Friends… sometimes I get something stuck in my head that I cannot seem to forcibly dislodge. I’ve also been sick the last few days so apologies for the lack of any semblance of a post yesterday. Anyways… a while back I wrote a post talking about my attempt at creating something that feels like Righteous Fire in Last Epoch and it was great… up until the point that it was not. The build sort of just fell apart when I entered the level 100 Empowered Monoliths because I was not dealing enough damage and did not have enough survival… so basically could not keep moving forward with it. I attempted to resurrect the build and got it to a point where it felt “aggressively fine” but also not exactly what I was going for in the first place.
I had this entirely different plan and created a Paladin that I was going to do some Healing Hands nonsense with… but before long found myself leveling again with a Firestarter’s Torch and Warpath. Which led me down the path of trying to figure out how Paladin was better suited to the burnination of my dreams. It turns out yes… yes it is. However, I held off on talking about the build until I reached empowered monoliths because I did not want to prematurely share my nonsense before I knew if the wheels were going to stay on the bus this time. Today despite my generally lousy “sickboy” status… I wanted to share what I had been up to. Apologies for the thrashed state of my voice in the above video where I talk about the build and show off some empowered monolith gameplay.
So the idea is not at all dissimilar from the previous build… where I went all in on making Warpath do the fire damage things. I’m trying to do a few new things, namely since I am throwing in Judgment occasionally for more damage which causes me to stop spinning… I’ve taken Giant Splitter which does a bit AOE attack each time I stop channeling. I will likely shift around these points a bit before I land on the final configuration of the build. However, the concept is straight forward… convert all bleed to ignite and convert Warpath to fire damage so that I can scale it and the ignite damage at the same time. Also, this is what makes the build feel thematically like Righteous Fire so it is a hill I am willing to die on.
The big thing that is making the build function a little better… and is the reason why I care about it being Paladin is Holy Aura. This is the unique ability for the Paladin mastery and is just sort of a build-your-own-buff aura system. I’ve found nowhere in the game that properly shows all of the buffs that the aura is granting me so I pasted the above list from the build planner. Largely I am throwing points in fire damage, attack speed, and an ability that will proc a fire explosion whenever I have hit something 6 times in a row. I am not entirely certain if that last bit is worth it because it currently costs me 7 points to get there… and I am wondering if I would not be better off just taking flat damage scaling instead. This also serves as a burn button because when I activate the ability it increases how much of these buffs it is providing.
The thing I dig about the Last Epoch Tools Build Planner is that it collates all of the stats and gives you nice numerical rollups that don’t really exist in the game. Based on the stats in the planner I just linked it shows that I am dealing 832% increased fire damage and have 204% chance to ignite on hit… not factoring in that I have other abilities that Judgement that also have their own baked-in 200% additional chance to ignite on hit with that ability. On top of that for survival purposes, I have 18% melee leech and 7% leech off the additional damage that I am dealing over time with ignite. If I can swap some of my gear around and get more void resistance, I can throw on a shield that will generate a good deal more fire damage over time and ignite chance.
All things considered, I am pretty happy with the state of the build currently. There are a number of levers that I could pull to keep tweaking the damage while leveling the rest of the way to 100. Am I happier with it than I am with my Void Knight? Honestly, I am not sure. However, I am very happy that I did not give up on this concept and was finally able to see it the rest of the way to something viable for empowered monoliths. Would I suggest playing this build? Sure if you like burning things and want to track down either the items I am using or something that gives a similar amount of ignite chance and fire damage scaling. It is a heck of a lot of fun and offers a fairly chill playstyle which is ultimately the aspect of Righteous Fire that I loved so much. Throw on a movie or like I have recently… an audio book… and just grind out some chill monoliths for tasty loot. That really is my happy place.
Morning Folks! I am sure you are all probably sick of me talking about this build, but I think more than anything I am shocked it is still functional. I thought for certain that the wheels would begin to fall off as soon as I got deeper into Monolith Echoes. At this point, I am working on the level 75 Monolith and things still seem to be strong. In fact, as of this morning, I equipped a few new pieces of gear and the damage output seems to be even stronger. The only negative is that I feel like at some point I am going to have some survival problems. I have pretty bad resistance and not a ton of health. We struggle with some of the same problems as POE when you are trying to create a build with a bunch of uniques… you somewhat lack room for survival unless said uniques are already covering that.
