The Ultimate discussion thread

[MaxQuest]

7 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

CombatPet? Sound like the Conjurer's Familiar.

Hah) No, she's pretty unique in that she is the only one summon of "CombatPet" type.

Familiars are of "Summoned" type. And the remaining 3 types are: "Pet", "AnimalCompanion" and "NotSummoned" (which is a funny type for a Summon).

P.S. Unfortunately off.documentation doesn't provide much insight on the difference between these. Maybe there will be something in the code...

[Jayd]

23 minutes ago, Alhoon said:

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.

Since the spirit of the challenge is to make the game as unplayable as possible to see if it is even possible for a human being to finish I would say that it would be against the spirit of the challenge to look down on any strategy as 'against the spirit of the challenge'. This is kill or be killed territory. You're supposed to exploit any and everything you can to get through.

[Boeroer]

No you are not. At least that's the impression you get when you read the devs' comments.

Read Josh's tweets and you'll get a (fuzzy) impression.

It sounds as if exploiting bugs will get you diqualified.

But they will not tell you why they disqualify you. So better play it save than wasting lots of hours.

[Yougottawanna]

To me the spirit of the challenge is (or should be) that you can use cheese but not glitches.

For example, doing the trick that lets you stack food bonuses I would say is a glitch. Using shadowing beyond to trigger brilliant is cheese. BDD/SoT shenanigans are cheese.

If a form of cheese if found that trivializes the challenge (that's a big if, lots of things sound unbeatable during theorycraft but run into unexpected problems in practice), then I think the best way to handle it is to allow that one playthrough that uses that form of cheese, but only the one. Otherwise everyone else will just copy the strategy of the first.

 

Unrelated question: I'm not on a computer that has the game on it at the moment. Will Vela invalidate the Ring of the Solitary Wanderer bonus?

[pmchem]

Do you guys think that quickly completing quests that don't require combat will be a staple of any Ultimate run?  There's a list in this thread, not sure if it's a complete list but it looks pretty good:

Could be a good way to level up fast, early in the game.

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Alhoon said:

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.

i think we should clearly draw the line between "cheesing" and "cheating." I think cheesing is mandatory.

Good leg work on the Vela interaction. This means that brand enemy/gouging strike strats can work, so long as you yourself stay de-aggroed. This opens up tactician multiclasses!

Though I don't know how anyone else attempting the challengfe is doing so far. I'm still getting murdered on Port Maje Island. Did best so far with FF monk with buckler but at such low levels all it takes is a bad galawain's roll on beasts or an unlucky crit and you (or vela) are dead. I'm streaming so much garbage to my youtube channel (11 deaths so far, all in act 1).

though if this is anything like ultimate, my progress returns should be exponential as i slowly narrow down a functional build and get better at the tactics needed.

Edited May 10, 2019 by thelee

[Alhoon]

26 minutes ago, Yougottawanna said:

To me the spirit of the challenge is (or should be) that you can use cheese but not glitches.

For example, doing the trick that lets you stack food bonuses I would say is a glitch. Using shadowing beyond to trigger brilliant is cheese. BDD/SoT shenanigans are cheese.

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.

[thelee]

something that wasn't immediately obvious to me but is very relevant for a tactician is that end of combat, there's a brief window where you're the only alive party member, which is enough to trigger brilliant for hair of a second (i guess so long as you don't have a perception debuff). it's not much (and normally doesn't matter), but it's enough to regen 1 resource from the initial application of the inspiration, which gives the tactician or tactician multiclass a slow but steady drip of resources with woedica's challenge on.

also i had never played much with woedica before, but only class resources are set to per-rest. class per-encounter abilities still work. maybe this was obvious or already well-known, but it means i get holy radiance back at the start of every fight (and presumably things like shapeshift as well). so far all this has meant is that even being too low level to take advantage of hte interactions mentioned upthread, tactician+skaen cleric has so far had the best survivability.

edit - still died in port maje, but at least got further. i think the big ??? of a tactician-cleric is the mid-low levels (only so many non-combat quests) and the lack of a good solution against megabosses. i guess the idea is that if you have an hour's worth of BDD active or infinite spells you can whack anything to death, but hauani o whe is distinctly one megaboss that you can't just grind down normally (and who can also cleanse you)

Edited May 10, 2019 by thelee

[Zenzen]

Forum posts are great for discussion threads, but not so great for compiling a lot of information on a subject into readable chunks.  Since beating The Ultimate is going to be a terribly difficult challenge, maybe we should create some sort of community-curated document to separate ideas into different categories?  Something like:

1) Starting Optimization:  What classes can possibly do this?  What's the optimal background to import from PoE 1?  (sacrificing a person is a given, as is getting Devil of Caroc armor, but what else?  Are there any key quests you can resolve peacefully with a specific background or disposition?)

