wildeyn00700

Could you explain a bit more about how you did bounties from stealth with a bm/priest? How do you get combats started? Do a few combats just start even though you are still in stealth, or is there a technique to use?

Ok, I've done a bunch of testing (with my Ultimate character) and I believe that you have to lose rest bonuses once you go out into the wilderness in SSS and choose your location/artifact. The closest area doesn't kill your rest bonuses, but it leads to the absolutely impossible changeling battle. The other two, even if you make all of your skill checks, kill your rest. It is stupid - it says "1 hr" passed and that removes rest bonuses. On the other hand, keeping rest bonuses for 80 days is also stupid, so two bad designs cancel out, I suppose. Vive Obsidian. Specifically, before you use grappling hook, a bit of athletics, and 10 con in the endurance area (bottom right area), 1 hr passes. And the other area, the one in the bottom left with the spider cave fight, makes 5 hrs pass even if you do it right (doing it wrong makes 24 hrs pass), and in either case you lose resting bonuses. If anybody finds a way otherwise, definitely let me know as I'd love to not have that happen, but I don't see what options I am missing. I didn't get any "bad" outcomes to make that happen. This is the only place pre-Ukaizo that I believe you have to lose resting. I got through FS and BW w/o losing bonuses. Certainly, all content and mega-bosses can pretty much be finished before loss of bonuses. SSS can apparently help give you extra acc vs. vessels if done after BW, but I haven't tested that. That would help with Dorudugan, but not if resting bonuses get jacked. (You could get 1 of the incremental Rymgrand/vessel bonus before the forced SSS rest, if you wanted 2 acc vs him at the cost of some travel time, which I doubt is worth it.)

I posted about that a post or two back. With the right skills, you can bypass the bridge w/o losing bonuses. Then, doing the seeker artifact area, if you dont pass skill tests - history at least - then you lose a day and lose resting bonuses again.

With enough history skill, are you able to avoid losing your resting bonuses on the confusing trail?

Um, how on earth does anybody do the Changeling's Dance? Is there any way to get out of doing that fight, or of winning it on Ultimate? I can't do invocations or use belt items, so there is no play that I can think of at all. Do some classes spells work? How did you manage it, Decadency? Ohhh... if you go to a different location on the main map to get a different artifact, maybe you can avoid that fight. I'll check it out.

Just did that bridge for the first time. Dex 14 and athletics 8 gets you across. Not sure if you need to know the bridge sucks first, which is mech 14, surv 13, or a steath check might examine successfully also - not sure of that one. Finished with the fights prior to going outside the arena in SSS. Flame nagas took a while in real life, but only 3 hrs in game time. So far, the fights are a lock, but at least 2 of them, judging from videos, may be a problem for my character. We'll see.

Grats! Keep it up. Working on SSS now myself, first time I'm seeing the content. Any advice in particular that I should be aware of, or was the advice mostly class specific?

I just did FS for the first time, and it worked! Vela seems to take less damage than characters and summons do, from the security system. I did that fight successfully just now. The hard part is actually not until Maura and the 2 librarians show up right in the middle, as that can happen right on top of Vela. Until then, she is fine. What I did was kill the armors and get ready to withdraw Vela right as an animated weapon killed the last power conduit, and then try to get the attention of Maura and the librarians with my summons. Maura still cast on Vela a couple of times, but they were non-damaging spells. I am near the oracle, but I just watched a video of it that showed pretty clearly how you aren't forced to have Vela right up in the middle of the fight, so I should be fine (famous last words - heh). I defeated the Memory Hoarder, although right at the last minute, he tried to head all across the area for seemingly no reason, after Vela. He was nearly dead and I got his attention back. Trouble would have been if he did it earlier and got close enough for her to hit her with screams. One Librarian also randomly headed for her once as well, but I killed him before he got to her. I proactively killed the Librarians once I saw that they were going to get activated anyway. So, "just" SSS (whch I haven't seen at all, pretty much, to prove the concept; I am worried about the dialogue-initiated battle against Pokohoa (sp?) and not sure how the other fights are positioned there either. I have to do Drowned Barrows and check to make sure I can kill the Sigilmaster and the Ooze and the Guardian, but I have a friend who has mostly proved out the ooze and sigilmaster as doable. But for now, another DLC conquered, so I'll allow myself to feel triumphant for a day before my hopes are perhaps dashed to bits in SSS... By the way, I ran into an odd thing that I believe is a bug. I respecced at the imp vendor in FS (to unlock the 26 mech door to hurry things along and see what happened), and I believe it wiped out all of my resting bonuses when I did that. Anybody else ever encounter something like this?

