Falconer

Good Morning Folks! I took a bit of a break last week but I am hitting the ground running with a bit of a long topic. On Wednesday Last Epoch is dropping its 1.0 release marking the game officially coming out of early access. There has been an exceptional amount of buzz and hype surrounding the game, and I thought I would take a bit this morning and talk about some of the relevant features of the game. If you are coming from Diablo, this is going to be a bit more detailed than you are used to. If you are coming from Path of Exile, it will be considerably easier for you to build your own builds and grasp the concepts. What I dig about the game is that it is perfectly reasonable to “yolo” your way through a build and wind up with something that mostly works, as opposed to Path of Exile where without following some predetermined plan you are going to wind up with a mess.

The Fifteen Masteries

I think probably the most important concept to get firmly in your head starting out is that this is a game with fifteen masteries that are in themselves almost like MMORPG classes. You start the game as a base class either an Acolyte, Mage, Primalist, Rogue, or Sentinel, and then when you reach the End of Time zone for the first time you are asked to choose a Mastery. This is important because this is the only decision that you make from that point forward that cannot be relatively easily undone. While Masteries do not necessarily set your build, they do sort of lean into a specific class fantasy which will set the scope of the types of builds you can create with it.

• Sentinel
  • Forge Guard – Focuses on summoning weapons and suits of armor to fight alongside you.
  • Void Knight – Very Shadow/Death Knighty dealing with the power of the void and bending time.
  • Paladin – Holy warrior that channels the power of the light into devastating attacks.
• Acolyte
  • Lich – Transform yourself into the undead to wield powerful death magics.
  • Necromancer – Summon a large army of undead minions to do your bidding.
  • Warlock – Channel the power of chaos and the dark gods to vanquish your foes.
• Primalist
  • Shaman – Harness the power of the elements to bolster your melee attacks.
  • Beastmaster – Summon an army of animal companions and bring them to battle with you.
  • Druid – Master shapeshifting and taking the form of a Werebear, Spriggan, or Swarm Queen.
• Rogue
  • Bladedancer – Strike from the shadows and summon your inner ninja.
  • Marksman – Ultimate ranged master hitting multiple targets at once and dealing significant damage.
  • Falconer – Synchronize combat with your Falcon friend and do devastating combo attacks.
• Mage
  • Runemaster – Be an Avatar of the elements and bend them to your will as you combo them together.
  • Spellblade – Enchant your weapon with magics and channel magic attacks through it.
  • Sorceror – A focused spellcaster that tends to pick a single element to go all in on rather than trying to wield them all at once.

Passive Trees

Like I said the only decision that cannot be undone is your specialization choice, but from that point forward you can pretty easily undo your decisions. Each Class will have a generic passive tree and you will get a new choice from it every level, then each Mastery will have its own passive tree and spending points in that tree will unlock new abilities based on the number of points that you have spent into it. You can still dip into the other trees to grab abilities that you might find useful for your build. For example my Void Knight goes 20 points into Paladin so I can grab Sigils of Hope an ability that buffs my damage. At any point I can remove points from the passive tree for the cost of gold and reallocate them if I decide I need to shift things up a bit.

Skill Specialization

A Build is generally made up of five different abilities, and as you level you unlock additional specialization slots. Specializing a skill allows you to unlock its talent tree and begin allocating points tweaking how that ability works. You can use any ability you have unlocked but generally speaking you are going to focus on the ones that you have specialized as they will be more effective in the way you are targeting your specific build. For example in my Void Knight that I have been playing and plan on playing come cycle launch at 1.0, I am running Warpath as my primary ability which is a whirlwind like spinning melee ability. With that I am using Shield Charge, but I have specialized it so that I no longer require a shield to use that ability, and then am running Sigils of Hope for buffs, Anomaly to debuff targets in a given area while bolstering my own attacks, and Volatile Reversal for a bunch of different useful things.

Respeccing Skills

Each individual specialized skill has a talent tree and as you level that skill you gain additional points to spend into it up to a maximum of 20. That “maximum” however can be modified by finding gear that gives you additional skill points, for example two of my abilities in my Void Knight set up are sitting at 24 because I have found specific items that target giving those abilities more points to spend. Respeccing skills works a little different than passives, because you can remove single points from the tree or despecilize a skill removing all of the points at once. As you level up your skills end up with a baseline number of points that you can spend, and when you change specialized skills that ability is reset back to that baseline number of points. You then have to re-earn skill levels by playing the game but your skills catch up at an extremely elevated rate until they are back in line with your other abilities.

