r2d23

You could install IE mod (https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity/mods/1?tab=description), there's a feature that allows to tweak stats for existing npcs. So you can have your cake and eat it too.

Does anybody by chance has a compiled assembly dll for OS X with the UPMod and IEMod incorporated? Since the upgrade to Catalina I've lost the opportunity to do this myself, not being able to run a 32-bit version of Mono.

No, upscaling is not needed for the achievement. Only if you want the extra challenge.

You need to craft them.

There's no earlier save game to come back to? I'd advise against it. It's a nice bonus, but it's not game breaking. Keep playing, you'll need to figure things out anyway if you intend to try the ultimate achievement later on. Restarting the whole game does not appear useful to me because of a single minor ability.

That's not cheesing, that's trial and error. As for the city, just go area after area. All quests that are doable by sneaking around in the sewers are a good choice, quests that you get from taverns (purnisc, ambushes in the docks), verzano, other minor quests in the docks. The first jobs from various factions. You might even have enough stealth to do two out of three main plot quests: sanitarium and tower inside the zombie area (you didn't think you were going to fight your way through those, did you?).

"Cheesing" is something with a broad definition, everyone has his own meaning what is "cheesy" and what is acceptable. Pulling out enemies one by one and similar tactics are necessary until your build comes into power. I am not entirely sure when that happens for the retaliation monk but I imagine you need to have all of the core abilities and items on hand, be able to forge those Flame Shield potions on a regular basis and so on. That's somewhere around level 7-9. Don't worry though, there's plenty of easy XP to grab from the city quests. Monk's retaliation scales with levels. The same goes for the endurance pool. So you have no choice but to wait until it gets stronger. You also need those abilities and items to boost your DR, stats, etc. Until that happens you need to give up the idea of handling all encounters up-front and head on as if you were doing it with full party. There's a certain much slower pace that you have to adapt. I presume you've already played through the game at least once with the party, so you unless you want to experiment yourself with the solo play I'd suggest you check out some of those videos I've recommended in order to get the feel for what is solo play all about. On the fifth level what you need to do is go to the city and do as many simple quests as possible. It gives huge amount of XP when you're running solo. The spider cave is something that one would generally try to tackle around level 6-7 with the party.

Yes, you generally avoid lots of stuff early on. Minor quest fights in the city shouldn't be problematic, use DoT effects like combusting wounds (randomised rings, see above about the random loot table) and touch of rot (gloves that could be bought from Cartugo, trader on the street in the middle of the docks area), figurines, etc. Killing Raedric at level 5 solo isn't something that is done generally. Early XP should be gathered by running around everywhere, exploring areas, opening locks, doing easy quests, etc.

I don't think that missing a point in athletics should be a huge difficulty. Granted, survival is more important for this particular build, but you'll save up some points due to having a bonus in mechanics (you'll have a base of 7 instead of . I think there should be enough to get you to that 14 survival in the end but I'll admit that I didn't do the proper math. Also note that if you want to use scrolls, you'll have to invest points into Lore. The original build has zero in that skill point. Dr. <3 could probably comment further on this since he actually went solo from start to finish with the build, something I never did (last time I've had a retaliation monk in the party, I ended up having two priests with him as well, so at later levels there wasn't much stuff that survived long enough to even hit him...), but overall PoE isn't a "numbers" game. You could probably manage some of the health/endurance loss with potions such as of Major Endurance and Infuse with Vital Essence. If you want to be sure, load up a late game save with the party (if you have one on hand), hire some custom monks and see which numbers you achieve exactly with either background.

