Good Morning Friends! I’ve now spent more time with Last Epoch and leveled a character further than I had managed previously. Last night I dinged level 50, and am an undetermined amount of progress into the story. I kinda like how Path of Exile has nice clean points of demarcation between content blocks, but Last Epoch is this whole weird timey-wimey chrono-trigger-esc mess of timelines. I’ve been playing the Necromancer and it is pure nonsense. Right now if I am summoning the maximum number of critters following me and doing my bidding I have:
2 – Bone Golems
5 – Skeletal Warriors
3 – Skeletal Mages
6 – Exploding Zombies
3 – Skeletal Vanguard
2 – Wraiths
So at full compliment… which I admittedly only really hit regularly when I am in a boss fight… I am roaming around with Twenty-One Horrible Children. This is what I want in a Necromancer class, just a veritable army of dead friends doing my work for me. Admittedly that is ALL I do… because I effectively keep summoning Exploding Zombies in lieu of casting a fireball or something of the sort. Each time one of my pets die, including my exploding zombies that are designed to die… I have a 10% chance of summoning a Skeletal Vanguard. So while the rest of my pets I can summon up before I get into battle, those I need to effectively get through combat. I guess technically I could probably sit there summoning Exploding Zombies until I procced all three of them.
There are a lot of things that I really like about the game and probably the biggest one of those is the crafting system. Coming from Path of Exile, I think I have had my fill of “crafting gamba” and hate how you have to game that system in order to get what you actually want from it… while at the same time always being on the very edge of “bricking” your item in the process. In Last Epoch, the “random” element is pushed to finding the crafting shards in the wild, but once you have one it is always going to apply a predictable effect to an item. Sure this sucks a bit when you really need Minion Damage on an item and you have not found any Minion Damage shards, but at least you have a fixed item that you need to get as a drop. There are items that let you shatter an item that has a stat you want with a chance of recovering a shard of that type, so at least there are ways around that.
If you really want that “big gamba energy” though there are various rare items that cause your crafts to give you less predictable results. For example, if you have an item with one bad affix on it, you can try your luck with a Glyph of Chaos which will replace it with a random affix that could exist on that item. Rune of Refinement is effectively the equivalent of a Divine Orb from Path of Exile where it rerolls the stat values of all of your affixes allowing you to try and eke out a little bit of extra stat bonus. So there is still some random chance in the system, but if you just want some basic things on your gear that will support your build you can fairly predictably make that happen. The most important thing however is the forging potential of an item in determining whether or not you can shift it to be exactly what you were wanting. That stat ultimately dictates how many modifications you can apply to an item before it is essentially “locked” and can no longer craft on it.
One thing that I desperately wish the game had… was some sort of wardrobe system. My character looks awful right now, and there is no real way I can change that. I am going to look like a mess until I get to a point where I can effectively start wearing better-looking set gear. I am always big into cosmetic systems because if your character looks cool, it feels better to play said character. This is why games with cosmetic microtransactions will always be my weakness because it is pretty easy to get me to pony up a few bucks to feel better about how my character looks. There is a tab in the UI for appearances but it is inaccessible and I am not even sure where on the roadmap those features sit. I would assume that it would be important because cosmetics are ultimately when you can start offering things for sale in the shop and give the game a renewable line of income.
Another thing that I really want is some version of the Diablo III pet that runs around vacuuming up gold and shards. Having to walk over gold gets annoying really quickly after you’ve been used to a game with a pet, and a game without any sort of gold equivalent. The shards all get picked up at once when you click on any one of them, similar to the gems in Diablo III but I wish they went straight to the crafting bank. At any point, you can click a button in your inventory to send them there, so it just feels tedious for them not to do that by default. After a while most of what you are going to be picking up are the shards because you will likely be running a loot filter and ignoring everything that doesn’t have a stat package conducive to your base class.
