The Ultimate discussion thread

[thelee]

I think (at least part) chanter is close to mandatory thanks to abydon and woedica. I don't have a lot of experience with soloing so maybe SC monk could work but how would you deal with the sustain when you aren't healing after each fight?

Cipher and tactician have infinite resources but I don't know how a tactician could reliably trigger brilliant solo, and cipher doesn't solve the sustain or abydon problem nearly as well as a chanter.

Part blood mage could work. It's not like you'll be refreshing your empowers very frequently any way. Also, unlike other classes, their sustain works outside of combat on woedica mode.

 

edit - paladin and fighter also have replenishible resources, but only at medium-high levels, and very slowly. can corpse eater barbarian eat bodies out of combat?

Edited May 9, 2019 by thelee

[JESUSSSAYSNO]

4 minutes ago, thelee said:

I think (at least part) chanter is close to mandatory thanks to abydon and woedica. I don't have a lot of experience with soloing so maybe SC monk could work but how would you deal with the sustain when you aren't healing after each fight?

Bloodmage's passive heals you out of combat, and the class has infinite spell slots. You have access to a plethora of HP sustain spells, defensive buffs, nukes, CC, etc as well. BM's out of combat regeneration makes it so incredible. it lets you wait out a bit of regen without Resting.

[thelee]

4 minutes ago, JESUSSSAYSNO said:

Bloodmage's passive heals you out of combat, and the class has infinite spell slots. You have access to a plethora of HP sustain spells, defensive buffs, nukes, CC, etc as well. BM's out of combat regeneration makes it so incredible. it lets you wait out a bit of regen without Resting.

yeah, i know (mentioned in my post). I was more specifically asking how an SC monk (for resonance) could work, since several people suggested it.

[thelee]

to anyone with solo experience - have you also done iron man solo?

i'm wondering how defensive to be with gear, or how worried i should be about hard CC. my current brainstorming basically involves covering all my basis so that hard CC is impossible: feet that grant dex immunity, rekvu that grants interrupt immunity, ring of mule's wit for int*/res resist (though can still be charmed), and aumaua for might resist. (in an early draft i was also a part paladin for poison/disease immunity, though i don't know how good the paladin part is going to be in the ultimate).

* normally int afflictions don't matter when soloing, but with vela around you will happily go up and whack her to death and she will be the only target around as well, so trying to avoid int afflictions might matter more on hylea  + solo.

 

edit - thinking about SC troubadour right now, with monastic unarmed training. in addition to infinite skellies and animated weapons, strong fists that you can conditionally quaff a potion of ascension plus prestige for fight-long legendary fists that never need repairing, you also have an instadeath invocation to use against bosses. you have anti-AR invocation, and animancy cat for bonus PEN on your animated weapons (who themselves scale up to legendary); the animated sword basically grants you infinite interrupts for tough single-target fights (or for keeping Hauani o Whe from merging). equip nomad's brigandine and bonus stride gear/passive so that you can face tank enemies away from vela by running in and out of scary attacks while your summons do the dirty work. you can even put on the int resist chant and due to how it works you'll grant yourself immunity to int afflictions because it'll tick every 3 seconds and keep downgrading the int affliction (AI doesn't seem to change your chant if you're dominated or charmed). still need lots and lots and lots of withdraw scrolls for vela though.

Edited May 9, 2019 by thelee

[Waski]

@thelee On SC  helwalker solo run i died after port maje only if I heavily missplayed(ie i was bored of WotW).  I had few deaths in Maje when I tried gorecci and digsite. Affliction were covered by shark soup,  skaen robe(perception),  modwyr and pet(resolve resistance but I knew where there was danger of it)  and laughingstock cap( doesn't influence you but when you summon souls they have it too so you shake off "shaken")   Two layers of concentration (belt and hood from FS, first dlc to finish because of that, didn't pick passive )  were enough to fire first WotW. With Hylea talons( I aimed with strenght  to have the dot  from it above 8 with 2 wounds but without Thunderous Blows for generating more wounds) and dance of the death I could chain WotW  almost indefinitely.

Does Ultimate allows retraining?

Edit I switch for INT and/or RES immunities gear when needed only. 

Edited May 9, 2019 by Waski

[thelee]

20 minutes ago, Waski said:

With Hylea talons( I aimed with strenght  to have the dot  from it above 8 with 2 wounds but without Thunderous Blows for generating more wounds) and dance of the death I could chain WotW  almost indefinitely.

i don't know what the mechanics of hylea talons. how does this generate more wounds?

i guess i'm not used to playing many monks, because i don't see how early game you aren't terribly squishy, especially as a helwalker.

