Hello Last Epoch community!

As we get closer to the upcoming 1.0 launch of Last Epoch on February 21st, it’s time to drop the details on what you can expect for Twitch Drops during the weeks after launch.

First off: Head on over to www.lastepoch.com/twitch and make sure your accounts are correctly linked.

Starting on February 22nd (Thursday), you can head on over to the Last Epoch category on Twitch and look for users who have drops enabled.

Four total cosmetic items can be earned, and each day will be different. The following week, starting on February 29th, each item will be available one last time in case you missed it the first go-round. You will not be able to earn two of each.




Week 1 - February 22nd - 25th

• Day 1 (Thur the 22nd) - Mantle of the Prophesier cosmetic back slot item.
  
• Day 2 (Fri the 23rd) - Green Dire-Guana pet cosmetic item.
  
• Day 3 (Sat the 24th) - Merchant’s Mantle cosmetic back slot item.
  
• Day 4 (Sun the 25th) - Blue Seer’s Orb pet cosmetic item.

Week 2 - February 29th - March 3rd

• Day 1 (Thur the 29th) - Mantle of the Prophesier cosmetic back slot item.
  
• Day 2 (Fri the 1st) - Green Dire-Guana pet cosmetic item.
  
• Day 3 (Sat the 2nd) - Merchant’s Mantle cosmetic back slot item.
  
• Day 4 (Sun the 3rd) - Blue Seer’s Orb pet cosmetic item.

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements as we look forward to Last Epoch’s amazing 1.0 Launch, starting Wednesday, February 21st, 2024!

• Fixed a bug where mini healthbars were not appearing over enemies or minions
  
• Fixed a bug where Flurry would collide with friendly players and minions
  
• Fixed a bug which could result in a Gray Splash Screen on client start
  
• Fixed an issue where Lagon would not drop potions in phases 1 and 3
  
• Fixed a bug which would result in enemies in arena not animating properly after spawning
  
  • This can still occur due to a different bug which we are still working on, however is far less frequent

• Reduced the sizes of many textures loaded on client start. This should reduce the starting memory footprint when launching the client, as well as help the client launch a bit faster. Because this reduces the start-up memory footprint, we also expect this to help with many cases of “crash-on-startup” which were due to memory issues.
  
• Added support ticket submission to in-game bug report tool for players looking for support rather than to report an issue.
  
• Several backend improvements for performance improvements while playing in a party, as well as for longer game sessions
  
• Cleaned up a number of log events which were not logging useful information

Welcome Travelers, and thank you all for joining us for November’s Developer Blog as we progress through the final stretch to 1.0. As many of you are likely already aware, yesterday saw the first reveal of our Cinematic Trailer for Last Epoch over on IGN. We want to thank everyone for the fantastic support we saw in regards to the trailer, it’s been a great morale boost to see the continued excitement for our 1.0 release. If you didn’t have a chance to check out the Cinematic Trailer yet, please do so below!



Of course, on October 20th, we also announced our roadmap to 1.0, covering the main news articles to keep an eye out for, as well as our 1.0 release date of February 21st, 2024! We’re all very excited for the big day and wanted to talk about both what to expect in regards to the roadmap, as well as share with you all some of the things we’ve been working on. I’m sure you’re all excited to hear about some of these things coming, so allow us to waste no more time and get into it!




Let us start by talking a bit about the Roadmap we showed with our Release Date announcement. As many of you are aware, 1.0 not only marks the release of Last Epoch from Early Access, but will also introduce Item Factions, The Warlock and Falconer masteries, and a host of additional updates!

In the roadmap, we showcase the major upcoming announcements leading up to our 1.0 release on February 21st. We wanted to provide a bit more context on what to expect from each of these areas and give you a bit of a look into how Last Epoch continues to support its community, with both the Warlock and Falconer previews being community-driven exclusives that are designed to bring some awesome depth of information for these masteries ahead of their release at 1.0.

