It is weird to me how I have gone from thinking I would give the Crucible League a hard pass… to be extremely excited for the league start tomorrow. It reminds me quite a bit of back when no matter my mental state… the mere existence of BlizzCon and the news feed that would come from it would stir up a desire to log back in. I seem to have been inoculated from BlizzCon Madness over the last several years, and even though I was playing the Alpha for Dragonflight I had no real interest in playing the game at launch. That said I am still extremely susceptible to Diablo III Seasonitis, and it brought me back to the game to play with the Altar mechanics in Season 28. It seems that maybe with Sanctum, Path of Exile finally burrowed its way deep into my core and I am going to be just as vulnerable to the League Virus as well.
I’ve had people ask me before why I participate in Seasons and Leagues… when in truth you are just playing the same game over again but taking away any advantage you might have earned in the past. This is so much the case that I rarely if ever touch my “Standard” characters that largely just end up being a storehouse of materials that will never be used. For me personally, it has nothing to do with the challenge, but more that it is like this microcosm of a game launch. I love the launch of a new MMORPG and the excitement as folks scurry around trying to adapt to the game systems and the almost crushing amount of content flowing forth about the game. That same environment exists around the launch of a new season or league as everyone gets excited about the start, and then gibbers excitedly about what new lessons they have learned and exciting drops they might have found. It is all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… crammed into a few weeks to a month every three or four months repeating like clockwork… and once you engage with it fully it can be addictive as fuck.
The unfortunate truth however is your “Standard” characters often feel like cleaning up after one hell of a party. Path of Exile has maybe the best method for dealing with the cleanup. Essentially you get a tab added to your standard inventory that is marked as “remove-only” and then you can withdraw things from it at your leisure. This is far better than the Diablo III norm of just mailing you all of your items. In a season or league, you end up just collecting a bunch of nonsense. For example, I apparently gathered up almost 9000 Chaos Orbs, that I never took the time to convert to Divine Orbs for easier storage. I spent some time yesterday straightening up my standard inventory in prep for the launch of the new league, which meant painstakingly withdrawing items from one tab and depositing them into another. I should have waited until AFTER the league patch dropped because the stack size is being increased from 10 to 20… and it would have literally taken half the time.
I am certain that I will be starting out the league as a Marauder and moving towards Juggernaut and Righteous Fire because it is just too good of a general build not to have at my disposal. During the last league, I ended up leveling and gearing a whole slew of characters. Other than the RF Jugg I had my SRS Necromancer, Seismic Saboteur, and two attempts at a Toxic Rain build that I liked in both Trickster and Pathfinder variants. Primarily I say this because I absolutely expect to have more than one character. Righteous Fire is an amazing build for Delve, Heist, and burning through the early maps but at some point, I want something that is more “Bossing” friendly. I only ended up getting two void stones last league, because quite honestly… I do not enjoy the bossing game nearly as much as I enjoy the rest of the game. However, I might want to change that and try and knock out the last two void stones so I can have T16 maps for everything. For those curious, the above video is Pohx simulating a run of all 10 acts as Righteous Fire.
If I was not starting Righteous Fire, I would probably try out this build from Ghazzy which is more of a traditional ARPG minion build. I don’t think it will probably be as good of a bosser as my SRS build was last league, but it looks like a pretty chill option. The only annoying thing is using Hungry Loop to essentially give you a 5 link for Animate Guardian. I do not love Animate Guardian, so if I did try this out I would probably run it largely ignoring that. The spell is cool in design but the fact that you erase uniques to equip it… and then lose them all if it ever dies… just feels bad. We will have to see how bad the Poison SRS variant is currency-wise, because I might try building this league as my “bosser” since I enjoyed my Fire variant in Sanctum.
