The Ultimate discussion thread Pt 2

[Tenray]

2 minutes ago, Waski said:

@Tenray hey.  Watching it now, did you try writ of war on 2nd stage Hauani? I am wondering if it prevents merge (but WILL may be to high too land...)

I am pretty sure I tried all of the writs against hauani and nothing seemed to work against the merge. I think the merge skill of hauani has a completely different "tag", that cannot be suppressed by any abilities unless you actually CC or interrupt him.

I have tried this ofc before running it as priest of Woedica, especially for Hauani, because this boss is for many class combinations the "run-killer". I picked Woedica really only for the spiritual weapon. As already mentioned priest of Wael is also fine because you get Gaze of the Adragan, which will  be useful for many more encounters and you can still fight with bare fists. I can however not guarantee that you will have enough burst to kill hauani, but I guess you can still manage to do it.

As you can see I haven't used Deltro's Cage Helmet because I haven't found a consistent way of dealing lightning damage to myself. As a rogue/priest + attributes, my reflex is already really high. Just HITTING yourself, for example with scrolls, is already unlikely and critting yourself is even more unlikely. So I just dropped the idea with Deltros.

This was my first Ultimate attempt as a Zealot and I wanted to make sure to waste as less time as possible. You recommended once to use Rakhan field boots + essence interrupter+blunting belt to trigger deltro in this thread, which works like a charm and will guarantee to have enough burst even without Woedica's Spiritual Weapon. I didn't want to risk to waste too much time on it to get all the items, but it's definetly an option and it would be possible to play with every priest subclass then.

[Waski]

ok. Why no Cap of Laughingstock? No funds? Or wantend rekvu's with wound? Since you melee mostly that essentialy +10acc

[Tenray]

13 minutes ago, Waski said:

ok. Why no Cap of Laughingstock? No funds? Or wantend rekvu's with wound? Since you melee mostly that essentialy +10acc

Oh wow. You are right picking up the Cap is great. I do remember that you really are out of money after buying sandals + magrans belt while doing my route. You do meet Thaenic a 2nd time however and you could buy the Cap. Very nice idea, honestly!

BUT I would not change Cap for Revkus for:

- The Battle Royal fight. Simply because you do not want to maximize damage, but actually just want to survive it while not getting interrupted on SoT and BDD.

- Belranga fight. Belranga can spawn with Bullish which means that her attacks will interrupt, same applies to ALL of the spiders she does summon. You will get perma-interrupted by 100 spiders and won't be even able to cast a SoT. This is an instant GG. Happened to me twice. You can and should learn from my mistakes =D

 

But summarized I can say, you are right. If you want to maximize your damage for the "more safer" bosses/encounters the Cap of Laughingstock is a great choice.

Edited August 20, 2019 by Tenray

[thelee]

On 8/20/2019 at 5:49 AM, Tenray said:

Nevertheless it happened and the best way to get around this IMO, is simply to play as a druid/wizard and repair the bridge OR as I did in my Ultimate Run respecc into 14 mechanics/survival and repair it this way (this will however cost you 2 days of ingame time).

 

I don't know if people know, but if you have mid-teens mechanics or stealth, 14 dex and 8 athletics, you can cross the bridge no problem without any specific class support or without burning any time. (edit: the dialogue tree would go -> examine, use stealth/mechancis, carefully cross the bridge (new option appears after examining the bridge with enough skill), and then you're done (you just click through a dex and athletics check).)

I ended up manually looking through the game conversation files for this encounter because this encounters is so poorly documented and could've been a dealbreaker/huge-waste-of-time for my tactician/skaen (who does not have access to web or the druid spells).

 

edit 2 - though honestly it's not that big a deal to brute force your way through the bridge with insufficient dex/athletics, so long as you don't have any injuries (iirc you can accumulate up to three just from a "successful" crossing). you can always quaff a luminous adra potion after, or leave them in place if you have rekvu's.

