The Ultimate discussion thread

[MaxQuest]

44 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Some more questions:

1. Can you cast Beetle Shell on Vela (guess not)? 
2. If yes: do enemies lose interest? I also guess not. But maybe it's worth checking?
3. Would there be any way to cast Cipher's Statis Shell on Vela? e.g. if you are confused (hello Tactician)?
4. Wouldn't mind control spells like Whisper of Treason or Puppet Master help to pull enemies away from Vela?
5. I guess there's no trick that allows you to cast Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure on Vela... ?

1. As Raven has already mentioned, Beetle Shell has "AffectedTargetType": "Friendly", just like Withdraw. Meanwhile Stasis Shell can be cast only on "Hostile".

2. A unit in stasis can't threaten/engage, so if he was engaging prior to being encased in stasis, the enemy would lose a bit of "interest". But since Vela wasn't engaging anyone in the first place, I think there will be no interest difference between in Cowering Vela and Beetle Shelled Vela.

3. I remember trying to cast Tenous Grasp (which has the same targeting as Stasis Shell, i.e. hostile) on a confused party member and couldn't do it. Would need also to check if a confused cipher can do it. Btw, in PoE1, in Adra Dragon fight, it was possible to wait for Eder to get dominated, and Stasis Shell him before the dominate would expire, and the dragon sometimes would try to hit him (post-dominate, but still in stasis).

4. If WoT or Puppet Master have landed - yes, those affected will stop hitting Vela. And ringleader is especially handy for that. The problems are AoEs, enemy immunities, possible misses.

5. The invisibility part? No way)

P.S. Looking at a few videos / streams, I have a feeling that Vela attracts less attention from the enemies, compared to a party member (with same stats as Vela) would.

Edited May 14, 2019 by MaxQuest

[Waski]

SC bloodmage with lay of hands and physicer belt with 15 might is pulling around 24hp/3sec and have access to temporal cocoon.  Big burst,  leave 2 enemies, fill back spells, finish off with phantom. Wall of draining all the time.   But Dorudugan and Auranic can be next to impossible. Just thinking. 

Edit per encounter items are still per encounter??  (gloves of lay of hands) 

Edited May 14, 2019 by Waski

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

Some more questions:

1. Can you cast Beetle Shell on Vela (guess not)? 
2. If yes: do enemies lose interest? I also guess not. But maybe it's worth checking?
3. Would there be any way to cast Cipher's Statis Shell on Vela? e.g. if you are confused (hello Tactician)?
4. Wouldn't mind control spells like Whisper of Treason or Puppet Master help to pull enemies away from Vela?
5. I guess there's no trick that allows you to cast Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure on Vela... ?

1. i believe it does

2. no, enemies still attack.

3. afaict, confusion doesn't change targeting limitations, it only changes the foe/friendly-friendliness of aoe or bounce.

4. sure, any hard CC could help protect vela. but for context, even at level 20 some low level wisps can kill vela pretty quickly. also, IME when i was doing my hylea run, the bulk of vela deaths were due to two cases: a) incidental AoE (this was exacerbated by the no-level-scaling bug at the time) which a lot of hard CC is not going to help you with and b) the AI script of many rogues and rogue-likes who, when reduced to bloodied, will Escape or Shadowing Beyond or Shadow Step behind the front line (you) to go after the weakest character (Vela) - and unlike for you the player, Shadowing Beyond's untargetability doesn't go away when they make an attack - so hard CC won't help here unless you have 100% uptime from right before bloodied to death on any and all rogue-likes (including skeletons, risen, xaurip plaguestrikers, kith rogue-types, etc.)

this is just to say that "enemies lumbering over to attack vela with lots of warning" was an extreme minority of cases - running forth at the start of combat to be the front line was generally good enough to keep enemies uninterested in vela. it was the out-of-nowhere stuff (there were some BoW enemy aoes that I was surprised to learn actually did damage in addition to afflictions, for example; the damage was so minor it was irrelevant to my party but extremely lethal to vela after a couple casts) that would kill vela. (Escape/Shadowing Beyond/Shadow Step is extremely hard to disrupt even when you don't have expert mode on... and their AI will keep making them attempt it until they run out of rogue resources.)

