Last Epoch

Improving Last Epoch

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Hey Folks! I am having a blast with Last Epoch but as always the case as I spend hundreds of hours playing a game, I start to create a mental list of things that I would change or do differently. Inevitably I end up making one of these posts where I talk through that list. At this point, I have clocked just over 350 hours of Last Epoch through various phases of its lifecycle and as such I have quite a bit to talk about. I feel like the game is a solid “A-Tier” experience that will very likely be an “S-Tier” game as it continues to evolve. For reference, the only S-Tier ARPG right now on the market would be Path of Exile because it just has an overwhelming amount of depth, but that is depth that has been built up over ten years of releases. Also for reference, I should probably say that I consider Diablo IV a C or D Tier game depending on the current patch cycle… Season 2… was a solid B Tier experience, but the base game would probably be C and the current season D. Diablo III in its current state would be a solid B or maybe even an A tier at times.

Character Customization

I get that gender-locked classes are a common ARPG trope… but that ship has long since sailed and it is actively a problem for picking this game up and adopting it. I have many friends who simply do not want to touch this game because they do not want to be an old man who looks like Charles Dance. There are probably some folks out there who want to play a rogue but don’t want to look like a discount bin Sera from Dragon Age Inquisition. I feel like players tend to sort into one of two camps when it comes to character customization… either it does not matter to them at all and they could play a colorless square named Jake happily… or it is the most important thing in the entire game experience. If you don’t at least offer some level of rudimentary customization… you are locking out an entire chunk of the player base that spends more time on the character creator than playing through the tutorial experience.

I’ve given Diablo IV a ton of shit since its launch but they absolutely nailed the character creator. It is simple enough that you can get through it quickly if you do not care in the least, but has enough detail that the folks who really want to tweak their characters can do so happily. Like there are still problems with it because each character is locked into a very specific body type, but I will take this as a good starting place as opposed to nothing. EHG has at least given lip service to wanting to add some sort of character customization but that they have not prioritized it in the development cycle due to needing to fix core systems. Now that the 1.0 launch is over… I feel like it is time to start working on systems that bring in the players for whom customization is king.

Collecting Armor Appearances

While we are on the customization bent… A lot of the armor in the game looks pretty cool, but I have zero control over the appearance of my character. My choice is to equip one of a very limited selection of cosmetic skins from the shop, or just accept the fact that my characters will never actually look cool. What I really want is the ability to collect item appearances while I pick them up, and then create a cosmetic appearance for my character out of a selection of existing default graphics and from any cool things that are added into the cosmetic shop later. Guild Wars 2, Diablo III, Diablo IV, and even World of Warcraft now have this sort of a system where you collect the appearance of items and then can utilize those to create a very custom-looking appearance.

This is another place where Diablo IV did a really good job. I would have liked it to go further, and the ability to dye individual channels on the items rather than just painting the appearance with a broad brush, but again… it is “good enough”. Even if they sold this system to me… I would pay more than the initial purchase price to get this sort of functionality added to the game. For some players legitimately cosmetics are the true end game, and you are sort of locking out that group of player from having any meaningful interactions with their appearance. I can make due with looking like a mess, but I would be much happier with some sort of collection system. I mean there is already an appearance customization system in Last Epoch, I just want to be able to use armor I have collected in addition to the limited selection of cosmetic options.

Map Persistence

One of the things that absolutely confuses every player from the start, is that “Town Portal” does not work in this game like it does in other games. There is no popping to town to do some vendoring, and then popping back into the existing instance of a map that you were in previously. Instead, if you leave a map… even if you accidentally bounce acrossed a zone boundary, you have effectively reset the zone. This leads to all sorts of problems, and I feel like this is a core issue with their system design. I get that this would be a massive overhaul of the way that some systems work, but I feel like map persistence within a play session is kind of an important thing. I would love to see them implement a system like Path of Exile where a map does not reset until you have been out of it for 10-15 minutes with a way to manually reset a map if you so choose.

Multiple Attempts on Activities

I feel like this is a side effect of the fact that map persistance does not exist in the game at all… but all activies are effectively oneshot encounters. If you take a death, you have to start over from scratch and if you consumed a resource to open that encounter like a dungeon key, that resource is gone. It feels real bad to get through the annoying assed maze that is the temporal sanctum only to fail one mechanic and have to go back to square one again. Even Path of Exile, which is known for punishing encounters… gives you six portals to attempt something. It feels extra bad when you are playing in multiplayer and just have to sit on the ground and wait for your friend to either solo the encounter or die so you can both start over. Similarly there are few things more demoralizing than failing a monolith echo and knowing that you will have to do it again… for no rewards… just to clear your way past it. I would like to see them rework how these systems function, because if I wanted to be playing in a one attempt and then you are done scenario I would have played hardcore.