It is fairly customary in any solo endeavour to invest skill points early on into stealth during the first act. Five points should be enough to stealth around everything in the first act and the same amount in mechanics enough to discover and open everything that is hidden or locked. Seeing as it is also customary to avoid any major combat encounter during act 1 because no char can confidently handle them at this stage (maybe except the wizard or paladin/chanter) there isn't any particular reason to use consumables at that point. The most robust way to kill mobs is to split-pull them (a necessity of solo play that makes it so depressing, in my opinion). You can always use food, however, since it's cheap, easily replenished and gives a nice boost. There is only one fight that is strictly necessary in the first act: Maerwald. It is usually overcome by drinking a potion of bullwark defense (the one that gives huge temporary DR against elemental attacks) and cleverly avoiding Maerwald's certain damaging spells. There are also techniques in that fight that you can employ such as pulling everybody into the door so that you can limit exposure to enemies' hits while also setting up a coverage for your cone-like Torment's Reach attacks. You can also lure them out into the room adjacent to the one where Maerwald resides. You'll have enough space there them to kite your enemies around. You can even lure them towards the other adjacent room, the one with the beetles. The latter consider everyone else, including Maerwald, hostile and help you out (just make sure you're out of sight so that they do not gang up on you afterwards). There's another problematic fight against spirits in the Caed Nua's throne room but, incidentally, retaliation monk is one of those classes that can handle it despite being perma-stunned by the phantom spirits. Dr. <3 gave a very detailed tutorial on how to achieve that at level four, I think, in this very thread. You can still easily avoid this fight by having stealth of 5 and sneaking along the northern wall towards the corridor that leads further into the dungeon. You will find some videos that demonstrate this tactic on youtube. Overall, this the kind of stuff you have to get used to: kiting, split-pulling, positioning your char in the doorway or adjacent to the wall (in order to limit exposure and prevent your character from being surrounded), using consumables. The most common consumables are food (aim for those that give non-overlapping +2 bonuses to primary stats), summoning figurines, certain specific potions (llengrath defense, combat buffs, elemental protection in certain fights, deleterious alacrity of motion - you'll have to get used to starting any serious fight with the gulp of this one to speed up everything else) and scrolls (such as of valor and of defense for combat buffs, moonwell for healing, prayers against fear/treachery/etc when necessary and so on). It is also a common technique to use a table of random loot distribution depending on the in-game day number in order to gain certain useful things from specific containers inside the Raedric's Keep and the other early areas: ring of searing flames (grants usages of Combusting Wounds per rest), boots of stealth, boots of accuarcy, gloves of mechanics, etc. Having said all that and coming back to your original question about Raedric's keep: invest enough points to get your stealth and mechanics to have both around 5. This is quite easily achievable, especially if you take a background that gives starting bonuses to one or both of those skill points during character creation. Don't worry about wasting skill points, you can always retrain, it's fast and cheap (you're not playing wizard so you don't have to relearn spells each time after retraining, spending extra money and dragging around tons of spell books). You can enter either through the dungeon or through the wall. The dungeon isn't terribly difficult: just pull the enemies to the closest doorway and hit them with Torment's Reach from there, those ghouls and revenants go down very easy. Then, you can free the acolyte from his prison cell and report to the elder priest upstairs who'll give you the key that opens a shortcut route directly to the throne room. You can navigate the upper floor either by timing the movement of certain guards who engage you into questioning or simply trick them (there are certain dialogue checks that you should be able to pass, theoretically). When you get to Raedric himself, agree to side with him and the whole castle will become friendly to you. Loot away. You can always come back later and defeat everyone when you're stronger. Overall, if you're not very familiar with the solo tactics for this game, don't worry, there's a certain limited amount of solutions that work and solo play is, basically, training yourself to apply them in a specific order. The exception to that, I'd say, is the wizard because he has lots of stuff to make solo play fun right from the first level. There's a very extensive 10-hour video on youtube by Woodjee that features a full-length, uninterrupted ultimate run from start to end with the rogue class from start to finish. Since rogue isn't a class with lots of AoE capability to deal with large mobs of monsters, there's lots of trickery and clever usage of resource and surroundings. You learn a lot about such techniques from that video.

Someone already did, with the slightly modified build. There was a discussion on reddit about it (https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/6i6azc/the_ultimate/), and the player has commented in depth in this thread as well. The main issue, as I understand, is the need to rely on buggy potion drinking animation. You can install MaxQuest's mod that somewhat fixes the problem, though (makes the animation faster).

Well, I'm happy to report this was a success. No compiler ninja skills required. Mono runs the patchwork perfectly, the only gotcha is to use --arch=32 flag because the 64 bit version has no decent support for WinForms. The other nuance is to symlink the data folder into the folder where the binary resides (in case of a Steam version). Smooth sailing from there on. Both IEMod and UPMod load up properly. I haven't tested UPMod in depth yet but it gives no errors, appears on the label and so on. Good stuff. I love many ease-of-use things like faster speed and so on. I can finally re-spec stats for in-game companions (I hate playing with custom adventurers), although haven't tested it yet. UPMod should be fun too with DoT fixes and improved potion drinking animation. What's the opinion on "all spells per encounter" option? Cheat or ease-of-use to rest less often for veteran players? I am very tempted. I did have one problem with IEMod. When the game loads an error message appears stating that one of the files inside the names folder is missing (fantasy names for backer dialogues). Anybody had an issue with that? I've checked they seem to be all there. EDIT: fixed that, had an incorrect folder symlinked. Now all is good, backer names and custom stats for companions are loading up properly.

Looks like IEMod is theoretically cross-platform and the patchwork is open-sourced... I'll check if it's possible to make it work.

This looks awesome. Is there a way to get it up and running on OS X?

What is the rationale for having low CON and high RES in this build and not vice versa?

