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.
Hey Folks! I’ve been down a rabbit trail for the last few days in Last Epoch where I started a brand new character. Initially, it started out as a “I lapped my friends, so I should start something new so I can play with them” which led me to start a Forge Guard character. Forge Guard is in the same Sentinel class that Void Knight is but in theory, its tree is all about minions and catching things on fire instead of purple damage. I thought it might be fun to play around with some of the minion options there as something a bit different from the Necromancers and Beastmasters that I have played before. However, while I do have a large lad that follows me around… I wound up going down a slightly different path. I should note this build is a sort of “yolo” from start to finish and I didn’t really set out with a clear plan in mind.
Yesterday I recorded a video because I was afraid this nonsense that I had created would not stay viable for long. It all started when I made the fateful decision to use a level one equippable unique called the Firestarter’s Torch. This essentially is a relatively mediocre item save for the percent chance to apply spreading flames. For anyone who has played Last Epoch, this is essentially ignite proliferation, and very rapidly I noticed that this could catch the entire screen on fire. So I leaned into this nonsense and before long I was wearing Calamity, 2 Sunwreaths, and a bunch of other random uniques and just dealing all the fire and ignite damage that I could. The above video shows some of the gameplay around level 29ish of me just setting the world on fire in a very Righteous Fire feeling manner.
The real “star player” of the build revolves around leaning upon Warpath once again to do spinning nonsense. I picked up the mandatory nodes to make the ability no longer cost mana, and then immediately dove into the path that causes Warpath to bleed… and then converts all bleeding damage to ignite chance and the base damage type of Warpath over to Fire instead of Physical. From there I made it so that every second I am casting Smite, and specced into the fire path of that ability as well so that I am constantly lighting everything on fire. Making it even more nonsensical I equipped Vortex Pennant that makes it so that while I am channeling Warpath I am throwing axes in random directions… and the axe hits themselves also ignite. For bonus nonsense, at some point, I am going to try and get some of the Idols that make it so that thrown axes cause Smite on hit.
The end result is this rolling inferno that ignites everything I touch, as well as a lot of things just off-screen through either the interaction with spreading flames, or when one of my axes makes contact with something and ignites it and everything it passes through. I’ve been building more and more into fire penetration which is making everything go so much faster. Like even one point of fire penetration chance was a noticeable difference and the next few points in Warpath are going to go for another fire penetration node as I am wielding a sceptre.
At the moment I am still running the same no-LP Firestarter’s Torch, but now that I am starting Monoliths I am going to be trying to farm one with at least Legendary Potential on it. I dropped one Sunwreath for a well-rolled exalted ring with some survival on it in addition to fire damage over time and fire damage. I am trying to find some All Resist on Channeling relics to try and create a Legendary out of Vortex Pennant because I am going to really need that affix to fix some of my resistance problems. Right now honestly the biggest thing that I need are some more levels. I have a pair of Fiery Dragon Shoes and a Rahyeh’s Light Shield that I plan on throwing on once I can equip them. I’ve also got a Solarum plate Exalted that I am going to throw on for some survival, +2 Warpath, and the implicit fire damage mod.
I can’t say this is the best bosser in the world, but I certainly ripped through Lagon without any issues. At this point I am in the Black Sun Monolith and am still Deathless, so that is at least something. My clear speed still feels pretty solid given that I am never running out of resources and can just keep rolling forward over top of things. I am kinda in a weird place ability-wise because right now… the only things that truly matter are Warpath and Smite. For the moment I am running Ring of Shields, because I thought it might be a nice damage booster with some survival baked in. The big problem there is that it just does not last long enough, and costs way the hell too much mana to cast. Since I am not regenerating mana at all while channeling… and I am always channeling… nothing has great synergy with Warpath. The proc at the end of the Forge Guard tree is only a 3% chance on hit and that just never seems to be up. The node is still worth it because it gives my minion a ton of health though but I plan on speccing out of Ring of Shields entirely and picking up Sigils of Hope at some point.