Notable Talents

One of the things that simplifies the process of setting up your skills is that a given skill tree tends to do different things when you go in different directions. All skills will have a number of notable talent points that are identified by having a Hexagonal border and these abilities tend to make some significant change to how that ability is played. For example, the above image is a photoshop job showing the Skeletal Mage tree and thee different notable choices. Pyromancers shifts the damage your Skeletal Mages deal to fire, Cryomancers similarly shifts them to Ice Damage, and then Death Knights completely changes the way the units work and instead of being Mages they are instead powerful Tanky Melee units that deal necrotic damage.

You can’t choose all three because they change the way the unit works entirely, so you would then factor your talent tree to take advantage of bonuses that work well with those notable choices. Not all trees are this straight forward, but in most cases they are all going to do something similar. If you go in this direction it will focus your tree on doing a specific thing instead of doing something else. So when focusing on creating your homebrew build, you want to look at the edges and then work your way back in towards the middle to plot the course that leads to the abilities that change the gameplay in the manner that you want. Normally speaking if you shift one ability into a specific damage type, you are going to want to shift ALL of your abilities to that damage type to develop synergies in gearing.

When in Doubt Check the Guide

If you find yourself in a situation where you are lost and confused and can’t figure out how something works… check the guide. At any point you can hit the G key in game and it will bring up a fully searchable game guide. While this probably won’t be as detailed as some of the wikis that support ARPGs, it will give you enough basic information to hopefully be able to reason out how something works. If an attack applies Armour Shred and you don’t understand what that means, you can pop open the guide type “Shred” and it will bring up the articles for Armour Shred and Resistance Shred with explanations of what both mean. It is far from perfect because there are other abilities that don’t exist in the guide like when your attack applies “Doom”, but it is at least a better start than pretty much any other ARPG out there.

Plenty of Storage

A huge problem for other games is lack of storage space. In Diablo IV you are limited to a very small fixed amount of storage. In Diablo III you have to complete seasonal achievements to slowly unlock your maximum potential over the course of a few years. In Path of Exile, you essentially have to buy your way out of storage woes with real-world money spent for stash tabs. Last Epoch pretty much lets you just keep buying stash tabs with gold until your heart is content and all of the tabs feature full search as well as a button that attempts to play “item tetris” for you and create the maximum free space. I am sure there is a maximum number somewhere but I have yet to hit it, and I’ve seen folks with fifty or so tabs. Basically you can organize things as granularly as you would like and just keep buying more tabs. What helps as well is that all of your crafting resources get whisked away magically into an unlimited storage tab of shards, scrolls, and runes that won’t be clogging up your space.

Early Uniques are Useful

The reason why all this storage space is important, is that Uniques in Last Epoch work wildly differently than the legendaries from Diablo. Basically in Diablo III, getting a legendary drop at 68… feels like a waste because the only ones that really matter apart from cubing them are dropped at maximum level. Uniques in Last Epoch have a fixed level that they drop at and some of the early ones end up being build defining unites. For example The Claw, which is a necklace that you can find at level 4 is critical for Primalist Wolves builds and is essentially used until you can later replace it for a direct upgrade called The Fang. Death Rattle similarly is an item that is often used by endgame necromancers, and Arboreal Circuit is similarly used for Druid Spriggan builds. Dreamthorn is a Void Damage Twohanded Sword that shows up around level 15 and I used it all the way through the campaign on my Void Knight and could have kept using it if I did not luck into another option. If you are like me and like to create Alts, having a stash of uniques can really help with the leveling process and get you started on some specific builds.

Legendary Potential

While a lot of these items are great for getting started, what you are looking for really is something with the attribute “Legendary Potential”. In the endgame there is a dungeon called the Temporal Sanctum, and when you finish the dungeon you are given access to a crafting machine that will allow you to take a unique with legendary potential and an exalted item and mash the two together into an item known as a legendary. The legendary potential number denotes how many stats from the Exalted item will be transferred to the finished Legendary item. Ultimately the best option would be to find Legendary Potential 4 which will transfer all four of the stats from an Exalted item, but even LP1 and LP2 which are much more common are worth holding onto. The cool thing is that this does not change the equippable level so you can create some really amazing twink gear for leveling new characters.

Weaver’s Will

There is another special type of unique that you might keep your eyes open for. These are called Weavers Will uniques and will have a number associated with that stat. These are uniques that “level up” while you are wearing them and the number denotes how many improvements you can get on that specific item. Each time you have gained enough experience you will get a message indicating that your item has improved. Essentially the base stats of the item stay the same but you can add up to four different affixes to your item for a maximum total of eight, and each time your item levels up it will either add a brand new affix or increase the stats on one of the existing affixes. The above image shows two different items in their raw state and then on the right side two items that have been completed.

