Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Corruptions Are Wild

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday, we got Shattered Omens, the new season for Last Epoch. Last night I did our Thursday Funday nonsense, and during the middle of it, I was asked what should be a simple question… How long has Last Epoch Been Out? Technically, I have been playing small amounts of the game since November 8th, 2018, when I bought into Alpha 0.5.3. However, I really started playing the game seriously on July 12th, 2022, in its pre-multplayer variant, because things were really starting to cook. Collectively, the AggroChat crew started playing more regularly when the Multiplayer release dropped on March 9th, 2023. The answer that Sita was probably looking for was February 21st, 2024, when the game officially launched into its 1.0 version. So, at this point, we are a little over two years into the lifecycle of Last Epoch as a “complete” game, and I say that in quotes because we still do not have all of the acts that will eventually be in the final version of the story. We are on Season 4, but I have no clue what the actual number should be because originally, they did this whole patch number “cycle” nonsense instead of just calling them seasons.

One of the most delightful things about playing a new Last Epoch season is that I get to once again roam around with my adventuring companions. I’ve been a pretty avid supporter of the game and purchased pretty much every MTX offering backer set that they offer us, because they are priced so much cheaper than the Path of Exile league packs. For example, the Fractured Legend’s supporter pack, which features everything available for this Season is $59.99 as compared to one of the Mirage supporter packs, which runs $90 for technically less stuff. I love this game and want it to survive so I keep giving it money, but after many years of doing this, I have a fancy Capybara, Toucan, and Sloth that hangs out on my back… and running around with this trio of animal companions makes me happy in ways that I cannot quite adequately explain. Maybe I am too old school, but I believe that you really should support the games that you enjoy playing in some way or another, and have always done so as best I can.

Each time a new season drops, they have added new content to the game, and slowly, bit by bit, the frequency of “interesting things” in maps has increased. This time around, starting with Act 2, we have the appearance of something called the Omen Window. This is your classic ARPG “kill things in a circle” mechanic and reminds me a bit of a mix between Ritual and the new Unstable Breach, for Path of Exile players. Ritual, because you are confined to a specific fixed location, and Unstable Breach, because random monsters are summoned and you fill a bar, which breaks the “boss” encounter out of its invulnerability phase. When you take down the boss, the encounter ends, and you are rewarded with a bunch of corrupted loot and some of the crafting currency for this league that allows you to corrupt your own items. Essentailly these are Vaal Orbs for the Path of Exile player, or for someone not familiar with the concept… it is a final step that you can do in crafting an item which can produce some wild outcomes… but also keeps you from further modifying the item.

It is hard to fully explain just how game-changing this has been for the campaign. These are all items that I got from my first two Omen Windows. If you get a good corrupted weapon in Act 2… You can literally keep using it all of the way from the campaign because it is dropping with stats that you cannot get until the Monolith. For example, the ring on the left with +11 Strength on it… is something that I am still using in Act 7 and will probably keep using until I finally get some other way of replacing that huge boost in attributes. I have held onto these for when I ultimately level alts, because the stat packages are just too wild. For example, that axe with 96% increased Physical Damage and 26% Damage Leech is pure nonsense. Sure, it would have been much better if it had rolled with flat damage, but I am not going to complain at all. You can corrupt your own items, but be VERY careful because I corrupted a level 10 dagger…. and it ended up swapping it to a level 56 required dagger base, effectively bricking it for me.

I started screenshotting some of the early drops from Omens, because it was freaking wild. This one for example dropped two completed legendary items. Granted, they were more akin to the random legendaries that you get from the Nemesis system, but they were still extremely strong… and I am using several items that I got early on from corruptions. The only negative that I see about the power of the Omen Windows is that it sort of makes every other encounter feel worse as a result. Exiled Mages were already pretty bad, because you only really care about them if they can drop something that your build specifically needs. I am thankful that you get a little warning message in chat when you enter a map with Omens, and in theory… it might not be a bad strategy to just farm the same map over and over for corruptions in one of the first areas. What was so interesting about this while leveling, is if you get a really strong item… it might convince you to try some things that you had never tried previously.