That leads me to Manifest Armor, the only minion available to a Forge Guard that I am actually using. Right now he is essentially a giant walking flamethrower. I am tanking for him and that is mostly working out fairly well. I’ve put points into inheriting stats from my Helm, Body Armor, and Shield and everything else has gone into the fire line making him ignite everything. He does a non-zero amount of damage because when I forget to summon him it is a noticeable difference. However, I am mostly playing a Warpath build that happens to have a DPS pet, and not necessarily playing a true Minions build. His survival is good enough to keep him up through almost everything, and it doesn’t cost a ton to summon him in the middle of combat if he happens to fall down. It honestly reminds me of the way that Beastmaster felt in Rift, where you mostly just had a pet following you as added damage and not necessarily a tanking scenario.
All told though I am really freaking happy with the current state of the build and am interested to see how it evolves as I get through the normal monoliths and move into empowered. At the moment with a mix of health, armor, block, leech, and middling resistances I seem to have really solid survival. That all may change once the damage and health pools increase significantly. I think I am going to take it pretty slow though on getting through monoliths. I say that… and then this is a character that I created late Sunday night and is now in Monoliths as of Tuesday evening. I may or may not know what “take it slow” means.
The post Almost Righteous Fire appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I had a request from one of my friends over on Mastodon to at some point do an explanation of the crafting system for Last Epoch. Apparently at one point I did one of these for Path of Exile… and here is proof that I do not remember half the things that I write here because my mind blanks on what I even said. That said I am going to do my best to fulfill this request but I feel like I need to start off with a few caveats. I am by no means a master crafter nor am I some god of Last Epoch information. This is going to be a rough explanation of the crafting system as I have used it, because in truth it is pretty straightforward and I have done a heck of a lot of “fixing” gear by tweaking one or two things on it. If you have any specific questions about how an individual item works, I suggest consulting Last Epoch Tools because it seems to be the trove of knowledge on the game.
The Forge Screen
Let’s start off with the most basic elements of crafting. At any point in the game, you can hit the F key to pop up your forge interface, or optionally you can click on any of the anvil devices scattered throughout the social hubs of the game. This will bring up the crafting interface allowing you to place an item into the window and modify the elements of it. The most basic component of an item is its Forging potential, which is a number that indicates how many actions you can take against an item in an attempt to change its elements. Each action that you take usually will remove some amount of this number, and these will be indicated by a range with the highest success being that it removes zero points, and the worst possible interaction removing the full cost usually somewhere around 10. Below the item is the Glyph slot which will allow you to slot in an item that will modify the way a current crafting attempt works. Below that is the Rune slot which will impact the item as a whole rather than an individual craft.
Item Rarity
Every piece of gear can have two prefixes and two suffixes. You cannot craft on Unique or Set pieces by default and I am not going to talk about the process of creating a Legendary item… so for now we are only going to focus on the four rarities of normal items: Normal (white), Magic (blue), Rare (yellow), and Exalted (purple). The primary difference between Normal, Magic, and Rare is how many affixes are filled on the item. A Normal Item will have none of its affixes filled, a Magic will have at least one, and a Rare item will have at least three. Exalted denotes something specific in that one of the affixes on an item is Tier 6 or Tier 7. The highest that you can craft on an item is a Tier 5 affix, as a result some of the most sought out items in the game have one or more exalted affixes on them.
I specifically chose the same base item for this visual to illustrate a point. There is another element of an item that I have not talked about and that is the Implicits, which are inherited from the item you are crafting on. For example, this is an Augury Plate which will always have 475 Armor and some amount of Increase Mana Regen with the range being a random roll between 18% and 35%. Before we leave the discussion of Item Rarity, I feel like it is important to note that when an item drops… its Forging Potential is determined by the rarity of the item. An exalted item will by default have more forging potential than a normal item. Forging Potential is a range of possible values, but it is something to note that the better quality item you start the crafting process with, the more wiggle room you have for modifying it.
Item Bases
Expanding upon this further, here is a selection of Sentinel Body Armors, aka items that will have what is considered to be a large amount of armor on them. Iron Cuirass is a body armor with 100 Armor and a range of Cold Resistance. Solarium Plate is a body armor with 420 Armor, a range of endurance values, and a range of increased fire damage values. Augury Plate which was used in the previous example has 475 armor and a range of Increase Man Regen. Finally we have the Apocalypse Plate which was newly added in with the 1.0 patch and features 513 Armor, a range of Stun Avoidance, and a Void Knight specific implicit that increases Echo Damage when a Skill is Echoed. Each one of these items is going to lean towards a specific type of build and use case. I’ve been working on an ignite Forge Guard and in theory I am probably going to want to be watching for Solarium Plate’s with the correct stat combination because that implicit would greatly increase the amount of fire damage I would be capable of stacking.
