Tales of the Watcher: A Pillars of Eternity I + II No Reload Thread

[Enuhal]

Atara XIV - Thaos himself

Before facing the final battle, we rest with the accuracy bonus versus vessels and eat all types of food for additional attribute bonuses.

Once combat starts, we open with potions of power/alacrity of motion, call in figurines to tank both vessels and thaos until we can get into position, follow up with war paint, prayer against bewilderment - Edér moves to tank Thaos, who has started with Shields of the Faithful and follows up with Interdiction. Meanwhile, Hiravias goes for Relentless Storm and we use Scrolls of Protection/Defense. Thaos' Cleansing Flame only hits our Rain Blight, he follows up with another Shields of the Faithful for some reason:

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Atara activates Dominion of the Sleepers, Durance prays against treachery, Aloth buffs with Eldritch Aim and Merciless Gaze, and while Durance gets our accuracy buffs going, Atara uses "Steps to the Wheel" on both vessels, getting a good paralyzation effect going:

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Aloth casts Explose Vulnerabilties on the vessels, and while Thaos kills our Rain Blight with a Pillar of Holy Fire, Edér summons an Delemgan with another figurine instead. Aloth's follow up is a Freezing Pillar, Pallegina goes into melee combat with a ton of buffs/potions now active, Durance activates his Radiance, and Atara applies Recall Agony on the Headsman as the Judge is already quite hurt. Hiravias spiritshifts - his Returning Storm is a huge boon as it sometimes even randomly stuns Thaos himself:

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With both Pallegina and Hiravias now going for direct melee attacks, the Judge falls very quickly:

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And the Headsman soon follows:

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Hiravias is just a monstrous damage dealer with war paint and alacrity of motion + priest buffs. Aloth calls in Minor Blights and we attack Thaos, hitting him with Recall Agony and Wrath of the Five Suns, some of our best ways to increase single target damage. Atara, Hiravas and Pallegina deal tons of damage - Thaos only survives for a few seconds:

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Good job everyone! The battle wasn't very close, but we were very well prepared this time around.

No surprise: Hiravias leads in the damage race. A spiritshift/storm druid is hard to beat, and so far I've only done it with lategame rangers. The knockout count is 3 on Durance and Aloth - considering that Edér isn't up there at all, I think we can definitely conclude that he can be a suitable tank.

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Over all, the official companions did quite well. You can't go wrong with all three types of vancian spellcasters in the party - while I definitely felt Durance's weak dexterity at times, he still does the job. Pallegina did great for single target damage with her Wrath and FoD, especially in the midgame. I am finishing up the run here for now, as I only ever planned to do PoE1 this time around, but I do have a little experiment planned for PoE2, so I will continue posting in the thread for a while.

 

[Antimatter]

Congratulations, as always!

Your party resembles my own favourite party, it was just that I used Kana for damage instead of Hiravias. I agree wholeheartedly the official companions can do quite well. It's more a question of metaknowledge, using the right items and spells.

An off-topic (kinda) question: would you be interested in playing Avowed when it releases and would you be recreating some of your characters in that game?

 

[Enuhal]

I am not 100% sure I'm going to play Avowed, but I'm open to it, though I haven't been following it very closely at all so far. I rarely re-create characters from previous runs / other RPGs (unless it's a direct story continuation), because their background would rarely make sense in a different story (and the characters here are relatively closely identified with being the Watcher of Caed Nua and Captain of the Defiant) - as far as I am aware the genre and combat systems will be entirely different, so even similiar builds seem unlikely. There are some classes/subclasses that I like a lot from a worldbuilding perspective, so if those are available and seem interesting in Avowed as well, I might return to them, but propably in a very different way.

Kana would have been a very viable choice in this party, though most likely in place of Pallegina, not Hiravias - this would have resulted in less single target damage, but more AoE power with the "Dragon Thrashed" chant, though after playing so much Deadfire recently, the fact that they start combat with zero phrases in PoE1 does make chanters feel a little slow in comparison.

 

[Enuhal]

Introducing Trisk - An Oracle (Psion/Ancient) experimenting with Deadfire Act I

The sole point of this run is to try and complete Act I of Deadfire ob PotD without using any hired companions, so only with the Watcher, Xoti and Edér (and Aloth after the digsite battle) - basically, almost half of the party slots are empty for what are some of the most challenging battles in the game. I've done everything else in Deadfire without hired help, but such a small party seems not very well equipped to deal with some of these dangerous fights. However, it's certainly possible, but might need a few attempts. Now, of course, there is an easy way to get through Act I without hiring anyone or even adding any official companions to the party - that would be by using stealth, which is actually not all that difficult except for maybe one group inside the dungeon itself. This would be the easiest way to go about that, but my ambition is to fight the battles at the digsite and the arena sub-level instead. I'm still going to not fight at Gorecci street - that seemed lethal even with a full party, and since there clearly is an official peaceful option, I see no reason not to take that one.

