My favorite game of all time is Path of Exile (PoE). I have sunk countless hours (~6000) into it over multiple years. I am also a fan of ARPGs in general and have played a number of them over the years including all the Diablos, Titan Quest, all the Torchlights, Grim Dawn, and most recently Last Epoch. Last Epoch (LE) had it's 1.0 release in February earlier this year. Since then they have done a couple of what they call cycles (seasons, ladder resets, etc.) and I have sunk around 180 hours into the game over that time. I wanted to discuss what makes LE good and what keeps me from playing it more.
Starting off on a positive note LE does a lot well. To start with it has an excellent crafting system. I won't go into crazy detail but just to outline the basics items can have up to 4 (occasionally 5) affixes two prefixes and two suffixes. You can bring up the forge at any time to modify an item by adding, improving, rerolling, or removing an affix. There are 5 tiers of each affix but there are a 6th and 7th tier that are drop only. So finding a good base with a tier 6 or 7 affix that helps you feels really good. Then shaping that into the perfect item is very rewarding. There is also the concept of legendary potential (LP) on unique items which goes from 1-4 and allows you to smash a rare item into the unique to get 1-4 of those mods onto the unique. This requires running a dungeon to smash these together and also 4 LP items are very very rare so it is frequently a gamble to see what gets carried over to a unique. There are more nuances to this system but suffice to say it give you a lot of agency and reward for using it.
2LP item after combining |
The next thing LE does well is the graphics. Performance is good and everything looks nice. The effects are neat and varied. The levels look good. The feeling of jumping into a bunch of monsters and wrecking them is satisfying.
Chthonic Fissure and level graphics |
LE has five base classes and fifteen master classes which are gated by the base classes. The base classes have a number of common skills that are unlocked via putting points into a passive tree and then the master classes have a master skill and then additional skills to unlock via adding points that particular passive tree. You can also put points into the other two master class trees but you are locked out from the other two master skills and the top two skills of the other two master classes. This system leads to a good variety of classes with unique skills.
Warlock passive tree |
Those skills are the next strong point for LE. You can specialize five skills and each skill has it's own skill tree with can radically change the skill. The can be as simple as just doing more damage or adding more projectiles or as complex as changing the damage type or triggering other skills. For example my Chthonic Fissure has a chance to cast Chaos Bolts which themselves have a chance to cast Rip Blood which is normally physical and restores life but now is necrotic damage and grants ward (thing kind of like energy shield from PoE). So when I use that skill it gives me ward in addition to doing damage.
Chthonic Fissure skill tree |
LE has a trade economy, which I have not tried yet, but it also has a very strong solo self found experience. There is a faction you can join that gives you bonuses to drops and chances to duplicate drops. Plus this concept of prophecies that allow you to target farm certain types of items like helms or wands when you kill certain enemies or bosses. There are strong items that are gated behind the highest end bosses but you can get reasonable gear just completing prophecies and playing the game.
All of this sounds pretty good, and it is but I generally get to the end game which is going through these things called monoliths and get bored and quit around level 80 or so. Monoliths are this interconnected set of areas that you complete and they have certain rewards and after you have completed enough to build up the stability of the monolith you get the opportunity to fight the monolith boss. The bosses are generally well done and they drop certain types of loot and maybe even specific unique items. But the variety of the areas you clear is not great. It's basically go and kill this monster or monsters, kill these spires (immobile monsters), kill enough monsters to lure out an ambush, or go to this fountain and click it and kill everything that spawns. This kind of equates to mapping in PoE but it would be like running random maps every time and the maps aren't interesting. They look fine but it's like run this generic snow area then fire area then desert area and do these same things. I do appreciate some of the in area activities like the loot lizards and the harbingers and exiled mages you can challenge but the areas are not distinct enough and you have little control over which you are running.
Coming from PoE there are literally dozens of ways to farm different types of content to either use yourself or sell. While LE does have some targeted farming strategies I feel like they are very limited. It is down to go for nodes that have rewards you like, run monoliths that give you rewards you like, and complete prophecies that give you items you like. Each of the areas being samey is a drawback. In PoE you run certain maps for multiple reasons including divination card drops, layout, boss, and the way altars work on the map (for example Sepulcher and Jungle Valley don't have boss altars until you enter the boss area). Mesa has the boss in the middle and you can just rush to it if you are doing a boss rushing strat, Strand is long and linear so running it gets you to all the monsters then the boss pretty quickly, and if you want to run legion you run Dunes because it is big and wide open with plenty of room to spawn legions. Now PoE has been out for literally 11 years so comparing the amount of content isn't really fair to a game that has been out 8 months but the lack of identity of "maps" is kind of a fundamental thing. The only strategy here is the equivalent of running a bunch of random maps to get to Eater or Exarch in PoE then killing them and doing it again.
Another thing I am not terribly fond of in LE is the dungeons, there are three of them and they all have some kind of gimmick and are all not terribly interesting. The one let's you combine a rare with a unique that has LP so that is useful but running it isn't interesting it's just the outcome. One let's you gamble for items at the end and the other lets you spend gold to increase rewards in the final treasure room. The bosses also drop certain uniques so you will potentially have to run these. The one with the combining shrine thing you will have to run to min-max.
The last con is the trading system. Mind you I haven't interacted with it myself so this is all second hand but it sounds like the system is janky. You have to walk up to different vendors to look at different markets, the search functionality is limited, and you have to get to a fairly high faction level with the merchants to be able to sell everything. I won't really go into this much more but it doesn't sound good and I am not excited to try it which is why I stick with the SSF route.
So those are my impressions of LE after 180 hours. I would still recommend this game to anyone who wants a good ARPG, you will definitely get your $35 out of it and the developer is committed to adding more content down the line.