Squirrels

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.

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.

Squirrels Are Go

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Good Morning Folks! Shocking to no one… I am still playing an awful lot of Last Epoch. The game is in a truly phenomenal state and all of the random uniques that I am picking up… just keep driving me towards wanting to play various builds. While I am still slowly working on getting my Void Knight to 100, and am a little over halfway to dinging 99… I’ve been playing Beastmaster quite a bit lately. This is a build that I really enjoyed in previous releases of the game, and it was the very first alt that I created in this cycle. While leveling on the Void Knight I picked up most of the early uniques required to make a “Bleed Wolves” build feel really solid. However, I was largely following the templating of the Squirrel build over on Maxroll because I had hopes of maybe one day being able to transition into that.

Over the weekend I got a drop that I had been hunting for longer than probably any other drop in this game save for the illusive Bastion of Honor. I spent so much time farming for the Herald of the Scurry in The Black Sun timeline on my Necromancer but never managed to see one drop. Earlier in the league my friend Ace managed to pick one up which gave me some hope that maybe just maybe all of the drop chance juicing that we go through the Circle of Fortune faction would let me see one. Sunday afternoon that happened and I picked up this helm which will allow me to shift from summoning a bunch of Wolves to summoning twice as many Squirrels. I want to command a chittering army of death by adorableness, but alas I have to get to level 73 before I can actually shit from my Artor’s Legacy over to the Scurry proper.

I was Deathless on my Beastmaster until I attempted Rahyeh in The Black Sun timeline. This is the boss that has pretty much ended every Deathless streak that I have gotten this far with. My inner 13-year-old is delighted that I made it to level 69 before taking my first death. I thought maybe I would be able to make it through, but I was somewhat of a dumbass to attempt this feat with only 4% void resistance. So I am in the process of balancing out my gear a bit and trying to stack some more resistances in the right places. My idols are a mess and I need to focus farm some with prophecies. My health is also atrocious but that should resolve itself as I pick up some more exalted bits of armor and replace my leveling uniques/weavers will items. I am very much looking forward to transitioning into the Squirrels build as this is something I have wanted to play from the moment I heard it existed.

In another bit of weird loot luck, I picked up a wild pair of gauntlets. They have 2 T6 affixes on them and a T7 affix. While they don’t exactly fit anything I am actively playing… I gotta say it is making me contemplate a shield throw build as I have a bunch of gear for that build sitting in my exalted stash tabs. I guess at some point I should research how that build even works and what it cares about. I am guessing it is probably a Paladin build and I don’t really have one of those yet… but similarly, I am not sure I want a third Sentinel build quite yet. I am getting a serious itch to play a Necromancer as I have picked up a bunch of items that had eluded me in the past like the Ravens’ Rise gauntlets. If I end up picking up an Aaron’s Will chest with any legendary potential I will probably consider it a sign that I need to work up another Bone Golem build. Similarly, I would love to see the David Harbour helmet and try a Wraithlord Build.

I managed to hit Rank 9 in the Circle of Fortune guild and honestly… I was not even paying attention not my progress. I only knew that I hit it because I had one monolith reward every item of two different sets. I have to say though, this rank is a bit more annoying than it is really worth. By the time you are capable of hitting rank 9… You’ve very likely seen every single set item in the game. It isn’t like they are very useful in the first place as compared to a combination of uniques and exalted items. I would love to see them either buff the heck out of set pieces or lower their equippable level significantly so you could use them for leveling alts. As it stands they are mostly just vendor trash so making the entire set drop every time… just ends up clogging your inventory. I am happy to have unlocked my final lens slot however so that was cool.

One thing I was a bit disappointed in was Lightless Arbor. I spent around 800k gold on the gambler there and while it certainly looks like a lot of loot… by the time I had hoovered up all of the affixes and glyphs it truthfully wound up being around five or six items worth keeping. I see more usable loot in a single monolith than that. This combined with the fact that very rarely see Legendary Potential items through Runes of Ascendance lead me to believe that Circle of Fortune bonuses only impact mob-dropped loot. As a result Lightless Arbor keys are probably better sold to the vendor than used because you get spoiled by the sheer amount of drops that you see thanks to Circle of Fortune. Maybe these are great for the folks who wound up going to trade league but I am progressively feeling like they made the wrong choice.

I am consistently amazed by how much more I am enjoying the game right now as opposed to in previous versions. The sheer volume of loot I think is the real difference here. Circle of Fortune makes it feel like it is just an inevitability that you will eventually see the item you are seeking. More than that… you are probably going to see enough copies of it with legendary potential that you can probably make a bunch of attempts to get a really good item. That all makes the mechanical loop of the game that much more enjoyable for me personally. I’m highly loot-motivated and I love rolling the dice and seeing what items I end up getting this time. Maybe I would not have appreciated it quite so much had I not played in versions of the game where the loot was significantly more stingy.

All of that said, however… I am keenly watching the various spoilers for the next Path of Exile League. That has been announced for the end of this month and I am certain I will be back in that game at league start. Unless there are some pretty significant changes I will probably be going for the Chieftain Righteous Fire build that I ended up playing so much this past league. I feel like maybe GGG delayed their spoilers a bit to give EHG some breathing room for the Last Epoch launch. I know the two companies are friendly so It gives me hope that maybe they will play nicely together with the timing of future Cycles/Leagues.