Good Morning Folks. Shocking to no one, I spent pretty much all of the extended weekend playing Last Epoch. We did spend a bit of time working on the backyard and prepping it to migrate all of the furniture and such from the garage out there. However all of the rest of the time was spent leveling my latest version of an Ignite Warpath Paladin. What is wild about this build is this is my sixth time playing some version of warpath and once again… I have shifted things up considerably. I did not follow even my own previous versions of this character and just made the choices that I felt like I needed to make in the moment. The end result has seen me leaning into slightly different avenues of scaling than I have previously… and I think overall the build is more powerful. It does however feel like it has less survival so I guess there were tradeoffs made.
While leveling I did not get a lucky Firestarter’s Torch this time early into my progression, but instead pulled a Taste of Blood axe from a Nemesis Egg. The particular pathing that I make ends up shifting both Warpath and Lunge to convert all bleed damage dealt into ignite stacks, effectively allowing me to utilize bleed as a proxy for ignite. What I have found is that Taste of Blood actually allows me to stack ignite so much faster than the Torch combo normally would and I almost instantly have 60+ stacks of ignite on my target. I got a very lucky LP3 copy of the smite sword which allowed me to craft effectively the ideal weapon for the build as my very first legendary slam. Lastly I have a tab full of Code of an Erased Sentinel that I am fishing for the best combos and right now +2 levels of Holy Aura is the winner.
You can always check out the current state of my character over on Last Epoch Tools as they have an automatically updating character profile thing similar to POE.Ninja. Right now I am fully capped and in many cases way overcapped on resistances and recently shifted around my gear so that I could become crit immune… or at least immune to the bonus damage. The biggest thing that I need right now is more life because 1900 is not terribly comfortable for empowered monoliths. Right now I am dumping passive points into Reverence of Duality which gives me 2% increases to Health, Damage, Healing Effectiveness, and Mana for every point spent. I only have 3 points in this passive node, but plan on taking this all of the way up to 12 which will give me an additional 18% Health, Damage, Healing, and Mana. More than that though I am constantly on the hunt for gear upgrades that either give me raw health or more preferably hybrid health without dropping any of the other stats that I care about.
I had to drop my Rule of Simoon gloves to add some additional survival… but doing so had other benefits. One of the biggest challenges with the new mob types is that standing in melee range because a lot more difficult, because they all seem to paint large areas of bad stuff on the ground or have huge slams. Having my entire screen cluttered by my own flaming tornadoes was a huge problem for the readability of attacks. I am probably going to drop the cosmetic for Warpath as well because the base fire twirl version is similarly just easier to read whatever is going on at the time. I miss the Torch and it setting everything on fire for the entire screen… but the bleed axe just does way more hit damage while at the same time stacking ignites faster than the torch ever did. I’ve reached a point where empowered monoliths are comfortable enough, but more health and more levels will improve that.
I’ve said before that the weakness of Last Epoch was its endgame, and Tombs of the Erased largely fixes that problem entirely. Grinding through normal monos used to feel like a chore, because there really was not much going on there. This patch introduced so much bonus content that it feels like there is constantly something interesting going on. This is before you factor in the whole map crafting aspect of the game which allows you to edit your timeline and add new echoes wherever you want to. I’ve been slowly working my way through all of the echoes that grant additional passive skill tree points, and then I have a bunch that I am saving for later because they much be run in empowered monoliths. Essentially you have to run a cemetery to edit your tree, and that is really my only complaint about the new system. I wish this was something that you could simply pop open at any time. You can place as many woven echoes on your map as you like, but it does feel a bit like running a tower to be able to juice your maps in Path of Exile II, and as such sort of feels superfluous design wise.
