1.2 Tombs of the Erased

Corruption is Cumbersome

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been playing Last Epoch almost exclusively at this point and I have not only progressed into the Empowered Monoliths but reached a point with my build where I am beginning to thrive there. Right now Last Epoch has legitimately some of the best systems design in isometric loot chase action role-playing games. Some of the new crafting options for example are exceptionally fun because they lean into this pattern of “do a thing” and then “get a crafting bench”. Temporal Sanctum as a concept was really neat, but the problem with it has been the generally shitty state of dungeons as a whole. These new systems however feel like they understand the failings of dungeons and are effectively making better versions of them.

Since I am doing fairly well in Monoliths I have begun actually caring about trying to progress the Forgotten Knights faction. This is essentially a ladder to progress your way through the endgame and involves stacking corruption and then fighting harbinger encounters at these new corruption levels. Mechanically the Faction concept is pretty cool and I have enjoyed the way they have implemented a brand new one with the Weavers. However for a game with such amazing systems design work… it is all the more jarring when you encounter a legacy fragment that is not so well thought out. Basically the entire process of stacking corruption sucks, and while they have attempted to band-aid this… I feel like the entire design needs to be rethought in a major way.

So essentially each timeline has its own corruption level which determines how much additional difficulty that timeline has. Like I said they have added band-aids in the form of a catch up mechanic to bring one timeline up to the same level as your highest progressed timeline, as well as a specific type of woven echo that lets you transfer corruption level from one character to another. However the general concept of corruption just feels bad at least compared to the other systems. Ultimately you want to build up timeline stability which allows you to fight the boss of the timeline… which adds a Gaze of Orobyss stack… which then allows you to gain more corruption when you kill the Shade of Orobyss and reset the timeline progress. This whole song and dance of limping your way through corruption levels just feels poorly thought out.

After you have reset your timeline the first time, a new node shows up called the Sanctuary of Eterra which lets you fight a little boss fight to reduce your corruption and dial back the difficulty of your timeline. This entire process was aggressively fine earlier in the life of this game, but now that we have seen the type of systems that Eleventh Hour Games is capable of producing… the entire structure of corruption just feels really bad. Clearly the team has learned a lot of lessons in system design in the years that have past since the idea of timelines and corruption was first “ideated”. I just think that they can do much better, because the entire thing feels deeply cumbersome and unwieldy.

Ultimately what I would like to see is something akin to the way that Greater Rifts are handled in Diablo III and the Pit is handled in Diablo IV. Essentially once you have reached a specific corruption level you can then set the level of your timeline up to that corruption level via a drop down or slider… and make this value be set at an account level. This makes it beneficial for a player to push as far as they can possibly go… and then easily dial things back a bit to a very comfortable and clear farming level. I cannot tell you how much it makes my eye twitch that I need to get to 175 on my timeline corruption to do the next Harbinger but it is very likely that I will overshoot that number at be running it at 178 or something like that. Having a way to clearly set the difficulty of each timeline would go so far to making the whole corruption concept feel a bit better.

I also feel like the whole concept of timeline stability is not the most amazing system in the world, but I see it as a sort of necessary evil. It serves the role of keeping someone from simply farming the same boss over and over and is an alternative to the Path of Exile design of collecting key fragments. I would rather grind Monolith Echoes and fill up an arbitrary bar than attempt to farm 10 Maven Fragments to get a key. I feel like both Corruption and Stability were designed hand in hand, but also feel like Stability can function entirely on its own without the existence of the current state of Corruption. I think EHG understands that the corruption system is problematic, otherwise they would not keep trying to apply quality of life band-aids to it. Gaze of Orobyss itself was a band-aid to allow folks to raise it faster and the account corruption transfer woven echo is brand new attempting to stabilize a different problem. Mostly I think it is time to take the sledgehammer to the system and just make it better instead of spackling over the holes.

Ending on a more positive note however… I cannot fully explain the level of joy it brings me to run around with my Travelers Backpack in Last Epoch. This is an item that was given to early players of Last Epoch in honor of them selling 500k units. You can see a higher detailed version over on the Last Epoch Forums, but it is full of so many references. It has the original kickstarter era Last Epoch logo, the rolled up thing at the top I believe is based on a desk sized mouse pad that they sent out to early backers, and there is even a tiny Mike head transposed on top of what I think is a Bee model. The map that is rolled up on the side of the backpack looks similar to the old kickstarter-era world map. Mostly it is just a really fun tchotchke showing that you have been around for awhile. I kinda hope they do more things like this in the future as they continue to transition between phases of the game.

