Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the start of the reset for the second cycle of the Last Epoch ARPG. That is a contorted mess to say, and EHG really needs to get better at naming this shit. In fact is is actually less clear than calling it Cycle 2… because EHG refers to this as Cycle 1.1 Refresh. Legitimately name things more clearly so that you can understand which Cycle/League/Season you are in with a reasonable chronology. Diablo IV just simply increments the number and Path of Exile gives every league a name and a patch version. Naming your cycles off the arbitrary versioning scheme of your game is kind of madness. Whatever the case… I opted to essentially recreate my last seasonal character to see if I could improve upon the design and as such BelBurnsBrightly now exists… I would absolutely give you a character profile link if LastEpochTools were updated. Instead, I present you BelLikesToSpin the last incarnation which I will be following pretty closely.
I’ve said before that the only thing standing in the way of EHG claiming the “Best ARPG” crown is more content. They are competing with Path of Exile for that title when it has over a decade’s worth of content that just creates this environment where there is always something interesting going on in your maps. This cycle reset introduced the addition of Loot Lizards, and I have to say… they go a long way towards making maps feel fun and exciting. Essentially these critters spawn with a pack of loot on their back and you have to chase them down and “knock the pack off” their back… giving you a lovely loot pinata explosion. They come in a bunch of different varieties but so far I have seen ones that drop Rare loot, ones that drop Idols, and ones that drop Unique items. In all cases, they drop a lot of affix shards and glyphs which go a long way to helping you get started in the new league.
They also seem to have a very high drop rate for Runes of Ascendence which is helping me out considerably in getting the uniques that I need for my build. It took me two Runes to fish for the Firestarter’s Torch which is quite possibly my favorite item in the entire game. After that I started fishing for the cast on smite sword Palarus’s Sacred Light. I think I am five runes down and have not picked that up yet, but I did get the Humming Bee which is shockingly good for this build. I am hitting extremely fast which is causing me to gain a bunch of ward while spinning through the levels adding significant survival while also increasing my elemental damage output a tiny bit. The rest of my gear is a bit of a mess bit I am leveling several weavers will items, and then using Calamity to increase my fire damage and Avarice to give me elemental leech. I did have two quicksilver coils, but I dropped one to level a WW ring to see what I might get from it.
The other major system change is the addition of a stash tab priority system… which will be familiar to you as the affinity system in Path of Exile. Thing is this goes so much further than that system ever has by adding all manner of filter parameters allowing you to get really specific about what you want to store in which tabs. Stash maintenance is one of the biggest annoyances in an ARPG and being able to dump the loot you want to keep quickly is so important to the flow in your endgame progression. So for example if I wanted to create a tab that ONLY stores Legendary Potential 3 and 4 uniques, for a specific class… I could do so extremely simply. Basically, this adds all the power of the loot filter to a stash affinity system which now officially crowns EHG the “Best ARPG Stash Tab System”. Since GGG has been spurred into action to create quality life improvements based on innovations from Last Epoch, I am hoping we see something like this in Path of Exile soon.
I am not skipping any of the content so I am slowly chewing my way through the campaign. I got through the beginning of Imperial Era Majeka last night and will pick up from there today and push through hopefully to the end. I am working on getting my survival up a bit because I know Lagon is always going to be a bit of an obstacle. I am no longer deathless because last night while hanging out on Discord with Ace, I had to get one of my cats off my PC case…. because she was clawing at the magnetic vent cover. When I looked away something wandered over and wrecked me. At least this saves me the frustration of losing my deathless stream to either Lagon or Rahyeh which are traditionally the things that kill me in other runs.
One of the persistent memes in the POE community is “Login Dude!” when there is a good patch or a quirky bug worth exploiting. So I guess this is the point where I say to you that if you played Last Epoch in the past, this weird awkward cycle reset period is a great time to return. There is plenty of meat on those bones when it comes to the addition of Loot Lizards alone, and the quality of life that the stash tab priority system adds greatly improves the quality of life. Basically, I am at the point where I really need to sit down and build my loot filter for the league so that I can start sifting through loot that is actually worth keeping and worth breaking down. It isn’t necessarily a daunting or difficult task, just one that I had been avoiding.
