Sentinel

Detonate Dead is UnFun

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Good Morning Folks. I am still spending the majority of my time in Last Epoch currently, as I am trying to push up to level 100. I also did not make it super far in Cycle 2 before the reset, so that means I have only done a handful of the Harbingers that start showing up at the end of empowered monoliths. That is honestly one of my complaints is that they really should have gone for a system like Guardians that appear in Path of Exile maps. As it stands the Harbinger spawns in right after you kill the boss and you effectively have to survive two fights in a row in order to get your loot. This feels REALLY bad when you have a prophecy dump a ton of stuff on the ground and you don’t have time to loot it before ultimately getting attacked again… and feels even worse if you fail the Harbinger and are effectively locked out of any of your rewards. Harbingers should spawn a portal to go into their fight area rather than this whole surprise attack bullshit.

The other thing that has sucked is that the Imperial Undead packs feel way harder than the rest of the map content. I’ve adjusted my playstyle and am way more cautious… but this feels bad. I should in theory be able to continue face-rolling low corruption levels for a while before I have to start playing tense and on edge all the time. However several of the undead appear to have a version of Detonate Dead from Path of Exile, called Necrotic Self Destruct. This is awful and it is messaged so much worse than Detonate Dead is currently, which means you basically have to stay away from looting corpses for a period of time after finishing combat. It just sort of fucks with the flow of things, and feels like it punishes melee play way more than it punishes ranged play. Melee already has to deal with more inherent risk… so stacking additional effects as a “gotcha” always feels a bit miserable. I am dealing with it, but I am also grumpy about it.

At this point, I have dinged level 88 and am working on filling out the last bits of my tree. I had skipped an attack speed talent in the general sentinel tree so I am largely going back and snagging that for the time being. Since I have leech and on-hit effects, more attack speed weirdly means more survival. I’ve swapped out a bunch of gear over the last few days and feel like I am in a much better place than I was previously. The biggest slots that I probably need to find upgrades for are my helm and my belt, which are not really doing much for me. I swapped out one of my rings for a reasonably well-rolled Sunwreath with 2 LP and then failed to land any of the stats I actually wanted on it. I’ve still not seen any eggs from the Nemesis system because I really need to start getting some LP on my weapon cache that I have been stockpiling for that purpose.

I will be honest… I am not sure how much longer I will keep plugging away at Last Epoch. I just don’t enjoy its endgame anywhere near as much as I enjoy the Endgame in Path of Exile. Right now it feels very focused on grinding out Harbingers so that you can fight Aberroth and while I am glad something like that exists… I am just not a bossing-focused person. In Path of Exile tend to kill every boss once and then sell my tokens when I get them to fund more of the nonsense that I actually do enjoy doing. There is no equivalent grind to Delve in Last Epoch, and baseline mapping does not feel anywhere near as fun or rewarding as it does in Path of Exile. That is not to say that I have not enjoyed myself quite a bit during Cycle 2.5, but more just that there is a cap to how much of it I want to do.

Right now my goal is to hit 100 and then potentially finish grinding the Circle of Fortune rep to tier 12. Things have definitely slowed down reputationally, however, because I am just not making that much progress. It could be simply that I am not progressing through maps as fast as I was before, but I think maybe they backloaded the grind so that the first bit was super easy to get and the later levels would be stretch goals. I would also like to make it through all of the Harbingers even though I doubt I will actually kill Aberroth. I got a wild item drop last night, but I am just not sure if I have an alt in me in order to take advantage of it. It was essentially an insanely rolled version of what looked to be Cloud’s Buster Sword.

All of this said… Minecraft has been calling my name again. I’m still building a bit on the side and at some point, I will give you all an update on the progress of my world. The biggest change is that I have dabbled with mods again and installed a shader pack that completely changes the experience. Anyways… I hope your week is going excellently and if you made it this far into the post you are definitely one of those dedicated folks.

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.