I recorded a fresh video this morning of me doing a level 75 Monolith Echo, showing off what the gameplay looks like. For the most part I am just lighting everything that gets near me on fire, and that fire damage over time is eventually killing things. That which I don’t kill outright, my Manifest Armor minion or the trail of flame behind me tends to finish off. For those curious, I found out how to dump my build to Last Epoch Tools this morning, so you can see the current state of the build and the gear that I have equipped here. I would not follow directly in my footsteps though, because nothing I am doing is clean enough to be considered a proper build guide. I still feel like I need to rework most of my passives for example which is something I will probably do in the coming days.
I am still leaning heavily upon Firestarter’s Torch and the chance to inflict spreading flames. This does a lot of the work in making sure that everything is catching on fire. This morning I added Rahyeh’s Light which is a shield intended for a Judgement build but has stats that we care about and a heck of a lot of block chance and block effectiveness. I hope to find a version of this with Legendary Potential so I can maybe throw on all resistances or health on block. Sunwreath continues to do a lot of work in giving us melee ignite chance and fire damage over time. Sadly the flame reave lines are useless for us, but everything else works and again my hope is to stack on some sort of survival. Fiery Dragon Shoes are another new addition that gives us a bunch of fire penetration, and reduced bonus damage taken on crit… but the trade-off is it makes it so we get crit slightly easier. However, when we are crit it leaves a fire trail which is pretty slick.
All told I am pretty freaking happy being a walking inferno, and I am curious if this continues to scale as I level into empowered monoliths. I know there are some issues to solve here… specifically resistances and packing on more health and general survival… but for the moment I am having a blast having a super chill mapping experience. Last night I put on an audiobook and just kept my head down grinding through echoes all night. Mostly my goal is to pack on some more levels and start getting into empowered monoliths where hopefully I can finally test the build and see how longterm viable it is. Bossing is not amazing, but also not the worst thing I have ever experienced. Having 16 potions makes up for a lot of mistakes.
It isn’t like I stopped playing my Void Knight either. I am still using it to farm prophecies pretty regularly and working towards trying to get a handful of items with legendary potential to take that build to the next level. I’ve tried making a few legendaries and so far I have mostly wound up with duds that did not hit any of the stats that I had hoped for. This means that I need to farm up more legendary potential items and more exalted items to make additional attempts. This is probably where playing in the trade side of the cycle makes a bit more sense because you can just keep buying more items to try and craft into legendaries or simply buy the finished legendary rather than farming random content and hoping. The amount of loot that you get from Circle of Fortune though is outrageous.
Still having a freaking blast with this Last Epoch Cycle. Are you playing? If so what build did you go with? Drop me a line below.
Good Morning Friends! I freaking love Last Epoch. Back in 2018, I have to admit I did not see where this game would go but it has honestly become that happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile for me. As much as I love it though, there are still some features that I wish it had. This morning I am going to spitball a wishlist of features that I would love to see that I feel would turn this diamond in the rough into the perfect game. I feel like this is fair game since the group at Eleventh Hour Games seems to be constantly evolving the game to make it better. The multiplayer patch really brought Last Epoch into the pantheon of great ARPGs for me. That however is not to say that there cannot be improvements.
Guilds/Clans
With the drop of 0.90 we got the ability to group up with other people, which is really key for my long-term enjoyment of an ARPG. When this was implemented there were also some very basic social features, like the ability to add players to your friend list. This is sort of the bare minimum of required functionality, but I would love to see this expanded a bit more. I am very much a guild-minded person, and even in the largely throw-away Open Beta weekend, I created a branch of Greysky Armada in Diablo IV. Guilds are many things, but at their most simple level, they are an easier way of meeting up with your friends rather than having to trade dozens of individual account ids. Even if we got nothing more than the ability to join a guild and the ability to have a guild chat channel, I would be happy enough.
I mean ultimately that is the only functionality that we have within Diablo III, but it is important enough to me that I consider it on the “should haves” if not on the “must haves” list when approaching a long-term social ARPG. I mean I did not play Path of Exile very long without going through the process of creating a guild.