The weavers tree aka passive atlas tree… is freaking brilliant though and adds so much depth to the game. I largely rushed the various imprint nodes which allow you to imprint an item, which then makes it more likely for that item to drop. There are two nodes that you can imprint a woven echo, and this makes it so that those echoes naturally show up on your map without the need to add them manually. Right now I have it so that the map that effectively gives you like 50 shrines and the one that allows you to fight 6 Nemesis encounters appear naturally on my maps. There is one that is just loaded full of Loot Lizards which might be fun to imprint as well. I’ve gone deep into buffing the appearance of loot lizards and making it so that every one drops a guaranteed unique regardless of their normal reward type. I think next I am going to try and figure out what I can do with Exile Mages, because for the moment they feel like the most boring of the encounters.
Playing Last Epoch after coming off the previous Path of Exile II patch has been wild. Everything in Tombs of the Erased seems to be centered around enabling just fun game-play. For example in the above screenshot you can see what happened after opening a chest and having I think six of the exalted rarity loot lizards pop out of it, forcing me to chase them down to break open those loot pinatas. It is just big dumb fun, and I am so here for it. Combining this with the fact that I feel comfortable enough with Last Epoch to just sort of yolo my way through a build, knowing that there is no decision that I cannot easily undo if I make a mistake… feels phenomenal. I started a brand new Primalist last night that I went Beastmaster with, for the idea of doing a Raptor build… but I am just sort of winging my way through it rather than following any per-determined leveling guide. That is just not really something I can do with Path of Exile, especially with the sequel game… giving how few builds end up viable.
When Path of Exile II dropped its patch 0.2.0 release date on top of the already planned Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased date… I was frustrated and annoyed. However I feel like Last Epoch rescheduling combined with the fact that Dawn of the Hunt has been one of the worst received ARPG patches I can remember… has really helped Last Epoch to succeed. Playing Last Epoch just feels so refreshing as contrasted with the lack of loot and frustrating tedium of Path of Exile II. Of note… I play all of these games and will probably continue to play all of them as they release additional content so I am not trying to stoke idiotic tribalism here. However it does absolutely seem like the drop in Path of Exile II players has directly impacted the rise of Last Epoch. I think the highest concurrent player count I saw was around 160k players which is a little over half of the total they had at the launch of 1.0, which seems really freaking good.
One of the most telling comments that I saw over the weekend is someone remarking at just how quiet the Reddit was, because it seemed like everyone was simply too busy playing the game to make posts. However since we are now returning to the work week… the entire place has blown up to the point of no longer being able to find that thread. Tonight I will return to empowered monos and try and make some additional progress and maybe take out a few more Harbingers to level that faction. Sure there are still some quality of life improvements that I would like to see. I still want them to update the character models and allow for multiple gender options, and I desperately crave a personalized hideout where I am run all of the content from without interacting with strangers. There are still some maps that have issues interacting with Warpath, but all in all I am having a freaking blast. Sure the moment 3.26 drops for Path of Exile I will zoom back over there, but for the moment Last Epoch is my moment of gaming zen.
If you are curious about some more commentary from me, you can listen to yesterday’s podcast where Ace and I went on at length about the things we are enjoying. While I rarely explain the origin behind some of the non-sequitur AggroChat episode titles… the above screenshot at least explains Lord Orca. Ord Lorca is one of the new Champion encounters and Ace and I both remarked that when we first read the name of that mob, we thought it was Lord Orca. I really hope they do some interesting things with Champion names, because one of my favorite things from Diablo III is when I encountered monsters that were named after content creators. I loved whenever I got to kill my friend Qelric in a map mostly in that DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme style moment of recognition. I think “Orca” is a giant lizard, but the screen is always covered in so much nonsense… and that champion happens to have some sort of a flame effect shield that makes visual clarity a challenge.
Anyways! Are you playing Last Epoch? What did you end up building? Drop me a line below because I am super curious to hear the thoughts of others that are maybe not so bought into this franchise.
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Good Morning Folks! Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased has launched and I am still in the process of leveling my character through the campaign. Just like I thought I was going to do… I rolled a Sentinel and specialized into Paladin going for something similar to what I have built previously. The thing is… right now this BelStillBurns is not a one for one copy of the previous characters I have built as ignite warpath, and I am sort of adjusting my ideas on the fly while I level. I am not going to write a super long blog post this morning so that I can get back to playing. I could have probably pushed into maps yesterday but I generally prefer a more relaxed trip through the campaign than trying to do the hyper optimal gameplay thing. Truth be told I generally like the campaign in ARPGs. Path of Exile II’s campaign was a bit of an exception for me… where I enjoyed it the first time but would absolutely skip it instantly if given half the choice.