[Boeroer]

Hyleas Talons can put a raw DoT on you (or your enemy). This happens all the time and thus you generate wounds. They also give you a lash. 

Edited May 9, 2019 by Boeroer

[Waski]

There is a high chance (don't remember what %)  that you gonna put a dot on enemy or yourself, with swift flurry /heartbeat drumming one iteration of WotW is enough to put it on yourself. 

[thelee]

what about the sustain? that's a lot of damage you're taking, and you won't get healed to full after each fight, and resting will be extremely limited (basically inns, and even then it's basically a no-rest run due to eothas).

[dunehunter]

Abydon’s and woedica’s challenge makes monk the most suitable candidate to me. U don’t need to worry about weapon degrade because u use fist, and you have infinite resources.

I can’t imagine any lower tier classes be able to complete the ultimate honestly. Only monk, chanter, tactician and bloodmage seems to be possible to do this.

Edited May 9, 2019 by dunehunter

[Boeroer]

I don't think it's a good way to get wounds. I'd still say that Forbidden Fist is the way to go. With very high Res the curse is less than 2 sec (close to no dmg) and the expiration of afflictions will heal you (and trigger Crucible). That's free wounds basically. 

High RES might be desirable anyway.

Edited May 9, 2019 by Boeroer

[Waski]

For fights without danger to resolve take pet(20 health on kill)  and sabre from dragon lair maybe (8 on crit)? 

[Boeroer]

Isn't Grog the best pet for an Ultimate run? If you are k.o. you die anyway. And no engagement makes for easy movement. No need to wear Nomad's and stuff.

[thelee]

21 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

I don't think it's a good way to get wounds. I'd still say that Forbidden Fist is the way to go. With very high Res the curse is less than 2 sec (close to no dmg) and the expiration of afflictions will heal you (and trigger Crucible). That's free wounds basically. 

High RES might be desirable anyway.

i think as far as monk goes, boeroer may be right. SC monk can get both resonance (probably better anti-belranga/dorudugan/sigilmaster solution than gouging/brand unless you solve the Vela aggro problem) and wotw, and SC forbidden fist has the better answer w.r.t. to sustain. helwalker just gives you extra damage and for such a long iron man run you might want to err on inevitable survivability rather than a bit more damage here and there. (remember that one or two "random deaths" one might have had on solo and not thought much about is much much much more annoying when on trial of iron. it took me seven tries to do the ultimate in PoE1 and it made me extremely conservative about risk in the process)

16 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Isn't Grog the best pet for an Ultimate run? If you are k.o. you die anyway. And no engagement makes for easy movement. No need to wear Nomad's and stuff.

maybe, also saves a separate trip just to get nomad's, too. you could then maybe equip fleshmender for the health regen and extra item slot (for potions/withdrawal).

 

I'm convinced now that SC forbidden fist could be a good approach, but I also think SC troubadour might be equally viable (trades off some offense and megaboss inevitability with more survivability). i'm a little bit of a skeptic on taking out hauani o whe solo without the aid of something like summons, but i'm happy to be argued wrong.

Edited May 9, 2019 by thelee

[Waski]

Yep,  lack of solid autohealing on helwalker can be problem. 

Edit what about sage? (bloodmage) I killed Belranga and Ooze with sage,  Doru is easy with anything multi with monk,  only Auranic can be a problem.  But I didn't try dlcs.  But with massive cheese FS and BoW should be easy,  trigger Brilliant from cloak out of combat and stack few hours of it with Wall of draining on some barrels etc.   should be enough because you don't go to world map in this dlcs. 

Edited May 9, 2019 by Waski

[dunehunter]

A SC monk can solo all mega bosses in a no god challenges playthrough. Now you just need to 1. Do every battle without pause; 2. Keep vela safe with withdraw scroll. It takes a lot more practice and bit of luck to make it, but doable imo.

