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Correction: Static hits a set number of enemies chosen randomly. It is an awesome alpha trike on bosses. At level 23 my statis does 23,000 base damage at full charge which is insane.
 
Things I learned about Last Epoch the last couple days:

1: Legendary shrines are awesome, but you will not get gear that will work for any character you are building.

2: Static Orb is fun! Burns through mana but kills everything fast.

3: Most importantly, do not use other people's builds. Make your own that work for you. More fun, and more efficient for how you play.
 
Things I learned about Last Epoch the last couple days:

1: Legendary shrines are awesome, but you will not get gear that will work for any character you are building.

2: Static Orb is fun! Burns through mana but kills everything fast.

3: Most importantly, do not use other people's builds. Make your own that work for you. More fun, and more efficient for how you play.

I never did get the attraction to meta gaming an ARPG. the fun is in the experimentation.

If I have to fault POE for anything it is that POE probably is most responsible for the rise in meta gaming because they made respeccing a character so difficult that most people would rather follow a recipe while leveling than invest 40 hours in a character that doesn't work.
 
I tried playing Outer Wilds and... I just couldnt get into it. What bothered me most was that you only had 20 minutes of exploring before you died and got time looped back to the beginning. It sort of killed any kind of momentum I had after doing it a number of times. Even though the game got overwhelmingly positive responses, I guess Im the spoiler. Rating DNF. 🤷‍♂️
 
So I played a lot of LAST EPOCH this weekend and I eventually started to get bored/annoyed with the Acolyte. I think the issue I was having is that I feel like the Acolyte more than any class it heavily gear dependent,, or maybe I was just unlucky. Eitherway she ground to a halt around level 30. I was having a really hard time having strong minions and also not being fairly useless myself.

I decided to start another mage/runemaster and go with a bunch of spells I hadn't used before to see how they work. I'm now a convert to the spell STATIC. The spell has a power-up function that is driven my how far you have walked since the last time to cast it. At level 20 right now and when I have full charge it does a 5000+ damage AOE. I can mostly clear everything by simply kiting them into a group and casting it. Lost of fun.

Haven't dug too deeply in to the who Rune mechanic but it also seems to be very AOE driven, which is OK by me.

So my suggestion for anyone playing is to try out a static Mage/Runemaster. It's a lot of fun!
Have you tried a Spellblade yet? Should be stupid powerful, but after leveling to mastery(Ok, admittedly that does not take long), specced into Shatter Strike, started combat, and discovered that for whatever reason I now had about half the mana I had before, and did not have nearly enough to use Shatter Strike with any kind of pace. Really frustrating. I am sure it gets better fairly quickly, and looking at skills, the class should get uber strong with high DPS and tankability(god I love Flame Ward), but the early 20s are going to be a nightmare.

Also, Last Epoch is hell for ADD players like me. I will be going along, and all of a sudden a build idea hits, and I got to try it out at least a bit. So I have a long list of characters in the early to mid 20s...
 
Have you tried a Spellblade yet? Should be stupid powerful, but after leveling to mastery(Ok, admittedly that does not take long), specced into Shatter Strike, started combat, and discovered that for whatever reason I now had about half the mana I had before, and did not have nearly enough to use Shatter Strike with any kind of pace. Really frustrating. I am sure it gets better fairly quickly, and looking at skills, the class should get uber strong with high DPS and tankability(god I love Flame Ward), but the early 20s are going to be a nightmare.

Also, Last Epoch is hell for ADD players like me. I will be going along, and all of a sudden a build idea hits, and I got to try it out at least a bit. So I have a long list of characters in the early to mid 20s...

I haven't played a spell blade for many of the same reasons you are having trouble. When faced with the base bonus of +30% elemental damage with Runemaster, +50 mana+ INT damage boost for Sorcerer or .. whatever spell blade has, I chose one of the other two.

I'm thinking of reworking my Mage/Runemaster because I want to try and sort out the whole Ward thing. I've never really gotten ward working with my mages.
 
