Good Morning Folks! Today is the day that the Last Epoch league starts, and I am going to be taking a bit of a pause in my Path of Exile shenanigans to enjoy it thoroughly. I really love this game, and I get that sometimes I talk about it in slightly negative light… but that is really only because the totality of the game is not quite as fleshed out as my beloved Path of Exile. I think there are a lot of things that Last Epoch does so much better, and it is also a much more approachable game. It took me almost two years before I got the hang of playing even the basics of Path of Exile with any level of proficiency. Last Epoch is the sort of experience that I can just log in and start being functional almost immediately. To paraphrase the classic Tolarian Community College standard… Reading the Skill Explains the Skill. Sure you might not be able to yolo your way to Aberroth with your first build, but you can at the very least make it through the campaign, and from there the game gives you easy tools to tweak your character without much pain to make it better over time.
Say you want to play Last Epoch, but you do not want to yolo things. Much like every other ARPG out there, we have a bunch of folks who came up through the community of the game that make build guides. Sure, you can probably lean on all of the same ARPG stalwarts that you are used to, because most of the Path of Exile and Diablo folks also play Last Epoch seasons. However, I would highly suggest you maybe give your time and attention to the folks who are supporting the community during the downtime. Here are a few that I would suggest you check out for builds.
Aaron Action RPG – Aaron is one of the most prolific guide creators out there, especially in the minion-based builds space. Unfortunately, he has a bit of a verbal schtick with these guides that grates my nerves, but you cannot discount the quality of the builds he is creating, or the level of devotion he spends to providing much-needed news and updates for the community as a whole. He also runs and maintains ActionRPG.com, which is an up-and-coming guide site for the ARPG community as a whole to rival others in the market.
Dr3adful – Great guide creator… shitty attitude. Specifically, he seems to take issue with the “Dad Gamer” or “Low Effort” community looking for easy builds… which he ironically does actually support because I am very likely going to be playing one of his builds. If you can push past this, he does some really interesting stuff with some of his builds that often go off in less-than-obvious directions.
BinaQc – Bina is sort of the Zizaran of the Last Epoch community. Really good-natured, and does a pretty good job of covering the most popular builds of the league. He is not necessarily going to give you absolutely unique builds, but will cover a lot of the things that Maxroll has guides for.
Frozen Sentinel – This is not a creator that I have consumed a lot of content from, but when I have it has been more focused on some of the farming strategies. They do some deep dives into specific mechanics, similar to someone like a SirGog or Slippery Jimmy.
Maxroll.gg – While not a creator necessarily, I am specifically calling out the Maxroll website because the folks that they have aligned with in the community (BinaQc, LizardIRL, Volca, Terek, etc), do a really good job of keeping updated and easy-to-follow guides to the game both in and out of the seasons.
Dread released a video where he talks about five different builds that are pretty low effort that will get you through monoliths and through the non-uber version of Aberroth without much issue. Again, like I said… for someone who seems to be spiteful towards the Righteous Fire crowd… he made a pretty freaking great guide. Essentially, he outlines Forged Weapons Forge Guard, Rip Blood Warlock, Crit Hammerdin, Vengeance Bleed Carrior of Creation Paladin, and Warpath Void Knight. Of these, the only one that I have actually played is Warpath Void Knight, but it is pretty much one of the most classic and tried and true builds that has been around in one form or another since pre-release days. There were a lot of changes to Mages, so I think they will also be powerful this league, but I do find it interesting that none of those builds made it into this summary.
There is a ten-hour video guide to Forge Weapons Forge Guard, and I think this is probably going to be what I am starting this go around. I’ve always liked Forge Guard, and they got a heck of a lot more compelling for me personally when they got a version of “Titans Grip” from World of Warcraft that allows them to wield a two-handed weapon with a shield. That just makes me happy thematically, so there have been a few times that I have built around Forge Guard as a platform just so I could do that for funsies. I tried playing the minion build several leagues back, but I never actually played their version of Animate Weapons, and the more I see of it, the more I think maybe that was a massive mistake. Sentinel as a starter is very comfortable to me, because I have probably spent more time on that class than I have anything else. You can check out my profile, which will allow you to get to all of my characters over on LastEpochTools, and ten of my characters have been built around the Sentinel in one form or another.
The other build that I really want to play around with is the Beemancer, though I am not entirely certain I would be playing it on a Necromancer base instead of the Primalist. Essentially, there is a new unique set that gives you access to a giant, angry bee-bear-hybrid thing that then summons an army of bee minions. I will probably use my Forge Guard build to gather up the uniques to create something around this. This is sort of the logic that I apply in Path of Exile, when I roll a Righteous Fire character first to break into the endgame and then use it to fund other ideas that I might have for the league. The only negative of this is that Last Epoch tends to have sticky loot, which means that I am probably going to see way less necromancer-style gear if I am on a sentinel. Some of this is loot filters, and some of this is just the way the drops seem to work there.
For Primalist, I would probably start out with the Cocaine Bear build from last league. This is essentially a Beastmaster build that goes all in on a single bear minion, and then buffs it to silly levels. Similarly to Forge Guard, I have never done this with Beastmaster, because the only build I have actually played is one around the Squirrel helmet. So this is probably something I am going to explore if the whole Bee thing does not go well.
