Tenray

Antidote is king in the Belranga fight.

What is actually your definition then of beating solo PotD, if I may ask ? - skipping mega bosses - skipping all other "critical" encounters - do we fight at all? - what do you define as broken ? You could theorethically skip all encounters with Bounding Boots, like I have shown once in one my clips and "beat" the game on PotD. I just think you cannot beat a lot of the encounters, yet alone the mega bosses, without abusing any of the "broken" mechanics.

I personally have a problem calling it a BG3 while it looks like a remastered DOS2, plays like a DOS2 and has a lot of mechanics of DOS2. I did play both DOS games. They were not as great as BG or PoE - imo - but the uproar wouldn't be so huge if they would just call it DOS3. Simple and honest. Back to the topic: What I disliked in PoE2 the most: - naval fights: yes, every RPG has some kind of "dragging out the end" (don't know how to describe it properly), but the naval fights just weren't entertaining at all. I actually jumped straight to the "real" combat instead of that "text based fighting". - build variety "was" huge until they introduced mega bosses. I really like the mega bosses a lot, they are quite a challenge. But it really killed a lot of viable builds, especially any DoT builds (the few DoT spells that exist anyways) and/or casters in general. - everything was more interesting than the main story line, lol. Sorry to say. I like side questing and looking at games like Witcher3 or Skyrim: all of the side quests are also more interesting. But really ... fighting all your way through to Eothas and then ... You are having a nice chat with him and that's it? That was so disappointing to me. What I wish needs to come in PoE3 or at least needs to stay: - build variety / multi class - a more fair distribution between arche types of the spells, most of them are direct damage and/or buffs/debuffs - a lot more spells ... a lot more please. like to experiment Besides my points there is not that much that I do complain about. Both PoE games are great.

Considering the fact that Divinity Original Sin 3 will ... oh wait Baldurs Gate 3 will be really bad, I am looking forward to a POE 3.

Hello boys and girls! I was working on a run as single class monk but I did quit at some point. Main reason however was that I was really exhausted after the first two ultimate playthroughs and that I have to work a lot atm, so I don't think I will try again any near in the future. The mega bosses are actually the "easiest" part or let's say the ones that give less of a headache. You will encounter the real problems when facing too many mobs at once. That is and will always be the problem. The Biggest headache for me personally are all of the arena fights in SSS, it is an absolute pain and so random ... It's just too random, too time consuming, playing around 5 hours every time you die in these god-damn arena fights; don't forget about Vela. Yes, there is a nice trick, that I have showcased/explained how to get rid of Vela for the arena fights, but it's still hard to pull off as a single class monk. Second and third big headache is Oracle of Wael and Guardian of Ukaizo. The fight with Oracle of Wael is also quite random and beating the Ultimate I personally want consistency. Don't get me wrong I actually did beat every encounter but it was so too random sometimes ... Guardian of Ukaizo is actually really hard to beat aswell upscaled with 4x megaboss buff. It is not the toughest encounter but you can easily die there if you are not careful. Theoratically I would say it is possible to do it was a monk, practically ... I just think it is not worth throwing away your time if you could just do it with any priest + x class. SC monk will need endless amount of tries, I suppose. Main reason why I think monk struggles the most is simply Vela. Even if you have unlimited amount of Withdraw scrolls, 99% of the time I simply died in my runs due to the recovery time between casting Withdraw and being able to spamm WotW again. However, I am still willing to try again, but I need new input, new tricks, new ideas for monk. With the knowledge I currently have atm about monk I will probably not try it again.

First of all hello guys and wishing you great holidays. I got some spare time now aswell and wanted to get the news about PoE2 Ultimate runs! First of all congratz @thelee Wishing you the best aswell! Dedication and patience were you friends =D How is the rest of you doing ? Anyone else working on a ultimate run ? ---- @Enoch you can disjoint Arcane Dampener if you use Shadowing Beyond.

Getting ready for Pillars of Eternity 3 - The Ultimate! *Already stretching* =D Will be cool if there will be some kind of Ultimate achievement for the new Baldurs Gate game aswell.

Yes I actually got the letter this week on monday. Instantly opened when I came back from work =D Was really happy. But as I said I am working again and so I have alot less time to communicate and forgot to mention it here on the forums. I have posted it on the discord server aswell. So is anyone else here trying to beat it ?! Don't you dare giving up guys! I believe in you!

