Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Happy Labor Day holiday weekend for our fellow countryfolk. We start off this show with Thalen making a reference to a dream that Bel had… which forces a recounting of the madness. From there, we talk about Last Epoch and a completely silly build that Bel is playing, where things explode around him without doing anything. Grace also talks a bit about their similarly silly single minion build that just melts most things. Bel talks a bit about YoloMouse and how it solves the problem of not being able to find your cursor on screen. From there, Tam talks a bit about PEAK, which is a new popular multiplayer frustration adjacent experience. Bel talks a bit about the launch of the Third Edict league in Path of Exile II and how it seems like none of the streamers are actually having fun… and he most definitely was not. We close out the show with some discussion about some of the recent updates to Star Citizen and how it continues to shape up to actually being a game.
Good Morning Folks! Since Path of Exile II is awaiting a patch, I figured I would spend some time doing something else. Sunday I started an Acolyte and turned her into a Necromancer going down the path of doing a fairly common minions build since that is what I played almost 300 hours of in Path of Exile II. It is wild just how comfortable Last Epoch is compared to Path of Exile. While the game is lacking at the endgame, and hopefully the big April patch will alleviate that a bit… the leveling experience is so freaking cozy. By my play session last night I was starting in on Monoliths and having a grand old time with my army of horrible children.
I played quite a bit in September when they did the Cycle Refresh and had gotten my Circle of Fortune faction up to rank 11. This made leveling a new character feel amazing, because I was constantly getting really interesting items. More than that the Nemesis system feels phenomenal at low levels because you are regularly getting pretty interesting unique items turned into legendaries with random stats attached to them. The only negative about the Nemesis systems… is that it makes all of the other content feel significantly worse. Rogue Mages for example need a rework because it feels like they only drop Clutch Plates for a 77 Honda Civic Hatchback… which is awesome if you need one of those but otherwise pretty forgettable.
Some of the items that I am seeing from drops are wild. Path of Exile II wanted to make loot on the ground matter and failed miserably at that, but honestly… that is precisely the state of Last Epoch right now. This is an item I picked up off the ground… that has 3 Tier 6 affixes… one of which sealed so that i could in theory roll off one of the other affixes trying to get something with better synergy. Granted I don’t plan on playing a character that needs any of those things, but it is still a wildly compelling item. Given enough time spinning the randomizer I will start seeing items that DO have the stats that I want on them. The fact that I can target specific monoliths for specific gear slots… and also throw Runes of Ascendance at random items use that trying to get the Uniques that I want. I feel like I have so many options to either farm perfect loot, or perfect less than perfect loot.
Right now I am mostly wearing a bunch of weavers will items, because they were handy and often have interesting results. I’m also running two Hollow Fingers which give me extra skeletons. I had one with two legendary potential and attempted to turn it into a ring with Minion Health and Minion Damage, but unfortunately hit flat health instead. Still a reasonable item to use but not necessarily an ideal item. That is one of the things that I dig about Last Epoch is that you can get to a pretty reasonable gear state easily, and then slowly over time attempt to improve upon it by making more Legendary items or lucking into some really tasty drops.
I am sure when the POE2 patch drops I will be back over there testing out the changes, but for the moment I am living my best life in Last Epoch. This game is so damned good, and really… once it has the amount of content that Path of Exile does… it is going to be the easy winner for my attention. I am definitely looking forward to April and the next Cycle where they are supposedly focusing on the endgame entirely. The monolith is a good core, but it just needs more surprise content to borrow a term from the POE2 patch announcement over the weekend. Monoliths feel great when you have a Nemesis, Rogue Mage, and a loot chest… and feel pretty awful when none of those spawn. The more of those little doses of joy that they can pack into the mapping experience, the better the game is going to be.
