Good Morning Folks. Shocking to no one, I spent pretty much all of the extended weekend playing Last Epoch. We did spend a bit of time working on the backyard and prepping it to migrate all of the furniture and such from the garage out there. However all of the rest of the time was spent leveling my latest version of an Ignite Warpath Paladin. What is wild about this build is this is my sixth time playing some version of warpath and once again… I have shifted things up considerably. I did not follow even my own previous versions of this character and just made the choices that I felt like I needed to make in the moment. The end result has seen me leaning into slightly different avenues of scaling than I have previously… and I think overall the build is more powerful. It does however feel like it has less survival so I guess there were tradeoffs made.
While leveling I did not get a lucky Firestarter’s Torch this time early into my progression, but instead pulled a Taste of Blood axe from a Nemesis Egg. The particular pathing that I make ends up shifting both Warpath and Lunge to convert all bleed damage dealt into ignite stacks, effectively allowing me to utilize bleed as a proxy for ignite. What I have found is that Taste of Blood actually allows me to stack ignite so much faster than the Torch combo normally would and I almost instantly have 60+ stacks of ignite on my target. I got a very lucky LP3 copy of the smite sword which allowed me to craft effectively the ideal weapon for the build as my very first legendary slam. Lastly I have a tab full of Code of an Erased Sentinel that I am fishing for the best combos and right now +2 levels of Holy Aura is the winner.
You can always check out the current state of my character over on Last Epoch Tools as they have an automatically updating character profile thing similar to POE.Ninja. Right now I am fully capped and in many cases way overcapped on resistances and recently shifted around my gear so that I could become crit immune… or at least immune to the bonus damage. The biggest thing that I need right now is more life because 1900 is not terribly comfortable for empowered monoliths. Right now I am dumping passive points into Reverence of Duality which gives me 2% increases to Health, Damage, Healing Effectiveness, and Mana for every point spent. I only have 3 points in this passive node, but plan on taking this all of the way up to 12 which will give me an additional 18% Health, Damage, Healing, and Mana. More than that though I am constantly on the hunt for gear upgrades that either give me raw health or more preferably hybrid health without dropping any of the other stats that I care about.
I had to drop my Rule of Simoon gloves to add some additional survival… but doing so had other benefits. One of the biggest challenges with the new mob types is that standing in melee range because a lot more difficult, because they all seem to paint large areas of bad stuff on the ground or have huge slams. Having my entire screen cluttered by my own flaming tornadoes was a huge problem for the readability of attacks. I am probably going to drop the cosmetic for Warpath as well because the base fire twirl version is similarly just easier to read whatever is going on at the time. I miss the Torch and it setting everything on fire for the entire screen… but the bleed axe just does way more hit damage while at the same time stacking ignites faster than the torch ever did. I’ve reached a point where empowered monoliths are comfortable enough, but more health and more levels will improve that.
I’ve said before that the weakness of Last Epoch was its endgame, and Tombs of the Erased largely fixes that problem entirely. Grinding through normal monos used to feel like a chore, because there really was not much going on there. This patch introduced so much bonus content that it feels like there is constantly something interesting going on. This is before you factor in the whole map crafting aspect of the game which allows you to edit your timeline and add new echoes wherever you want to. I’ve been slowly working my way through all of the echoes that grant additional passive skill tree points, and then I have a bunch that I am saving for later because they much be run in empowered monoliths. Essentially you have to run a cemetery to edit your tree, and that is really my only complaint about the new system. I wish this was something that you could simply pop open at any time. You can place as many woven echoes on your map as you like, but it does feel a bit like running a tower to be able to juice your maps in Path of Exile II, and as such sort of feels superfluous design wise.
The weavers tree aka passive atlas tree… is freaking brilliant though and adds so much depth to the game. I largely rushed the various imprint nodes which allow you to imprint an item, which then makes it more likely for that item to drop. There are two nodes that you can imprint a woven echo, and this makes it so that those echoes naturally show up on your map without the need to add them manually. Right now I have it so that the map that effectively gives you like 50 shrines and the one that allows you to fight 6 Nemesis encounters appear naturally on my maps. There is one that is just loaded full of Loot Lizards which might be fun to imprint as well. I’ve gone deep into buffing the appearance of loot lizards and making it so that every one drops a guaranteed unique regardless of their normal reward type. I think next I am going to try and figure out what I can do with Exile Mages, because for the moment they feel like the most boring of the encounters.
