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.
Good Morning Folks! I know a few days ago I stated that I was going to be putting my Ignite Warpath Forge Guard aka “Fire Bro” on hold. However yesterday I ended up ripping the bandaid off and completely rebuilding the character into something slightly different. I am not sure how interesting this post is going to be for most people, because I am going to be diving into the changes that I made. I decided to go ahead and write about it mostly to show how easy it is to shift gears within Last Epoch. I’ve said this before, but the only thing that is absolutely set in stone is your mastery. So no matter what I would be doing from this point out, I would be doing it as a Forge Guard. Within that mastery, there is a heck of a lot of leverage to move around and change things up significantly.
For anyone who has not been following the saga of “Fire Bro” let’s do a really quick recap. The above video shows some Monolith gameplay of the build as it stood at the beginning of yesterday. I was focused on shifting Warpath to fire damage, and then using Lunge also shifted to fire damage as my movement ability, generating Sigils of Hope on kill, and proccing Smite every second while spinning to deal additional fire damage and some splash healing. It worked phenomenally well… up until the point that it didn’t. I had put almost all of my eggs in the block mechanic basket and did not have enough health or general survival to keep pushing forward. While I got to Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 + 100 Corruption version of the endgame system… I spent most of my time just getting overwhelmed by incoming damage. For anyone curious here is a Build Planner for the state of this build before the impending rework.
Yesterday started largely as me sitting down and trying to figure out how to work Healing Hands into my build. This is an ability that received a new talent tree with 1.0 and offers a ton of utility. Firstly you can have melee attacks proc healing hands 100% of the time generating a burst of direct healing and some healing over time. On top of that you can shift the ability to scale based on melee damage with Seraph Blade and if you have enough points left over you can turn it into a movement ability when directly cast and even give it the same invulnerability frames that other movement abilities have. A huge positive side effect of this interaction is the splash healing is not only keeping me alive but also keeping my Manifest Armor minion topped off. The problem with all of this… is it does not work terribly well with Warpath. It will proc once per channel, meaning that you need to constantly “pulse” Warpath meaning that you are losing some of the benefits that I had stacked for “channeling” constantly. Essentially I needed a new main damage-dealing ability.
Without Warpath smite was out the window as well, but I landed on another favorite of my abilities Rive. Essentially Rive is a 3-strike combo and the talent trees allow you to tweak which of the strikes is the most important. For me I wanted to go with Focused Strike which means that the third large AOE strike will always be a critical strike. On top of that while I can’t shift the damage of Rive to Fire… I can pick up three points into Savagery meaning that I am dealing 45% more damage against Ignited Targets and both my Manifest Armor and I are always igniting targets. Lastly, there is Coup De Grace which means that rive has a 15% kill threshold so that it simply deletes any target when their health drops to 15% or below.
Since I removed… Smite, Warpath, and Lunge… that left me with an open slot. As uninteresting of a choice as it is… I ended up going with the good ole swiss-army-knife of damage dealing… Volatile Reversal. I do not care at all about void damage, but this ability creates a rift at the start of my movement rewind and a rift at the end of my movement and causes everything touched by either rift to take 30% more damage. Additionally, I gain a boost in global attack speed meaning I burn through my 3-hit combo faster causing more ignites and dealing more critical damage on that third hit. The cooldown is lowered to the point where I can basically be constantly pressing it while in combat pending the “rewind” functionality does not screw things up.
With all of these changes also came a significant rework of some of my gearing. You can see the totality of the changes with this new Build Planner export, but I will talk through a few of them specifically. Firstly this build is still based around Firestarter’s Torch and the interactions with that weapon and ignite damage. I’ve managed to craft an amazing legendary version with T7 Hybrid Fire Penetration, and T5 Ignite Chance. I swapped out Rahyeh’s Light for the best rolled Cradle of the Erased that I have managed to pick up so far. Golden Aegis is a ton of survival, and the stats on this shield work pretty well with what I am trying to do. I had to swap out my helm and chestpiece trading Manifest Armor and Warpath for ones focused on Healing Hands and Rive. I am sticking with Solarum Plate as it gives me a nice boost in Fire Damage along with decent armor and endurance. Lastly giving up Warpath meant that I lost my ability to convert bleed into ignite, which means that I had to swap out my gloves for a pair of Maehlin’s Hubris which I managed to craft into a legendary with T6 Hybrid Health.
I can now rip through Empowered Monoliths, but that is not to say I don’t still have some issues. I am still using seven uniques and at some point, I would like to replace my Sunwreath and Fiery Dragon Shoes with either a good legendary version of either or a really well-rolled Exalted. Neither are doing anything that I could not pick up off another item and several of the lines on Sunwreath specifically only apply to a spellblade. I need a lot more health in order to be really comfortable as I am still sitting at around 1800. From an offense standpoint, I have 530% Fire Damage and 1 point shy of 300% Chance to Ignite which feels really good. I could use some more flat physical damage however to buff the moment-to-moment combat with Rive. There are still levers to tweak with this build, and I will likely be slowly poking at it until the next Path of Exile league.
Is it as fun as the previous version? Honestly… no. There was something so chill about rolling over the top of things and watching them burn to death in my wake. That aspect of the build is gone, but I am not sure what I could have done to keep making that sort of gameplay work. What I wanted was a pseudo Righteous Fire gameplay style with super chill Monoliths and so long as I stuck to the level 90 non-Empowered ones it worked well enough. I needed to do something to make things work for Empowered and my series of significant revisions to the build have done that. Is it still enjoyable? Yeah, it absolutely still is, but combat does not feel anywhere near as fluid as it did before. Needing to cycle through the three-hit combo of Rive gives everything a stutter-step feel which is nowhere near as smooth as spinning around and clipping through mobs constantly. My Void Knight continues to remain my “main” and I dinged 97 last night and continue pushing towards 100. However “Fire Bro” will likely stay here as a pet project.
The post Resurrecting Fire Bro appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