Speaking of the loot filter… that is definitely something that I like greatly about the game. You can absolutely import a filter from your clipboard and there are plenty of sources for good filters on the internet. I do wish it worked a bit more like a POB and that you could just import from a pastebin URL given that most filter authors seem to store said filters there. The functionality that I like the most about this however is that once you have imported a filter, you can customize it easily in the game. This will allow you to tweak it later on when you are looking for specific items to stylize that loot when it finally does drop. For example, in Path of Exile I was looking for a Gladiator armor base and would have loved if I could simply add a custom rule for that item in the game quickly. In Last Epoch, I will absolutely be able to do that when I am specifically hunting for something that might otherwise get dropped by the filters.
Mechanically it is a deeply enjoyable game, but I think time will tell if I feel like the endgame is good. One of the reasons why I am so damned hooked on Path of Exile is that it has so much content left over from previous leagues that it allows me to narrow in on the one specific thing that I want to spend most of my time doing. I’ve not made it to anything close to the end game, so I will be interested to see what it entails. Essentially I need something that is a fun loop that feels rewarding while also being something that I can mostly turn my brain off for. That is why I stuck with Diablo III for so long because the rhythm of running Rifts and Bounties was something I found deeply soothing. The thing I struggle with in Path of Exile is that for whatever reason the game seems to relish random assed deaths, and there is never a point where you can truly just zone out and chill. Delve has been the closest to that for me, but even then it is entirely possible for me to encounter exactly the wrong combination of abilities from a mob and take an almost instant death.
Shifting back to the negative column for a bit. The story in Last Epoch is “fine” for an ARPG but is largely nonsense. You are shifting back and forth between multiple Eras of the same area and while it is cool the times you have to go back into the past to impact an event in the future, like flipping a switch in a temple before it was ruined to extend a bridge in the future. Those gameplay loops seem to be few and far between and the timescape seems to largely just be a way of presenting different-looking maps as you fight not-demons that might as well be demons as well as copious amounts of the undead. It feels like a bog standard Diablo-like ARPG with some technically and mechanically superior features that have learned lessons from all of the games that came before it. While that makes a deeply interesting game to play, it doesn’t necessarily fix the “not great story” problem that all ARPGs seem to have.
This might be a “feature” rather than a “bug” honestly because ARPG gameplay is largely about mechanical repetition and making that loop enjoyable. If you are forced to stop and deal with the narrative, it makes repeat playthroughs more cumbersome than they need to be. Essentially what I am saying is that if you are a player that primarily plays games for the narrative adventure, this game is probably going to disappoint you in the long run. If you like to play games while doing something else like watching a show, or in my case often listening to an audiobook… then this is precisely that sort of game.
I am currently playing in the Multiplayer Beta Week, and I am really interested to see how this game feels with other players. That can often make or break the overall experience of an ARPG, because while Path of Exile is a deeply interesting game… it sucks to play with friends. I’ve never found a game that feels anywhere near as good as Diablo III does with other players, and I am hoping beyond all hopes that maybe Last Epoch will fill that niche. I know what I am doing on March 9th though, because I will likely be recreating the character I am playing on the beta server. My hope is I can coax a few of my friends to also give it a shot so we can test how it feels to play with others. I like enough of the core systems that I could see really engaging with this game long-term.
Are you playing Last Epoch? Have you played Last Epoch? Are you interested in the multiplayer launch? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.
The post Deterministic Crafting appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I spent my evening running around in the Last Epoch multiplayer beta and opted to start up another Acolyte. I’ve been enjoying the Necromancer play style lately, and as a result, I am leaning super hard into it with this game. I’m also wanting to spend some time exploring Wolcen soon and plan on doing the same given that Necromancer play styles tend to be pretty chill. It is thoroughly weird to me the way my brain has flipped over the last several years. There was a time when I would only play melee characters and more specifically only characters with a sword and shield. I was completely bought into the mythos of the “tank” and that meant a very specific thing to me namely a full plate-wearing character with a sword and a shield, and occasionally if the class lends itself to that fantasy, a bit damned two-hander.
