Last Epoch Tips and Tricks for New Players (2024)

This is a great collection of Tips and Tricks aimed at helping you as a new player with various aspects of Last Epoch in your first steps!

While the tips and tricks here are intended for new players, we hope even those who have played a while will be able to find value in some of these tips as well. We’ll have them separated by categories to make it easier to find tips that are useful to areas you may struggle.

General Tips

These are very basic and broad tips to improve the overall gameplay of Last Epoch.

Since we’ll often use several skills and want quick access to certain UIs, make sure to assign comfortable keybinds for them. This will not only make it easier to fight, but also craft, mess with Loot Filters and other settings as well.

By default in a Keyboard and Mouse setup, Move/Interact is set to Left Mouse Button. We’ll want to adjust the movement option of the hotbar to Move Only (the Icon that looks like two footprints), rather than the default Move and Attack (Sword with X icon). This keeps enemies from preventing us from moving away from them and prevents an attempted melee attack if we try to use a spell at range.

Similarly, we can avoid accidental item pickups or objective interactions by setting a keybind for Force Move. Force Move will only move our character. We will not interact or attack anything we have our move over when using this option. I’ve personally set my keybind for this option to Z.

Movement Speed is a great thing to have at all stages of the, letting us get around faster. All Boots have some amount of movement speed on them by default, so even a pair of Common Boots will make you faster.

Settings Tips

These tips dive into settings and give some nice Quality of Life options.

For some basic Gameplay Settings, we recommend enabling Health Bars over Players, Enemies, and Minions. This helps us more readily keep an eye on our health in combat without needing to look at our actual health globe or in the case of our minions, see their health at all when we have 2 or more of any type.

Adjust Overlay Map Zom to its minimum value. This makes the overlap map as large as possible and easier to read. Ideally, Overlap Map Opacity is as high as necessary for better visibility as well, but that’s an entirely personal preference.

For Items, we highly recommend enabling Item Ground Label Affix Indicators, these make it easier to tell at a glance if an item has open affixes and what type they are. This lets us know immediately if you can add additional defensive power via a Suffix or more Damage and Utility of a Prefix.

You can also adjust the length of the item names between Short (Item Name Only), Normal (Name + First Prefix and Suffix names), or Long (Name and all Affix Names). We recommend using the Normal option here, as it’ll be easier to tell at a glance which affixes are likely to be Exalted.

As our last recommendation for Gameplay Settings, disable Screen Shake by setting the Screen Shake Mode option to Off. While this does remove some of the visual impact of some skills, it overall makes the game feel smoother.

Loot Tips

Collecting your loot in Last Epoch shouldn’t seem like it’d need any tips, but we have a few that tie into a few important aspects of Last Epoch that may be overlooked or just not thought about.

Unlike other ARPGs, like Path of Exile or even Diablo 4, Gear Drops do not sell for much. While those games will reward us with currency in some shape or form for even trash items you pick up, Last Epoch will simply hand us just a few Gold and call it a day. Even Unique and Legendary drops often sell for less than 1,000 Gold a piece.

However, if we are hurting for gold, Arena Keys will sell for a ton of gold (relatively). Where most gear pieces sell for hundreds, these often sell for thousands. It’s not a huge jump necessarily, but they drop often enough to be a stable source of income if we’re hurting for Gold. Note that this only applies to Arena Keys specifically, Soulfire bastion and Temporal Sanctum Keys give the same 500-ish Gold as a Unique would.

Like any other ARPG, Last Epoch also has a variety of base item types, which may or may not suit our level or build all that well. This is where Loot Filters come in handy. Loot Filters can allow you to automatically filter out weaker, undesired, or low-rarity items as you level. We won’t go into depth here on just how customizable they can be, we’ll have a dedicated Loot Filter Guide in the future.

Despite their low value, you won’t always want low-rarity items hidden, but selectively shown when they have relevant affixes. This is because all gear can be broken down into Affix Shards using Runes of Shattering or Runes of Removal at a forge. This will be the easiest way to build up a stockpile of Affix Shards, used to upgrade or apply Affixes on your gear. This is especially true for Class-specific Affixes, as they appear more commonly as drops on gear than in their Affix Shard form. We’ll go a bit more in-depth on these runes and other parts of the crafting System in our upcoming Crafting Guide.

To keep a steady stock early on, it’s great to be selective with the use of Runes of Shattering and pick some up each time you visit a vendor. These will drop alongside Affix Shards and other Runes, but spending a bit of Gold to keep them on hand is always worthwhile.

