Good Morning Folks! I know a few days ago I stated that I was going to be putting my Ignite Warpath Forge Guard aka “Fire Bro” on hold. However yesterday I ended up ripping the bandaid off and completely rebuilding the character into something slightly different. I am not sure how interesting this post is going to be for most people, because I am going to be diving into the changes that I made. I decided to go ahead and write about it mostly to show how easy it is to shift gears within Last Epoch. I’ve said this before, but the only thing that is absolutely set in stone is your mastery. So no matter what I would be doing from this point out, I would be doing it as a Forge Guard. Within that mastery, there is a heck of a lot of leverage to move around and change things up significantly.
For anyone who has not been following the saga of “Fire Bro” let’s do a really quick recap. The above video shows some Monolith gameplay of the build as it stood at the beginning of yesterday. I was focused on shifting Warpath to fire damage, and then using Lunge also shifted to fire damage as my movement ability, generating Sigils of Hope on kill, and proccing Smite every second while spinning to deal additional fire damage and some splash healing. It worked phenomenally well… up until the point that it didn’t. I had put almost all of my eggs in the block mechanic basket and did not have enough health or general survival to keep pushing forward. While I got to Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 + 100 Corruption version of the endgame system… I spent most of my time just getting overwhelmed by incoming damage. For anyone curious here is a Build Planner for the state of this build before the impending rework.
Yesterday started largely as me sitting down and trying to figure out how to work Healing Hands into my build. This is an ability that received a new talent tree with 1.0 and offers a ton of utility. Firstly you can have melee attacks proc healing hands 100% of the time generating a burst of direct healing and some healing over time. On top of that you can shift the ability to scale based on melee damage with Seraph Blade and if you have enough points left over you can turn it into a movement ability when directly cast and even give it the same invulnerability frames that other movement abilities have. A huge positive side effect of this interaction is the splash healing is not only keeping me alive but also keeping my Manifest Armor minion topped off. The problem with all of this… is it does not work terribly well with Warpath. It will proc once per channel, meaning that you need to constantly “pulse” Warpath meaning that you are losing some of the benefits that I had stacked for “channeling” constantly. Essentially I needed a new main damage-dealing ability.
Without Warpath smite was out the window as well, but I landed on another favorite of my abilities Rive. Essentially Rive is a 3-strike combo and the talent trees allow you to tweak which of the strikes is the most important. For me I wanted to go with Focused Strike which means that the third large AOE strike will always be a critical strike. On top of that while I can’t shift the damage of Rive to Fire… I can pick up three points into Savagery meaning that I am dealing 45% more damage against Ignited Targets and both my Manifest Armor and I are always igniting targets. Lastly, there is Coup De Grace which means that rive has a 15% kill threshold so that it simply deletes any target when their health drops to 15% or below.
Since I removed… Smite, Warpath, and Lunge… that left me with an open slot. As uninteresting of a choice as it is… I ended up going with the good ole swiss-army-knife of damage dealing… Volatile Reversal. I do not care at all about void damage, but this ability creates a rift at the start of my movement rewind and a rift at the end of my movement and causes everything touched by either rift to take 30% more damage. Additionally, I gain a boost in global attack speed meaning I burn through my 3-hit combo faster causing more ignites and dealing more critical damage on that third hit. The cooldown is lowered to the point where I can basically be constantly pressing it while in combat pending the “rewind” functionality does not screw things up.
With all of these changes also came a significant rework of some of my gearing. You can see the totality of the changes with this new Build Planner export, but I will talk through a few of them specifically. Firstly this build is still based around Firestarter’s Torch and the interactions with that weapon and ignite damage. I’ve managed to craft an amazing legendary version with T7 Hybrid Fire Penetration, and T5 Ignite Chance. I swapped out Rahyeh’s Light for the best rolled Cradle of the Erased that I have managed to pick up so far. Golden Aegis is a ton of survival, and the stats on this shield work pretty well with what I am trying to do. I had to swap out my helm and chestpiece trading Manifest Armor and Warpath for ones focused on Healing Hands and Rive. I am sticking with Solarum Plate as it gives me a nice boost in Fire Damage along with decent armor and endurance. Lastly giving up Warpath meant that I lost my ability to convert bleed into ignite, which means that I had to swap out my gloves for a pair of Maehlin’s Hubris which I managed to craft into a legendary with T6 Hybrid Health.
