I bought the game. Haven't had the chance to play it yet, hopefully I can get some hours in over the weekend.

When I first got the game I definitely remember the performance being a handful. Changing some graphic settings would cripple your FPS until you restarted the program. I also used to play via Proton on Manjaro and the performance was pretty bad, I had to turn settings down a lot. I haven't touched those settings in ages so no idea of those things still remain. I can say that I'm running a 1660 Super with a 12100F on Windows 11 at 1080p, and I limit my fps to 90 and it's solid. It's Ultra with a couple of things turned down. I'd say the campaign zones and monolith don't generally change in performance much, but the arena zones have way more mobs on screen at once and those give me frame drops sometimes. Haven't got there in this update yet but I suspect it'll be the same.

And yeah, monoliths are fun while you are still working on your build, but once you are getting close to maxing it and upgrades are potentially gonna take forever, the monolith content alone isn't enough to keep things interesting.

I enjoyed it when i played in Oct last year, but found it was quite buggy (main quests bugging out completely), and the optimization needed work (30 FPS slowdowns on a 4080 and graphical settings had ZERO impact).

It's loot filter and storage space were a breath of fresh air compared to D4 though!

And whilst i enjoyed the campaign and classes, the monolith grind at max level become a boring grind quite quickly.

Picked this up and played for a few hours yesterday and so far it's a lot of fun. The skill system is really deep and customizable without being overwhelming, the combat is fun, the story seems solid. The servers were down most of the day yesterday but the game has an offline mode so you can make offline characters (that is still connected to online chat) so no worrying about not being able to play the game you paid for.

Seems a solid middle ground between D4 (highly polished but overly simple and shallow) and PoE (poorly polished but as complex as it gets and as deep as an ocean). Can't go wrong for $35 bucks. Especially knowing that their seasons (called cycles) and expansions will be free. That kind of deal makes me more likely to want to reward good development with the occasional cosmetic purchase.

VaranDragon wrote on Feb 22, 2024, 09:44:

MisterBenn wrote on Feb 22, 2024, 09:28:
Basically yes, but it's complex and only just got added in this update so the dust hasn't settled yet. When you hit a certain point in the campaign, you have to choose one of two factions. One of them is the Merchant's Guild which means you have access to trading, and the other is Circle of Fortune which means you can't trade but get stuff to help you play self found, like better drop rates and prophecies which help you force specific items to drop deterministically. It's brand new, I'm playing self found and haven't got far in the game in this update yet, but the trading is gold based rather than the PoE system, and items can only be traded once so there won't be item brokering like PoE. I think the trading community hasn't taken off yet because of the servers, who knows how it will balance out once the community swarms over it, and who knows how devs will tweak or update the system going forward.

Interestingly players from both factions can play together in coop because loot is instanced. It's a pretty bold / surprising solution but the devs have been trying to keep everyone happy. Lots of people wanted to avoid self found drops being shit because you are expected to trade, and lots of people love trading and couldn't live without it.

Edit: Here is some info

Color me interested. Devs that actually listen to the community.

*edit*

Holy shit the explanation for trading and how to go about it is convoluted as hell. Like why can't I simply give an item I find to my fellow party member....*sigh*

There's a whole "loot filter" system that you can use to block or highlight loot that you want which, while cool in theory, is complicated enough that I ended up bouncing off the game fairly hard. Especially since if you ask for help you kind of get a "just set it up for your character" response. There isn't a lot of hand holding in the game and the systems are complex enough that there's a bit of effort understanding the game, which is fine, but also for some reason just didn't pull me into the game very well.

MisterBenn wrote on Feb 22, 2024, 09:28:
Basically yes, but it's complex and only just got added in this update so the dust hasn't settled yet. When you hit a certain point in the campaign, you have to choose one of two factions. One of them is the Merchant's Guild which means you have access to trading, and the other is Circle of Fortune which means you can't trade but get stuff to help you play self found, like better drop rates and prophecies which help you force specific items to drop deterministically. It's brand new, I'm playing self found and haven't got far in the game in this update yet, but the trading is gold based rather than the PoE system, and items can only be traded once so there won't be item brokering like PoE. I think the trading community hasn't taken off yet because of the servers, who knows how it will balance out once the community swarms over it, and who knows how devs will tweak or update the system going forward.

Interestingly players from both factions can play together in coop because loot is instanced. It's a pretty bold / surprising solution but the devs have been trying to keep everyone happy. Lots of people wanted to avoid self found drops being shit because you are expected to trade, and lots of people love trading and couldn't live without it.

Edit: Here is some info

Color me interested. Devs that actually listen to the community.

*edit*

Holy shit the explanation for trading and how to go about it is convoluted as hell. Like why can't I simply give an item I find to my fellow party member....*sigh*

Basically yes, but it's complex and only just got added in this update so the dust hasn't settled yet. When you hit a certain point in the campaign, you have to choose one of two factions. One of them is the Merchant's Guild which means you have access to trading, and the other is Circle of Fortune which means you can't trade but get stuff to help you play self found, like better drop rates and prophecies which help you force specific items to drop deterministically. It's brand new, I'm playing self found and haven't got far in the game in this update yet, but the trading is gold based rather than the PoE system, and items can only be traded once so there won't be item brokering like PoE. I think the trading community hasn't taken off yet because of the servers, who knows how it will balance out once the community swarms over it, and who knows how devs will tweak or update the system going forward.

