Hey Folks. I did not end up blogging yesterday because the morning just sort of got away from me. On Monday I talked about my adventures in Pohx League 2.0 with the Atlas Invasion ruleset. Immediately following that post… I rolled a character in Sir Gog’s league which is using a Softcore Ruleset based on the Gauntlet event. Initially my goal was to run up a Commander and do another attempt at Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. I didn’t get that far and am instead some sort of one handed mace sunder build… leaning into fire damage with the goal of at some point farming up the right main attack gem. One of the fellow league participants dumped a bunch of random uniques on me in early act 1… one of which was a Lead Sprinkler which essentially caused me to shift focus to building around that. Truth be told I have something akin to a functional build going, and after a bit of respeccing away from the early bleed iteration it is getting more functional. I do know that I will pretty much NEVER again level using Rolling Magma when I could be using Ground Slam and Crushing Fist any time I block something. The optimal slam tree is close enough to the Righteous Fire tree that I am just going to stop muling an Templar and roll with it going forward, because I really hate Rolling Magma.
I get why someone might like the Gauntlet ruleset, because there are a bunch of shocking changes to the flow of the game. For example it took me three deaths to get off the beach because Hillock was supported by The Maven, had a new leapslam attack, and summoned zombies. I decided to side with “Definitely Oak” here for the extra life, but I am sure that fight is pretty different considering that the other two most certainly were. On some level it is a bit fun to see how ridiculous this event was, but also… it feels like I am just grinding my way through the rough spots by throwing my body at it over and over until the monster falls down. A lot of the Act bosses specifically feel more cheap than they are interesting… I have no clue how in the hell a melee players on hardcore did the Vaal Oversoul for example. Looking back at actual gauntlet footage, a lot of players seemed to be playing cheap builds designed to oneshot encounters from a safe distance. Basically yesterday I decided that as I entered Act 5… that I wasn’t really having any fun. The novelty had warn off and all I was left with was friction… and I’ve never been a “frustration for frustrations” sake type gamer.
I could always roll back to Pohx’s Atlas Invasion league where I am progressed to the point of maps… but honestly… for a limited event with only three weeks left I am just not sure how much effort I am willing to put out there. Settlers of Kalguur specifically is starting to wear very thin. I’ve played the original league, Necro Settlers league, Pohx League 1.0, the Legacy of Phrecia Event, Pohx League 2.0, and Sir Gog’s Gauntlet league. During Phrecia I even pushed all the way to level 100 with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. I just feel like I have done this song and dance too many times to really find much joy in it. Sure it was exciting and refreshing to return to Path of Exile over the weekend… but once I cleared the campaign and got used to the new reality of map bosses in every map… the fun sort of drained away. I feel like I am going through a weird funk right now where I am struggling to find a permanent source of enjoyment. This could be because I have a bunch of real world things going on that are beating me down… but that is all the more reason why I need my diversionary tactics to keep me sane.
I had an absolute blast in Last Epoch, but similarly arrived at a point where I felt like I “beat” the game. There are a whole slew of alternate characters that I could run up and gear… but I am not exactly drawn to doing that right now. I made it further this league than I ever have before… and in large part that is due to the fact that the Judgement build is so freaking broken. I’ve cleared the Harbingers, gotten to 400ish corruption comfortably, and taken down normal Aberroth. I have no real drive to keep grinding away to the point where I could start farming Uber Aberroth. Basically I know what I would need and it either comes from being exceptionally lucky… or diligently trying the same content over and over. I spent a bit of time early in the evening yesterday running Monolith Echoes and they are still a lot of fun in the moment to moment game play, but I am struggling to find anything that really scratches that meaningful progression itch in the game right now.
