Good Morning Folks! I am starting to get extremely excited for the 1.0 launch of Last Epoch. Next Wednesday at 11 am CST the patch will go live and with it a bunch of new systems. They are waiting for a day before turning on Twitch Drops, which is honestly pretty smart given that I am certain that there will be some day-one issues. Eleventh Hour Games recently announced that they had passed the 1 million copies sold mark, so I have a feeling that there will probably be some server congestion issues. Were this a AAA studio I would expect that they could throw money at the problem and scale up to be able to support the load… but given that EHG is still very much in indie mode I am going to doubt that happens. Though I do wonder how many people will take advantage of playing in the fully offline mode. I know that I will not because one of my hopes for the game is that I can actually play with some friends who also seem excited.

At this point, I have put in a bit over 200 hours into the game and my two highest characters are my Fire Golem Necromancer and my Spriggan Druid. I’ve also put in quite a bit of time on my very first character that went down the “unstoppable” Paladin path, which was fun at times but not nearly as smooth as I would have liked. The problem with the Necromancer is it was extremely squishy while not having a lot of interactivity given that you were mostly following your mob of pets around. The Druid build was fun, but you sort of had to keep spamming abilities in order to keep your fury up and stay in Spriggan form. I spent some time working towards the Squirrel build for Beastmaster but could never get the helm to drop that was required for that build.

For the 1.0 Launch I think I am going to go down a path that I have not really explored heavily. Most of my Sentinel characters have been sword and board and very defensive-minded. This time I think I am going to lean on the Void Knight and specifically go down the Warpath route of creating a very “spin to win” character. It seems like at a minimum this is going to be one of the more fun ways to level through the campaign. On top of just a leveling build, Echo Warpath is one of the more popular meta builds for the class meaning that I should have no real issue transitioning into empowered monoliths. Essentially I should be able to charge between packs with lunge and then shred them with warpath. This is very much a playstyle that is in my wheelhouse so I am looking forward to it.

There is also a later game Void Knight build that folks call an “autobomber” because you sort of just walk through packs in a very Righteous Fire fashion. Going Void Knight should allow me to pivot easily into this build if that ends up being something I want to try. There is also a bleed variant of the warpath build that is supposedly really good. So I feel pretty comfortable committing to Sentinel and more specifically Void Knight as there should be plenty of room to respec and pivot to whatever build feels the best in the late game. That was a problem that I with Paladin is that I didn’t really want to go with the full caster Smite variant so I somewhat felt pidgeon holed into the one build that I was playing. Last Epoch allows you to pretty easily respec your character, but you can’t change your specialization so essentially I was limited to ONLY Paladin builds. With Void Knight there are already a handful of builds that I am really interested in so I should be able to eventually land on the one that I like the best. Since Warpath is a super early ability, leveling with it should feel good as it won’t require a midgame respec.

As such I have been looking at some of the early uniques to keep an eye open for. Essentially I would really like to find a Dreamthorn and a pair of Darkstride boots early on as they should make a lot of the early leveling more enjoyable. Since I will be scaling Void Melee damage, the Darkstride boots will in theory just keep making my movement faster which will make Warpath feel better and better. For an early chestpiece I think Yrun’s Wisdom is a pretty good choice and a bit later game I am contemplating moving into a Titan’s Heart for the reduced damage taken while using a two-hander. The problem with that is that I am not sure how well I can offset the loss of regeneration. If I can lean heavily into life leech it could in theory be worth it as I should always be dealing damage to my targets given I will have fairly high mobility.

I created a baby Void Knight some time ago, and I am contemplating screwing around on it for a while as I am finding myself in that awkward “between games” phase. It would at least allow me to get acclimatized to Last Epoch again. I don’t want to hit the game super seriously until next Wednesday because I am amped to be playing in the very first season aka “cycle” as they are going to refer to them. I’m really interested to see all the tweaks to the game, and very interested in the magic find faction. I think most of my friends are going to go that route which will mean I need to be actively grouping with them so that we can trade goods when we find something the others need. I am honestly kinda hoping that the next Path of Exile league gets delayed a bit so that I won’t be tempted away for that until I have really given Last Epoch a proper go.

Are you going to be playing Last Epoch on launch next week? What sort of build are you contemplating and what class and specialization are you leaning towards? Drop me a line below.