paladin

Shadow Drop Paladin and Game Awards

by

Yesterday was Geoff Keighley show of madness known as The Game Awards, and I was motivated to watch because there was a Path of Exile II mtx to be farmed as a twitch drop. I stuck around and watched the entire thing because if I was already a few hours into it… I might as well see the end. Prior to the show we had seen rumors swirling around Diablo IV and the fact that the Paladin was going to be previewed… which is why they had such a god awful league start time of starting up after the show finished airing. What I did not expect was the fact that they shadow dropped the entire Paladin class, pending you were willing to preorder the next expansion. The only sad thing about this… is that because they so hamfistedly planned their league start to stomp right on top of the much more exciting Path of Exile II league start… that I am not sure how many people are actually going to care about this. Blizzard has always had this way of trying to piss on the news from other studios to steal their thunder… but I hate to tell them that they are no longer the massive juggernaut that they once were. Path of Exile 1 and 2… and hell even Last Epoch are doing way more exciting things than Diablo IV is… so they will always be relegated to third or fourth fiddle when it comes to the ARPG community.

I of course fell for the madness and pre-purchased the expansion so I could poke my head in and try out the Paladin. So far I would say this class feels way more akin to the Diablo III Crusader than it does the Diablo II Paladin. The naming is largely just semantics and determins which of the holy orders the character comes from in lore more than anything. I am not shocked they went back to the Paladin as the name, but I am happy that they seem to be following the pattern set forth by the Crusader. That was probably my favorite character from Diablo III, and it makes me wonder if there is going to be an equivalent to Thorns Invoker in this game, which was my single favorite build. Right now I am leaning into the lunge attack that acts as a gap closer and the orbiting hammer throw that shatters into more hammers when it hits things. So far it seems plenty strong but I will be curious to see what endgame builds end up looking like on this class. However I am probably only going to play this over lunch, because once POE2 drops I am going to be focused on that.

Now you are going to get a bunch of trailers and me talking about them. The thing that I am absolutely the most hype about is Control Resonant. The only downside there is that it does not appear like we are playing as Jesse Faden this time. Instead we are going to be playing as her brother. Something has gone horribly wrong at The Oldest House and Jesse appears to be missing. So now we get to go on an adventure to save reality…. and I am so fucking here for this. I love Remedy games, and quite possibly… they are the studio that I now look forward to the most when they drop something new. They are a surreal feast of visuals and the storytelling and lore goes so deep that it feeds my hunger in those departments too. All of the Remedy games are connected… even though they cannot officially be so due to the weird history of how they released titles for various studios. If you ever want to deep dive into this madness… I highly suggest you play everything they have ever released.

In things that I absolutely did not expect… we are getting a sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic games featuring one of the folks from that era Casey Hudson. I have so much hope pinned on this nonsense, and the thing that bolsters me is the fact that it is not coming from Electronic Arts. I realize this is probably five years out at this point… but I can have hope… please god leave me with some shreds of hope. Knights of the Old Republic will always be one of my favorite games to have ever existed, and it is my favorite Star Wars era. I want to be positive about something for once.

Pivoting from the remants of Bioware… to a spiritual successor to Bioware… we got another trailer for Exodus. The disappointing thing about this is that we now know this is not coming until 2027. This game looks amazing and feels like they are leaning hard into the Mass Effect formula. Please god let this be good, because I also need this. Bioware is in shambles, and I have very little faith that Mass Effect 4 is going to be any good. I am okay with starting fresh with a new franchise and new characters to care about…. but what I really want is that good good ship of fools gameplay that Mass Effect provided. Give me a ship, and an interesting crew, and a bunch of cool missions to go on. Let me romance weird aliens and line the halls of my ship with all manner of miscreants. I am probably going to be there on day one if they manage to pull off even half of the joy that was Mass Effect 2.

So something you need to know… is that I fucking love Ma Dong-seok. I have loved him since Train to Busan, and if you have never seen that film… stop what you are doing and go watch it now. Wierd Yakuza adjascent game featuring Ma Dong-seok as the main character? Sign me the hell up. That is all honestly.