Guild Bank/Trading/Locking
Surrounding the announcement of the multiplayer patch there was a lot of discussion surrounding trade. Right now it is extremely simple and follows something akin to the rules of Diablo III. If you are with a player when an item drops, you can gift the item to another player. However, I believe with the 1.0 patch, they will be working in a brilliant compromise to the debate of no public trade or a full-on POE-style trading economy with APIs supporting it. Essentially every player will have the choice of either joining the Merchants’ Guild and eventually receiving access to full trading including a public auction house system or joining the Circle of Fortune and receiving improved drop rates but losing the ability to publicly trade items. Circle of Fortune players will be able to build up a currency with another player and then use that to gift items to them, pending they are also a member of the Circle of Fortune. Merchants’ Guild players will never have access to items dropped by folks on the Fortune side.
I would love to see this tweaked a bit to add a new classification to the item locking. I would love to have something similar to the guild bank from Path of Exile. As we work our way through a new league, we are often dropping items that look decent for folks coming up behind us. I would love for some way to have “guild locking” for lack of a better term so that if you donate an item to the guild bank, it can only be used by members of that guild. This would keep those items from ever making it to the trade economy but also increase the social aspect of the gameplay. Maybe even create a “guild currency” that you gain from spending time grouped with guild members, which you can then spend to remove items from the guild bank. Granted there would need to be some administrative level that allows folks to clean out the bank and dump unneeded items straight to gold or shattering, but I am certain Eleventh Hour Games could reach a good compromise for how all of that might work.
Adventure Mode/Bounties
The worst part about leveling a new character in both Path of Exile and Last Epoch is the fact that you need to go through the story content again. One of the systems that work brilliantly is Adventure Mode from Diablo III, and I am somewhat shocked that no other game has implemented something similar to this. Essentially in Diablo III, once you have finished the campaign one time (and I believe now it is just immediately open to everyone), you get access to adventure mode which allows you to freely move between all waypoints available in the game and choose your own path to leveling.
Given that the Last Epoch map feels pretty similar to the Diablo III one, I could see this sort of system working beautifully. Another aspect of Adventure Mode that I really enjoy is doing Bounties for Bounty Caches. I get that for many players these are not exactly the highlight of their gaming experience, and they are often much maligned by more hardcore players as being a “requirement” of the seasonal journey there. I personally like them because it gives me a clear micro objective that is broader than running a single map, but less time-consuming than completing an entire quest sequence. There are lots of generally useful resources that already drop like candy, that I could see rolling up into specific bounty caches. You could have a cache of crafting resources, a cache of idols, or even a cache of rare gear with the very limited ability to drop uniques or set pieces. More paths to the same result is always a good thing as far as I am concerned because it allows folks to vary up their gameplay.
Unstable Echoes
This idea goes somewhat hand in hand with the opening of an alternative leveling mode like Diablo III’s adventure mode. Right now you can technically start the Monolith when you reach the End of Time zone for the very first time. Whether or not you can actually do that is another question, because the Monolith system as it exists today is at a fixed level and requires you to be able to survive a level 55 map. What I would propose is something akin to the Nephalem Rift/Greater Rift system from Diablo III. The idea I had is to call them “Unstable Echoes” and effectively zone into a random echo map with random objectives and random rewards. Much like players enjoy leveling through doing Rifts in Diablo III, it would be awesome if we could just start doing Monoliths in a random system independent from the ACTUAL Monolith progression.
I mean if Eleventh Hour Games wanted to go for the gold, it would be neat if these Unstable Echoes had a sequence of objectives that ultimately led to fighting a miniboss similar to a Rift Guardian. That however isn’t necessary, and I would honestly be perfectly happy with just randomly spawning one of the existing Monolith Echoes at a level that scaled to the player. Bonus points would be if the system allowed players to choose what level of Monolith they wanted to tackle. This could even be spun into a completely unique progression system that worked kinda like Greater Rift progression so as you passed level 100, you were gaining a certain amount of corruption as well to keep making harder and more rewarding singleton Echoes.
Hideouts/Housing
Right from the start I know this request is a bit out there because player housing is an exceptionally expensive system to implement. It is one of those systems that can have some extremely solid returns when it comes to selling cosmetics, but a massive initial outlay of work to put even the most basic version in the game. That said… I love the Hideout/Guild Hideout system from Path of Exile and I would love to see something like this implemented at some point in the future in Last Epoch. I mean these really don’t serve a purpose other than allowing players to have a trophy hall of sorts and a shared communal space. This is definitely on the long-term “wouldn’t it be cool” list.
