Last Epoch

More Angry Fireballs

by

Good Morning Folks! Something happens in Path of Exile when you get past around level 95… you start trying your best never to die because a single death can cause an experience loss that sets you back multiple hours worth of experience gain. As a result I tend to go through periods where if I am very very close to leveling up… I only want to tackle content that I am not likely to take a death on. I had been in this mode for several days, but last night I hit level 97 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and as a result… I am now shifting into the other phase… where I try more tricky content while taking a death doesn’t feel quite as bad.

So last night I did a lot of things… I took down my first Elder and am working up to another one. I burned through several guardian maps to try and get fragments to try some of those fights. I took down two breach lords that I had saved up. What I am working towards now is getting enough fragments to try Shaper, Maven, and Uber Elder aka Elder in the Shapers realm. I was kinda shocked at how “facerolly” Elder went last night. Normally speaking this is a fight that I have at least struggled a bit on in past leagues, but I was able to take him down without even coming close to using a health potion. I picked up a decent enough Grace/Purity of Elements Watcher’s Eye as well. Essentially now I need to do a lot of Maven witnessed maps in an attempt to build up a stockpile of Guardian maps… that I can then run to get more fragments. The irony is… that likely all of this activity will once again put me close to dinging a new level… which means I will slow down again until I push through and hit the next plateau.

I had been working on a Storm Brand Inquisitor, and I have to say… I am just not feeling the character so far. I’ve only made it to Act 5, but it already feels a little sluggish for my tastes. I am certain that I could push through and eventually reach a point where I have enough crit to make this feel good… but for now I just am not in the mood for it. Rather than rerolling to something else… I am just going to park this character for awhile and see if maybe I am in the mood for it later. Mostly Storm Brand is way slower than I remember it being, and I think it is because I just don’t have enough crit support yet in my passive tree. The problem with lightning damage is that it has a VERY large range of damage values… and in order for it to feel good you have to throw your thumb on the scale and try and make sure that it is ALWAYS rolling at the top end of the damage curve. I think maybe I switched to Storm Brand a bit too fast, so I might flip over to Armageddon Brand or Wintertide Brand to finish leveling.

What I am working on at the moment… as in I just literally started this character last night… is an Elemental SRS Guardian. This is apparently the new hotness and I remember SRS being extremely good at Sanctum. Essentially I would like to have SOME character that makes Sanctum easymode so that I can at the very least knock out some of the achievements. There are an awful lot of them this league that are gating my progress towards unlocking yet another sad little totem pole. I am also curious to see how an SRS build aka Summon Raging Spirits… feels with something other than the Necromancer. I feel like it is probably much easier to make this feel tanky than it was with the witch.

I’m not terribly far along but have swapped over to a three link Summon Raging Spirits with Melee Splash and Minion Damage support, and am already zipping through the content. It is hillarious that last league I saw I think 8 raw Tabula Rasa drops, and so far this league I have seen zero. I picked up a +2 minion gems Tabula last night and it is sitting there waiting for me to hit level 16 so I can equip it. Mostly I am wanting to focus on making this a Sanctum runner, but it would not be bad if this was good at bossing either. Supposedly the elemental variant with Guardian can hit the peaks that Poison did with Necromancer. It is also apparently much cheaper to gear because the required items for poison have trickled up in price after having four leagues of that being a phenomenal build.

Other than that, today the Runes of Power patch drops in Last Epoch, so I am certain I will be poking my head into that game to check out the changes. They have apparently done quite a bit to add some random encounters in the Monoliths, which ultimately is the part of the game that needed the most improvement. Running Monoliths gets stale way faster than running Maps in Path of Exile. There are apparently rogue mages that are a cross between a Diablo Loot Goblin and a Path of Exile Essence monster. I am curious to see how these work and I am hoping that their drop tables are generous and give you a bit of a way to target farm some uniques.

Anyways! I hope you are having an excellent week and I hope we can all slide into the weekend without much hassle.