Another game that I did not know anything about going into the show was No Law. Mostly I am here for the cyberpunk dystopia. It seems to be some sort of a shooter, and depending on how that plays out I am here for it. Mostly I am just into the visuals of this game. I am hoping it ends up being fun, and not chock full of weird microtransactions and AI Slop since it is coming out from Krafton.

There is a “somehow sebulba has returned” meme floating around and it is delightful. A game that I did not know that I needed was what feels like a spiritual successor to Star Wars Pod Racer on the Nintendo 64. What is cool though is it seems like it is not just pod racers, but also featuring a bunch of speeders. I love a good big dumb racing game, and I am hoping this provides. If nothing else the visuals look really cool.

For the most disturbing game trailer, that goes to Larian for their next Divinity game. They are supposedly taking everything that they have learned making Baldur’s Gate III and then bringing that home to their own Divinity setting. So expect a rich isolemtric CRPG with a truly staggering number of choices. Maybe this will prompt me to actually go back and play Original Sin 1 and 2 so I can get caught up on the lore of this setting. I played Divinity 1 and 2 and loved them, but never could seem to get into Original Sin. If you needed a trailer where children revel while a man is burned alive… while also simultaneously a bunch of random people are fornicating in the front row… you might need to get your head checked. Regardless it was certainly memorable. I loved Baldur’s Gate 3, and I have loved various other Larian games in the past so I am hoping this brings me back into the fold.

Another thing that I did not expect is that we are getting a Total War game set in the Warhammer 40k universe. This is especially confusing because we are just about to get another Dawn of War game, which is also an RTS. It seems like these two games would cannibalize audience from each other. It could simply be that Dawn of War 3 is much closer to release and this is much further out, and we won’t be seeing the Total War game for a few years. Either way I am interested. I’ve heard the Total War Warhammer Fanatasy games were great, though I have never played them.

The last game that I am going to highlight is Highguard, which is a really quirky looking competitive shooter. It sort of reminds me of a bunch of other games that I have played in the past mutated into a single experience. I am not entirely against competitive shooters, but I want the playing field to be level if possible and for there to be other objectives that we are focused on rather than just racking up kills. My favorite competitive shooters were the Enemy Terrritory series with both Wolfenstein and Quake games set in it. This sort of feels like a spiritual successor to that where you seem to be focused on holding objectives and setting up attacks like the siege tower that is built that the group is obviously escorting across the map. I am really interested to see how this plays it. It screams hero shooter to me, and that is ultimately going to determine how much I like it… because if you keep having to buy the latest and greatest hero it is going to limit my joy for the long term.

If you missed the show they released a 4k 60fps version this morning, but be warned it is a 3 hour and 35 minute long commitment. These shows always overstay their welcome, and while I had fun for the first hour or so… I was mostly just wanting to hit the fast foward button from that point on. You truly are better off just checking the YouTube page the next morning and cherry picking the trailers that you want to watch. The award portion of the show always feels like an afterthought, and there is generally one game that wins everything… for example I am pretty sure that Expedition 33 won every award it was up for. I like that there exists something like this, that is now the focal point of the gaming year…. especially with E3 long dead and gone… but in truth I would rather have an event like this once a quarter… that is half as long than have this one big dumb stupidly long event at the end of the year.

Did you watch The Game Awards? What games were you excited about that I did not cover? Drop me a line below.

Aberroth Down

by

Good Morning Folks. My new Judgement Paladin has been a bit of a wild ride. Like I said yesterday this was a brand new character on Sunday morning, and as of yesterday I have effectively completed all of the content that is reasonable to complete at this moment. Since factions are shared across your account, I was able to pick up where I left off on my spin to win character at seven of ten harbingers down. I trivially downed the last few harbingers and then was set up for the pinnacle boss fight which is Aberroth. I get that this entirely has been lowered in difficulty with the Tombs of the Erased patch, but it still seems like a significant challenge.

Yesterday over lunch I made an attempt and was shocked to take down the entire encounter in one go. There are some tricky bits that I happened to just luck into doing the right thing. The problem with being able to tank all the damage, is that you don’t really learn the fight until a bit later. At this point I have now done the encounter around ten times and know some of the pitfalls given that not ALL of those were successes. I’ve managed to pick up copies of most of the items that I will at some point want to swap over to… but I either need to cook them in Nemesis Eggs or hope for better drops with more LP in order to really make the transition.

