Last Epoch - time travel action-RPG

[Sykar]

Does have retarded spells scaling with weapons mechanics?

https://www.neoseeker.com/last-epoch/guides/Combat_Mechanics#Base_Damage

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/899770/view/3222898523444486906

Music Showcase: The End of Time
Hey Traveler!
Today we are sharing some design thoughts surrounding the creation of our new track in “The End of Time” in Last Epoch. If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s beautiful - have a listen!


Singing wordless vocals throughout help create the mysterious feeling for the End of Time soundtrack. The track also contains a lot of ethereal synths and mandolins that are drenched in echo effects to help create the feeling that you are in a mysterious, faraway place that also has a feeling of hope.

Halfway through the track, a version of the LE theme comes in that hints at the melody and plays around with the timing to give the track familiarity, but with an abstract approach.

This is the first track in the game to utilize a generative music system that evolves over time. This system was designed to combine different sonic elements composed ahead of time at random. For example, in the game the music engine could play vocal part 3 over background 2 the first time you hear it, then the next time, it could play back vocal part 1 over background 3.

This system allows the player to hear the track for extended periods of time without it sounding repetitive, because the system is constantly combining different elements to create a unique variation each time the player hears it.

Keep your eye on our social channels throughout the week, or join us on our discord at discord.gg/lastepoch as we’re going to be posting our next Development Update soon. This Development Update will be including some important news, and will be available to read in just two days on Wednesday, June 22nd!

 

[d1r]

Has someone here reached "endgame" content and call tell us how it compares to Diablo 2 or Path of Exile?

 

[1451]

Endgame content in a early access game?

 

[d1r]

Endgame content in a early access game?

Well, it's possible. Path of Exile also introduced maps and randomly generated dungeons (Maelström of Chaos) in Early Access (Beta).

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Also a general tell of the pacing. Is this going to be yet another zoom-zoom-boom-boom fuckfest or can you play it like a normal person that wants to admire a sword cleaving someone's head off?

 

[Hyperion]

Also a general tell of the pacing. Is this going to be yet another zoom-zoom-boom-boom fuckfest or can you play it like a normal person that wants to admire a sword cleaving someone's head off?

It's made by PoE fans, it's a clearspeed autism simulator.

Has someone here reached "endgame" content and call tell us how it compares to Diablo 2 or Path of Exile?

I haven't played in awhile, but the 'monolith' system at the time was just you choosing 1 of 2 map modifiers that would stack until you reached the end. It's just mapping without the currency sink, and player agency.

 

[Renevent]

Yes, there's end game. It's called the monolith of fate and basically there's different islands with a monolith. For each island you have to do random maps with increasingly difficult modifiers, which unlocks various "stages" of progress for that island. At the end you fight a boss, and then can unlock a new island with it's own monolith. You also can get keys as drops (or maybe it was rewards, forget) which unlock single try dungeons with difficult bosses that drop unique loot and allow for upgrading legendary gear with legendary potential. I haven't done this so can't tell you much more, but I think it's taking one legendary item and imparting one of it's attributes to another piece of gear (or something like that).

It's okay, obviously still a WIP but I do like where they are heading.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I just want "a game", not "endgame"

 

[Lim-Dûl]

I just want "a game", not "endgame"

Wow, such profundity.

 

[ADL]

It's made by PoE fans, it's a clearspeed autism simulator.

Maybe it's just because I'm running Druid but I find the clear speeds to be far slower and the gameplay to be much more involved so you're not just teleporting with a character built entirely around a single skill where the game plays like a slightly more involved idle clicker. I'm using all my skills and synergizing them in interesting ways.

Wouldn't say they're fans either, their objective seems to be "fuck Path of Exile we can do it better" and so far they've succeeded by trimming a lot of the fat. If Last Epoch can expand on the monolith system, give us more dungeons and deliver meaningful league mechanics that don't age like milk while avoiding PoE's signature $100 micro transactions and loot boxes then they're in the clear as the GOAT as far as I'm concerned.

