The Ultimate discussion thread

[Boeroer]

Don't think that's the "spirit of the challenge".

[thelee]

On 5/18/2019 at 9:40 PM, DozingDragon said:

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

oracle is definitely listed as part of the ultimate quest, and i only assume that part actually breaks down into meaning beating both oracles.

 

For the curious, I just did the second of the two FS fights I was worried about, and it's not bad but does require you to adapt. It's the oratory, with the periodic blast of damage from the security system. There's no safe space to stand, but I was able to find a spot that doesn't aggro enemies, and both Vela and me just had to take all the damage, using the spiritual ally to keep robust up on both of us the entire time. Once I could chain-salvation of time BDD, then I could just leave the game on while auto-buffing even though I kept getting blasted. (For some reason, the security system only does like ~40 damage to Vela even though it does like 150+ to me. For reference, Robust from Spiritual Ally heals ~15 per tick, so unless you get bad RNG you can keep Vela completely healed even without worrying about keeping BDD up during early buffing.)

The scariest part is after you take out the power conduits; you can gett interrupted a lot by the spore-infested librarians and/or grasped by one of maura's tentaciles and be unable to stop Maura from doing an Arcane Dampener (doesn't matter whom she targets, it's lethal either way). Buffing up with a Potion of Impediment and going into the battle with an injury and Rekvu's Fractured Casque is an absolute must so you can keep maura interrupt-locked while not being interrupt-locked yourself

Edited May 20, 2019 by thelee

[Decadency]

21 hours ago, Kaylon said:

 

Well I needed to try xD

[DogMeat-]

Feeling a bit unsure should I try Ultimate or not. Did it in PoE1 (though, I had to save scum the swamp dragon :S ) and i barely remember the mechanical things of game. Was waiting for this challenge to come for a long time, but I didn't expect Vela to be there. I already feel like it's a more or less deal breaker for me. Well, maybe I will be trying withdrawal as well... Or if there's some other methods to keep her further aside from enemies. I guess the "limitations" of the class choices make this slightly "easier" to figure out how to start with this..

[baldurs_gate_2]

What i don't know is, if you use spirit weapons as skaen, you get a club / stilletto as weapons. Do you keep the stats from your normal equiped weapons aka scordeo's and if not, does somebody know, how much repair cost it has (abydon challenge)?

[thelee]

16 minutes ago, baldurs_gate_2 said:

What i don't know is, if you use spirit weapons as skaen, you get a club / stilletto as weapons. Do you keep the stats from your normal equiped weapons aka scordeo's and if not, does somebody know, how much repair cost it has (abydon challenge)?

what do you mean "stats?"

summoned weapons are like completely different equipment - it has its own enchantment level and its own special characteristics (if any). they are unaffected by abydon's challenge.

scordeo's edge's Blade Cascade works because for some reason it is a buff that provides a universal 0s recovery time (whereas other weapon-triggered-buffs tend to be specific to that weapon)

repair cost can be significant. i've spent 3k to repair 1 level of damage, and closer to 7k to repair 2 levels of damage on scordeo's edge. the repair cost scales with the enchant level on the weapon (e.g. normal weapons are dirt cheap to repair). (this can be annoying when it can take sometimes 2 levels of damage to trigger scordeo's edge.)

Edited May 20, 2019 by thelee

[baldurs_gate_2]

57 minutes ago, thelee said:

what do you mean "stats?"

summoned weapons are like completely different equipment - it has its own enchantment level and its own special characteristics (if any). they are unaffected by abydon's challenge.

scordeo's edge's Blade Cascade works because for some reason it is a buff that provides a universal 0s recovery time (whereas other weapon-triggered-buffs tend to be specific to that weapon)

repair cost can be significant. i've spent 3k to repair 1 level of damage, and closer to 7k to repair 2 levels of damage on scordeo's edge. the repair cost scales with the enchant level on the weapon (e.g. normal weapons are dirt cheap to repair). (this can be annoying when it can take sometimes 2 levels of damage to trigger scordeo's edge.)

****, i hoped you would keep the stats of the weapons you have equiped, when you use summoned weapons. Don't know now, if you can do that oathbreaker bleading cut trick vs. dorudugan without breaking the weapon.

[thelee]

53 minutes ago, baldurs_gate_2 said:

****, i hoped you would keep the stats of the weapons you have equiped, when you use summoned weapons. Don't know now, if you can do that oathbreaker bleading cut trick vs. dorudugan without breaking the weapon.

Yeah, nope. I'm pretty sure for any megabosses fight the sheer amount of damage you need to do means you must have either fists or a summoned weapon or else you won't last.

[dunehunter]

2 hours ago, thelee said:

Yeah, nope. I'm pretty sure for any megabosses fight the sheer amount of damage you need to do means you must have either fists or a summoned weapon or else you won't last.

Can’t u just hoard a lot of exceptional weapons for boss fight? And throw them away once they are broken.