Yesterday was unfortunately not a launch without some growing pains. The servers came up right around 11 am CDT and it took me a bit longer than that to get the 7.3 gb patch applied. However once I attempted to login I was met with good ole error LE-52 indicating that the login server was overloaded. This lasted until around 12 pm CDT, but once you beat the login boss the game was pretty smooth. I did have some minor issues trying to create my character, which has created the weird situation where I have two characters named the same thing. Once we are in the clear I will probably open a support ticket for that, because I am afraid to delete my second BelStillBurns for fear that it also deletes the primary character I am leveling.
For concurrent players Last Epoch blew last July’s patch launch out of the water and has consistently had more players than Path of Exile II. It was a Thursday launch which is not ideal timing for a lot of players, so I figure come this evening and over the weekend we will probably hit new peak numbers for the game as a whole. At one point last night Raxxanterax, a streamer that I have followed since his Diablo III days had 21,000+ viewers which was the highest number any ARPG streamer at that time. Someone referred to him as the Bob Ross of ARPG streamers… which is a title that I feel like he has to fight Pohx for because they both have that sort of energy. If you look at the Last Epoch category though, pretty much all of the Path of Exile streamers are playing it.
I have continued my tradition of Josie causing my first death. Last night I was on the couch and near the end of Act Five when she decided that she absolutely had to stand in front of me. Unlike with Path of Exile II… there is no pause and some random trash mob wandered over and killed me. The cats keep me real, and make sure I know that I have to take breaks in order to give them attention. Quite honestly I appreciate them playing this vital role. There was a bit where I stopped playing for thirty minutes because Josie also decided to lay on top of my keyboard hand, so it makes me think it was absolutely purposeful that she wanted me to stop paying attention to the screen. The furthest I have ever gotten Deathless was into the monolith, because I always die to Rahyeh on my first attempt for the second monolith.
I’ve not had the lucky run that I did the last two times I have played ignite warpath, and have yet to find a Firestarter’s Torch. I really miss the spreading flames ignite proliferation, but since I don’t have this… I am having to pivot into another drop. I got Taste of Blood with a good health on hit role and since both warpath and lunge are currently converting chance to bleed into chance to ignite… it still works as an amazing item for me. I am paring that with whatever rare sword I can pick up that has decent stats, and then have also grabbed a lucky Quicksilver Coil from a nemesis egg, which is not 100% ideal but has high regen, haste, and attack speed. Sadly the stats that I got from the egg are useless form my build but I will take a well rolled Quicksilver Coil regardless of how I got it.
I said this was going to be a short post… but in truth it ended up being just about as long as my normal fare. One thing that I completely missed yesterday is that apparently it was the 16th Anniversary of my blog. The literal Hello World post for this blog was posted on April 17th of 2009. I thought it would be fun to look up the original theme of the blog again and use that for today’s post. This blog started it’s life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking and Raid Leading Blog. Super freaking niche and that did not last for terribly long… I essentially painted myself into a corner and when I stopped having fun raiding… it also meant that I stopped having fun blogging. Those early years are full of posts where I am apologizing for the massive lapses in time between posts. Once I shifted in 2013 to this just being a blog about me and my misadventures things got considerably more easy.
I know I have a pretty regular reader-base… but I am curious. Do I still have any readers that were with me way back in the beginning or at least after my initial viral moment of being featured on WoW Insider? If so drop me a line below because I am legitimately curious. I think a lot more folks know me for Blaugust than pretty much anything else.
