As a new player who hasn’t explored the endgame options that much, I’m curious how people usually handle it when they first hit endgame with a new character.
It seems like monoliths are most heavily pushed by the game itself (and of course you can’t run arena w/o finding some arena keys through monoliths first), but I’ve also heard that arena is much better for leveling. Do you run arena whenever you can, early on, to push levels? Do X number of monolith quests first to get blessings, and then run arena? Stick to solely monoliths until you have reasonably solid gear? What do you prefer? How would that change based on your level or your quality of gear?
Monolith is more forgiving at first then arena, I would not take a character in arena with less res then 50% ideally should be have all res caped.
most important for both is your defenses.
personally I would do the first monlith time line before arena.
So usually what i do in SSF is to push the story until i finished chapter 7.
I skip Chapter 8 and do some monoliths to find arena keys. I always go for the arena once i found a key because of the good experience you get there. In the meantime i continue the first Monolith Timeline to get Woven Flesh. After that i finish chapter 8 because my dmg is way better already and i can rush through the big monster density in c8. Then i focus on completing Black Sun, Ending the Storm & Reign of Dragons Timelines first to get some good Character Blessings for extra defenses. When i want to reach some important passive nodes i do arena again for better leveling and if i need better gear i do monolith. This has pretty much become a ongoing strategy for me.
Yeah, as far as defenses go, I really haven’t bothered sorting them out yet. It just hasn’t been necessary, frankly, things still feel very steamrollable. Having minions undoubtedly helps. Just did my first Arena run (started at level 59, with roughly 50/30/20 ele res, 60-70 phys, and 30/50/5 for the other resists), and got squished to the sirens somewhere around wave 75-80. But to be frank, I was also watching youtube videos because at that point I was very bored, I imagine if I actually tried I could have made it to around 100. I was very impressed with the xp (I went from barely 59 to 62.5).
I think I’ll go ahead and do monoliths for a while, until I feel like crafting out better gear (rearranging a few passives at least got my void res up from its glorious pathetic 5% to 40%). I really do love the arena xp, but it also kind of makes me want to vomit with the monotony. I’m hoping there’s a GD Crucible-like system of checkpoints at certain levels so you don’t always have to waste so much damn time on early Arena waves. It feels like if I can mindlessly clear nearly the first 100 waves in random crap I’m wearing from leveling with only a little bit of crafting and zero attention to defenses (or which offenses are best, either), the balance is way off.
I never actually realized you could do monolith before C8, that’s good to know!
