Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back after taking a break last week due to the limited number of folks available. This week we start off with a topic that has bounced around a bit on our docket. Namely, we marvel at just how balanced City of Heroes/City of Villians is and what a pinnacle of system design it really is. Bel spent a bit of time playing Nightingale now that is available in early access, and talks about the mess of a game that it is. Finally, we dive into our primary topic this week and talk about the Last Epoch 1.0 launch and how phenomenal the game feels right now despite all of the server-side woes.
Good Morning Friends! I am nearing the end of the campaign. Last night before I finished up for the evening I got to the beginning of Chapter 9 and I believe level 55. This morning before sitting down to write I made it into Majelka in the Divine Era and apparently, you don’t have to finish the campaign to join a faction. Once you zone into town one of the quest givers will offer you access to either the Bazaar or the Observatory aka the headquarters for each faction. I joined the Circle of Fortune because in truth my preferred method of play is “Guild SSF” where you are mostly SSF but have a group of friends that you trade among. Trading feels like a necessary part of playing Path of Exile, and I am hoping that is not really the case in Last Epoch.
So far faction gains seem pretty quick. I did a single quest after joining the faction and am already sitting at rank 2. Upon joining the faction you immediately get a 35% additional chance at loot drops which seems pretty solid, and in theory, should make up for the general nerfs in loot drops that took place between 0.9.2 and 1.0. I am really happy that I managed to join so easily because as I started grinding out monoliths I really wanted it to count towards faction progress. I did have around 400 Favor but I spent some of it on my very first prophecy.
Once you enter the observatory, there are four telescopes that you can use to purchase prophecies. Each gives you access to a type of loot… Armor, Jewelry, Weapons, or Idols. Each prophecy has a favor cost associated with it, and has some specific parameters that will trigger the drop. The one I purchased was for a pair of rare crusader gloves, that will drop whenever I kill a boss. Since I have not finished the campaign I am hoping that this will trigger when I fight the final boss of the game if not sooner on an individual zone mini-boss. The one I have highlighted is for clearing Soulfire Bastion and will reward an exalted ring.
The prophecy seems to narrow down the type of loot that can drop, and then you can purchase lenses from another vendor that socket into the telescope further limiting the specificity of the drop. For example, the one I have highlighted gives you a 20% chance of a prophecy rewarding a one-handed axe. So in theory, if you have a prophecy that rewards a unique weapon, you might be able to skew the results to potentially drop one from the pool of available axes or hammers etc. I’ve not seen evidence yet of a prophecy specifically indicating that a named unique item will drop, but it at least might allow you to put your thumb on the scale to skew it in that direction. When combined with the existing methods of targeting specific slots via the monoliths… it might be enough to allow one to target farm specific gear.
When you start a character, you have a tag on your character sheet indicating that you are “Deathless” and I officially lost mine last night. I was playing from the couch with a laptop and at some point during Chapter 8, Josie decided to crawl out onto my chest and block my ability to see the screen. She is my baby girl and I did not want to disturb her because if she wanted attention… she was going to get attention. However, before she left I apparently managed to get killed by something that was near where I was idling. Kind of a bummer but I had to die at some point, and at least I can’t be blamed for this one. My cats have been the cause of many deaths, and I can’t get too worked up about it.
I continue to be overwhelmed by just how many facelifts the game got. For example, this abattoir in the Imperial undead area used to just be this hallway with grinders on either side. Now there is this whole raised catwalk and such with mood lighting, and it looks so much better. The sewers similarly in the same region got a massive rework and I will be playing along and just be struck with how good the game looks now. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything to someone who has not been playing this game for a few years but so much work went into the 1.0 release and I can see it clearly.
There are still plenty of problems though with servers and connections. Yesterday the game hit a new peak for concurrent players, and I imagine over the weekend this number is going to raise considerably higher. All in all though I knew what I was getting in for when they announced that they had passed a million copies sold. I am still able to play, the zone times just take for freaking ever. I am hoping they manage to scale things up and iron out the bugs and get everything nice and stable within a week. Right now the core problem seems to be surrounding the multiplayer nature of towns… because the only real issues that I have are either zoning into a town or zoning out of a town. When I am bouncing between single player quest instances, everything seems pretty solid.
The team at EHG is still doing a phenomenal job of communicating with the players and really, that is all I can ask of them. This is their first major launch and most of them did not come from the games industry at all. I think in the grand scheme of things they are doing pretty good for their first time dealing with the massive onslaught of players trying to play their game at the same time.
The post Circle of Fortune appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the 1.0 launch for Last Epoch and it was a bit of a wild ride. The servers came online at 11 am CST, and the 7.32 GB Steam patch showed up a bit later. Most folks had to exit out of Steam entirely to get it to show up correctly. After loading in I got a weird blank character creator screen and had to crash out to the desktop, but after coming back things seemed normal. That was until we tried to exit the first town. Last Epoch experienced its very own Raubahn Savage moment as folks were stuck trying to load into The Fortress Gardens. Essentially everyone was getting the [LE-61] Failed to Matchmake issue as the EHG servers were struggling under the load to spin up enough instances for the influx of players.