For example…. I probably never would have leveled a Sentinel with Prism Wraps and Calamity. However, I got a Prism Wraps off my second Omen, which had +1 to all skills… making it insanely powerful for leveling, and I am still wearing it. Calamity similarly has a huge amount of physical resistance on it, and given that I am dealing fire damage, I just rolled with it… especially when I got a pair of Falcon Fists later from a Nemesis egg. I would likely never run a Vipertail on a Sentinel either, but since so much of my power comes from procs… and I greatly benefit from hitting really fast… I started using it for the melee attack speed and kept using it because the poison damage was pretty overpowered since I was hitting very fast. Code of an Erased sentinel, I only included because I am pretty proud of that being the first one I picked up off the ground, and turning into a pretty formidable item. I am sure I will have to wear proper gear once I get to the Monolith, but for now this leveling package feels really strong.

I am level 47 and made it to Heoborea in Act Seven, without taking any deaths. I am sure once I hit monoliths, I will lose my “deathless”, or potentially before, because I keep doing dumb things. Path of Exile II introduced the ability to pause the game while playing by hitting escape to bring up a menu. A few leagues ago, this was also added to Path of Exile, and it was a very welcome addition that I adapted to quickly. As a result, I keep hitting Escape, thinking I am pausing the game, only to watch the corners of my screen turn red as I start getting hit. This is muscle memory… and at some point I am going to do this… alt tab out and come back sad and dead. I would love it if EHG added pause to the online portion of the game, but then again… they have a lot on their plate. There are a ton of quality-of-life tweaks that I would love to see, but some of them seem to be lines that they do not want to cross. For example, I would love to have my pets pick up any of the loot that gets vacuumed into your inventory, like affix shards. I won’t be holding my breath on that one.

I should be able to wrap the campaign up tonight. I don’t usually take any skips and go out of my way to unlock the various dungeons as I am near them on the map. Though I do remember the latest acts taking quite a bit longer than the early ones. I am still going to complete them, though, because you can apparently speed through the monolith faster if you have completed the campaign and are not required to do as many of the early monos. It feels like I am gaining levels much faster than normal, so I am interested to see what level I am when I open up Monos for the first time. I am sure I will be playing this hard and heavy all weekend long, so if you are around, feel free to friend me. My Account ID is Belghast, and the character I am playing this time around is a Forge Weapons Forge Guard called BelForgedNonsense.

Last Epoch Shattered Omens Launch Day

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Good Morning Folks! Today is the day that the Last Epoch league starts, and I am going to be taking a bit of a pause in my Path of Exile shenanigans to enjoy it thoroughly. I really love this game, and I get that sometimes I talk about it in slightly negative light… but that is really only because the totality of the game is not quite as fleshed out as my beloved Path of Exile. I think there are a lot of things that Last Epoch does so much better, and it is also a much more approachable game. It took me almost two years before I got the hang of playing even the basics of Path of Exile with any level of proficiency. Last Epoch is the sort of experience that I can just log in and start being functional almost immediately. To paraphrase the classic Tolarian Community College standard… Reading the Skill Explains the Skill. Sure you might not be able to yolo your way to Aberroth with your first build, but you can at the very least make it through the campaign, and from there the game gives you easy tools to tweak your character without much pain to make it better over time.

Say you want to play Last Epoch, but you do not want to yolo things. Much like every other ARPG out there, we have a bunch of folks who came up through the community of the game that make build guides. Sure, you can probably lean on all of the same ARPG stalwarts that you are used to, because most of the Path of Exile and Diablo folks also play Last Epoch seasons. However, I would highly suggest you maybe give your time and attention to the folks who are supporting the community during the downtime. Here are a few that I would suggest you check out for builds.

  • Aaron Action RPG – Aaron is one of the most prolific guide creators out there, especially in the minion-based builds space. Unfortunately, he has a bit of a verbal schtick with these guides that grates my nerves, but you cannot discount the quality of the builds he is creating, or the level of devotion he spends to providing much-needed news and updates for the community as a whole. He also runs and maintains ActionRPG.com, which is an up-and-coming guide site for the ARPG community as a whole to rival others in the market.
  • Dr3adful – Great guide creator… shitty attitude. Specifically, he seems to take issue with the “Dad Gamer” or “Low Effort” community looking for easy builds… which he ironically does actually support because I am very likely going to be playing one of his builds. If you can push past this, he does some really interesting stuff with some of his builds that often go off in less-than-obvious directions.
  • BinaQc – Bina is sort of the Zizaran of the Last Epoch community. Really good-natured, and does a pretty good job of covering the most popular builds of the league. He is not necessarily going to give you absolutely unique builds, but will cover a lot of the things that Maxroll has guides for.
  • Frozen Sentinel – This is not a creator that I have consumed a lot of content from, but when I have it has been more focused on some of the farming strategies. They do some deep dives into specific mechanics, similar to someone like a SirGog or Slippery Jimmy.
  • Maxroll.gg – While not a creator necessarily, I am specifically calling out the Maxroll website because the folks that they have aligned with in the community (BinaQc, LizardIRL, Volca, Terek, etc), do a really good job of keeping updated and easy-to-follow guides to the game both in and out of the seasons.