An early morning session with Last Epoch has me better understanding the ward mechanic. I have yet to read an online guide to ow ward works, though, because I want to solve this on my own. :LOL:

Essentially there seem to be two characteristics of Ward: Ward Generation and Ward retention.

As far as I can tell, Ward Retention determines the minimum ward that you will retain after all of your generated ward disappears. So, for instance, if I take a passive tat adds 20 to ward retention that would make my ward stop declining at 20, if I added 50% ward retention that ward would be 30. My mage has that resting ward value at about 90 right now, which is OK, it certainly helps with survivability given how active war generation is... but there are a lot of ways to increase ward generation, which seems to be the stat you really want to improve.

90 ward retention is not a good as 30 ward generation, for instance, because generation happens so rapidly that in combat would will constantly be mitigating incoming damage. 30 ward generation per second in a fight that lasts 5 seconds is equivalent to 150 ward.

Hopefully this even I will get more time to explore further. I'm lookin to create a Runemaster Disintegrate Tank for the late game as I am rolling up on the end of the main quest and might finish it tonight.

But then I have been playing Last Epoch for years now and have completed the main quest more times than I can count at this point.

For fun, here is my first impressions when I played Last Epoch in early beta in 2019:

 
An early morning session with Last Epoch has me better understanding the ward mechanic. I have yet to read an online guide to ow ward works, though, because I want to solve this on my own. :LOL:

Essentially there seem to be two characteristics of Ward: Ward Generation and Ward retention.

As far as I can tell, Ward Retention determines the minimum ward that you will retain after all of your generated ward disappears. So, for instance, if I take a passive tat adds 20 to ward retention that would make my ward stop declining at 20, if I added 50% ward retention that ward would be 30. My mage has that resting ward value at about 90 right now, which is OK, it certainly helps with survivability given how active war generation is... but there are a lot of ways to increase ward generation, which seems to be the stat you really want to improve.

90 ward retention is not a good as 30 ward generation, for instance, because generation happens so rapidly that in combat would will constantly be mitigating incoming damage. 30 ward generation per second in a fight that lasts 5 seconds is equivalent to 150 ward.

Hopefully this even I will get more time to explore further. I'm lookin to create a Runemaster Disintegrate Tank for the late game as I am rolling up on the end of the main quest and might finish it tonight.

But then I have been playing Last Epoch for years now and have completed the main quest more times than I can count at this point.

For fun, here is my first impressions when I played Last Epoch in early beta in 2019:

I have not delved into ward in any detail, merely noting that a ton of stuff my sorcerer did generated ward, and that it faded away fast. It does alot of work, but on a small scale mostly(except Fire Ward ofc). Ward retention affects how fast the ward fades(ie 100 % ward retention means your ward lasts twice as long I think), Ward Decay Threshold determines the minimum it can decay to. Or to simplify into terms I can understand, ward gud, ward retention gud, and ward decay threshold gud, get all 3 and not die as much. And yes, that last sentence is exactly how I think about it ingame. I did see a passing comment somewhere that you want 300 % ward retention by the end of the campaign. How true that is, I have no idea, my goal today is to hit at least level 30 on a character so I got a ways to go.
 
I have not delved into ward in any detail, merely noting that a ton of stuff my sorcerer did generated ward, and that it faded away fast. It does alot of work, but on a small scale mostly(except Fire Ward ofc). Ward retention affects how fast the ward fades(ie 100 % ward retention means your ward lasts twice as long I think), Ward Decay Threshold determines the minimum it can decay to. Or to simplify into terms I can understand, ward gud, ward retention gud, and ward decay threshold gud, get all 3 and not die as much. And yes, that last sentence is exactly how I think about it ingame. I did see a passing comment somewhere that you want 300 % ward retention by the end of the campaign. How true that is, I have no idea, my goal today is to hit at least level 30 on a character so I got a ways to go.

I got to the final fight in the story line at level 52 early this morning and remembered what a ball buster of a fight it is when your gear is sub par, so I spent most of my morning crafting new gear.