Still, it looks like you may be the first to complete it. You've proven your concept in a mirror game, right? Tactician/priest or do I have that wrong? edit: just saw your video below, so I see you are a mage/priest. I'm still looking to prove my concept with ranger/chanter, and may definitely still fail to do that. I have part of FS and all of SSS to go, not in an actual Ultimate, but in a test game. I'm also starting to look at a chanter/priest, played much like I am playing my chanter/ranger except for that way I have priest spells and combos for any fights if/when I run into a wall with the my current character. I was hoping that the Eothas challenge wouldn't be overly difficult, if one makes a character that can win the necessary fights without resting. It sounds like that may not be the case.

I didn't read it as a gray area; when I read the rules I understood them to be clearly saying it was ok, and that was before I was interested in, or knowledgeable of how, to switch. Ultimate is absurd enough that I'm not going to give myself any further disadvantages. Besides, suppose you pick turn-based as your main original choice. Turn-based has bugs constantly (in addition to the guards jumping in bug, there is also a bug that adds a 15 second pause every few turns in various fights, such as against Concelhaut, which is soul-sucking, making a fight take 2 hours instead of 1), so switching to real time sometimes is mostly for dealing with that. Few, if any, non-bugged fights need real time. Anyway, as I said, Ultimate is silly enough without adding assumptions about stuff that makes it even more impossible. Here is why I think they allow switching: turn-based is known to be slow as heck, far slower than other games that have turn-based. Fights can literally take an hour or more, against normal monsters, not even bosses. Switching to real-time sometimes, to deal with that, is likely intended. Dorudugan took me about 3 hours of real time, or more, in REAL TIME. In turn based, it may have taken many more hours. They also seem to want to have a game that uniquely allows players to use either mode, and the modes are supposed to be balanced, which also means they have to let players switch. Plus, they intentionally allow it. They could easily have made switching unavailable for Ultimate, like they made 1roll20s commands disabled. I actually was worried for a sec, since I've just been playing in simulated Ultimate to test, so I just made an actual Ultimate character and tested to see if you could switch in Ultimate, and you can. Anyway, I think I've made this into a bigger deal than it actually is. With my build and my test game, I'm doing essentially every fight in turn-based anyway. Only Nekataka-guard-bug fights and Dorudugan have been done real time, and Outcast's Refuge where you have a similar bug-ish issue with mobs (several witches) coming from an entirely different room in turn-based, that doesn't happen in real time. And I could probably do both of the latter fights (everything outside of the Nekataka guard bug) in turn-based if necessary. My build may not work for other reasons, but the turn-based/real-time switch isn't really a big deal.

It may be of interest, with a priest/chanter (trying out to see how the leveling goes, with all challenges on except TOI, Eothas, Wael, and Skaen), I killed the monsters between the beginning of the main dig site underground (starting with the sporelings, crystal spider, wisps, wurms) and continued the same fight all the way through killing the adra ooze and essence anomalies and such, so no sneaking was required except for past the panthers, which I think is minimal. Not sure if it is 100% repeatable, because Vela seemed to get left behind a bit at first, but the basic idea was to pull Sporelings with the speed chant to run faster, then summon Wurms and flee and the Wurms aggro the sporelings and the rest of what comes, and then combat stays active and you sort of carefully hop to the next set of mobs with something like 1 wurm to active them (but they don't keep chasing when the wurm disappears). I got to the next phase of the Eothas challenge with 1-2 days cushion, which means you can do something similar in the 1st cave on the beach if you want extra experience and such. There will also likely be plenty of opportunities to do the same sort of thing, where you find a fight you can win somewhere in an area without Vela getting killed, and then activate other monsters, who then sit around waiting for your summons to arrive and safely kill them. The priest part of my character was irrelevant for this, any chanter can do it. Also, it is probably common knowledge, but if you exit the docks part of Maje in the bottom left, that lets you enter Gorecci St in the right place.

Ultimate rules explain explicitly that you can use the console, just not for anything that involves Iroll20s. Also, in a similar context, it mentioned explicitly that turn-based can be toggled on and off during the game, not just at the beginning. I think that is found in the original announcement about Ultimate. It is plenty of a ridiculous challenge already. It seems they didn't see a reason to restrict you to just one mode. I'm not aware of whether there are any other uses of the console besides this; I never used it before, and just figured it out because of the turn-based/real-time toggle. I looked it up once I encountered the bug in turn-based where Nekataka guards attack you when they should not.

Nope - it is doable and within the rules for Ultimate to do so. You hit the tilde key (below ESC) and then type: settacticalmode followed by either a 0 or 1, then press [ENTER] 1 is turn based; 0 is real time. As a quality-of-life thing, of course in turn-based you turn the combat speed all the way up... but then don't forget to turn it all the way back down for real time. If you do have a char that is good for turn-based, note that you HAVE to switch if you do any city battles in Nekataka such as Cotta or the Imp or Katrenn, or else the guards jump in. In normal real-time, the guards don't spawn and attack, so that is a bug but that is what Obsidian is best at (having games with tons of bugs) heh.

The build relies mostly on killing with summons, and on an important fact: in turn-based, Vela STAYS STILL even without being terrified, IF she stays not terrified. So, for a typical fight, take the Tortuk fight on the Dunnage docks. I send my boar (boar is huge because it regenerates after getting knocked out nearly every combat) to attack one of the powder monkey adds, while my MC is sneaking far away over to the left around a sort-of-corner by the steps of the deck (not pier). I learned the hard way to suicide my boar rather than to try to save him. Trying to save him draws enemies near myself and/or Vela, and they coded Vela in an extreme sort of way, where she runs into combat way too insanely, and enemies do target her sometimes. So, my boar will use its movement to run to the right, even farther away from me. The enemies will head after the boar. For this fight, I might be lvl 11 with upgraded Wurms and also normal Ogres. I move forward on my turn (half movement dots b/c in stealth), and summon wurms as far from myself and as close to enemies as I can. The actual summoning spell finished on turn 2. As opposed to Ogres, Wurms tend to get initiative right after being summoned. This is important because it means they can move closer to the enemy right away before the enemy moves closer to them, which prevents creep of the fight getting closer to Vela. Now, the enemy is basically locked. If they have the firepower to kill my summons before I can make more, then I stay in stealth and I am fine. Nearly always, they cannot kill my summons, so I leave stealth and help fight a bit with a 2h ranged weapon (or not, if I don't want to have decay of the weapon for no reason). However, I use my judgement and don't leave stealth until the fight is under control enough so that I won't get enemies messing with me. It would be very bad to be out of stealth and get interrupted while you are summoning, and be left with no chants and no summons. However, there are a million belt-items that can summon 1/rest for emergencies I always keep a fresh one handy. It is rare I need to use one. 20 int with items is a magic number, btw, for duration in rounds, especially once you get lvl 19 with ancient weapons. 