[thelee]

1 hour ago, dunehunter said:

Can’t u just hoard a lot of exceptional weapons for boss fight? And throw them away once they are broken.

i'll bet that without fleshmender or a blackjacket you'll still run out of weapon slots. there's a lot of damage to do (except for maybe sigilmater auranic). in one of my test boss fights i completely destroyed a weapon slot with a legendary weapon in it, and that's basically 2 exceptional weapon slots (i'm assuming a linear decay rate). remember that when i have bad RNG my scordeo's edge will accumulate 2 broken levels from legendary just from trying to proc blade cascade on a spiritual ally, and that's not a lot compared to a megaboss.

Edited May 21, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

well, frick, lads and ladies, while testing out the last fight in the FS, the unlikely happened: i completely broke scordeo's edge (from fully repaired) before i could trigger blade cascade.

that is a bit problematic. over a long enough timeline, improbable events will happen, so this is a bit of RNG that will inevitably happen over a long run. a scordeo's edge strategy needs a backup shroud of phantasm, getting-hit-by-your-ally-to-trigger-that-1%-brilliant, item strategy so you don't end up breaking scordeo's edge.

Edited May 21, 2019 by thelee

[dunehunter]

5 minutes ago, thelee said:

well, frick, lads and ladies, while testing out the last fight in the FS, the unlikely happened: i completely broke scordeo's edge (from fully repaired) before i could trigger blade cascade.

that is a bit problematic. over a long enough timeline, improbable events will happen, so this is a bit of RNG that will inevitably happen over a long run. a scordeo's edge strategy needs a backup shroud of phantasm, getting-hit-by-your-ally-to-trigger-that-1%-brilliant, item strategy so you don't end up breaking scordeo's edge.

That's a bit unlikely, because you have 5% chance to trigger it, not so low imo. And to be mentioned u need to 'hit' to trigger, graze won't work.

[thelee]

32 minutes ago, dunehunter said:

That's a bit unlikely, because you have 5% chance to trigger it, not so low imo. And to be mentioned u need to 'hit' to trigger, graze won't work.

i have confident aim, and intuitive, so the likelihood that i graze is pretty low.

it is a bit unlikely to completely break scordeo's edge before triggering, it but it's not impossible. and over a long enough run "improbable but not impossible" become increasingly likely to happen. but yeah, i figured breaking scordeo's edge was a possibility, but didn't think i'd run into it after just a couple hours of experiments. keep in mind during just a few hours of testing and setting up fights, i've already had bad RNG where i've had scordeo's edge degrade twice before triggering blade cascade. Four degradations (when breakage occurs) was unlikely, but not impossible. and sure enough, it happened during one of my oracle test runs. 

i've probably done maybe 30-40 fights (many were repeats as i tried to find a safe vela option). if we assume my breakage rate is "fairly typical" (warning: fuzzy stats coming up) and 30-40 is the median time between catastrophic failure, let's say in any given fight  have a 1/80 chance of catastrophic failure (so after 40 i have 50% e.g. "typical" odds to trigger it). over the course of an entire run, unless i have a backup plan, this catastrophic failure will have better odds than not that it will happen.

the biggest part of RNG that can kill this run is if this happens during a megaboss fight. even with constant brilliant uptime from shroud of phantasm, without blade cascade you just can't DPS things fast enough to finish out a fight, and there's no way to repair in combat. berath's - it giveth and it taketh away.

Edited May 21, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

I dunno, what does the community think? So far otherwise this build looks solid (haven't found a fight it can't handle, lots of Vela survivability), but possible RNG that can screw it at the worst possible time. Try to swing the ultimate with it?

 

edit - if i reserve scordeo's edge basically exclusively for bosses where DPS is super important or places where i can't safely de-aggro after a fight has progressed a bit, then my exposure to catastrophic failure goes down. 1 - (79/ 80)^(15 + some change) is still a greater than 0% chance of RNG screwing me over, but not as high as before, and maybe some of the bosses don't need as much DPS and I can rely on brilliant cloak or periodic de-aggroing with shadowing beyond. so maybe this is less of a big deal than i initially thought, though i was getting extremely used to the DPS boost of scordeo's edge.

edit 2 - maybe all ultimate builds are going to have some element of RNG that will completely murder it, and this is no different and i just have to roll the dice. *sigh*

Edited May 21, 2019 by thelee

[Boeroer]

I would go for it. You will never be able to eliminate RNG from this challenge. And if you can, it's most likey a glitch that's "against the spirit of the challenge".

If you do XP hunt and the necessary encounters in the most effective order I think the attempt won't even last that long - so failing one or two times may not be superfrustrating...?

[knownastherat]

I suspect failing the run to be quite frustrating due to the fact that to level up, which involves mostly completing routine (read boring) tasks, to the appropriate level to be able to beat enemies like the fire dragon who is on a timer, can take around 4 hours minimum, I guess, and the challenge basically begins after this time. So its 4 hours of let's say unproductive game-time which has little to do with the challenge itself. 

