Last Epoch Ruined Everything For Me

all right so uh it's been a few weeks since last Epoch released I've been playing pretty consistently over that time basically getting in a few hours each day in between work and playing other stuff really not been in a rush to accomplish anything in particular I haven't felt the need or pressure to like reach max levels fast as possible and clear through all the end game just really haven't been all too bothered just enjoying playing the game really I've been steadily leveling my Falconer while hopping on alts here and there in between when I want to do something other than grinding monoliths and praying for best and Slot drops and while I will say I do feel like things are slowing down a bit in terms of my motivation to keep on grinding I will probably move on from the game soon lots of other stuff I want to play right now but all in all I got to say I have really really enjoyed my time with last Epoch these past few weeks it does a few things very well in my opinion that I think other arpg and just other loot games in general could really learn from and take into consideration for their own games or for future games or whatever really just another great example of the benefits of competition in any genre here are are a few of the things in particular that I think last Epoch does really well that I have really enjoyed so first there's the end game which in last EPO this consists primarily of grinding these things called monoliths of Fate these are broken up into these different sections areas that are themed around these alternate timelines and when you begin a timeline you start at its Center and then you move your way outward progressing from one Echo to the next each Echo is kind of like a mini dungeon these normally take just a few minutes to clear and usually you'll have to complete some sort of basic task like kill a bunch of enemies until you reveal the boss location then go kill the boss or destroy various structures that are spread across the map or go to and defend a particular location from a few waves of enemies but I what I find interesting here is that each one of these Echo actually come with their very own bonus reward category and you see that ahead of time so before you enter an echo you can actually tell what sort of extra loot you're going to get at the end this could be a particular gear slot uh piles of gold bonus experience crafting resources or keys and the monolith timelines aren't just a single straight path but multiple paths with dungeons which are those Echoes branching in several different directions so the end result here is you are moving in whatever Direction you want based on the bonus rewards that you happen to be looking for so if I'm feeling like I'm low on gold I can keep progressing towards Echo that reward extra gold at the end or if I want to level faster I'll pick ones that reward bonus experience whatever it is that you're after you can just work towards those rewards while also at the same time doing the general endgame gear grind of killing things opening chest and looking for gear and there's additional layers to the system as well like the fact that every single Echo will boost enemies with some modifier making them a little more difficult by graning granting offensive or defensive enhancements each Echo you complete also works towards filling this timeline stability bar which you can kind of think of as an area progression as you complete Echoes as you clear those dungeons you'll fill the bar and then this unlocks these timeline Quest Echoes of which there are three at the very end you have the final boss encounter for that timeline and that gives you some nice rewards but that's just the whole Loop you're are progressing out moving through all of these Echoes collecting loot along the way as you unlock the quest Echoes and then eventually do those three quests to fight the final boss of that timeline and then rinse and repeat you do it over again and then there's also the final layers of corruption and empowered monoliths and both of these are simply systems that make the whole thing harder in exchange for you getting better loot uh what I've enjoyed really about how last depac has done its end game as kind of simple as it might be and this is one of the big complaints for the game but I got to say what I like about it is that the whole process gives you some agency along the way at the end of the day you're still playing an arpg your goal is smashing through hordes of enemies as you wait for your ideal loot drops just like any other arpg but during that process with this system of Echo and how it does its bonus rewards you're getting to sort of Select what category at ories you get for these extra bonus loots every couple of minutes every Echo you clear every dungeon you run through and sort of along those same lines is this next system where you get some sort of Target farming thanks to the faction system in particular the circle of Fortune faction uh this lets you choose additional Target bonus loot drops as you play you have these quests called prophecies they'll ask you to complete some objective normally killing a a certain boss or type of enemy and then either in a particular timeline or having to meet certain other conditions like a corruption level but the tldr is you select from an assortment of quest picking the ones that have the loot rewards you want which these will be unique and exalted pieces of gear for any of the gear slots and then once you complete that Quest objective that gear just literally drops straight at your feet you don't have to go cash it in anywhere it just appears once you actually finish whatever the task is on top of that there's also an extra layer of a reputation system for the faction so as you play and engage with the circle of Fortune by spending favor you level up with a faction and each reputation level grants you some really nice Rewards boosting your loot drops like a chance to find rarer loot to get loot with better stats and the ability to get tons of bonus loot like doubling the rewards that you get from any prophecy you complete or there's a reputation level that once you unlock it anytime a single set item would drop it instead drops the entire set so between the circle of Fortune faction and how the monoliths work I really never felt more in control of farming for items in an in a loot game as I have in last Epoch the reputation boost alone in the circle of Fortune I think feel really good like when one set item drops you get the entire set instead are are you kidding me it's awesome it's really really cool now there is another faction in the game I believe it's called the merchants Guild I have heard that technically this is better for getting the loot that you want because it simply gives you access to a player auction house where you can buy and sell Gear with other players just using the in-game gold currency but you know personally I normally don't really love engaging in these big auction houses these trading systems in these games I prefer prer just finding stuff via playing myself and obviously especially if you're playing solo self found or if you're playing the game offline circle of Fortune is going to be the one to go with and I think it's an interesting system so much so that I almost wish that the game just gave you both right that you had the circle of Fortune and the player trading auction house but I understand they're trying to make us make meaningful choices here they become less meaningful when there's a one clearly better choice for your goal which is gearing but again circumstantially and depending on how you play as a player for me personally I don't even care that I'm more likely to get my best in slought gear faster if I went with the merchants Guild and just bought gold from the auction house from other players I just don't really like playing these games that way so I'm happy with the circle of Fortune and I think the way they've done the circle of Fortune is really really cool another thing I like in this game is the crafting system really awesome so every single piece of gear that you find in the game from Blue up to purple Rarity comes with a certain amount of what is called forging potential so you'll have a piece of Loot drop with some random assortment of 1 to four a fixes on it and intrinsic stats as well as a set number of forging potential and then using that forging potential you have a huge variety of options for what you can do uh with your gear to make it better so at the base level the simple thing you can do is enhance the stats on an item so using some of your forging potential and A Shard you can add more value of whatever particular AIX you want so if you get a chest piece that drops that has agility on it using agility shards and a little bit of forging potential you can then just add more agility to that item but then there are all of these support glyphs that give you a whole bunch more possibilities so there's a glyph of Hope which gives you a 25% chance to not spend any forging potential when boosting the stats of an AIX which lets you get even more improvements put on that item or the glyph of chaos which will then replace an AIX of your choice with a random AIX of the same category and this is obviously useful if you get a gear drop that um has an AIX on it that isn't useful for you it's not useful for your build or your class or whatever you can use a glyph of chaos to randomly replace that with a new AIX of the same category and then there's also things like the of Despair which actually has a chance to seal an AIX which moves it into its very own slot leaving the prior slot free the simple version of this is any item can have a Max of four attribute stats on it but if you use this seal function you can take one of them put it off in its own separate category and then that fourth slot then gets freed up so all of a sudden you have a gear piece with five FX slots on it using something like the glyph of Despair and there's other similar systems with other mechanics in the crafting system as well it's fairly complicated but once you get your hands in and and working with it it's really awesome and again plays into that player agency that I I love so much that last depac does well and all of this is fueled by these AIC shards that I mentioned a moment ago so how these work is while playing the game you'll find Shards as loot drops with there being shards for every single type of aex in the game every core attribute stat all of the resistances the offensive and defensive enhancements like bonus damage movement speed crit chance crit damage life Lee there's also a plus to skills everything that could show up as an affx on a Gear will have shards you'll collect as you play also if you find an item that has a fixes you like on it but you don't want to equip that item because it isn't exactly what you want you can actually use this thing called the Rune of shattering to destroy the item which will then pull a random assortment of that item's affixes and turn it into AIX shards put into your collection that you can then later use on another piece of gear and there are additional modifier runes as well that let you roll the value of affixes if you happen to get a bunch of low rolls you can roll an items implicit it stats you can remove a random AIX freeing up a slot to be replaced with something else there's also this thing called the Rune of ascendancy which lets you change a regular item into a unique item that orange Rarity of the same category and then there's also the legendary gear which has you taking those highly valuable orange uniques and then combining them with purple gear adding additional affixes to the already powerful uniques just the whole gearing system I know there's a lot here but it's yet another aspect of last Epoch uh it just plays so much into the player agency where where I feel like I have a lot of control and flexibility over the gearing process and I've really enjoyed that oh also did I mention the game stash tabs it has stash tabs as many as you want really who would have thought that was possible I've seen players with I think I don't know like hundreds of stash tabs on their account you are able to name and color code these you can put them in their very own sections these categories that have sub trees underneath them there's also a search feature that will then highlight any gear that has whatever word you searched for in it or on it and you can just keep adding more and more this is a gold sync it will cost an ever increasing amount of gold but as someone who's just playing kind of semi casually that's how I describe myself at this point I already have like over 20 stash tabs and it's more than I can use I got a bunch of them that are just sitting there empty and boy it doesn't cause the game to explode you don't have to spend real world money how did they do it I don't know somehow last depac figured out how to make stash tabs work it is an absolute Miracle oh and quickly I do want to give a shout out as well to this system before I get into the big one that is a real real