Surely, I am overexaggerating at some point and you are right all RPGs are using cliches, but why do you think some are getting rated very high and others get completely forgotten. It's about presentation! I give you an example of how I look at this things: Let's talk about The Elder Scrolls and the Dark Brotherhood. This is a vampire theme, super stereotypical, nothing really innovative there. BUT I haven't met a single person yet that would have denied this questline being amazing/entertaining. So after this questline was well received in the the Oblivion game, what have they done with in Skyrim ? Well, they just took it again, added some similar generic quests, some unique quests to continue the brotherhood story and everyone is going nuts again. Again great, at least that's my opinion and everyone I have talked to about that. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. One of the most important things to mention is that the Dark Brotherhood is an element Bethesda did not really advertised with in contrast to Obsidian with the pirate theme. Let's now take an example from Deadfire, the Flying Dutchman cliche. A very obvious element from the pirate theme. Davy Jones aka Lucia Rivan here get's introduced. You get the story told about Lucia by the kid that survived. Furrante, Aeldys and Yseyr. All of them telling you about her, it's really cool, honestly. The introduction was perfectly fine, but when you finally are able to step onto the Flying Dutchman things are getting really disappoiting for me. All you do, after finally meeting Lucia, is: Talk to her for literally less than 5 minutes and to decide to kill her and take the ship OR if you have the skill check trade the ship for your own ... That's it. That was SO disappointing. That's an element from the pirate theme, that Obsidian did advertise with, am I right ? I mean there is nothing behind Lucia Rivan. You do not really listen to HER story, what does she say, what is her real intention, you cannot side with her and take revenge or something like that, maybe she is looking for some kind of salvation because she is cursed and you might help her, not even a single quest that you directly get from HER. I just think you could have done alot more with the Flying Dutchman cliche. That's why I am saying it's about presentation. I like the pirate theme actually, I would have liked alot siding with her, being a part of the undead and doing some cruel quests for example. Unfortunatelly you cannot. Edit: I actually also want to mention a great example in Deadfire. Let's take the cliche of "there is drake terrifying the village and you are the hero to climb the mountain and kill it". This cliche is used for Beast of the Winter, which is btw my favourite DLC. Just look how Obsidian presented it: - you are being introduced to some kind of cult, everyone is waiting for you and wants to hear what to do next - you actually have no clue what is going on - out of the nothing the drake appears and you think everyone is going crazy -> they want to get killed on purpose and are looking for some kind of salvation this way, no clue, mindblowing for personally - you follow the drake into a cave, into the Vytmadh where he has an never-ending battle with Rynhaedr - you replay older scenarios, which are frozen in time, SUPER cool - and even more stuff ... THAT is amazing presentation, let me tell you that. BW was awesome. Same applies to others DLCs. They are really great. That is a way to use a cliche and present it where the player, at least me, doesn't instantly know what is really going on and what to do. The problem is: when the DLCs are much better than the actual main game, you might get bad reponses/reviews. Even if they would buy the game NOW with all DLCs, they tend to play the main plot first before exploring the rest. That's problematic. Dont't get me wrong. I really do not want to brag more about it. PoE2 is really awesome. I have played almost 800 hours by now. More than twice as much as in PoE1 because in Deadfire there is alot more to do and to explore, but some elemets are just so poorly presented, I am sorry.

Are you using any mods ? I do remember this happened to me a couple times shortly after release when my steam client wasn't connected to the cloud. Thought this was fixed. Never happened to me again.

On some of my characters I actually didn't invest points in DEX, great to know that you only need 14. Can be easily adapted, ty. But you still need Athletics 8, so you have to respecc probably anyways like me except you really do want invest in athletics. You get +2 from the Adra Potion, +2 Burglar's Gloves, +2 Ngati's Girdle (which I usually sell, because it gets you alot money early) + X (nothing comes to my mind now). You cannot use Unguent of Animalism because it's an interaction on the world map. So you still need to invest 2 points for athletics while leveling. BUT that was my whole point, you cannot just brute force your way through it. I have done so many runs and my game tends to bug out especially on THIS bridge. And I am really no talking about like 1 out of 10 times, it literally bugs out for me in easily 80% of my runs. No matter how often I save and reload the savegame itself is somehow corrupted and will always bug at this interaction while other savestates from different characters are fine. Don't ask me why. Reinstalled PoE2 aswell, already. Made no difference.

