thelee

I think very few people have actually tried megabosses and hylea's challenge. on the forums, I think I've maybe seen two people mention that they've combined hylea with megabosses, so the metagame information might be very limited here. I agree with trying to keep a more structured document, though personally between just trying to do the challenge, a day job, kids, and a family, it's hard enough to squeeze in the hours just to plow through on the challenge. But this is definitely something we should try to build collective knowledge on. Working backwards, the only evidence I've seen of people successfully solo-ing megabosses via videos seem to be limited to monk/monk multiclass, and chanter/chanter multiclass. (i imagine blood mage could also be trivially feasible even though there's no video about it i can find) then there's the cheese option of rogue with gouging strike, but i don't know if anyone has actually done that with hauan o whe somehow. Working backwards is definitely a good idea, but part of the problem is that this challenge is so unique that we really need to be holistic, because I don't think anyone has made it out of port maje yet (I sat on someone's twitch stream earlier and they mentioned they hadn't made it past level 3 yet). A lot of end-game build ideas sound nice in theory, but it's all moot if 90% of the game you don't have access to all those tools and you basically can't get to that point in the first place. and a build ideally should be fairly reliable - I mean, RNG is RNG but the kind of RNG that results in Vela dying when you're 10 minutes away from victory is horrible. I think I might need to set up some practice runs of just megabosses with various solo characters (sacrifice one of my other games to mess up with a console) because i think metagame knowledge here is just so limited. I think so far tactician + skaen has a lot of promise just from mid to late game, and so far was my best act 1 run out of all the builds I tried: i mentioned to JESUSSAYSNO that I got this character up to level 5 but I remembered wrong, I got up to a past 4 before failing, but definitely almost made it out of port maje - i'm going to try a tweaked version tonight that might successfully clear act 1. but it's all moot if there's no viable megaboss strategy for such a build; i think infinite spells and BDD will carry them through belranga, dorudugan, and possibly even sigilmaster if you can take out hte cleansing sigil fast enough, but i'm not sure they can handle hauani o whe. I think JESUSSAYSNO is streaming a lot of attempts tonight, so we'll see if he makes any good progress with some of his builds.

something that wasn't immediately obvious to me but is very relevant for a tactician is that end of combat, there's a brief window where you're the only alive party member, which is enough to trigger brilliant for hair of a second (i guess so long as you don't have a perception debuff). it's not much (and normally doesn't matter), but it's enough to regen 1 resource from the initial application of the inspiration, which gives the tactician or tactician multiclass a slow but steady drip of resources with woedica's challenge on. also i had never played much with woedica before, but only class resources are set to per-rest. class per-encounter abilities still work. maybe this was obvious or already well-known, but it means i get holy radiance back at the start of every fight (and presumably things like shapeshift as well). so far all this has meant is that even being too low level to take advantage of hte interactions mentioned upthread, tactician+skaen cleric has so far had the best survivability. edit - still died in port maje, but at least got further. i think the big ??? of a tactician-cleric is the mid-low levels (only so many non-combat quests) and the lack of a good solution against megabosses. i guess the idea is that if you have an hour's worth of BDD active or infinite spells you can whack anything to death, but hauani o whe is distinctly one megaboss that you can't just grind down normally (and who can also cleanse you)

i think we should clearly draw the line between "cheesing" and "cheating." I think cheesing is mandatory. Good leg work on the Vela interaction. This means that brand enemy/gouging strike strats can work, so long as you yourself stay de-aggroed. This opens up tactician multiclasses! Though I don't know how anyone else attempting the challengfe is doing so far. I'm still getting murdered on Port Maje Island. Did best so far with FF monk with buckler but at such low levels all it takes is a bad galawain's roll on beasts or an unlucky crit and you (or vela) are dead. I'm streaming so much garbage to my youtube channel (11 deaths so far, all in act 1). though if this is anything like ultimate, my progress returns should be exponential as i slowly narrow down a functional build and get better at the tactics needed.

super good to know. i haven't left port maje left so i don't have a ship to access. (embarassingly i've already failed five times though the first one i don't want to count because it was just me being dumb about turn-based mode). i just assumed when the screen faded to black they were gone for good. this means i can revive my helwalker idea and rely on the buckler to get mortification back when i need to.

with solo mode enabled, NPCs immediately disappear, no chance of recruiting them afaict. that's literally waht i ended up doing for poe1 ultimate, basically using a normal run as "research" to confirm some stuff in advance of hard fights and to practice. i'm sort of doing it now while still trying to figure out a build that actually can get out of port maje in decent shape without resting.

something that i just realized that might not be fully appreciated - dance of death is a mortification-based ability, which means it's not actually a renewable ability without rest. it's not exactly a no-rest run, but it's pretty close. for this reason either nazpalca or FF is probably worth diving into more just because they have alternate ways to reliably generate wounds as well (and dance becomes more of a specialty ability). it's too bad that solo completely removes NPCs from the game, because otherwise xoti's buckler's ability to get you mortification back would actually be handy here. edit - another lesson learned. i'm pretty sure woedica not causing health regen at end of combat also applies to vela. yikes. scrolls aplenty for vela or something other than a monk for sustain.

