The Ultimate discussion thread Pt 2

[Constentin Lévine]

I think it is possible to prevent the Hauani O Whe to split when crit him with the Essence interruptor, doesnt it?

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Constentin Lévine said:

I think it is possible to prevent the Hauani O Whe to split when crit him with the Essence interruptor, doesnt it?

i think they explicitly patched this out, so as of whatever that patch was you can't do this. that doesn't preclude the fact that they may have undid this change unintentionally later.

but they definitely didn't handle the much more ubiquitous case of disintegrate annihilating hauane o whe, so there's a way to bypass the split

[Boeroer]

Afaik only Disintegrate prevents the split nowadays. 

[Raven Darkholme]

It's been a while and I'm doing another run.

However I messed around too much with traveling and now I'm at 2 months and 2 days at Ashen Maw.

Do you guys think it's possible to salvage this run at all, considering most people were 1 month 15 daysish for Ashen Maw? I also haven't even done nemnok yet...

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Raven Darkholme said:

It's been a while and I'm doing another run.

However I messed around too much with traveling and now I'm at 2 months and 2 days at Ashen Maw.

Do you guys think it's possible to salvage this run at all, considering most people were 1 month 15 daysish for Ashen Maw? I also haven't even done nemnok yet...

iirc i ended my run with ~10 days remaining. i definitely wasn't completely efficient with travel (iirc i had to salvage my route when my test character ran into difficulties that required some equipment), but i think you're really cutting it too close if you're down a few weeks.

[Raven Darkholme]

3 minutes ago, thelee said:

iirc i ended my run with ~10 days remaining. i definitely wasn't completely efficient with travel (iirc i had to salvage my route when my test character ran into difficulties that required some equipment), but i think you're really cutting it too close if you're down a few weeks.

Hm I think I'm down 7 days, since a month has 20 days?

So maybe there is hope.

[thelee]

Just now, Raven Darkholme said:

Hm I think I'm down 7 days, since a month has 20 days?

So maybe there is hope.

several years of deadfire and i only just now learned that a game-month has 20 days.

 

of note - what's your build/apporach? i needed a lot of cushion because the skaen + salvation of time build that so many people did, the way i would very conservatively pre-buff, each fight would be like a half day on its own (that would get me buffed up to like 400-600s on my buffs). if you're using strand of favor clickiness you probably get a lot of time efficiency that i didn't know about/have in my run.

[Raven Darkholme]

45 minutes ago, thelee said:

several years of deadfire and i only just now learned that a game-month has 20 days.

 

of note - what's your build/apporach? i needed a lot of cushion because the skaen + salvation of time build that so many people did, the way i would very conservatively pre-buff, each fight would be like a half day on its own (that would get me buffed up to like 400-600s on my buffs). if you're using strand of favor clickiness you probably get a lot of time efficiency that i didn't know about/have in my run.

Ye I won't really have to prebuff a lot since I'm going the SC wizard route, so both vela and me will be permanently untargetable due to SoF + Temp Cocoon, and I'm also doing the grimoire switch cheese you discovered to steal permanently spamable SoT + Bdd just for good measure.

[Raven Darkholme]

And in old fashion I messed up my run with silly **** again.

At the fire dragon my strategy was the usual pre summon fire blight with Magran belt, so Vela is scared before i cocoon her.

However it took unusually long to summon the blight (blunderbuss broke to the last state before completely broken) so I got impatient and turned speed to double, because my combat speed was on half anyway.

However during the dialogue with the dragon combat ends for a second and ofc my dumb ass forgot to reduce out of combat speed, Vela came out of cocoon to fast and the blight killed her... (it didn't follow me cuz I was untargetable due to cocoon)

I think the safest way would have been to just do the dialogue first, then immediately sneak (i did that in my last run and it works perfectly, combat does not start), THEN do Magrans belt and then go activate combat with dragon....

[thelee]

35 minutes ago, Raven Darkholme said:

At the fire dragon my strategy was the usual pre summon fire blight with Magran belt, so Vela is scared before i cocoon her.

did you have to just repair your blunderbuss alot? at 1% chance i imagine more often than not you're running it almost down to broken? 

[Raven Darkholme]

57 minutes ago, thelee said:

did you have to just repair your blunderbuss alot? at 1% chance i imagine more often than not you're running it almost down to broken? 

I don't ever use it except there, once you are level 16 and can do the grimoire switching spell stealing, you can extend cocoon on vela with SoT (it makes you untargetable to enemy but not "friendly" spells including friendly fire) and ofc you also get bdd.