Edited August 21, 2019 by thelee

[Tenray]

3 hours ago, thelee said:

I don't know if people know, but if you have mid-teens mechanics or stealth, 14 dex and 8 athletics, you can cross the bridge no problem without any specific class support or without burning any time. (edit: the dialogue tree would go -> examine, use stealth/mechancis, carefully cross the bridge (new option appears after examining the bridge with enough skill), and then you're done (you just click through a dex and athletics check).)

I ended up manually looking through the game conversation files for this encounter because this encounters is so poorly documented and could've been a dealbreaker/huge-waste-of-time for my tactician/skaen (who does not have access to web or the druid spells).

On some of my characters I actually didn't invest points in DEX, great to know that you only need 14. Can be easily adapted, ty.

But you still need Athletics 8, so you have to respecc probably anyways like me except you really do want invest in athletics. You get +2 from the Adra Potion, +2 Burglar's Gloves, +2 Ngati's Girdle (which I usually sell, because it gets you alot money early) + X (nothing comes to my mind now).

You cannot use Unguent of Animalism because it's an interaction on the world map. So you still need to invest 2 points for athletics while leveling.

 

3 hours ago, thelee said:

edit 2 - though honestly it's not that big a deal to brute force your way through the bridge, so long as you don't have any injuries. you can always quaff a luminous adra potion after, or leave them in place if you have rekvu's.

BUT that was my whole point, you cannot just brute force your way through it. I have done so many runs and my game tends to bug out especially on THIS bridge. And I am really no talking about like 1 out of 10 times, it literally bugs out for me in easily 80% of my runs. No matter how often I save and reload the savegame itself is somehow corrupted and will always bug at this interaction while other savestates from different characters are fine. Don't ask me why. Reinstalled PoE2 aswell, already. Made no difference.

Edited August 21, 2019 by Tenray

[thelee]

So anyone know if @Tenray ever got credit for either of their attempts? I've been moving so haven't had time to make much progress.

[Boeroer]

I asked Josh on Twitter while commenting on @Decadency's "Thank you" tweet. Decadency then told me that he spoke to @Tenray : his run was finally validated.

[Tenray]

21 hours ago, Boeroer said:

I asked Josh on Twitter while commenting on @Decadency's "Thank you" tweet. Decadency then told me that he spoke to @Tenray : his run was finally validated.

Yes I actually got the letter this week on monday. Instantly opened when I came back from work =D

Was really happy. But as I said I am working again and so I have alot less time to communicate and forgot to mention it here on the forums. I have posted it on the discord server aswell.

 

So is anyone else here trying to beat it ?! Don't you dare giving up guys! I believe in you!

[Kaylon]

Gratz!

PS. There should be an official thread where are listed the people who beat the ultimate...

Edited September 4, 2019 by Kaylon

[thelee]

53 minutes ago, Tenray said:

So is anyone else here trying to beat it ?! Don't you dare giving up guys! I believe in you!

when I'm finally finished moving I should be able to resume progress again. I think it's pretty straight-forward at this point, but there's one tricky stealth section and a couple of places where RNG messed up my practice run. Other than that though, hopefully I'll be on the plaque soon. and if this run botches, all my notes are written down (plus I have the videos I've recorded so far) so it should be easy (if annoyingly tedious) to just go back and go through it again.

Edited September 4, 2019 by thelee

[Enoch]

 

 

Edit:  Is the forum's auto-inbedding of twitter links looking weird for anyone else?  Here's the tweet as a link, just in case. 

Edited September 12, 2019 by Enoch

[thelee]

dang, guess I won't be the first tactician! congrats to mark twain, whomstever they are (not a forum goer I guess).

Edited September 12, 2019 by thelee

[Boeroer]

It's this guy: https://twitter.com/Ionfujur

He knew me - so I guess he's either using a different username here or a long-time lurker.

[Raven Darkholme]

Pretty sure thats fuzelogic.

[Boeroer]

@fuzelogic? 

[thelee]

Update:

[Boeroer]

Does that mean you're starting it or that you already completed it?