Appearance Collection/Wardrobe
I love cosmetics and wardrobe systems, and right now Last Epoch already has the most basic version stubbed out. Currently, if you have one of the pets gained through backing the game at various times during its development process, you can have them follow you around. In-game there is an Appearance tab for your character and it has slots similar to Path of Exile where you can in theory modify the visual appearance of every item you have equipped. I would assume that the idea as it stands to have a similar cosmetic shop to Path of Exile where you can buy an appearance and then wear that as a sort of visual override to what you actually have equipped.
This is a good start for certain, but what I would love to see as the final implementation is something akin to games like Guild Wars 2 where every item that drops saves a copy of that appearance to your wardrobe. Then when you click on a slot you see every appearance that has dropped along with every appearance that you have purchased. This sort of system just feels better than a cash-shop-only system, because it allows everyone to participate and also… gives folks options if nothing available through the cash-shop really interests them. Sometimes you just want to wear something that matches and don’t necessarily want to be blinged out. Cosmetic systems are great, but the systems that blend in world drops with purchased appearances are always the best ones.
Character Creator/Gender Options
Last Epoch suffers from the same problem that a lot of older ARPGs have, where when you choose your character class you are also locking in gender and a specific appearance. At this point, I am mostly numb to this construct as I have dealt with it over and over in these games. Diablo III has a slightly improved system where when you choose your class you are still locking in a specific appearance, but you get to choose between a male and female option. Mike one of the developers from Eleventh Hour Games regularly hosts a Friday live stream over on Twitch where he fields questions from the audience, and this has come up multiple times. Each time he gives essentially the same answer… that they would like to do this but they have not felt they could devote the budget to it yet.
On some level this makes sense. In development, especially when you are working on missing features… you often end up with a mindset of “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” and right now they have a functional character system. However at some point, I would love to see them address this, and they have at least shown some modicum of interest in it as a long-range goal. When they do rework the character creation system, I would love to see them at least have some basic appearance options as well. Diablo IV did not have necessarily the most amazing character creation system, but you at least felt like you could put your own mark on what the character looks like and I would love to see them implement at least something along those lines. Not every character creator has to be something that you are going to spend literal hours on perfecting, but it would be nice to have options.
Account-Based Monolith Progression
The Monolith Timeline and Echo system feels really good. It is a fun endgame that sees your character zipping around the end of time collecting resources and fighting interesting bosses. The problem is when approaching a seasonal progression arc… you are quickly locked into making a hard choice of what character you want to play because progressing this system on multiple characters is a huge ask. I’ve been chewing away at this for weeks, and I’ve still not entered the “true” endgame of Empowered Monoliths. I’ve been interested in trying out a primalist character, but it feels like the idea of progressing another character to this point is a massive outlay of time. Sure you can get a friend to somewhat cheat your way into empowered monoliths… but even that feels super janky.
What I would love to see is something akin to the Atlas of Worlds in Path of Exile, where your progress is tied to your account and not any individual character. Alting is healthy in an ARPG, and I feel like right now… Last Epoch is not terribly alt friendly. A good number of the suggestions that I have made above are to make a variety of ways that you can interact with the game on different characters, and having account-based progression is quite possibly the most important of these. I am hoping that internally Eleventh Hour Games already realizes this is a problem and is working on its own solution.
Seasonal Expansions
Eleventh Hour Games has already announced that they do have a seasonal mechanic planned at some point called “Cycles” and that they plan on these being pretty basic resets. This is fine, and I would expect them to stay basic for a while. However, I do hope at some point the door is open to using this seasonal cadence as the introduction of entirely new game modes. While I feel like maybe the Path of Exile seasonal mechanic system is a bit much for any other game, I would love to see some new game mode added each year or so. I love Delve and Heist in Path of Exile and they wildly change the enjoyment of that game for me. Eleventh Hour Games has already had some pretty brilliant solutions to classical ARPG problems, and I would love to see the sort of game modes they can come up with to expand the base of the game. I am not saying we need the expansion every three months cadence of Path of Exile, but I would love to see something eventually.
Wrapping Up
Last Epoch is a phenomenal game, and so far has been the game I always wished for… something that kinda splits the difference between the overwhelming complexity of Path of Exile and the quick simple joy of Diablo III. That said it can always be improved and my goal of this morning was to lay out some of my ideas for things I would love to see. Do I think anyone from Eleventh Hour Games is even going to see this? No not really. I realize I very small voice from a very small corner of the internet, but I think more than anything I did this for my own benefit to get this nonsense out of my head. I am going to keep playing Last Epoch and enjoying myself, but also going to keep playing Path of Exile and other ARPGs to keep collecting “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas. I love where the ARPG genre is right now and how many different expressions of it exist, but as with MMORPGs, there are always things I would love to see from one game to another game.