Load Straight into the Ready room

One of my favorite parts about Last Epoch is running Monoliths. One of the things that I dig the most about that experience is how you have this thing that I personally refer to as the “ready room” that lets you take care of any of your needs between rounds. It essentially is a stripped down version of a town with a vendor, your stash chest… and an anvil for some reason because apparently people don’t just hit F to open up the forge interface. What I want almost more than anything… is to be able to load directly into this ready room. As it stands when you teleport into a specific timeline, you are put out in the overworld map and have to complete at least one echo to get back to your ready room. This has so many incidental rammifications, and makes me put off doing things that require me to leave it. Making it easier to pop into this specific chamber would be great.

Interact with Circle of Fortune/Merchants Guild from Ready Rooms

So I get that EHG put in a lot of effort to make interesting faction specific hubs. Thing is I don’t play ARPGs to interact with strangers. In fact I mostly started playing ARPGs because I could do everything in them solo and this is in large part why I shifted to them as my main gaming addiction over MMORPGs. The thing with ARPG players… is we crave efficiency. “Town is Lava” is a common phrase you will hear bandied about in ARPG circles in that the most efficient use of your time is to never go back to town or at least go back as infrequently as possible. One of the activities that I put off… is buying prophecies because I know I have to pop over to this hub… and then can’t get back to my ready room without running an echo. I would love to see the ready room concept expand to have a stripped down version of the faction experience. Maybe have a vendor that gives you action to either things available from Circle of Fortune or to your Stall interface for Merchants Guild without ever leaving the comfort of home.

Bring in Guilds

The one place where I feel like social hubs SHOULD exist, is that the game needs guilds. It is so much easier to connect with your friends while playing an ARPG when you are all sharing the same guild tag. As it is now every member of a social circle need to remember to throw an invite to every other member in that group so that they can see and interact with them in game. Guilds streamline this process and allow you to have a single invite that covers all of those bases and grants someone easy access to everyone. Since they like to build social hubs, you could even create a guild based hub similar to the faction hideouts that allows the players to have a meeting area. I love our guild hideout in Path of Exile because it gives us a common ground when we want to run maps together rather than one person “owning” the map device because you are in their hideout.

If we are throwing out all possilbities, I would love to see them implement something like Guild Wars 2 has. The ability to have multiple guilds that you can be a member of is really a game changer. In Guild Wars 2 I am in my main guild that I help run that I spent 99.9% of my time representing. However I am also in Knight of Mercy and Kamikaze Runners which are very small friends and family guilds that are specific groups of players that interact with them. Then I am in two mega guilds Gaiscioch and Prismatic Aspects that give me access to bigger groups of players and more directed activities. It is this perfect blend of having multiple places to call home without feeling like you are giving up something in the process.

Guild Found Mode

While we are talking about wishlists… and guilds… what I really want is for the implementation of a Guild Found Mode. This is honestly my ideal way of playing an ARPG where we pool our resources and help each other out… but are not necessarily engaging in trade. With the Affliction League in Path of Exile we started out as a Private Trade League called the “Bel League” and this gave us that sort of functionality. Having access to trade in POE is sort of a necessity because you won’t have access to large swaths of items without it… but for what it was I had a freaking blast. Last Epoch is way more Guild Found friendly because between the handful of us we probably have seen almost every build enabling item.

I like knowing that I found something that one of my friends can play, and while the trade and resonance system works… there are a lot of my friends that I simply don’t have the same schedule as. The only time I can really play together with Kodra for example is on the weekend, because our active timeframes cross, and this weekend I really need to find an hour or two to play with him so that I can build up the resonance to be able to trade an item he needs for a build. A Guild Bank and Guild Found mode would solve all of those problems, while still keeping things out of the trade economy. Maybe lock everyone in that mode to a specific faction, or have it be based on a private cycle. Whatever the case I would love to be able to play Last Epoch, sharing freely with my friends… while also still being in Circle of Fortune.