PoE2 is a great. I had alot fun playing it. I don't think the pirate theme is bad at all, but it is just a little too stereotypical imo: everywhere are pirates, everyone is drunk and also talking like that and OFC there is somewhere a kraken hiding and a Davy Jones ship that is not being owned by Davy Jones, he got replaced by a female skeleton thingy called Lucia Rivan. I really felt SOMETIMES like playing a Pirates of the Carribbean game. It's just a little too much. On the contrast however, PoE2 offers great combat, multiclassing, alot of really unique items, turn-based mode, cool and challenging bosses and alot alot to explore. Unfortunatelly the main path literally consists of only 4 quests, which is just too little imo (Crypt -> Hassongo -> Ashen Maw -> Ukaizo -> Done). Furthermore PoE1 had a really dark story, from my perspective, which I liked alot. I really liked Thaos! He was mysterious and I was actually looking forward to get somehow more involved in the Leaden Key in PoE2. As I said the pirate theme is not bad at all, but the transition from PoE1 to PoE2 was so weird for me. From a dark story into an overall alot happier atmosphere (besides what Eothas is doing ofc). Summarized I would still say PoE2 totally deserves a 90/100 aswell as PoE1 because it does alot things better than PoE1, especially gameplay/combat/quests, but I was just hoping personally for a much darker and longer main story for the sequel. If they would have continued the dark theme and introduced more mysterious characters, like Thaos, PoE2 would have been 95+/100 easily.

You should not judge too early about a build. Most builds are not working before they get some of their core abilities. Playing TCS will almost always be something like: "avoid every fight possible and collect exp until lvl x", simply because there is no other way. Doing tactical plays like pulling mobs into a corner or fighting in a narrow corridor is neccessary when you play solo. There is no build that starts on lvl 1 and can just run in brain afk mode and facetank everything, especially not on PotD. I really do get your point! You want to play it as you feel without thinking too much about mistakes you have maybe made. You want to compensate that by being tanky, but unfortunatelly that is not how PoE works. There are certain encounters, that need good preparation. If you start the fight with wrong equipment, wrong buffs or forgot to buy the proper potions you will most likely fail regardless of how tanky your character is. However, if you really want a build that can afk facetank everything, being almost invincible to everything, play one of the builds I used for my Ultimate run. But that doesn't really belong here in this discussion.

It definitely works with 5.0, it is still great. However, the actual question is how far do you want to take this build ... - Do you just want to finish the game TCS mode and get the achievement ? Then sure. The game can be completed without taking a single fight, so. - Do you want to play casually ? Means discovering, doing random bounties and exploring the whole Deadfire ? Then I would say doing everything of this as TCS is possible to a certain extent. Most likely you will fail at the mega bosses, but they are an own category ... For everything else in the game you are good to go, imo.

I am very sure you can finish the quest without killing the boss. You just have to sneak very close to the top left corner to get the quest log updated. You do NOT have to kill the boss. I have done it several times this way.

Oh wow. You are right picking up the Cap is great. I do remember that you really are out of money after buying sandals + magrans belt while doing my route. You do meet Thaenic a 2nd time however and you could buy the Cap. Very nice idea, honestly! BUT I would not change Cap for Revkus for: - The Battle Royal fight. Simply because you do not want to maximize damage, but actually just want to survive it while not getting interrupted on SoT and BDD. - Belranga fight. Belranga can spawn with Bullish which means that her attacks will interrupt, same applies to ALL of the spiders she does summon. You will get perma-interrupted by 100 spiders and won't be even able to cast a SoT. This is an instant GG. Happened to me twice. You can and should learn from my mistakes =D But summarized I can say, you are right. If you want to maximize your damage for the "more safer" bosses/encounters the Cap of Laughingstock is a great choice.

I am pretty sure I tried all of the writs against hauani and nothing seemed to work against the merge. I think the merge skill of hauani has a completely different "tag", that cannot be suppressed by any abilities unless you actually CC or interrupt him. I have tried this ofc before running it as priest of Woedica, especially for Hauani, because this boss is for many class combinations the "run-killer". I picked Woedica really only for the spiritual weapon. As already mentioned priest of Wael is also fine because you get Gaze of the Adragan, which will be useful for many more encounters and you can still fight with bare fists. I can however not guarantee that you will have enough burst to kill hauani, but I guess you can still manage to do it. As you can see I haven't used Deltro's Cage Helmet because I haven't found a consistent way of dealing lightning damage to myself. As a rogue/priest + attributes, my reflex is already really high. Just HITTING yourself, for example with scrolls, is already unlikely and critting yourself is even more unlikely. So I just dropped the idea with Deltros. This was my first Ultimate attempt as a Zealot and I wanted to make sure to waste as less time as possible. You recommended once to use Rakhan field boots + essence interrupter+blunting belt to trigger deltro in this thread, which works like a charm and will guarantee to have enough burst even without Woedica's Spiritual Weapon. I didn't want to risk to waste too much time on it to get all the items, but it's definetly an option and it would be possible to play with every priest subclass then.

