As you may have already noticed, our Primalist is getting a lot of love in patch 0.8.4. Not only is his Druid Mastery going through a complete overhaul, but he is also getting some new, powerful baseline tools added to his kit. Today, the new Primalist skill Upheaval is making its smashing reveal to our community, so hold on to your boots and lets get into the details below.


Upheaval is a powerful, semi-spammable ground slam ability. It will do decent amount of damage and have a medium mana cost. With the announced removal of Ice Thorns, Upheaval will be stepping in to fill its empty skill slot. This means that moving forward, upheaval will be an early and core addition to the Primalist theme and leveling experience.



We knew that the visuals of Upheaval needed to feel impactful for our players. We started by adding some additional screen shake, then we added another ‘slam’ visual object right when the Primalist’s weapon hits the ground.

The visual design of Upheaval also presented us with the opportunity to create a new visual skill-tool: Decals over a trail. This is a design tool that drops visual-decals every 1.5 units which results in a repeated trail of decals. This design truly realized the desired visuals for Upheaval, and we will certainly be using it to shape other future skills in Last Epoch.


Upheaval is a powerful melee attack with a solid range.

Upheaval specialization tree offers a wide variety of powerful nodes to support many different builds. Here are a couple highlights from the brand new Upheaval skill tree. We can't wait to see the earth-shaking creations from our community once they get a hold of the full skill tree.

Values have been omitted as we are still balancing the skill.






The cold version of Upheaval cast by totem.








Excavating blow with Tectonic Slam obliterating enemies.





Upheaval will be joining the Primalist’s skill kit before the end of the year with patch 0.8.4. For those keeping score in the community, that means you’ll have patch 0.8.4 in your hands in no more than 46 days from now.

In that time you’ll be hearing from us a lot. In fact, we’ve barely scratched the surface in revealing what all is coming your way. We have more blog posts, feature reveals, announcements, and trailers heading your way in the coming weeks - so stay tuned for all the news for our Ete… oops, to patch 0.8.4!

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We hope you’ve been enjoying our Druid Development Week so far, and thanks for joining us here again for our biggest reveal yet. We’ve been eager to show you all of the major changes coming to the Druid Mastery in 0.8.4 and we are finally able to do so with the third and final transformation: the deadly Swarmblade.


All imagery, animations, mechanics, and videos are captured during the development process and do not directly reflect the final product. All instances shown are subject to change as needed

When it came time to develop the final transformation for our Druid, we knew we wanted to do something unique and exciting. These goals meant we wanted to steer clear of other often used animal transformations so we could land on something fresh. When we started reviewing the stunning concept art for the Swarmblade below, we knew we found the answer.

Insects exist in many different shapes and forms so we had a lot of material to explore. As you can see in the picture below, our artists had an awesome mix of ideas for the insect-based form.





The ability to transform into a deadly flying bug that can slash your enemies to ribbons is a really fun fantasy we are excited to deliver in patch 0.8.4. The Swarmblade went through many visual and naming iterations before we had finally crafted the fearsome bug-king hunter you see below.





Transforming into the Swarmblade takes you into a spinning slash animation that we feel connects the player very well to the Swambalade fantasy - it feels visceral and impactful. This was a great feeling with most transformation situations, but in some others (for example Werebear to Swarmblade) it had to be adjusted since a massive Werebear performing a ‘full-spin’ just didn’t look right.



Swarmblade has two distinct fantasies we wanted to slice. One being a fast slashing bug and the other being the ‘hive-father’. With only 4 skills on the bar, we were aware that in order to really hit both of these we would need to have these themes overlap on some skills. Also, having a contained kit like this on a character gave us the ability to create some really exciting ability interactions.

Swarmblade’s first skill, Armblade Slash, is fast melee slash attack. It will be your most reliable attack in Swarmblade form with no cooldown and no Rage cost. We’ve designed the Swarmblade heavily around rapid melee slashing, and while Armblade Slash will be deadly, it will not be the only melee attack in your arsenal.



Swarmblade’s second skill is Dive. We knew we needed to hit the mobility aspect while also maintaining his aggressiveness. Looking at the Rogue’s Shift ability, we saw how responsive and good it felt to use, so we emulated that for Swarmblade while also decreasing the range a bit and adding a slash at the end. This allows you to either engage or disengage quickly.



Swarmblade’s third skill is summon hive. When using the ability, he throws down a hive and summons some feisty locusts to fight with him. This hits the summoner theme that a Druid should have and puts the Swarmblade as a hive-father or “king bee” of sorts. And of course, these locusts will scale with Minion Damage.



Since the hives are going to summon locusts, we designed another skill that would interact with them to help promote ability synergy. That’s where Swarmblade’s fourth and final skill comes in - Swarm Strike. Swam Strike is a 360 degree heavy spin attack that also rallies your summoned bugs around you dealing heavy AoE damage. This ability really rounds out the Swarmblade’s toolkit.



With every new transformation comes a new skill tree and Swarmblade is no exception. Swarmblade’s specialization tree is packed with a wide variety of powerful or nodes supporting different playstyles. As in the case of Werebear and Spriggan, Swarmblade also has several options to generate rage to stay in the form longer or even permanently.



