The Ultimate discussion thread Pt 2

[Raven Darkholme]

Wow another finisher, congratz @Armaxy!

On 1/11/2020 at 7:58 PM, Boeroer said:

Afaik Josh said using bugs is fair game. But it's their call after all so maybe you should ask him on Twitter before investing all that time.

I just wanted to clarify that at least what josh posted on my stream was purely related to having to reload a game because of bugs.

He might have meant that bugs were fair game in general but he didn't specifically say that.

Maybe he said it elsewhere tho.

[Armaxy]

21 hours ago, Waski said:

Why didn't you use the other enchantment on staff(+15% dmg on everything)? And since you had deltro why no mantle of 7 bolts? You can use it basically everywhere except Hauani and Neri maybe.

Coz that enchantment gives me temporary buff +15% weapon dmg, which will be suppressed by other temporary buff +20% from Minor Avatar. Am I rigth?

I didnt know about 7 bolts mantle, my bad. Thx for the tip, man It could be more insanity in my run, where I go via multiple separate fights (all DLCs and Nemnok at least).

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, Armaxy said:

Coz that enchantment gives me temporary buff +15% weapon dmg, which will be suppressed by other temporary buff +20% from Minor Avatar. Am I rigth?

I guess Elemental Induction and Soul Storm will stack with Moinor Avatar because one is from a weapon and non-active (not manually activated) which usually stacks with everything. But I never tested.

[Waski]

1 hour ago, Armaxy said:

Coz that enchantment gives me temporary buff +15% weapon dmg, which will be suppressed by other temporary buff +20% from Minor Avatar. Am I rigth?

I didnt know about 7 bolts mantle, my bad. Thx for the tip, man It could be more insanity in my run, where I go via multiple separate fights (all DLCs and Nemnok at least).

It won't be suppressed ( rule of thumb is that buffs orginated from items that are turn on automatically are treated as passive edit.  "claim"  from necklace is suppresed btw) 

Edited February 1, 2020 by Waski

[Boeroer]

14 minutes ago, Waski said:

It won't be suppressed ( rule of thumb is that buffs orginated from items that are turn on automatically are treated as passive edit.  "claim"  from necklace is suppresed btw) 

But good to get confirmed.

Edited February 1, 2020 by Boeroer

[Tenray]

Hello boys and girls!

I was working on a run as single class monk but I did quit at some point. Main reason however was that I was really exhausted after the first two ultimate playthroughs and that I have to work a lot atm, so I don't think I will try again any near in the future.

 

The mega bosses are actually the "easiest" part or let's say the ones that give less of a headache. You will encounter the real problems when facing too many mobs at once. That is and will always be the problem. The Biggest headache for me personally are all of the arena fights in SSS, it is an absolute pain and so random ... It's just too random, too time consuming, playing around 5 hours every time you die in these god-damn arena fights; don't forget about Vela.

Yes, there is a nice trick, that I have showcased/explained how to get rid of Vela for the arena fights, but it's still hard to pull off as a single class monk.

 

Second and third big headache is Oracle of Wael and Guardian of Ukaizo. The fight with Oracle of Wael is also quite random and beating the Ultimate I personally want consistency. Don't get me wrong I actually did beat every encounter but it was so too random sometimes ... Guardian of Ukaizo is actually really hard to beat aswell upscaled with 4x megaboss buff. It is not the toughest encounter but you can easily die there if you are not careful.

 

Theoratically I would say it is possible to do it was a monk, practically ... I just think it is not worth throwing away your time if you could just do it with any priest + x class. SC monk will need endless amount of tries, I suppose. Main reason why I think monk struggles the most is simply Vela. Even if you have unlimited amount of Withdraw scrolls, 99% of the time I simply died in my runs due to the recovery time between casting Withdraw and being able to spamm WotW again.

 

However, I am still willing to try again, but I need new input, new tricks, new ideas for monk. With the knowledge I currently have atm about monk I will probably not try it again.

[thelee]

On 1/31/2020 at 6:36 AM, Madscientist said:

blood mage: you can get spells back at the cost of HP. Just to be sure: This does only restore mage spells, not priest spells?

tactician: It is beyond my understanding how players can manage that all enemies are flanked, and you are not flanked even in normal gameplay. (not solo, no god challenges). It is even more unbelieveble how your target can also be the target of another friendly char when you play solo. But brilliant inspiration is great for sure.

