Last Epoch

Last Epoch Shattered Omens Launch Day

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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.

Importance of the Journey

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I love Last Epoch, but one of the things that I have lamented for a while is that there just does not feel like there is enough to do in the game. So as a result, I have a couple of good weeks and then bounce because I run out of things that I actually care to do. On Tuesday nights, Ace and I have what we refer to as “Sibling Time” and more often than not lately it just ends up with us hanging out and chatting while we are doing out own things. Ace has been enjoying Path of Exile more than normal, but also was talking about how much they were looking forward to Last Epoch. At this point, I dug out my old lament, which led to us trying to dissect why it is that Last Epoch does not have the staying power that Path of Exile does. After some back and forth, I think we landed on the “why” behind this statement.

Ace and I have had a lot of bonding moments over the years. There is a natural back and forth between a tank that I always played and a healer that they always played. There is also the bonding of growing up in oddly similar circumstances, despite being in wildly different states. However, I would say probably our most pivotal bonding experience was a shared love of Diablo, and quite frankly, were it not for them and the fun that I had playing Diablo III Seasons, I would probably not be the ARPG junkie that I am today. I will always be deeply thankful for them indoctrinating me into the cyclical nature of Diablo III Seasons, and quite honestly, it was an event that I looked forward to more than pretty much anything else on the gaming calendar. I cannot say with any certainty which season was the first season we did this ritual together, but it became sacred.

So much of this experience centered around the Diablo III Seasons Journey, which was a series of achievements that ultimately unlocked some sort of cosmetic item. Generally speaking, this was some sort of a pet or a portal effect, and in the grand scheme of modern MTX, it was rather meager. What it did more than anything was give us something to focus on other than just grinding mobs and explosions of loot. Sure, we only got a week or two out of a Diablo III season, and by the end of that first weekend, we would have 90% of the list checked off, but it did force us to do some outliers in order to complete everything. This is what Last Epoch is missing, some sort of long ranged goal that we can focus on during the season and that pushes us to do specific content in order to knock out individual achievements.

I’ve also realized that is really what changed regarding my interaction with Path of Exile. Starting with the Sanctum league I started caring about trying to complete league challenges. This was an easy carryover from Diablo III, since I was already in that mindset, and for each league from that point forward, I have purposefully tried to get enough challenges completed to earn the little totem pole for my hideout. It started with just attempting to get one at all, to now where I am specifically trying to finish at least 34 of 40 each league, so I can earn the same size as I have in the last several leagues. I’ve never actually completed 40 of 40, because it involves doing a bunch of bossing, which is not really something I enjoy, given that bossing characters are different from mapping characters. It still gives me something to focus on and has pushed me outside of my comfort zone and forced me to learn a bunch of leagues’ worth of content that I had never interacted with previously.

Even Diablo IV has something similar in the form of the battlepass, and while I have issues with its specific implementation… it still gives a long tail to the league. There are specific things that you can focus on doing in order to unlock a sequence of cosmetic items. They made it worse since, in order to do most of these, you have to pay money to unlock them, but it still exists in one form or another. Last Epoch does not have something like this. Sure, Last Epoch has a ladder, but I am not the sort of competitive player who gives a shit about this sort of thing. What it is missing is some sort of long grind that has a destination in mind and rewards some sort of bauble for doing so. There is a certain measure of bragging rights in being able to show off your pet from a season, years later, after it is no longer available. Not that Last Epoch MTX are generally that great… it still would give me a bit more focus towards pushing down to specific levels in the Monolith, completing dungeons, or something that would push me out of the standard practice of playing for a few weeks and then going right back to Path of Exile.

Right now, the closest thing that Last Epoch has is the Forgotten Knights path of killing Harbingers and fighting Aberroth. However, this is often something that you can do in a single weekend with a good enough build and does not really require you to go out of your way in order to accomplish it. I feel like this is the equivalent of unlocking your Atlas and Voidstones in Path of Exile, and less a destination and more the starting place of the “true” endgame. I feel like Last Epoch really needs something that will take a few weeks to chip through in order to keep us grinding well past the natural expiration date of one of their seasons. I’ve jokingly said that I really like grinding and loot explosions, but it seems like the thing that really keeps me engaged is a series of tasks to tick off. I think this is in part why I love daily quests so much, because it gives me a reason to play the game and something specific to focus on without having to make any real decisions for myself. Similarly, this is why I have engaged in so many Legendary gear grinds in Guild Wars 2, because it gives me an overarching goal to focus on. Last Epoch really needs something more than trying to get slightly better gear, and I am hoping that, at some point, they give us some equivalent to all of these systems that I talked about today.

