Meta Information
Last Epoch has an upfront cost to purchase (currently $35 in the US, varies by region), and a cosmetic-only MTX shop.
The devs have talked about a system similar to leagues in the future, but we don’t have any details yet. They’re focusing on the base game and expanding endgame content before moving onto leagues.
LE has multiplayer with squads of up to 4. Enemies gain increased life based on the number of players. Loot is instanced, each player gets their own loot and it does not match what the rest of the squad gets.The devs have said there are no plans to make any content that specifically benefits party play over solo.
The devs generally plan releases to not conflict with PoE leagues.
lastepochtools.com is sort of like PoB combined with PoEDB. 3rd party tools are a lot less necessary in LE, but still nice to have. The loot filter editor is built into the game and is easy to use once you get the hang of it. Filters can be exported and imported as text for easy sharing.
The in-game glossary gives details on a lot of mechanics.
General Gameplay
Player damage is overall lower, and it means tough enemies are harder to instakill. Big attacks from bosses and tough mobs are generally more telegraphed and easier to dodge.
Bosses reset if you die, so throwing your corpse at a tough boss is not a valid strategy.
LE is much less punishing of sub-optimal decisions. You can usually just pick something that looks cool and figure out how to make it work, no build guides needed. That’s not to say that all skills can be a main damage skill, but overall LE is more forgiving of experimentation.
Leech can apply to DoTs, but most sources of leech only work with hits.
Penetration applies to both hits and DoTs.
You can’t build MF stats on gear. There are other ways to improve your loot.
Characters
LE has more Attributes, each starting between 0 and 2 depending on the class. There are no attribute requirements on items, only level requirements. Attributes have lower numbers than in PoE. For example, a decent dex stacking build in LE typically has 70-90 dex in endgame.
Each class has its own basic passive tree and 3 mastery (ascendancy) trees.Unlike ascendancies, masteries cannot be changed. You can still respec their points but not change to a new mastery. After choosing your mastery, you can still put points in the passive trees of the other masteries, but only the starting half.
Each class has skills unlocked with level, by spending points in the relevant mastery trees, and a mastery specific skill granted when you select your mastery. Putting points into another mastery will let you gain a few skills from that mastery.
Respeccing passive points is much cheaper, there’s a small gold cost to respec each point.
You can also delevel or completely despec skills. You don’t immediately get those points back, but skills have a minimum level that scales with character level (up to 10), and they also get bonus exp after respeccing.
Respeccing skills is easier later in the game, where the high exp will get your skills back up to a reasonable level very quickly. In the early game it takes longer, and you should avoid respeccing your main damage skill until you have a new one up to a decent level.
Movement speed is, on average, a bit lower in LE. This is especially true if you like to play turbo zoomy map clear builds in PoE.
Skills
Skills have their own trees, and normally max out at level 20. Items can have +skill levels in various forms, allowing for skills to go over 30 in extreme cases. Skills don’t directly scale with skill levels, however, so the value of +skills depends on the nodes you want to take.
You can spec into up to 5 skills at a time, and can have up to 5 skills on your bar.
LE has more cooldowns and higher proportional mana costs than PoE. Some skills have ways to substantially lower these, usually with some drawback, but not all.
All classes have at least one skill that can have a net mana gain, many builds use one because there are no mana flasks, and not all builds have easy access to large amounts of passive mana regen.
LE has very few one button builds, due to cooldowns, mana costs, and lack of options to automate buffs and debuffs. Most builds will be regularly using 2-3 skills, not counting the movement ability.
There are fewer options for builds that can off-screen mobs or one-tap bosses. You’ll want to learn boss mechanics because it is very hard to skip them with DPS in the endgame.
Most movement skills have cooldowns, and there are few ways to lower them.
Mana can go negative, letting you use a high cost skill in an emergency. You can’t use any skills with a non-zero mana cost until your mana is positive again.
LE doesn’t have mana reservation. Aura-type skills have a passive bonus while they’re on your bar. Activating them will have another effect, usually a temporary increase to the aura effect, but some are proper active skills.
If one skill triggers another skill your class has, the triggered skill will use your tree if you have it specialized. There are some cases in which a minion can use one of your skills, and in that case, it will NOT use your tree (unless otherwise noted).
Totems are minions. Minions are allies.
