Sentinel

Third Time More Burny

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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.

Last Epoch Launch Plans

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Good Morning Folks! I am starting to get extremely excited for the 1.0 launch of Last Epoch. Next Wednesday at 11 am CST the patch will go live and with it a bunch of new systems. They are waiting for a day before turning on Twitch Drops, which is honestly pretty smart given that I am certain that there will be some day-one issues. Eleventh Hour Games recently announced that they had passed the 1 million copies sold mark, so I have a feeling that there will probably be some server congestion issues. Were this a AAA studio I would expect that they could throw money at the problem and scale up to be able to support the load… but given that EHG is still very much in indie mode I am going to doubt that happens. Though I do wonder how many people will take advantage of playing in the fully offline mode. I know that I will not because one of my hopes for the game is that I can actually play with some friends who also seem excited.

At this point, I have put in a bit over 200 hours into the game and my two highest characters are my Fire Golem Necromancer and my Spriggan Druid. I’ve also put in quite a bit of time on my very first character that went down the “unstoppable” Paladin path, which was fun at times but not nearly as smooth as I would have liked. The problem with the Necromancer is it was extremely squishy while not having a lot of interactivity given that you were mostly following your mob of pets around. The Druid build was fun, but you sort of had to keep spamming abilities in order to keep your fury up and stay in Spriggan form. I spent some time working towards the Squirrel build for Beastmaster but could never get the helm to drop that was required for that build.

For the 1.0 Launch I think I am going to go down a path that I have not really explored heavily. Most of my Sentinel characters have been sword and board and very defensive-minded. This time I think I am going to lean on the Void Knight and specifically go down the Warpath route of creating a very “spin to win” character. It seems like at a minimum this is going to be one of the more fun ways to level through the campaign. On top of just a leveling build, Echo Warpath is one of the more popular meta builds for the class meaning that I should have no real issue transitioning into empowered monoliths. Essentially I should be able to charge between packs with lunge and then shred them with warpath. This is very much a playstyle that is in my wheelhouse so I am looking forward to it.

There is also a later game Void Knight build that folks call an “autobomber” because you sort of just walk through packs in a very Righteous Fire fashion. Going Void Knight should allow me to pivot easily into this build if that ends up being something I want to try. There is also a bleed variant of the warpath build that is supposedly really good. So I feel pretty comfortable committing to Sentinel and more specifically Void Knight as there should be plenty of room to respec and pivot to whatever build feels the best in the late game. That was a problem that I with Paladin is that I didn’t really want to go with the full caster Smite variant so I somewhat felt pidgeon holed into the one build that I was playing. Last Epoch allows you to pretty easily respec your character, but you can’t change your specialization so essentially I was limited to ONLY Paladin builds. With Void Knight there are already a handful of builds that I am really interested in so I should be able to eventually land on the one that I like the best. Since Warpath is a super early ability, leveling with it should feel good as it won’t require a midgame respec.

As such I have been looking at some of the early uniques to keep an eye open for. Essentially I would really like to find a Dreamthorn and a pair of Darkstride boots early on as they should make a lot of the early leveling more enjoyable. Since I will be scaling Void Melee damage, the Darkstride boots will in theory just keep making my movement faster which will make Warpath feel better and better. For an early chestpiece I think Yrun’s Wisdom is a pretty good choice and a bit later game I am contemplating moving into a Titan’s Heart for the reduced damage taken while using a two-hander. The problem with that is that I am not sure how well I can offset the loss of regeneration. If I can lean heavily into life leech it could in theory be worth it as I should always be dealing damage to my targets given I will have fairly high mobility.

I created a baby Void Knight some time ago, and I am contemplating screwing around on it for a while as I am finding myself in that awkward “between games” phase. It would at least allow me to get acclimatized to Last Epoch again. I don’t want to hit the game super seriously until next Wednesday because I am amped to be playing in the very first season aka “cycle” as they are going to refer to them. I’m really interested to see all the tweaks to the game, and very interested in the magic find faction. I think most of my friends are going to go that route which will mean I need to be actively grouping with them so that we can trade goods when we find something the others need. I am honestly kinda hoping that the next Path of Exile league gets delayed a bit so that I won’t be tempted away for that until I have really given Last Epoch a proper go.

