thelee

1. gorecci street. it's hilarious how this we can agree, unironically, that one of the earliest fights int he game is one of the hardest. 2. engwithan dig site external fight. i think more people aren't rating this higher because they're used to pulling the mobs into separate groups, which they might not yet be willing to need to do for gorecci street, but if you're not splitting, you can still get wiped out very fast, even using stairs as a chokepoint thanks to Gore and the young drake hitting you with fire aoe. 3. that SSS changeling fight where you all get transformed. I hate this fight. Hate hate hate this fight. Especially because it's really janky in how its implemented. If you have a party of paladins or other classes that have innate passives, it can be real easy, but that just illustrates how messed up this is. It's not difficult now because i've done it enough to know precisely what I need to do to win, but it's a puzzle fight and until you solve the puzzle it's basically impossible, whereas other puzzle fights can let you brute force your way sometimes. 4. Hauani o Whe - you could go the entire fight flawlessly only to mess up at the very end and everything falls apart very rapidly. At least with dorudugan, a properly geared party can almost passively deal its basically-instadeath onslaught. whereas with HoW you have to be actively interrupting and focus-firing. 5. hanging sepulchers - this whole quest is just targeting the wrong level. in no playthrough do I actually play it at the target level. I always deliberately overlevel a bit before attempting it.

i actually thought of that last night (after having died the night before). normally i don't have the AI on during fights (only for buffing, so I don't use up my level 6 spell slots while running to the fight when i'm done buffing) because I never anticipate my 1% cloak triggering unless i'm actually going for it, but there are so many oozes pelting me in that fight that it procs actually several times throughout the fight. once I realized that, the fight was a cinch and now have a super-clear, easily-repeatable path to be in act iv with 47 days left (with cave grub, fire dragon down). I probably didn't even need to buff for 12 minutes before hand. i don't know how much act iv time you had, but hopefully 47 days should be plenty. edit - i also figured out that kalakoth's is not even RNG in what blight it spawns. it appears to go in a fixed order of fire->corrode->frost->shock->fire->etc. so i think my real run (currently sitting mid-act iii) should actually just start hoarding these to take advantage of any elemental weaknesses since it's easily controllable.

something i learned while futzing around with my practice run that I don't know if people know: there's an invisible timer on Kalakoth's Minor Blights for the blight being swapped out, and that timer can be extended with Salvation of Time (this is distinct from the total duration for Kalakoth's Minor Blights). I discovered as part of a last-ditch effort to salvage my current run - I got past the Ashen Maw fights, but it was looking like a tactician/skaen just couldn't handle the fire dragon (mine spawned with Vampiric). I was basically incapable of bringing it down from Unharmed for more than a few seconds at a time due to my low PEN with spiritual weapons and their Vampiric buff. I looked at my inventory to see what options I had, saw Kalakoth's Minor Blights scroll and wondered if I could range her. In the process, I unintentionally made the frost blight last for 600s (once I started buffing with Salvation of Time the blight never switched out again). I still died that practice run (not enough buffing because I forgot about the fire dragon's mid-fight robust), but at least now I have a path forward. It's actually made me wonder if there are other places where a couple scrolls of Kalakoth's plus some RNG luck can make the fight a lot easier.

Have there been others? (I've been away for a bit). Or are you truly on top of the world right now?

holy crap, i took a break off to recover from burning out a bit, but looks like Decadency you took it all the way?? i haven't gone through all the pages, so sorry fi this is reundant, but what in the end was your build? Edit - also many congratulations!

i would love for you to share your current build (stats/race/subclasses). it's really exciting that a non-withdraw-based strategy is going to be viable.

it was me, but that was to the cave. it's effectively impossible to stealth back from the cave. so the stealth ends up being moot with my current critical pathing (the stealthing was important before when I wasn't already level 16 in ashen maw so I could hit level 16 after fighting the dragon and then clear it on the way out, but in practice galawain + fire dragon is a bit too tedious/rough at level 15 so i had to re-path it). but yes, what i'm talking about are just those three fights, before the cave and the two you mentioned. all the fights are eminently doable at level 16, it's just a matter of breaking through the tedium of buffing for huge amounts of time before hand. also, eothas challenge means you really can't spend too much time buffing, because you can end up burning a significant amount of in-game time just buffing, and all that ship travel for all the megabosses is going to be expensive. so this means having to be relatively precise with the amount of time spent buffing, with cushion in case of bad galawain's rolls (since it varies between my practice and real run). it's really my fault, because the way i'm doing this challenge is doing a section with my practice character, rehearsing until it's perfect, and then doing it with my real character, and that translates into (for a combat-dense section like ashen maw) a mind-numbing amount of time just leaving the game running with a stopwatch going for a minimal amount of progress when I could be doing more fun things (including a different deadfire game, not to mention steam summer sale happened). at least with megabosses or with DLC like FS i can break up the combat with extended sections of stealthing/traveling so it mentally feels like a lot more progress than crawling forward a screen at a time. and all other fights before now have been more interactive and didn't require nearly as much buffing. so it's purely a psychological hurdle, not a mechanical one. some day soon i'll just have to man-up and get 'ir done.

