Good Morning Folks! I know a few days ago I stated that I was going to be putting my Ignite Warpath Forge Guard aka “Fire Bro” on hold. However yesterday I ended up ripping the bandaid off and completely rebuilding the character into something slightly different. I am not sure how interesting this post is going to be for most people, because I am going to be diving into the changes that I made. I decided to go ahead and write about it mostly to show how easy it is to shift gears within Last Epoch. I’ve said this before, but the only thing that is absolutely set in stone is your mastery. So no matter what I would be doing from this point out, I would be doing it as a Forge Guard. Within that mastery, there is a heck of a lot of leverage to move around and change things up significantly.
For anyone who has not been following the saga of “Fire Bro” let’s do a really quick recap. The above video shows some Monolith gameplay of the build as it stood at the beginning of yesterday. I was focused on shifting Warpath to fire damage, and then using Lunge also shifted to fire damage as my movement ability, generating Sigils of Hope on kill, and proccing Smite every second while spinning to deal additional fire damage and some splash healing. It worked phenomenally well… up until the point that it didn’t. I had put almost all of my eggs in the block mechanic basket and did not have enough health or general survival to keep pushing forward. While I got to Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 + 100 Corruption version of the endgame system… I spent most of my time just getting overwhelmed by incoming damage. For anyone curious here is a Build Planner for the state of this build before the impending rework.
Yesterday started largely as me sitting down and trying to figure out how to work Healing Hands into my build. This is an ability that received a new talent tree with 1.0 and offers a ton of utility. Firstly you can have melee attacks proc healing hands 100% of the time generating a burst of direct healing and some healing over time. On top of that you can shift the ability to scale based on melee damage with Seraph Blade and if you have enough points left over you can turn it into a movement ability when directly cast and even give it the same invulnerability frames that other movement abilities have. A huge positive side effect of this interaction is the splash healing is not only keeping me alive but also keeping my Manifest Armor minion topped off. The problem with all of this… is it does not work terribly well with Warpath. It will proc once per channel, meaning that you need to constantly “pulse” Warpath meaning that you are losing some of the benefits that I had stacked for “channeling” constantly. Essentially I needed a new main damage-dealing ability.
Without Warpath smite was out the window as well, but I landed on another favorite of my abilities Rive. Essentially Rive is a 3-strike combo and the talent trees allow you to tweak which of the strikes is the most important. For me I wanted to go with Focused Strike which means that the third large AOE strike will always be a critical strike. On top of that while I can’t shift the damage of Rive to Fire… I can pick up three points into Savagery meaning that I am dealing 45% more damage against Ignited Targets and both my Manifest Armor and I are always igniting targets. Lastly, there is Coup De Grace which means that rive has a 15% kill threshold so that it simply deletes any target when their health drops to 15% or below.
Since I removed… Smite, Warpath, and Lunge… that left me with an open slot. As uninteresting of a choice as it is… I ended up going with the good ole swiss-army-knife of damage dealing… Volatile Reversal. I do not care at all about void damage, but this ability creates a rift at the start of my movement rewind and a rift at the end of my movement and causes everything touched by either rift to take 30% more damage. Additionally, I gain a boost in global attack speed meaning I burn through my 3-hit combo faster causing more ignites and dealing more critical damage on that third hit. The cooldown is lowered to the point where I can basically be constantly pressing it while in combat pending the “rewind” functionality does not screw things up.
With all of these changes also came a significant rework of some of my gearing. You can see the totality of the changes with this new Build Planner export, but I will talk through a few of them specifically. Firstly this build is still based around Firestarter’s Torch and the interactions with that weapon and ignite damage. I’ve managed to craft an amazing legendary version with T7 Hybrid Fire Penetration, and T5 Ignite Chance. I swapped out Rahyeh’s Light for the best rolled Cradle of the Erased that I have managed to pick up so far. Golden Aegis is a ton of survival, and the stats on this shield work pretty well with what I am trying to do. I had to swap out my helm and chestpiece trading Manifest Armor and Warpath for ones focused on Healing Hands and Rive. I am sticking with Solarum Plate as it gives me a nice boost in Fire Damage along with decent armor and endurance. Lastly giving up Warpath meant that I lost my ability to convert bleed into ignite, which means that I had to swap out my gloves for a pair of Maehlin’s Hubris which I managed to craft into a legendary with T6 Hybrid Health.
