Various Thoughts

Took a bit, but now I have eleven of Last Epoch‘s fifteen available specializations sitting at the Cultist Camp. Which (while still quite early game) is a good point to get a feel for most of the builds’ playstyles.

The Chaos Warlock gets real crazy once it unlocks Chaos Bolt. Just a constant stream of devastation. What’s particularly nice about this build is that since you only have 3 active skills, you can put skeletons or a bone golem on the free slots for some extra damage/distractions with zero drawback. Speaking of which, taking Blood Pact so far has worked out well. It has no downside against powerful single targets and against groups the life drain is negligible with all the healing you get.

Less chaotic but no less insane damage-wise, the Sparking Spellblade starts getting real crazy once all the synergies start firing. Although early on you’ll want to play it a bit safe and use Lightning Blast manually as a starter, by the time you reach the surface of the Ruined Timeline you should be able to just teleport into masses of enemies and destroy them with both Mana Strike and Static discharges. I cannot wait until Surge gets unlocked and the final piece of the puzzle is assembled.

The Bleed Bomb Falconer starts off quite slow since all the key abilities are unlocked later, yet once you acquire Falconry stuff just gets minced. Even without Net and Dive Bomb the Falcon Strike ability alone just lays down total devastation. Zero complaints.

Last of the Icy Veins builds, the Cleaving Void Knight just takes off once you get Erasing Strike. The combo of Lunge -> Void Cleave -> Erasing Strike -> Volatile Reversal is just plain unfair. Nothing to complain about with this build either.

And that’s it for the builds I modified. Now on to the ones I put together from scratch.

One of the later ones, the Harvest Lich build focuses on the titular Harvest skill supported by Spirit Plague, (unchanneled) Drain Life, and Reaper Form. Spirit Plague melts anything it touches to a shocking degree. At first I was torn on whether to use Transplant or Reap as the mobility skill, but ultimately Transplant’s Bone Armor tipped the scales in that direction. Currently Reaper Form is saved for bosses, but eventually it should have basically full uptime. We’ll see.

Last of the Acolyte specializations is the Volatile Necromancer. This build had a bit of a journey, as first the idea was to just cast nothing but Volatile Zombies with the Bone Marrow node activated. Then I realized that Summon Wraith could handle spawning the zombies and Cycle of Putrescence would always keep at least one perpetually spawned. And then, finally, I realized I was being silly and dropped Bone Marrow completely in favor of leveling the wraiths. Just beware of Transplanting into a hostile situation and nothing should ever be able to get close to you.

For Sorcerer I decided to go with a fire-based channeling build. The idea here is to use Disintegrate on general trash mobs and then switch to Elemental Nova for bosses or massive swarms. Flame Ward provides constant protection, Teleport acts as both mobility and extra damage (from the Nova nodes), and Arcane Ascendance is just there to add insult to injury. Main issue here is the perpetual mana shortage and early game the damage is rather lacking. At this point (Cultist Camp) the damage finally seems to be catching up to some of the above builds, so we’ll see how things develop.

Lots of minor changes have been made to my Stormy Beastmaster build. I kept flip-flopping on how to ultimately level the wolves, finally settling on maxing out Tundra Stalkers, Stormborn, and On the Hunt while ignoring the Howl nodes. Gathering Storm also had some back-and-forth and may yet still depending on how the mana situation is later on. Pretty happy with its damage and crowd-control aspects so far though.

For the Thorn Druid build I eventually decided on going the 24/7 shifter route. It will be some time until I can see if Swarmblade is worth it, but right now the Totems (and unleveled Wolf) combined with Spriggan Form’s Vines and Spirit Thorns just massacre enemy groups. I’ve been using leveled Gathering Storm with the staff bolt and physical shift nodes as a placeholder so far to decent effect, but plan to replace it with Summon Spriggan once that’s unlocked and start using unleveled Upheaval as the main attack (assuming my shapeshift uptime is still lacking at that point).

Next up is the Ethereal Marksman, who seems to wield something closer to a machinegun than a bow. Flurry is fast. One of the ‘late bloomer’ builds, you’re going to have some difficulty with swarms early on until Multishot unlocks (I ended up using a combination of Acid Flask and Decoy to acceptable effect). Once it does you never really have to do anything other than Flurry, toss the occasional Decoy, or drop an (unleveled) Smoke Bomb at your feet if something gets close. The endgame strategy here is to Flurry everything, then if something nasty gets hit use (unleveled) Dark Quiver into Decoy and follow that up with a Flow-boosted Hail of Arrows. Time will tell if the gimmick is worth it or not.

