Ignite Warpath in Monoliths

Morning Folks! I am sure you are all probably sick of me talking about this build, but I think more than anything I am shocked it is still functional. I thought for certain that the wheels would begin to fall off as soon as I got deeper into Monolith Echoes. At this point, I am working on the level 75 Monolith and things still seem to be strong. In fact, as of this morning, I equipped a few new pieces of gear and the damage output seems to be even stronger. The only negative is that I feel like at some point I am going to have some survival problems. I have pretty bad resistance and not a ton of health. We struggle with some of the same problems as POE when you are trying to create a build with a bunch of uniques… you somewhat lack room for survival unless said uniques are already covering that.
I recorded a fresh video this morning of me doing a level 75 Monolith Echo, showing off what the gameplay looks like. For the most part I am just lighting everything that gets near me on fire, and that fire damage over time is eventually killing things. That which I don’t kill outright, my Manifest Armor minion or the trail of flame behind me tends to finish off. For those curious, I found out how to dump my build to Last Epoch Tools this morning, so you can see the current state of the build and the gear that I have equipped here. I would not follow directly in my footsteps though, because nothing I am doing is clean enough to be considered a proper build guide. I still feel like I need to rework most of my passives for example which is something I will probably do in the coming days.
I am still leaning heavily upon Firestarter’s Torch and the chance to inflict spreading flames. This does a lot of the work in making sure that everything is catching on fire. This morning I added Rahyeh’s Light which is a shield intended for a Judgement build but has stats that we care about and a heck of a lot of block chance and block effectiveness. I hope to find a version of this with Legendary Potential so I can maybe throw on all resistances or health on block. Sunwreath continues to do a lot of work in giving us melee ignite chance and fire damage over time. Sadly the flame reave lines are useless for us, but everything else works and again my hope is to stack on some sort of survival. Fiery Dragon Shoes are another new addition that gives us a bunch of fire penetration, and reduced bonus damage taken on crit… but the trade-off is it makes it so we get crit slightly easier. However, when we are crit it leaves a fire trail which is pretty slick.
All told I am pretty freaking happy being a walking inferno, and I am curious if this continues to scale as I level into empowered monoliths. I know there are some issues to solve here… specifically resistances and packing on more health and general survival… but for the moment I am having a blast having a super chill mapping experience. Last night I put on an audiobook and just kept my head down grinding through echoes all night. Mostly my goal is to pack on some more levels and start getting into empowered monoliths where hopefully I can finally test the build and see how longterm viable it is. Bossing is not amazing, but also not the worst thing I have ever experienced. Having 16 potions makes up for a lot of mistakes.
It isn’t like I stopped playing my Void Knight either. I am still using it to farm prophecies pretty regularly and working towards trying to get a handful of items with legendary potential to take that build to the next level. I’ve tried making a few legendaries and so far I have mostly wound up with duds that did not hit any of the stats that I had hoped for. This means that I need to farm up more legendary potential items and more exalted items to make additional attempts. This is probably where playing in the trade side of the cycle makes a bit more sense because you can just keep buying more items to try and craft into legendaries or simply buy the finished legendary rather than farming random content and hoping. The amount of loot that you get from Circle of Fortune though is outrageous. Still having a freaking blast with this Last Epoch Cycle. Are you playing? If so what build did you go with? Drop me a line below. The post Ignite Warpath in Monoliths appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Exploding Your Friends

