thelee

oh yeah, i forgot about that - i think 1000g reward. i'm so obsessive about not letting my hired companions fall behind that i never even consider doing that first. probably originally intentional - obs was a lot more deliberate with the game economy this time around (at least up until the lewt-bomb of doing e.g. FS kinda wipes that out)

typically I only have money for two custom companions at the moment I arrive i Port Maje, and that's with hiring level 1 adventurers (only 250g). You can probably scrounge up a bit after some questing on the main island (though level 1 adventurers would be falling further behind at that point). with the gold blessing you can obviously get a whole lot more/higher level.

I don't know if people know, but if you have mid-teens mechanics or stealth, 14 dex and 8 athletics, you can cross the bridge no problem without any specific class support or without burning any time. (edit: the dialogue tree would go -> examine, use stealth/mechancis, carefully cross the bridge (new option appears after examining the bridge with enough skill), and then you're done (you just click through a dex and athletics check).) I ended up manually looking through the game conversation files for this encounter because this encounters is so poorly documented and could've been a dealbreaker/huge-waste-of-time for my tactician/skaen (who does not have access to web or the druid spells). edit 2 - though honestly it's not that big a deal to brute force your way through the bridge with insufficient dex/athletics, so long as you don't have any injuries (iirc you can accumulate up to three just from a "successful" crossing). you can always quaff a luminous adra potion after, or leave them in place if you have rekvu's.

as a perpetual waelite, I found that extremely annoying in PoE1 - some wael-only options were marked as "honest". Sometimes I think the writers just forgot what they were doing.

i think it was kilay just messing around, because they were also trying to add dispositions to pallegina's paladin class. either way, xoti's disposition at last check is not actively checked by the game, so I don't think we can take any gaun dispositions (if they do exist) as canon.

that's a fair observation. i think in that sense giftbearers are probably the best representation of her "church" per se, which does seem to be a bit more [shady, benevolent]+ which is an odd combination. it does raise the issue of what happens when there are multiple churches/aspects/observations, though... you'd think gaun should have different dispositions that eothas because of that. (though in terms of in-game mechanics, xoti doesn't have any dispositions.)

no way ondra is benevolent, she keeps lies if it benefits her and she literally committed a crime against humanity. i'd say she's more calculating and serious: +[rational, shady], -[honest, clever]. i mean, when in any dialogue with her does she crack a joke or enjoy one of yours? as for galawain, not being actively benevolent is not the same thing as hating benevolence. the guy thinks survival of the fittest is the best way to improve everyone, and in poe1 he's part of the faction that wants you to give the souls to the benefit of the kith (also an option in SSS). he's also not cruel, in the sense that nature isn't cruel, it's just uncaring. i'd also say he's not that clever or fun-loving. i'd say +[aggressive, passionate] and -[diplomatic, stoic]

that first ultimate thread is like an entire novel unto itself at this point

wow, i never realized they kept upgrading themselves. i always ended up with watcher upgrades that were a mix of inspirations, instead of one that just kept getting stronger. even if it's per-rest, i had so much time at the end that having a foolproof brilliant buff as backup would've been nice.

wait what?? am i a moron and missed something obvious?

It's a shame, I wonder what's up? What did you go with for priest/rogue? Still Skaen? Or maybe not because now rogue gives you lots of invisibility options? (I'm assuming this build is also brilliant cloak-dependent.) Is Smoke Veil decent or is the duration too short compared to just picking up Shadowing Beyond? I have to imagine that given that brilliant+bdd based strategies keep you at approximately 1 health for entire fights that Streetfighter would be an incredible pick, even with scordeo's buff in tow. edit - dang, was gonna try to DM @jesawyer to get some attention on your run, but his privacy settings are locked down a bit. (i was going to tweet, but an earlier tweet-response I got from @jesawyer about the ultimate got deleted, so I think they're trying to avoid saying much publicly about the ultimate runs.)

