wildeyn00700

I believe that you can do this, because you know a lot more about item and ability interactions that I do, but when I imagine myself trying to do this with Dorudugan, I see this: I go close to him in the middle to initiate combat, and Vela follows me. Then she gets terrified, too close to the middle. When Dorudugan, who can't be interrupted, does his huge area fire effect after his 3X charging up, I see it killing her, because if she is close-ish to the middle, I don't think you have enough room to pull him far enough from her. On the other hand, if I do something (with a SC monk) to keep her still in the corner while I approach Dorud (such as the 1/rest watcher stun cone ability), then I could do it if I could otherwise do enough damage. By the way, I believe there is an ambush on the way to get the Fire-immunity cloak that is also a pain to do with Vela. Priests of course get around this with BDD and SoT, and I (with a ranger/chanter) get around this by initiating combat with my animal companion, while my MC stays in the bottom right with Vela. The boar brings Dorud close enough to terrify Vela while she is still in the corner, and then I move him away after that. A lot of what will make a SC monk (or any non-priest build, I think) possible is the ability to simulate what I do with a boar, without a boar. Some extremely reliable way that really works, to get every enemy in a fight away from Vela and keep her away. (Chanter summons that can be directly controlled also help with this, such as against the Oracle when adds spawn near her. As a single character, you are going to run into several situations something like this, where keeping all enemies away from Vela for an entire fight, can be tough.) If the oracle, for example, is allowed to start walking towards the middle, Vela will be in trouble. Possibly a super fast offense will compensate for that. Stunning everybody with WotW will work sometimes, but I wonder if it will work every time. Something as simple as those phantasmal hounds in FS, that zoom around, go invis, and split into 4 parts, may possibly be an issue. I'm quite interested in seeing a SC monk work. I tend to solve problems by thinking of the bottlenecks and trying to break them, so I'm not shooting down the monk idea; just trying to work through it. I certainly wouldn't have guessed how to beat the Sigilmaster with a bm/skaen like Decandency explained, so, similarly, there are very possibly ways to make a monk work that I'm not guessing right now. (Without Abydon's challenge I killed him by learning from how you did it in your video, but with Abydon's ruining that strategy, since it took me a lot of hits with the bow to take him down, for full Ultimate, I just hit him with True Love's Kiss and waited for about 2.5 in-game days for him to die, because I couldn't find another way to kill him past his healing and with weapons crumbling during the fight. I could sort of keep him from healing himself by drawing his attention and staying far-ish away and hoping his bombs would go far enough away not to heal him, but I can't make that happen with enough consistency to realistically win.)

Ah, this was very cool to read So, it isn't all simple, at all, or fast. A lot like my experience with Ultimate. I have several fights where I would have to make a similar description of how I win. I think that this will be how a character that can do Ultimate will look. They need to have a trick that can deal with most of the fights, and then they have to get creative and practiced with how to do a few fights that the trick doesn't work for. And then you need to get your path down with skill checks and such. Did you have to do much re-speccing your character for particular skill checks? I have to do that a few times; I'm still working on making sure I don't go through most of the game and then accidentally have my skills wrong somewhere. Some important ones I've seen are 12 intim for the Maw, 17 dipl for the undead ship, and I need to go back over what is needed for Beast of Winter. SSS has a few alternate checks for the bridge (I think I'll do the sneak one), and then athletics, I believe, for the 3-way championship fight water thing, and then intimidate and 3 stoic to avoid fighting the guy in the in-between. And then there are times when it might be better to have higher stealth or arcana for certain fights, and I have to decide if I'm too lazy to re-spec or not. Does anybody know what that 19 athletics check is for as you go down to the Oracle? I failed it but nothing happened. Did I just miss an item, or does it do something else?