So, my primary tools to win the digsite battles have been cipher and druid spells, most notably Whisper of Treason and Charm Beasts. We can get both by making our Watcher an Oracle, which is the Cipher/Druid multiclass. For the druid part we pick the ancient subclass, which provides us a) with a higher power level for our charm beasts and b) with the sporeling summon, which is quite tanky at those early levels. For our cipher multiclass there's a clear strong choice in Psion, because we're going to be busy casting spells from both of our classes, so we won't have time to attack to gather focus, so we need the Psion's passive focus generation. Psion seems like an awesome multiclass for any spellcaster (especially any type of chanter - you could fill the resource-starved downtimes of each class with spells from the other one).
So, we go for the benevolent soul background, pick a pale elf for the fire resistance against the breath weapon of the digsite drake, start with Whisper of Treason, Charm Beast and Spiritshift: Cat and put Dex/Per/Int at 16, the other attributes at 10. Our Background is Deadfire Archipelago/Slave, our proficiencies go to Overdraw and Bewildering Blows.

We summon sporelings to help out with the pirate ship attack, save the crate and pick up Edér as a Swashbuckler (Fighter/Rogue) - the reason being that, with only 3 party members, everyone needs to contribute to DPS as well, and we want as wide a range of possible ablities as we can get. So, after immediately moving to Port Maje without doing anything else, we take on Xoti as a Contemplative (Priest/Monk) for the same reason - a bigger toolbox, and a better contribution to party damage.

Now we do the non-violent quests in Port Maje, which gets us to levels 2 and 3:

Trisk: Lingering Echoes, Fast Runner
Edér: Disciplined Barrage, Escape
Xoti: Lesser Wounds, Force of Anguish

We move back to the Sea Cave. Not too difficult with the help of our sporelings and a few Whispers of Treason plus Xoti's incredible Blessed Harvest spell, which works especially well with her monk subclass. As we explore the island, since we're experimenting anyway, I decide to actually fight during the druid encounter to the north instead of peacefully obtaining his necklace - we call in Sporelings, keep 1-2 of the boars charmed and keep Edér healed up:

Spoiler

Our damage comes from the charmed creatures, Swift Strikes, Barrage + Crippling Strike etc. The battle ended up being a success, and I learned that the psion focus generation is really strong, at least in the early game (I am not sure how well it will scale later on). However, it wasn't really a worthwhile decision - minor beastiary XP for the boars, but the exploration XP for entering the digsite area would have gotten us to level 4 anyway. We still get the necklace, but the additional items aren't worth mentioning. We scatter the xaurip ambush via our cipher powers during the scripted interaction, rest with Captain's Banquets, get the Dawnstar Blessing, buy some brigadines (and all the other useful items we can afford) for our party and enter the digsite. Here are our level 4 abilty choices:

Trisk: Amplified Thrust, Insect Swarm, Aimed Shot
Edér: Fighter Stances, Weapon and Shield Style, Parrying Blade
Xoti: Dance of Death, Weapon and Shield Style, Destructive Channeling

Next time, we will attempt the first battle at the digsite.

 

[Enuhal]

Trisk vs the first Digsite Battle - An Oracle (Psion/Ancient) experimenting with Deadfire Act I

I am not super confident when entering the digsite with just 3 characters - in fact, I am quite sure that my previous tactics will not work with this setup, so I'm going around, looking for different aproaches, an I do find something interesting: Climbing down the ladder further north, which seems to allow for a very tight chokepoint in comparison to the main stairway. Only one enemy should be able to get to us there at any point. It is, however, not too easy to actually pull enemies to that position - they tend to get stuck on the way and reset - but after a couple of tries we get them to follow us. The psion focus generation turns out to be great here, and we can immediately charm both a boar and a wurm while only Edér is able to be attacked. Luckily, the other enemy wurms attack our charmed boar:

Spoiler

This gives us enough time to call in our sporelings, which we send towards the wurms so they don't attack us at range. Xoti activates Dance with Death to gather accuracy and wounds while attacking with her scepter at range while Trisk keeps chaming boars whenever she can, which is quite often. Xoti has to heal up Edér once with Radiance, once he does it himself with second wind, and he does get some damage in with Disciplined Barrage and Crippling Strike. Xoti uses Blessed Harvest to get rid of the final boar:

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Now, we just have to help out our surviving sporeling with the wurms, which is easy enough:

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That went surprisingly well. This position is definitely superior to the one I previously used. Positioning is so important in both PoE games, it's really one of the main factors in making or breaking a battle. However, this was the easy part. The drake battle is going to be a lot more difficult.

 

[Enuhal]

Trisk vs the second Digsite Battle - An Oracle (Psion/Ancient) experimenting with Deadfire Act I

Now for the big one. I decided to try and use the explosive gunpowder barrel at the south of the arena for this battle - sneaking downstairs, waiting until a few enemies moved closer to the barrel (they patrol around a bit) and shooting at it with Orima's arquebus from stealth - I was able to get a good timing here, and there might have been a little luck involved: 2 enemies die immediately due to the explosion, many more are wounded, and Edér, activating parrying blade and block, unstealthes to get the enemies' attention:

Spoiler

Since we're not using a chokepoint for this one (the price we pay for being able to open up with the barrel, though I guess both could be combined, especially when using a rogue with escape to explode it), timing is now crucial - Edér is about to get swarmed and will die in seconds, so we need to be on point with our Charm Beast spell - we empower it for goot measure. 3 Grazes, 4 Hits. Awesome. All but the drake are charmed:

