Last Epoch

All Over the Map

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Good Morning Friends! I was a bit all over the place when it came to gaming this weekend. I did not make nearly as much progress as I thought I would in Guild Wars 2. Essentially I wrapped up Bitterfrost Frontier and Lake Doric, which now plants me firmly in the middle of Draconis Mons. I have some bad memories of this section of Living World 3. Specifically I remember there was a quest chain where I had to change up my keybindings in order to get through it. By default I have an option turned on that makes my ground target effects center on whatever I happen to be targetting. This is super useful when it comes to not having to fiddle with aiming them. However there was a sequence I can remember when I was flying up in the air and having to target specific things on the ground which required me to turn this all off. So I will have to figure how HOW I do that… by the time I get to that part of the quest.

I am still playing a bit of Honkai Star Rail every day, and still slowly working on trying to get Coffin Guy aka Luocha. It is not necessarily that I even like him as a character, but I want access to a second healer. In my travels of trying to pull for him, I did manage to pick up Pela which is cool. I bonded with her as a character during the whole Museum event. Speaking of events there is a new one starting today that gives you double Calyx rewards. Like as far as events go it is boring… but it is a decent time to stock up on resources. Unfortunately only the first 12 Calyx battles count towards the double rewards, so I guess I know what I will be doing for the next few days at least… stockpiling resources.

One of the cool things about Mastodon in general is that it has a heavy indie dev presence. The other day the very awesome Megan Fox (the game dev one) was doing a thing where she was boosting indie devs that had less than 100 followers. One of these was Craig, who works on a game that recently hit early access on Steam called Trinity Fusion. So I picked it up and have played quite a bit of it over the weekend. Essentially it has a lot in common with Dead Cells and Hades, and there are some really interesting options. I think maybe the difficulty curve might be a bit overtuned especially if you choose the “easy” mode because there isn’t really much of a difference from the normal mode. The art style reminds me a bit of Flashback for reasons I can’t fully explain. There are a lot of interesting weapon options, some of them clearly better than others but that is always going to happen. I will be interested to see how this one evolves over time.

I also spent some time this weekend screwing around with Yuzu the Nintendo Switch emulator. It had been quite awhile since I last touched it, and lord has it improved during that time. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the emulator is capable of latching onto the gyro sense in my Dual Sense PS5 controller. I remember when I was playing through Breath of the Wild on Cemu I had to use some monstrocity where I latched into the gyro in my android phone to complete those puzzles. I mean I could just play all of these games on my switch, but I know with Cemu the ability to remove weapon durability from Breath of the Wild made that game infinitely more enjoyable. I need to dive into the mods for Yuzu and see if I can find something similar for Tears of the Kingdom. I have to say playing on my 3080 equipped PC… is so much prettier and smoother than playing on a native Switch.

Lastly I spent some time this weekend screwing around on the Mage in Last Epoch. I’ve decided to follow a build guide and go all in on lightning damage. So far it is just immensely fun to shock everything to death and watch the lightning damage arc between oncoming monsters. I am not sure how far I will make it with this character. I spent the entire podcast on Saturday playing it and am now around level 21 ish. I’ve chosen my specialization and went Sorc but am still picking up basics from the Mage tree. I am curious to see how this character feels once I get a decent amount of ward preservation on it, because at the moment it feels a wee bit squishy.

Last week was a bit of a slog, in spite of only being three days long. I am hoping this week will be a little less compacted and stressful. I know I essentially have to prepare for being in training all week the week after next. I’ve not done anything in person for that many days in a row for awhile, so that will be its own sort of stress. I hope you all have a pheomenal week, and I hope that maybe I can pick one of the many things I have been doing to actually focus on.

