1.1.7 Imperial Uprising

Unlimited Chicken

by

Good Morning Folks! Friends… I am swimming in cooked chicken. For years when I have played Minecraft the first thing that I have done is wrangle a bunch of cows… stuff them in a hole and then feed them wheat until they pass the entity cramming limits and start dying off giving me a stable supply of leather and beef. The thing is… I don’t really need much leather… and my chicken operation has been way more productive than I thought it would be. As such I am contemplating tearing down the cow station… and sending them all to that big farm upstate… to free up room for more shenanigans. I just do not need the beef in quite the way that I thought I would and chicken appears to be a perfectly cromulent option.

Chicken solves a lot of other problems like the ability to get a quick safe experience boost to repair items. In theory, if I cared more about it I would relocate the chickens to a place where I could reasonably use them to feed the egg-throwing machine directly. I could do some nonsense with minecart hoppers and bubble elevators, but that seems like “a lot”. Also, minecarts are super noisy, and I am already dealing with the din of a thousand clucks at all hours of the day. There is something primal that I enjoy about loading up a pitching machine and watching it birth chickens into my pen. I’ve created so many lanterns for the nether tunnels that I am going to need to find a more stable source of iron. I’ve gotten most of it from hollowing out areas under my base, but I might be trying to build a Villager breeder soon… and from there an Iron Golem farm since I have Pillagers nearby.

I am still playing quite a bit of Last Epoch and one of the things about Cycle 2.5 that I have to say… is that I don’t think dungeons are quite as much of a waste of time. This is in large part because mapping content that appears in Monoliths, can now appear and does so frequently in dungeons. Better than that, each floor of the dungeon seems to count as a new map meaning that you can find a Nemesis, Treasure Chest, and Exiled Mage on each floor giving you a way to burn through Nemesis so much faster than monoliths. I’ve only really spent much time doing Temporal Sanctum trying to create legendary gear, but then again that tends to be the only dungeon that I do consistently.

I had a dry streak of eggs that I complained about on the blog, and then grouped with Ace and immediately following that have gotten an egg for almost every single Nemesis. This is allowing me to start burning through my stockpile of non-LP copies of Palarus and Firestarter. This actually makes the whole Circle of Fortune thing making it super common to get 1LP uniques a bad thing. I wish you could throw LP uniques in the Eggs and then either get it turned into a completely random legendary or upgrade to higher LP levels. As it stands right now 1LP uniques… feel sorta awful to loot. I upgraded my Palarus this morning significantly keeping the 15 Health on Hit and adding 109% Melee Damage. I will keep trying for a 3 or 4 LP version, but for the time being, I am pretty happy with it.

I have to admit though, I feel like I am starting to wind down a bit on Last Epoch. This is the phase of the game where it always loses me. I am just not motivated by completing all of the bosses, and the worst thing about Last Epoch… is that it isn’t Path of Exile. What I mean by that is POE has quite possibly the most interesting endgame with a lot of player choice in what you want to focus on mechanic-wise. If I could take the player builds from Last Epoch and copy-paste in the Atlas of Worlds and all of the other endgame systems like Heist and Delve over top of the existing endgame… it would be my ultimate experience. The worst thing about Last Epoch is that it just doesn’t have a rich and varied endgame yet. I know over time they will get there, based on what we have seen so far, but it also means for the time being… every cycle has a shelf life.

Anyways Minecraft is giving me plenty of alternative shenanigans to enjoy, and at some point, I want to dive into Final Fantasy XVI now it is on PC, and Space Marine 2. I might try both of those out either today or this weekend.

Detonate Dead is UnFun

by

Good Morning Folks. I am still spending the majority of my time in Last Epoch currently, as I am trying to push up to level 100. I also did not make it super far in Cycle 2 before the reset, so that means I have only done a handful of the Harbingers that start showing up at the end of empowered monoliths. That is honestly one of my complaints is that they really should have gone for a system like Guardians that appear in Path of Exile maps. As it stands the Harbinger spawns in right after you kill the boss and you effectively have to survive two fights in a row in order to get your loot. This feels REALLY bad when you have a prophecy dump a ton of stuff on the ground and you don’t have time to loot it before ultimately getting attacked again… and feels even worse if you fail the Harbinger and are effectively locked out of any of your rewards. Harbingers should spawn a portal to go into their fight area rather than this whole surprise attack bullshit.

The other thing that has sucked is that the Imperial Undead packs feel way harder than the rest of the map content. I’ve adjusted my playstyle and am way more cautious… but this feels bad. I should in theory be able to continue face-rolling low corruption levels for a while before I have to start playing tense and on edge all the time. However several of the undead appear to have a version of Detonate Dead from Path of Exile, called Necrotic Self Destruct. This is awful and it is messaged so much worse than Detonate Dead is currently, which means you basically have to stay away from looting corpses for a period of time after finishing combat. It just sort of fucks with the flow of things, and feels like it punishes melee play way more than it punishes ranged play. Melee already has to deal with more inherent risk… so stacking additional effects as a “gotcha” always feels a bit miserable. I am dealing with it, but I am also grumpy about it.

