Last Epoch Idols Guide

Last Epoch’s Idol system is a flexible gearing system that offers a ton of character power. This guide breaks the system down to help get the most out of it.

What are Idols

Idols are special equipment that can begin dropping very early in the game. Unlike most other gear, they are not level-restricted and can be equipped so long as you have the slots to fit them. Some of them however are class-restricted, but only to the base classes of Last Epoch.

These Idols come in seven varieties, each of different sizes. Smaller varieties of Idols are available to all classes, while the larger Idols are the class-restricted variants. Below is a table of each of the variations found in the game.

The smaller and more generic Idol have fitting Affixes, usually providing Health, Armor, Resistances, or generic offensive stats. The larger and class-restricted ones have a variety of build-enabling Affixes for the respective class, which can empower certain skills or playstyles beyond what’s offered by generic Idols.

These Idols are then slotted into our Idol Container, where it’s very beneficial to place them carefully for maximum effect. We’ll cover this more in-depth in the Best Idols to Use section below.

How to Unlock Idols and Idol Slots

Idols become available and will begin dropping after the completion of the “The Void Assault” quest during Chapter 2 of the main Campaign. These can drop from any enemy, like most other loot in the game, and will drop fairly commonly.

Upon the completion of the same quest, we’re awarded four Idol Slots for our Idol Container as well as one Humble Idol and one Stout Idol. We’ll immediately notice that we cannot equip both of these yet, as Idols cannot overlap or share slots. This makes Idol slots a very precious gear slot for our character.

As we progress through the Main Campaign, we’ll unlock a total of 20 slots for our Idol Container. These are obtained from main and side quests. Below is a list of the quests that award each of our Idol slots.

It’s worth noting that despite there being 12 quests listed, only the first five side quest we complete from this list will provide

The layout of these 20 Idol slots is the way they are balanced, as we’ll only be able to fit a maximum of any two Ornate, Huge, or Adorned Idols across them before needing to use smaller Idols.

Best Idols to Use

Which Idols you use will determine how many you can fit, though most builds will want to opt to use Grand, Large, Huge, Ornate, or Adorned Idols where possible. These offer significant power to nearly every build you could put together. However, there’s still plenty of merit to using them as a defensive tool as well if there’s nothing that quite fits your ideal build for one reason or another.

During Campaign

At the early levels, you won’t get much bigger than the Humble Idols or Stout Idols until level 20+ when the rest will start becoming available. For these, we’ll want to be on the lookout for Resistances primarily, with Health and Armor being close seconds. This is largely due to them offering decent defensive bonuses, but much weaker offensive bonuses compared to the larger variants.

We’ll still want to keep them mostly defensive until we finish the Main Campaign. They’re a super easy way to round out our defenses until we can get better gear from the Monolith of Time or have the resources to craft better gear.

Using Idols defensively in combination with our Full Campaign Walkthrough, is a great way to quickly and easily progress through the game’s main story.

Another important note for this stage is that the Lagonian Idols, both Small and Stout, boost Cold, Fire, and Lightning Damage or Resistance. Meanwhile, the Eterran variants cover the remaining elements types of Necrotic, Physical, Poison, and Void. This can help you quickly round out your defensive stats without spending too much time looking at every Idol.

Early Monolith of Time

For the most part, at this stage of the game, we have access to better gear. Maybe not quite Best-in-Slot (BiS) yet, as getting there can take a while. By this point, even a fresh character will have Affix Shards available allowing our Idols to be opened up to more offensive options.

We can still keep the more defensive setup and just focus more heavily on getting offensive stats on our gear instead. However, if we have access to a powerful stat from an Idol that helps out build, it’s a good time to squeeze it in.

We’ll worry more about offensive optimization when we’re getting deeper into the end game and sorting out our final gear set.

Empowered Monoliths

It’s at this point we’re looking to go full min-max with our Idols, only taking defensive Idols when necessary to round out any small gaps in our gear. There are many ways we can go about this, but we’ll want to be putting more priority on the larger Idols.

We’ll want to place the largest Idols first, typically being Adorned, Grand, Huge, Large, or Ornate Idols. Below are some examples of ways to arrange our Idol Container.

Adorned Idol Focus

While Adorned Idols tend to be more generalist, there are quite a few great stats found in their pools. Unlike the Ornate and Huge Idols, there’s room to fit up to four Adorned Idols. This can be particularly good for select builds, but it’s a very small pool of builds.

The only drawback to committing to this many Adorned Idols is that we’re only left with space for four small idols, which can offer only very minor stat bonuses and don’t have a wide enough variety to always support such a setup.

Ornate Idol Focus

This setup often consists of two Ornate Idols, two Grand Idols, two Small Idols, and two Humble or Stout Idols. This is one of the more ideal setups that can offer a ton of power to a wider variety of builds, often covering different archetypes than Huge Idols.

With this mix of Idols, we get a lot of additional value from still getting a good amount of defenses or even some generic damage boosts from those Humble or Stout Idols.

Depending on how we place the Ornate Idols, we can also opt to swap this to a setup with an additional Large Idol on one side, which would replace one of the Humble or Stout Idols.

This variation tends to be less ideal outside of some builds, as there’s not a ton of overlap between Ornate and Large Idols in terms of build synergy. They can however fill larger defensive gaps.

Huge Idol Focus

This setup often consists of two Huge Idols, two Large Idols, two Small Idols, and two Humble or Stout Idols. This is one of the more ideal setups that can offer a ton of power to a wider variety of builds, often covering different archetypes than Ornate Idols.

With this mix of Idols, we get a lot of additional value from still getting a good amount of defenses or even some generic damage boosts from those Humble or Stout Idols.

Depending on how we place the Huge Idols, we can also opt to swap this to a setup with an additional Grand Idol on one side, which would replace one of the Humble or Stout Idols.

This variation tends to be less ideal outside of some builds, as there’s not a ton of overlap between Huge and Grand Idols in terms of build synergy. Unlike the alternative version of the Ornate Focus setup, this one often adds more power rather than almost strictly defense.

That concludes our Last Epoch Idols Guide. For a deeper and more advanced look at optimizing an Idol Container, we recommend checking out our Last Epoch Builds.