leveling

Good Morning Folks. I said I was going to talk about Last Epoch this morning, and essentially I am going to attempt to present a case for why you should try the game out for the upcoming Season 2 launch on Thursday. I feel like I should set out some credentials before we go forward. I play a lot of ARPGs and have been deeply engaged in the seasonal model since the launch of Diablo III Reaper of Souls expansion. It took me awhile to get into Path of Exile, but when it did… it grabbed a hold of me super freaking hard and never fully let go. When I say I have played a lot of these games I have played roughly 1000+ hours of Diablo III, 500+ hours of Diablo IV, 3000+ hours of Path of Exile, 500+ hours of Path of Exile II, and 650+ hours of Last Epoch. Truth be told I probably have more hours of Path of Exile than that… but several leagues ago I swapped over to the non-Steam client and lost my easy gauge of time spent and have ground up multiple level 95s and two characters to level 100 since doing that.

I lay out my credentials mostly to say that I am very much a purveyor of the loot explosion and a connoisseur of full screen clears. Essentially I love these games for a few reasons. I love getting loot and I love clearing huge packs of monsters… and there is something that I find satisfying about progressing a character and seeing where I can push it. I love the subtle art of gearing and even playing the same build… how each specific instance of a character has its own feel to it. I love the various things you can to do tweak endgame strategies, and I love how I can effective turn my brain off and just fall into a trance-like flow state when I play the game. I do not claim to be particularly skilled at any of this, but I do find it deeply enjoyable and I regularly am listening to some audio-book while I grind away in peace and harmony. There is something about that combined experience that uniquely satisfies my cravings like nothing else.

Before I talk about Last Epoch, I am going to talk a bit about Diablo games because be it Diablo III or Diablo IV they have some of the same pitfalls. They are essentially relatively shallow experiences and are fun for a weekend or two before I really lose any desire to keep moving forward. In both cases it is relatively easy to get your character set up and functional… but absolute unobtanium to actually get perfectly optimized. In the case of D3 getting a set up and running and then upgrading it to ancient legendaries is pretty straight forward and is just a matter of spinning the loot wheel enough times. Getting Primal Ancient Legendaries however… is effectively not something you are ever going to see. Similarly in Diablo IV getting a set of Ancestral gear is pretty straight forward but acquiring Mythical items is damned near impossible to get your full set without dipping into trade… which is its own ridiculous experience.

Path of Exile on the other hand is not straight forward at all… in fact you would pretty much be lost if you were not following a guide. After around 2000 hours of gameplay I finally reached the point where I felt comfortable building my own characters relatively successfully. I understood the fundamentals of defensive and offensive layers… but the whole process of gearing the character was its own problem. The game has a deep and rich crafting system but it requires a freaking degree in craftology to figure it out. Maybe if you started back at the beginning and learned each system as it was introduced… it was not that big of a deal. It also requires you to understand what feels like a bajillion different unique currencies, all of which do different things and can be used at exactly the right time to influence the outcome of an item.

Because of the complexity of crafting and the very low odds that you will ever find an item that has exactly the stats that your build needs to succeed… it pushes you to utilize the trade system. Even thousands of hours into the game I find this system to be deeply obtuse. Essentially you price an item and stick it into a stash tab… which causes it to show up on the trade website where you can search for items and then whisper a player… hoping that they are actually paying attention and willing to stop what they are doing at that moment to teleport to their hideout and invite you there to trade in person with them. Its a bad system… but it is the best system that the game has and ultimately is the only way that people can get exactly the items that they need for the builds that they are trying to build… which require VERY specific stat breaks in order to succeed by out-mathing their way through problems. I love Path of Exile with every fiber of my being… but even I can admit it is a giant cluster-fuck of gaming experience.

I would never ask you to sit down and play Path of Exile without a predetermined build in front of you, likely on your second monitor in Path of Building… a third party tool which keeps track of this information. However with Last Epoch, my suggestion is just to play the game and figure things out as you go. Going into Season 2, the only permanent decision that you cannot undo is your initial choice of class. In the current version you cannot change Ascendancy, but they even made that flexible with season 2. It is very easy just to “fuck around and find out” what you like and what you want to build. Coming from games like POE1 and POE2 where there are a handful of viable builds at any given time… I am consistently shocked at just how many options there are in this game. Shit I have built the same effective build idea five different ways, and all of them were relatively successful in their own ways.

Essentially the only permanent decision you need to make is which of the five base classes you are going to play. From left to right you have the Sentinel which is this games tanky heavily armored Warrior/Paladin type character that also has a path which makes it more of a Deathknight/Shadowknight type character. Then you have the Rogue which tends to excel at light melee and bow based combat so your Ranger/Thief/Assassin type character. In the middle we have the Mage which is your finger wiggler deluxe that wields elemental magic and also has some hybrid magic melee builds. With a bear companion we have the Primalist which serves the dual roles of Barbarian and Druid and features some Hunter style companion gameplay as well as nature and transformation magics. Lastly we have the Witch that fills the role of the dark caster either diving into Necromancy or deep Cthonic magics. The only real negative about this line up is that they are gender locked, and that you have no real choice as to their default graphical appearance. Eleventh Hour Games has said this is on the roadmap but no clue if and when it will ever happen. Right now the models they are using do not support any real customization.