Are you going to be playing Last Epoch on launch next week? What sort of build are you contemplating and what class and specialization are you leaning towards? Drop me a line below.

Affliction Spoiler Nonsense

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This morning’s post is almost entirely thanks to SirGog a YouTuber who does an admirable job of providing Path of Exile information and largely just getting straight to the facts or data-influenced predictions. I am writing a blog post about today’s spoilers because they represent a whole order of nonsense. Essentially tomorrow is the big reveal stream for the Affliction League and generally speaking in the days leading up to this stream, we start seeing spoilers from the community staff at Grinding Gear Games. This league has been a bit odd, and the spoiler started later than normal… and have been not terribly forthcoming with information. This could be caused by many different things, not the least of which could be that this is the first spoiler season since the departure of long-term community manager Bex.

To this point we have had a Divination Card spoiled, and some general quality of life changes like the ability to split stacks of currency in the trade window. We’ve also received notice that Trial of the Ancestors league would not be going into standard, and that all of the uniques associated with that league save for the ones that have specific interactions with the tattoo mechanic would be going into the general “drop anywhere” unique pool. Players have focused heavily on the specific wording of this notice “Trial of the Ancestors won’t be going core in 3.23” as a sign that we might be seeing some of these mechanics returning later. I would honestly be shocked if we do not see the Trial in some form because it seemed like it was a huge amount of work to make that content and tattoos as a mechanic were really interesting.

Yesterday/This Morning because timezones are nonsense… Grinding Gear Games released a relatively innocuous image that I have edited to highlight a few things. Firstly the obvious “spoiler” is showing that there is going to be a nice quality of life change that indicates how many character slots you have on your account and how many you have available. Given that I have reached the point where I have to start deleting my characters… this is a good change. What is less than obvious are the two character names. Firstly it was pointed out that those names are too specific to be a community manager banging away at the keyboard. As SirGog states in his video, try typing them and you will see just how awkward it would be to arrive at them by random chance.

This led to speculation and eventually a solution presented by Neversink the dedicated person behind the best series of loot filters for Path of Exile. It was a Caesar Cypher, where you essentially shift the characters by a fixed set of letters to get the original message… in this case an 8-character shift. The end result gives you the message “IWONDER INALTESSENTIALS” which sort of screams Anagram. After many attempts including some rather rude ones… Neversink landed on “Sentinels Atlas Win or Die” which folks are taking to mean that Sentinels are going standard, that Affliction is going to have an Atlas Rework of some sort, and that Ultimatum league is going standard as well.

I admit I did not fully understand what players meant about Ultitmatum coming back, because in patch 3.19 GGG gave us the ability to collect a bunch of nonsense from Vaal activities in order to summon the Trial Master. I’ve done this a few times because one of the rarest items required drops down in Delve. However. since I did not play in this league, I did not realize that there was an in-map component to it as well. I gotta say I am kinda excited about the prospects of something like this permanently getting added to the game. I assume there will be Atlas support for both Sentinels and the Ultimatum Trial encounter, and that the Trial Master will still exist as a weird Vaal crafting recipe.

Sentinels and Ultimatum Trials would already be an awful lot of new content added to the game, but I can’t see that GGG won’t have something new and unique for Affliction. I still think that we are going to see some sort of Ritual rework as part of this patch cycle because the trailer clearly shows a ritual totem. I am definitely looking forward to the stream tomorrow where they announce the full features of the league. If you can tune in tomorrow the stream will start at 12:30 PM PST and drops will be available until 9:30 PM PST featuring a set of Huntsman Wings. Funny enough Diablo 4 is having a stream just ahead of the Path of Exile proceedings where they are going to talk about the upcoming additional changes to Season 2.

