Last Epoch - time travel action-RPG

[Seethe]

So is Soul Feast on both Lich and Warlock like the maxroll planner says, or is lich gonna lose it and get something else nothing for now?

The Devs deciding to revamp some Shaman skills instead of finishing the skill tree on the Paladin heal skill is bizarre too. Then again releasing the game with unfinished skills and campaign is also bizarre so what do I know.

Also lol @ the "curse" mastery only getting one actual new curse.

Er..what? Are you talking about this?

https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/healing-hands-skill-tree-coming-to-last-epoch-february-21st/62387

 

[Justinian]

So is Soul Feast on both Lich and Warlock like the maxroll planner says, or is lich gonna lose it and get something else nothing for now?

The Devs deciding to revamp some Shaman skills instead of finishing the skill tree on the Paladin heal skill is bizarre too. Then again releasing the game with unfinished skills and campaign is also bizarre so what do I know.

Also lol @ the "curse" mastery only getting one actual new curse.

Er..what? Are you talking about this?

https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/healing-hands-skill-tree-coming-to-last-epoch-february-21st/62387

Oh, that's good to hear, last I saw someone comment on that it wasn't going to.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Healing Hands Skill Tree | Coming to Last Epoch February 21st
Hello Travelers, and welcome to day three of the pre-patch blog posts!

Healing Hands is a skill which has existed in the Paladin tree for quite some time, without being able to be specialized. There’s various reasons we waited to create a tree for this skill, one of the bigger reasons being that we wanted this type of skill to be able to support nodes which help cooperation with other players.

With our release of Last Epoch on February 21st, Healing Hands will finally be getting its long awaited skill tree. While Healing Hands at its core offers a large amount of support, focusing on healing, one should remember that the Paladin is not a back-line player. Healing to a Paladin means more than mending wounds, but also healing the world of its evils. As such, Healing Hands offers a great deal of customization for offensive ability as well, including multiple ways to make it a directly damaging ability.

Healing Hands

As a baseline, Healing hands is an ability which casts a medium sized area of effect which heals all allies, including yourself for an immediate burst, and applies a heal over time for three seconds.

Both heals from the ability scale with Increased Healing Effectiveness, as well as the nodes on the skill tree. This grants Healing Hands not only strong immediate recovery, but also provide a fairly strong heal over time to help keep yourself and allies nice and healthy. As a Paladin, Healing Hands can offer very strong competition to even Life Leech as a source of health sustain, in addition to its specialization options.

Cleric’s Hammer

Cleric’s Hammer grants Healing Hands a chance to trigger on any melee attack, up to a 100% chance with the full four points assigned. This imbues all melee attacks to provide healing to all allies and yourself in the area. When combined with other options on the tree, this can also effectively convert any melee attack into an offensive spell melee attack, synergizing well with many of the Paladin’s hybrid melee and spell abilities.

Hand of Aurelus

More favorable towards ranged damage? Hand of Aurelus allows Healing Hands to instead synergize with direct Smite casts, adding its own healing area to smites. Combined with Searing Light, adding Damage to Healing Hands’ area of effect, Healing Hands can further augment Smite builds with the additional hit damage.

Divine Bolt

Healing Hands also adds support for Divine Bolts. By picking up the Divine Catalyst node, you will cast a number of Divine Bolts with every direct use of Healing Hands. Further, with just one point in this node, all sources of Divine Bolt will scale with the nodes in the Healing Hands tree.

Rahyeh’s Chariot

Healing Hands can also be converted to a Traversal ability, charging to a target location casting Healing Hands upon arrival. This adds a 6 second cooldown to Healing Hands, however, unlike Lunge, Rahyeh’s Chariot does not require a target to move to.

Seraph Blade

Prefer to channel your healing powers through your blade? Taking this node will convert Healing Hands into a Melee Attack. converting Spell Damage from the tree into Melee Damage. A heavy hitting melee attack which also provides strong healing, Seraph Blade embodies the strongest aspects of the Paladin Mastery.

Unbroken Prayer + Skyfall

Who doesn’t like a good Sky Beam? By assigning Unbroken Prayer, converting Healing Hands into a channeled ability, you can further specialize it into Skyfall. By paying an additional mana cost each second, you will deal additional fire damage over time while channeling Healing Hands, scorching clear a path of righteousness.

