Things I appreciate about Last Epoch vs PoE2

I finally reached maps the other day, and decided to take a break while waiting for the devs to come back. As a casual player, the current PoE2 endgame is just too tedious and unrewarding (but I'm still really hopeful about the game's future... it's still early in Early Access, and things can and will change).

In the meantime, I had a chance to go back and play that most underrated ARPG, Last Epoch, again. It was such a stark difference! This isn't a "dis game better, dat game sucks" thread. Rather, I just wanted to point out some things I love about both games:

Things I love about Last Epoch:

* Quality-of-life. SO much of it. Playing that game feels like a gentle, loving grandma, vs PoE2's sexy but slightly abusive dominatrix. It's clear the devs there spent a lot of time and effort thinking "how can we remove tediousness from the player experience to let them focus on the fun parts".

* The in-game loot filter is amazing. You can add individual rules and deeply customize them to decide exactly what you see, what's hidden, and what's emphasized through recoloring and capitalization. It's as powerful as the PoE trade website, but all in an in-game interface that you can customize right there, without having to go to some external website.

* Same with the in-game trading system. Not QUITE as powerful as the PoE trade site, but having in-game is wonderful.

* Loot vacuuming (for crafting materials) and 1-click transfer from inventory to the stash, along with inventory auto-sort and in-the-field deconstruction. Limits how often you have to go back to town.

* Their solo-self-found mode, Circle of Fortune, incentivizes non-trading play by improving loot drops.

* Its trading counterpart (the merchant's guild) has reputation-based buying restrictions, and items are bind-on-trade. Together this means inflation is slower and bots are less of a problem since there's a smaller market (only higher-level players with the required reputation can buy powerful things, slowing down RMT a little bit).

* At least until the endgame, every build is pretty viable. The classes and skills are all relatively powerful, so you can easily get through the campaign just by winging it and playing whatever sounds fun or feels cool. Respecs are easy too.

Things I love about Path of Exile 2:

* The slower, tactical pacing of combat, even if dodge rolls are a bit excessive. As a casual player, I'm not even really a fan of soulslikes, but the PoE1 zoominess is a bit too extreme – and so was Ruthless. PoE2 seems like a good middle ground (if only the loot, trials, one-portal maps, etc. were fixed). I do love the WSAD movement, tactical boss fights, and the general focus on tactics and positioning rather than pewpew-optimized builds.

* The support gems system is great, as long as you can get enough jewelers' orbs. This is still one of PoE's outstanding strengths, and the different permutations make skills far more fun to try. Last Epoch's simple trees feel so basic by comparison. Unfortunately, with the time and expense it currently takes to 5L or 6L something, it heavily discourages exploration instead of grinding. I wish basic build-defining things (like your links and ascensions) weren't so gated between RNG. There should be some deterministic way you could, with effort instead of luck, do both.

* The spirit system for minions, heralds, perma buffs is a great innovation for the genre. Pets are SO much more fun now – again, as long as you're lucky enough to get spirit loot.

* Production values: Graphics, sound design, map design, etc.: PoE2 has LE handily beat here, as you'd expect from a company of GGG/Tencent's resources. Can't wait for the MTX to finally show up though.

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Why did I make this thread? Mostly because it's awesome that we have good (different) options in the ARPG space. I hope LE can borrow some of PoE2's ideas (like WASD and support gems) and I hope PoE2 can someday do a QoL push and make the game less tedious to manage. (Why do you make us waste so much time managing our inventory and making town runs?)

Of course, I also hope that PoE2 can eventually have different difficulty levels to accommodate more casual players like me. That might not be compatible with The Vision™, though, so we'll see. But QoL, why not? Can't imagine having an external trade site and loot filters is a design decision... they really should be in the game.

At the end of the day, though, I'm just glad both are great games already and can only get better.

Good post. LE does have better qol, but LE is still lacking a lot in this area as well. I made a long list of UI/QOL suggestions for them ages ago, here's the link if you're interested: https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/long-list-of-small-suggestions-and-improvements-after-over-500-hours-in-game/60193. To my knowledge, they haven't implemented any of them. Sadly qol improvements aren't a high priority for most developers, it seems. But they definitely should be for games in this genre, which imo is the genre where it is the most important.

It's interesting you find POE's gem system more deep than LE's skill tree system. I think it could be there some day, but rn there's just not a lot of meaningful choices for gems, and they often don't change your skill in a big way.

dont know if you allready noticed Poe2 is in EA. Comparing it to a full released game is ridiculous, jesus.

LE is having a major patch around April, maybe it will address the endgame a bit.

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Wilmots#7633 wrote:

dont know if you allready noticed Poe2 is in EA. Comparing it to a full released game is ridiculous, jesus.

1. PoE2 have a team that already made an ARPG, and largely copied a lot of mechanics over from PoE1. The game already have an in-game shop so arguably it's released.

2. Funny enough, the 1.0 for LE was only marketing, it's still also EA only that the 1.0 released online, ssf/trade and the missing 3 classes. The main story was still unresolved and ended abruptly and the end-game "mapping" still not changed much.

So they are in similar situations really.

you are making it even worse, pointless approach bananas will never be apples.

besides, this is so subjective...LE was the most boring arpg i ever played...

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mrfox123#7595 wrote:

LE is having a major patch around April, maybe it will address the endgame a bit.

When we are talking about LE, we should specify year, not just month. April 2026 I assume.