thelee

Yeah, nope. I'm pretty sure for any megabosses fight the sheer amount of damage you need to do means you must have either fists or a summoned weapon or else you won't last.

what do you mean "stats?" summoned weapons are like completely different equipment - it has its own enchantment level and its own special characteristics (if any). they are unaffected by abydon's challenge. scordeo's edge's Blade Cascade works because for some reason it is a buff that provides a universal 0s recovery time (whereas other weapon-triggered-buffs tend to be specific to that weapon) repair cost can be significant. i've spent 3k to repair 1 level of damage, and closer to 7k to repair 2 levels of damage on scordeo's edge. the repair cost scales with the enchant level on the weapon (e.g. normal weapons are dirt cheap to repair). (this can be annoying when it can take sometimes 2 levels of damage to trigger scordeo's edge.)

that doesn't actually work. arcane blaster's bullet time gives you 0 recovery but there's still a minimum reload (i reported as bug some versions back and never saw a fix). for the curious, it is mathematically impossible to get to 0 recovery with anything other than a specific buff that either gives you -100% recovery time or specifically zeroes out your recovery (the only true example I can think of is Blade Cascade from Scordeo's Edge). It's because otherwise all recovery time reduction buffs translate into an action speed increase, which is of the formula default_recovery_time/(1 + total_action_speed_bonus_as_decimal) = final_recovery_time. for those who remember their high school geometry, this is basically the graph y = 1/x, and if you remember, no matter how large x is, y can never be zero. from a game perspective, it might be possible to accumulate enough action speed bonus that the game rounds down to zero but in practice you would need an impractially huge amount of recovery time bonus (for a 2s recovery from casting a slow spell you'd need more than >4000% action speed bonus to have .05s or less recovery, which would round down to 0s recovery on the tooltip (though the game might still track that single frame or two of recovery behind the scenes without rounding).

i don't think this is right? if it's a single, stacking buff then it would in fact be possible to get to -100% recovery after just 20 stacks. if it was action speed, then it would be the situation you're describing, but a single, increasing recovery time bonus does have increasing returns (similar situation is fighter mob stance, but in practice you can't threaten 20 enemies so it's not a concern from a balance perspective)

oracle is definitely listed as part of the ultimate quest, and i only assume that part actually breaks down into meaning beating both oracles. For the curious, I just did the second of the two FS fights I was worried about, and it's not bad but does require you to adapt. It's the oratory, with the periodic blast of damage from the security system. There's no safe space to stand, but I was able to find a spot that doesn't aggro enemies, and both Vela and me just had to take all the damage, using the spiritual ally to keep robust up on both of us the entire time. Once I could chain-salvation of time BDD, then I could just leave the game on while auto-buffing even though I kept getting blasted. (For some reason, the security system only does like ~40 damage to Vela even though it does like 150+ to me. For reference, Robust from Spiritual Ally heals ~15 per tick, so unless you get bad RNG you can keep Vela completely healed even without worrying about keeping BDD up during early buffing.) The scariest part is after you take out the power conduits; you can gett interrupted a lot by the spore-infested librarians and/or grasped by one of maura's tentaciles and be unable to stop Maura from doing an Arcane Dampener (doesn't matter whom she targets, it's lethal either way). Buffing up with a Potion of Impediment and going into the battle with an injury and Rekvu's Fractured Casque is an absolute must so you can keep maura interrupt-locked while not being interrupt-locked yourself

Note for others following along: so far in FS, the first Oracle fight is actually a bit touchy to de-aggro (but it is de-aggro-able, and this was one of two fights in FS i was worried about). the arena is small, and if you aren't fast you'll aggro the fight instantly after combat, but there's like some sort of grace period where you can stealth away. BUT, as MaxQuest suggested when he looked up the in-game trigger for brilliant (and I was wrong on this), enemy range matters. And if you mess up ever so slightly when doing the shadowing-beyond trick, you might have an observer move out of position - and they don't quite exactly move back into position after they de-aggro. if this happens, you're basically eff-ed, there's no way to trigger tactician brilliant. I tried a few times and got the positioning down, but boy do you have to be careful (you have to pull the enemies on the right, and hopefully jsut the shimmering beast, before you immediately shadowing beyond away and hope the observer doesn't come along). this is definitely one of the parts where i'm going to have to rehearse several times before the axctual run does this part, because a little observer mispositioning can ruin your entire run.