I can now rip through Empowered Monoliths, but that is not to say I don’t still have some issues. I am still using seven uniques and at some point, I would like to replace my Sunwreath and Fiery Dragon Shoes with either a good legendary version of either or a really well-rolled Exalted. Neither are doing anything that I could not pick up off another item and several of the lines on Sunwreath specifically only apply to a spellblade. I need a lot more health in order to be really comfortable as I am still sitting at around 1800. From an offense standpoint, I have 530% Fire Damage and 1 point shy of 300% Chance to Ignite which feels really good. I could use some more flat physical damage however to buff the moment-to-moment combat with Rive. There are still levers to tweak with this build, and I will likely be slowly poking at it until the next Path of Exile league.
Is it as fun as the previous version? Honestly… no. There was something so chill about rolling over the top of things and watching them burn to death in my wake. That aspect of the build is gone, but I am not sure what I could have done to keep making that sort of gameplay work. What I wanted was a pseudo Righteous Fire gameplay style with super chill Monoliths and so long as I stuck to the level 90 non-Empowered ones it worked well enough. I needed to do something to make things work for Empowered and my series of significant revisions to the build have done that. Is it still enjoyable? Yeah, it absolutely still is, but combat does not feel anywhere near as fluid as it did before. Needing to cycle through the three-hit combo of Rive gives everything a stutter-step feel which is nowhere near as smooth as spinning around and clipping through mobs constantly. My Void Knight continues to remain my “main” and I dinged 97 last night and continue pushing towards 100. However “Fire Bro” will likely stay here as a pet project.
Hey Folks! I am having a blast with Last Epoch but as always the case as I spend hundreds of hours playing a game, I start to create a mental list of things that I would change or do differently. Inevitably I end up making one of these posts where I talk through that list. At this point, I have clocked just over 350 hours of Last Epoch through various phases of its lifecycle and as such I have quite a bit to talk about. I feel like the game is a solid “A-Tier” experience that will very likely be an “S-Tier” game as it continues to evolve. For reference, the only S-Tier ARPG right now on the market would be Path of Exile because it just has an overwhelming amount of depth, but that is depth that has been built up over ten years of releases. Also for reference, I should probably say that I consider Diablo IV a C or D Tier game depending on the current patch cycle… Season 2… was a solid B Tier experience, but the base game would probably be C and the current season D. Diablo III in its current state would be a solid B or maybe even an A tier at times.
Character Customization
I get that gender-locked classes are a common ARPG trope… but that ship has long since sailed and it is actively a problem for picking this game up and adopting it. I have many friends who simply do not want to touch this game because they do not want to be an old man who looks like Charles Dance. There are probably some folks out there who want to play a rogue but don’t want to look like a discount bin Sera from Dragon Age Inquisition. I feel like players tend to sort into one of two camps when it comes to character customization… either it does not matter to them at all and they could play a colorless square named Jake happily… or it is the most important thing in the entire game experience. If you don’t at least offer some level of rudimentary customization… you are locking out an entire chunk of the player base that spends more time on the character creator than playing through the tutorial experience.
I’ve given Diablo IV a ton of shit since its launch but they absolutely nailed the character creator. It is simple enough that you can get through it quickly if you do not care in the least, but has enough detail that the folks who really want to tweak their characters can do so happily. Like there are still problems with it because each character is locked into a very specific body type, but I will take this as a good starting place as opposed to nothing. EHG has at least given lip service to wanting to add some sort of character customization but that they have not prioritized it in the development cycle due to needing to fix core systems. Now that the 1.0 launch is over… I feel like it is time to start working on systems that bring in the players for whom customization is king.
Collecting Armor Appearances
While we are on the customization bent… A lot of the armor in the game looks pretty cool, but I have zero control over the appearance of my character. My choice is to equip one of a very limited selection of cosmetic skins from the shop, or just accept the fact that my characters will never actually look cool. What I really want is the ability to collect item appearances while I pick them up, and then create a cosmetic appearance for my character out of a selection of existing default graphics and from any cool things that are added into the cosmetic shop later. Guild Wars 2, Diablo III, Diablo IV, and even World of Warcraft now have this sort of a system where you collect the appearance of items and then can utilize those to create a very custom-looking appearance.
This is another place where Diablo IV did a really good job. I would have liked it to go further, and the ability to dye individual channels on the items rather than just painting the appearance with a broad brush, but again… it is “good enough”. Even if they sold this system to me… I would pay more than the initial purchase price to get this sort of functionality added to the game. For some players legitimately cosmetics are the true end game, and you are sort of locking out that group of player from having any meaningful interactions with their appearance. I can make due with looking like a mess, but I would be much happier with some sort of collection system. I mean there is already an appearance customization system in Last Epoch, I just want to be able to use armor I have collected in addition to the limited selection of cosmetic options.