No idea whats so great about hellwalker. Your might is higher but you take much more damage.

blood mage - only restores mage spells. you need shroud of phantasm and self-damage (wall of flame is popular) to trigger brilliant, which you can extend perpetually with Salvation of Time.

tactician - if you're invisible or withdrawn (and vela is out of combat or also withdrawn) you de-aggro the entire enemy party, but Berath's keeps you in combat. This puts you in a game mechanics loophole where you trigger tactician brilliant. You can buff perpetually with Salvation of Time. But you still need shroud of phantasm because there is one fight you can't actually de-aggro (Water Dragon). However, against bosses, mule kick plus perception resistance/immunity is a great way to have brilliant up perpetually regardless. (edit - the actual mechanics of tactician brilliant are more complicated then that. there's a distance check, for example, so it's possible to be too far away to trigger brilliant. some enemy AI--mostly in SSS--will still try to snoop around for you even when invisible and sometimes even when withdrawn!)

helwalker - taking damage is irrelevant for most of the game because barring death's door obviates the need to worry about it. most of my ultimate run I was at 1 health.

Edited February 3, 2020 by thelee

[Madscientist]

Thanks

a few more questions:

- Monk is good because fists do not degenerate, they are fast and they scale with power level so they can be better than mystic. But they do not have barring deaths door (BDD) and salvation of time (SOT) and according to the wiki there are no scrolls for these spells.

- Monks and blood mages get back resouces when taking damage. Does this also work when BDD (or mayby other stuff?) prevents you from being damaged?

- BDD has a base duration of 8sec, SOT has a base duration of 10 sec, withdraw has a base duration of 20sec, you can use empower and duration goes up with int and some items and you have to look at recovery time and you cannot pause and there are much more things to consider. Just looking at this is enough to prevent me from trying. Looks like you have to defeat enemies really fast and bosses have lots of HP and high defenses. Do you have things that help you with timing? I as a normal player (compared to experts like you) have to pause often just to look what buffs/debuffs I have and how long they last.

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, Madscientist said:

- Monk is good because fists do not degenerate, they are fast and they scale with power level so they can be better than mystic. But they do not have barring deaths door (BDD) and salvation of time (SOT) and according to the wiki there are no scrolls for these spells.

Right. Also because they regain resources easily (wounds) and have Whispers of the Wind and Resonant Touch which are very powerful damage tools and especially Whispers of the Wind (which makes you invisible and can synergize with the Stalking Cloak which stuns enemies from invisibility) is extremely helpful.

1 hour ago, Madscientist said:

- Monks and blood mages get back resouces when taking damage. Does this also work when BDD (or mayby other stuff?) prevents you from being damaged?

Still works. BDD doesn't prevent you from being damaged (attack resolution still applies and normal damage still gets rolled). It prevents you from dying by not letting you drop below 1 HP after getting damaged. Mechanically that's a difference.

1 hour ago, Madscientist said:

- BDD has a base duration of 8sec, SOT has a base duration of 10 sec, withdraw has a base duration of 20sec, you can use empower and duration goes up with int and some items and you have to look at recovery time and you cannot pause and there are much more things to consider. Just looking at this is enough to prevent me from trying. Looks like you have to defeat enemies really fast and bosses have lots of HP and high defenses. Do you have things that help you with timing? I as a normal player (compared to experts like you) have to pause often just to look what buffs/debuffs I have and how long they last.

You will use the Brilliant inspiration first. This will ensure that you will regain spell uses every few seconds. The interval of regaining spell uses is shorter than the duration of Salvation of Time. 

Thus you will cast Salvation of Time (once all buffs are up) and you will prolong every benefical effect for 10 seconds, including Brilliant. You keep on casting SoT over and over again until you feel you have enough duration - you can do that for hours and end with hours of duration.

[Madscientist]

Thanks

How can you get brilliant?

You still need lots of planning with the timing so you have all buffs the moment SoT hits you.

