Video Games

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.

Temporal Gambling

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve decided that we are going to refer to this current cycle reset as Cycle 2.5, given this is the second half of the second cycle. I still feel like EHG needs to come up with a better naming scheme, but I’ve already nattered on about that in previous posts so I am not going to any further this morning. At this point, I have a level 85 character up and running and into empowered monoliths. There are still a lot of gear pieces that I need to swap out but that mostly just requires running a lot of content in the hopes of seeing something useful. The biggest thing that I need currently is more sources of melee or fire leech to keep refilling my health bar while I spin around like a Beyblade of doom. I’ve been running around in the void cosmetic set in part because the game has no good fire cosmetics yet available.

Last Epoch Tools has been updated and now you can see my live profile if you are so inclined for this character. Over the weekend I grouped quite a bit with my friend Ace and they handed me my very first iteration of Palarus’s Sacred Light, the weapon that largely makes this build work. After that, I found a few copies, including one that had one legendary potential which I then gambled trying to get exalted melee leech onto the weapon. I failed that chance but did land Health on Hit which is still pretty useful but truth be told I probably would have run with any additional stat that I managed to land. I’ve not encountered a single egg from the Nemesis system, and when I finally do I will obviously be chucking the spare copies I have sitting around in and attempting to get either a good random legendary or a weapon with legendary potential to try again. My Firestarter’s Torch is honestly pretty decent for the time being.

I’m in this weird position with Cycle 2.5 where the level 90 monoliths are a cakewalk… and the level 100 empowered monoliths are just straight-up wrecking me. This is a bit odd given that I have maxed out resistances, a decent health pool, and a pretty good amount of leech and health gain on hit. I am not sure what exactly I can do to fix things… save for just grinding out a bunch more levels. I am not sure what they changed with Cycle 2.5 but it feels like they changed something, because quite honestly I had a much weaker character overall in Cycle 2, but did not remember running into this problem transitioning to empowered. Ace has reported the same general feeling with their character, so I quite honestly am not sure what to think about that.

For the moment I guess I am going to grind up to at least level 90 in the normal monoliths and then try and transition to empowered again after that. One thing that has been wild, is that even with some nerfs applied on Saturday… the drop rates are still insane. I’ve had more Runes of Ascendance this league than I have probably in total from ANY of the other leagues. This is pretty freaking awesome because it means that I can target farm various uniques, and have pulled a few torches and broadswords using this option. It gives me a little side game to keep trying for better weapons which has been nice. I will admit the friction transitioning into Empowered monoliths is harming my fun a bit. If I can’t push through it, I am not sure how much more of this league I am actually going to play.

Have you been playing Last Epoch Cycle 2.5? Are you having issues moving over to Empowered Monoliths as well? Drop me a line with your progress.

AggroChat #493 – So Many Lizards

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Apologies for taking a few weeks off but Covid kicked Belghast’s butt and he is the person who records, edits, and posts the show.  This week we had a mountain of topics to get through and got nowhere close to hitting them all. Last Epoch has their very poorly named cycle reset going on, in which they added some pretty freaking cool new features like Loot Lizards, Stash Priority system, and the Imperial Undead event.  We talk a lot about the game and then dive into a whole discussion on seasonal models and what works and does not work for them.  We also tangent off into a discussion about the Clue movie from the 80s for some reason…  so look forward to that.  From there we talk a bit about Dwarven Realms as it gets closer to the full release of the game. Ash, Kodra, and Tam talk a bit about their experiences playing the ISS Vanguard Living World physical board game.  Thalen kicks off a discussion about Astro Bot and how it is essentially the mascot game Sony has always needed.  Ash shares his experiences with Gundam Breaker 4 and Tam a bit about playing Hades 2 as a research project. Packed show with roughly half of the topics getting bumped to next week.