wow i completely forgot that one aspect of the ultimate is that it turns expert mode on, which i'm totally not used to. also lol that run was short. maybe I shouldn't do a TB mode run, since it's a style of gameplay i have no experience with. RIP L'Egan the first, Long Live L'Egan the second! (it's just as well, i was "streaming" but have no idea where my video stream ended up. sigh, technology)

must be out of date. people complained a lot about the accessibility issues of not letting people slow down the game, and tehre was a patch that brought back time slowing. unless 5.0 undid that, you should still be able to adjust time. edit - can confirm with my first four horrible attempts that you can slow time in magran. also, I'm yet again revisiting SC troubadour. I think on turn-based it can work pretty well because then micromanaging is no problem and the expanded graze range will make the infinite knockdowns you have access to real good. plus, I think people might be underestimating how much incidental damage vela can take and the passive regen of having ancient memory or something without having to use a scroll of withdraw can be real useful. I might actually run two separate characters, an SC helwalker on RTWP and an SC troubadour on tb-mode and see which does better (and submit the first one that succeeds).

I might have to walk back my SC troubadour idea, I think animated weapons become less good if you can't micro them as well due to lack of pause (notably the knockdown). SC helwalker it is. (Also managing like 6 skellies + 4 weapons in a fight like hauani seems too much for reliable success, even at slow speed)

How would that help? The problem isn't the range, it's the wound generation rate. If you go look at a SC monk vs hauani video, once the ooze splits the wotw uptime is virtually 100% thanks to endurance dance and symbiote. Occasionally there's a mortification, but that has no recovery. In the video the wotw uptime was hugely important because it literally was needed to prevent oozes from merging (and in fact one merge successfully happened in the video I watched)

don't you have a lot of experience doing solo? you planning on getting your name on a plaque?

hasn't this always been the case? (knock up effects always break targeting while the enemy is int he air)

that doesn't sound like a gpu/graphics-related issue then

the big difference is that doing all the challenges now officially gives you a completed check mark plaque over the "ultimate" god slot. it's definitive proof that you enabled everything and killed everything. otherwise you could have done a bunch of separate runs to individually get check marks on all the other god portraits and it would look indistinguishable to a player who did one run with all of the challenges enabled.

you need to have a full video recording (they say youtube playlist or dropbox folder of videos), in addition to the save file. i haven't figured out a good recording software to use, but my AMD tuning software comes with some built-in recording software, so I'm going to give that a try and then upload to youtube later. Nvidia should have something similar.

lack of pause I don't think is a big deal if you're soloing and you only have a few buttons to mash, and not even that often. (blood mage probably much bigger problem). you can still slow down time. if you're extremely patient, you can do it on TB-mode, where all it does is limit you to ten seconds per turn, which is more than enough for solo, but I imagine megabosses would be an extreme pain to sit through. (it also makes it impossible to do running-out-of-range tricks with grog/nomad) i just looked up a video of monk soloing hauani o whe and i guess the secret sauce is the stalking cloak to basically perma-stun the smaller forms. edit - though it calls into question the forbidden fist approach because there's no way to get such high uptime on WotW unless you're getting wounds from symbiote or something on top of enduring dance.

i think as far as monk goes, boeroer may be right. SC monk can get both resonance (probably better anti-belranga/dorudugan/sigilmaster solution than gouging/brand unless you solve the Vela aggro problem) and wotw, and SC forbidden fist has the better answer w.r.t. to sustain. helwalker just gives you extra damage and for such a long iron man run you might want to err on inevitable survivability rather than a bit more damage here and there. (remember that one or two "random deaths" one might have had on solo and not thought much about is much much much more annoying when on trial of iron. it took me seven tries to do the ultimate in PoE1 and it made me extremely conservative about risk in the process) maybe, also saves a separate trip just to get nomad's, too. you could then maybe equip fleshmender for the health regen and extra item slot (for potions/withdrawal). I'm convinced now that SC forbidden fist could be a good approach, but I also think SC troubadour might be equally viable (trades off some offense and megaboss inevitability with more survivability). i'm a little bit of a skeptic on taking out hauani o whe solo without the aid of something like summons, but i'm happy to be argued wrong.

what about the sustain? that's a lot of damage you're taking, and you won't get healed to full after each fight, and resting will be extremely limited (basically inns, and even then it's basically a no-rest run due to eothas).

i don't know what the mechanics of hylea talons. how does this generate more wounds? i guess i'm not used to playing many monks, because i don't see how early game you aren't terribly squishy, especially as a helwalker.

nope, only charmed acts like this.