LE does not have an equivalent of Convocation, so some minions will trail behind you. There are some ways to have minions teleport or leap to you when you use a movement skill. There is also a “command minions” key that will tell them to move or attack a target.
In addition to spells, melee attacks, and bow attacks, LE also has thrown attacks. These often do not scale with damage affixes on weapons, but instead with throwing-specific damage affixes on other gear slots.
Scaling
LE uses the same increased/decreased and more/less wording as PoE. Most “more” modifiers will also specifically say that they scale multiplicatively to clear up any confusion.
Damage numbers are lower in general. Flat damage is relatively more powerful than in PoE. Flat added damage applies to hits and non-ailment DoT skills, but not ailments.
Almost every skill has at least one attribute it scales directly with.
LE uses similar damage tags as PoE e.g. spell damage, elemental damage, melee damage, etc.
Almost all hits have a default crit chance of 5%, meaning flat crit chance is very powerful.
Damage conversion works a bit differently. Modifiers to the original damage type do NOT still apply after it’s been converted to another type. Most things that convert damage to a new type will also convert related ailment chance (the nodes will say if they do or not).
Much like PoE, the tooltip DPS is almost always wrong. However, if a change in gear or passives increases your tooltip, it will usually also increase your real DPS.
Ailments
Each element has at least one ailment associated with it, most have several. Most damaging ailments stack infinitely, most non-damaging ailments stack up to 10. Check the in-game glossary for details.
Ailment chance over 100% gives a chance to inflict multiple stacks with the same hit. For example, 250% chance to poison means a hit will inflict 2 poison stacks with a 50% chance to inflict a 3rd. Ailment chance is a powerful and necessary way to scale any ailment-based build.
Damaging ailments each have their own base damage per second, their damage is not dependent on the hit that inflicted them.
Damage multipliers on skill trees apply to ailments inflicted by that skill as long as the tags fit.
Any type of damage can inflict any ailment, all that matters is the ailment chance. No damage type has any inherent ailments, the way cold damage always attempts to chill in PoE.
Defenses
LE has many more damage types and corresponding resistances, which all cap at 75 (there is currently no way to raise this cap). The endgame is also balanced around capping resistance, but does it in a much more forgiving way. All enemies pierce resistance equal to the area level (up to level 75), and the actual damage is balanced around the player having 0 res after this piercing.
Capping res is not as important. Both health and res are suffixes, so you have to be careful about balancing them. 0 res in PoE means you take 4x damage, 0 res in LE means you take 1.75x damage.
The very general resistance priority is physical > elemental > void > necrotic > poison. This will vary a lot depending on the content you’re doing.
Armor applies to all damage from attack and spell hits, but is 30% less effective against non-phys damage. Armor can go negative with certain debuffs, increasing hit damage.
Dodge also works with all hits. This game doesn’t have accuracy for players or enemies, your dodge chance is calculated from your dodge rating and the area level. Enemies can’t dodge by default, but some effects can give them flat dodge chance.
Ward is similar to ES in that it’s extra life on top of your actual life, but it works very differently. It starts at 0 and degenerates faster the more you have. You can scale Ward Retention and Ward Threshold to slow the degen. Ward builds use large amounts of ward gain per second or ward gain from their main skills, in addition to lots of retention.
Low life builds are possible with the unique chest Exsanguinous and other items with similar functions.
Endurance is a defense that reduces all incoming damage to health by a percentage when your life is below a flat threshold. You can scale both the threshold and the reduction %. Large hits that would bring you below the threshold will have that part of their damage reduced by Endurance.
Block gives a chance to reduce the damage of a hit. The reduction scales with block effectiveness.
Glancing blow chance is like spell suppression but for all hits. The default damage reduction for a glancing blow is 35%. Generally, only Rogue gets glancing blow scaling.
There are affixes to both reduce the enemies crit chance, or to reduce the extra damage from crits. Most players agree that it is very important to have some way to deal with crits in the late endgame (i.e. high corruption empowered monoliths).
MoM exists in the form of the unique Fractured Helm.
Items and crafting
Magic items can have up to 1 prefix and 1 suffix, rares get up to 2 of each. There is a special crafting item that can add a 5th affix to a rare item.
Mod tiers go from 1 (worst) to 7 (best). Tiers 6 and 7 are called exalted mods, and items with exalted mods are referred to as exalted items. Exalted mods can’t be crafted, they must be found on loot. T6 exalts are fairly common, T7s are rare. An item can have multiple exalted affixes but it is extremely rare.