Congrats!! As a side note, I did some practicing against the Water Dragon, probably the hardest fight for my build, and I believe I have it down to a science now, where I kill two water whips, and then one more once the dragon summons more, and otherwise focus on the dragon and withdraw Vela. I can't believe how little real time it apparently takes to win with the bloodmage/priest. Does it really just take about 8 hours total? It has to be 20 or more, possibly 30, to do ultimate with my ranger/chanter build. That makes it so you really want to get the tougher fights down to where you have very little chance of breaking the whole run. Decadency, how do you deal with Arcane Cleanse or similar effects? Do you sometimes just use summons to distract the enemy, like against Concelhaut? But then what about the sigilmaster? Do you use a unique method for that boss? Dorudugan is like that for my build - I have to use a completely different method to beat him than I do for everything else, because he has such huge healing that can't be interrupted.

But you need WotW, which means single-class. I was just musing about whether a multi-class of monk would do much, and it looks like it won't. I watched the video of a monk beating the ooze, so now I understand. Vela and Abydon's would seriously complicate things, although possibly neither would be an absolute block. I can see that it all comes down to beating the original ooze. For Vela, you'd have to initiate combat, get symbioted, get it off yourself and kill the little oozes (or kill them a bit later), get Vela terrified, and then move the ooze far away from her, so that Vela doesn't get hit with symbiote. If you tank the ooze anywhere near Vela, she'll get hit with Symbiote for certain. That might be doable. It is somewhat possible that the ooze would hit Vela immediately with symbiote, unless there is a way to keep her back (actually there is a 1-rest Watcher ability that stuns her that all classes can use, so that would deal with that). Then it just comes down to making sure you can tank the main ooze before your armor breaks (or that you can tank naked somehow). For Dorudugan, the only way for a monk to beat him with Vela, as far as I can imagine with my limited knowledge, is to initiate combat with a trap, from stealth, and then sneak in and hit him True Love's Kiss (or else if WotW works, just use that). Then make a summon and switch weapons and run back to the bottom right before Vela follows and gets terrified (perhaps by figuring out another way to stop her, or maybe by stunning her and going back into stealth just before Dorudugan hits your trap). Or, and this would be funny, you could do turn-based, which keeps Vela still, and do the same method, and hit "next turn" for several hours... I hate the documentation in this game. True Love's Kiss (which requires stealth) doesn't work from an invisibility potion, but the same exact wording and documentation, assuming it wasn't changed, seems to work with WotW and the Stalking Cloak. "Invisibility" from WotW apparently counts as stealth for the cloak? I wonder if it counts for True Love's Kiss from the dagger sold in the metalworks.

ah, that I don't know. I'd guess not, but I agree that is possible.

By the way, Wotcha, I've used your discovery a bit. Once in awhile, such as at the start of combat against the Dragonslayer group in SSS, or in an emergency during a tough combat, it is really great to have as an option.

It would certainly be a lot of fun to straight-up beat up the tough enemies in Ultimate without a lot of screwing around trying to activate cheese first. (Or, in my case, without taking forever). Would be great to see Kaylon do it, or maybe I'll try it out myself (or whoever else may try it and let us know) Abydon's challenge would make using the Voidwheel and Keeper of Flame weapons somewhat questionable, but that may not be an absolute problem with either enough money, fast enough kills, or perhaps not needing to use them all that much. I have a question, also: can you control the monk duplicates? One possibly interesting thing is that maybe there is a better class than chanter to go with ranger for a different way to do my type of strategy. Ranger probably sounds weak to you guys, but in Ultimate, that boar is amazing. Of course, you'd lose what may be the whole point of a monk, which are its tier 8 and 9 abilities. A monk needs resonant touch to beat the mega-ooze, is that right? Although, if you can control the monk duplicates, you could beat the mega-ooze, potentially, the same way I beat him with a ranger/chanter.