Closing

Thank you for again joining us today in this coverage of the Paladin’s Healing Hands skill tree. Offering potential as both a support ability, a damaging ability, triggers, or direct casting, Healing Hands offers the Paladin a number of new ways to build. Healing Hands still remains available at 5 points invested into the Paladin Tree, meaning you can also pick up Healing Hands as either a Forge Guard or Void Knight should you theory-craft such a use.

Tomorrow we’ll be recapping the coverage of Item Factions, Falconer, and Warlock for all the Travelers just recently joining us, or who may have missed the previous information releases. Then on Sunday we’ll be covering some of the new Item bases, Item Affixes, and Unique Items coming with the release of Last Epoch on February 21st!

 

[Lacrymas]

While I appreciate a hack and slasher having support builds, is the game even built around party play?

 

[Jaedar]

So I see this game is releasing soon. For those who have played EA, is it ready for primetime? Or is it one of those "better wait 6 months" situations?

I saw the technical trailer, and the lich (sub?)class made me interested. As well as the official SSF playstyle support.

 

[mediocrepoet]

So I see this game is releasing soon. For those who have played EA, is it ready for primetime? Or is it one of those "better wait 6 months" situations?

I saw the technical trailer, and the lich (sub?)class made me interested. As well as the official SSF playstyle support.

It was decently playable even a year or so ago. They've mainly been adding/revamping campaign maps and class content like skills and subclasses. It should be fine if you're inclined to pick it up, just don't go in expecting a great storyline. It's basically edgy Chrono Trigger.

They had been improving the campaign steps though to tighten the narrative up. Before there were gaps that were a bit weird.

 

[Lacrymas]

It really depends on what one means by "playable". It's technically complete-able and has some kind of endgame content. However, it's extremely easy, the easiest hack and slasher I've ever played, the masteries are all over the place and the crafting is, for me, bizarre and finicky. It's definitely not as good as people make it out to be.

 

[Peachcurl]

The crafting system is miles ahead of, say, PoE's or D4's.

 

[Hobo Elf]

So I see this game is releasing soon. For those who have played EA, is it ready for primetime? Or is it one of those "better wait 6 months" situations?

I saw the technical trailer, and the lich (sub?)class made me interested. As well as the official SSF playstyle support.

It's not releasing with all the promised release content. The coming year will be spent making the game properly feature complete before they start adding the seasons.

 

[Lacrymas]

The crafting system is miles ahead of, say, PoE's or D4's.

Sure, I get that, but I don't think that's a good thing in this particular case. It's miles ahead of those because it's more granular and perhaps more intertwined with the overall systems, but it turns all drops into vessels for stats you can mix and match to your liking. Yeah, there are items you can't tinker with, but those come really late and you have to play for quite a while to see even 1 of those. I honestly don't know what problem this crafting system is trying to address.

 

[Jaedar]

It was decently playable even a year or so ago. They've mainly been adding/revamping campaign maps and class content like skills and subclasses. It should be fine if you're inclined to pick it up, just don't go in expecting a great storyline. It's basically edgy Chrono Trigger.

They had been improving the campaign steps though to tighten the narrative up. Before there were gaps that were a bit weird.

It's not releasing with all the promised release content. The coming year will be spent making the game properly feature complete before they start adding the seasons.

It really depends on what one means by "playable". It's technically complete-able and has some kind of endgame content. However, it's extremely easy, the easiest hack and slasher I've ever played, the masteries are all over the place and the crafting is, for me, bizarre and finicky. It's definitely not as good as people make it out to be.

Sounds like a "wait 6-12 months" scenario then. I don't mind not having seasonal content, but I'd rather wait for the feature complete version.

 

[Lacrymas]

They need to add difficulty options for the campaign at least. They had one at one point but removed it for some reason. I can get over the crafting and the masteries will most likely be fixed, but I can't get over the fact you can sleepwalk your way through the entire game on hardcore. I'm not exaggerating when I say the only way to die is to be afk.

 

[covr]

A year ago I was not able to finish campaign due to a very difficult boss, probably near the very end. I was playing necromancer build and gave up after 10 attempts.
So a year ago not every build was really balanced and viable. I thought that my build was rather strong, but that boss was killing my minions in no time and avoiding his attacks required some dexterity I do not posses.
Playing my necro build in D2 on highest difficulty was piss easy compared to LE.

 

[Hobo Elf]

A year ago I was not able to finish campaign due to a very difficult boss, probably near the very end. I was playing necromancer build and gave up after 10 attempts.
So a year ago not every build was really balanced and viable. I thought that my build was rather strong, but that boss was killing my minions in no time and avoiding his attacks required some dexterity I do not posses.
Playing my necro build in D2 on highest difficulty was piss easy compared to LE.