Wizard is great and a lot of fun. But if you want to beat really EVERYTHING SOLO I do agree with Boeroer. SC monk is great, but pls don't try to trial of iron. If you are free to quicksave and load as many times as you want, SC monk is fine. If you do not play trial of iron, I would recommend Helwalker. You can leave might at 10 and fill out others stats because you get up to 10 might from your wounds as helwalker. You will do enough damage with 10 might, trust me. If you want more consistency and want to be more tanky, you can go Nalpazca. It doesn't sound convincing on the first look because of the downside of Nalpazca, but getting wounds for free is great as a monk. Drugs are also not so rare, can be crafted very easily and there are plenty of people selling drugs aswell. You can also built a FF monk and be even more tanky while still doing great damage, but I honestly don't know how to beat some of the mega bosses as FF monk.

Hello boys and girls, I am happy to present you my 2nd Ultimate run played as a Zealot (Streetfighter/Woedica). Since I have already shared some information about my run regarding skill choices, pathing etc. I decided not writing a novel here and just link you my playlist. The only important thing I have to mention: All clips are unedited except for part 4. The reason for this is simply that my game bugged out, sadly it does happen regularly on the bridge in SSS, and I needed a workaround for this bug. At this interaction I was forced to Alt+4 / terminate the window and start again. As Josh mentioned once, these kind of bugs do not directly disqualify you and I also asked someone and got told that such a bug would technically not disqualify me. Nevertheless it happened and the best way to get around this IMO, is simply to play as a druid/wizard and repair the bridge OR as I did in my Ultimate Run respecc into 14 mechanics/survival and repair it this way (this will however cost you 2 days of ingame time). Rest of the clips is completely unedited footage. I can certainly say as for my first run, no cheats, no console commands etc. OFC At the moment I am planning to create a compilation showing you all funny bugs/glitches/tricks that I have found so far. My third attempt with a SC monk is yea well ... let's say the progress stagnates and it's far less motivating to play lately. I am not sure if I am just exhausted on PoE2 or that playing as a SC monk is just too "random". Behaviour of WotW is too random when you are fighting bigger groups of enemies and the amount of withdraw scrolls and potions I need is so unreal that it really demotivates me playing monk. Potions and scrolls wouldn't be the problem if Vela wasn't there. She is actually the real problem =S HOWEVER I still think it is very possible to do the Ultimate as a monk, but it does take alot more time, alot more tries and alot more nerves/patience tbh. Enjoy. Tenray

Sounds like a suicide Stag that doesn't want to die. Reminds me of Kenny from Southpark, lol. Last time I played multiclassed priest with anything that could summon, I noticed that it does not matter if you extend the summon duration. They will still disappear after some time, that's what I have experienced. My initial idea was, when Mega Bosses were released, to create immortal summons fighting for you. Unfortunatelly didn't work out. Or did they change something about that ? Last time I played around with summons is probably couple of months ago.

That is really interesting indeed. I noticed a similar behaviour when using summonend weapons. In my case I used once on my multiclassed wizard Nannasin's Cobra Strike and Rot Skulls. If you cast Rot Skulls first and then Cobra you will have both summoned weapons in each hand. Simply means, double DoT on your target for more DPS. ____ I really forgot to mention something IMPORTANT about my Priest/Rogue Ultimate Run. Wit of Deaths Herald (upgraded ability that gives you Brilliant) can be cast out of combat, therefore it's effect also last after combat ends !!! You can, and I did so in my run ofc, cycle it between each fight without the need to rest everytime. That's why I mentioned that I only need to rest like 15 times. If you prolong the buff long enough you can easily jump into the next fight without resting, for example the arena fights in SSS or in the Forgotten Sanctum. Enjoy. As always. #IdoNotHideStrats Tenray

That's very kind of you, Sir. Didn't even know that they have some discord server.

Well I did some testing on bosses before going the Ultimate Run and Priest/Rogue with buffs and Hands from Woedica just deals insane damage which makes alot fights easier. You can crit for 200+ with each hand. It's absurd. SC priest does work aswell, no doubt. It just does less damage.

I posted the strategy here alreay. I called it "new hippster strat". - Blunderbluss + Belt of Magrans Chosen - Shoot Vela in some safe corner and summon the Fire Blight of her - Heal yourself and wait for the Fire Blight to trigger Brilliant

As Wotcha said, doing right choices for all god conversations. As for combat: - start fight safe if you want with traps OR immobilize + withdraw and invis - cast Wit of Deaths Herald on Vela => you get Brilliant - start buffing as usual Needs however resting because all Watcher abilities are per rest only.