I can now rip through Empowered Monoliths, but that is not to say I don’t still have some issues. I am still using seven uniques and at some point, I would like to replace my Sunwreath and Fiery Dragon Shoes with either a good legendary version of either or a really well-rolled Exalted. Neither are doing anything that I could not pick up off another item and several of the lines on Sunwreath specifically only apply to a spellblade. I need a lot more health in order to be really comfortable as I am still sitting at around 1800. From an offense standpoint, I have 530% Fire Damage and 1 point shy of 300% Chance to Ignite which feels really good. I could use some more flat physical damage however to buff the moment-to-moment combat with Rive. There are still levers to tweak with this build, and I will likely be slowly poking at it until the next Path of Exile league.
Is it as fun as the previous version? Honestly… no. There was something so chill about rolling over the top of things and watching them burn to death in my wake. That aspect of the build is gone, but I am not sure what I could have done to keep making that sort of gameplay work. What I wanted was a pseudo Righteous Fire gameplay style with super chill Monoliths and so long as I stuck to the level 90 non-Empowered ones it worked well enough. I needed to do something to make things work for Empowered and my series of significant revisions to the build have done that. Is it still enjoyable? Yeah, it absolutely still is, but combat does not feel anywhere near as fluid as it did before. Needing to cycle through the three-hit combo of Rive gives everything a stutter-step feel which is nowhere near as smooth as spinning around and clipping through mobs constantly. My Void Knight continues to remain my “main” and I dinged 97 last night and continue pushing towards 100. However “Fire Bro” will likely stay here as a pet project.
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While I am still very much pushing my main Belgrevious the Echo Warpath Void Knight to 100, every so often I need a break. Lately, I have been tinkering with a Spellblade Mage, specifically one focused on Flame Reave, Firebrand, and Flame Ward. My friend Tam had talked at length about how much he was enjoying the Spellbade mastery and how specifically it was playing into his core fantasy of a melee mage. So I decided to give it a shot and ran up BelSpellReave to play with this. I believe he shifted his damage to Lightning, but for me setting things on fire will always be my happy place. I have to say I have gotten much faster at the campaign for Last Epoch and I think probably in total it took me around five hours to level from beginning a character to defeating Majasa and entering the Monolith. This is much faster than I am at getting through the Path of Exile campaign, and I am not even using any of the skips available in Last Epoch.
I have to admit when the concept of “Melee Mage” came up, it wasn’t necessarily this. Generally speaking, I expected to be swinging a weapon that was enchanted with magic… almost a Lightsaber for lack of a better description. What the Spellblade is doing instead is casting a very short-range blade-like spell that extends out in front of them. Essentially you have Flamebrand shown above or Shatter Strike that creates a weird strike that sort of wraps around your character. Mana Strike is the one that feels the closest to what I would have expected a Spellblade to feel like, but it feels super weak and is a default mage thing, not something attached to the specialization. It does not live up to my mental picture of what caster melee would look like, but I can roll with pretty much anything given that I am forced into the role of a caster in most of the characters I play in Path of Exile.
What is however a lot of fun is Flame Reave. By default, it is a cone that shoots out in front of you, but with the addition of the unique Sunwreath, it changes to a ring of fire that shoots out from your character. With points in the tree, you can make this ring return to your character causing it to deal another pulse of damage as it shrinks back down. It feels really good running around the map, gathering up a ton of mobs, and then firing off a few Flame Reaves to clean them up. The problem with this however is that I am constantly out of mana because I think in total I can shoot off four of these before it entirely drains my mana pool. This is one of the core problems I have with the design of Last Epoch… is that there does not seem to be a way to properly “fix” your mana problems. In Path of Exile, you can take actions that will make it so you effectively have an unlimited mana pool and never have to stop your most fun abilities. I’ve yet to truly figure out how to do this with most abilities in Last Epoch.
I realize that a lot of my current woes can almost directly be traced to the fact that my gear is a complete mess. Predictive loot is awesome for leveling a character and finding things that you can actually use… but it royally sucks for leveling alts that are of different base classes. I am wearing almost entirely a bunch of not-exactly ideal unique items because that is what I have in droves laying around that I can throw on a character. I am just now starting to get decent mage drops and I figure as I keep swapping out more of these items the character will perform significantly better. Uniques are a great boost in power while leveling… but that starts to become a hindrance as you near the end of the campaign and actually need some mana and survivability.