I eventually managed to get into an instance and moved forward with gameplay… that is until I reached the point in the story quest where it asked me to go back into town. Essentially I was stuck in this quest instance loop where I could not leave it, but because of the way the sequence of zones landed… could keep bouncing between two maps and resetting the mobs. So I decided to record some gameplay for future generations of that time when I was able to farm “SouthPark boars” style and get to level 11 by just resetting the same few screens worth of mobs over and over. Eventually, I attempted to invite my friend to the nonsense, and when they zoned in… it broke the quest instance causing us both to be locked out of the content.
As much as I do not love that Discord has become the replacement for forums… I have to give the EHG team and specifically Judd aka MoxJet for keeping the lines of communication wide open. In the news channel there was a series of scrolling updates starting out with individual messages and then eventually landing on just updating the same message over and over with news updates. I attempted to copy/paste the majority of the thread into an image. By around 4pm CST things hard largely stabilized and as a result, I was able to play all night with minimal interruptions. Sure there were the occasional flareups of LE-61 but after a few attempts to zone they went away. What I was most impressed by however was the general lack of lag. All of the issues that were happening were due to congestion and trying to spin up instances, and not server connectivity.
This screenshot was taken from SteamCharts this morning around 7 am showing that Last Epoch is having near-peak concurrent numbers. Yesterday they hit just over 148k players when the previous peak was around 40k. That is a lot of new players and while I think they made an attempt to scale quickly… that is still a lot for any company to handle, let alone an indie dev. I was really happy to see that Judd sent folks home early in the evening to get some rest because I am sure it was one hell of a day for their ops folks. For the most part ARPG players took it in stride, but there were a handful of toxic folks as you would expect. For years during ARPG launches players have been wailing on the point that games should have an “offline mode” so that even if the servers are down the game could still be enjoyed. Last Epoch absolutely has a fully playable offline mode… but that didn’t really stop the complaints telling me that folks are just going to be angry when they can’t do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it.
Once the servers stabilized though… it was on like Donkey Kong. I managed to get to level 28 and the beginning of Chapter 4 in the main story quest before calling it a night. I had a heck of a lot of fun and other than minor hiccups here and there was able to play without issue from about 5 pm CST onwards. I have to say the first thing that hit me with this 1.0 release is just how much better everything looks. This was especially noticeable during the world of ruin sections fighting void mobs in void-infested areas. These were originally some of the first areas in the game and they got a massive glow-up both in mob appearance and all of the set dressing of the world. Everything looks and feels so damned good and I am a huge fan of their new custom font that they integrated into the game showcased in the name bar of the elite mob in the above screenshot.
It also feels like they made some significant changes to the base character models. The sentinel for example no longer feels quite so “thicc” as he once was and the new armor set that you start the game in looks gorgeous. As I have pushed through the levels and swapped gearsets they all continue to look better than they did before. The thing that I was enjoying the most though were all of the “Deckard Cain” moments where they added a bunch of books into the game with voice-over dialog. As a whole the story feels so much more cohesive and comprehensible. Like before I knew there was some “timey wimey bullshit” happening but everything is coming together into a proper lore.
I’ve really enjoyed the chapter-end cutscenes that bring home the key events that are taking place. The artwork is gorgeous, and while it largely is a slide show with voice-over dialog it still feels awesome. I’m very proud of how far Last Epoch has come since the first time I screwed around with it. I first started playing the game periodically in 2018 and at that point, I was not too hip to what it was doing. Now however I consider it one of my “main” games along with Path of Exile, and Diablo III. Even over the last few years, it has improved massively and I look forward to seeing what all gets added now that they are over this massive 1.0 hump. I can only imagine how many resources went into getting the game from 0.9.2 to this point because it is immediately noticeable how much better everything looks and feels.
I’ve found zero of the uniques that I was hoping to find, and have not seen any runes of ascension to even try gambling for one. I think I will probably go after boots first as the movement speed boost from those is massive. The above screenshot is the assortment of five unique that I have found. The only one that I am actually using right now is the weavers will ring, and only then because it is giving me a massive chunk of elemental resistance. I screwed up and chose the wrong NPC and wound up with the crit neck instead of the elemental resistance gloves. Mostly I just forgot which one gave which reward. All in all though I have not seemed to really need the uniques, because I am clearing content and surviving very well as a spin to win Void Knight.
The other cool thing that was added to the game is a refer-a-friend program. Instead of needing to click a link and do some nonsense before you buy the game, you just go into the social menu (H key), click the referrals tab, and there you can find your code to share with folks. You can type the name of a player account that referred you, and they will get a bee pet. You can collect up to three referrals and each time you get a different more nonsensical pet… with the highest form being this swarm of 12 bees. If you don’t have anyone to refer might I suggest my friends Alzbeta or Dominia. Like admittedly this is an awful pyramid scheme since there are going to be a lot of folks who never get a bee pet. You can only enter one name for referral and I used mine already. I just wish it told me who all added me as their referrer so I could thank them directly.