Weaver’s Will items improve in a random manner. For example here are three different pairs of Swaddling of the Erased gloves that I leveled up while leveling my Void Knight. Each of them got a completely different stat package than the others. If you get one to drop, it is often worth throwing it on just to see what sort of item might pop out the other end. I especially like them for leveling because at that point the stats don’t matter quite as strongly as they do in an endgame build.

Craft Early Craft Often

Crafting in Last Epoch is EXTREMELY strong. Especially if you are coming from a more simplistic game like Diablo, this is going to be more power than you are used to experiencing over the type of gear that you have equipped. Essentially you can open up your Forge at any time by hitting the F key in game and this will bring up an interface that allows you to modify an existing item. Crafting utilizes Affix shards, which you can gain through drops in the world or by removing stats from existing items. You can then apply those affixes to other items or use them to improve the rank of existing stats on an item. You can level up a single affix on an item to a maximum of Tier 5 through crafting. You can however find Exalted items in the wild that have stats with Tier 6 or even very rarely Tier 7.

What is so nice about this is that you are given tools to take “almost perfect” items that might have three affixes that are ideal and one that doesn’t quite work for your build, and “perfect” them. The entire system works on how much Forging Potential an item has which is denoted as a number. For example in the above image that chestpiece has a Forging Potential of 37. Every action that I take on the item will remove some of that forging potential. There are things that you can do like using a Glyph of Hope which gives you a 25% for your current action to remove no forging potential. There is also the ability to “crit” a craft and cause it to improve your item more than you originally intended. What is awesome about having this much deterministic power over crafting is that it makes a lot of items that would otherwise get vendored in other games, worth making an attempt to potentially get an amazing final product.

Built-in Loot Filter Editor

Since more items are potentially useful, that means you are likely to spend a lot of time hovering over items on the ground to see if maybe just maybe that 13th sword you saw in a map might have stats that are worth crafting on. There is a much easier way however because the game has a very robust loot filter system allowing you to get deeply granular on exactly the statistics that you are looking for. You can highlight specific items of note, or completely hide other items that you just don’t want to see anymore. These loot filters are set on a character by character basis so you can really drill down on what you want for your specific build. The in-game editor allows you to get something going pretty easily, but if you want to just lean on someone else’s work most of the build creators out there have loot filters that you can import. Essentially all you have to do is copy the XML for a filter to your clipboard and then the in-game menu will allow you to import that as a new filter and get up and running quickly.

Don’t Skip the Campaign… but you can

One of the weird things about Last Epoch is that while I would never suggest skipping the campaign… technically you are placed in the “Endgame” area around level 20. Once you reach The End of Time and can select your specialization… you can technically start working on the end game system known as the monoliths. This is a horrifically bad idea as the first monolith has a static level of 58, and a level 20 would probably not have much luck beating that content quickly. However it is doable and at any point you get bored and want to test your mettle you can absolutely start down the path of the monoliths. I will talk about monoliths specifically in a bit, but End of Time essentially serves as your final hub and you get access to it pretty rapidly.

Side Quests and Main Quests

In theory on every character I work my way through the campaign in part because there are some things you can only get through the campaign. Essentially anything that is part of the main story will be marked with a Gold Question Mark on the map. Anything that is a side quest will be marked with a Silver Question Mark with a Blue Background. It is perfectly fine to skip side quests but there are a couple of things that you need to pay attention to. Specifically I have highlighted two things in the above photoshopped together image, because you care about quests that reward passive points and quests that reward Idol Inventory expansion. Idols are little charms that you slot into a special inventory in your character and at the end of the game there are twenty slots in a fully unlocked idol inventory. There are way more side quests that reward idol inventory expansion than there are available inventory slots, so once you have unlocked the full grid you can in theory start skipping these quests.

Tab is the Map You’re Looking For

I’ve heard this complaint from a few friends already, but essentially when you hit M to bring up the map it shows you the zone connection map not a map for the specific zone that you are in. This is generally not the behavior that folks are expecting. The map you are actually looking for is the one that comes up when you hit Tab. This is the map overlay and will show you where you are in relation to a zone boundary map. You can move the map around your screen to look for areas that you might have missed by hitting the arrow keys, and then recenter the map again by tabbing tab. The map opacity and zoom settings all refer to this map, not the zone connection map.