The problem is my route to 16 was bad so I only hit 16 in Ashen maw and with way too much traveling.

Ideally I need to hit 16 in Neketaka or with enough time to just go to Neketaka, because the skeleton priests in Sacred Stair have both BDD and SoT.

Edited June 29, 2022 by Raven Darkholme

[cohlin]

Is it possible to reach level 20 or 19 without a single fight in ultimate?

[Raven Darkholme]

47 minutes ago, cohlin said:

Is it possible to reach level 20 or 19 without a single fight in ultimate?

19 is definitely possible @Waski did it in his Assassin run, I wouldn't be surprised if 20 is possible too.

[Boeroer]

Do you count ship fights (not boarding) as fights, too?

[cohlin]

On 7/1/2022 at 1:50 AM, Boeroer said:

Do you count ship fights (not boarding) as fights, too?

Great idea !

[Boeroer]

They are rel. risk-free at a certain point (even at lower levels bc. only the sailor/crew experience matters and not the character level), especially if you invested in some equipment and crew. Won ship fights will give you a lot of XP and loot.

[Raven Darkholme]

2 hours ago, Boeroer said:

They are rel. risk-free at a certain point (even at lower levels bc. only the sailor/crew experience matters and not the character level), especially if you invested in some equipment and crew. Won ship fights will give you a lot of XP and loot.

Keep in mind ship fights are a lot harder with one of the god challenges and you only get char xp from bounty ship fights, regular fights will only award crew xp.

[Boeroer]

Yes, but with Ondra's Challenge they only get +1 to rank (meh) and might sail faster (don't care). The rest stays the same. You don't need to decide quickly, cannons don't degrade as weapons do and so on.

Monstercheese tactics aside: If I had to decide between a "real" fight with all the additional god challenges or a ship bounty fight in order to progress I would nearly always pick the ship fight (when properly prepared).

Of course if you can avoid fights altogether and still progress: even better.  

[thelee]

On 7/4/2022 at 5:45 AM, Boeroer said:

Yes, but with Ondra's Challenge they only get +1 to rank (meh) and might sail faster (don't care). The rest stays the same. You don't need to decide quickly, cannons don't degrade as weapons do and so on.

Monstercheese tactics aside: If I had to decide between a "real" fight with all the additional god challenges or a ship bounty fight in order to progress I would nearly always pick the ship fight (when properly prepared).

Of course if you can avoid fights altogether and still progress: even better.  

i actually think wael's challenge is much more deadly aspect--in conjunction with ondra's--since you have almost no indication of how things are going. you only have vague clues about the *other* ship, based on the art you see and how large it is. for that reason i only did as many ship bounties as necessary to get to the level i needed to get to and no more, it's way too much of a risk IMO, you just need a bit of mysterious bad luck and you die.

[StillwaterNA]

Is there any way or class combo where you don’t absolutely have to cheese it to death? For example manipulating things by doing tricks like the blight on fire dragon, or just strand of fervor spamming? 

[Kaylon]

7 hours ago, StillwaterNA said:

Is there any way or class combo where you don’t absolutely have to cheese it to death? For example manipulating things by doing tricks like the blight on fire dragon, or just strand of fervor spamming? 

The most limiting challenges in the ultimate are keeping Vela alive and having to repair your equipment. Basically all classes relying on shield/armor to survive are excluded. You're left with two possibilities: be invincible (BDD or being able to out heal the damage taken) or don't get hit (or very little). Being invincible always require some sort of cheese/exploit... Not being hit involves CCs, pets and invisibility. 

The monk can spam WotW and stay invisible as long as there are at least two enemies alive while vs single enemies he can use his summons to do the tanking for him. The bloodmage also has access to invisibility, summons, CCs, heavy damage and unlimited resources.

The chanter has access to unlimited pets and paired with a bloodmage is another great choice.

There's also the tactician/invisibility interaction which triggers brilliant inspiration opening some powerful combos - wizard/tactician, priest of skaen/tactician and assassin/tactician.

These are probably the main combos able to solo the encounters without heavy cheese/exploits. In theory all of them can keep Vela alive using Withdraw/BDD or by using different strategies to keep her away from the battle.