An important part of our Druid overhaul is also allowing players to utilize other Primalist’s skills even while being transformed. You will find several different options inside the skill tree.



Here are a few examples of some new and powerful Swarmblade nodes.





We’re moving away from a Mana based resource for all Druid transforms and replacing it with a new resource called Rage. This new resource system comes with new mechanics to support a wide variety of playstyles including permaform builds as well as multiform builds. To catch up on the new rage mechanic we provide more info in our previous blogs - Werebear and Spriggan.

Now that all three forms are revealed we can talk about something really exciting. For those of you who prefer a more versatile approach to shapeshifting - we have added support for the powershifting playstyle, and we are so excited to see what our community can do with the power of multiform support at their fingertips.

To achieve this, there are now nodes in each skill tree that allow you to shift directly into another form without having to revert back to a human first. These direct transformations also come with an additional effect.









Thank you for joining us this week for this discovery of our newly designed Druid Mastery. We hope to see you Werebears, Spriggans and Swarmblades fighting back the void across Eterra when 0.8.4 drops later this year.

Oh and don’t worry, we have plenty more to share in the coming weeks.

Druid Rework Development Week:

1st November - Werebear Form Blog Post
2nd November - Entangling Roots Blog Post
3rd November - Spriggan Form Blog Post
4th November - New Form Teaser
5th November - Druid Rework Overview and New Form

We hope you enjoyed our new Entangling Roots design in the Entangling Roots Blog. We are thrilled to have you back again for our next reveal.

Today marks day three of our Druid Development Week, so stay tuned in the coming days to catch even more great news (full schedule below)! Today, we will be focusing on the Druid’s most adaptive transformation - the Spriggan.

The design goal of the new Spriggan form is to connect our players to the 'magical spellcaster rooted in nature' type of fantasy. This involved committing to a couple thematic design goals:

• The Spriggan would not utilize any movement abilities. Being a tree-man, he can’t move very quickly without breaking the fantasy.
  
• All attacks and spells should be deeply rooted in nature magic
  
• The two major themes expressed through gameplay should encompass the feeling of controlling the environment and summoning nature’s creatures.

The visuals for our current Spriggan form were a bit outdated and the abilities felt rather clunky and difficult to use. All around, he needed of a lot of love. Here is some of our early concept art for the model redesign:




Once we decided upon the concept art and the details within, we set forth to create a new epic model for the Druid’s Spriggan form. Complete with hardened bark, a variety of natural growth, and an ancient glowing power within, our new Spriggan form stands ready to take on any threat.



We’ve given our new Spriggan form an exciting new transformation animation and integrated the casting of a new ability while transforming: Thorn Shield. Casting Thorn Shield while transforming into Spriggan strongly communicates the fantasy of becoming a tree. It feels great in dangerous situations, and connects the player with the soul of the Spriggan fantasy.



This patch we have updates to all of the abilities which include replacing Vale Blast with Spirit Thorns, and replacing Root Wall with Thorn Shield. Let's dive into each of these decisions a bit more below.

Vale Blast, while decent at single target damage, felt rather lackluster and its theming did not fit well. Generic green laser blast of sorts doesn't really scream "nature magic." Also, we're removing Ice Thorns from Primalist this patch, so we would be lacking in any spell cast where you are creating thorns, which is very appropriate for a nature caster. So that led us to building Spirit Thorns. This is a single target, or multitarget, skill that feels much more satisfying to use than Ice Thorns or Vale Blast currently does, and really hits on that Spriggan nature theme.



While we loved the theme of Root Wall, we’ve ultimately decided it wasn’t effective or impactful enough, so it was time for it to retire. Its replacement, Thorn Shield, is a rather different skill compared to Root Wall. It forms a protective barrier of thorns around you that grants armor and reflects a flat amount of damage to attackers. When the shield expires, a burst of thorns shoots out and damages all nearby enemies. For Thorn Shield, we wanted to double down on the thorn theme, and also fully empower and support a “thorns” style of gameplay, where things die just from touching you. Being able to cast it on your companions also enables a fun playstyle where you stand back and send your thorny bear into battle for you. Or you can even sprout some thorns on your friends as they charge into the fray.



Healing Totem and Summon Vines are both keeping their current base functionality but gain visual updates and several new options in the overhauled skill tree. The reworked Spriggan Form minions often feel like new skills when using them in battle.





As we discussed in the Werebear Blog, we're moving away from a mana based resource for all Druid transforms and they will use a new resource called Rage. There will be many ways to recover Rage such as the examples below.



Similar to the Werebear, one of our major redesign goals with the Spriggan skill tree is to allow players to bring in the power of other skills while transformed. This will allow players to make more strategic decisions when choosing which other skills they wish to specialize in.



The entire Spriggan skill tree has been redesigned with the intent to allow our community of Travelers to create many new builds and explore new ways to play.

Here are some of our favorite new nodes:




Great Vine lives up to its name

Thank you for joining us for this reveal of the changes coming to the Druid’s Spriggan form in Patch 0.8.4. We hope you love the new direction for the Druid and, as always, would love to hear your feedback in the comments! We hope to see you again tomorrow for a sneak peak at our Druid’s new and final transformation!

