May 20th AMA on reddit with Judd Cobler - Last Epoch CEO

Iselin

https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/nbreb7/hey_reddit_im_judd_cobler_eleventh_hour_games_ceo/

Just a heads up incase you're interested in this game and what's coming now that it's heading down the home stretch out of beta and into release (likely before the end of the year.)

Iselin

All gear except uniques, are just crafting bases. The gearing revolves around getting something with useful intrinsics (the stuff at the top you can't reroll) and maybe a couple of affixes useful to your build and 8mproving that through crafting.

My custom loot filters don't focus on rarity but rather on key affixes of high enough level (e.g. + lightning damage that is at least T3.) It's not really about yellow being better than blue. A  blue item with superior intrinsic rolls and 2 useful affixes is often much better as a crafting starting point than a yellow with worse intrinsics and only 1 of 4 affixes I want.

All that yellow vs. blue means in this game is that blue will have at most 2 affixes and yellow will have 3 or 4.

Yeah the crafting takes some getting used to with the items that let you guarantee success etc., but it's pretty straight forward. And factures are not a huge problem like outright destructions of the item are. All a fracture means is that you can't craft that item any better than it already is. When leveling especially, I use many fractured items if I managed to get the key affixes up to a good level before it fractured.

I kind of like their loot/crafting system as a nice change of of pace from other ARPGs that are mostly about what drops. I feel like I have more control. I don't have enough cold resistance? I look for items that have it intrinsically and then add more to it in the affixes until I have enough.

As to balance, there are some skills much better than others and I suspect that will always be the case. Rogues, Sorcerers and most other classes typically will have a skill - usually their mobility skill - that can be talented to proc other skills for free when you use it. It's a common building strategy to synergize those things and put them together into a build.

I'm currently playing a sorcerer in HC mode that casts 3 lightning novas when I teleport and if I "teleport" to the same place I'm already at that casts all 3 in that one spot. meanwhile those lightning novas are talented to give me a 100% chance to proc a spark charge which essentially doubles the damage of the nova. That means my teleport is doing the damage of 6 novas at no cost.

That's just an example but the game and all classes have those kinds of synergies. Some of those are currently OP AF but when they get nerfed, something else will be

As to what I want out of this AMA, I want to question him about timelines and timing. 8.2 is almost ready and will be out in the next couple of weeks and that focuses mostly on improving the end-game echoes and arena play. 

I want to know when the missing spec classes are coming and multiplayer since those two things + final polish are all that's missing before release.