what I love about this game uh but I want to mention the skill customization in last Epoch it's phenomenal every single skill in the game has its very own skill tree that you can specialize in these trees each have like 25 to 30 nodes that let you enhance upgrade and in some cases even totally change how the skills function uh you've got five skills that you can have on your hot bar and then you can specialize in five skills but those don't have to be the same either so you could have active hot bar skills but then specialize in a skill that isn't on your hot bar but triggers off of other skills what it comes down to is there's just so much potential here especially when combined with this gear and the a effect system this appears to be a really good game for people who want to try out different funky builds and do a bunch of theory crafting now that isn't me I normally just use build guides and maybe make a few tweaks in here here and there I just don't have the time or really the desire to spend the hours of time theory crafting and testing different builds I'll let other people do that and then if they post them online I'll check them out if they're cool and I have fun great we're all having a good time but even though I don't personally go through the process of making my own builds I do think it's really cool I also think it's super important in these games especially for their long-term health and that this game has it and that is really great but the last feature is probably the thing that I've enjoyed most about last deac and that is its Loop filter now if you're not a hardcore arpg player if you don't have thousands of hours of Path of Exile you might be thinking excuse me a loop filter that's your favorite thing yes it is and let let me explain why this is actually I think super important so over the years uh playing games loot games let's just mention Diablo right so playing season after season of Diablo I and then last year spending hundreds of hours with Diablo 4 I continuously noticed that there's one thing in particular that keeps dragging those experiences down and ultimately one thing that is one of the reasons I eventually stopped playing in both games I would just get so sick and tired of having to manually filter through mounds of garbage gear all the time now these are loot Games part of the experience is going through the bad loot until you get the good loot but in both Diablo 3 Seasons and Diablo before I release when I played it come the end game I it really feels like I'm spending like half of my play time looking at gear in my inventory to check if the stats are applicable to my character if they're applicable to my build if the roles on those stats are better than the roles that I already have it feels like half my play time is spent doing this and I don't love it in Diablo 3 I'd run a couple of Greater Rifts my inventory is full sit in town for a few minutes checking every piece of gear in Diablo 4 run a nightmare dungeon check my inventory go to a hell TI check my inventory hop in for a world boss or stronghold check my inventory I am just doing it but I'm not meaning to just pick on Diablo here because this does apply to the larger genre of these more loot focused games like playing games like the division playing Warframe out Riders Destiny Anthem Borderlands I could go on and on in a lot of these games 99% of the time the loot that I'm looking at is garbage doesn't fit my build doesn't have good enough stat roles it's for the wrong class whatever it is I'm wanting to spend more of my time playing the game enjoying the content blowing things up hacking and slashing but instead in a lot of these games I feel more like an accountant who's sitting there comparing numbers all day and I just don't love it but the loot filter and last Epoch let you see as much or as little as you want pretty much you can filter out for things like Rarities hiding all the common and blue gear you can filter for particular attributes only showing the drops that have the exact stats you need for your build you can filter to show gear that's great for sharding gear that's good for upgrading Gear with perfect rolls Gear with just below perfect rolls if you're not quite there yet you can also set this priority list so maybe you will filter out all blue gear except if a blue piece drops and it has a great AIX that you could break down into a Shard and use to enhance another piece of gear with then it will show that particular blue drop while also still hiding all of the other blue drops you can even adjust the color boldness and font size of the gear of the drops for stats that you really want so for example as you get towards endgame you'll start seeing a ton of uniques the this orange gear and uniques are great but what you're really looking for is uniques with like two or more legendary potential and then once you get those great uniques that you need for your build that have high legendary potential you're then going to want to take the purple gear and smash it together to form a legendary item but just like yellow gear purple gear has a random asortment of stats and doesn't always have what you need but you can set up a filter so that you're only seeing purple gear that really has the best and Slot combination of stats you want the filter in this game as far as I can tell lets you see pretty much exactly and only what you want to see what you're looking for a more or less as free or strict as you want it to be and I think it's amazing so like right now for example I'm playing a falconer that's my main character and I have a filter specifically for this character so I'm only going to see drops that have the exact type of stats I'm looking for the plus skills that I want the crit chance the minion damage the dexterity the defensive stats move speed on boots Etc it is a little loose right now because I'm sort of at I guess what you consider mid to late game I'm happy to also have more than a less than best in slot gear because apparently this class is pretty po popular and strong I picked it cuz I liked the bird turns out it ended up being one of the broken builds oh well just it happens sometimes but yeah rather than having to manually check every single piece of loot that drops 90% of which isn't good for me I can just see the ones that have that combination of attributes I want for smashing into uniques and uh adjust the filter so it automatically shows me exactly that it is just such an amazing quality of life feature and practically eliminates one of the main issues I have with many loot