Here is a peek at what you can expect this week! See you next time!

Druid Rework Development Week:

1st November - Werebear Form Blog Post
2nd November - Entangling Roots Blog Post
3rd November - Spriggan Form Blog Post
4th November - New Form Teaser
5th November - New Form Blog Post
5th November - Druid Rework Overview Video

We hope all you Druid fans loved the unveiling of our new Werebear design in the Werebear Blog. We are thrilled to have you back again for our next reveal. We are eager to share our full vision for the future of the Druid Mastery, and all the exciting changes coming your way before the end of the year.

Today marks day two of our Druid Development Week, so stay tuned in the coming days to catch even more great news! See the full schedule below. Today, we will be focusing on the Druid’s skill - Entangling Roots.

While redesigning the Druid as a whole, we knew we needed to elevate one of his skills into the Mastery-locked section of his passive tree. After some consideration we felt that thematically, Entangling Roots fit this spot very well. By elevating the skill in this way, we also knew we had to elevate the power, visuals, and impact of the skill across the board to make sure it was worth committing to. We are thrilled to share with you the results of that work below.



We wanted to keep the core fantasy of rooting large groups of enemies while also being open to changing other aspects. We quickly came across 3 design challenges.

• Currently it created too much visual noise by being a large persistent area of effect, and this was a major barrier to bringing its VFX up to our latest quality standards as it had a negative impact on performance.
  
• In it’s current form, Entangling Roots simply slowed enemies rather than completely immobilizing them resulting in them doing a slow walking animation that again did not hold up to our standards.
  
• New enemies walking onto the skill’s area were also effectively rooted. This often created a pile-up effect as enemies were all stopping at the edge of the skill’s effected area. This made it harder to solve as completely immobilizing the enemies exacerbates the pile-up effect.

To combat visual noise it made sense to avoid leaving a persistent visual effect on the ground for the full duration of the root. From a mechanical perspective, losing the persistent ground effect would have the added benefit of preventing the pile up issue, as no new enemies could be rooted after the initial cast. As such, we changed the skill from having a persistent ground effect to having an initial impact that left enemies immobilized, while also suffering damage over time.



From a visual perspective, this meant we could focus the roots visuals around individual enemies, allowing us to increase the prominence of the roots without causing too much visual noise and increase their visual fidelity without sacrificing performance.

The end result is a fresh take on a classic Druid-themed skill that we are very proud to share with our community. We hope you enjoy exploring this newly energized skill and its brand new skill tree full of unique decisions and powerful changes.


The skill specialization tree is also getting a complete overhaul with a wide variety of options for different druid playstyles. Enjoy a taste of what Entangling roots skill has to offer!

Values have been omitted as we are still balancing the skill.

















Thank you for joining us for this reveal of the changes coming to the Entangling Roots skill in Patch 0.8.4. We hope you enjoy the new direction for the Druid and, as always, would love to hear your feedback in the comments! We hope you join us again soon to check out the exciting updates coming to the Druid’s most adaptive transformation - the Spriggan.

Here is a peek at what you can expect this week!

Druid Rework Development Week:

1st November - Werebear Form Rework
2nd November - Entangling Roots Rework
3rd November - Spriggan Form Rework
4th November - New Form Teaser
5th November - Druid Overhaul Overview and New Form

We hope all you Druid fans are ready for some excitement because heading into patch 0.8.4 our Primalist’s most adaptive Mastery is receiving a full development update. We are eager to share our vision for the future of the Druid Mastery, and all the exciting changes coming your way before the end of the year.

Today marks the kickoff of our Druid Development Week, so stay tuned over the coming days to catch even more great news (full schedule below)! Today, we will be focusing the Druid’s first and most ferocious transformation - the Werebear.
We’re moving away from a mana based resource for all Druid transforms. Previously, to maximize time in the form you often had to avoid using your heavier abilities and that resulted in one-dimensional gameplay where you mostly spammed your low cost abilities. Instead, all Druid transformations will now use a new resource called Rage. Rage will be restored to full when you enter a form and will then drain slowly over time. Skills themselves will have little to no Rage cost by default so it won’t feel punishing to utilize your whole set of abilities while transformed.

There will be many ways to recover Rage, so you have a lot of build options if you want to stay in one form for a long duration. Reaching the point where you can stay in a form indefinitely should be much easier than before and there will be more ways to achieve it.



The design goal of our new Werebear model is to connect our players to a 'massive, in your face brawler' type of fantasy. We started with new concept art, increasing the size and presence of our thick-furred fighter. Concept #3 - 'Top Heavy' was quickly selected as the best champion of this fantasy.





Next came the design of our new ferocious model. Below you will find the upgraded version of our Werebear complete with new textures & materials including bone, claw, fur and war paint.





When recreating the Werebear we knew we wanted him to feel like a massive brawler. Some of the design requirements here included moderate mobility and heavy sweeping attacks. The previous Werebear kit missed the mark in a few areas. Firstly, Charge felt too fast for the size and stature behind the Werebear. Secondly, Swipe was a bit too successful at restoring your Mana, preventing our Druid players from feeling the desire for working in Roar or Ravage into their rotations.

