Last Epoch

Detonate Dead is UnFun

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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

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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.

Last Epoch Cycle 2 Reset

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the start of the reset for the second cycle of the Last Epoch ARPG. That is a contorted mess to say, and EHG really needs to get better at naming this shit. In fact is is actually less clear than calling it Cycle 2… because EHG refers to this as Cycle 1.1 Refresh. Legitimately name things more clearly so that you can understand which Cycle/League/Season you are in with a reasonable chronology. Diablo IV just simply increments the number and Path of Exile gives every league a name and a patch version. Naming your cycles off the arbitrary versioning scheme of your game is kind of madness. Whatever the case… I opted to essentially recreate my last seasonal character to see if I could improve upon the design and as such BelBurnsBrightly now exists… I would absolutely give you a character profile link if LastEpochTools were updated. Instead, I present you BelLikesToSpin the last incarnation which I will be following pretty closely.

I’ve said before that the only thing standing in the way of EHG claiming the “Best ARPG” crown is more content. They are competing with Path of Exile for that title when it has over a decade’s worth of content that just creates this environment where there is always something interesting going on in your maps. This cycle reset introduced the addition of Loot Lizards, and I have to say… they go a long way towards making maps feel fun and exciting. Essentially these critters spawn with a pack of loot on their back and you have to chase them down and “knock the pack off” their back… giving you a lovely loot pinata explosion. They come in a bunch of different varieties but so far I have seen ones that drop Rare loot, ones that drop Idols, and ones that drop Unique items. In all cases, they drop a lot of affix shards and glyphs which go a long way to helping you get started in the new league.

They also seem to have a very high drop rate for Runes of Ascendence which is helping me out considerably in getting the uniques that I need for my build. It took me two Runes to fish for the Firestarter’s Torch which is quite possibly my favorite item in the entire game. After that I started fishing for the cast on smite sword Palarus’s Sacred Light. I think I am five runes down and have not picked that up yet, but I did get the Humming Bee which is shockingly good for this build. I am hitting extremely fast which is causing me to gain a bunch of ward while spinning through the levels adding significant survival while also increasing my elemental damage output a tiny bit. The rest of my gear is a bit of a mess bit I am leveling several weavers will items, and then using Calamity to increase my fire damage and Avarice to give me elemental leech. I did have two quicksilver coils, but I dropped one to level a WW ring to see what I might get from it.

The other major system change is the addition of a stash tab priority system… which will be familiar to you as the affinity system in Path of Exile. Thing is this goes so much further than that system ever has by adding all manner of filter parameters allowing you to get really specific about what you want to store in which tabs. Stash maintenance is one of the biggest annoyances in an ARPG and being able to dump the loot you want to keep quickly is so important to the flow in your endgame progression. So for example if I wanted to create a tab that ONLY stores Legendary Potential 3 and 4 uniques, for a specific class… I could do so extremely simply. Basically, this adds all the power of the loot filter to a stash affinity system which now officially crowns EHG the “Best ARPG Stash Tab System”. Since GGG has been spurred into action to create quality life improvements based on innovations from Last Epoch, I am hoping we see something like this in Path of Exile soon.

I am not skipping any of the content so I am slowly chewing my way through the campaign. I got through the beginning of Imperial Era Majeka last night and will pick up from there today and push through hopefully to the end. I am working on getting my survival up a bit because I know Lagon is always going to be a bit of an obstacle. I am no longer deathless because last night while hanging out on Discord with Ace, I had to get one of my cats off my PC case…. because she was clawing at the magnetic vent cover. When I looked away something wandered over and wrecked me. At least this saves me the frustration of losing my deathless stream to either Lagon or Rahyeh which are traditionally the things that kill me in other runs.

One of the persistent memes in the POE community is “Login Dude!” when there is a good patch or a quirky bug worth exploiting. So I guess this is the point where I say to you that if you played Last Epoch in the past, this weird awkward cycle reset period is a great time to return. There is plenty of meat on those bones when it comes to the addition of Loot Lizards alone, and the quality of life that the stash tab priority system adds greatly improves the quality of life. Basically, I am at the point where I really need to sit down and build my loot filter for the league so that I can start sifting through loot that is actually worth keeping and worth breaking down. It isn’t necessarily a daunting or difficult task, just one that I had been avoiding.

A Jumbled Mess

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Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.

I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.

I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.

Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.

What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.

Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.

Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.