Dread released a video where he talks about five different builds that are pretty low effort that will get you through monoliths and through the non-uber version of Aberroth without much issue. Again, like I said… for someone who seems to be spiteful towards the Righteous Fire crowd… he made a pretty freaking great guide. Essentially, he outlines Forged Weapons Forge Guard, Rip Blood Warlock, Crit Hammerdin, Vengeance Bleed Carrior of Creation Paladin, and Warpath Void Knight. Of these, the only one that I have actually played is Warpath Void Knight, but it is pretty much one of the most classic and tried and true builds that has been around in one form or another since pre-release days. There were a lot of changes to Mages, so I think they will also be powerful this league, but I do find it interesting that none of those builds made it into this summary.

There is a ten-hour video guide to Forge Weapons Forge Guard, and I think this is probably going to be what I am starting this go around. I’ve always liked Forge Guard, and they got a heck of a lot more compelling for me personally when they got a version of “Titans Grip” from World of Warcraft that allows them to wield a two-handed weapon with a shield. That just makes me happy thematically, so there have been a few times that I have built around Forge Guard as a platform just so I could do that for funsies. I tried playing the minion build several leagues back, but I never actually played their version of Animate Weapons, and the more I see of it, the more I think maybe that was a massive mistake. Sentinel as a starter is very comfortable to me, because I have probably spent more time on that class than I have anything else. You can check out my profile, which will allow you to get to all of my characters over on LastEpochTools, and ten of my characters have been built around the Sentinel in one form or another.

The other build that I really want to play around with is the Beemancer, though I am not entirely certain I would be playing it on a Necromancer base instead of the Primalist. Essentially, there is a new unique set that gives you access to a giant, angry bee-bear-hybrid thing that then summons an army of bee minions. I will probably use my Forge Guard build to gather up the uniques to create something around this. This is sort of the logic that I apply in Path of Exile, when I roll a Righteous Fire character first to break into the endgame and then use it to fund other ideas that I might have for the league. The only negative of this is that Last Epoch tends to have sticky loot, which means that I am probably going to see way less necromancer-style gear if I am on a sentinel. Some of this is loot filters, and some of this is just the way the drops seem to work there.

For Primalist, I would probably start out with the Cocaine Bear build from last league. This is essentially a Beastmaster build that goes all in on a single bear minion, and then buffs it to silly levels. Similarly to Forge Guard, I have never done this with Beastmaster, because the only build I have actually played is one around the Squirrel helmet. So this is probably something I am going to explore if the whole Bee thing does not go well.

There is also a new pair of boots for the Necromancer that might give us proper Righteous Fire, so I will probably be playing around with this if/when I find a pair of them. Similarly, Fire Aura is apparently massively buffed on the Mage side, so I might be playing around with that as well. My goal is to get through the monolith, get through Aberroth, and then start playing around with other build concepts. It is super easy to level and super easy to play with build concepts, so hopefully this keeps me engaged longer than the last few seasons have. That is the core problem that I have with Last Epoch is that there just isn’t as long a tail of engagement with the game as I have with Path of Exile. To be fair, this is also my same problem with Path of Exile II, and Diablo IV… is that they feel way too shallow compared to everything that Path of Exile has. This is not a fault of any of these games, and just the fact that Path of Exile has decades worth of content.

I will probably still be poking my head into Path of Exile periodically, but expect me to focus super hard on Last Epoch for a bit.

Mirage Progress

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I stayed up way the hell too late, because I got focused on working on seasonal challenges in the Mirage League. I’ve reached the point in the league where my main build is extremely fleshed out, my second build of the league is pretty solid as well, and I have turned my attention to trying to complete as many challenges as I can before I wander off and play the Last Epoch Season that starts tomorrow. I usually come back later and finish things up, because ultimately my goal is to get 34 Challenges so that I can keep the streak of the same size totem pole in my hideout for each of the recent leagues. I’ve already placed the one for Mirage, and you can see it is a bit lacking so far, but hopefully time and focus will fix that.