Affix Shards
From a very early level, you will be used to seeing explosions of brown text on your screen that you rapidly hoover up into your inventory. Eventually you hit the transfer materials button, at which point they are whisked away to your crafting inventory never to be thought of again. The thing is every single one of these crafting materials is an item with its own stats and text explaining their use. I decided to pull out four different Affix shards so we could talk about them a bit. Health is probably one of the first affixes that you will encounter in the game and it is pretty much universally sought. If you read the text it denotes that this specific variant gives you X% Increased Health and can be applied to Body Armor, Helmets, or Belts. Armor is another very early affix and this one gives you X% increased armor and can be applied to Helmets, Body Armor, Boots, and Shields. Chance to Slow on Hit specifically is something that can go on a weapon or a quiver which is the same for a lot of the “on hit” mechanics.
Lastly we have a very specific type of shard that can only be found on items that increase the level of the Sentinel skill Warpath, allowing you to allocate additional points in the skill specialization tree. This opens the door to another aspect of crafting which is looking for items that you might want to harvest affixes from. There are a few specific ways to do this which I will dive into in the next subject, but essentially you can break down items with Runes in order to reclaim affix shards that you can then use to craft on another item. A lot of the loot that I pick up in a dungeon or monolith, is specifically things that I am snagging for harvesting purposes. When crafting on affixes there is the possibility to “crit” your craft reducing the amount of forging potential that it takes or giving you free levels of either the same affix or one of the other affixes.
Runes
Runes are a type of crafting material that applies to the entire item, not a specific prefix or suffix craft. These can have some pretty sweeping changes to your item and override whatever you have configured in your glyph or affixes. Make sure you remove runes before finalizing your craft if you do not intend to use them as they will stay slotted in the forge window after a crafting attempt. Let’s talk a bit about each of the types of runes and what it is used for.
Rune of Shattering
This is ultimately going to be your most commonly used rune. This is essentially the same as salvaging an item in other games. It will destroy the current item and return a random number of affix shards from the item. It could be all of the affixes slotted into an item, or it could be just one. When an affix shard is returned it also gives you a random number of them, which could be the full face value of the craft on the item or just a single shard. This is the most commonly used because it does not require any forging potential so you can use this to destroy items that have been “zeroed out”.
Rune of Removal
This is similar to Shattering but it requires forging potential and will consume between 1 and 25 per craft. The difference is this will remove a random single affix and return all of the shards on an item. So for example if you remove an exalted T7 affix, it will remove seven copies of that affix. Remember though that which one is removed is completely random so you need to have plenty of forging potential if you are trying to target a specific affix.
Rune of Discovery
This rune costs no forging potential and will fill any empty affix on an item with a random Tier 1 affix. So if you were to use this on a Normal item, you would end up with a Rare containing four random Tier 1 affixes. For me at least these have two uses, firstly in the very early game before I have access to rare gear I can throw a Rune of Discovery on something and my alt has at least some power quickly. The other time I would use one is if I have an item with otherwise good stats but zero forging potential left, and hitting it with a Discovery just fills up the affixes regardless of what the final result ends up being.
Rune of Shaping
This rune will reroll the random implicit values on a piece of gear. Remember above I said that each of the base types came with a certain number of implicit and some of those had random ranges. This would be used on an item that has otherwise great stats but really low rolls on those implicits. Unfortunately it has a high potential cost consuming between 1 and 25 forging potential so this is something you really need to do early in the crafting process.
Rune of Refinement
This does something similar to Shaping, but will reroll ALL of the affixes on your item giving you a new random value within the range of possible values for each affix. This will consume between 1 and 15 forging potential, but honestly feels like a pretty risky move because you could of course get nothing but top-tier rolls… or you could end up with an item with baseline stats. This is essentially the same as the Divine Orb from Path of Exile with the difference being that you are eating up Forging Potential each time you use one.
