The Ultimate discussion thread

[thelee]

45 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Scordeo's Edge is not only great because of Blade Cascade but also because of Adaptive. It stacks with every other ACC buff since it's from an item 

Speaking about Avenging Storm: against mobs Hand Mortar is still the most awesome way to use it. Especially if you can crit a lot with Adaptive (+20 ACC) or even Strategic Shot (+30 ACC). As said earlier Blinding Smoke triggers Avenging Storm and every AoE attack roll from the mortar has the potential to trigger the AoE cone of Blinding Smoke. In addition to the Disorient. So Tactician/something sounds like a good idea. 

If you combine it with Pull of Eora & Clear Out you generate (AoE_targets_Clear_Out * AoE_targets_Hand Mortar * AoE_targets_Blinding_Smoke) hits which all trigger Avenging Storm.

And against single targets I would presume that Scordeo's Edge + Xefa's Empirical Explication should be very nice as well once Blade Cascade triggers. Or doesn't it remove reload time as well? Always used it with another melee weapon...

there was an issue (that i'm pretty sure is still in place) where arcane blaster with bullet time (-100% recovery) still had a short reload time - i think there's an absolute minimum reload durution unless you have a weapon that can specifically fire multiple shots before reloading. so I don't think scordeo's edge plus xefa is going to be great against single targets (versus 2w melee with no recovery), but the mob clearing effect of hand mortar sounds great. (though might have to reserve its usage because i don't know how many guaranteed scrolls of avenging storm one can easily get and i think huana o whe definitely has one use reserved... maybe belranga would be a great place to take advantage of the mob clearing effect)

Edited May 15, 2019 by thelee

[Waski]

It looks that there was a silent nerf to BDD / potion of final stand.  You can't trigger brilliant from cloak when you  are on 1hp.  I suppose because you don't take damage 

At least I couldn't, maybe just bad roll. 

[thelee]

59 minutes ago, Waski said:

It looks that there was a silent nerf to BDD / potion of final stand.  You can't trigger brilliant from cloak when you  are on 1hp.  I suppose because you don't take damage 

At least I couldn't, maybe just bad roll. 

how long did you try? at only 1% chance of success the variance is pretty huge.

[Waski]

7 minutes ago, thelee said:

how long did you try? at only 1% chance of success the variance is pretty huge.

Few minutes,  noticeable difference is that numbers don't pop up above head when you shoot yourself with missiles.  Before 5.0 they did,  I have it on video from with sage beating big ooze (edit,  I wrote Belranga) 

Edited May 15, 2019 by Waski

[Yougottawanna]

For Scordeo's Edge synergies, I'm like 90% sure that the ooblit pet affects the duration of the no-recovery buff. It also affects blade turning, and at least one SC monk strat uses blade turning vs. huani. (Unfortunately, the 3 sec bonus doesn't scale with INT, it's just a flat bonus)

For Vela I wonder if you could hide her behind a chokepoint or something. Aggro on a bridge or next to a door or something, cast a figurine or something to block her, then pull the enemies somewhere else. Let her just wander around on the other side of the screen. If you're limited in the number of withdrawal scrolls you have, it could be a workaround.

[thelee]

7 minutes ago, Yougottawanna said:

For Scordeo's Edge synergies, I'm like 90% sure that the ooblit pet affects the duration of the no-recovery buff. It also affects blade turning, and at least one SC monk strat uses blade turning vs. huani. (Unfortunately, the 3 sec bonus doesn't scale with INT, it's just a flat bonus)

For Vela I wonder if you could hide her behind a chokepoint or something. Aggro on a bridge or next to a door or something, cast a figurine or something to block her, then pull the enemies somewhere else. Let her just wander around on the other side of the screen. If you're limited in the number of withdrawal scrolls you have, it could be a workaround.

your obstacle has to be permanent for the duration of the fight, because so long as vela isn't aggroed, she *will* beeline towards you (like a pet). she doesn't begin her cowering until she's within range of enemies.

ooblit doesn't matter for me because i only need one proc of scordeo's edge, and then i can just salvation of time it to whatever duration i need.