Gonna predict that Path of Exile 2 will suffer quite a bit for the first couple years because of abandoned or redundant league mechanics and feature bloat.

or can you play it like a normal person that wants to admire a sword cleaving someone's head off?

yes, saw some builds where you teleport around but it looks about 75% slower than PoE. Still fast but slow enough to appreciate moment to moment gameplay.

 

[abija]

Has someone here reached "endgame" content and call tell us how it compares to Diablo 2 or Path of Exile?

Some patches ago when I played the monolith of fate was shit because best way to do the "maps" was run to objectives and then kill around there a bit. It was absolute zooming but no idea if that's their intention with the final product.

Maybe it's just because I'm running Druid but I find the clear speeds to be far slower and the gameplay to be much more involved so you're not just teleporting with a character built entirely around a single skill where the game plays like a slightly more involved idle clicker. I'm using all my skills and synergizing them in interesting ways.

Game is easy so your "spread way too thin" shitty build works good enough. Strong builds synergize into few skills.

 

[Hobo Elf]

It's made by PoE fans, it's a clearspeed autism simulator.

Maybe it's just because I'm running Druid but I find the clear speeds to be far slower and the gameplay to be much more involved so you're not just teleporting with a character built entirely around a single skill where the game plays like a slightly more involved idle clicker. I'm using all my skills and synergizing them in interesting ways.

You just don't have an efficient build. The same can be said of PoE as well if you aren't min/maxed. Last time I played a Bear Druid in LE I used two skills only, one was charge for speed and the other was a roar for utility. The rest of my skills were cast as passive bonuses. I was basically just running through shit fast and ruining enemies left and right with massive damage while passively dropping down vines for AoE damage and heals.

 

[Fedora Master]

It's made by PoE fans, it's a clearspeed autism simulator.

Maybe it's just because I'm running Druid but I find the clear speeds to be far slower and the gameplay to be much more involved so you're not just teleporting with a character built entirely around a single skill where the game plays like a slightly more involved idle clicker. I'm using all my skills and synergizing them in interesting ways.

You just don't have an efficient build. The same can be said of PoE as well if you aren't min/maxed. Last time I played a Bear Druid in LE I used two skills only, one was charge for speed and the other was a roar for utility. The rest of my skills were cast as passive bonuses. I was basically just running through shit fast and ruining enemies left and right with massive damage while passively dropping down vines for AoE damage and heals.

Riveting, engaging gameplay.

 

[abija]

My first build, first time I played it since about a year ago: https://youtu.be/jVGxFjkAFts
Second char I did, some patches later: https://youtu.be/jVGxFjkAFts

Videos recorded just now, was curious how they still play. Both were blind playthroughs, just experimented with respecs and whatever meaningful drops I had. I haven't bother reading anything outside the game. Builds are certainly nothing special, first one seems to have been nerfed a lot or the lvl 100 maps buffed (cloud used to delete everything 2nd tick).

Deep and meaningful gameplay featured, beware.

I had fun toying with the builds but game needs to be finished and then have a lot of passes before the char building fun reflects in gameplay. And in a year progress seems minimal.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/899770/view/3344507206081908475

September 2022 Development Update
Hello Travelers, and welcome to the September Development Update!

We have big news for you today: The CT Multiplayer Build for Last Epoch is going online 24/7 starting in early September. This means our Community Testers will be in full multiplayer test mode (by the way you can apply here[forum.lastepoch.com]) all day, every day as we polish, improve, and prepare for our upcoming Multiplayer Launch. We’ll be diving into the details regarding Multiplayer development in its dedicated section below.

In today’s Development Update you’ll also find details on our continued improvements to performance, optimization, combat feel, and upcoming mechanical balance changes, all coming in our next update.

