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.