All of that said, I am still really looking forward to the launch of Last Epoch Season 4 when it drops on the 26th of this month. However, I still expect to mostly play for a few weeks and then go right back to Path of Exile.

2025 in Review: The Games

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Good Morning Folks! After giving you updates on my life… it is time to roll on into the rest of my year in review topics. I legitimately do not know how many of these I have, but I have stalled long enough. This morning I am going to talk about the games that were important to me during the last year in either a good way or a bad way. This list is not going to look anything like most 2025 in review lists, because I do not play a ton of new games. I play an awful lot of ARPGs and treat each season as though it were a game launch. This wildly skews the sort of results that I have in this scenario. I am also this time sort of loosely grouping the list into less important to more important, but not necessarily a strict order.

Path of Exile II: The Last of the Druids

This is probably the most recent of the games I am going to talk about it, and I am still more or less playing it. On December 12th, Path of Exile II released a big update that launched the Last of the Druids and Fate of the Vaal league. In it they gave us access to the first of the Int/Str hybrid classes the Druid which has ascendancies for Shaman and Oracle. More important than that, they gave us access to the primal ability tree and the talisman weapon that allow us to turn into a Bear, Wolf, or Wyvern. I’ve been deeply critical of Path of Exile II up until this point, seeing it as a bit of a mechanically worse version of Path of Exile that just happens to have better graphics and a better user interface. Playing Bear Druid, and specifically Demon Bear Shaman is what really pushed me over the edge to truly enjoying this game. It is fun as heck to hop around the map causing big explosions with my fat bear ass. The game still has problems… and will continue to have problems for a very long time… but this gameplay got me hooked.

Slormancer

Slormancer is a little 2D sorta isometric view roguelike arpglike game that is a heck of a lot of fun. I did not play this game anywhere near as much as I should have, but I hope to remedy that in 2026. I did play it enough however to want to talk about it. The mechanics of this game are just really fun, and it reminds me of what if you took Rogue Legacy and turned it into an ARPG. I mostly played the knight character, but the archer was pretty fun as well. This really wants to be played with a controller though, and is ideal for television gaming. Once I get off my ass and figure out what I want to use as a proper Steam in the Livingroom setup, I will probably be playing more of this. If you have not checked it out and like any of the types of games that I eluded to in this post… check it out. It’s a heck of a lot of fun for $20.

Dune Awakening

I have such wildly mixed feelings about Dune Awakening. This is going to be a game that goes in my disappointments of the year pile. The AggroChat folks and friends decided to play together on a private server that Tam rented for us as we all got started, and I feel like that is the correct way to play this game. It is unfortunate that it requires someone shelling out for a server, and it is even more unfortunate that it does not grant you private access to the shared open world pvp deep desert. What killed this game for me though… was upkeep. You are required to play a certain amount of this per week in order to generate enough fuel to keep the shield on your base active, or your base slowly disintegrates over time. This feels really fucking bad. Namely because I got busy with various events while playing this game… and then had the death of a spouse which knocked me even further out of whack with ever getting back in. Once I lost everything, there was no point in me going back. I would love to see a pure PVE sandbox version of this game that allows you to set custom rules on a server by server basis for things like upkeep. The game itself has gone from a peak concurrency of not quite 200k players to an average of 8k…. so I think maybe it did not work quite right for a lot of players.

Hellclock

So what if I told you there was a game… loosely based on the real world events surrounding Brazil’s War of Canudos… that took place in the aftermath of the abolishment of slavery, but also somehow involves exploring dungeons and killing zombies and shit? Hellclock is a deeply odd and stylistic roguelike ARPG where you have a fixed amount of time to explore on each run, and once you run out of time everything winds back and you get to keep any powerups that you purchased during the previous run. The cyclical nature of the game is deeply satisfying and you get various tools to extend your runs as you get better. I did not play anywhere near enough of this game but again I think it is prime fodder for once I sort out my Steam in the Livingroom setup. I have to solve my wireless network woes before I really do that unfortunately because I have my old gaming rig hooked up in the livingroom, the connectivity speeds are complete ass. I’ve also not really figured out a good keyboard and mouse option, and there will be games that I don’t necessarily want to play with a controller. Anyways NONE of that is about Hellclock, which is just a universally interesting game.

