Passives and Skills

Welcome to the Passives and Skills guide! Here we provide all the key information, tips and tricks to help you understand and maximize these game systems. Regardless of what build you decide to play, this article compiles everything you need to know about them.

Passives

A character gains a Passive Point for every Level starting at level 3. Additionally, characters can gain up to 15 Points as rewards from certain Quests in the Campaign. The total amount of Passive Points that characters can get is 113.

Passive Points can be spent on any unlocked Node in the Passives Trees. The golden Progression Bar displays the amount of Passive Points that need to be spent in the Tree to unlock a specific Passive Node or Skill.

Passive Trees

All Classes have a Base Tree an 3 additional Mastery Trees (some Masteries are not in-game yet. Coming in 1.0).

Base Tree

At the start all characters only have access to the base Class Passive Tree. Mastery Trees can be unlocked after spending 20 Points in the base Class Tree and completing the Mastery Quest in the Campaign. The Mastery Choice is permanent and can't be undone. A player may spend more than 20 Points in a base Class Tree.

Mastery Trees

Once the Mastery Trees have been unlocked, players are able to invest Points into any of the Masteries. You can allocate Passives on the first half of all Masteries regardless of the one you chose but the second half is only available for the one you picked.

Some builds spent their Passive Points fairly evenly across all Mastery Trees due to their versatility and others do the opposite, focusing on their main Mastery Tree to fully enhance a particular playstyle.

If you would like to Respec your Passive Points you need to visit a Chronomancer NPC. Remember, your Mastery Choice is permanent.

Skills

Skills in Last Epoch are the most defining aspect of your character and your adventures through Eterra. There are more than 100 Skills and they all come with Specialization Trees filled with compelling ways of adjusting them!

Skills can be unlocked upon reaching certain character levels, after investing a certain number of passive points into a Class, or after selecting a Mastery Class. Opening the Skills Window (bound to the S key by default) allows you to see which Skills your character can unlock, and how to do so. Clicking one of the 5 Skill Slots on your Action Bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to change which Skill is equipped there.

Skill Specialization

Skill Specialization Slots are unlocked as your character levels up, to a maximum of 5 (to match how many Skills can be equipped on the Action Bar). You can use unspecialized on your Action Bar too; this can be extremely handy when one of sour Specialized Skills does not need to be directly used with your build.

• Skill Specialization Slots unlock at character level 4, 8, 20, 35 & 50.

The Skills you have chosen earn experience, levelling up to become more powerful. Upon unlocking a Skill Specialization Slot, you can choose to specialize in a Skill that your character currently knows. Doing so allows you to level up that Skill and invest Points into its Specialization Tree. Investing Skill Points empowers your Skills and can even transform them entirely. Skills have a default maximum level of 20, which is reached around level 75.

You can increase the maximum level of your Skills above 20 with Affixes, Set Items and Unique Items with +Level of Skills. Some of these properties are generic; like the one provided by Omnis and affect all Skills. Others only affect a specific Skill; like Level of Marrow Shards.

Any Skill levels currently granted by Items are shown above a Skill's XP bar inside its Skill Tree. Unequipping an Item which grants levels to your Skills will remove Points from them, unless you have a number of unspent Points greater than or equal to the levels lost. Nodes that lost points like this are highlighted in red when inspecting that Skill's Tree.

If you would like to specialize in a different Skill, you can press the Respec button at the top right of the Skills Window while viewing the tree for a specialized Skill. Newly specialized Skills will be automatically set to your Minimum Skill Level, and may receive a bonus to XP so they can catch up to your other skills. The Minimum Skill Level caps at 10.

• Additional Minimum Skill Levels unlock at character level 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 & 80.

You can see your current Minimum Skill Level on the Respec button inside a Skill's tree. Skills currently affected by a XP bonus will state so above their XP bar on the left side of their tree.

Summary

Overall, the Passive and Skill systems in Last Epoch are really fun, flexible while still keeping enough depth to allow players to min/max their characters and encourage experimentation. Have fun with it!

Credits

Written by Lizard_IRL.
Reviewed by Facefoot, McFluffin.