I am amped to see what all the Affliction League is going to entail, and I am also bracing myself for some nerfs… specifically to Guardian.

Kalandra Redemption Arc?

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Last night I wound up playing Diablo IV again. I am not really certain how much longer I will be lingering in this game, but I realized after yesterday’s post how close I was to finishing the 90 levels of the Battle Pass system. For reference, I dinged 80 this morning while I was in the game taking some screenshots, and dinged 90 on the Battle Pass around the time I hit 79, so it is easily done on a single character without partaking of the nonsense “accelerated” version. This honestly makes me feel much better about the battle pass as a whole because it seems significantly less grindy than what I experienced with Destiny 2. As far as the seasonal achievements… it is really asking me to get a character through all of the end-game boss fights, and if I actually stick around to grind out the next 20 levels… I might care about those.

While I greatly enjoy Legions and the “Bloodtide” events, I have reached a point in progression where I only really care about the World Bosses. The World Bosses can drop item level 925 gear, and so far I have picked up six pieces in total with a few spares sitting in the bank. No event other than the World Boss seems to be capable of dropping gear that high level, or at least I have not ground up Nightmare Dungeons to the point where they can given that I am around the level 21-25 range with them currently. Legions, Bloodtide, and Helltide all seem incapable of dropping anything decent yet so that puts me in the awkward position of not really caring about much loot that is dropping save for hunting for the handful of legendary affixes that I care about and lining up some spare aspects to extract.

Mechanically the game is still quite fun, but I am reaching the point where I am grinding for the sake of grinding. Otherwise, I can just keep the D4Armory Events page up and pop in right before a World Boss spawn. I ran a handful more Nightmare Dungeons and they are sort of in the “aggressively fine” state where I am getting enough map drops that I can salvage the ones with the affixes that I don’t care for, and then craft more of hopefully the ones that I don’t mind too much. I know I complained the other day about Drifting Shadows… but honestly, that is one of the better options that does not seem to impede too much on the fun of romping through the dungeon. I still do not think the state of dungeons in general is good, but it is at least something to do and I should probably spend more time leveling my glyphs.

Path of Exile released a trailer and some general announcement notes about the November events that will be taking place starting next Friday. There is no Endless Delve as folks had thought, and instead, the first event is a return of the Krangled league… where all of the passive tree and ascendancy nodes are jumbled making it almost impossible to build a viable character. This is going to get a hard pass from me, but the next one is a revisiting of the league mechanics from Sentinel and Kalandra… both of which I actually enjoyed so I am probably going to try league starting an RF Chieftain during this event. Lastly is a league called Shifting Stones where every map will have a super juiced version of the Atlas passives applied to it, and what each map gives you will shift every 15 minutes. If I am feeling up to it I might throw together something quickly just to play with that. If you get a character to at least level 50 in two of the three events, you will get a loot box… which legitimately is not that big of a reward but at least something.

I am legitimately hoping that the Sentinel/Kalandra league means that we might see a revisiting of these two mechanics in Standard with 3.23. I always thought that the Kalandra mechanic specifically was very interesting, but just happened to land at a time when the sandbox state of the game was not great. Had it released in place of say Crucible, when the balance of the league was very strong… I think it would have been significantly better received. It has a really bad taste in most players’ mouths because the game itself was in a bad state at that moment, so maybe this event will give it a bit of a redemption arc. Players have also been begging for Sentinel’s recombinator system to go standard for a while. If nothing else it will be an interesting week to get in and revisit all of this for seven days.

Lastly, I wrapped up The Peripheral by William Gibson last night and enjoyed it enough to start the second part of the unfinished “Jackpot Trilogy” immediately following. I’ve been a fan of Gibson since first reading Neuromancer, but I got out of the habit of rabidly consuming everything he released. I caught part of The Peripheral series on Amazon and liked it quite a bit, which prompted me to try out the novel given that the series was not picked up for additional seasons. All in all, it was a good novel with memorable characters, but maybe not the high point of my year so far. I am going to at least make my way through the second novel and then be sitting and waiting for the release of the third.