New Player - Monolith/Looting advice

Hey everyone!

I beat what is available in the campaign yesterday and now have a 55 Beastmaster. I have done a handful of monolith runs. I wanted to ask everyone how they approach looting during their runs. What kind of things should I be actively looking to pick up? Is the endgame less about looting and more about crafting? Also, do you all mouse over all loot drops during a run?

I would also appreciate comments on what what I should be trying to do with my gear in general… for example, I come from PoE and I know getting resistances maxed is an absolute must to survive late game content. Sorry for the volume of questions, don’t feel obligated to answer everything. Thanks friends!

1 Like

First of, welcome to the LE community and great to see you here asking question, there are plenty of people happy to help you and bring you more enjoyment out of this game.
You don’t have to apologize for asking questions, that’s what the forum is here for.

So here some of my thoughts on the various subjects:

In the early/midgame while still being in he campaign i usally look for items that have at least 2 usefull affixes for my build and try to early craft them a bit better, without wasting too much ressources, generally having 1 or 2 high tier affixes is worth more then having 3 or 4 mid-tier affixes, especially for the damage you deal with melee weapons(the pre-fix slots)

So depending on your build you want to watch out for certain affixes.

At the endgame there can drop already very powerful items, but most of the time you need to give them a few crafts to make them god-tier

There is an option to display the full item names (all pre- and suffixes), this will at first might make the loot a little bit less “readable” , but you will soon get used to the affix names and learn their names.

Then you get used to that display of item names you will quickly look at the loot and filter it without needing to hover over every single item.

You will want to loot everything with affixes that are usefull for your build, even if the items is crap, because you can use “Runes of Shattering” on them to destroy the item and gain a few of it’s affixes as craftign shards.

First of all, the defence/mitigation system in this game works ALOT different from PoE.
While the generel statement that defences are very very important still is correct, the way you approach it in LE is very different.

Without going too much into detail, basically Health and Protections are equally strong, because of the damage mitigation formula. You can read the exact formula ingame using the Game Guide(press g and search for protections).
Protections do not give flat out % damage reduction, but instead effective health.
So focusing on stacking health OR protections OR a combination of both is equally good.

BUT, there are several other means of defences in this game, like for example the 2 strongest are “chance to recieve a glancing blow” (50% damage), which works for everything except DoT’s and % Crit Avoidance(which is a chance that a recieved crit becomes a normal hit)

So glancing blow and crit avoiudance affixes are also very rare and needed, search for those, to use runes of shattering as well.

Pretty common way to get glancing blow stat to 100% are the “set” affixes (X% chance for each item with this same affix), which will max it out with 4 or 5 items.

TL:DR Stack Health OR Protections in conjuction with 100% Glancing Blow and 100% Crit Avoidance.

4 Likes

Thanks, Heavy!

I can see why this game has a great reputation when it comes to community!

I just recently changed item names from normal to long. I’ll try to pay more attention to affix names. Great point about using Runes of Shattering, I haven’t really done much with runes yet, although I have done some crafting.

I also appreciate the explanation of protections, it’s very clear to me now. Also, thanks for the heads up on glancing blow and crit avoidance, I’ll definitely look into that!

1 Like

Hi, I’m pretty new to the game as well, but I have been approaching looting PoE style and just having a dump tab that I go through whenever I got about 3 or so pages filled with stuff. When it comes to Items that I loot, I set my item names to short so it doesn’t show prefix and suffix and I have just tried learning the high level bases for now. You can go to lastepochtools.com, or lastepoch.tunklab.com to see item bases and the level the game requires you to be at for them to drop. I like what Heavy said and his method is way more efficient than mine. I will definitely try to start learning all the prefixes and suffixes when I am a little more confident.

I do not mouse over items before I pick them up. I am just looking for good bases then I’ll sort them out later. Even then, it feels like 90% of them are trash but you will occasionally get blues with 2 useful T4 affixes that are good for your build or in general. Sometimes you get crazy rares, but the vast majority of my items have come from crafting on blues. I will take those items and craft on them to make solid items for either my current builds, or generalize the crafts so I can use them for future builds. I am still learning the game so this definitely isn’t the best approach but it has been what helps me a lot. Good luck and have fun!

3 Likes

Odyssey310,

Thanks my friend! Yeah, I was thinking about making a dump tab as well… old habits never die I guess? Haha

Thanks for sharing the links, I’ll definitely check those out. I was also curious on if most yellows are garbage or not… I guess it all just depends on if all affixes actually fit your build or not.

2 Likes

You’re welcome.

One more info about those, because they are decently rare, you can buy 4 of them every 15 min from a vendor, just check vendor everytime you are in town or any hub while leveling/doing MoF, to fill up your crafting tab with those, they will melt like butter if you reach higher MoF Timelines.

I understand when people don’t wanna use full item names, it is indeed i little bit more “stressfull”, but as you said definitely more efficient.
But the sooner you start with it, the faster you learn the affix names and at some point it will become almost automated process.

But when they will introduce lootfilter(hoepfully soon) everything will get alot easier.

While this definitely applies to endgame, in the early- and midgame and even early-ish endgame affixes are way mroe important than the base.

Also the sooner you make use of “Runes of Shattering”, the more stuff you have to craft awesome items. I really hate when i want to craft my next item and don’t have the proper shards already in my crafting tab.

Having a 2x T3/4 affix Blue Item is way stronger and easier to craft than a 4x T1/2 affix Yellow Items.

That i should have said in my initial post, do NOT ignore blue items.

EDIT:

As i said above, i forgot to mention in my inital post, that you should never ignore the blue items^^

1 Like

Is it better to shatter blues that have 2 affixes you definitely need, or am I going to get more shards from yellows?

I’m glad you mentioned this! In fact, besides buying tabs and Runes of Shattering, what else do you spend your money on in late game?

1 Like

Each Tier of an affix gives you the chance for 1 shard, minimum is always one and the maximum is the tier of each affix, so shattering a 1x T5 X-Affix 1x T4 Y-Affix Item gives you the chance to get 1-5 X-Affix Shards and 1-4 Y-Affix shards, you will alwas get minimum of 1 from each affix present on the item.

EDIT: Forgot to mention… also here you can use the Game Guide(Press G ingame), there are awesome explainations for all the glyphs/runes in there.
Don’t get me wrong, i do happily answer you questions, i just want to point newer player to the game guide, because i believe that is a truly awesome feature that has so much potential for expansion

So to answer you question, High Tier affixes of your most desired affixes are worth shattering the most.

Also very important poin here, as you said that you come from PoE. There is technically no difference for blue and yellow items, they are both considered “magic” items in LE, Yellow Items just simply have 3+ affixes. At the moment this is not very important, but maybe devs have future stuff in store for us for crafting(new runes/glyphs maybe?)

You can use Gold at the Gamlber(one Gambler is in the End of Times a little right from the MoF). You can either gamble for good bases you need or even unqiue/set items (chance to get an unique/set item from a gamble is roughly about 1/100)

Thanks my friend! I really need to read over all of the Game Guide’s material in regards to crafting and shards. You’ve definitely helped me get off on the right foot.

Now that I have a general idea of how to approach loot and the endgame, I am sure I am going to get countless more hours in this character alone.

1 Like

Glad i could help and guide you a bit on your journey, there is still a looong enjoyful way ahead of you :stuck_out_tongue:

Feel free to ask further questions as they might come up while you dive deeper into the game. (Either by creating new thread or feel free to pm me)

1 Like

Minor addition, but using the [Alt] or [Ctrl] or [Alt] + [Ctrl] keys on items is very helpful. There is so much useful information hidden behind these keys.

Also, the [Alt] key shows the “instability” of items (as well as the ranges of both Implicit and Affix stats). But I bring this up because you might wonder why don’t I just try crafting an endgame item from just a base Common (White) item? Well, it’s because Blue/Yellow items will start with a much lower base Instability value than if you had tried to craft that exact same item from a White.

Surely, crafting early to mid-game items from Commons is okay but (as mentioned) to achieve higher tier’d affix items you will need to start from an item that already has 2-3 affixes you want and at the highest tiers you can find to have better odds in crafting those elusive 4xT5 endgame items.

2 Likes

Andrew,

Thank you for pointing that out! I was not aware of that.

I use Alt a good bit, but I need to explore the other hotkeys as well. Great advice!

1 Like

I’ll jump in here and add a few things that I have been doing in my mono running and looting. First thing though I do shatter blues if they have rare or very rare affixes and I need them, farming gold is fairly easy, 2k for me is easier than rare affixes imo.

The fastest and best way I’ve got gold and gear from mono, is running and destroying trash but not really stopping at all to look at items or gold. I run max speed boots and i rush killing weak trash only and final objective. I loot the final drops and the chest outside of the arena looking at rares that I might want to craft, then looking for any affixes i may want off the blue then I jump right back in. When the enemies start to take to long to kill just do objective or reset the mono and start from level 1. I get more gold this way than doing arena or anything and the experience isn’t too bad into the early to mid level 70’s. Then spend money on gambling on the bases you want.

Oh one way I’ve been getting uncommon and rare affixes is every time i can i stop by gambler and I buy all the 50 gold rings and belts just looking for those affixes, that has greatly increased my pool of those harder shards.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.