I don’t get at all why I am caught up on this emotional rollercoaster of the league start when I am legitimately enjoying myself playing Last Epoch. The heart wants what the heart wants, unfortunately. I did get my primalist/beastmaster up to the second monolith last night however and am still enjoying that gameplay. Right now without going into totems like the build I was loosely following suggests, it feels quite a bit like a HotA Barb from Diablo III. It also seems to have just a ton of survival and feels way tankier than my Necromancer does. I’m technically working on the Monolith that has a higher than reasonable chance of dropping the Herald of the Scurry helm that I will ultimately need, but unfortunately, I think the level is too low yet and I will have to farm it once I get to empowered monoliths.
I’ve also been back to logging into BelginnersLuck shown in the first screenshot of the post and trying to get a unique to drop from Hillock. If nothing else… I am definitely much faster at pathing through that first map in a league and much better at fighting that first obstacle. Tomorrow I will be rolling a brand new character and diving into the league. I don’t necessarily expect any of my friends to really join me in this madness, because I know it literally is that now… madness. I enjoy myself though so that I guess is the part that matters the most. If you plan on diving into the Crucible league drop me a line and say hey.
The post The Heart Wants appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Friends… I have to admit that I was contemplating just sitting out of the Crucible League. I am still not entirely certain if I am going to go all in Path of Exile this time, but that itch in the back of my head… has returned. I still have some deep concerns about Crucible and the direction of the game, but also… I had a heck of a lot of fun in Sanctum League even though I was one of the few AggroChat folks who really got into it. I really loved the rhythm that I fell into of having a mapping/bossing character and then having my Righteous Fire Juggernaut do super chill Heist and Delve runs on. I have no clue what my plans are for the OP bossing character… but I am pretty sure I am starting the league with Righteous Fire at this point.
Pohx released his Righteous Fire video for 3.21 and an updated Path of Building guide over on his website. The main reason why I am interested in doing Righteous Fire again is that it is ultimately a playstyle that I enjoy greatly. Something that I have learned about myself is that I really like three types of builds:
Screen Clear Ranged Builds
Minions do the Work Builds
Super Tanky Damage Feedback Builds
My two favorite Diablo III builds sort of fall into the Tanky/Feedback builds with Whirlwind involving you spinning through packs of mobs and letting them break themselves on your whirling blades, and Invoker Crusader being a mega thorns build that causes them to essentially explode with damage if they touch you. Righteous Fire definitely falls into that sort of category where you are lighting yourself on fire and then running around and watching things burn up as they attempt to get to you. I’ve yet to really find a version of the Demon Hunter Multishot builds in Path of Exile that I really enjoy playing past about the midpoint in leveling.
The other reason why for a Righteous Fire start is because it does a good job of being an all-around character for doing a lot of different mechanics. More specifically it is good at the mechanics that I personally enjoy doing like Delve and Heist which each offer early access to a bunch of interesting types of loot that are much harder to get otherwise. To quote Jorgen, “Delve Provides” and with the Crucible mechanic focused around weapons… I have a feeling that Delve Crafting will be just as strong as ever as folks try and get that perfect Rare item with the perfect weapon tree on it. In Sanctum as soon as I had filled up on a decent amount of resonators I could pretty much liquidate them instantly which allowed me to funnel resources into shopping trips to fully equip builds.
The other benefit of just choosing to run up Righteous Fire which is a tried and true build… is it gives me some time to see how the other builds in the league shake out. I enjoyed Summon Raging Spirits last go-round, and I went with a fire-based build which was not nearly as strong as the poison variant but still good for doing Metamorph bosses. One of the things I contemplated last league was trying to build some sort of minion instability build turning the raging spirits into bombs. The above video talks about this sort of setup and honestly, I might consider that as my second build of the league.
I’ve never gone Boneshatter so I am contemplating playing around with one of those as well. I know this is one of traditionally the stronger league starts. I’ve also tried to play around with a Poison Rain build several times but never really got it playing in a manner that I enjoyed it. I think my problem with so many bow builds is that they tend to focus on ballistas doing the damage rather than hits doing the damage. I still want to find a fun and chill screen clear hit build that doesn’t cost 100 divines… but I have yet to really land on that. I figure in the next few days we are going to be flooded with builds but really we won’t know entirely what works until a week or so in.
