Path of Exile 2 is so close I can almost taste it, and promises to be something truly special. But until it arrives to prove itself, and despite the many hours of fun Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred has provided, Last Epoch remains the best new ARPG I have played so far this year. Yet, as with any new game, there are always those little frustrations that get in the way, and they start to become more irritating as your relationship with it lengthens. Happily, we live in a world where such issues can be fixed, and developer Eleventh Hour Games shows it’s been listening to players in a new blog post announcing some much-needed improvements.
“We’ve said it so often it hardly needs repeating, but the feedback we receive is so critical to the decisions we make in the studio,” EHG writes. The Last Epoch team says it has “an incredibly long list of this feedback already in the works,” and wants to share a few key updates for one of 2024’s best RPGs that are already close to being ready, although it notes that the full list “is far too long to include in this article.”
First on the list is the ability to compare items with those equipped in your off-hand or second ring slots. Currently, the main hand and first ring always take priority, making on-the-fly gear comparisons a bit of a pain to handle, so this is very welcome. Another essential upgrade is that dungeon keys will now have their own dedicated storage slot that can hold an unlimited number of keys, meaning you can always have the right keys on hand without taking up space in your inventory or stash. While the Last Epoch stash system is very generous, this is just a much cleaner way to handle keys generally.
EHG has been hard at work solving “a fairly obnoxious and deadly bug” with the evade skill that could cause a second use of it to be erroneously queued, causing you to return immediately to the spot you’d just evaded away from. This is a problem, but in its attempts to fix it, the team is also taking the chance to improve evade more generally to make it more consistent and more responsive to use, especially at higher latency.
The Boss Ward system introduced with the Harbingers of Ruin update is also being adjusted. Designed to stop bosses melting in moments without punishing high-damage builds too much, EHG says feedback about the feature “has been fairly substantial.” In the next season, it will decay faster and you will see it less often both during the campaign and the endgame. “Only enemies that feel like they should have it will have it, such as chapter bosses in [the] campaign and more notable bosses like dungeon and timeline bosses.”
The Void Knight’s time-bending Volatile Reversal skill “is getting some much-needed attention in Season 2.” In its new form, it will hurl you forward in time to a targeted location, and can be recast within three seconds to return you to your original spot, dealing devastating damage upon your arrival in both instances. Its mana cost and cooldown have both been lowered “so it can become a new source of damage,” and we can also look forward to
That’s all for the end-of-month update, although EHG’s full blog also recaps a few of the new and reworked node teasers that have popped up across its November livestreams, in case you missed any of them. While the audience’s attention is likely to be squarely on the Path of Exile 2 release date right now, there’s certainly going to be plenty of reason to come back to Last Epoch when its next major update lands, which is currently expected to fall in the first quarter of 2025.
If you’re craving some ARPG action while we wait for the next big arrival, try out one of the best Last Epoch builds for size, or jump into another of the best games like Diablo.
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