that ambush, unless it also got buffed as part of the ukaizo guardian buff, is extremely low-level compared to what most people should be at that point. if you could handle the rest of the game under the ultimate, then that really should be no problem. i'm taking a bit of a break, trying to get motivated again. it's kind of a killer-amount-of-tedium that i know the next time i boot up deadfire, i literally am just going to be sitting around doing nothing for most of the next hour (dense fights in ashen maw that are not easily stealthable, and one boss fight). that's ironically probably the hardest part of the tactician/priest setup, just the sheer buffing tedium. though when I do that, that should give me a huge amount of time to clear out other bosses and DLC (50+ days), helped along by the fact that you get auto-teleported back from ashen maw to nekataka. it would be exceedingly great if ranger/chanter really can go all the way.

This is true, but I was understood that as being some sort of "you can use console if your game bugs out" sort of thing. The idea of switching back and forth between real-time and turn-based via console commands for your own advantage seems to me to be very gray area, since it might not be "in the spirit of the challenge." Josh has said advantageous bugs are OK (since it's their fault), but i'm not so sure about advantageous console commands. I.E. it might be ok to use that to avoid city guards attacking you and ending your run, but to selectively use it to get an advantage in fights, I dunno... maybe compared to Brilliant exploits it's no big deal, but that just feels a little bit like just finding the weak points within the game mechanics itself.

good to see someone experimenting with a different approach with good success, I'd like to know more about how your build plays out because frankly I'm a little surprised that a straightforward troubadour/ranger can be so effective and safe. the only thing I'd be truly worried about are the fights in SSS and FS (which you said you hadn't tried yet) where you don't have a lot of maneuvering room and Vela might not have a safe place to be (especially when fighting the security system in FS), though maybe you can stock up on enough withdraw spells to make it work.

yeah, sure i would love that. you can message me or share a google doc with me. i also have my own keep list of TODO updates, and phenom sent me a few things to update. permission to give credit to you by name? edit - just realized you wouldn't have an email to share a doc with me. if you want go that route, just direct message me and i'll give you one

Yes, this is something I personally tested back in the day, so if it gets the dual wielding penalty that was a silent fix, likely in one of the patches from 4.1 to 5.0, probably 5.0 itself given the size of the patch. Another thing to update when I get around to it, ultimate is sort of consuming my deadfire time atm. Thanks for looking into it.

ah, this takes me back to the days of diablo 2 where paladin sacrifice builds were trying to get enough life leach to sustain through sacrifice's 9% health cost.

i haven't played around with the kit, but i imagine a barbarian (esp furyshaper) would work well - with spirit frenzy they can trivially add staggered with hits, and barbarians tend to get hit a lot so the sustain from steel garotte could be nice.

i actually hadn't worried about AR until recently, where now i'm fighting tough (high-health) enemies that have both high blunt and high pierce AR, because up until then the bulk of my fights have only been after getting champion's boon, coupled with stiletto's high baseline AR and doing both pierce and blunt i'm always getting some decent damage in (and i haven't needed to fight any pierce immune vessels). fists wouldn't help with that directly, though the raw lash with higher baseline damage would help. the ultimate cost of high AR would be causing an inordinate amount of buffing time and also producing a long fight - my ashen bridge trouble so far requires me to spend literally like a 1/3 of an in-game day just buffing, and then a decent chunk fighting because half the enemies there I have little PEN against (and their health is so high i wear my non-summoned sabers down almost to dust if i try to use them and i need to reserve all my money for repairing a future scordeo's edge from here on out). with my current pathing i don't think time will be an issue (i am expecting to have something like 55 days to do megabosses, all DLC (i timed FS at three in-game days and that dlc probably is the most combat-heavy, though SSS will require some slow island wandering), and other major fights), but if it does woedica fists can probably help shave off a few days.

update for anyone else thinking about ultimate run: 1. much of the earlier discussion in this thread focused on tactician/skaen's ability to go invisible, but in practice that invisibility is flaky about triggering brilliant. enemy AI is a little weird about it. so when i don't end up triggering brilliant, i end up withdrawing both vela and myself, which is virtually foolproof (though there are still quirks to be aware of) and lasts long enough that even if enemy AI is doing something weird, the AI tend to reset before withdraw wears off. (as a plus, withdraw will bring vela and myself up to full or near-full health, which shadowing beyond does not do) 2. because of #1, you can probably just get away with any other priest subclass, so long as you always have two withdraw casts available (or at least a scroll or two as backup). in fact, i mentioned elsewhere that if i end up botching this tactician/skaen run, i might end up rolling woedica instead, because increasingly i just use shadowing beyond as an escape spell to withdraw faster, and woedica fists are much better than skaen stiletto/club. (woedica fists at level 17 are legendary monk fists with up to a +31% lash, which makes them arguably the best dps weapon in the game outside of a single-class monk with various +PL or specific mythic-level uniques). 3. that being said, skaen does get two really useful bonus spells: spiritual ally and minor avatar, which i would want to take anyway, so i think they still have a very slight edge over other priest subclass by basically giving me two free abilities (considering woedica gives spiritual weapon for free, it's a net of just one free ability though).

are you somehow a beast? only thing i can think of is some buggy interaction with the galawain's buff that gives a T3 inspiration.

