Last Epoch

Every Day a New Betrayal

by

Good Morning Folks. I realize it has been a while since I last posted, but my world has been turned upside down in the last few days. On some level, I knew this would be hard, but I am not sure I was fully prepared for what it feels like when your body betrays you. Every day has been its own wild ride. I’ve been taking notes because, in theory, I will be going through the same feelings and symptoms at the same time each rotation, and more than anything, that has me dreading the next four months. Can I really do this seven more times? What will even be left of me when I am through the other end? Nothing about this process is easy or comfortable, and it is honestly a struggle to keep sustenance in me. At this point, I am down 50 lbs from my highest weight, and that is just a start. I have no clue where I am going to end up at the end of this journey, because it definitely feels like everything I am going through is accelerating this process, whether or not I want it to. I had a bit of a scare on Friday as my blood pressure meds pushed me down into dangerous territory, so I have completely halted those for the time being and am not sure if and when I will start them back up.

I am not even sure what this means for my blog right now. This is easily the longest gap I have had in writing for a long while, given that it has been five days since my last post. Essentially, all of last week was a wash, and I am not entirely certain how much that will change over time. I keep thinking I will hit a point of equilibrium with the changes my body is going through because they will be cyclical, and that at some point I will be used to the rollercoaster of killing off cells and waiting on new ones to grow back. Every day has been different than the last, but not the same level of better or worse on a progressive scale. I had it in my head that the worst days would be the days actively taking chemo, and then after I finished that, it would be a progressive recovery of functionality, where every day would build upon the previous. That does not appear to be the sort of curve that we are dealing with. Everything just takes so much longer than it normally would, because I keep having to rest between actions. It isn’t that I “can’t” do things… just that the actions bring me to cold sweats and make me need to take pauses in between every micro action. I woke up at 6 am and immediately started getting ready. It was not until around 7:15 that I made it upstairs with breakfast, and everything in between was “do something” and then take a seat for a bit to recover from the thing I just did.

Writing is how I deal with things. I am in part sharing this with you, my readers… because it is my instinct to do so, not necessarily because I want pity or suggestions. I think we have all been around friends and family dealing with cancer in various ways, and this is just my time of life to deal with it. However, the one thing that I can offer is a perspective, as I write through it to process the experience for myself. I’ve always said that I can get used to anything, given enough time and repetition, and I am hoping that this cancer rollercoaster will be one of those things, or that maybe my body will get better at bouncing back. Right now, it is just so broad the impact… because it feels like every single muscle and every single bone… aches at a deeper level than I have ever experienced. I know logically, those are cells dying off and regrowing, and ultimately, I am going to go through this every single round. It feels like when I was a kid and would have massive muscle and bone aches right before a growth spurt. It would also be hilarious if I grew in height from this, but I don’t think it works that way.

On the gaming front, I have cleared all of the Harbingers and am up to Aberroth, but just cannot bring myself to push past and kill him, because I stopped caring enough about it. The build that I am playing is far from immortal, and right now… given my mental bandwidth, I think I need an immortal build to enjoy myself. I could roll a second character and futz around for a while, but I think I might have reached the point where Last Epoch has run its course for me at the moment. There are so many vectors to scale my build on, but they all require massive amounts of effort to accomplish. Were I playing trade, I could just save up and buy whatever I needed, but I do not play trade in this game. So instead, I might just sunset the game for the moment and move on to other things. Maybe if I run across some other build that I just absolutely have to play, I will give it a go, but for the moment, I think I am going to wind things down in Eterra.

That means that I am largely back playing Path of Exile, because the level of engagement works for me. Before the Last Epoch season started, I got my build to a point of almost being immortal, and as a result, I can just go through the motions and collect loot. There are still a bunch of challenges that I want to knock out so that I can upgrade my hideout decoration. I can slowly chip away at these while I am otherwise incapacitated, and feel like I am doing something… while mostly just faffing about. What worries me is that I have four months of this ahead of me. Four months of barely getting by as my body betrays me, and none of this sounds like a good time. I need gaming to keep me sane, but I am going to have to find easy gaming options because I just cannot function at a high level right now. I was naive in that I expected the between week to mostly be getting life back to normal, but so far it is anything but. Maybe as things move forward into the week, it will improve significantly and rapidly, but every day has been a new series of sensations. I am going to realistically also need to start probably forcing myself to work out some, for fear that I lose critical muscle mass each time I kill off cells and regrow them.

