Orobyss

Corruption is Cumbersome

by

Good Morning Folks. I’ve been playing Last Epoch almost exclusively at this point and I have not only progressed into the Empowered Monoliths but reached a point with my build where I am beginning to thrive there. Right now Last Epoch has legitimately some of the best systems design in isometric loot chase action role-playing games. Some of the new crafting options for example are exceptionally fun because they lean into this pattern of “do a thing” and then “get a crafting bench”. Temporal Sanctum as a concept was really neat, but the problem with it has been the generally shitty state of dungeons as a whole. These new systems however feel like they understand the failings of dungeons and are effectively making better versions of them.

Since I am doing fairly well in Monoliths I have begun actually caring about trying to progress the Forgotten Knights faction. This is essentially a ladder to progress your way through the endgame and involves stacking corruption and then fighting harbinger encounters at these new corruption levels. Mechanically the Faction concept is pretty cool and I have enjoyed the way they have implemented a brand new one with the Weavers. However for a game with such amazing systems design work… it is all the more jarring when you encounter a legacy fragment that is not so well thought out. Basically the entire process of stacking corruption sucks, and while they have attempted to band-aid this… I feel like the entire design needs to be rethought in a major way.

So essentially each timeline has its own corruption level which determines how much additional difficulty that timeline has. Like I said they have added band-aids in the form of a catch up mechanic to bring one timeline up to the same level as your highest progressed timeline, as well as a specific type of woven echo that lets you transfer corruption level from one character to another. However the general concept of corruption just feels bad at least compared to the other systems. Ultimately you want to build up timeline stability which allows you to fight the boss of the timeline… which adds a Gaze of Orobyss stack… which then allows you to gain more corruption when you kill the Shade of Orobyss and reset the timeline progress. This whole song and dance of limping your way through corruption levels just feels poorly thought out.

After you have reset your timeline the first time, a new node shows up called the Sanctuary of Eterra which lets you fight a little boss fight to reduce your corruption and dial back the difficulty of your timeline. This entire process was aggressively fine earlier in the life of this game, but now that we have seen the type of systems that Eleventh Hour Games is capable of producing… the entire structure of corruption just feels really bad. Clearly the team has learned a lot of lessons in system design in the years that have past since the idea of timelines and corruption was first “ideated”. I just think that they can do much better, because the entire thing feels deeply cumbersome and unwieldy.

Ultimately what I would like to see is something akin to the way that Greater Rifts are handled in Diablo III and the Pit is handled in Diablo IV. Essentially once you have reached a specific corruption level you can then set the level of your timeline up to that corruption level via a drop down or slider… and make this value be set at an account level. This makes it beneficial for a player to push as far as they can possibly go… and then easily dial things back a bit to a very comfortable and clear farming level. I cannot tell you how much it makes my eye twitch that I need to get to 175 on my timeline corruption to do the next Harbinger but it is very likely that I will overshoot that number at be running it at 178 or something like that. Having a way to clearly set the difficulty of each timeline would go so far to making the whole corruption concept feel a bit better.

I also feel like the whole concept of timeline stability is not the most amazing system in the world, but I see it as a sort of necessary evil. It serves the role of keeping someone from simply farming the same boss over and over and is an alternative to the Path of Exile design of collecting key fragments. I would rather grind Monolith Echoes and fill up an arbitrary bar than attempt to farm 10 Maven Fragments to get a key. I feel like both Corruption and Stability were designed hand in hand, but also feel like Stability can function entirely on its own without the existence of the current state of Corruption. I think EHG understands that the corruption system is problematic, otherwise they would not keep trying to apply quality of life band-aids to it. Gaze of Orobyss itself was a band-aid to allow folks to raise it faster and the account corruption transfer woven echo is brand new attempting to stabilize a different problem. Mostly I think it is time to take the sledgehammer to the system and just make it better instead of spackling over the holes.

