Good Morning folks. I am getting a bit later start than normal to blogging, because work got in the way. If it can start interrupting me at 6 am… I can take a brief break to bang out a blog post. While I have mostly been focused on my new Thorns Forge Guard build, I am still playing quite a bit of my Minion Necromancer. I have to say I really love the look of the coven set that was one of the support packs this season. I buy the most expensive supporter pack every season, because I like giving Eleventh Hour Games my money because they do a phenomenal job of giving me a few fun weeks each new season. They are also considerably cheaper than Grinding Gear Games in the way that they price these packs, making it feel like a massive steel. That said… I don’t love every armor set that I end up picking up, but this one… perfectly fits the vibe of the Acolyte.
I said yesterday that I have changed my perspective on how to build a loot filter, and now that I am building one for all of my characters in a given season… it means that often times I get really cool things for the character I am not actively playing. As a result I got a bunch of really good upgrades for my Necromancer yesterday while working on unlocking Empowered Monoliths. Firstly I got an LP2 copy of the Mantle of the Pale Ox and leaned heavily into survival giving it +flat health and +regen percentage. Next up I got an LP1 copy of Tyrant’s Skull and I gave it percentage Minion Damage… and quite honestly it will be pretty unlikely that I improve this further. For Dragonflame’s Edict I gave it Minion Fire Pen which was the best of the options I had laying around for donor staves. It’s not ideal but it does at least prove that I can clear a t4 Julra without much issue. I really need to farm the End of Dragons timeline for more chances at staves. I also really wish this game had some equivalent of the Path of Exile 3 to 1 vendor recipe because I have a bunch of junk that I really need to feed into the turtle to see if I can upgrade it, but that is way more of a hassle than just vendoring things.
I’ve been spending way more time over on the Forge Guard because having things just explode when they look at me is too much fun not to take advantage of it while it lasts. This is one of those builds that I do not expect to survive this season, or at least not at this power level. Everything that I have heard is that Judgement Paladin is still one of the best builds out there, but it is nowhere near the levels of raw survival and damage output that it had last time. That is really the thing that I appreciate the most about Eleventh Hour Games is that they nerf things down to a reasonable level… rather than giving the GGG triple tap and knocking them completely out of the rotation. I think GGG feels like they have to shake up the meta every league, but what ends up happening is they just create a new build of the league… and all of the other play-styles suffer. Right now in Last Epoch there are countless perfectly viable builds, and that seems really healthy.
Now that my Thorns build is online, I am going to start actually focusing on pushing corruption. I knocked out my third Harbinger and at the suggestion of my friend Ace I did Lagon because the arena is so limited there that it becomes a bit of a pain in the ass to actually fight the Harbinger. The earlier you fight a Harby… the weaker a version of it that you end up getting. So the easier fights… you probably want to wait until the last few tiers of corruption. Ultimately when you hit 300 corruption you unlock Aberroth and I want to do that and see how well this build continues to hold up. Right now it actually does a really great job of bossing, but is lacking a bit in the survival department so I am trying to buff that as I swap out gear. At the moment I have two completely useless rings, so I will be targeting trying to figure out what I actually want in those slots for survival and damage output. I am trying to stack as much Phys Resistance, Attunement, and Reflection as I can, wherever I can get it.
I’ve made so many changes and updates to the build since the last post. Essentially I swapped out six pieces of gear and am looking to swap out even more as I get deeper down this particular rabbit hole. The biggest upgrade is a new copy of the Thicket chest and crafting a t6 thorns onto it. I am still keeping Last Laugh because after having tried a bunch of different things, I find I miss the culling strike when I don’t have access to it. I had a two-hander with +8 to all attributes, and I figured that was good enough for the time being until I found a higher legendary potential version. Other than that my general plan has been to throw on additional life or survival in general onto every piece that I can. I am still using Boulderfists because they have good armor and life on them… and I need to sort out what I actually want as an eventual replacement for those.
The biggest challenge I am facing is that in order to really push this build to the limit… I need a ton of small weavers idols with damage reflect on them. This problem is two fold. In all of the idols that have dropped for me this league, I have found exactly two of these. Secondly there is no real way to target farm weavers idols apart from running a bunch of cemeteries. Normal idols there is an entire tab in the prophecies that supports farming those. Weavers Idols… not so much. There is not even any support on the weavers tree for making them drop more often. Ultimately I think this is one of those builds that is only really going to reach its maximum potential in a trade league economy… and even swapping to trade would be futile since for whatever reason… trade just never quite works out in Last Epoch. It is either wildly overpriced or completely dead. So far I am dealing roughly 8000 reflect damage every .5 seconds to everything looking at me… and this scales up to I believe 3 million damage against bosses due to the more multiplier on the chest for bosses and rares.
Anyways… I am having fun. Friday though I am swapping for a bit to Path of Exile II to farm the MTX, but depending on how that goes I will probably keep poking at this build and seeing where I can take it.
The post A Thorny Reception appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
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