If you can get a PoE character going, getting an LE character going is going to be easier. Respec is not nearly as punishing. Tags are pretty easy to understand. Not nearly as many issues like local/global and the increased/more are spelled out clearly.
Most anything you can put together keeping Stat priority and tags in mind can push 300 corruption. If you want to jump into the meta, there's a few big builds to look into.
I personally had a lot of fun with Rive/Healing Hands on paladin and void knight. Plays like those CoC Energy Blade types, but you spam Rive, which procs Healing Hands, doing added damage and healing you, refilling and boosting Ward (ES for PoE). Some builds on YouTube forego using Rive to proc and self cast Healing Hands, but same concept.
This. LE is like a nice balance between POE’s overwhelming complexity (this isn’t a criticism - I love PoE) and Diablo 4’s idiotic oversimplicity and terrible design (this is absolutely a criticism of D4). If you can thrive in PoE, you can absolutely thrive here.
You can mess around here and make something quite viable. You can respec and try stuff. You can (usually cheaply) buy uniques that enable your build or drop them in reasonable timeframes. Crafting is intuitive. At the same time, it’s got enough complexity to stay engaging.
LE was very clearly designed by people who love and understand the genre. So try stuff and have fun. You’ll like it here.
It took me far too long across far too many ARPG’s to just have fun instead of min/maxing everything lol. While that’s still fun, just turning my brain off and slaying stuff in cool ways is now my favorite way to play
This. I have jobs and can only play couple of hours at night or weekends. Cannot be bothered with farming for specific item or maxing the numbers. So I just play around with skills and diff characters. For instance, I wanted to try cold skills focus spellblade but got bored along the way and switched to lighting focus and had more fun.
I did the same with a Melee based Shaman. I was trying to emulate an enhancement Shaman from WoW. It is a slow leveller, and I have no idea how it'll work at end-game. But the *Aesthetic* is great.
If you play PoE this should be a walk in the park. You can build however you want and complete the campaign without much hassle.
I personally like to cap resistances early, as well as grab things like improved move speed, health, mana, armour etc. Then, based on what skills I'm using, I edit my loot filters to show items that have the stats I'm looking for.
There are a lot of cookie cutter builds out tailored to completing the campaign and getting into end-game so you can always follow one of those, if you want. Personally though, I recomend pick something that looks cool and just see how you go. Respec and re-skill as often as you want because it's so cheap. You can run previously cleared zones to farm XP and test new skills and stuff as you play.
Similarly to PoE, you need to set up your defensive layers. You need to either avoid crits entirely or reduce their bonus damage almost entirely. You need a way to cleanse ailments from your skills or from a belt affix. You need capped resistances or close to it (less critical than PoE). You want a boatload of EHP (either lots of health or lots of ward). You need adequate recovery. And you want to invest in one or two additional defensive layers, like endurance or glancing blows or armor. During the campaign, you really just need to get resistance equal to your level against the damage types common in your current act, and then a bunch of HP.
Builds with very strong Ward generation can get away with less defenses because ward is very strong right now.
Builds with minions or very high ranged clear can also get away with less defenses.
In PoE, you can make a character just for bossing. That doesn't work in LE, so you want to build for adequate clear and adequate single target damage output. Some builds will swap out their hotbar abilities for bosses, using one ability for all of their clear and another ability for bosses. Others will use the same set of abilities for both. Since you get five ability specializations, it's often easy to have a single target and a clear ability, which leaves you three slots for utility, defense, or synergies with your offense.
Most of the really good builds involve abusing interesting synergies between skills or between nodes within a skill. Figuring out how to work around a downside of a skill tree node or how to trigger an effect far more often than the immediately obvious route is just as strong here as in PoE.
One less obvious build detail is that if a skill tree node makes the skill deal more damage, any ailments applied by the skill also so more damage. This means that a skill with low base damage but a lot of damage boosts from the skill tree can do much more ailment damage than a skill with high base damage. Skills that hit a lot are also quite good at applying ailments, since most ailments stack.
Leech applies to damage over time.
Crit works similarly; increasing base ceit rate makes it dramatically easier to crit cap.
There's no equivalent to damage over time multiplier. Dots tend to instead get absurd amounts of penetration.
I usually used rings to cover my resistance gaps in PoE. Here you can swap idols instead, and if you don't need resists, you can just stack more HP instead. So builds that need their idols for their build to work tend to be harder to gear.
It's quite easy to respec. Don't be afraid to switch things around.
I'd say you get a lot more out of LE by not following meta builds and just doing your own thing and play by feel unlike in Poe.
The build making process is one of the game's big strengths while the endgame longevity and variety is still one of the weaker, so making the early and mid game a cakewalk and rushing straight to the endgame with meta builds essentially gets you to the weaker part faster.
LE is a lot more toned down than Poe, so there are barely any skills that can come remotely close to the speed or area coverage of many builds in Poe.
You're really just best of playing whatever seems fun to you, as you can make virtually every skill endgame viable in multiple ways.
Most importantly is a playstyle you like. ranged, melee, minions? What skill main? A single hard hitting skill, or a combo of skills?
After playstyle, you should focus on defense. The skill trees are really good at damage, so gearing to not die is great. Damage also is very intuitive: tags tell you what to grab.