Topics Discussed:

  • Last Epoch Cycle Reset
    • Loot Lizards
    • Stash Tab Priority System
    • Imperial Undead Event
  • Dwarven Realms
  • ISS Vanguard
  • VHS Board Games
  • 1980s Clue Movie
  • Astro Bot
  • Gundam Breaker 4
  • Hades 2 Early Access

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Nether Fortress at Home

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Good Morning Folks! This is probably going to be the last day of Minecraft updates for a while, given that this afternoon the Cycle reset is happening in Last Epoch. I feel somewhat mixed about this because I have actually been enjoying myself quite a bit, and have a number of projects on the horizon that I am contemplating doing. Probably the biggest single project that I undertook last night was utilizing some of the real estate that I cleared outside of my base to set up proper fields. Right now I have pumpkin, potato, beet, and carrot farms outside of my walled area and have also taken the opportunity to move my sugarcane farm into this protected lot as well. At some point, I will probably uproot my wheat farm from inside the base and then expand out the fenced area to move it outdoors. Farms take up large amounts of room to do them properly so it just makes sense to move them outside of the closed-in area.

Other than that I started building out some more themed buildings in the main walled-in complex. I set up a proper smithy with an anvil, stonecutter, grinding wheel, smith bench, and a stack of blast furnaces. At some point, I might modify these to auto-feed fuel but before doing that I really need to set up a blaze farm in the nether. The lava buckets have been great for cooking meat, but this is not as easily repeatable for automating fuel intake into forges. Sadly the lava cauldron setup that I have does not work with either hoppers or dispensers so there is no way of feeding it into a furnace or blast furnace. I found a broken nether portal to the north of my base where I harvested a bunch of obsidian and magma blocks and then decided to use those as part of my design with some copper trap doors over them since I have so damned much copper.

The other new building that I added was a storehouse where I am consolidating all of my stuff. At some point, I plan on massively renovating the central tower and as such I am slowly migrating everything that I was storing up there down into sorted bins at ground level. I’ve incorporated a few barrels just because I like the look of them and on the left side you have spare tools, and on the right side, there are torches and arrows. Just to the far side of the building is a little troth that I set up for making obsidian, which I used to complete gathering what I needed for a nether portal. I also created a quickie infinite water source there so that I can grab it when I need it.

One of the big things that I did this morning was craft and enchant a full set of diamond armor. This means that I have officially retired my unenchanted and heavily battered set of iron armor. I figured I might as well use it as a decorative element so I set it up on an armor stand outside the smithy. I say I made a full set of diamond armor but that is a lie. I am wearing a golden armor helmet to give me immunity to piglins in the nether. While I enjoy killing them… I don’t want them to be aggro on sight. The nether is dangerous enough for me to not add additional difficulty levels. Several years ago when I started a hardcore Minecraft run, I did not know about this… and it summarily ended my run VERY quickly.

That experience has made me take the nether EXTREMELY seriously from that point forward. As a result, I have built my main portal underground and in an area closed off behind both a gate and a copper door. I’ve also been using these new copper grates in lieu of glass blocks because they are considerably more sturdy and I am not going to accidentally break them by swinging my sword to fight a stray piglin that makes it through my portal. At some point, I might fancify my portal room but for now, it works well enough. In general, I want to rethink the core of my base because it is getting extremely cumbersome to climb down the spiral staircase when I want to harvest materials from my strip mines down at bedrock. The spiral is super compact and was extremely efficient for getting down deep early on when I was still breaking the caves and such beneath my base, but the long staircase just works better for general purpose.

I’ve built the most rudimentary of shelters on the nether side, with cobblestone so that it won’t blow up easily and a copper door to wall off the portal chamber to keep it from being destroyed. Spawnwise I lucked out extremely well in that my portal is beside a Nether Fortress in the soul sand biome. This gives me access to a ton of resources and the ability to start farming Wither Skeletons as well as Blaze and the Lava Slimes. I think I might be on the boundary between biomes because a little way into the Nether Fortress it all changes over to Basalt and Black Stone. I wish I were in one of the tree biomes so that I could start farming those resources and I might need to make some expeditions out into the nether to try and find one of those.

For the moment I have limited most of my exploration to the immediate area surrounding the fortress. Last night I found a Blaze spawner really close to my portal, and as such I am probably going to set up a Blaze rod farm there. I will of course have to sort out how best to get from my portal to that area safely, which means a lot of tunneling and general construction. I will probably need to set up a more permanent base camp in the nether with chests full of non-nether materials for building tunnels. All of this is probably going to happen considerably later, and as such I am honestly glad that I have been blogging about my adventures. This will serve as a way of jogging my memory when I eventually return to this save.

Anyways! For now, I will be venturing forth into Last Epoch and starting a new cycle character. If you are so inclined for that nonsense I will hopefully see you there.