Was it Lagon? He seems to be the common filter for many players. Bosses in LE scale in a finicky way. The nitty gritty details aren't fresh in my mind, but the basic gist of it is that there are caps to how much damage you can push on them within X amount of time. This means that even if you dedicate all your stats to damage you won't be able to forcefully burst them down ASAP. The devs wanted players to go through each boss phase instead of skipping them with lots of damage. Because of this it's more beneficial to have a balanced approach with good defenses as well as damage. As a minion master you can't just rely on standing behind your horde since you have to avoid the AoE attacks.

 

[Lacrymas]

There's 0 reason to stack damage in the campaign.

 

[Seethe]

A year ago I was not able to finish campaign due to a very difficult boss, probably near the very end. I was playing necromancer build and gave up after 10 attempts.
So a year ago not every build was really balanced and viable. I thought that my build was rather strong, but that boss was killing my minions in no time and avoiding his attacks required some dexterity I do not posses.
Playing my necro build in D2 on highest difficulty was piss easy compared to LE.

Was it Lagon? He seems to be the common filter for many players. Bosses in LE scale in a finicky way. The nitty gritty details aren't fresh in my mind, but the basic gist of it is that there are caps to how much damage you can push on them within X amount of time. This means that even if you dedicate all your stats to damage you won't be able to forcefully burst them down ASAP. The devs wanted players to go through each boss phase instead of skipping them with lots of damage. Because of this it's more beneficial to have a balanced approach with good defenses as well as damage. As a minion master you can't just rely on standing behind your horde since you have to avoid the AoE attacks.

I saw a dev saying on reddit a few weeks or months ago that on release the bosses damage reduction will no longer scale like that. Some bosses work like that in Binding of Isaac such as Hush, and I always found it dumb.

 

[covr]

A year ago I was not able to finish campaign due to a very difficult boss, probably near the very end. I was playing necromancer build and gave up after 10 attempts.
So a year ago not every build was really balanced and viable. I thought that my build was rather strong, but that boss was killing my minions in no time and avoiding his attacks required some dexterity I do not posses.
Playing my necro build in D2 on highest difficulty was piss easy compared to LE.

Was it Lagon? He seems to be the common filter for many players. Bosses in LE scale in a finicky way. The nitty gritty details aren't fresh in my mind, but the basic gist of it is that there are caps to how much damage you can push on them within X amount of time. This means that even if you dedicate all your stats to damage you won't be able to forcefully burst them down ASAP. The devs wanted players to go through each boss phase instead of skipping them with lots of damage. Because of this it's more beneficial to have a balanced approach with good defenses as well as damage. As a minion master you can't just rely on standing behind your horde since you have to avoid the AoE attacks.

Yes, it was fucking Lagon! I just could not avoid all of his attacks and summon my minions on the same time.

I thought that LE does not have level scaling of enemies. What a shame, I hate that. Was actually looking forward into playing this in a month or two, after they fix 1.0 bugs, but now I don't think I am going to do this. Maybe there is some mod that removes lvl scalling?

 

[Lacrymas]

That's not level scaling, the damage you can inflict on them in any phase is hardcapped.

 

[cyborgboy95]

Factions, Falconer, and Warlock | Coming to Last Epoch February 21st
Happy Saturday, Travelers!

For today’s pre-patch blog post, we’re taking a look at information regarding the three headlining features coming on February 21st: Trade Factions, the Warlock, and Falconer!

There have been a lot of new Travelers recently joining us in the final stretch to release, so for today’s post, we’re going to be covering all of the information regarding these three big features.

Item Factions

On January 11th, we released our deep dive into the Item Faction system. Item Factions is our answer to the eternal trade debate. Offering an option to players who want trade as part of their itemization experience, and those who don’t, without splitting the player base, and without being left behind the other.

To read the full deep dive, you can do so here: Trade & Item Factions[forum.lastepoch.com]. Our Game Director, Judd, also made a video overview of the Item Faction system, which you can watch it below.

With Item Factions, you can either join the Merchant’s Guild, which grants access to the Bazaar to trade items with other players, or join the Circle of Fortune, which grants significant item drop bonuses.

We do want to mention one fairly large change to Merchant’s Guild we’ve made since the deep dive. From both the CT Program, and public discussions, there were concerns about item supply within the Bazaar. This concern stemmed from the ability to sell certain items being locked behind Reputation levels. This meant players would not be able to sell many items for some length of time, reducing selling participation.