Edited May 14, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

I was testing with a cheaty tactician+skaen that i consoled to level 20 and came up with several findings:

- Stealth success is based, in part, on enemy level. I was pulling my hair out wondering why my level 20 cheatyface couldn't sneak past the wisps and spirits in the engwithan digsite right before oderisi, but my level 4 Tinny XIX had no problem (I even consulted my own youtube video in case I forgot some critical pathing), and I eventually figured out that despite the fact that cheatyface had a slightly higher stealth (6 vs 5) the enemies had all level scaled up +4 levels, making it basically impossible to stealth past them. I'm not quite sure what to do with this information yet, but probably means that investing in stealth and leveling up needs to be very deliberate so you don't unintentionally make act 2 or 3 impossible due to upwards level scaling.

- the de-aggro brilliant trigger doesn't seem to work 100% if done in the middle of combat. i need to do more tests (lest this happen during a a real run), but i don't have a functional theory as to what sometimes causes it to not work in the middle of combat versus the start (which has a 100% success rate). if there's some mechanic that doesn't let you reset in the middle of a fight, it could spell doom against arcane dampeners and auranic, because you basically need to do that to dodge having all you and vela's life-saving buffs suppressed/cleansed.

- creating an AI script that just casts salvation of time with 0 cooldown and adjusting combat speed to fast makes buffing real easy. probably i'll get a stopwatch and set a specific time on my stopwatch to keep buffing based on cheatyface's tests, so i can replicate buffing perfectly when wael's challenge is back on.

- with stealth you can start combat just at the edge of enemy detection, which means that you can stay just outside the enemy detection rate and buff yourself and vela. i mentioned this possibility before, but so long as you aren't surprised by enemies, it's easy to position yourself with vela to do this with 100% success. (you can even use halt to ensure vela stays well out of detection range so that you can start combat, and then run back to withdraw/sahdowing beyond and guarantee everyone stays out of range)

- also, this is probably no surprise to people who played around a lot with tacticians before, but i seriously understimated just how friggin good a tactician is 1 v 1 (or even 1 v 2 with skaen spiritual ally) - mule kick basically guarantees 100% brilliant uptime due to disorient. it's making me feel a lot better about bosses and hauani o whe's early parts, because even if expert mode + magran challenge makes it really hard to actually interrupt an ability and get a resource refunded, the constant brilliant uptime plus time spent being knocked up and prone from mule kick is almost as good. With WotEP this could be fantastic.

- brilliant trigger is great, but you have to be careful that you always have a spare level 2 and level 5 spell cast available. this might seem like a no-brainer, but with cheatyface i keep making errors (still not used to woedica's challenge) where I use level 2 or level 5 abilities in combat without letting htem get restored and in the next fight i'm missing a critical component of the combo. it's a shame because searing seal on AL5 is extremely useful, but if you're not careful (wael makes it harder to know how many AL5 casts you have) you can end combat before an in-combat brilliant has a chance to restore at least one AL5 cast. you can rest but you don't really want to rest unless you absolutely have to.

Edited May 14, 2019 by thelee

[MaxQuest]

^ Regarding stealth and wisps: Will-o-Wisps have supernatural perception type. (while ice wisps have normal)

Other enemies that have same supernatural perception type are:

• phantoms + spectres + wraiths (but not shadows)
• skulldrak + skulldrak screecher
• crypt deathguards + liches
• Neryscirlas

Also there are a few enemies with keen type:

• tyrant of decay + warden of decay + scourge + soul collector
• Scyorielaphas
• Jadaferlas

As the names suggest, keen enemies are hard to sneak by; and supernatural are even harder.