My Own Worst Enemy

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Good Morning Folks. I failed entirely to write a blog post yesterday because I guess other things were going on. I am still playing Last Epoch and still having quite a blast… but there was a brief period of time where I was having less of one. The problem with yolo-ing your way through an ARPG is that occasionally you run into problems and you have to pivot. One of the best parts about Last Epoch is just how easy that pivot ends up being. Essentially I was steamrolling over the top of everything with great impunity… then got to empowered monoliths and started taking oneshots left and right. The difficulty curve of Last Epoch can be exceptionally steep at times and essentially I had to re-evaluate my build and figure out how to fix the problems.

So the first problem that I knew was when I hit Empowered Monoliths I had just shy of 2000 life… which was simply not enough because these mobs were taking ALL of my life at once. Another problem is that I was not crit immune, and when one of these things would hit me… it was hitting me for like 4000 health at once… and there would never be a way for me to fix that. Essentially there are two paths to remove critical strikes… one is to stack Reduced Bonus Damage Taken from Critical Strikes to 100% and the other is to stack Critical Strike Avoidance to 100%. I went the first route… but one of the items that I have also happens to have some of the second stat. I also tried to grab as much health as I could while still maintaining 75% in all resistances… which means I am using a belt with a champion stat that I do not care about just to get hybrid health and cold resistance.

The other problem that I was dealing with was that I was just straight up getting swarmed constantly, and when I had multiple champions and weavers mobs on me at once… all doing big AOE attacks that I needed to avoid… the visual clarity went out the window. So I started trying to evaluate what was happening with my character to determine why I was having this problem. Ultimately I went all in on Divine Bolts which meant that every time I encountered a new mob I was firing off like five fireballs that went in random directions… that could often pull things off screen… causing smite to occasionally proc and do more AOE damage… leading to the end result of everything in the damned zone seeking me out to murder me. Its really great if you can just tank all the damage in the universe because your build is pulling for you… its less cool when you are a bit on the squishy side. So I dropped 3 points in one trait and 4 points in the other trait… and redistributed those points in other areas that gave me pure survival.

My updated tree looks a little bit like this. Essentially I poured more points into Holy Icon and Reverence of Duality and the end result is that I am now level 92 and have a little over 2800 health with full crit immunity which is a marked improvement. You can check out my build profile here if you are curious about more fine details than that. All told, the game once again became a pretty chill grinding experience and as of last night I started actually trying to increase corruption so that I could take out more Harbingers and progress that faction tree. I’ve never really felt much of a need or desire to push corruption before now, so we will see how this goes. I am just not a very bossing focused person in these games, and instead prefer to just keep grinding maps indefinitely.

As far as my Weavers Tree goes aka the Atlas Passive Tree for POE vets, I have gone all in on Loot Lizards. Essentially they really are the thing that makes mapping feel so damned good in this game, because they are tiny explosions of loot… and now that I have all of my points allocated into making more of them spawn it all feels so much better. I need to sort out where I am going to spend my points next however, because as my corruption levels increase I will gain access to a few more maps that require specific corruption levels to run. I think at this point I have unlocked everything that I currently have access to at least until I push to rank 8 in the Weavers Faction.

Another significant change that I made is to swap out Lunge for Healing Hands converted into a movement skill. Lunge is my favorite of the Sentinel movement abilities… it is fast and zooms to a specific target which is ultimately the behavior that I usually want in this game. However it doesn’t really have a ton of utility. Whereas Healing Hands is a pretty potent healing/regeneration ability that moves to a target location instead of a target mob… allowing you to use it as a way of speeding up moving through the gaps in mob density and also just firing it off as a point blank attack if you are stacked on top of a boss or to get out of the range of an attack quickly. Largely I did all of this to gain the extra healing from it…. and at first I thought I would be proccing it constantly, but Warpath only counts as hitting for the purpose of this ability when you first start channeling meaning that I either needed to keep pulsing the attack or just give up on the auto procs. As a result I just removed a few points and will buff the total regeneration amount once I have finished leveling back up the ability.