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Good Morning Friends! This weekend I played an exceptional amount of Last Epoch because at the moment that seems to be the game I am most engaged with. A few months back Eleventh Hour Games announced that everyone who had purchased the game before the launch of the 0.9 Multiplayer update would be getting a gift. Yesterday I noticed a post on the official discord stating that it was now live and in-game, and as a result, I have this really beautiful backpack with a ton of small details to roam around on a character that moves through content so fast that it is impossible to focus in on any small details. I mean it is really freaking cool honestly and I am happy to wear it and have it as an “I was here early” type thing, but it really does require you to zoom in to see anything.
Right now there are a number of microtransactions in the game, but most of them are limited to pets. For example, that amazing floating Runed Primordial Turtle means I was an Alpha backer of the game. If you backed the Kickstarter there were a number of Sylpine and Chronowyrm pets that you got. Currently the available supporter backs include weird anthropomorphic armadillo-badger sort of things called Skullen as pets. So far Eleventh Hour Games has been very clear that there will never be a way in the future to obtain any of these items, and while I think the Skullen looks sorta dumb, I am very happy to have my pet turtle and backpack… even though neither actually does anything. My hope is at some point pets might possibly work like they do in Diablo III and zoom around gathering gold for me.
As far as endgame progressions go, I am now officially in Empowered Monoliths, and boy do they occasionally just kick your ass. I need to focus on building out the rest of my kit before going too crazy with corruption. At the moment I am short on a couple of resists and when I encounter anything that really exploits those… I do not last terribly long. I think it is pretty cool that at any point you can flip between the Normal and Legendary versions of the Monoliths. This only supports my case for Monolith progression being account wide instead of tied to a specific character. That way if you want to run lower-level monoliths on your brand-new characters, you can do so at will by just choosing the normal versions.
I finished the first of the Empowered Monoliths and defeated its boss, and now am target farming Ending of the Storm which has nodes apparently that can drop unique or set gloves. Essentially I am trying to farm up Ravens’ Rise a unique set of gloves that blends nicely with my Necromancer build. In theory, I need to farm the Reign of Dragons timeline as well to try and get Dragonflame Edict the weapon that I am supposed to be using that drops from the boss. Out on Last Epoch Tools, there is a handy filter in the Item Database that lets you look at each timeline and what items come from it for farming purposes. If I did not already have Aaron’s Will, I would be trying to farm the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline as it drops chest pieces.
I personally cannot handle non-stop progression content, so I spent a chunk of the weekend working on a few different primalists. Right now I am leaning heavily towards Belgloam my Beastmaster because I am just having more fun with it than Belgraves my Druid. The idea with each of them is to go Squirrel build on the Beastmaster, and Swarm Queen on the Druid. However, for the moment I am enjoying the gameplay of beastmaster quite a bit more as I run around using upheaval with my pack of four wolves. I do not have Herald of the Scurry which changes my Wolves into Squirrels, but I will probably try and target farm that on the Necromancer. I can only imagine cackling with joy as my army of squirrel friends decimate my foes.
In the column of assorted dumb things I did this weekend, I recorded a series of videos. Essentially I have talked at length about the things I did not enjoy in Diablo IV, but I never really talked about or showcased the things that I love doing in ARPGs. So as a result I recorded a series of four videos… one in Last Epoch doing a Monolith Echo, and Three in Path of Exile doing an Atlas Map, a Delve, and a Heist. So if you have any interest in listening to me ramble on while I play through some content, here is your chance. I’ve also sort of come to the realization that I have been doing my “Bel Bungles” series all wrong. I should have just had a single video series given that I swap around games relatively often. I think at some point I might renumber all of my “Bel Bungles” videos and put them in a playlist.
I will admit recording the videos, and the announcement of the 3.21 Crucible League… caused a bit of a relapse this weekend. There is nothing in any ARPG that I enjoy quite as much as Delve. There is just something about the endless nature of crawling from node to node seeking out the treasure that soothes me. My hope is with the Crucible league that I can build up a Righteous Fire character again and then use it to fund other types of characters as I did in the Sanctum league. I know without a doubt I will be heading into Delve as soon as possible.
Anyways! I hope you had a wonderful weekend and that the coming week is at a bare minimum tolerable. I will likely be here continuing to do my nonsense.
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