Wotcha

For ambush fights, my personal favorite cheesy tactic is to start the fight by sending in my rogue, who immediately uses Smoke Bomb/Shadowing Beyond as soon as combat starts. Then he flees back out of range to safety with the party, and the fight resets... with all the ambushers spawned and hanging around to be rounded up and murdered in a controlled fashion via AoE attacks at the REAL start of the fight. That is, if you're choosing to be bold and dive into it rather than doing split pulls on the would-be ambushers like a sensible person. Here's a thought to mess up the Fampyrs: equip your tank with Modwyr (or use the Harmony ring, or food, or whatever to be Intellect-immune) and Shimmer Scale with the enchantment that has 50% chance to reflect gaze attacks. You're still protected if the attack doesn't reflect, and if it does reflect, the fight just got a lot easier. It's pretty easy to make sure all the gazes go to your tank if you have the rest of the party hang well back with ranged attacks.

Also, coming to the forum, one doesn't need to ASK for very much at all. There's a lot out there that's been given away for free. That's how sharing works. I haven't had much unique to contribute- the only thing I believe I have independently discovered is the ability to instant-cast cast-time spells in turn-based mode in some circumstances by hovering the cursor over the Delay Turn button but not clicking it. I don't know if that's even of any use for any Ultimate attempts, but I put it out there anyway. Hell, I don't even know if it's enough of an exploit to get disqualified over, because it kind of feels like it. I, too, question Fuze's motivation in trying to dangle "discoveries" in the thread. It doesn't seem like anything but a cry for attention. It seems to be working, after a fashion, but it's not exactly positive attention.

I dunno, I did read your claim that you had some amazeballs unstoppable tricks that you weren’t going to tell anybody. Perhaps you even do! I also noted your mentioning that you’re watching some of the guys stream, and you did apparently have some good suggestions to make. In any event, if you do have some kind of trick that greatly reduces the difficulty of the run, that kind of devalues the effort of the challenge, doesn’t it? Maybe you should keep quiet about it until the players good enough to do it without such cheese get their victories in.

You yourself are a case in point, Wildey. You showed up out of nowhere with a completely unorthodox build that might just take the cake for first place, and you've been more than willing to swap ideas about it. Personally I'm rooting for you specifically, although it's a competitive field out there. What I'm hoping that you (or whoever delivers the first practical win) determine is how much spare time exists. Until that's known, everybody's approach is on figuring out how to do it with as few rests as possible. Once the completion time for a particular pathing is known, then the number of rests you can afford on that path becones a variable you can optimize around, and you can start using that rest budget quite early in the progression (basically, as soon as you finish the digsite). For instance, it's very easy to get a long-duration Brilliant as an on-rest ability via making the correct dialog choices at the digsite, Hasongo, and Ashen Maw. That's still a tough bar to clear under Ultimate conditions, but at that point some other strategies might become viable if you're not leaning on specific resting bonuses, if for a limited number of fights you can spare 8 hours to refresh your Brilliant-rank Wit of Death's Herald. At the very least it could be a player-time saver, by eliminating the tedious wrangling of cloak triggers.

I look at it differently, Fuze. This entire forum is built around collaboration, sharing ideas, and building on each other's ideas. I am rooting for everybody who has shared their ideas on this thread, and if it's any of them who claim the first title, I have little doubt that they will acknowledge the tremendous support and credit they received from their fellow players. Anybody who's read through the ideas here, but chooses to withhold their own, doesn't sound like much of a team player, particularly if they then also refuse to credit the community's shared research towards their own efforts.

I think you’re asking for what RPG slang would call a “stat stick”. There are a couple in Deadfire. The easiest to get is possibly Griffin’s Blade (from a random encounter in Neketaka) and then give it the enchantment that adds +10% to spell damage. There are others that have other effects on spell casts but they come later. The real problem is that you will run out of abilities pretty fast and be left standing there picking your nose while the rest of the party does all the work. You could sustain weaponlessness with chanters, or ciphers with the psion subclass, or blood mage if you had a lot of party healing they could pour into you to sustain your blood sacrifices. You could maybe make it work with a cipher beguiler, but it would be very easy for you to bottom out on focus due to misses and then you’d be stuck unless you stooped to hitting something with a stick. If you’re doing it or RP purposes, just use a scepter, rod, or wand, and pretend that it’s spells you’re casting with it, nothing so crude and random as a pistol....