Cycle Objectives

I am not normally an acheesement person and they don’t tend to motivate me in games. I’ve never bragged about getting “platinum trophies” or 100% percenting games. However there is something that I do enjoy about ARPGs with some sort of seasonal challenge system. Diablo III, Diablo IV, and Path of Exile all have something like this and it ends up influencing my activities in subtle ways. There will be times when I go out of my way to do this activity or that activity because I know I will be ticking off a box in the total seasonal journey. In Path of Exile I set it as my goal to make sure I do enough of the 40 total challenges in order to qualify for one of the totem poles that goes into your hideout as a decoration. If I am engaging with Diablo III season, I tended to do a full sweep because that was required to get a cosmetic pet. In Diablo IV my ultimate goal is to make sure I achieve all of the steps on the battlepass. Whatever the case having some sort of objectives to the seasonal content is a net positive for me.

More Random Events in Monoliths

Monoliths can be a bit samey after awhile. The most efficient method of running Monoliths is to rush to the objective, complete it, and then bounce out to head to the next objective. However for me at least that all changed in 0.9.2 when they introduced Rune Prisons and themed Treasure Chests into the Monoliths. These now became objectives that if I could see it on the map, I wanted to specifically veer over to complete that encounter because they offered specific rewards that I could not get elsewhere. This is ultimately what Path of Exile has done with seasonal mechanics, and why that game is so damned rich.

This is ultimately what makes Path of Exile as good as it is, is because there is so much optional content that shows up when you run maps… which is their equivalent to the Monolith. Seeing what an impact the relatively simple Exile Mages and Treasure Chests made to my overal Echo running experience… I crave more. I am hoping that with each new cycle they can add one or two new things that have a chance of showing up when running a Monolith. I am hoping after some time we build up a long list of random encounters that could happen. I would even love to see them introduce some of the random story events that happen in Diablo III maps. Those were super fun and while they are not the most efficient thing to run or the most rewarding… I always enjoyed doing them when they happened to align with whatever other objectives I was doing.

Bounty Mode

I know that there are a ton of players out there that HATED Bounties from Diablo III… but I loved them. I loved having a reason to go back and revisit areas of the campaign and then get rewarded for doing so. The format was super chill and just something that I could turn my brain off and do from time to time when I needed to lower my level of interactivity. They also served a really important way to get some resources. Last Epoch has so many cool areas in the campaign that you never really experience again, and I think it would be awesome to have a bounty system that asked you to revisit various objectives around the maps and then get a cache of rewards as a result. Affix Shards, Scrolls, and Runes already exist as the perfect reward structure for this sort of thing. Maybe even have the chance at dropping items specific that give you a little boost of faction experience. There are already ways in the monos to farm most resource but I do think it would be pretty cool to have this exist as it would help give you a specific reason to run the campaign prophecies.

Unique Modification Systems

So this often happens when you are going through the upgrading process with Last Epoch where you might start out with a build enabling unique that does not have legendary potential. When you do finally get a copy with legendary potential… it might not be as good as the item you were upgrading out of. The game already has glyphs to solve this problem, allowing you to reroll the stats on an item attempting to improve it. I would love to see some sort of crafting resource that works the same as a Divine Orb does in Path of Exile that would allow you to attempt to improve the rolls of a Unique or Set item.

Brute Force Legendary Potential

Similarly I would love to see a process to brute force Legendary Potential. Say you have two Siphon of Anguish laying around in your stash tabs, you could do something and get access to a crafting machine similar to the one you use to craft legendary items and brute force two rings with no legendary potential into a single ring that has it. Similarly you could trade in two rings with 1 LP to get a single ring with 2 LP and so on until you finally get a 4 LP item out the other end of a long sequence of swaps. So it would take 32 items without Legendary Potential to get a 4LP version but… there is a path there if you are commited to it. One of the things I dig in Path of Exile are some of the crafts where you swap multiple copies of an item and get a brand new item on the other side. It gives me a micro objective so that when I find a copy of Ventor’s Gamble for example, I chuck it in a stash tab until I have enough of them to trade in to try and get a better rolled one as a result.

Persist Chat Settings

I know that I have done a lot of navel gazing here… and throwing out some significant expansions for the game. I am going to close my round up of things I would like to change with more of a bug fix. I do not want to interact with public chat. I do however want to be open to messages from friends and folks that I happen to be grouped with. I would really love it if chat settings persisted between play sessions. Right now I have the option of either completely disabling chat, or manually turning off public chat every time I get into the game. This definitely feels like more of a bug note, and I have even submitted it as such… and not that I think anyone from EHG will ever find my blog post but… lord would I love this one fixed.