Multiplayer Progress Update

Progress Since Last Update

Features and Gameplay

Since our last update, we now have all abilities working! Channeled abilities were the last bit we needed to do. We’re now focusing on ensuring all abilities are smooth and responsive in multiplayer. Essentially this comes down to minor bugs with things like positioning and network interpolation. We’ve also progressed the Monolith to ~95% complete with empowered timelines being wrapped up and again moving to working on ensuring smooth experience with small bug fixes and polish.

We’ve continued to make great progress on our new Chat implementation. We’ve completed matching parity of features with our current chat system, and are now working on expanding the functionality. This change of our chat system gives us a lot more flexibility and potential for features than our old chat system. This includes channel support, and game guide linking which we’re really excited for.

We are already making progress on the remaining endgame systems (Arena and Dungeons), and will be digging into a polish pass for our questing system soon. We will have more to share on these features in our next Development Update.

Online Experience, Stability, and Services

We’ve made a lot of headway on improving the overall experience of playing multiplayer. This means improving the connect and disconnect flow, error messaging, and ensuring scene transitions are as smooth as possible. There's still more to do here, and we'll always be working to ensure this experience is as easy and clean as possible. Having an intuitive and consistent user experience when playing multiplayer is just as important as making sure all the multiplayer stuff behind the scenes is functioning smoothly, so we’re ensuring this is as crisp and smooth an experience as possible.

We’re pretty much complete with our migration from our previous backend platform (such as for account services), and we now have all the core components in place. This was a fairly large task which has allowed for many improvements with multiplayer and the new cohesive single player and multiplayer combined client. We’ll announce more details for what this means for players alongside our 0.9.0 posts as we close in on the update date.

Another area of focus for us at the moment is carefully evaluating and improving how we save and keep character data. This is one of our largest remaining projects for multiplayer because we understand just how important it is to have accurate information for players and their inventories. We had hit a couple challenges during our work on this feature, but our talented team is through them now and we have a clear path forward.

All of this work has lead us to our most exciting development update…

Multiplayer Alpha: Online 24/7

Starting September, we will be taking our multiplayer build online 24/7 for our CT Program. From this point on, testers will be able to play multiplayer whenever they would like instead of playing within specific testing windows. With this, we will be providing regular updates to the alpha from now, until the launch of 0.9.0.

We anticipate having minimal downtime during these updates, and will be both experimenting with, and refining our release processes during this time to establish the best processes possible for once we’re fully online for the entire community. We’re really excited about this stage as this is a big observable step closer to our goal of open multiplayer and we get to experience and refine maintaining the live service.

Invitation waves and future expansions

We’re feeling very good about how multiplayer is progressing, and with great confidence in our CT program we are now in the process of expanding the program to ~1000 users. It feels like just yesterday the very first people outside of EHG were getting their hands on multiplayer, and now we’re at the thousand mark already. This is amazing, and we’re extremely happy that so many players are interested in participating in testing. With this, a big thank you to all past, present, and future, CT program members for helping us make this as great a feature as possible.

We will be continuing to expand the program even more leading up to 0.9.0, and there is likely to be multiple waves of intakes to reach that point. So make sure if you’re interested in applying and getting involved with alpha testing to submit an application! You can read all about the program and how to apply in this post here[forum.lastepoch.com].

Upcoming Performance Blogs

If you’ve been following our previous development updates you know we’ve been making some massive headway on our performance and optimization goals. That momentum hasn’t slowed down since we last shared our progress. We’ve been boosting frame rates, reducing draw calls, optimizing shaders, culling triangles, removing memory leaks, and minimizing disk space impact. The result of all of this means your time in Eterra is feeling smoother, more beautiful, and more immersive than ever before - all with a lower impact on your hardware. We are so excited to bring these updates into the game along side out upcoming multiplayer patch.

Last time around, we mentioned some updates to one of our favorite non-performants, the Ancient Dragon. We finished up some more work on this enemy, and wanted to show off the latest updated version with a more direct FPS comparisons in game as a result of these improvements.

Of course, the Ancient Dragon is not the only thing we've been focusing on. We will be sharing a deeper dive into the details about optimization in an upcoming blog post, where we can dig into the ins and outs of each initiative listed above. Keep your eyes out for those upcoming blogs - until then, check out this sneak peak at some big framerate gains!