Titan’s Quest II

Titan’s Quest II had quite a number of updates throughout the year and I spent several days really getting into the game and checking out what it had to offer. I landed on the decision that I do not really enjoy playing a melee class in the game, but dig the heck out of playing ranged. I played a sort of icicle archer thing that worked really well, and honestly the game itself is just gorgeous. The fights are pretty interesting, and this is very much a worthy successor to the first game, which in itself was a worthy successor to Diablo II. If you like ARPGs in general or you were ever a fan of TItan’s Quest, then I suggest checking it out. They are continuing to release updates for the game as it is still in development so if you would rather play it once it is finished, then this might be a game to put a pin in and check back when the 1.0 release finally happens.

Abyssus

This game is a heck of a lot of fun to play with a friend, and Ace and I spent a bit of time playing this game and should probably at some point return to it. I think Destiny Rising more or less stole the place in our gaming lives that this took up for a bit. Essentially Abyssus is a wave based arena shooter rogue-like… about exploring the depths of an underwater dungeon. You and your friends take on waves of monsters, get loot, and work your way down to fixed boss fights at specific floors. The deeper you go the harder it gets and the more varied the environments become. Big Nautical-punk vibes with this game because you are both wearing these diving suits while you wield your big damned guns and kill things. The further you go the more points you get to configure your build and control your weapon load-outs, but a lot of options unlock symmetrically as you reach certain floors giving you a mix of guaranteed upgrades and choice based upgrades. I am not sure this game would be fun solo, but it was a blast with someone hanging out on voice chat.

Path of Exile – Mercenaries of Trarthus

Mercenaries of Trarthus was a challenge league that ran in Path of Exile from June 13th to October 27th and represented the first new content we had gotten in almost a year since the launch of Settlers of Kalguur the previous year. First it was just amazing to get some new content in the game, but more than that it introduced Mercenaries and I have always loved those sorts of mechanics in ARPGs. One of my favorite aspects of Diablo III was building out my companion to buff the things that were weak in my build, and that is largely what players did in order to make some truly busted builds. The real meta of the league was doing some sort of build that could apply large amounts of Lightning damage, and then using Doryani’s Prototype on your mercenary, to debuff all of the mobs in your presence to have large amounts of negative lighting resistance. I think the build that I ran as my second in the league managed to get close to -300% Lightning Resistance while dealing a ton of damage with Storm Brand of Indecision. It was thoroughly busted but lord did I have a lot of fun playing this league.

Monster Hunter Wilds

There will be some of you who do not remember just how much I got into Monster Hunter World when it released in 2018 both on the original PS4 release, and later when it came out on PC in August of that same year. I had never really mainlined a Monster Hunter game despite trying to dabble in them on the mobile platforms, but this game sucked me in and stole so much of my time. Monster Hunter Wilds was a return to the same style of game as Worlds and when it launched I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it. Sadly I did not really stick around as much as I thought I might, but that does not discount the fact that I had an awful lot of fun playing it. I probably would have played it more but every time Ammo, Sita and I tried to group up I started having network problems. Capcom… has some of the shittiest grouping systems ever, and if they got someone from a western live service game to come unfuck their game interface… I think folks would be around far longer. I only put in around 60 hours, but it was 60 hours well spent.

Last Epoch – Beneath Ancient Skies

On August 21st Last Epoch dropped a pretty signfiicant update with Beneath Ancient Skies which added a whole new chapter to the game and a new league mechanic hunting down primal monsters and chosing to evolve them making them more difficult and rewarding. I had a really fun league with this game, but ultimately I burned through it pretty quickly. I played a Fire Minions Necromancer build and then ultimately hopped on the Thorns damage train for quite possibly the stupidest build I have ever played in any game where I am just nuking the entire screen with thorns damage. The new act was a lot of fun and it is probably the best content they have added into the game to date. The primal league mechanic was also a lot of fun, and each time this game expands it keeps getting better. I think the challenge for me is that I “finish” with the game way faster than I do with Path of Exile. I reach a point with my builds where I have seen everything that I really want to see and really pushing to the true pinnacle content of the game requires more hours than I really want to dump into it. That is not a failing of the game and more a case that it still needs more years to cook before it will be as rich of an experience as Path of Exile has.

Path of Exile – Legacy of Phrecia Event

Earlier when I talked about Mercenaries of Trarthus, part of the reason why that league was so damned much fun is that it had been a literal year since we last got a new league in the game. So much of GGG’s time was being devoted to the care and feeding of the fledgling Path of Exile II, that the POE core felt ignored. That is not to say things were not happening, we had a few fun private leagues like the Pohx League event, but there was one thing that probably took the cake. Almost as a shadow drop, Grinding Gear Games gave us the Legacy of Phrecia alternative ruleset event where every single one of the 19 Ascendancy classe were replaced. It was wild to play through this and I played a Righteous Fire Scavenger… which is the alternative version of the Scion. It was so much fun, and now this game mode exists as an alternate ruleset that you can use to create custom leagues. There is part of me though that wishes at some point all of the Phrecia ascendancies go core and become just alternate options allowing us 38 different ascendancy choices in the game.

