Last Epoch News

We’re eager to share details about changes and additions coming to Last Epoch in the Sands of Majasa Update. Read on to learn more about the upcoming content, improvements, reworks, and quality of life changes coming September 3rd!

[h3]What to Expect[/h3]

• New Chapter and continuation of the story of Last Epoch
  
• New Sentinel Skills
  
• Necromancer skills Updates
  
• Skill Improvements and Overhauls
  
• New Primalist model and armor set
  
• 45 New Weapon Models
  
• and much, much more!
  

[h2]New Chapter[/h2]


Your journey continues in Chapter 9 where you will uncover more secrets, visit never seen before locations, and will have to fight through new and challenging enemies.

• 15 new locations
  
• 30+ new enemies
  
• Epic boss battles
  

[h2]Updated Primalist model and Armor Set[/h2]
In the Sands of Majasa Update, the Primalist will be the first character to receive an entirely new model. In addition, we are bringing a new Armor Set, which fits the brutish nature of this character.


[h2]Sentinel Skill Updates[/h2]
Sentinel is getting a wide variety of updates to his arsenal - many of his skills such as Warpath, Lunge, Judgement, Erasing Strike are getting significant improvements or complete overhaul.



We also updated visual effects of many skills, including conversion variants.



Sentinel is also getting 3 new skills, giving him even deeper customization and more ways to play.

[h3]Void Cleave[/h3]
Void Cleave is a powerful 2-handed melee attack with a short cooldown and moderate mana cost that hits all enemies in front.



[h3]Multistrike[/h3]
Multistrike is a 0 mana cost Sentinel melee skill. Its damage ramps up over time as you use it by creating more and more extra hits to other nearby enemies.



And no, you are not counting wrong. More is still coming!

[h2]Necromancer Skill Updates[/h2]

All necromancer skills are receiving significant updates to address several issues. One of the main goals is to support the necromancer style with permanent pets, leading an army of undead monsters to battle and just support it from behind without constantly summoning the army.


[h2]Controller Support Improvements[/h2]
We want to deliver the best possible experience for playing with the controller and the next patch brings major improvements to Controller Support.



[h2]Monolith Improvements[/h2]
Monolith of Fate will also get some major improvements, including balance pass to all spires and timeline exclusive echo reward types that grant unique or set items of specific types, allowing you to target farm specific uniques. In addition, we have given buffs to many empowered blessings.

[h2]New Weapons[/h2]
Several weapon groups are getting a complete rework with new 3D models, 2D art, and powerful implicit affixes to support more variety of builds. You will be able to find 45 new weapons across 4 weapon groups, including 1-handed and 2-handed axes.



Sands of Majasa Update also brings new unique and set items, balance changes, bug fixes, quality of life changes, performance improvements, new music, and so much more.

As always, we greatly appreciate the community for the continued support and engagement, we would not be here without you!

Join our Official Community Discord!

Hello Travelers, and welcome to the August multiplayer update!
I am once again excited to provide you with a status update on the development progress as we’ve made great strides since July’s Update.

The goal for this update will be to talk to each of the points I brought up last month, as well as mention some of our major goals for the coming month. It’s worth noting that we are also hard at work releasing the Sands of Majasa Update, which is currently receiving polishing touches and undergoing a heavy QA pass.

Let’s address the topics from last month:
[h3]1. Ensuring our content, up to reaching End of Time, is polished and easy to play. A major system we are to begin on is Waypointing so players can play asynchronously more easily.[/h3]

• We’ve made incredible progress here! We are now playing content together, starting from logging in from End of Time and using waypoints to travel across the eras. Quest and scene states are being polished and the town portal logic is working well. We’re still figuring out some of the logic of some side quests for example, but most work well and we’re happy with them.
  

[h3]2. Debugging our party system to ensure play is as smooth as possible. The last 20% is the trickiest.[/h3]

• A lot of code that was written early on for the party system was simplified and optimized significantly this month. Parties are now fully functional.
  

[h3]3. Planning for earlier access to one of our endgame systems in order to extend multiplayer play to make it viable for wider testing.[/h3]

• For July to August, we decided to go with the Arena system and have successfully implemented it. Playing the Arena in a party has a number of new considerations, such as the need for a voting system to progress to further waves, how to handle distributing rewards for multiple players before progressing, how a single player’s death will affect the part and ongoing arena run, and more. We crafted a voting system and are internally testing the Arena every week now in 2-3 hour sessions!
  