Think of beguilers like this: Almost by definition, you want to be casting spells more than you want to be attacking-to-generate-focus-to-cast-spells. Because if you'd be better off just attacking, you could do that at any time! The beguiler mechanic works like this: If you are casting a Deception spell, you pay the focus cost normally. But for every target you hit that has an affliction (including grazes, and INCLUDING the affliction you might have just applied with this very spell cast), you get 5+PL points of focus back. If you hit multiple targets with a relatively low-focus-cost spell, you GAIN focus. Even for higher-cost spells, if they hit multiple targets, their focus cost is significantly reduced. The two stars for this: 1) Eyestrike (only costs 10 focus, at max level you gain 2 focus (5+PL 7) only hitting only 1 target, and if you hit 2 or more you rapidly turn a profit). 2) Phantom Foes (costs 20 focus, but affects a MUCH larger area, so it is very easy to rack up a lot of focus if the board is full). Play your cards right, and you should be able to spend most of the fight casting Deception spells without needing to stop and make weapon attacks. This shines in particular in multiclass with casters. Normally that would be a bad choice because spellcasting from the other class doesn't generate you any focus. But if your primary goal is casting Deception spells mostly/exclusively, you don't NEED to generate much if any focus to do that, so you're more or less free to cast either kind of spell without worry. Psion has a very similar friendly-to-caster synergy because they generate focus even while spellcasting, but most people still prefer Beguiler overall for that role. This also can be friendly for tanks, because there are a ton of fast-casting Deception spells which even a tank can safely cast without worry of interrupts, it plays well into the tank's role of board control, and the tank's typical downside of slow action speed and long recovery is mitigated by the generally long-term payoff of long-duration debuffs, which don't need huge throughput to get coverage. On that note, Borrowed Instinct IS a Deception spell, and it is amazeballs-effective for a tank. So what's the downside? The chief downside is that beguilers' focus generation from attacking is poor compared to vanilla ciphers or ascendants. With Draining Whip (the default, and the way you should basically always be thinking about your focus generation), vanilla ciphers get 100% Focus per point of damage, Ascendants get 125% Focus per point of damage, and Beguilers get 75% Focus per point of damage if the target has an affliction, or only 50% if the target does not have an affliction (although if you're in this situation the fight should be well advanced enough that you should at least have Flanked, so it's your own damn fault if the target isn't afflicted). So if you wind up using up your focus, and either don't have enough to cast the Deception spell you want, or if it's late enough in the fight that there's no sufficient cluster of enemies to generate positive returns via your Deception focus mechanic, then you will be regaining focus more slowly than you otherwise would. This is partially mitigated if you're saving up to cast Deception spells, because you will need to still save up the full price, but you'll still be getting some of it back even if you only hit one target.

Like many of the fights in the Seeker sequence, there is a trick. All of the shades are invulnerable except for one. Kill that one (and the sub-shades it spawns on death), then find the next unprotected one (when you kill the vulnerable one, the vulnerability jumps to one of the other ones), lather rinse repeat.

On that note, there's a bug I've noticed in turn based. I haven't figured out the entire parameters of it. You can trigger instant-cast of casting-time spells under certain circumstances, which I think are 1) you haven't used any of your movement, and 2) your spell, if cast, will not go off until a lower initiative in the following round. What you do is start casting the spell, then hover your cursor over the "Delay Turn" button, but don't click it, and then move your cursor away. Your spell cast will move its slot in the turn order from whatever initiative it was next turn, to the same initiative in the CURRENT turn, even if your own initiative is already past that. In such a case, when you end your turn, the spell goes off immediately afterward. Obviously this is super, super useful. Equally obviously, it cannot possibly be intended. It's egregious enough that I wouldn't necessarily want to bet my Ultimate playthrough on it, although given the "advantageous bugs are all Obsidian's fault and fair game", I wouldn't rule it out entirely. It could be extremely powerful for something like a Chanter build where getting a summon off instantly instead of in the following round could be very clutch indeed. It's also great for party coordination (not much of a consideration for Ultimate, obvs), where you can delay all your team's turns, get your cast-time crowd-control spells instantly, and then get to enjoy the advantages of all the prones or one-round duration effects with your own team before the enemy gets a chance to act and shake the prones/one-turn durations off.