Destiny Rising

Destiny Rising is essentially my game of the year…. but it does not get the top slot for reasons I will talk about later. This is a gacha game from Net Ease that remixes the tried and true Destiny format, but also makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable in the process. There is no reason why I should be loving a Gacha game as much as I am, because I thought Genshin Impact broke me of that. However… Destiny Rising is shockingly fair when it comes to its Gacha mechanics. I have 3 accounts, 2 of which I have spent zero money on… and they both feel like I have plenty of things to do without having spent a dime. The whole three acccouints thing is largely because I am trying to maintain a guild when there are really only two or three of us that are actively playing. That is a whole other discussion. If you ever loved Destiny at any point in the past, you owe it to yourself to check out Destiny Rising. It is so damned much fun and really streamlines what made that game great. If you DO end up playing… hit me up because we certainly can use some more active players in our guild to do dailies.

Guild Wars 2 Fractal Incursion Event

My “Game of the Year” really goes to more specifically an event of the year. In September, Guild Wars 2 shadow dropped an event called the Fractal Incursion. This added a new feature to the game which allowed you to randomly queue for Fractals, giving the game what it needed so badly… a more modern group finder. Not only did they do this… they bribed the fuck out of us to run tons of them by providing a path to a piece of legendary armor, and also giving you a pathway to get said armor for every single weight class in the game. The end result was that Lion’s Arch specifically around the Mists portal was busier than at any point I have ever seen in this game’s history. The above screenshot was taken one morning when I was working on my blog post… so completely off peak hours for either EU or NA and it was STILL packed. Better yet we are going to be getting a version of this same group finder for a combined version of Raids and Strikes later this year. This has breathed so much new life into Guild Wars 2, and prompted us to have some really fun Thursday night fractal groups as we all chain ran them trying to get through the achievements. Absolutely the highlight of my gaming year, and on the 13th I believe we are getting a return of the Fractal Rush event so looking forward to that as well.

Those were my games and gaming events of the year. I am sure it looks pretty different than the lists for most people. I did not really play much in the way of single player experiences this year. I hope to remedy that in 2026, but who knows where that will go. My happy place tends to be listening to an audiobook while plugging away at a mechanically interesting but narratively devoid experience. Even for this coming year my games list will be the games that I played, not necessarily the games that came out so at some point when I finally do get around to beating Clair Obscur it will probably make a list. Anyways. Were there any unusual games that made your personal Games of the Year list? Drop me a line below.

What Happened to Last Epoch?

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Good Morning Folks. If you have been reading this blog lately you might have had a bit of whiplash as I went from having a blast in Last Epoch… to suddenly diving headlong into Path of Exile II. So you might be asking yourself… Hey Bel… What happened to Last Epoch? This is one of the challenges of both the seasonal model of ARPGs and the fact that a new game launched over an extended United States Holiday weekend. Kodra and Ash are still very much 100% engaged with Last Epoch, and I think I maybe just burned through the process a bit faster than they did. Ultimately I built two fairly successful characters with my Fire Minions Necromancer and then later my Thorns Forge Guard. More than that though I think I just accomplished everything that I really wanted to accomplish in a very short amount of time… far shorter than I thought it would be.

On Saturday, Ace and I spent the day pushing through corruption levels. I was a bit further progressed than they were and thanks to these temporal token things, you can force a boss pretty fast in a given timeline to help catch corruption up. So before lunch we burned through all of the Harbingers that they were missing that I had completed, and then after a lunch break we pushed through all of the remaining Harbingers. The unfortunate part about this story is that when you are pushing corruption with a friend… your own corruption levels are not updating at all. This feels like something that really needs to change because I think above anything else this kill momentum for Ace. They were sub 200 when we started the day and to push up to 300+ is hours worth of work. I really feel like Eleventh Hour Games needs to rethink the way that corruption works, and that it should be something akin to how pushing Greater Rifts worked in Diablo 3, that once you achieve a rank in any timeline… you can select the corruption that you want to farm from a slider or drop down.

