Monoliths

Joining the Judges

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Good Morning Folks. I pretty much spent the entire weekend playing Last Epoch, and I regret nothing. For those who have not been following this particular rabbit hole, I have been playing what I think is my sixth incarnation of an Ignite Warpath Paladin. It has been pretty enjoyable but as I began pushing corruption it started slowing down significantly. I am sure there are probably tweaks that I could make to the build to resurrect it, but honestly I am pretty happy I got as far as I did. Generally speaking up to this point on a character I have made it into Empowered Monoliths, and cleared a few of them before ultimately dipping out because running Monoliths got tedious. Now with the Tombs of the Erased expansion, there is so much additional content that I can easily rip through a dozen without really realizing how many I have done. This is a massive win for Eleventh Hour Games as a whole because I am hearing the same sort of “lost time” paradigm from others.

More than that I have made it further into the endgame than I have on any other build to date. I’ve cleared seven of the ten Harbingers and have been working my way up to 250 corruption so I could attempt the next one. However once I crossed that 200 corruption barrier, things slowed down considerably. The corruption 200 boss and harbinger fight took a good 10 minutes to get through. I had the sustain to and tankyness to keep going almost indefinitely… but I just got a bit tired of the amount of time it took to push through the bosses. When I crossed the 225 line even the Echoes themselves got a bit tedious… which was not helped by the fact that I ran around with Ace this weekend and saw the kind of speed their build had. Essentially they went down the Heartseeker path and could melt Harbingers in under a minute.

I could in theory just respec my level 97 Paladin, but yesterday I decided to go down a different path and just level a brand new one. I am joining the bandwagon of Judgment, more specifically the faux Righteous Fire variant. I don’t quite have the point that turns it into an aura but I will be picking it up next. I started the character around 10 am yesterday and by 9 pm I was on my third Monolith Timeline. We will see if Monolith Lagon is who finally takes my Deathless tag away from me… but Judgment is stupidly powerful. I had a few pieces of gear in my bank that could be repurposed for this mission and am running around 800 Healing Effectiveness, and the suggestion for Uber Aberroth is 1500 Healing Effectiveness for reference. I spent a bit of time writing a brand new loot filter just for this build, and the main reason why I did not respec my other character is I could still in theory use it to farm items.

Even without the Aura the gameplay is pretty enjoyable as you effectively run around for awhile grouping up the mobs and then dropping a single Judgment on the entire pack destroying everything at once. Vengeance is used to as your builder attack, which is proccing Healing Hands which deals fire based damage in an AOE splash while also healing and building ward. I’ve also specced Healing Hands to be my movement ability since I tend to prefer it to Shield Charge in this game. Truth be told the AOE Fire Splash from Vengeance is more than enough damage to clear with and bosses just sort of melt. When I did the Rahyeh timeline the boss did not actually get to fire any abilities off before it was dead. What is wild is on narrow maps you can sort of bait mobs to walk into the Consecrated Ground left by the Judgment which melts anything that walks into it.

Other than Judgment Boy, I have been playing around with a Wolves Primalist that I will eventually turn into a Squirrel build. This is something that I never quite got off the ground in previous seasons and since I have a bank full of the helms, I figured I might as well make a go at it. Aaron Action RPG dropped a video over the weekend about a 1000+ corruption version of the build. The only item that I do not have laying around from this build is a Vessel of Strife. This means I will probably need to farm some T4 Julra to get one of these to drop, which in theory once the Judgment build is entirely online should be a piece of cake. I am sure I could technically do the fight on my Ignite Warpath character but it would take a heck of a lot longer.

I am hoping that by the time I finish leveling through the Empowered Monoliths on my Judgment Character that I will have enough gear to handle higher corruptions. There is a Woven Echo called the Confluence of Oblivion that in theory will allow me to copy the corruption levels of my Warpath paladin over to my Judgment Paladin so that I don’t have to spend quite so much time pushing it up again. I will have to fight all of the Harbingers again, but in theory using Glyph of Envy and some crappy Exalted items I can force my way through the timelines pretty quickly. Mostly right now I just need levels more than anything. I’m currently level 65 and really need to get into my 80s before pushing very far into Empowered Monoliths. I have some more gear in my bank for when I hit my 70s and can start wearing it. Hopefully between that and whatever I happen to find as drops I can push this character up pretty quickly.