In our 0.8.4 redesign the Werebear form has a mix of both new and returning skills, and even the returning ones have been revamped with new VFX, sounds, altered base functionality, and new potential in their skill trees! Here is a sneak peek of the new skills being added to the Werebear’s ferocious arsenal.
Swipe is one of the more successful elements of the previous Werebear form. The ability to use the existing Swipe skill tree to augment your Werebear’s abilities was really great. It lets you create a stronger build while not wasting those precious specialization slots if you wanted to be permanently transformed. We saw this and made a focused effort to get a few more interactions like Swipe into each of the Transform trees. Every good brawler also needs a consistent, spammable, damage skill, and Swipe fits that role very well.


We replaced the old Werebear Roar with Warcry because it felt extremely thematic and fitting. This also reduced redundancy within the Primalist skills as a whole. We were then able to apply a re-shuffle of the skill unlocks, allowing Warcry to be unlocked in base Primalist instead of Beastmaster. Now, if players choose to specialize in Warcry they will gain the full effects in their ferocious Werebear form.


Maul is a new skill for Werebear, replacing Ravage. Ravage had two issues that we wanted to resolve. Firstly it didn’t feel distinct enough from Swipe to use, given its similar status as a low AoE melee attack, and it was difficult to balance it to compete with Swipe when the latter had its own entire tree. Secondly, the new werebear model has different proportions, with much larger arms and a less prominent head. A bite animation like Ravage no longer made sense with this new model.

We still wanted to include a heavier melee attack with a cooldown in Werebear form to provide a way to mix up the melee gameplay so that it’s not always just Swipe Swipe Swipe. To reinforce a distinct use case for this melee attack we decided to give it a medium to a large area of effect and gave it more damage. We added movement to it to make it feel very different to attack with, and to help add enough weight and impact to the animation. With all these changes, the old name Ravage no longer fits so well, so we changed it to Maul.


Every good brawler would really love a way to get around the battlefield quickly. Especially in an ARPG. While the Werebear’s charge provided this option and it worked mechanically, it was not ideal for a charging Werebear to be moving so fast. It was also basically the same as Lunge, which we weren’t super enthused about. So we took some of the other themes and ideas we wanted to portray to come up with a new movement skill that is unique and fun. Having a wild Rampage feels very thematic. Mechanically you don’t move super quickly, but you damage all the units along the way and you can slightly adjust your trajectory while moving.



One of the strengths of the Druid fantasy comes from its ability to adapt to danger through transformation. In our previous version of the Werebear, this transformation also came with a fair amount of restrictions. Once you transformed you lost access to the previous skills on your bar that you chose to specialize in. Our new Werebear design solves this problem by introducing several options for you to tie in previously specialized skills and utilize them while transformed. As a result the Werebear arsenal feels deeper and more diverse than ever before.
Here are just few examples of these nodes as well some other powerful ones.


Few example nodes which allow you to utilize other primalist skills in the Werebear form

Werebear specialization tree offers a wide variety of powerful nodes.

Bringer of Storms and Crackling Assault in action

Thank you for checking out this sneak peek of some of the changes coming to the Druid’s Wearbear form in Patch 0.8.4. We hope you join us again soon to check out the exciting updates coming to the Druid’s skill - the Entangling Roots.

Here is a peek at what you can expect this week! See you next time!

Druid Rework Development Week:

1st November - Werebear Form Rework
2nd November - Entangling Roots Rework
3rd November - Spriggan Form Rework
4th November - New Form Teaser
5th November - Druid Overhaul Overview and New Form

In recent patches, we update the 3D and 2D art of several weapon groups and added powerful implicit affixes to support a wide variety of builds. In the next patch, we are updating more weapon groups such as the polearms.

We’re also making a couple of changes to item type names in 0.8.4. Polearms are being renamed to Spears and maces are no longer sometimes referred to as blunt weapons instead of maces. This changes from “polearms” and “blunt weapons” to “spears” and “maces” is being made for a couple of reasons.

• When we originally named these item categories, we went with names that had wide scopes that clearly encompassed all their individual base types. However this resulted in the names themselves feeling quite dry and technical, especially blunt weapons, so when choosing the new names we instead decided to prioritize compelling names with a strong fantasy attached.
  
• The second reason is that the intentionally wide scope of the original names resulted in ambiguity where they could arguably refer to base types that did not belong to them. In the case of polearms, we have items like the Imperial Halberd and Lucerne, which are an axe and mace respectively (they work better with those animations), but in a real-world sense they are polearms and many other games categorize them as such. Meanwhile, blunt weapons could be understood as also including sceptres and staves, especially as the name is stylistically different to something like “swords” or “axes” and so could easily be misconstrued as referring to a larger category of items.
  For both new names, there will be more cases where the item type doesn’t perfectly describe an individual base type, such as Spear for Trident or Mace for Pick Hammer. However we believe that this style of naming convention for these item types is common enough in RPGs that this won’t trip many people up, and if someone is unsure about an item’s item type it is better if that confusion is just not knowing what it is (e.g. “what is a club? Is it a mace or something else?”), than mistakenly believing that it’s the wrong item type (e.g. “I’m guessing that Lucerne is a Polearm”).