Are you suggesting a single-class monk? I don't know their skill tree and I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment If you are suggesting a monk with no priest multi-class, I would ask if you have really tried the Hylea (Vela) challenge for a lot of combats. She's really hard to keep alive. I have a ton of respect for you, and in print it is hard to convey tone; you may have an excellent grasp of what it is like to escort Vela, but I have to ask if you have tried it much, so I understand where you are coming from. Are you thinking (and you may even be correct - I don't have good experience with the monk end) that a Monk can kick ass so fast that Vela gets protected that way? If that actually is possible, that would be really cool. My way of doing Ultimate is really slow, dinking away with summons exclusively. It would be awesome to have a character with such strong offense that you could pretty much use 1 withdraw scroll on Vela in a fight and win or distract all of the enemies. People may not realize, by the way, for those who are thinking of non-priest builds, you can get a LOT of extra withdraw scrolls by sinking merchant ships, and you can win those fights 100% of the time with a Dhow and double-bronzers (plus after doing a few battles, your cannoneers and other crew get even better). As far as I've seen, every merchant ship has 1-2 withdraw scrolls in their loot.

I have an exact answer for you, Dec, because that first fight would have been totally impossible for my build, so I found a way out of it. Assuming you go to the left first, the laboratories I think it is called, where the memory hoarder is (I haven't tried the other way first yet), then if you DONT do anything with the brainwashed people after killing the Hoarder, and then when the Oracle talks to you in the In-Between, you say that you aren't a wizard and from there don't fight him, you don't need to do that fight then. Which is great, because, in my game, in that fight, Vela somehow literally charged into battle and actually attacked the Oracle or one of the adds before getting terrified, and the fight would have been impossible.

One way to find out would be to ask Decadency when it was critical to be a mage, in the mage/priest combo, and then figure out if a monk could handle those issues as well, or better. Mages like to level up from 10-16 partly with sending clones into battle while stealthed. Tacticians can get brilliant early for doing fights. I'm not sure that Monks have something similarly powerful for that, but maybe if you get good at pulling monsters one at a time, you can do it that way. At the point where you have brilliant, salvation, and barring death's door, I'm not sure it matters if you are a monk or some other multiclass (but it may). And before you have that, a monk had better have insane offense to deal with the fact that his armor will get destroyed pretty fast. I'm not very knowledgeable about how to abuse monks, but It seems impossible, off the top of my head, to use them with anything but a priest for Ultimate. That is why comparing monk with mage as the other class would be helpful in figuring out which might be better. One thing, you'd need to make sure you have a plan for the Ooze (since for that Decadency used Concelhaut's Hammer and Slicken). Is that crazy monk way to kill the Ooze in a couple of minutes, still valid?

Heh, just tested against the Oracle; glad I did. (Previously I had just seen a video that showed I could begin combat in stealth.) It is definitely a pretty easy fight with my character (ranger/chanter), but it isn't fully cheesable, as twice duing the fight, adds spawn in a place too close to Vela and she becomes terrified and therefore visible and theoretically vulnerable. It is only dangerous two times, when you get the Oracle to 3/4 health, and again when you get him to 2/4 health. And it is pretty easy to keep monsters off her. Mostly you just make sure to have 1 weapon over to the left where the adds spawn, so they have something close to target intead of Vela. And if they target her, 1 withdraw scroll should keep her safe for that whole add spawn. So, max 2 scrolls, which isn't bad. First I fought him once to see how the fight went, then I won the next try, using 1 scroll. You also have to be careful never to let the oracle move more than a few inches from his starting point, but that isn't hard once you know it matters. That is now fully officially every fight tested, and all won either 1st try, or 1st try after me knowing what was going on. So, a very solid class to do Ultimate, and 100% certain it is possible. I think it takes more real life time than priest multiclasses, as you have to play in turn-based. The advantage to my build is that it doesn't take much timing-based skill in real time. You don't need to use stealth to get past fights, and the fights are turn-based (except inside of Nekataka b/c of the guard spawn bug, and against Dorudugan where you have to switch your brand of cheese to a new brand just for him) so that allow for a bit more precision. You do have the 10 second time limit, but I haven't found that to be much of an issue, and of course the more a person practices, the easier that 10 sec limit is.