At that point I repeated what I now remember is an old thought process with Last Epoch... by the time I was geared for the final boss I was actually geared to start late game monolith farming. You can start monolith farming pretty much the moment the quest line takes you to the End Times zone... it's just that monolith maps start at level 58, so not much hope of successfully farming those aps at level 20.

Anyway, with decent gear and a serviceable build I can farm level 58 maps fairly easily, easier than the final boss, anyway, so that is what I will do now. I'll go back and destroy the final boss at some point down the road, but I love the idea that in the last Epoch you don't need to defeat the final boss in order to play end game content, so I'm going to go back to full time gear farming and build experimentation.
 
Made it to level 41 on my Bladedancer today. Fun build to play. Gear is frustrating as I don't know yet how best to get upgrades, and upgrades do not seem to drop much kinda thing. I know you are supposed to craft the upgrades, but there is a real limit to how much you can upgrade each piece of gear, and it is making the whole thing frustrating. On the other hand, with the gear I have, I am having not much trouble so will wait and see. Time for a break though. Maybe a couple more levels before bed, but first something away from the computer.
 
Made it to level 41 on my Bladedancer today. Fun build to play. Gear is frustrating as I don't know yet how best to get upgrades, and upgrades do not seem to drop much kinda thing. I know you are supposed to craft the upgrades, but there is a real limit to how much you can upgrade each piece of gear, and it is making the whole thing frustrating. On the other hand, with the gear I have, I am having not much trouble so will wait and see. Time for a break though. Maybe a couple more levels before bed, but first something away from the computer.

I set my loot filter for weapons to key on specific affixes and then I duplicate it to the same affixes but also specific weapon types and I show in the same color but capitalized.

The capitalized ones I put into "in development" tab for later crafting, the rest go into the "to shatter" tab to harvest affixes. The rest of it I ignore since it is a very minimal source of gold anyway. Most low level uniques are very situational or bad, but I save them all in a tab for uniques just in case a future character might need it.

Itemization should start getting easier after level 41 too. As you open up idol slots you will be getting another source of damage and resistance buffs, but mostly you'll start getting Exalted gear drops more often. It's rare that you'll find an exalted drop with the exalted affix you need for your build but you will sometimes find one to change your course and try a new build to exploit the gear.

When you reach level 53.. ish, and have descent defenses go to the End Times and try running a monolith map. They are a descent source of exalted gear and allow a bit of target farming.

Finally, save your "Hope" glyphs for gear that you find that already has a couple affixes that you want already. Hope glyphs give you more crafting capability, but are really wasted on a white or blue item.
 
OK, I am now in the Last Epoch bandwagon. Playing Acolyte and have a question: which golem is best? Blood, Frost or Fire?
 
OK, I am now in the Last Epoch bandwagon. Playing Acolyte and have a question: which golem is best? Blood, Frost or Fire?

That is a tough call. I'd say that early on Blood is better just for the added healing, and late game frost is better for the crowd control. But you'll play fire golem because DPS is what the cool kids play. 😄
 
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Also, a few pointers on creating a functional build in Last Epoc:

1) The more specific the gear bonus, the higher the gain per-point. Lightning Damage has a higher ceiling than Spell/Melee Damage has a higher ceiling than Elemental Damage

2) Given the fact of 1, focus on gathering affixes for the damage type you want to do, and the attack type you want to use... except...

3) In early/mid game I'd suggest focusing on attack-type damage and, if applicable, generic elemental damage. The reasoning here is that it will give you an equal boost to all skills that you will have access to and give you the best comparison of the skills... in mid/late game as you hone in on a set of skills start looking for the specific modifiers for your skills.

4) Learn the basics of Damage type interactions with Affixes so that you don't build for a bonus that your skill can't use.

Skills with Damage over Time -- Can't cause critical strikes

Skills that are Channeled -- unaffected by Attack/Cast speed

Poison, Necrotic and void damage have no generic bonuses... as such, plan on dedicating heavily to one damage type for these attacks and choosing your specialized skills based on the same damage type.

