Friends… sometimes I get something stuck in my head that I cannot seem to forcibly dislodge. I’ve also been sick the last few days so apologies for the lack of any semblance of a post yesterday. Anyways… a while back I wrote a post talking about my attempt at creating something that feels like Righteous Fire in Last Epoch and it was great… up until the point that it was not. The build sort of just fell apart when I entered the level 100 Empowered Monoliths because I was not dealing enough damage and did not have enough survival… so basically could not keep moving forward with it. I attempted to resurrect the build and got it to a point where it felt “aggressively fine” but also not exactly what I was going for in the first place.
I had this entirely different plan and created a Paladin that I was going to do some Healing Hands nonsense with… but before long found myself leveling again with a Firestarter’s Torch and Warpath. Which led me down the path of trying to figure out how Paladin was better suited to the burnination of my dreams. It turns out yes… yes it is. However, I held off on talking about the build until I reached empowered monoliths because I did not want to prematurely share my nonsense before I knew if the wheels were going to stay on the bus this time. Today despite my generally lousy “sickboy” status… I wanted to share what I had been up to. Apologies for the thrashed state of my voice in the above video where I talk about the build and show off some empowered monolith gameplay.
So the idea is not at all dissimilar from the previous build… where I went all in on making Warpath do the fire damage things. I’m trying to do a few new things, namely since I am throwing in Judgment occasionally for more damage which causes me to stop spinning… I’ve taken Giant Splitter which does a bit AOE attack each time I stop channeling. I will likely shift around these points a bit before I land on the final configuration of the build. However, the concept is straight forward… convert all bleed to ignite and convert Warpath to fire damage so that I can scale it and the ignite damage at the same time. Also, this is what makes the build feel thematically like Righteous Fire so it is a hill I am willing to die on.
The big thing that is making the build function a little better… and is the reason why I care about it being Paladin is Holy Aura. This is the unique ability for the Paladin mastery and is just sort of a build-your-own-buff aura system. I’ve found nowhere in the game that properly shows all of the buffs that the aura is granting me so I pasted the above list from the build planner. Largely I am throwing points in fire damage, attack speed, and an ability that will proc a fire explosion whenever I have hit something 6 times in a row. I am not entirely certain if that last bit is worth it because it currently costs me 7 points to get there… and I am wondering if I would not be better off just taking flat damage scaling instead. This also serves as a burn button because when I activate the ability it increases how much of these buffs it is providing.
The thing I dig about the Last Epoch Tools Build Planner is that it collates all of the stats and gives you nice numerical rollups that don’t really exist in the game. Based on the stats in the planner I just linked it shows that I am dealing 832% increased fire damage and have 204% chance to ignite on hit… not factoring in that I have other abilities that Judgement that also have their own baked-in 200% additional chance to ignite on hit with that ability. On top of that for survival purposes, I have 18% melee leech and 7% leech off the additional damage that I am dealing over time with ignite. If I can swap some of my gear around and get more void resistance, I can throw on a shield that will generate a good deal more fire damage over time and ignite chance.
All things considered, I am pretty happy with the state of the build currently. There are a number of levers that I could pull to keep tweaking the damage while leveling the rest of the way to 100. Am I happier with it than I am with my Void Knight? Honestly, I am not sure. However, I am very happy that I did not give up on this concept and was finally able to see it the rest of the way to something viable for empowered monoliths. Would I suggest playing this build? Sure if you like burning things and want to track down either the items I am using or something that gives a similar amount of ignite chance and fire damage scaling. It is a heck of a lot of fun and offers a fairly chill playstyle which is ultimately the aspect of Righteous Fire that I loved so much. Throw on a movie or like I have recently… an audio book… and just grind out some chill monoliths for tasty loot. That really is my happy place.