Decadency is going to have 10 or more days to spare this time; it looks like he may complete this run he's on. He certainly deserves it, as well. Thank you for the kind words, however It is an interesting thought you bring up, about whether there may be a different sort of path, where you rest 5-10 or even more, times. You'd still have the abydon's challenge and vela issue to deal with, both of which seem (but maybe there is a way around) to limit so many builds out of ultimate. It is kind of funny, but, while the per-encounter-->per-rest challenge seems quite defining, it may not really be. With my build, as one example, being able to refresh bond wouldn't do much. I could maybe add a bit of damage in fights better, like with acc wounding shot and marked prey, but that would be a small difference, and I'd run into the Abydon challenge problem. Still, it is a very interesting idea, to open back up the idea of being able to rest plenty of times if you want to. I'll be thinking about it, for sure.

yeah, I agree with Wotcha - much of the fun of Ultimate is in collaborating. It is so hard, there is no real point to trying to sit alone and try to beat the rest of the world to be the first to do it. Being 1st will mostly only prove that you spent more time, more immediately after Ultimate came out, and had spent more time learning Pillars 2 and its DLC last year as well. and I'm 99% certain that no trick is going to make Ultimate easy, only possible. And I can now announce it officially; I've proven (to myself and any who believe me or have specific questions) that Ranger/Chanter(troubador) can do Ultimate. I've tested all God challenges and every fight and the path to lvl 20. Today I finished the Guardian and the Sigilmaster (and the "ambush" after the Guardian) and won each of the fights 1st try after orienting myself to how the fight was set up.

Nope, the Guardian of Ukaizo ran out of tricks. No infinite robust, which was the main thing I was worried about. I couldn't remember if he had it, or something similar. And then, the last fight isn't actually an ambush, by the faction on the Promenade. So, auto-win there. Just finished the ending, all clear. I'll double-check the Sigilmaster, and then I will have done 100% of the path and fights to win Ultimate with a ranger/chanter, in 2 test games. And there aren't any low-% fights, as far as I can tell. Once I figured each fight out, I won it the first time. There are a few fights (Water Dragon, Beast of Winter, maybe the SS spiders and Dragonslayer SSS championship fight) that are a bit scary, since Vela comes out of stealth in those, that aren't necessarily 100%, but they can probably be practiced so that they are very close to 100%, or perhaps even fully 100%.

ok, thanks. I'll understand better when I see the boots. The wiki must not describe what they do. The boots from skipping ahead? Do you know if the Guardian of Ukaizo has any infinite healing as he starts getting more hurt? I have the sentinels dead and he's at "hurt" and I have him unless he has infinite healing. Does he do something at like near death?

Rakhan boots? from skipping ahead? you can abuse the no quarter ability? or something else?

I'm glad to know more tricks and tips, and it will be interesting to check out Arcane Reflection, but I don't see how it makes Ultimate into something trivial, by a long shot. It may be me who is not seeing it, but as far as I can tell, you still have to get a mage up to lvl 16, and protect Vela in every fight, plus have brilliant going, presumably with wall of draining and/or salvation of time, at which point fights are already mostly trivial.

(Once I hit "quote" on this forum, I seem unable to delete that, if that is showing up on this reply from a post I started before but didn't bother with.) Have you guys seen the Guardian of Ukaizo since they added mega-bosses? He now gets a buff X4 for the 4 megabosses you have to kill before getting to him. I think he is still just as beatable, but of course yet another time that I have to spend another couple of hours dinking away. And I can't remember if the guardian heals himself, which could be a major problem for me. We'll see how it goes. I'm fighting him now and got him away far away from vela and killed the starting animats, and I'm in stealth, but it will take a long time to actually kill him, so I'll take a break and come back to it. +9 Accuracy (X4) +9 All Defenses (X4) +1 AR (X4) x1.25 Damage (X4) x1.25 Healing (4) +1315 Max Health (X4) +1 Pen (X4) This will put his armor at 20 general, 17 for crushing and lightning, higher for pierce, immune to corrosion. His deflection is still low, at 105. His other defenses are quite high - 155 refl, 165 will, and 201 for fort.

Keep it up! 31 days sounds like a huge amount. You should have 10 days or more, to spare, no?

