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! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.
The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:
One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.
The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.
The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.
We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.
I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues.
All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship.
The post Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