Rune of Ascendance
This is quite possibly my favorite crafting item. Essentially this is the Chance Orb from Path of Exile but one that works every time. This will take an item and upgrade it into a random Unique for that type. This will not respect item bases, but it will respect broad categories of items. For example if you use this on a Two-Handed Sword, you are going to end up with a Unique Two-Handed Sword as a result. I mostly use these to target specific slots that I need a specific unique for, but it is an absolute gamble. They are just fun and you never quite know what you are going to get from them. I do not believe you can get anything that drops in a specific location or has specific corruption level requirements in order for an item to drop. This is just based on my own experience and I do not know this for certain however.
Rune of Creation
This item is similar to the Mirror of Kalandra from Path of Exile for those who might be familiar with that. Essentially it will allow you to duplicate any item with crafting potential so as such cannot be used on Uniques or Set items which cannot be crafted on at all, it also cannot be used on items that have been zeroed out. This item will consume all of the forging potential of both the original and the duplicate so nothing further can be done with either save for using one of the runes that requires no forging potential. Essentially this prevents the nonsense that happens in Path of Exile where folks have “mirror shops” and keep duping the same items over and over. I’ve personally used this to create multiple copies of an Exalted item before attempting to make a Legendary, but again not going to dive into that process today.
Glyphs
Glyphs are the other part of crafting and I decided to cover them after runes since they impact specific affixes not broad change to the entire item. There are a few edge cases but largely in order to use a Glyph you will need Forging Potential, Available Affix Shards of a given type, and an Affix that is less than T5 aka the maximum level that you can craft on. Let’s talk through the various options.
Glyph of Hope
Let’s start off with the best glyph, aka the one you are probably going to want to use every single time you do any crafting. Using a Glyph of Hope while upgrading an affix gives you a 25% chance to use zero forging potential. The more upgrades that you can get for free, the more wiggle room you have on an item to perfect it. If I am just grinding a stat up to T5 I am going to be using one of these and the 25% roll is independent of the normal “critical” crafting process allowing you to both get it for free and get a bonus stat level at the same time.
Glyph of Chaos
While there is no true equivalent to the Chaos Orb from Path of Exile, this is probably the closest that exists. The Glyph of Chaos essentially allows you to replace any affix on an item with a random affix that is possible to roll on that item. It will also raise the Tier of that affix slot by one, therefore placing a limit on the number of times you can attempt to reroll an affix. This is really a yolo move for an item that has three great affixes, but one that is meaningless to your build. Sometimes you luck out and get something good… worst case is you just get a different stat that is meaningless. Unlike POE, I don’t really know of any times when a single stat line can brick your build.
Glyph of Order
Okay, this is probably the most complicated to explain. When you apply an affix, it gives you a value within a range so for example if that range is 1 to 10… you could get any of those values. When you raise the tier of an affix, it rolls again giving you another random value within a range. Glyph of Order allows you to preserve the location in the range while bumping it up to a higher tier. If you have an item with the maximum stat for a given tier, then it is worthwhile to use a Glyph of Order to keep making sure you are pegging out the top of that range each time you move up in tier.
Glyph of Despair
Glyph of Despair does something weird with an item, and in theory allows you to have more than four affixes. Essentially when you use this on an item there is a chance to “seal” the affix and empty the slot that it previously occupied allowing you to craft something new in its place. This is chance-based and the lower the tier of the affix that you are trying to seal, the higher the chance it will succeed. When the craft “fails” it simply upgrades that affix to the next highest tier.
Experimental Gear
Up until this point, I have been covering “normal” crafting. As with any game that gets new content over time, there begin to be a few edge cases. In 0.9.2 Rune Prisons were introduced to the game, and with them Experimental gear. When you open a Rune Prison in a map an Exiled Mage spawns and if you manage to kill it, it drops an experiment type of gear. These contain prefixes that cannot be gained through any other way and that cannot be extracted in shard form. These can do some really interesting things like for example there is one that summons X zombies to fight on your side whenever you use a potion. Some of these are very powerful, but the majority are sort of interesting edge cases. With these items however introduced a few other crafting options that I left off the table as not to confuse you too early.
