Cycle One

Done Isn’t a Bad Thing

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This weekend we talked a bit about Last Epoch and I get the impression that I came off as a bit more negative than I had expected. When I said “I think I am done with Last Epoch”, it was meant to indicate that I had seen all that I really wanted to see during this cycle and not that I was done with the game completely. At this point, I have pushed my Echo Warpath Void Knight all the way to level 100 and seen all of the content that there is to see save for doing higher corruption pushing which feels largely pointless. On top of that I created another character for an attempt at making something Righteous Fire Adjacent… only to fail completely but still managed to get Forge Guard to 88. Then I rerolled yet another sentinel and succeeded in creating the Ignite Warpath goodness that I was trying to make in my now level 89 Paladin. I also managed to pick up a Helm of the Scurry and pushed a Bleed Squirrels Beastmaster all the way to level 84 along with an attempt at a Flame Reave Spellblade that I stopped at 65.

Essentially since the launch of 1.0 and the very first cycle on February 21st, I have put roughly 300 hours into the game and I think it is time to stop for now. I have 11 tabs full of LP1 or higher copies of uniques, 10 tabs full of well-rolled Exalted items for slamming, and a full tab of dungeon keys that I have no real interest in spending. I could in theory cobble together a few more builds, I have five copies of the David Harbour collab helmet that summons a Wraith Lord and that was going to be my next character to finish leveling. I’ve just reached a point where I think I am done grinding for the moment. That is not to say I won’t happily return to the game at the start of the next cycle. This is sort of the way of ARPGs in that I get in… grind a copious amount of time… then reach a point where I am happy to walk away again and then dive into the next one.

I got roughly a month of constant play out of Last Epoch and that honestly seems really good. In general, I tend to get about two months out of a Path of Exile league and two weeks out of a Diablo III Season. What ultimately stymies me is that the Monoliths are not really done baking, and are in need of more different forms of content to break up the rhythm. Adding chests and rogue exiles went a long way to making them more exciting, but they are still a far cry from Path of Exile where running a map without support can yield content from some forty leagues that have played out over the last decade. I think each cycle the game will get better and add more things to break up the monotony, but the team at EHG just hasn’t had the time to build in the same levels of nuance and complexity. I got a lot of pushback from the AggroChat folks when I said there was no competition and that Path of Exile was clearly the better game… but what I meant is that there is more depth of content than any other ARPG currently has.

I had a heck of a lot of fun playing Last Epoch over the last month, and the game is in a far better state than it has ever been before. That said the well of content currently is not limitless. I could force myself to keep pushing, but with Path of Exile releasing its next league on Friday it seemed like a good time to get off the ride before my opinions started to turn. So like I said I feel like I came across as more negative than I intended during the Podcast. My joy in this sort of game is not necessarily building a bunch of characters and then never really pushing them very far. As always if I am going to play any game… the long-term grind is going to be about the acquisition of loot. I could keep pushing and trying to perfect my builds by getting ever better rolled legendary items… but what would I be doing it for?

In Path of Exile, there are a lot of pieces of content that require you to operate at a certain level to be able to attempt and ultimately succeed at it. While I am not necessarily a bossing motivated person, getting my four void stones was a nice accomplishment last league, and I was able to take down all of the non-uber bosses. More than that being able to survive juiced T16 maps and reap the rewards from running them was extremely cool as well. Pushing Monolith corruption doesn’t really feel that rewarding yet or more so… the things that I am chasing are not that fundamentally different than the things I currently have access to. At some point, I am certain there will be a reason for me to keep pushing, but for now, there really isn’t. I have a handful of functional builds and could keep churning those out for a while now if I really pushed myself but I would rather leave while I am still very happy with the game than burn myself out on it when my attention is waning.

So instead of being progressively more grumpers about the game… I am looking forward to the start of a new Path of Exile league and leveling once again from scratch. Right now I plan on going for something similar to the Righteous Fire Chieftain that I played last league as my starter. From there I will be able to farm enough currency to build whatever other characters that interest me. I am contemplating a trip down memory lane and firing up some sort of Toxic Rain build again, after spending a bunch of time playing Lightning Arrow for a map blaster over the last two leagues. I am also somewhat interested in some sort of an elemental strike build. I’ve also never actually made anything with Cyclone despite threatening to do so for years. I’m also interested in trying out one of the alternate Boneshatter builds using Trauma support and some other ability.