Edited May 15, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

fuuuuu- man, that scordeo's edge is totally the trick. thanks so much dunehunter! i could've done it even faster, but i forgot to buff avenging storm before hand. oh well. mule kick still was super relevant because even with lots of interrupts per second, i still needed it to do so to trigger brilliant and interrupt merges (searing seal ended up being way too slow and inaccurate). aside from me not having wael's on, this was as close to the real thing as possible, and all the items i used should be obtainable through a quick crit path.

 

i've got a few more bosses to try out (mostly to make sure i have enough room to deaggro in all situations, I'm actually sorta concerned about FS Oracle that you get teleported into/dropped into), but i think we've got a real contender here with a tactician+skaen.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 16, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

Follow up for non-tactician/skaen folks who want to try. Withdraw ended up being a non-factor in this fight, huani o whe is easy to pull far away from Vela once she cowered (generous sized map) so it basically didn't even matter that I could infinite withdraw her (she was out of range of all the oozes). So depending on the spacing of other fights, lack of withdraw may not be as big a concern as I thought.

 

Also, FYI abydons is brutal for a boss fight. even just using scordeo on a spiritual Ally to proc the recovery buff I broke it down one level. Without fists or replenishable summoned weapons I think you basically annihilate your gear before you can beat bosses when soloing. But I don't think excludes any class that hasn't already been excluded.

Edited May 16, 2019 by thelee

[dunehunter]

2 hours ago, thelee said:

Follow up for non-tactician/skaen folks who want to try. Withdraw ended up being a non-factor in this fight, huani o whe is easy to pull far away from Vela once she cowered (generous sized map) so it basically didn't even matter that I could infinite withdraw her (she was out of range of all the oozes). So depending on the spacing of other fights, lack of withdraw may not be as big a concern as I thought.

 

Also, FYI abydons is brutal for a boss fight. even just using scordeo on a spiritual Ally to proc the recovery buff I broke it down one level. Without fists or replenishable summoned weapons I think you basically annihilate your gear before you can beat bosses when soloing. But I don't think excludes any class that hasn't already been excluded.

Don't forget Frostseeker + Resonant Touch, since the whole combo only relies on raw damage of RT, it doesn't matter if your weapon shattered or not.

[Waski]

2 hours ago, thelee said:

fuuuuu- man, that scordeo's edge is totally the trick. thanks so much dunehunter! i could've done it even faster, but i forgot to buff avenging storm before hand. oh well. mule kick still was super relevant because even with lots of interrupts per second, i still needed it to do so to trigger brilliant and interrupt merges (searing seal ended up being way too slow and inaccurate). aside from me not having wael's on, this was as close to the real thing as possible, and all the items i used should be obtainable through a quick crit path.

 

i've got a few more bosses to try out (mostly to make sure i have enough room to deaggro in all situations, I'm actually sorta concerned about FS Oracle that you get teleported into/dropped into), but i think we've got a real contender here with a tactician+skaen.

 

 

 

 

Whole FS should be fairly easy(depends how OBS look at it).  You need to trigger brilliant from cloak just once and pump it( once I did whole splinter reef with thaumaturge like that,  got brilliant on first ambush fight,  SoT into hours).  You can lure first vithrak,  flank wit spiritual ally(brilliant from tactician) , and wait for cloak to trigger. Only Arcane Cleanse  can mess you up. 

[thelee]

6 hours ago, Waski said:

Whole FS should be fairly easy(depends how OBS look at it).  You need to trigger brilliant from cloak just once and pump it( once I did whole splinter reef with thaumaturge like that,  got brilliant on first ambush fight,  SoT into hours).  You can lure first vithrak,  flank wit spiritual ally(brilliant from tactician) , and wait for cloak to trigger. Only Arcane Cleanse  can mess you up. 

Interesting idea but I think eothas might make that unworkable. At 2x speed, one minute of nonstop salvation of time added around 50 seconds of buffs. After 10 minutes of buffing at 2x speed, half a game day passed. Depending on how much spare time one has, you might not be able to burn many in-game days to prebuff the DLC.