Interestingly players from both factions can play together in coop because loot is instanced. It's a pretty bold / surprising solution but the devs have been trying to keep everyone happy. Lots of people wanted to avoid self found drops being shit because you are expected to trade, and lots of people love trading and couldn't live without it.

Edit: Here is some info

MisterBenn wrote on Feb 22, 2024, 07:46:
I've got 300 hours in this from the past couple of years and I'd recommend it easily. It looks decent, not cutting edge but does look modern and stylish. The levelling, configuring skills, crafting and finding items are very strong. The individual class skills can be configured a lot, lots of them can be switched between damage types, aoe versus single target, spammy or channeled or occasional big hits, spawning secondary effects or applying debuffs or gaining resources, etc. It's very freeform and you can really mix and match a few skills together in a way that feels like your own build. The drops are balanced so that loot drops always matter, crafting is really strong but items only have limited crafting potential, and the best affix levels are drop only so you need to keep finding good bases then try craft them up. The game is also very approachable, if you know the genre you'll be tinkering with your items and skills in no time and won't need a wiki.

Lastly it respects your time more than Path of Exile. If you want to throw yourself fully into an ARPG and want it to be as big as possible, PoE is still the choice because they've added to it and honed it for a decade. Last Epoch is great fun but isn't really endlessly replayable at the endgame unless you are seriously dedicated. You can target farm certain items, try to find ideal gear, play the mapping system and see how far you can push it, but probably after 2 or 3 dozen hours you might feel like you've done everything with this character, and roll a new guy or play something else for a while. That fits with the way I want to play, I no-lifed PoE years ago and loved it, but these days I want something I can dip into that does a lot of things very well, and then put it down before it takes over my life.

Edit: oh and the servers are swamped at the moment, you can play offline but if you are looking for online and/or coop it's not working as of this moment. Maybe today or tomorrow the servers will stabilise. I'm playing offline to avoid these troubles.

Is there trading in the game?

I've got 300 hours in this from the past couple of years and I'd recommend it easily. It looks decent, not cutting edge but does look modern and stylish. The levelling, configuring skills, crafting and finding items are very strong. The individual class skills can be configured a lot, lots of them can be switched between damage types, aoe versus single target, spammy or channeled or occasional big hits, spawning secondary effects or applying debuffs or gaining resources, etc. It's very freeform and you can really mix and match a few skills together in a way that feels like your own build. The drops are balanced so that loot drops always matter, crafting is really strong but items only have limited crafting potential, and the best affix levels are drop only so you need to keep finding good bases then try craft them up. The game is also very approachable, if you know the genre you'll be tinkering with your items and skills in no time and won't need a wiki.

Lastly it respects your time more than Path of Exile. If you want to throw yourself fully into an ARPG and want it to be as big as possible, PoE is still the choice because they've added to it and honed it for a decade. Last Epoch is great fun but isn't really endlessly replayable at the endgame unless you are seriously dedicated. You can target farm certain items, try to find ideal gear, play the mapping system and see how far you can push it, but probably after 2 or 3 dozen hours you might feel like you've done everything with this character, and roll a new guy or play something else for a while. That fits with the way I want to play, I no-lifed PoE years ago and loved it, but these days I want something I can dip into that does a lot of things very well, and then put it down before it takes over my life.

Edit: oh and the servers are swamped at the moment, you can play offline but if you are looking for online and/or coop it's not working as of this moment. Maybe today or tomorrow the servers will stabilise. I'm playing offline to avoid these troubles.

Saboth wrote on Feb 21, 2024, 21:54:
I notice the 1/2 the price of D4.

It's probably also only half as good.

Avatarium wrote on Feb 22, 2024, 03:18:
S4? What game is that?

It's short for Shit 4. As in Diablo 4 Shit 4.

S4? What game is that?

The Watcher wrote on Feb 21, 2024, 22:10:
If you've finished D4S3 and want something to play this will be fun. End game is also setup nicely. Graphics are ok.

I dig D4 so I like this new one, too. Also like PoE. It's new and will be a nice time sink until S4 releases. Watch some videos and you can get a feel for it.

This is the review I was looking for.

Well... I wasn't gonna try to get into PoE again... And I definitely wasn't going to buy anything from Blizzard...
So I guess I might end up getting this for that arpg itch. Hopefully it 'feels' [movement, drops, etc..] like D2 did, which just felt all balanced.

Never played and tempted a bit but in a few months. Not because I'm looking for a sale price but mostly because they are a small studio and the full release now will make them fix all the issues and maybe add improvements to what the community will feed them so I'm not in a rush to play something new right now, I'll wait for a little more polished form of it a bit later.

I had picked it up way back when but never played far into it. Reloaded for the launch. It seems ok. they added an offline mode for 1.0 but it appears to be offline-ish. My internet has been flaky today and I could not get it to run with steam offline. Oh well.

If you've finished D4S3 and want something to play this will be fun. End game is also setup nicely. Graphics are ok.

I dig D4 so I like this new one, too. Also like PoE. It's new and will be a nice time sink until S4 releases. Watch some videos and you can get a feel for it.

Any Bluers play this? The reviews all say, "play this if you didn't like Diablo4, and you think Path of Exile is too hard." I don't think PoE is too hard... So I'm curious what you folks think about it.

I notice the 1/2 the price of D4.