Last week Path of Exile II released a pretty significant patch that in large part solved some of the loot problems that were happening with the game. I’ve been back and played a few maps and there does in fact appear to be way more loot dropping than had previously been. The challenge there is that adding more loot does not really fix the problems with that game. The moment to moment game play still feels pretty awful, and like I am wading into a pool filled with oatmeal. Yes I can clear entire screens by leaping into a pack of mobs and then hitting Boneshatter which gets amplified by Herald of Ash. Sure that works… but the whole delay and sluggishness of movement makes it feel sort of awful. That same type of build in Path of Exile 1 would feel phenomenal. Everything feels like it is locked behind animation cycles that feel awful to wait on. All of the most popular builds right now are largely focused around exploiting some bug that is currently in the game to cause a single attack to either wipe the entire screen or delete a boss in second. I just do not care enough about the game to shift to building one of those builds right now. So essentially… there is no fun left there either.
There is also a new Diablo IV season going on right now, so in my search for joy… I rolled a character with the idea of playing the whirlwind build that I never quite created during any of the other leagues. I recently resolved my performance issues that I had with the game and others… because at some point windows had decided to set my virtual memory to my slowest drive. Even though the game feels fresh and snappy compared to previous leagues… I am just not feeling it. Diablo IV gameplay is so samey, and it feels like the ideal method for leveling is to run from zone to zone chasing these new invasion events… where players will straight up oneshot everything before you can touch them. Playing a Barbarian was probably the wrong call because I am constantly starved for rage right now, since I am not getting the initial hit on things that are being nuked from orbit by random ranged players. This game would be infinitely more enjoyable if there were no other players in the world. Had they not tried to retrofit Diablo into the MMORPG model… there might have been a really enjoyable game there. I want the ability to play with my friends when I am in the mood to do so… but every other instance of other players in my games is a net loss. Which is ironic… because in games like Guild Wars 2… I love the existence of random players.
So ultimately last night I went in a totally different direction and left behind the ARPG games that have fueled me for the last five or six years. I’ve heard amazing things about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and fired it up yesterday. This game is phenomenal and I have only really just played through the prologue. I am not the biggest fan of quick time events in my combat… but am playing on the lowest difficulty setting as to avoid as much of the annoyance as I can. I would be far happier if this were truly just turn based combat instead of playing “press your luck” to avoid damage. However all of that said… the game world, the characters, the set design… all make up for those frustrations. I already want to know what the heck is going on in this world. It is also shocking how damned good this game looks for coming from what seems to be a really small studio with many of the folks having this as their first game release. I’m already hooked and really like the characters so far.
So I guess this is what I am going to be playing… at least until it too stops bringing me joy. Fun is a deeply ephemeral thing, because all of the above should in theory be fun for me. However for some reason my brain is wired in a specific manner so that very little is really hitting in the right ways.
The post Fun is Ephemeral appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. One of the things that I really miss from Path of Exile is the existence of a Hideout. Even in that game I am constantly annoyed that I have to load into a public area, instead of just spawning in my hideout… but in Last Epoch I miss someplace private to escape to. Ultimately the thing I call the Monolith Ready Room is the closest thing we have, and unfortunately there is no way to directly port into that area without first running an echo. Truth be told if they just gave us that area I would be appeased, because there are times where I just need to empty my inventory of vendor some items… and the end of time always seems to take forever to zone into. I assume is because I am waiting on other player character models to load. The irony of ARPGs is that I always play then in Online mode, so that I can play with friends if I want to… but then spend 99.9% of my time wishing other players didn’t exist.
I spent most of my night running the Nemesis Woven Echo. I had so many items with Zero Legendary Potential that I needed to cook in eggs, and figured this was also a reasonable way to get more Weavers faction. I think I ran 28 of them in total and eventually gave up on creating clusters and just sort of trailed them off into the far distance of the Stolen Lance timeline. Essentially I would run Echoes until I built up enough stability to do the boss fight, and then take it down before returning to Echoes. Later I used this influx of Gaze of Orobyss to push my corruption up to level 400… which is when I realized that you can only consume so many at once. Weirdly running 400 corruption has not felt that different from 300 corruption.
The only problem with running a bunch of Nemesis Echoes, is that you generate a bunch of bad legendaries. This is honestly a massive boon if you plan on doing a bunch of alting… but unfortunately I have not really done that yet other than the reroll over to Judgement. My poor Beastmaster is sitting there languishing right now. I find it extremely hard to bring myself to delete these. There is still something magical feeling about having a Legendary item in this game, even though I can print dozens of them in a single play session. I think what feels so weird about it is that ultimately when you stick a zero LP unique into an egg… getting a legendary now feels like the failed state instead of a win. Ultimately I am holding onto them I think so that I can use them as fodder to “Divine” uniques in the future, since a bad legendary with 4 affixes on it… still counts as an item with 4 Legendary Potential for those purposes.