In spite of my lengthy want list, Last Epoch is a freaking wonderful game. I am so proud of the folks at Eleventh Hour Games as I have watched how much the game as a whole has evolved since 2018. I started out not exactly a big fan, and you have won me over time and time again. I look forward to watching this game turn into the experience that I know it can be over the course of several years. I will be here playing pretty much every new cycle from this point out. I am very happy to have something fresh and exciting to blend with Path of Exile leagues when they grow stale and I am hoping that the two companies can sort of reach a stagger step release cadence for content so I can bounce between them and other games that I care about deeply like Guild Wars 2. The launch was a bit of a wild ride but I am happy that things have stabilized and I am hoping that the EHG team has managed to get at least some rest.

Ignite Warpath in Monoliths

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Morning Folks! I am sure you are all probably sick of me talking about this build, but I think more than anything I am shocked it is still functional. I thought for certain that the wheels would begin to fall off as soon as I got deeper into Monolith Echoes. At this point, I am working on the level 75 Monolith and things still seem to be strong. In fact, as of this morning, I equipped a few new pieces of gear and the damage output seems to be even stronger. The only negative is that I feel like at some point I am going to have some survival problems. I have pretty bad resistance and not a ton of health. We struggle with some of the same problems as POE when you are trying to create a build with a bunch of uniques… you somewhat lack room for survival unless said uniques are already covering that.

I recorded a fresh video this morning of me doing a level 75 Monolith Echo, showing off what the gameplay looks like. For the most part I am just lighting everything that gets near me on fire, and that fire damage over time is eventually killing things. That which I don’t kill outright, my Manifest Armor minion or the trail of flame behind me tends to finish off. For those curious, I found out how to dump my build to Last Epoch Tools this morning, so you can see the current state of the build and the gear that I have equipped here. I would not follow directly in my footsteps though, because nothing I am doing is clean enough to be considered a proper build guide. I still feel like I need to rework most of my passives for example which is something I will probably do in the coming days.

I am still leaning heavily upon Firestarter’s Torch and the chance to inflict spreading flames. This does a lot of the work in making sure that everything is catching on fire. This morning I added Rahyeh’s Light which is a shield intended for a Judgement build but has stats that we care about and a heck of a lot of block chance and block effectiveness. I hope to find a version of this with Legendary Potential so I can maybe throw on all resistances or health on block. Sunwreath continues to do a lot of work in giving us melee ignite chance and fire damage over time. Sadly the flame reave lines are useless for us, but everything else works and again my hope is to stack on some sort of survival. Fiery Dragon Shoes are another new addition that gives us a bunch of fire penetration, and reduced bonus damage taken on crit… but the trade-off is it makes it so we get crit slightly easier. However, when we are crit it leaves a fire trail which is pretty slick.

All told I am pretty freaking happy being a walking inferno, and I am curious if this continues to scale as I level into empowered monoliths. I know there are some issues to solve here… specifically resistances and packing on more health and general survival… but for the moment I am having a blast having a super chill mapping experience. Last night I put on an audiobook and just kept my head down grinding through echoes all night. Mostly my goal is to pack on some more levels and start getting into empowered monoliths where hopefully I can finally test the build and see how longterm viable it is. Bossing is not amazing, but also not the worst thing I have ever experienced. Having 16 potions makes up for a lot of mistakes.

It isn’t like I stopped playing my Void Knight either. I am still using it to farm prophecies pretty regularly and working towards trying to get a handful of items with legendary potential to take that build to the next level. I’ve tried making a few legendaries and so far I have mostly wound up with duds that did not hit any of the stats that I had hoped for. This means that I need to farm up more legendary potential items and more exalted items to make additional attempts. This is probably where playing in the trade side of the cycle makes a bit more sense because you can just keep buying more items to try and craft into legendaries or simply buy the finished legendary rather than farming random content and hoping. The amount of loot that you get from Circle of Fortune though is outrageous.

Still having a freaking blast with this Last Epoch Cycle. Are you playing? If so what build did you go with? Drop me a line below.

Almost Righteous Fire

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Hey Folks! I’ve been down a rabbit trail for the last few days in Last Epoch where I started a brand new character. Initially, it started out as a “I lapped my friends, so I should start something new so I can play with them” which led me to start a Forge Guard character. Forge Guard is in the same Sentinel class that Void Knight is but in theory, its tree is all about minions and catching things on fire instead of purple damage. I thought it might be fun to play around with some of the minion options there as something a bit different from the Necromancers and Beastmasters that I have played before. However, while I do have a large lad that follows me around… I wound up going down a slightly different path. I should note this build is a sort of “yolo” from start to finish and I didn’t really set out with a clear plan in mind.