Last Epoch was a great run, and I look forward to being excited to start over again in the next cycle when 1.1 drops. We are already starting to get some teasers about what that is going to entail including several new bosses and a new pinnacle boss. That is cool and all but what I am really hoping is for some additional monolith content. We need something like Ritual or Legion to break up the monotony of the same three map types over and over: Arena, Ambush, and Spires. I would also love to see them get inventive and create new gameplay modes similar to Heist or Delve in Path of Exile. Dungeons are not really my thing and I would love to see those reworked to be more enjoyable. As it stands the lead-up to the boss is boring as hell and then you get a single attempt at the boss before having to go through the boring parts again. As much as I have maligned Nightmare Dungeons in Diablo IV, they would honestly be preferable to the Last Epoch Dungeon design.

In Path of Exile, you can really focus on a single game mode and have more than enough content doing just that in order to get an entire league worth of play. My hope is that at some point each of the game modes in Last Epoch will be equally rich. I have faith in how far I have seen the game come since I first set foot in it back in 2018 and comparing that to what it plays like today. I think the game will get there, and they have already added so much good stuff. The Circle of Fortune and the prophecies are brilliant and I enjoyed running them so much. I hope at some point we get character customization, something akin to the hideout system from POE, and the ability to unlock item drops as cosmetics. There is so much room to grow the game, and I think given enough time we will see all of it come to fruition.

Anyways! At the moment I have been playing through Horizon Forbidden West on the PC and am hoping to wrap that up prior to the launch of the Path of Exile Necropolis league. I will probably talk some about that in the coming days. Apologies for the lack of blog posts for Thursday or Friday, but I took those days off and just was not feeling the blog.

Third Time More Burny

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Friends… sometimes I get something stuck in my head that I cannot seem to forcibly dislodge. I’ve also been sick the last few days so apologies for the lack of any semblance of a post yesterday. Anyways… a while back I wrote a post talking about my attempt at creating something that feels like Righteous Fire in Last Epoch and it was great… up until the point that it was not. The build sort of just fell apart when I entered the level 100 Empowered Monoliths because I was not dealing enough damage and did not have enough survival… so basically could not keep moving forward with it. I attempted to resurrect the build and got it to a point where it felt “aggressively fine” but also not exactly what I was going for in the first place.

I had this entirely different plan and created a Paladin that I was going to do some Healing Hands nonsense with… but before long found myself leveling again with a Firestarter’s Torch and Warpath. Which led me down the path of trying to figure out how Paladin was better suited to the burnination of my dreams. It turns out yes… yes it is. However, I held off on talking about the build until I reached empowered monoliths because I did not want to prematurely share my nonsense before I knew if the wheels were going to stay on the bus this time. Today despite my generally lousy “sickboy” status… I wanted to share what I had been up to. Apologies for the thrashed state of my voice in the above video where I talk about the build and show off some empowered monolith gameplay.

So the idea is not at all dissimilar from the previous build… where I went all in on making Warpath do the fire damage things. I’m trying to do a few new things, namely since I am throwing in Judgment occasionally for more damage which causes me to stop spinning… I’ve taken Giant Splitter which does a bit AOE attack each time I stop channeling. I will likely shift around these points a bit before I land on the final configuration of the build. However, the concept is straight forward… convert all bleed to ignite and convert Warpath to fire damage so that I can scale it and the ignite damage at the same time. Also, this is what makes the build feel thematically like Righteous Fire so it is a hill I am willing to die on.

The big thing that is making the build function a little better… and is the reason why I care about it being Paladin is Holy Aura. This is the unique ability for the Paladin mastery and is just sort of a build-your-own-buff aura system. I’ve found nowhere in the game that properly shows all of the buffs that the aura is granting me so I pasted the above list from the build planner. Largely I am throwing points in fire damage, attack speed, and an ability that will proc a fire explosion whenever I have hit something 6 times in a row. I am not entirely certain if that last bit is worth it because it currently costs me 7 points to get there… and I am wondering if I would not be better off just taking flat damage scaling instead. This also serves as a burn button because when I activate the ability it increases how much of these buffs it is providing.

The thing I dig about the Last Epoch Tools Build Planner is that it collates all of the stats and gives you nice numerical rollups that don’t really exist in the game. Based on the stats in the planner I just linked it shows that I am dealing 832% increased fire damage and have 204% chance to ignite on hit… not factoring in that I have other abilities that Judgement that also have their own baked-in 200% additional chance to ignite on hit with that ability. On top of that for survival purposes, I have 18% melee leech and 7% leech off the additional damage that I am dealing over time with ignite. If I can swap some of my gear around and get more void resistance, I can throw on a shield that will generate a good deal more fire damage over time and ignite chance.