In other news… my whole grand plan of being able to predicatively unspec my abilities via my relic slot… did not really work out. It seem like when you remove an item that is giving you bonus levels of a skill… it sort of randomly chooses which nodes you lose. It also seems to ignore Keystones and the minimum requirements to get that Keystone. So even though I did some shenanigans to try and make sure I had all of the other points allocated before equipping the relic, and that the Keystone was in fact gained through those points… it didn’t work. So instead I am trying to learn to love not having the Righteous Fire like aura. In truth you end up dealing so much more damage that I am kind of getting used to the flow of it. It makes such a different on bosses/mini-bosses that it almost seems worth it to give up the quality of life to save from having to unspec all the time.
I do sort of feel like I am maybe winding down a bit. I’m focused on the Reign of Dragons timeline in an attempt to get an upgraded version of my Relic. That and trying to farm more memory amber so that I can buy more woven echoes so that maybe someday I can max out that faction. On some level I feel like I have beat the game. While I love everything there is about Circle of Fortune, not having trade does limit my engagement to some extent. What I mean by this is that I reach a point where I am geared enough to do most things, and the instance of me ever finding an upgrade because less and less likely. Essentially you reach a state where the amount of friction required to keep moving forward, is not necessarily worth it. In Path of Exile there is always trade that I can lean on to get the items that I have not seen with my eyes, which makes more things valuable for the sake of picking up to sell. I could probably never play Last Epoch without Circle of Fortune because it amps up the fun aspect too damned much, but it does also mean that much like Diablo games there is a time limit on just how long I am going to stay engaged.
So then becomes the question, that if I am winding down Last Epoch… what do I want to do instead? There is always the sirens song of Path of Exile, and with the new free private leagues is coming another round of PohxLeague. This time it is with the Shifting Stones and Atlas Invasion mechanics… the later of which makes every map spawn a random boss, some of which can be guardians. I’ve never experienced this and it could either be super freaking rippy, or a heck of a lot of fun. Additionally there was a big loot patch over in Path of Exile II, and at least on some level I want to pop back in and run a few maps to see how much improvement it made. Then of course there is also a Diablo IV season going on, but given that Raxx called it the season of the battlepass… I am hesitant to log in and play. If I do end up dropping in I will probably play a Whirlwind Barbarian because it is supposedly S-Tier at this point.
Basically I have no clue what I am going to be doing. The desire to join another Pohx League is shockingly stronger than I thought it might be.
The post Cooking Nemesis Eggs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This character has been a wild ride. You have to remember this was a brand new character that I started late Sunday morning and cobbled together gear from my stash to get up and running. I maintained Deathless until I fought a 230ish Spirits of Fire boss… but honestly I think that was my screw up. The Maxroll guide suggested that I use Transcriber’s Graver and I did not fully understand why… so when a really sweet Sceptre dropped I swapped over to that. Essentially my attack speed plummeted because I was not getting all of those bonuses from wielding a sword, which caused me to not stack anywhere near as much ward as I was used to… causing me to take bigger hits that I would normally be soaking with that ward. Had I NOT made that mistake… I would probably still be Deathless because I have not taken another death since swapping back to the sword.
I ran the woven echo that allowed me to copy my corruption over from another character, which unfortunately did not copy ALL of the corruption over. However I did get my first item that allows you to stack corruption faster. At first I did not realize you had to have it equipped in your idol slot, so it took me a few attempts to trigger it and get several stacks of Gaze of Orobyss, but when I did it allowed me to push my corruption on that Monolith past 300. Last night I took down my Eighth and Ninth Harbingers and this morning I copied as much corruption as i could to that final timeline. Unfortunately I am going to have to kill at least one Shade before I can get it back up to 300 and take on the final Harbinger. After that I will probably make an attempt on Aberroth tonight.
