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.

AggroChat #493 – So Many Lizards

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Apologies for taking a few weeks off but Covid kicked Belghast’s butt and he is the person who records, edits, and posts the show.  This week we had a mountain of topics to get through and got nowhere close to hitting them all. Last Epoch has their very poorly named cycle reset going on, in which they added some pretty freaking cool new features like Loot Lizards, Stash Priority system, and the Imperial Undead event.  We talk a lot about the game and then dive into a whole discussion on seasonal models and what works and does not work for them.  We also tangent off into a discussion about the Clue movie from the 80s for some reason…  so look forward to that.  From there we talk a bit about Dwarven Realms as it gets closer to the full release of the game. Ash, Kodra, and Tam talk a bit about their experiences playing the ISS Vanguard Living World physical board game.  Thalen kicks off a discussion about Astro Bot and how it is essentially the mascot game Sony has always needed.  Ash shares his experiences with Gundam Breaker 4 and Tam a bit about playing Hades 2 as a research project. Packed show with roughly half of the topics getting bumped to next week.

Topics Discussed:

  • Last Epoch Cycle Reset
    • Loot Lizards
    • Stash Tab Priority System
    • Imperial Undead Event
  • Dwarven Realms
  • ISS Vanguard
  • VHS Board Games
  • 1980s Clue Movie
  • Astro Bot
  • Gundam Breaker 4
  • Hades 2 Early Access

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.