Edited May 16, 2019 by thelee

[baldurs_gate_2]

9 hours ago, thelee said:

fuuuuu- man, that scordeo's edge is totally the trick. thanks so much dunehunter! i could've done it even faster, but i forgot to buff avenging storm before hand. oh well. mule kick still was super relevant because even with lots of interrupts per second, i still needed it to do so to trigger brilliant and interrupt merges (searing seal ended up being way too slow and inaccurate). aside from me not having wael's on, this was as close to the real thing as possible, and all the items i used should be obtainable through a quick crit path.

 

i've got a few more bosses to try out (mostly to make sure i have enough room to deaggro in all situations, I'm actually sorta concerned about FS Oracle that you get teleported into/dropped into), but i think we've got a real contender here with a tactician+skaen.

 

 

 

 

How long did it take to beat him down? And can you PM me the strategy or post it here? Just curious about new builds.

[thelee]

2 hours ago, baldurs_gate_2 said:

How long did it take to beat him down? And can you PM me the strategy or post it here? Just curious about new builds.

i'll just post it here. it took probably ~15 minutes at a mix of slow and super slow game speed (plus ~8 minutes of very fast speed prebuffing). not too worried about it being public, since i think the ultimate will ultimately come down to execution and time, and between a dayjob and kids and a family, there's no chance i have the time to be first. i think it's best just to be collaborative on the metagaming here.

unless i say otherwise, anything i list below is essential.

items: gauntlets of greater reliability (can get away with normal reliability if need be); scordeo's edge dual-wielded with a ranged weapon; helm of the white void (for +10 acc on mule kick), marux amanth soulbound to priest (convenience)

consumables: deadeye, potion of impediment, scroll of avenging storm (forgot to use it for prebuffing though, used it in the middle of hte fight to some effect), potion of perfect aim

race: boreal dwarf

abilities: mule kick, confident aim, BDD, salvation of time, shadowing beyond (automatic), escape (automatic), champion's boon, 2w spiritual weapon, halt (convenience), spiritual ally (automatic), minor avatar (automatic, convenience), storm of holy fire (convenience)

real life equipment/setup: stop watch; combat speed up and combat speed down bound to keys so you can adjust easily

AI script: set up your AI to auto attack as default action, defensive, and create a new AI script that all it does is "always true: cast salvation of time: self" with 1 second cooldown (I tried with a 0 second cooldown in an earlier run and it sometimes causes weird "abandoned casting salvation of time" issues, less so with a 1s cooldown)

you absolutely need the combination of boreal dwarf, potion of perfect aim, gauntlets, and the helm also really helps, because otherwise you have no chance to consistently mule kick hauani o whe's first two forms. i had made an earlier attempt without the potion of perfect aim and i missed a real important merge interrupt of two gigantic oozes and the fight basically reset. (at massive ooze and below the fort defense is low enough that it's less of a concern)

actual strat:

