Good Morning Folks. If you have been reading this blog lately you might have had a bit of whiplash as I went from having a blast in Last Epoch… to suddenly diving headlong into Path of Exile II. So you might be asking yourself… Hey Bel… What happened to Last Epoch? This is one of the challenges of both the seasonal model of ARPGs and the fact that a new game launched over an extended United States Holiday weekend. Kodra and Ash are still very much 100% engaged with Last Epoch, and I think I maybe just burned through the process a bit faster than they did. Ultimately I built two fairly successful characters with my Fire Minions Necromancer and then later my Thorns Forge Guard. More than that though I think I just accomplished everything that I really wanted to accomplish in a very short amount of time… far shorter than I thought it would be.
On Saturday, Ace and I spent the day pushing through corruption levels. I was a bit further progressed than they were and thanks to these temporal token things, you can force a boss pretty fast in a given timeline to help catch corruption up. So before lunch we burned through all of the Harbingers that they were missing that I had completed, and then after a lunch break we pushed through all of the remaining Harbingers. The unfortunate part about this story is that when you are pushing corruption with a friend… your own corruption levels are not updating at all. This feels like something that really needs to change because I think above anything else this kill momentum for Ace. They were sub 200 when we started the day and to push up to 300+ is hours worth of work. I really feel like Eleventh Hour Games needs to rethink the way that corruption works, and that it should be something akin to how pushing Greater Rifts worked in Diablo 3, that once you achieve a rank in any timeline… you can select the corruption that you want to farm from a slider or drop down.
We made an attempt on Aberroth together but had both completely forgotten the mechanics. We took a break to go off and do things before the podcast and I returned managing to take down Aberroth after a few tries. The problem with this however is that it how feels like I have effectively beaten the game. Pushing corruption for the sake of pushing corruption never really feels like a meaningful goal. Before you hit corruption levels you have honestly unlocked most of the content you will ever be engaging with, and doing the harbingers sort of feels like a last hurrah for your build. Sure Uber Aberroth exists, but I am not nearly “tryhard” enough to care about taking it down. At this point I would probably swap builds and try running something else up through the paces. There are more woven echoes that I could unlock for more points in the weavers tree… but I sort of just feel like I finished on a good place.
Farming content is enjoyable, and I am sure I will play some more Last Epoch before the next season. There are a few builds that I want to try, but there is just something missing in this game that Path of Exile has that keeps me engaged. I am not entirely certain how to quantify it. Last Epoch is a game about farming multiple copies of the same thing trying to get ever more perfect versions… but you can essentially reach a point of good enough to do all of the content extremely quickly. There are fewer endgame systems to engage with, and as a result it starts to feel stale more quickly. Whereas Path of Exile has a decades worth of content that is all super detailed enough to be its own game… and I wind up going down rabbit holes trying to farm this super rare item or that. The only thing of equivalent rarity here is the Red Ring… which I have never seen, nor do I think I will ever actually see. It is like trying to farm a mageblood or mirror… and effectively unobtainium.
I legitimately expected to only play enough Path of Exile II to farm up the MTX for clearing Act 1 and then move on with my life. However I wound up rerolling and found out that Minion Internalist is still a pretty freaking solid build. More than that I am actually enjoying myself and wanting to see how deep I can push this time around. The gearing process also feels like it takes way longer here, which is a double edged sword. You have to engage with the trade system to really build a functional character, or you need a PHD in the crafting system in order to build your own gear. I managed to mostly get a stable character with stuff off the ground, but now I am largely in currency acquisition mode so that I can eventually afford nicer stuff. Last Epoch doesn’t really have that currency acquisition mode feeling… because even in a trade economy they are using the boring resource of gold… and not the exciting tink of getting a Divine Orb to drop in a map. Gold will never feel as individually special as getting that rare currency item to drop for you.
There are also these “Difficult Boss” nodes that I want to check out, but have not pushed my map tiers up high enough to be able to farm them yet. I did figure out how to unlock them and I figured I would post an infographic for anyone who follows after me. Essentially when you see a blocked node covered in fog, there will be nodes that show up with blue swirlies around them. Inside of each of them there will be a Draiocht Hengestone in the boss chamber of that map, and clicking on this will cause another node to show up. Once you have cleared a few of these the swirlies will move to the blocked node and uncloak the fog of war around it. There is a similar Temporal Sandstorm and Eye of the Storm mechanic on the map but I have not figured out the on map tell for either of those. I know for the Temporal Sandstorm I have started to find hourglasses in the boss rooms of the surrounding maps, and I assume like the hengestones that if I click on enough of these a path will show up.