Spriggan Empowered Monoliths

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Yesterday I talked about my recent Diablo IV adventures, which are admittedly largely led by a desire to keep hanging out with my friend Cyl. That is the game that she is playing so I keep offering myself as tribute to do whatever shenanigans she has in her mind. We did some Nightmare Dungeons last night and I have to admit… while I enjoyed hanging out I didn’t really enjoy the content. We were doing a variety of 21-23 dungeons and honestly… they just were not that fun. It might be that my level is lagging behind hers significantly, or it might be that the content just isn’t actually that fun… but whatever the case the moment we broke for the night I returned to my comfy standby… Last Epoch. I got my Druid to level 84 last night and am still hunting for a few pieces of gear. I need to sit down and properly sort out what I want for each slot and then adapt my loot filter for those specific stats.

Over the weekend I got the Spriggan build through all of the normal mode monoliths and unlocked Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 Legendary variants of each. I’ve been focused on farming Black Sun mostly for a chance at the squirrel hat aka Herald of the Scurry. I’ve yet to give up on the hope of eventually playing that build. More than anything at the moment I am just farming experience to gain levels. I would really like to have at least one character hit level 100 before the 1.0 drop. This is only the second character that I have hit Empowered Monoliths on so I am still relatively new to the Last Epoch endgame as a whole. That said I already feel like I could use some variety in my life with the content, and my hope is that we maybe see some of the randomization changes sooner rather than later. The Action RPG YouTube channel does a summary of the Friday dev chat live streams and it sounds like something akin to a Loot Goblin is a near-term addition.

I’ve been milking a little bit more experience out of the level 90 normal monoliths because they are so much more chill than empowered. I really need to get back into the habit of throwing on an audiobook while grinding, because when I am doing that… I don’t really notice the repetitive nature of doing monoliths or delve or whatever ARPG grind I happen to be engaged with. The Power sort of broke me as far as books go… and I’ve yet to really dive into another book after that. I tried starting a few but ended up bouncing pretty early. I have a target for the next novel to consume via Audio Book, but I just need to sit down and decide to do it.

At least until the next Path of Exile League, this is going to probably be my gaming happy place. I am still progressing in Honkai Star Rail and got my first character to level 70 last night. I’m going to need to do some devoted grinding in order to get the materials to pull up the rest of my team to 70 as well… then my secondary team after that. I’m pretty happy with the state of my gaming options at the moment. I have Final Fantasy XVI but since it is on console… I just never seem to feel like playing it. I realize I am the weirdo… but the idea of playing a game on a console just feels so exhausting. Controllers are not my natural mode of gameplay and while I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and Genesis… the moment I got access to a 386 computer I was all in on PC gaming. I am honestly somewhat annoyed that Square chose to launch that game ONLY on the PS5 for the time being. If they had done PS5 and Epic Game Store… I would be probably actively playing it on the PC right now.

Anyways hopefully your week is going smoothly. Mine is considerably less hectic than last week was now that the world around me has largely recovered from the storm damage. What are you playing right now? Drop me a line below. Last little note… if you are on Blue Sky you can follow me there now. I had a nice person shove an invite code into my hand. I am not entirely certain what I think about it so far. It feels really really basic, and I still greatly prefer mastodon/gamepad. I am however checking it a few times a day.

Swole Treebeard

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Good Morning Friends! I think I am probably done with Diablo IV for a while. I absolutely got some enjoyment out of the game, but as far as long-term replayability goes… it isn’t really doing it for me. The moment-to-moment gameplay and grind are just not what I want out of an ARPG, but I also sort of knew this going into the game. As a result, I am back to my usual nonsense and playing some Last Epoch. When I was having a blast in the Path of Exile Crucible league, my friend Ace was having a similar blast playing a Druid Spriggan build in Last Epoch. So this morning I am going to talk a bit through the build and share some gameplay footage that I recorded yesterday. First, however… I want you all to bask in the glory that is my Wild Man Pool Cleaner… because I can’t NOT see a pool skimmer with the way he is holding that staff.