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The beasts, with our help, deal enough damage to the already wounded drake to take it down outright, just before the beasts that only got grazed break free:

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We make sure to move Xoti and Trisk away and Trisk starts casting multiple Whispers of Treason to get un-charmed beasts back on our side - while Xoti heals up herself and Edér with Restore:

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Inbetween whispers, Trisk calls in her sporelings as well to aid Edér in tanking:

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The sporelings also help us in flanking the remaining enemies as their numbers start to dwindle - we keep up our Whispers of Treason with the psion focus generation giving us a constant advantage in combat:

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Surprisingly, we still have some abilities left as the final opponent is dealt with:

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I do think that we got a bit lucky there - the explosive barrel and the initial Charm Beast were both basically perfect, and I don't think I would be able to reliably reproduce the execution of our strategy here - still, this shows that it can be done, and I'm very happy with the results.

Aloth joins us as a single class wizard and gets trained in Chill Fog, Eldritch Aim, Merciless Gaze and Parasitic Staff.

The party, now with four people, quickly clears out the adra pool and foreman's quarters - even with an incomplete group these areas are easy enough that I don't think a detailed writeup is of any value. The same will not be true for the Ancient Training Hall, where we will move next.

 

[Enuhal]

Trisk vs the Ancient Training Hall - An Oracle (Psion/Ancient) experimenting with Deadfire Act I

I didn't expect this to be the place where things would go seriously wrong, but here we go. We enter from the western entrance, disarm some traps, lure a group of skeletons towards us - and immediately, the skeletal sorcerer casts fireball on Trisk, rolls a crit and deals 69 damage, which is just enough for a oneshot kill against Trisk, who only has 66 maximum health. This is where the downside of being an ancient, extra damage taken from vessels, really hurts us:

Spoiler

The only thing Trisk had managed to do before that devastating crit was to charm one of the skeletal archers, though that was a valuable contribution nonetheless. Still, we're down to only 3 party members, with arguably the most powerful now gone. We're not taking huge damage from the get go as some enemies are focused on their charmed ally, and Aloth lands a decent chill fog. He activates Merciless Gaze, trying to spam Fan of Flames (he starts with 3 of these scrolls in his inventory) as we're severely lacking in damage, having often relied on charmed enemies beforehand:

Spoiler

Once all the scrolls are out, we've successfully dealt with the skeletal sorcerer, but due to his low overall accuracy, Aloth didn't manage to kill any other skeletons. At least Xoti is able to finish off the archer with an empowered Blessed Harvest:

Spoiler

However, there are still 3 powerful skeletal warriors left, and we're basically out of spells. Without Trisk, none of our class resources regenerate (except for Xoti's wounds, but they don't translate into anything too powerful at this point), and we're lacking sources of damage that go beyond our pitiful auto-attacks. Everything in our quickslots is thrown at the enemy - which is mostly a few cinder bombs. The fight does seems rather hopeless - the enemies deal far more damage to us than we can deal to them, and we're using second winds, healing potions and item-based healing as much as we can. Xoti goes on to use Force of Anguish to allow very wounded party members a safe way to retreat without breaking engagement, so they can drink healing potions, such as Aloth in this screenshot:

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We're able to take out one of those skeleton warriors, mostly due to Aloth's scepter dealing crushing damage, but Xoti herself is soon one hit away from death:

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However, she is able to drink her healing potion just in time and Aloth gets another scepter kill:

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Xoti and Edér flank the final skeleton, and, somehow, despite things looking close to the end multiple times during this battle, we make it out of there with only the one injury on Trisk:

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We're now fairly low on healing potions - I don't think there's ever been a battle where I had to use that many of them in Deadfire before - but we survived, and can now rest with Mariner's Porridge. Our reward is some fine equipment, and the final area of this experiment, the arena sub-level, awaits.

 

[Enuhal]

Trisk vs most of the Arena Sub-Level - An Oracle (Psion/Ancient) experimenting with Deadfire Act I

Once we enter the main dungeon, we first get our hands on the Gladiator Sword before moving west for the first battle. We make sure to find a chokepoint for Edér to tank in, and Aloth activates Merciless Gaze + Chill Fog once the enemies arrive, while Trisk calls in Sporelings to help with the tanking and Insect Swarm to deal some damage. Xoti heals up Edér as best as she can, even removing the deadly Paralyzing Bite via the Ring of Unshackling, though a second bite hits our tank soon after that:

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Aloth calls in his Parasitic Staff and starts dealing good damage, Xoti is able to keep Edér alive through the paralyze effect and once the last spider dies, we only need to chase down the brine imps:

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For the second group, I decide not to use Chill Fog so that Trisk can freely cast Whisper of Treason - the Fog tends to break our charm effects. Trisk Whispers to the spiders, who are by far the most dangerous foes here due to their Paralyzing Bite:

Spoiler

A constant spam of Whisper of Treason on the Wurms helps as well, though the spider does get free just before its death and manages to paralyze Edér. However, at this point we're already in a great position and easily claim victory.

The third big group here involves runed copper constructs and is generally very easy to deal with, so there's not much to comment on here:

Spoiler

Now only the final group of the chapter remains.

