Welcome to the final Pre-Patch Hype Week Blog Post! This is our last Hype Week post before The Patch Notes, and today, we’ll discuss some of the Quality of Life changes, as well as a few other game improvements, coming with Last Epoch Season 2: Tombs of the Erased on April 17th.
We’ll also expand on some features you may have already seen through our Announcement Trailer, Twitch Streams, Eterra Monthly Newsletters, or the recent Dev Podcasts and cover some new exciting features yet to be mentioned. So, let’s dive right in!
Mastery Respecialization
As a carefully kept secret until the Announcement Trailer, players will be able to respecialize their Mastery from Season 2 onwards - for a price, of course.
Chronomancer Lerinne is already adept at helping you respecialize your Passive Points, and you can now respecialize your Class Mastery at the end of time. Simply choose the ‘Respecialize Mastery’ option, and Lerinne will let you know how much Gold will be required. Be aware that selecting a new Mastery will reset all your Passive Points.
Eternity Cache Changes
Crafting is something Last Epoch is known for doing well, and we continue to improve and offer new ways for players to get creative and maximize their potential. With that, we took a look at the Eternity Cache crafting system. Taking that 2 or 3 Legendary Potential Unique and not getting the T7 Exalted Affix you’re after can be frustrating, especially if you already had a 1 Legendary Potential Unique that successfully took the same T7 Exalted affix, so we’ve introduced a quality of life change to ease that pain. However, for players wishing to truly leave their items in the hands of Eterra, that option will remain.
From Tier 2 and above in the Temporal Sanctum, players will be able to choose 1 affix to guarantee crafting on to their Unique when sealing, while the rest of the Exalted affixes will be decided by the Uniques LP level and Fate.
Speaking of fate, however, just like regular Forge crafting, there is now also a chance for a “Critical Success” when crafting via the Eternity Cache. This adds the potential to seal affixes past the Legendary Potential level of the Unique, so an item with 1 Legendary Potential that experiences a “Critical Success” will seal two affixes instead of one. The chance for Critical Success depends on the amount of Legendary Potential the item has and how powerful the Unique Item is, so it is very rare to see a “Critically Success” when creating Legendaries with Eternity Cache, and even more rare for powerful items.
Dungeon Changes
Dungeon Key Inventory
You asked for a keyring to free up Inventory space, but we saw just how many keys you’d been saving and realised no one makes keyrings that big. Instead, Keys now have their own space in the Inventory UI, freeing up valuable gear space in your Stash Tabs. This allows you to also more easily see how many of each Key type you have gained, and have available to exchange, though only with a specific Vendor who’s services aren’t quite officially sanctioned in Maj’Elka.
Dungeon Key Charms and Vendor
We are introducing two types of Dungeon Key Charms: Portal Charms and Scale Charms. You can only exchange your keys for Portal Charms at the Black Market Key Trader in Maj’Elka’s Upper District. Though for our loot lizard loving players, Scale Charms will instead only drop from mobs.
When used at the entrance to a Dungeon, a Scale Charm will greatly increase the amount of loot lizards that spawn during that Dungeon run. Similarly, the Portal Charm will let the player travel directly to the Dungeon Boss with a random set of floor modifiers based on the tier of the Dungeon selected. The modifiers apply as if you had fought through each of those floors, but now you can jump straight to the Boss and rewards.
Though for players that wish to reach the Boss the old fashioned way, or have prophecies to complete, we have made improvements to Dungeon zones based on your feedback. Dungeons are now smaller, with fewer blockers and a lower chance for dead ends. Though if you do find yourself pinned in and falling to a hoard of mobs, fret not, as there is now also another reason to pick up all those Keys you see.
Dungeon Respawn
Dungeon Keys can now be spent to respawn IN the same Dungeon area where you died, or outside the Boss area if you fell while trying to defeat the Dungeon Boss. This should help make it easier to gain those Boss drops or access those unique dungeon mechanics repeatedly. Please be aware that for Hardcore Players, some specific terms and conditions will apply.*
*Hardcore Terms and Conditions:
Not available for you. You die, you die.
However, that’s not all we’ve updated for our Dungeons. For a while now, we’ve had a partial Campaign Skip via our Dungeons, which has allowed players to speed up or customize their progression through the Story at the cost of missing, and having to backtrack to, certain quests for Passive Points and Idol Slots.
From Season 2, new short quests have been added that reward 2 Passive Points and unlock 1 Idol Slot for defeating each Dungeon’s Boss. These quests will also direct players to the Alternate Dungeon Exits, bypassing parts of the Campaign.
Controller Targeting
Controller targeting has been significantly improved with a new “targeting paradigm" system, this means we can create custom behaviours for every skill based on the intended use of a skill while using a controller, such as - ‘Cast On Self’, ‘Cast Max Range Forwards’ and ‘Cast on Closest Enemy in Range’. ‘Cast On Enemy in Forward Facing Cone’ is the default behaviour. This also includes if a node or gear changes how a skill works, allowing us to create two-tiered behaviours, something far more specific that what was used before.