Right now Last Epoch is delivering a sufficient dose of dopamine, and since Ace finished out the Harbingers and took out Aberroth I kind of want to do that too. I could probably do it as Ignite Warpath but it would be more of a struggle than I really want to deal with. Essentially this feels like when I build a Penance Brand of Dissolution character in Path of Exile when that was the new hotness. Sure I would have loved to have my own personal build make it all the way through the bosses… but getting seven down seems like good progress.

Last Epoch is Cozy

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Good Morning Folks! Since Path of Exile II is awaiting a patch, I figured I would spend some time doing something else. Sunday I started an Acolyte and turned her into a Necromancer going down the path of doing a fairly common minions build since that is what I played almost 300 hours of in Path of Exile II. It is wild just how comfortable Last Epoch is compared to Path of Exile. While the game is lacking at the endgame, and hopefully the big April patch will alleviate that a bit… the leveling experience is so freaking cozy. By my play session last night I was starting in on Monoliths and having a grand old time with my army of horrible children.

I played quite a bit in September when they did the Cycle Refresh and had gotten my Circle of Fortune faction up to rank 11. This made leveling a new character feel amazing, because I was constantly getting really interesting items. More than that the Nemesis system feels phenomenal at low levels because you are regularly getting pretty interesting unique items turned into legendaries with random stats attached to them. The only negative about the Nemesis systems… is that it makes all of the other content feel significantly worse. Rogue Mages for example need a rework because it feels like they only drop Clutch Plates for a 77 Honda Civic Hatchback… which is awesome if you need one of those but otherwise pretty forgettable.

Some of the items that I am seeing from drops are wild. Path of Exile II wanted to make loot on the ground matter and failed miserably at that, but honestly… that is precisely the state of Last Epoch right now. This is an item I picked up off the ground… that has 3 Tier 6 affixes… one of which sealed so that i could in theory roll off one of the other affixes trying to get something with better synergy. Granted I don’t plan on playing a character that needs any of those things, but it is still a wildly compelling item. Given enough time spinning the randomizer I will start seeing items that DO have the stats that I want on them. The fact that I can target specific monoliths for specific gear slots… and also throw Runes of Ascendance at random items use that trying to get the Uniques that I want. I feel like I have so many options to either farm perfect loot, or perfect less than perfect loot.

Right now I am mostly wearing a bunch of weavers will items, because they were handy and often have interesting results. I’m also running two Hollow Fingers which give me extra skeletons. I had one with two legendary potential and attempted to turn it into a ring with Minion Health and Minion Damage, but unfortunately hit flat health instead. Still a reasonable item to use but not necessarily an ideal item. That is one of the things that I dig about Last Epoch is that you can get to a pretty reasonable gear state easily, and then slowly over time attempt to improve upon it by making more Legendary items or lucking into some really tasty drops.

I am sure when the POE2 patch drops I will be back over there testing out the changes, but for the moment I am living my best life in Last Epoch. This game is so damned good, and really… once it has the amount of content that Path of Exile does… it is going to be the easy winner for my attention. I am definitely looking forward to April and the next Cycle where they are supposedly focusing on the endgame entirely. The monolith is a good core, but it just needs more surprise content to borrow a term from the POE2 patch announcement over the weekend. Monoliths feel great when you have a Nemesis, Rogue Mage, and a loot chest… and feel pretty awful when none of those spawn. The more of those little doses of joy that they can pack into the mapping experience, the better the game is going to be.

Refracting Lens of Wealth

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Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a brief blog post because I have to go into the office today. It is funny how doing a thing that I used to have to do every day… basically ruins my entire day after four years of remote work. I spent a heck of a lot of time last night on my Void Knight and managed to push him to level 99 before daylight savings sleep debt finally claimed me. I really want to get to 100, but I have found that if I don’t focus on leveling… it feels like it goes so much more quickly. There are a handful of Uniques that I would like to farm better versions of, so I will probably continue to focus on that and wait until my experience bar fills without realizing it.

I also managed to get my Beastmaster to level 73 and now have a full complement of squirrels. I need to get better gear for this character, but I now get to experience a chittering mass of nonsense each time I attack anything. Weirdly it seems like the squirrels are much better behaved than the wolves. I’ve been having this bug where apparently all of my wolves would just wander the fuck off aimlessly at the beginning of a map. I would have to hit A to make them attack a location to summon them all back to my side before starting the monolith proper. The squirrels largely just hang out at my side until I engage something and then they behave like minions normally behave. I have to say though… I think maybe wolves were stronger, but I am having more fun with squirrels so that is really what matters the most.