The post Starting Righteous Fire for Crucible appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This weekend I played an exceptional amount of Last Epoch because at the moment that seems to be the game I am most engaged with. A few months back Eleventh Hour Games announced that everyone who had purchased the game before the launch of the 0.9 Multiplayer update would be getting a gift. Yesterday I noticed a post on the official discord stating that it was now live and in-game, and as a result, I have this really beautiful backpack with a ton of small details to roam around on a character that moves through content so fast that it is impossible to focus in on any small details. I mean it is really freaking cool honestly and I am happy to wear it and have it as an “I was here early” type thing, but it really does require you to zoom in to see anything.
Right now there are a number of microtransactions in the game, but most of them are limited to pets. For example, that amazing floating Runed Primordial Turtle means I was an Alpha backer of the game. If you backed the Kickstarter there were a number of Sylpine and Chronowyrm pets that you got. Currently the available supporter backs include weird anthropomorphic armadillo-badger sort of things called Skullen as pets. So far Eleventh Hour Games has been very clear that there will never be a way in the future to obtain any of these items, and while I think the Skullen looks sorta dumb, I am very happy to have my pet turtle and backpack… even though neither actually does anything. My hope is at some point pets might possibly work like they do in Diablo III and zoom around gathering gold for me.
As far as endgame progressions go, I am now officially in Empowered Monoliths, and boy do they occasionally just kick your ass. I need to focus on building out the rest of my kit before going too crazy with corruption. At the moment I am short on a couple of resists and when I encounter anything that really exploits those… I do not last terribly long. I think it is pretty cool that at any point you can flip between the Normal and Legendary versions of the Monoliths. This only supports my case for Monolith progression being account wide instead of tied to a specific character. That way if you want to run lower-level monoliths on your brand-new characters, you can do so at will by just choosing the normal versions.
I finished the first of the Empowered Monoliths and defeated its boss, and now am target farming Ending of the Storm which has nodes apparently that can drop unique or set gloves. Essentially I am trying to farm up Ravens’ Rise a unique set of gloves that blends nicely with my Necromancer build. In theory, I need to farm the Reign of Dragons timeline as well to try and get Dragonflame Edict the weapon that I am supposed to be using that drops from the boss. Out on Last Epoch Tools, there is a handy filter in the Item Database that lets you look at each timeline and what items come from it for farming purposes. If I did not already have Aaron’s Will, I would be trying to farm the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline as it drops chest pieces.
I personally cannot handle non-stop progression content, so I spent a chunk of the weekend working on a few different primalists. Right now I am leaning heavily towards Belgloam my Beastmaster because I am just having more fun with it than Belgraves my Druid. The idea with each of them is to go Squirrel build on the Beastmaster, and Swarm Queen on the Druid. However, for the moment I am enjoying the gameplay of beastmaster quite a bit more as I run around using upheaval with my pack of four wolves. I do not have Herald of the Scurry which changes my Wolves into Squirrels, but I will probably try and target farm that on the Necromancer. I can only imagine cackling with joy as my army of squirrel friends decimate my foes.
In the column of assorted dumb things I did this weekend, I recorded a series of videos. Essentially I have talked at length about the things I did not enjoy in Diablo IV, but I never really talked about or showcased the things that I love doing in ARPGs. So as a result I recorded a series of four videos… one in Last Epoch doing a Monolith Echo, and Three in Path of Exile doing an Atlas Map, a Delve, and a Heist. So if you have any interest in listening to me ramble on while I play through some content, here is your chance. I’ve also sort of come to the realization that I have been doing my “Bel Bungles” series all wrong. I should have just had a single video series given that I swap around games relatively often. I think at some point I might renumber all of my “Bel Bungles” videos and put them in a playlist.