Last night I grouped up with Ace, because the Woven Echo which requires you to kill 10 Harbingers in a row was kicking my ass. Instead of suffering alone… we suffered together because it was STILL kicking our collective asses. Instead we opted to alternate between summoning Aberroth and trying to farm the items we were needing from the encounter. The only annoying thing about doing this is that the only person who gets guaranteed boss table drops is the person who uses the key. There is a chance of getting drops, as we managed to pick up a few items on the table when not being the summoner, but it seemed super rare. That said it is still well worth it to group up for this because you can always gift items that the other person needs, and the encounter goes so much faster with a second person.

The only frustrating bit is that I realized some of the items I was hunting for were unique to the 500 Corruption Uber Aberroth Woven Echo version of the fight. It is highly unlikely that I will get any of those, at least not without them significantly nerfing the encounter which is counter intuitive to the fact that it is the highest difficulty pinnacle fight. I picked up a few items that like i said need to cook in eggs, but I did swap a few pieces of gear out. First up I got a chest piece with good health and t7 Mana Gained on Vengeance which is required to make the Judgement build feel good since that is your way of regenerating your mana quickly. I also farmed up a Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros and slammed T7 Judgement onto it so that I could swap off my weavers will sentinel relic. Lastly I farmed up a Throne of Ambition unique idol which is highly suggested for the build and does seem to significantly increase my damage output, but I did lose a bit of Healing Effectiveness in doing the swap.

More important than all of that however is that I shuffled my gear around and am now 100% Crit Damage Immune. This is pretty massive because during all of my recent boss attempts I was only sitting at around 35% which was VERY noticeable. I’ve also gotten my block chance up to 76% which is pretty solid, though I would love to be able to hit 100% at some point. The shuffling did drop my Increased Healing Effectiveness below 1300, but only barely which still feels pretty solid. My health is also just shy of 2800 and hopefully once I pour on some more levels I will be able to cross that threshold. A lot of my survive comes from stacking ward which I can usually have around 3000ish without much issue during a boss fight.

The four extra points in Judgement has allowed me to pour some additional area of effect and duration making the whole mapping experience feel considerably more comfortable. This actually does now feel like Righteous Fire and chasing down things like Loot Lizards has become trival. For pure boss fights however, I should probably drop the Anointed keystone because which it is great for mapping it is sort of counter intuitive to how bossing works. Since I am not dropping Consecrated Ground on the floor, I can’t stack it up and add multiple layers of damage on the boss and those same multiple layers of healing on myself. It is kind of annoying to have to unspec something and respec it for mapping…. but it might be worth it if I was chain farming Aberroth or something like that. Probably something I am going to play around with a bit. Ultimately I could probably get this effect by just un-equipping and re-equipping my relic… but then I would also have to fiddle with respeccing all of the other points it is giving me.

The only BAD thing about zooming through so many objectives as I have as quickly as I have… is that I am sort of directionless. I just set up a bunch of Nemesis Towers and I will likely be cooking a bunch of items in those eggs tonight, but in the coming days I am probably going to shift my focus to my Beastmaster build that I intend on going Squirrels with. Other than that I will probably offer assistance to anyone that wants help with Harbingers or Aberroth kills. I still need to max out my Weavers Faction, but it seems like chain buying Woven Echoes goes a long way towards that. I spent down all of my Memory Amber so I need to spend the next bit farming it back up.

Faith in Judgement

by

Good Morning Folks. This character has been a wild ride. You have to remember this was a brand new character that I started late Sunday morning and cobbled together gear from my stash to get up and running. I maintained Deathless until I fought a 230ish Spirits of Fire boss… but honestly I think that was my screw up. The Maxroll guide suggested that I use Transcriber’s Graver and I did not fully understand why… so when a really sweet Sceptre dropped I swapped over to that. Essentially my attack speed plummeted because I was not getting all of those bonuses from wielding a sword, which caused me to not stack anywhere near as much ward as I was used to… causing me to take bigger hits that I would normally be soaking with that ward. Had I NOT made that mistake… I would probably still be Deathless because I have not taken another death since swapping back to the sword.

