We’re diving into a collection of practical early-endgame tips that can make your progression smoother, your crafting more efficient, and your overall experience significantly more enjoyable. Having enough cheap Last Epoch gold can also greatly enhance your gaming experience. These are the small but important details players often overlook—especially when transitioning from campaign into monoliths, crafting upgrades, and farming key items.

Optimize Your Loot Filter Early

One of the most impactful improvements you can make at the start of a new cycle—or even on your very first character—is optimizing your loot filter. Many players struggle early on because they’re missing essential shards like hybrid health, all resist, or specific class affixes. These are universally useful and should be highlighted in your filter.

Early in progression, consider enabling rules that highlight:

Rare class-specific affixes

Hybrid health

All resist

Hard-to-find penetration stats are useful for your build

By highlighting these, you’ll avoid situations where you want to use a glyph of chaos or upgrade a mod, only to discover you don’t have even a single shard to work with.

Once you’ve stocked up on the essentials, you can always disable these rules later to keep your screen clean.

Use Rune of Removal—Not Shattering—When You Need Specific Shards

Many players default to the rune of shattering when they want shards from items. While shattering is fine for bulk shard generation, it’s unreliable—especially for rare tier 4–5 affixes. Sometimes you get one shard, sometimes none.

Rune of Removal, however, guarantees 100% of the shards of whichever affix it removes. Early-game, when the rune of removal is still somewhat rare, use it only for crucial affixes you urgently need. But it is massively more efficient than shattering for targeted shard farming.

Monster Timeline Stability With Glyph of Envy

If you’re farming boss uniques, the glyph of envy can dramatically speed up your timeline cycling. For example, if you're targeting Atrophy from the Black Sun boss, using glyphs of envy while in that timeline will give you 150–250 timeline stability per use. That lets you blast through stability, kill the boss, and reset rapidly.

If you're in Circle of Fortune, this becomes even stronger once you get the rank that grants bosses a 150% increased drop rate. In many cases, you’ll get 2–4 copies of a boss unique per kill, allowing you to mass-farm LP attempts extremely quickly.

Efficient Legendary Potential Farming With Farsight Turtle

If you're targeting 1–2 LP uniques for potential upgrades—like Atrophy—use the Farsight Turtle in the Weaver’s crafting tree. Here's how the workflow looks:

Farm 10–15 copies of a unique with LP 1.

Feed them into the Turtle.

Sometimes they upgrade to LP 2.

Many will lose their LP—but that's fine!

When LP gets wiped, use Nemesis Dragon Eggs (from Conquer Tower echoes) to regenerate LP. This loop lets you take many shots at getting the LP rolls you want. If you're preparing for the Jewelled Dungeon 2nd-tier smash, remember:

Two LP can become three LP on a critical roll.

More attempts = better odds on those miracle hits.

Using Rune of Redemption and Rune of Havoc

Both of these runes are extremely powerful this cycle:

Rune of Redemption

Target an item with at least one tier 7 affix—usually obtained via Nemesis upgrades.

Each use rerolls the affix values and often spits out more tier 7s.

It’s a great way to generate high-tier helm bases, weapon bases, or other crafting foundations.

Because they are rare, use them wisely—focus on slots that will eventually become legendary bases.

Rune of Havoc

Rune of Havoc rerolls all affixes, including sealed ones, and is even rarer. Use it only on items that already have the perfect layout of affixes or hard-to-get sealed set bonuses.

How Set Items Are Crafted

Many players aren’t sure how set item affixes work. Set items function as craftable prefixes that you can seal:

Weapons can receive the Void Damage Intensity + Haste per Second affix.

Shields may get a defensive prefix.

Seal these at Tier 1 early on for consistency.

Higher tiers are great, but sealing becomes much less reliable as tiers increase.

To acquire more set items, use the Great Bridge event—it turns all your collected set items into shards you can use for future crafting.

Campaign Skip for New Characters

Campaign skip is extremely easy—even for your first character of a cycle.

Softcore approach:

As soon as you reach the End of Time (Level ~16–20), go straight to Monoliths.

Hardcore approach:

Progress to the Oracle’s Abode

Complete Sapphire Tablet

Level through monoliths until you can complete a Temporal Sanctum

That dungeon takes you directly to the Divine Era

Complete quests in Soreth’ka and kill Majasa for the final skill point

This gives you full idols and skill points extremely quickly.

Nemesis Interactions & Vow Trees

A few notable Vow challenges are especially strong early:

Shrine Vows – Great if you’re specced into Loot Lizard chance; they drop guaranteed uniques. Having enough Last Epoch gold can also help you pass the challenge easily.

Conquer Tower – Excellent for farming Nemesis Dragon Eggs.

Soul Foundry – Fast, exalted, and unique generation.

Lost Caches (Unclaimed Trove) – Your go-to for helmet-hunting thanks to the high drop potential from treasure chests.

Experiment with these depending on what stage of gearing you're in.