Yesterday, I finished up three challenges to knock off the list. Deadly Deeds is one that involves running a bunch of juiced league content, and I completed my final one by running three legion five-ways. This was a big part of why I respecced my third Atlas passive tree over to Legion, so that I could collect a bunch of emblems and finish this one out pretty easily. Seized Strength focuses on completing endgame content that is associated with various leagues, knocking that one out by finishing a fifteen-wave simulacrum. Leathal Leaders I did not end up screenshotting, but I wrapped that up by clearing an Alva Temple and completing a Vox Twin encounter. Finally, I took a few of the gems that I had been leveling and sacrificed them to the Vaal gods so that I could get a corrupted outcome and finish up Glorious Gemcraft.

At this point, I am sitting at 26 of 40 challenges, and have a handful that are pretty close to wrapping up. Coveted Currency mostly just requires that I spend some currency buying coins to imbue things with in order to complete my last objective there. Remarkable Realms, unfortunately, is going to have to wait until I can farm up a Doryani’s Machinarium in Delve because they are going for 16 Divines at the moment… and I refuse to pay that when I run as much Delve as I do. I could, in theory, reroll Kirac until it eventually shows up, which is an option because I seem to be generating a bunch of gold at the moment. Magnificent Memories is honestly pretty close as well, and I have stacks of Originator-influenced maps that I could be running. I need to get in the habit of using Exalted Orbs on maps so that I can get them up to 8 mods before running them for maximum impact.

Last night I also dinged 99, which feels like it is faster than I usually do in leagues like this. It could just be all of the times that I took the Mirage wish that gave me bonus experience. I should probably queue up a bunch of maps that I have with full Mirages, while burning through some of the challenges related to running map content with scarabs, and hope for the experience bonus. In theory, a FULL map with that bonus would be really nice and a decent boost. If I really want to push through experience, though, I should probably either spec one of my trees to an Alva strategy or a Betrayal strategy because both reward a ton of experience for completing them. I think the Alva scarabs are pretty expensive right now, because it seems like Alva maps sell for quite a bit of currency at the moment. Delve is also a pretty great source of experience, and it tends to be relatively safe for me. Tonight is pretty much my last push for getting to 100, though, before I lose focus and play a bunch of Last Epoch for a while.

In other moves, I shuffled some gear around and picked up a new shield and helm, so that I could, in theory, run Malevolence in addition to the auras that I have already been running. Due to socket pressure, I had to drop the arrogance vitality setup, but I still have 2000 life per second regen, so that is fine. I lost a bit of regen with my new Archdemon Crown setup, but gained quite a bit of single-target damage, so I think it shakes out. Mostly, I wanted to buff my damage before I tried the Legion 5-Way and Simulacrum. I have another double influence shield that I have been crafting on, but I doubt I will actually hit anything better than the one I am using. I played pass down the gear to my friend Carthuun, who is a bit behind me in Righteous Fire progression. Sure, I could have sold it for some divines, but generally speaking, I would rather pass gear down to a friend than profit from it.

I feel like I am in pretty good shape for the launch of Last Epoch Shattered Omens tomorrow. I know I will cycle back around to Path of Exile after Last Epoch, but I am hoping I get a good few weeks to a month out of Season 4. I think a lot of the changes are going to be really good, and I am mostly trying to figure out what I want to do for a build. I know I will probably make a Minion Necro at some point, but I don’t think I want to start that. I am contemplating going with Forge Guard and doing the summoned weapons nonsense since I have never actually done that. I will probably talk tomorrow about some of the builds that I am contemplating. For this morning, however, I am pretty happy with the progress I made in Path of Exile last night.

Way Too Many Minions

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Good Morning Folks. The other day I talked about the build that I had been cooking up centered around the new unique staff called The Broken Elegy. When I wrote about it, I was still leveling, but having a great time doing so. Ultimately I went with Guardian, not necessarily because I thought it would be the best option, but more because it would be the most enjoyable leveling path. Essentially, once you get your Sentinel of Radiance online, aka Butter Boy, you can face roll the campaign from that point forward, and you can pick him up in the first lab. It ends up playing like a slightly delayed version of Righteous Fire, because you charge into a pack of mobs, convocate him into the middle, and his burning aura pretty much obliterates everything instantly. Technically, The Broken Elegy would probably have been better served by a Necromancer, and most definitely would be better served by the Servant of Arakaali. However, Guardian puts me in the right corner of the tree for Staff defenses, and also has its own benefits, so I rolled with it.