I absolutely skyrocketed through the campaign but hit a bit of a wall when I reached Majasa for the first time. She was simply dealing more damage to me faster than I could generate ward. I have really bad health and cannot seem to generate ward fast enough to make up for that fact. I was able to rip through Monoliths without problems and put on a few more levels and then finally came back and killed her at level 60 with fewer problems. In those few levels, I had done some swapping around of gear and talent points to try and focus more on survival and less on wholesale murder. That is one huge positive of the Spellblade though. It can certainly do a proper murder and has zero issues shredding bosses. If I can ever solve my ward woes and mana malfunctions… it will be a pretty dang fun build.
I’ve been through so many phases with this character in the last two days since starting it. I’ve fallen in love with the clear speed while doing the campaign, been frustrated with how weak the survival feels, and then reached a place of acceptance that it is never going to feel as sturdy as my Void Knight but certainly has faster-killing potential. Would I play one of these again? Probably not… or at least not without learning some significant lessons on how to fix some of its problems. I’ve never played a ward character before, and I essentially need to learn how to make them feel good. I also need to swap out almost all of my uniques for properly rolled exalted gear… which is simply going to take time in the monolith. It will be a pet project for when I get tired of spinning and winning.
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Good Morning Friends! I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Last Epoch. With it I am playing a slew of different characters that all have their own different demands. At least in part, I am “yoloing” my way through gearing and speccing most of the characters, and it made me think about some of the skills key to that process. Path of Exile and Last Epoch have a specific tagging system that indicates how abilities, gear, and passive points interact with each other, but coming from Diablo it was not necessarily something that I was super familiar with. In Diablo you generally think about how to scale a Barbarian, or a Demon Hunter, or a Crusader… and less so about how to scale one individual ability in their wide array of abilities. In Path of Exile you could play any ability on any base class, and while this is not exactly the case with Last Epoch… you can make every class perform in wildly different ways based on your specific choice of abilities and how you support them with the talent tree and your gear.
Ultimately it is the skill tags that will dictate how this interaction is going to work. If you mouse over any ability in the game and hold down the alt button, you are going to see an extended amount of information about how that ability is interacting currently. I chose a wide number of abilities and specifically what we are going to focus on the most is Scaling Tags. For example, Static is a Lightning Spell, and as such has both the tags “Lightning” and “Spell”, but it also has the tag “Instant Cast” and “Intelligence” indicating that it scales based on your current Intelligence stat and counts as an instant cast for anything that interacts with instant abilities. Summon Thorn Totem is a Minion but more specifically a Totem and will scale based on those tags but also indicates that it scales based on your Attunement ability score. Every ability in the game has tags that map out how they are going to interact with other abilities, the gear you equip, and the sorts of passive talent points that you invest in.
It is that last bit that becomes very important because sometimes a skill talent tree can impact the tags associated with a skill. They can either add new tags, remove tags, or sometimes change a tag completely. Let’s look at Warpath specifically as I am currently running two different builds that use that ability in different ways. By default, Warpath has the tags Physical, Melee, Area, Channeled, Movement, and Strength and you can scale the ability based on any of those interactions. If you choose Apocalypse Whirl in the skill tree it causes that ability to lose the Physical tag and instead gain the Void Tag. Similarly, if you choose Earthscorcher it will cause the ability to lose the physical tag and gain the Fire tag instead. These two notable passives are mutually exclusive, and change how you would begin to gear for that ability. Most abilities in the game have some sort of version of this interaction that allows you to lean into a specific playstyle or damage type, allowing you to more efficiently scale.
If you look at gearing, the affixes that are on an item will more or less map directly to the tagging system. For example, the Two-Handed Mace above scales Void Damage, so it would work well with an ability that either starts as dealing void damage or one that you have shifted to void damage in the above Warpath example. The Bow has Minion Melee Damage and Minion Bow Damage, and as such would scale the damage of any minions you create that either do Bow Attacks or Melee Attacks, but would not scale Thorn Totems that we talked about above because they have the Spell tag associated with them and not Bow or Melee. Harthenon’s Vow scales Melee Physical Damage which would work great with Warpath in its original form, but does nothing if you shift it to Fire or Void. Things get a little more tricky when afflictions interact with items… for example, Warpath shifted with the Earthscorcher talent can inflict Ignite, which itself does fire damage over time. Knowing that means that Firestarter’s Torch will specifically scale the damage if the Ignite you are inflicting on targets, but not necessarily the Fire-based Warpath damage directly.
