The Ultimate discussion thread

[nouser]

Does "devotions of the faithful"  (priest spell) stack with  "despondent blows"  ?  and which skill is best, "practiced healer" or "tough"?

[thelee]

On 5/25/2019 at 3:54 AM, Raven Darkholme said:

The fear can actually be used to your advantage.

The trick is to get her feared far away from the enemies "spawn point" - the point they return to when they lose sight of you.

Most effective way to achieve this is to cc her where you want her lead the enemies to her and then away from her again.

You might have to withdraw her, but here comes the positive about her fear effect, you never need to withdraw her more than once, so non priest classes without an actual withdraw are also fine with using scrolls, since you don't need more than one per fight as long as you fight out of line of sight of Vela her fear will stop her from following you.

during some of my rehearsal runs, for this reason, Halt became a really useful spell (second to Withdraw). Essentially, withdraw mostly became an "oh-crap!" insurance spell, because with halt and a decent duration i could essentially make vela a non-factor - for a tactician specifically if vela is far enough away, you don't even need to withdraw her to de-aggro enemies (just shadowing beyond) since she never entered the fight. it's also relevant because if vela is safely away from enemies and not constantly withdrawn, i can buff her with BDD/salvation of time, because in a pinch i can then use vela to tank (mostly relevant in situations where i could be otherwise getting hit with lots of interrupts or if i want to avoid being flanked). (that being said, in at least one of my rehearsal fights, due to some mistakes I did end up significantly appreciating infinite withdraws as a failsafe)

[abstrack]

Can Berserker Rage self raw dmg trigger the Shroud of Phantasm (and Brilliant?)

[Waski]

16 minutes ago, abstrack said:

Can Berserker Rage self raw dmg trigger the Shroud of Phantasm (and Brilliant?)

Nope.

[baldurs_gate_2]

Hmm, how can you trigger the cloak with a celebrant? (troubadour / priest)

[thelee]

46 minutes ago, baldurs_gate_2 said:

Hmm, how can you trigger the cloak with a celebrant? (troubadour / priest)

Summons whacking yourself is how I did it in tests. (it's very slow and tedious and you need some passive regen and you will shatter any armor you wear, but you really don't need armor in such a setup tbh)

Edited May 31, 2019 by thelee

[pmchem]

What's the furthest someone has gotten so far?  Any megabosses downed in an Ultimate run?

[fYNX]

3 hours ago, pmchem said:

What's the furthest someone has gotten so far?  Any megabosses downed in an Ultimate run?

VictorCreed died at level 14 today:

He is doing pretty well, but he also needs level 16 to unlock the necessary skills. No megabosses or important battles as far as I know.

Edited June 1, 2019 by fYNX

[baldurs_gate_2]

4 hours ago, pmchem said:

What's the furthest someone has gotten so far?  Any megabosses downed in an Ultimate run?

I died with Level 12 down in the Neketaka sewers, because i wanted to dodge the fights and stepped on a corpse. When i say, i died, i mean Vela, because she is useless. Second time i got caught stealing and Vela died again. No problem at level 13 with the monk summons anymore, but you have to get it b4 the hard fighting quests (should be possible), otherwise i will use the four figurines you can get in neketaka / dunnage.

[thelee]

my test character is sitting at ~level 14 at the start of act 3, and i'm steadily rehearsing and getting my real character up to that point. not a lot of risk involved, there's one hairy stealth sequence in tikawara, but otherwise should be harmless. i'm in the process of recording/uploading as i get up.

i'm guessing i'm going to be in a similar boat to victor_creed. my test character is stuck because i'm trying to figure out a way to reasonably safely get up to level 16, and once skaen hits level 16 the possible fights you can take really open up (including bosses). but until then a tactician/skaen is still pretty iffy.

[Zoso der Goldene]

Does anyone here know whether the "The Ultimate" quest itself is on the Critical Path, i.e. has a due date attached? 

[Raven Darkholme]

44 minutes ago, Zoso der Goldene said:

Does anyone here know whether the "The Ultimate" quest itself is on the Critical Path, i.e. has a due date attached? 

No the Ultimate does not have a deadline.

[Zoso der Goldene]

1 minute ago, Raven Darkholme said:

No the Ultimate does not have a deadline.

Then I don't really understand some of the discussion re: not being able to craft enough Scrolls for most of the bosses - did I miss something?

[Raven Darkholme]

36 minutes ago, Zoso der Goldene said:

Then I don't really understand some of the discussion re: not being able to craft enough Scrolls for most of the bosses - did I miss something?

How does it matter if the Ultimate has a deadline or no, when your deadline for Ukaizo will still run out?

Not having completed the Ultimate quest and ending the deadline will result in failure of the Ultimate, obviously you can't go back to the bosses after beating the game.

[Zoso der Goldene]

6 minutes ago, Raven Darkholme said:

How does it matter if the Ultimate has a deadline or no, when your deadline for Ukaizo will still run out? 

Not having completed the Ultimate quest and ending the deadline will result in failure of the Ultimate, obviously you can't go back to the bosses after beating the game.

So implicitly, it does have a deadline, thanks for the clarification!

[Boeroer]

You could say that it "inherits" the main quest deadlines from the Eothas Challenge. It adds no further deadlines though.

[thelee]

5 hours ago, Zoso der Goldene said:

Then I don't really understand some of the discussion re: not being able to craft enough Scrolls for most of the bosses - did I miss something?