Tiers do not scale linearly. The difference between a T4 and T5 affix is quite a bit larger than the difference between T1 and T2. This is especially true for exalted affixes.
Crafting is done with affix shards. Each affix has an associated type of shard (e.g. health shard, increased melee damage shard, +skill levels shards). Shards are gained from drops and shattering magic/rare items. Applying a shard to an item will add that affix, to it, or increase the tier of that affix by 1.
There are also glyphs, which modify how shards add affixes, and runes, which alter items in ways different from shards (such removing an affix).
Craftable items have Forging Potential. Every crafting action will consume a semi-random amount of FP. Once an item has 0 FP, it can’t be crafted on at all, though it can still be shattered if you want to recover some materials from a bricked craft.
Crafting is useful throughout the campaign and endgame. Finding a good base with a few good affixes and finishing it with the crafting system is the primary way to get good gear.
Most item bases have powerful implicits. Some item bases are class-specific.
All items are effectively stat sticks. There are no local mods. The attack speed of a weapon acts as a multiplier on the base attack time of the attack being used.
Dual wielding requires a passive node to enable, not all classes can do it. Attack speed is averaged between both weapons when dual wielding.
Shields are almost exclusively defensive, a different type of offhand item called a Catalyst serves as a utility/offensive offhand for builds that don’t dual wield.
Idols are a bit like other equipment, but with their own dedicated inventory space. They give passive benefits when in the idol inventory, but not the regular inventory. Magic idols all have 2 mods, and there are no rare idols at this time. They can range from simple things like resistances and attributes, to adding new mechanics to skills. Idols can’t be crafted.
Unique items can’t be divined, and often have very wide ranges on the rolls. It can be worth picking up uniques you already have to check the rolls.
Uniques can have Legendary Potential. One of the endgame dungeons lets you combine an 4-mod exalt with a unique, and the unique will gain random mods from the exalted equal to the number of LP it had. 1 LP is somewhat common, 2 a bit more rare, 3 and 4 are extremely rare. LP can occasionally make bad uniques worth building around, but most of the time it’s just bonus stats on a unique that was already good.
Items drop identified, loot filters can be very specific. Shattering bad rares for a few rare shards means a lot more drops are worth picking up.
All nearby crafting materials are picked up with one click, and they have their own limitless Forge inventory. They still show up in your normal inventory, though, to make it easier to see what you got. There’s a transfer button to send them to the Forge.
Gold is auto-pick-up when you walk over it. Vendor prices are currently too low to be worth picking up items just to sell. Endgame gold farms are much more efficient if you need a bunch for something.
Endgame
The main endgame content is Monoliths. There are several timelines filled with echoes (maps) with randomly generated goals, reward types and enemy buffs, similar to map mods. Each echo will have a goal (usually to beat a map boss or to find a thing and click on it), completing the goal and returning to town will reward you with echo rewards and a bonus chest. The echo rewards will have a type, such as gold, rare helmets, crafting shards, etc. so you can kind of target farm. The bonus chest is just a bunch of random loot, with quantity based on how many monsters you killed in the echo.
Completing echoes also rewards timeline stability (the amount scales with kills in the echo). Once you have enough stability, you can do the story missions for that timeline. Beating the timeline boss will give you a blessing, a large passive bonus to stats or drops. You can grind a timeline again to get new blessings, or get a better roll on one you already had.
Certain echoes will add or remove corruption from a timeline. Corruption increases enemy damage and life, and IIR and exp for the player. Regular monos have max 50 corruption.
Completing all 3 level 90 timelines will unlock Empowered Monoliths, which are always level 100 and start with corruption of 100, with no maximum.
There are 3 dungeons which require keys, primarily dropped from echoes to enter. Each dungeon has its own gimmick and special reward. Temporal Sanctum has a time travel mechanic and rewards the ability to craft one Legendary unique item each time you complete it. Soulfire Bastion is heavy on fire and necrotic mobs and gives you a special currency used for Gwennen-esque gambling. Lightless Arbor has a darkness mechanic similar to Delve and serves as a gold sink; pay tons of gold to add special chests to the vault at the end of the dungeon.
LE also has an arena, which is what it sounds like. Fight waves of enemies, get loot every few waves, see how far you can go.