[thelee]

1 minute ago, Boeroer said:

Does that mean you're starting it or that you already completed it?

Check mark means I completed it

 

edit: The final video is finishing uploading, I'll have playlist shared soon. At this point I don't even care if it gets validated or not, I'm just glad I finally finished it.

Edited October 19, 2019 by thelee

[Boeroer]

Then my congratulations!

Which class did you use and what did you do and so on and so forth? I guess I won't have time to watch the whole season.  

[Raven Darkholme]

Congratulations @thelee!

[Boeroer]

By the way: for tricky stealth passages you can use Necklace of Fireballs to lure away hostile npcs. So you don't waste precious spells (before getting the Brilliant Cloak or whatever). With a Tactician/Skaen you can also use other spells that can be cast outside of encounters (Desponent Blows for example or even a Repulsing Seal). Since you can get resources back when going invisible the loss of a spell shouldn't be such a problem as for other class combos.

If you have 2 Necklaces oFB you can even cast 8 Fireballs per encounter - and then after encounter replenish by stacking them in the stash. I wonder why nobody used this so far...? Doesn't it work with Woedica's Challenge? Since it's an oversight in th first place I don't think so.

You can also stack two Ivory Wurm Figurines and thus cast that summon in every enounter. At least that worked last time I tried it. Not that it's powerful or so but it gives you a free distraction in every encounter.

Edited October 21, 2019 by Boeroer

[Boeroer]

I also have another question:

Once you get Scordeo's Edge and you triggered and prolonged Blade Cascade: why is nobody switching to some non-unique Battle Axe + Bleeding Cuts then? When using Attack Abilites your weapons will not break - and if they do you can then use summoned weapons or fists or whatever. But by then you will have stacked a crazy amount of DoT instances on the enemy that last for a fairly long time (way over a minute with decent INT). And they will continue to tick while you cast stuff or have to run around, helping Vela out and whatnot.

What am I missing? Or is it just not worth the hassle?

[thelee]

6 hours ago, Boeroer said:

I also have another question:

Once you get Scordeo's Edge and you triggered and prolonged Blade Cascade: why is nobody switching to some non-unique Battle Axe + Bleeding Cuts then? When using Attack Abilites your weapons will not break - and if they do you can then use summoned weapons or fists or whatever. But by then you will have stacked a crazy amount of DoT instances on the enemy that last for a fairly long time (way over a minute with decent INT). And they will continue to tick while you cast stuff or have to run around, helping Vela out and whatnot.

What am I missing? Or is it just not worth the hassle?

that's an interesting idea, for myself I honestly never considered it. Part of that is the fact that up until level 16 I literally need every weapon proficiency that I pick up, so for most of my planning I never even contemplated a non-core weapon. Plus, even though after BoW I had more money than I knew what to do with, up until then every single coin mattered (for repairing Scordeo's, for buying mats, and most importantly for having 20000g to buy off the imp so I don't have to fight it in BoW, all keeping in mind that I may be surrendering lots of cash to ship fights). From my practice run (since I couldn't tell how much money I actually had in my real run), it wasn't until after BoW that I started building up my cash (though by the end of FS I had 100000g+). Having to worry about replenishing or repairing magical axes (or even just "not selling axes") would have been very bad for my bank account. It would've either slowed down BoW or worse threatened the run (if I couldn't afford the mat for a critical scroll or potion).

