Last Epoch

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.