15 int is enough for resummoning Ogres and Wurms. You only need to use the original skeletons in the first cave, since you can get to lvl 4 before the digsite fights. The only active ranger abilities I use, and very rarely obviously (since they are per-rest until and unless you get brilliant of course I do a no-rest run for all the bonuses and for Eothas time), are marked prey (non upgraded) and evasive roll (which is awesome sometimes mid-combat when Vela is safe). Passives are things like resilient companion, 2h weapons, Marksmanship, shield, concentration, and then you have have so many extra talents that you take stuff like extra weapon slot, fast running, and 1-3 of the +10 saves ones, since why not. Definitely take survival of the fittest, lucky, toughness, and such. None are breakers, but they add up and few talents are critical. Once you get ancient weapons, you still want to have upgraded wurms, and that is all you need. I don't use other invocations, but somebody might find some narrow use for a damage one. Chants, you mostly want ancient memory and at lvl 20 the one that makes skeletons (which don't unsummon your ancient weapons, by the way). 15% fire damage on weapons is useful a little bit, and dragon wailed is almost irrelevant but you may use it a bit. Dordugan is a somewhat special case, as you have to beat him yourself, with the chant-skeletons. Because of how this all works, it has to be in real time, so Vela has to get terrified. You start with Vela in the bottom right, and use your boar to start combat and lead Dorud close to her to get her terrified, then shoot him and lead him to the other side of the map. It is then easy to keep him far enough that his massive range abilities still don't ever hit her. Otherwise, he'd be fully impossible, but once you do that, you fight him a lot like Kaylon did in his video on youtube. Because of Abydon's challenge, you'd want 3 good ranged weapons and would need to kill him before they break. For this one fight, you'd want the invocation that gives you str and +2 pen (among some other stuff - forgetting the name of it) since that means you can pen with other ranged weapons (not just the Essence Bow) along with the marksmanship ring. And of course the cloak that heals you from fire. So, your own abilites don't matter much. I wouldn't ditch anything too strongly, although maybe dex can go down pretty far. You need enough int to get to 20, and maybe to 25 eventually would be good. Perception for traps and hitting. And enough con to not die to stuff that hits you sometimes like the undead dragon. I had 10 might for this build, but I'd try to go higher for Dorudugan if I could. Resolve can probably be ditched, but overall it helps to not be overly squishy sometimes (such as against the water dragon and the risen undead dragon). There are a lot of fights in the game, and not all can be handled from stealth. When getting Revku's burden cloak, for example, you get ambushed by fire bats and a naga and stuff, and you need to help in the fight so that Vela isn't killed. Turn based combat pulls more enemies, from farther away, than real time usually does. For example, in the hanging sepulcher, I started combat in that room with the risen guys, and the darguls and shade actually joined the fight, but for some reason the wraith stayed out of it. Still, this build is so powerful in situations like that, that I beat all of them, or rather, my Ogres and Wurms did (however, I believe I was lvl 16 when I did that, which is fairly high level). Wurms are great when you want to take down low-hp enemies who are in back, like Risen Archers and that Priest and such. Ogres have a ton of hps and once you have sweeping attack, that is really good for lvls 16-19, which can involve a fairly large amount of non-boss but not easy fighting, including some bounties. I beat that goldpact group bounty (Beina, I believe) who also has that ironclad, for example, as well as the 4 guys with the treasure map pieces, as part of leveling up. In the cave with the bog witches in outcast's refuge, I did real time and that way didn't pull the witches in the farther room, but in turn based they all jumped in. So, as I said in my first post, I keep aware of the benefits and drawbacks of turn-based and of real-time and switch as appropriate. For a pet, I use the animancy cat mostly, and for some fights like the Beast of Winter, the troll that makes you immune to engagement is great.