i didn't watch that part until just now, though i did end up doing that for the sigils in auranic. my practice run ended up clearing with tons of time to spare (14 days). meticulous notes with every consumable and path plotted out and fight strategies that are pretty RNG-proof. hopefully in a couple weeks i'll also be getting validated. the only thing i'm particularly worried about is bad RNG with scordeo's (fortunately I have lots of coping strategies, it'll just add some time) or a game-breaking soft lock that happened once to my practice character against the ukaizo dragon. also - holy hell with 4 megabosses down, the ukaizo dragon is super tanky, mostly because of stupidly high AR.

lol, yeah i had a bit of tunnel vision. literally like 30 minutes ago, I was like "wait I got several scrolls of maelstrom from FS". a few high level scrolls + holy fire wiped most everything out and then i could just keep concelhaut mule kicked until they died. i forgot that most of bekarna's observatory targets a much lower level and everyone has pretty low defenses and health compared to some other areas even with upscaling.

just wanted to confirm some other things said earlier - I previously had speculated that if I were to try again, I would maybe go for Woedica because their spiritual weapon (monk fists + raw lash) is better than skaen's (club/stiletto + pierce lash). But I think to confirm what Decadency alluded to, I honestly can't imagine doing a brilliant-based run that doesn't have a huge source of invisibility like skaen does (or blood mage) thanks to Arcane Dampener and Arcane Cleansing. Nemnok wasn't bad - just had to bait it all out with a few spiritual allies. But Concelhaut is giving me a surprising amount of trouble for my practice character because Concelhaut appears to be on a timer instead of having authentic spell casts, which means casting Dampener or Cleansing even after they've already cast a few. I just had a practice character die because they got Skyward Kicked and were lying on the ground and during the like 1.5s of lying down and then additional standing up time, Concelhaut started and then completed an Arcane Cleansing I didn't know they had left. (Invisibility also helps against dodging Form of the Helpless Beast, which I needed to do a couple times with Nemnok and in Forgotten Sanctum. Not as critical though because with all my buffs Helpless Beasts's tusks are a decent weapon [my practice character literally knocked off like 50% of the final oracle's health just with tusks], and I ended up picking up Monastic Unarmed Training as backup just for these cases where I un-shapeshift and no longer have spiritual weapon.) That being said, it's just a matter of time still. My practice character is doing way better on time than I anticipated - at Concelhaut with 17 days left, with only Auranic and Ukaizo remaining. My real character is catching up and approaching Act IV. Sometimes I fantasize about being able to play Deadfire for pure fun again.

yes, robes of the weyc is stupidly exploitable. unless you're doing a rest-constrained run, it's not even a big deal to just rest every few empowers.

I don't generally use mods, but I have unintentionally done SHIFT+hotkey enough times to try to buffer an ability that I could almost kill for a mod like this.

congrats decadency! also, eff me, that Kōhatekana Expanse has a FORCED REST during the scripted encounter. WHY OH WHY did they ever have this "feature"??? edit - good thing i wasn't actually reliant on captain's banquet. sad to lose hylea's bounty... so i guess no +4 skills for me, just the +2 from luminous adra.

how long has it been since you submitted it? how long did it take for decadency? i have to imagine they are actually watching the entire videos (maybe on higher speed). must be a tedious job for someone at obsidian HQ.

lololol too bad it doesn't also heal vela

yeah good thing I'm practicing SSS, the AI is indeed super weird. Have to double-check what goes in Decadency's vids (maybe Decadency just super-charges brilliant in the first fight and don't bother needing to buff/hide in the later ones), but the Naga fight and the first vs enemy party fight have weird AI (probably some of the final ones, too, but haven't gotten to them yet). For some reason some of the characters seem to have a behavior where they appear to go to the last known position of a viable target instead of resetting, which means standing right on top of you or Vela with withdraw. Fortunately, I found a way to bait them around so I can still completely de-aggro them, but it definitely required me to lean on shadowing beyond so I could lure enemies into one area and then invis and withdraw elsewhere. That being said, I don't think I've ever roflstomped SSS so hard as with a brilliant+BDD+scordeo's character.