Edited May 14, 2019 by MaxQuest

[thelee]

1 minute ago, MaxQuest said:

^ Regarding stealth and wisps: Will-o-Wisps have supernatural perception type.

Other enemies that have same supernatural perception type are:

• phantoms + spectres + wraiths (but not shadows)
• skulldrak + skulldrak screecher
• crypt deathguards + liches
• Neryscirlas

Also there are a few enemies with keen type:

• tyrant of decay + warden of decay + scourge + soul collector
• Scyorielaphas
• Jadaferlas

As the names suggest, keen enemies are hard to sneak by; and supernatural are even harder.

wow, i didn't know that. good to know.

 

worth pointing out though that specifically my level 4 tinny xix had 5 stealth and could sneak past the whisps and phantoms before Oderisi without filling up even half of the yellow circle, whereas my level 20 cheatyface had 6 stealth spent literally an hour trying to sneak past and could not. i eventually gave up and just did the brilliant trick to kill them all manually. level scaling is definitely a factor here for stealth.

[MaxQuest]

Yeah, that info is not listed anywhere ingame afaik.

Btw, have you tried the interaction between Brilliant Tactician and INT afflictions?

I am curious what happens if you have Brilliant, and somehow get hit by Confuse / Charm / Dominate; the Brilliant will prevent the effect -> and:

• a). Brilliant will be removed
• b). Brilliant will be removed, but will immediately come back

 

Edited May 14, 2019 by MaxQuest

[thelee]

19 minutes ago, MaxQuest said:

Yeah, that info is not listed anywhere ingame afaik.

Btw, have you tried the interaction between Brilliant Tactician and INT afflictions?

I am curious what happens if you have Brilliant, and somehow get hit by Confuse / Charm / Dominate; the Brilliant will prevent the effect -> and:

• a). Brilliant will be removed
• b). Brilliant will be removed, but will immediately come back

 

hm, i haven't tested it specifically, but Galawain's will sometimes add a durationless (e.g. tactician-style) tier-3 inspiration on beasts, and at least pre-5.0 the interaction was weird. if I remember correctly, it won't prevent you from applying an affliction, they'll just sort of co-exist, which is extremely weird. on occasion i actually managed to dispel the "permanent" tier 3 inspiration, but wasn't able to reproduce this consistently or have this happen more than a couple of times. edit: now that i think about it, post-5.0 i had a few early ultimate attempts with a forbidden fist monk, and enfeebled I could use to prevent robust boars from being immortal in the opening part of port maje island (probably the worst early game RNG you can get for an ultimate run is to have the boars have Robust on them). the enfeebled didn't dispel the robust, both effects just co-existed and the enfeebled just blocked the robust healing until the enfeebled wore off.

my hypothesis is that something similar will happen: you'll still have brilliant, and a confuse/charm/dominate effect will also simultaneously affect your character. it will dispel any "normal" int inspiration.

Edited May 14, 2019 by thelee

[dunehunter]

I think still monk is best, reason is simple, the faster u kill enemies, the less mistaken u will make. In most combat u don't need to use too many withdraw scroll because u can pull enemy away and kill them. Only mega bosses requires a lot of them, but monk kill mega boss pretty fast too, ooze 2 min, dorugudan 5 min. I might be wrong because of Ethos challenge, u might not have enough time to get key gears and optimize yourself.

[Boeroer]

Ooze 2 min, dorugudan 5 min seems like an extreme exaggeration if you count it in actual in-game time (which is the time you should keep in mind if you want to estimat how many scrolls you need).

[dunehunter]

4 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Ooze 2 min, dorugudan 5 min seems like an extreme exaggeration if you count it in actual in-game time (which is the time you should keep in mind if you want to estimat how many scrolls you need).

indeed.