Experimental Crafting
With 0.9.2 there was a new rune and a new glyph added to the game that interacted with these experimental affixes. Runes of Research can only drop from Exiled Mages, and Glyph’s of Insight supposedly can only drop once you have used a Rune of Research. I cannot confirm nor deny this… but I can confirm that I did not see a single Glyph of Insight drop until after I had used a Rune of Research and then I found it within a few Exiled Mage kills. Could be a coincidence but I am not certain. Let’s talk about how each is used.
Rune of Research
This item allows you to take an Experimental Item and seal that affix so that you can craft another prefix onto the item. Unlike Glyph of Despair, this is 100% chance and will always seal the prefix taking somewhere between 1 and 20 forging potential to do so. Really I cannot think of a downside to doing this as it allows you to make an Experimental item better.
Glyph of Insight
This Glyph on the other hand allows you to take an existing item with a filled prefix and replace it with a randomly chosen Experimental Affix that is capable of rolling on that item type. Folks have apparently mathed out what the chances are and what affixes are available in a bunch of different scenarios so you can check out this calculator to determine what you might get. So this is an option if you have an item with a useless prefix that might be improved by an experimental one.
The Wrap Up
Well, folks, that is the crafting system. Like I said going into this I am by no means an expert, but have been crafting items regularly since I started playing this game in 2018. What I dig about the system is that it is really powerful while still being relatively deterministic. Path of Exile crafting potentially is more powerful, but it is also way the hell more random… and you need a whole slew of community-supported tools to really understand it. Last Epoch thankfully is simple enough that I could cover almost everything in a single blog post. While it might seem complicated, I promise it is pretty easy to get the hang of. I hope my post helped some of you who might have had cold feet about diving in. I’ve likely missed some elements and I am sure someone will respond in the comments to fill in those details.
The post Last Epoch Crafting Primer appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This weekend was a weekend where I pretty much played nothing but Last Epoch. Given how much I focus in on a single game and then just beat the crap out of it… this should shock no one. What might shock some players however is that I was able to play Last Epoch without a ton of issues in spite of all of the server issues. Unfortunately, this is a side effect of me being in the “endgame” and essentially once you are in Monoliths the game is perfectly fine. The problem that seems to plague players is zoning in and out of shared social hub towns, and the beginning of the game sees you bouncing back and forth from quest zones to the town hub three or four times in a row. This means that without a lot of patience, a lot of players are just hitting a brick wall.
Last Epoch has had over 1000% growth in player numbers since the beginning of this launch. Ultimately the day one numbers blew out of the water any preplanning that had been done for the game, and the Game Director said that his pre-launch comments have aged like milk. Last Epoch has bypassed the highest peak concurrency numbers for Path of Exile on Steam which took place during the Crucible league. I am not sure how this compares to lifetime numbers for Path of Exile as there is no real way to quantify players who use the standalone client. I know they have said most of their player growth was on Steam and that the console player base only represents about 10% of the total. So Last Epoch probably does not have more concurrent users than the entirety of Path of Exile, but it is still impressive to see it pass the Steam numbers.
Another impressive stat is that currently, Last Epoch is number three on the global top sellers list on Steam. Essentially you can count this as the second highest-selling game because number two is Counter Strike 2 a free game, and also given that CS has massive ban waves… it is likely a fair number of those are new account sign-ups involved in the RMT trade. Coincidentally Helldivers 2… the number one game is also having massive issues keeping up with the player growth and keeping their servers online. Both games are in similar situations, from Indie studios that have never had this level of growth. In the case of Last Epoch, its previous peak was around 40k players, and even back then it struggled… and I assume that they planned for maybe seeing 100k players… not over 250k. I am not sure if we have seek the true peak yet, but things are at least getting better. Each day has been a bit more easy to get into game and into monoliths, and last night things were comfortable enough that I actually rolled my first alt.
On Friday I finished up the campaign and started in on Monoliths and by about mid-day on Saturday I had reached Empowered Monoliths. From that point forward I have been working on farming some specific gear pieces. Originally I needed a chestpiece from the boss at the end of the Stolen Lance timeline, but I’ve kept doing it because I have my corruption up there. One of the drops that I need from Orobyss only shows up once you have at least 120 Corruption Level. In theory I should shift over to do another timeline that actually drops gear slots that I care about, but I have not wanted to put in the work to get the corruption level to the sweet spot again. I had allowed my corruption to get up to around 150… which is way too high for the current state of my build and had to lower it a bit.
