Good Morning Folks! Yesterday, we got Shattered Omens, the new season for Last Epoch. Last night I did our Thursday Funday nonsense, and during the middle of it, I was asked what should be a simple question… How long has Last Epoch Been Out? Technically, I have been playing small amounts of the game since November 8th, 2018, when I bought into Alpha 0.5.3. However, I really started playing the game seriously on July 12th, 2022, in its pre-multplayer variant, because things were really starting to cook. Collectively, the AggroChat crew started playing more regularly when the Multiplayer release dropped on March 9th, 2023. The answer that Sita was probably looking for was February 21st, 2024, when the game officially launched into its 1.0 version. So, at this point, we are a little over two years into the lifecycle of Last Epoch as a “complete” game, and I say that in quotes because we still do not have all of the acts that will eventually be in the final version of the story. We are on Season 4, but I have no clue what the actual number should be because originally, they did this whole patch number “cycle” nonsense instead of just calling them seasons.
One of the most delightful things about playing a new Last Epoch season is that I get to once again roam around with my adventuring companions. I’ve been a pretty avid supporter of the game and purchased pretty much every MTX offering backer set that they offer us, because they are priced so much cheaper than the Path of Exile league packs. For example, the Fractured Legend’s supporter pack, which features everything available for this Season is $59.99 as compared to one of the Mirage supporter packs, which runs $90 for technically less stuff. I love this game and want it to survive so I keep giving it money, but after many years of doing this, I have a fancy Capybara, Toucan, and Sloth that hangs out on my back… and running around with this trio of animal companions makes me happy in ways that I cannot quite adequately explain. Maybe I am too old school, but I believe that you really should support the games that you enjoy playing in some way or another, and have always done so as best I can.
Each time a new season drops, they have added new content to the game, and slowly, bit by bit, the frequency of “interesting things” in maps has increased. This time around, starting with Act 2, we have the appearance of something called the Omen Window. This is your classic ARPG “kill things in a circle” mechanic and reminds me a bit of a mix between Ritual and the new Unstable Breach, for Path of Exile players. Ritual, because you are confined to a specific fixed location, and Unstable Breach, because random monsters are summoned and you fill a bar, which breaks the “boss” encounter out of its invulnerability phase. When you take down the boss, the encounter ends, and you are rewarded with a bunch of corrupted loot and some of the crafting currency for this league that allows you to corrupt your own items. Essentailly these are Vaal Orbs for the Path of Exile player, or for someone not familiar with the concept… it is a final step that you can do in crafting an item which can produce some wild outcomes… but also keeps you from further modifying the item.
It is hard to fully explain just how game-changing this has been for the campaign. These are all items that I got from my first two Omen Windows. If you get a good corrupted weapon in Act 2… You can literally keep using it all of the way from the campaign because it is dropping with stats that you cannot get until the Monolith. For example, the ring on the left with +11 Strength on it… is something that I am still using in Act 7 and will probably keep using until I finally get some other way of replacing that huge boost in attributes. I have held onto these for when I ultimately level alts, because the stat packages are just too wild. For example, that axe with 96% increased Physical Damage and 26% Damage Leech is pure nonsense. Sure, it would have been much better if it had rolled with flat damage, but I am not going to complain at all. You can corrupt your own items, but be VERY careful because I corrupted a level 10 dagger…. and it ended up swapping it to a level 56 required dagger base, effectively bricking it for me.
I started screenshotting some of the early drops from Omens, because it was freaking wild. This one for example dropped two completed legendary items. Granted, they were more akin to the random legendaries that you get from the Nemesis system, but they were still extremely strong… and I am using several items that I got early on from corruptions. The only negative that I see about the power of the Omen Windows is that it sort of makes every other encounter feel worse as a result. Exiled Mages were already pretty bad, because you only really care about them if they can drop something that your build specifically needs. I am thankful that you get a little warning message in chat when you enter a map with Omens, and in theory… it might not be a bad strategy to just farm the same map over and over for corruptions in one of the first areas. What was so interesting about this while leveling, is if you get a really strong item… it might convince you to try some things that you had never tried previously.
For example…. I probably never would have leveled a Sentinel with Prism Wraps and Calamity. However, I got a Prism Wraps off my second Omen, which had +1 to all skills… making it insanely powerful for leveling, and I am still wearing it. Calamity similarly has a huge amount of physical resistance on it, and given that I am dealing fire damage, I just rolled with it… especially when I got a pair of Falcon Fists later from a Nemesis egg. I would likely never run a Vipertail on a Sentinel either, but since so much of my power comes from procs… and I greatly benefit from hitting really fast… I started using it for the melee attack speed and kept using it because the poison damage was pretty overpowered since I was hitting very fast. Code of an Erased sentinel, I only included because I am pretty proud of that being the first one I picked up off the ground, and turning into a pretty formidable item. I am sure I will have to wear proper gear once I get to the Monolith, but for now this leveling package feels really strong.
I am level 47 and made it to Heoborea in Act Seven, without taking any deaths. I am sure once I hit monoliths, I will lose my “deathless”, or potentially before, because I keep doing dumb things. Path of Exile II introduced the ability to pause the game while playing by hitting escape to bring up a menu. A few leagues ago, this was also added to Path of Exile, and it was a very welcome addition that I adapted to quickly. As a result, I keep hitting Escape, thinking I am pausing the game, only to watch the corners of my screen turn red as I start getting hit. This is muscle memory… and at some point I am going to do this… alt tab out and come back sad and dead. I would love it if EHG added pause to the online portion of the game, but then again… they have a lot on their plate. There are a ton of quality-of-life tweaks that I would love to see, but some of them seem to be lines that they do not want to cross. For example, I would love to have my pets pick up any of the loot that gets vacuumed into your inventory, like affix shards. I won’t be holding my breath on that one.
I should be able to wrap the campaign up tonight. I don’t usually take any skips and go out of my way to unlock the various dungeons as I am near them on the map. Though I do remember the latest acts taking quite a bit longer than the early ones. I am still going to complete them, though, because you can apparently speed through the monolith faster if you have completed the campaign and are not required to do as many of the early monos. It feels like I am gaining levels much faster than normal, so I am interested to see what level I am when I open up Monos for the first time. I am sure I will be playing this hard and heavy all weekend long, so if you are around, feel free to friend me. My Account ID is Belghast, and the character I am playing this time around is a Forge Weapons Forge Guard called BelForgedNonsense.
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