My gear is still not amazing but I am sitting at around 1200 Healing Effectiveness which is the engine that you use to fuel Judgement. I had a shield sitting in my bank that I picked up from somewhere and had been holding onto in case I wanted to try out this build, and quite honestly I am not sure I can ever replace it. If I pick up a 4LP version of another shield I might slam it over onto it… but it does have a T4 sealed Physical Resistance that is pretty freaking nice. Other than that I have made decent slams with a Transcriber’s Graver and a Sunwreath and I have an LP3 version of the Graver waiting for a better sword to slam into it. Ultimately this unique gets used mostly because it is hard to get a lot of Spellpower on a Sword.
I’ve also got some scuffed Legendaries that I am using in my build. First up there is a Code of an Erased Sentinel that I am mostly using because it gives me a massive amount of healing effectiveness in addition to +1 to all skills. I would really like to have one with a useful skill on it as well, but so far that has not been in the cards. I’ve slammed 20% Increased Health onto an Immolator’s Oblation which is good… but I would really rather have an LP2 at least that I can slam maybe a high Hybrid Health roll and decent Healing Effectiveness roll on it. Finally I have a super scuffed pair of Wing Guards that I am mostly using only to get more attack speed and haste because the faster I hit, the faster I can stack ignite on myself which gets converted to spell damage… and those hits also generate a lot of ward. Ultimately I will probably use these until I can replace them with the final suggested item for the build, Immortal Vise, that drops from Aberroth.
I am somewhat disappointed in the way that The Woven faction levels. I assumed that collecting memory amber itself would eventually fill the bar. However it appears that this is mostly leveled by placing Woven Echoes on the atlas. Since I have been so focused on pushing corruption and killing the Harbingers, I have not really been spending much time interacting with the Atlas Tree. Once I have taken down the last Harbinger and Aberroth I will likely shift focus to trying to grind this up. If I can fill all of the factions bars I will consider this a very successful league. I also want to see what the other woven echoes that I have not unlocked do.
Speaking of filling bars… last night night I went on a prophecy spree and finished pushing Circle of Fortune all of the way to Rank 12. Getting double rewards from Prophecies means that my screen is about to be complete nonsense. What I am tentatively planning on doing is going on another spending spree right before I take on Aberroth. The idea is that I want to see if stacking “boss kill” prophecies that reward Unique items will cause more of the specific drop pool from that encounter to also drop. Essentially I need a bunch of items from Aberroth for the final version of this build, and most of them I need with at least LP1 on them. Mostly getting that means increasing the amount of total drops and I am thinking by stacking boss drop uniques it might fill that role. Who knows though if that is even a thing, because in theory the prophecies could be limited to generic unique drops. Either way it is well worth testing.
One parting thought is some information that Ace shared with me. One of the nodes that you probably want to pick up on the Weaver tree is Warden’s Echo. What this does is give you a 20% chance to see dungeon specific encounters while you are in Monolith Echoes. These have the chance of dropping Dungeon specific uniques as well as a really high chance of dropping Dungeon keys. This means that in theory you might NEVER have to actually run the dungeons to get the items you want from them. This is a massive win in my book and on this second character I absolutely shifted the way in which I was speccing out my tree to make sure I could fit both nodes. After doing this… it feels like MOST maps seem to have these extra encounters, just adding more excitement to the Monolith.
On one hand… I am glad I made the decision to roll the overpowered build of the league. On the other hand I am a bit disappointed that I did not make it all the way to Aberroth on a build of my own design. However I am pretty proud of the seven of ten that I got with it. I might continue to tweak that build to see if I can make it go further, but for now I am happy enough and just want easier access to high end content.
The post Faith in Judgement appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I’ve been playing Last Epoch almost exclusively at this point and I have not only progressed into the Empowered Monoliths but reached a point with my build where I am beginning to thrive there. Right now Last Epoch has legitimately some of the best systems design in isometric loot chase action role-playing games. Some of the new crafting options for example are exceptionally fun because they lean into this pattern of “do a thing” and then “get a crafting bench”. Temporal Sanctum as a concept was really neat, but the problem with it has been the generally shitty state of dungeons as a whole. These new systems however feel like they understand the failings of dungeons and are effectively making better versions of them.