Anyways. I am a fucking mess, friends. I will get through this because I have entered the “only way out is through” territory, but holy crap was it not what I was expecting.

Juggling Weapons for Harbingers

by

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.

Corruptions Are Wild

by

Good Morning Folks! Yesterday, we got Shattered Omens, the new season for Last Epoch. Last night I did our Thursday Funday nonsense, and during the middle of it, I was asked what should be a simple question… How long has Last Epoch Been Out? Technically, I have been playing small amounts of the game since November 8th, 2018, when I bought into Alpha 0.5.3. However, I really started playing the game seriously on July 12th, 2022, in its pre-multplayer variant, because things were really starting to cook. Collectively, the AggroChat crew started playing more regularly when the Multiplayer release dropped on March 9th, 2023. The answer that Sita was probably looking for was February 21st, 2024, when the game officially launched into its 1.0 version. So, at this point, we are a little over two years into the lifecycle of Last Epoch as a “complete” game, and I say that in quotes because we still do not have all of the acts that will eventually be in the final version of the story. We are on Season 4, but I have no clue what the actual number should be because originally, they did this whole patch number “cycle” nonsense instead of just calling them seasons.

One of the most delightful things about playing a new Last Epoch season is that I get to once again roam around with my adventuring companions. I’ve been a pretty avid supporter of the game and purchased pretty much every MTX offering backer set that they offer us, because they are priced so much cheaper than the Path of Exile league packs. For example, the Fractured Legend’s supporter pack, which features everything available for this Season is $59.99 as compared to one of the Mirage supporter packs, which runs $90 for technically less stuff. I love this game and want it to survive so I keep giving it money, but after many years of doing this, I have a fancy Capybara, Toucan, and Sloth that hangs out on my back… and running around with this trio of animal companions makes me happy in ways that I cannot quite adequately explain. Maybe I am too old school, but I believe that you really should support the games that you enjoy playing in some way or another, and have always done so as best I can.

Each time a new season drops, they have added new content to the game, and slowly, bit by bit, the frequency of “interesting things” in maps has increased. This time around, starting with Act 2, we have the appearance of something called the Omen Window. This is your classic ARPG “kill things in a circle” mechanic and reminds me a bit of a mix between Ritual and the new Unstable Breach, for Path of Exile players. Ritual, because you are confined to a specific fixed location, and Unstable Breach, because random monsters are summoned and you fill a bar, which breaks the “boss” encounter out of its invulnerability phase. When you take down the boss, the encounter ends, and you are rewarded with a bunch of corrupted loot and some of the crafting currency for this league that allows you to corrupt your own items. Essentailly these are Vaal Orbs for the Path of Exile player, or for someone not familiar with the concept… it is a final step that you can do in crafting an item which can produce some wild outcomes… but also keeps you from further modifying the item.

It is hard to fully explain just how game-changing this has been for the campaign. These are all items that I got from my first two Omen Windows. If you get a good corrupted weapon in Act 2… You can literally keep using it all of the way from the campaign because it is dropping with stats that you cannot get until the Monolith. For example, the ring on the left with +11 Strength on it… is something that I am still using in Act 7 and will probably keep using until I finally get some other way of replacing that huge boost in attributes. I have held onto these for when I ultimately level alts, because the stat packages are just too wild. For example, that axe with 96% increased Physical Damage and 26% Damage Leech is pure nonsense. Sure, it would have been much better if it had rolled with flat damage, but I am not going to complain at all. You can corrupt your own items, but be VERY careful because I corrupted a level 10 dagger…. and it ended up swapping it to a level 56 required dagger base, effectively bricking it for me.

I started screenshotting some of the early drops from Omens, because it was freaking wild. This one for example dropped two completed legendary items. Granted, they were more akin to the random legendaries that you get from the Nemesis system, but they were still extremely strong… and I am using several items that I got early on from corruptions. The only negative that I see about the power of the Omen Windows is that it sort of makes every other encounter feel worse as a result. Exiled Mages were already pretty bad, because you only really care about them if they can drop something that your build specifically needs. I am thankful that you get a little warning message in chat when you enter a map with Omens, and in theory… it might not be a bad strategy to just farm the same map over and over for corruptions in one of the first areas. What was so interesting about this while leveling, is if you get a really strong item… it might convince you to try some things that you had never tried previously.

