MMO

Good Morning Friends! I think I am probably done with Diablo IV for a while. I absolutely got some enjoyment out of the game, but as far as long-term replayability goes… it isn’t really doing it for me. The moment-to-moment gameplay and grind are just not what I want out of an ARPG, but I also sort of knew this going into the game. As a result, I am back to my usual nonsense and playing some Last Epoch. When I was having a blast in the Path of Exile Crucible league, my friend Ace was having a similar blast playing a Druid Spriggan build in Last Epoch. So this morning I am going to talk a bit through the build and share some gameplay footage that I recorded yesterday. First, however… I want you all to bask in the glory that is my Wild Man Pool Cleaner… because I can’t NOT see a pool skimmer with the way he is holding that staff.

Thankfully however you spend all of your time in this build as a Swole Treant. This build revolves around spending all of your time in Spriggan Form and then buffing the abilities that you have access to in that form. Spriggan form like the other transformed forms relies on rage, so you will be needing to do things to make sure that you can make it all the way through a map without getting knocked back into your weaksauce human form again. We are also going to be shifting as much damage as we can to cold… which adds a bunch of benefits including a whole other defensive layer that comes from slowing and eventually freezing enemies.

Yesterday over lunch I recorded a video showing off some gameplay. This is me doing a level 75 monolith as I slowly work towards getting this character into empowered monoliths. Essentially the gameplay involves having 1 Spriggan, 1 Wolf, and 1 Storm Crow pet that provide buffs, conditions, and some meager additional damage and then running amok through the map dropping 9 Healing Totems and 12 Vines. The Healing Totems are converted to spiked totems through the Spriggan Form skill tree and the Vines are converted into frozen thorn turrets. So what ends up happening in practice is that the Healing Totems keep you alive through almost any damage, and there are just so many things firing spikes in all directions that it shreds most smaller mobs. It isn’t amazing at bossing… because it takes quite a bit of time for them to actually deal damage to the stronger enemies but the excessive healing you are receiving allows you to survive basically anything that does not one-shot you.

Currently, I am at level 73 and working my way through the level 85 Monolith without much issue. After conquering that I will have the three level 90 Monoliths to complete and then can properly begin Empowered level 100 Monoliths. Honestly, the mapping portion of running the various Echoes is smooth as butter. The only challenges thus far have come from the bosses, where there are a lot of one-shot mechanics that I have to dodge. I steamrolled the first Monolith boss and took two attempts at Rahyeh, and two attempts at Lagon. While it took quite a while for my army of turrets to burn down the bosses, the healing allowed me to deal with a lot of the smaller mechanics that just sort of whittles you down over time. So on Lagon for example I needed to dodge any of his beam attacks… but could just stand in and soak the waves.

As far as the build goes, Aaron from Action RPG has a guide video above and you can find the Last Epoch Tools template here. One thing that I find I miss greatly when playing games that are not Path of Exile… is POE.Ninja. That website scrapes the build information from the top progressed players so if you are curious how others have solved specific problems in a build, you can sift through information til your heart is content. I legitimately wish EVERY ARPG had something like this, so you could see how players that are focused on a specific type of play are gearing out and solving the inherent issues with the build. Mostly what I would love to see from build creators is some stat information… like you should have X amount of Y stats, rather than suggesting some idealized pieces of gear that will probably be almost impossible to replicate.

For my build currently, I have some pretty scuffed gear and am utilizing two uniques. The first is Tears of the Forest, which is very likely to be required to make this build work. Essentially it solves your rage problems and generates 2 Rage per second for each Vine you currently have summoned. Since you are going to be trying to keep up all twelve Vines at any given time, this means you are generating 24 Rage per second which is pretty much faster than you can reasonably spend it. I’m also using Valeroot, which is not super amazing… but does give me +1 to the level of Spriggan Form. My goal is at some point to replace that with a purple chest that has more than one level of Spriggan Form on it. While I have legendary potential on Valeroot… I am just not sure if it is worth trying to turn into a Legendary.

All I know for certain is that this has revitalized my joy in Last Epoch for the time being. I have two builds that need specific items to drop for them to really be able to transition into the next level, and Spriggan seems to be extremely solid with little to no specific items. My hope is if nothing else I can use this build to farm items in higher tiers of corruption in order to finish out both my Bone Golem Necro build and my Squirrelmaster build. I have been contemplating turning my necro from being Fire Based to Necrotic/Self-healing based but it just felt like too much fiddling to really make happen. Not that it would actually be that difficult given that I shifted gears to Spriggan extremely abruptly on my baby druid, but it is sort of the “full bags” problem I have with MMORPGs.

What I mean by the “full bags” problem is that there is often a game for me that I might want to play… but there is just enough friction involved with playing it that I have trouble getting started. Traditionally this has been an MMORPG problem where I have no clue what any of the items in my bags do anymore, and it would require an hour or so of dedicated effort to sort things out… so instead I keep logging in and then logging right back out. I’ve had this most specifically with Everquest II, where I have some 300 bag slots full of probably useless crap, and I just don’t want to dedicate the mental bandwidth to trying to figure out what to do with any of it. Similarly, I have this wall with getting back into Genshin Impact, where I have too many quests pulling me in too many different directions… so instead I just don’t engage at all. So instead of taking the time to sort out my Necromancer in Last Epoch… I just shifted my focus to a different character for a while.

I am a “stuffer” and this drives my wife insane. She will occasionally bring me an object… that she wants me to deal with, but at the moment she hands me it… I can’t dedicate the mental bandwidth to figuring out what to do with it so I just find someplace to put it. Often that place is somewhere I will likely never find it again, but I just can’t deal with new stimuli when I am in the middle of doing something at times. In Path of Exile I have several “dump” tabs, where I just shove gear that might be useful at some point but I can’t deal with trying to decide if I sell them or vendor them at that very moment. The huge benefit of having seasons that reset in ARPGs… is it limits my ability to get into a state of having too much shit to process. For now, I am enjoying the heck out of the Spriggan, and my hope is that this will ground me enough in Last Epoch again to feel comfortable going and actually dealing with making the Necromancer work in a more comfortable manner. The post Swole Treebeard appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.