Map Persistence
One of the things that absolutely confuses every player from the start, is that “Town Portal” does not work in this game like it does in other games. There is no popping to town to do some vendoring, and then popping back into the existing instance of a map that you were in previously. Instead, if you leave a map… even if you accidentally bounce acrossed a zone boundary, you have effectively reset the zone. This leads to all sorts of problems, and I feel like this is a core issue with their system design. I get that this would be a massive overhaul of the way that some systems work, but I feel like map persistence within a play session is kind of an important thing. I would love to see them implement a system like Path of Exile where a map does not reset until you have been out of it for 10-15 minutes with a way to manually reset a map if you so choose.
Multiple Attempts on Activities
I feel like this is a side effect of the fact that map persistance does not exist in the game at all… but all activies are effectively oneshot encounters. If you take a death, you have to start over from scratch and if you consumed a resource to open that encounter like a dungeon key, that resource is gone. It feels real bad to get through the annoying assed maze that is the temporal sanctum only to fail one mechanic and have to go back to square one again. Even Path of Exile, which is known for punishing encounters… gives you six portals to attempt something. It feels extra bad when you are playing in multiplayer and just have to sit on the ground and wait for your friend to either solo the encounter or die so you can both start over. Similarly there are few things more demoralizing than failing a monolith echo and knowing that you will have to do it again… for no rewards… just to clear your way past it. I would like to see them rework how these systems function, because if I wanted to be playing in a one attempt and then you are done scenario I would have played hardcore.
Load Straight into the Ready room
One of my favorite parts about Last Epoch is running Monoliths. One of the things that I dig the most about that experience is how you have this thing that I personally refer to as the “ready room” that lets you take care of any of your needs between rounds. It essentially is a stripped down version of a town with a vendor, your stash chest… and an anvil for some reason because apparently people don’t just hit F to open up the forge interface. What I want almost more than anything… is to be able to load directly into this ready room. As it stands when you teleport into a specific timeline, you are put out in the overworld map and have to complete at least one echo to get back to your ready room. This has so many incidental rammifications, and makes me put off doing things that require me to leave it. Making it easier to pop into this specific chamber would be great.
Interact with Circle of Fortune/Merchants Guild from Ready Rooms
So I get that EHG put in a lot of effort to make interesting faction specific hubs. Thing is I don’t play ARPGs to interact with strangers. In fact I mostly started playing ARPGs because I could do everything in them solo and this is in large part why I shifted to them as my main gaming addiction over MMORPGs. The thing with ARPG players… is we crave efficiency. “Town is Lava” is a common phrase you will hear bandied about in ARPG circles in that the most efficient use of your time is to never go back to town or at least go back as infrequently as possible. One of the activities that I put off… is buying prophecies because I know I have to pop over to this hub… and then can’t get back to my ready room without running an echo. I would love to see the ready room concept expand to have a stripped down version of the faction experience. Maybe have a vendor that gives you action to either things available from Circle of Fortune or to your Stall interface for Merchants Guild without ever leaving the comfort of home.
Bring in Guilds
The one place where I feel like social hubs SHOULD exist, is that the game needs guilds. It is so much easier to connect with your friends while playing an ARPG when you are all sharing the same guild tag. As it is now every member of a social circle need to remember to throw an invite to every other member in that group so that they can see and interact with them in game. Guilds streamline this process and allow you to have a single invite that covers all of those bases and grants someone easy access to everyone. Since they like to build social hubs, you could even create a guild based hub similar to the faction hideouts that allows the players to have a meeting area. I love our guild hideout in Path of Exile because it gives us a common ground when we want to run maps together rather than one person “owning” the map device because you are in their hideout.
If we are throwing out all possilbities, I would love to see them implement something like Guild Wars 2 has. The ability to have multiple guilds that you can be a member of is really a game changer. In Guild Wars 2 I am in my main guild that I help run that I spent 99.9% of my time representing. However I am also in Knight of Mercy and Kamikaze Runners which are very small friends and family guilds that are specific groups of players that interact with them. Then I am in two mega guilds Gaiscioch and Prismatic Aspects that give me access to bigger groups of players and more directed activities. It is this perfect blend of having multiple places to call home without feeling like you are giving up something in the process.
Guild Found Mode
While we are talking about wishlists… and guilds… what I really want is for the implementation of a Guild Found Mode. This is honestly my ideal way of playing an ARPG where we pool our resources and help each other out… but are not necessarily engaging in trade. With the Affliction League in Path of Exile we started out as a Private Trade League called the “Bel League” and this gave us that sort of functionality. Having access to trade in POE is sort of a necessity because you won’t have access to large swaths of items without it… but for what it was I had a freaking blast. Last Epoch is way more Guild Found friendly because between the handful of us we probably have seen almost every build enabling item.
