legacy of phrecia

Last Epoch Season 2 Delayed

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday we got a bit of news from Eleventh Hour Games that they would be delaying the launch of Last Epoch Season 2 from April 2nd to April 17th. This is to create some distance between their launch date and that of Path of Exile 2 and its first league on the 4th. This whole situation is frustrating because multiple sources have stated that Eleventh Hour Games was in communication with Grinding Gear Games regarding their choice of April 2nd making it an extreme dick move to schedule their own start two days later. I entirely feel like GGG is in the wrong here… but there also may be some external forces at work that we do not know about.

Whatever the case this is probably the right decision for Eleventh Hour Games. As stated in a Zizaran video talking about this situation, it is rare that people go back to a game after the launch… so that would likely mean folks would play Last Epoch for a day or two… if they even gave it a shot at all, and then would flip to Path of Exile II and never look back. I am disappointed mostly because right now I care far more about Last Epoch than I do Path of Exile II. I do not think that there is going to be enough in the upcoming patch to really shift the trajectory of POE2 enough for me to truly enjoy it more than the first game. I might be shocked on the 27th when they announce all of the content, but in truth I mostly just want to get my hands on the redesigned endgame for Last Epoch.

In the meantime I am still playing quite a bit of the Legacy of Phrecia event. In theory I should hit level 99 tonight and I am starting to pick back up and work on some of the challenges that I never completed from Settlers of Kalguur. I’m cycling between Delve and mapping and still only have two of the four voidstones unlocked. I should probably work on that, but I hate the process of grinding for the fragments required to attempt Maven and Uber Elder. The whole bossing system in Path of Exile feels bad to me. I feel like there should be quest support for all four voidstones like there are the first two so that you can knock these out in a relatively straightforward fashion. At some point I should probably try out a T17 again to see if I can complete that, but my build is not exactly great at bossing. Generally speaking I just do not enjoy that side of the game and the whole process of getting access to the fights.

I have burned through a good chunk of my reserves of gold and dust in order to start up a bunch of mappers. One of the league challenges from Settlers that I never knocked out was running 200 t14 or better maps at 100% success rate with mappers, and I figured I might as well start chipping away at that since I am still playing. If I can push to level 100 and complete the rest of those maps that will knock out one more of the challenges and potentially give me a bigger totem pole for my hideout. In truth Path of Exile is just a comfortable activity for me to spend chill evenings listening to an audiobook, and has kind of become my default gaming activity. I hate that among the AggroChat folks, I am the only one who seems to have really reached that point with the game.

I am also still pushing forward with Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon because I hate having a “did not complete” in my list. I swapped over to the Soundbooth Theater version of the audiobook and it is infinitely better than the one I was listening to earlier. There is a significant difference between being read a book out loud, and having someone act out a book… and at this point I have become spoiled by the later. This is a brutal story… in content… and in just how much graphic detail is put into it. I am not sure I would ever suggest this to someone else, but it has enough of a hook into me that I am going to see it to its conclusion. Effectively this is Hostel style torture porn, and my kink does not run in that direction.

A New Sceptre

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Morning Folks. Essentially each night I am progressing a bit in Monster Hunter Wilds, and then wind up back in Path of Exile for super chill mapping and delve time. There is only so much directed combat that I can take in a single evening. Monster Hunter Wilds is cool but also feels like it has zero chill right now because every quest leads to another big boss fight. I did spend some time last night roaming around and picking up materials so that I could upgrade a few things. It is probably weird that Path of Exile is known for being this obtuse nut to crack… but that I also find it my super chill happy place. I’ve been slowly working my way through unlocking all of the Heist quests, which given that I tend to find two to three rogue caches in each map… it is going pretty quickly.

Over the weekend I recorded another one of my dumb little videos where I effectively documented the state of my Righteous Fire Scavenger build. I personally find these useful because as I look back on various builds it helps me remember exactly what the state of the build was when I stopped playing it. This one was especially important I thought because we will not be getting Scavenger for very long, and the whole chaos explosions thing is really fun to experience. Essentially I zoom into a pack and it more or less explodes and then proliferates out to everything else in the area causing them to either explode or at least get whittled down in health so that my Righteous Fire can finish them off. I still prefer RF Chieftain because it is way more sturdy, but this is pretty damned fun.

