factions

Good Morning Friends! I am nearing the end of the campaign. Last night before I finished up for the evening I got to the beginning of Chapter 9 and I believe level 55. This morning before sitting down to write I made it into Majelka in the Divine Era and apparently, you don’t have to finish the campaign to join a faction. Once you zone into town one of the quest givers will offer you access to either the Bazaar or the Observatory aka the headquarters for each faction. I joined the Circle of Fortune because in truth my preferred method of play is “Guild SSF” where you are mostly SSF but have a group of friends that you trade among. Trading feels like a necessary part of playing Path of Exile, and I am hoping that is not really the case in Last Epoch.

So far faction gains seem pretty quick. I did a single quest after joining the faction and am already sitting at rank 2. Upon joining the faction you immediately get a 35% additional chance at loot drops which seems pretty solid, and in theory, should make up for the general nerfs in loot drops that took place between 0.9.2 and 1.0. I am really happy that I managed to join so easily because as I started grinding out monoliths I really wanted it to count towards faction progress. I did have around 400 Favor but I spent some of it on my very first prophecy.

Once you enter the observatory, there are four telescopes that you can use to purchase prophecies. Each gives you access to a type of loot… Armor, Jewelry, Weapons, or Idols. Each prophecy has a favor cost associated with it, and has some specific parameters that will trigger the drop. The one I purchased was for a pair of rare crusader gloves, that will drop whenever I kill a boss. Since I have not finished the campaign I am hoping that this will trigger when I fight the final boss of the game if not sooner on an individual zone mini-boss. The one I have highlighted is for clearing Soulfire Bastion and will reward an exalted ring.

The prophecy seems to narrow down the type of loot that can drop, and then you can purchase lenses from another vendor that socket into the telescope further limiting the specificity of the drop. For example, the one I have highlighted gives you a 20% chance of a prophecy rewarding a one-handed axe. So in theory, if you have a prophecy that rewards a unique weapon, you might be able to skew the results to potentially drop one from the pool of available axes or hammers etc. I’ve not seen evidence yet of a prophecy specifically indicating that a named unique item will drop, but it at least might allow you to put your thumb on the scale to skew it in that direction. When combined with the existing methods of targeting specific slots via the monoliths… it might be enough to allow one to target farm specific gear.

When you start a character, you have a tag on your character sheet indicating that you are “Deathless” and I officially lost mine last night. I was playing from the couch with a laptop and at some point during Chapter 8, Josie decided to crawl out onto my chest and block my ability to see the screen. She is my baby girl and I did not want to disturb her because if she wanted attention… she was going to get attention. However, before she left I apparently managed to get killed by something that was near where I was idling. Kind of a bummer but I had to die at some point, and at least I can’t be blamed for this one. My cats have been the cause of many deaths, and I can’t get too worked up about it.

I continue to be overwhelmed by just how many facelifts the game got. For example, this abattoir in the Imperial undead area used to just be this hallway with grinders on either side. Now there is this whole raised catwalk and such with mood lighting, and it looks so much better. The sewers similarly in the same region got a massive rework and I will be playing along and just be struck with how good the game looks now. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything to someone who has not been playing this game for a few years but so much work went into the 1.0 release and I can see it clearly.

There are still plenty of problems though with servers and connections. Yesterday the game hit a new peak for concurrent players, and I imagine over the weekend this number is going to raise considerably higher. All in all though I knew what I was getting in for when they announced that they had passed a million copies sold. I am still able to play, the zone times just take for freaking ever. I am hoping they manage to scale things up and iron out the bugs and get everything nice and stable within a week. Right now the core problem seems to be surrounding the multiplayer nature of towns… because the only real issues that I have are either zoning into a town or zoning out of a town. When I am bouncing between single player quest instances, everything seems pretty solid.

The team at EHG is still doing a phenomenal job of communicating with the players and really, that is all I can ask of them. This is their first major launch and most of them did not come from the games industry at all. I think in the grand scheme of things they are doing pretty good for their first time dealing with the massive onslaught of players trying to play their game at the same time. The post Circle of Fortune appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.