If you have a DOT or Channel skill and you stacked these affixes, they are doing nothing for you.

Likewise, if you play a character that does poison AND necrotic or Void AND physical your itemization will end up very problematic since you will only be applying half your gear bonuses to each attack.

the only caveat to this is taking a skill that does a damage type that you aren't geared for but causes vulnerabilities to skills you are geared for.

Hope that helps.
 
@jmotivator is Lagon the last main quest line fight? Cuz holy hell what a nightmare. Going to take a break and come back to that...
 
@jmotivator is Lagon the last main quest line fight? Cuz holy hell what a nightmare. Going to take a break and come back to that...

No, but that is the ball buster fight I was talking about. He was the final fight during the beta.

Full disclosure, I haven't actually done much after Lagon at this point, I've been doing too many monoliths. There is a major end game mechanic that unlocks soon after Lagon, but you are better off running monoliths for a while before you head back to Lagon.

I got to Lagon at like level 53, lost the fight, went back to my stash and cobbled together the best defenses I could through gear changes and crafting and then ran Monoliths until level 58... and then better geared and better defended I went back and murdalized him.

That said, I have some tips on cheese-ing that fight if you want them.. they don't make it an easy win but it makes it a lot easier. if you want the tips read on....

(Spoilery Cheatish Tip Ahead)

There is a spot on the Lagon stage of the fight where it is hard for Lagon to hit you. If you move all the way to the left and just a bit down the steps Lagon's lightning breath and claw can't hit you. When you are in that position the only thing he can hit you with if the time delayed AOE which you can avoid. He will swat you though if you get out of the way of the AOE and walk into an area where he can swat you.

The Middle stage is not a DPS test as much as it is a Frogger minigame. You have to kill enough enemies to graduate to the final stage, I think, but the only real threat in the frogger minigame are the waves.
 
No, but that is the ball buster fight I was talking about. He was the final fight during the beta.

Full disclosure, I haven't actually done much after Lagon at this point, I've been doing too many monoliths. There is a major end game mechanic that unlocks soon after Lagon, but you are better off running monoliths for a while before you head back to Lagon.

I got to Lagon at like level 53, lost the fight, went back to my stash and cobbled together the best defenses I could through gear changes and crafting and then ran Monoliths until level 58... and then better geared and better defended I went back and murdalized him.

That said, I have some tips on cheese-ing that fight if you want them.. they don't make it an easy win but it makes it a lot easier. if you want the tips read on....

(Spoilery Cheatish Tip Ahead)

There is a spot on the Lagon stage of the fight where it is hard for Lagon to hit you. If you move all the way to the left and just a bit down the steps Lagon's lightning breath and claw can't hit you. When you are in that position the only thing he can hit you with if the time delayed AOE which you can avoid. He will swat you though if you get out of the way of the AOE and walk into an area where he can swat you.

The Middle stage is not a DPS test as much as it is a Frogger minigame. You have to kill enough enemies to graduate to the final stage, I think, but the only real threat in the frogger minigame are the waves.
Just ran a couple monoliths, seem pretty doable at my level(54). Loot drops in first one was pretty meh. Second one I got two uniques, one set piece, a rare shard and a couple nice idols.
 
Just ran a couple monoliths, seem pretty doable at my level(54). Loot drops in first one was pretty meh. Second one I got two uniques, one set piece, a rare shard and a couple nice idols.

That's thinking with Monoliths.
 
So now that I know more about Ward... 3 years after I started playing this game... I can't understand how I ever got by without it.

Ward is easily the cornerstone of your defense. When you stack Ward generation, retention and threshold your character can become nearly unkillable.

I guess my initial reservation with Ward is I looked at all the ward buffs with the eyes that "Ward" was just "Shield" by another name... and maybe I was biased against shield due to how situational it is useful in games like PoE... but ward is not like any shield in any other ARPG.

What makes ward powerful in Last Epoch are all the reasons it is different.

