Last Epoch

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.

Leaping Doggos

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Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.

When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.

Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.

I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.

Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts.

I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend.

My ARPG Hours Played

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Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.

Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.

Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.

To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.

So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.

This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.

The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.

I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.

I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.

This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.

The Heart Wants

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It is weird to me how I have gone from thinking I would give the Crucible League a hard pass… to be extremely excited for the league start tomorrow. It reminds me quite a bit of back when no matter my mental state… the mere existence of BlizzCon and the news feed that would come from it would stir up a desire to log back in. I seem to have been inoculated from BlizzCon Madness over the last several years, and even though I was playing the Alpha for Dragonflight I had no real interest in playing the game at launch. That said I am still extremely susceptible to Diablo III Seasonitis, and it brought me back to the game to play with the Altar mechanics in Season 28. It seems that maybe with Sanctum, Path of Exile finally burrowed its way deep into my core and I am going to be just as vulnerable to the League Virus as well.

I’ve had people ask me before why I participate in Seasons and Leagues… when in truth you are just playing the same game over again but taking away any advantage you might have earned in the past. This is so much the case that I rarely if ever touch my “Standard” characters that largely just end up being a storehouse of materials that will never be used. For me personally, it has nothing to do with the challenge, but more that it is like this microcosm of a game launch. I love the launch of a new MMORPG and the excitement as folks scurry around trying to adapt to the game systems and the almost crushing amount of content flowing forth about the game. That same environment exists around the launch of a new season or league as everyone gets excited about the start, and then gibbers excitedly about what new lessons they have learned and exciting drops they might have found. It is all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… crammed into a few weeks to a month every three or four months repeating like clockwork… and once you engage with it fully it can be addictive as fuck.

The unfortunate truth however is your “Standard” characters often feel like cleaning up after one hell of a party. Path of Exile has maybe the best method for dealing with the cleanup. Essentially you get a tab added to your standard inventory that is marked as “remove-only” and then you can withdraw things from it at your leisure. This is far better than the Diablo III norm of just mailing you all of your items. In a season or league, you end up just collecting a bunch of nonsense. For example, I apparently gathered up almost 9000 Chaos Orbs, that I never took the time to convert to Divine Orbs for easier storage. I spent some time yesterday straightening up my standard inventory in prep for the launch of the new league, which meant painstakingly withdrawing items from one tab and depositing them into another. I should have waited until AFTER the league patch dropped because the stack size is being increased from 10 to 20… and it would have literally taken half the time.

I am certain that I will be starting out the league as a Marauder and moving towards Juggernaut and Righteous Fire because it is just too good of a general build not to have at my disposal. During the last league, I ended up leveling and gearing a whole slew of characters. Other than the RF Jugg I had my SRS Necromancer, Seismic Saboteur, and two attempts at a Toxic Rain build that I liked in both Trickster and Pathfinder variants. Primarily I say this because I absolutely expect to have more than one character. Righteous Fire is an amazing build for Delve, Heist, and burning through the early maps but at some point, I want something that is more “Bossing” friendly. I only ended up getting two void stones last league, because quite honestly… I do not enjoy the bossing game nearly as much as I enjoy the rest of the game. However, I might want to change that and try and knock out the last two void stones so I can have T16 maps for everything. For those curious, the above video is Pohx simulating a run of all 10 acts as Righteous Fire.

If I was not starting Righteous Fire, I would probably try out this build from Ghazzy which is more of a traditional ARPG minion build. I don’t think it will probably be as good of a bosser as my SRS build was last league, but it looks like a pretty chill option. The only annoying thing is using Hungry Loop to essentially give you a 5 link for Animate Guardian. I do not love Animate Guardian, so if I did try this out I would probably run it largely ignoring that. The spell is cool in design but the fact that you erase uniques to equip it… and then lose them all if it ever dies… just feels bad. We will have to see how bad the Poison SRS variant is currency-wise, because I might try building this league as my “bosser” since I enjoyed my Fire variant in Sanctum.

I don’t get at all why I am caught up on this emotional rollercoaster of the league start when I am legitimately enjoying myself playing Last Epoch. The heart wants what the heart wants, unfortunately. I did get my primalist/beastmaster up to the second monolith last night however and am still enjoying that gameplay. Right now without going into totems like the build I was loosely following suggests, it feels quite a bit like a HotA Barb from Diablo III. It also seems to have just a ton of survival and feels way tankier than my Necromancer does. I’m technically working on the Monolith that has a higher than reasonable chance of dropping the Herald of the Scurry helm that I will ultimately need, but unfortunately, I think the level is too low yet and I will have to farm it once I get to empowered monoliths.

I’ve also been back to logging into BelginnersLuck shown in the first screenshot of the post and trying to get a unique to drop from Hillock. If nothing else… I am definitely much faster at pathing through that first map in a league and much better at fighting that first obstacle. Tomorrow I will be rolling a brand new character and diving into the league. I don’t necessarily expect any of my friends to really join me in this madness, because I know it literally is that now… madness. I enjoy myself though so that I guess is the part that matters the most. If you plan on diving into the Crucible league drop me a line and say hey.