 

[Enuhal]

Trisk vs the final battle of Act I - An Oracle (Psion/Ancient) experimenting with Deadfire Act I

The final group involves a few spirits, including a greater anomaly. We place a fireball trap, which does very little damage, but every bit helps. Trisk calls in the sporelings while Xoti Dances with Death and starts attacking while her accuracy increases. Our Watcher also charms the first incoming Essence Anomaly, which is able to flank the Greater Anomaly for us - extremely helpful. What's also really helpful is the fact that Trisk is using an Arquebus as her main weapon, which allows her to ignore the veil-touched status of the spirits:

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Xoti uses Blessed Harvest to take down the Greater Anaomaly, and we charm another one of the spirits:

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These spirits have fairly high will defenses, so our Whispers of Treason are mostly grazes, resutling in low durations (we also get a few full misses, but our insane psion focus generation allows us to go again very quickly). Meanwhile, Xoti actually has the best accuracy in the party after using Dance of Death for a while and wielding a fine hunting bow - not exactly what you would expect a priest/monk to do, but what works, works. Aloth has his Parasitic Staff going, and Xoti heals up the party two times - during that time period, we take out most minor opponents:

Spoiler

Since this battle is quite long, our sporelings' summoning duration are about to run out, so Trisk uses her second first level druid spell to call in two more. Edér has to drink a healing potion and Xoti uses Gaun's Share as we're able to take down the last spirit - only the adra ooze remains:

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We are almost out of abilities now, though Trisk can cast one last insect swarm, and, of course, her cipher powers are essentially infinite. We surround and flank the ooze, getting a good hit with Amplified Thrust:

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Our very last ability is one first level spell for Xoti, so she empowers her Blessed Harvest to take down the now-bloodied ooze:

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I am somewhat intrigued by the multiclass version of Xoti. I think there is a lot of potential for fun synergy between monk and priest for her specifically, as her monk subclass grants her tons of wounds on a kill and blessed harvest is perfect for getting the final hit on a wounded foe.

Well, there we have it - Act I is essentially done - we pick our final few abilities as we reach level 5:

Trisk: Mental Binding
Edér: Dirty Fighting
Xoti: Spiritual Weapon
Aloth: Displaced Image, Minor Blights

On the way to Neketaka, Serafen joins us as a barbarian, picking up: Barbaric Yell, Thick Skinned, Accurate Carnage, Two-Handed Style, Body Blows, One Stands Alone, Bloodlust

We sail to Neketaka without incident. Now we can recruit whatever party we want, and Act I without any adventurers on PotD is done:

Spoiler

I am quite surprised I was able to do this on my first try. I think I did get a bit lucky with the drake battle - the gunpowder barrel turned out to be a bit more effective than I would expect in an average attempt, killing two foes, wounding more, including taking half the health of the drake. The timing was very fortunate. However, I think luring the group to one of the chokepoints, especially the super tight one I used for the first digsite battle, might have yielded good results as well. The psion Whisper spam is just that good (we would maybe have to heal a lot against the drake's breath attack, though).

I am sure more experienced players can do this with any class and, as I mentioned, doing it solo via stealth is even easier - in fact, you can easily stealth-skip this battle even in a group, though you might have to fight at least one or maybe two battles inside the arena sub-level if not enough points are put into stealth, and you won't have Aloth for that, so adventurers would be nice for such a purpose as well.

Still, the Oracle Ancient/Psion seems like a real early game powerhouse from what I've seen. Since I managed to do this without any reloads, I might continue with this party at some point (I think a strong setup would be Pallegina as a Herald, Maia as a Scout, and Xoti + Aloth with their current classes - this would allow me to get some monk experience as well, as I've never had this class in my party for a full Deadfire run). Maybe in case someone else joins the challenge, because it's always more fun to have multiple runs going at once. For now, however, the party will be put on ice, since I really only wanted to test out the whole Act I with only official companions thing.

I do have some more PoE experiments planned; Not really no-reload stuff, but it could contain useful info for future no-reload runs, so I will post about it in this thread soon.

 

[Enuhal]

Triozum's non-canonical return: Seeker, Slayer, Survivor

So, I decided to try out what would have happened if I did try to do the DLC content in Deadfire on PotD during one of my two successful Deadfire runs. While Thayn Goron and his party are much more suited for the style of content that awaits us here, as a lot of these battles can go on for a long time, so regenerating class resources such as chanter phrases or cipher focus are extremely powerful, I can't use him here. Since that run was played on Trial of Iron, I can't load up an earlier save game, which forces me to use the Triozum run, which has zero replenishable class resources and not even any sources for the brilliant inspiration, so this is quite a weak party for tackling these challenges. However, this was a run without level scaling, so, for the first two DLCs, we will somewhat outlevel our opponents (Seeker, Slayer, Survivor is designed around level 16, Beast of Winter around level 14, as far as I know).

Since all of this is non-canonical and not part of no-reload gameplay, there won't be any detailed reports here - just some observations for my first time tackling these DLCs on PotD and how they might look if attempted in a no-reload run. So, I decided to start with Seeker, Slayer, Survivor:

Despite some scripted encounters, I got to the arena without a fight - the dialogue implied that this is because I healed the Green Lady at Motare o Kozi.