Good thing i have this experimental character, because i thought other advance buffing would work but all temporary effects go away at the end of the fight. The only exception appears to be drugs and item effects (so e.g. brilliant from shroud of phantasm will stick around). I thought I would try to be clever by de-aggroing, buffing to high heavens for like half an hour, and doing all of FS super buffed up, but doesn't work like that. (he found out after dying all of a sudden when he thought he had 1000+ seconds of BDD up)

interesting. only trick is that there are some fights where you start in combat effectively immediately (technically speaking if you didn't have magran's challenge on, you could have auto pause enabled to pause "on enemy sighted" and stealth as soon as the game autopauses, but for all intents and purposes you start in combat on the ultimate) and such an approach doesn't give you an avenue to safely try to trigger brilliant. you might be able to create a quest path that avoids these fights (i think they are all opt-in events), just something to be aware of.

i didn't have a chance to test xoti, but if you look at my screenshot, my test character has a 25% lash (with some rounding/partial damage), so the neutral case should be working (they have no disposition because i cheated her from vilario's rest to hauani o whe). if you're seeing actual 20% (ignoring PEN variance) then it's a bug with xoti's spiritual weapon. i'm pretty sure, though, that xoti has 25% and you might have seen less because you were up against an enemy that had better fire AR than the pierce/slash AR.

