Good Morning Friends! Sometimes I get a dumb idea stuck in my head and can’t shake it loose. One of these recently is that I decided I wanted to pick up a commander tag. I’ve dipped my toes into trying to start groups in the group finder, and one challenge is the inability of someone without a Commander Tag to create groups larger than 10 players. Technically you can make strikes work but can do nothing to create subgroups and arrange people. Then there is the problem that technically a group without a commander means that anyone can tag up and effectively take control of your group away from you. I’ve heard anecdotes of folks going into the strikes section… merging groups and then telling everyone that they are now doing raids instead. Even if that does not happen… gating the ability to control a group properly behind a hefty price tag is not exactly great.
However, of my friend group, I am definitely the most “wealthy” because last year I hit the jackpot in opening a black lion crate and getting a permanent banker. Instead of keeping this, I opted to sell it and have been living on the proceeds ever since. So while 300 gold is a heck of a lot of money, it was something that I could afford and figured would definitely make group activities go a little bit more smoothly. The normal commander tag is pretty easy to get and I believe you can purchase it from a vendor in every major city. When you purchase the commander tag… you get a choice of one of these icons floating over your head.
I mean this is perfectly fine and functional… but would be the incorrect choice. There is however a semi-hidden system that allows you to get the “catmander” tag granting you access to these much better symbols floating over your head.
If I was going to spend 300 gold on something so frivolous, I was at a minimum going to get the arguably better version. So this began my quest and planted a seed in my head a few weeks back that I could not seemingly remove.
The problem with this mission however is that the Catmander requires you to do one of three jumping puzzles located in the World vs World borderlands. So not only do you have to be comfortable enough with WvW in general, but also be able to complete some of the most annoying jumping puzzles I have experienced thus far. The problem with these is that they are not so much jumping puzzles… but falling puzzles. The final leg of each of them involves falling gracefully from a perch and trying to land on a shelf below that will ultimately allow you to jump into the opening to the cave where the Catmander is located. After spending an entire afternoon making an untold number of tries, I stumbled upon the above video. Effectively I could use a druid staff ability to catapult myself to the ledge with the Catmander and skip the jumping puzzle entirely… or at least most of the hard bits.
Just like that, on my first attempt doing the above method… I landed on the ledge and made my way to the Catmander’s chamber. I ultimately went after the Blue Catmander, because the quirks of WvW meant that it was functionally easier for me to get to that chamber this week. Inside you are greeted with a delightful sight as the Catmander is obviously training some recruits… with kittens working on training dummies while a lieutenant cat supervises. This scene alone is worth the price of admission honestly.
One of the cute quirks of Guild Wars 2 is that you have a form of player housing called the “Home Instance”. This is used as part of the early story quests and is something that you can collect things for over the course of the game. One of the things you can collect is a series of cats that live in your instance with you. Effectively around the world are various cats and if you have a specific item in your inventory you will be given a prompt to interact with them and feed them that “food”. It seems that you can do this with the three Catmanders as well. The Blue one for example wants a Gift of Battle, aka something that you farm up for legendary weapons and is a rewards track in WvW. So of course I am now farming up another Gift of Battle so I can collect that cat. Thankfully the Yellow Catmander requests something more sensible and wants a Can of Spicy Meat Chili. That would leave only Penelope the Unconquerable in Armistice Bastion… but she resides at the end of a pretty traumatic jumping puzzle and that zone requires paid access so it might be a while before I collect that Catmander.
As much as I love World Boss Trains… I am uncertain if I am going to be finding myself leading them. It seems like a lot of effort, and while I applaud the commanders that go from zone to zone leading the troops… I figure I will probably keep my tag in my back pocket for when I need to arrange instanced content. I just feel like I am maybe not comfortable enough leading most content… that is other than Tequatl. I can do “Taco” in my sleep and have collected many spoons in the process. I guess if you find yourself in need of a commander for something, hit me up.
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Good Morning Friends! When we last talked on Friday I spoke of how Eleventh Hour Games was struggling a bit under the crush of new players attempting to explore the multiplayer update. This morning I can safely say that for the most part from Friday onwards, the servers were exceptionally stable. I close out the weekend just shy of 50 on my Paladin build and have loose plans to start trying some dungeons and monoliths multiplayer on Tuesday. In truth, there are still some residual issues, like movement abilities often causing rubberbanding where the server and your game client disagree on the location of your character. However, these have lessened significantly over the weekend and for the most part, you can just log in and play whenever you want.