Some thoughts on each of the challenges:

Tyrant of Decay: Fairly easy if everyone but a very tanky character stays at range.
Trial of the Naga: Serafen did a ton of work here, jumping around, taking down totems and spamming Driving Roar. Not exactly easy, though.
Maerwald: Fairly easy thanks to Aloth and Serafen - Aloth uses Gaze of the Adragan on the mirror copies and casts two wilting winds, while Serafen jumps upstairs to take on Maerwald himself.
The Bloodletting: The easiest battle so far as it's just a traditional party vs party battle - which is what this group excells at - and we're also at a higher level.

For the follow-up quest on the island we first go the Survivor's path, and while all companions get double injured while getting to the relic, Triozum remains healthy. The other two paths are quite easy.

Here are some short notes on the next battles that I fought:
The Languafeth Brood: The first battle that gave me a some trouble - Triozum needed to use two reviving exhortations here, but still, no reload required.
Tactical Ogres: In comparison, super easy.
The Skeleton Crew: Ths one was pretty challenging and quite close at times - I wouldn't have wanted to do it with level scaling, and it helps if every party member has fairly good defenses as enemies will constantly jump/teleport to weak characters - but we only got one wound in the end.
Secrets of the Ooze: Fairly easy, though Abduction could disrupt someone quite a bit.
Changeling's Dance: Super, super easy.
Razorback Pack: Fairly easy, as long as everyone has at least some defenses or can be protected by a priest with Withdraw or similiar effects.
Brothers of Book and Branch: Fairly easy - I didn't make use of the wards.
Engwithan Fire Titan: Easy.
In Defense of the Written Word: This is kind of a puzzle fight and one that one bested me during my first try, as I simply wasn't able to protect enough of the notes. After some online research I crafted a bunch of scrolls of Withdraw, handed them to every party member and used them whenever I failed to interrupt an attempt at burning the research notes. That gave me the victory (still not super trivial, but so, so much easier) - with that knowledge I think it's completely fine to try in no-reload mode, but without a massive number of Withdraw scrolls I would not recommend it.
Shades of the Seeker: Another one where everyone needs strong defenses - I suffered one injury here.
Trial by Fangs and Fur: Actually a very straightforward battle.
Animancer's Folly: This was very easy for me, though having the Red Hand to double tap constructs helped a lot - with level scaling, this would propably be a lot more difficult.
The Spider's Web: Quite easy over all.
Cult of the Naga Shaman: Not super easy, but an aggressive attack on the totems and shamans does the trick (thanks to Serafen).
Gul Trouble Endurance Trial: Easier compared to the somewhat similiar "Skeleton Crew", though having the ability to double-tap the ancient fampyr clerics helps a lot, so another one that might be a lot more difficult with level scaling. I still got a wound here, but it was entirely my own fault because I payed absolutely no attention to our health.
Trial of the Changeling: A bonus battle to gain the final soulbound level of the Changeling's Mantle (which I had equipped just to unlock this fight). That one looks quite easy at the beginning but after a while it gets to be quite difficult. We suffered 2 wounds here, but didn't need to reload.
Survivor's Contest: Fairly easy
I loaded up the previous save to also try the Slayer's Contest and Seeker's Contest. The Slayer's Contest was even easier, but the Seeker's Contest was the easiest of them all, especially since it was fairly easy to sneak behind the entire enemy group and get into an amazing position.

So, it's actually good to do the Survivoer's Contest so you face one of the weaker groups in the battle royal I guess? Well, for the battle royal:
It seems like we had the right spells and athletics score for the scripted sequence here to take down the Slayer crew without a real fight and then faced the Seeker group, which was easy. The second part, the Giant Grub, wasn't too much of a problem either. During the next quest, I decided to fight the slaying face and had to kill the seeking face as well - no trouble with those two.

The Poroka, the final boss, is actually tough. I did manage to kill it in my first try, but Xoti and Aloth got knocked out, and we were quite close to a reload here - even Triozum, for once, actually took serious damage and really needed to use his defensive abilities, which hasn't happened in ages for this party. Maia and Serafen, who had to equip his blunderbusses as staying in melee combat was simply to dangerous, did some kiting whenever Triozum got knocked down by the Poroka's abilties, and with a little patience that approach granted us the win.

Finally we get to unlock the three remaining optional battles, starting with the Tomb of Vathor Cadhu. That was quite easy, especially since we could start wherever we want, so we started right next to the boss.
Xaurip Chronicles: Quite easy.
Tenebrous Tenacity: This is one of those battles where everyone should have decent defenses. That said, it's easier than similiar ones like skeleton crew or even gul trouble.

So, in the end, we end up with 1 total reload and at least 1 very close call. We gain a bunch of okay to good unique items, mostly for the belt/head/helm slots; The weapons and armor seem like nothing too special to me, especially since you propably already have that part of your equipment sorted out once you get here. The most important thing is actually the possibility (depending on dialogue choices) to get a huge amount of free upgrades to legendary, which are limited in the base game - very nice is you use a lot of different weapon sets.

All in all, not super difficult, but you need to know what you're getting into, especially with the more gimmicky fights like "In Defense of the Written Word" or some of the endurance challenges. If your desire is to only finish the game, there's little point in going here - unless you want to build around a specific item from the arena, this is only worth it if you want to face an extra challenge or if you, for some reason, want to upgrade a ton of items to legendary (which, to be clear, you won't need to finish the game, but if you want to do Forgotten Sanctum or the Megabosses, this might be a good idea, and some of the unique items are useful for those).

