wolves

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.

Luring Defenseless Animals

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So I am still on my Minecraft nonsense, and priority one for yesterday was to lure some helpless animals into my custody. We are not going to talk about the deeply disturbing things that I am going to put them through… or at least not until later. The biggest challenge was trying to separate the cows from the sheep because both of them were lured with wheat. It was pretty hilarious me slowly backing towards my base with a mob of five sheep and four cows. I created an impromptu dirt bridge across the pond outside of my base to make it a little easier and was impressed that none of them fell in the water. I did make it three blocks wide which seems to have helped in this case.

I also went out into the world and tamed a bunch of doggos. It is pretty wild playing this game while being trailed by six wolves. It ends up making the entire experience feel a bit more like a World of Warcraft Hunter. I plink something with an arrow and then before the mob can get anywhere near me my team of expert “goodest boys” has wrecked it completely. The only negative is that they won’t seem to attack creepers, which is one of my larger problems honestly. They completely destroy Pillagers though, and they are the sole reason why I was able to rain the nearby outpost and get myself a shiny new crossbow. I have no clue how to destroy said outpost, because by the time I was leaving everything was respawning in full again.

I did have to put my sweet babbos in timeout though, because digging tight tunnels while followed by six wolves… is complete madness. The best part about these kiddos though is that they eat zombie meat and seem to think it is good… which means I get to save all of the steak for myself and heal them up with otherwise useless junk. I specifically parked them under the shelter of my base because it felt awful to have them sitting out in the rain and weather. I have no clue why I am suddenly personifying these puppers, but it is a thing that is happening. This is hilarious considering the sheer animal cruelty that I am committing just across the courtyard from these “goodest boys”.

Since I did not have access to much Redstone, I have opted to instead make a traditional “meat hole” with my chickens. There is a fried chicken machine that works much better but it requires me to have way more resources than I currently have. My hope is that at some point I can convert the current machine over to the automated version at a later date. Essentially both the Chicken and Cow machines work based around the concept of entity cramming, where only 24 entities can occupy the same square of space and when a new entity is created… the oldest entity is killed off creating drops… which get whisked into a chest via a hopper system. So essentially I hop up on the top of the machine and feed the chickens grass seed, which creates baby chickens, which kills off older chickens, and drops feathers and meat into the chest. Additionally, the hopper collects more eggs than I can ever use… most of which I am throwing at the ground to try and spawn additional chickens and then eventually manually killing them. Cows work so much better than Chickens for this purpose… because the drop rates of chicken meat and feathers is much lower than beef/leather.

The sheep are suffering a significantly less dire fate because shears exist and I can just corral them in a small space and then hop down into the pen and harvest all the wool easily. Most of the food that I am using comes from the cows, and the chicken farm exists only to serve as a way of getting feathers to replenish my arrow supply. Were it not for the fact that sheep end up being “bycatch” from my act of trying to lure cows into my base… I would not even have messed with collecting any. Once you have made a bed… there isn’t much use for sheep in general. Sure they drop meat, but they are overall a way less efficient animal. Similarly, I did not even mess with collecting any pigs. However since this batch of sheep so willingly entered my den of horrors… I figured I might as well keep them penned up in case I need more wool in the future.

The other part of the arrow-making routine has involved creating giant towers of gravel and then harvesting it down hoping for flint. I really wish they would add a crafting machine recipe for turning gravel into flint, because honestly… this is a bit maddening to keep harvesting the same gravel over and over hoping for that rare drop. The only real positive is that you get to see some nice above shots of my base while I am up on my tower of nonsense. You can see that I am farming sugarcane out by the water to build up a proper enchanting shack. I think the next big renovation phase is going to be trying to make my base look a little less shit. I also am contemplating expanding out a bit more and doing a land grab to get more “safe” territory. I’ve contemplated moving the entire from of my base out over top of the waterfront so that I can move my sugarcane farm indoors.

In other news, I have finished my spiral staircase down to bedrock, and in doing so found my very first diamond block. Legitimately it was just a single node, which is a bit infuriating but once I got down to bedrock I set up the standard strip mining operation. This quickly yielded enough diamonds to make myself a set of tools. Right now I have Iron Armor, and it will probably be quite a long time before I can get enough diamonds to make a full set of armor out of that material. I found some pointed dripstone and I think one of my next projects is going to be building a renewable lava setup. This will be useful for a few reasons… the primary that I will be able to start using lava buckets instead of coal for cooking the assorted meat that I am gathering. After that, I can start using it for farming obsidian to eventually build a nether portal.

So at this point, I have a Diamond Pick, Diamond Axe, and Diamond Sword. I am too cheap usually to make shovels, but at some point, I am sure I will. I still mostly use stone tools because I don’t have tons of diamonds yet. I am just too cheap to waste diamonds right now. I am sure tonight I will probably spend a bit more time down in the mines because there are still a lot of resources that I have not found. At some point, I plan on building a nether portal and start trying to gather some of the resources there. However, I do not want to set foot into the nether without at least some gold armor, because I do not want to deal with massive pigman aggro. I have found exactly zero gold so far, so I am probably going to set up a few different branch mines off my spiral staircase at different levels looking for various resources.

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.

Leaping Doggos

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Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.

When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.

Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.

I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.

Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts.

I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend.