Blessings are just way too RNG

Feedback and Suggestions
21

When a blessing rolls, it rolls for what blessing and then for what range. You can redo the roll over and over by simply farming the boss, blessings only roll with one stat on them so you do not need to try to hit multiple different things getting perfect at the same time.

Compare this to a perfect item, you not only need specific affixes to spawn to get a perfect item, it needs to roll t7 exalt and on the specific affix associated with the build, it also needs the perfect base and the other affixes have to be good too, you then need the roll ranges to be high. A lot of these steps are easier because of crafting, but it is still orders of magnitude less likely than perfect blessings.

22

I must have been having a very uniquely flavored playthrough thus far, I’m having what feels like a lot more luck in getting desired affixes to T5/6/7 than getting the blessings I want lol.

I still feel like my original feedback stands, blessings should be less RNG to progress, but also recognize that I appear to be in the minority. Might change my mind after a few more characters with less bad luck haha.

23

The main thing is that you can get thousands of items to drop in the time it takes to kill a boss once though. So while it is statistically more likely to get perfect blessings, it takes a while to do so… also you are talking about getting decent gear - not perfect gear.

24

Same though for a decent, not perfect blessing. I’d have been fine with 15% and up, but when my bad luck ran out I got 19% because EHG felt bad for me. xD

25

For that affix slot in particular you could have gotten crit avoid instead if you got a high roll. Both the all res and the crit avoid are roughly equal in how many affixes they save most builds. So the odds of a good blessing in that slot are rather high.

1 Like
26

@lonnieep84 I’m going to agree with @Llama8 that getting crit damage reduction is more important than perfectly capping resistances. My poison is 59% and Necrotic 68% and I’m AOE pulling 250c.

One thing I recommend when picking builds, is to be skeptical about the claims of these content creators. They are selling views not good game experiences. Below is one creator who popularized that Storm Totem build you’re using. In his video he goes into 300c and is clearing at only modest speed while wearing full LP3 uniques. An amateur video about that build was “showing off” doing a boss at 100c. I’m not saying tornado shaman is bad, I’m saying you need to find someone using it in 200c with junk gear to be inspired.

The Best Primalist Starter I’ve Ever Played - Tornado Shaman | Last Epoch Season 2 Prep - YouTube

Tornado Starter - Last Epoch Character Planner

Now take a look at my homebrew Beastmaster/Bear/Swipe build. I’m not trying to encourage you to switch to Beastmaster, I’m just trying to say that I am playing SSF/CoF with easy to get LP1s and regular drops and 250c is a joke. Here is a tiny video where I chain pull 5 groups together and start nemesis with a train of trash still incoming and it’s turbo easy, bosses are just as easy. I’m sure I’ll reach a corr level where it gets harder, but that is not here.

Beastmaster, level 95 (Tombs of the Erased / 1.2.1) - Last Epoch Build Planner

lvl 95 beast/bear/swipe corr 250 - YouTube

I’ve seen a susprising number of people have shaman issues on Primalist on discord, so I hope to spend a little time playing shaman to give people an actually good build to play.

2 Likes
27

The problem with Shaman is that the best way to build one is to use Spriggan Form, which means only a few builds will work. Almost everything else a shaman can do, a druid or a beastmaster can do better.

That’s not to say there aren’t good Shaman builds. It’s just that the other masteries have better tools to build them. So unless you’re going for Avalanche (kinda underpowered at the moment) or Spriggan Form, you’re usually better off with the other 2.

1 Like
28

Ok I have 2 learning points here, thank you for posting again!

  1. I never saw the crit avoid come up when killing Bone Dragon but honestly I was pretty honed in looking for the resist, I may have missed it. This is my own fault and could have saved me a lot of trouble…

  2. I FORGOT CAPPED RES’s aren’t AS important in this game… Oh hell I have been crippling myself for no reason. I gotta stop defaulting to PoE 1 and 2 thinking, I think I’ve caught myself doing this like a dozen times now. THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME!

BTW, I’m not playing a storm totem build, did I send you to the wrong place somehow for what I’m playing? I’ve been playing Tornado using Summon Spriggan, Gathering Storm (off bar), Warcry, Tornado, Fury Leap unspecced, Maelstrom. Not the storm totem or bear druid tornado (I played bear first but I didn’t like the constant form swapping for 6 seconds of More Damage).

Regardless I will check out your vids now and I do follow your advice regarding skepticism, I’m just too new to how the game is now to do it well xD I’ll get better with time and return to making my own builds again once I’m not doing dumb-arse things like I’ve been doing with PoE brain. Gotta re-learn this game xD Thank you for giving me some applicable re-learning material! I look forward to seeing your take on Shaman once you get to play it, hopefully it won’t need a minion haha.

29

You can go to the NPC in the end of time to respec your blessings. He’s on the right, close to the monoliths.
He will let you respec the blessings with the highest roll your character got or with the lowest roll if it was an alt that unlocked it.

So if you rolled that blessing and missed it, it’s still there with your highest roll saved.

1 Like
30

WE CAN RESPEC BLESSINGS NOW!? I have missed so much holy cow, gonna go check right now…

Effin Ay, I have this at a very high roll (68% and 53 dodge rating)… I am so lucky y’all replied to my thread so much, I need to play this as if I’ve never played before instead of thinking I know things, sooooooo much has changed since my last real playthroughs on this game. Pre-multiplayer I played quite a bit, then had very short 1-3 day sessions checking out falconer and rune master. So much has changed, and for the better!

You all have convinced me, blessings genuinely are fine as is. Will edit my original post to reflect this.

1 Like
31

I mean, it was introduced in 1.1, so 9 months ago :stuck_out_tongue:

If you make an alt, you just have to kill the boss, then you can respec into any other blessing an alt unlocked, just at the lowest value. This means that, for example, you kill the Emperor of corpses on normal mono and you could go to the end of time and immediately respec for the empowered version at minimum roll (13% all res). Even if you rolled the all res blessing (7%-12%), it would still be an immediate upgrade.

1 Like
32

I don’t know what version it was, but my last time I really played was when MP was in a terrible state and still in beta. I’m going to readjust my thinking to “new player” as best I can, roll an alt and actually read everything instead of assuming I know things… I’m very excited =)

2 Likes
33

Yeah, a bunch of stuff changed. I would advise you to go check the News category and check the major announcements for 1.0 and beyond. You don’t need to read patch notes, but just get the general gist of all the improvements they added.

1 Like
34

I usually view this as a challenge to wring the strength out of a class/spec… People have had time to figure out shaman, but maybe the creators just have not figured it out.

At the risk of talking about builds in feedback and suggestions…

Strong builds are all about synergy, which means not only aligning the scaling of the skills and passives, but also using multiplicative bonuses between them.

I do not see how it’s possible to make a very strong build with both tornado and gathering storm, because they scale differently. I also think spriggan is strongest when you have lots of minions (as it heals/buffs all allies) not when you have none.

Just looking at the trees and the math, if someone forced me to play spell damage tornado shaman, I would focus on ranged damage skills… which means leveling Fury Leap → warcry → storm crows → upheaval → eterras blessing → storm totem → maelstrom (on totem) → tornado → avalanche… and I’d have to experiment with what final combo of skills was the best as there would be a few viable. There is a possibility I would throw bear tank in there for a short while if it was needed…

One important issue is having frequent cleanse, because lots of what kills in higher corruption is dots… On my beastmaster I am constantly getting cleanse “for free” whenever I use fury leap or warcry… As a shaman we can get cleanse from Fury Leap and Eteras Blessing, but the blessing cleanse could be awkward if we have minions that are getting targetted instead.

I’m really not sure what the endgame build would be… I don’t love using totems as ranged, because I’m kiting and running which often doesn’t play well with stationary totems, but then shaman tree has lots of bonuses for totems.

I’m out of time right now (researching all that was fun but took a while!), but I want to try this tommorow. I’m typically 2 hrs to level 30 monos, so it wont take too long to have some real experience.

1 Like
35

tis confusion

36

Just did 5 successive runs of The Black Sun or whatever the Level 66 monolith is called (the one with Evil Rahyeh), in an effort to get the “Wrath of Rahyeh” blessing, since I’m on a throwing build and that would open up my Relic slot for something that’ll grant more defenses or whatever (or just let me double-dip on Leech, who knows).

Unfortunately, across those 5 attempts (and the 5 or so other characters who have finished it as well, so about 10 overall), I have not gotten that blessing to appear even once. Yes, even with extra corruption.

I get having a random assortment, but when it’s down to 1 out of … what, 13, and I’ve still not managed that on 30 effective slots, that’s pretty damn pathetic.

37

Fun read! Just FYI, Gathering Storm is off-bar as well, it’s used to scale Storm Bolts, and all of Tornado’s damage is from Storm bolts as well; I’d say it’s pretty synergistic in theory, perhaps the numbers just aren’t what they need to be. Or maybe they are and I still need to figure out where they’re hiding =)

38

@lonnieep84 - I played three level 0-30 shaman runs in the last few days, trying a bunch of builds… Last one hit level 30 in 3hrs doing all nemesis in solo-character-found (no lightless arbor skip key), which is respectable but can still be faster. I’m probably 20 minutes away from the temporal sanctum door.

At least at level 25-30, tornado feels ultra week and mana hungry compared to Upheaval in any gear I can pick up off the ground, and this is with tornado effectively taking two spec slots because of gathering storm connection. I think this is because Upheaval scales melee which is just easier to get early because of the common avaialbility of flat melee dmg affixes on 2h weapons… compared to spelldmg, which I am barely finding.

This is not yet pushing corruption, but I am comfortably doing level 54 monos starting around level 28 with Upheaval (and can probably do it a bit sooner), wheras I can’t find a way to scale tornado to do anything useful at this level. I just have not seen much high spell damage gear.

My Spec around level 25 is:

  • On Bar: Storm Totem, warcry, fury leap, gathering storm, upheaval
  • 1st Spec: Fury Leap
  • 2nd Spec: gathering storm
  • 3rd Spec: Upheaval

Once I have more mana regen, I drop gathering storm for Earthquake, which puts out dumpster level DPS for burst, but is very mana hungry.

This is a snapshot of my most recent character… this is Solo-character-found, so no twinking or anything, and only a little crafting (because I have few affix shards) I also included an unedited 3hr video of the run (no voice).

Last Epoch Build Planner

Last Epoch Shaman 3hr run to level 30 - YouTube

From theorycrafting the skills and scaling, the only way I can see tornado having a big payoff in Shaman is to do a spell damage melee build based on tempest-strike, maelstrom, and tornado… since these can all scale atunement/spell…

The Tornado Druid Wearbear build is based on totally different scaling with Wearbear skill point “wizened claws” that gives you 1 spell damage per strength when in bearform…and this somehow affects already spawned tornados and maelstroms.

I’m going to push this Upheaval shaman into corrupted monos and see how it feels. Maybe if I have time I’ll try to do a fully spell damage tornado build, but it probably wont have gathering storm.