We made an attempt on Aberroth together but had both completely forgotten the mechanics. We took a break to go off and do things before the podcast and I returned managing to take down Aberroth after a few tries. The problem with this however is that it how feels like I have effectively beaten the game. Pushing corruption for the sake of pushing corruption never really feels like a meaningful goal. Before you hit corruption levels you have honestly unlocked most of the content you will ever be engaging with, and doing the harbingers sort of feels like a last hurrah for your build. Sure Uber Aberroth exists, but I am not nearly “tryhard” enough to care about taking it down. At this point I would probably swap builds and try running something else up through the paces. There are more woven echoes that I could unlock for more points in the weavers tree… but I sort of just feel like I finished on a good place.

Farming content is enjoyable, and I am sure I will play some more Last Epoch before the next season. There are a few builds that I want to try, but there is just something missing in this game that Path of Exile has that keeps me engaged. I am not entirely certain how to quantify it. Last Epoch is a game about farming multiple copies of the same thing trying to get ever more perfect versions… but you can essentially reach a point of good enough to do all of the content extremely quickly. There are fewer endgame systems to engage with, and as a result it starts to feel stale more quickly. Whereas Path of Exile has a decades worth of content that is all super detailed enough to be its own game… and I wind up going down rabbit holes trying to farm this super rare item or that. The only thing of equivalent rarity here is the Red Ring… which I have never seen, nor do I think I will ever actually see. It is like trying to farm a mageblood or mirror… and effectively unobtainium.

I legitimately expected to only play enough Path of Exile II to farm up the MTX for clearing Act 1 and then move on with my life. However I wound up rerolling and found out that Minion Internalist is still a pretty freaking solid build. More than that I am actually enjoying myself and wanting to see how deep I can push this time around. The gearing process also feels like it takes way longer here, which is a double edged sword. You have to engage with the trade system to really build a functional character, or you need a PHD in the crafting system in order to build your own gear. I managed to mostly get a stable character with stuff off the ground, but now I am largely in currency acquisition mode so that I can eventually afford nicer stuff. Last Epoch doesn’t really have that currency acquisition mode feeling… because even in a trade economy they are using the boring resource of gold… and not the exciting tink of getting a Divine Orb to drop in a map. Gold will never feel as individually special as getting that rare currency item to drop for you.

There are also these “Difficult Boss” nodes that I want to check out, but have not pushed my map tiers up high enough to be able to farm them yet. I did figure out how to unlock them and I figured I would post an infographic for anyone who follows after me. Essentially when you see a blocked node covered in fog, there will be nodes that show up with blue swirlies around them. Inside of each of them there will be a Draiocht Hengestone in the boss chamber of that map, and clicking on this will cause another node to show up. Once you have cleared a few of these the swirlies will move to the blocked node and uncloak the fog of war around it. There is a similar Temporal Sandstorm and Eye of the Storm mechanic on the map but I have not figured out the on map tell for either of those. I know for the Temporal Sandstorm I have started to find hourglasses in the boss rooms of the surrounding maps, and I assume like the hengestones that if I click on enough of these a path will show up.

The biggest problem that I am having right now is with map sustain. It used to be that running a map with a boss guaranteed an upgrade to the next tier higher. This seems to no longer be the case and I am struggling to keep upgrading my map tiers and pushing things higher. I am heading towards a corrupted area now, desperately trying to spawn a T6 map drop… so that I can complete the corruption nexus and get more skill points. I really do not like this method for unlocking atlas points, and in truth I hope they rethink the whole design of this endgame system. This is a perfectly fine endgame system, but I don’t feel like it is a good replacement for mapping from Path of Exile. I loved Delve, but that was not a game mode for everyone. This is honestly a complaint I have with the game is that it feels like they have doubled down on specific mechanics and are now forcing everyone to do them. Sanctum and Ultimatum were perfectly fine mechanics if you enjoyed them, and so long as they were optional… life was great… same for Delve. However now that all three are required mechanics to progress in the game… players are not enjoying it.

We had a big patch yesterday and so far my build seems to have survived it just fine. That has not been the case with other Spectre builds, and it makes me really glad that I have not chased the trend of hopping on the latest and greatest spectre combination. The unique spectres that gave specific buffs ate the nerfbat, and unfortunately one of the new hotness spectres that everyone has been switching to also got impacted. The last bit is supposedly a mistake, but I am glad that I have more or less stuck with Vaal Guards in spite of the visual noise. I could run more but I feel like a mix of Arsonists and Vaal Guards helps clear significantly because the Arsonists do nice instant damage and the Guards have a delayed grenade impact effect.

I have a few gear upgrades that I snagged cheaply, but unfortunately both require level 80… so I am mostly head down farming mode until then. It looks like the Frozen Mandibles were restored in a patch this morning so when I get that additional spirit I might try swapping over to them at that point.