To some extent, I blame Diablo III for beginning the slow battering down of these walls. I fell in love with the Demon Hunter and how amazing it was for clearing seasonal content. With the right build, you could make literally everything on the screen explode in a hail of fire, making it extremely safe to play. I still greatly prefer high survival characters, but I was forced to reconcile that sometimes overwhelming damage… is a survival ability. Mostly this forced me to re-evaluate what being “fun to play” meant to me personally and that largely meant the ability to kill things without much fear of death. I always got this style of play through traditional MMORPG tanks but found that under certain circumstances I could find that style of play in other families of classes.
I think my mental transformation was really cemented by my time playing Guild Wars 2 last year. I had been trying for a decade to make the Warrior in that game conform to the sort of gameplay that I wanted, a very high survival tanky play that had no fear of dying but could still clear content. It never really felt that way to me personally, and in a moment of frustration, I sat down and had a conversation with my friend Tam. He asked me to describe the goals I wanted in a class and after some serious side eye, I accepted the challenge to try playing a Necromancer. It turned out that while it conformed to none of my normal sensibilities, it was in fact the “tankiest” and highest survival class I had ever played in an MMORPG. This sort of sent my world into a tailspin and has caused me to re-evaluate what it means to be tanky and what it means to “feel good” to play.
Path of Exile has also continued this path forward as I seek out characters that are highly survivable yet still able to clear content. I think maybe the best version of this that I have experienced so far is my Righteous Fire Juggernaut because it is effectively exactly what I want in a game like that. One of my favorite Diablo III builds is the exceptionally tanky Thorns Crusader, which wanders around while everything effectively breaks itself on your damage shield. I’ve also enjoyed my time spent playing on my Summon Righteous Fire Necromancer quite a bit, because while squishier than RF… it can move around freely to avoid a lot of the damage while my pets focus on shredding the target. As I have gained additional levels on that character I have poured more focus into survivability since the damage seems to be solid.
So now that I am playing some Last Epoch, I figured a Necromancer might be a good call. After some research, it does in fact seem to be an extremely tanky option. At the moment I am running around with Skeleton Warriors, a Giant Skeleton Golem, and summoning that game’s equivalent of my “raging spirits” in the form of explosive Zombies. I started a fresh character last night and got it to around 22 before calling it for the night. Unfortunately, the transition to Necromancer seems to be gated behind a quest so I really need to push forward in the story before I spend any more points on the build. The few bosses I have encountered have been extremely relaxing as I simply avoid the telegraphed attacks and let my pets keep chewing away at it.
Last Epoch Build Planner is by the same folks who do the Grim Dawn Tools, and I am largely following this Necromancer build at least as far as Skills and Passive choices go. You can blame Path of Exile on making it so that I just feel more comfortable venturing forth with a build to at least loosely follow. Last Epoch as a whole seems like a much more straightforward game and offers the ability to respec a bit more easily. However, once I started down the path of following a build, I find it is probably going to be harder to shake mentally. Given that I am juggling a large number of ARPGs at the moment, I don’t really want to waste my time building something that won’t be viable and as a result, won’t be “fun”.
If you want to see an example of Necromancer gameplay in Last Epoch, check out the above video. Essentially it is designed around summoning exploding zombies and replenishing your pets as needed when they die. Otherwise, you just zoom around and avoid telegraphs while your army of horrible children kills your foe. I had a lot of fun last night screwing around on the beta server, and will likely be creating the same basic build when the multiplayer patch drops in March.
The post Re-evaluating Tankyness appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.
One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.
I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.
I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.
What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.
All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.
With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.
The post Yup Books and Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We start off the show with a discussion that has been kicking around our list for a while, where Tam discusses the shared DNS of a Good Stealth Game and a Good Metroidvania. From there Kodra has had time to play Forspoken and talks about his experiences after last week’s show. We dive into a discussion about the news coming out that no one seems to be signing up for E3 and once again we question if there really is a place for that show in the public consciousness. Lastly, we talk about some of the games that are supposed to be released this year and try and determine which we actually think are.
Topics Discussed
Shared DNA of Stealth games and Good Metroidvanias