All Over the Map

by

Good Morning Friends! I was a bit all over the place when it came to gaming this weekend. I did not make nearly as much progress as I thought I would in Guild Wars 2. Essentially I wrapped up Bitterfrost Frontier and Lake Doric, which now plants me firmly in the middle of Draconis Mons. I have some bad memories of this section of Living World 3. Specifically I remember there was a quest chain where I had to change up my keybindings in order to get through it. By default I have an option turned on that makes my ground target effects center on whatever I happen to be targetting. This is super useful when it comes to not having to fiddle with aiming them. However there was a sequence I can remember when I was flying up in the air and having to target specific things on the ground which required me to turn this all off. So I will have to figure how HOW I do that… by the time I get to that part of the quest.

I am still playing a bit of Honkai Star Rail every day, and still slowly working on trying to get Coffin Guy aka Luocha. It is not necessarily that I even like him as a character, but I want access to a second healer. In my travels of trying to pull for him, I did manage to pick up Pela which is cool. I bonded with her as a character during the whole Museum event. Speaking of events there is a new one starting today that gives you double Calyx rewards. Like as far as events go it is boring… but it is a decent time to stock up on resources. Unfortunately only the first 12 Calyx battles count towards the double rewards, so I guess I know what I will be doing for the next few days at least… stockpiling resources.

One of the cool things about Mastodon in general is that it has a heavy indie dev presence. The other day the very awesome Megan Fox (the game dev one) was doing a thing where she was boosting indie devs that had less than 100 followers. One of these was Craig, who works on a game that recently hit early access on Steam called Trinity Fusion. So I picked it up and have played quite a bit of it over the weekend. Essentially it has a lot in common with Dead Cells and Hades, and there are some really interesting options. I think maybe the difficulty curve might be a bit overtuned especially if you choose the “easy” mode because there isn’t really much of a difference from the normal mode. The art style reminds me a bit of Flashback for reasons I can’t fully explain. There are a lot of interesting weapon options, some of them clearly better than others but that is always going to happen. I will be interested to see how this one evolves over time.

I also spent some time this weekend screwing around with Yuzu the Nintendo Switch emulator. It had been quite awhile since I last touched it, and lord has it improved during that time. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the emulator is capable of latching onto the gyro sense in my Dual Sense PS5 controller. I remember when I was playing through Breath of the Wild on Cemu I had to use some monstrocity where I latched into the gyro in my android phone to complete those puzzles. I mean I could just play all of these games on my switch, but I know with Cemu the ability to remove weapon durability from Breath of the Wild made that game infinitely more enjoyable. I need to dive into the mods for Yuzu and see if I can find something similar for Tears of the Kingdom. I have to say playing on my 3080 equipped PC… is so much prettier and smoother than playing on a native Switch.

Lastly I spent some time this weekend screwing around on the Mage in Last Epoch. I’ve decided to follow a build guide and go all in on lightning damage. So far it is just immensely fun to shock everything to death and watch the lightning damage arc between oncoming monsters. I am not sure how far I will make it with this character. I spent the entire podcast on Saturday playing it and am now around level 21 ish. I’ve chosen my specialization and went Sorc but am still picking up basics from the Mage tree. I am curious to see how this character feels once I get a decent amount of ward preservation on it, because at the moment it feels a wee bit squishy.

Last week was a bit of a slog, in spite of only being three days long. I am hoping this week will be a little less compacted and stressful. I know I essentially have to prepare for being in training all week the week after next. I’ve not done anything in person for that many days in a row for awhile, so that will be its own sort of stress. I hope you all have a pheomenal week, and I hope that maybe I can pick one of the many things I have been doing to actually focus on.

Spriggan Empowered Monoliths

by

Yesterday I talked about my recent Diablo IV adventures, which are admittedly largely led by a desire to keep hanging out with my friend Cyl. That is the game that she is playing so I keep offering myself as tribute to do whatever shenanigans she has in her mind. We did some Nightmare Dungeons last night and I have to admit… while I enjoyed hanging out I didn’t really enjoy the content. We were doing a variety of 21-23 dungeons and honestly… they just were not that fun. It might be that my level is lagging behind hers significantly, or it might be that the content just isn’t actually that fun… but whatever the case the moment we broke for the night I returned to my comfy standby… Last Epoch. I got my Druid to level 84 last night and am still hunting for a few pieces of gear. I need to sit down and properly sort out what I want for each slot and then adapt my loot filter for those specific stats.