Yesterday I recorded a video because I was afraid this nonsense that I had created would not stay viable for long. It all started when I made the fateful decision to use a level one equippable unique called the Firestarter’s Torch. This essentially is a relatively mediocre item save for the percent chance to apply spreading flames. For anyone who has played Last Epoch, this is essentially ignite proliferation, and very rapidly I noticed that this could catch the entire screen on fire. So I leaned into this nonsense and before long I was wearing Calamity, 2 Sunwreaths, and a bunch of other random uniques and just dealing all the fire and ignite damage that I could. The above video shows some of the gameplay around level 29ish of me just setting the world on fire in a very Righteous Fire feeling manner.

The real “star player” of the build revolves around leaning upon Warpath once again to do spinning nonsense. I picked up the mandatory nodes to make the ability no longer cost mana, and then immediately dove into the path that causes Warpath to bleed… and then converts all bleeding damage to ignite chance and the base damage type of Warpath over to Fire instead of Physical. From there I made it so that every second I am casting Smite, and specced into the fire path of that ability as well so that I am constantly lighting everything on fire. Making it even more nonsensical I equipped Vortex Pennant that makes it so that while I am channeling Warpath I am throwing axes in random directions… and the axe hits themselves also ignite. For bonus nonsense, at some point, I am going to try and get some of the Idols that make it so that thrown axes cause Smite on hit.

The end result is this rolling inferno that ignites everything I touch, as well as a lot of things just off-screen through either the interaction with spreading flames, or when one of my axes makes contact with something and ignites it and everything it passes through. I’ve been building more and more into fire penetration which is making everything go so much faster. Like even one point of fire penetration chance was a noticeable difference and the next few points in Warpath are going to go for another fire penetration node as I am wielding a sceptre.

At the moment I am still running the same no-LP Firestarter’s Torch, but now that I am starting Monoliths I am going to be trying to farm one with at least Legendary Potential on it. I dropped one Sunwreath for a well-rolled exalted ring with some survival on it in addition to fire damage over time and fire damage. I am trying to find some All Resist on Channeling relics to try and create a Legendary out of Vortex Pennant because I am going to really need that affix to fix some of my resistance problems. Right now honestly the biggest thing that I need are some more levels. I have a pair of Fiery Dragon Shoes and a Rahyeh’s Light Shield that I plan on throwing on once I can equip them. I’ve also got a Solarum plate Exalted that I am going to throw on for some survival, +2 Warpath, and the implicit fire damage mod.

I can’t say this is the best bosser in the world, but I certainly ripped through Lagon without any issues. At this point I am in the Black Sun Monolith and am still Deathless, so that is at least something. My clear speed still feels pretty solid given that I am never running out of resources and can just keep rolling forward over top of things. I am kinda in a weird place ability-wise because right now… the only things that truly matter are Warpath and Smite. For the moment I am running Ring of Shields, because I thought it might be a nice damage booster with some survival baked in. The big problem there is that it just does not last long enough, and costs way the hell too much mana to cast. Since I am not regenerating mana at all while channeling… and I am always channeling… nothing has great synergy with Warpath. The proc at the end of the Forge Guard tree is only a 3% chance on hit and that just never seems to be up. The node is still worth it because it gives my minion a ton of health though but I plan on speccing out of Ring of Shields entirely and picking up Sigils of Hope at some point.

That leads me to Manifest Armor, the only minion available to a Forge Guard that I am actually using. Right now he is essentially a giant walking flamethrower. I am tanking for him and that is mostly working out fairly well. I’ve put points into inheriting stats from my Helm, Body Armor, and Shield and everything else has gone into the fire line making him ignite everything. He does a non-zero amount of damage because when I forget to summon him it is a noticeable difference. However, I am mostly playing a Warpath build that happens to have a DPS pet, and not necessarily playing a true Minions build. His survival is good enough to keep him up through almost everything, and it doesn’t cost a ton to summon him in the middle of combat if he happens to fall down. It honestly reminds me of the way that Beastmaster felt in Rift, where you mostly just had a pet following you as added damage and not necessarily a tanking scenario.

All told though I am really freaking happy with the current state of the build and am interested to see how it evolves as I get through the normal monoliths and move into empowered. At the moment with a mix of health, armor, block, leech, and middling resistances I seem to have really solid survival. That all may change once the damage and health pools increase significantly. I think I am going to take it pretty slow though on getting through monoliths. I say that… and then this is a character that I created late Sunday night and is now in Monoliths as of Tuesday evening. I may or may not know what “take it slow” means.