[Waski]

1 hour ago, Madscientist said:

How can you get brilliant?

Either cloak or wit of death herald. There is no issue with timing buffs, after getting brilliant you go BDD-few SoT-buff-again few SoT-buff- etc .

There are 4 runs on YouTube(links here in thread),  check them to get the idea.

[Madscientist]

Thanks, now I get it.

So under normal conditions (no god challenges, no mega bosses) every priest can become immortal once he gets lv6 spells and a way to trigger brilliant. So you get brilliant, cast BDD and then you recast SOT all the time and add whatever buffs you want. You just need to attack between casting SOT and do more damage than the enemy regenerates. Well, enemies that cause interrupt, dispell or debuffs that prevent you from casting could still kill you, plus maybe some other things I guess.

I watched a video a bit, but a) you try to avoid combat as much as possible so it was hard to find a scene with combat and b) you play so fast that a noob like me has problems to see whats going on.

Anyway, you can learn a lot of things when you look how the experts face the biggest challenges.

[thelee]

45 minutes ago, Madscientist said:

Thanks, now I get it.

So under normal conditions (no god challenges, no mega bosses) every priest can become immortal once he gets lv6 spells and a way to trigger brilliant. So you get brilliant, cast BDD and then you recast SOT all the time and add whatever buffs you want. You just need to attack between casting SOT and do more damage than the enemy regenerates. Well, enemies that cause interrupt, dispell or debuffs that prevent you from casting could still kill you, plus maybe some other things I guess.

I watched a video a bit, but a) you try to avoid combat as much as possible so it was hard to find a scene with combat and b) you play so fast that a noob like me has problems to see whats going on.

Anyway, you can learn a lot of things when you look how the experts face the biggest challenges.

ironically, berath's challenge makes it even easier to become immortal, because you can de-aggro enemies but still stay in combat, which is valuable for tactician, but also valuable for Shroud of the Phantasm since you can still whack yourself with a fire wall or summons to trigger brilliant (1% chance on being hit on the cloak).

In my experience, you want to avoid combat because:

1. combat (mostly buffing) can take a really long time. Probably most of the time passed in my run was just buffing. Pre-buffing for one of hte megaboss fights, for example, easily took half a day. When you have Eothas's challenge on limiting the # of days you have, you don't want to waste time if you don't have to. I ended with probably ~10 days left, but I needed a cushion of a few days in case something didn't work out. A few unnecessary fights and that really starts eating into your window.
2. combat is the main place you can fail. It is possible to make mistakes. For example all you need is for Vela to become un-withdrawn while you're in the middle of recovery or something and BLAM end of run. because combat is the main place you can fail, why expose yourself to fights if you don't need to?

the interrupt thing is not a big deal - if it is messing up your run, all you need is rekvu's helm (easily bought in Delver's Row) and an injury. Tons of ways to get an injury easily. Outside of combat if you self-target a spell and knock yourself out, that doesn't count as gameover, you just stand back up with an injury (what I did in my run to collect an injury).

[n00biwan]

reviving this thread with my first post here.

Finished recording my ultimate run, I just copied tenray's zealot run (woedica priest/streetfighter rogue) with some very very minor adjustments here and there. I even encountered the same bug that made me alt f4 and waste 2 days in game time at the SSS bridge repair interaction. 

Heres hoping obsidian approves it

 

Shoutout to Victor Creed & jaggedjimmayjay82 for helping me figure the dragul sss fight, and ofcourse tenray since i basically copied his strat!

Edited May 14, 2020 by n00biwan

[thelee]

Congrats!

1 hour ago, n00biwan said:

I even encountered the same bug that made me alt f4 and waste 2 days in game time at the SSS bridge repair interaction. 

Heres hoping obsidian approves it

They really should - it's their fault (bug) not yours. Here's hoping it gets approved.

[Raven Darkholme]

Grats man, glad you made it.

