thelee

dumb question - what's the captain's banquet for? so far i've only needed to periodically use Svef (which gives resistance, not immunity). it's highly possible i've forgotten something.

color me just as surprised as you. they seem like textbook case of the same buff not stacking. maybe something got changed and they didn't use to stack. but at least for me it's 100% reproducible - i incurred some injuries from belranga, i drank a luminous adra potion, and found my skills were higher despite me thinking that since i had hylea's bonus active i wasn't going to get anything. loaded up a different experimental character, summoned up a hylea bounty and a luminous adra and combined one after the other, and sure enough i got a total of +4. would have been useful to know earlier on, might have saved me some skill respecs or tight stealth sections.

well gang, i'm cautiously optimistic. 25 days to do content that i got from above with that one trip back to nekataka removed gives me just barely enough time; 6 days for SSS, 2.5 days for FS, 2.5 days for BoW. that leaves about 2 days per other megaboss or boss left, and i've been able to take out nemnok and belrange in just one day (hauani o whe will probably be slowest at 1.5-2 days), effectively giving me more leeway to make timing mistakes later on. even though the path ahead is pretty clear now, it'll still be a couple weeks what with my schedule. but dang, thanks @Decadency for posting your vids here, just scouring them for clues and how you clear certain areas has really helped me squeeze out enough in-game time that I can still pull this run out of the toilet. i was probably gonna give up otherwise. to anyone else contemplating a run: don't do what thelee does - don't waste time going to motare o kozi. PS - something i only just discovered in act iv almost by chance is that the +2 all skills from hylea's bounty and +2 all skills from luminous adra stack. i think this will help out a bunch with some skill checks in the DLCs.

aha, well i noticed in the last video that motare o kozi isn't uncovered. i didn't friggin realize you could just the engolio de espiers wherever so i've been doing the huana faction quests even though i'm already doing 99% of the principi. so that definitely ate a lot of time to travel. (for some reason i seemed to think that engolio espiers being used only outside dunnage, and then having an extremely slow ghost boat to travel with all the way to the end) well, we'll see if i can find a way to squeeze in the last stuff, otherwise i'm going to have to start over, since i'm well past the point where i could re-path and ignore the huana faction quest. not so sure if i would start over with a tactician/skaen... edit - actually, this realization does save me some time, because now i don't have to waste time to travel back to/stay in nekataka to do the final huana faction quest (blowing up the powderhouse). saves just a day maybe, but every bit helps. edit 2 - gives me an extra day for content and removes one thing off my TODO list to worry about. getting there, we'll see.

i have to double-check but i think i have a level 4 navigator via worthless idiot. it comes a little bit later than one could get from crookspur; didn't know until watching decadency's videos that that option existed. edit - btw, i don't think going to nemnok then belranga before fire dragon will actually save me that much time. i'm going to have to more thoroughly examine the earlier decadency vids because it just seems like something along my route must've been extremely inefficient that i'm struggling to fit everything into the end.

well i'm squeezing the time a bit. a couple of minor pathing tweaks and got myself the voyager ship and now i have 23 days remaining for all the content. going to try the traveling circuit again with some palm sails and boneframe hull (an add'l +10m travel speed) and see how much time that gives. maybe with all that combined i'll have enough time for all the content.

well, going through the vids, the big thing is going to nemnok and belranga before the fire dragon. that seems like it shaves off some travel time (since i basically have to make a very similar trip in act iv to get to belranga). i'll have to check out my act iii pathing, i didn't think my quests worked out such that i had access to SoT to do boss fights - i needed the dump of experience from arriving at ashen maw to get to level 16. maybe this was all figured out in part 1 of this thread and i just missed it while i was recovering.

problem is that i don't have access to storm of holy fire (yet). i sped things up a bit with picking up shining beacon, but i'm starting act iv still "only" at level 16; i need 19 for storm of holy fire. i'm going through decadency's videos a little more closely now. it's possible that my act iii is super inefficient and i can shave off a lot of time there (thankfully my real character hasn't moved forward in act iii since i wanted to make absolutely sure my current path would work out; glad i did so).

welp, this is my nightmare. after verifying a water dragon clear with my practice char i decided to sail around with my practice char to see how much left I had for actual content, and when all sailing is done, I have 20 days for content (20 days just for sailing). Using some rough estimates, I need 24 days to do all the content... It's possible there might be a faster sailing route or some efficiencies I can get from some of the content (though I don't anticipate megabosses will be faster than 1.5 days, and timing FS on a practice clear it took 3 days roughly so I don't think I'll do better here), but tactician/skaen might just be too slow for the Ultimate. My real character is sitting still in Act III so I could reset my practice character to see if there's a better path, but I might be hitting a point soon where I have to toss in the towel on the tactician/skaen.

hm, another reason why skaen/bloodmage is better. rehearsing the water dragon fight, a plain tactician/skaen is literally impossible. there's just no way to de-aggro to actually do buffing. the only viable solution appears to be probably what decadency shows in their vid, which is to buff with the cloak brilliant buff before hand and carry it over from a previous fight (fortunately now i can use the blight summon explosion to my favor to act as a brilliant trigger). so either way, you're going to need a cloak (whereas before i just had it as a backup), so you don't get as much from the tactician. though i appreciate seeing your vids. i'm probably going to respec just to pick up shining beacon because with a mid-fight briliant trigger, just being able to spam any kind of aoe is probably going to a big help.

@Decadency, watching through some of your videos, I'm getting convinced that bloodmage/skaen (or bloodmage/priest+invis) is probably the best ultimate build, even if brilliant trigger is a bit more annoying than how a tactician could do it. Some of the fights that I struggle with on my rehearsal runs you have no problem with and it just boils down to the ability to AoE or DPS more consistently. Tactician/Skaen just really is rather slow when it's not a 1-on-1 or boss fight (not that it's particularly fast then, but at least it's pretty idiot-proof). Though it does hint to me that I need to respec to arcana sooner to help with some of the mob trash fights (I was saving that respec for my megaboss circuit). As an example - I'm trying to rehearse a water dragon clear with my practice character, and just the naga that i need to kill to get the quest item is getting a major headache, whereas you just happen to drop a couple of freezing pillars before all the blight summoning can get out of control. edit - i wonder if i could also get away with using serafen's weapon and using vela as a tank edit 2 - also learned a useful trick for keeping vela back from your vids, using spiritual ally to bring a mob back to trigger her cowering. thanks!

why? boy I wish I had any significant amount of time to get this done. i was mapping out my final act last night into chunks of time that i could do in one evening a piece, and that still will take me a couple weeks to do, and that's ignoring any roadblocks i hit with my practice character that i need to find a solution to (and thus re-rehearse).

one of the random galawain's abilities is that beasts stay stealthed until attack, and they become re-stealthed upon knocking out an ally (mostly moot for the ultimate). metagame knowledge/rehearsal is pretty good for not being surprised by invisible beasts.

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.