Timeline Progression

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Good Morning Friends! Right now I have to say I am thankful for Last Epoch. It is weird to me that this game that I had written off back in 2018, had morphed into almost exactly the game that I have always wanted. Granted I would still love to see more endgame options added in because effectively you have 3 wildly different dungeons, a horde-mode-like arena, and then monolith echos which are the equivalent of Path of Exile mapping. I would still love to see someone other than Diablo III implement the equivalent of bounties and an entirely alternate system for leveling other than doing the story. Last Epoch suffers from the same problem as Path of Exile where doing the acts over and over does tend to drag on a bit. I’ve been wanting to level up and try out a primalist and the only thing holding me back is needing to repeat all of the story content again. Even if they added an alternative step so that when you get to the first interaction with the Epoch, you had the alternative path shifting into effectively an endless version of the monolith echoes that dumped you out into the end of time.

Speaking of paths and timelines… I spent a lot of Tuesday night unlocking pathways that I had not opened up. There are still technically a few alternate paths between timelines that I have not unlocked but I at least have access to all of them directly now. Knowing what I know now… I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and could have taken a much shorter route to the final three. Essentially at a bare minimum, it seems like you have to clear seven timelines before being able to unlock the empowered monolith. The path I wound up taking would have put me through eight before I went on my side jaunt to unlock the rest of the timeline islands. The final three islands are a bit of a chore and I’ve actually taken a death in them so I am in no real rush to meet those bosses.

I honestly struggled a bit with the Emperor of Corpses in the level 85 timeline, in part because once again I was overthinking things. In the above screenshot, you see this giant hurricane attack with the area around the boss being the safe zone. Prior to that, the boss does a close AOE attack and I thought I would have to dance on the line between these two attacks. That meant that inevitably I would lose some minions because they would be slow getting out of the hurricane of death. What I finally realized is that I can stand in the small AOE without taking significant damage, so I could simply stay in close range at all times and just need to move away from the head of the dragon to avoid breath attacks. Again like the Rahyeh my interpretation of the fight was making everything much harder than it actually needed to be.

Last night I dinged 84 and have almost filled up enough Stability in The Last Ruin to start working on boss progress for that timeline. However, I think what I am going to do is fill up the bar past the third node, and then shift timelines and start working on another one to get it filled as well. The goal is to gain a few levels and be a bit closer to level 90 before I face any of the last three timeline bosses. I could probably yolo my way through the timelines and rush the final bosses, but I prefer to level and potentially gain a bit more gear before stepping into those fights. My tendency will always be to over level encounters because in truth I don’t really “crave” challenging fights in the same way some people do. I am fine with them if I have to deal with them, but I would rather “roflstomp” things when possible. I play ARPGs for the power fantasy achieved through leveling and gearing more than any sense of overcoming difficulty.

My gear is still a bit of a mess. Right now I have a lot of less-than-perfect items and still am wearing three slots that are yellow that I have not found a purple worth equipping yet. My resistances are still a mess with absolutely nothing in the poison and void category. I’ve heard that the real win here is to get resistance through blessings and that once you get access to empowered blessings these help significantly. I have a lot of minion health and less raw minion damage… because I’ve just happened into a few pieces with significant T6 minion health rolls on them. This makes my minions super tanky but maybe take a bit longer to shred bosses… but generally I am okay with that.

I realize that Last Epoch is still very much a pre-release game but I am anxious for them to implement some cosmetics other than pets, and the upcoming backpack. Like I am mostly fine with the way my character looks… but at some point would love to see something other than “Night Hag” has my graphical options. Maybe it is just the phenomenal necromancer graphics from Diablo IV coming into play here, but I would love to be able to equip a consistent look and stick with it all the way through leveling. I am always more than happy to spend money on making my character look cool while leveling rather than looking like an unmatched outlands era fury warrior. I am hoping that when 1.0 lands this is one of the systems that also open up because I am more than happy to give them more than my initial $30 to keep the game running and evolving.