As you may notice with this dev blog, this roadmap is not an exhaustive list of all news posts to expect leading up to 1.0, so you can look forward to much more insight into 1.0 before the big date. Instead, this roadmap shows the dates of when you can expect to get more information on the three headlining features for 1.0 - Item Factions, The Warlock, and The Falconer.


Fresh into the new year, keep an eye on our socials as well as here on our regular posting platforms where we’ll be releasing a comprehensive blog post diving into Item Factions: providing information on The Merchant’s Guild, The Bazaar, Circle of Fortune, and Prophecies. There’s a lot of information we’ll be sharing in this post, so look forward to getting all the info in this deep dive! As a note, to clear any potential confusion, Item Factions are launching with the 1.0 update, and not on Jan 11th.


On this date, our community member AaronActionRPG will be providing a first look at the final Acolyte Mastery - The Warlock over on Icy-Veins.com. A long-time fan of the acolyte class, a huge supporter of Last Epoch, and a great member of the community, we are excited to see what Aaron and Icy-Veins have in store for the reveal. As a note - The Warlock will be coming with the 1.0 update, and this will be an early informational look at the class.


Just over a month before Patch 1.0, the bird will be the word over on Maxroll.gg with the first look into the final Rogue Mastery - The Falconer. We’ve worked with the team over at Maxroll before, and are happy to be rejoining them for this reveal leading up to release. Here, some of our hardest-going community members will be representing Maxroll for this reveal, so we know no interaction will be left unturned. Find out how the Falcon works, what kind of skills will be coming with the mastery, and what kind of stats to expect on the Falconer over on Maxroll.gg on February 8th! As a note - The Falconer will be coming with the 1.0 update, and this will be an early informational look at the class.


The big day! On February 21st, 2024, Last Epoch will be releasing with version 1.0! On this day, everyone will be able to play the Full Last Epoch experience with Item Factions, The Warlock, The Falconer, and all the other improvements we’ve been hard at work on!

Of course, 1.0 is just the start of our journey here at Eleventh Hour Games as we plan for many years of content to come. However we cannot understate our excitement to be hitting this massive milestone, and look forward to seeing you on Launch Day!


A couple of weeks ago we invited everyone to provide feedback on things they wish they knew as a new player to Last Epoch. We would like to thank everyone for providing responses to this form, and we’ll be going over this great feedback to find further improvements to the new player experience we can sneak into 1.0, as well as what kind of community resources we can put together to continue supporting you all in your travels.

If you haven’t had a chance yet to provide feedback on things you wish you knew as a new player, let us know by following this link to the form: https://forms.gle/8Mg9u7e1NJcyDJph9 .

Now, Lets take a look at a few of the improvements coming on the big day!



One of our major goals for the game is to improve both visual quality and performance across the board. To continue chasing this goal, we are making multiple changes to our lighting systems, shaders, and more.

Historically, many of our scenes felt a bit floaty, with characters and objects not grounded in the way we would wish. A big part of this issue was missing good contact shadows and shadows in general. There are many reasons why this is not as simple to solve as it may look - the most significant reason is of course the performance.

One of the systems we have improved for 1.0 is Ambient Occlusion. Our new implementation creates much more accurate contact shadows and brings much-needed depth into many of our scenes.

In addition to ambient occlusion improvements, we are also adding a modern screen-space Soft Shadow system. In many scenes, where we previously did not have any shadows, player light is now the source of physical light where objects around the player properly cast shadow, which is increasing much more dramatic lightning in our scenes, while still keeping performance in check. Since this is screen space solution, it has fixed performance cost, no matter how many objects or monsters are on the screen.



In addition, we are reworking lighting in almost every scene in the game, with multiple goals in mind - to improve performance, to increase the visibility of the player, and frankly, to improve the visual fidelity of our scenes.

Here is our EoT scene as an example. With new ambient occlusion, shadow system, and reworked lighting, all objects in the scene feel more grounded, the player character is clearly visible and there is a much better sense of depth.