Next time, I will write about my experiences with The Beast of Winter.

 

[Enuhal]

Triozum's non-canonical return: The Beast of Winter

After starting this quest, it appears to maybe be worth it to land here just to pick up/buy some of the food and acquire the figurine that allows you to summon 2 greater ice blights, as long as you don't get too close to the shrine in the main building, otherwise you have to fight the Messenger, which can be troublesome.
This dragon battle I did in my first try, though I wouldn't exactly call it easy - this is a level 14 quest, and with level scaling it might've been quite troublesome. Okay, now let's get going with the various quest areas:

Outcrop on High:
There are two battles here - these fights are doable enough at our level, especially the one against the pilgrims was rather easy because of the bridge chokpoints being great for Serafen's Driving Roar. Remember to backtrack and turn in the pilgrim quest right away so you don't have to double back later on.

Rimebound Temple:
This entire area and its sub-areas are quite easy, and the sidequests are easy to do. If you can get through the first part of Beast of Winter (mostly the initial dragon battle), it might also be very much worth going at least this far at the appropriate level because of access to some nice and rare enchant materials plus decent soulbound items. For us, none of them are strong enough to really make much use of.

Rymrgand's Realm:
We start with "The Bridge Ablaze" - the burning soldiers here can deal a lot of damage, resulting in Serafen, and later on, Aloth, getting an injury during our travels. The encounters aren't exactly very hard, but a serious upgrade compared to what we had to face beforehand. Still, not close to needing a reload.

The Endless Queries: Rather easy, no trouble at all here

The Drowned Kingdom: Very easy again; The only thing that can take some time is getting the Twin Eels sword, which seems like a very interesting build-around item and maybe one of the reasons why you would actually want to go here a bit earlier on.

I didn't find the final dragon battle to be as difficult as I expected. I immediately sent 3 different characters to pick up help from the NPCs we had freed during the three previous quests and was able to defeat our foe without taking a wound. Of course, the experience might have been a bit different with level scaling or without using the help of the NPCs, but it's there for a reason. It should be noted that there are ways to entirely avoid this encounter, but they need pretty incredible stats in various conversation skills.

The Beast of Winter and the way to get there are only semi-dangerous - and the Beast is also an optional encounter.

Over all I got through the entire DLC without needing a reload. Doing this at level would be a very different experience, of course, but I don't think a strong party needs to fear this at level 20.

In terms of loot, you mostly get weapons and armor, so if you're interested in building around one of these specific items you might want to visit, otherwise I don't see the much worth in going here, except for the challenge or for the lore, which is interesting enough and compared to Seeker, Slayer, Survivor possibly worth the visit if you enjoy the worldbuilding. The upgraded Finality's Claim might be an interesting item even for endgame parties (though note that it also works on your own party members). I am at least testing it out. Next up: Forgotten Sanctum.

 

[Enuhal]

Triozum's non-canonical return: The Forgotten Sanctum

This is kind of the high level endgame dungeon that the original game was maybe missing, with max level enemies everywhere, throwing around the highest level spells.

I started by going to the Central Stacks/Restricted Section/Quarantined Section. Over all we only took 3 wounds here, which is pretty good. The party healed them with luminous adra potions because we had very strong foodbuffs going, and immunities to either physical or mental afflictions are very much recommended (for this part, I recommend Mental - which I didn't use, as we shall see). One wound was from a few enemy rogues focusing one party member down too much, the second came from a combination of powerful AoE spells hitting us, overwhelming our healing capabilities. It helps to be on point and ready to interrupt certain very powerful high level spells or crowd control the opponents that might cast these big spells - each random nameless spellcaster can potentially unleash something deadly such as a missle storm. The fight against the giant luminescent spore stands out at being quite tough, and everyone takes tons of damage - propably the first time Triozum had to use two Unbedings and two greater Lay on Hands to stay alive, and Xoti is almost out of healing spells as combat ends. The animated armor is also somewhat hard to beat.
However, the real problem occurs right at the end during a generally rather simple spore fight - Xoti got dominated and Maia apparently killed her permanently (though why the death was permanent I can't quite figure out) just by virtue of accidental driving flight shots - that was unexpected. Well, this doesn't technically force a reload, and in a true no-reload run I would now take Vatnir into my party, but I don't feel like skilling him up and equipping him right now, so I do reload - This teaches us the valuable lesson that a Captain's Banquet would've been the best food option here.

Now towards the Oratory of Wael - I am somewhat surprised that I managed to do this in my first try and without taking wounds - this is one that I would rather not do blind, as there is a pretty dangerous gimmicky mechanic added into the fight.. If you don't realize what's going on pretty early, you might be screwed.

Now for the second part - The Enclosures. The main level is easy enough to clear out, we're just trying to avoid missle salvos. As for the Hall of Transfiguration - the frightened child battle is pretty hard, though I did manage to complete it without wounds. The other fights down there were easy enough, even when I accidentally managed to hit one of the neutral NPCs with an aoe spell during a battle and had to fight a double group, which is not recommended.
The Spun Terrace: Not too difficult for me, there are some good chokepoints available here - I also had the item to make peace with Sissak, so I didn't fight all the battles in the area. The Memory Hoarder, our next boss encounter, was fairly easy to take down compared to other encounters. It seems like the Central Stacks are over all harder than the Enclosures, at least for this party. We move to the Upper Bowels - Some tough battles here, but none that caused a wound for us (though one of them was close).