1. set to AI autoattack
2. run into top left corner and wait for vela to come close.
3. cast halt on vela
4. run close to aggro Hauani O Whe (henceforth HoW), immediately shadowing beyond back to vela
5. you should trigger brilliant because you've already de-aggroed
6. run back to vela
7. summon spiritual ally, whack it with your scordeo's edge until you proc blade cascade (you may have to resummon the ally a few times). you dual-wield scordeo's edge with a ranged weapon not because you care about the ranged weapon, but so you're attacking at 2w speed levels with just scordeo's edge.
8. as soon as you proc blade cascade, slow down time all the way and salvation of time. start buffing with minor avatar, BDD (on vela, too), deadeye, impediment, avenging storm, champion's boon, and any fighter buffs. make sure to intersperse consumables with abilities (so you buy more time for salvation of time to recover from brilliant) and keep spamming salvation of time to keep buffs active.
9. once all your initial buffs are setup, turn on your AI, crank game speed up to max speed, switch to marux amanth, start stop watch for 3 minutes and go get a drink.
10. cast spiritual weapon. start stop watch for 4 minutes and go get a drink.
11. slow game speed down to normal, switch AI script back to autoattack only. start stop watch for 20s.
12. run towards hauani o whe. once vela starts cowering, withdraw her.
13. run all the way to the east side of the map. you might take a few symbiote or solvent cleanses while HoW periodically ranges you while following.
14. once HoW melees you, turn on your AI script, just start unleashing hell. use mule kick any time HoW doesn't have distract. everytime you proc brilliant your character should salvation of time automatically.
15. once HoW hits near death, turn off your AI script. wait two cycles of mule kick (to gaurantee that you have two level 6 casts) and then alternate between manually casting salvation of time and spiritual ally with each mule kick-induced brilliant. the spiritual ally will help DPS down (mostly by eliminating tactician PEN penalty). (edit2: note - you wait for near death because keeping an ally summoned otherwise exposes you to too much corrosive solvent while casting an ally. otherwise, even without avenging storm being up, you can pretty much prevent HoW from doing anything)
16. once HoW splits, have spiritual ally attack one ooze, and then escape or shadowing beyond behind another ooze and lure it away, to the bottom of hte map. if you have symbiote active, you'll have to stop to clear out a few oozes. slow the game speed down to the slowest at this point so you don't miss a merge from here on out.
17. dps down the ooze you have split off, refreshing an ally every 3-5 mule kicks or so. if you're unable to keep them fully apart, it just means you'll have to be a little bit more careful about interrupting merges. notably, for the gigantic oozes, it looks like you only need to mule kick one of them to make them both give up on merge (isn't true for smaller forms).
18. when a greater ooze splits, don't need an ally anymore, so turn back on the AI script. just try to keep mule kick up on everyone and avoid flanked (for some reason even though i had nomad's brigandine equipped i would still periodically get shaken/confused). when a massive ooze is getting to near death, try to mix in a cast of storm of holy fire (though highest priority is interrupting any merge)
19. when split down to greater ooze, mule kick spam and hopefully you have one or two storms of holy fire active to help aoe down the greater and lesser oozes.
20. rinse and repeat with the other massive ooze
21. rinse and repeat with the other gigantic ooze and its splits. (should be much easier - when you're back down to just the one gigantic ooze you basically get 100% salvation of time uptime and can refresh your buffs because the gigantic ooze is really easy to interrupt and mule kick and proc perma-brilliant)

the scariest part of this was the fact that after  HoW splits into two gigantic oozes, you'll start getting hit by the corrosive solvent, since it becomes much harder to keep both oozes interrupted. at massive and lower they don't have corrosive solvent so once you split one of hte gigantic ooze it becomes easier to just periodically mule kick the gigantic ooze. but you should have enough duration (coupled with ongoing salvation of time spam) to face tank it all without losing any critical buff. (meanwhile vela, after popping out of withdraw, is just terrifying wandering around a spot near the entrance of the map and is out of range of being hit by symbiote)

if you're not dumb like me and have avenging storm up for your initial buff, it should be pretty fast and much easier (because you'll be interrupting a lot because the lightning bolts can also proc impediment or deadeye). i started avenging storm halfway through phase 1 when i realized i wasn't seeing any bolts, managed to get the duration up, but it got dropped during the two gigantic oozes from corrosive solvent. with the same 500+s worth of buff as everything else, it should last you the entire fight (which itself will be much shorter).

edit - the stop watching timings, waiting for specific mule kicks, etc is to make this strategy wael-proof. wael doesn't appear to block information on an enemy's relative health status (you can still see e.g. "bloodied") and is the only in-game information this strat ends up relying on. though even with expert mode + wael, you'll still see little ability icons appear for the merge cast (which fortunately is a slow cast ability) so you can still interrupt them with mule kick, you just won't have the combat tooltip telling you where in the recovery the oozes are.

