After going through Last Epoch’s campaign, you’ll encounter a difficult choice: join the Circle of Fortune or the Merchant Guild. The decision is crucial to your character’s endgame progression.
But what is the difference between the two factions, and what should you choose? Here’s a quick explanation on how the Circle of Fortune and the Merchant Guild factions work in Last Epoch.
Should You Join the Circle of Fortune or the Merchant Guild in Last Epoch?
During Chapter 9, you’ll see a secondary objective show up and tell you to either join the Circle of Fortune or the Merchant’s Guild. Before making this crucial decision, what does joining each faction do for your character?
Circle of Fortune Benefits
In the Circle of Fortune faction, you get a permanent and powerful loot bonus, giving you more and rarer items as you farm through the endgame.
Apart from getting better items, you also exclusively get Prophecies from the Observatory. These Prophecies give you higher ranks, giving better yields or benefits from the Circle of Fortune.
There are also equippable Lenses that can give you a more direct buff, such as getting more Humble Idols. These Lenses can customize Prophecies to target items of your choice, so you can try to get a specific item that you want.
All these benefits sound good already, but there’s a downside. Joining the Circle of Fortune doesn’t let you trade with other players.
Merchant’s Guild Benefits
You can already see where this is going. The Merchant’s Guild gives you access to a trading system, letting you trade useful items with other players.
Even if you find something valuable but not the right fit for your character, you can still squeeze out some currency by trading it in the Merchant’s Guild.
These trades are all done at the Bazaar, which requires Favors, a new type of currency. You gain Favor when slaying enemies, and use it to buy and sell units in the Bazaar. Selling items requires less Favor than buying items.
Access to trade puts the game on easy mode since you can technically get almost anything you want through the trading system.
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Can You Switch Factions in Last Epoch?
You can switch factions in Last Epoch, but it’s not worth it at all. You can get the loot bonus from the Circle of Fortune and switch out to the Merchant’s Guild to trade some items, but there’s a massive drawback.
The thing is, each item you obtain gets tagged with whatever faction you were with. Once tagged, you cannot use the item unless you are with a specific faction. For example, if you gained a full equipment set with all the idols while with the Merchant’s Guild, switching to the Circle of Fortune will disallow you to wear those items.
It is almost as if you were starting from scratch again. You can switch factions by talking to the NPC in their main towns: the Merchant’s Guild’s Bazaar and the Circle of Fortune’s Observatory.
If you start a new character, you can align with a faction as early as Chapter 1, but the stash is faction-shared, not account-shared.
Published: Apr 19, 2025 03:33 am