Thankfully however you spend all of your time in this build as a Swole Treant. This build revolves around spending all of your time in Spriggan Form and then buffing the abilities that you have access to in that form. Spriggan form like the other transformed forms relies on rage, so you will be needing to do things to make sure that you can make it all the way through a map without getting knocked back into your weaksauce human form again. We are also going to be shifting as much damage as we can to cold… which adds a bunch of benefits including a whole other defensive layer that comes from slowing and eventually freezing enemies.

Yesterday over lunch I recorded a video showing off some gameplay. This is me doing a level 75 monolith as I slowly work towards getting this character into empowered monoliths. Essentially the gameplay involves having 1 Spriggan, 1 Wolf, and 1 Storm Crow pet that provide buffs, conditions, and some meager additional damage and then running amok through the map dropping 9 Healing Totems and 12 Vines. The Healing Totems are converted to spiked totems through the Spriggan Form skill tree and the Vines are converted into frozen thorn turrets. So what ends up happening in practice is that the Healing Totems keep you alive through almost any damage, and there are just so many things firing spikes in all directions that it shreds most smaller mobs. It isn’t amazing at bossing… because it takes quite a bit of time for them to actually deal damage to the stronger enemies but the excessive healing you are receiving allows you to survive basically anything that does not one-shot you.

Currently, I am at level 73 and working my way through the level 85 Monolith without much issue. After conquering that I will have the three level 90 Monoliths to complete and then can properly begin Empowered level 100 Monoliths. Honestly, the mapping portion of running the various Echoes is smooth as butter. The only challenges thus far have come from the bosses, where there are a lot of one-shot mechanics that I have to dodge. I steamrolled the first Monolith boss and took two attempts at Rahyeh, and two attempts at Lagon. While it took quite a while for my army of turrets to burn down the bosses, the healing allowed me to deal with a lot of the smaller mechanics that just sort of whittles you down over time. So on Lagon for example I needed to dodge any of his beam attacks… but could just stand in and soak the waves.

As far as the build goes, Aaron from Action RPG has a guide video above and you can find the Last Epoch Tools template here. One thing that I find I miss greatly when playing games that are not Path of Exile… is POE.Ninja. That website scrapes the build information from the top progressed players so if you are curious how others have solved specific problems in a build, you can sift through information til your heart is content. I legitimately wish EVERY ARPG had something like this, so you could see how players that are focused on a specific type of play are gearing out and solving the inherent issues with the build. Mostly what I would love to see from build creators is some stat information… like you should have X amount of Y stats, rather than suggesting some idealized pieces of gear that will probably be almost impossible to replicate.

For my build currently, I have some pretty scuffed gear and am utilizing two uniques. The first is Tears of the Forest, which is very likely to be required to make this build work. Essentially it solves your rage problems and generates 2 Rage per second for each Vine you currently have summoned. Since you are going to be trying to keep up all twelve Vines at any given time, this means you are generating 24 Rage per second which is pretty much faster than you can reasonably spend it. I’m also using Valeroot, which is not super amazing… but does give me +1 to the level of Spriggan Form. My goal is at some point to replace that with a purple chest that has more than one level of Spriggan Form on it. While I have legendary potential on Valeroot… I am just not sure if it is worth trying to turn into a Legendary.

All I know for certain is that this has revitalized my joy in Last Epoch for the time being. I have two builds that need specific items to drop for them to really be able to transition into the next level, and Spriggan seems to be extremely solid with little to no specific items. My hope is if nothing else I can use this build to farm items in higher tiers of corruption in order to finish out both my Bone Golem Necro build and my Squirrelmaster build. I have been contemplating turning my necro from being Fire Based to Necrotic/Self-healing based but it just felt like too much fiddling to really make happen. Not that it would actually be that difficult given that I shifted gears to Spriggan extremely abruptly on my baby druid, but it is sort of the “full bags” problem I have with MMORPGs.