I've read through quite a bit of the forums (I lurk for a long time before I ever get up the courage to post!), but I missed the Gorecci Street one. I hadn't heard of the reloading items one either. Maybe I should use the holiday weekend to trawl the forums again looking for such gems!

That is NOT common knowledge, as far as I am aware, but if it's true, that is AWESOME. I want to try that. You can sneak through the enemies but it takes a decent amount of stealth and is very tricky. If it's possible to avoid it entirely, that's terrific.

I didn’t think it was possible to toggle between real time and turn based, but you are talking like it is. How does that work? I thought you chose at startup and that was a permanent choice for that playthrough.

That's the thing that seems exciting to me, is that it presents a small enough attack surface that the number of fights that need Withdraw scrolls starts to approach the number of Withdraw scrolls that can be reasonably obtained/crafted. The technique of suicide-bombing with your pet to open up combat in perfect safety from any distance, and then sending endless waves of summons to whittle everything down, has nearly 100% coverage in what is killable. It's uncertain if it's close enough to 100% to be scroll-able for the remainder, but it's impressive just to be in the realm of consideration. Somebody's got a workable build idea that isn't "be a priest". Will wonders never cease. I also like that it's potentially viable in turn-based.

Welcome, Wildey! That's very interesting, to hear of a completely different evolutionary approach. That's one of your advantages being away from the game for a while, you are free and clear from the groupthink that tends to happen as people cluster around the things already proven to work. The one piece of advice that may be of use for you would be to look into Effigy's Husk for use against vampiric enemies. It has a -50% enemy healing aura out of the box, and an enchantment to bring up to -75%. The aura only has 5m range so you can't sit completely out of the fight to employ it, but you only need it to deal with specific healing enemies. You have to be bloodied for the aura to activate though, but that shouldn't be too hard to safely achieve for you because you can have summons beat on you to bring you down. I find it particularly interesting because I tend to ignore non-ghost heart rangers because of the tremendous utility of placement and REplacement, although it conflicts with summons which is why I would never have considered your build. I had considered the possibility of using a regular ranger pet to safely open combats, but hadn't made the connections you had. Otherwise, I'd love for you to keep exploring your own corner of the strategy space, and telling us what you find!

It was annoying to micro, but I had fun with a party where everybody but the tank was multiclass Assassin (the tank was multiclass Trickster instead). I would trivialize many fights by starting from stealth, and having everybody use arquebuses and attack a single target with Devastating Blow (five of which back-to-back would generally kill any non-tank targets), then immediately Smoke Cloud (taking advantage of firearm reload-vs-recovery mechanics) to reset the fight. Lather rinse repeat on all of the squishies on the other team, and then mop up the tanks via more conventional means at the end.

Because it's the kind of corner case thing which might make or break somebody's playthrough, I thought I should share an idea I just had reading through the back pages of this thread. Some of the considered-viable combos revolve around Blood Mage, and a useful spell for it is Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, normally gotten from the reward grimoire one gets after completing Bekarna's Observatory. But it's also possible to get that spell without leaving Neketaka, if you can kill Arkemyr, because it's in his own personal grimoire too, if I remember correctly. Maybe even pickpocketing it off of him if that's possible, although I'm not sufficiently familiar with the pickpocketing rules to know if it's in his pickpocketable inventory. I'd wait to do it until after he gives you the Bekarna quest just in case. Although I wonder if killing him would have any interesting consequences for doing Forgotten Sanctum later. Kind of wondering if I should try it out for fun in my current (not-even-remotely-Ultimate) playthrough, to see if there are any entertaining alterations to the FS conversations. I have no idea if that's any easier or more practical than doing Bekarna (or possibly just worth even though you're planning on Bekarna but not until later), but it was a weird enough idea I wanted to mention it.

I was wondering if you'd considered Woedica for this reason. That much raw lash is close to making AR a non-issue (and it being a summoned weapon makes weapon degradation also a nonissue, but you get that anyway because Priest). I don't know how much you consider AR to be worth worrying about. I have to imagine that nearly every fight worth worrying about follows the same template of "1) Activate Immortality Engine, 2) grind everything into paste, however long that happens to take". The only reason to worry about AR or damage output in general would be if it's somehow taking TOO long for one reason or another.