i'll just post it here. it took probably ~15 minutes at a mix of slow and super slow game speed (plus ~8 minutes of very fast speed prebuffing). not too worried about it being public, since i think the ultimate will ultimately come down to execution and time, and between a dayjob and kids and a family, there's no chance i have the time to be first. i think it's best just to be collaborative on the metagaming here. unless i say otherwise, anything i list below is essential. items: gauntlets of greater reliability (can get away with normal reliability if need be); scordeo's edge dual-wielded with a ranged weapon; helm of the white void (for +10 acc on mule kick), marux amanth soulbound to priest (convenience) consumables: deadeye, potion of impediment, scroll of avenging storm (forgot to use it for prebuffing though, used it in the middle of hte fight to some effect), potion of perfect aim race: boreal dwarf abilities: mule kick, confident aim, BDD, salvation of time, shadowing beyond (automatic), escape (automatic), champion's boon, 2w spiritual weapon, halt (convenience), spiritual ally (automatic), minor avatar (automatic, convenience), storm of holy fire (convenience) real life equipment/setup: stop watch; combat speed up and combat speed down bound to keys so you can adjust easily AI script: set up your AI to auto attack as default action, defensive, and create a new AI script that all it does is "always true: cast salvation of time: self" with 1 second cooldown (I tried with a 0 second cooldown in an earlier run and it sometimes causes weird "abandoned casting salvation of time" issues, less so with a 1s cooldown) you absolutely need the combination of boreal dwarf, potion of perfect aim, gauntlets, and the helm also really helps, because otherwise you have no chance to consistently mule kick hauani o whe's first two forms. i had made an earlier attempt without the potion of perfect aim and i missed a real important merge interrupt of two gigantic oozes and the fight basically reset. (at massive ooze and below the fort defense is low enough that it's less of a concern) actual strat: set to AI autoattack run into top left corner and wait for vela to come close. cast halt on vela run close to aggro Hauani O Whe (henceforth HoW), immediately shadowing beyond back to vela you should trigger brilliant because you've already de-aggroed run back to vela summon spiritual ally, whack it with your scordeo's edge until you proc blade cascade (you may have to resummon the ally a few times). you dual-wield scordeo's edge with a ranged weapon not because you care about the ranged weapon, but so you're attacking at 2w speed levels with just scordeo's edge. as soon as you proc blade cascade, slow down time all the way and salvation of time. start buffing with minor avatar, BDD (on vela, too), deadeye, impediment, avenging storm, champion's boon, and any fighter buffs. make sure to intersperse consumables with abilities (so you buy more time for salvation of time to recover from brilliant) and keep spamming salvation of time to keep buffs active. once all your initial buffs are setup, turn on your AI, crank game speed up to max speed, switch to marux amanth, start stop watch for 3 minutes and go get a drink. cast spiritual weapon. start stop watch for 4 minutes and go get a drink. slow game speed down to normal, switch AI script back to autoattack only. start stop watch for 20s. run towards hauani o whe. once vela starts cowering, withdraw her. run all the way to the east side of the map. you might take a few symbiote or solvent cleanses while HoW periodically ranges you while following. once HoW melees you, turn on your AI script, just start unleashing hell. use mule kick any time HoW doesn't have distract. everytime you proc brilliant your character should salvation of time automatically. once HoW hits near death, turn off your AI script. wait two cycles of mule kick (to gaurantee that you have two level 6 casts) and then alternate between manually casting salvation of time and spiritual ally with each mule kick-induced brilliant. the spiritual ally will help DPS down (mostly by eliminating tactician PEN penalty). (edit2: note - you wait for near death because keeping an ally summoned otherwise exposes you to too much corrosive solvent while casting an ally. otherwise, even without avenging storm being up, you can pretty much prevent HoW from doing anything) once HoW splits, have spiritual ally attack one ooze, and then escape or shadowing beyond behind another ooze and lure it away, to the bottom of hte map. if you have symbiote active, you'll have to stop to clear out a few oozes. slow the game speed down to the slowest at this point so you don't miss a merge from here on out. dps down the ooze you have split off, refreshing an ally every 3-5 mule kicks or so. if you're unable to keep them fully apart, it just means you'll have to be a little bit more careful about interrupting merges. notably, for the gigantic oozes, it looks like you only need to mule kick one of them to make them both give up on merge (isn't true for smaller forms). when a greater ooze splits, don't need an ally anymore, so turn back on the AI script. just try to keep mule kick up on everyone and avoid flanked (for some reason even though i had nomad's brigandine equipped i would still periodically get shaken/confused). when a massive ooze is getting to near death, try to mix in a cast of storm of holy fire (though highest priority is interrupting any merge) when split down to greater ooze, mule kick spam and hopefully you have one or two storms of holy fire active to help aoe down the greater and lesser oozes. rinse and repeat with the other massive ooze rinse and repeat with the other gigantic ooze and its splits. (should be much easier - when you're back down to just the one gigantic ooze you basically get 100% salvation of time uptime and can refresh your buffs because the gigantic ooze is really easy to interrupt and mule kick and proc perma-brilliant) the scariest part of this was the fact that after HoW splits into two gigantic oozes, you'll start getting hit by the corrosive solvent, since it becomes much harder to keep both oozes interrupted. at massive and lower they don't have corrosive solvent so once you split one of hte gigantic ooze it becomes easier to just periodically mule kick the gigantic ooze. but you should have enough duration (coupled with ongoing salvation of time spam) to face tank it all without losing any critical buff. (meanwhile vela, after popping out of withdraw, is just terrifying wandering around a spot near the entrance of the map and is out of range of being hit by symbiote) if you're not dumb like me and have avenging storm up for your initial buff, it should be pretty fast and much easier (because you'll be interrupting a lot because the lightning bolts can also proc impediment or deadeye). i started avenging storm halfway through phase 1 when i realized i wasn't seeing any bolts, managed to get the duration up, but it got dropped during the two gigantic oozes from corrosive solvent. with the same 500+s worth of buff as everything else, it should last you the entire fight (which itself will be much shorter). edit - the stop watching timings, waiting for specific mule kicks, etc is to make this strategy wael-proof. wael doesn't appear to block information on an enemy's relative health status (you can still see e.g. "bloodied") and is the only in-game information this strat ends up relying on. though even with expert mode + wael, you'll still see little ability icons appear for the merge cast (which fortunately is a slow cast ability) so you can still interrupt them with mule kick, you just won't have the combat tooltip telling you where in the recovery the oozes are. edit3 - a very similar strat should work for other megabosses and faster, at least in terms of prebuffing. did some paper math and scordeo's edge plus buffs plus spiritual weapon should take out dorudugan in 180s, so 4-5 minutes of prebuffing with spiritual weapon is all you need. you'll need rekvu's helm to avoid getting proned all the time though, and you need spiritual ally uptime for flanked and removing tactician PEN penalty. belranga you need antitode as one of your buffs to prevent paralyze/petrify, but you can even skip any hand mortar/avenging storm and just dps down 150+ spiders and then the burrows until belranga can be trivially mule kicked to death (though hand mortar + storm will probably make this fight super easy and you'll probably just kill belranga by accident while slaughtering hundreds of spiders). all other bosses should be like dorudugan at worst. the only remaining wildcards are a) any fight where you are unable to deaggro (hopefully these don't exist, i have to double check a few) and b) sigilmaster auranic and her cleansing rune.

