Good Morning Friends! I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Last Epoch. With it I am playing a slew of different characters that all have their own different demands. At least in part, I am “yoloing” my way through gearing and speccing most of the characters, and it made me think about some of the skills key to that process. Path of Exile and Last Epoch have a specific tagging system that indicates how abilities, gear, and passive points interact with each other, but coming from Diablo it was not necessarily something that I was super familiar with. In Diablo you generally think about how to scale a Barbarian, or a Demon Hunter, or a Crusader… and less so about how to scale one individual ability in their wide array of abilities. In Path of Exile you could play any ability on any base class, and while this is not exactly the case with Last Epoch… you can make every class perform in wildly different ways based on your specific choice of abilities and how you support them with the talent tree and your gear.
Ultimately it is the skill tags that will dictate how this interaction is going to work. If you mouse over any ability in the game and hold down the alt button, you are going to see an extended amount of information about how that ability is interacting currently. I chose a wide number of abilities and specifically what we are going to focus on the most is Scaling Tags. For example, Static is a Lightning Spell, and as such has both the tags “Lightning” and “Spell”, but it also has the tag “Instant Cast” and “Intelligence” indicating that it scales based on your current Intelligence stat and counts as an instant cast for anything that interacts with instant abilities. Summon Thorn Totem is a Minion but more specifically a Totem and will scale based on those tags but also indicates that it scales based on your Attunement ability score. Every ability in the game has tags that map out how they are going to interact with other abilities, the gear you equip, and the sorts of passive talent points that you invest in.
It is that last bit that becomes very important because sometimes a skill talent tree can impact the tags associated with a skill. They can either add new tags, remove tags, or sometimes change a tag completely. Let’s look at Warpath specifically as I am currently running two different builds that use that ability in different ways. By default, Warpath has the tags Physical, Melee, Area, Channeled, Movement, and Strength and you can scale the ability based on any of those interactions. If you choose Apocalypse Whirl in the skill tree it causes that ability to lose the Physical tag and instead gain the Void Tag. Similarly, if you choose Earthscorcher it will cause the ability to lose the physical tag and gain the Fire tag instead. These two notable passives are mutually exclusive, and change how you would begin to gear for that ability. Most abilities in the game have some sort of version of this interaction that allows you to lean into a specific playstyle or damage type, allowing you to more efficiently scale.
If you look at gearing, the affixes that are on an item will more or less map directly to the tagging system. For example, the Two-Handed Mace above scales Void Damage, so it would work well with an ability that either starts as dealing void damage or one that you have shifted to void damage in the above Warpath example. The Bow has Minion Melee Damage and Minion Bow Damage, and as such would scale the damage of any minions you create that either do Bow Attacks or Melee Attacks, but would not scale Thorn Totems that we talked about above because they have the Spell tag associated with them and not Bow or Melee. Harthenon’s Vow scales Melee Physical Damage which would work great with Warpath in its original form, but does nothing if you shift it to Fire or Void. Things get a little more tricky when afflictions interact with items… for example, Warpath shifted with the Earthscorcher talent can inflict Ignite, which itself does fire damage over time. Knowing that means that Firestarter’s Torch will specifically scale the damage if the Ignite you are inflicting on targets, but not necessarily the Fire-based Warpath damage directly.
You can in theory limp through the campaign on almost any combination of abilities, gear, and passive points. However, if you want a build that feels exceptionally good, you are going to want to pay attention to synergies between abilities, the tags that scale them, and the gear that you were equipping. Shifting everything to a single damage type, for example, makes it much easier to gear your character and makes every interaction that much more powerful. On my Void Knight that I am pushing towards 100, I have shifted pretty much every ability that I am using towards Void Melee damage so that I can scale effectively off either pure Void Damage, Void Melee, or pure Melee scaling. For the Ignite character that I have been tweaking, I have been focusing more on Fire Damage Over Time and Ignite Chance so that I don’t have to worry too much about whether or not my abilities are critical attacks. I need to take a step back and rework some things because right now I am having survival issues… but knowing my core focus on that character will allow me to shift some things around to create a better functioning total package.
The awesome thing about Last Epoch is that the interactions between abilities, gear, and talents are extremely straightforward. In Path of Exile, there are a bunch of edge cases where something might be tagged as this but scales in a very specific way when it comes to the damage that is being dealt. I am sure there are probably SOME edge-case interactions here, but most things certainly feel more clearly outlined. Mostly I wanted to talk about the concept of tagging because I know at this point Last Epoch is interesting to a lot of players who have not gotten down in the weeds when it comes to character builds. When I was playing Diablo, I was not necessarily paying attention to the nuance of every ability and trying to glean their finer interactions because I didn’t need to. Skill Tagging however is one of those concepts that will help you go a long way towards making more enjoyable characters without following a guide.