2) Routing:  This section should be broken up into multiple segments of the game.  How do you get through Port Maje with Vela in tow?  As pmchem mentioned above, Hieronomymous' information is probably going to come in clutch here.  It also might be worthwhile for somebody to test if you can reliably level up via ship combats despite Wael's challenge.  Maybe if you do them in a specific order its fine?

3)  Skills, key items, and consumables:  Is doing a "no-rest" run optimal for the challenge?  What item's do we think are going to be especially useful (Rekvu's, maybe the poverty cloak?) and where do we get them/what skills do you need in order to grab them peacefully?  How do we sustain enough Withdraw scrolls to keep Vela alive?

5) Endgame Optimization:  We can work the problem from the end of the game backwards towards the beginning.   What characters can solo every megaboss with Vela in tow?  How do they do it?

 

I'm not the greatest Pillars player by any means, but I would love to see the challenge solved.  I think a good starting spot is for players interested in completing the challenge (or helping to test stuff out) would be to turn on all god challenges/Ultimate rules EXCEPT Ironman and Wael's challenge, and document their progress either through written notes or streams.

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Zenzen said:

What characters can solo every megaboss with Vela in tow?

I think very few people have actually tried megabosses and hylea's challenge. on the forums, I think I've maybe seen two people mention that they've combined hylea with megabosses, so the metagame information might be very limited here.

I agree with trying to keep a more structured document, though personally between just trying to do the challenge, a day job, kids, and a family, it's hard enough to squeeze in the hours just to plow through on the challenge. But this is definitely something we should try to build collective knowledge on.

 

Working backwards, the only evidence I've seen of people successfully solo-ing megabosses via videos seem to be limited to monk/monk multiclass, and chanter/chanter multiclass. (i imagine blood mage could also be trivially feasible even though there's no video about it i can find) then there's the cheese option of rogue with gouging strike, but i don't know if anyone has actually done that with hauan o whe somehow.

Working backwards is definitely a good idea, but part of the problem is that this challenge is so unique that we really need to be holistic, because I don't think anyone has made it out of port maje yet (I sat on someone's twitch stream earlier and they mentioned they hadn't made it past level 3 yet). A lot of end-game build ideas sound nice in theory, but it's all moot if 90% of the game you don't have access to all those tools and you basically can't get to that point in the first place. and a build ideally should be fairly reliable - I mean, RNG is RNG but the kind of RNG that results in Vela dying when you're 10 minutes away from victory is horrible.

 

I think I might need to set up some practice runs of just megabosses with various solo characters (sacrifice one of my other games to mess up with a console) because i think metagame knowledge here is just so limited.

I think so far tactician + skaen has a lot of promise just from mid to late game, and so far was my best act 1 run out of all the builds I tried: i mentioned to JESUSSAYSNO that I got this character up to level 5 but I remembered wrong, I got up to a past 4 before failing, but definitely almost made it out of port maje - i'm going to try a tweaked version tonight that might successfully clear act 1. but it's all moot if there's no viable megaboss strategy for such a build; i think infinite spells and BDD will carry them through belranga, dorudugan, and possibly even sigilmaster if you can take out hte cleansing sigil fast enough, but i'm not sure they can handle hauani o whe. I think JESUSSAYSNO is streaming a lot of attempts tonight, so we'll see if he makes any good progress with some of his builds.

Edited May 11, 2019 by thelee

[dunehunter]

4 minutes ago, thelee said:

I think very few people have actually tried megabosses and hylea's challenge. on the forums, I think I've maybe seen two people mention that they've combined hylea with megabosses, so the metagame information might be very limited here.

I agree with trying to keep a more structured document, though personally between just trying to do the challenge, a day job, kids, and a family, it's hard enough to squeeze in the hours just to plow through on the challenge. But this is definitely something we should try to build collective knowledge on.