I will admit recording the videos, and the announcement of the 3.21 Crucible League… caused a bit of a relapse this weekend. There is nothing in any ARPG that I enjoy quite as much as Delve. There is just something about the endless nature of crawling from node to node seeking out the treasure that soothes me. My hope is with the Crucible league that I can build up a Righteous Fire character again and then use it to fund other types of characters as I did in the Sanctum league. I know without a doubt I will be heading into Delve as soon as possible.
Anyways! I hope you had a wonderful weekend and that the coming week is at a bare minimum tolerable. I will likely be here continuing to do my nonsense.
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Good Morning Friends! I freaking love Last Epoch. Back in 2018, I have to admit I did not see where this game would go but it has honestly become that happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile for me. As much as I love it though, there are still some features that I wish it had. This morning I am going to spitball a wishlist of features that I would love to see that I feel would turn this diamond in the rough into the perfect game. I feel like this is fair game since the group at Eleventh Hour Games seems to be constantly evolving the game to make it better. The multiplayer patch really brought Last Epoch into the pantheon of great ARPGs for me. That however is not to say that there cannot be improvements.
Guilds/Clans
With the drop of 0.90 we got the ability to group up with other people, which is really key for my long-term enjoyment of an ARPG. When this was implemented there were also some very basic social features, like the ability to add players to your friend list. This is sort of the bare minimum of required functionality, but I would love to see this expanded a bit more. I am very much a guild-minded person, and even in the largely throw-away Open Beta weekend, I created a branch of Greysky Armada in Diablo IV. Guilds are many things, but at their most simple level, they are an easier way of meeting up with your friends rather than having to trade dozens of individual account ids. Even if we got nothing more than the ability to join a guild and the ability to have a guild chat channel, I would be happy enough.
I mean ultimately that is the only functionality that we have within Diablo III, but it is important enough to me that I consider it on the “should haves” if not on the “must haves” list when approaching a long-term social ARPG. I mean I did not play Path of Exile very long without going through the process of creating a guild.
Guild Bank/Trading/Locking
Surrounding the announcement of the multiplayer patch there was a lot of discussion surrounding trade. Right now it is extremely simple and follows something akin to the rules of Diablo III. If you are with a player when an item drops, you can gift the item to another player. However, I believe with the 1.0 patch, they will be working in a brilliant compromise to the debate of no public trade or a full-on POE-style trading economy with APIs supporting it. Essentially every player will have the choice of either joining the Merchants’ Guild and eventually receiving access to full trading including a public auction house system or joining the Circle of Fortune and receiving improved drop rates but losing the ability to publicly trade items. Circle of Fortune players will be able to build up a currency with another player and then use that to gift items to them, pending they are also a member of the Circle of Fortune. Merchants’ Guild players will never have access to items dropped by folks on the Fortune side.
I would love to see this tweaked a bit to add a new classification to the item locking. I would love to have something similar to the guild bank from Path of Exile. As we work our way through a new league, we are often dropping items that look decent for folks coming up behind us. I would love for some way to have “guild locking” for lack of a better term so that if you donate an item to the guild bank, it can only be used by members of that guild. This would keep those items from ever making it to the trade economy but also increase the social aspect of the gameplay. Maybe even create a “guild currency” that you gain from spending time grouped with guild members, which you can then spend to remove items from the guild bank. Granted there would need to be some administrative level that allows folks to clean out the bank and dump unneeded items straight to gold or shattering, but I am certain Eleventh Hour Games could reach a good compromise for how all of that might work.
Adventure Mode/Bounties
The worst part about leveling a new character in both Path of Exile and Last Epoch is the fact that you need to go through the story content again. One of the systems that work brilliantly is Adventure Mode from Diablo III, and I am somewhat shocked that no other game has implemented something similar to this. Essentially in Diablo III, once you have finished the campaign one time (and I believe now it is just immediately open to everyone), you get access to adventure mode which allows you to freely move between all waypoints available in the game and choose your own path to leveling.