You can in theory limp through the campaign on almost any combination of abilities, gear, and passive points. However, if you want a build that feels exceptionally good, you are going to want to pay attention to synergies between abilities, the tags that scale them, and the gear that you were equipping. Shifting everything to a single damage type, for example, makes it much easier to gear your character and makes every interaction that much more powerful. On my Void Knight that I am pushing towards 100, I have shifted pretty much every ability that I am using towards Void Melee damage so that I can scale effectively off either pure Void Damage, Void Melee, or pure Melee scaling. For the Ignite character that I have been tweaking, I have been focusing more on Fire Damage Over Time and Ignite Chance so that I don’t have to worry too much about whether or not my abilities are critical attacks. I need to take a step back and rework some things because right now I am having survival issues… but knowing my core focus on that character will allow me to shift some things around to create a better functioning total package.
The awesome thing about Last Epoch is that the interactions between abilities, gear, and talents are extremely straightforward. In Path of Exile, there are a bunch of edge cases where something might be tagged as this but scales in a very specific way when it comes to the damage that is being dealt. I am sure there are probably SOME edge-case interactions here, but most things certainly feel more clearly outlined. Mostly I wanted to talk about the concept of tagging because I know at this point Last Epoch is interesting to a lot of players who have not gotten down in the weeds when it comes to character builds. When I was playing Diablo, I was not necessarily paying attention to the nuance of every ability and trying to glean their finer interactions because I didn’t need to. Skill Tagging however is one of those concepts that will help you go a long way towards making more enjoyable characters without following a guide.
The post Last Epoch and Skill Tags appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a delightful weekend. I spent most of my in Last Epoch and a shocking amount of it grouped up with friends doing some multiplayer shenanigans. That is really the piece of this game that works so much better than Path of Exile… grouping with my friends does not feel needlessly punitive. In fact, if you happen to die while grouped with friends… you can res up and port back into the instance just fine. I’ve mostly shifted back to playing my Void Knight but I will talk about the reasoning for that a bit later. Kodra has come back from his trip and recently we have been trying to get him caught up and through normal monoliths. Originally my Fire Bro was an attempt to keep a character at his level… but then it was just too damned fun and I rushed through to empowered monoliths without really meaning to.
As far as my Void Knight goes, I have added a few levels but have not really made any major gear changes since I last talked about the character. I keep farming 120+ Orobyss but have had zero luck in finding another Apathy’s Maw Axe… specifically one with legendary potential and have not yet seen a Shattered Chains belt. Similarly, I’ve farmed God Hunter Argentus a number of times and have yet to see another Wings of Argentus chest-piece let alone one with legendary potential. I have levers that I can pull to keep trying for better get, but have simply not been lucky. I did find an LP1 copy of Darkstride boots but didn’t exactly get lucky on the craft, but wound up with something better than nothing. If you are curious I’ve dumped a build over on Last Epoch Tools for the current state of my character.
One thing that I had to do this weekend was create a significantly more strict loot filter. I had been using one that started out as something that came from Maxroll and that I kept tweaking. I decided I just needed to blow that away completely and start out on my own. I’m essentially hiding all normal, magic, rare, exalted, and idols and then only showing very specific stats that I care about. I have a broader rule that shifts things to pink that I specifically want to keep track of for sharding. Then I have some super specific rules for the Sceptres and Two-Handed Axes that I am looking for on both Void and Fire builds. Lastly, I have a rule to show ALL Tier 7 Exalted items, and then the one I am showing in the above screenshot in an attempt to catch any Exalted item with two Tier 6 affixes. This was made more important since I am just about to ding Rank 8 with Circle of Fortune where EVERY Rare drop will have a 25% chance of upgrading into an Exalted.
As for Fire Bro…. in truth right now in its current state, this build is just not good enough. I was able to get all the way to Empowered Monoliths… with some help from Ace in killing Elder Gaspar. However in Empowered Monoliths I either need more damage or more survival… because the combination of what I currently have is simply not good enough. I could tweak this build in a number of ways but I was trying to stay pure to the original goal of using the Torch and lighting everything on fire. I want to spend some time pouring over the character sheet and playing with it a bit in Last Epoch Tools to see if I can find a way forward either through gearing or respeccing points. I need to spend some time looking at other ignite builds to see how they are working and what sort of gearing they are going for. I’ve not given up… I just would rather focus on my Void Knight for the time being.
I also have a bunch of alts waiting in the wings that I am probably going to level a bit as well. I have a Falconer, Bleed Wolves Beastmaster, Flame Reave Spellblade, and a character that I plan on trying to yolo my way into a Fire Damage Earthquake Shaman build. Still having a heck of a lot of fun with this game and trying out new characters that I have not played before.
The post Fire Bro On Hold appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