The Ultimate flips on all god challenges, the most important (for this purpose) being Eothas challenge, which provides a firm deadline for all major crit path quests.

So I wouldn't even call it an "implicit" deadline. It's a very explicit deadline.

[Raven Darkholme]

You guys are silly.

The ultimate quest is not on a critical path and does not have a deadline.

If it did you could extend the Ukaizo deadline by killing megabosses/finishing dlcs, but you can't.

(Also the Ultimate doesn't have the eothas icon in the questlog.)

The original question was if the quest was on a critical path, so I assumed  @Zoso der Goldene knows about Eothas timers and was a little surprised by his question about crafting scrolls.

Please keep in mind that the critical path quest have 3 timer resets the very first one only gives you 3 days ish to get to the dig(ck) site, so it's not like Ukaizo is the only timer and the Ultimate "implicitly inherits" (sorry for murdering your quotes and the english language :P) this one, the quest simply doesn't have a timer and is not on a critical path, which doesn't change the fact that you have to beat the game in give or take 90 ingame days.

[Boeroer]

If it walks like a duck and talks like a rusty trumpet it's usually a bantam c0ck.

Edited June 3, 2019 by Boeroer

[Decadency]

This 14-16 levels are such a pain ><

[baldurs_gate_2]

Disarming traps at nemnok's place or ship over the different locations on the sea nets very much exp, but i don't know how much time it costs, even with the max sail speed. At least you would not have to fight anything.

[Zoso der Goldene]

@Raven Darkholme

Just watched the first couple of episodes of the Bloodmage/Priest of Skaen attempt, nice!

But I wonder whether there is a reason not to take Hylea's Boon right away, add the black bird as a pet and do the Helping Hands quest by sneaking through the cave? I costs 2-3 hours tops, you get some more "Deceptive" and "Cruel" options (on deck with the ghost, the other in the cave), and it nets 1484 xp right away. AFAIK food effects last until the next rest, so there's no downside apart from 2-3 hours, but hey, 1484 xp might be worth that. And if it fails for whatever reason - I don't see why it would - it would be so early in that it hardly mattered.

Am I missing something (again :)?

(To be honest, I TCSed the original game without the DLCs, and now came back for the Ultimate - so I missed the fact that, like PoE1, you can't do DLC content after the main game, silly me:)

[Raven Darkholme]

1 hour ago, Zoso der Goldene said:

@Raven Darkholme

Just watched the first couple of episodes of the Bloodmage/Priest of Skaen attempt, nice!

But I wonder whether there is a reason not to take Hylea's Boon right away, add the black bird as a pet and do the Helping Hands quest by sneaking through the cave? I costs 2-3 hours tops, you get some more "Deceptive" and "Cruel" options (on deck with the ghost, the other in the cave), and it nets 1484 xp right away. AFAIK food effects last until the next rest, so there's no downside apart from 2-3 hours, but hey, 1484 xp might be worth that. And if it fails for whatever reason - I don't see why it would - it would be so early in that it hardly mattered.

Am I missing something (again :)?

(To be honest, I TCSed the original game without the DLCs, and now came back for the Ultimate - so I missed the fact that, like PoE1, you can't do DLC content after the main game, silly me:)

Yes, I later changed my route and do it that way now, besides the xp it also saves you travelling time.

[thelee]

On 6/3/2019 at 1:00 PM, Decadency said:

This 14-16 levels are such a pain ><

i think i've figured out a way to get to level 16 without much pain - it requires altering the latter part of my act 2 pathing (fortunately my real character was only just about to do that section so I don't have to reset) and "exploits" the partial experience you get for some quest objectives without actually completing them. it still requires some optimistic assumptions about what quests i can handle safely via stealth and or what fights a level 14/15 tactician/skaen can take without salvation of time, so we'll see what i can do with my practice character. it also assumes that if you finish an act extremely quickly, all of that time also gets transferred to the next part, eothas-wise (and not a few days' worth) because it turns act 3 into beelining between hasongo, stealthing old city (no giant cave grub fight), somehow stealthing hanging sepulchers, and then beelining straight to and completing ashen maw (fire dragon should be solo-able if you can stealth past all the other encounters) and hoping all the remaining 20+ days of act iii transfer over to act iv instead of being "wasted."

if i miscalculated XP or some of my assumptions about what quests i can handle via stealth are off i think the only remaining route is to do ship bounties as i come across them while sailing aorund to motare o kozi/tikawara/fort deadlight/dunnage which unfortunately seems like it's going to add a significant RNG element to the challenge.

 

edit - if all this still proves to be untenable i think blood mage or troubadour + skaen might end up being a better choice just to have a better pre-level 16 game, though it sounds like raven darkholme/victor_creed is having their own challenges with those setups pre-level 16.

Edited June 6, 2019 by thelee

[Wotcha]

Stupid question, but are you considering the exploration XP for sailing around the map?  You can get a pretty solid whack of XP particularly in the endgame stuff on the north end, without fighting anybody.  It does cost sailing time though, and I don't know how hazardous it is to do with Ondra challenge.  But particularly if that time is otherwise going to waste if your worry about act timer clipping is valid, you might be losing the time no matter what you do, might as well burn it to get some no-combat XP.

My game exploration lately hasn't been for The Ultimate (I have only so much free time!), but I was able to pretty easily get to 16 solo, via steath and exploration xp.  Although that includes Ashen Maw, which I did NOT fight the dragon in, because I'm not on an Ultimate run and don't have to.