[thelee]

18 minutes ago, dunehunter said:

I think still monk is best, reason is simple, the faster u kill enemies, the less mistaken u will make. In most combat u don't need to use too many withdraw scroll because u can pull enemy away and kill them. Only mega bosses requires a lot of them, but monk kill mega boss pretty fast too, ooze 2 min, dorugudan 5 min. I might be wrong because of Ethos challenge, u might not have enough time to get key gears and optimize yourself.

i think there's a significant overestimation of the availability and underestimation of the necessity of withdraw on the SC monk path. I could be wrong (i haven't actually tried act 2 or beyond yet, merely doing a lot of critical path mapping and testing/preplanning), but

a) withdraw doesn't last nearly as long as you think, even in fights you are wrecking

b) scrolls of withdraw aren't nearly as common as you think, especially since you can't just spam rest to refresh vendor supplies (recall your last run of pillars, how many scrolls of withdraw did you actually find? because you probably need tens of them unless you want to leave a lot of fights to the RNG gods. i don't remember finding that much)

edit: i agree though that of the possible viable builds, monk is definitely a strong candidate. just personally i am erring on the side of low-risk, and to me infinite withdraw (or vela with infinite bdd+salvation) and low dps is much lower risk than finite withdraw with very fast dps. i think anyone attempting the ultimate should just go with what they feel is the best option, because we won't truly know what's possible until someone actually does it.

Edited May 14, 2019 by thelee

[dunehunter]

6 minutes ago, thelee said:

i think there's a significant underestimation of the availability and necessity of withdraw on the SC monk path. I could be wrong (i haven't actually tried act 2 yet, merely doing a lot of critical path mapping), but

a) withdraw doesn't last nearly as long as you think, even in fights you are wrecking

b) scrolls of withdraw aren't nearly as common as you think, especially since you can't just spam rest to refresh vendor supplies

edit: i agree though that of the possible viable paths, monk is definitely a strong candidate. just personally i am erring on the side of low-risk, and to me infinite withdraw is much lower risk than very fast dps on megabosses.

hmmm u are right, the duration of the scroll seems to be not scale with int or arcane, only power level.

[MaxQuest]

33 minutes ago, thelee said:

now that i think about it, post-5.0 i had a few early ultimate attempts with a forbidden fist monk, and enfeebled I could use to prevent robust boars from being immortal in the opening part of port maje island (probably the worst early game RNG you can get for an ultimate run is to have the boars have Robust on them). the enfeebled didn't dispel the robust, both effects just co-existed and the enfeebled just blocked the robust healing until the enfeebled wore off.

my hypothesis is that something similar will happen: you'll still have brilliant, and a confuse/charm/dominate effect will also simultaneously affect your character. it will dispel any "normal" int inspiration.

Hmm. Interesting.. how does this work...

Galawain_Exalted_SE_Robust and Greater_Lay_On_Hands_SE_Robust look extremely similar, the only difference being DurationType Infinite (1s) versus UseDurationTime (8s).

Brilliant_Tactician_SE_Brilliant also has infinite duration, so yeah, it will most likely behave the same as Exalted Robust.

In rest.. they are like regular inspirations.

 

P.S. Checked Vela's Cower ability. It applies [terrified effect] directly, and not [terrified affliction] (which consists of -5 RES, -3 PL, terrified effect). So Cap of the Laughingstock most likely won't help (since it gives immunity vs affliction) \

Edited May 14, 2019 by MaxQuest

[baldurs_gate_2]

When you go in to stealth mode, will vela too or can she even be spotted, when you won't? Because in the burial site, that one room before the adra pillar, is the only hard one to manage.