Ending on a more positive note however… I cannot fully explain the level of joy it brings me to run around with my Travelers Backpack in Last Epoch. This is an item that was given to early players of Last Epoch in honor of them selling 500k units. You can see a higher detailed version over on the Last Epoch Forums, but it is full of so many references. It has the original kickstarter era Last Epoch logo, the rolled up thing at the top I believe is based on a desk sized mouse pad that they sent out to early backers, and there is even a tiny Mike head transposed on top of what I think is a Bee model. The map that is rolled up on the side of the backpack looks similar to the old kickstarter-era world map. Mostly it is just a really fun tchotchke showing that you have been around for awhile. I kinda hope they do more things like this in the future as they continue to transition between phases of the game.

Fire Bro On Hold

by

Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a delightful weekend. I spent most of my in Last Epoch and a shocking amount of it grouped up with friends doing some multiplayer shenanigans. That is really the piece of this game that works so much better than Path of Exile… grouping with my friends does not feel needlessly punitive. In fact, if you happen to die while grouped with friends… you can res up and port back into the instance just fine. I’ve mostly shifted back to playing my Void Knight but I will talk about the reasoning for that a bit later. Kodra has come back from his trip and recently we have been trying to get him caught up and through normal monoliths. Originally my Fire Bro was an attempt to keep a character at his level… but then it was just too damned fun and I rushed through to empowered monoliths without really meaning to.

As far as my Void Knight goes, I have added a few levels but have not really made any major gear changes since I last talked about the character. I keep farming 120+ Orobyss but have had zero luck in finding another Apathy’s Maw Axe… specifically one with legendary potential and have not yet seen a Shattered Chains belt. Similarly, I’ve farmed God Hunter Argentus a number of times and have yet to see another Wings of Argentus chest-piece let alone one with legendary potential. I have levers that I can pull to keep trying for better get, but have simply not been lucky. I did find an LP1 copy of Darkstride boots but didn’t exactly get lucky on the craft, but wound up with something better than nothing. If you are curious I’ve dumped a build over on Last Epoch Tools for the current state of my character.

One thing that I had to do this weekend was create a significantly more strict loot filter. I had been using one that started out as something that came from Maxroll and that I kept tweaking. I decided I just needed to blow that away completely and start out on my own. I’m essentially hiding all normal, magic, rare, exalted, and idols and then only showing very specific stats that I care about. I have a broader rule that shifts things to pink that I specifically want to keep track of for sharding. Then I have some super specific rules for the Sceptres and Two-Handed Axes that I am looking for on both Void and Fire builds. Lastly, I have a rule to show ALL Tier 7 Exalted items, and then the one I am showing in the above screenshot in an attempt to catch any Exalted item with two Tier 6 affixes. This was made more important since I am just about to ding Rank 8 with Circle of Fortune where EVERY Rare drop will have a 25% chance of upgrading into an Exalted.

As for Fire Bro…. in truth right now in its current state, this build is just not good enough. I was able to get all the way to Empowered Monoliths… with some help from Ace in killing Elder Gaspar. However in Empowered Monoliths I either need more damage or more survival… because the combination of what I currently have is simply not good enough. I could tweak this build in a number of ways but I was trying to stay pure to the original goal of using the Torch and lighting everything on fire. I want to spend some time pouring over the character sheet and playing with it a bit in Last Epoch Tools to see if I can find a way forward either through gearing or respeccing points. I need to spend some time looking at other ignite builds to see how they are working and what sort of gearing they are going for. I’ve not given up… I just would rather focus on my Void Knight for the time being.

I also have a bunch of alts waiting in the wings that I am probably going to level a bit as well. I have a Falconer, Bleed Wolves Beastmaster, Flame Reave Spellblade, and a character that I plan on trying to yolo my way into a Fire Damage Earthquake Shaman build. Still having a heck of a lot of fun with this game and trying out new characters that I have not played before.

Nearing Ninety

by

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.