The next big patch for "Last Epoch" could destroy the most broken builds, but Eleventh Hour Games wants player feedback to direct its approach to balancing the game.

The mid-season patch for "The Last Epoch" will be the first opportunity to fix the most serious bugs and overkill, and Eleventh Hour Games has acknowledged that major changes could ruin entire builds and gear setups, and is looking for feedback from players to direct its approach to balancing the game. posted a survey that included questions about how they would approach the process.

"Up until now, our decision regarding mid-cycle balancing has been to avoid adjusting skills and items that are overperforming but not buggy, and to avoid fixing bugs that would significantly weaken those skills. The exception is bugs that cause server stability issues," Eleventh Hour Games wrote in the survey.

The survey focused on bug, skill, and item nerfs during Last Epoch's roughly three-month cycle and whether leaderboards should be reset when changes are made. Users can choose on a scale of 1 to 5 how much they think certain things should be nerfed. Eleventh Hour Games said it was aware that "the conversation could be more nuanced," but that it had managed to get similarly broad feedback during Early Access development.

A Reddit thread about the survey received over 500 comments. Most commenters agree that bugs should always be fixed, regardless of their role in popular builds. Players are currently bringing up a bug in the Warlock's passive skill, which sacrifices a minion to mistakenly grant 40% of the magical shield Ward (instead of 4% of the tooltip) on top of its physical strength, making it virtually invincible. Several people have argued that such a bug was never intended and should be fixed, even if it is the core of the meta-build at this point.

"I fully understand that nerfing something in the middle of a cycle, for whatever reason, can cause short-term pain to the players who rely on it," HRTS5X wrote.

"But I think fixing buggy interactions is an important move for the long-term integrity of the game.

BaThalnoNow added that in their experience, using anything else on Warlock "makes you not want to play the normal build."

In response to another Reddit post about another bug, a developer named EHG_Justin said, "We are not adamantly opposed to fixing bugs that affect player power mid-cycle. We are simply trying to avoid mid-cycle changes that could hurt existing character builds at this time.

Diablo 4 is another action RPG that is attempting to approach seasonal balance patches. This week, Blizzard released the Season 3 mid-season patch, which intentionally leaves the barbarian's most powerful skill, the charge, intact. However, the bug that was causing rogues to do millions more damage with their crossbows than they should have has been fixed. Most people seem to have no complaints about the patch, but some are hoping that Blizzard will oust the Barbarian from the strongest class for the third time in a row.

As Blizzard revealed in the streaming and Eleventh Hour Games is trying to get in the survey, balancing a season of action RPGs is difficult. Some players want an untouched experience, warts and all, while others want everything to be as equal as possible. You have to weigh the satisfaction of finding a strong build against the satisfaction of getting a build so strong that there is no reason not to imitate it. The answer will probably always be somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, but I expect both games to come back to this discussion as time goes on.