Over the weekend I got the Spriggan build through all of the normal mode monoliths and unlocked Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 Legendary variants of each. I’ve been focused on farming Black Sun mostly for a chance at the squirrel hat aka Herald of the Scurry. I’ve yet to give up on the hope of eventually playing that build. More than anything at the moment I am just farming experience to gain levels. I would really like to have at least one character hit level 100 before the 1.0 drop. This is only the second character that I have hit Empowered Monoliths on so I am still relatively new to the Last Epoch endgame as a whole. That said I already feel like I could use some variety in my life with the content, and my hope is that we maybe see some of the randomization changes sooner rather than later. The Action RPG YouTube channel does a summary of the Friday dev chat live streams and it sounds like something akin to a Loot Goblin is a near-term addition.

I’ve been milking a little bit more experience out of the level 90 normal monoliths because they are so much more chill than empowered. I really need to get back into the habit of throwing on an audiobook while grinding, because when I am doing that… I don’t really notice the repetitive nature of doing monoliths or delve or whatever ARPG grind I happen to be engaged with. The Power sort of broke me as far as books go… and I’ve yet to really dive into another book after that. I tried starting a few but ended up bouncing pretty early. I have a target for the next novel to consume via Audio Book, but I just need to sit down and decide to do it.

At least until the next Path of Exile League, this is going to probably be my gaming happy place. I am still progressing in Honkai Star Rail and got my first character to level 70 last night. I’m going to need to do some devoted grinding in order to get the materials to pull up the rest of my team to 70 as well… then my secondary team after that. I’m pretty happy with the state of my gaming options at the moment. I have Final Fantasy XVI but since it is on console… I just never seem to feel like playing it. I realize I am the weirdo… but the idea of playing a game on a console just feels so exhausting. Controllers are not my natural mode of gameplay and while I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and Genesis… the moment I got access to a 386 computer I was all in on PC gaming. I am honestly somewhat annoyed that Square chose to launch that game ONLY on the PS5 for the time being. If they had done PS5 and Epic Game Store… I would be probably actively playing it on the PC right now.

Anyways hopefully your week is going smoothly. Mine is considerably less hectic than last week was now that the world around me has largely recovered from the storm damage. What are you playing right now? Drop me a line below. Last little note… if you are on Blue Sky you can follow me there now. I had a nice person shove an invite code into my hand. I am not entirely certain what I think about it so far. It feels really really basic, and I still greatly prefer mastodon/gamepad. I am however checking it a few times a day.

Swole Treebeard

by

Good Morning Friends! I think I am probably done with Diablo IV for a while. I absolutely got some enjoyment out of the game, but as far as long-term replayability goes… it isn’t really doing it for me. The moment-to-moment gameplay and grind are just not what I want out of an ARPG, but I also sort of knew this going into the game. As a result, I am back to my usual nonsense and playing some Last Epoch. When I was having a blast in the Path of Exile Crucible league, my friend Ace was having a similar blast playing a Druid Spriggan build in Last Epoch. So this morning I am going to talk a bit through the build and share some gameplay footage that I recorded yesterday. First, however… I want you all to bask in the glory that is my Wild Man Pool Cleaner… because I can’t NOT see a pool skimmer with the way he is holding that staff.

Thankfully however you spend all of your time in this build as a Swole Treant. This build revolves around spending all of your time in Spriggan Form and then buffing the abilities that you have access to in that form. Spriggan form like the other transformed forms relies on rage, so you will be needing to do things to make sure that you can make it all the way through a map without getting knocked back into your weaksauce human form again. We are also going to be shifting as much damage as we can to cold… which adds a bunch of benefits including a whole other defensive layer that comes from slowing and eventually freezing enemies.

Yesterday over lunch I recorded a video showing off some gameplay. This is me doing a level 75 monolith as I slowly work towards getting this character into empowered monoliths. Essentially the gameplay involves having 1 Spriggan, 1 Wolf, and 1 Storm Crow pet that provide buffs, conditions, and some meager additional damage and then running amok through the map dropping 9 Healing Totems and 12 Vines. The Healing Totems are converted to spiked totems through the Spriggan Form skill tree and the Vines are converted into frozen thorn turrets. So what ends up happening in practice is that the Healing Totems keep you alive through almost any damage, and there are just so many things firing spikes in all directions that it shreds most smaller mobs. It isn’t amazing at bossing… because it takes quite a bit of time for them to actually deal damage to the stronger enemies but the excessive healing you are receiving allows you to survive basically anything that does not one-shot you.