Bang! It all worked! I beat the mega-ooze. Turn-based, splitting him up, worked out perfectly with initiative with 14 dex, carroc armor, and quick summoning. I never had to take damage (stayed in stealth until finishing off first 1/4 ooze, then didn't need to go near the other gigantic ooze); came out of stealth to do a few hits with weapons to kill greater/lesser oozes that merge immediately if you don't kill them instantly. I had chanter lighting but it didn't really matter. I used chant skeletons but I don't think I actually needed them. With initiative working just right, ancient weapons can fully tank and kill. (Bow tanked a gigantc and massive, melee weapons killed on massive 1/4 ooze on the other side of the screen.) Vela was fine, down in the bottom left. She tried to get into the action later in the fight, heh, but I kept the gigantic ooze far far away from her so it wouldn't get ideas about symbiote. This is still with testing, but that should be the last potential puzzle. Just need to double-check the sigilmaster, and check the ending. You can get unlimited withdraw scrolls from weak merchant ships, by the way. Just a Dhow and double-bronzers and you can kill them 100% chance. Just don't attack named captains; they like to try to board and/or escape which is a real pain.

very cool with the hammers. smart of Victor. sliken also - very cool. that is the thing with a mage/priest - there are so many potential options. There is no way to preserve resting bonuses in SSS unless you do the cruel option in the closest area, but then you have to do that impossible challenge where you are an ironclad and cant use any abilities. The other two areas force you to lose bonuses even if you make all skill checks. I tried every possible option and made all checks, and no success keeping bonuses. Thanks Waski for the video. Splitting them is a lot harder with Abydon's challenge, because I don't think you can tank them yourself. I'm working on doing it with chanted skeletons. I think I may have figured out how to do it in turn-based. I may have had it in real-time, but I ran into performance issues that made it hard to select and direct my summons with perfect precision. The problem with tanking with chanted skeletons in real-time is that the ooze sometimes kills them all and moves forward just a bit before the next one comes, and that adds up. If I pillars 2 didn't seem to have buggy performance issues (maybe it is unity engine with my nvidia card), I could likely do it. I thought I had the ooze taken care of. My friend, testing with the same character, actually managed to kill the mega ooze without him splitting. We thought it was the essence interrupter, but I can't duplicate it in my testing, so now I'm having to figure out how to win it. I'm pretty confident that I'll get it. I have one other back-up plan that may work if my current plan falls through, and if both don't work, I'll try to find a computer that runs Pillars 2 better and see if I can do the fight in real-time.

what do you do for the gigantic oozes to keep them from rejoining? get your attack speed super fast, or use some sort of spell to mess with them? Is there a testing version of working on this, such as in Victor's streams from before? Or is there a spell that lets you spam interrupt with in an area?

<grin> yeah, I'm at the point where I think I'll do it also. When I did Ultimate in Pillars 1, my wife was on a 2 week trip home to Russia. Now she is there again for a couple of more weeks, time for Pillars 2 Ultimate... I assumed that I'd run into a block that I couldn't get past with my build, and have to learn to play a mage/priest or something like that, but it is looking doable now.

Wow! congrats! That's insane! And you are on actual Ultimate, right? Seems like you have a ton of time. I think that your build is much less likely to die than mine is, once you are high level, as I understand it. I haven't actually played it, but it sounds like that is how it is for you. Just be humble around Rymrgrand, lol.

Yeah, I'm amazed at the time myself - thanks. That makes sense, about that route. But, for my character, I went back down to Crookspur from Nemnok, and nabbed 2000 xp exploration bonus just a little to the left and south on the way, turned in the Tip of the Spear (killing Huanu leaders) quest (I don't need Scordeo's Edge and I've only had to go to Deadlight once), then went to Dunnage and turned in the quest to the Pirate leader and got Fleetbreaker, an amazing Xbow, and then went back to Neketaka to turn in Beina and Dywgas bounties, and talk to the queen for an absolute ton of xp. I went from lvl 16 right before Nemnok to lvl 19 that way.