What I mean by the “full bags” problem is that there is often a game for me that I might want to play… but there is just enough friction involved with playing it that I have trouble getting started. Traditionally this has been an MMORPG problem where I have no clue what any of the items in my bags do anymore, and it would require an hour or so of dedicated effort to sort things out… so instead I keep logging in and then logging right back out. I’ve had this most specifically with Everquest II, where I have some 300 bag slots full of probably useless crap, and I just don’t want to dedicate the mental bandwidth to trying to figure out what to do with any of it. Similarly, I have this wall with getting back into Genshin Impact, where I have too many quests pulling me in too many different directions… so instead I just don’t engage at all. So instead of taking the time to sort out my Necromancer in Last Epoch… I just shifted my focus to a different character for a while.

I am a “stuffer” and this drives my wife insane. She will occasionally bring me an object… that she wants me to deal with, but at the moment she hands me it… I can’t dedicate the mental bandwidth to figuring out what to do with it so I just find someplace to put it. Often that place is somewhere I will likely never find it again, but I just can’t deal with new stimuli when I am in the middle of doing something at times. In Path of Exile I have several “dump” tabs, where I just shove gear that might be useful at some point but I can’t deal with trying to decide if I sell them or vendor them at that very moment. The huge benefit of having seasons that reset in ARPGs… is it limits my ability to get into a state of having too much shit to process. For now, I am enjoying the heck out of the Spriggan, and my hope is that this will ground me enough in Last Epoch again to feel comfortable going and actually dealing with making the Necromancer work in a more comfortable manner.

Last Epoch 0.9.1 Patch Review

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the drop of the latest Last Epoch patch, and as a result, it meant that Ace and I spent a chunk of last night hanging out while we both explored the changes. Since a big part of the content drop was a completely reworked leveling experience. This received mixed feedback when this news was dropped on Monday, but I absolutely understand why the focus was on the early game. Essentially you really need to grab the player in the opening minutes to an hour of the game if you really want to keep them engaged, and the previous starter experience was a little odd and uneven. It also was some of the very earliest content that had been released and was starting to show its age. If you want to see all of the features you can check out the highlight reel trailer below.

I used the patch as an opportunity to reboot my Rogue character that I never leveled far enough to actually specialize. That is the first major positive change is the flow of the content makes it so that you arrive at the “End of Time” zone which is the gate for specialization… at about the time when you would normally be needing to choose a specialization. The previous flow of the game made it so that you were usually wildly over-leveled by the time you reached the core hub of the game and could choose which specialization you wanted to go into. On almost every character up until this point, it meant that at about level 20 I just had to stop choosing passives because I could not put them into the specialization trees. On this latest character, I reached the End of Time at roughly level 16 and that felt pretty freaking solid.

The start of the campaign attempts to actually give you a reason for some of the things that you are doing and spends some time setting up a few of the core conflicts lore-wise. Previously you sort of just stumbled into bad things happening and rolled with the punches, now you are introduced to some conflict, get introduced to a bad faction doing bad things, and then are introduced to a plot MacGuffin that said bad people are after, and that you need to get to first. It flows so much better and a number of the content blocks and zones and been reordered in a manner that makes much more sense. It is still very much an “ARPG Story” which is to say it is pretty light on details and largely talks about things in broad terms… but I more or less find this as sufficient motivation to kill lots of things and chase loot. Someone on the team also learned how to draw women’s faces that do not all look like they are 10 years old, so that is a huge positive as well.

There are a few hilarious timing moments where an enemy swoops in to capture one of the NPCs… but there is this weird lag involved with it. You end up sitting there wondering what exactly is going on… and then suddenly someone flies away with the NPC and you are left to think “Oh, okay bye then”. This post is coming across as way more snarky than I intended it to. Maybe it is just that I have played so many of the early missions in this game that I am overanalyzing the changes. The biggest cool thing from the new content though is all of the really interesting enemy types. Ace and I talked last night about how much we are looking forward to seeing these new areas as endgame Monolith Echoes. Patch 0.9.1 was a good step forward, and I am hoping that also means that they plan on going back and smoothing out some of the other awkward transition points later in the campaign. For example how you rapidly go from being in frosty tundra land, and then extremely rapidly transitioning to adventuring on the literal ocean floor.