And last up is my Retaliation Sentinel build, which specializes as a Forge Guard. Gods I love retaliation builds. Sure it’s less than thrilling when you’re fighting something slow or physically resistant, but when you can just (unleveled) Shield Charge through multiple groups of enemies then double back to Rebuke them all into paste…. Few things can even dent my health pool through the Vengeance defense buffs, and those that do get instantly nullified by the Healing Hands auto-spam. Just crazy survivability so far.

As for the four remaining specializations (Runemaster, Bladedancer, Paladin, and Shaman)… I’m going to hold off making any of them for the time being. I want some progress in the main quest to get a better feel for the expected progression level first.

Occupying a space between Diablo and Grim Dawn, Last Epoch is quite a lot of fun if you’re the type to enjoy theory-crafting character builds and/or collecting randomized loot.

Class-wise you can choose between five different base characters (like the former game’s), each with three potential specializations (like the latter’s leveling):

Sentinel is a mix of Soldier, Paladin, and Oathkeeper.
Rogue takes elements from Assassin/Nightblade and Amazon.
Mage combines Sorceress and Arcanist.
Primalist mixes Barbarian and Shaman.
Acolyte is basically Necromancer with some Cabalist attributes.

Itemization is where things really stand out though, as not only is there a robust Loot Filter system in place, but there’s also a forging system which lets you directly upgrade or add/remove attributes from items. In a sense an upgraded version of Diablo‘s socket system or GD‘s runes/components. Another change is that legendary items act as personalized uniques instead of being their own drop class, which is an interesting choice to make and was presumably done to further incentivize said forging system.

When I first started (which was quite recently, but still) I wasn’t really interested in pouring over the ability nodes and so just looked at Icy Veins‘ endgame build list to see if anything stood out. A few did indeed look fun and I promptly ended up doing some minor modifications to the build plans.

First up was the Chaos Warlock. Only real change here is using Blood Pact (since the minion damage from Blood Aura is kind of wasted without dedicated minions) and taking a Dance of Blood point in Transplant for even more healing. Not sure those will work out…. but I can always revert them if they don’t.

Next was the Void Knight. Can’t recall if I changed anything significant here, but it’s worth noting that early game you’ll want to focus on void-shifted Warpath and Lunge until you finally unlock your main skills.

For Rogue, the Bleed Bomb archetype looked fun enough and I ended up waffling around with the build planner for it quite a bit. Don’t think anything too significant changed, but like with the Void Knight above in the early game you’re going to be stranded without your core skills for a while… so don’t sleep on Acid Flask or Decoy.

The Spark Charge Spellblade was an easy choice for me when deciding which Mage build to go with, and by this point I was really getting into adding/removing points all over the place. The unleveled use of Flame Ward really stands out here as just a ridiculously useful spell for the build and gave me ~ideas~ for later.

Finally we come to the Primalist and… I didn’t really like any of the builds they had. So this build ended up the first I created from scratch. It is, of course, not without issue. Namely that the base damage of the wolves does not mesh at all with the magic boosting nature of the spriggan. I thought that would be mitigated by the Storm Bolt triggers, but at this point it’s too early to tell. Storm Crows are the obvious solution, and I may end up going that direction (swapping out Shark Aspect for Lynx).

Strongly gripped by the theory-crafting bug now, I quickly identified that I didn’t have any builds dealing with poison or retaliation damage. Not wanting to double-up on the classes I decided to make the next five builds Hardcore only, with the first being a Retaliation Sentinel (inspired by the Flame Ward usage in that earlier Spellblade build). While my original idea used Ring of Shields, I quickly realized that its presence would only detract from the goal of massive Rebuke and Thornshell damage. Healing Hands looks like it will work far better for automated healing.

Which just left poison, something a Primalist-Druid seemed best to exploit (that it was my second choice for a retaliation build also played a part). The idea for general play here is to scout with Thorn Totems, then spam Entangling Roots everywhere while using Leap if anything gets too close. When encountering a boss or something else that requires more caution however Spriggan Form comes out to spam vines and Spirit Thorns from a safe distance while doubling up on spriggans for extra healing.

Rounding out the Hardcore builds will probably be a channeling setup for the Mage, a bow-based Rogue, and some sort of Acolyte yet to be determined. I should be pretty busy leveling and tweaking these seven builds as it is though.