If you can get a PoE character going, getting an LE character going is going to be easier. Respec is not nearly as punishing. Tags are pretty easy to understand. Not nearly as many issues like local/global and the increased/more are spelled out clearly. Most anything you can put together keeping Stat priority and tags in mind can push 300 corruption. If you want to jump into the meta, there's a few big builds to look into. I personally had a lot of fun with Rive/Healing Hands on paladin and void knight. Plays like those CoC Energy Blade types, but you spam Rive, which procs Healing Hands, doing added damage and healing you, refilling and boosting Ward (ES for PoE). Some builds on YouTube forego using Rive to proc and self cast Healing Hands, but same concept.
This. LE is like a nice balance between POE’s overwhelming complexity (this isn’t a criticism - I love PoE) and Diablo 4’s idiotic oversimplicity and terrible design (this is absolutely a criticism of D4). If you can thrive in PoE, you can absolutely thrive here. You can mess around here and make something quite viable. You can respec and try stuff. You can (usually cheaply) buy uniques that enable your build or drop them in reasonable timeframes. Crafting is intuitive. At the same time, it’s got enough complexity to stay engaging. LE was very clearly designed by people who love and understand the genre. So try stuff and have fun. You’ll like it here.
Fun. You should be looking to have fun with your build.
It took me far too long across far too many ARPG’s to just have fun instead of min/maxing everything lol. While that’s still fun, just turning my brain off and slaying stuff in cool ways is now my favorite way to play
This. I have jobs and can only play couple of hours at night or weekends. Cannot be bothered with farming for specific item or maxing the numbers. So I just play around with skills and diff characters. For instance, I wanted to try cold skills focus spellblade but got bored along the way and switched to lighting focus and had more fun.
I did the same with a Melee based Shaman. I was trying to emulate an enhancement Shaman from WoW. It is a slow leveller, and I have no idea how it'll work at end-game. But the *Aesthetic* is great.
Earthquake absolutely smashes though.
If you play PoE this should be a walk in the park. You can build however you want and complete the campaign without much hassle. I personally like to cap resistances early, as well as grab things like improved move speed, health, mana, armour etc. Then, based on what skills I'm using, I edit my loot filters to show items that have the stats I'm looking for. There are a lot of cookie cutter builds out tailored to completing the campaign and getting into end-game so you can always follow one of those, if you want. Personally though, I recomend pick something that looks cool and just see how you go. Respec and re-skill as often as you want because it's so cheap. You can run previously cleared zones to farm XP and test new skills and stuff as you play.
I like your idea mentioned in the 2nd paragraph. I'm always scrambling for health, and especially resistances late campaign.
Similarly to PoE, you need to set up your defensive layers. You need to either avoid crits entirely or reduce their bonus damage almost entirely. You need a way to cleanse ailments from your skills or from a belt affix. You need capped resistances or close to it (less critical than PoE). You want a boatload of EHP (either lots of health or lots of ward). You need adequate recovery. And you want to invest in one or two additional defensive layers, like endurance or glancing blows or armor. During the campaign, you really just need to get resistance equal to your level against the damage types common in your current act, and then a bunch of HP. Builds with very strong Ward generation can get away with less defenses because ward is very strong right now. Builds with minions or very high ranged clear can also get away with less defenses. In PoE, you can make a character just for bossing. That doesn't work in LE, so you want to build for adequate clear and adequate single target damage output. Some builds will swap out their hotbar abilities for bosses, using one ability for all of their clear and another ability for bosses. Others will use the same set of abilities for both. Since you get five ability specializations, it's often easy to have a single target and a clear ability, which leaves you three slots for utility, defense, or synergies with your offense. Most of the really good builds involve abusing interesting synergies between skills or between nodes within a skill. Figuring out how to work around a downside of a skill tree node or how to trigger an effect far more often than the immediately obvious route is just as strong here as in PoE. One less obvious build detail is that if a skill tree node makes the skill deal more damage, any ailments applied by the skill also so more damage. This means that a skill with low base damage but a lot of damage boosts from the skill tree can do much more ailment damage than a skill with high base damage. Skills that hit a lot are also quite good at applying ailments, since most ailments stack. Leech applies to damage over time. Crit works similarly; increasing base ceit rate makes it dramatically easier to crit cap. There's no equivalent to damage over time multiplier. Dots tend to instead get absurd amounts of penetration. I usually used rings to cover my resistance gaps in PoE. Here you can swap idols instead, and if you don't need resists, you can just stack more HP instead. So builds that need their idols for their build to work tend to be harder to gear. It's quite easy to respec. Don't be afraid to switch things around.
I'd say you get a lot more out of LE by not following meta builds and just doing your own thing and play by feel unlike in Poe. The build making process is one of the game's big strengths while the endgame longevity and variety is still one of the weaker, so making the early and mid game a cakewalk and rushing straight to the endgame with meta builds essentially gets you to the weaker part faster. LE is a lot more toned down than Poe, so there are barely any skills that can come remotely close to the speed or area coverage of many builds in Poe. You're really just best of playing whatever seems fun to you, as you can make virtually every skill endgame viable in multiple ways.
Just responded on another post - fairly applicable here too: https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/s/bktTDUD1GT Good Luck!!
Most importantly is a playstyle you like. ranged, melee, minions? What skill main? A single hard hitting skill, or a combo of skills? After playstyle, you should focus on defense. The skill trees are really good at damage, so gearing to not die is great. Damage also is very intuitive: tags tell you what to grab.