The post Froggy and Capy Are Best Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Waiting Room by Fugazi is not only my favorite song from that band… but one of my favorite songs of all time. Right now I am very much sitting in the waiting room, waiting on the Last Epoch servers to come up and the Tombs of the Erased season to start. I did a very dumb thing. I took the day off work, which almost certainly means that the game is going to be unplayable for large chunks of the day. This is pretty much the rule of game launches… that you never take time off for it. However in this case I have a backup plan, or at least some chores that need to get done around the house. So once I wrap this post I will be going in the backyard and continuing the leaf removal process that we have been doing for the last few days so that we can properly open the back yard and set up the patio off our bedroom.
One of the productive things that you can do while waiting on the servers to come up, is to fiddle around with your loot filter. This is legitimately one of my favorite parts of Last Epoch is that I can customize my filter until my heart is content, and honestly… it is way more straight forward than you might think. It seems like each new league I greatly simplify my process and filter out more chaff. This is essentially the base version of my filter and they are applied from the bottom up so you sort of have to remember the order of operations. As the league progresses I will tighten my filter but right now going into the league this is what I am going to be running with.
Since they get applied from the ground up, here is a brief explanation of what each filter does:
Starting at level 5 I am going to hide all Normal aka White Items
Starting at level 15 I am going to hide all Magic aka Blue Items.
Starting at level 40 I am going to hide all Rare aka Yellow Items… and at that point I will probably delete the first two rules to free up some space. Later I will tweak this rule to remove the level requirements and start hiding Purple items.
The next rule is to hide all Idols, because most of them are absolute trash.
The next rule is a Recolor rule, which will show and color any Idols with at least two affixes that I care about on them. I trigger the Emphasis bit which puts the item names in all Caps so that I can know for certain it was triggered by a rule and that it did not just somehow slip through the cracks of my hide rules.
The next rule I am looking for any item that has an affix that I care about coloring it blue. This is my shard fodder rule allowing me to build up crafting resources that I need through salvaging items.
Next up I am looking for any item that has at least TWO affixes that I care about on it and then coloring those purple.
Lastly is my “good item” rule where I am looking for any item with at least 3 affixes that I care about and a total item weight of at least 20 tiers which I color Red.
You can do a lot more but for the time being this is what I am going to roll into the new season with. As the season goes on I will start caring about only wanting specific base types which will further limit the visual clutter from mapping.
In other filter news… Neversink/Filterblade has been updated with a brand new theme called Cobalt. I spent some time last night running with it and I really like it quite a bit. Sure it is going to take awhile to train my brain on what is and what is not something that I care about, but the colors that are being used feel fresh and new. This is in honor of the 10th anniversary of Filterblade, which really is the site you should be using for your item filter needs in Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. In a perfect world I would have EHG hire this team to rework their own item filter visualizations. The thing I miss most when playing Last Epoch is the “tink” sound from a great drop.
I’ve made it to T10 maps after spending two days hunting for another nexus of corruption. I’ve also started to actually see this again, since the T10 mobs are a bit rippier than the T9 and below ones were. I am wondering if I need to tweak my gear to add on more survival bits, or if this is just the point at which armor begins to be ineffective against damage. I’ve tried to do my third ascendancy a few times and I just can’t. Either I need to spend time farming lower tier Sanctums looking for honor resist idols, or I need a really good run of RNG in the Trial of Chaos. If I can get my next two points I can buff all of my resists up to 89. The thing that is super brutal though is there are these plants that spawn from certain monsters that throw out a ton of chaos balls… and they will just fucking rip through you and if there is too much mob density on screen you cannot even see them.
In totally not ARPG news… my friend Mog/Astella has had the foresight to create a Fediverse Hunter Squad for Monster Hunter Wilds. Since you can seemingly be in a bunch of different squads I joined this morning, and it is going to be an excellent time for anyone on Mastodon/The Fediverse that is also playing the game. Essentially you can search for the squad via the id TA8E48PM and then request to join. Mog had already thrown me an invite so this process was greatly simplified for me. Also side note if you are tired of trying to be normal on social media and want a place almost exclusively populated with fellow weirdos… then check out the Mastodon Server that I help administrate. Right now I am on Bluesky and Tumblr, but the real place I consider my home is The Fediverse aka Mastodon aka Gamepad.club.