I think it is important to take that statement into context because over the weekend the game saw staggering growth. Prior to the launch on Thursday, the highest number of concurrent players Last Epoch had ever seen was just a bit over 5,000 in September of 2021. Sunday afternoon around 3 pm the game was seeing just over 40,000 concurrent players and at that point, the game was rock solid. Whatever they did to scale the servers has seemingly worked, and my hats are off to the team for certain. Sure Last Epoch had tested its multiplayer functionality in a number of waves, but you never really get a true test until it is under a real load. I would say that once they sorted out the queue thing late Thursday night, they effectively solved most of the issues players were having.
The other thing that I find interesting is just how many streamers have been swapping over to Last Epoch. Really this patch lands at the ideal time, and it was something that they could not really have planned for. Path of Exile is winding down the Sanctum league, Diablo III just had a great season 28… but again most players have finished up that process… and Diablo IV is a few days away. This leaves a vacuum of games that feel relevant at the moment and as a result, every Path of Exile streamer is actively playing Last Epoch and honestly saying a lot of good things about their experience. The above screenshot was taken around 6:30 am CST… and there were still over 10,000 viewers actively watching Path of Exile. I wish I had thought to take some numbers from yesterday when I saw effectively every ARPG streamer of note playing the game. If they start breaking into more mainstream streamers, I think we are going to continue to see those concurrent numbers rise.
As far as the game itself, I likely would have made it significantly further were it not for my dealing with a production issue yesterday at work. Needing to hop on calls periodically limited just how engaged I could be, but I still have reached around the same spot in the story I left off in testing with my Necromancer. I’ve noticed that I am starting to get into territory where resistance is beginning to matter a bit. When I was going through the ice area, I noticed that several of the maps could chunk my health significantly and this largely resolved itself once I threw in a few points of cold resistance. It does make me wonder what I am going to need as far as a resistance profile for the end game. Coming from Path of Exile I am used to needing to cap my resists and honestly, at this point, I have no clue what capping would even look like in Last Epoch.
One other thing that I did over the weekend was creating a Last Epoch page in my “Game Tools” menu. With this, I am going to be trying to collect the various bits of information I am using about the game and the resources that I am relying on. Another thing that I am adding that I have not done on other pages, is a section devoted to the builds that I am playing with video/guide links for each. I figure when the next Path of Exile league lands, I will do the same for that game going forward. These pages are as much for my benefit as they are for yours because I find them a useful way of collecting resources that I might be relying on. I realize after my very trade league in POE, I need to update that page with some of the resources that I used for selling items.
I am really enjoying the game and the build I am playing, but I also don’t exactly feel like I am in a rush. There is no season journey that I am necessarily taking, so there are no objectives I am trying to tick off as quickly as possible. I think my initial goal is to get all the way through the monolith so that I can hopefully experience empowered monolith maps. Like I said before Ace and I have tentatively planned on doing some serious group content on Tuesday night, so it will be interesting to see what the monolith and dungeons are like with friends. I’ve been extremely impressed with how quickly Eleventh Hour Games recovered from the server crush on Thursday and just how stable the game has been. Honestly, I’ve had fewer issues with Last Epoch than I do during a normal Diablo III Season Journey.
If you were waiting in the wings to see if it was stable… then I would say the coast is clear. Come on in the water is fine.
The post Last Epoch Stabilizes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning Folks! We start off the show with some random talk about Rick Astley and the history of Rickrolling. From there Bel talks about getting a Commander tag and going for the obvious best choice… that Catmander. Kodra talks about beating Axiom Verge and his struggles with M.A.S.S. Builder not quite being detailed enough. From there we talk about the launch of the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch and the struggles of instant 8X growth. We talk a bit about the challenge of a game launch and scaling servers without overbooking capacity. Then we finish out with some discussion from Tam about the Star Citizen 3.18 patch and its own server capacity issues.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Last Epoch Multiplayer patch 0.9 and it was most certainly interesting. Shocking to no one that has ever experienced an MMO launch… there were problems. I attempted to create a character around noon when the servers first went online and encountered a litany of errors and gave up. Last night around 4 pm when I was attempting to log in, I kept encountering the above situation where it would try and load the character and then fail out with an error of “[LE-61] Failed to Matchmake” but have to hit some sort of time out before it returned me to the character select screen to try again. Around 5:30 my time, things had calmed down enough that I was actually able to log into the game as was my good friend Ace. From there we experienced a pretty hilarious night of weird bugs until I reached a point where I could no longer interact with NPCs… and we had to call it a night.