The scene variant system is another major system we are introducing for 1.0. It is basically a set of tools and shaders which allow us to improve the visual quality of our scenes and add more variety to the game. It allows us to create dramatically different-looking scenes by using scene variant templates

In the past, it was quite hard for us to create different variants of the scene, having different weather effects or changing our vegetation. In most cases, we needed to create new materials, new texture maps or assets, and decals, and combine them to achieve results we needed - which has a negative impact on performance, since it all can increase draw calls.

However with shader changes, we now can change the vegetation, wetness of our surfaces, and add puddles to the scene using just shader functions. In other words, we can now have richer looking scenes, while improving performance in the process.

This set of tools also allows us to create new scenes more quickly, allowing the level design team to focus on, well, level design, without trying to solve technical issues and challenges.

Last, but not least, it allows us to bring much more variety into the game. For example monolith scene can look very different each time you will enter it, as you can see in some of the examples below!

We have big plans for the system and you will see us utilize it more and more as the game progresses in the future.




We’ve heard all of the feedback regarding the Shaman Mastery and agree. For 1.0 we’ll be revisiting our favorite warrior of the north (sorry Grael), giving this mastery some much needed love helping to bring it up to par with the other mastery options in Eterra. With this revisit to Shaman, we won’t be doing a complete rework of the mastery; However, we know some aspects of the mastery can be a bit lacking at the moment, and we decided it needed some time dedicated to it in preparation for 1.0.

These changes are still a work in progress, so for today’s post we’ll just be speaking a short bit to one of the big improvements coming to Shaman with the reworked Tempest Strike skill. We’ll also be making changes to the Mastery’s Passive Tree to improve options in the tree and a new, as of yet to be disclosed skill. Expect more information in a later post!


Tempest Strike, as it’s currently implemented, is a spammable melee skill imbuing each strike with a chance to trigger elemental storm spells on hit, and offering elemental penetration instead of attack speed scaling. Being a hybrid skill with both attack and spell features, with the spell procs not being the most reliable, and lack of attack speed scaling, Tempest Strike has been in a fairly rough spot. As such, Tempest Strike is getting a complete rework for 1.0, keeping the same name and theme, but with completely new mechanics, skill tree, and even role as a skill.



As of 1.0, Tempest Strike will instead be a powerful high-cost combo ability. With each strike of your weapon, Tempest Strike will flow through launching penetrating icicles, creating tornadoes, and expanding rings of lightning. In its tree you’ll find the ability to specialize into each of these strikes making them more powerful, or removing them for other benefits. You’ll also find the reworked Tempest Strike will be quite favorable to building attack speed, allowing you to rage an elemental storm through hordes of enemies with a whole new suite of animations and VFX.

Speaking of storms, this change to Tempest Strike leaves a vacancy within Primalist for a low cost generator, or filler skill, tailored towards Shaman - but that’s a story for another time as we get closer to 1.0.


We’ve gotten a lot of feedback concerning endgame echo modifiers, as well as corruption scaling. As such, we’ve decided this is another great area we can add polish to with our release. In this area, there was two main pieces of feedback we wanted to address. The first is inequality and obfuscation of Echo Modifiers, and the second is the effects of scaling corruption.


With Echo Modifiers, we wanted to focus on enemy power coming less from the modifiers themselves, and more from the inherent strength of high level enemies and Corruption directly. The goal of these changes are primarily to achieve a more predictable experience in high corruption Timelines.

To accomplish this we’ve made Echo Modifiers have shorter durations (now lasting a maximum of three echoes), and importantly made these mods no longer scale with corruption or distance from center.



As we dove into echo modifiers, there was a number of mods which scaled invisibly with corruption including enemies enraging at half health, Enemies have high speed and crit chance until approached, and enemies are deadly if not damaged recently.

These mods actually scaled at the same rate as increased damage modifiers, which if you're familiar with these mods, means these quickly became extremely deadly without clearly presenting the increasing difficulty of these mods. This will no longer be the case as these will now have fixed values alongside all other mods, including the infamous increased damage mods.