This brings us to the final boss, and most likely the hardest non-megaboss encounter in the game: The Oracle of Wael. A super tough fight - I actually successfully did it in my first try despite not quite realizing what was going on (some prior knowledge is highly, highly recommended), but every one in the party died at least once during the encounter - Xoti had one item-based self-resurrection only to die again, Aloth got resurrected and died again, and Triozum was able to barely finish the job (though Maia's bleed effect from gougin shot got the kill) after his own self-resurrection via the high level fighter ability Unbreakable. It is kind of amazing how close we came to losing - the Oracle died at the same time Triozum, the last living party member, did, with the only difference being that Triozum was able to get back up:

Spoiler

In true Crusader fashion, it took Triozum several minutes to kill these two remaining foes, but he ended up with more HP than he started with upon his self-resurrection.
I repeated the fight out of curiosity to see if I could do it in a more reliable way by just ignoring the adds and bursting down the Orcale, but this turned out to be a terrible approach - while I did kill the Oracle, its minions destroyed my party soon after that:

Spoiler

So, in the end we only reloaded here once, and it wasn't a forced reload, but the Oracle fight felt so unsafe that I wouldn't go here again without additional testing. However, I do get the feeling that, specifically during this battle, Thayn Goron and his party would've done a much, much better job. They were much better at this type of long, drawn out fight with a powerful boss added into the mix.

Since Forgotten Sanctum is far more difficult than anything in the vanilla game, there is little reason to go here except for the additional challenge or curiosity, as the story is quite interesting, though it didn't grab me as much as I would've expected considering how interested I generally am in the circle of archmagi and Wael (I didn't like the portrayal of Wael in Deadfire compared to PoE1 - maybe that was the point and a conscious writing decision, though). Still, some of the books down here are absolutely worth reading (with some of them actually being quite funny).

Well, we're done with the DLCs - time for the Megabosses, I guess. I'm not really looking forward to these - those were painful encounters for me the one time I killed them, and that was on normal difficulty.

 

[Enuhal]

Triozum's non-canonical return: Megaboss 1/4 - Sigilmaster Auranic

Auranic is by far the easiest megaboss, but still much, much more difficult than anything else in the basegame and the expansions. The difference in difficulty level between the megabosses and all other content is huge. You can easily destroy everything you come across during the entire game and still feel absolutely helpless when facing even the easiest of the megabosses. All of these require detailed knowledge of their respective mechanics, especially with a group like this. There are some ways to cheese them, but I will only use these when conventional methods fail, and, of course, you can do the usual infinite resource salvation of time/barring death's door/brilliant shenanigans to effectively become immortal, so it's not like these are impossible (otherwise there would be no successful The Ultimate runs), but that would require changing the party setup. I will see what I can do with just these companions.
Triozums party is pretty much the worst possible setup for megaboss battles. These last far, far longer than anything else in the game, so any non-regenerating class resource is almost worthless in the grand scheme of things unless you're using some kind of salavation of time/brilliant inspiration stuff. We have no cipher, no chanter, no monk, no blood mage, and no source of brilliant inspiration, so... auto-attacks will have to do a lot of work here.

For the Sigilmaster, we rest with Konstanten's Massage and prepare with some arcane reflection potions and the ones with resistance to resolve afflictions (due to the fear sigil). I wonder if captain's banquet with major reflection potions would be better here - not quite as much of a reflection chance, but no resolve afflictions entirely.

Our first try fails - I can't get in the arcane reflection potions in time - they don't last too long so I didn't want to drink them too early. On my second/third try we got hit by a bad arcane dampener, which removed our crucial potion buffs. I decided to change up some things, starting with potions of focused mind, making sure the party stays back so only Triozum can get hit with Arcane Dampener, and after that we drink arcane reflection. However, we get screwed over by a potion drinking bug that is one of the more annoying things in the game - sometimes a character when given the command to drink a potion will only start the animation and do something else before the potion drinking is done. However, this is easily solvable by turning the AI off entirely, so we do that next.
Somewhere around try 5-8 (my notes aren't detailed enough to make sure) things finally work out for us: We get our initial potion setup just right for the lightning obelisk to destroy itself during its first activation, we take out the adds, but things get more complicated: We run out of reflection/mind focusing potions, have to chuck tons of healing potions istead, run almost out of spells, resurrect party members at least 5 times with Xoti and Triozum. However, when the dust is settled, the Auramaster is out of spells as well, the obelisks are gone and only Aloth remains dead with no resurrections left on our side:

Spoiler

After the auramancer attempts a final attack, gaining back her spells, we use our last few remaining abilities (lots of rarely used item-based stuff such as these new star servants from Forgotten Sanctum) to get the kill:

Spoiler

A gruesome battle, but still, the easiest of the megabosses. The other ones are going to be much worse for us. This already took as way more reloads than the entirety of the DLCs (only 2 there, and one of them was kind of optional - here we're already at around 4-7).