Since I am doing fairly well in Monoliths I have begun actually caring about trying to progress the Forgotten Knights faction. This is essentially a ladder to progress your way through the endgame and involves stacking corruption and then fighting harbinger encounters at these new corruption levels. Mechanically the Faction concept is pretty cool and I have enjoyed the way they have implemented a brand new one with the Weavers. However for a game with such amazing systems design work… it is all the more jarring when you encounter a legacy fragment that is not so well thought out. Basically the entire process of stacking corruption sucks, and while they have attempted to band-aid this… I feel like the entire design needs to be rethought in a major way.
So essentially each timeline has its own corruption level which determines how much additional difficulty that timeline has. Like I said they have added band-aids in the form of a catch up mechanic to bring one timeline up to the same level as your highest progressed timeline, as well as a specific type of woven echo that lets you transfer corruption level from one character to another. However the general concept of corruption just feels bad at least compared to the other systems. Ultimately you want to build up timeline stability which allows you to fight the boss of the timeline… which adds a Gaze of Orobyss stack… which then allows you to gain more corruption when you kill the Shade of Orobyss and reset the timeline progress. This whole song and dance of limping your way through corruption levels just feels poorly thought out.
After you have reset your timeline the first time, a new node shows up called the Sanctuary of Eterra which lets you fight a little boss fight to reduce your corruption and dial back the difficulty of your timeline. This entire process was aggressively fine earlier in the life of this game, but now that we have seen the type of systems that Eleventh Hour Games is capable of producing… the entire structure of corruption just feels really bad. Clearly the team has learned a lot of lessons in system design in the years that have past since the idea of timelines and corruption was first “ideated”. I just think that they can do much better, because the entire thing feels deeply cumbersome and unwieldy.
Ultimately what I would like to see is something akin to the way that Greater Rifts are handled in Diablo III and the Pit is handled in Diablo IV. Essentially once you have reached a specific corruption level you can then set the level of your timeline up to that corruption level via a drop down or slider… and make this value be set at an account level. This makes it beneficial for a player to push as far as they can possibly go… and then easily dial things back a bit to a very comfortable and clear farming level. I cannot tell you how much it makes my eye twitch that I need to get to 175 on my timeline corruption to do the next Harbinger but it is very likely that I will overshoot that number at be running it at 178 or something like that. Having a way to clearly set the difficulty of each timeline would go so far to making the whole corruption concept feel a bit better.
I also feel like the whole concept of timeline stability is not the most amazing system in the world, but I see it as a sort of necessary evil. It serves the role of keeping someone from simply farming the same boss over and over and is an alternative to the Path of Exile design of collecting key fragments. I would rather grind Monolith Echoes and fill up an arbitrary bar than attempt to farm 10 Maven Fragments to get a key. I feel like both Corruption and Stability were designed hand in hand, but also feel like Stability can function entirely on its own without the existence of the current state of Corruption. I think EHG understands that the corruption system is problematic, otherwise they would not keep trying to apply quality of life band-aids to it. Gaze of Orobyss itself was a band-aid to allow folks to raise it faster and the account corruption transfer woven echo is brand new attempting to stabilize a different problem. Mostly I think it is time to take the sledgehammer to the system and just make it better instead of spackling over the holes.
Ending on a more positive note however… I cannot fully explain the level of joy it brings me to run around with my Travelers Backpack in Last Epoch. This is an item that was given to early players of Last Epoch in honor of them selling 500k units. You can see a higher detailed version over on the Last Epoch Forums, but it is full of so many references. It has the original kickstarter era Last Epoch logo, the rolled up thing at the top I believe is based on a desk sized mouse pad that they sent out to early backers, and there is even a tiny Mike head transposed on top of what I think is a Bee model. The map that is rolled up on the side of the backpack looks similar to the old kickstarter-era world map. Mostly it is just a really fun tchotchke showing that you have been around for awhile. I kinda hope they do more things like this in the future as they continue to transition between phases of the game.
The post Corruption is Cumbersome appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