Now, let’s take a closer look at some of our new Spear weapons, which you will be able to find in 0.8.4.


















We’ll be sharing more exciting news about upcoming content and features very soon through our social media channels so make sure to follow along:

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In the October 2021 Development Update we revealed our plans for Patch 0.8.4 and beyond where we talked about our ongoing efforts to increase the visual quality and fidelity of the game. New character models are an important step for the future of Last Epoch. The upgraded models will increase the fidelity of the characters, and lay the groundwork for facial animation support during key story moments in future updates.

The Sands of Majasa Update brought an exciting new Primalist model and armor set - something you can continue to look forward to in our next update. Next up on the remodel, the Sentinel!




In addition to the new model, the Sentinel is getting two new armor sets. Say goodbye to his starter armor set, one of the oldest sets in the game! In the image below you can see the replacement for our beloved and internally coined “bucket-head armor set”.



The second Sentinel armor set coming in Patch 0.8.4 will start dropping in mid-game. Our art team has added a lot of new details to this collection, combining several materials like leather, cloth, and metal. We continue to push ourselves towards new and higher standards for our character models and we are very proud of the work done here with the Sentinel.



We hope you enjoyed our first look at the new Sentinel model and armor sets. We’ll be sharing more information and teasers on the upcoming patch through our social media channels so make sure to follow along:

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Hello, Travelers!

Our most recent release, The Sands of Majasa Update, raised the quality bar for our patch releases and is a good example of what our growing team is able to accomplish. We welcomed thousands of new Travelers to our community, and with your help we hope to continue building a home for all Last Epoch players for years to come.



To our outstanding community members who have been working hard to keep in-game chat an inclusive and welcoming experience for all of our new Travelers - thank you! Due to our quickly expanding community, we acknowledge the need for a major update to our in-game chat services to provide you with a fun and functional experience. We’ll have more to share on our plans for updating chat in the near future.


We know players are excited about multiplayer in Last Epoch and we can’t wait to play with all of you, however, there is still work to be done before we can open the floodgates. We feel it is important to remain transparent about our progress, which is why we publish a monthly multiplayer status report. Last week, we released Multiplayer Progress Update - September 2021. To learn more, check also our Multiplayer FAQ.


A few months back we talked about changes to our roadmap format. The goal of this change is to better inform players about what’s coming to the game next. And in the spirit of these changes, today we’d like to share our forecast for 0.8.4.



As you can see in the updated forecast, the next patch will bring a lot of interesting content and long-awaited changes. Let’s take a closer look at what you can look forward to in patch 0.8.4, coming later this year.


Legendary items and the Eternity cache are a major feature of 0.8.4. Since announcing these features all the way back in 2018 we’ve iterated on their design a lot internally to ensure that they enhance Last Epoch’s itemization by providing great end-game chase and make item drops more exciting. . We’re not ready to announce exactly how Legendary items work or how the Eternity Cache factors into their acquisition, but hold onto your exalted items that have good affixes. You’ll want them.


Earlier this year we talked about plans to improve the Druid mastery and especially the transformation skills and mechanics . Here are some changes you can expect to see in this next update:

• New Druid form
  
• Transform skills are all getting new visuals
  
• Transform skills are all getting new skill trees
  
• New transform mechanics including a new resource system
  
• The ability to stay in transforms permanently more easily
  
• Support for multi-form builds
  
• Keybinding for druid form abilities
  
• Reworks and Updates to other druid skills

We will share more about these changes in the upcoming weeks, but for now, enjoy this sneak peek of our reworked Werebear gameplay.




Patch 0.8.4 will bring our first dungeon into the game. The dungeon system is another major system in Last Epoch that we will build upon over time adding more dungeons and dungeon mechanics in later updates. We will have more information for you closer to the patch release, but for now, we can reveal that it will utilize our first iteration of map layout randomization and will offer different gameplay compared to Monolith maps.


Crafting in Last Epoch is one of our fan-favorite systems so when making updates to it, we want to be careful not to change what players like about it. However, we feel there are some issues with the current system. For example, the random factor and fracturing items can lead to “feel bad” and frustrating moments.

In 0.8.4, crafting will get some major changes. It will still be deterministic, and involve using shards to augment or add specific modifiers on the item, and we also still keep an element of randomization. However, that randomization will no longer come in the form of an item suddenly fracturing.


We are improving Last Epoch’s visuals every patch and 0.8.4 will be no different. For example, In the Sands of Majasa Update, the Primalist got a new model and we will be adding new models for the rest of our characters in this upcoming patch. New models will support facial animations which will be important for the future improvements of the game. We are also hard at work on creating new and updated armor sets as we’re nearing completion brand new models on all of our in-game weapons and offhands.

Many visual effects, that don’t represent the current quality of Last Epoch visuals are being reworked. Some initial targets beyond the Druid rework include Flame Reave, Serpent Strike, Wandering Spirits, Frenzy, Haste, and many on-hit visuals.



We also are constantly looking to update older enemies. Some of the void enemies encountered early in the game are some of the oldest and are being brought up to our modern standards.