Good Morning Friends! Last night was the culmination of a “bad ideas” project that I have been working on for a bit. I leveled a Necromancer up through Kitava and geared it out yesterday, then tested the sort of content that it could do. You might remember that I played a Fire-based Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer some last league and enjoyed it quite a bit. This league as my third character I decided to go down that path again but take a slight detour into “Minion Instability” land. For those unfamiliar with that keystone, it makes it so that Minions explode when reduced to low life and deal 33% of their maximum life as fire damage to surrounding enemies. So essentially I am using Summon Raging Spirits to create bombs, which then nuke my enemies with a baptism in flames when they get low on life.
This entire build started when I stumbled onto a helmet in my travels. I was looking for a better version of my pseudo-six-link helm that I use for Righteous Fire when I came across this monstrosity for 5 Chaos. I snapped it up because my brain immediately went to using it for some sort of Explosive SRS build. While I would have liked it to have higher than a level 16 Minion damage gem, the important bit for the explosive goodness is that level 20 Minion Life. Essentially this makes it so my Summon Raging Spirits will have the following setup:
  • Summon Raging Spirits
    • Burning Damage
    • Concentrated Effect
    • Minion Life
    • Minion Damage
    • Fire Penetration
    • Combustion
    • Lifetap
    • +2% Critical Strike Chance
Generally speaking for a Necromancer build I would have looked to get a good Skin of the Lords with a useful keystone on it. However this league Skin of the Lords starts at 5 Divine Orbs for one with a crap keystone, and the only one available with Eldritch Battery is 59 Divine Orbs. This caused me to pivot and just lean into a bunch of gear with Armor and Energy shield. Other than the fancy shield that I just added last night, in total all of my gear could be purchased for a single Divine Orb, and you would probably still have some change left over. The pseudo-eight-link helm for Summon Raging Spirits allowed me to shift my chest to effectively become 3 four-links summoning different alternative summons.
  • Zombies / Spectres / Stone Golem
    • Minion Damage
    • Minion Life
    • Feeding Frenzy
This leads us to bad ideas item number two for this setup. Tavukai can effectively replace Infernal Army as a way of shuffling my angry skulls off this mortal coil as it deals them 20% of their maximum life as Chaos Damage per second. That gives my SRS a maximum duration of 3 seconds which is just about long enough to fly into range of the enemies and explode. When I was shopping for a Tavukai I noticed a number of them were corrupted with various abilities, and one had Golem Commander which gives me 40% increased buff from my Stone Golem and lets me summon two of them. So all told that gives me a maximum load of the following minions:
  • 7 Zombies
  • 2 Stone Golems
  • 2 Spectres
  • 8 Raging Spirits (largely limited by how fast I can actually click the button)
I geared my character out before taking down Kitava in Act 10, and pretty much instant-phased that fight. Then I went over to the Uber Labyrinth and while I did not get the achievement for insta-gibbing the boss I did burn through each of the Aspirant Trial phases super fast. From there I opted to test my mettle against a T1, T6, T11, T15, and finally a chain of T16 maps. I also decided to try a couple of fully juiced metamorphs in the laboratory as well, and for the most part other than a couple of dumb deaths to lockboxes I breezed through the content. I would say this character is extremely comfortable to run content on in its current state and could probably be scaled to do a lot more damage once all of my gems are actually level 20 and I have the rest of my passive tree points. This is what my build looks like as of today.
There are some glaring problems that I could fix given the time and desire to do so. Namely, I would like to get my block chance up much higher so that it properly acts as the defensive layer that it should. Additionally, there is the problem that I am not elemental ailment immune, and unfortunately, I don’t have enough mana reservation for the easy button way of fixing that with Purity of Elements. I am overcapped on my resistances but I am not really sure how I could fix that without regearing entirely to remove some of those resists, but it just means that I don’t have other stats on my gear to replace them. All said though I am pretty happy with this “bad ideas” character or at least happy enough for my third viable character of the league. The biggest immediate issue is just my low life pool of only 3500 health. I have to be honest… this was more of a thought experiment than an actual character that I intended to do much with. Right now Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire are just stronger in their current state, and could be even stronger if I spent more currency on upgrading them. I mostly just wanted to see what this would do, and now that I have… my curiosity is satiated. My side project interest turns to a discussion I had with Ashgar yesterday about maybe trying to build a Wintertide Brand character, but I am not sure if that will actually happen. I would like to get a Scion up if for no reason other than getting the achievement for clearing Act IV with that class. Other than that I would like to finish getting my void stones this season, but that either requires a lot of farming T14 or higher maps looking for guardian map drops… or just buying the fragments I need to summon the fights. This has easily been my best league so far, but it is a bit sad given that so few have dropped off the game. However, I’ve come to realize that the grind of Path of Exile is enough to keep me happy for the time being. The post Exploding Your Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Enter Dread Phalanx

