Alhoon

The problem of course is how one determines what is intended, what is cheese and what is glitch. Invis cheesing Brilliant Tactician in my opinion is a glitch more than a cheese, because it was probably supposed to be fixed in a patch (4.1.0: Brilliant Tactician will no longer activate if there isn't an enemy present) but wasn't for some reason, which would suggest Obs thinks it's a bug.

Tested gameplay with Vela and Invis a bit more. This may be common knowledge but I'll post it anyways since I've never played with Vela. If you stealth and walk next to enemies, start the fight and pop Withdraw on Vela and Shadowing Beyond away, you gain Brilliant Tactician for as long as you stay away from the enemies. Even when Vela gets released from Withdraw, as long as your player character isn't aggroing the enemies, Vela will not aggro them either. She just stands there covering in the middle of enemies. This means one could do Start fight -> Withdraw Vela -> Shadowing Beyond -> Wait for full spells -> Spam BDD+SoT -> Re-engage, Withdraw Vela and complete the encounter. Then again, is this against the spirit of the challenge? It sure as hell sounds like it, but again, I don't think this challenge is doable without cheesing.

Just tested this since I haven't used it with Vela before, and the answer is yes.

I did Iron Man Solo a long time ago, before any megabosses or DLCs, but I did kill both dragons and the end boss. As Assassin+Bleak Walker multiclass. It involved maximum stealth cheesing and combat resetting. That's obviously not possible in The Ultimate. On a topic of how to trigger Brilliant Tactician solo, any invisibility still triggers it with Berath's Challenge in 5.0 when all enemies have disengaged. This bug was supposed to be fixed many patches ago according to patch notes, but it still isn't, and probably will never be fixed as the game is going to maintenance mode now.

There's one thing I find a bit questionable: Cheating and using mods is clear, of course. About save-scumming, I really hope they have some sort of system in place to flag save files as "save-scummed" or something, if that's even possible. But the real question is the last part, what counts as "in a manner contrary to the spirit of the challenge"? I mean, I don't think this challenge is possible without some major cheese strategies, but having your save arbitrarily invalidated because of that would be quite disheartening.

Damn, I was really looking forward to playing this game. After these news, I most definitely will not buy anything from "Games for Windows LIVE" store or Fortnite moneygrubbers, not even this game, no matter how good it turns out to be. I know my opinion as an individual is worth pretty much nothing, but maybe this backlash as a whole will serve as a warning to future endeavours for Obsidian, their publishers and everyone in the gaming industry.

I played that skeleton fight on my Tactician / Assassin like a week ago, PoTD (Upscaled)+Triple Crown+Solo. It wasn't that hard, and my character uses guns most of the time, so I had to resort to using suboptimal weapon (I think I used regular Quarterstaff, not even magical). That weapon is so bad because you can't use Smoke Veil right after doing damage, since only guns have reload instead of recovery and all guns are pierce damage. Just pull one skeleton at the time with traps and they weren't difficult 1 on 1. The mage needs to be pulled WAAY back though, since he casts Dimensional Shift and this pulls all the other skeletons (noticed this on my parallel non-ToI practice run).

Specifically the No Quarter ability it gives. I did a quick search on the forums and couldn't find topic regarding these. As a refresher: No Quarter Uses: 1 per encounter Cast Time: 0.5 sec Recovery Time: 4.0 sec Range: 6m Noise: Quiet (Use) / Quiet (Impact) Effects:Target:Interrupt | Accuracy vs. Deflection Full Attack I did some testing regarding something else and discovered you can hit yourself with this ability. Also it's usable outside of combat and as such recovers uses constantly, so it can be used to stack some on-hit buffs before combat while playing solo. What are some good gears to combo with this knowledge? Already tested with Scordeo's Trophy, which grants either 5% Recovery Time or 10% Melee Weapon Recovery, depending on enchants, and these stack with each stack expiring independently, but also increasing in duration independently using WoD / SoT. Works great. So, any other good combos?

My guess is they're just using a mod/cheat to enable multiple "unstackable" buffs and use "pause method" as an excuse to seem legit.

Oh, right. I just assumed SoTP by default when talking about BDD+SoT on non-Tactician.

I haven't used this combo so maybe I'm just misunderstanding things, but seeing how BDD lasts for 8 seconds, SoT gives +10 seconds and Brilliant gives resource every 6 seconds, how would this not give practically infinite BDD even after the fix?

I also noticed that while testing a new character for solo playthrough, but wasn't this supposed to be a bug and be fixed in 4.1 ("Brilliant Tactician will no longer activate if there isn't an enemy present"). Maybe not, but seems fishy... Still, I've tested this quite a lot (especially with Magran's Fires: Berath challenge active, because otherwise in solo play invisibility tends to drop you from combat) and there's certainly something very finicky with this. When I turn invisible, the Brilliant won't activate until the fight state has reset, so the enemies have to cycle through their ongoing animations and sometimes even return to their place before the Brilliant activates. My original idea was to have Tactician/Assassin that uses Arquebus (or any weapon that has zero recovery), and increase Smoke Veil duration to 6+ seconds. This would mean that using Smoke Veil initiates Brilliant, giving one resource, and waiting while invisible for 6 seconds gives second resource, meaning this could be used to cheese everything the game throws at you. While at least part of me is happy this can't really be used (at least until Smoke Veil has some serious duration increase from items), it's quite sad to see that a reason it's unusable is due to a glitch. And then there's a bug that I can just turn invisible, run away and even though Berath challenge won't let the combat end, I gain Brilliant (without being invisible) and the enemies won't chase, letting me to soft reset the fight by gaining all lost resources back. Wasn't THIS at least supposed to be fixed in 4.1?

But the game gives you a high five for completing the starting island, a tutorial if you will. But it won't give you a high five for truly achieving something that requires dedication? What does that tell you about the game itself, may I ask? Regardless, I don't want the game to give me a high five. I just want a confirmation that I can share with my friends and anyone else who is interested, that I have achieved something worth achieving. If for some truly absurd reason this cannot be a part of Steam achievements because some people want 100% to be a freebie, so be it. But I think there needs to be some way that the game recognizes when you've achieved something difficult and a way to share this accomplishment with other people.

Sorry to say but I completely disagree with this. I mean, they are called achievements. Google says: "achievement: a thing done successfully with effort, skill, or courage". Games these days hand achievements for starting the game for the first time, getting the first companion or something equally trivial. Why are these even in the game when they're essentially participation awards? I just cannot understand people who want to have 100% completion just handed to them for the sake of it without any semblance of challenge. Achieving TCS and The Ultimate were one of my fondest memories of Pillars 1. I guess I have you (and other like minded people) to blame for denying me that sense of awe in this game.

Just throwing my two cents here, I think Magran's is absolutely horrible, because it completely removes the most tactical aspect of the gameplay, as many have pointed out. This is coming from someone who mainly plays these games solo, I spend roughly twice as long paused than I do unpaused during combat. I can't even imagine how painful it is for party play. I applaud Obsidian for having the balls to try out something new and completely game changing like this, but personally I dislike it.