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This weekend was an extended weekend for me, having taken two days off to match up with my wife who is on fall break. As a result I had more than my average amount of play time and the timing happened to line up perfectly with the first Iron Banner for the Season of the Undying in Destiny 2. This time around there was a quest chain that I wrote about the other day that walks the player through collecting four weapons and a full suit of the Iron Banner armor. After this however it became my first mission to make sure I had completed that on all three characters. The above collage shows them all in the gear set that I picked up with some shaders applied to make them look cooler.
The most curious part of the weekend is that I somehow capped my Valor twice and reset it… and am now grinding it up a third time presently sitting at the Brave II rank. Partially this is due to the fact that the weekend included a bonus to all valor gained, and partially due to the fact that I played an excessive amount of crucible via the Iron Banner. I am guessing that the bonus valor also somehow equated to bonus XP because I skyrocketed from around 33 at the start of Iron Banner to 60 as of last night. I also managed to hit the less permeable cap of 960… aka 950 gear and 10 bonus light coming from the artifact. From this point on I believe the gains are in single point increments.
I was completely all over the place this weekend when it came to the activities that I dipped my toes into. While podcasting I opted to grind the Menagerie a bit and attempt to get a good roll of the Austringer, something that I had apparently completely failed at doing during the Season of Opulence. I am not even sure what a God Roll looks like, but my friend Teyeger01 suggested either Rampage/Rapid Hit or Rapid Hit/Kill Clip… the later sounds most excellent. I pulled an Outlaw/Rampage which seems like a perfectly reasonable option for the time being and one well worth using. For the time being I am completely out of Desire runes and will probably wait for Thalen to unlock the chalice before grinding some out again seeing as he was not benefiting from my runefinder buff.
Speaking of which, I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with Thalen and doing whatever he had on his list of activities. I now fully understand why Squirrel always wanted me to drive the activity we were doing, because after a point it doesn’t really matter what it is we are actually doing. It is the act of running around and getting to play big brother guardian that is really fun. I wish I could have somehow carried people to the Iron Banner armor, but the way those objectives were set up to do not exactly lend themselves to being helped out by another guardian. So many of the checkmarks are depended upon getting weapon kills of a specific type, which means you need to be the one that actually finishes the Guardian off. If they were assists… maybe just maybe I could have helped folks like Pix through the Iron Banana because apparently I am better than I realized?
Speaking of killing Guardians… I finished off my Malfeasance… which is a Hand Cannon that I am probably never going to use. Right now I am heavily favoring swapping back and forth between Austringer and Ace of Spades when I want to play with that weapon type. The problem with Malfeasance is its special perk procs an explosion after the fifth hit on a target. Very few targets can handle five hits… even Guardians tend to drop somewhere in the 3 to 4 hit range. This means the only time you are ever going to get use of the perk is on some tanky Majors and Boss type encounters… which are situations you are probably going to use a heavy or a special on. So basically this weapon feels like it needs some tweaking… if it was 3 hits and then an explosion this gun would be amazing. Regardless it is another Exotic quest checked off on my list, and another quest out of my log.
At the start of this week I would have said without a doubt that this was the best feeling Iron Banner I had experienced to date. Then things shifted… and I eventually found out that Bungie made tweaks to the way the matchmaking was working. Originally as a solo queue player I was almost always getting matched with other solo queue players, which felt amazing. The problem is the vocal minority of the “sweaty” pvpers complained that they were sitting in orbit with a full team for hours and not getting matches. Bungie made some tweaks to the system and suddenly on Saturday I started getting matched up with 4 or 5 players from the same clan against my rag tag group of solo queues. Basically I am glad that I got most of my progress towards the armor sets done before that point, because on my Hunter it took way longer than it did on any of the others.
It makes me realize how much better the Crucible would be for me personally… if there was a freelancer play list. I am almost always going to queue as a solo player, because that tend to be how I play crucible most of the time. On the first few days before they applied this tweak… Iron Banner felt amazing. On the days after the patch was applied… I got one of two games… competitive or shut outs that I got “mercied”. Even when you lose in a close game… it somehow feels better because you had a chance. The weirdest realization for me personally… is that even in the scenarios where I was getting completely tromped… I was doing reasonably well. I think of myself as a very shitty PVPer… but maybe just maybe I have improved over time. I did enjoy myself and I find doing the Crucible bounties a little less tedious than it used to be.