Another enemy that we will be replacing is all forms of Spriggans.



Last Epoch’s character creation and selection screen is also showing its age as many have pointed out. We understand that first impressions are very important and we’re reworking these screens entirely to include new visuals, better representation of characters, and updated UI.


One of our long-term goals is to continue to improve and rework campaign chapters to bring the quality of the campaign up to our new standards. We are adding more voice acting, making dialogue and narrative adjustments to help engage players with the story, and working on lore collectibles which will give players a way to know the deeper stories of Eterra.

We also have targets that will make combat in Last Epoch feel more impactful and satisfying. It is absolutely crucial to get the feel of the combat right, and we are exploring many improvements we can make , including updating hit visual effects, exploring directional hit effects, improving hit sounds across the board, and more.

We’ll be sharing more information and teasers on the upcoming patch through our social media channels so make sure to follow along:

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Thank you all for the amazing support and opportunities you’ve provided to Eleventh Hour Games. We’re working hard to make Last Epoch a game that you want to come back to for years to come.

Hello travelers, and welcome again to the monthly multiplayer update!

Through the last month we were hard at work delivering our Sands of Majasa update, which of course takes some of our attention to ensure we can deliver a high quality release to everybody. We were humbled to see more and more engagement with new players every day, and the reality of what this means for the scale of our multiplayer release is not lost on us.

I'd like to update everybody on our goals from the August Update, as well as share some information about some decisions we've made for group Arena play. I am also going to discuss some of the learnings we have made about the scale we need to get to in order to ensure a high quality multiplayer release.

Onwards to the updates!

1. Convert the Idol System to be 100% server authoritative

This is complete and works well online. We will have ongoing work to fix a number of the Idol affixes, specifically the ones that have very unique custom properties such as casting other abilities. It's more important for us to focus on the backend and technical portions of multiplayer at the moment, so we are happy with the progress we have made here until we get to CT and MP Alpha testing.

2. Collect additional server performance data

I am very happy to say we now have this. We can now actively see the performance of all of our game servers at any given time, and we have a permanent history of them as well. It's possible for us to find outliers, good and bad performance, and major outages using our own hand build diagnostics. This is crucial for us to be able to work quickly if there are issues when we go live. If you are having a bad time when Last Epoch multiplayer goes live, we're going to know where to look right away.

3. Improve gamepad support for server-side multiplayer

We performed some preliminary investigations here, and discovered that it will take some refactoring of our existing gamepad code in order to make it easier to co-develop it with multiplayer. We know what to change and have a plan of how to do it, and anticipate no issues making it all work. We are going to return to this project once we're done focusing on our backend and scaling.

4. More testing and optimization of the Arena experience for multiple players in a party, and advance supporting systems noted above

After playtesting, we have decided that Multiplayer Arena runs will use a group voting system in order to allow players to vote on whether to continue to more challenging Waves.

How it works

• Every 5 waves, a "majority rule" voting system will determine whether the arena run continues to additional waves
  
• When a player in a group dies, they will remain down until the end of the 5 wave run. If the whole party is downed, the entire Arena run ends

A Party voting on whether they want to continue an Arena run

Why use a voting system?

During playtests, we felt that having an entire run end due to one player having to leave the party unexpectedly felt too punishing.

Using a majority vote system to progress in the Arena allows the party some level of flexibility, which is particularly beneficial when attempting longer Arena runs.

We will continue to assess the multiplayer Arena experience and make any further changes required before we release it all to you.

5. Start preparing to add Multiplayer to the Community Tester Program

I probably should have been anticipating the response here, as I caused some chaos for our support team by having the community reach out through our support network :) sorry!

We had an overwhelming response of people interested in involving themselves in our Community Testing program, no doubt aided by the fact that it might involve early Multiplayer Testing.

I want you to know that we've received everybody's responses and we'll eventually be selecting new candidates as we get ready to test our game at scale - if you've already applied we will eventually get to you.


It's first worth establishing two important concepts: Last Epoch as a multiplayer game, and Last Epoch as a platform.

The first refers to all our game content and gameplay "netcode"; setting up all the game content online, compensating for gameplay lag - essentially making sure the game is functional and feels as good as our singleplayer game does.

Last Epoch as a platform involves *everything else* it takes to bring a game online: How do we allocate you servers? What is our matchmaking code? How does our character storage database work? Can our login system handle hundreds of thousands of requests at the same time? Do we need a queue system? Do we have metric systems in place to monitor the health of all this?

We have been performing relentless testing of our multiplayer platform for Last Epoch to ensure it can scale up to handle many players, and do so in a stable manner. Between our continued development of our own skills as Live Ops developers, as well as observations about modern ARPG releases, we have learned a lot about where the real risks of a live release are (hint: the servers are the easiest part).

As a result of all this testing and learning, we have come to discover that some of our backend services may not hold up well to scale as well as we would have liked them to. We are very happy to make these kind of observations now before we release to a lot of unhappy people unable to play our game, but it still means we need to go back and make some changes.

So what does this mean? Firstly, this does not stop us working on Last Epoch multiplayer gameplay content - we're still readily adding and testing our singleplayer content and preparing it for group play, making sure it feels great and performs well. It does mean we are taking a step back on some of our backend systems to make them even better, such as the way we allocate servers, or our chat system.