Given that the Last Epoch map feels pretty similar to the Diablo III one, I could see this sort of system working beautifully. Another aspect of Adventure Mode that I really enjoy is doing Bounties for Bounty Caches. I get that for many players these are not exactly the highlight of their gaming experience, and they are often much maligned by more hardcore players as being a “requirement” of the seasonal journey there. I personally like them because it gives me a clear micro objective that is broader than running a single map, but less time-consuming than completing an entire quest sequence. There are lots of generally useful resources that already drop like candy, that I could see rolling up into specific bounty caches. You could have a cache of crafting resources, a cache of idols, or even a cache of rare gear with the very limited ability to drop uniques or set pieces. More paths to the same result is always a good thing as far as I am concerned because it allows folks to vary up their gameplay.
Unstable Echoes
This idea goes somewhat hand in hand with the opening of an alternative leveling mode like Diablo III’s adventure mode. Right now you can technically start the Monolith when you reach the End of Time zone for the very first time. Whether or not you can actually do that is another question, because the Monolith system as it exists today is at a fixed level and requires you to be able to survive a level 55 map. What I would propose is something akin to the Nephalem Rift/Greater Rift system from Diablo III. The idea I had is to call them “Unstable Echoes” and effectively zone into a random echo map with random objectives and random rewards. Much like players enjoy leveling through doing Rifts in Diablo III, it would be awesome if we could just start doing Monoliths in a random system independent from the ACTUAL Monolith progression.
I mean if Eleventh Hour Games wanted to go for the gold, it would be neat if these Unstable Echoes had a sequence of objectives that ultimately led to fighting a miniboss similar to a Rift Guardian. That however isn’t necessary, and I would honestly be perfectly happy with just randomly spawning one of the existing Monolith Echoes at a level that scaled to the player. Bonus points would be if the system allowed players to choose what level of Monolith they wanted to tackle. This could even be spun into a completely unique progression system that worked kinda like Greater Rift progression so as you passed level 100, you were gaining a certain amount of corruption as well to keep making harder and more rewarding singleton Echoes.
Hideouts/Housing
Right from the start I know this request is a bit out there because player housing is an exceptionally expensive system to implement. It is one of those systems that can have some extremely solid returns when it comes to selling cosmetics, but a massive initial outlay of work to put even the most basic version in the game. That said… I love the Hideout/Guild Hideout system from Path of Exile and I would love to see something like this implemented at some point in the future in Last Epoch. I mean these really don’t serve a purpose other than allowing players to have a trophy hall of sorts and a shared communal space. This is definitely on the long-term “wouldn’t it be cool” list.
Appearance Collection/Wardrobe
I love cosmetics and wardrobe systems, and right now Last Epoch already has the most basic version stubbed out. Currently, if you have one of the pets gained through backing the game at various times during its development process, you can have them follow you around. In-game there is an Appearance tab for your character and it has slots similar to Path of Exile where you can in theory modify the visual appearance of every item you have equipped. I would assume that the idea as it stands to have a similar cosmetic shop to Path of Exile where you can buy an appearance and then wear that as a sort of visual override to what you actually have equipped.
This is a good start for certain, but what I would love to see as the final implementation is something akin to games like Guild Wars 2 where every item that drops saves a copy of that appearance to your wardrobe. Then when you click on a slot you see every appearance that has dropped along with every appearance that you have purchased. This sort of system just feels better than a cash-shop-only system, because it allows everyone to participate and also… gives folks options if nothing available through the cash-shop really interests them. Sometimes you just want to wear something that matches and don’t necessarily want to be blinged out. Cosmetic systems are great, but the systems that blend in world drops with purchased appearances are always the best ones.