Thanks - that Effigy's Husk ability is something I totally forgot about. It'll be fun to keep up with progress on this thread, from you all and from me (until and unless I run into a full block with FS). If you are curious how I have done any particular combats with this build, let me know. I use a boar of course.

Great thread, guys. I'm actually trying a different character build angle than what I've seen here, and have gotten very close to proof of concept. It is a character type I developed when they first beefed up PoTD over a year back, since I wasn't aware that you could stealth past the digsite and I was trying to actually beat the fights there at lvl 4. The build is designed to initiate combat with an animal and then summon with chanter before enemies get anywhere near you, which locks most fights. When I saw Ultimate, I noticed that my build still had potential. I actually couldn't imagine any other build succeeding, but I was unaware of the the brilliant cloak and how to use salvation of time, so I think that you guys are onto something very possibly better. Still, since my approach is different and is turning out to be surprisingly promising, I'll explain more: I haven't played Pillars since then, over a year, so I am ignorant about so much regarding combos and about how to use the priest/brilliant thing, how to get to 0 recovery with Scordeos, or how to kill most everything right away with a monk. I was also ignorant of how to use stealth. A couple of years ago (approximately), I did do TCS in Pillars 1 with a monk, and Ultimate in Pillars 1 with a chanter. 20 years back I was a Magic the Gathering proplayer with the most pro-tour points worldwide. Anyway, when I saw Ultimate was a thing again, I figured I'd start working on it and see how far I got. I've learned a lot from you guys about so many things (such as what I mentioned above) I had no idea about. However, my character concept works without many tricks or combos - a ranger/chanter (troubador). Using a combination of turn-based and real-time, and playing a game with the combat-critical god-challenges (including Vela and Galawain and the per-encounter no-regen one) on to see if it is possible (since so much of the content is new to me - I just did beast of winter for the first time yesterday, and haven't seen SSS or FS at all yet). I know the following so far: I can get to lvl 20, no issues, because you can actually win most any fight you want with this combo while protecting Vela (via keeping her out of the fight except for specific problematic fights such as water dragon and beast of winter). I beat the water dragon using 3 withdraw scrolls, and used 4 to beat the damn Beast of Winter who conversation-teleports you and vela and then those adds spawn right on top of her. The lava dragon was vampiric which stymied me at lvl 16 but I [reloaded and] came back at lvl 20 and beat him turn-based with crossbow/pike interrupts to interfere with his vamp regen, especially from his meteor shower that would otherwise give him massive vamp-based heals. (By the way, TheLee, with this build, the fight against the lava bats and drakes on the bridge is no problem and goes quite fast. I beat the undead dragon in a similar manner, but with more skill and tension involved since he dives on you. Notably, though, I beat the undead risen dragon first attempt with only Naxia (sp) and ignoring the other two buffs/areas in the white void. I beat Dorudugan but it took forever; I'd spec differently in the future to up my main char damage (for most fights I rely on summons, especially because of item degradation). Also I beat the Spider Queen first attempt (I watched a video so I had some idea of what to expect). Haven't done the the Ooze or SigilMaster, but both look fairly possible. Beat Concelhaut and of course the Cave Grub (the grub I actually did at lvl 10 or 11, but I probably wouldn't recommend that and my weapon would have degraded a bunch if I had that challenge on). Haven't seen Forgotten Sanctum content yet, but this is pretty promising. As to actually getting so good with the details that I actually complete an actual run successfully, I am doubtful. For now, proving the concept to be possible (or not) with this build is interesting to me. I think that for your combo salvation of time builds, real-time is a must, but otherwise, such as for my build, turn-based is often massively important. It is buggy in towns, and takes more real-life time, but it actually takes less in-game Eothas-challenge time for many combats. And, for my build, there are many fights that I couldn't possibly win [in Ultimate] with real-time, but can easily do turn-based. For example, the undead dragon that chain-casts Concelhaut's Siphon is easy to interrupt in turn-based but (at least for me) impossible to deal with in real-time. Chanter ancient weapon summon special abilities (WS, KnockDown, FoD) are hugely great, but very hard to use well in real-time, unless I am unaware of how to use the AI properly for that. And even if AI worked with those, doing their abilities (especially the pike knock-down interrupt) at the strategically right time is too hard for me in real time. Also by the way, the Hanging Sepulcher with the eulogies is straightforward with this build - you can just kill the mobs. You can sort-of do it at lvl 10, or by lvl 16 (which is when you get Ogre sweeping attack) you can do it quite easily. - David Mills

update: I don't think that suppress affliction on the main char is what is causing it. Not sure what is doing it now. But it happened again with a different character, this time a monk lvl 16

bump - this is NOT fixed and it is Dec 2017. Suppress affliction ruins a character file forever, as far as I can tell.

this isn't fixed. my solo chanter now gets any and all afflictions permanent on him any time an enemy hits him, of course this is game-breaking. prone, for example, means perma-prone. I believe this happened when an emeny paladin got confused-charmed by the new pirate hat and suppressed afflictioned me. Also, by the way, anytime an enemy gets confused, possibly confused-charmed by the hat, they start regenning really fast. Gamebreaking when a dragon gets it; essentially you cannot fight a dragon with the pirate hat or you will lose. But it is bugged against all enemies that way, if they get confused-charmed by the hat, they start regenning.

Its worse than this. When deep wounds is suppressed, it actually HEALS the enemies like trolls. Game breaking for solo rogues against the drake on lvl 5 of Caed Nua and against the Adra Dragon, where I just realized this is what was happening. Had to reload, luckily wasn't playing ironman. Also, after summoning Concelhaut and him dying, you can't summon other summons.