For example…. I probably never would have leveled a Sentinel with Prism Wraps and Calamity. However, I got a Prism Wraps off my second Omen, which had +1 to all skills… making it insanely powerful for leveling, and I am still wearing it. Calamity similarly has a huge amount of physical resistance on it, and given that I am dealing fire damage, I just rolled with it… especially when I got a pair of Falcon Fists later from a Nemesis egg. I would likely never run a Vipertail on a Sentinel either, but since so much of my power comes from procs… and I greatly benefit from hitting really fast… I started using it for the melee attack speed and kept using it because the poison damage was pretty overpowered since I was hitting very fast. Code of an Erased sentinel, I only included because I am pretty proud of that being the first one I picked up off the ground, and turning into a pretty formidable item. I am sure I will have to wear proper gear once I get to the Monolith, but for now this leveling package feels really strong.

I am level 47 and made it to Heoborea in Act Seven, without taking any deaths. I am sure once I hit monoliths, I will lose my “deathless”, or potentially before, because I keep doing dumb things. Path of Exile II introduced the ability to pause the game while playing by hitting escape to bring up a menu. A few leagues ago, this was also added to Path of Exile, and it was a very welcome addition that I adapted to quickly. As a result, I keep hitting Escape, thinking I am pausing the game, only to watch the corners of my screen turn red as I start getting hit. This is muscle memory… and at some point I am going to do this… alt tab out and come back sad and dead. I would love it if EHG added pause to the online portion of the game, but then again… they have a lot on their plate. There are a ton of quality-of-life tweaks that I would love to see, but some of them seem to be lines that they do not want to cross. For example, I would love to have my pets pick up any of the loot that gets vacuumed into your inventory, like affix shards. I won’t be holding my breath on that one.

I should be able to wrap the campaign up tonight. I don’t usually take any skips and go out of my way to unlock the various dungeons as I am near them on the map. Though I do remember the latest acts taking quite a bit longer than the early ones. I am still going to complete them, though, because you can apparently speed through the monolith faster if you have completed the campaign and are not required to do as many of the early monos. It feels like I am gaining levels much faster than normal, so I am interested to see what level I am when I open up Monos for the first time. I am sure I will be playing this hard and heavy all weekend long, so if you are around, feel free to friend me. My Account ID is Belghast, and the character I am playing this time around is a Forge Weapons Forge Guard called BelForgedNonsense.

Last Epoch Shattered Omens Launch Day

by

Good Morning Folks! Today is the day that the Last Epoch league starts, and I am going to be taking a bit of a pause in my Path of Exile shenanigans to enjoy it thoroughly. I really love this game, and I get that sometimes I talk about it in slightly negative light… but that is really only because the totality of the game is not quite as fleshed out as my beloved Path of Exile. I think there are a lot of things that Last Epoch does so much better, and it is also a much more approachable game. It took me almost two years before I got the hang of playing even the basics of Path of Exile with any level of proficiency. Last Epoch is the sort of experience that I can just log in and start being functional almost immediately. To paraphrase the classic Tolarian Community College standard… Reading the Skill Explains the Skill. Sure you might not be able to yolo your way to Aberroth with your first build, but you can at the very least make it through the campaign, and from there the game gives you easy tools to tweak your character without much pain to make it better over time.

Say you want to play Last Epoch, but you do not want to yolo things. Much like every other ARPG out there, we have a bunch of folks who came up through the community of the game that make build guides. Sure, you can probably lean on all of the same ARPG stalwarts that you are used to, because most of the Path of Exile and Diablo folks also play Last Epoch seasons. However, I would highly suggest you maybe give your time and attention to the folks who are supporting the community during the downtime. Here are a few that I would suggest you check out for builds.