Playing Last Epoch after coming off the previous Path of Exile II patch has been wild. Everything in Tombs of the Erased seems to be centered around enabling just fun game-play. For example in the above screenshot you can see what happened after opening a chest and having I think six of the exalted rarity loot lizards pop out of it, forcing me to chase them down to break open those loot pinatas. It is just big dumb fun, and I am so here for it. Combining this with the fact that I feel comfortable enough with Last Epoch to just sort of yolo my way through a build, knowing that there is no decision that I cannot easily undo if I make a mistake… feels phenomenal. I started a brand new Primalist last night that I went Beastmaster with, for the idea of doing a Raptor build… but I am just sort of winging my way through it rather than following any per-determined leveling guide. That is just not really something I can do with Path of Exile, especially with the sequel game… giving how few builds end up viable.
When Path of Exile II dropped its patch 0.2.0 release date on top of the already planned Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased date… I was frustrated and annoyed. However I feel like Last Epoch rescheduling combined with the fact that Dawn of the Hunt has been one of the worst received ARPG patches I can remember… has really helped Last Epoch to succeed. Playing Last Epoch just feels so refreshing as contrasted with the lack of loot and frustrating tedium of Path of Exile II. Of note… I play all of these games and will probably continue to play all of them as they release additional content so I am not trying to stoke idiotic tribalism here. However it does absolutely seem like the drop in Path of Exile II players has directly impacted the rise of Last Epoch. I think the highest concurrent player count I saw was around 160k players which is a little over half of the total they had at the launch of 1.0, which seems really freaking good.
One of the most telling comments that I saw over the weekend is someone remarking at just how quiet the Reddit was, because it seemed like everyone was simply too busy playing the game to make posts. However since we are now returning to the work week… the entire place has blown up to the point of no longer being able to find that thread. Tonight I will return to empowered monos and try and make some additional progress and maybe take out a few more Harbingers to level that faction. Sure there are still some quality of life improvements that I would like to see. I still want them to update the character models and allow for multiple gender options, and I desperately crave a personalized hideout where I am run all of the content from without interacting with strangers. There are still some maps that have issues interacting with Warpath, but all in all I am having a freaking blast. Sure the moment 3.26 drops for Path of Exile I will zoom back over there, but for the moment Last Epoch is my moment of gaming zen.
If you are curious about some more commentary from me, you can listen to yesterday’s podcast where Ace and I went on at length about the things we are enjoying. While I rarely explain the origin behind some of the non-sequitur AggroChat episode titles… the above screenshot at least explains Lord Orca. Ord Lorca is one of the new Champion encounters and Ace and I both remarked that when we first read the name of that mob, we thought it was Lord Orca. I really hope they do some interesting things with Champion names, because one of my favorite things from Diablo III is when I encountered monsters that were named after content creators. I loved whenever I got to kill my friend Qelric in a map mostly in that DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme style moment of recognition. I think “Orca” is a giant lizard, but the screen is always covered in so much nonsense… and that champion happens to have some sort of a flame effect shield that makes visual clarity a challenge.
Anyways! Are you playing Last Epoch? What did you end up building? Drop me a line below because I am super curious to hear the thoughts of others that are maybe not so bought into this franchise.
As an outside observer; has POE2 really lost it’s audience? I.e. is the situation recoverable or does it look like an inevitable slide into low player numbers? I’ll queue up the podcast for listening later this week.
I think on some level it might just be that Path of Exile II is a game that was not really designed for the Path of Exile I audience. The interviews that have been hosted after the roughly 0.2.0 launch have really underlined that the design of the game is intended to be different from what the average ARPG player wants.
So when you introduce Last Epoch a game that is very much a Core-ARPG experience, not this attempt at a Soullike-ARPG experience then it makes sense why folks bailed. More so I think whenever POE1 releases 3.26 almost the entire player base will poof from POE2, because it will again underline what a difference it is between the game folks seem to want and the game that was built.