[thelee]

10 hours ago, Kaylon said:

In theory all of them can keep Vela alive using Withdraw/BDD or by using different strategies to keep her away from the battle.

early on i thought builds w/out access to withdraw (and by extension, BDD) were effectively impossible b.c. of vela's fragility. it's made the successful runs without a priest all the more impressive. even with cheese, the ultimate is a massive test of patience and consistency and withdraw/BDD at least is a bit forgiving[1], so the fact that a few ppl have been basically able to tightrope without a net underneath them is all the more impressive. on paper, strand of favor/brilliant/etc exploit might seem trivial, but it really isn't

 

[1] in my actual run, iirc i had two almost disasters, despite tons of practice. the ability to drop a withdraw on vela and yourself (and/or invisibility) can be quite literally the life saver.

[Shai Hulud]

On 8/1/2022 at 1:51 PM, thelee said:

early on i thought builds w/out access to withdraw (and by extension, BDD) were effectively impossible b.c. of vela's fragility. it's made the successful runs without a priest all the more impressive. even with cheese, the ultimate is a massive test of patience and consistency and withdraw/BDD at least is a bit forgiving[1], so the fact that a few ppl have been basically able to tightrope without a net underneath them is all the more impressive. on paper, strand of favor/brilliant/etc exploit might seem trivial, but it really isn't

 

[1] in my actual run, iirc i had two almost disasters, despite tons of practice. the ability to drop a withdraw on vela and yourself (and/or invisibility) can be quite literally the life saver.

I've tested the hard parts of the game (all dlc content, all bosses and megabosses) with a naked transcendent without ever using withdraw or any cheese strategies. It is possible. Will require a ton of stealth until like level 16 probably, but should be doable. Have tested couple other builds that can handle the combat aspects but have no good way to control Vela besides fire blight or ray of fire scrolls with whale of a wand, which is kind of sketch given I'm not sure how many you'd need throughout the game and they can come pretty close to killing her. Casting psychovampiric shield over and over is a lot safer.

Anyway, I am tempted to do another ultimate run "legitimately" but I am kind of very annoyed that Obsidian still has not even responded to my ultimate submission from four months ago, which I submitted twice just in case they didn't see it the first time.

Does anyone still care about ultimate runs? 

I actually think I can do it with deadly deadfire hardcore on as well, though that's a mod and therefore not technically an ultimate run so IDK. Conflicted about starting another. Was stressful enough with infinite withdraw casts...

EDIT: Forgot transcendent needs community patch. Bleh. Well I have at least one other build that I'm pretty sure would work, though I haven't tested the battles as thoroughly. I've been using BPM a lot was originally planning to do it with that.

Can definitely do it with several blood mage, skaen, and tactician combos but these are all arguably exploit heavy, Tacticians less than combos with outright immortality. Can possibly do hierophant without cheese (aside from wall of draining prolonging standard buffs). Very probably loremaster. 

Psion / troubadour is a maybe, the one battle I havent figured out is dorudugan, despite quite a few attempts.

Herald seems promising but havent tested enough.

Pretty sure I can do FF / paladin but it is boring as hell and FF / SG healing doesn't even work with FF so I guess FF / gold pact is most promising. 

Inquisitor is interesting but havent tested much.

 

 

Edited April 23, 2023 by Shai Hulud

[thelee]

On 4/22/2023 at 7:37 AM, Shai Hulud said:

Anyway, I am tempted to do another ultimate run "legitimately" but I am kind of very annoyed that Obsidian still has not even responded to my ultimate submission from four months ago, which I submitted twice just in case they didn't see it the first time.

Does anyone still care about ultimate runs? 

they are pretty slow, especially now that all plaque slots are gone and now it's just patches. be sure to re-email them periodically. back when i was getting verified, i had to periodically email them even though at that point they were pretty responsive. i think it's just mostly just the ordeal of them having to watch hours of not-terribly exciting content (the person who verified my run mentioned they ended up watching it while on a plane?)

[Shai Hulud]

13 hours ago, thelee said:

they are pretty slow, especially now that all plaque slots are gone and now it's just patches. be sure to re-email them periodically. back when i was getting verified, i had to periodically email them even though at that point they were pretty responsive. i think it's just mostly just the ordeal of them having to watch hours of not-terribly exciting content (the person who verified my run mentioned they ended up watching it while on a plane?)

They originally were going to veryify the first 50 iirc, and I'm like number 15 (maybe lower if there's people not listed on wiki) or so. What is there to verify by even watching them? Can't the game files tell if you used the console or whatever? But yeah my run was pretty long, I'm slow at doing the quests and super careful when stealthing around things. Also quite a few mundane fights where I'm just trying to steal spells with minor grimoire imprint. Overall 70ish hours long, but there have been much longer submissions.