Good Morning Friends! Last night other than my habitual Tequatl was pretty much a night devoted to Last Epoch. While I have run up a Paladin to 68, there is some stuff about the build that I am not really feeling. So much of it depends on Shield Charge and right now with the movement abilities and rubberbanding… it just sort of feels janky. I think once Shield Charge is as smooth in this game as it is in Path of Exile, I will probably return to the build and enjoy it quite a bit. For now, I have shifted focus back to the class that I played during the test builds, the Acolyte turned Necromancer. Last night I finished the story that exists currently and began working on the Monolith in earnest.
I’ve been mostly following this Fire Necromancer build which I believe originally came from Aaron of the Action RPG channel on YouTube. Ultimately it shifts your Skeletal Mages, Bone Golem, and Exploding Zombies into fire damage and then buffs everything with Dread Shade and gives you permanent Wraiths. Aaron has a unique in the game now that is designed to go with this sort of build, and when you find it you can shift up a little bit and go into a build that can give you up to 4 full-size Bone Golems. I think that is my ultimate hope to find Aaron’s Will and shift into that sort of a setup.
At the moment I am just not really feeling Dread Shade. Like I get that this is probably the superior choice for the build because its aura buffs everything… including me. The problem is… I just can’t afford to stand anywhere near my pack of horrible children. This means that the Dread Shade isn’t of much actual benefit to my survival. I also keep forgetting to resummon it, because it disappears periodically when whatever it was attached to dies or when I shift zones. Since I don’t get an actual minion icon for it in the same row as the rest of my minions… I keep forgetting about it meaning that I am getting zero benefits from it most of the time.
Instead, I have decided to shift things up a bit and drop Dread Shade and pick back up Skeletons. I ran a Monolith this morning and managed to get enough points to make them useful. Essentially I am bouncing around to pick up all of the bonus skeletons, and then Dread Phalanx which makes them stronger but cuts the number I can summon in half, and Shambling Steel which makes them all melee. Combined this gives me four beefy melee characters that are pretty freaking fast… not as fast as my exploding zombies but still able to soak up any threats that are headed directly at me. This is ultimately what I did on the test realm and after switching it up, the build already feels comfier.
So at any given time, I have nineteen horrible children following me around. The full list includes:
  • 1 – Bone Golem
  • 3 – Skeletal Mage Pyromancers
  • 4 – Skeletal Dread Phalanx
  • 2 – Perm Wraiths
  • 6 – Exploding Zombies (this is my spam ability)
  • 3 – Skeleton Vanguard
This will in theory go up significantly when I pick up Aaron’s Will and can start fielding multiple bone golems on the field at once. In testing, I took the trait line that split my golem in half and gave me two less effective ones, and I did not go down that direction because when I did get multiple golems… I want them all to be the big tanky boys that I have currently.
What I need to work on more desperately now is my survivability. I am exceptionally squishy and failed a monolith echo last night for the first time in a while. Essentially if you look at my resists… they are pretty pathetic and the total lack of any physical resist and poison resist means that when one of those hits me… it effectively one-shots me. Having more bodies on the field to soak up more hate definitely helps, but I still keep to chain potions during dicey situations to keep standing which is not a position I want to be in long term. Part of the problem is I am still wearing some items from around level 6… so I hope as I dive further into the monolith I will start finally finding some reasonable upgrades.
I’ve realized that I am apparently in the minority in my feelings regarding Diablo IV. This is honestly probably a good thing because I want that game to be something that most people are going to enjoy. Personally, I think Last Epoch is more my speed. I do plan on giving it another shot over the weekend when the open beta happens and maybe trying a slightly different Barbarian build. I do want to try playing with some friends to see how the D4 group game feels. However, for me, the mix of Last Epoch and Guild Wars 2 seems to work extremely well. I still need to try some of the dungeons in Last Epoch. I’ve been stockpiling keys for a theoretical future date when I grab a friend and do them. Since they are a limited resource, it feels like I almost need to save them like I would a puzzle ring from Diablo III. Additionally the later I wait to run them, the better the rewards will likely be. The post Enter Dread Phalanx appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Kindle Arrives

A New Toy

Kindle Arrives

Sunday I wrote a bit about my troubles with Amazon and shipping recently, and I guess maybe that complaining worked.  Not only did I get additional prime subscription time added to my account to appease me, but yesterday mid day my new Amazon Fire 7 inch tablet showed up.  As a result I spent a good deal of last night fiddling with it, and I figured I would write a little bit about it as a result.  The tablet I am talking about is the one that has been widely advertised as being sold in six packs…. and singles go for only $49.99 so that the marketing can say “under $50 dollars”.  Over the recent holiday consumer madness… they were selling the tablet for $34.99 which finally got me to jump on buying one just to see what it is like.  I already have owned several android tablets, and even got a used ipad 2 since my wife loved hers so much.  After all of that I had pretty much decided I simply was not a “tablet” person.  If I have time to use a tablet… I am probably at home and could just play on my PC, PS4, Vita, PS3…  you are getting the idea.  What I lacked though was a really good device to read on… because the iPad and Android tablets were just too bulk to use in bed comfortably without nodding off every so often and whacking myself in the face.