Last Epoch Crafting Primer

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I had a request from one of my friends over on Mastodon to at some point do an explanation of the crafting system for Last Epoch. Apparently at one point I did one of these for Path of Exile… and here is proof that I do not remember half the things that I write here because my mind blanks on what I even said. That said I am going to do my best to fulfill this request but I feel like I need to start off with a few caveats. I am by no means a master crafter nor am I some god of Last Epoch information. This is going to be a rough explanation of the crafting system as I have used it, because in truth it is pretty straightforward and I have done a heck of a lot of “fixing” gear by tweaking one or two things on it. If you have any specific questions about how an individual item works, I suggest consulting Last Epoch Tools because it seems to be the trove of knowledge on the game.

The Forge Screen

Let’s start off with the most basic elements of crafting. At any point in the game, you can hit the F key to pop up your forge interface, or optionally you can click on any of the anvil devices scattered throughout the social hubs of the game. This will bring up the crafting interface allowing you to place an item into the window and modify the elements of it. The most basic component of an item is its Forging potential, which is a number that indicates how many actions you can take against an item in an attempt to change its elements. Each action that you take usually will remove some amount of this number, and these will be indicated by a range with the highest success being that it removes zero points, and the worst possible interaction removing the full cost usually somewhere around 10. Below the item is the Glyph slot which will allow you to slot in an item that will modify the way a current crafting attempt works. Below that is the Rune slot which will impact the item as a whole rather than an individual craft.

Item Rarity

Every piece of gear can have two prefixes and two suffixes. You cannot craft on Unique or Set pieces by default and I am not going to talk about the process of creating a Legendary item… so for now we are only going to focus on the four rarities of normal items: Normal (white), Magic (blue), Rare (yellow), and Exalted (purple). The primary difference between Normal, Magic, and Rare is how many affixes are filled on the item. A Normal Item will have none of its affixes filled, a Magic will have at least one, and a Rare item will have at least three. Exalted denotes something specific in that one of the affixes on an item is Tier 6 or Tier 7. The highest that you can craft on an item is a Tier 5 affix, as a result some of the most sought out items in the game have one or more exalted affixes on them.

I specifically chose the same base item for this visual to illustrate a point. There is another element of an item that I have not talked about and that is the Implicits, which are inherited from the item you are crafting on. For example, this is an Augury Plate which will always have 475 Armor and some amount of Increase Mana Regen with the range being a random roll between 18% and 35%. Before we leave the discussion of Item Rarity, I feel like it is important to note that when an item drops… its Forging Potential is determined by the rarity of the item. An exalted item will by default have more forging potential than a normal item. Forging Potential is a range of possible values, but it is something to note that the better quality item you start the crafting process with, the more wiggle room you have for modifying it.

Item Bases

Expanding upon this further, here is a selection of Sentinel Body Armors, aka items that will have what is considered to be a large amount of armor on them. Iron Cuirass is a body armor with 100 Armor and a range of Cold Resistance. Solarium Plate is a body armor with 420 Armor, a range of endurance values, and a range of increased fire damage values. Augury Plate which was used in the previous example has 475 armor and a range of Increase Man Regen. Finally we have the Apocalypse Plate which was newly added in with the 1.0 patch and features 513 Armor, a range of Stun Avoidance, and a Void Knight specific implicit that increases Echo Damage when a Skill is Echoed. Each one of these items is going to lean towards a specific type of build and use case. I’ve been working on an ignite Forge Guard and in theory I am probably going to want to be watching for Solarium Plate’s with the correct stat combination because that implicit would greatly increase the amount of fire damage I would be capable of stacking.

Affix Shards

From a very early level, you will be used to seeing explosions of brown text on your screen that you rapidly hoover up into your inventory. Eventually you hit the transfer materials button, at which point they are whisked away to your crafting inventory never to be thought of again. The thing is every single one of these crafting materials is an item with its own stats and text explaining their use. I decided to pull out four different Affix shards so we could talk about them a bit. Health is probably one of the first affixes that you will encounter in the game and it is pretty much universally sought. If you read the text it denotes that this specific variant gives you X% Increased Health and can be applied to Body Armor, Helmets, or Belts. Armor is another very early affix and this one gives you X% increased armor and can be applied to Helmets, Body Armor, Boots, and Shields. Chance to Slow on Hit specifically is something that can go on a weapon or a quiver which is the same for a lot of the “on hit” mechanics.