Then again, what frustrating is and whatnot is a matter of opinion. To fail a couple of times would be to me too frustrating and that is why I don't even dream of going for the challenge. It's not a fun challenge at all to me.  Sure, there is an amount of meta-knowledge needed, which could be considered fun, but there is too much of mechanical requirement due to no pause. In fact so much that it feels like Soul's games where the difficulty is to behave like a robot who makes no mistakes. 

Edited May 21, 2019 by knownastherat

[Raven Darkholme]

I will start my actual ultimate run on stream today.

(after a couple of days of testing)

[knownastherat]

You are a brave, and very stubborn, man vic  But that is what is needed. 

 

Just in case, my previous post was not meant to discount or discredit the Ultimate in any way.  To me, it's an inhuman challenge and whoever completes it, first, should be flown to Obsidian office and given standing ovations there, seriously. 

[baldurs_gate_2]

Can not even see the roadmap. Port Maje ---> Deadlight ---> Dunnage? ---> Neketaka ---> Hasongo? ---> ???

For Cleric or SC Monk it is very important to reach Level 16+ as fast as possible.

[knownastherat]

Indeed, level 16 is for the said classes, no idea about others, essential. Reaching it without a timer can be done without much issues in my experience. Come to tonight's stream and we can talk about this while watching VictorCreed to boldly go where no one has gone before  He usually starts at 17:00 CET.

[thelee]

1 hour ago, knownastherat said:

Indeed, level 16 is for the said classes, no idea about others, essential. Reaching it without a timer can be done without much issues in my experience. Come to tonight's stream and we can talk about this while watching VictorCreed to boldly go where no one has gone before  He usually starts at 17:00 CET.

wow it finally clicked for me that Raven Darkholme = VictorCreed (didn't notice the steam tag before). best of luck. what are you going to go with (won't be able to tune in)?

 

I decided to go with my cleric, RNG or not. I think i'll probably start my real run in a few nights (cleared FS after figuring out some tough positioning for the last oracle fight and things are starting to look extremely feasible). no way i'm going to live stream it, the pressure to perform for a public would make me crack

 

Edited May 21, 2019 by thelee

[Raven Darkholme]

7 hours ago, thelee said:

wow it finally clicked for me that Raven Darkholme = VictorCreed (didn't notice the steam tag before). best of luck. what are you going to go with (won't be able to tune in)?

 

I decided to go with my cleric, RNG or not. I think i'll probably start my real run in a few nights (cleared FS after figuring out some tough positioning for the last oracle fight and things are starting to look extremely feasible). no way i'm going to live stream it, the pressure to perform for a public would make me crack

 

I'm going with Bloodmage/Skaen. Decided to not risk brilliant bug ending up not in the spirit of the challenge, also don't really like how brilliant from tactician and cloak don't interact well with each other. (Getting both will end up amking the 2nd one you get being useless, say you are out of enemy sight and have brilliant tactician and somehow trigger brilliant cloak (could also happen in combat against encounters that can easily be flanked) the brilliant buff from cloak will actually not recover resources, so if you lose brilliant tactician even tho you have mind over matter you won't regen resources)

Also I found out that casting most non damaging spells (and also flame wall for some reason) from invis (including phantoms) will not disable invis, this makes getting brilliant less important, once you have Arkemyr's invis spell (tbf you need to kill Concelhaut for this and will also have the cloak) you could do things like invis, flame wall, the enemies get attracted to the wall and even stand on it searching for you, then any CC (pull is really good for this) do some damage to them, freezing pillar is really good for this, go back to stealth use blood sacrifice get your spells back.

This might seem to tedious, but keep in mind wall of draining can be used from invis too and Arkemyr's invis can be prolonged by both BS and SOT (unlike Shadowing Beyond), so you could invis bdd, draining wall, now casting blood sacrifice won't kill you and you can also unstealth and attack the enemies for real, while taking damage from them you might end up getting the brilliant anyway.

[thelee]

brilliant cloak seems extremely tedious to me to have to regularly depend on for resource regen for priest part, but all the same, best of luck to you. personally the idea of being able to spam crushing doom kept making me want to contemplate a bloodmage roll.

[Raven Darkholme]

For those who can't hang out in the stream I will also post videos on yt, starting with the char creation:

 

[Boeroer]

By the way: Josh said on Twitter that if your character's name is offensive or silly or if they simply don't like it they will disqualify you as well (if you refuse to change it).

Stuff like "Donald Trump" will def. get you disqualified given Josh's political alignment.

I guess "Hold my beer" will not be valid as well. Maybe restart before finding out the hard way.

The recomendation was to pick the usual "boring" fantasy name.

Source:  Tweet

Edited May 22, 2019 by Boeroer