Low Polygon Turtle

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Good Morning Friends! Happy Super Adventure Box! I have to be honest I am not nearly as nostalgic for the April Fools event in Guild Wars 2 as some folks are, but they did manage to pry some more money from my pocket with this amazing Siege Turtle skin. Really the price of admission is entirely worth it for the 1980s arcade sound effects while using it. I love the aesthetics of this event even if I don’t necessarily love grinding through the world. Essentially I tend to easily get up to the frog boss and then fail miserably. What I did not expect is that apparently unlocks for SAB are character bound instead of account bound, so I had to go through the process of rigging up all of the things like bombs and shovels on my Ranger since I prefer to be playing that character currently even though for the purposes of the Super Adventure Box it does not really matter.

For anyone who has no clue what I am talking about, the Super Adventure Box is this weird original one-off April Fool’s event where players could run around in a vaguely Super Mario 64 inspired map. This was so beloved by the player base that it ultimate became a permanent event coming back each year for a week or so around the beginning of April. I’ve talked about it before in the past and even have some screenshots of the world. Essentially you work your way through a series of challenges in a Mario-esc 1-1, 1-2 etc sequence. There are a number of achievements for you to get like finding green and red baubles and a whole slew of items available for purchase through Bauble Bubbles which you can purchase for every 250 baubles collected in the levels. It uses a Zelda-like mechanic where you keep having to purchase larger wallets in order to hold more Baubles through each trip into the zones.

Super Adventure Box requires a continue coin in order to play, and at the beginning of the festival, you are given five of these. They can then be purchased with baubles or I believe found in chests spread throughout the levels. Since I was already making a purchase, I decided to pick up the Super Adventure Pack which includes a convenience item called the Infinite Continue Coin. Essentially when you hit the game over screen, in lieu of inserting a continue coin… you can use your infinite continue coin which will then give you 99 lives to explore the level making the whole process way less tedious. This is essentially a one-time purchase and is only available during the Super Adventure Festival.

Now this is where we get into the long history of Guild Wars 2, because apparently as I understand it… there was a third world teased at one point but never actually delivered. I believe this is in part because all of Super Adventure Box was essentially a passion project of one of the devs, and when they left the company so left the motivation to keep making Super Adventure Box levels. So all of the achievement hunters are currently slavering over a playable “test” of the third world. Essentially this area is missing some of the final polish but allows folks to go through it and collect some of the achievements. I watched a live stream for a bit yesterday afternoon of one of the OG players hunting for the baubles that they were missing.

While the jumping puzzles are not necessarily my jam… I do love this time of year for the neat skins that you can get. For example yesterday out of one of my daily loot boxes from killing Champions, I got this Retro-Forged Rifle which sorta looks like a giant 8-bit era zapper gun. I’ve got a similar pixelated hammer and Legend of Zelda-looking short bow skin. There are also craftable skins for various bosses in the mini-game. I picked up the infinite continue coin because this year I would really like to finish the entire map, or at least beat all of the bosses. I might need to watch a strategy video because King Toad always kicks my ass. It feels like I should be able to dodge or jump over some of the mechanics but I never seem to be able to do so.

Are you participating in Super Adventure Festival? Were you also swayed by the low polygon turtle mount skin? Have you been anxiously awaiting World Three? Drop me a line below.

Reign of Dragons

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Good Morning Friends! Last night was absolutely a Last Epoch while listening to an audiobook and snuggling with cats type evening. I was not feeling great and I don’t think Josie has been either. She has been glued to me at every possible opportunity and even this morning she is already on the box beside me. As a result of this and the fact that Gracie was telling us it was bedtime at about 8:30 last night… I wound up going to bed significantly earlier than normal. This was probably a good call and other than waking up in the middle of the night to turn off the brightness of the muted television… I think I slept all of the ways through. My major accomplishment for last night is that I dinged 80 on my Necromancer which continues to feel pretty solid.