I like knowing that I found something that one of my friends can play, and while the trade and resonance system works… there are a lot of my friends that I simply don’t have the same schedule as. The only time I can really play together with Kodra for example is on the weekend, because our active timeframes cross, and this weekend I really need to find an hour or two to play with him so that I can build up the resonance to be able to trade an item he needs for a build. A Guild Bank and Guild Found mode would solve all of those problems, while still keeping things out of the trade economy. Maybe lock everyone in that mode to a specific faction, or have it be based on a private cycle. Whatever the case I would love to be able to play Last Epoch, sharing freely with my friends… while also still being in Circle of Fortune.
Cycle Objectives
I am not normally an acheesement person and they don’t tend to motivate me in games. I’ve never bragged about getting “platinum trophies” or 100% percenting games. However there is something that I do enjoy about ARPGs with some sort of seasonal challenge system. Diablo III, Diablo IV, and Path of Exile all have something like this and it ends up influencing my activities in subtle ways. There will be times when I go out of my way to do this activity or that activity because I know I will be ticking off a box in the total seasonal journey. In Path of Exile I set it as my goal to make sure I do enough of the 40 total challenges in order to qualify for one of the totem poles that goes into your hideout as a decoration. If I am engaging with Diablo III season, I tended to do a full sweep because that was required to get a cosmetic pet. In Diablo IV my ultimate goal is to make sure I achieve all of the steps on the battlepass. Whatever the case having some sort of objectives to the seasonal content is a net positive for me.
More Random Events in Monoliths
Monoliths can be a bit samey after awhile. The most efficient method of running Monoliths is to rush to the objective, complete it, and then bounce out to head to the next objective. However for me at least that all changed in 0.9.2 when they introduced Rune Prisons and themed Treasure Chests into the Monoliths. These now became objectives that if I could see it on the map, I wanted to specifically veer over to complete that encounter because they offered specific rewards that I could not get elsewhere. This is ultimately what Path of Exile has done with seasonal mechanics, and why that game is so damned rich.
This is ultimately what makes Path of Exile as good as it is, is because there is so much optional content that shows up when you run maps… which is their equivalent to the Monolith. Seeing what an impact the relatively simple Exile Mages and Treasure Chests made to my overal Echo running experience… I crave more. I am hoping that with each new cycle they can add one or two new things that have a chance of showing up when running a Monolith. I am hoping after some time we build up a long list of random encounters that could happen. I would even love to see them introduce some of the random story events that happen in Diablo III maps. Those were super fun and while they are not the most efficient thing to run or the most rewarding… I always enjoyed doing them when they happened to align with whatever other objectives I was doing.
Bounty Mode
I know that there are a ton of players out there that HATED Bounties from Diablo III… but I loved them. I loved having a reason to go back and revisit areas of the campaign and then get rewarded for doing so. The format was super chill and just something that I could turn my brain off and do from time to time when I needed to lower my level of interactivity. They also served a really important way to get some resources. Last Epoch has so many cool areas in the campaign that you never really experience again, and I think it would be awesome to have a bounty system that asked you to revisit various objectives around the maps and then get a cache of rewards as a result. Affix Shards, Scrolls, and Runes already exist as the perfect reward structure for this sort of thing. Maybe even have the chance at dropping items specific that give you a little boost of faction experience. There are already ways in the monos to farm most resource but I do think it would be pretty cool to have this exist as it would help give you a specific reason to run the campaign prophecies.
Unique Modification Systems
So this often happens when you are going through the upgrading process with Last Epoch where you might start out with a build enabling unique that does not have legendary potential. When you do finally get a copy with legendary potential… it might not be as good as the item you were upgrading out of. The game already has glyphs to solve this problem, allowing you to reroll the stats on an item attempting to improve it. I would love to see some sort of crafting resource that works the same as a Divine Orb does in Path of Exile that would allow you to attempt to improve the rolls of a Unique or Set item.
Brute Force Legendary Potential
Similarly I would love to see a process to brute force Legendary Potential. Say you have two Siphon of Anguish laying around in your stash tabs, you could do something and get access to a crafting machine similar to the one you use to craft legendary items and brute force two rings with no legendary potential into a single ring that has it. Similarly you could trade in two rings with 1 LP to get a single ring with 2 LP and so on until you finally get a 4 LP item out the other end of a long sequence of swaps. So it would take 32 items without Legendary Potential to get a 4LP version but… there is a path there if you are commited to it. One of the things I dig in Path of Exile are some of the crafts where you swap multiple copies of an item and get a brand new item on the other side. It gives me a micro objective so that when I find a copy of Ventor’s Gamble for example, I chuck it in a stash tab until I have enough of them to trade in to try and get a better rolled one as a result.