to anyone with solo experience - have you also done iron man solo? i'm wondering how defensive to be with gear, or how worried i should be about hard CC. my current brainstorming basically involves covering all my basis so that hard CC is impossible: feet that grant dex immunity, rekvu that grants interrupt immunity, ring of mule's wit for int*/res resist (though can still be charmed), and aumaua for might resist. (in an early draft i was also a part paladin for poison/disease immunity, though i don't know how good the paladin part is going to be in the ultimate). * normally int afflictions don't matter when soloing, but with vela around you will happily go up and whack her to death and she will be the only target around as well, so trying to avoid int afflictions might matter more on hylea + solo. edit - thinking about SC troubadour right now, with monastic unarmed training. in addition to infinite skellies and animated weapons, strong fists that you can conditionally quaff a potion of ascension plus prestige for fight-long legendary fists that never need repairing, you also have an instadeath invocation to use against bosses. you have anti-AR invocation, and animancy cat for bonus PEN on your animated weapons (who themselves scale up to legendary); the animated sword basically grants you infinite interrupts for tough single-target fights (or for keeping Hauani o Whe from merging). equip nomad's brigandine and bonus stride gear/passive so that you can face tank enemies away from vela by running in and out of scary attacks while your summons do the dirty work. you can even put on the int resist chant and due to how it works you'll grant yourself immunity to int afflictions because it'll tick every 3 seconds and keep downgrading the int affliction (AI doesn't seem to change your chant if you're dominated or charmed). still need lots and lots and lots of withdraw scrolls for vela though.

yeah, i know (mentioned in my post). I was more specifically asking how an SC monk (for resonance) could work, since several people suggested it.

I think (at least part) chanter is close to mandatory thanks to abydon and woedica. I don't have a lot of experience with soloing so maybe SC monk could work but how would you deal with the sustain when you aren't healing after each fight? Cipher and tactician have infinite resources but I don't know how a tactician could reliably trigger brilliant solo, and cipher doesn't solve the sustain or abydon problem nearly as well as a chanter. Part blood mage could work. It's not like you'll be refreshing your empowers very frequently any way. Also, unlike other classes, their sustain works outside of combat on woedica mode. edit - paladin and fighter also have replenishible resources, but only at medium-high levels, and very slowly. can corpse eater barbarian eat bodies out of combat?

some more thoughts on interactions: i don't think enough people are paying attention to ondra's factor here. ondra + wael is probably going to make most early ship combat more lethal - you'll literally have no idea how well your ship is doing (other than seeing a "repair hull" event icon appear at 50%), how well the other ship is doing, how far apart the two of you are, and you won't be able to outrun most ships even early on (on map or in combat). on ironman mode this basically removes an easy XP generator early game (until you buy a better ship) unless you're willing to roll the dice and start from scratch every time you die out of nowhere. (though eothas will prevent you from doing all the ship bounties in the first place). i think using a trap to get an injury and stocking up on rekvu gear is going to be required, mostly for the interrupt protection. With Galawain's on, all you need is a small pack of low level beasts with Bullish on them to interrupt lock you to death. the brand/gouging tactic may work less well because with vela around you have to find a way to de-aggro enemies completely, and the big problem I see is that you can't force Vela to run back after combat begins, and if you use a scroll of withdraw on her and then on yourself, she will come out of withdraw first and likely be close enough to re-aggro the enemies before you have a chance to come out of withdraw and protect her. maybe you can quaff a potion of refuge (with diff alchemy skill level it'll be shorter than the Vela withdraw), but it still doesn't solve the re-aggroing problem. arcana is the only skill that actually gates your ability to use scrolls. you can have alchemy of 0 and explosives of 0 and still use potions and bombs (if crappily). arcana you can't even use a scroll of fan of flames unless you have a point or two. so i think investing in arcana is the way to go.

Dang, there goes my idea. Plan on bringing/craftings lots of scrolls of withdraw then. Vela doesn't stand in one spot, she wanders periodically as if she's terrified. It's actually quite annoying, and would make kiting-based strategies extremely hard since once combat starts she's no longer "leashed" to staying near you (unlike a pet, who even in combat will stay nearby your PC). my eothas run was pretty lush, time-wise, after hasongo - you front load a lot of nekataka quests in act 2 and suddenly act 3 and 4 are pretty spacious. You still should not waste time searching burial sites or shipwrecks, and you should definitely not aimlessly wander around the map (or even try many ship bounties), but if you're basically doing a no-rest, any% run of the DLCs the timing shouldn't be awful. abydon challenge - i hadn't thought of that. my abydon run, by late game, even modest fights could see weapons and armor breaking down twice in one fight - it was so annoying i ended up blitzing through the crit path at around level 14 or so. Dorudugan, Belrange, and Sigilmaster you could get around it by gouging/branding them to death, but Hauani O Whe you probably need to bring in a lot of backup weapons or else you'll be left without anything. Wael would make this more annoying because you'd have no idea how much money you'd have to do repairs. however, if you're a chanter, you can just keep summoning allies, and they don't break down. in this respect, being part monk (or picking up monastic unarmed training) or part chanter is probably required or else you just won't be able to last long enough to do decent damage. yes. wael challenge is pretty thorough in what it hides.