As is the tradition when I do something dumb… I record one of my dumb little videos. I am not doing anything terribly challenging, but essentially, as soon as I exited the campaign, I rolled straight into t16 maps. Technically, I ran a single T10 just to see how it was going, and after stomping all over that, I ripped the band-aid off. The biggest challenge that I think I am running into is simply having too many minions for any of them to be doing effective damage. You already run into this problem with just Raging Spirits sometimes, but in total, I have 43 minions… and that is before I take into account the Greater Skeletal Shrine belt that I am running. Look… I completely understand that this is a dumb idea, but I am having fun… and quite frankly, that is the most important part of any build. I have noticed that things die faster if I stop summoning Raging Spirits, but when it comes to clearing maps… having so many aggressive minions means that they just sort of spread out and lay waste to everything.

I’ve been using them to farm Legion, because I have been trying to get a bunch of the new honoured incubators so I can stockpile some of the imbuement coins. This is not really working out as I had hoped, but I am still enjoying running something like six legions per map. I have a ton of emblems, and those will ultimately come in handy when it comes to doing some of the league challenges. Maps take way too long right now with the Mirages for me to efficiently do any sort of targeted farm, because I cannot seem to bring myself to ignore mechanics. Effectively, I am sort of this worse version of SSF, where I play in trade… but still feel like I want to farm almost everything myself. I would be so much better off if I just focused on a single mechanic and then used it to make currency, which I then spent on other things. However, that does not bring me joy. Sure, I like being able to buy the items that I cannot be bothered to farm, but if I can farm it… I want to farm it.

Speaking of buying things… I am using name-brand corpses for the very first time. In the past, these have always been super freaking expensive, but for some reason this league, they are all cheap. Perfect Turtles are only around 20 Chaos right now, and in theory, I should probably buy a bunch of them to stockpile for when I eventually kill one of these and cannot get it back somehow. Perfect Forest Warriors were less than 10c, and I am running a 5c Perfect Hulking Miscreation because apparently Raging Spirits count as constructs, and it buffs those nicely. Running the Forest Warrior provides Onslaught, which is going to allow me to rework my tree a bit at some point… because I no longer need the node that gives my minions Onslaught. I might end up rolling a cluster jewel and switching over to that, because there is an entire upper branch of my tree layout that is progressively becoming less optimal.

Speaking of less than optimal, I did zero planning for this build and sort of just winged it as I went. Mostly, I typed “Minion|Life|Block” into the search bar and routed around as many of those nodes as I could make happen easily. At the suggestion of Kodra, I just now pathed down to pick up Divine Shield, and that seems to help out considerably and makes my 2000 energy shield a bit more useful. With the Guardian Turtle, I have around 9000 armor, and around 4500 without it, so I am still going to never run into problems with regenerating my entire energy shield if needed. I realistically probably have more than enough survival… but I have considered doing the terribly dumb thing of going six life masteries for the 10% life boost. I feel like I have plenty of damage for what I want to do with this build. I could stack more minion damage, and probably should… but I am not as motivated by “number goes up” as I am doing dumb things that I find enjoyable.

I have zero doubt that proper minion players will be turning their noses up at what I am doing, and that is okay. I do think at some point, someone terribly more clever than I am… will build around The Broken Elegy and make it really strong. It seems like a crazy item, especially if you could figure out a way to make the minions that it spawns a little more reliable. I believe they are inheriting everything that I am currently doing to buff my Raging Spirits, which should mean they are pretty potent already. I should probably actually drop the whole imbue thing that I am trying and just go with a 21/20 Raging Spirits gem instead. I am not that certain that Imbues have turned out to be as much power as I was hoping they would be. They are also really freaking painful to try and land something useful on, because I am building this graveyard of bricked gems that makes me more than a little sad inside. I know I will be taking a break this week to play the new Last Epoch season, but at some point, once that has run its cours,e I will be returning to grind out more challenges here and having fun doing so.