Teleport From Anywhere

Most ARPGs with Waypoints are centered around to getting to the teleport pad and that teleport pad allowing you to bip to any other zone that you have unlocked. Last Epoch works slightly differently in that you can bring up your zone connection map at any time and click on any waypoint to teleport there directly. This gives you “better than town portal” functionality on demand. Town Portal still exists and mostly just serves as a rapid way to return you to a town hub and is something you can do fast while running away from mobs if things get a little too dicey.

The Monolith of Fate

I talked about this briefly, but technically as soon as you can get to the End of Time you can zone into the Monolith of Fate which serves as the bulk of the endgame for Last Epoch. These are comprised by a number of timelines and each timeline has a number of individual echos which serve as something similar to a Path of Exile Map, Diablo III Greater Rift, or Diablo IV Nightmare Dungeon. Each Echo has some objective that you need to accomplish and upon finishing the echo you can teleport out and get any bonus loot associated with that echo as well as a treasure chest that gives you generic rewards based upon how much of the echo you cleared. Completing echoes in a timeline unlocks a series of three quests with the last quest being to defeat the boss of the echo opening up the next timeline in the Monolith of Fate.

Empowered Monoliths

Once you have unlocked and completed the three Timelines at the top of the Monolith of Fate, you unlock the ability to enter Empowered Monoliths which are level 100 versions of the timelines. These are the proper endgame and allow you access to some of the best stuff in the game, as well as a way to target farm specific gear slots in specific timelines. Scattered among the echos are ways to face bosses and raise the difficulty of the entire Monolith aka increase your “corruption” level. Think of this similar to ramping up Torment difficulties in Diablo. Corruption makes all of the encounters a bit harder but also increases the rarity and quantity of the items found. Fighting one of these bosses also resets the entire timeline causing all of the nodes you have already completed to respawn. The timelines and the nodes that they contain are randomly set and you can only see so many nodes out ahead of your current location.

No Second Chances

This is one of the things I do not love about Last Epoch. You get one shot at every echo, meaning that if you die while trying to complete one you lose all of the rewards associated with completing it. This feels pretty awful. You see something that looks like the above node with a black circle and the text “Rewards Lost From Dying in Echo” on the description. You can still complete the echo and you can still get rewards to drop in the map, but anything that was a specific reward from completing that echo is lost. This sucks an awful lot when it is one of the rare nodes that gives you a unique for a specific item slot for example. It feels really demoralizing because often times you still need to finish that node in order to keep progressing along a path. If you are playing in Multiplayer, and you die… you forfeit your rewards even if your party members are capable of finishing the echo.

That is another weird thing about the monoliths is that in multiplayer, you are only making progress for the person who started the echo. If we are completing my Monolith, I am getting the fixed rewards as highlighted in the timeline. You as someone tagging along still get rewards, and often times better rewards than the person completing the timeline but they are chosen from a random pool of loot. Still though it feels really good to run around with a friend and do monoliths for that reason.

Dungeons

The other major endgame system is Dungeons, but I have to admit that I have the least experience with these. Essentially in the world keys drop, and these will unlock access to specific dungeons. Each dungeon has a unique type of reward from being them. Temporal Sanctum for example unlocks access to the Eternity Cache which allows you to craft a legendary item by placing a Unique with Legendary Potential and an Exalted item into this crafting bench. Lightless Arbor unlocks access to the Vault of Uncertain Fate which is a massive gold sink that allows you to dump gold into more and higher quality rewards that you get when you finally open the vault. Soulfire Bastion has a mechanic that costs souls to use, and depending on how many souls you have left at the end of the dungeon it will give you access to unique rewards that only come from that dungeon. Then there is the Arena which I consider a dungeon, but is really just a horde mode where you keep getting thrown at wave after wave of enemies with rewards depending upon how far you managed to get. I greatly prefer the random mapping gameplay of Monoliths, but there are very good reasons to run each of the dungeons.

A Ton of Things to Do

I am certain that I left a lot of things on the table, and that there are several things that I did not get around to talking about today. Mostly I wanted to throw out some information for my readers who might be considering taking a dive into Last Epoch on Wednesday when 1.0 drops. Cycles are the name of this game’s “seasons” or “leagues” and I will be creating a whole new batch of characters and leveling them up in the seasonal model. As always if you have any questions while playing hit me up and I will answer them to the best of my knowledge. You can also check my Game Tools page for Last Epoch where I have compiled a number of resources that I personally lean on. It is a great game and it is only going to keep getting better as time goes on. I bought in years ago and it has been amazing just how far this game has come since then.