All things considered, I am pretty happy with the state of the build currently. There are a number of levers that I could pull to keep tweaking the damage while leveling the rest of the way to 100. Am I happier with it than I am with my Void Knight? Honestly, I am not sure. However, I am very happy that I did not give up on this concept and was finally able to see it the rest of the way to something viable for empowered monoliths. Would I suggest playing this build? Sure if you like burning things and want to track down either the items I am using or something that gives a similar amount of ignite chance and fire damage scaling. It is a heck of a lot of fun and offers a fairly chill playstyle which is ultimately the aspect of Righteous Fire that I loved so much. Throw on a movie or like I have recently… an audio book… and just grind out some chill monoliths for tasty loot. That really is my happy place.

Refracting Lens of Wealth

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Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a brief blog post because I have to go into the office today. It is funny how doing a thing that I used to have to do every day… basically ruins my entire day after four years of remote work. I spent a heck of a lot of time last night on my Void Knight and managed to push him to level 99 before daylight savings sleep debt finally claimed me. I really want to get to 100, but I have found that if I don’t focus on leveling… it feels like it goes so much more quickly. There are a handful of Uniques that I would like to farm better versions of, so I will probably continue to focus on that and wait until my experience bar fills without realizing it.

I also managed to get my Beastmaster to level 73 and now have a full complement of squirrels. I need to get better gear for this character, but I now get to experience a chittering mass of nonsense each time I attack anything. Weirdly it seems like the squirrels are much better behaved than the wolves. I’ve been having this bug where apparently all of my wolves would just wander the fuck off aimlessly at the beginning of a map. I would have to hit A to make them attack a location to summon them all back to my side before starting the monolith proper. The squirrels largely just hang out at my side until I engage something and then they behave like minions normally behave. I have to say though… I think maybe wolves were stronger, but I am having more fun with squirrels so that is really what matters the most.

The other thing that I have been playing with is the Lens system. When I hit Rank 9 with Circle of Fortune I unlocked my last Lens and can now modify prophecies with three of them at a time. “Juiced” prophecies can be complete nonsense. This all came from a single prophecy. That is fifteen of the Weavers Will unique armor pieces with a minimum Weavers Will level of 16 each. Note that sets the minimum level because at least one of them rolled with 20 levels worth of upgrades on it. It is just nonsense how much more rewards you can get by stacking your lenses.

Here is another Photoshop job showing the three lenses that I am currently running. First I have been blocking dungeon event prophecies because quite honestly… I hate the dungeons in this game. I will run Temporal Sanctum out of necessity to craft Legendary items, but the rest of them don’t really feel like they are rewarding enough to deal with the hassle of running them. I feel about them the same way I feel about Labyrinth in Path of Exile and will avoid them if at all possible. The next lens makes it so that I see significantly more Unique items which in theory at Rank 9 is a 135% boost to the occurrence of prophecies with Unique rewards. The one that has made the biggest difference however is the Refracting Lens of Wealth which increases the cost of a Prophecy by 90% favor but causes them to offer double the rewards for completion.

The end result is some nonsense like this… where a single prophecy for a single Orbyss kill awarded ten unique pieces of body armor. On top of “doubling” the rewards for a single prophecy proc, they also seem to in many cases double the number of uses you get out of a single prophecy. So basically that one lens greatly increases the sheer amount of rewards that you can get from running prophecies… a system that was already extremely rewarding. So essentially I am probably going to be spending a lot of that level 99 to 100 grind targeting different encounters that give me some very high-end rewards. What I really need to find is a prophecy for Orbyss that rewards a large number of two-handed axes per kill just to test whether or not prophecies can trigger boss-specific drops in addition to general drop-anywhere uniques. I need a ton of upgrades on the Void Knight but almost all of them are boss-specific drops.

Anyways! Time for me to close this out and move on with my morning. Don’t be sleeping on those prophecies and more specifically… don’t bypass the Refracting Lens of Wealth.

Squirrels Are Go

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Good Morning Folks! Shocking to no one… I am still playing an awful lot of Last Epoch. The game is in a truly phenomenal state and all of the random uniques that I am picking up… just keep driving me towards wanting to play various builds. While I am still slowly working on getting my Void Knight to 100, and am a little over halfway to dinging 99… I’ve been playing Beastmaster quite a bit lately. This is a build that I really enjoyed in previous releases of the game, and it was the very first alt that I created in this cycle. While leveling on the Void Knight I picked up most of the early uniques required to make a “Bleed Wolves” build feel really solid. However, I was largely following the templating of the Squirrel build over on Maxroll because I had hopes of maybe one day being able to transition into that.