Yesterday I bankrupted myself and bought a Putrid Cloister which unlocked the 3 Crafted mods benchcraft. Then I liquidated all of my available chaos to buy two Divine Orbs so that I could take the Sceptre I had been sitting on and turn it into a Damage Multi/Fire Multi setup. When Righteous Fire lost its flat damage the whole gem levels thing became way less important in the long run, and you are generally better off just trying for as much damage multi on your weapon as you can get. The other stats are largely just useless but I had a few exalted orbs sitting on my bank and figured might as well slam something on it. I even used an imprint beast on this just in case the regal orb bricked the item, so that I had one more shot at it. I now have an imprint that is mostly useless, but I would rather use it and not need it than need it and not have used it given that I captured the beast on my own.

While I was in a video recording mood I also took a bit of time and documented the final state of my Pohx League build, which was Ice Trap of Hollowness Trickster. I really do want to revisit this build during a proper league to see how far I can take it. Right now I just lack the evasion to make this feel more comfortable. I would really like to be able to hit 90% evasion chance and the limited trade environment made that difficult… or at least unaffordable. During a proper trade league there would be way more gear available, and I would probably be able to find an Ice Trap Dragonfang amulet. I had a search running for a few days and none of them showed up on the market. If this says viable, I may legitimately start it during 3.26 just to see how far I can take it, given that I already know I can run up a RF character as a backup in a few days without much issue if it crashes and burns.

This morning I got the first Tabula Rasa that I have gotten in a few league events. I think Crucible was the last league when I was getting these constantly. I had a bank full of various corrupted versions because I kept getting them, and kept rolling the dice with Vaal orbs. Not that I plan on leveling anything else during Legacy of Phrecia, but a Tabula is always a good way to start out a build. Though over the last few leagues I think I prefer some of the other starter chests if you can throw enough currency on it to get it up to four links. It is really hard to beat Thousand Ribbons for starter gear.

Last night I took out the Black Flame and then continued on and took out a corrupted Doshaguma and then a corrupted Rathalos. At that point I wandered around for awhile until the itch to play some Path of Exile caught me. I seem to only be able to take about three or four boss fights before needing to do something else for a bit. I looked at a quest guide and it does not appear that I am even halfway through the main story quest yet. I am not exactly in a massive rush, but I do prefer the endgame loop of Monster Hunter games to the story driven leveling process. Mostly I don’t love the whole fiddling around with temporary gear sets and would prefer to invest my time in a final build. It is what it is… and I find it bizarre the games that I enjoy the leveling process in like Path of Exile and the games that I just want a skip button to zoom straight to endgame goodness like Monster Hunter.

Anyways! I figure I will be flipping back and forth between these two games at least until April 2nd when the new Last Epoch Cycle lands. Depending on how engaged I get with Monster Hunter I might swap from Path of Exile to Last Epoch and then alternate between LE and MHWilds.

AggroChat #514 – Seeking Tribooty

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Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We are down our West Coast contingent this week but carried forth with a relatively short show.  Bel talks a bit about the Anti Sanctum Alliance and how it seems to have actually made an impact at least in the pricing of Sanctum Tomes in the Legacy of Phrecia event. From there Thalen shares his experiences with The Roottrees Are Dead, which is a logic puzzle spiritual successor to games like Return of the Obra Dinn.  We move on to talking a bit about Monster Hunter Wilds and our early experiences so far.  We’ve needed some Palico shenanigans to help us cope with our present dystopia. Last week we got a new feature trailer for the upcoming Last Epoch Cycle 2 coming April 2nd.  We spend a bit of time talking about what has been revealed for the new features and how it appears like the long wait has been worth it.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile
    • Legacy of Phrecia
    • Impact of the Anti-Sanctum Alliance
  • The Roottrees Are Dead
  • Monster Hunter Wilds
  • Last Epoch Cycle 2 Trailer

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Scuffed Scavenger

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Hey Folks! Things are starting to come together. Yesterday I made a number of changes to my build that have incrementally moved me towards the indestructible nonsense that is the pinnacle form of Righteous Fire. The next map that I run I will ding level 92 but this morning I dumped a fresh POB to show the state of things. The biggest change is that I managed to pick up a Shaper shield and after running a bunch of Harvest I managed to craft one with 5% life gain on block, which allowed me to shift to the block version of the build. What confuses me however is I have no clue how Pohx is hitting 75% spell block with his build, so I am going to have to pay considerably closer attention to his POB to understand it.

Right now I have 4687 life, but that will improve as I continue to shift things around in the build and pile on additional levels. I have 83% Fire Resistance and 80% Cold and Lightning which when combined with 75% attack block and 30% spell block feels pretty comfortable. Most of the time I can just stand still in a pack of mobs and my health barely moves. I really need more regeneration at this point because I am not super comfortable with only 1100 ish. I would really prefer to be sitting somewhere around 2000, but had to give up some nodes on the tree as well as the regen % on my helmet. I’m essentially playing a juggling act right now since I am not able to focus ONLY on Fire Resistance since I am not playing a Chieftain.

I made a number of gear swaps. First up I rolled a much better temporary sceptre using alts and then threw some ignite and additional fire damage on it. Sadly I could not craft the big betrayal Fire/Ignite on it, but I have a few more sceptres that I am working on rolling T1 damage over time multi on so I can try and recombinate something with both generic multi and fire multi on it. I picked up a somewhat scuffed Elder helm and got 20 Burning Damage/20 Concentrated Effect on it giving me a psuedo-six-link Fire Trap. I rolled a life recovery shield like I talked about earlier and also improved the Immortal Flesh I was running for a minimum negative resistance while gaining a bit of life and regen over my existing one.

My current Idol set up gives me a bunch of Delirium and I have managed to gather up raw cluster jewels and rolled a new Large cluster with Prismatic Heart, Widespread Destruction, and the throwaway Smoking Remains. I am combining it with one Medium that has Fan the Flames and Flow of Life, and another that has Flow of Life and Smoking Remains. As I find more minimum passive skill medium and large clusters I will probably try and craft slightly better versions of these cluster jewels. Smoking Remains is not exactly a great hit, but I also did not want to spend forever rolling over things and needed something I could use. I bought the cheapest two jewels I could find on the market with max Fire Multi and percentage life on them, but again those could be massively improved over time.

That is honestly the broad theme of this character… everything is more than a little scuffed. I’m trying to learn to give up on perfect items, because quite honestly I am not making enough currency to be able to afford them. Instead I am trying to find or craft items that are good enough for my purposes. I’ve played RF enough to know what I actually need, versus what the perfect textbook example of an item looks like. At this point I should be fine to get all the way through the rest of maps, and considerably deeper into delve. Right now I am sitting at 62 of 115 and have a few more maps that are ready to run. I’ve been holding off on running any Red maps because I know Kirac will almost exclusively start giving me those once I have passed that boundary. I am a weirdo that likes completing each individual tier in order if I can help it. I really need to find more cities down on delve, because they produce random map tiers rather than ones that I would natively have access to.

I’m recycling an image from yesterday of the pops, but really… I think this build is starting to feel stronger than the Chieftain build normally is at this point. The explosions feel like they spread so much further than the Hinekora explosions do. If I can get an Oriath’s End it will feel even better because effectively I will have three sources of explode combined with ignite proliferation… which should basically allow me to just charge through maps. The big goals going forward are to get another Cloak of Flame that is either better rolled than my current one, or has a useful corruption on it… and then figure out how best to six-link it. After that once I get back down into Delve I am going to start banking more 40% Elemental Damage sceptres in an attempt to recombinate a phenomenal one.

It feels like each league I play… I get more comfortable with understanding what I can do with gear and how I can acquire it on my own. If I can get a rudimentary understanding of recombination under my belt, I think it will improve gear acquisition considerably.