Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Apologies for taking a few weeks off but Covid kicked Belghast’s butt and he is the person who records, edits, and posts the show. This week we had a mountain of topics to get through and got nowhere close to hitting them all. Last Epoch has their very poorly named cycle reset going on, in which they added some pretty freaking cool new features like Loot Lizards, Stash Priority system, and the Imperial Undead event. We talk a lot about the game and then dive into a whole discussion on seasonal models and what works and does not work for them. We also tangent off into a discussion about the Clue movie from the 80s for some reason… so look forward to that. From there we talk a bit about Dwarven Realms as it gets closer to the full release of the game. Ash, Kodra, and Tam talk a bit about their experiences playing the ISS Vanguard Living World physical board game. Thalen kicks off a discussion about Astro Bot and how it is essentially the mascot game Sony has always needed. Ash shares his experiences with Gundam Breaker 4 and Tam a bit about playing Hades 2 as a research project. Packed show with roughly half of the topics getting bumped to next week.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the start of the reset for the second cycle of the Last Epoch ARPG. That is a contorted mess to say, and EHG really needs to get better at naming this shit. In fact is is actually less clear than calling it Cycle 2… because EHG refers to this as Cycle 1.1 Refresh. Legitimately name things more clearly so that you can understand which Cycle/League/Season you are in with a reasonable chronology. Diablo IV just simply increments the number and Path of Exile gives every league a name and a patch version. Naming your cycles off the arbitrary versioning scheme of your game is kind of madness. Whatever the case… I opted to essentially recreate my last seasonal character to see if I could improve upon the design and as such BelBurnsBrightly now exists… I would absolutely give you a character profile link if LastEpochTools were updated. Instead, I present you BelLikesToSpin the last incarnation which I will be following pretty closely.
I’ve said before that the only thing standing in the way of EHG claiming the “Best ARPG” crown is more content. They are competing with Path of Exile for that title when it has over a decade’s worth of content that just creates this environment where there is always something interesting going on in your maps. This cycle reset introduced the addition of Loot Lizards, and I have to say… they go a long way towards making maps feel fun and exciting. Essentially these critters spawn with a pack of loot on their back and you have to chase them down and “knock the pack off” their back… giving you a lovely loot pinata explosion. They come in a bunch of different varieties but so far I have seen ones that drop Rare loot, ones that drop Idols, and ones that drop Unique items. In all cases, they drop a lot of affix shards and glyphs which go a long way to helping you get started in the new league.
They also seem to have a very high drop rate for Runes of Ascendence which is helping me out considerably in getting the uniques that I need for my build. It took me two Runes to fish for the Firestarter’s Torch which is quite possibly my favorite item in the entire game. After that I started fishing for the cast on smite sword Palarus’s Sacred Light. I think I am five runes down and have not picked that up yet, but I did get the Humming Bee which is shockingly good for this build. I am hitting extremely fast which is causing me to gain a bunch of ward while spinning through the levels adding significant survival while also increasing my elemental damage output a tiny bit. The rest of my gear is a bit of a mess bit I am leveling several weavers will items, and then using Calamity to increase my fire damage and Avarice to give me elemental leech. I did have two quicksilver coils, but I dropped one to level a WW ring to see what I might get from it.
The other major system change is the addition of a stash tab priority system… which will be familiar to you as the affinity system in Path of Exile. Thing is this goes so much further than that system ever has by adding all manner of filter parameters allowing you to get really specific about what you want to store in which tabs. Stash maintenance is one of the biggest annoyances in an ARPG and being able to dump the loot you want to keep quickly is so important to the flow in your endgame progression. So for example if I wanted to create a tab that ONLY stores Legendary Potential 3 and 4 uniques, for a specific class… I could do so extremely simply. Basically, this adds all the power of the loot filter to a stash affinity system which now officially crowns EHG the “Best ARPG Stash Tab System”. Since GGG has been spurred into action to create quality life improvements based on innovations from Last Epoch, I am hoping we see something like this in Path of Exile soon.
I am not skipping any of the content so I am slowly chewing my way through the campaign. I got through the beginning of Imperial Era Majeka last night and will pick up from there today and push through hopefully to the end. I am working on getting my survival up a bit because I know Lagon is always going to be a bit of an obstacle. I am no longer deathless because last night while hanging out on Discord with Ace, I had to get one of my cats off my PC case…. because she was clawing at the magnetic vent cover. When I looked away something wandered over and wrecked me. At least this saves me the frustration of losing my deathless stream to either Lagon or Rahyeh which are traditionally the things that kill me in other runs.
One of the persistent memes in the POE community is “Login Dude!” when there is a good patch or a quirky bug worth exploiting. So I guess this is the point where I say to you that if you played Last Epoch in the past, this weird awkward cycle reset period is a great time to return. There is plenty of meat on those bones when it comes to the addition of Loot Lizards alone, and the quality of life that the stash tab priority system adds greatly improves the quality of life. Basically, I am at the point where I really need to sit down and build my loot filter for the league so that I can start sifting through loot that is actually worth keeping and worth breaking down. It isn’t necessarily a daunting or difficult task, just one that I had been avoiding.
Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.
I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.
I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.
Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.
What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.
I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.
Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.
Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.
Good Morning Folks! Happy first day back from a long holiday weekend for my fellow United States friends. I took Friday off so as a result… today is going to be rough to get through. I am also still fighting whatever generic crud my wife brought home to me, and neither of us is in great shape. However, I am going to push through it and get shit done today. I spent most of my weekend casually leveling my new Guardian in Guild Wars 2. I am really glad that I did this experiment because Guardian had always been one of those classes that I thought I could really like… but never spent much time playing because I just was not feeling the Asura that I chose to level back in the day. As a Norn however, I have had a freaking blast and last night I pushed through to level 70 and then decided to go ahead and boost the last ten levels so that I would get a full set of gear. We’ve had friends find out the hard way that if you wait until level 80, you don’t get the gear from taking the character boost, and given that I had several sitting around… I did not want to get busy and make that mistake.
On Saturday I ground out another Gift of Battle because the anniversary buff was in place, making it got considerably faster. I am sure there were ways that I could have made it more efficient, but I started around 10 am and wrapped up around 2 pm, taking me about four hours of focused gameplay to get through it. During most of that time, I was in the Eternal Battlegrounds either capturing objectives or defending Stonemist Castle when our group held it. I am still not entirely certain why I enjoy WvW so much, but there is just something about being a ranger and harassing enemy armies at range that I enjoy. More specifically I really enjoy defending objectives and getting up on the wall and raining down arrows on the entire mass of players.
The good thing about grinding out that Gift of Battle was that I ended up with a ton of Jade Heroics as a result. So when I boosted to level 80, I popped over into one of the borderlands and bought seventeen Maguuma Scrolls giving me a huge boost in Hero Points. I then zoned out from the Guild Hall into Seitung Province and after running around and collecting all of the Hero Points there, I was able to unlock Willbender completely. I’ve been super curious about the Hammer Heal Alac Bender for awhile, but based on what I saw from Snowcrows it seems like the ideal version currently is with a spear which makes it even better. I’ve really enjoyed Guardian Spear and as a result, now I am running around with a scuffed version of the build while wearing Celestial Gear since that can kind of do everything… while also not being necessarily the best at anything.
Right now my goal is to complete the original storyline this evening, and then from there, I am not sure if I will keep pushing up through the Living World content or take a break from Guardian and go back to my Ranger main. Based on what I heard from Thalen this weekend, it seems like maybe the Janthir meta is starting to get a bit easier and as such I would probably like to start farming it nightly. I also need to get better at catching the other key metas as they are spawning, because I really should be doing some of the Heart of Thorns content weekly. I really need to build back up my stockpile of Mystic Coins and as such I need to start hitting the leyline event each day for a while. I am getting really close to being able to craft the Juggernaut legendary and mostly at this point it is just a matter of deciding that I am willing to buy the rest of the trophies that I need.
In other weekend news, I pushed across the finish line and picked up my ridiculous pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I am now way less under pressure to do PVP each day, and feel considerably better about that… but would have been super sad had I not picked up this monstrosity. PVP Roulette is still a really good way to get a quick experience boost on characters and as a result, I will still probably keep doing it whenever I am in the mood to play some FFXIV. We did not do our weekly raid nonsense in part because we were down an Ash but more so because I was feeling like complete crap. It is a bit of a bummer as I really do enjoy the Arcadion raid. I’m in a bit of a weird place with FFXIV at the moment, because I feel like I have accomplished everything I wanted to do in Dawntrail. I cleared the normal raid and completed a set of gear from it… and am mostly okay with just muddling about aimlessly until the next content drop whenever that happens.
Last week we got news that Last Epoch was going to be doing a cycle reset with some updates, and I figure I will hop on this train on the 19th. I did not really play Last Epoch much this cycle in part because Dawntrail was a thing… and then once that wound down a bit the new Path of Exile League was a thing. Bad timing on both parts meant that while technically I got a character to empowered monoliths I didn’t really play that much. A cycle reset will mean that I can go through the experience of a fresh start mid-cycle and hopefully feel better about the current state of the game because I will be in the mood for it. I am not sure if I am going to go down the same path I did for leveling, but the whole fire warpath smite thing was pretty fun. Any other builds that I am interested in feel like they are way more gear-dependent and while there are a few key items for the build I was playing… it worked just fine without them.
Until then however I seem to be in a Guild Wars 2 frame of mind, and I am going to ride this until it peters out. I am not sure if I will be playing the new Guardian a ton, shift back to my Ranger… or even maybe revisit my Warrior or Necromancer which I still enjoy playing. Ranger is still probably the most fun to do group content on, but he is also one of the more selfish characters that I have given that I am not really providing much to a party setting. That was in large part why I wanted to play around with Heal Alacrity Willbender on the Guardian because it is way more group-centric, but also seems to be a really good solo experience. Anyways that was my extended weekend… hopefully yours was also pretty great minus the whole being sick thing.