 

Working backwards, the only evidence I've seen of people successfully solo-ing megabosses via videos seem to be limited to monk/monk multiclass, and chanter/chanter multiclass. (i imagine blood mage could also be trivially feasible even though there's no video about it i can find) then there's the cheese option of rogue with gouging strike, but i don't know if anyone has actually done that with hauan o whe somehow.

Working backwards is definitely a good idea, but part of the problem is that this challenge is so unique that we really need to be holistic, because I don't think anyone has made it out of port maje yet (I sat on someone's twitch stream earlier and they mentioned they hadn't made it past level 3 yet). A lot of end-game build ideas sound nice in theory, but it's all moot if 90% of the game you don't have access to all those tools and you basically can't get to that point in the first place. and a build ideally should be fairly reliable - I mean, RNG is RNG but the kind of RNG that results in Vela dying when you're 10 minutes away from victory is horrible.

 

I think I might need to set up some practice runs of just megabosses with various solo characters (sacrifice one of my other games to mess up with a console) because i think metagame knowledge here is just so shallow. I think so far tactician + skaen has a lot of promise just from mid to late game, and so far was my best act 1 run out of all the builds I tried (i mentioned to JESUSSAYSNO that I got this character up to level 5 but I remembered wrong, they got up to a little past 4 before failing, but definitely almost made it out of port maje - i'm going to try a tweaked version tonight that might successfully clear act 1). but it's all moot if there's no viable endgame strategy for such a build (and i don't know if a tactician/skaen could pull off a hauani o whe figtht... i think infinite spells and BDD will carry them through belranga, dorudugan, and possibly even sigilmaster if you can take out hte cleansing sigil fast enough). I think JESUSSAYSNO is streaming a lot of attempts tonight, so we'll see if he makes any good progress with some of his builds.

Why can't u leave port maje? U can skip almost all fights i think.

[thelee]

6 minutes ago, dunehunter said:

Why can't u leave port maje? U can skip almost all fights i think.

easier said then done. the enemy density in the digsite is pretty tight - my most recent run died because i thought i had enough clearance, got caught, thought i had vela far enough way to safely withdraw her out of the fight, and it wasn't until i was in the middle of face tanking some sporelings on the other side of the map that i had kited and i suddenly got a "you have failed" pop up that i realized vela hadn't been far enough away.

truth be told, the first 7-9 or so failures were fail-fasts because i was just seeing how a certain build could handle the boars post-ship fight and boy a lot of them really sucked.

 

Edit - also a big chunk of experience comes from finding all the NPCs in the first area, which involves some beetles and skellies to fight. I have not found that to be very trivial on any build other than tactician + skaen 

Edited May 11, 2019 by thelee

[Yougottawanna]

By putting all skill points into stealth (you can still respec in the Ultimate, I believe, right?) and using the +stealth pet that is a backer bonus or something (it's the black wyrm. I'm not sure why I have it) I've been able to stealth past everything on the first island. However I haven't done it with Vela and I don't know how much harder that is. (I won't be able to play the game again until monday)

And I bet you can do it without the backer bonus pet, but I haven't tried that either. 

[dunehunter]

2 minutes ago, thelee said:

easier said then done. the enemy density in the digsite is pretty tight - my most recent run died because i thought i had enough clearance, got caught, thought i had vela far enough way to safely withdraw her out of the fight, and it wasn't until i was in the middle of face tanking some sporelings on the other side of the map that i had kited and i suddenly got a "you have failed" pop up that i realized vela hadn't been far enough away.

truth be told, the first 7-9 or so failures were fail-fasts because i was just seeing how a certain build could handle the boars post-ship fight and boy a lot of them really sucked.

Victor creed did that for test builds in TB mode, without magran and wael's challenge tho. But I think that two challenge has less impact. Strategy is stealth and avoid as much combat as possible

[thelee]

1 minute ago, Yougottawanna said:

By putting all skill points into stealth (you can still respec in the Ultimate, I believe, right?) and using the +stealth pet that is a backer bonus or something (it's the black wyrm. I'm not sure why I have it) I've been able to stealth past everything on the first island. However I haven't done it with Vela and I don't know how much harder that is. (I won't be able to play the game again until monday)

And I bet you can do it without the backer bonus pet, but I haven't tried that either. 

vela doesn't break stealth so it's not a concern.

since respeccing is essentially free, it might be worth doing that and respeccing out of stealth once out of port maje. that opens up a lot of options.