Wow, TIL that even inspirations can vary in stacking rules based on where it comes from. Consider me corrected. I would still lean towards summoned weapons due to the automatic legendary and not needing arms bearer, but it's more of a horse race now. Edit - this makes the weird treatment of T3 inspirations on beasts from galawains make more "sense".

fyi - brilliant and potion of ascension don't stack. you have to basically be single-classed for prestige, and then some combination of potion of ascension, or nature godlike plus acute/brilliant/something else to get +3 PL. and that +3 PL gets you to legendary, not mythic. you need +6 PL to get mythic with monastic unarmed training, which requires death godlike, near death, plus prestige, plus potion of ascension. not implausible (and past level 16 my character spends all fights at near death anyway), but giving up a head slot is pretty painful (rekvu's fractured casque) and losing the boreal dwarf bonus is almost lethal for the build IMO (needed against hauani o whe, also helps in FS) the upshot is that summoned weapons were preferred because they are legendary automatically, don't constrain the build as much (single-classing is also probably lethal) and with a +30% lash (could have been +31% but i had to get a benevolent reputation to complete a quest) they are actually comparable to monastic unarmed training (which dps like normal weapons that have a +30% lash). there's also a hidden cost in that with spiritual weapon, i can use scordeo's and then summon spiritual weapon, and still have a second, completely unrelated weapon slot in tow, whereas to accomplish the same thing with monastic unarmed training I have to also take arms bearer, so it actually costs two ability points instead of one for the same results.

well this weekend has been a two step forward one step back kinda thing. i finally had a minor breakthrough in finding a pathing that gets me to level 16 without burning a lot of time redundantly going to fort deadlight/dunnage to cash in a quest and doesn't involve some insanely tricky stealthy on the ashen bridge... ...but while getting to level 16 certainly makes the endgame feasible, it still doesn't make it easy. i spent a whole afternoon just trying to clear the mobs on the ashen bridge, with no luck... it's all about finding the right combination and duration of buffs to actually kill everything even with bad RNG when it comes to galawain's buffs without blowing unnecessary time since I still feel having to sail around to all the different megabosses and final fights will be expensive. ah well, next time have to do 8 minutes of buffing instead of 7... scordeo's edge can't come soon enough (elder flame bat with hardened is surprisingly bullet spongey) level 17 is going to be the next sweet milestone, since that'll get me legendary spiritual weapons and then after that level 19 for minor avatar (the +20% weapon damage buff).

i wonder if it's level dependent? i was level 15 with 14 mechanics plus hylea's if so, then my current run can't benefit from it (my real character is well past your point), but good to know if i completely botch this one.

i was definitely not getting 310-370 xp per trap, more like 30-40 xp. when did you attempt this? what was your mechanics?

FYI - I was attempting some non-ashen maw pathing today and sandswept ruins is frankly a deadend. i actually don't understand how people are getting 3 to 8k in experience there unless you've been avoiding all traps throughout the game. I figured out in the process that there's some sort of "max trap disarming" experience and my character is hitting it after only like 1k of experience. coupled with the fact that it's like a 6-day detour (that I have to repeat to do dorudugan) and it's a non-starter for my run.

this is why i'm doing ashen maw right now. i have like 24 days left, and i'm hoping to see if all of it carries over. a small # of days definitely do carry over, that much can be confirmed.

ha, no worry about that, i'm testing everything. even trivial run-around-for-fetch quests part i rehearse a minimum of two times (one for pathing, one for dress-rehearsal) to make sure there's absolutely no mistake about even hitting the wrong dialogue option. super tedious, but after an early attempt where i did the Upoho Wharo Woods on Maje Island and hit the wrong option and instead of getting Wise Teeth Necklace I entered a fight that was rapidly fatal, I'm making sure everything is pre-planned and well-known. btw, good thing I practiced the giant cave grub. We both forgot about skaen's challenge. You can't range what you can't see. Fortunately, at level 15 the giant cave grub is extremely easy to solo with tactician/skaen - it helps that the giant cave grub is stationary so once adds appear I can duck into the entrance and the giant cave grub is automatically "out of the fight" so I just mule kick both adds and now I have Brilliant on.