Good Morning Friends! When we last talked on Friday I spoke of how Eleventh Hour Games was struggling a bit under the crush of new players attempting to explore the multiplayer update. This morning I can safely say that for the most part from Friday onwards, the servers were exceptionally stable. I close out the weekend just shy of 50 on my Paladin build and have loose plans to start trying some dungeons and monoliths multiplayer on Tuesday. In truth, there are still some residual issues, like movement abilities often causing rubberbanding where the server and your game client disagree on the location of your character. However, these have lessened significantly over the weekend and for the most part, you can just log in and play whenever you want.
I think it is important to take that statement into context because over the weekend the game saw staggering growth. Prior to the launch on Thursday, the highest number of concurrent players Last Epoch had ever seen was just a bit over 5,000 in September of 2021. Sunday afternoon around 3 pm the game was seeing just over 40,000 concurrent players and at that point, the game was rock solid. Whatever they did to scale the servers has seemingly worked, and my hats are off to the team for certain. Sure Last Epoch had tested its multiplayer functionality in a number of waves, but you never really get a true test until it is under a real load. I would say that once they sorted out the queue thing late Thursday night, they effectively solved most of the issues players were having.
The other thing that I find interesting is just how many streamers have been swapping over to Last Epoch. Really this patch lands at the ideal time, and it was something that they could not really have planned for. Path of Exile is winding down the Sanctum league, Diablo III just had a great season 28… but again most players have finished up that process… and Diablo IV is a few days away. This leaves a vacuum of games that feel relevant at the moment and as a result, every Path of Exile streamer is actively playing Last Epoch and honestly saying a lot of good things about their experience. The above screenshot was taken around 6:30 am CST… and there were still over 10,000 viewers actively watching Path of Exile. I wish I had thought to take some numbers from yesterday when I saw effectively every ARPG streamer of note playing the game. If they start breaking into more mainstream streamers, I think we are going to continue to see those concurrent numbers rise.
As far as the game itself, I likely would have made it significantly further were it not for my dealing with a production issue yesterday at work. Needing to hop on calls periodically limited just how engaged I could be, but I still have reached around the same spot in the story I left off in testing with my Necromancer. I’ve noticed that I am starting to get into territory where resistance is beginning to matter a bit. When I was going through the ice area, I noticed that several of the maps could chunk my health significantly and this largely resolved itself once I threw in a few points of cold resistance. It does make me wonder what I am going to need as far as a resistance profile for the end game. Coming from Path of Exile I am used to needing to cap my resists and honestly, at this point, I have no clue what capping would even look like in Last Epoch.
One other thing that I did over the weekend was creating a Last Epoch page in my “Game Tools” menu. With this, I am going to be trying to collect the various bits of information I am using about the game and the resources that I am relying on. Another thing that I am adding that I have not done on other pages, is a section devoted to the builds that I am playing with video/guide links for each. I figure when the next Path of Exile league lands, I will do the same for that game going forward. These pages are as much for my benefit as they are for yours because I find them a useful way of collecting resources that I might be relying on. I realize after my very trade league in POE, I need to update that page with some of the resources that I used for selling items.
I am really enjoying the game and the build I am playing, but I also don’t exactly feel like I am in a rush. There is no season journey that I am necessarily taking, so there are no objectives I am trying to tick off as quickly as possible. I think my initial goal is to get all the way through the monolith so that I can hopefully experience empowered monolith maps. Like I said before Ace and I have tentatively planned on doing some serious group content on Tuesday night, so it will be interesting to see what the monolith and dungeons are like with friends. I’ve been extremely impressed with how quickly Eleventh Hour Games recovered from the server crush on Thursday and just how stable the game has been. Honestly, I’ve had fewer issues with Last Epoch than I do during a normal Diablo III Season Journey.
If you were waiting in the wings to see if it was stable… then I would say the coast is clear. Come on in the water is fine.
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