Persist Chat Settings
I know that I have done a lot of navel gazing here… and throwing out some significant expansions for the game. I am going to close my round up of things I would like to change with more of a bug fix. I do not want to interact with public chat. I do however want to be open to messages from friends and folks that I happen to be grouped with. I would really love it if chat settings persisted between play sessions. Right now I have the option of either completely disabling chat, or manually turning off public chat every time I get into the game. This definitely feels like more of a bug note, and I have even submitted it as such… and not that I think anyone from EHG will ever find my blog post but… lord would I love this one fixed.
In spite of my lengthy want list, Last Epoch is a freaking wonderful game. I am so proud of the folks at Eleventh Hour Games as I have watched how much the game as a whole has evolved since 2018. I started out not exactly a big fan, and you have won me over time and time again. I look forward to watching this game turn into the experience that I know it can be over the course of several years. I will be here playing pretty much every new cycle from this point out. I am very happy to have something fresh and exciting to blend with Path of Exile leagues when they grow stale and I am hoping that the two companies can sort of reach a stagger step release cadence for content so I can bounce between them and other games that I care about deeply like Guild Wars 2. The launch was a bit of a wild ride but I am happy that things have stabilized and I am hoping that the EHG team has managed to get at least some rest.
Morning Folks! I am sure you are all probably sick of me talking about this build, but I think more than anything I am shocked it is still functional. I thought for certain that the wheels would begin to fall off as soon as I got deeper into Monolith Echoes. At this point, I am working on the level 75 Monolith and things still seem to be strong. In fact, as of this morning, I equipped a few new pieces of gear and the damage output seems to be even stronger. The only negative is that I feel like at some point I am going to have some survival problems. I have pretty bad resistance and not a ton of health. We struggle with some of the same problems as POE when you are trying to create a build with a bunch of uniques… you somewhat lack room for survival unless said uniques are already covering that.
I recorded a fresh video this morning of me doing a level 75 Monolith Echo, showing off what the gameplay looks like. For the most part I am just lighting everything that gets near me on fire, and that fire damage over time is eventually killing things. That which I don’t kill outright, my Manifest Armor minion or the trail of flame behind me tends to finish off. For those curious, I found out how to dump my build to Last Epoch Tools this morning, so you can see the current state of the build and the gear that I have equipped here. I would not follow directly in my footsteps though, because nothing I am doing is clean enough to be considered a proper build guide. I still feel like I need to rework most of my passives for example which is something I will probably do in the coming days.
I am still leaning heavily upon Firestarter’s Torch and the chance to inflict spreading flames. This does a lot of the work in making sure that everything is catching on fire. This morning I added Rahyeh’s Light which is a shield intended for a Judgement build but has stats that we care about and a heck of a lot of block chance and block effectiveness. I hope to find a version of this with Legendary Potential so I can maybe throw on all resistances or health on block. Sunwreath continues to do a lot of work in giving us melee ignite chance and fire damage over time. Sadly the flame reave lines are useless for us, but everything else works and again my hope is to stack on some sort of survival. Fiery Dragon Shoes are another new addition that gives us a bunch of fire penetration, and reduced bonus damage taken on crit… but the trade-off is it makes it so we get crit slightly easier. However, when we are crit it leaves a fire trail which is pretty slick.
All told I am pretty freaking happy being a walking inferno, and I am curious if this continues to scale as I level into empowered monoliths. I know there are some issues to solve here… specifically resistances and packing on more health and general survival… but for the moment I am having a blast having a super chill mapping experience. Last night I put on an audiobook and just kept my head down grinding through echoes all night. Mostly my goal is to pack on some more levels and start getting into empowered monoliths where hopefully I can finally test the build and see how longterm viable it is. Bossing is not amazing, but also not the worst thing I have ever experienced. Having 16 potions makes up for a lot of mistakes.
It isn’t like I stopped playing my Void Knight either. I am still using it to farm prophecies pretty regularly and working towards trying to get a handful of items with legendary potential to take that build to the next level. I’ve tried making a few legendaries and so far I have mostly wound up with duds that did not hit any of the stats that I had hoped for. This means that I need to farm up more legendary potential items and more exalted items to make additional attempts. This is probably where playing in the trade side of the cycle makes a bit more sense because you can just keep buying more items to try and craft into legendaries or simply buy the finished legendary rather than farming random content and hoping. The amount of loot that you get from Circle of Fortune though is outrageous.
Still having a freaking blast with this Last Epoch Cycle. Are you playing? If so what build did you go with? Drop me a line below.