There are also several problems though that I see:

1. Even with Brilliant the number of attack abilities you can use is very low (keep in mind with Scordeo's you attack every like .5s, which is 12 attacks before you get a resource back)
2a. Being solo + Scordeo's Edge really eats through your weapon durability super fast. When I was practicing Auranic, I tried one version with Morning Star (Saru-Sichr) and Scordeo's to just keep her permainterrupted and hope for an insta-death kill (because the sigils were jsut super tedious to deal with, I had hoped I could keep her perma-interrupted the entire time... spoiler alert, it's extremely hard to interrupt her near-death self-buff that gives her permabrilliant and reveals all sigils, and even if I had a decent chance of success (I didn't) "mostly consistent" was not good enough of a solution). Anyway, that version of the practice attempt flopped pretty quickly because I took the Saru-Sichr to almost broken just from taking out the two barbarians, much less actually hurting the megaboss.
2b. Given how quickly you wear out weapons in any major boss fight, the added damage from the DoT--regardless of the number of stacks--is not going to have much of an impact as far as I can tell, versus sticking with a summoned weapon or fists the entire time.
3. Interactions with Shadowing Beyond or Withdraw when trying to de-aggro. I don't remember if DoTs break invis, but it was certainly not something I wanted to risk (or waste time during a practice run) doing. Long-lived effects can also subtly alter enemy AI - wouldn't matter for the blood mage runs, but with tactician there are ways to not have any enemy aggroed, but you still don't trigger Brilliant, and there's some subtle interaction with AI state that results in this. My run is extremely conservative by nature, and if there's an outside chance that I fail to deaggro the enemies when I need to, then I'm not gonna do it. Over the course of months of doing the ultimate, I sort of had a working knowledge of how the game determines that you met the conditions for Brilliant de-aggro, but it wasn't 100% consistent, more like 95% consistent. That remaining 5% almost threatened my run in the Belranga fight when Belranga failed to de-aggro enough to trigger Brilliant; I had to re-aggro and then de-aggro again. I put in the video notes that I don't think I can express how insanely close to failing the run I was just from pure AI flakiness. So adding anything to increase the chance of that kind of outcome happening was not desirable. (The number of times I needed to de-aggro in the middle of a fight were low, but when I needed to, I needed to with basically 100% success rate. I suppose I could have just no used an axe for those fights, but that would have just been one more thing to remember/note.)

 

8 hours ago, Boeroer said:

By the way: for tricky stealth passages you can use Necklace of Fireballs to lure away hostile npcs. So you don't waste precious spells (before getting the Brilliant Cloak or whatever). With a Tactician/Skaen you can also use other spells that can be cast outside of encounters (Desponent Blows for example or even a Repulsing Seal). Since you can get resources back when going invisible the loss of a spell shouldn't be such a problem as for other class combos.

 

1. the reason why I personally use sparkcrackers, traps, and in one occasion a scroll (it's either sunbeam or plague of insects) is their small AoE. I've definitely failed some stealth practice runs because I accidentally hit an enemy with the aoe of one of those effects (even sparkcrackers); remember that this has Skaen's challenge with Expert mode on so even with a torch you might not have visibility of where you need to lure enemies to (and thus what you're targeting). Fireball (or any other larger AoE) would be worse. Traps are basically guaranteed not to aggro enemies because they don't walk onto the trap, just up to it (except for Searing Seal).

2. Using any AL 2 (repulsing seal) or AL 5 spell is basically a non-starter. You almost always want both withdraws available at the start of the fight (either as insurance or because that's the way for this fight you need to de-aggro), and at least one Shadowing Beyond (sometimes more). I learned this the hard way. (This feeds back into the "flakiness" aspect of tactician brilliant - sometimes Shadowing Beyond is good enough, sometimes you need to Withdraw, and sometimes you don't know you need to withdraw until after you've shadowed beyond.) Maybe some of the other spell levels would've been OK, though for myself frankly every single spell I picked up was important up until the end game (where most things are irrelevant compared to just buffing Scordeo's Edge), so I didn't really have a spare spell to pick up just for luring.

Edited October 21, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

I haven't gotten any acknowledgment that OBS has even received my emails, despite a reminder email. Does anyone have any channel to help prod some attention from OBS (like how Tenray finally got validated)? I have a sneaking suspicion that theultimate is not a very closely monitored inbox.

[Boeroer]

Since you have a Twitter account: tag Josh on Twitter and ask him. He immediately answered last time I did this with a question about a pending ultimate run.