Melee, Bow, and Throwing Damage

A number of updates ago we introduced a change to flat Spell Damage, removing specific damage types from it in many cases, and introducing “Adaptive Spell Damage”. This meant that the damage would apply to whatever ability you used and was treated as matching the damage types for the skill. For example if you have a staff with “+40 Adaptive Spell Damage” and used a fire skill, it would be treated as added fire damage. The same staff used with a cold skill would treat it as added cold damage. This system has been fairly well received and enabled spell builds to scale flat damage without needing to seek out a type that matched the element of the spell or make do with mixed damage types that would be harder to scale.

Currently many melee, bow, and throwing attack builds find themselves limited to dealing mostly Physical Damage. This is true even with using a melee void attack, or fire bow attack, as that’s what weapons come with. This resulted in the best way to scale your damage often being counter intuitively and counter thematically increasing physical damage rather than increasing a damage type that matched the tags of the attack. As such, we’ve decided to extend this system to attack based damage - Melee, bows, and Throwing. This means the majority of weapons will now provide “Melee Damage” rather than “Melee Physical Damage” as an implicit property, and many passives will see a similar change. Our plan for this is to again open opportunities for more diverse melee builds and make building a melee character more intuitive and enjoyable. As a note, there will still be a few item types which have specific damage types (such as ‘scythes’ with implicit necrotic damage).

We’re also revisiting skills which have multiple damage options, and adjusting them to better utilize these changes (such as Warpath which can add the fire tag, but currently does not convert base damage). With these change many builds will have many more options made available to them rather than often needing to go physical due to available equipment.

Alongside this, we’ve also revisited flat throwing damage. Throwing skills often don’t benefit from flat implicit damage on weapons, and as such start with much higher base damage on the skill. Currently there are not a lot of sources of flat throwing damage, meaning while throwing skills often start out strong, there’s some difficulty getting throwing to scale into the late game without using ailments or triggered effects. To address this, we’ve changed the “Catapult’s” affix on items to provide flat throwing damage (which like the new melee is considered ‘adaptive’), as well as changing the “Ballista’s” affix to provide flat throwing damage rather than flat throwing physical damage. This should help allow builds like Hammer Throw to focus more on the hammer, and less on what the hammer can cause as a delivery system.

Ailment Changes

Another game mechanic we’re looking at for this patch is Ailments. We’re seeking to make ailment related stats easier to understand, more intuitive as to how they work, as well as making them easier to balance, particularly in multiplayer. The goals here aren’t necessarily for immediate balance improvements, but for performance and user experience as we’re moving into multiplayer and 1.0.

While we want to maintain a level of depth and complexity in Last Epoch’s item system, we also put a large priority on getting players invested in that system enough to care about the details, and a key part of that process is making sure that stats’ effects and interactions are clear. There were two areas we felt were easily misunderstood when it came to scaling the damage of ailments. One is that they are affected by penetration, and the other is that increased effect acts as a multiplier to their damage, but multiple sources of increased effect are additive. To alleviate both concerns, for damaging ailments we are replacing stats like "10% increased Ignite Effect" with "+10% Fire Penetration with Ignite”. With this, not all changes are 1:1, many values have been re-balanced to accommodate for this change. Most non damaging ailments, such as armor shred, will retain their increased effect stats.

Another commonly discussed topic we’ve had a look at is how some ailments, in particular resistance shredding ailments, tend to greatly favor faster hitting builds. This isn’t great for performance, networking, or build diversity. As such, we’ve reduced the stack limit on resistance shredding ailments. Resistance shredding ailments, including shock, will stack to 10 (from 20). Meanwhile, Poison will continue to stack ‘infinitely’, but only the first 30 stacks on a target will shred resistance. Poison will also deal more damage to compensate for this. In the case of shock where it also offers stun chance, we’ve doubled the stun chance portion to retain the same value as the previous stack limit.

