The Ultimate discussion thread Pt 2

[Decadency]

Many thanks for everyone's help. And also a huge Thank You to Victor Creed. You helped me a lot.

[Waski]

@Decadency Bravo,  congratulations  man. 

[Serg BlackStrider]

@Decadency Congratulations! Impressive achievement!

[Decadency]

Thanks guys.

Btw it's only 7 days left in the end. But I needed to buy rum in Neketaka after completing The Beast of Winter  and then I went back to Forgotten Sanctum

[algroth]

Well done Decadency! I just saw the Josh Sawyer tweet.

[Seriphos]

Congrats. Would you mind sharing the exact build you used to accomplish this?

[wildeyn00700]

5 hours ago, Decadency said:

Thanks guys.

Btw it's only 7 days left in the end. But I needed to buy rum in Neketaka after completing The Beast of Winter  and then I went back to Forgotten Sanctum

Congrats!!

As a side note, I did some practicing against the Water Dragon, probably the hardest fight for my build, and I believe I have it down to a science now, where I kill two water whips, and then one more once the dragon summons more, and otherwise focus on the dragon and withdraw Vela. 

I can't believe how little real time it apparently takes to win with the bloodmage/priest.  Does it really just take about 8 hours total?  It has to be 20 or more, possibly 30, to do ultimate with my ranger/chanter build.  That makes it so you really want to get the tougher fights down to where you have very little chance of breaking the whole run.

Decadency, how do you deal with Arcane Cleanse or similar effects?  Do you sometimes just use summons to distract the enemy, like against Concelhaut?  But then what about the sigilmaster?  Do you use a unique method for that boss?  Dorudugan is like that for my build - I have to use a completely different method to beat him than I do for everything else, because he has such huge healing that can't be interrupted.

Edited July 20, 2019 by wildeyn00700

[JackalTornMoons]

Congratulations!

[Punisher]

@Decadency

Congratulations, mate! This is quite an achievement.

I'd love to watch the videos of your run if you have them.

Edited July 20, 2019 by Punisher

[Decadency]

8 hours ago, wildeyn00700 said:

As a side note, I did some practicing against the Water Dragon, probably the hardest fight for my build, and I believe I have it down to a science now, where I kill two water whips, and then one more once the dragon summons more, and otherwise focus on the dragon and withdraw Vela. 

I can't believe how little real time it apparently takes to win with the bloodmage/priest.  Does it really just take about 8 hours total?  It has to be 20 or more, possibly 30, to do ultimate with my ranger/chanter build.  That makes it so you really want to get the tougher fights down to where you have very little chance of breaking the whole run.

Decadency, how do you deal with Arcane Cleanse or similar effects?  Do you sometimes just use summons to distract the enemy, like against Concelhaut?  But then what about the sigilmaster?  Do you use a unique method for that boss?  Dorudugan is like that for my build - I have to use a completely different method to beat him than I do for everything else, because he has such huge healing that can't be interrupted.

8 hours? 

 

Arcane Cleanse - I spammed phantoms so wizards wasted their Dampeners. For Concelhaut I used Storm of Holy Fire and withdraw myself.

And Sigilmaster was the hardest: 

Withdraw Vela, Use Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, Use Arkemyr's Hex on a sigil master to make her open the sigil, use Storm of Holy Fire on a Sigil and withdraw myself at once. Use Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure when I'm in stealth so it will cast at once after invis.

And after sigils were dead - just spam Storm of Holy Fire on the Sigilmaster cause she has no spells with that range and she can't move

[wildeyn00700]

2 hours ago, Decadency said:

8 hours? 

 

Arcane Cleanse - I spammed phantoms so wizards wasted their Dampeners. For Concelhaut I used Storm of Holy Fire and withdraw myself.

And Sigilmaster was the hardest: 

Withdraw Vela, Use Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure, Use Arkemyr's Hex on a sigil master to make her open the sigil, use Storm of Holy Fire on a Sigil and withdraw myself at once. Use Arkemyr's Brilliant Departure when I'm in stealth so it will cast at once after invis.

And after sigils were dead - just spam Storm of Holy Fire on the Sigilmaster cause she has no spells with that range and she can't move

Ah, this was very cool to read   So, it isn't all simple, at all, or fast.  A lot like my experience with Ultimate.  I have several fights where I would have to make a similar description of how I win.

I think that this will be how a character that can do Ultimate will look.  They need to have a trick that can deal with most of the fights, and then they have to get creative and practiced with how to do a few fights that the trick doesn't work for.  And then you need to get your path down with skill checks and such.

Did you have to do much re-speccing your character for particular skill checks?  I have to do that a few times; I'm still working on making sure I don't go through most of the game and then accidentally have my skills wrong somewhere. 

