Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Happy Labor Day holiday weekend for our fellow countryfolk. We start off this show with Thalen making a reference to a dream that Bel had… which forces a recounting of the madness. From there, we talk about Last Epoch and a completely silly build that Bel is playing, where things explode around him without doing anything. Grace also talks a bit about their similarly silly single minion build that just melts most things. Bel talks a bit about YoloMouse and how it solves the problem of not being able to find your cursor on screen. From there, Tam talks a bit about PEAK, which is a new popular multiplayer frustration adjacent experience. Bel talks a bit about the launch of the Third Edict league in Path of Exile II and how it seems like none of the streamers are actually having fun… and he most definitely was not. We close out the show with some discussion about some of the recent updates to Star Citizen and how it continues to shape up to actually being a game.
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. I failed entirely to write a blog post yesterday because I guess other things were going on. I am still playing Last Epoch and still having quite a blast… but there was a brief period of time where I was having less of one. The problem with yolo-ing your way through an ARPG is that occasionally you run into problems and you have to pivot. One of the best parts about Last Epoch is just how easy that pivot ends up being. Essentially I was steamrolling over the top of everything with great impunity… then got to empowered monoliths and started taking oneshots left and right. The difficulty curve of Last Epoch can be exceptionally steep at times and essentially I had to re-evaluate my build and figure out how to fix the problems.
So the first problem that I knew was when I hit Empowered Monoliths I had just shy of 2000 life… which was simply not enough because these mobs were taking ALL of my life at once. Another problem is that I was not crit immune, and when one of these things would hit me… it was hitting me for like 4000 health at once… and there would never be a way for me to fix that. Essentially there are two paths to remove critical strikes… one is to stack Reduced Bonus Damage Taken from Critical Strikes to 100% and the other is to stack Critical Strike Avoidance to 100%. I went the first route… but one of the items that I have also happens to have some of the second stat. I also tried to grab as much health as I could while still maintaining 75% in all resistances… which means I am using a belt with a champion stat that I do not care about just to get hybrid health and cold resistance.
The other problem that I was dealing with was that I was just straight up getting swarmed constantly, and when I had multiple champions and weavers mobs on me at once… all doing big AOE attacks that I needed to avoid… the visual clarity went out the window. So I started trying to evaluate what was happening with my character to determine why I was having this problem. Ultimately I went all in on Divine Bolts which meant that every time I encountered a new mob I was firing off like five fireballs that went in random directions… that could often pull things off screen… causing smite to occasionally proc and do more AOE damage… leading to the end result of everything in the damned zone seeking me out to murder me. Its really great if you can just tank all the damage in the universe because your build is pulling for you… its less cool when you are a bit on the squishy side. So I dropped 3 points in one trait and 4 points in the other trait… and redistributed those points in other areas that gave me pure survival.
My updated tree looks a little bit like this. Essentially I poured more points into Holy Icon and Reverence of Duality and the end result is that I am now level 92 and have a little over 2800 health with full crit immunity which is a marked improvement. You can check out my build profile here if you are curious about more fine details than that. All told, the game once again became a pretty chill grinding experience and as of last night I started actually trying to increase corruption so that I could take out more Harbingers and progress that faction tree. I’ve never really felt much of a need or desire to push corruption before now, so we will see how this goes. I am just not a very bossing focused person in these games, and instead prefer to just keep grinding maps indefinitely.
As far as my Weavers Tree goes aka the Atlas Passive Tree for POE vets, I have gone all in on Loot Lizards. Essentially they really are the thing that makes mapping feel so damned good in this game, because they are tiny explosions of loot… and now that I have all of my points allocated into making more of them spawn it all feels so much better. I need to sort out where I am going to spend my points next however, because as my corruption levels increase I will gain access to a few more maps that require specific corruption levels to run. I think at this point I have unlocked everything that I currently have access to at least until I push to rank 8 in the Weavers Faction.
Another significant change that I made is to swap out Lunge for Healing Hands converted into a movement skill. Lunge is my favorite of the Sentinel movement abilities… it is fast and zooms to a specific target which is ultimately the behavior that I usually want in this game. However it doesn’t really have a ton of utility. Whereas Healing Hands is a pretty potent healing/regeneration ability that moves to a target location instead of a target mob… allowing you to use it as a way of speeding up moving through the gaps in mob density and also just firing it off as a point blank attack if you are stacked on top of a boss or to get out of the range of an attack quickly. Largely I did all of this to gain the extra healing from it…. and at first I thought I would be proccing it constantly, but Warpath only counts as hitting for the purpose of this ability when you first start channeling meaning that I either needed to keep pulsing the attack or just give up on the auto procs. As a result I just removed a few points and will buff the total regeneration amount once I have finished leveling back up the ability.
I will admit however that there is part of me that really wants to try out the shenanigans that Pohx is doing. Essentially Judgment can be turned into a Righteous Fire like aura ability, and you gain damage for it by stacking Healing Effectiveness… which means you are healing yourself for stupid amounts of health. Combine this with block and heal on block, you end up with a near indestructible character that can push high corruption. Now that I have started stabilizing my gear… I might start adding in some of the items for this build to my loot filter so I can farm them up while grinding monoliths to potentially run up a second Paladin entirely for the purpose of creating this build. I could of course respec my Warpath character, but I think I would rather preserve the current state of it and play up something else for the purpose of this build instead.
Mostly this morning I wanted to talk through the process of how I am fixing my build, to largely go through some of the logic behind my madness. I am hoping to push more corruption tonight and do another harbinger before moving on to a new timeline to do it all over again.
The post My Own Worst Enemy appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