We're still tweaking numbers for this and testing the changes, so we're not quite ready to share numbers. These changes to Echo modifiers should make for a smoother more predictable experience, however don't expect tackling endgame scaling to suddenly be an easier task.


While Echo modifiers are getting reigned in, we’re also shifting some of that power from scaling modifiers directly into Corruption scaling. The difficulty modifier from corruption will now scale much more quickly meaning corruption will be the primary method of scaling difficulty, and hitting these points should be both a quicker and smoother experience. For this, we feel it’s important to provide some numbers here for context, however please do keep in mind these numbers are still subject to change:


100 corruption: 60% more monster damage and health (from 50%)
200 corruption: 170% more monster damage and health (from 100%)
300 corruption: 281% more monster damage and health (from 147%)
500 corruption: 505% more monster damage and health (from 289%)

Corruption will now also slightly scale up the average legendary potential and weaver’s will values. This means item rarity from echo modifiers will increase the total number of unique item drops for more chances at Legendary potential, while Corruption will have a multiplicative effect directly increasing the chance for Legendary Potential on each Unique item which drops.


With 1.0 being such a significant point for us, features are not the only thing we’re working on. We’re continuing to work through many of the current bugs, Improving our networking, improving performance, and addressing many balance concerns brought forward by you all. We want to ensure Last Epoch has the best launch it can for everyone, and we’re working hard towards that goal.

With 0.9.0, we had to change a number of processes with the Community Tester program, meaning we weren’t able to get the program back up and running for 0.9.1, and managed to get the program up and running only just before 0.9.2. We know with this, there’s been feedback and concerns regarding if there will be sufficient testing and review of these big new features coming to Last Epoch. We’re happy to say that the program already started a week ago providing testing a few of these upcoming features, and have already started adjusting to feedback from these community members!

Currently the program isn’t accepting additional members, however we wanted to provide the reassurance that we’re as always committed to working closely with the community, and making sure we fulfill that cooperation and coordination for these important features. Though not limited to the CT Program, we as always will be keeping a close eye on everyone’s feedback as we continue on the path to 1.0 and beyond.

Thank you all for for taking the time to read up on the latest goings-on here at Eleventh Hour Games. For more information concerning 1.0 and all things Last Epoch, make sure to mark the Roadmap Events on your calendar, keep tuned into our social channels, and join us on Discord at discord.gg/lastepoch for further blog posts and teasers as we work forward to the February 21st release!

• Fixed a bug where a Lost Cache could be looted multiple times
  
• Fixed a bug where simultaneously exploding Volatile Zombies creating Infernal Shades could exceed the Shade limit
  
• Fixed a bug where holding Shift would not prevent movement
  
• Fixed a bug where Region Select was defaulting to US-Central
  
• Fixed a bug where Exiled Mage's Mana strike was not able to reach players
  
• Fixed a bug where closing the in-game Bug Report tool with esc would disable game inputs
  
• Fixed a bug where some Osprix enemies would appear invisible in Liath's Tower
  
• Fixed some instances of pink particle effects

Hello Travelers!

A quick hotfix today to resolve an issue where a small number of players were unable to log in.

• Fixed a bug where some newly created characters were being generated with items using a newer version of item serialization that the live client was not able to deserialize preventing the character from loading, or any character if the item was placed in the stash.

Along with today’s hotfix, we also want to provide a quick update of some of the bugs and fixes we are continuing to work on.

A fix went out for this in 0.9.2f, however withheld the patch note as we still saw a reproduction of the case internally. However, we believe this was purely internal and the fix did correctly work. If you’re still experiencing blockers in offline Temporal Sanctum, please let us know.

There is a bug with two nodes in Volatile Zombie that are triggering while at negative mana. (Abilities which consume mana shouldn’t trigger while at negative mana.)

