Good Morning Folks. I pretty much spent the entire weekend playing Last Epoch, and I regret nothing. For those who have not been following this particular rabbit hole, I have been playing what I think is my sixth incarnation of an Ignite Warpath Paladin. It has been pretty enjoyable but as I began pushing corruption it started slowing down significantly. I am sure there are probably tweaks that I could make to the build to resurrect it, but honestly I am pretty happy I got as far as I did. Generally speaking up to this point on a character I have made it into Empowered Monoliths, and cleared a few of them before ultimately dipping out because running Monoliths got tedious. Now with the Tombs of the Erased expansion, there is so much additional content that I can easily rip through a dozen without really realizing how many I have done. This is a massive win for Eleventh Hour Games as a whole because I am hearing the same sort of “lost time” paradigm from others.
More than that I have made it further into the endgame than I have on any other build to date. I’ve cleared seven of the ten Harbingers and have been working my way up to 250 corruption so I could attempt the next one. However once I crossed that 200 corruption barrier, things slowed down considerably. The corruption 200 boss and harbinger fight took a good 10 minutes to get through. I had the sustain to and tankyness to keep going almost indefinitely… but I just got a bit tired of the amount of time it took to push through the bosses. When I crossed the 225 line even the Echoes themselves got a bit tedious… which was not helped by the fact that I ran around with Ace this weekend and saw the kind of speed their build had. Essentially they went down the Heartseeker path and could melt Harbingers in under a minute.
I could in theory just respec my level 97 Paladin, but yesterday I decided to go down a different path and just level a brand new one. I am joining the bandwagon of Judgment, more specifically the faux Righteous Fire variant. I don’t quite have the point that turns it into an aura but I will be picking it up next. I started the character around 10 am yesterday and by 9 pm I was on my third Monolith Timeline. We will see if Monolith Lagon is who finally takes my Deathless tag away from me… but Judgment is stupidly powerful. I had a few pieces of gear in my bank that could be repurposed for this mission and am running around 800 Healing Effectiveness, and the suggestion for Uber Aberroth is 1500 Healing Effectiveness for reference. I spent a bit of time writing a brand new loot filter just for this build, and the main reason why I did not respec my other character is I could still in theory use it to farm items.
Even without the Aura the gameplay is pretty enjoyable as you effectively run around for awhile grouping up the mobs and then dropping a single Judgment on the entire pack destroying everything at once. Vengeance is used to as your builder attack, which is proccing Healing Hands which deals fire based damage in an AOE splash while also healing and building ward. I’ve also specced Healing Hands to be my movement ability since I tend to prefer it to Shield Charge in this game. Truth be told the AOE Fire Splash from Vengeance is more than enough damage to clear with and bosses just sort of melt. When I did the Rahyeh timeline the boss did not actually get to fire any abilities off before it was dead. What is wild is on narrow maps you can sort of bait mobs to walk into the Consecrated Ground left by the Judgment which melts anything that walks into it.
Other than Judgment Boy, I have been playing around with a Wolves Primalist that I will eventually turn into a Squirrel build. This is something that I never quite got off the ground in previous seasons and since I have a bank full of the helms, I figured I might as well make a go at it. Aaron Action RPG dropped a video over the weekend about a 1000+ corruption version of the build. The only item that I do not have laying around from this build is a Vessel of Strife. This means I will probably need to farm some T4 Julra to get one of these to drop, which in theory once the Judgment build is entirely online should be a piece of cake. I am sure I could technically do the fight on my Ignite Warpath character but it would take a heck of a lot longer.
I am hoping that by the time I finish leveling through the Empowered Monoliths on my Judgment Character that I will have enough gear to handle higher corruptions. There is a Woven Echo called the Confluence of Oblivion that in theory will allow me to copy the corruption levels of my Warpath paladin over to my Judgment Paladin so that I don’t have to spend quite so much time pushing it up again. I will have to fight all of the Harbingers again, but in theory using Glyph of Envy and some crappy Exalted items I can force my way through the timelines pretty quickly. Mostly right now I just need levels more than anything. I’m currently level 65 and really need to get into my 80s before pushing very far into Empowered Monoliths. I have some more gear in my bank for when I hit my 70s and can start wearing it. Hopefully between that and whatever I happen to find as drops I can push this character up pretty quickly.