A good example of this is Ballista. By default, Ballista is a long-range, easily damaged minion that you summon and stick close to. However, with the right choices in the Skill Tree, you could turn it into an explosive you want to hurl at your enemies. Previously, the system only allowed for one action - stay or throw - to take place, and thus Ballistae were always thrown regardless of how your Skill Tree was specced into. Now the new two-tiered system lets summoned Ballistae stay safely at your side while explosive Ballistae are correctly thrown at the nearest enemy.
It is also now much easier to kite enemies without being required to turn and aim directly at them with most skills, and each ability has been updated to feel more intuitive and satisfying. This includes Puncture (Bow form), Ranged Projectiles that had a non-standard delay or targeting that didn’t work well in the older system, and Meteor, though we’re still making improvements on this one.
Auto-Storing
Shards, Runes, Glyphs, Keys, Woven Echoes… It’s a lot to track and loot and store, and something we have made some changes to with Auto-Storing! In Season 2 players will have more control over what stackable items move to their dedicated storage systems on looting and which move to the players Inventory, allowing the player to decide what happens to to those items next.
This feature will let players individually choose if Keys, Woven Echoes, Common Runes, Shards and Glyphs, and Rare Rune, Shards and Glyphs move to their Inventory or not. This setting will be enabled for everyone at the start of Season 2 and can be adjusted in the Settings Menu at any time.
Inventory Redesign
Inventory space is a premium resource, and with new Uniques, Gear and Items being added, that space needs to be used wisely. That’s why on top of auto-storing crafting materials, you might have noticed that you can also choose to auto-store Keys and Woven Echoes. That is because these items now also have their own Inventory tabs, along with an easier-to-access Gifting Tab.
Death Vacuum
Fate is not always kind, but it is fair.
Losing loot when you die is a staple of ARPGs, however it can feel particularly painful when that loot includes a rare Boss Unique. This was highlighted even more with the introduction of Harbingers, where defeating a Timeline Boss would then spawn in a Harbinger, forcing players to choose between grabbing the loot they could before they died or fighting to survive if they could.
A change being introduced with Season 2 is the Death Vacuum. Upon death inside the Monolith of Fate, it’s not just the Traveler that is moved to the Monolith Hub, the loot surrounding you gets ‘caught in the pull of your fate’ and will move there too.
Comparing Off-hand Feature
Two rings, two weapons…one compare tooltip. No more! Now when comparing items to your equipped gear, you will be able to press CTRL to compare rings or weapons in your main hand as usual and while holding CTRL then press and hold ALT to compare an item to the ring or weapon in the off-hand slot. You can see this in action below.
This can also be done on a controller by pressing and holding L3 (left stick), then pressing and holding R3 (right stick).
Other Changes
Faction Waypoints
After successfully joining an Item Faction on a Character for the first time, players are able to then join an Item Faction from the Keeper’s Camp on Alt Characters, as long as that Character shares a Stash with the first.
From Season 2 onwards, joining an Item Faction in the Keepers Camp will also unlock the Waypoints for the Observatory and Bazaar. These will not act as ‘Campaign skips’ however, as players will not be able to travel back to Maj’Elka from these locations.
Shared Monolith Timeline Unlocks
Another place we’ve heard a lot of feedback from our Alt-oholics is regarding repeatedly unlocking Empowered Monoliths. Even with the change introduced in the Harbingers update that required Alt characters to conquer just one Level 90 Normal Timeline to unlock Empowered Monoliths (as long as another character had conquered the three required Level 90 Timelines), they still needed to complete all of the Timelines leading up to those level 90 Timelines.
From Season 2, new characters will have access to all Normal Monoliths that have been unlocked by other characters who share that Stash. They will still need to conquer a single Level 90 Normal Monolith to unlock Empowered Monoliths.
This won’t retroactively apply to existing Legacy characters however, so players will need to unlock them at least once after Season 2 starts. This can be achieved by slaying a Timeline Boss with a character that had not yet defeated that Boss - For example, if a Legacy character slays the Emperor of Corpses in the Reign of Dragons Timeline for the first time, this will then unlock this progress for all other Legacy characters that have reached the End of Time and also share the same Stash.
Automatic potion drinking option
When your build relies on maintaining low Health to maintain high Ward or boost any other stat, running over a potion can be a big blow to your offense or defense. Well going forwards, there will be an option in the Settings menu to control this. Players will be able to toggle on or off - 'Automatically drink health potions when belt is full’.
This can also be useful even if you’re not playing a build that relies on low Health. Automatically drinking potions when your Health dips even a tiny bit could be wasting a valuable potion you need later on, so this option provides a more strategic use of potions as it will require you to first pick up the potion, by having space on your potion belt, before drinking the potion manually.
Outro
That wraps up the last Pre-Patch Hype Week Blog Post. Thank you for joining us again. We look forward to sharing the Patch Notes with you tomorrow and seeing you realize the full scope of what’s coming in Season 2 with the Tombs of the Erased update.
Don’t miss EHG’s Founder and Game Director - Judd, Creative Director - Ross, and Senior Technical Game Designer Mike talking in depth about what’s coming in Season 2 with AaronActionRPG & Frostylaroo Friday at 3:00 PM CDT!
Thank you all once again, Travelers. Now that we’ve spent a whole post on the various types of vacuum we have added to Last Epoch, we hope these changes will make your journeys through Eterra even more fun and rewarding!