The above video is one that I snagged from this post on Reddit and uploaded to YouTube so that I could embed it. Unfortunately, it was uploaded directly to Reddit so please know I am not attempting to take credit for it. I absolutely encountered this same bug several times yesterday, and in truth, it seemed to be happening quite a bit for various skills. For example, if I used Lunge without a target, it would lock me in the movement animation while seemingly it waited for the command to time out. When I got shield charge, I was able to charge through walls and skip sections of the map…. because I am guessing my client, Ace’s client, and the server all had a disagreement on where exactly I was heading and where I successfully managed to go. The funniest thing though was when I would shield charge… and it would go super slow for a few seconds and then rapidly warp me to the final destination of the ability. When things got really bad towards the end of my session I started rubberbanding back to near Ace’s location because it was as though the server lost track of me.
Please note this is not me complaining, this is me regaling you with the experience we had last night. Ace and I were on discord laughing the entire time like we were drunk with joy. The folks I feel bad about though are the team over at Eleventh Hour Games. I am certain they did not get any sleep last night… most specifically MoxJet aka Judd (Mox) on Discord. He was in the chat when I disappeared last night and was back up this morning around 6 am, still answering questions… still being chill, responsive, and helpful. I remember when we were attempting to log in yesterday I was watching the chat for any signs of updates, and the chat was thrown into slow mode allowing one new message from each user every 5 minutes. Even then being throttled like it was… it was scrolling by faster than I could read it. I mean all multiplayer launches are at least somewhat traumatic, but I feel for the late nights the team is going to have over the coming days.
Last Epoch is legitimately overwhelmed by new players at the moment. If you look at the steam charts, as of writing this post Last Epoch is sitting in the 8th spot for top-selling games in the US and 12th Globally. Notice that Steam indicates that it is new to the list, which I believe means it has not appeared before on the top 100 list at all. This game went from a very niche title to being thrust into the mainstream literally overnight. I bought into the game in 2018 when it was a wildly different experience, and over time it has shifted from something I honestly did not enjoy much to being a legitimate contender for the Diablo/Path Of Exile throne. This is absolutely benefitting from the hype surrounding Path of Exile having a phenomenal Sanctum league, and Diablo IV waiting in the wings… but not quite ready for launch. It is probably even widely benefitted from Diablo II getting a remastered edition that has had its own traction among classic ARPG players. So while this is awesome for the future of Eleventh Hour Games as a company… it is going to be a bit of a rocky ride in the interim for that team.
For the moment since I spent so much time playing Necromancer in testing, I decided to try out a Sentinel build. This looked to be the sort of Righteous Fire gameplay I enjoy where you are nigh unkillable and just AOE everything around you to death. You can see the .85 build here on Last Epoch Tools, which I am adapting to fit .9, and for the most part, there are not significant enough differences to really cause challenges. I also plan on playing around with a Ritualist and Acolyte like I did in testing and Rogue is just stupid fun and arrives at a point of power way earlier than the other classes. I ran a bunch of things up on the test realm and I plan on doing the same over the coming weeks in online play. The game keeps your offline and online characters separate similar to how Wolcen did, so you have to make a choice of playing with friends or not ever playing with friends. I wish we could have at least played characters offline and then shifted to online play, but I get why they wanted to keep online play somewhat sacred.
Sadly I have no screenshots of me playing with Ace last night because quite honestly we were laughing too hard for me to think to take screenshots. We managed to run a few characters up to around level 17, and I plan on more or less holding my Sentinel where it is currently and resuming play together tonight. At first, we thought maybe there was some catch-up experience going on, but I think they just buffed the XP rates across the board whether or not you were grouped. The main thing we noticed is it felt like we were getting way more “Blue” and “Yellow” monsters than we would in a non-multiplayer map. The chat message indicates that the monster’s health is buffed but I think the changes maybe go deeper than that. It felt good to play with friends and did not feel like we were just stomping things without any challenge. I even died last night because I just did not get out of the bad fast enough. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I am hoping the servers calm down or stabilize as the team adds more resources.
I did not get anything that was necessarily set defining, and I probably traded more good items to Ace than I kept because I ended up getting a lot of +minion items on a build that does not care in the least about that. I did get Snowblind which is a somewhat universally good leveling item. Sadly I am not really going into elemental attacks at all, but maybe I will find some +cold weapons to make this do some work for me. I am also using Avarice Gloves which have synergy with elemental attacks. If I can lean in that direction a bit, those items should help me out a little bit. I had fun though and that is ultimately the real judge of a game launch. I think the Eleventh Hour Games team has a great product on their hands, and hopefully, they have the capital required to ramp up enough to stem the bleeding. They definitely have some work ahead of them because the testing did not hammer the servers anywhere near what happened last night. However, I think they are in a good place to move forward because it was at least playable.
Did you play Last Epoch last night? What were your experiences? Drop me a line below.
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