The first shocker is the size, because really when you think about it… 7 inches sounds like a large size.  The tablet as a whole feels more like a large phone… so something along the lines of a Samsung Note and less like a tablet.  The build quality is solid, and the device feels nice in your hand… but the plastic back makes it feel a little on the cheap side.  Then again this is a tablet that I just paid $34 for…  and in the past that would have gotten me some shanzhai reject and not a perfectly viable device.  There are some caveats to know going into it.  Firstly there is no Google Play store on the device by default, and in theory it is set up in a way to keep directing you at the Amazon ecosystem for music, movies and everything else related.  This is good in one aspect, especially if you are a Prime user… since well it has one of the better interfaces for actually watching the free streaming with Prime.  The whole lack of Google Play would have potentially been a deal breaker since, as someone already embedded in the Android world… I already own pretty much all of the apps I need to function there and have zero interest in repurchasing them from Amazon.  Thankfully I did a bit of research before jumping into this device and apparently it is a relatively trivial experience to load the Play store, it simply involves loading four different android apps on your device in a specific order.  Luckily however the above video shows you the appropriate order and provides what seems to be a clean link to the downloads.  I personally just downloaded them from my device to save having to try and swap them over through a computer.

It Plays Hearthstone

Kindle Arrives

The other thing that I would really like to do with a tablet is to be able to quickly get into Hearthstone and play it from bed.  Previously most of my Android devices simply performed like crap in Hearthstone, with the best possible version being on my Samsung Galaxy S5… and even then it was super sluggish.  This device however, took a bit of time initially to boot into Hearthstone and sign into Battle.net the first time, but from that point on I have been able to get in and doing stuff pretty quickly.  The interface ends up being a little small, so things like the settings gear can be a bit awkward to click on at first, but the base interface of the game performed smoothly.  I played a few games last night, and experienced real issues, and even as multiple effects were firing on screen I didn’t see any noticeable lag.  So for my purposes the device passes with flying colors when it comes to gaming.  At some point I will throw other games on it and test those out as well, but since I was mostly concerned about running what is normally a fairly intensive mobile game like Hearthstone…  that is what I went with first.  Please excuse the kinda crappy photo but I wanted to take a photo of me running hearthstone ON the device…  which meant taking a photo with my phone since I have not figured out how to do a screenshot on Kindle Fire OS yet and the normal methods from my phone did not work at all.

As far as the other purpose of the device, it also passes with flying colors.  Any device can read a book, so that wasn’t really what I was concerned about… so instead I booted into my Marvel Unlimited account and attempted to read some comics.  I wanted to see if a full comic page was readable with the small screen size and my less than perfect eyes.  I have to say I was pretty happy with the end results, and the slightly strange format as you might expect fits a page size perfectly.  Laying in bed last night I read around a dozen or so comics and my eyes never felt like they were being strained.  The only time things got awkward is when I needed to read a double panel spread, at which point I had to mostly zoom in and move around the screen to read the panels.  These were still awkward as shit on my full sized iPad, so I am not really too shocked about this.  These are one of those things that only really works well in a physical book.  The next step will be to load the puppy up with books, since right now our Amazon account is loaded up with quite literally thousands of books that I have zero interest in… since my wife and her mother are the primary users of that account.  In the past I always preferred reading through Aldiko so I will have to install that and test it out as well.  All told though… I am really happy with my $34 purchase… which after using some built up Discover cash back bonus…  ended up covering the entire cost.

Best Laid Plans

Kindle Arrives

Last night I had every plan of running a bunch of LFR in the hopes of getting a main hand weapon.  However in the middle of piddling around in Tanaan jungle I got a Baleful Armament to drop for me.  Unfortunately… it turned into the lowest possible version I could get.  That said it is better than nothing and matches the 650 shield that I have as well.  I am at the very least “viable” as a tank, though I need to do some stuff to set up my bars.  It is my hope that at some point I will get a decent sword and shield to drop in normal that I will roll offspec on.  In the meantime I need to get used to tanking as a Paladin, and this at least gives me the ability to run the daily heroic relatively easily for Valor.  As to how much pug tanking I will be doing… that is an entirely different question.  The main problem with last night however… is that I did not really sleep well Sunday night.  So by the time I spent awhile fiddling with the Kindle, my wife suggested that it was bedtime… and for once I agreed.  Admittedly I went to bed and continued to play with the Kindle, but sitting on the couch was invoking the most furious of yawns.  At the very least tonight I want to run the Black Gate on both characters, in the hopes that Tuesday night LFR is still the best possible time to run it.  In theory I should probably do the entire LFR on Belghast in the hopes of getting an upgraded weapon before the Wednesday night normal raid with Jed and crew.