Technically you can start doing endgame before completing the campaign, but you still need to do at least enough campaign missions to get all your bonus passives and idol inventory space. Viewing the map will tell you how many passive and idol rewards you’re missing.
Unlike the Atlas, endgame progression in LE is all character-bound, not account bound. You have to grind through all the Monoliths on each new character if you want to do all content.
Trade
LE has a system called Item Factions. Players can choose to join the Merchants Guild or the Circle of Fortune. Guild members can buy and sell items, while Circle members can get MF bonuses and limited ways to target farm.
Trade is searchable and asynchronous. Once an item has been traded, it can’t be traded again. All equippable items can be traded at max Guild rank, but crafting materials can’t be traded.
This trade system is brand new. We don’t yet know how the economy will play out, what inflation will be like, or what the best strategies will be.
You can gift items to players who were in your party when the item dropped. If you frequently party up with another player, you will eventually be able to drop a resonance item for that player. You can apply resonance to an item that didn’t drop while you were partied up to gift it to them. This avoids the problem of not wanting to play without your friends online in case you get something they need for their build. This gifting system is available to everybody regardless of item faction.
LE builds similar to PoE builds
(This list is biased by my own preferences and experiences. It is not an exhaustive list.)
Cyclone: Warpath is literally just Cyclone, every ARPG has one. It can be built for physical, fire, or void damage, as well as ignite or bleed.
Cyclone CoC: There are several builds that use Warpath to trigger stuff. The best at the time of writing is triggering Flameburst gained from Holy Aura. Other options are triggering Smite, summoning Forged Weapons (Animate Weapon but they’re all copies of your main hand), or using a unique like Volcanus (Ngamahu’s Flame).
Bow CoC: The closest is probably the Bowmage build (which is actually a rogue and not a mage) which uses the unique bow Reign of Winter to trigger Icicle (Ice Spear) on hit. There are few versions of this build, the current best uses Mourningfrost boots to stack dex for a ton of flat cold damage. A similar build can be made using the Dragonsong bow.
Righteous Fire: Aura of Decay inflicts poison to nearby enemies several times a second, while also inflicting poison stacks on you. Scaling methods are a bit different but the playstyle is the same as RF. At the time of writing, Aura of Decay does not scale very well into endgame.
Blade Vortex: There are 3 ways to do this. Maelstrom Primalist, Shuriken Rogue, or Hammer Throw Sentinel. Maelstrom is like Vortex except it always follows you and you can have multiple stacks at once, so it ends up playing like BV. Shuriken (with Blade Shield specced) is more like BV, and is especially powerful when built for poison. Hammer Throw Sentinel also has a spec where the hammers orbit you. You can directly scale hits, use them to inflict bleeds, or proc Smite on hit for a weird sort of BV Herald build.
Ethereal Knives: Shuriken (not blade shield) Rogue, probably best built as poison, but there are also a lot of ways to get flat elemental damage on throwing attacks.
Spectral Throw/Helix: Hammer Throw Sentinel. Hammer Throw works a bit like ST by default, and can be specced to work like SH as well as the aforementioned BV.
Soulrend: Yet another Hammer Throw spec. You can give the hammers a degen AoE that works kinda like Soulrend.
Slams: Earthquake Primalist is probably the best. You turn into a bear and EQ the screen. Erasing Strike Sentinel has less damage and is less visually impressive, but has built-in Profane Bloom style pops.
Arc: Lightning Blast Mage. It’s a lightning skill that chains. Can also be converted to cold if you prefer freeze over damage.
Autobomber: Devouring Orb Sentinel. Technically only automated due to the numlock trick, which the devs have said they’re not a fan of. Might get removed in the future, but for now, you get to run past enemies while orbs fly around and blow things up.
Animate Weapon: Forge Strike Sentinel. Forged Weapons are copies of your main-hand weapon, though they won’t trigger some unique weapon mods. Warpath can be specced to summon a Forged Weapon every few seconds of channeling, which is arguably a better Forged Weapon build than actually using Forge Strike. Sentinel also has Manifest Armor, which is kind of like Animate Guardian.
Necromancer can do the whole “minion army” thing that appears in every ARPG. Basic skeletons can be ranged or melee, and there are also more powerful skeleton mages. Golems can be built as support or main minions. Volatile Zombies work like minion instability. There are also a few good single-minion builds, which use Dread Shade and/or Infernal Shade to giga-buff one minion, usually a Skele Mage, Bone Golem or Abomination.