[JESUSSSAYSNO]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/423242291

I'm on a boat bitch.

Edited May 11, 2019 by JESUSSSAYSNO

[thelee]

is this the SC blood mage i saw you rolling?

[JESUSSSAYSNO]

Nah, Troubadour/Tactician.

I dont have my game pulled up, but I hard dump dex to minimum and bring res to 6 and pump str, con, per, and to a lesser extent, int. I take a misc blunt weapon to handle skeletons, and medium shield at level 1.

get the crew, path the cave beetles>3 skeles>find the dwarf>leave, go to Maje, get Rinco and the Jailer's quest and leave for the Huana village because this quest is time sensative and she wont answer after dark. Go back to Maje at Rico's houseto turn in, talk to the governer, talk to the inkeeper, deal with the drunks, then leave maje by the western exet to go to gorrecci street. Sneak past the dudes there, and then solve the quest peacefully, then collect the dope necklace in the well. leave town without turning in the jail quest. Go to the Ruins, go north, down the ladder, sneak past the three small drakes and then sneak past the big drake encounter. Go west in the ruins and sneak past both of the next encounters. The Adra Ooze requires 2 stealth to sneak past. Sneak back and you're through.

The path is prone to RNG failure, but that's just how this mode goes. this is a RNG heavy marathon run.

I've created a practice save with all god affixes, path of the damned, solo, without trial of iron, so i can make saves and test areas without needing a 20+ minute reload every time I die. With it I can chew through everything very quickly. I'm considering making a save without Wael as well, because Wael doesnt impact math, just my ability to see whats going on. Having Wael off would make trial and error very much easier. This is a run best broken down into small chunks that can be mastered. A final run will come after tons and tons of practice, so why not expedite the practice using another save as a practice tool?

Edited May 11, 2019 by JESUSSSAYSNO

[thelee]

curious, what does the tactician add to the troubadour?

[JESUSSSAYSNO]

It's not what Tactician adds to the Troubadour, it's what the Troubadour can add to Tactician. Units.

[JESUSSSAYSNO]

With Troubadour, I can sit with a super powerful ghost buddy flanking, and fully resore fighter resources at the end of every encounter, by proxy effectively making fighter resources a per encounter resource.

[JESUSSSAYSNO]

IN ADDITION, you can flank a single target for every 2 you control. Summon Skeletons and Corpse Explosion are two options that let you summon 3 allies, which lets you proc Tactical Mastery on 2 enemies instead of 1. While you have Brilliant on, every attack you make is a juiced up Knock Down and you've got your fighter acc buff up putting your perception at 25 with the well necklace. Later in the game, you can use the same tactic for Unbending and other solid defensive. So in a way, Tactician is both an execute phase for encounters and it re-normalizes fighter back into a per-encounter class. Both sides of the kit play off each other pretty well.

[thelee]

boat club! (though youtube had better be processing the last 7 minutes of this video because as of this linking, it is missing minutes 40: to 47:, which contains the boat raising. i'm gonna be pissssed if i can't rely on youtube streaming to archive my run. well, better discovering this now rather than later when there's a gap for submission) 

 

i was too impatient to set up a practice party for this run, but i'm definitely going ot pause and set up a parallel run. there is certainly a lot of potentially stupid RNG here (almost dying to those skeletons) the least we can do is practice and remove skill from the equation.

unfortunately i don't actually know how good this build is going to be because it's mostly just stealth for now.

Edited May 11, 2019 by thelee

[Yougottawanna]

Tactician with rechargable discipline will get very powerful once you have unbending. I think you can fully heal any damage taken at around 14-15 INT, so between +INT and +beneficial effect duration items/foods (which I believe also effect unbroken) you could have a ton of time to build up chants/summons. I'm curious to see how it works because I suspected unbending might be one way to beat this thing.

However, on a multiclass you won't get the upgrade which gives you concentration, so you may need to find a workaround for enemies with lots of interrupts.

[thelee]

1 minute ago, Yougottawanna said:

However, on a multiclass you won't get the upgrade which gives you concentration, so you may need to find a workaround for enemies with lots of interrupts.

rekvu's helm and walking over a trap to get an injury?