The other thing that I have been playing with is the Lens system. When I hit Rank 9 with Circle of Fortune I unlocked my last Lens and can now modify prophecies with three of them at a time. “Juiced” prophecies can be complete nonsense. This all came from a single prophecy. That is fifteen of the Weavers Will unique armor pieces with a minimum Weavers Will level of 16 each. Note that sets the minimum level because at least one of them rolled with 20 levels worth of upgrades on it. It is just nonsense how much more rewards you can get by stacking your lenses.

Here is another Photoshop job showing the three lenses that I am currently running. First I have been blocking dungeon event prophecies because quite honestly… I hate the dungeons in this game. I will run Temporal Sanctum out of necessity to craft Legendary items, but the rest of them don’t really feel like they are rewarding enough to deal with the hassle of running them. I feel about them the same way I feel about Labyrinth in Path of Exile and will avoid them if at all possible. The next lens makes it so that I see significantly more Unique items which in theory at Rank 9 is a 135% boost to the occurrence of prophecies with Unique rewards. The one that has made the biggest difference however is the Refracting Lens of Wealth which increases the cost of a Prophecy by 90% favor but causes them to offer double the rewards for completion.

The end result is some nonsense like this… where a single prophecy for a single Orbyss kill awarded ten unique pieces of body armor. On top of “doubling” the rewards for a single prophecy proc, they also seem to in many cases double the number of uses you get out of a single prophecy. So basically that one lens greatly increases the sheer amount of rewards that you can get from running prophecies… a system that was already extremely rewarding. So essentially I am probably going to be spending a lot of that level 99 to 100 grind targeting different encounters that give me some very high-end rewards. What I really need to find is a prophecy for Orbyss that rewards a large number of two-handed axes per kill just to test whether or not prophecies can trigger boss-specific drops in addition to general drop-anywhere uniques. I need a ton of upgrades on the Void Knight but almost all of them are boss-specific drops.

Anyways! Time for me to close this out and move on with my morning. Don’t be sleeping on those prophecies and more specifically… don’t bypass the Refracting Lens of Wealth.

Nearing Ninety

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend was a weekend where I pretty much played nothing but Last Epoch. Given how much I focus in on a single game and then just beat the crap out of it… this should shock no one. What might shock some players however is that I was able to play Last Epoch without a ton of issues in spite of all of the server issues. Unfortunately, this is a side effect of me being in the “endgame” and essentially once you are in Monoliths the game is perfectly fine. The problem that seems to plague players is zoning in and out of shared social hub towns, and the beginning of the game sees you bouncing back and forth from quest zones to the town hub three or four times in a row. This means that without a lot of patience, a lot of players are just hitting a brick wall.

Last Epoch has had over 1000% growth in player numbers since the beginning of this launch. Ultimately the day one numbers blew out of the water any preplanning that had been done for the game, and the Game Director said that his pre-launch comments have aged like milk. Last Epoch has bypassed the highest peak concurrency numbers for Path of Exile on Steam which took place during the Crucible league. I am not sure how this compares to lifetime numbers for Path of Exile as there is no real way to quantify players who use the standalone client. I know they have said most of their player growth was on Steam and that the console player base only represents about 10% of the total. So Last Epoch probably does not have more concurrent users than the entirety of Path of Exile, but it is still impressive to see it pass the Steam numbers.

Another impressive stat is that currently, Last Epoch is number three on the global top sellers list on Steam. Essentially you can count this as the second highest-selling game because number two is Counter Strike 2 a free game, and also given that CS has massive ban waves… it is likely a fair number of those are new account sign-ups involved in the RMT trade. Coincidentally Helldivers 2… the number one game is also having massive issues keeping up with the player growth and keeping their servers online. Both games are in similar situations, from Indie studios that have never had this level of growth. In the case of Last Epoch, its previous peak was around 40k players, and even back then it struggled… and I assume that they planned for maybe seeing 100k players… not over 250k. I am not sure if we have seek the true peak yet, but things are at least getting better. Each day has been a bit more easy to get into game and into monoliths, and last night things were comfortable enough that I actually rolled my first alt.