As far as the audiobook goes, I had originally intended to roll into the next book in the Iron Druid Chronicles series but wound up having the decision made for me. My hold for The Hunger of the Gods the next book in the series that I just finished the first book of came open. So I could either let it pass or roll on into this book knowing that my mind was already keyed up for that particular brand of norse nonsense. At this point, I am around 80% through the novel and should finish it up today… which I guess is a good thing because this morning I woke up to find that my hold for Legends & Lattes has just come open as well and I have three days to claim that. I suppose that my book nonsense is sorted for the next bit then, and that also probably means I am going to be playing a lot more Last Epoch given that ARPGs blend nicely with listening to an audiobook.

At this point, I am working on my fifth monolith. At some point, I should go back to the previous monoliths and unlock those while the experience gained from them would still be reasonable. Essentially when you get the endgame after defeating the boss of the first Monolith you are presented with a choice. Do you go down the level 62 monolith path or down the 66 monolith path? I went down the 66 path and then once I got to the level 75 monolith I was presented with another choice… whether or not to fight and ultimately kill Architect Liath. I did not realize this was making a path choice, because I decided to let her go which led me to the level 80 monolith. Had I chosen to fight and kill her I would have gotten the 85 monolith… but even though I made this decision it seems to have only delayed my progress not changed it significantly as I am now working on the 85 monolith.

Last night I began work on Reign of Dragons which is the level 85 web of echoes and I am nearing the point where I can challenge the boss. Ultimately I have decided that my preferred method for doing a monolith is to fill the bar, and then run through all of the quest’s echoes in order rather than filling to a quest echo and doing it, then filling again and doing the next one. Essentially my general path through an echo is to look for resource nodes, key nodes, and anything that rewards idols or set/unique items. Ultimately you end up having to take some of the crappier gold or rare item nodes in order to connect the dots to some of the nodes you actually want. Ace is already through the first pass of the monoliths and on to Empowered Monoliths so I am trying to play a bit of catch-up.

So I did a thing yesterday that was completely unplanned. I realized I had been talking about what I was not enjoying about Diablo IV Beta, but not really giving many examples of the sorts of things that I do enjoy. As a result, I recorded a quick video of me playing through a Monolith Echo and kind of talking through the process as I did it. It has been a really long time since I last recorded a video, but I think it came together well enough. I will never be a YouTuber in earnest, but I do like occasionally recording videos to share with my friends in order to illustrate a point. Some people write blog posts to back up their videos… and I record videos to back up my blog posts. It wildly has gotten quite a few views over the last twenty-four hours… at least a lot for one of my videos.

Necros and Pyre Golems

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Good Morning Friends. This past weekend was the Open Beta for Diablo IV and since my friend Ace was going to give it a spin, I thought I would try out the Necromancer. That gameplay is something that I have enjoyed greatly in other games, so I figured it was worth a shot here as well. At this point, I have leveled Barbarian and Necromancer both to 25, and they were wildly different experiences. Necromancer felt pretty solid and honestly a bit on the grossly overpowered side, and Barbarian felt like I had made a mistake at the character selection screen. You would think that the Necromancer would have improved my opinions of Diablo IV, but in truth, it didn’t because there is something intangibly wrong with this game and it is almost impossible to put my finger on it.

I thought it was just me honestly. I thought maybe I was struggling to grasp the brilliance of this game. Then Ace played it and had some of the exact same comments. There was a side thread going on over slack about how they felt like the game just was wrong, that there was something not right with the combat, and that they could not put their finger on it either. I’ve tried to give you a close approximation over my several posts about Diablo IV… but none of them really explain the totality of the experience. The thing is… the game that is there seems to be what a lot of players wanted. I’m seeing quite a few comments showing up in my threads about how much they enjoyed the experience. I did not. I stopped playing a little way into Saturday because after hitting 25… I just felt like I didn’t care enough to keep playing. I had accomplished the ephemeral goal I had for the weekend which was maxing out the Necromancer and was largely done with the game after that.

