Last Epoch 1.0 Overview by Game Director, Judd Cobler Last Epoch is Releasing 2024-02-21T17:00:00Z (UTC)! Welcome everyone to the Patch Notes for Last Epoch 1.0! It’s been an amazing road to this point, and it’s unreal to be writing patch notes without using the term “Beta Patch”. With this patch Last Epoch will officially be leaving Early Access. We couldn’t have made it to this point without all of you, our amazing community driving the world of Eterra alongside us. We ...
Interesting, but the implementation feels a bit meh. This implies traded items are sub-par, right? Since you get better items if you join the faction that causes them to be non-tradeable.
Item drop rate, and chance for higher quality items will be higher. But that is to make up for the fact that you won’t have access to the entire aggregate market of drops. The highest tier item that can drop in solo mode is equivalent to the highest tier item that can drop in trade mode. But in solo mode your chances of actually seeing it drop for you are higher.
Just to be clear, which faction you choose does not impact who you can group with. Items that drop because you’re in circle of fortune will require that faction to use that item, but the base item drops won’t require either faction. You can even give items to party members that were present when the item dropped (like D3), or if you party with the same people often you’ll get special materials that will let you give them items even if they weren’t there when it dropped.
The whole system is a really creative solution to how to balance loot for both trade and self found players.
Yeah, I’m really happy to see them trying something different to add some balance
Just from this screenshot, it seems that good loot will drop more frequently if you choose to disable trading, to make up for the lost opportunities I guess.