Do you agree with some of my assessments? Did I completely get this all wrong? Drop me a line below and tell me your own thoughts.
Good Morning Friends! Right now I have to say I am thankful for Last Epoch. It is weird to me that this game that I had written off back in 2018, had morphed into almost exactly the game that I have always wanted. Granted I would still love to see more endgame options added in because effectively you have 3 wildly different dungeons, a horde-mode-like arena, and then monolith echos which are the equivalent of Path of Exile mapping. I would still love to see someone other than Diablo III implement the equivalent of bounties and an entirely alternate system for leveling other than doing the story. Last Epoch suffers from the same problem as Path of Exile where doing the acts over and over does tend to drag on a bit. I’ve been wanting to level up and try out a primalist and the only thing holding me back is needing to repeat all of the story content again. Even if they added an alternative step so that when you get to the first interaction with the Epoch, you had the alternative path shifting into effectively an endless version of the monolith echoes that dumped you out into the end of time.
Speaking of paths and timelines… I spent a lot of Tuesday night unlocking pathways that I had not opened up. There are still technically a few alternate paths between timelines that I have not unlocked but I at least have access to all of them directly now. Knowing what I know now… I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and could have taken a much shorter route to the final three. Essentially at a bare minimum, it seems like you have to clear seven timelines before being able to unlock the empowered monolith. The path I wound up taking would have put me through eight before I went on my side jaunt to unlock the rest of the timeline islands. The final three islands are a bit of a chore and I’ve actually taken a death in them so I am in no real rush to meet those bosses.
I honestly struggled a bit with the Emperor of Corpses in the level 85 timeline, in part because once again I was overthinking things. In the above screenshot, you see this giant hurricane attack with the area around the boss being the safe zone. Prior to that, the boss does a close AOE attack and I thought I would have to dance on the line between these two attacks. That meant that inevitably I would lose some minions because they would be slow getting out of the hurricane of death. What I finally realized is that I can stand in the small AOE without taking significant damage, so I could simply stay in close range at all times and just need to move away from the head of the dragon to avoid breath attacks. Again like the Rahyeh my interpretation of the fight was making everything much harder than it actually needed to be.
Last night I dinged 84 and have almost filled up enough Stability in The Last Ruin to start working on boss progress for that timeline. However, I think what I am going to do is fill up the bar past the third node, and then shift timelines and start working on another one to get it filled as well. The goal is to gain a few levels and be a bit closer to level 90 before I face any of the last three timeline bosses. I could probably yolo my way through the timelines and rush the final bosses, but I prefer to level and potentially gain a bit more gear before stepping into those fights. My tendency will always be to over level encounters because in truth I don’t really “crave” challenging fights in the same way some people do. I am fine with them if I have to deal with them, but I would rather “roflstomp” things when possible. I play ARPGs for the power fantasy achieved through leveling and gearing more than any sense of overcoming difficulty.
My gear is still a bit of a mess. Right now I have a lot of less-than-perfect items and still am wearing three slots that are yellow that I have not found a purple worth equipping yet. My resistances are still a mess with absolutely nothing in the poison and void category. I’ve heard that the real win here is to get resistance through blessings and that once you get access to empowered blessings these help significantly. I have a lot of minion health and less raw minion damage… because I’ve just happened into a few pieces with significant T6 minion health rolls on them. This makes my minions super tanky but maybe take a bit longer to shred bosses… but generally I am okay with that.
I realize that Last Epoch is still very much a pre-release game but I am anxious for them to implement some cosmetics other than pets, and the upcoming backpack. Like I am mostly fine with the way my character looks… but at some point would love to see something other than “Night Hag” has my graphical options. Maybe it is just the phenomenal necromancer graphics from Diablo IV coming into play here, but I would love to be able to equip a consistent look and stick with it all the way through leveling. I am always more than happy to spend money on making my character look cool while leveling rather than looking like an unmatched outlands era fury warrior. I am hoping that when 1.0 lands this is one of the systems that also open up because I am more than happy to give them more than my initial $30 to keep the game running and evolving.
