Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week Bel has been playing Last Epoch quite a bit of late and has roped both Grace and Tam into it. We talk a bit about how the game has improved over time and how it compares to Diablo III and Path of Exile. From there Thalen and Tam talk a bit about their further experiences with Lord of the Rings Online. Kodra talks about his adventures in watching a live stage production of Bluey, and we talk a bit about the show in general. Tam shares his thoughts on Hi-Fi Rush and dives into a topic about the oddities of Steam Deck Compatibility.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I spent my evening running around in the Last Epoch multiplayer beta and opted to start up another Acolyte. I’ve been enjoying the Necromancer play style lately, and as a result, I am leaning super hard into it with this game. I’m also wanting to spend some time exploring Wolcen soon and plan on doing the same given that Necromancer play styles tend to be pretty chill. It is thoroughly weird to me the way my brain has flipped over the last several years. There was a time when I would only play melee characters and more specifically only characters with a sword and shield. I was completely bought into the mythos of the “tank” and that meant a very specific thing to me namely a full plate-wearing character with a sword and a shield, and occasionally if the class lends itself to that fantasy, a bit damned two-hander.
To some extent, I blame Diablo III for beginning the slow battering down of these walls. I fell in love with the Demon Hunter and how amazing it was for clearing seasonal content. With the right build, you could make literally everything on the screen explode in a hail of fire, making it extremely safe to play. I still greatly prefer high survival characters, but I was forced to reconcile that sometimes overwhelming damage… is a survival ability. Mostly this forced me to re-evaluate what being “fun to play” meant to me personally and that largely meant the ability to kill things without much fear of death. I always got this style of play through traditional MMORPG tanks but found that under certain circumstances I could find that style of play in other families of classes.
I think my mental transformation was really cemented by my time playing Guild Wars 2 last year. I had been trying for a decade to make the Warrior in that game conform to the sort of gameplay that I wanted, a very high survival tanky play that had no fear of dying but could still clear content. It never really felt that way to me personally, and in a moment of frustration, I sat down and had a conversation with my friend Tam. He asked me to describe the goals I wanted in a class and after some serious side eye, I accepted the challenge to try playing a Necromancer. It turned out that while it conformed to none of my normal sensibilities, it was in fact the “tankiest” and highest survival class I had ever played in an MMORPG. This sort of sent my world into a tailspin and has caused me to re-evaluate what it means to be tanky and what it means to “feel good” to play.
Path of Exile has also continued this path forward as I seek out characters that are highly survivable yet still able to clear content. I think maybe the best version of this that I have experienced so far is my Righteous Fire Juggernaut because it is effectively exactly what I want in a game like that. One of my favorite Diablo III builds is the exceptionally tanky Thorns Crusader, which wanders around while everything effectively breaks itself on your damage shield. I’ve also enjoyed my time spent playing on my Summon Righteous Fire Necromancer quite a bit, because while squishier than RF… it can move around freely to avoid a lot of the damage while my pets focus on shredding the target. As I have gained additional levels on that character I have poured more focus into survivability since the damage seems to be solid.
So now that I am playing some Last Epoch, I figured a Necromancer might be a good call. After some research, it does in fact seem to be an extremely tanky option. At the moment I am running around with Skeleton Warriors, a Giant Skeleton Golem, and summoning that game’s equivalent of my “raging spirits” in the form of explosive Zombies. I started a fresh character last night and got it to around 22 before calling it for the night. Unfortunately, the transition to Necromancer seems to be gated behind a quest so I really need to push forward in the story before I spend any more points on the build. The few bosses I have encountered have been extremely relaxing as I simply avoid the telegraphed attacks and let my pets keep chewing away at it.
Last Epoch Build Planner is by the same folks who do the Grim Dawn Tools, and I am largely following this Necromancer build at least as far as Skills and Passive choices go. You can blame Path of Exile on making it so that I just feel more comfortable venturing forth with a build to at least loosely follow. Last Epoch as a whole seems like a much more straightforward game and offers the ability to respec a bit more easily. However, once I started down the path of following a build, I find it is probably going to be harder to shake mentally. Given that I am juggling a large number of ARPGs at the moment, I don’t really want to waste my time building something that won’t be viable and as a result, won’t be “fun”.