At this point, I have dinged level 88 and am working on filling out the last bits of my tree. I had skipped an attack speed talent in the general sentinel tree so I am largely going back and snagging that for the time being. Since I have leech and on-hit effects, more attack speed weirdly means more survival. I’ve swapped out a bunch of gear over the last few days and feel like I am in a much better place than I was previously. The biggest slots that I probably need to find upgrades for are my helm and my belt, which are not really doing much for me. I swapped out one of my rings for a reasonably well-rolled Sunwreath with 2 LP and then failed to land any of the stats I actually wanted on it. I’ve still not seen any eggs from the Nemesis system because I really need to start getting some LP on my weapon cache that I have been stockpiling for that purpose.

I will be honest… I am not sure how much longer I will keep plugging away at Last Epoch. I just don’t enjoy its endgame anywhere near as much as I enjoy the Endgame in Path of Exile. Right now it feels very focused on grinding out Harbingers so that you can fight Aberroth and while I am glad something like that exists… I am just not a bossing-focused person. In Path of Exile tend to kill every boss once and then sell my tokens when I get them to fund more of the nonsense that I actually do enjoy doing. There is no equivalent grind to Delve in Last Epoch, and baseline mapping does not feel anywhere near as fun or rewarding as it does in Path of Exile. That is not to say that I have not enjoyed myself quite a bit during Cycle 2.5, but more just that there is a cap to how much of it I want to do.

Right now my goal is to hit 100 and then potentially finish grinding the Circle of Fortune rep to tier 12. Things have definitely slowed down reputationally, however, because I am just not making that much progress. It could be simply that I am not progressing through maps as fast as I was before, but I think maybe they backloaded the grind so that the first bit was super easy to get and the later levels would be stretch goals. I would also like to make it through all of the Harbingers even though I doubt I will actually kill Aberroth. I got a wild item drop last night, but I am just not sure if I have an alt in me in order to take advantage of it. It was essentially an insanely rolled version of what looked to be Cloud’s Buster Sword.

All of this said… Minecraft has been calling my name again. I’m still building a bit on the side and at some point, I will give you all an update on the progress of my world. The biggest change is that I have dabbled with mods again and installed a shader pack that completely changes the experience. Anyways… I hope your week is going excellently and if you made it this far into the post you are definitely one of those dedicated folks.

Temporal Gambling

by

Good Morning Folks. I’ve decided that we are going to refer to this current cycle reset as Cycle 2.5, given this is the second half of the second cycle. I still feel like EHG needs to come up with a better naming scheme, but I’ve already nattered on about that in previous posts so I am not going to any further this morning. At this point, I have a level 85 character up and running and into empowered monoliths. There are still a lot of gear pieces that I need to swap out but that mostly just requires running a lot of content in the hopes of seeing something useful. The biggest thing that I need currently is more sources of melee or fire leech to keep refilling my health bar while I spin around like a Beyblade of doom. I’ve been running around in the void cosmetic set in part because the game has no good fire cosmetics yet available.

Last Epoch Tools has been updated and now you can see my live profile if you are so inclined for this character. Over the weekend I grouped quite a bit with my friend Ace and they handed me my very first iteration of Palarus’s Sacred Light, the weapon that largely makes this build work. After that, I found a few copies, including one that had one legendary potential which I then gambled trying to get exalted melee leech onto the weapon. I failed that chance but did land Health on Hit which is still pretty useful but truth be told I probably would have run with any additional stat that I managed to land. I’ve not encountered a single egg from the Nemesis system, and when I finally do I will obviously be chucking the spare copies I have sitting around in and attempting to get either a good random legendary or a weapon with legendary potential to try again. My Firestarter’s Torch is honestly pretty decent for the time being.

I’m in this weird position with Cycle 2.5 where the level 90 monoliths are a cakewalk… and the level 100 empowered monoliths are just straight-up wrecking me. This is a bit odd given that I have maxed out resistances, a decent health pool, and a pretty good amount of leech and health gain on hit. I am not sure what exactly I can do to fix things… save for just grinding out a bunch more levels. I am not sure what they changed with Cycle 2.5 but it feels like they changed something, because quite honestly I had a much weaker character overall in Cycle 2, but did not remember running into this problem transitioning to empowered. Ace has reported the same general feeling with their character, so I quite honestly am not sure what to think about that.

For the moment I guess I am going to grind up to at least level 90 in the normal monoliths and then try and transition to empowered again after that. One thing that has been wild, is that even with some nerfs applied on Saturday… the drop rates are still insane. I’ve had more Runes of Ascendance this league than I have probably in total from ANY of the other leagues. This is pretty freaking awesome because it means that I can target farm various uniques, and have pulled a few torches and broadswords using this option. It gives me a little side game to keep trying for better weapons which has been nice. I will admit the friction transitioning into Empowered monoliths is harming my fun a bit. If I can’t push through it, I am not sure how much more of this league I am actually going to play.

Have you been playing Last Epoch Cycle 2.5? Are you having issues moving over to Empowered Monoliths as well? Drop me a line with your progress.