As far as “gear for my build” goes I have picked up four pieces. Darkstride boots I got from my friend Ace and it allowed us to test out the trade resonance system. Shortly after that, I picked up a Siphon of Anguish which is a common drop from any corruption-level version of Orobyss, and have since upgraded that to an LP2 version. I’m just hunting for a good ring to try and smash onto it before converting it into a legendary. Apathy’s Maw dropped pretty quickly once I got into Empowered Monoliths but I am obviously hunting for a version of it with legendary potential so I can hopefully add some crit to it. The last item that I picked up is the Wings of Argentus which drops from God Hunter Argentus in the empowered version of The Stolen Lance timeline. I’ve done the fight six times I believe and it is one of the most technical fights I have experienced in the game so far, but unfortunately, I’ve not seen any more chestpieces let alone any with legendary potential. The last chase unique would be Shattered Chains which can drop from Orobyss in any timeline that is at a minimum of 120 Corruption.
As far as the rest of my gear… I’ve mostly been looking for survival stats… resists, health, armor and then anything that can increase either void damage or void melee damage. My worst pair of gear is my gloves, but I have yet to find anything that I can reasonably slot in without giving up my health. I am already teetering on the edge of 2000 hitpoints and I don’t want to drop much lower. The second “worst” item that I am using is my relic… which has two stats on it that are completely useless… but also gives me the needed 43% to All Resistances while Channeling which allows me to pretty much hit the resistance cap on everything. My second ring is something that I picked up while leveling and just have not found anything worth replacing it but I did pick up a LP1 Liath’s Signet if I can find anything to smash into it to gain a bit of health. That would allow me to back off on some of the resistances that I have in my idols since it gives me 75% to all elemental resistances while channeling, and due to Warpath, I am always channeling.
Since Last Epoch lacks any sort of API system that allows for a way to view your build and gear offline… I figured I would take a screenshot and then highlight the tooltip for my main damage-dealing ability. I feel pretty squishy now that I am raising my corruption levels. When I was up around 150, it felt like I was teetering on the brink of oblivion pretty much all of the time. Now that I have dialed things back to around 120, it seems more reasonable. I think once I get better gear though I should be able to push up to 200 without much issue. The big problem that I have is when I have a bunch of rares stacked on top of each other, and it becomes very hard to see the visualizations for all of their big attacks. If any two attacks are stacked on top of each other… I am dead and my leech just cannot keep up with it. At 150… it was enough for a Rogue Mage to one-shot me at times if their mechanics landed just right.
All of this… is why yesterday I decided that I needed to “alt” a bit. I did find out something really cool. Once you have chosen a faction on your first character, there is an NPC for each faction in the very first town so you can choose your faction for your alts easily. I had wondered how all of the gear I have been collecting that is tied to Circle of Fortune would work out, because most of it is great for alts. Once I picked my faction I could equip all of it just fine and was up and running quickly. For the moment I am going for a bleed wolves build on my Primalist, but might shift that up later as I get different gear. I pretty much had all of the uniques needed for bleed wolves sitting in my bank, so that was a no-brainer.
I am still having a freaking blast and the prophecy system is so damned good. For example, this is a screenshot of me killing a mob that triggered two different prophecies… one to drop 5 pairs of unique boots and another to drop a unique bow. I love that you can stack them up like this and then when they trigger get a massive loot fiesta. All told I am very happy with the current state of Last Epoch and once the servers calm down and they manage to work out the kinks around “matchmaking” aka zoning in or out of social hub towns… I think the game is going to be in a phenomenal state. I played with my friend Ace quite a bit this weekend and it was so much fun. Very chill hanging out with friends and gameplay time, and I am there for it. For reference, it took roughly an hour to get a resonance, and I am hoping in the coming days/weeks to get some game time in with all of my circle of friends playing this game so I can build up resonances with them as well.
Are you playing Last Epoch? Have you been able to fight the servers and get some leveling in? What are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
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