Some important ones I've seen are 12 intim for the Maw, 17 dipl for the undead ship, and I need to go back over what is needed for Beast of Winter.  SSS has a few alternate checks for the bridge (I think I'll do the sneak one), and then athletics, I believe, for the 3-way championship fight water thing, and then intimidate and 3 stoic to avoid fighting the guy in the in-between.  And then there are times when it might be better to have higher stealth or arcana for certain fights, and I have to decide if I'm too lazy to re-spec or not.

Does anybody know what that 19 athletics check is for as you go down to the Oracle?  I failed it but nothing happened.  Did I just miss an item, or does it do something else?

Edited July 20, 2019 by wildeyn00700

[Decadency]

1 hour ago, wildeyn00700 said:

Did you have to do much re-speccing your character for particular skill checks?  I have to do that a few times; I'm still working on making sure I don't go through most of the game and then accidentally have my skills wrong somewhere. 

Does anybody know what that 19 athletics check is for as you go down to the Oracle?  I failed it but nothing happened.  Did I just miss an item, or does it do something else?

I did re-specing like 8-10 times. 

19 athletics - no idea. Failed it too.

[Boeroer]

@Decadency: My congratulations!

Now I'll keep my fingers crossed that it gets valididated by Obsidian. 

[Kaylon]

On 7/19/2019 at 3:51 PM, Decadency said:

Hey guys! I want to share with you something:

 

Gratz!

PS. Will you upload your run?

On 7/18/2019 at 11:34 AM, wildeyn00700 said:

But you need WotW, which means single-class.  I was just musing about whether a multi-class of monk would do much, and it looks like it won't. 

I watched the video of a monk beating the ooze, so now I understand.  Vela and Abydon's would seriously complicate things, although possibly neither would be an absolute block.  I can see that it all comes down to beating the original ooze. 

For Vela, you'd have to initiate combat, get symbioted, get it off yourself and kill the little oozes (or kill them a bit later), get Vela terrified, and then move the ooze far away from her, so that Vela doesn't get hit with symbiote.  If you tank the ooze anywhere near Vela, she'll get hit with Symbiote for certain.  That might be doable.  It is somewhat possible that the ooze would hit Vela immediately with symbiote, unless there is a way to keep her back (actually there is a 1-rest Watcher ability that stuns her that all classes can use, so that would deal with that).

Then it just comes down to making sure you can tank the main ooze before your armor breaks (or that you can tank naked somehow).

For Dorudugan, the only way for a monk to beat him with Vela, as far as I can imagine with my limited knowledge, is to initiate combat with a trap, from stealth, and then sneak in and hit him True Love's Kiss (or else if WotW works, just use that).  Then make a summon and switch weapons and run back to the bottom right before Vela follows and gets terrified (perhaps by figuring out another way to stop her, or maybe by stunning her and going back into stealth just before Dorudugan hits your trap).  Or, and this would be funny, you could do turn-based, which keeps Vela still, and do the same method, and hit "next turn" for several hours...

I hate the documentation in this game.  True Love's Kiss (which requires stealth) doesn't work from an invisibility potion, but the same exact wording and documentation, assuming it wasn't changed, seems to work with WotW and the Stalking Cloak.  "Invisibility" from WotW apparently counts as stealth for the cloak?  I wonder if it counts for True Love's Kiss from the dagger sold in the metalworks.

The ooze and Dorudugan aren't very hard because you can easily withdraw Vela and then pull them away from her. Then you can use the Dichotomus Soul to do the tanking while using the Long Pain/Whispers of the Wind to deal damage... And yes, only Lover's Embrace requires true stealth, while the other items (cloak and helm) with stealth abilities work also from invisibility.

[baldurs_gate_2]

Gratz. I hope we will see the full run on youtube soon. I just gave up on it, after i got hooked up on Wild Hunt.

[wildeyn00700]

11 hours ago, Kaylon said:

The ooze and Dorudugan aren't very hard because you can easily withdraw Vela and then pull them away from her. Then you can use the Dichotomus Soul to do the tanking while using the Long Pain/Whispers of the Wind to deal damage... And yes, only Lover's Embrace requires true stealth, while the other items (cloak and helm) with stealth abilities work also from invisibility.

I believe that you can do this, because you know a lot more about item and ability interactions that I do, but when I imagine myself trying to do this with Dorudugan, I see this: I go close to him in the middle to initiate combat, and Vela follows me.  Then she gets terrified, too close to the middle.  When Dorudugan, who can't be interrupted, does his huge area fire effect after his 3X charging up, I  see it killing her, because if she is close-ish to the middle, I don't think you have enough room to pull him far enough from her.  On the other hand, if I do something (with a SC monk) to keep her still in the corner while I approach Dorud (such as the 1/rest watcher stun cone ability), then I could do it if I could otherwise do enough damage.  By the way, I believe there is an ambush on the way to get the Fire-immunity cloak that is also a pain to do with Vela. 