*(as shown in the above screenshot, the 15 stack limit for ailments on the enemy health bar UI has been removed)*

Alongside this, we’ve also re-assessed how damage over time is factored into tooltip DPS. While ailment duration would theoretically just be multiplicative for DPS, this is not felt in practice as many targets will die before the most of the ailments they were inflicted with have expired. As such tooltip DPS previously curtailed the effect of Increased Ailment Duration. However it did not apply the same principle of diminishing returns to the base ailment duration, resulting in ailments being perceived as having an exaggerated effect on tooltip DPS compared to their actual usefulness for damage. This approach has been changed so that diminishing returns apply to an ailment's total DPS (as long as it lasts at least 1 second) rather than distinguishing between base duration and extra duration from increased duration stats, and this results in the tooltip DPS being lower overall (this is a good thing - it’s more accurate to expected results).

We’re currently still testing and iterating on these changes, so we won’t go too much into numbers or the changes to all the individual ailments, such as frostbite, but wanted to cover the design philosophies on some of the changes. Also note these redesigns are still subject to change.

Updated Models / VFX

Our talented Art, VFX, and SFX teams continue to raise the bar when it comes to improving Eterra’s visual and combat experiences. This has been one of our longest patch cycles to date, and as such we have built up an impressive queue of upgrades ready to go live when patch 0.9 hits Last Epoch. Incase you missed some our previous updates in this area, including from our Friday streams we highly recommend checking them out. One of our fantastic community members AndrewTilley has actually compiled a list of teasers for the current cycle here[forum.lastepoch.com]. Let’s take a peek at some highlights from the most recent round of upgrades below!

Totems

All totems have had VFX and SFX reworks. Previously all totems used the same base model, typically with an extra model or two kind of ‘glued’ onto it. We really wanted to revisit these to give them all their own distinct identities and make them truly awesome with completely custom and individually created designs.

Spells

Many other older skills are getting both VFX and SFX updates and we want to show a couple examples of those here with both Fireball, and Wandering Spirits.

Enemies

The denizens of Eterra continue to see improvements to make the world more distinct and memorable. Some may be replaced, others however have very strong themes we enjoy and so are instead sticking around with reworks. Today, we’d like to show off another one of the latter, with the Voidfused Armor. In this clip, we’ve included a comparison with the old and new Voidfused Armor enemies, with the new model exhibiting a much more imposing frame, matching its aggression and threat to players everywhere.

Sound Design Updates

As mentioned in the the VFX section, we’re also making a lot of updates SFX. This is another area of improvement so large, similar to Performance, where we’re currently planning on having a more dedicated and expanded post to talk about SFX improvements and sound design in general. However, for this post, we not only want to provide some treats for the eyes, but also some for the ears. Here’s a few clips of some of the improved SFX you’ll find in patch 0.9.0.


We’ll take a deeper dive into some of this work with our sound team later on, and hope to see you all in that post!

Closing

Multiplayer is on the horizon now, and moving forward to the launch of 0.9 you are going to hear a lot more communication from us. We don’t quite have a date we’re ready to share yet, but it’s most certainly getting closer. Alongside multiplayer, 0.9.0 is introducing a whole new level of polish to Last Epoch never seen before. Greatly improved performance, tons of new SFX and improvements to combat feel, updated enemies, and tons of other improvements. We’re really excited to get this update into everyone’s hands, raising the bar on what’s expected for Last Epoch, and we have no plans of stopping here.

One final reference for this post - if you’re interested in getting involved in the alpha stage of multiplayer testing, you can find all the relevant information in this post here[forum.lastepoch.com]. We’re looking forward to diving into more details concerning 0.9.0, and will see you all again soon in our optimization blog posts.

Until next time Travelers, may Eterra bless your journeys!