There is also a new pair of boots for the Necromancer that might give us proper Righteous Fire, so I will probably be playing around with this if/when I find a pair of them. Similarly, Fire Aura is apparently massively buffed on the Mage side, so I might be playing around with that as well. My goal is to get through the monolith, get through Aberroth, and then start playing around with other build concepts. It is super easy to level and super easy to play with build concepts, so hopefully this keeps me engaged longer than the last few seasons have. That is the core problem that I have with Last Epoch is that there just isn’t as long a tail of engagement with the game as I have with Path of Exile. To be fair, this is also my same problem with Path of Exile II, and Diablo IV… is that they feel way too shallow compared to everything that Path of Exile has. This is not a fault of any of these games, and just the fact that Path of Exile has decades worth of content.
I will probably still be poking my head into Path of Exile periodically, but expect me to focus super hard on Last Epoch for a bit.
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This is going to be a bit of a weird one, for anyone not deeply entrenched in the names and faces of Path of Exile content creators. Essentially what triggered this blog post is a simple message that I saw scroll across my timeline over on BlueSky. Ziggy D, a content creator in the Path of Exile community that I know almost exclusively as “the guy who does the Q&A discussions after a Path of Exile League announcement“, got snatched up by Maxroll. I’ve been a supporter of Maxroll for quite a while since Raxxanterax took a role with the site in the lead-up to the release of Diablo IV. They’ve seemingly pioneered this model of going into a community and signing up a bunch of creators who are already known for creating great content. However, this is not just something they are doing right now.
On November 20th Lolcohol, another Path of Exile Content Creator announced that he was taking the leap and going full-time content creator and at the same time announced his partnership with a site I had never heard of before. This of course caused me to do what I always do and furiously google it to glean some understanding. It seems like Mobalytics is a big player in the MOBA guide space, and is now casting out its fortunes with ARPGs. It turns out it was not just Lolcohol that they snatched up but also signed a bunch of other names that I actually care about. Here is the list of folks on the Content creator team that I immediately recognized:
There are a few other names listed but I have no clue who they are. If you have read any of my discussions about Path of Exile, you will probably recognize at a minimum SirGog and Jorgen, two creators that influence me pretty heavily. I am certain I will watch to see what sorts of content gets released on this site as we roll into POE2, and how heavily these creators end up promoting it.
I talked at the top of this post about Maxroll and their recent land grab for creators, and quite honestly they have a very impressive team as well. I think the big thing they are known for among creators is their profit-sharing agreements. This is something that ZiggyD went into at length in this thread on Bluesky. I know at least in their support of Path of Exile 1, their guide creation and the way they format the information has been presented has improved massively since their first few outings. That is the biggest thing I like about the site and why I have decided to become a supporter, is that they keep changing the site to service the content better. Anyways like I said they have a pretty stacked list of creators and these are the ones that I immediately recognized:
Like I have said before it was really the involvement of Raxxanterax that made me sit up and pay attention to Maxroll initially. More recently getting Zizaran to come on board in a major way was a huge boon to the site, because essentially he is synonymous with Path of Exile and New Player Guides. I also like that basically it is a single site that I feel entirely comfortable recommending to friends who are just getting started out. The initial round of POE guides were a bit bait, but they have improved drastically over time.
However, we can’t really talk about POE Guide sites without talking about POE Vault aka the site owned by a major player in the MMORPG space Icy Veins. Until the advent of Maxroll, Icy Veins was my go-to site for Diablo III guides and information, and for years it was probably the most recognizable single source of guides for Path of Exile. The thing is… it isn’t anywhere near as clear to determine who is actually being sponsored by IcyVeins to create guides for them. I know that GhazzyTV is, mostly because he has talked about it specifically and his role in helping to manage that site. For a lot of folks, it was just a convenient place to host the text version of their otherwise largely YouTube guides. Pohx for example hosts his guides there in spite of having an entirely custom wiki surrounding his infamous Righteous Fire content. So while it is uncertain what the relationship is with the site financially, there are still quite a few creators who seem to support the site:
There are other names associated with the site, but those are the main ones that I would personally care about. The danger of the site is there are also quite a few guides that feel like bait. Example… I would take anything maintained by TbXie with a massive grain of salt because the friends I know who have attempted to follow their guides have struggled considerably.
It certainly feels like most of the guide creation for Path of Exile and Path of Exile II, has been consumed by three websites at this point. It makes me wonder if this trend will accelerate as they attempt to effectively lock down the remaining talent. I question though… how much money is there really in creating guides for an ARPG? There will of course be plenty of guides unaffiliated with these sites. Reddit and the PathOfExile2Builds subreddit which is patterned off the already excellent PathOfExileBuilds will be a likely source. It is just really weird to watch this land grab happening for Content creators because I do not remember similar things happening in the MMORPG space necessarily. There was always the eternal war between Icy Veins and WoWHead but it seemed to be way less centered around “celebrities” from those communities.
My hat is in the ring with Maxroll, mostly because it is the site that personally seems to be the most valuable to me. I am however really interested to see what sorts of things SirGog and Jorgen end up creating on Mobalytics.
The post Path of Exile Creator Land Run appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we continue our recent tradition of picking up on topics that we did not quite have time for on the previous episode. First off we discuss our general feelings about “cheating” and by cheating we are talking about relying on guides, maps, and walkthroughs in additional to other more traditional cheats and mods. From there Bel talks a bit about his experiences with Orsinium and how playing through all three factions of the original Elder Scrolls Online content is paying off. From there we discuss long games that have a very clear failure state and how generally lousy that feels when it occurs. Finally we talk a bit about the recent ArenaNet community issues and share some of our feelings about it.