I contemplated trying out the Druid, because that is another class I have liked quite a bit in the past and wished that Diablo 3 got. However, after watching this video from Wudijo… I decided against it. All signs point to the Druid feeling even worse than the Barbarian did. I think maybe my general takeaway is that much like Path of Exile… playing melee is arguably the wrong choice. The players that opted to play the Sorceror or the Necromancer had pretty good experiences. Playing a ranged rogue was fine, but was not really doing it for me in the way that the Demon Hunter did in Diablo III. Though honestly, it seems like a lot of people liked the sluggish gameplay because to them it felt more weighty and meaningful. For me, it just felt like a game from a different genre than the one I was wanting to play. I said this on the podcast but had I not been gifted a copy of Diablo IV, I would have absolutely made the decision to just pass this game up until a year or so after launch. I feel like there are more issues with the game than three months can solve.

Really stupid thing that pissed me off. This screen. When you exit the tutorial you are given a prompt to buy the game. When you finish the campaign… you are yet again given a prompt to buy the game. I own a copy of the game. In fact, I own the granddaddy super mega package for the game, because my benefactor was overly generous. I feel sort of awful not liking the game knowing how much they spent on it. Doesn’t Blizzard have the tech to be able to detect if someone owns a valid license to the game or not? Because that seems like a relatively trivial check. If I already own the game… stop showing me a billboard in the game.

Honestly, I think the problem really is me and my expectations. I am too ingrained in the culture of the ARPG game to accept this MMORPG as the next Diablo game. Had I been someone who played through Diablo III once, and then showed up to play this game… I probably would have been extremely happy with what I saw. It would have been a better-looking game that has the window dressing of a franchise that I remember fondly. However, I have expectations of what it should be based on what I have experienced from games that have moved on past Diablo and created honestly better experiences. So a key example of expectations biting me in the ass is with the World Boss. When you say that, I picture the deep mechanical feasts that are the world bosses and meta bosses of Guild Wars 2 that feature 50 players. What we got instead was a 10-player limited instance featuring a bag of hit points with three mechanics that all one-shot you if you failed any of them. It felt awful and was so much less than what I was expecting as the bare minimum.

So instead of playing any more of Diablo IV after I finished up with Ace on Saturday afternoon… I went back to Last Epoch a game that is making me extremely happy. I’ve since moved on to the level 80 monolith after fighting my way through the annoying revamp of Lagon at the end of the level 75 monolith. Ace is far enough ahead of me to now be on empowered monoliths, so I am trying to catch up. Slowly bit by bit I am replacing gear that I had held onto for far too long, and that is making me feel more powerful as a result.

When I got to the level 75 Monolith I started saving all of my level 75 chest pieces and then using the stockpile of runes that turn an item into a random unique for that slot. There is a new unique chest that went in with the 0.9 patches called Aaron’s Will, named after the content creator behind the Action RPG channel on youtube. Essentially it makes it so you can no longer summon Skeletal Warriors/Archers and instead for every 4 warriors you can summon, it gives you an additional full sized full strength Bone Golem.

So now I am running around with two giant Pyre Bone Golems, that do stupid amounts of AOE fire damage… and the game feels amazing. Like it felt good before now, but after swapping things out it feels dumb in the best of ways. It also meant that I dropped Skeletons since that didn’t really do me much good and let me pick back up Dread Shade again. I had a blast last night chipping away at the level 80 monolith. I ended up killing the Shade of Orobyss without realizing what I was doing… and now have +5% corruption on all of my maps. I think I am stepping away from Diablo IV and the rhetoric surrounding it because clearly, it was not making me happy. Instead, I am focusing on the things that are making me happy and just moving on with life. If you enjoyed Diablo IV, then awesome. I hope it has a very smooth launch. I hope the next few months turn it into exactly the game you want it to be. For me, I think it is too far off the mark to really salvage.