games as I said moments ago that is spending a massive chunk of my time staring at my inventory looking at gear on the ground filtering through garbage instead of playing the game and I know that this is part of the experience it's part of loot games going through the bad gear to get to the good I don't want it to be a major part I don't even want it to be a third of the time that I spent I want to play the game and then get the loot not spend half my time looking at Loot and half my time playing the game that's again just personal preference thing here now the downside to this system and this particular loot filter on lasty is it's pretty complicated to set up with a lot of rules and menus to go through but once you understand how it works it is an incredibly useful tool and frankly you can get away as well with not fully understanding it as there are plenty of online sources and guides with links to loot filters that you can just literally copy and paste into your game just look up your build look up a loot filter from a popular guide there you go you have a good filter for the class and the build that you're playing now I know last Epoch isn't the first game to have something like this from what I understand Path of Exile also has a pretty good loot filter but I'm just speaking and all I can do is speak from my personal experience I have played Path of Exile but it was like 10 years ago it was like it was when the game first came into Early Access I'm pretty sure all they had for endgame at that point was continuously playing through the campaign like they didn't have this whole system of maps and these Ubers and everything that path of XL has for now this totally built up up and fleshed out endgame it didn't have that and maybe it had the loot filter but if it was I was completely oblivious the point is I'm not saying lyac is the first game to come up with something like this cuz I know it isn't but it's my first real genuine experience with something like a loot filter and I feel like it's a game changer really it honestly completely changes my opinion about loot games I think any loot game that showers you in garbage gear I feel like should have some variation of a loot filter or some filtering system it doesn't even necessarily need to be as complex or finely tuned as this or as what's in um path of XL but there should be options in every loot game to filter out stuff you absolutely do not want to see and spend time checking every piece of gear to realize 99% of it isn't exactly what you need in fact it's all just garbage obviously it can't just show you only what you need it's part of this genre and it's all a balancing act just like developers choosing how much gear drops for you is part of that whole Balancing Act how much gear they allow you to have in a loop filter would be part of it as well and I also understand that some of these uh larger games that are trying to appeal to a m audience Mass larger audience are probably going to be a little scared to have a system like the loot filter that's in lasty and I'm presuming the loot filter in Path of Exile is similarly kind of complex and to understand and get started and navigate I get why like blizzard for Diablo I doesn't want to have this like super complex system of all the stuff to go through in their games because they feel like it it's not going to appeal to the wide audience it's going to be too complicated and maybe frustrating to them but I would say uh give your audience some credit don't just assume Everyone's an idiot and have this system in this game if people want to engage with it they can if it is too complicated if it is too frustrating then people can avoid it right and then you can also have various levels to it so you could have a built-in loot filter with a guided system where blizzard themselves would have an automatic filter that you could enable for your particular class and your particular build or if you wanted to get more nuanced you could look up guides and you could tune it further to be more accurate to whatever the current meta is and to what you should be looking for that whatever blizzard implemented didn't exactly pan out you know what I'm saying but again I'm not just here to pick on blizzard I'm not just here to pick on Diablo I think this is applicable to a lot of the loot games that I've played there just always seems to come a time in those games after playing and getting to endgame and really getting to the point where you're showered with loot where I just get so fed up of constantly staring at on my inventory just literally like in a lot of these games it's like a third to 50% of my time is looking at my inventory instead of playing the game and usually it's around that point I'm not saying it's the only reason but usually around that point is when I end up just getting fed up and quit these games because I don't like doing that I liked the point where I was leveling and just equipping everything with a green arrow when I was just leveling and most of my time was playing that's my favorite part and then when I get to the end game and most of my time staring at inventory and looking at gear that's my least favorite part and the loot filter helps to alleviate and address this and I I really like it so yeah I may be winding down with lasty po but I am so glad that I spent the past few weeks playing I think this game does some things very very well and I hope other loote games take inspiration from it giving players a greater sense of agency when the with the endgame grind do things like targeted farming as well as doing the overall farming Loop this in-depth gear crafting system not being restrictive with storage especially in games that have you wanting to hold on to lots and lots of items but especially and finally I think in games that shower you with loot consistently drop a large number of items for you to look through man this highly customizable loot filter has been such a welcome relief got to say last EPO best $35 I've spent on entertainment in a long time uh so well done 11th Hour games excited to see how this game grows and expands in the future but you're off to a great start and I'm looking forward to seeing it in the years ahead that does it for me today though thank you guys as always for watching hope you enjoyed I'll see you next time take it easy

Channel: Force Gaming

Views: 203,706

Keywords: Last epoch gameplay, Last epoch review, Last epoch impressions, Last epoch vs Diablo 4, Is last epoch any good

Id: 0ABRYnvjJd4

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024