It is quite possible for certain classes (including rogues, of course) to stealth solo past nearly every battle on the critical path of the game. Obsidian did that deliberately to support that playstyle as a viable way to complete the game. I did a stealth solo run as my second play through and I hardly fought anything. However, there is a LOT of content in the game which is not on the critical path, and a lot of it would be very hard to try to solo without understanding the game very well beforehand. You may find it frustrating to attempt some of the fights solo unless you are playing on a low difficulty setting. You can easily “win”, but you won’t even come close to seeing everything. There’s no real equivalent of a Lone Wolf talent in this game. There are a few items which grant bonuses if you are alone or at least distant from other party members, but they aren’t nearly compensation for the significant added challenge of playing solo. If you do it, do it for fun and realize in advance that many fights might be extremely frustrating and tough, particularly before you learn all the little corner cases and tricks. Rogue and priest are the classes with the easiest access to combat-escaping abilities, and thus are best suited for a solo stealth run. You could multi class either of those two classes with any other class you choose, and be able to complete the main quest line almost entirely through stealth.

I'm thinking a separate thread should be started to memorialize the honorable dead. I have a feeling we're going to be seeing quite a few of these posts before somebody reaches the finish line.

The "big money" combo requires separate priest and cipher, because a cipher cannot cast Ancestor's Memory (for the Brilliant buff) on themselves, and that is the buff that potentially allows unlimited casts of Salvation of Time (and thus indefinite durations for any other buffs). Ascendant works well either solo or multiclass, but you should think of it more as a tradeoff, where you sacrifice -1 PL to get significantly increased focus generation. Ascending for the +3 PL bonus can take quite a while to assemble the focus at the start of the fight, which is generally the part of the fight that you most want to be spending your time casting actual spells (like, say, Ancestor's Memory on your Priest so you can get the sweet, sweet SoT spam going). Once you get things under control, you can either Ascend (and stay there forever with SoT spam), or don't bother because there aren't all that many fights where you aren't already well on your way to mopping up before you finish ascending. That's true for single-classed, anyway, if you multiclass rogue or ranger, you will gain focus a lot faster and it becomes a little more feasible to Ascend soon enough to really make a difference. Because action speed is so worthless in turn based, Time Parasite is not the sexy thing it is in real time, so the only real draw in my mind for a SC cipher is Driving Echoes, which basically makes penetration as a mechanic a nonissue. However, if you are paying attention to gearing and spell choices, penetration isn't as big a deal as all that. Beguiler is interesting as well, because you can basically spam Deception spells to gain focus instead of weapon attacks, at least early in the fight when there are many enemy targets. Once the board clears, they instead gain focus SLOWER because they get a lower total multiplier on their damage. But they are more friendly with caster multiclassing, spending the first couple of rounds maxing out their focus (and throwing around AoE debuffs while they're at it), and then rationing out their focus for the rest of the fight along with spell casts. Psions get a bad rap because their focus generation is slower than you can get from the other options, but it's automatic, and in turn based mode it has the extra benefit that you get your focus gen for the round up-front rather than trickling in per second. They also pair well with casters, particular casters that hang back from the fight (because they lose their focus gen for a round if they get hit). Psions in turn-based get 6 focus per round, and an additional 6 per round at every odd PL. So at max level, a MC psion will get 24 focus each round. Which means that as long as they aren't getting hit, they can spam PL 1 or 2 powers indefinitely, which is something other ciphers can't do (except for Ascended Ascendants receiving SoT cheese). If they are instead spending rounds casting spells from their other class, they can bank up a bunch of focus for dropping bigger spells. A minor note, if you are abusing SoT for endless buffs, you are also in the position of abusing Barring Death's Door, and casting BDD on your psion, extending it with SoT, and leaving him at 1 hit point without healing, will mean that he technically doesn't take damage even if somebody hits him, and so he will not lose his focus generation. All that said, a Beguiler is probably better than a Psion in most situations. I personally don't think Soulblades or vanilla ciphers offer any real advantage compared to these three options. Dumping focus on melee strikes just isn't that great. TL;DR: go Ascendant/Trickster, you'll probably be pretty happy with it. Once you play through and see how things work, you'll be able to judge for yourself what you'd like to try.