edit3 - a very similar strat should work for other megabosses and faster, at least in terms of prebuffing. did some paper math and scordeo's edge plus buffs plus spiritual weapon should take out dorudugan in 180s, so 4-5 minutes of prebuffing with spiritual weapon is all you need. you'll need rekvu's helm to avoid getting proned all the time though, and you need spiritual ally uptime for flanked and removing tactician PEN penalty. belranga you need antitode as one of your buffs to prevent paralyze/petrify, but you can even skip any hand mortar/avenging storm and just dps down 150+ spiders and then the burrows until belranga can be trivially mule kicked to death (though hand mortar + storm will probably make this fight super easy and you'll probably just kill belranga by accident while slaughtering hundreds of spiders). all other bosses should be like dorudugan at worst. the only remaining wildcards are a) any fight where you are unable to deaggro (hopefully these don't exist, i have to double check a few) and b) sigilmaster auranic and her cleansing rune.

Edited May 16, 2019 by thelee
lots of copy-editing and getting the ooze sizes right

[Boeroer]

PM me the strategy? Are you with the Hand Occult or something?

Edited May 16, 2019 by Boeroer

[dunehunter]

Is there console command to add vela to u? Would like to do some test too.

[thelee]

On 5/15/2019 at 9:48 AM, AndreaColombo said:

@thelee since you've been running a Priest, could you confirm whether the Faith Attuned lash from spiritual weapons still scales with the Watcher's disposition scores?

It's supposed to follow the pattern you described here, however the lash is marked in the spiritual weapons' description as a fixed +20% (dynamic values usually can be hovered upon to reveal the variables influencing them.) Your post also mentions companions' spiritual weapons scaling with the Watchers' dispositions, but in my current playthrough Xoti's lash is 20% even though I maxed out on both Benevolent and Honest, and only have one rank in Eothas's disfavored dispositions.

i didn't have a chance to test xoti, but if you look at my screenshot, my test character has a 25% lash (with some rounding/partial damage), so the neutral case should be working (they have no disposition because i cheated her from vilario's rest to hauani o whe). if you're seeing actual 20% (ignoring PEN variance) then it's a bug with xoti's spiritual weapon. i'm pretty sure, though, that xoti has 25% and you might have seen less because you were up against an enemy that had better fire AR than the pierce/slash AR.

Edited May 16, 2019 by thelee

[Yougottawanna]

I'm still unable to test things, so I can't test this myself, but: Rakhan field boots can be used on yourself, out of combat, and are per-encounter, meaning they recharge after a second. I don't believe Woedica's challenge should change that, because it only applies to the character abilities as far as I know and not abilities from equipment.

So Rakhan field boots + shroud of the phantasm + salvation of time could be a way to get long brilliant without either using tactician or wall of draining. Apologies if someone already brought this up, I skimmed the thread and didn't see it.

[thelee]

1 minute ago, Yougottawanna said:

I'm still unable to test things, so I can't test this myself, but: Rakhan field boots can be used on yourself, out of combat, and are per-encounter, meaning they recharge after a second. I don't believe Woedica's challenge should change that, because it only applies to the character abilities as far as I know and not abilities from equipment.

So Rakhan field boots + shroud of the phantasm + salvation of time could be a way to get long brilliant without either using tactician or wall of draining. Apologies if someone already brought this up, I skimmed the thread and didn't see it.

interesting.

only trick is that there are some fights where you start in combat effectively immediately (technically speaking if you didn't have magran's challenge on, you could have auto pause enabled to pause "on enemy sighted" and stealth as soon as the game autopauses, but for all intents and purposes you start in combat on the ultimate) and such an approach doesn't give you an avenue to safely try to trigger brilliant. you might be able to create a quest path that avoids these fights (i think they are all opt-in events), just something to be aware of.

[Boeroer]

10 hours ago, Yougottawanna said:

I'm still unable to test things, so I can't test this myself, but: Rakhan field boots can be used on yourself, out of combat, and are per-encounter, meaning they recharge after a second. I don't believe Woedica's challenge should change that, because it only applies to the character abilities as far as I know and not abilities from equipment.