The biggest problem that I am having right now is with map sustain. It used to be that running a map with a boss guaranteed an upgrade to the next tier higher. This seems to no longer be the case and I am struggling to keep upgrading my map tiers and pushing things higher. I am heading towards a corrupted area now, desperately trying to spawn a T6 map drop… so that I can complete the corruption nexus and get more skill points. I really do not like this method for unlocking atlas points, and in truth I hope they rethink the whole design of this endgame system. This is a perfectly fine endgame system, but I don’t feel like it is a good replacement for mapping from Path of Exile. I loved Delve, but that was not a game mode for everyone. This is honestly a complaint I have with the game is that it feels like they have doubled down on specific mechanics and are now forcing everyone to do them. Sanctum and Ultimatum were perfectly fine mechanics if you enjoyed them, and so long as they were optional… life was great… same for Delve. However now that all three are required mechanics to progress in the game… players are not enjoying it.
We had a big patch yesterday and so far my build seems to have survived it just fine. That has not been the case with other Spectre builds, and it makes me really glad that I have not chased the trend of hopping on the latest and greatest spectre combination. The unique spectres that gave specific buffs ate the nerfbat, and unfortunately one of the new hotness spectres that everyone has been switching to also got impacted. The last bit is supposedly a mistake, but I am glad that I have more or less stuck with Vaal Guards in spite of the visual noise. I could run more but I feel like a mix of Arsonists and Vaal Guards helps clear significantly because the Arsonists do nice instant damage and the Guards have a delayed grenade impact effect.
I have a few gear upgrades that I snagged cheaply, but unfortunately both require level 80… so I am mostly head down farming mode until then. It looks like the Frozen Mandibles were restored in a patch this morning so when I get that additional spirit I might try swapping over to them at that point.
The post What Happened to Last Epoch? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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. I am getting a bit later start than normal to blogging, because work got in the way. If it can start interrupting me at 6 am… I can take a brief break to bang out a blog post. While I have mostly been focused on my new Thorns Forge Guard build, I am still playing quite a bit of my Minion Necromancer. I have to say I really love the look of the coven set that was one of the support packs this season. I buy the most expensive supporter pack every season, because I like giving Eleventh Hour Games my money because they do a phenomenal job of giving me a few fun weeks each new season. They are also considerably cheaper than Grinding Gear Games in the way that they price these packs, making it feel like a massive steel. That said… I don’t love every armor set that I end up picking up, but this one… perfectly fits the vibe of the Acolyte.
I said yesterday that I have changed my perspective on how to build a loot filter, and now that I am building one for all of my characters in a given season… it means that often times I get really cool things for the character I am not actively playing. As a result I got a bunch of really good upgrades for my Necromancer yesterday while working on unlocking Empowered Monoliths. Firstly I got an LP2 copy of the Mantle of the Pale Ox and leaned heavily into survival giving it +flat health and +regen percentage. Next up I got an LP1 copy of Tyrant’s Skull and I gave it percentage Minion Damage… and quite honestly it will be pretty unlikely that I improve this further. For Dragonflame’s Edict I gave it Minion Fire Pen which was the best of the options I had laying around for donor staves. It’s not ideal but it does at least prove that I can clear a t4 Julra without much issue. I really need to farm the End of Dragons timeline for more chances at staves. I also really wish this game had some equivalent of the Path of Exile 3 to 1 vendor recipe because I have a bunch of junk that I really need to feed into the turtle to see if I can upgrade it, but that is way more of a hassle than just vendoring things.
I’ve been spending way more time over on the Forge Guard because having things just explode when they look at me is too much fun not to take advantage of it while it lasts. This is one of those builds that I do not expect to survive this season, or at least not at this power level. Everything that I have heard is that Judgement Paladin is still one of the best builds out there, but it is nowhere near the levels of raw survival and damage output that it had last time. That is really the thing that I appreciate the most about Eleventh Hour Games is that they nerf things down to a reasonable level… rather than giving the GGG triple tap and knocking them completely out of the rotation. I think GGG feels like they have to shake up the meta every league, but what ends up happening is they just create a new build of the league… and all of the other play-styles suffer. Right now in Last Epoch there are countless perfectly viable builds, and that seems really healthy.
Now that my Thorns build is online, I am going to start actually focusing on pushing corruption. I knocked out my third Harbinger and at the suggestion of my friend Ace I did Lagon because the arena is so limited there that it becomes a bit of a pain in the ass to actually fight the Harbinger. The earlier you fight a Harby… the weaker a version of it that you end up getting. So the easier fights… you probably want to wait until the last few tiers of corruption. Ultimately when you hit 300 corruption you unlock Aberroth and I want to do that and see how well this build continues to hold up. Right now it actually does a really great job of bossing, but is lacking a bit in the survival department so I am trying to buff that as I swap out gear. At the moment I have two completely useless rings, so I will be targeting trying to figure out what I actually want in those slots for survival and damage output. I am trying to stack as much Phys Resistance, Attunement, and Reflection as I can, wherever I can get it.