 

[Nikanuur]

Yes, there's end game. It's called the monolith of fate and basically there's different islands with a monolith. For each island you have to do random maps with increasingly difficult modifiers, which unlocks various "stages" of progress for that island. At the end you fight a boss, and then can unlock a new island with it's own monolith. You also can get keys as drops (or maybe it was rewards, forget) which unlock single try dungeons with difficult bosses that drop unique loot and allow for upgrading legendary gear with legendary potential. I haven't done this so can't tell you much more, but I think it's taking one legendary item and imparting one of it's attributes to another piece of gear (or something like that).

It's okay, obviously still a WIP but I do like where they are heading.

I've liked that one. Specifically, how islands and their associated rewards become inaccessible after the player fails the challenges contained within. There is a true element of striving for success right there. A bold move from the creators.

 

[pickmeister]

Tried it out and refunded.

The game looks very well and feels pretty good. First big difference I've noticed is that in PoE and D3 the targeting is slightly sticky - if your mouse is not directly on the target, your spells hit the target anyway. Not in Last Epoch, you need to be accurate with your mouse. A nice change if I may say.

The gameplay is also noticeably slower than D3 and PoE. I've seen some videos of zoom zoom builds but from what I've read, they're not very common or practical.

However, the reason I refunded is that the campaign is way too easy. The mobs feel like thin paper. I'll happily try it again after they adjust the difficulty. To note - I am an extremely casual ARPG player. Never played hardcore or any of that autistic faggotry.
Apparently, there's a masochist mode you can turn on that makes mobs hit you twice as hard and you do 1/4 of damage to them but you have to already play for several hours for it to unlock. Fuck that, why is it not available from the start?

Let it simmer a bit more.

 

[somerandomdude]

It's just a worse Grim Dawn in pretty much every way except for graphics. You can take the worst league in Path of Exile, and that's still better than this game is ever going to be.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's just a worse Grim Dawn in pretty much every way except for graphics. You can take the worst league in Path of Exile, and that's still better than this game is ever going to be.

grim dawn is a single player game, last epoch isn't

no, nobody wants to play online grim dawn full of hackers and duped items, don't even bring it up

 

[somerandomdude]

It's just a worse Grim Dawn in pretty much every way except for graphics. You can take the worst league in Path of Exile, and that's still better than this game is ever going to be.

grim dawn is a single player game, last epoch isn't

no, nobody wants to play online grim dawn full of hackers and duped items, don't even bring it up

Last Epoch is supposed to get an offline version at launch. Although I heard the developers may have went back on that promise.

Also, Grim Dawn has a community league:
https://www.grimleague.com/

With Path of Exile 2 around the corner and Diablo 4, this game is going to be fucking dead. Its only value will be in the single player offline for players who don't want to play online.

 

[pickmeister]

Who in their fucking mind wants to play these games online to compete on ladders full of autists with way too much time on their hands or hackers? The only reason for online play of these games is with friends.

ARPGs are supposed to be a singleplayer casual snoozefest. Any time I joined a random multiplayer game in an ARPG, it was the most boring time I ever had, thinking I'd have much more fun playing alone without this zoom zoom fuckery.

And those players know it too. Anytime people ask "Is <random ARPG> worth playing right now?" the first answer always is "I have X thousands of hours in the game. Don't play it, it sucks and you'll hate yourself.".

If they manage to not fuck up singleplayer, it's a job well done in my book.

As for Path of Exile 2 - it'll bring some casuals who'll leave immediately. It's not gonna bring anything new. Just a new campaign. It's still gonna be a zoom zoom shitty ass game with an excessively large skill tree full of +0.3% modifiers that don't do shit.
Diablo 4 is gonna suck ass just like Diablo 3. The Blizzard capable of making a good game is gone for 10+ years.

Yeah, this genre is dead.

 

[Peachcurl]

With Path of Exile 2 around the corner and Diablo 4, this game is going to be fucking dead. Its only value will be in the single player offline for players who don't want to play online.

There's enough of a market for all three.

 

[Peachcurl]

Also, sadly, PoE2 isn't really "around the corner".

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Yeah, this genre is dead.

that which was never alive can never truly be dead