[thelee]

18 minutes ago, baldurs_gate_2 said:

When you go in to stealth mode, will vela too or can she even be spotted, when you won't? Because in the burial site, that one room before the adra pillar, is the only hard one to manage.

vela will also stealth, but it's moot because enemies don't care (or even check) for her stealth level. enemies don't even care about her existence unless you have aggro-ed them, really (which is how the withdraw + shadowing beyond + tactician combo works so well).

in my earlier posted youtube video starting at 35:20 (embedded again here directly to that time) you can see me sneaking past the enemies with 5 stealth with vela in tow

 

Edited May 14, 2019 by thelee

[Marigoldran]

On 5/8/2019 at 10:36 PM, dunehunter said:

SC monk or herald  @Marigoldran

Yes!!!!! Thank you! LOL.  

[Marigoldran]

I haven't read all 8 pages of the discussion but why has most of the community decided it's monk, not herald?

[dunehunter]

30 minutes ago, Marigoldran said:

I haven't read all 8 pages of the discussion but why has most of the community decided it's monk, not herald?

Because Woedica + Ethos makes classes that cannot regen resource a inferior choice i think. Chanter is solid tho.

[thelee]

2 hours ago, dunehunter said:

Because Woedica + Ethos makes classes that cannot regen resource a inferior choice i think. Chanter is solid tho.

i think you misread marigold's comment. the community is narrowing down on SC monk because WotW and Resonant Touch.

edit: oh i guess paladin doesn't have regen resources. yeah, someone else tried herald and found that the paladin side really stunk with woedica's challenge on.

Edited May 15, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

after spending all my spare evening with tactician + skaen against hauani o whe i'm pretty demoralized about its prospects. it just doesn't DPS enough.

even with infinite withdraw, and constant uptime on brilliant by mule kicking hauani o whe (which also requires a boreal dwarf, gauntlets of reliability, potion of perfect aim, helm of hte white void, conqueror stance, disciplined strikes to actually land mule kick against 189 fort defense), and even with pre-buffing basically an entire-in-game day to get 1000+ duration on all my buffs, once i engage hauani o whe it's a one-way ticket to loserville, population: me. i haven't even been able to get it below healthy, much less get an opportunity to deal with its splits. the cleansing effect is too strong, too quick, and even with non-stop mule kicks (which hurts dps because i'm constantly graze-ing against such a huge fort defense), potion of deadeye, and potion of impediment, i can't really make that much of a dent in its ability to whack me and take -10s off my buffs every few seconds. maybe i'm just missing some good strat for face-tanking it.

also - vela really sucks in this fight. even with infinite withdraw, if i let her pop out for more than a few seconds, over a long enough fight there's a good chance she gets hit by symbiote, and will terrified-walk around, generating oozes, which murders my ability to keep up brilliant for a while. i imagine this might also be a nightmare for an sc monk, who will not have as many withdraws, but maybe blade turning + resonant touch + wotw stunlock will be fast enough that it's less of a concern.

i'm down, but not out. i have a few more ideas i'm willing to try before giving up on tactician + skaen and going back to trying with monk (or even troubadour).

Edited May 15, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

another class for consideration - blood mage + skaen. wall of flame might be an easier way to try to trigger the brilliant cloak, and i think bloodmage has pretty good megaboss options (crushing doom/slicken spam hauani o whe and most bosses, not so sure about bosses that can't be interrupted though, but maybe it doesn't matter in those other cases if you or vela can't die).

[dunehunter]

1 minute ago, thelee said:

another class for consideration - blood mage + skaen. wall of flame might be an easier way to try to trigger the brilliant cloak, and i think bloodmage has pretty good megaboss options (crushing doom/slicken spam hauani o whe and most bosses, not so sure about bosses that can't be interrupted though, but maybe it doesn't matter in those other cases if you or vela can't die).

if u cast spells out of combat, do u regain them?

[thelee]

1 minute ago, dunehunter said:

if u cast spells out of combat, do u regain them?

nope.

for my specific example, blood mage can blood sacrifice the fire wall back.

Edited May 15, 2019 by thelee

[dunehunter]

Just now, thelee said:

no, but blood mage can blood sacrifice the fire wall back.

but u cannot use blood sacrifice out of combat neither?