Echo Warpath

Nearing Ninety

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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.

Last Epoch Launch Plans

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Good Morning Folks! I am starting to get extremely excited for the 1.0 launch of Last Epoch. Next Wednesday at 11 am CST the patch will go live and with it a bunch of new systems. They are waiting for a day before turning on Twitch Drops, which is honestly pretty smart given that I am certain that there will be some day-one issues. Eleventh Hour Games recently announced that they had passed the 1 million copies sold mark, so I have a feeling that there will probably be some server congestion issues. Were this a AAA studio I would expect that they could throw money at the problem and scale up to be able to support the load… but given that EHG is still very much in indie mode I am going to doubt that happens. Though I do wonder how many people will take advantage of playing in the fully offline mode. I know that I will not because one of my hopes for the game is that I can actually play with some friends who also seem excited.

At this point, I have put in a bit over 200 hours into the game and my two highest characters are my Fire Golem Necromancer and my Spriggan Druid. I’ve also put in quite a bit of time on my very first character that went down the “unstoppable” Paladin path, which was fun at times but not nearly as smooth as I would have liked. The problem with the Necromancer is it was extremely squishy while not having a lot of interactivity given that you were mostly following your mob of pets around. The Druid build was fun, but you sort of had to keep spamming abilities in order to keep your fury up and stay in Spriggan form. I spent some time working towards the Squirrel build for Beastmaster but could never get the helm to drop that was required for that build.

For the 1.0 Launch I think I am going to go down a path that I have not really explored heavily. Most of my Sentinel characters have been sword and board and very defensive-minded. This time I think I am going to lean on the Void Knight and specifically go down the Warpath route of creating a very “spin to win” character. It seems like at a minimum this is going to be one of the more fun ways to level through the campaign. On top of just a leveling build, Echo Warpath is one of the more popular meta builds for the class meaning that I should have no real issue transitioning into empowered monoliths. Essentially I should be able to charge between packs with lunge and then shred them with warpath. This is very much a playstyle that is in my wheelhouse so I am looking forward to it.

There is also a later game Void Knight build that folks call an “autobomber” because you sort of just walk through packs in a very Righteous Fire fashion. Going Void Knight should allow me to pivot easily into this build if that ends up being something I want to try. There is also a bleed variant of the warpath build that is supposedly really good. So I feel pretty comfortable committing to Sentinel and more specifically Void Knight as there should be plenty of room to respec and pivot to whatever build feels the best in the late game. That was a problem that I with Paladin is that I didn’t really want to go with the full caster Smite variant so I somewhat felt pidgeon holed into the one build that I was playing. Last Epoch allows you to pretty easily respec your character, but you can’t change your specialization so essentially I was limited to ONLY Paladin builds. With Void Knight there are already a handful of builds that I am really interested in so I should be able to eventually land on the one that I like the best. Since Warpath is a super early ability, leveling with it should feel good as it won’t require a midgame respec.

As such I have been looking at some of the early uniques to keep an eye open for. Essentially I would really like to find a Dreamthorn and a pair of Darkstride boots early on as they should make a lot of the early leveling more enjoyable. Since I will be scaling Void Melee damage, the Darkstride boots will in theory just keep making my movement faster which will make Warpath feel better and better. For an early chestpiece I think Yrun’s Wisdom is a pretty good choice and a bit later game I am contemplating moving into a Titan’s Heart for the reduced damage taken while using a two-hander. The problem with that is that I am not sure how well I can offset the loss of regeneration. If I can lean heavily into life leech it could in theory be worth it as I should always be dealing damage to my targets given I will have fairly high mobility.

I created a baby Void Knight some time ago, and I am contemplating screwing around on it for a while as I am finding myself in that awkward “between games” phase. It would at least allow me to get acclimatized to Last Epoch again. I don’t want to hit the game super seriously until next Wednesday because I am amped to be playing in the very first season aka “cycle” as they are going to refer to them. I’m really interested to see all the tweaks to the game, and very interested in the magic find faction. I think most of my friends are going to go that route which will mean I need to be actively grouping with them so that we can trade goods when we find something the others need. I am honestly kinda hoping that the next Path of Exile league gets delayed a bit so that I won’t be tempted away for that until I have really given Last Epoch a proper go.

Are you going to be playing Last Epoch on launch next week? What sort of build are you contemplating and what class and specialization are you leaning towards? Drop me a line below.