Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a brief blog post because I have to go into the office today. It is funny how doing a thing that I used to have to do every day… basically ruins my entire day after four years of remote work. I spent a heck of a lot of time last night on my Void Knight and managed to push him to level 99 before daylight savings sleep debt finally claimed me. I really want to get to 100, but I have found that if I don’t focus on leveling… it feels like it goes so much more quickly. There are a handful of Uniques that I would like to farm better versions of, so I will probably continue to focus on that and wait until my experience bar fills without realizing it.
I also managed to get my Beastmaster to level 73 and now have a full complement of squirrels. I need to get better gear for this character, but I now get to experience a chittering mass of nonsense each time I attack anything. Weirdly it seems like the squirrels are much better behaved than the wolves. I’ve been having this bug where apparently all of my wolves would just wander the fuck off aimlessly at the beginning of a map. I would have to hit A to make them attack a location to summon them all back to my side before starting the monolith proper. The squirrels largely just hang out at my side until I engage something and then they behave like minions normally behave. I have to say though… I think maybe wolves were stronger, but I am having more fun with squirrels so that is really what matters the most.
The other thing that I have been playing with is the Lens system. When I hit Rank 9 with Circle of Fortune I unlocked my last Lens and can now modify prophecies with three of them at a time. “Juiced” prophecies can be complete nonsense. This all came from a single prophecy. That is fifteen of the Weavers Will unique armor pieces with a minimum Weavers Will level of 16 each. Note that sets the minimum level because at least one of them rolled with 20 levels worth of upgrades on it. It is just nonsense how much more rewards you can get by stacking your lenses.
Here is another Photoshop job showing the three lenses that I am currently running. First I have been blocking dungeon event prophecies because quite honestly… I hate the dungeons in this game. I will run Temporal Sanctum out of necessity to craft Legendary items, but the rest of them don’t really feel like they are rewarding enough to deal with the hassle of running them. I feel about them the same way I feel about Labyrinth in Path of Exile and will avoid them if at all possible. The next lens makes it so that I see significantly more Unique items which in theory at Rank 9 is a 135% boost to the occurrence of prophecies with Unique rewards. The one that has made the biggest difference however is the Refracting Lens of Wealth which increases the cost of a Prophecy by 90% favor but causes them to offer double the rewards for completion.
The end result is some nonsense like this… where a single prophecy for a single Orbyss kill awarded ten unique pieces of body armor. On top of “doubling” the rewards for a single prophecy proc, they also seem to in many cases double the number of uses you get out of a single prophecy. So basically that one lens greatly increases the sheer amount of rewards that you can get from running prophecies… a system that was already extremely rewarding. So essentially I am probably going to be spending a lot of that level 99 to 100 grind targeting different encounters that give me some very high-end rewards. What I really need to find is a prophecy for Orbyss that rewards a large number of two-handed axes per kill just to test whether or not prophecies can trigger boss-specific drops in addition to general drop-anywhere uniques. I need a ton of upgrades on the Void Knight but almost all of them are boss-specific drops.
Anyways! Time for me to close this out and move on with my morning. Don’t be sleeping on those prophecies and more specifically… don’t bypass the Refracting Lens of Wealth.
Good Morning Folks! Shocking to no one… I am still playing an awful lot of Last Epoch. The game is in a truly phenomenal state and all of the random uniques that I am picking up… just keep driving me towards wanting to play various builds. While I am still slowly working on getting my Void Knight to 100, and am a little over halfway to dinging 99… I’ve been playing Beastmaster quite a bit lately. This is a build that I really enjoyed in previous releases of the game, and it was the very first alt that I created in this cycle. While leveling on the Void Knight I picked up most of the early uniques required to make a “Bleed Wolves” build feel really solid. However, I was largely following the templating of the Squirrel build over on Maxroll because I had hopes of maybe one day being able to transition into that.
Over the weekend I got a drop that I had been hunting for longer than probably any other drop in this game save for the illusive Bastion of Honor. I spent so much time farming for the Herald of the Scurry in The Black Sun timeline on my Necromancer but never managed to see one drop. Earlier in the league my friend Ace managed to pick one up which gave me some hope that maybe just maybe all of the drop chance juicing that we go through the Circle of Fortune faction would let me see one. Sunday afternoon that happened and I picked up this helm which will allow me to shift from summoning a bunch of Wolves to summoning twice as many Squirrels. I want to command a chittering army of death by adorableness, but alas I have to get to level 73 before I can actually shit from my Artor’s Legacy over to the Scurry proper.
I was Deathless on my Beastmaster until I attempted Rahyeh in The Black Sun timeline. This is the boss that has pretty much ended every Deathless streak that I have gotten this far with. My inner 13-year-old is delighted that I made it to level 69 before taking my first death. I thought maybe I would be able to make it through, but I was somewhat of a dumbass to attempt this feat with only 4% void resistance. So I am in the process of balancing out my gear a bit and trying to stack some more resistances in the right places. My idols are a mess and I need to focus farm some with prophecies. My health is also atrocious but that should resolve itself as I pick up some more exalted bits of armor and replace my leveling uniques/weavers will items. I am very much looking forward to transitioning into the Squirrels build as this is something I have wanted to play from the moment I heard it existed.