We have some fixes and adjustments we’ve made internally focused around these bugs and skill interactions which are currently planned to be released at 1.0, which we’ll share for awareness. Please note that these changes are still subject to further change, or omission with other changes. The planned changes:

• Fixed a bug where Volatile Zombies’s Grand Sacrifice and Effigy of Combustion could trigger while on negative mana
  
• Volatile Zombie changes: Dreadful Horde and Giant Zombie now only have a 10% chance to trigger their effects on indirect casts (from always triggering), such as via Awakening Presence or the Experimental Belt affix
  
• Giant Zombie gives 120% increased mana cost (from 300%)

Our current decision of not releasing these in a hotfix is due to the power of the builds that rely on this, and that it doesn’t greatly impact performance negatively (server and/or client). We generally want to avoid hotfix changes that suddenly invalidate builds, particularly when that change could prevent others from pushing as far on leaderboards. We’re always eager to hear your thoughts on these sorts of decisions.

The changes to Giant Zombie were unrelated to the bugs, but are general changes to make indirectly casting Giant Zombie less necessary when using Volatile Zombie as a damage skill.

Here’s a list of some of the other fixes we’re currently working on. Please keep in mind this is not exhaustive, but some of the more commonly reported items which are in the works.

• Flurry collides with players and minions in online play
  
• Flurry is producing too many projectiles
  
• We’ve seen reports of this still occurring since the last patch, and are re-investigating
  
• Flurry sometimes not hitting with very high attack speeds
  
• Detonating Arrow Cone is exploding in the wrong direction
  
• Flame Rush tracks Rune generation between skill uses
  
• Effigy boss (giant worm) can spawn loot off the map
  
• Skeleton enemies missing health bars and hover outlines
  
• Enemies in arena not properly animating after spawning
  
• Runic Invocation’s “Unbridled Ruin” not providing its damage bonus
  
• Teleporting back to town doesn’t put you near your portal

We have deployed a fix following the patch to resolve an issue where players were unable to transition zones, or connect to some towns (such as upon log-in). If you’re still experiencing these issues, please make sure you restart your client and have the latest patch. We apologize for the disruption.

• Fixed a bug where the Soul Eater Backslot was on the wrong layer causing some decals to appear on top of it
  
• Fixed a number of abilities that, in online play, when used multiple times in the same scene would stop working or start behaving differently. The most common occurrences of this issue were:
  
• Blade Shield would not spawn Shurikens after first cast in a scene, if it hit an enemy
  
• Flurry would generate too many arrows and Multishot procs
  
• Cinder Strike’s first attack would not deal damage
  
• Fixed a bug where Town Chat would be unavailable while in a town scene
  
• Several bugfixes for Town reliability and connection issues
  
• Fixed a bug where Frost Claw projectiles would be deleted when coming into contact with Water
  
• Fixed a bug where Osprix Raiders would appear invisible in Liath’s Tower

• Added Keybind for “Force Move”. This is unbound by default.
  
• Removed Lost Caches from spawning in Arena Echoes

• Updated dropdown options to better match types of bug reports
  
• Replaced “Severity” selection with a “Unable to Progress” checkbox
  
• Added additional information to Bug Report Tool for contacting support when looking for assistance rather than submitting a report

Travelers,

I’m thrilled to announce that Eleventh Hour Games is launching the long-awaited 1.0 version of Last Epoch on February 21st, 2024. After a journey that started with the dream of uniting genre enthusiasts to create the next great ARPG and forming an after-hours team through Reddit, to holding a successful Kickstarter 18 months later, and then building Last Epoch alongside our passionate community throughout Early Access… we’re confident in saying that we’ve made something truly special.

Last Epoch’s 1.0 launch will mark a new beginning for Eterra, and will set a new bar for quality, polish, gameplay feel, and visual excellence. Beyond 1.0, Eleventh Hour Games will bring substantial new content to Last Epoch every few months in what we call “Cycles”. These releases will contain additions and refinements to many aspects of the game, such as end-game content, skills, unique items, gameplay systems, quality-of-life features, etc.