While these discoveries can often feel like a setback, the reality is that we are collectively quite relieved to now have the confidence to build out our own platform and own it. We are also confident that we'll be able to quickly fix any problems that might happen when we go live. We now have a clear vision for Last Epoch as a long-term live platform, and I'd like to share more of my philosophies on that next month.


We will be focused on making the changes mentioned above for the sake of our stability and scalability. We're actually well underway in most avenues here, and we hope to be playtesting Last Epoch multiplayer with our new changes in the next coming weeks. Until then, we're still actively adding and changing game content to account for group play.

Rather than provide a list of bullet points this month, I plan on discussing the core pillars around what matters to us for a successful Multiplayer release, and what you as a player should expect from us when we go live. I will also update you on the progress we make strengthening our backend to prepare for release.

I'm sure we're also going to show you a cool gameplay feature or two ;)

Thank you so much for all the support, and I am really excited to show you all what we have cooked up for next month.

Stanzwar

Due to a miscommunication pre-patch, Javelin's Holy Trail ended up with added spell damage scaling, which was not intentional. The healing effectiveness scaling from the Path of Judgement node is meant to be a replacement for added damage scaling like it is for Consecrated Ground. Having spell damage and healing effectiveness scaling means that extremely high damage can be achieved by scaling both, because they're multiplicative with each other.

Despite this being a mistake, it has made damage over time paladin builds that scale healing effectiveness viable, which was one of our aims when adding Holy Trail. As such we have decided to keep the spell damage scaling, but make it stack additively with the healing effectiveness scaling.

• Path of Judgement grants +1 adaptive spell damage per 5% increased healing effectiveness (from 1% more damage per 1% increased healing effectiveness).
  
• Holy Trail deals 25% more damage.
  
• Pilgrimage grants 25% more fire and lightning damage (from 15%).
  
• Fixed Pilgrimage's tooltip saying that it gave just 15% melee ignite chance and melee electrify chance (it gave 25% and still does).

• 66% more damage.
  
• Now scales with increases to spell damage.
  
• Added spell damage now applies at 150% effectiveness per second.
  
• Now gains +1 adaptive spell damage per 5% increased healing effectiveness (from 1% more damage per 1% increased healing effectiveness).
  
• The increased healing effectiveness from Sanctified Serenity is now taken into account for Consecrated Ground's bonus damage per increased healing effectiveness.
  
• Lingering Force grants 12% increased duration (from 10%).
  
• Holy Eruption has 33% more base damage.
  
• Added spell damage applies to Holy Eruption at 200% effectiveness (from 100%).
  
• Holy Eruption restores 80 health (from 50).

• This change is to avoid this node warping the potential power of Consecrated Ground, while giving it a wider range of uses with other builds. Nodes like this are generally intended to provide an immediate boost of power to a single instance of an attack, rather than buff a persistent effect.
  
• Now grants +5% crit chance and +100% ignite chance per point (from 50% more fire damage).
  
• Now applies to the next melee or throwing attack (from the next melee attack).
  
• Now excludes channelled skills.

• The Dark Shackles node in the Drain Life tree adds 60 mana cost (from 65).
  
• Drain Life's beam now attaches to the Acolyte's left hand, catalyst, or shield, rather than to a fixed point behind her.
  
• Drain Life's circle vfx no longer rotates when you change its angle relative to the character.

• The Lone Watcher node on the Dread Shade tree grants 100% increased duration (from 50%).

• Changed to use the same animation as Erasing Strike which better matches the vfx and fantasy of the skill (it still has the original animation if you have the Sanctification Node which removes the melee hit).
  
• Reduced delay until you can use another ability by 20%.
  
• Range now scales with weapon range.
  
• Sigil of Sacrifice now also grants added spell damage and no longer states incorrectly that it gives base fire damage (it gave melee fire damage, and still does alongside spell fire damage).
  
• Divine Destruction now also applies to damage from Consecrated Ground.
  
• Purifying Flame now also applies to damage from Consecrated Ground and requires 1 point in Sacred Sword (from 2).
  
• Destructive Impact grants 30% increased Consecrated Ground area (from 25%).
  
• If you have nodes to remove the melee hit and turn Consecrated Ground into an aura the Move To Attack behaviour is disabled for Judgement.

• The lightning ability from Mana Strike's Mana Storm node has been named Mana Arc to help clarify that it is a subskill.
  
• Mana Arc is now affected by nodes on Mana Strike’s skill tree.

• Now reveals 4 spirits immediately on cast (from 1) - this does not affect the rate at which spirits are revealed afterwards.
  
• Deals 29% more damage.
  
• Spirits deal damage in a 7% larger area - reveal area has not been changed.
  
• Added a new node that makes the spirits shred necrotic resistance.
  
• Added a new node that makes the spirits inflict Damned.
  
• Lingering Souls grants 13% increased duration per point (from 10%), but can have 3 points allocated (from 4).
  