If you want to see an example of Necromancer gameplay in Last Epoch, check out the above video. Essentially it is designed around summoning exploding zombies and replenishing your pets as needed when they die. Otherwise, you just zoom around and avoid telegraphs while your army of horrible children kills your foe. I had a lot of fun last night screwing around on the beta server, and will likely be creating the same basic build when the multiplayer patch drops in March.
Good Morning Friends! Surprised Josie is surprised that I am taking her photo. I figured since this is going to be a fairly light post this morning I would lead off with a cat photo and maybe even close with a cat photo. I’ve not really talked about it on my blog but late last year I was involved with the preparation and launch of a mastodon instance and said involvement went off the rails. As a result, I have not really had a default Mastodon instance to suggest to my friends. There are of course excellent sites run by Stux like Mastodon.coffee, Mstdn.social, and Masto.ai that I currently reside on, but there is just something different about having a nice focused local feed that you can rely on. Since most of my online interaction is with gaming-focused topics, it would be lovely to have a gaming-focused instance that did not have a shitbird for an administrator.
Back in 2019, during another wave of migrations from Twitter my friend Gazimoff founded MMORPG.social and it was a delightful place. You might know him better from his time spent writing for MMORPG.org or the ZAM Network… or even his intense involvement in the Wildstar community… or maybe the Mana Obscura blog. MMORPG.social was really cool but also of fairly limited focus… given that MMORPGs in general represent a pretty small slice of the total gaming public. Then there was the fact that a lot of lessons were learned in a rapid-fire succession about how best to build a Mastodon instance and be able to scale it with demand. While MMORPG.social was ultimately shuttered, lessons were learned about how to build a better community going forward and more than that how to make the entire site scale more sustainably.
Now we scan forward to yesterday when Gaz finally pulled back the curtain on his next venture. Gamepad.club is the result of that understanding gained back in 2019 and created to be a more general focus gaming instance rather than a niche devoted to MMORPGs. Essentially Gaz decided there was a need for a stable gaming-focused instance that could scale as needed and that had a steady hand. I am very happy to have an instance that I feel like I can wholeheartedly support and suggest to my friends. He is doing it right from the start and has signed on to the Mastodon Server Covenant that outlines some basic parameters for operating an instance. I’m not currently formally involved with the running of this instance in any way, because I decided it was probably best that I was not at least in the short term. I’m admittedly concerned that the vindictive admin of another gaming instance might take some sort of retaliatory action against Gamepad.club if I were.
I have however set up an account there and worked on my profile. I’ve not made the formal leap, but I am sure at some point in the coming weeks I will. I have a lot of faith in Gaz and the lessons that he learned while running MMORPG.social and how best to keep from running into any roadblocks with Gamepad.club. I think one of the huge benefits of the way it is configured is that it is not just another hosted instance on masto.host, and as a result, he can pivot and apply custom patches as needed rather than waiting for the entire hosted infrastructure to be updated at the same time. I plan on picking his brain on his experiences with Linode, because I have been deeply considering shifting all of my infrastructure to a self-managed cloud environment rather than the shared web hosting that I currently have.
I will close out this morning’s post with a picture of Josie and Gracie chilling on the sofa and actually getting along. Josie is not all that sure about her role as “Big Sister” and mostly gets annoyed by Gracie’s love and attention. Essentially my friends if you are looking for a more gaming-focused instance, then I highly suggest you check out Gamepad.club. It is still pretty small but I figure in the coming weeks it will grow into a lovely community, without any terribly onerous rules. Gaz is someone I trust and someone who has been a friend for years. I am very willing to put my faith in him when I migrate.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off the show with some updates about Wizards of the Coast and the OGL debacle that they are so rapidly trying to walk back. Are we going to forgive and forget or is the damage done? From there we talk a bit about Fire Emblem Engage and how it is quite different from previous Fire Emblem outings. Tam does his best to combat the bad press and shares with us his thoughts about Forspoken, and how it is actually a really good game.
From there we dive down a rabbit hole that is revisiting Lord of the Rings Online. We talk about how it has held up through the years and the interesting way that it is continuing to expand now that they have finished the main story arc of the books. We also talk a bit about what an interesting place the Landroval server is specifically.