So Rakhan field boots + shroud of the phantasm + salvation of time could be a way to get long brilliant without either using tactician or wall of draining. Apologies if someone already brought this up, I skimmed the thread and didn't see it.

Nobody. I knew about this but simply forgot it. So much cheesy stuff.  
Another one with Shroud of Phantasm: Living Illusions also duplicates a Ranger's animal companion. And I believe those don't have the low health as the duplicate of the char has. Don't think that this is usable for the Ultimate though since the 1/rest cast won't get refilled by Brilliant.

Did somebody consider Ranger's animal companion as a bodyguard for Vela or something? Ranger also has those passives that help against AoE spells. Maybe good against some bosses? Also Beast's Claw cheese (also usable with ranged weapon/melee weapopn setup - think of blunderbusses' multishot with Driving Flight), + Marked Prey + Survival of the Fittest + Stalker's Link to help with the hitting, AoE Concussive Tranquilizer, long lasting Binding Roots to stop enemies from reaching Vela, Takedown Combo for interrupting and +100% dmg ...

Tactician/Ghost Heart maybe? More engagement, lots of ACC (cheese), plenty of interrupting and removing buffs (Takedown Combo, Concussive Tr.), defensive buffs, a bit of CC, an additional body.

Maybe there's even a glitch where you can cast "Play Dead" on Vela, hehe.

       

[Waski]

10 hours ago, Yougottawanna said:

I'm still unable to test things, so I can't test this myself, but: Rakhan field boots can be used on yourself, out of combat, and are per-encounter, meaning they recharge after a second. I don't believe Woedica's challenge should change that, because it only applies to the character abilities as far as I know and not abilities from equipment.

So Rakhan field boots + shroud of the phantasm + salvation of time could be a way to get long brilliant without either using tactician or wall of draining. Apologies if someone already brought this up, I skimmed the thread and didn't see it.

But how exactly you can "abuse" it??  SoT is combat only. 

[baldurs_gate_2]

/EDIT NVM, figured it out

Edited May 17, 2019 by baldurs_gate_2

[thelee]

On 5/16/2019 at 12:35 AM, Waski said:

Whole FS should be fairly easy(depends how OBS look at it).  You need to trigger brilliant from cloak just once and pump it( once I did whole splinter reef with thaumaturge like that,  got brilliant on first ambush fight,  SoT into hours).  You can lure first vithrak,  flank wit spiritual ally(brilliant from tactician) , and wait for cloak to trigger. Only Arcane Cleanse  can mess you up. 

Good thing i have this experimental character, because i thought other advance buffing would work but all temporary effects go away at the end of the fight. The only exception appears to be drugs and item effects (so e.g. brilliant from shroud of phantasm will stick around). I thought I would try to be clever by de-aggroing, buffing to high heavens for like half an hour, and doing all of FS super buffed up, but doesn't work like that. (he found out after dying all of a sudden when he thought he had 1000+ seconds of BDD up)

Edited May 19, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

Note for others following along: so far in FS, the first Oracle fight is actually a bit touchy to de-aggro (but it is de-aggro-able, and this was one of two fights in FS i was worried about). the arena is small, and if you aren't fast you'll aggro the fight instantly after combat, but there's like some sort of grace period where you can stealth away.

BUT, as MaxQuest suggested when he looked up the in-game trigger for brilliant (and I was wrong on this), enemy range matters. And if you mess up ever so slightly when doing the shadowing-beyond trick, you might have an observer move out of position - and they don't quite exactly move back into position after they de-aggro. if this happens, you're basically eff-ed, there's no way to trigger tactician brilliant. I tried a few times and got the positioning down, but boy do you have to be careful (you have to pull the enemies on the right, and hopefully jsut the shimmering beast, before you immediately shadowing beyond away and hope the observer doesn't come along). this is definitely one of the parts where i'm going to have to rehearse several times before the axctual run does this part, because a little observer mispositioning can ruin your entire run.

Edited May 19, 2019 by thelee

[DozingDragon]

Do you have to do both Oracle battles for the Ultimate?  

[Kaylon]

Someone already did a full run of the ultimate: