Good Morning Folks. I’m officially in the Monolith on my second character of the league. This does not mean that I have abandoned my Necromancer, in fact I ran around on it last night with my friend Ace. I actually swapped over to Dragonflame Edict last night and dropped my crab ring for another Phantom Grip to make up for the +2 Minion Skills that I was losing when I dropped Tolmat. I will forever miss my incorrectly named minions and crab… but really in empowered monoliths their survival was awful so they were not staying alive for very long. What I leveled this time is a Forge Guard, which means adding a bunch of Sentinel specific nonsense to my loot filter. That is something that I arrived at is rethinking how I build my loot filters… instead of making them character specific I am going to just keep adding to them so that I can keep searching for items I need for all of my characters in a specific league.
This morning I recorded one of my trademarked “dumb little videos” to show off the interaction of Thicket of Blinding Light. Essentially this gives you a very Righteous Fire style Thorns Aura that effectively hits the entire screen at once. The chest piece has the text “Every 0.5 seconds you Blind all enemies facing you and deal Damage to them equal to your Damage Reflected to Attackers stat“. So that means that every .5 seconds you are pulsing a giant thorns aura on anything that can see you. Due to the particulars of the build you can scale this nonsense in four ways… by stacking Attunement, Overcapped Physical Resistance, Armor and by reference Armor Mitigation, and then also any flat damage reflect that you can find on gear. All of which will just make the aura of death that you are pulsing deal more damage, but as you can see in the video it is already pretty formidable.
Ash and I had talked about this played on a Primalist, but this video shifted my focus over to trying it on a Forge Guard especially after seeing how silly it looked. You obviously need the Thicket of Blinding Light , which is rather expensive resource wise… and if you are like me and get a low roll you will need to keep buying them from the vendor trying to get one with some Legendary Potential on it. Thornshell is also a bit part of the build since it is a good source of reflect damage, as is Thorn Slinger. I am running Decayed Skull mostly because it gives a multiplier to armor, and then Boulderfists just to have something to slot in, but I will likely replace that by a good exalted item. The build utilizes the Forge Guard ability to use a two handed weapon with a shield and I am currently running The Last Laugh so I can get additional armor shred and a culling strike effect, but the original build I based mine from was running Dreamthorn for its added block chance.
It is a truly silly build and I have no clue how far I will end up taking it. Like I said there is another variant that I have seen that uses Spriggan for the build and you can see a video of it playing out here running up against Aberroth. They are specifically using Valdyr’s Chalice but I have heard that the percentage damage reflected does not actually impact the pulse from the chest piece. I guess if I pick one of those up it would be worth throwing it on just to test and see if it makes a difference. Anyways if you are looking for a fun build that is very unlikely to make it out of this league unscathed… it is worth running up a character to play around with it. The AFK nature of the build is nice, because Gracie keeps crawling up in my arms and blocking my face. I guess I will keep trying to improve the gear and improve my general survival to see how far I can get with it.
The post Righteous Fire but Thorns appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This weekend is the launch of Path of Exile II 0.3 aka The Third Edict and I have had every intent to just start playing whenever the hell I felt like it. Last Epoch Season 3 launched this past weekend and with how close these two things seem to always be now… I feel like we are always going to be courted towards one or the other. Last Epoch got the win last go round with the combination of a pretty frustrating 0.2 patch in POE2 combined with Last Epoch pushing back their seasonal start so that players frustrated by one game could bounce to the next. The thing about The Third Edict is that nothing about the patch really excites me except for the new asynchronous trade system. I have been wanting a more automated trading system in Path of Exile since I first started playing it, and I am pumped as hell that they have already announced a version of this is coming to the superior game… Path of Exile 1.
What raised my excitement level however is that yesterday Grinding Gear Games announced that there will now be an in game version of the trade website browser. I am pretty freaking pumped about this, because while sure… power traders will likely keep using the trade website on a second monitor, this makes trade in general much more approachable for players and a much better option for those who play on console. Sure the whole concept of having to teleport into a hideout to buy your items is a bit kludgy, but this is so much better than anything we have had access to. It will also present some interesting situations to make bulk selling items more reasonable, because when someone teleports in to buy one sanctum book for example, it is likely they will just hoover up all of the books at the same price. Our very own community Saint, Sir Gog released a video this morning as a bit of a warning though, outlining several different scams that he can see working under the new system. It will kill several that are notorious in both POE1 and 2, but offers up some new ones for folks who are in a hurry to get their currency deleted.
What has changed for my equation of playing this in a few weeks… is that they are running an event the first weekend where they are giving away a few MTX for anyone who has cleared Act 1. I am a sucker for MTX… and as a result I am very much likely going to be firing up a character and at a minimum clearing through Count Geonor. Right now I am looking to play a version of the character that I rolled late in 0.2 that is some sort of a Warrior playing with Crossbows, and namely Incendiary Shot with Armor Explosion support. More than likely I am going to be doing a Titan and then stacking small passives to inflate the damage and survival of the build. I have no clue what order I am going to take my ascendancy points… probably do Crushing Impact first and then when I get my second ascendancy done, swap the points into Hulking Form given that the bag is a waste of a point until you can go two points in. Everything that Crushing Impact is doing, I can get with support gems, but it will be handy once I am able to pick up a fourth ascendancy and get 50% more multiplier against heavy stunned enemies.
The other thing of note about the Path of Exile II 0.3 release weekend is that they are opening it up for all players to try out the game for free. Starting at 1pm PDT on August 29th and ending at 1pm PDT September 1st… anyone is going to be able to go to the platform of their choice and download the game for free and play it. This likely means that the servers are going to be heavily congested. However it sounds as though the free players will not be able to start the download until that 1pm deadline ticks over, giving anyone who already has the full client a bit of a head start in the process. I hope it works out for them and does not lead to a massive quagmire over a holiday weekend. The last league launched over Easter Weekend and caused all manner of issues with them updating bugs… and I realize that Labor Day is not a thing outside of the United States… but I really hope they are prepared for the onslaught of players. If you’ve ever been curious about the game then I suggest you give it a shot and check it out. If nothing else… Path of Exile II is a great gateway drug to the real goodness of Path of Exile 1.
Over in Last Epoch I am slowly progressing on my Zoo Necromancer build, but I am starting to hit my first opposition as I begin raising corruption. This is probably something that levels could resolve, either that or trying to perfect my passive tree and go with the Abomination build. Mostly I am now through two harbingers and need to actually begin raising corruption to keep progressing. The big problem that I am having is that even though I have better general survival while mapping… I still can easily get one shot by bosses. I struggled to get through Gaspar in The Last Ruin timeline, because I just kept dying to the rotating beam phase once there was more shit on the ground that I needed to avoid. Once I beat Gaspar, actually downing the Harbinger was more tedious than anything. I’ve been focusing on some of the harder timelines to knock those out for these first few Harbingers so that I can do some of the easier ones later once the difficulty increases.
I’m also being tempted away by another build. Ash had already signaled to me that there was the possibility of some thorns shenanigans with the new primordial chest called Thicket of Blinding Light. He was thinking about this as a build on the Primalist tree, but I think I am more comfortable with the Sentinel tree overall and its general survival options. Yesterday the algorithm fed me this video doing exactly that thing… and now I want to give it a try. Last night I started a brand new character and have been leveling it with Shield Throw converted to fire damage. I had never really played around with Shield Throw in this game and it is a heck of a lot of fun. I basically leveled with Hammer Throw until I unlocked it and then when I had enough points into Shield Throw I dropped Hammer Throw entirely. Right now I am trying to pick up the Paladin tree points so I can start speccing out the abilities needed from there before dumping more points into Forge Guard.
I think tonight Ace and I might run around on our Necros and try and do some nonsense. I am not super feeling the current state of that build so I might try and tweak it a bit over lunch today. That is of course pending I am doing better by tonight. I essentially breathed in some fumes over the weekend and they have thrashed my lungs a bit… and I am having quite a bit of trouble breathing today. It is one of those days where I can work remotely just fine, but today is supposed to be an in office day and there is no way I can do that. So as a result I will likely be taking a sick day.
The post POE2 Free Weekend and Thorns Sentinel appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. On Thursday the Last Epoch Season 3 started and since then I have largely been focused on leveling. I finished Act 10 at some point on Saturday morning, and pushed into Empowered Monoliths last night around 7pm. I have a pretty solid build at the moment, but it is one that I just winged my way through rather that following a guide. In theory at some point I should probably optimize things, but I really how skill respecs work in this game. You can respec your character passives without much issue just by spending a bit of gold at a vendor to remove points and then immediately you can put them back. For skills, you remove the point… and then have to deal with not having that point until you have earned enough experience to level it back up again. I really hate this process and as a result I am avoiding it until I absolutely cannot progress any further in the current state of my build.
There are basically three things that have caused me to die in this game. The first is getting a loot lizard shrine and then freaking out about trying to chase them down and ignoring the packs of monsters between me and the lizard and just getting overwhelmed. The second is the fact that Gracie has decided that she needs to crawl up into my arms at a moment’s notice and the game does not have the pause functionality that I am so used to now from Path of Exile. The last death type is due to the fact that I have around twenty minions on screen at any given time… and I simply lose my damned cursor and given that Last Epoch does not lock the cursor to the screen area… it could be over on the second monitor. When I need to deftly blink away from some incoming attack I need to be pointing the cursor in the right direction and my old man eyes cannot see the stupid thing.
In Path of Exile I can equip a more visually distinct cursor and same goes for running a cursor pack through BlishHUD in Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately for some reason the way in which Last Epoch was built has caused them to be unable to modify the cursor at runtime, in spite of them exploring this at length. So apparently the accepted solution by the community is to run a tool called YoloMouse that you can buy from Steam for roughly $4. Aaron Action RPG has a video about setting it up for Last Epoch if you are curious. Now instead of a very hard to find cursor that blends in with everything… I have a giant 50px green arrow that clashes spectacularly with the screen and I can locate in seconds. Sometimes you just have to make adjustments… especially as your eyesight gets worse. Prime old man gaming woes.
I’ve been leveling as Necromancer with effectively 9 Archers, 5 Mages, 2 Wraiths, 1 Golem, 1 TRex, 1 Crab, 1 Random Incorrectly Named Mob, and then summon a Rift Beast when certain monsters hit 40% health. The only challenge with the build is that sometimes my army of minions gets distracted and I have to kill forcing them to stay on target. There is a bit of lag between when I command them to attack and when they actually do… but once they are on target things melt pretty quickly. I am running up to 6 Volatile Zombies at a time, with leap, and they essentially cause the equivalent of culling strike when they hit something at 15% life or lower. I do wonder if I would have better dps if I swapped my Golem for an Abomination per the trendy build… because it would have a single minion doing the majority of my damage and potentially allow me to rip through things faster.
I am running a truly aggressive number of uniques with this build… more so than I am probably comfortable with. That means I need to keep finding better copies or copies with legendary potential so I can get some of the stats that I would be missing if I were using an exalted item in that slot. This is not too terribly different from the snapshot from Friday with the addition of getting a lucky Nemesis drop of the Pale Ox chest, a slightly better Phantom Grip, a slightly better Evolution’s End, and then picking up the Primal item I am running the Tyrant’s Skull which gives me the TRex minion. Right now I am trying to chase a high LP version of Reach of the Grave but it seems like 3 and 4 LP versions are super rare. If only Cleaver Solution were worded differently… and converted Strength as additive Intelligence… I would probably be running that, but alas it is your Intelligence equals your current Strength.
I’ve unlocked all of the slots on my weaver’s tree and two are devoted to Reach trying to farm a good one to convert into a legendary. I have a Tolmats in one of the remaining slots and a Phantom Grip in the other so I can keep getting those pretty regularly. As far as my maps go I have the Nemesis Tower map in both slots because those are always useful to find on the monolith. Now I am starting to focus points on things that I actually want to unlock and the first two went into the node that makes Dungeon specific monsters appear in the monolith so that you can get those rewards without ever having to run those dungeons. Next I will probably focus on increasing the frequency of Rift Beasts in my maps so that I can hopefully farm up better copies of Tyrant’s Skull. Lastly I will probably throw points into the rest of the Loot Lizard nodes because while they cause me to play in imprudent ways… they are still a heck of a lot of fun and big loot bonanzas.
I’ve pushed The Woven faction up to level 5 and unlocked a few more maps to buy which will give me points to spend. Over on Circle of Fortunate I have it at 8 which gives items a higher chance to get legendary potential, and also higher chance of getting more of it. The biggest thing I need to watch is when I get a bunch of currency in either faction because I am notoriously bad at actually spending it down. These screenshots were taken this morning after I purposefully bought a bunch of prophecies and maps, but usually I am carrying at least 10k in each currency because I just forget about spending them. What I really want is a hideout that allows me to have a merchant from each faction in it, so that I don’t have to keep going over to an otherwise useless zone all of the time. Legitimately something akin to the Path of Exile hideout is now the thing that I think I want the most in this game.
As far as the campaign and new content goes… Act 10 was really solid. It felt a bit on the longer side, but I am not sure if that is just because I have the rest of the campaign memorized and optimized at this point. I was super happy to see the world turtle showing up in this content and lending us a hand. Originally we first saw this character in one of the weaver mas and since they already had the model it seems like a good place to add it in as they help us get across a broken bridge. There is some side content that is entirely missable but also pretty hilarious, so I suggest you duck into the areas even if the game is not pointing you into that direction. Ace told me about it which caused me to back track and figure out how to find it. In total it probably adds another hour onto the content and lets you start the Monolith at a much higher level. This also makes that first Monolith way more dicey if you are doing content skips however.
All told it is a good time… but I do admit I am feeling a bit of wanderlust and am contemplating rolling a Primalist to try out the earthquake bear thing. There is also part of me that wants to see just how badly they nerfed Judgement, and if it is still as viable for bossing and deep corruption as it was last league. I need to group up with Ace and do some nonsense because I know that will be a heck of a lot of fun, and will make everything feel more engaging. I am feeling sort of rudderless at the moment. I am having fun, but also not sure how much effort I want to put into grinding things out like I did last league. I am sure I will probably at least attempt Aberroth once, but I don’t enjoy the Harbinger chase nearly as much as I do other parts of the game. I don’t really like bossing in ARPGs… and that holds just as true for Last Epoch as it does for Path of Exile. I would be perfectly happy never pushing any higher than 100 Corruption were it not for the fact that the game sort of forces you to do so.
I am not sure what is up but I am not really feeling this league and this character as much as I did last go round. Necromancer is a way more passive gameplay style and I might try pivoting to something else and see if that brings back the magic. I will think about it today and see where it leads me. Are you playing this season? What character are you playing? Drop me a line below and let me know how you are enjoying it.
The post Visual Clarity Overrated appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the release of Last Epoch Season 3 aka Beneath Ancient Skies and I spent all evening leveling a Necromancer. There are a number of changes to the way that minions work in this update and I wanted to give it a spin. More importantly the supporter packs added a Sloth that hangs out on my back and a Toucan, which added to my existing Capybara pet allows me to run around with a great party for adventures. I’m just a Hot Witchy Goth roaming around the countryside raising the deads to make the baddies pay. My character this time around is the aptly named “BelMakeDeadGo” and I am sort of yoloing my way through the leveling with the plan to actually follow some build guide once I start running into problems. The way minions work in Last Epoch is in general so much freaking better than the way minions work in Path of Exile, because while they fixed Animate Guardian… Spectres are still a giant pain in the ass for the first game. I also think I like exploding zombies better than angry flaming skulls.
I’ve had an exceptional amount of luck in getting things to drop that are actually useful for my build. The first unique drop that I got was Doublet of Onos Tull, which is not phenomenal… but early on is super good at making your minions just deal more consistent damage by making them all deal bleeds. Shortly after that I got Tolmat’s Incorrect History of Eterra which I have never used, but is super fun because it summons a random zone specific monster to fight along side you… which is pretty freaking solid overall. Add to this a Reach of the Grave and a Crab ring which just added more minion goodness and another disposable easily resummoned target to soak damage. The real amazing drop was Evolution’s End which dropped after letting the league mechanic go to its maximum number of evolutions, and allows me to summon the beast that I built during the process of creating it. When I get a unique to 40% it pops into the battle and feels sufficiently like a Kaiju joining the field. It gives big “Let Them Fight” energy.
Speaking of league mechanics, the primal hunt involves you following around an NPC named Skarven Bloodhorn as he opens up rifts to the location of a specific beast. The rifts are marked with 4 claw slashes in the air, and clicking on one either summons a new cave to explore and find a new beast to grant mutations, or summons a beast to fight that has all of the mutations you have chosen to date applied to it. It honestly took me a bit to grasp that I was stacking mutations and making things harder and harder, because for a bit I thought maybe this mechanic was just wildly overtuned. After you have killed enough beasts you can pop into a zone and fight the final form one last time, and upon killing it a fancy unique will drop. I am not sure if it is always a version of Evolution’s End, or if there are more things on the loot table because I have only taken one all the way to completion.
I think this will go much faster when we are in the monolith, but during the campaign it essentially took me all of the way until level 45ish to complete one of these having never skilled a single primal rift. What I ended up with was a beast two two extra heads, one frost, and one ice… that summons these pretty brutal whirlwinds that chase the target down and that periodically divebombs the target location. This was a massive pain in the ass to fight while I was unlocking it, and it was super good at churning through my minions forcing me to run away and resummon everything. Now that it is on my side… it can just wreck pretty much any boss and I am kind of happy I suffered through the process of getting it unlocked so that I can use it going forward. Pretty sure I am going to be using this neckpiece for a really long time, as it seems to scale well as I level.
One of the nice things about this mechanic is that you can spend the beast parts that you collect with Skarven to unlock primal uniques. You can only equip one of these at a time, but was pretty happy to see that Tyrant’s Skull aka the relic that summons a TRex minion, is just something I can buy off this vendor. This is not something I will get anytime soon because it requires 13500 Ancient Bones, 15 Primordial Fangs, and 10 Primordial Horns… the last bit is not even a resource I have seen yet in any form. Looking it up this appears to be something that you either exchange at Skarven for other parts, or comes from one of two different woven echoes. Since I only really care about one of these items right now, I will probably start exchanging my Primordial Pedals for the Horns that I need.
All told I am having quite a bit of fun leveling a Necromancer. I am going to likely not make a ton of progress tonight, because I am meeting up with a friend to paint miniatures. Note this is not something I have done in almost two decades, so I am sure I will be rusty as heck. If I produce anything worth sharing I will likely turn that into a blog post at some point or share on my various social medias. Mostly the point of today is to go over and there and try a bunch of different paint ranges so I can figure out what I am going to buy my way into. At the moment I seem to be leaning towards Pro Acryl, but I could be easily convinced to go in any other direction after today’s outing. I still have to do some cleaning and rearranging before I can reasonably set up a painting area.
Are you playing some Last Epoch? What character did you end up creating? What do you think of the new league mechanic? Drop me a line below.
The post Witchy Goth, Sloth, Toucan, and Capy appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