[thelee]

17 minutes ago, dunehunter said:

A SC monk can solo all mega bosses in a no god challenges playthrough. Now you just need to 1. Do every battle without pause; 2. Keep vela safe with withdraw scroll. It takes a lot more practice and bit of luck to make it, but doable imo.

lack of pause I don't think is a big deal if you're soloing and you only have a few buttons to mash, and not even that often. (blood mage probably much bigger problem). you can still slow down time. if you're extremely patient, you can do it on TB-mode, where all it does is limit you to ten seconds per turn, which is more than enough for solo, but I imagine megabosses would be an extreme pain to sit through. (it also makes it impossible to do running-out-of-range tricks with grog/nomad)

 

i just looked up a video of monk soloing hauani o whe and i guess the secret sauce is the stalking cloak to basically perma-stun the smaller forms. edit - though it calls into question the forbidden fist approach because there's no way to get such high uptime on WotW unless you're getting wounds from symbiote or something on top of enduring dance.

Edited May 9, 2019 by thelee

[Boeroer]

Forbidden Fist with very high defenses will get missed a lot. Lots of misses means wounds through Imagined Pain.

You could even stack Tumbling + Graceful Retreat and use missing Disengagement Attacks as source of wounds. Maybe...?

With additional affliction reduction (Clarity + items) your Forbidden Fist curse will vanish almost immediately, giving you wounds. 

I don't think wound generation will be a problem.

 

[Kaylon]

The forbidden fist won't be able to beat all the megabosses. VS Hauani, the other monk types can have infinite wounds (thanks to the symbiote), allowing them to spam WotW and perma stun the oozes (while building also resonance stacks very fast). VS Dorudugan you won't be able to tank him and your only source of wounds will be the dance - which won't be enough to maintain the Dichotomous Soul all the time.

[thelee]

27 minutes ago, Kaylon said:

The forbidden fist won't be able to beat all the megabosses. VS Hauani, the other monk types can have infinite wounds (thanks to the symbiote), allowing them to spam WotW and perma stun the oozes (while building also resonance stacks very fast). VS Dorudugan you won't be able to tank him and your only source of wounds will be the dance - which won't be enough to maintain the Dichotomous Soul all the time.

don't you have  a lot of experience doing solo? you planning on getting your name on a plaque?

[Jayd]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

You could even stack Tumbling + Graceful Retreat and use missing Disengagement Attacks as source of wounds. Maybe...?

I have done this and it works well. Run through some mobs for two seconds and your wounds are full again. Extra stride helps for triggering the disengages quickly.

[Jayd]

37 minutes ago, Kaylon said:

The forbidden fist won't be able to beat all the megabosses. VS Hauani, the other monk types can have infinite wounds (thanks to the symbiote), allowing them to spam WotW and perma stun the oozes (while building also resonance stacks very fast). VS Dorudugan you won't be able to tank him and your only source of wounds will be the dance - which won't be enough to maintain the Dichotomous Soul all the time.

If I remember correctly, FF works with Instruments of pain. What if you used that and spammed FF at a distance (it doesn't need to land to give you the debuff)? 

 

(Sorry for double post)

Edited May 9, 2019 by Jayd

[thelee]

20 minutes ago, Jayd said:

If I remember correctly, FF works with Instruments of pain. What if you used that and spammed FF at a distance (it doesn't need to land to give you the debuff)? 

 

(Sorry for double post)

How would that help? The problem isn't the range, it's the wound generation rate. If you go look at a SC monk vs hauani video, once the ooze splits the wotw uptime is virtually 100% thanks to endurance dance and symbiote. Occasionally there's a mortification, but that has no recovery. In the video the wotw uptime was hugely important because it literally was needed to prevent oozes from merging (and in fact one merge successfully happened in the video I watched)

[Jayd]

11 minutes ago, thelee said:

How would that help? The problem isn't the range, it's the wound generation rate. If you go look at a SC monk vs hauani video, once the ooze splits the wotw uptime is virtually 100% thanks to endurance dance and symbiote. Occasionally there's a mortification, but that has no recovery. In the video the wotw uptime was hugely important because it literally was needed to prevent oozes from merging (and in fact one merge successfully happened in the video I watched)

My comment was directed at the second part of their post, where they said that enduring dance will be the only source of wounds vs Doru. I was suggesting an alternate source. Specifically with the strat that has your summons tank Doru while you stand at a distance.

As for Hauani, I don't know.

Edited May 9, 2019 by Jayd

[Ivanfyodorovich]

@thelee - w/r/t Woedica's challenge and lack of regen between fights, I believe trollskin belt and similar equipment still regens outside of combat, which sort of trivializes this aspect. You can just equip regen gear right after a fight and quickly heal up.