In another bit of weird loot luck, I picked up a wild pair of gauntlets. They have 2 T6 affixes on them and a T7 affix. While they don’t exactly fit anything I am actively playing… I gotta say it is making me contemplate a shield throw build as I have a bunch of gear for that build sitting in my exalted stash tabs. I guess at some point I should research how that build even works and what it cares about. I am guessing it is probably a Paladin build and I don’t really have one of those yet… but similarly, I am not sure I want a third Sentinel build quite yet. I am getting a serious itch to play a Necromancer as I have picked up a bunch of items that had eluded me in the past like the Ravens’ Rise gauntlets. If I end up picking up an Aaron’s Will chest with any legendary potential I will probably consider it a sign that I need to work up another Bone Golem build. Similarly, I would love to see the David Harbour helmet and try a Wraithlord Build.
I managed to hit Rank 9 in the Circle of Fortune guild and honestly… I was not even paying attention not my progress. I only knew that I hit it because I had one monolith reward every item of two different sets. I have to say though, this rank is a bit more annoying than it is really worth. By the time you are capable of hitting rank 9… You’ve very likely seen every single set item in the game. It isn’t like they are very useful in the first place as compared to a combination of uniques and exalted items. I would love to see them either buff the heck out of set pieces or lower their equippable level significantly so you could use them for leveling alts. As it stands they are mostly just vendor trash so making the entire set drop every time… just ends up clogging your inventory. I am happy to have unlocked my final lens slot however so that was cool.
One thing I was a bit disappointed in was Lightless Arbor. I spent around 800k gold on the gambler there and while it certainly looks like a lot of loot… by the time I had hoovered up all of the affixes and glyphs it truthfully wound up being around five or six items worth keeping. I see more usable loot in a single monolith than that. This combined with the fact that very rarely see Legendary Potential items through Runes of Ascendance lead me to believe that Circle of Fortune bonuses only impact mob-dropped loot. As a result Lightless Arbor keys are probably better sold to the vendor than used because you get spoiled by the sheer amount of drops that you see thanks to Circle of Fortune. Maybe these are great for the folks who wound up going to trade league but I am progressively feeling like they made the wrong choice.
I am consistently amazed by how much more I am enjoying the game right now as opposed to in previous versions. The sheer volume of loot I think is the real difference here. Circle of Fortune makes it feel like it is just an inevitability that you will eventually see the item you are seeking. More than that… you are probably going to see enough copies of it with legendary potential that you can probably make a bunch of attempts to get a really good item. That all makes the mechanical loop of the game that much more enjoyable for me personally. I’m highly loot-motivated and I love rolling the dice and seeing what items I end up getting this time. Maybe I would not have appreciated it quite so much had I not played in versions of the game where the loot was significantly more stingy.
All of that said, however… I am keenly watching the various spoilers for the next Path of Exile League. That has been announced for the end of this month and I am certain I will be back in that game at league start. Unless there are some pretty significant changes I will probably be going for the Chieftain Righteous Fire build that I ended up playing so much this past league. I feel like maybe GGG delayed their spoilers a bit to give EHG some breathing room for the Last Epoch launch. I know the two companies are friendly so It gives me hope that maybe they will play nicely together with the timing of future Cycles/Leagues.
Good Morning Folks! This weekend was a weekend where I pretty much played nothing but Last Epoch. Given how much I focus in on a single game and then just beat the crap out of it… this should shock no one. What might shock some players however is that I was able to play Last Epoch without a ton of issues in spite of all of the server issues. Unfortunately, this is a side effect of me being in the “endgame” and essentially once you are in Monoliths the game is perfectly fine. The problem that seems to plague players is zoning in and out of shared social hub towns, and the beginning of the game sees you bouncing back and forth from quest zones to the town hub three or four times in a row. This means that without a lot of patience, a lot of players are just hitting a brick wall.
Last Epoch has had over 1000% growth in player numbers since the beginning of this launch. Ultimately the day one numbers blew out of the water any preplanning that had been done for the game, and the Game Director said that his pre-launch comments have aged like milk. Last Epoch has bypassed the highest peak concurrency numbers for Path of Exile on Steam which took place during the Crucible league. I am not sure how this compares to lifetime numbers for Path of Exile as there is no real way to quantify players who use the standalone client. I know they have said most of their player growth was on Steam and that the console player base only represents about 10% of the total. So Last Epoch probably does not have more concurrent users than the entirety of Path of Exile, but it is still impressive to see it pass the Steam numbers.
