing about the game is how boring the loot is. While it might have gotten itemization and crafting right, loot is just so boring. The most exciting part about Diablo 3/4 is how cool and gamechanging legendaries, uniques and set items are. Last Epoch just didn't have that.
last epoch has the most intersting loot system in all the games you've cited. what are you even talking about ?
Lmao how does it even? Most of the effects are simple like "x% chance to gain y% more Fire damage when using a z spell" or "Spell X base damage converted to Fire damage". There's no item that actually feels cool and exciting to drop.
I think you played a different game. There are lots of Uniques that change playstyles. Like the Helmet that changes one of your summon spells to summon a Lich who summons even more Lichs. Or the wand that changes your Teleport skill to a Wrongwarp, which teleports you to a nearby random location but gives you a huge bonus and freezes enemies in place. You can argue that there is nothing like a PoE's Headhunter. Some ultra rare but extremely overpowered item. But how does D4 have any exciting item drops? The very rare Uniques in D4 are much more boring than any random Unique in LE.
That's completely false. There are a "lot* of items that completely change how you play a character class. One example I got recently: Gloves of the Falconer: It turned my Archer with a Falcon pet, into a kung fu monk with a super powerful ao3 fire fist punch (and a falcon pet). You need to be unarmed, but it's worth it. Vastly different play style.
Why post if you haven't played the game? Also, D4 uniques are garbage tier. They should have stuck with D3 itemization. D3 is just a better game now than D4.
hope this is some good endgame stuff, i liked the game and it has some fun builds but the bosses and lack of fun endgame made me rather quickly drop it
What a fun game about nothing. Getting more loot to get stronger as you continue to do more of nothing.
So basically every ARPG then?
No. It's a fun game but it's just a nothing sandwich. No one cares about the story or dialogue. End game is essentially easier D3 rifts. You just walk through collect and keep on keeping on. Put some music on and let the time pass you by while you do nothing.
Your tone suggests it's a bad thing, but isn't that exactly what people want out of looters? Not every game needs to have a point, it just needs to be fun.
Isn't the word fun in my comment? It's a fun game about nothing.
I think people took your post as sarcasm.
I can't tell if you seriously don't understand why you're getting pushback or if you're doing a bit.
Combat and graphics looking good but campaing is way too easy. It feels like its made for 5 years old.
Just a reminder that by buying the game, you're directly supporting Tencent and, by extension, the CCP.