I will admit however that there is part of me that really wants to try out the shenanigans that Pohx is doing. Essentially Judgment can be turned into a Righteous Fire like aura ability, and you gain damage for it by stacking Healing Effectiveness… which means you are healing yourself for stupid amounts of health. Combine this with block and heal on block, you end up with a near indestructible character that can push high corruption. Now that I have started stabilizing my gear… I might start adding in some of the items for this build to my loot filter so I can farm them up while grinding monoliths to potentially run up a second Paladin entirely for the purpose of creating this build. I could of course respec my Warpath character, but I think I would rather preserve the current state of it and play up something else for the purpose of this build instead.

Mostly this morning I wanted to talk through the process of how I am fixing my build, to largely go through some of the logic behind my madness. I am hoping to push more corruption tonight and do another harbinger before moving on to a new timeline to do it all over again.

Best ARPG Patch So Far

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Good Morning Folks. Shocking to no one, I spent pretty much all of the extended weekend playing Last Epoch. We did spend a bit of time working on the backyard and prepping it to migrate all of the furniture and such from the garage out there. However all of the rest of the time was spent leveling my latest version of an Ignite Warpath Paladin. What is wild about this build is this is my sixth time playing some version of warpath and once again… I have shifted things up considerably. I did not follow even my own previous versions of this character and just made the choices that I felt like I needed to make in the moment. The end result has seen me leaning into slightly different avenues of scaling than I have previously… and I think overall the build is more powerful. It does however feel like it has less survival so I guess there were tradeoffs made.

While leveling I did not get a lucky Firestarter’s Torch this time early into my progression, but instead pulled a Taste of Blood axe from a Nemesis Egg. The particular pathing that I make ends up shifting both Warpath and Lunge to convert all bleed damage dealt into ignite stacks, effectively allowing me to utilize bleed as a proxy for ignite. What I have found is that Taste of Blood actually allows me to stack ignite so much faster than the Torch combo normally would and I almost instantly have 60+ stacks of ignite on my target. I got a very lucky LP3 copy of the smite sword which allowed me to craft effectively the ideal weapon for the build as my very first legendary slam. Lastly I have a tab full of Code of an Erased Sentinel that I am fishing for the best combos and right now +2 levels of Holy Aura is the winner.

You can always check out the current state of my character over on Last Epoch Tools as they have an automatically updating character profile thing similar to POE.Ninja. Right now I am fully capped and in many cases way overcapped on resistances and recently shifted around my gear so that I could become crit immune… or at least immune to the bonus damage. The biggest thing that I need right now is more life because 1900 is not terribly comfortable for empowered monoliths. Right now I am dumping passive points into Reverence of Duality which gives me 2% increases to Health, Damage, Healing Effectiveness, and Mana for every point spent. I only have 3 points in this passive node, but plan on taking this all of the way up to 12 which will give me an additional 18% Health, Damage, Healing, and Mana. More than that though I am constantly on the hunt for gear upgrades that either give me raw health or more preferably hybrid health without dropping any of the other stats that I care about.

I had to drop my Rule of Simoon gloves to add some additional survival… but doing so had other benefits. One of the biggest challenges with the new mob types is that standing in melee range because a lot more difficult, because they all seem to paint large areas of bad stuff on the ground or have huge slams. Having my entire screen cluttered by my own flaming tornadoes was a huge problem for the readability of attacks. I am probably going to drop the cosmetic for Warpath as well because the base fire twirl version is similarly just easier to read whatever is going on at the time. I miss the Torch and it setting everything on fire for the entire screen… but the bleed axe just does way more hit damage while at the same time stacking ignites faster than the torch ever did. I’ve reached a point where empowered monoliths are comfortable enough, but more health and more levels will improve that.

I’ve said before that the weakness of Last Epoch was its endgame, and Tombs of the Erased largely fixes that problem entirely. Grinding through normal monos used to feel like a chore, because there really was not much going on there. This patch introduced so much bonus content that it feels like there is constantly something interesting going on. This is before you factor in the whole map crafting aspect of the game which allows you to edit your timeline and add new echoes wherever you want to. I’ve been slowly working my way through all of the echoes that grant additional passive skill tree points, and then I have a bunch that I am saving for later because they much be run in empowered monoliths. Essentially you have to run a cemetery to edit your tree, and that is really my only complaint about the new system. I wish this was something that you could simply pop open at any time. You can place as many woven echoes on your map as you like, but it does feel a bit like running a tower to be able to juice your maps in Path of Exile II, and as such sort of feels superfluous design wise.