To ensure a strong item supply within the Bazaar, there is no longer a Reputation level requirement to sell any class of item. Also to promote healthy item supply within the Bazaar, Favor costs for selling items are much lower than buying favor costs, so Merchant’s Guild members can be a bit more free with selling items.

Warlock

The Warlock makes its long awaited arrival on February 21st. With both existing Curse abilities and five new curses, the Warlock is a master of forbidden arts, twisting enemy minds and bodies.

With the Warlock, we wanted the class to focus around manipulation of souls and curses. This theming can be found across the mastery’s abilities: from the Mastery Skill - Chthonic Fissure cracking open the ground to spew out souls, to Profane Veil, converting yourself into soul-like ephemeral fog.

The Warlock is not concerned with distance or close range; they have many options at their disposal to choose the amount of risk they desire in their combat style. The Warlock focuses on debilitating their foes to enhance their own damage and combining curses, debilitations, and damage synergies to eradicate their enemies.

Abilities such as Chaos Bolts and Cthonic Fissure enable the Warlock to fight from range. Profane Form may be used as an escape skill or an aggressive skill by granting it synergies for passing through enemies, either applying or reacting to applied debuffs. Soul Feast functions well at mid-range.

Abilities such as Ghostflame and Profane Form enable the Warlock to enter close combat range, to apply debuffs and high-risk, high-reward levels of damage.

The Warlock is focused foremost on debilitating curses and debuffs, and while direct damage does exist in the class, it’s slightly more niche compared to their foil, the Sorcerer.

For the Warlock reveal, we partnered with the amazing people over at http://icy-veins.com/ , who released a number of articles detailing the various Warlock abilities and passives. We’ve compiled all of these information releases below:

Passive Tree Reveal: Last Epoch - Warlock Reveal: Passive Tree - News - Icy Veins[www.icy-veins.com]
Ghostflame: Last Epoch Warlock Mastery - Skill Reveal: Ghostflame - News - Icy Veins[www.icy-veins.com]
Soul Feast: Last Epoch Warlock Mastery - Skill Reveal: Soul Feast - News - Icy Veins[www.icy-veins.com]
Profane Veil: Last Epoch Warlock Mastery - Skill Reveal: Profane Veil - News - Icy Veins[www.icy-veins.com]
Chaos Bolts: Last Epoch Warlock Mastery - Skill Reveal: Chaos Bolts - News - Icy Veins[www.icy-veins.com]
Chthonic Fissure: Last Epoch Warlock Mastery - Skill Reveal: Chthonic Fissure - News - Icy Veins[www.icy-veins.com]

Falconer

In the case of the Falconer, we wanted the mastery to offer an atypical minion playstyle. One where the Falcon is much more than a minion or companion but an extension of your own play.

The Falconer is designed to synergize with several playstyles: melee, bow, or throwing, creating a tie between the existing Bladedancer and Marksman masteries. As Throwing is a common focus for Rogues, we also offered extra synergy towards Throwing skills in passives and synergies, and even introduced the first Trap Skill to Last Epoch: Explosive Trap.

With Falconry & Falcon Strikes, the Mastery ability you gain upon becoming a Falconer, we created the very core of the mastery, the atypical minion: The Falcon. The Falcon is un-targetable, meaning it cannot take damage, scales strongly with many of your stats, and offers options to join in with your build style, be it ranged or melee. This means that, unlike many minion-type setups, the Falconer can build strongly for their own stats, with the Falcon growing in strength alongside you.

The Falconry & Falcon Strikes skill offers within its tree methods to build the Falcon, many of which will apply across all actions the Falcon takes. With Explosive Trap and Net, the Falconer can ensure an unfair fight by leading enemies to their end. Or perhaps, use Arial Assault to fly into the fray with the Falcon to cut down enemies alongside your avian ally. Alternatively, you can order the Falcon forth to Dive Bomb the enemy, plummeting into a group of enemies like a feathery meteorite.

The Falconer focuses on its unwavering bond with the Falcon. By sharing stats with the Falcons, the Falcon and Falconer granting buffs to each other, and coordinating their attacks together - the Falcon is far more than a minion.

For the Falconer Reveal, we worked closely with all the fantastic members over at http://maxroll.gg/, who created created a technical deep dive into the mastery with all the passives and skill trees, as well as skill overviews.

