Good Morning Folks. Waiting Room by Fugazi is not only my favorite song from that band… but one of my favorite songs of all time. Right now I am very much sitting in the waiting room, waiting on the Last Epoch servers to come up and the Tombs of the Erased season to start. I did a very dumb thing. I took the day off work, which almost certainly means that the game is going to be unplayable for large chunks of the day. This is pretty much the rule of game launches… that you never take time off for it. However in this case I have a backup plan, or at least some chores that need to get done around the house. So once I wrap this post I will be going in the backyard and continuing the leaf removal process that we have been doing for the last few days so that we can properly open the back yard and set up the patio off our bedroom.
One of the productive things that you can do while waiting on the servers to come up, is to fiddle around with your loot filter. This is legitimately one of my favorite parts of Last Epoch is that I can customize my filter until my heart is content, and honestly… it is way more straight forward than you might think. It seems like each new league I greatly simplify my process and filter out more chaff. This is essentially the base version of my filter and they are applied from the bottom up so you sort of have to remember the order of operations. As the league progresses I will tighten my filter but right now going into the league this is what I am going to be running with.
Since they get applied from the ground up, here is a brief explanation of what each filter does:
- Starting at level 5 I am going to hide all Normal aka White Items
- Starting at level 15 I am going to hide all Magic aka Blue Items.
- Starting at level 40 I am going to hide all Rare aka Yellow Items… and at that point I will probably delete the first two rules to free up some space. Later I will tweak this rule to remove the level requirements and start hiding Purple items.
- The next rule is to hide all Idols, because most of them are absolute trash.
- The next rule is a Recolor rule, which will show and color any Idols with at least two affixes that I care about on them. I trigger the Emphasis bit which puts the item names in all Caps so that I can know for certain it was triggered by a rule and that it did not just somehow slip through the cracks of my hide rules.
- The next rule I am looking for any item that has an affix that I care about coloring it blue. This is my shard fodder rule allowing me to build up crafting resources that I need through salvaging items.
- Next up I am looking for any item that has at least TWO affixes that I care about on it and then coloring those purple.
- Lastly is my “good item” rule where I am looking for any item with at least 3 affixes that I care about and a total item weight of at least 20 tiers which I color Red.
You can do a lot more but for the time being this is what I am going to roll into the new season with. As the season goes on I will start caring about only wanting specific base types which will further limit the visual clutter from mapping.
In other filter news… Neversink/Filterblade has been updated with a brand new theme called Cobalt. I spent some time last night running with it and I really like it quite a bit. Sure it is going to take awhile to train my brain on what is and what is not something that I care about, but the colors that are being used feel fresh and new. This is in honor of the 10th anniversary of Filterblade, which really is the site you should be using for your item filter needs in Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. In a perfect world I would have EHG hire this team to rework their own item filter visualizations. The thing I miss most when playing Last Epoch is the “tink” sound from a great drop.
I’ve made it to T10 maps after spending two days hunting for another nexus of corruption. I’ve also started to actually see this again, since the T10 mobs are a bit rippier than the T9 and below ones were. I am wondering if I need to tweak my gear to add on more survival bits, or if this is just the point at which armor begins to be ineffective against damage. I’ve tried to do my third ascendancy a few times and I just can’t. Either I need to spend time farming lower tier Sanctums looking for honor resist idols, or I need a really good run of RNG in the Trial of Chaos. If I can get my next two points I can buff all of my resists up to 89. The thing that is super brutal though is there are these plants that spawn from certain monsters that throw out a ton of chaos balls… and they will just fucking rip through you and if there is too much mob density on screen you cannot even see them.
In totally not ARPG news… my friend Mog/Astella has had the foresight to create a Fediverse Hunter Squad for Monster Hunter Wilds. Since you can seemingly be in a bunch of different squads I joined this morning, and it is going to be an excellent time for anyone on Mastodon/The Fediverse that is also playing the game. Essentially you can search for the squad via the id TA8E48PM and then request to join. Mog had already thrown me an invite so this process was greatly simplified for me. Also side note if you are tired of trying to be normal on social media and want a place almost exclusively populated with fellow weirdos… then check out the Mastodon Server that I help administrate. Right now I am on Bluesky and Tumblr, but the real place I consider my home is The Fediverse aka Mastodon aka Gamepad.club.
Anyways! I really hope today’s launch of the new Last Epoch season goes really smoothly. They are getting a ton of press from various ARPG streamers, so I am hoping it pays off massively for them.