The weavers tree aka passive atlas tree… is freaking brilliant though and adds so much depth to the game. I largely rushed the various imprint nodes which allow you to imprint an item, which then makes it more likely for that item to drop. There are two nodes that you can imprint a woven echo, and this makes it so that those echoes naturally show up on your map without the need to add them manually. Right now I have it so that the map that effectively gives you like 50 shrines and the one that allows you to fight 6 Nemesis encounters appear naturally on my maps. There is one that is just loaded full of Loot Lizards which might be fun to imprint as well. I’ve gone deep into buffing the appearance of loot lizards and making it so that every one drops a guaranteed unique regardless of their normal reward type. I think next I am going to try and figure out what I can do with Exile Mages, because for the moment they feel like the most boring of the encounters.

Playing Last Epoch after coming off the previous Path of Exile II patch has been wild. Everything in Tombs of the Erased seems to be centered around enabling just fun game-play. For example in the above screenshot you can see what happened after opening a chest and having I think six of the exalted rarity loot lizards pop out of it, forcing me to chase them down to break open those loot pinatas. It is just big dumb fun, and I am so here for it. Combining this with the fact that I feel comfortable enough with Last Epoch to just sort of yolo my way through a build, knowing that there is no decision that I cannot easily undo if I make a mistake… feels phenomenal. I started a brand new Primalist last night that I went Beastmaster with, for the idea of doing a Raptor build… but I am just sort of winging my way through it rather than following any per-determined leveling guide. That is just not really something I can do with Path of Exile, especially with the sequel game… giving how few builds end up viable.

When Path of Exile II dropped its patch 0.2.0 release date on top of the already planned Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased date… I was frustrated and annoyed. However I feel like Last Epoch rescheduling combined with the fact that Dawn of the Hunt has been one of the worst received ARPG patches I can remember… has really helped Last Epoch to succeed. Playing Last Epoch just feels so refreshing as contrasted with the lack of loot and frustrating tedium of Path of Exile II. Of note… I play all of these games and will probably continue to play all of them as they release additional content so I am not trying to stoke idiotic tribalism here. However it does absolutely seem like the drop in Path of Exile II players has directly impacted the rise of Last Epoch. I think the highest concurrent player count I saw was around 160k players which is a little over half of the total they had at the launch of 1.0, which seems really freaking good.

One of the most telling comments that I saw over the weekend is someone remarking at just how quiet the Reddit was, because it seemed like everyone was simply too busy playing the game to make posts. However since we are now returning to the work week… the entire place has blown up to the point of no longer being able to find that thread. Tonight I will return to empowered monos and try and make some additional progress and maybe take out a few more Harbingers to level that faction. Sure there are still some quality of life improvements that I would like to see. I still want them to update the character models and allow for multiple gender options, and I desperately crave a personalized hideout where I am run all of the content from without interacting with strangers. There are still some maps that have issues interacting with Warpath, but all in all I am having a freaking blast. Sure the moment 3.26 drops for Path of Exile I will zoom back over there, but for the moment Last Epoch is my moment of gaming zen.

If you are curious about some more commentary from me, you can listen to yesterday’s podcast where Ace and I went on at length about the things we are enjoying. While I rarely explain the origin behind some of the non-sequitur AggroChat episode titles… the above screenshot at least explains Lord Orca. Ord Lorca is one of the new Champion encounters and Ace and I both remarked that when we first read the name of that mob, we thought it was Lord Orca. I really hope they do some interesting things with Champion names, because one of my favorite things from Diablo III is when I encountered monsters that were named after content creators. I loved whenever I got to kill my friend Qelric in a map mostly in that DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme style moment of recognition. I think “Orca” is a giant lizard, but the screen is always covered in so much nonsense… and that champion happens to have some sort of a flame effect shield that makes visual clarity a challenge.

Anyways! Are you playing Last Epoch? What did you end up building? Drop me a line below because I am super curious to hear the thoughts of others that are maybe not so bought into this franchise.

Froggy and Capy Are Best Friends

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Good Morning Folks! Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased has launched and I am still in the process of leveling my character through the campaign. Just like I thought I was going to do… I rolled a Sentinel and specialized into Paladin going for something similar to what I have built previously. The thing is… right now this BelStillBurns is not a one for one copy of the previous characters I have built as ignite warpath, and I am sort of adjusting my ideas on the fly while I level. I am not going to write a super long blog post this morning so that I can get back to playing. I could have probably pushed into maps yesterday but I generally prefer a more relaxed trip through the campaign than trying to do the hyper optimal gameplay thing. Truth be told I generally like the campaign in ARPGs. Path of Exile II’s campaign was a bit of an exception for me… where I enjoyed it the first time but would absolutely skip it instantly if given half the choice.

Yesterday was unfortunately not a launch without some growing pains. The servers came up right around 11 am CDT and it took me a bit longer than that to get the 7.3 gb patch applied. However once I attempted to login I was met with good ole error LE-52 indicating that the login server was overloaded. This lasted until around 12 pm CDT, but once you beat the login boss the game was pretty smooth. I did have some minor issues trying to create my character, which has created the weird situation where I have two characters named the same thing. Once we are in the clear I will probably open a support ticket for that, because I am afraid to delete my second BelStillBurns for fear that it also deletes the primary character I am leveling.

For concurrent players Last Epoch blew last July’s patch launch out of the water and has consistently had more players than Path of Exile II. It was a Thursday launch which is not ideal timing for a lot of players, so I figure come this evening and over the weekend we will probably hit new peak numbers for the game as a whole. At one point last night Raxxanterax, a streamer that I have followed since his Diablo III days had 21,000+ viewers which was the highest number any ARPG streamer at that time. Someone referred to him as the Bob Ross of ARPG streamers… which is a title that I feel like he has to fight Pohx for because they both have that sort of energy. If you look at the Last Epoch category though, pretty much all of the Path of Exile streamers are playing it.

I have continued my tradition of Josie causing my first death. Last night I was on the couch and near the end of Act Five when she decided that she absolutely had to stand in front of me. Unlike with Path of Exile II… there is no pause and some random trash mob wandered over and killed me. The cats keep me real, and make sure I know that I have to take breaks in order to give them attention. Quite honestly I appreciate them playing this vital role. There was a bit where I stopped playing for thirty minutes because Josie also decided to lay on top of my keyboard hand, so it makes me think it was absolutely purposeful that she wanted me to stop paying attention to the screen. The furthest I have ever gotten Deathless was into the monolith, because I always die to Rahyeh on my first attempt for the second monolith.

I’ve not had the lucky run that I did the last two times I have played ignite warpath, and have yet to find a Firestarter’s Torch. I really miss the spreading flames ignite proliferation, but since I don’t have this… I am having to pivot into another drop. I got Taste of Blood with a good health on hit role and since both warpath and lunge are currently converting chance to bleed into chance to ignite… it still works as an amazing item for me. I am paring that with whatever rare sword I can pick up that has decent stats, and then have also grabbed a lucky Quicksilver Coil from a nemesis egg, which is not 100% ideal but has high regen, haste, and attack speed. Sadly the stats that I got from the egg are useless form my build but I will take a well rolled Quicksilver Coil regardless of how I got it.

I said this was going to be a short post… but in truth it ended up being just about as long as my normal fare. One thing that I completely missed yesterday is that apparently it was the 16th Anniversary of my blog. The literal Hello World post for this blog was posted on April 17th of 2009. I thought it would be fun to look up the original theme of the blog again and use that for today’s post. This blog started it’s life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking and Raid Leading Blog. Super freaking niche and that did not last for terribly long… I essentially painted myself into a corner and when I stopped having fun raiding… it also meant that I stopped having fun blogging. Those early years are full of posts where I am apologizing for the massive lapses in time between posts. Once I shifted in 2013 to this just being a blog about me and my misadventures things got considerably more easy.

I know I have a pretty regular reader-base… but I am curious. Do I still have any readers that were with me way back in the beginning or at least after my initial viral moment of being featured on WoW Insider? If so drop me a line below because I am legitimately curious. I think a lot more folks know me for Blaugust than pretty much anything else.