[n00biwan]

Question regarding the trip to ukaizo

Some background: I've been trying to get a speed run of the ultimate, and i've done a test run of a single class skaen so far where i go to ashen maw at level 11.5, skipping the tomb in neketakka and most of the fetch quests, doing justdereo (since i need to come back later for the grub anyways) and arkemyr, then its a quick trip to deck of many things, plus a respec to sneak for the 1% cloak). I've finished every single objective except for the guardian at the end with ~ 10 hrs of playtime (9hrs actual since i died and reloaded a few times)

However I cannot survive the journey to okaizo, what can I actually do without getting floating hangman and still complete this run? Is a single class priest pointless to play since I have to sail to fort deadlight /dunange for blade cascade anyways, so i might as well play a multiclass and just fight at lvl 16?

Edit: some fun little things i found, since the run is entirely based off wits of herald after the first fight in ashen maw, and a single class priest has so much free ability points, i ended up taking all the empower buffs and killing pretty much every single non fire resistant enemy encounter just spamming empowered holy flame, the fights were ending so fast it was a bit insane. For encounters like the BoW undead dragon, i actually used effigys husk and holy flame spam, and he died before the armor broke twice.

Edited May 22, 2020 by n00biwan

[thelee]

On 5/21/2020 at 10:22 PM, n00biwan said:

However I cannot survive the journey to okaizo, what can I actually do without getting floating hangman and still complete this run? Is a single class priest pointless to play since I have to sail to fort deadlight /dunange for blade cascade anyways, so i might as well play a multiclass and just fight at lvl 16?

unfortunately i think you either have to juice up with a faction to get their special ukaizo-trip-survival-thing, or you have to get the special hull and sails, which used to be just an items you could buy, but now is a mini-quest in and of itself to find the different components.

[Elric Galad]

Where is the current Hall of Fame ?

[Waski]

3 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

Where is the current Hall of Fame ?

100 Spectrum Center Dr Irvine, California??

[n00biwan]

3 minutes ago, Waski said:

100 Spectrum Center Dr Irvine, California??

I'll give you guys the exact reply I got from obsidian when I submitted the run.

"I just wanted to let you know it may take us a bit of time to review all of the footage as we have a couple others we are going through right now as well, but rest assured we will get to it and let you know when that process has been completed"

So, I'm guessing a lot of people , like me, had tons of extra time during the quarantine period and did this challenge, so I'm not even sure if I'll make it on to the honor roll, maybe just a badge  

So expect frequent updates on the newer hall of fame in the coming days

 

Edited May 26, 2020 by n00biwan

[cohlin]

is there any possibility that monk/skaen priest works? as monk doesnt really require weapons

[Raven Darkholme]

7 hours ago, cohlin said:

is there any possibility that monk/skaen priest works? as monk doesnt really require weapons

Priest + anything works perfectly.

Monk is one of the better options to dual it with.

[thelee]

19 hours ago, cohlin said:

is there any possibility that monk/skaen priest works? as monk doesnt really require weapons

you could do it but i'm not sure what a multiclass monk gets you over most other multiclass options. for example, in my tactician/skaen build, i picked up monastic unarmed training anyway. For multiclassing, that's very close to identical to a multiclass monk's fists. i think the real wins come from single-classing monk and getting really powerful fists and also whispers of the wind (but i'm not a monk expert).

 

if you're just interested in doing something different, though, go for it, like Raven Darkholme says priest is the most important part of the "standard" ultimate meta and everything else can be fudged. (unless you're super hardcore like the one guy who did it as a single class wizard)

Edited June 13, 2020 by thelee

[cohlin]

20 hours ago, Raven Darkholme said:

Priest + anything works perfectly.

Monk is one of the better options to dual it with.

Thanks :3

 

8 hours ago, thelee said:

you could do it but i'm not sure what a multiclass monk gets you over most other multiclass options. for example, in my tactician/skaen build, i picked up monastic unarmed training anyway. For multiclassing, that's very close to identical to a multiclass monk's fists. i think the real wins come from single-classing monk and getting really powerful fists and also whispers of the wind (but i'm not a monk expert).

 

if you're just interested in doing something different, though, go for it, like Raven Darkholme says priest is the most important part of the "standard" ultimate meta and everything else can be fudged. (unless you're super hardcore like the one guy who did it as a single class wizard)

Thanks, was just wanted to do something new. So there are already tactician/skaen, bm/skaen, SC wizard, SC monk that has already completed the ultimate challenge right?