Lastly we have a very specific type of shard that can only be found on items that increase the level of the Sentinel skill Warpath, allowing you to allocate additional points in the skill specialization tree. This opens the door to another aspect of crafting which is looking for items that you might want to harvest affixes from. There are a few specific ways to do this which I will dive into in the next subject, but essentially you can break down items with Runes in order to reclaim affix shards that you can then use to craft on another item. A lot of the loot that I pick up in a dungeon or monolith, is specifically things that I am snagging for harvesting purposes. When crafting on affixes there is the possibility to “crit” your craft reducing the amount of forging potential that it takes or giving you free levels of either the same affix or one of the other affixes.

Runes

Runes are a type of crafting material that applies to the entire item, not a specific prefix or suffix craft. These can have some pretty sweeping changes to your item and override whatever you have configured in your glyph or affixes. Make sure you remove runes before finalizing your craft if you do not intend to use them as they will stay slotted in the forge window after a crafting attempt. Let’s talk a bit about each of the types of runes and what it is used for.

  • Rune of Shattering
    • This is ultimately going to be your most commonly used rune. This is essentially the same as salvaging an item in other games. It will destroy the current item and return a random number of affix shards from the item. It could be all of the affixes slotted into an item, or it could be just one. When an affix shard is returned it also gives you a random number of them, which could be the full face value of the craft on the item or just a single shard. This is the most commonly used because it does not require any forging potential so you can use this to destroy items that have been “zeroed out”.
  • Rune of Removal
    • This is similar to Shattering but it requires forging potential and will consume between 1 and 25 per craft. The difference is this will remove a random single affix and return all of the shards on an item. So for example if you remove an exalted T7 affix, it will remove seven copies of that affix. Remember though that which one is removed is completely random so you need to have plenty of forging potential if you are trying to target a specific affix.
  • Rune of Discovery
    • This rune costs no forging potential and will fill any empty affix on an item with a random Tier 1 affix. So if you were to use this on a Normal item, you would end up with a Rare containing four random Tier 1 affixes. For me at least these have two uses, firstly in the very early game before I have access to rare gear I can throw a Rune of Discovery on something and my alt has at least some power quickly. The other time I would use one is if I have an item with otherwise good stats but zero forging potential left, and hitting it with a Discovery just fills up the affixes regardless of what the final result ends up being.
  • Rune of Shaping
    • This rune will reroll the random implicit values on a piece of gear. Remember above I said that each of the base types came with a certain number of implicit and some of those had random ranges. This would be used on an item that has otherwise great stats but really low rolls on those implicits. Unfortunately it has a high potential cost consuming between 1 and 25 forging potential so this is something you really need to do early in the crafting process.
  • Rune of Refinement
    • This does something similar to Shaping, but will reroll ALL of the affixes on your item giving you a new random value within the range of possible values for each affix. This will consume between 1 and 15 forging potential, but honestly feels like a pretty risky move because you could of course get nothing but top-tier rolls… or you could end up with an item with baseline stats. This is essentially the same as the Divine Orb from Path of Exile with the difference being that you are eating up Forging Potential each time you use one.
  • Rune of Ascendance
    • This is quite possibly my favorite crafting item. Essentially this is the Chance Orb from Path of Exile but one that works every time. This will take an item and upgrade it into a random Unique for that type. This will not respect item bases, but it will respect broad categories of items. For example if you use this on a Two-Handed Sword, you are going to end up with a Unique Two-Handed Sword as a result. I mostly use these to target specific slots that I need a specific unique for, but it is an absolute gamble. They are just fun and you never quite know what you are going to get from them. I do not believe you can get anything that drops in a specific location or has specific corruption level requirements in order for an item to drop. This is just based on my own experience and I do not know this for certain however.
  • Rune of Creation
    • This item is similar to the Mirror of Kalandra from Path of Exile for those who might be familiar with that. Essentially it will allow you to duplicate any item with crafting potential so as such cannot be used on Uniques or Set items which cannot be crafted on at all, it also cannot be used on items that have been zeroed out. This item will consume all of the forging potential of both the original and the duplicate so nothing further can be done with either save for using one of the runes that requires no forging potential. Essentially this prevents the nonsense that happens in Path of Exile where folks have “mirror shops” and keep duping the same items over and over. I’ve personally used this to create multiple copies of an Exalted item before attempting to make a Legendary, but again not going to dive into that process today.

Glyphs

Glyphs are the other part of crafting and I decided to cover them after runes since they impact specific affixes not broad change to the entire item. There are a few edge cases but largely in order to use a Glyph you will need Forging Potential, Available Affix Shards of a given type, and an Affix that is less than T5 aka the maximum level that you can craft on. Let’s talk through the various options.