Priests of course get around this with BDD and SoT, and I (with a ranger/chanter) get around this by initiating combat with my animal companion, while my MC stays in the bottom right with Vela.  The boar brings Dorud close enough to terrify Vela while she is still in the corner, and then I move him away after that.  A lot of what will make a SC monk (or any non-priest build, I think) possible is the ability to simulate what I do with a boar, without a boar.  Some extremely reliable way that really works, to get every enemy in a fight away from Vela and keep her away.  (Chanter summons that can be directly controlled also help with this, such as against the Oracle when adds spawn near her.  As a single character, you are going to run into several situations something like this, where keeping all enemies away from Vela for an entire fight, can be tough.)  If the oracle, for example, is allowed to start walking towards the middle, Vela will be in trouble.  Possibly a super fast offense will compensate for that.  Stunning everybody with WotW will work sometimes, but I wonder if it will work every time.  Something as simple as those phantasmal hounds in FS, that zoom around, go invis, and split into 4 parts, may possibly be an issue.  I'm quite interested in seeing a SC monk work.  I tend to solve problems by thinking of the bottlenecks and trying to break them, so I'm not shooting down the monk idea; just trying to work through it.  I certainly wouldn't have guessed how to beat the Sigilmaster with a bm/skaen like Decandency explained, so, similarly, there are very possibly ways to make a monk work that I'm not guessing right now.

(Without Abydon's challenge I killed him by learning from how you did it in your video, but with Abydon's ruining that strategy, since it took me a lot of hits with the bow to take him down, for full Ultimate, I just hit him with True Love's Kiss and waited for about 2.5 in-game days for him to die, because I couldn't find another way to kill him past his healing and with weapons crumbling during the fight.  I could sort of keep him from healing himself by drawing his attention and staying far-ish away and hoping his bombs would go far enough away not to heal him, but I can't make that happen with enough consistency to realistically win.)

Edited July 22, 2019 by wildeyn00700

[Tenray]

Hey guys I just noticed some weird bug during my ultimate runs. I only noticed it now while recording with OBS. I get an incorrect real-time when compared to my recorded one. I uploaded a picture to make it more clear.

This bug however does not occur everytime ... But when it does it almost always happens on the first savegame.

I am not using any mods.

 

Edit: It also just happened to my current run both video files together have the length of (00:55:30 + 1:11:36 = 2:07:06) but my savegame tells me I have played 02:25:59.

I mean if the difference would be very little like a minute you could maybe argue that I did not stop the recording immediately when saving. But considering this huge time differences. It is just super weird.

Edited July 23, 2019 by Tenray

[Decadency]

I can't get what's the problem by the screenshots ><

But if you've got any problems with time of your PC you can try to check a battery in your motherboard.

Also I think it's kinda offtopic.

1 hour ago, Tenray said:

Edit: It also just happened to my current run both video files together have the length of (00:55:30 + 1:11:36 = 2:07:06) but my savegame tells me I have played 02:25:59.

Ah sorry. I think I get it. I guess when your game is paused (you are on invetory or quest log screen for example) it doesn't count.

Edited July 23, 2019 by Decadency

[thelee]

holy crap, i took a break off to recover from burning out a bit, but looks like Decadency you took it all the way??

i haven't gone through all the pages, so sorry fi this is reundant, but what in the end was your build?

Edit - also many congratulations!

Edited July 23, 2019 by thelee

[Decadency]

14 minutes ago, thelee said:

holy crap, i took a break off to recover from burning out a bit, but looks like Decadency you took it all the way??

i haven't gone through all the pages, so sorry fi this is reundant, but what in the end was your build?

Edit - also many congratulations!

Thanks

It was Bloodmage Skaen.

[thelee]

Have there been others? (I've been away for a bit). Or are you truly on top of the world right now?

[bringingyouthefuture]

That's amazing congrats!!!

[Boeroer]

8 hours ago, thelee said:

Have there been others? (I've been away for a bit). Or are you truly on top of the world right now?

I think he's the only one right now. At least he's the only one who got mentioned by Josh on Twitter so far. Maybe somebody else did it secretly and asked Obsidian not to say anything, but I doubt it. 

[Elric Galad]

Congratulations !

For a while, no one including Obsidian really knew whether it was actually possible.

I think that was quite a Gamble for Obs because it would have been a bad advertisement for them if no one succeeded.

But it is a good advertisement that it took a while !

[Tenray]

Oh boy. Today I wanted to continue my run and this happened ...

I guess another RIP. Epic bugs are epic.

https://streamable.com/6w4i8

Edit: Was kinda forced to Alt + F4 and tried again but same bug occured. On my parallel run I do not get stuck there. Probably have to start all over. Savegame may be corrupted or something like that, no clue.

Edited July 24, 2019 by Tenray