Interesting idea but I think eothas might make that unworkable. At 2x speed, one minute of nonstop salvation of time added around 50 seconds of buffs. After 10 minutes of buffing at 2x speed, half a game day passed. Depending on how much spare time one has, you might not be able to burn many in-game days to prebuff the DLC.

Follow up for non-tactician/skaen folks who want to try. Withdraw ended up being a non-factor in this fight, huani o whe is easy to pull far away from Vela once she cowered (generous sized map) so it basically didn't even matter that I could infinite withdraw her (she was out of range of all the oozes). So depending on the spacing of other fights, lack of withdraw may not be as big a concern as I thought. Also, FYI abydons is brutal for a boss fight. even just using scordeo on a spiritual Ally to proc the recovery buff I broke it down one level. Without fists or replenishable summoned weapons I think you basically annihilate your gear before you can beat bosses when soloing. But I don't think excludes any class that hasn't already been excluded.

fuuuuu- man, that scordeo's edge is totally the trick. thanks so much dunehunter! i could've done it even faster, but i forgot to buff avenging storm before hand. oh well. mule kick still was super relevant because even with lots of interrupts per second, i still needed it to do so to trigger brilliant and interrupt merges (searing seal ended up being way too slow and inaccurate). aside from me not having wael's on, this was as close to the real thing as possible, and all the items i used should be obtainable through a quick crit path. i've got a few more bosses to try out (mostly to make sure i have enough room to deaggro in all situations, I'm actually sorta concerned about FS Oracle that you get teleported into/dropped into), but i think we've got a real contender here with a tactician+skaen.

your obstacle has to be permanent for the duration of the fight, because so long as vela isn't aggroed, she *will* beeline towards you (like a pet). she doesn't begin her cowering until she's within range of enemies. ooblit doesn't matter for me because i only need one proc of scordeo's edge, and then i can just salvation of time it to whatever duration i need.

how long did you try? at only 1% chance of success the variance is pretty huge.

any mods active? any berath's blessings? how did you resolve whakura pass? this is real odd. i've never seen a bug like this.

no, unless something dramatically changed in 5.0. weapon modals are active abilties, so do not stack with other active abilities (tenacious/energized) edit: historically this has meant that maces are useful because if you have a consistent source of tenacious/energized/potion of piercing strikes, you can still get mileage out of the modal for penetrating enemy AR, because it's a debuff of enemy AR versus a buff of your PEN.