I’ve made so many changes and updates to the build since the last post. Essentially I swapped out six pieces of gear and am looking to swap out even more as I get deeper down this particular rabbit hole. The biggest upgrade is a new copy of the Thicket chest and crafting a t6 thorns onto it. I am still keeping Last Laugh because after having tried a bunch of different things, I find I miss the culling strike when I don’t have access to it. I had a two-hander with +8 to all attributes, and I figured that was good enough for the time being until I found a higher legendary potential version. Other than that my general plan has been to throw on additional life or survival in general onto every piece that I can. I am still using Boulderfists because they have good armor and life on them… and I need to sort out what I actually want as an eventual replacement for those.
The biggest challenge I am facing is that in order to really push this build to the limit… I need a ton of small weavers idols with damage reflect on them. This problem is two fold. In all of the idols that have dropped for me this league, I have found exactly two of these. Secondly there is no real way to target farm weavers idols apart from running a bunch of cemeteries. Normal idols there is an entire tab in the prophecies that supports farming those. Weavers Idols… not so much. There is not even any support on the weavers tree for making them drop more often. Ultimately I think this is one of those builds that is only really going to reach its maximum potential in a trade league economy… and even swapping to trade would be futile since for whatever reason… trade just never quite works out in Last Epoch. It is either wildly overpriced or completely dead. So far I am dealing roughly 8000 reflect damage every .5 seconds to everything looking at me… and this scales up to I believe 3 million damage against bosses due to the more multiplier on the chest for bosses and rares.
Anyways… I am having fun. Friday though I am swapping for a bit to Path of Exile II to farm the MTX, but depending on how that goes I will probably keep poking at this build and seeing where I can take it.
The post A Thorny Reception appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I’m officially in the Monolith on my second character of the league. This does not mean that I have abandoned my Necromancer, in fact I ran around on it last night with my friend Ace. I actually swapped over to Dragonflame Edict last night and dropped my crab ring for another Phantom Grip to make up for the +2 Minion Skills that I was losing when I dropped Tolmat. I will forever miss my incorrectly named minions and crab… but really in empowered monoliths their survival was awful so they were not staying alive for very long. What I leveled this time is a Forge Guard, which means adding a bunch of Sentinel specific nonsense to my loot filter. That is something that I arrived at is rethinking how I build my loot filters… instead of making them character specific I am going to just keep adding to them so that I can keep searching for items I need for all of my characters in a specific league.
This morning I recorded one of my trademarked “dumb little videos” to show off the interaction of Thicket of Blinding Light. Essentially this gives you a very Righteous Fire style Thorns Aura that effectively hits the entire screen at once. The chest piece has the text “Every 0.5 seconds you Blind all enemies facing you and deal Damage to them equal to your Damage Reflected to Attackers stat“. So that means that every .5 seconds you are pulsing a giant thorns aura on anything that can see you. Due to the particulars of the build you can scale this nonsense in four ways… by stacking Attunement, Overcapped Physical Resistance, Armor and by reference Armor Mitigation, and then also any flat damage reflect that you can find on gear. All of which will just make the aura of death that you are pulsing deal more damage, but as you can see in the video it is already pretty formidable.
Ash and I had talked about this played on a Primalist, but this video shifted my focus over to trying it on a Forge Guard especially after seeing how silly it looked. You obviously need the Thicket of Blinding Light , which is rather expensive resource wise… and if you are like me and get a low roll you will need to keep buying them from the vendor trying to get one with some Legendary Potential on it. Thornshell is also a bit part of the build since it is a good source of reflect damage, as is Thorn Slinger. I am running Decayed Skull mostly because it gives a multiplier to armor, and then Boulderfists just to have something to slot in, but I will likely replace that by a good exalted item. The build utilizes the Forge Guard ability to use a two handed weapon with a shield and I am currently running The Last Laugh so I can get additional armor shred and a culling strike effect, but the original build I based mine from was running Dreamthorn for its added block chance.
It is a truly silly build and I have no clue how far I will end up taking it. Like I said there is another variant that I have seen that uses Spriggan for the build and you can see a video of it playing out here running up against Aberroth. They are specifically using Valdyr’s Chalice but I have heard that the percentage damage reflected does not actually impact the pulse from the chest piece. I guess if I pick one of those up it would be worth throwing it on just to test and see if it makes a difference. Anyways if you are looking for a fun build that is very unlikely to make it out of this league unscathed… it is worth running up a character to play around with it. The AFK nature of the build is nice, because Gracie keeps crawling up in my arms and blocking my face. I guess I will keep trying to improve the gear and improve my general survival to see how far I can get with it.
The post Righteous Fire but Thorns appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