Check out the Falconer Reveal here: Falconer Reveal - https://maxroll.gg/last-epoch/news/falconer-reveal

You can also find the Falconer available in their build planner here: https://maxroll.gg/last-epoch/news/falconer-reveal

Closing

Thank you again to both http://maxroll.gg/ and http://icy-veins.com/ for working with us on these new Mastery Reveals! We’ve already started seeing a ton of great theorycrafting in the community for these masteries, and can’t wait for everyone to get their hands on them.

Join us for tomorrow’s pre-patch blog post when we’ll be going over New Items and Affixes you’ll be able to find on February 21st, including both new Implicits and Uniques!

 

[Damned Registrations]

A year ago I was not able to finish campaign due to a very difficult boss, probably near the very end. I was playing necromancer build and gave up after 10 attempts.
So a year ago not every build was really balanced and viable. I thought that my build was rather strong, but that boss was killing my minions in no time and avoiding his attacks required some dexterity I do not posses.
Playing my necro build in D2 on highest difficulty was piss easy compared to LE.

Was it Lagon? He seems to be the common filter for many players. Bosses in LE scale in a finicky way. The nitty gritty details aren't fresh in my mind, but the basic gist of it is that there are caps to how much damage you can push on them within X amount of time. This means that even if you dedicate all your stats to damage you won't be able to forcefully burst them down ASAP. The devs wanted players to go through each boss phase instead of skipping them with lots of damage. Because of this it's more beneficial to have a balanced approach with good defenses as well as damage. As a minion master you can't just rely on standing behind your horde since you have to avoid the AoE attacks.

I saw a dev saying on reddit a few weeks or months ago that on release the bosses damage reduction will no longer scale like that. Some bosses work like that in Binding of Isaac such as Hush, and I always found it dumb.

I think it's a good solution, especially when you're dealing with mechanics that can scale exponentially. Without that scaling there the boss is either going to be an invincible fucking wall or a wet fart with no room in between. Encouraging players to have a more rounded build is a good thing.

 

[Peachcurl]

They need to add difficulty options for the campaign at least. They had one at one point but removed it for some reason. I can get over the crafting and the masteries will most likely be fixed, but I can't get over the fact you can sleepwalk your way through the entire game on hardcore. I'm not exaggerating when I say the only way to die is to be afk.

Either that, or make the campaign skippable after the first playthrough, like several games in the genre do.

 

[Hobo Elf]

A year ago I was not able to finish campaign due to a very difficult boss, probably near the very end. I was playing necromancer build and gave up after 10 attempts.
So a year ago not every build was really balanced and viable. I thought that my build was rather strong, but that boss was killing my minions in no time and avoiding his attacks required some dexterity I do not posses.
Playing my necro build in D2 on highest difficulty was piss easy compared to LE.

Was it Lagon? He seems to be the common filter for many players. Bosses in LE scale in a finicky way. The nitty gritty details aren't fresh in my mind, but the basic gist of it is that there are caps to how much damage you can push on them within X amount of time. This means that even if you dedicate all your stats to damage you won't be able to forcefully burst them down ASAP. The devs wanted players to go through each boss phase instead of skipping them with lots of damage. Because of this it's more beneficial to have a balanced approach with good defenses as well as damage. As a minion master you can't just rely on standing behind your horde since you have to avoid the AoE attacks.

I saw a dev saying on reddit a few weeks or months ago that on release the bosses damage reduction will no longer scale like that. Some bosses work like that in Binding of Isaac such as Hush, and I always found it dumb.

I think it's a good solution, especially when you're dealing with mechanics that can scale exponentially. Without that scaling there the boss is either going to be an invincible fucking wall or a wet fart with no room in between. Encouraging players to have a more rounded build is a good thing.

It's not a good implementation because it's just not fun. The bosses end up being slogs, especially when you face them off in the end game grind system. Promoting a balacned build is a good intention, but not worth it if it comes at the expense of fun. Avoiding big glowing AoE markers is one of the worst aspects of modern ARPGs and MMOs. It's such a lame way to design a boss encounter. And then they want us to go through the entire fight ad nauseam.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's not anti-fun, it's anti-grind-efficiency.

 

[GrainWetski]

The crafting system is miles ahead of, say, PoE's or D4's.

D4 isn't worth mentioning in any context.

 

[Peachcurl]

The crafting system is miles ahead of, say, PoE's or D4's.

D4 isn't worth mentioning in any context.

Fair enough, but it's unfortunately the most prominent recent game in the genre. Moreover, you'll be hard pressed to find good crafting anywhere, so you might just as well consider D4.

I guess Grim Dawn has a reasonable system, though it is fairly simple.