Character Creator/Gender Options
Last Epoch suffers from the same problem that a lot of older ARPGs have, where when you choose your character class you are also locking in gender and a specific appearance. At this point, I am mostly numb to this construct as I have dealt with it over and over in these games. Diablo III has a slightly improved system where when you choose your class you are still locking in a specific appearance, but you get to choose between a male and female option. Mike one of the developers from Eleventh Hour Games regularly hosts a Friday live stream over on Twitch where he fields questions from the audience, and this has come up multiple times. Each time he gives essentially the same answer… that they would like to do this but they have not felt they could devote the budget to it yet.
On some level this makes sense. In development, especially when you are working on missing features… you often end up with a mindset of “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” and right now they have a functional character system. However at some point, I would love to see them address this, and they have at least shown some modicum of interest in it as a long-range goal. When they do rework the character creation system, I would love to see them at least have some basic appearance options as well. Diablo IV did not have necessarily the most amazing character creation system, but you at least felt like you could put your own mark on what the character looks like and I would love to see them implement at least something along those lines. Not every character creator has to be something that you are going to spend literal hours on perfecting, but it would be nice to have options.
Account-Based Monolith Progression
The Monolith Timeline and Echo system feels really good. It is a fun endgame that sees your character zipping around the end of time collecting resources and fighting interesting bosses. The problem is when approaching a seasonal progression arc… you are quickly locked into making a hard choice of what character you want to play because progressing this system on multiple characters is a huge ask. I’ve been chewing away at this for weeks, and I’ve still not entered the “true” endgame of Empowered Monoliths. I’ve been interested in trying out a primalist character, but it feels like the idea of progressing another character to this point is a massive outlay of time. Sure you can get a friend to somewhat cheat your way into empowered monoliths… but even that feels super janky.
What I would love to see is something akin to the Atlas of Worlds in Path of Exile, where your progress is tied to your account and not any individual character. Alting is healthy in an ARPG, and I feel like right now… Last Epoch is not terribly alt friendly. A good number of the suggestions that I have made above are to make a variety of ways that you can interact with the game on different characters, and having account-based progression is quite possibly the most important of these. I am hoping that internally Eleventh Hour Games already realizes this is a problem and is working on its own solution.
Seasonal Expansions
Eleventh Hour Games has already announced that they do have a seasonal mechanic planned at some point called “Cycles” and that they plan on these being pretty basic resets. This is fine, and I would expect them to stay basic for a while. However, I do hope at some point the door is open to using this seasonal cadence as the introduction of entirely new game modes. While I feel like maybe the Path of Exile seasonal mechanic system is a bit much for any other game, I would love to see some new game mode added each year or so. I love Delve and Heist in Path of Exile and they wildly change the enjoyment of that game for me. Eleventh Hour Games has already had some pretty brilliant solutions to classical ARPG problems, and I would love to see the sort of game modes they can come up with to expand the base of the game. I am not saying we need the expansion every three months cadence of Path of Exile, but I would love to see something eventually.
Wrapping Up
Last Epoch is a phenomenal game, and so far has been the game I always wished for… something that kinda splits the difference between the overwhelming complexity of Path of Exile and the quick simple joy of Diablo III. That said it can always be improved and my goal of this morning was to lay out some of my ideas for things I would love to see. Do I think anyone from Eleventh Hour Games is even going to see this? No not really. I realize I very small voice from a very small corner of the internet, but I think more than anything I did this for my own benefit to get this nonsense out of my head. I am going to keep playing Last Epoch and enjoying myself, but also going to keep playing Path of Exile and other ARPGs to keep collecting “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas. I love where the ARPG genre is right now and how many different expressions of it exist, but as with MMORPGs, there are always things I would love to see from one game to another game.
Do you agree with some of my assessments? Did I completely get this all wrong? Drop me a line below and tell me your own thoughts.
The post Perfecting Last Epoch appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