We understand that February is later than we had initially targeted for this release; however, our original December timeline became a bit crowded with other studios’ releases, and we didn’t want to force the ARPG community to have to choose. By moving our date, we’ll also be able to take advantage of a few more months of polish for our new systems and classes, complete more bug-fixing, and reinforce our team with a restful and well-deserved holiday break.

We thank you all for your unwavering support and enthusiasm that has allowed Eleventh Hour Games to make this game for all of us. We hope you will join us in Eterra this February and invite your friends to join in a new co-op hack-and-slash experience!

- Judd Cobler
Game Director, Last Epoch

Hello Travelers,

We’re releasing a quick hotfix to address a few issues with Towns instances. This hotfix aims to resolve issues with Town servers ‘zombifying’ preventing new players from joining the Town instance. The most common incarnation of this issue was preventing players from being able to log in with characters to the End of Time within a given region.

• Fixed a bug where Town servers would sometimes “zombify” preventing players from accessing the Town

Hello Travelers!

We’re releasing a quick hotfix today to resolve a progression blocking bug within Council Chambers. We are still working on a number of other bugfixes for a complete patch, but wanted to get this fix out ASAP.

• Fixed a bug where the barrier would sometimes fail to dispel in Council Chambers preventing access to The Sheltered Woods

Hello Travelers!

We have a whole bunch of fixes we’re releasing in today’s Patch. Two of the fixes we were targeting for this patch - Offline Temporal Sanctum Progression, and Ground Decals carrying over between echoes weren’t quite able to get in. The changes for these items unfortunately aren’t quite fixing them, and we don’t want to delay all the other updates for them. While we continue to be hard at work on those bugs (and others), read below for all the fixes and updates out today!

• Fixed a bug that occasionally resulted in a duplicate player body after entering a new scene.
  
• Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented Rune Prisons from spawning their encounters.

• Fixed a bug where Puncture would sometimes deal 1 damage
  
• Added Scaling Tags to Glyph of Dominion
  
• Fixed a bug where Frost Claw would leave a 'trail' on the ground when converted to Fire or Lightning
  
• Fixed a rare bug where some abilities could fail to hit
  
• Fixed a small timing issue with Runebolt
  
• Runebolt’s explosive skill tree node has had its placeholder name updated.

• Fixed a bug where players were unable to Unhide Quests on the Map
  
• Fixed a bug where changing or disabling a Loot Filter would sometimes prevent players from closing the Loot Filter panel
  
• Fixed a bug where Medium Item Names was displaying Long Item Names
  
• Fixed a bug where clicking on quests on the Map would not always bring Players to the proper node on the Map Screen

• Fixed ability pooling for Shade of Orobyss and Majasa
  
• Added ability pooling for a number of enemies to increase performance
  
• Fixed a bug where Exiled Mage's Mana Strike would fail to hit players
  
• Adjusted VFX for Winged Fire, and Dreadworm enemies
  
• Updated Skeleton’s weapon materials

• Fixed a bug where there was incorrect spacing between Hanja in Korean chat
  
• Added several localization updates

• Fixed health recovery stacking from Death Rattle
  
• Fixed a bug with the Unique gloves “Hand of Judgment” which resulted in abnormally rolled values.

• Fixed a bug that prevented some hardcore players from transitioning to softcore properly upon death.
  
• Implemented improvements to server stability and optimization
  
• Reduced matchmaking timeouts from 10min to 5min (This is not the AFK timer, but how long a server will wait for user connections, such as during a loading screen)
  
• Added several lighting improvements in Chapter H - Maj’elka

Thank you for your bug reports and feedback, including through our new in-game bug reporter. We’re still working on addressing more issues for future patches.

Here are some things we’re currently investigating:

• Decals persisting and layering from scene to scene.
  
• Progression blocker in Temporal Sanctum (offline)
  
• Transition times between scenes
  
• Rarely disconnecting immediately after connecting to a new server.
  
• Enemies in Arena and Monolith often do not animate properly
  
• Continuing localization and translation improvements