Another impressive stat is that currently, Last Epoch is number three on the global top sellers list on Steam. Essentially you can count this as the second highest-selling game because number two is Counter Strike 2 a free game, and also given that CS has massive ban waves… it is likely a fair number of those are new account sign-ups involved in the RMT trade. Coincidentally Helldivers 2… the number one game is also having massive issues keeping up with the player growth and keeping their servers online. Both games are in similar situations, from Indie studios that have never had this level of growth. In the case of Last Epoch, its previous peak was around 40k players, and even back then it struggled… and I assume that they planned for maybe seeing 100k players… not over 250k. I am not sure if we have seek the true peak yet, but things are at least getting better. Each day has been a bit more easy to get into game and into monoliths, and last night things were comfortable enough that I actually rolled my first alt.
On Friday I finished up the campaign and started in on Monoliths and by about mid-day on Saturday I had reached Empowered Monoliths. From that point forward I have been working on farming some specific gear pieces. Originally I needed a chestpiece from the boss at the end of the Stolen Lance timeline, but I’ve kept doing it because I have my corruption up there. One of the drops that I need from Orobyss only shows up once you have at least 120 Corruption Level. In theory I should shift over to do another timeline that actually drops gear slots that I care about, but I have not wanted to put in the work to get the corruption level to the sweet spot again. I had allowed my corruption to get up to around 150… which is way too high for the current state of my build and had to lower it a bit.
As far as “gear for my build” goes I have picked up four pieces. Darkstride boots I got from my friend Ace and it allowed us to test out the trade resonance system. Shortly after that, I picked up a Siphon of Anguish which is a common drop from any corruption-level version of Orobyss, and have since upgraded that to an LP2 version. I’m just hunting for a good ring to try and smash onto it before converting it into a legendary. Apathy’s Maw dropped pretty quickly once I got into Empowered Monoliths but I am obviously hunting for a version of it with legendary potential so I can hopefully add some crit to it. The last item that I picked up is the Wings of Argentus which drops from God Hunter Argentus in the empowered version of The Stolen Lance timeline. I’ve done the fight six times I believe and it is one of the most technical fights I have experienced in the game so far, but unfortunately, I’ve not seen any more chestpieces let alone any with legendary potential. The last chase unique would be Shattered Chains which can drop from Orobyss in any timeline that is at a minimum of 120 Corruption.
As far as the rest of my gear… I’ve mostly been looking for survival stats… resists, health, armor and then anything that can increase either void damage or void melee damage. My worst pair of gear is my gloves, but I have yet to find anything that I can reasonably slot in without giving up my health. I am already teetering on the edge of 2000 hitpoints and I don’t want to drop much lower. The second “worst” item that I am using is my relic… which has two stats on it that are completely useless… but also gives me the needed 43% to All Resistances while Channeling which allows me to pretty much hit the resistance cap on everything. My second ring is something that I picked up while leveling and just have not found anything worth replacing it but I did pick up a LP1 Liath’s Signet if I can find anything to smash into it to gain a bit of health. That would allow me to back off on some of the resistances that I have in my idols since it gives me 75% to all elemental resistances while channeling, and due to Warpath, I am always channeling.
Since Last Epoch lacks any sort of API system that allows for a way to view your build and gear offline… I figured I would take a screenshot and then highlight the tooltip for my main damage-dealing ability. I feel pretty squishy now that I am raising my corruption levels. When I was up around 150, it felt like I was teetering on the brink of oblivion pretty much all of the time. Now that I have dialed things back to around 120, it seems more reasonable. I think once I get better gear though I should be able to push up to 200 without much issue. The big problem that I have is when I have a bunch of rares stacked on top of each other, and it becomes very hard to see the visualizations for all of their big attacks. If any two attacks are stacked on top of each other… I am dead and my leech just cannot keep up with it. At 150… it was enough for a Rogue Mage to one-shot me at times if their mechanics landed just right.
All of this… is why yesterday I decided that I needed to “alt” a bit. I did find out something really cool. Once you have chosen a faction on your first character, there is an NPC for each faction in the very first town so you can choose your faction for your alts easily. I had wondered how all of the gear I have been collecting that is tied to Circle of Fortune would work out, because most of it is great for alts. Once I picked my faction I could equip all of it just fine and was up and running quickly. For the moment I am going for a bleed wolves build on my Primalist, but might shift that up later as I get different gear. I pretty much had all of the uniques needed for bleed wolves sitting in my bank, so that was a no-brainer.
I am still having a freaking blast and the prophecy system is so damned good. For example, this is a screenshot of me killing a mob that triggered two different prophecies… one to drop 5 pairs of unique boots and another to drop a unique bow. I love that you can stack them up like this and then when they trigger get a massive loot fiesta. All told I am very happy with the current state of Last Epoch and once the servers calm down and they manage to work out the kinks around “matchmaking” aka zoning in or out of social hub towns… I think the game is going to be in a phenomenal state. I played with my friend Ace quite a bit this weekend and it was so much fun. Very chill hanging out with friends and gameplay time, and I am there for it. For reference, it took roughly an hour to get a resonance, and I am hoping in the coming days/weeks to get some game time in with all of my circle of friends playing this game so I can build up resonances with them as well.
Are you playing Last Epoch? Have you been able to fight the servers and get some leveling in? What are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.
When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.
Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.
I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.
Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts.
I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend.