1) Ward is CONSTANTLY regenerating. If you stack 200 ward per second between Passives and gear, you will CONSTANTLY be stacking 200 every second up to your cap.
2) If you stack threshold you can have a Ward cap well above your health. I'm only starting to spec into ward heavy defense and I have 1200 ward cap -vs- 1000 health, and when I lose all of my ward (an amount of damage that would have killed my pre-Ward character) I just need to break away from the fight for a second or two and my ward is back. My teleport grants me 500 ward immediately.
3) Ward mitigates ALL incoming damage. It is essentially a constantly and quickly replenishing health pool.

Once I upgrade my flat damage mitigation a bit more the standard minions will basically do no damage to me.

I'm a convert.
 
I think I finally got my stash properly organized, at least for now. 14 tabs total. I think I like to store too much stuff...

stash.jpg
 
I think I finally got my stash properly organized, at least for now. 14 tabs total. I think I like to store too much stuff...

View attachment 67496315

Mine is still a work in progress.

The game currently hates me. I haven't gotten a purple drop for my damage stats yet, and I have like 4 tabs of purples.
 
I have put my plans on doing gaming videos on hold for a while as things have changed dramatically in my schedule over the last few months, but I am sitting here doing some gear farming and decided I just wanted to chat at the screen for a bit while I did so.

THere will be a fairly leangthy video of me talking a about Last Epoch a bit, my build, and some just kind of how the mage experimentation is going. More of a friendly chat than a how to.

It will go up whenever it's done uploading and processing, so tomorrow morning sometime.
 
View attachment 67492581

OK, here's a brief strategy guide for Iratus.

My ideal battle group (left to right): Fallen Dhampir > Ghoul > Werewolf > Tank (Bone Golem or Black Widow)

Top minions to take:

Ghoul- an excellent DPSer. She can move back and forth along the line and can be good anywhere. Her special ability can instakill any non-boss with 30% vigor left, and it heals her 100% too. A must have.

Werewolf- best all around damage dealer. Can also move back and forth along the line, and great special abilities that can attack twice per turn, debuff armor, and ravage the back lines of the enemy at up to 300% damage in a single hit. The one weakness is their low vigor, and they need allies or artifacts to heal.

Fallen Dhampir- another good all around S-tier minion, with multiple attack abilities and can heal by lifestealing with select stances and attacks. She can fight well all along the line too. Blood Phantasm has similar abilities and would make a good substitute if you cant create Dhampir yet.

If youre in the early game and cant build any of these, then a Reaper is a good low level damager to begin with. Bride of Iratus is also an excellent sniper as long as she stays in the rear, but beware of her low vigor.

Tanks: Bone Golem has low offensive capability but is a super damage soaker. Can heal on its own too, so its almost impossible to kill.

Black Widow is also very good- slightly better offensive capabilities than the golem.

If you cant get either of them during the early game, then Dark Knight makes a decent tank, provided you armor it up. It pairs good with a Skeleton too.

Stress damage dealers: you also need the occasional stress attacker to take down those with heavy armor. I would recommend Mummy- they can fight from any position, has high vigor and versatile attacks.

As far as leveling up Iratus himself, focus on the buffs for your minions first, then work on getting spells, unless its your first game.

There you go, good luck!
On sale for 5 bucks, picking it up.
 
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On sale for 5 bucks, picking it up.
Let us know if its good or not!

On a side note: playing Last Epoch with the acolyte lich. Contrary to all the build guides, I am maintaining a golem because it gets lonely, but I wonder if Im doing it wrong. Anyone have any ideas?
 
Let us know if its good or not!

On a side note: playing Last Epoch with the acolyte lich. Contrary to all the build guides, I am maintaining a golem because it gets lonely, but I wonder if Im doing it wrong. Anyone have any ideas?
In playing around with builds, it seems like there really are no wrong builds. Some are more efficient(not the ones I am making tho~), but it is hard to make a build that cannot get the job done.

I would note that according to the Last Epoch tools, 47.2 % of all the necro builds they have listed there specialize in Bone Golem.
 
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