• Spirit Swarm no longer increases mana cost, can have 3 points allocated (from 2) and is now attached to the root node (from requiring 1 point in Lingering Souls). The increased cooldown recovery speed it gives is no longer multiplicative with other sources.
  
• Terrifying Presence no longer increases mana cost, but now requires 1 point in Spirit Swarm (from being attached to the root node).
  
• Harrowing Aura no longer reduces damage and now also increases the range at which Wandering Spirits apply necrotic shred and damned.
  
• Reap the Damned requires 1 point in Lingering Souls (from 2 points in Souls of Rage).

• Path of Heavens grants +8 adaptive spell damage (from 50% increased spell damage).
  
• Winds of Justice grants 25% Smite chance per point (from 15%) and can have 4 points allocated (from 5).
  
• Amended Warpath's description to clarify that the movement speed modifier is multiplicative.

• Added alt text to Javelin’s Siege Barrage and Divine Fury nodes to state that they are incompatible.
  
• Added alt text to Summon Wraith’s Twin Souls and Covenant of Souls to state that they are incompatible.
  
• Fixed Static Orb’s Scatter Blast node stating the small orb did less damage, and clarified that only the small orbs can’t pull or explode.
  
• Clarified Divine Essence’s tooltip to state that it excludes healing over time effects.

• Echoes that contain a Spine Hunter Alpha that is not the boss contain 50% fewer of them.
  
• Enemy types that are rarer in Echoes are now even rarer in Arena Echoes.
  
• Immortal Chimeras no longer spawn in the arena.
  
• Reduced the pack size in the area of Spine Hunters, Scalebane Rogues, Crystal Elementals, Ascendant Embermages, Emerald Nagasa, and Osprix Zealots.
  
• Ascendant Embermages now move around 10% closer to their target before attacking and have 11% less health.
  
• Diamond Nagasa have 5% less health.
  
• Crystal Elementals deal 7% less damage.
  
• Crystal Elementals have a 20% longer delay before releasing projectiles when they spin and 80% of them only use their spin attack when damaged (from 40%).
  
• Crystal Elementals' spin attack deals 10% less damage.
  
• Crystal Golems' Beam ability locks in a target direction 20% sooner and has a 25% longer cast time.
  
• Crystal Golems' Punch ability locks in a target direction 30% sooner.
  
• Emerald Nagasa deal 10% less damage.
  
• Gold Elementals' Punch ability locks in a target direction 30% sooner.
  
• Scalebane Rogues deal 12% less damage.
  
• Scarab Riders deal 30% less damage with their ranged attacks.
  
• Spine Hunters' on death effect deals 40% less damage.
  
• Spine Hunter Alphas deal 5% less damage.

• The Oblivion Wave from Anchor of Oblivion now has 100% increased base damage and gains +2 spell void damage per point of Vitality.
  
• Magma Shards from Volcanus deal 20% more damage.

• Added chat language filter options. You can now hide chat messages which contain characters from other languages/scripts.
  
  • English/Latin, Chinese, and Russian are the current options.
    
  • A default setting will be picked according to your system language, but you can change it at any time in the Social tab of the settings window.
    
  • We still plan to offer multiple global chat channels and implement chat reporting features in the future, but they are not quick to implement (and are out of scope for a hotfix).

• Fixed a bug where using Ice Barrage with the Wintry Blast and Brittle Fragments nodes would degrade performance each time you used the skill until you moved to a new zone.
  
• Fixed the visuals for Tail Swipe, Flame Reave, and Voidfused Armoury (enemy abilities) being invisible.
  
• Fixed many player and enemy abilities having missing sound effects.
  
• Fixed the Lich’s Harvested Legions passive not working.
  
• Fixed a bug where Aberrant Call did not provide additional max wraiths if you had taken Summon Wraith's Echoes Inside node.
  
• Fixed a bug where Dark Forging Ornate Solar Idols did not provide their listed increase to Void Cleave's area of effect.
  
• Fixed a bug where Riposte was classified as a Spell rather than a Melee Attack. This caused it to consume “when you cast a spell” effects, etc.
  
• Fixed Puncture’s Scalebane node having unreadable text.
  
• Fixed a bug where Mana Arc (Lightning) could not trigger if you were distant from the enemy due to Mana Strike's Teleporting Strikes node.
  
• Fixed a visual bug where Mana Strike's VFX did not increase with increased area of effect.
  
• Fixed the Game Guide entry for Time Rot stating it stacks 3 times (it stacks 12 times).
  
• Fixed a bug where the Ruby Fang Cleaver item would float behind the player.
  
• Fixed a bug where Gorgons left behind a dust devil vfx on death.
  
• Consecrated Ground
  
  • Fixed a bug where the visuals disappeared at the end of the normal duration, even if you had increased duration.
    
  • Fixed a bug where the visuals didn't scale with increased area.
    
  • When you have the Anointed node turning Consecrated Ground into an aura the visuals no longer rotate with the character.
• Drain Life
  
  • Fixed a bug where some of Drain Life's sounds would fail to play when you took the Lay Waste node.
    
  • Fixed a bug where taking the Virulence node did not convert the circle vfx to the poison variant.
    
  • Fixed a bug where taking the Dark Shackles node resulted in the circle vfx floating too far above the target location.