Currently, I am at level 73 and working my way through the level 85 Monolith without much issue. After conquering that I will have the three level 90 Monoliths to complete and then can properly begin Empowered level 100 Monoliths. Honestly, the mapping portion of running the various Echoes is smooth as butter. The only challenges thus far have come from the bosses, where there are a lot of one-shot mechanics that I have to dodge. I steamrolled the first Monolith boss and took two attempts at Rahyeh, and two attempts at Lagon. While it took quite a while for my army of turrets to burn down the bosses, the healing allowed me to deal with a lot of the smaller mechanics that just sort of whittles you down over time. So on Lagon for example I needed to dodge any of his beam attacks… but could just stand in and soak the waves.

As far as the build goes, Aaron from Action RPG has a guide video above and you can find the Last Epoch Tools template here. One thing that I find I miss greatly when playing games that are not Path of Exile… is POE.Ninja. That website scrapes the build information from the top progressed players so if you are curious how others have solved specific problems in a build, you can sift through information til your heart is content. I legitimately wish EVERY ARPG had something like this, so you could see how players that are focused on a specific type of play are gearing out and solving the inherent issues with the build. Mostly what I would love to see from build creators is some stat information… like you should have X amount of Y stats, rather than suggesting some idealized pieces of gear that will probably be almost impossible to replicate.

For my build currently, I have some pretty scuffed gear and am utilizing two uniques. The first is Tears of the Forest, which is very likely to be required to make this build work. Essentially it solves your rage problems and generates 2 Rage per second for each Vine you currently have summoned. Since you are going to be trying to keep up all twelve Vines at any given time, this means you are generating 24 Rage per second which is pretty much faster than you can reasonably spend it. I’m also using Valeroot, which is not super amazing… but does give me +1 to the level of Spriggan Form. My goal is at some point to replace that with a purple chest that has more than one level of Spriggan Form on it. While I have legendary potential on Valeroot… I am just not sure if it is worth trying to turn into a Legendary.

All I know for certain is that this has revitalized my joy in Last Epoch for the time being. I have two builds that need specific items to drop for them to really be able to transition into the next level, and Spriggan seems to be extremely solid with little to no specific items. My hope is if nothing else I can use this build to farm items in higher tiers of corruption in order to finish out both my Bone Golem Necro build and my Squirrelmaster build. I have been contemplating turning my necro from being Fire Based to Necrotic/Self-healing based but it just felt like too much fiddling to really make happen. Not that it would actually be that difficult given that I shifted gears to Spriggan extremely abruptly on my baby druid, but it is sort of the “full bags” problem I have with MMORPGs.

What I mean by the “full bags” problem is that there is often a game for me that I might want to play… but there is just enough friction involved with playing it that I have trouble getting started. Traditionally this has been an MMORPG problem where I have no clue what any of the items in my bags do anymore, and it would require an hour or so of dedicated effort to sort things out… so instead I keep logging in and then logging right back out. I’ve had this most specifically with Everquest II, where I have some 300 bag slots full of probably useless crap, and I just don’t want to dedicate the mental bandwidth to trying to figure out what to do with any of it. Similarly, I have this wall with getting back into Genshin Impact, where I have too many quests pulling me in too many different directions… so instead I just don’t engage at all. So instead of taking the time to sort out my Necromancer in Last Epoch… I just shifted my focus to a different character for a while.

I am a “stuffer” and this drives my wife insane. She will occasionally bring me an object… that she wants me to deal with, but at the moment she hands me it… I can’t dedicate the mental bandwidth to figuring out what to do with it so I just find someplace to put it. Often that place is somewhere I will likely never find it again, but I just can’t deal with new stimuli when I am in the middle of doing something at times. In Path of Exile I have several “dump” tabs, where I just shove gear that might be useful at some point but I can’t deal with trying to decide if I sell them or vendor them at that very moment. The huge benefit of having seasons that reset in ARPGs… is it limits my ability to get into a state of having too much shit to process. For now, I am enjoying the heck out of the Spriggan, and my hope is that this will ground me enough in Last Epoch again to feel comfortable going and actually dealing with making the Necromancer work in a more comfortable manner.