Haven't had the chance to start the run yet, so I keep thinking here about my monk. I like the mechanics of the lashing build and it fits perfectly into the party with Kana and Pallegina in terms of synergy. The character will probably be super-durable against large groups, but he feels kind of out-of-place in terms of RP (I want to make a character for PoE2). I also don't like the low DEX score, playing a slow monk annoys me. On the other hand I really like the witch doctor idea, such a great character concept! Kind of a wandering monster slayer. But I worry about his durability on PotD + ToI, especially against the kith groups (the hardest bounties are amongst those). The mechanics feels risky to me as well: the necessity to catch some damage and disengage combined with mediocre CON probably isn't the best approach for ToI. I've been trying to come up with some ways to combine these two ideas into one build that will be durable enough to be in the thick of combat and deal passive damage via retaliation while being able to dish out fast ranged damage when needed. But I guess it's hard to have the cake and eat it too. The way I see it, i'd have to give up some of the lash mechanics (the lightning stuff or the corrode damage) in order to grab some a couple of racial damage talents. The race would have to be fire godlike, obviously, so that's less built-in accuracy from being a boreal dwarf. Maybe I don't even need that much built-in accuracy with priest and paladin in the party. The original witch doctor uses lots of disables but they don't get accuracy bonus from the long pain that's why all the racial talents, I guess. I'd probably have to sacrifice intellect too in favour of a higher DEX score (I am overall against the min-max approach). So that's a dilemma Unfortunately, I don't have much time to play-proof these ideas, and one can theory-craft only so much. So advice is welcome. In the end, if there's no good way to combine these two concepts without gimping the character too much, I'd rather go with fast lash retaliation monk and grab TLP for him at some point. Maybe also enlist Zahua later on to check out the potential of the full-blown TLP build.

Ring of Searing Flames, it gives a couple of uses per rest. You can find a couple of those, I believe.

Any chanter gains it automatically with levels.

Sounds good. I'm giving it a go. Is there a recommended order for selection of abilities to achieve optimum performance? I already took swift & lightning strikes + torment's reach. Fighting with bare hands at the moments appears to be more effective, but I'm considering picking WF next and switching to weapons in order to boost the accuracy. And then Turning Wheel since it's one of the core abilities for the build. Somewhere soon after that should come Scion of Flame, Heart of the Storm and dual-wielding. By the way, did anybody ever notice how monk's wound-based abilities behave in a weird manner sometimes? I press a hotkey and the character sort of stands there doing nothing, the ability is highlighted as if about to be activated but it doesn't happen. Sometimes the character just loses the given order to activate the ability. AI is off. Very strange.

How does chanter's burning lash chant affect monk's retaliation and paladin's FoD? And any other spells or weapons, for that matter? I've been thinking that having two paladins might be too much (and too dull). So I considered taking a retaliation-based fire godlike monk instead. I'd still have an alpha strike team of Eder + Pallegina for taking out priority targets and a crazy monk in the middle of trash mobs taking care of everybody else. If Pallegina's FoD and Sacred Immolation and Monk's fire-based retaliation were to be affected by the chant, Kana would be an ideal support companion here with his regeneration aura, chanting and extra fire from scrolls and stuff like rings of searing flames. I'd give him a Scion of Flame too, figuring that he might interleave both Dragon Thrashed and the burning lash chant due to linger time. Then there's Aloth and Durance as well... All this sounds too good on paper

Thanks for the info. I've already gathered that one can stack indecent amounts of accuracy on a frontman with the help of a paladin and a priest. And what about before he hits level 16 along with Deep Faith and max bonus from Faith and Conviction? I am always more worried about mid-game scenarios rather than late game ones. In any case, I can always shift some points from RES to CON as Boeroer suggested.

Yes, I've read this build, it looks quite nice. I am a bit worried about his low CON though. Could be tough dealing with upscaled content without having high fortitude. Does it make sense to have two paladins with accuracy buffs (coordinated attacks, marking weapons, flanking)? If I have two paladins working along with a teammate on a single enemy each would both teammates get accuracy bonuses? E.g., the protagonist supporting Eder and Pallegina improving accuracy of Durance or Aloth for spellcasting or melee attacks (in latter case).

I'm going to resurrect this old thread of mine. I'm looking to do a TC play-through on upscaled PotD. Party members will be all standard NPCs. Most probably I'll have Eder (DW DPS), Pallegina (alpha strike + Sacred Immolation later on), Aloth, Durance, Hiravias or Kana (tanking + AoE DPS). I'm looking at paladin for the role of the main character. Ideally I want him to have a good mixture of party buffs and offense. Is this too much to expect from? The extreme routes are obvious: 1) Darcozzi high con/might/int tank with focus on supportive paladin abilities and, perhaps, later on sacred immolation. Maybe even without it because Pallegina will be specced for fire-based stuff. 2) Bleak Walker alpha strike version built full-out for FoD damage (lashes, offensive abilities, talents that increase elemental damage, etc.) Is it possible to have a paladin who can buff the party, be reasonably sturdy (i.e. high CON), pack some punch with FoD and do steady auto-attack damage? Or at least three of these four? I've tried to read up on the subject yesterday, and oh dear there's so much stuff written on the forums, it's like studying for a dissertation. Two hours suddenly passed by and I am more confused than clear.

Indeed, I forgot that CF itself has a duration, now it all makes sense, thank you.

Thanks. I think I've got it all except for this one: Why does 7 ticks translate into 9 ticks? What's the math here?