  • Glyph of Hope
    • Let’s start off with the best glyph, aka the one you are probably going to want to use every single time you do any crafting. Using a Glyph of Hope while upgrading an affix gives you a 25% chance to use zero forging potential. The more upgrades that you can get for free, the more wiggle room you have on an item to perfect it. If I am just grinding a stat up to T5 I am going to be using one of these and the 25% roll is independent of the normal “critical” crafting process allowing you to both get it for free and get a bonus stat level at the same time.
  • Glyph of Chaos
    • While there is no true equivalent to the Chaos Orb from Path of Exile, this is probably the closest that exists. The Glyph of Chaos essentially allows you to replace any affix on an item with a random affix that is possible to roll on that item. It will also raise the Tier of that affix slot by one, therefore placing a limit on the number of times you can attempt to reroll an affix. This is really a yolo move for an item that has three great affixes, but one that is meaningless to your build. Sometimes you luck out and get something good… worst case is you just get a different stat that is meaningless. Unlike POE, I don’t really know of any times when a single stat line can brick your build.
  • Glyph of Order
    • Okay, this is probably the most complicated to explain. When you apply an affix, it gives you a value within a range so for example if that range is 1 to 10… you could get any of those values. When you raise the tier of an affix, it rolls again giving you another random value within a range. Glyph of Order allows you to preserve the location in the range while bumping it up to a higher tier. If you have an item with the maximum stat for a given tier, then it is worthwhile to use a Glyph of Order to keep making sure you are pegging out the top of that range each time you move up in tier.
  • Glyph of Despair
    • Glyph of Despair does something weird with an item, and in theory allows you to have more than four affixes. Essentially when you use this on an item there is a chance to “seal” the affix and empty the slot that it previously occupied allowing you to craft something new in its place. This is chance-based and the lower the tier of the affix that you are trying to seal, the higher the chance it will succeed. When the craft “fails” it simply upgrades that affix to the next highest tier.

Experimental Gear

Up until this point, I have been covering “normal” crafting. As with any game that gets new content over time, there begin to be a few edge cases. In 0.9.2 Rune Prisons were introduced to the game, and with them Experimental gear. When you open a Rune Prison in a map an Exiled Mage spawns and if you manage to kill it, it drops an experiment type of gear. These contain prefixes that cannot be gained through any other way and that cannot be extracted in shard form. These can do some really interesting things like for example there is one that summons X zombies to fight on your side whenever you use a potion. Some of these are very powerful, but the majority are sort of interesting edge cases. With these items however introduced a few other crafting options that I left off the table as not to confuse you too early.

Experimental Crafting

With 0.9.2 there was a new rune and a new glyph added to the game that interacted with these experimental affixes. Runes of Research can only drop from Exiled Mages, and Glyph’s of Insight supposedly can only drop once you have used a Rune of Research. I cannot confirm nor deny this… but I can confirm that I did not see a single Glyph of Insight drop until after I had used a Rune of Research and then I found it within a few Exiled Mage kills. Could be a coincidence but I am not certain. Let’s talk about how each is used.

  • Rune of Research
    • This item allows you to take an Experimental Item and seal that affix so that you can craft another prefix onto the item. Unlike Glyph of Despair, this is 100% chance and will always seal the prefix taking somewhere between 1 and 20 forging potential to do so. Really I cannot think of a downside to doing this as it allows you to make an Experimental item better.
  • Glyph of Insight
    • This Glyph on the other hand allows you to take an existing item with a filled prefix and replace it with a randomly chosen Experimental Affix that is capable of rolling on that item type. Folks have apparently mathed out what the chances are and what affixes are available in a bunch of different scenarios so you can check out this calculator to determine what you might get. So this is an option if you have an item with a useless prefix that might be improved by an experimental one.

The Wrap Up

Well, folks, that is the crafting system. Like I said going into this I am by no means an expert, but have been crafting items regularly since I started playing this game in 2018. What I dig about the system is that it is really powerful while still being relatively deterministic. Path of Exile crafting potentially is more powerful, but it is also way the hell more random… and you need a whole slew of community-supported tools to really understand it. Last Epoch thankfully is simple enough that I could cover almost everything in a single blog post. While it might seem complicated, I promise it is pretty easy to get the hang of. I hope my post helped some of you who might have had cold feet about diving in. I’ve likely missed some elements and I am sure someone will respond in the comments to fill in those details.