  • Aaron Action RPG – Aaron is one of the most prolific guide creators out there, especially in the minion-based builds space. Unfortunately, he has a bit of a verbal schtick with these guides that grates my nerves, but you cannot discount the quality of the builds he is creating, or the level of devotion he spends to providing much-needed news and updates for the community as a whole. He also runs and maintains ActionRPG.com, which is an up-and-coming guide site for the ARPG community as a whole to rival others in the market.
  • Dr3adful – Great guide creator… shitty attitude. Specifically, he seems to take issue with the “Dad Gamer” or “Low Effort” community looking for easy builds… which he ironically does actually support because I am very likely going to be playing one of his builds. If you can push past this, he does some really interesting stuff with some of his builds that often go off in less-than-obvious directions.
  • BinaQc – Bina is sort of the Zizaran of the Last Epoch community. Really good-natured, and does a pretty good job of covering the most popular builds of the league. He is not necessarily going to give you absolutely unique builds, but will cover a lot of the things that Maxroll has guides for.
  • Frozen Sentinel – This is not a creator that I have consumed a lot of content from, but when I have it has been more focused on some of the farming strategies. They do some deep dives into specific mechanics, similar to someone like a SirGog or Slippery Jimmy.
  • Maxroll.gg – While not a creator necessarily, I am specifically calling out the Maxroll website because the folks that they have aligned with in the community (BinaQc, LizardIRL, Volca, Terek, etc), do a really good job of keeping updated and easy-to-follow guides to the game both in and out of the seasons.

Dread released a video where he talks about five different builds that are pretty low effort that will get you through monoliths and through the non-uber version of Aberroth without much issue. Again, like I said… for someone who seems to be spiteful towards the Righteous Fire crowd… he made a pretty freaking great guide. Essentially, he outlines Forged Weapons Forge Guard, Rip Blood Warlock, Crit Hammerdin, Vengeance Bleed Carrior of Creation Paladin, and Warpath Void Knight. Of these, the only one that I have actually played is Warpath Void Knight, but it is pretty much one of the most classic and tried and true builds that has been around in one form or another since pre-release days. There were a lot of changes to Mages, so I think they will also be powerful this league, but I do find it interesting that none of those builds made it into this summary.

There is a ten-hour video guide to Forge Weapons Forge Guard, and I think this is probably going to be what I am starting this go around. I’ve always liked Forge Guard, and they got a heck of a lot more compelling for me personally when they got a version of “Titans Grip” from World of Warcraft that allows them to wield a two-handed weapon with a shield. That just makes me happy thematically, so there have been a few times that I have built around Forge Guard as a platform just so I could do that for funsies. I tried playing the minion build several leagues back, but I never actually played their version of Animate Weapons, and the more I see of it, the more I think maybe that was a massive mistake. Sentinel as a starter is very comfortable to me, because I have probably spent more time on that class than I have anything else. You can check out my profile, which will allow you to get to all of my characters over on LastEpochTools, and ten of my characters have been built around the Sentinel in one form or another.

The other build that I really want to play around with is the Beemancer, though I am not entirely certain I would be playing it on a Necromancer base instead of the Primalist. Essentially, there is a new unique set that gives you access to a giant, angry bee-bear-hybrid thing that then summons an army of bee minions. I will probably use my Forge Guard build to gather up the uniques to create something around this. This is sort of the logic that I apply in Path of Exile, when I roll a Righteous Fire character first to break into the endgame and then use it to fund other ideas that I might have for the league. The only negative of this is that Last Epoch tends to have sticky loot, which means that I am probably going to see way less necromancer-style gear if I am on a sentinel. Some of this is loot filters, and some of this is just the way the drops seem to work there.

For Primalist, I would probably start out with the Cocaine Bear build from last league. This is essentially a Beastmaster build that goes all in on a single bear minion, and then buffs it to silly levels. Similarly to Forge Guard, I have never done this with Beastmaster, because the only build I have actually played is one around the Squirrel helmet. So this is probably something I am going to explore if the whole Bee thing does not go well.

There is also a new pair of boots for the Necromancer that might give us proper Righteous Fire, so I will probably be playing around with this if/when I find a pair of them. Similarly, Fire Aura is apparently massively buffed on the Mage side, so I might be playing around with that as well. My goal is to get through the monolith, get through Aberroth, and then start playing around with other build concepts. It is super easy to level and super easy to play with build concepts, so hopefully this keeps me engaged longer than the last few seasons have. That is the core problem that I have with Last Epoch is that there just isn’t as long a tail of engagement with the game as I have with Path of Exile. To be fair, this is also my same problem with Path of Exile II, and Diablo IV… is that they feel way too shallow compared to everything that Path of Exile has. This is not a fault of any of these games, and just the fact that Path of Exile has decades worth of content.

I will probably still be poking my head into Path of Exile periodically, but expect me to focus super hard on Last Epoch for a bit.