Good Morning Friends! I talked briefly about this yesterday but I’ve not spent some time with my friend Ace hanging out in the endgame systems of Last Epoch. Once you have made it through the story to the End of Time, you can in theory jump off and start doing monoliths almost exclusively. Granted the first monoliths start a level 55, so you have to have gotten to a high enough level to be able to survive in there or have someone carry you. It appears that at least on some level unlocks are shared regardless if you are working off your monolith or those of your group mates.
We started the evening working off my monolith since Ace was a bit under level. However about halfway through the night we swapped over and started working on their monolith instead. We defeated the boss of Fall of the Outcasts, which unlocked the second monolith for me even though I am still technically on the quest to finish the first monolith. Right now I am largely holding onto this quest so we can run it together because when I finished the Monolith on their campaign I still got rewarded with a blessing unlock. I want to see if we run it again if we both get a new set of blessings.
The main thing that we wanted to see with our little excursion was whether or not multiplayer was punitive. In all the echoes that we ran, the only situation we noticed where it felt a little bad was when Ace had died during a fight and came back into the Echo. It treated this like we had wiped and they did not get any rewards. However I still got rewards because I did not die, so while it feels a little awful that we did not technically wipe but one player was punished, it does not appear to brick the encounter for the rest of the party. When you are not running your own monolith you end up getting a choice of two seemingly random rewards at the end of each echo which does not seem to map up at all to what the other player is getting. In many cases as the ride-along player, it felt like I was actually getting better rewards.
One significant glitch that we noticed however is if the other player is not in the monolith when the owner starts up the echo and player two teleports to player one… you end up with this mess. This happened several times where I could not see the map and the encounters was effectively floating over top of the black hole skybox that you have at the End of Time zone. This was really weird because if something was on a lower level from you, it would appear visibly smaller… but also you had no real path to get down to it. I had to essentially hug Ace because only they could see where the walls were and how to actually navigate the level. The weirdest thing was that I could not see breakables like barrels and crates or the various shrines… I would just see an explosion of loot from seemingly nowhere.
My first thought is that you could probably drag someone along in monoliths to unlock progress, but we found out when attempting to take on the boss a second time, that the act of defeating the boss had reset Ace’s stability from 500 required to fight the boss down to 300 the previous break point. So we would have had to have ground out a few more echoes in the first monolith to progress to the fight again. I’ve started running some of the content in The Black Sun, aka the second monolith, and don’t seem to be encountering any weirdness for never having actually defeated the first boss on my account.
The prime weirdness that I am experiencing currently is that I cannot seem to complete the Lagon encounter. It is this giant Cthuloid monstrosity at the end of Act 8… which is unfortunately at the end of two long maps, and a mini-boss… all without a waypoint directly before this mega boss. Essentially the fight bugs out and refuses to give you the dialog required to progress. At the time of writing this, there is no patch fixing this interaction but I am reading that I can manually travel to the next location to effectively force the story forward. I am going to try this out in a bit and see if I can make progress into Act 9 finally.
I’ve said that I had a copy of Diablo IV gifted to me, and with that came early access to the beta this weekend. I noticed yesterday that I had access to install it and a few hours later I got an email indicating that as well. So starting tomorrow I will be poking my head into the beta a bit and playing at least enough to get to level 25 which I believe unlocks the cosmetic wolf cub backpack. I am guessing that I will probably be playing a Barbarian, so I guess I should sort out exactly what I want to do. I’ve heard there is a whirlwind build that is pretty solid, and I do love me some “spin to win”… so that is more than likely the path I will take.
Are you playing Last Epoch and if so what do you think of it so far? Are you going to be playing the Diablo IV Beta weekend? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.
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