Over the weekend I got a drop that I had been hunting for longer than probably any other drop in this game save for the illusive Bastion of Honor. I spent so much time farming for the Herald of the Scurry in The Black Sun timeline on my Necromancer but never managed to see one drop. Earlier in the league my friend Ace managed to pick one up which gave me some hope that maybe just maybe all of the drop chance juicing that we go through the Circle of Fortune faction would let me see one. Sunday afternoon that happened and I picked up this helm which will allow me to shift from summoning a bunch of Wolves to summoning twice as many Squirrels. I want to command a chittering army of death by adorableness, but alas I have to get to level 73 before I can actually shit from my Artor’s Legacy over to the Scurry proper.

I was Deathless on my Beastmaster until I attempted Rahyeh in The Black Sun timeline. This is the boss that has pretty much ended every Deathless streak that I have gotten this far with. My inner 13-year-old is delighted that I made it to level 69 before taking my first death. I thought maybe I would be able to make it through, but I was somewhat of a dumbass to attempt this feat with only 4% void resistance. So I am in the process of balancing out my gear a bit and trying to stack some more resistances in the right places. My idols are a mess and I need to focus farm some with prophecies. My health is also atrocious but that should resolve itself as I pick up some more exalted bits of armor and replace my leveling uniques/weavers will items. I am very much looking forward to transitioning into the Squirrels build as this is something I have wanted to play from the moment I heard it existed.

In another bit of weird loot luck, I picked up a wild pair of gauntlets. They have 2 T6 affixes on them and a T7 affix. While they don’t exactly fit anything I am actively playing… I gotta say it is making me contemplate a shield throw build as I have a bunch of gear for that build sitting in my exalted stash tabs. I guess at some point I should research how that build even works and what it cares about. I am guessing it is probably a Paladin build and I don’t really have one of those yet… but similarly, I am not sure I want a third Sentinel build quite yet. I am getting a serious itch to play a Necromancer as I have picked up a bunch of items that had eluded me in the past like the Ravens’ Rise gauntlets. If I end up picking up an Aaron’s Will chest with any legendary potential I will probably consider it a sign that I need to work up another Bone Golem build. Similarly, I would love to see the David Harbour helmet and try a Wraithlord Build.

I managed to hit Rank 9 in the Circle of Fortune guild and honestly… I was not even paying attention not my progress. I only knew that I hit it because I had one monolith reward every item of two different sets. I have to say though, this rank is a bit more annoying than it is really worth. By the time you are capable of hitting rank 9… You’ve very likely seen every single set item in the game. It isn’t like they are very useful in the first place as compared to a combination of uniques and exalted items. I would love to see them either buff the heck out of set pieces or lower their equippable level significantly so you could use them for leveling alts. As it stands they are mostly just vendor trash so making the entire set drop every time… just ends up clogging your inventory. I am happy to have unlocked my final lens slot however so that was cool.

One thing I was a bit disappointed in was Lightless Arbor. I spent around 800k gold on the gambler there and while it certainly looks like a lot of loot… by the time I had hoovered up all of the affixes and glyphs it truthfully wound up being around five or six items worth keeping. I see more usable loot in a single monolith than that. This combined with the fact that very rarely see Legendary Potential items through Runes of Ascendance lead me to believe that Circle of Fortune bonuses only impact mob-dropped loot. As a result Lightless Arbor keys are probably better sold to the vendor than used because you get spoiled by the sheer amount of drops that you see thanks to Circle of Fortune. Maybe these are great for the folks who wound up going to trade league but I am progressively feeling like they made the wrong choice.

I am consistently amazed by how much more I am enjoying the game right now as opposed to in previous versions. The sheer volume of loot I think is the real difference here. Circle of Fortune makes it feel like it is just an inevitability that you will eventually see the item you are seeking. More than that… you are probably going to see enough copies of it with legendary potential that you can probably make a bunch of attempts to get a really good item. That all makes the mechanical loop of the game that much more enjoyable for me personally. I’m highly loot-motivated and I love rolling the dice and seeing what items I end up getting this time. Maybe I would not have appreciated it quite so much had I not played in versions of the game where the loot was significantly more stingy.

All of that said, however… I am keenly watching the various spoilers for the next Path of Exile League. That has been announced for the end of this month and I am certain I will be back in that game at league start. Unless there are some pretty significant changes I will probably be going for the Chieftain Righteous Fire build that I ended up playing so much this past league. I feel like maybe GGG delayed their spoilers a bit to give EHG some breathing room for the Last Epoch launch. I know the two companies are friendly so It gives me hope that maybe they will play nicely together with the timing of future Cycles/Leagues.