more spaghetti code specifically it sounds like it's just the +2 all skills deal. also I didn't want to add more confusion at the time, but i didn't do a save/load cycle when I verified this on one of my test characters. I did do a zone transition - I started on worldmap, rested with Hylea, entered an area, quaffed the luminous adra potion. Blammo, got +4 all skills. While there was an autosave and a zone load, there was no reloading of the game. Don't know if that affects anything.

wow that makes the +PL bonuses from food potentially much better then (mostly thinking about a brain-dead way to boost monk or monastic unarmed training fists)

possibly, but my run has been leaning heavily on hylea's bounty. helped to do a lot of non-violent options, which is faster than actually fighting. i wish i had a test case that makes for a stronger case for it but like i said i wasted a lot of time unnecessarily doing huana quest.

so I haven't verified SSS yet (it's next on my practice character before going back to my real run and plugging forward since it's basically my last unknown), but all the SSS fights start you off in a safe area that doesn't trigger combat. So long as that exists then I'm fine; I watched Decadency's SSS clears to make sure there was plenty of room to do buffing in peace. The water dragon on other hand was a problem because there was literally no spot in that fight that was not visible to the water dragon or its tentacles, so I had to pre-buff with the cloak while fighting the naga upstairs since I literally couldn't beyond+withdraw away to do tactician brilliant. (edit - but, you never know. which is why I feel like I need to practice it beforehand. Also to make sure I have an answer to all the annoying skill checks in SSS) In previous similar fights, it might require a bit of Vela management to patiently wait to have her walk to the edge of the map, then I Halt her, run towards the fight, lure enemies back, then invis+withdraw. This way Vela starts cowering, and once she cowers she stays within a small-ish area that I can safely buff us or dance back and forth between the enemies and my safe spot without worrying about Vela messing things up. Might need a withdraw at times to fully de-aggro the enemies after I escape back, but I'm generally not using my level 2 spells anyway so I always have withdraw available.

So this is probably actually one great advantage of a tactician over being cloak-reliant. Most fights as tactician/skaen you don't need the cloak (so far I've penciled in a few times where it's really advantageous/required to do so <water dragon, fire dragon, and maybe to only have to do the big buffing once or twice for BoW>; I might pencil in a few more), so you don't need to worry about losing brilliant because you won't actually have it during most fights - you just have it while you buff. If for some reason I need to buff again, all I have to do is Shadowing Beyond+Withdraw and that basically resets Brilliant (this is actually very important for the fights that I need the cloak, because I don't have a fire wall to self-trigger the cloak; I literally just buff a bit, stand there with a stopwatch while enemies attack me, and if I haven't triggered cloak brilliant when my timer goes off I invis, reset, buff again, rinse and repeat until I get the cloak to proc). So I only need to be concerned for the fights where I need the brilliant from the cloak, and I need to avoid getting the tactician shaken/confused debuff from being flanked which will ordinarily dispell Brilliant, which Svef is good enough to prevent (it's not even a factor for the fire dragon fight because none of the magma oozes can actually flank me because they're ranged). (edit - not having brilliant active during a fight may contribute to tactician/skaen being slower than a bloodmage/skaen since I can't spam most abilities during fights, i'm only left with auto attack. With good timing I can do some mule kick spamming but that's about it until there's just a couple of enemies left that I can manually trigger flanked on and trigger tactician brilliant. At level 19 with my practice char now should be less of a concern since I'm hoping I can Storm of Holy Fire -> escape, brilliant, wait -> Storm of Holy Fire -> etc spam for the non-boss fights) Not directly related, but with solo tactician, the way it interacts with charm/dominate, is that as soon as you get charm/dominated, the tactician brilliant bonus kicks in and immediately dispels the charm/dominate (verified behavior from practicing FS which features lots of charm/dominate). I guess Vela doesn't count as an "enemy" for checking who's been flanked or not.