I ran the woven echo that allowed me to copy my corruption over from another character, which unfortunately did not copy ALL of the corruption over. However I did get my first item that allows you to stack corruption faster. At first I did not realize you had to have it equipped in your idol slot, so it took me a few attempts to trigger it and get several stacks of Gaze of Orobyss, but when I did it allowed me to push my corruption on that Monolith past 300. Last night I took down my Eighth and Ninth Harbingers and this morning I copied as much corruption as i could to that final timeline. Unfortunately I am going to have to kill at least one Shade before I can get it back up to 300 and take on the final Harbinger. After that I will probably make an attempt on Aberroth tonight.

My gear is still not amazing but I am sitting at around 1200 Healing Effectiveness which is the engine that you use to fuel Judgement. I had a shield sitting in my bank that I picked up from somewhere and had been holding onto in case I wanted to try out this build, and quite honestly I am not sure I can ever replace it. If I pick up a 4LP version of another shield I might slam it over onto it… but it does have a T4 sealed Physical Resistance that is pretty freaking nice. Other than that I have made decent slams with a Transcriber’s Graver and a Sunwreath and I have an LP3 version of the Graver waiting for a better sword to slam into it. Ultimately this unique gets used mostly because it is hard to get a lot of Spellpower on a Sword.

I’ve also got some scuffed Legendaries that I am using in my build. First up there is a Code of an Erased Sentinel that I am mostly using because it gives me a massive amount of healing effectiveness in addition to +1 to all skills. I would really like to have one with a useful skill on it as well, but so far that has not been in the cards. I’ve slammed 20% Increased Health onto an Immolator’s Oblation which is good… but I would really rather have an LP2 at least that I can slam maybe a high Hybrid Health roll and decent Healing Effectiveness roll on it. Finally I have a super scuffed pair of Wing Guards that I am mostly using only to get more attack speed and haste because the faster I hit, the faster I can stack ignite on myself which gets converted to spell damage… and those hits also generate a lot of ward. Ultimately I will probably use these until I can replace them with the final suggested item for the build, Immortal Vise, that drops from Aberroth.

I am somewhat disappointed in the way that The Woven faction levels. I assumed that collecting memory amber itself would eventually fill the bar. However it appears that this is mostly leveled by placing Woven Echoes on the atlas. Since I have been so focused on pushing corruption and killing the Harbingers, I have not really been spending much time interacting with the Atlas Tree. Once I have taken down the last Harbinger and Aberroth I will likely shift focus to trying to grind this up. If I can fill all of the factions bars I will consider this a very successful league. I also want to see what the other woven echoes that I have not unlocked do.

Speaking of filling bars… last night night I went on a prophecy spree and finished pushing Circle of Fortune all of the way to Rank 12. Getting double rewards from Prophecies means that my screen is about to be complete nonsense. What I am tentatively planning on doing is going on another spending spree right before I take on Aberroth. The idea is that I want to see if stacking “boss kill” prophecies that reward Unique items will cause more of the specific drop pool from that encounter to also drop. Essentially I need a bunch of items from Aberroth for the final version of this build, and most of them I need with at least LP1 on them. Mostly getting that means increasing the amount of total drops and I am thinking by stacking boss drop uniques it might fill that role. Who knows though if that is even a thing, because in theory the prophecies could be limited to generic unique drops. Either way it is well worth testing.

One parting thought is some information that Ace shared with me. One of the nodes that you probably want to pick up on the Weaver tree is Warden’s Echo. What this does is give you a 20% chance to see dungeon specific encounters while you are in Monolith Echoes. These have the chance of dropping Dungeon specific uniques as well as a really high chance of dropping Dungeon keys. This means that in theory you might NEVER have to actually run the dungeons to get the items you want from them. This is a massive win in my book and on this second character I absolutely shifted the way in which I was speccing out my tree to make sure I could fit both nodes. After doing this… it feels like MOST maps seem to have these extra encounters, just adding more excitement to the Monolith.

On one hand… I am glad I made the decision to roll the overpowered build of the league. On the other hand I am a bit disappointed that I did not make it all the way to Aberroth on a build of my own design. However I am pretty proud of the seven of ten that I got with it. I might continue to tweak that build to see if I can make it go further, but for now I am happy enough and just want easier access to high end content.

Joining the Judges

by

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.