Anyways! I really hope today’s launch of the new Last Epoch season goes really smoothly. They are getting a ton of press from various ARPG streamers, so I am hoping it pays off massively for them.
The post Sitting In The Waiting Room appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I released a bit of propaganda for the upcoming Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased season. I’ve been asked a few times what I plan on starting for the league. I’ve kicked around a few ideas, namely checking out the Forge Guard updates and running something with a Two-hander and Shield to see how that plays. However I think at least in the short term I am going to revisit some familiar territory. Warpath is without a doubt my favorite skill in Last Epoch. I’ve always loved whirlwind builds as a concept and I do love to spin and win. Over the course of various leagues I have played so many different versions of this build.
Each time I have played this build I have tweaked it a bit and improved upon the previous iterations. This video is recorded of that last version of the build and from what I can tell based on the patch notes and updates… it maybe got buffed a little bit. So unless something drastic changes between now and tomorrow when the league starts, I am going to essentially follow the template of this character. There are a few changes in the passive tree that I will navigate in the moment, but I have a pretty good idea of how I am going to path. I will very likely wing it, because having effectively built five versions of this character… I more or less know what I like. Do I suggest you follow this build? Fuck no. It works for me, but I’ve never done any of the pinnacle content on it, and it still requires you to be in melee range making it more challenging than probably literally any ranged build is going to be.
At some point I am probably going to run up some sort of a bow character and play with the brand new Heartseeker ability. I think this is what my friend Ace is going to start, so I will likely lean on their experiences. I have a feeling I am going to be playing Last Epoch for a few months and as a result I will probably run up multiple characters like I did at the 1.0 release. I probably want to lean into cold damage, because I like the crowd control aspect of that element. I think maybe the fire damage version is going to be more powerful though, but given that I am leaning into fire with my “Spin to Win” character I am not certain that I want to do that on multiple characters.
Another build that I have played a lot in the past that is pretty fun is some sort of Necromancer. For those builds I have tended to follow some of the builds from Aaron Action RPG. This is going to be one of those things that I only build if I get one of two uniques. Aaron’s Will is pretty freaking rare, but if I get one as a drop I will very likely go into the Golem build that uses it. More common is the build designed by actor David Harbor called Wraithlord’s Harbor which goes all in on summoning Wraiths. I’ve never actually made this build but I have always been curious about it. The only problem with minions is that you end up mostly just running around avoiding taking any damage while your swarm of minions overwhelm things. Its relatively comfortable but you also tend to not have much survival.
So right now that is my plan, to stick with the familiar and maybe at some point respec into something Forge Guard to play with some of those new abilities. I know that Warpath Ignite is going to give me a solid start to the league and allow me to build up some resources without much issue. Once I start getting some Circle of Fortune rep going and filling my bank with uniques, I might pivot into some other builds for funsies. I know I am going to at the very least play some sort of bow build, so I might add to my item filter some things to support that so I can begin banking useful gear for leveling purposes. There are some really good leveling uniques that you can lean on pretty heavily. The first thing that I am hoping to find is my old friend the Firestarter’s Torch which really trivializes a lot of the early content with my build.
In non-Last-Epoch news, we got another banger of a patch in Path of Exile II with 0.2.0f landing yesterday evening around 8pm. It includes a bunch of quality of life changes, including some stash tab affinities for various items that were annoying the shit out of me and belts being modified to have additional charm charges by default. I still think the charm system as a whole is complete garbage… but at least we might be able to use more than one of them at a time. Flask automation from Path of Exile was just better. The patch however apparently caused some unintended consequences for users with AMD cards so I suppose that sucked. Being able to bookmark nodes on the Atlas is pretty cool so you can mark those unique maps that you cannot quite run yet, or at least that has been my use of them so far.
Are you going to be firing up Last Epoch for the upcoming season? If so what are you playing? Are you planning on just sticking it out with what I have personally dubbed “Sad League” in Path of Exile II? Drop me a line below.
The post Still Burning appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