there was an issue (that i'm pretty sure is still in place) where arcane blaster with bullet time (-100% recovery) still had a short reload time - i think there's an absolute minimum reload durution unless you have a weapon that can specifically fire multiple shots before reloading. so I don't think scordeo's edge plus xefa is going to be great against single targets (versus 2w melee with no recovery), but the mob clearing effect of hand mortar sounds great. (though might have to reserve its usage because i don't know how many guaranteed scrolls of avenging storm one can easily get and i think huana o whe definitely has one use reserved... maybe belranga would be a great place to take advantage of the mob clearing effect)

per is slightly better in most reasonable offensive cases, especially on path of the damned, until late game where your baseline accuracy vs enemies is pretty high and underpenetration is rarer. for a barbarian, per is even better because you need to at least hit (not graze) to trigger carnage, which itself must do another hit roll (which is treated like a spell effect and has very few accuracy modifiers compared to the weapon attack but still includes perception). there's literally a (weak) squared-relationship between perception and damage output for a barbarian that isn't true with might. you shouldn't dump might, due to inversions, but low might is perfectly fine (especially considering a barbarian can basically guarantee uptime on a +5 might inspiration).

i haven't tested it again recently, but since they introduced the revised lash it's always listed a fixed +20% lash, and it's never actually done that. companions use your watcher's dispositions but obsidian-created npcs don't have any favored or disfavored dispositions (same with pallegina and vatnir) so that they can go into any party and be equally mediocre. also when you're computing lash % you have to pay attention to rounding and penetration. lashes do their own PEN check, so be absolutely sure there are no confounding variables. (xoti should have a 25% lash) edit - i've never actually tested xoti's spiritual weapon (i've used all PC-available spiritual weapon, but not xoti or vatnir, go figure), so it's also possible that xoti's spiritual is buggy and might not have any disposition scaling (not even the neutral +5% base bonus). edit 2 - if i have some time i'll do some tests tonight, in a separate game. (can't do it in my cheatyface run because magran's makes it impossible to evaluate combat log)

good to know going forward because i was getting sloppy with my act 1 time because i didn't think it mattered.

"You only have 3 days, 26 hours to finish Port Maje. You have 25 days to complete Hasongo. You have 26 days to complete Ashen Maw, and a similar amount of time to get to Ukaizo. This essentially limits your ability to explore, and really discourages you from searching abandoned settlements or burial grounds out on the world map. The time constraint is tight for the first act, but a little looser for successive acts (though not loose enough to go off and do all the DLC, at least until the final act). You can save some time and level up a bit by frontloading all the Nekataka quests in Act II (before going to Hasongo) since it only costs you a couple hours to go from district to district (versus days to travel on the map). This challenge also has the effect of requiring you to be much more deliberate about resting." i might have gotten this slightly wrong in my guide - in all my recent runs I have 27 days to complete Hasongo. I must've measured from getting the boat instead of from getting Oderisi's notes, because act 2 timer starts in the latter, even though you have no options to do anything other than go get your boat. do note that in practice the mandatory sailing just to get to crit path quest points eats up a good chunk of the time for all acts (one should try to invest in making their ship real fast). my discussion of all the challenges (except for the most recent one, the ultimate): https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/magrans-fires

that's extremely useful. all my successful de-aggro involves shadowing beyond back to where i engaged, but 150ft (~45m? i'm US but am used to all in-game measurements in meters) seems like a huge range that would basically cover many maps. i think shadowing beyond/untargetability--if there are no other targets for enemies to latch onto--removes all "not_friendly_units" from being in combat, so the third bullet point isn't even checked any more. that being said, as mentioned before there have been times with cheatyface that i can't get brilliant in the middle of combat despite apparently having de-aggroed enemies, and i wonder if there's a particular interaction with those three conditions.

what probably happens in turn-based mode is that DoTs and debuffs on a character don't progress don't advance until a character's turn. All DoTs do damage upon initial application as well. If the duration is not a multiple of 3, the last tick is a "partial" damage tick (so if you have a 1.5s duration tick left, it only does half the normal 3s tick damage). so maybe what's happening is that even with seconds->turn rounding, the game internally tracks how many ticks (including fractional ticks) of damage a dot does, and applies it correctly behind the scenes, which is why you might see a reduced damage tick at end of turn. like you say, this might have some odd interactions with TB mode.

if you de-aggro all the enemies in a fight, and you don't have a perception affliction/aren't flanked, that fulfills tactician's requirements to be brilliant: no one in your party is flanked, and all enemies are flanked (except there are no enemies, so this last part doesn't matter).