Right now Last Epoch is delivering a sufficient dose of dopamine, and since Ace finished out the Harbingers and took out Aberroth I kind of want to do that too. I could probably do it as Ignite Warpath but it would be more of a struggle than I really want to deal with. Essentially this feels like when I build a Penance Brand of Dissolution character in Path of Exile when that was the new hotness. Sure I would have loved to have my own personal build make it all the way through the bosses… but getting seven down seems like good progress.
The post Joining the Judges 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.
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.
Good Morning Folks. I am still spending the majority of my time in Last Epoch currently, as I am trying to push up to level 100. I also did not make it super far in Cycle 2 before the reset, so that means I have only done a handful of the Harbingers that start showing up at the end of empowered monoliths. That is honestly one of my complaints is that they really should have gone for a system like Guardians that appear in Path of Exile maps. As it stands the Harbinger spawns in right after you kill the boss and you effectively have to survive two fights in a row in order to get your loot. This feels REALLY bad when you have a prophecy dump a ton of stuff on the ground and you don’t have time to loot it before ultimately getting attacked again… and feels even worse if you fail the Harbinger and are effectively locked out of any of your rewards. Harbingers should spawn a portal to go into their fight area rather than this whole surprise attack bullshit.
The other thing that has sucked is that the Imperial Undead packs feel way harder than the rest of the map content. I’ve adjusted my playstyle and am way more cautious… but this feels bad. I should in theory be able to continue face-rolling low corruption levels for a while before I have to start playing tense and on edge all the time. However several of the undead appear to have a version of Detonate Dead from Path of Exile, called Necrotic Self Destruct. This is awful and it is messaged so much worse than Detonate Dead is currently, which means you basically have to stay away from looting corpses for a period of time after finishing combat. It just sort of fucks with the flow of things, and feels like it punishes melee play way more than it punishes ranged play. Melee already has to deal with more inherent risk… so stacking additional effects as a “gotcha” always feels a bit miserable. I am dealing with it, but I am also grumpy about it.
At this point, I have dinged level 88 and am working on filling out the last bits of my tree. I had skipped an attack speed talent in the general sentinel tree so I am largely going back and snagging that for the time being. Since I have leech and on-hit effects, more attack speed weirdly means more survival. I’ve swapped out a bunch of gear over the last few days and feel like I am in a much better place than I was previously. The biggest slots that I probably need to find upgrades for are my helm and my belt, which are not really doing much for me. I swapped out one of my rings for a reasonably well-rolled Sunwreath with 2 LP and then failed to land any of the stats I actually wanted on it. I’ve still not seen any eggs from the Nemesis system because I really need to start getting some LP on my weapon cache that I have been stockpiling for that purpose.
I will be honest… I am not sure how much longer I will keep plugging away at Last Epoch. I just don’t enjoy its endgame anywhere near as much as I enjoy the Endgame in Path of Exile. Right now it feels very focused on grinding out Harbingers so that you can fight Aberroth and while I am glad something like that exists… I am just not a bossing-focused person. In Path of Exile tend to kill every boss once and then sell my tokens when I get them to fund more of the nonsense that I actually do enjoy doing. There is no equivalent grind to Delve in Last Epoch, and baseline mapping does not feel anywhere near as fun or rewarding as it does in Path of Exile. That is not to say that I have not enjoyed myself quite a bit during Cycle 2.5, but more just that there is a cap to how much of it I want to do.
Right now my goal is to hit 100 and then potentially finish grinding the Circle of Fortune rep to tier 12. Things have definitely slowed down reputationally, however, because I am just not making that much progress. It could be simply that I am not progressing through maps as fast as I was before, but I think maybe they backloaded the grind so that the first bit was super easy to get and the later levels would be stretch goals. I would also like to make it through all of the Harbingers even though I doubt I will actually kill Aberroth. I got a wild item drop last night, but I am just not sure if I have an alt in me in order to take advantage of it. It was essentially an insanely rolled version of what looked to be Cloud’s Buster Sword.
All of this said… Minecraft has been calling my name again. I’m still building a bit on the side and at some point, I will give you all an update on the progress of my world. The biggest change is that I have dabbled with mods again and installed a shader pack that completely changes the experience. Anyways… I hope your week is going excellently and if you made it this far into the post you are definitely one of those dedicated folks.
The post Detonate Dead is UnFun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