Another new feature of 0.9.1 is the introduction of “towns” as hubs that blend together random players who happen to be visiting an area. This is cool in theory, but also I have zero interest in grouping with a bunch of randos… but I guess maybe someone out there wants to do this. Right now unfortunately there is a bit of a performance hit every time you zone into areas that would be flagged as a town… so essentially any encampment that has a stash chest and vendors. I am sure they will iron this out over time, but for the moment it just takes a long while to load into any of these social hubs. As the game grows and has more activities that require you to group up with other players, I am sure this will become more relevant. For now, it feels more like they are laying the groundwork for something else and now have to solve the technical changes that come with it.

This patch also introduced the cosmetic shop and it largely seems fine. There was some gnashing of teeth over the pricing model when this was originally announced, and EHG has significantly watered down the cost since then. I have a bajillion fake shop currency points because I was a pretty early supporter of the game. Essentially everything is now priced in increments of 50 coins aka $5 and the highest items that I saw for sale were 150 coins each or $15. The options are pretty limited at the moment but we knew that going into this release. They are essentially just testing the waters and ironing out any problems with making purchases before adding what I am sure will be a steady drip of cosmetics at “priced to own” values.

The only problem that I have at the moment is with the way the supporter packs are being handled this time around. Traditionally Last Epoch supporter packs have been a tiered affair so that if you bought pack D you also got all of the benefits of pack A, B, and C. Now this might just be the challenges of working within the pricing structure of the Steam Store, but right now… you have four packs that each gives you a backpack, a generic colored-coded pet, and a portal. They all award you the same amount of cash shop currency, but each one is $10 more than the previous one… for “reasons”. It feels pretty bad, to be honest, and I am not sure if this is designed to engender some sort of elitist “I bought the most expensive pack” bullshit or FOMO… but whatever the case I do not like it. I did in fact buy the most expensive pack but largely to test this theory. I don’t mind giving EHG more money to support the development of the game, but it doesn’t make it feel any less shit.

I think another aspect of why it feels so bad is that I have gotten used to Path of Exile supporter packs which are admittedly more expensive, but have the structure I was expecting. So for example if you buy the $60 pack you get everything from the $30 pack, all the new stuff at the $60 tier… and the full face value of the pack in cash shop currency. So similarly I at least expected some sort of similar structure in Last Epoch where if you bought a $50 pack you got everything from the packs leading up to that tier as well as 500 cash shop coins aka the face value of the pack. In Path of Exile, the supporter packs feel like a phenomenal deal and there are folks… myself included, who tend to buy one every season even if we have zero need for more currency. They just feel like a value proposition that is worth partaking of and also has the side benefit of supporting more of the madness you are enjoying. My hope is that EHG goes back to the drawing board and at a minimum makes the packs additive. As they stand now they just seem like we are giving them more money out of the goodness of our hearts… which admittedly is a thing but when you are giving me back kitsch that has no real-world value… it seems like you should be generous.

The super fancy wings that you get from the $50 pack seem to be bugged as well and look nowhere near as large as are depicted in the artwork advertising the pack so I am hoping that is also a bug. Do I regret buying the pack? Not really. I was going to throw more money at the game regardless because I feel like EHG deserves it. That said… I want them to be better than the competition and that definitely means that they also need to be a better value proposition. So here is hoping that they rethink their pricing model a bit further and become a bit more generous with the swag.

At this point, I have spent zero time with endgame content changes, so I fully expect that to be the next thing I dive into as last night I finished up all of the new story. I know there are some tweaks and changes to the drop rate of uniques that drop from specific timelines, so here is hoping that maybe just maybe I can get that dang Herald of the Scurry.