Good Morning Folks. This weekend, I should have spent the entire weekend prepping for the fact that I will be in a bad way, because tomorrow I start my bi-weekly dose of poison known as chemotherapy. I did not do that thing. I instead fucked around and played Last Epoch all weekend, because I did not feel like doing much else due to allergies… and I figured starting tomorrow, I might be too miserable to play much of anything. I technically did all of the things that I absolutely needed to do, like dishes, laundry, etc… and today I am going to get a haircut and pick up some groceries on my way back to the house at lunch. I will also be dealing with gathering the trash and putting the cart to the curb so that I do not have to deal with it in the morning, along with everything else, since I have to be at the chemo location starting at 7 am tomorrow morning.
At this point, I am level 91 and working on raising the corruption on the monolith with the current one I am working on sitting around 160 corruption, and I need to raise it to 175 so that I can do my next harbinger. Generally speaking, the hurdles that I deal with that end my Deathless streaks are Lagon in the Campaign, Rahyeh in early Monoliths, and if I manage to skirt past those… it is just some sort of massive damage happening at the same time that kills me. I made it past Lagon, and Rahyeh, and even the often dicey Emperor of Corpses for its big explosions, and finally took my first death at level 82 to the final step of an Omen Chain when there was just too much damage output for me to heal through. This character is exceptionally tanky… not Judgement Paladin tanky, but still pretty formidable so long as I can keep leeching life, and as I have improved my gear to allow me over 3000 hitpoints, I can heal through a lot.
I am playing a variant Forge Guard Forged Weapons, which is this weird hybrid of a melee class and a minion class. The minions in my case are Molten Armor, which is a build-your-own golem sort of thing that allows you to grant it stats from your own gear while also buffing the damage output that it does. The other “minion” is Forged Weapons, which are effectively a proc of a proc… making them slightly less than reliable to summon. Essentially, I am leaning heavily on Vengeance, which procs them based on my Attunement rating, and the only negative about this is that the build ends up with a “ramping” phase as I am summoning all 12 weapons, and while my Molten Armor is building ignite stacks on the target. I’ve specifically specced into Shrapnel, which is a node that gives my Weapon minions a shorter duration, but causes them to make a bit explosion at the end… which also means I can oversummon them to cause the oldest copies to explode.
I am only really able to oversustain weapons because of an exceptionally lucky drop. When I said I was doing a variant, I specifically mean that I am using a Two-Handed Weapon with a Shield, through the passive point that Forge Guard has access to. This gives me a bit more survival since I can use block as a defensive layer, but in order to proc things quickly… I need a pretty fast weapon. The lucky corrupt that I got on Volcanus gives me a second vector for summoning Forged Weapons, and allows me to skip the 3 points in Molten Strike that also serve to summon weapons, and instead invest those points in AOE scaling that also applies to the weapons. Other than that, I am constantly seeking better versions of Falcon Fists and Phantom Grip, and then I figured I might as well show off another lucky amulet that gives me +2 to all skills. Collectively, I think my gear is in a pretty strong place, and you can check out my profile over on LastEpochTools.
I was a bit slow getting to Empowered Monoliths because I spent a bunch of time doing every possible Woven Echo that I could, so that I could rush my Weaver Tree. My goal, as always, is to unlock every single imprint slot because I spend much time grinding the Monolith. For those unfamiliar, you can put an item in these slots, and it makes it so it is way more likely for that to occur when that specific type of item drops. These become way more powerful when you combine them with Circle of Fortune Prophecies that force specific content to drop specific items. For example, I am not sure I found a single Phantom Grip ring until I started running prophecies that force various encounters to drop legendary rings. Then once I got my first one… dedicating two imprint slots to them made it way more likely to see them. Now I am actually fishing for set pieces so that I can craft slightly better versions of my helm, which requires a shard from the helm slot of the Sunforged set to craft. At some point, I really need to start farming T4 Julra so that I can maybe get a high LP Vessel of Strife.
As far as progression goes, I am four Harbingers into the endgame monolith progression. I am building towards the 175 Corruption Harbinger and going to go ahead and knock out the Emperor of Corpses, since late versions of that can be pretty dicey with all of the explosions. Right now, at 160 Corruption, I can soak the big “get out” explosion without any issue, so I can just stand and tank everything, and that should hold true when I hit 175 as well. I have to admit I still hate the way that corruption works. It feels like you spend a lot of time fiddling around and trying to get your corruption level up high enough to do the next sequence of content. If I could pay someone to take me all of the way to 300… as you can with a carry service in Path of Exile, I would probably do that, just so I could knock out all of my Harbingers in a single go and take down Aberroth. I find the process of raising corruption to be way the fuck too fiddly and unfun… and wish it were more akin to Greater Rifts, where you could just keep bumping up a number manually without having to do the song and dance of killing a bunch of bosses so that when you take down a Shade of Orbyss, you get a decent jump.
The frustrations over raising corruption, though, might just be because this is not the fastest clearing build I have ever played. It is forbidable and tanky as hell, but nothing that I am doing is doing any sort of screen-wide clearing. I need to be in base-to-base combat with my targets to proc the weapons, which then decimate the targets. They drop pretty quickly… unless you are Draal, which I think are inherently resistant to fire. The biggest challenge, honestly, is wrangling my weapons and keeping them on a single target rather than letting them spread out to run amok. However, I will say they are pretty good at mopping up secondary targets while I am moving to the next area. For example, I almost never have to specifically target the little weavers’ egg cases, because the weapons are off destroying them either with melee attacks or their big explosions when they run out of summoning time.
I’ve made exceptionally fast progress in the Circle of Fortune, which has really helped in the gear acquisition department. Going into this season, they indicated that they were nerfing some of the drop rates, especially off imprint slots… and there were times that I could absolutely feel that. However, the deeper that I get into CoF, the better the drops in general feel, and I am slowly clawing back some of the missing loot. The only real frustration that I have right now is that it feels like I cannot gain gold fast enough to keep up with the need to buy more storage tabs. Those are now over 100k gold per tab, and it takes me a while to gather up a couple of hundred thousand. Maybe I should focus on the monolith echoes that reward gold or something to build that up more quickly. I also wish that we had some sort of guild system in this game with shared stashes and such, but then again, that would probably fight against the whole design goals of Circle of Fortune. Having a guild where everyone was limited to the same faction, though, might be able to get past that.
I’ve also made an attempt at starting a Primalist, because in my many travels I managed to get the Apiarist set which summons a bunch of bees. Much like the Squirrel build before it… I want to see if I can make a Bee build work. If not there is always “Cocaine Bear” to fall back on. I legitimately started writing this blog post this morning… and then got sidetracked and completely missed the fact that I never actually finished it and hit publish. Welcome to how my brain seems to be working right now… or not working. Tomorrow I start chemotherapy and that has been consuming almost all of my mental cycles. I am as prepared for that as I think I can be… and here is hoping I make it out the other side in several months. Suffice to say that since I have to be at the location at 7 am tomorrow morning… I will not be doing a blog post. I could in theory drag a laptop to the doctors office and blog from there… but I am not going to do that.
Last Epoch Season Four is really good, but is effectively the same game as before. If you liked it then, you will like it probably even more. However there is no massive revelation that will change your opinion of the title if you gave it a pass before. I will be playing it for the next several days I am sure… that is pending I can stay upright enough to do so.