As you get into higher levels, ensure your Loot Filter always shows Exalted Items, even the affixes that don’t benefit your build. These will begin dropping around Level 55 or so, and not only are they an important part of endgame gearing by themselves, but they also dismantle for even more Affix Shards and get used for Legendary Crafting.

These powerful Exalted Affixes are drop-only and go up to Tier 7, while crafted Affixes are limited to Tier 5 at most. You won’t see the Tier 7 ones until you get into the Empowered Monolith, but they can still be exceptionally powerful even at Tier 6.

The last loot tip we have for you is that each Timeline in the Monolith of Fate has different pools of Unique and Set items rewards from the “Unique or Set Item” echo rewards. This can allow you to target farm a specific Unique and potentially get a much higher Legendary Potential roll for it. The stronger a base Unique item is, the harder it is to get high Legendary Potential on.

Damage Tips

There are a lot of ways to improve your damage in Last Epoch, but here are a few stand-out things to keep in mind as you play.

Skills follow a Skill Tag system. The Scaling Tags will show what types of Affixes and Attributes a Skill will scale with. For example, a Class like Mage uses primarily Intelligence for scaling, while Sentinels can use multiple depending on their chosen Mastery.

Some skill upgrades or even unique items can alter these Skill Tags as well, adding or removing different tags. Using Mage and specifically the Fireball spell as an example, both the Plasma Ball upgrade and Liath’s Machinations Unique convert 50% of the skill’s damage to Lightning, adding the Lightning Skill Tag. Using both together however, will remove the Fire tag and disable any bonuses that apply to only Fire Skills.

Attributes work best when they benefit most or all of our skill selections, as not all skills will use just one Attribute. Many Mastery Classes will make use of two Attributes, so focusing on the one that will have the larger impact on our build is important, especially when each point is equal to a 4% increased damage affix in most cases.

All Affixes are global, meaning that all bonuses apply to us at all times regardless of the slot. This means things like flat damage modifiers that are typically Local to weapons in other games, don’t work the same here. Granted, Flat Damage only appears on weapons, but this is good to note for builds that utilize dual-wielding.

Armour Shred will increase all damage dealt, except Damage over Time. This is because both offensively and defensively, Armour will only mitigate Hit Damage. However, most damage we often deal will be Hit Damage, making it a very valuable Affix to have on Gear, Idols, or Monolith Blessings.

If we want to boost DoT effects, however, we can still shred the corresponding resistance of an enemy to increase DoT damage. This will apply to both skills that have direct DoT damage as well as the corresponding ailment for that damage type.

Defense Tips

Similarly to dealing damage, there are several ways to improve your ability to take damage as well.

When playing any build with ranged attacks, Kiting enemies is very effective. By kiting, we mean moving away from an enemy while throwing ranged attacks for spells at them. This can make large groups of weaker melee enemies very easy to deal with, and even reduce the DPS of the ranged enemies.

Armour is a decent ‘catch-all’, but should never be our sole defensive stat. While it’s most effective against Physical Damage, it will also mitigate other types of damage at 75% of its normal rate. Paired with Resistances, this helps to mitigate a ton of hit damage.

Health stacking is exceptionally strong for most builds, as Health offers additional benefits beyond just a larger health pool. Our Maximum Health will also scale our Endurance and Stun Thresholds. This is because our Endurance Threshold is always equal to a percentage of our Maximum Health, while the Stun Threshold is based on the amount of damage we take relative to our Maximum Health.

Unlike most other ARPGs, Last Epoch doesn’t explicitly require a build to have capped resistances. While it’s still incredibly useful to do so to make it easier to survive, we can generally get away with having as low as even 60% in any resistance. This will only become a huge issue when facing certain bosses, enemies that shred a given resistance, or deal damage with DoT effects like Poison.

One defensive layer we will always want to cap out is Critical Strike Avoidance. This caps out at 100%, making it impossible for us to be Critically Hit and making a good handful of Monolith modifiers less threatening in the endgame. This is easiest slotted on to our Rings, Gloves, and Boots. In the Early Monolith, the Woven Flesh Unique Chest is a great way to get 100% until you can hit the cap without it, and this has a high chance (50%) of dropping from the boss of the first Timeline ‘Fall of the Outcasts’.

Gear with the ‘Chance to Apply Fraility on Hit’ Affix is also exceptionally good as a defensive layer, when combined with Attack Speed or Cast Speed. Frailty is a debuff that reduces an enemy’s damage output. Bosses aren’t immune to this effect either, just keep in mind that like other debuffs it will wear off quicker against bosses.

That wraps up everything we have for beginner tips. Be sure to check out our other Last Epoch Beginner Guides, which include additional information for new players; as well as our Last Epoch Builds, which includes build to help get you started on any class.