We are not entirely out of the woods. This morning when I popped in to collect a few screenshots, I hit this weird bug where I was in the End of Time zone and able to move around, interact with NPCs, and my Stash tab… but had a purplish grey dimming overlay and the floating prompt “connecting”. I got past this by walking over to the monolith zone boundary and leaving the End of Time. It only happened that one time, but suffice to say there are still going to be bugs that need squashed. For those interested you can get the latest news about Last Epoch stability from the official discord. The team generally does a great job of keeping everyone informed with what is going on, even when there is not a major crisis. I am very curious to see as we get into the weekend if those concurrent numbers on Steam Charts go up significantly. I’m hoping to get through the campaign tonight and start chipping away at normal monoliths.
Are you playing? Are you enjoying yourself? What sorts of issues did you run into? Drop me a line below.
The post Rough but Stabilizing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! It is feeling like it is time to start putting things to bed in the Path of Exile Affliction league. I’ve been spending most of my time over the last few weeks playing either Enshrouded or Last Epoch, and with that has come less desire to log in and grind. I feel like it was a successful league considering this was the league that broke my favorite build. Throughout the league I wound up creating five viable characters and honestly enjoyed each of them:
The only real failed build of the league was Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, and even then I probably could have made that work were I sitting in trade league at the time. I pivoted that character to Righteous Fire and was able to get it going much easier.
That was another thing that I largely considered a big success. We started the league in a private “Guild SSF” and I think that was a heck of a lot of fun. I am not sure I would ever let that league extend out as long as we did, but I could definitely see starting off with a 10-day private league again. It was a lot of fun trying to get my builds up and running under the stipulations of having to either farm or craft everything. Playing with a group of people made it a lot easier to find some of the various build-required uniques for folks, and there was also a general sense of camaraderie that was a lot of fun. Going 40 days though… was a bit much and quite honestly MOST of the folks hit it heavy for the first week and then slowly tapered off. It was really only a handful of us that stuck around for the entire league and continued on into trade.
We find ourselves in the doldrums of the league now as player numbers are waning heavily. I think tomorrow and the launch of Last Epoch 1.0 and its first seasonal content called a “cycle” will be the final nail in Affliction League. As it stands it seems like most of the streamers are going to be transitioning from Path of Exile to Last Epoch, and without a steady drum beat of new build and farming strategy videos at least some of the player interest will drop. All in all I think the league was pretty successful in keeping players engaged, but I am honestly hoping we have a bit more sober of an experience for the next league. We jokingly referred to last league as the “Inflation League” and if that was the case… this league was the “Hyper Inflation League”.
I talked a while back about how Mirrors of Kalandra have spiked in price, in part because they were common enough to actually allow them to be regularly used in crafting. The weirder effect this league has had is that it has pushed the value of a Divine Orb into the ground. For the uninitiated in Path of Exile for the sake of trading Chaos Orbs are the Dollar Bill and the Divine Orb has traditionally been the next major unit of pricing for larger trades in the neighborhood of 200-260 Chaos orbs. During almost all of the Ancestor League the price of the Divine Orb stayed pretty stable at 250-260 on the higher end of “normal”, and as of this morning, Affliction Divine Orbs could be got on the market for 130 Chaos. You would assume that this would create upward pressure on items… but in truth, most staples of the market are down as well in price. Essentially anything that could be gotten from Magic Find and juicing the Affliction mechanic is plentiful and cheap.
The positive I guess in this whacky economy is that it has pushed up the price of a lot of things that come from sources OTHER than juiced mapping adding to a scenario where I have made far more currency in this league than any other to date. The lower price of otherwise expensive things has meant that I was able to pick up a Headhunter for 50 Divines, Mageblood for 140 Divines, and a Squire for 3 Divines. For Reference… during Ancestor league a Squire was roughly 25 Divines, Headhunter roughly 100 Divines, and Mageblood roughly 230 Divines. With the league winding down and prices always going up at the end of a league due to a limited player pool… I decided to go ahead and “cash out” and pick up these “Tier 0” uniques so that I at least have them to play with in the Standard league. It is highly unlikely I will ever be in the position to have them going forward, so might as well get them while the getting is good.
Now my thoughts are largely turning towards Last Epoch. At 11 am CST today the online servers are going dark until 11 am tomorrow when 1.0 drops officially. This means I am going to have to find something else to play tonight, either that or start some offline characters. It is going to be weird moving into a seasonal model with Last Epoch because I know me… and that means I will stop caring about my “standard” characters. I am just wired to play seasons at this point, and it will be interesting to see how it changes my focus going forward. I might even play some Diablo IV this evening because I barely made a dent in Season 3 before bailing to go back to Path of Exile. I could also work on some crafting projects in Enshrouded, but now that I have more or less “beat” that game my interesting has waned a bit. I am contemplating poking my head back into Valheim to see how that game has progressed while I have been away.
Anyways! Mostly I am anxious for Last Epoch 1.0 to drop tomorrow. I have already done a slew of planning and I hope luck is on my side when it comes to getting the uniques I want early.
The post Mageblood, Headhunter, and Squire appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