Dex is not quite a dump stat in TB mode because you will lose a significant amount of Stride if you fully tank it. But otherwise it's pretty terrible. They could have made it slightly better if, when you delayed your turn, you decided exactly when you would re-enter the initiative order instead of just going straight to the end. But as it is, if you really do need to interrupt some crucial thing, having an initiative that is too low is just as useless as having one which is too high. 10 dex is fine. In practice, the way to make sure you can interrupt at need is simply to make sure every one of your characters has a ready method of interrupting at will. If their class doesn't provide one, a single point of Arcana will let anybody use Thrust of Tattered Veils scrolls, which are super cheap and will do the job on any opponent except if they put up Spell Reflection. Note that ToTV even works on skeleton mages who are immune to the piercing damage- they take no damage but still get interrupted. Ciphers still work well for ranged. Good weapons are the Red Hand (arquebus), which is still very good even if it isn't the ridiculous monster it is in real time with pause, Scepter for enemies weak against bludgeoning, Hand Mortar/Fire in the Hole (special Blunderbuses you can get from Serafen's starting equip & personal quest) are good, and in RTwP particularly, Rod with the Blast modal enabled is a pretty decent weapon for clustered enemies, so long as it gets sufficient penetration (which Rods are relatively weak at). There's a unique ring that gives +4 ranged ACC and +1 ranged PEN, which on top of Hammering Thoughts gives ciphers reasonable penetration even with the weaker weapon types. There's also a late-game pistol doing Raw damage (with a modal to also do Crush/Corrode with VERY high penetration), which is also pretty awesome in turn-based because the initiative penalty of the modal doesn't matter at all. For a ranged cipher, pure single-classed will work well enough. Multiclassing either rogue or ranger would give good performance at range. Damage-wise Ranger doesn't really take off until Driving Flight though.

Could it be something like all spells that target Deflection? Because there's other stuff like Talon's Reach which could benefit from that particular combo. Although being tied to Instruments of Pain and multiclass, it's strictly an endgame combo, and stealth is an early-game strategy, because anybody making it as far as the endgame is spoiled for choice when it comes to brutally overpowered combos. Incidentally, if it is that spells targeting deflection that benefit from IoP... the first defense that Jernaugh's Equalizing Burst targets is Deflection. That's a spell that I'm dying to come up with a ridiculous combo for. I think I'll test that this weekend.

I have been focusing just on otherwise-vanilla PotD stealth runs as opposed to going full-monty Ultimate, but Sunbeam's range had NOT escaped my notice. It makes Eothas priests surprisingly good at stealth, because of the utility of long-range distraction. Particularly since priest spells otherwise have such crap range. For full-fledged druids, Burst of Summer Flame (an otherwise disappointing spell) has additional utility for this particular task, due to the very fast cast time allowing you to hit precise time windows for your distractions, on top of also having 15m range. Since Fury druids are stuck with that as their level 2 bonus spell, it's a way of getting some use out of it. For stealth runs where you can get back out of combat (i.e. no Berath challenge), Fury druids also have the benefit of the teleport encounter power on their shapeshift, which helps them reach a favorable position to drop combat from after the occasional stealth failure. Wizards aren't entirely out of the range game either, as Arduous Delay of Motion has 15m range so it can be used as a long-range distraction spell as well.

Sunbeam only has one Reflex attack roll, which if it hits does both the damage and the blind. So that roll is going to get the +acc bonus because of the blind, and incidentally get the damage coming along for the ride. There are a couple of damaging spells that work like this (the damage and affliction on the same roll), but not all of them. The spells like that are going to be particularly nice for the helm, compared to the ones where the affliction comes only on a secondary attack roll.

Dumb question, but last time I checked (which was definitely post-5.0 release), the penetration of the corrosion AoE from Rot Skulls was still a base of 0, which makes the spell pretty pointless. I know that particular bug came up in the turn based beta testing and it seemed like a simple one-liner fix was all that was needed. Is that fix included in the polishing mod anywhere?