From there once you hit around level 15 in the campaign you can choose a mastery for your class. This allows you to further specialize your character and ultimately determines which abilities you will have access to. For example if you choose Sentinel you can begin to draw on abilities from the Forge Guard, Void Knight, and Paladin trees… with there being a chain that locks off access to half of the tree for any of the masteries that you did not choose. I will talk about that in a few, but essentially this allows you to further shape the type of build that you want to craft. Each mastery gives you access to four abilities that are unique to that tree which then dictate what types of builds you can make. This used to be a permanent choice, but with Season 2 launch you will be able to respec this with gold which is the common in game dropped currency. I believe they said that at max level this caps out at requiring 500k gold to respec… which is a decent sum but also pretty easily obtained if you are doing endgame content.

The character build itself is effectively divide up into two pieces… the passive tree and then your skill specializations. Once you have chosen your mastery you gain access to the three other trees for your class. For example this is a screenshot that I took from one of my Void Knight characters which shows that I have full access to the entire tree. If I were to look at my Paladin and Forge Guard trees I would have a chain down the middle of the screen which locks off access to anything in the later half of the tree. As you spend points you unlock abilities along the bottom, which means that in order to really flesh out your build you need to dump points into the tree in order to get some of those abilities. However this also means that some of the abilities are pretty easy to get allowing you to effectively multi-class in abilities from the other specs. All of these abilities have detailed tool-tips, with hotlinks to an in-game wiki explaining what every term actually means so that you don’t have to keep shelling out to a third party site.

The other part of your build is which skills you chose to specialize. You can use ANY ability you have unlocked but you only get five slots for you to specialize those abilities unlocking a detailed skill tree for each of them. For example the above tree is for an ability called Warpath which is effectively this games equivalent to whirlwind or cyclone. The tree allows you to tweak how it works for example I have gone down a path which allows me to convert all of the physical damage to fire damage, but I could have just as easily gone down a different path which converted all of the damage to void damage. Essentially specializing your abilities allows you to lean into various synergies between the abilities on your character and the types of gear that you are using. My warpath also casts Smite automatically… which then leans upon the Smite spec tree which allows me to customize those automatic procs even further. As with the passives, all of this is in relatively easy to understand language and has definitions that link back to the in-game wiki.

The campaign pulls you through a Chrono Trigger style story as we time travel between different eras of the same world known as Eterra. We acquire a device called the Epoch which allows us to shift back and forth through reality between different times… and potentially different dimensions as we attempt to stop events from happening that ultimately destroy the world. Right now the game dead ends at Chapter Nine, and fair warning the game is not finished currently. If you are a “one and done” player who considers getting the campaign to be your engagement with a title… then you might want to wait until later. However I tend to use the campaign as a gauge for how successful my character is doing. There is a bunch of side content that you do not have to engage with as well as a number of campaign skips that you can use if you know where they are, but this ends up dumping you into the endgame really under-leveled so I am not going to explain how to do any of that. It is a fun campaign though and I do not mind repeating it with each new character, which is not something I can say for many ARPGs.

Where the game really shines is its crafting system, and last year I wrote an entire primer on how it works. Effectively at its base level items drop with a stat called Forging Potential, and each action that you take upon an item uses some of this potential. When the item hits zero potential, then you effectively have locked the current state of the item and can do nothing more with it. Runes and Glyphs along with Affix Shards allow you to modify and upgrade the stats on an item slowly improving it to be a bit more ideal for your build. You can absolutely get through the campaign by just throwing on whatever happens to drop on the ground, but as you progress into the endgame you are going to need the correct stats for your build and the crafting system allows you to manufacture the items that you need. Generally speaking you are going to start with an item that has two or three abilities that you want, add a fourth that matches your build, and then attempt to improve it until you run out of potential.

But the optimization does not stop there, once you have acquired the uniques you want for your build and some reasonably rolled items. You can start collecting uniques with Legendary Potential on them and attempting to slam them together with exalted items… aka items that have a Tier 6 or Tier 7 roll on them and show up as purple… in order to create something called a Legendary. Legendary Potential is a stat that allows you to imprint a certain number of stats from an exalted item onto it. You stick both items in a specific crafting bench called the Eternity Cache that appears at the end of a specific dungeon… the Unique and Exalted item are sacrificed and you get a shiny new Red Legendary item out on the other side. It will have chosen randomly a number of affixes from your input Exalted item up to the amount of legendary potential on that item. The example above shows me doing this with an item with 2 Legendary potential, and the end result is an item that gained two random stats from my Exalted item.

What I love about this system is that it is super easy to get to “good enough” but it is an uphill to get perfection. Though you can easily keep making attempts and incrementally improving things on the same character for a really long time. Coming with Season 2 there is the ability to guarantee at least one stat on your legendary item, pending you run a tier 2 dungeon in order to craft it. This is pretty freaking huge because in many cases you only really absolutely need a single stat to make your gear really good. You can still keep chasing an item with four legendary potential and then chasing a perfectly rolled exalted item to slam into it… but all of this feels like it is way more achievable than doing the same thing in another ARPG. There are also methods to take unique items with no legendary potential on them… and craft them into entirely randomly rolled legendary items… some of which might be really good for your build, but is ultimately a complete crapshoot. Similarly with Season 2 they are adding in a system that allows you to attempt to upgrade the legendary potential on a unique and either end up with a higher amount… or stripping it off entirely… allowing you to throw it in an egg and try and craft a random legendary with it.

When you arrive at the endgame you are asked to make a choice between two factions, that will ultimately dictate how you interact with loot going forward. You can choice the Merchant’s Guild with opens up the ability to sell items on the market and buy things from other players. Or if you are like me and would prefer to acquire your own loot if reasonably possible… there is the Circle of Fortune. This faction essentially allows you to improve your chances of getting better loot outcomes and spend favor on items called prophecies which allow specific types of gear to drop under very specific circumstances. For example you might have a prophecy that drops 3 pairs of unique boots when you kill a specific boss, that can be repeated 3 times… allowing you to more specifically target farm specific items. Once you start gaining faction and leveling this up, it is immediately noticeable how much better your loot drops become. You can still trade with fellow members of the Circle of Fortune, but it requires you to actually spend time playing with them and build up resonance which you then consume to send them items. Items that drop because of your faction perks though become flagged for that faction and become unusable the Merchants guild, so that you can’t really game the system and farm up a bunch of stuff and then swap factions.

One of the problems with generating large amounts of loot is that you sometimes need a filter to help you organize and highlight items that you actually care about. This is really a concept that showed up with Path of Exile, and mostly you end up relying on a third party filter crafted by someone like Neversink because they are pretty complicated to generate on your own. Understanding this issue the good folks at Eleventh Hour Games built their loot filter into the game itself, and honestly it is pretty straight forward to configure on your own. Essentially I build custom filters for all of my characters and it is as simple as “I am interested in these base items” and that I am looking for at least two of these affixes on the same item. The in game tool actually shows every single affix that can drop on an item really allowing you to drill down to exactly what you are looking for. Sure there are technically some general community supported filters that you can download and import but I have consistently found it easier to create my own. Some build makers will generate a filter and include it along with the guides.

Probably the biggest weakness of Last Epoch was the endgame. The monolith system is good enough but it could get really repetitive. Ultimately I would usually get my characters to 95ish before losing focus and either rolling a new character, or wandering back to Path of Exile. However with the Tombs of the Erased expansion, it is in large part a mostly endgame focused update. This is adding itemized maps similar to Path of Exile, as well as a bunch of extra content that can show up and impact your endgame. There are also a number of unique map types which give you various crafting options, which means you will have specific things that you are chasing in addition to your gearing goals. I am super freaking excited to see all of this new stuff coming, and more than that I am really looking forward to this game finally shifting into a more standard three to four month release model.

The new season starts on April 17th at 11 am CDT and features over one hundred pages of patch notes. The thing is… while there are a few builds that were nerfed a bit, way more were buffed and even the nerfed builds largely just went from endless amounts of damage to doing reasonable amounts of damage and are still going to be viable. Its essentially been six months since the last major update, and I feel like they did more than six months worth of work in the process. Effectively when they launched 1.1.7 they realized that their original roadmap needed to change. Players were almost universally complaining that there just was not enough to do at the endgame, which forced them to shift gears and really dive into that type of content. Seeing the end results… I am really freaking excited to get my hands on the new content and play it.

I realize that this post comes off as a bit of propaganda, but honestly… it is intentional. I love Last Epoch and I really appreciate the story of Eleventh Hour Games. Legitimately this entire company started as a Reddit thread about a bunch of people wanting to build the ARPG they always wanted to play. Hands down I feel like Last Epoch has the best systems of any game on the market in this genre. I want it to succeed, and I legitimately feel like it sits in this perfect happy medium between the simplicity and often dumbed down nature of Diablo, and the over complicated and obtuse nature of Path of Exile. What it has been missing is a really robust endgame, and it seems like Tombs of the Erased is finally bringing that. Sure there are still things missing like the last bits of the campaign and there is no social construct for guilds/clans but that can arrive over time. I have a blast each time a new content patch drops in this game, and I think you will too.

If you want more information from me on this game I wrote a more detailed Primer on the game when it launched into full release early last year. I also created a much more detailed crafting primer around the same time. If you are more video motivated, I record dumb little videos all the time about the games I am playing when I want to talk about a build or something that I am doing, and there is a section for “Bel Bungles Last Epoch” collecting a bunch of these. Lastly there is of course the Last Epoch archives here on this blog where I have collected all of the posts throughout the years where I have talked specifically about the game, as well as any episodes of AggroChat where we discussed it. I know I will be playing the game this Thursday and will very likely be actively blogging about my adventures here. I hope to see you all there as well.