On Friday I finished up the campaign and started in on Monoliths and by about mid-day on Saturday I had reached Empowered Monoliths. From that point forward I have been working on farming some specific gear pieces. Originally I needed a chestpiece from the boss at the end of the Stolen Lance timeline, but I’ve kept doing it because I have my corruption up there. One of the drops that I need from Orobyss only shows up once you have at least 120 Corruption Level. In theory I should shift over to do another timeline that actually drops gear slots that I care about, but I have not wanted to put in the work to get the corruption level to the sweet spot again. I had allowed my corruption to get up to around 150… which is way too high for the current state of my build and had to lower it a bit.

As far as “gear for my build” goes I have picked up four pieces. Darkstride boots I got from my friend Ace and it allowed us to test out the trade resonance system. Shortly after that, I picked up a Siphon of Anguish which is a common drop from any corruption-level version of Orobyss, and have since upgraded that to an LP2 version. I’m just hunting for a good ring to try and smash onto it before converting it into a legendary. Apathy’s Maw dropped pretty quickly once I got into Empowered Monoliths but I am obviously hunting for a version of it with legendary potential so I can hopefully add some crit to it. The last item that I picked up is the Wings of Argentus which drops from God Hunter Argentus in the empowered version of The Stolen Lance timeline. I’ve done the fight six times I believe and it is one of the most technical fights I have experienced in the game so far, but unfortunately, I’ve not seen any more chestpieces let alone any with legendary potential. The last chase unique would be Shattered Chains which can drop from Orobyss in any timeline that is at a minimum of 120 Corruption.

As far as the rest of my gear… I’ve mostly been looking for survival stats… resists, health, armor and then anything that can increase either void damage or void melee damage. My worst pair of gear is my gloves, but I have yet to find anything that I can reasonably slot in without giving up my health. I am already teetering on the edge of 2000 hitpoints and I don’t want to drop much lower. The second “worst” item that I am using is my relic… which has two stats on it that are completely useless… but also gives me the needed 43% to All Resistances while Channeling which allows me to pretty much hit the resistance cap on everything. My second ring is something that I picked up while leveling and just have not found anything worth replacing it but I did pick up a LP1 Liath’s Signet if I can find anything to smash into it to gain a bit of health. That would allow me to back off on some of the resistances that I have in my idols since it gives me 75% to all elemental resistances while channeling, and due to Warpath, I am always channeling.

Since Last Epoch lacks any sort of API system that allows for a way to view your build and gear offline… I figured I would take a screenshot and then highlight the tooltip for my main damage-dealing ability. I feel pretty squishy now that I am raising my corruption levels. When I was up around 150, it felt like I was teetering on the brink of oblivion pretty much all of the time. Now that I have dialed things back to around 120, it seems more reasonable. I think once I get better gear though I should be able to push up to 200 without much issue. The big problem that I have is when I have a bunch of rares stacked on top of each other, and it becomes very hard to see the visualizations for all of their big attacks. If any two attacks are stacked on top of each other… I am dead and my leech just cannot keep up with it. At 150… it was enough for a Rogue Mage to one-shot me at times if their mechanics landed just right.

All of this… is why yesterday I decided that I needed to “alt” a bit. I did find out something really cool. Once you have chosen a faction on your first character, there is an NPC for each faction in the very first town so you can choose your faction for your alts easily. I had wondered how all of the gear I have been collecting that is tied to Circle of Fortune would work out, because most of it is great for alts. Once I picked my faction I could equip all of it just fine and was up and running quickly. For the moment I am going for a bleed wolves build on my Primalist, but might shift that up later as I get different gear. I pretty much had all of the uniques needed for bleed wolves sitting in my bank, so that was a no-brainer.

I am still having a freaking blast and the prophecy system is so damned good. For example, this is a screenshot of me killing a mob that triggered two different prophecies… one to drop 5 pairs of unique boots and another to drop a unique bow. I love that you can stack them up like this and then when they trigger get a massive loot fiesta. All told I am very happy with the current state of Last Epoch and once the servers calm down and they manage to work out the kinks around “matchmaking” aka zoning in or out of social hub towns… I think the game is going to be in a phenomenal state. I played with my friend Ace quite a bit this weekend and it was so much fun. Very chill hanging out with friends and gameplay time, and I am there for it. For reference, it took roughly an hour to get a resonance, and I am hoping in the coming days/weeks to get some game time in with all of my circle of friends playing this game so I can build up resonances with them as well.

Are you playing Last Epoch? Have you been able to fight the servers and get some leveling in? What are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.