  Our highest group Arena ranking is currently Rank 53, which is very modest compared to leaderboard numbers. I imagine somebody will score a much higher ranking in this week’s playtest.
  
  How the Arena can work in a multiplayer environment is a very interesting discussion and I’m happy to field questions about it below.
  

[h3]4. Collecting data. We need to not only be able to monitor and track player activity to help inform good decisions, we need to be able to monitor all of our front-end and back-end systems if we want to provide you a high quality experience like other online ARPGs.[/h3]

• Progress over the last month has been steady. There are so many data points a high quality Action RPG wants to collect, and how we collect and store them is as critical as the data itself.
  
  We are now storing our game server health metrics on a very popular and large scale cloud service. We also successfully added player data collection for things such as class, abilities, levels, and more. Adding more data points is fairly trivial for us to do - even for things such as items.
  
  Our work over the next few months will be focused on interpreting and using the data to maximize online stability, and gain insights about players.
  

[h3]5. Optimizing our server size in order to save cost, and this comes in two major forms: server optimization, and “netcode” optimization. We are profiling our server to reduce its size online in order to allow us to put more servers on a single machine. We are optimizing our “netcode” to significantly reduce the size of the data we need to send between the server and clients, as well as optimize our gameplay code to reduce the amount of computations we send to the server in the first place.[/h3]

• In the last month we managed to reduce our server memory overhead by quite a bit (~30%). We are now in a range where it’s efficient enough to host our game servers at mass scale. We’ll continue to further optimize the server footprint up to release.
  
  We are constantly improving our game code to be more efficient, much in the same way we have done with our graphical performance. On this note, I may only provide updates in this department in the future when there are really significant finds!
  

[h3]6. Getting our idol and potion systems working server-authoritatively, so you can complete your character build (and survive!).[/h3]

• We have fully implemented potions and they are server authoritative as well. Idols are still a work in progress, and it’s not so much an issue with server authority as it is the case that idol unlock slots need to be properly synced to the client, and then all the idol affixes need a heavy QA pass and Multiplayer playtesting.
  

[h3]7. Scaling up to approach the ability to test more widely![/h3]

• We doubled the amount of bare metal servers we are hosting, and are now successfully using emergency alternatives for potential sudden spikes in concurrent players.
  

[h2]What Are Our Goals For September?[/h2]

• More testing and optimization of the Arena experience for multiple players in a party, and advance supporting systems noted above
  
• Convert the Idol System to be 100% server authoritative
  
• Collect additional server performance data
  
• Improve gamepad support for server-side multiplayer
  
• Start preparing to add Multiplayer to the Community Tester Program. This will involve fixing many “minor” bugs that we are used to internally but would not want testers to have to suffer through
  

With that said, we are always looking for more players who are positive, contributing members of the Last Epoch community to come and test our game before releasing to the wider public! We have a very active Community Tester group who get special access to early builds of our releases and help us make Last Epoch great.

If you are interesting in joining our Community Tester program, please submit a support ticket with your contact information!

Stanzwar

Sands of Majasa Update brings new and improved tools for hacking and slashing through enemies. Axes, both one-handed and two-handed, are getting new 2D and 3D art as well as powerful implicit affixes to support a wide variety of builds and create new opportunities. Check out some examples below!

[h2]One-handed Axes - Examples[/h2]


[h2]Two-handed Axes - Examples[/h2]


More weapon groups are being reworked for the Sands of Majasa Update and we will talk more about these soon.

[h3]Darkness within the jewel of the desert... Coming September 3, 2021[/h3]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It's an exciting time at Eleventh Hour Games and for Last Epoch development! In our efforts to be transparent and communicative, we've started a new Forum series to give you a peek behind the scenes. Here is a small collection of our latest updates as we progress down the road to 1.0:

Road to 1.0 - July 2021 Development Update
The most recent update on Last Epoch progress that covers the studio, live service planning, multiplayer and performance and optimization.
Read More


Multiplayer Update Blog Post
The first of a monthly multiplayer update series that covers current status, what we're working on next and potential risks to a successful multiplayer launch.
Read More


Multiplayer FAQ
Answers to common questions around multiplayer systems and their development. This page will be updated as new questions arise.
Read More

Have more questions? Our Last Epoch developers are highly active on our Forum and we welcome you to join the conversation!