 

[Enuhal]

Triozum's non-canonical return: Megaboss 2/4 - Slowly going insane while trying to take down Huanani o Whe

Huanani o Whe is, in theory, a very simple fight. You only have to track 2-3 abilities, the most important one by far being his re-merging. We rest with mohora wraps (for quick interrupts) and craft 25 scrolls of thrust of tattered veils, a stack for every party member. To get more interrupts I'm using the arbalest and crossbow I found during the DLCs on Maia and Xoti, who are the only ones to have arbalest/crossbow modal access (Mechanical Marvel on Maia, the crossbow from Forgotten Sanctum on Xoti).

Phase 1 is not the issue, but once the boss splits we have to reliably have to interrupt both of them, which is... hard. The timing has to be exactly right, we need to be in range, we can never mess up. The first three tries the gigantic oozes always merge at some point. I am really trying my best, but there is always some kind of slight timing issue. During the fourth try we almost get the first gigantic ooze, but at near death a cast of thrust of tattered veil takes slightly too long...
Try 5 is when we first kill the first gigantic ooze and get to the massive oozes. One key for the gigantic ones: It seems possible to position party members/figurines between those two, and they won't be able to get close enough to each other to actually merge (this doesn't seem to work for any smaller type of ooze). The second gigantic ooze reforms around 3 times, but unlike the main boss, this one doesn't deal enough damage for the re-merging to force us into a reload, we can just try again as long as we have interrupts - passive healing via paladin aura, pet and Lethandria's Devotion are enough to stay alive. The key to getting the interrupts without running out of pre-rest abilities/scrolls turns out to be Mechanical Marvel, because it attacks in a line, so with the right positioning, the prone modal affects both oozes at the same time. Trouble starts if Maia misses, which almost never happens, but if it does (and it will, since this battle lasts forever) we need to immediately be ready with a thrust of tattered veils (and this might actually be too late depending on when the arbalest attack gets in - sometimes we start the scroll cast anyway just in case we need it). This means at least one character has to stay idle so they aren't in recovery when needed, which reduces our damage so the encounter lasts even longer. Well, in any case, we need around 90 real-time minutes to actually kill all the oozes with multiple re-mergings. It was infuriating and made me hate this encounter with a burning passion. I'm happy to have completed it on PotD with an extremely sub-optimal party, but it wasn't very fun.

You may want to switch up your party and redistribute your skills for every single megaboss, honestly, if you really want to try them.

Here are some screenshots:

Spoiler

So, now that I am officially frustrated with the megabosses I've decided to give up on playing fair, though our of laziness, I still don't want to switch up the party composition if it can be avoided. Let's see if I can find a way to cheese Belranga without a chanter or access to brilliant inspiration.

 

[Enuhal]

Triozum's non-canonical return: Megaboss 3/4 - Belranga

I didn't know of any ways to cheese Belranga that didn't involve the typical The Ultimate tactics or other renewable class resources, so we had to figure something out while fighting, though I did try to defeat her in a fair way first. Before the battle, we rested with shark soup for the immunity to dexterity afflictions.

At around 80 stacks/dead spiderlings, I decided to switch our attention to Belranga herself, but it turned out to be near impossible to keep Triozum alive at this point. My initial plan here was to move him around inbetween some spiders and the boss to block her direct attacks, but her ranged attacks are powerful enough to take him down anyway. However, in some way, this idea does end up working for us: Since I was trying to test the behaviour of these spiders I decided to move the only two still-alive party members, Maia and Xoti, to the entrance. The many, many spiders in the area mostly end up blocking each other from moving at all, only a few can follow us, and only one at the time can actually attack. Easy enough for Maia to take out a single spiderling. Surprisingly, though, the next spider doesn't move forward towards us - there is a chance it got hurt by Belranga's AoE damage and tried to go after her instead, getting blocked out from reaching her though, and blocking the other spiders from reaching Maia and Xoti - in the end, we were still in combat but not getting attacked at all, with Belranga as well not in range to use her ranged attack - and Maia had applied gouging strike earlier on the megaboss, which applies a small bleeding damage over time effect that lasts for the ENTIRETY of combat no matter how long it lasts - and since combat didn't end as the spiders were blocking each other, all I had to do was turn combat speed up to maximum and go afk for some minutes:

Spoiler

8 damage at a time, and eventually the megaboss just dies. Not a very clean kill and very cheesy, but technically a first try success. Though the battle wasn't over yet - the small spiderlings still stay around, so Maia and Xoti have to kill these. However, this turns out to be easy enough for us:

Spoiler

I thought about resting with poison immunity (khapa tea) instead - might better for a straight-up combat attempt (which did work for me on normal mode). Well, now the toughest megaboss, which gave me the most trouble during the one time I did all of these before, remains - and most items that I used to eventually kill him, such as the Grog pet that grants immunity to engagement and the cloak that allows one party member to fully absorb fire damage, aren't avaliable anymore in this run (I must have sold them to vendors that became unavailable due to my faction choice).

 

[Enuhal]

Triozum's non-canonical return: Megaboss 4/4 - Dorudugan

With Grog and the fire absorption cloak unobtainable in this run, I do not think this party stands a realistic chance of beating Dorudugan without some kind of cheese/exploit. This boss has incredible armor/hp and deals incredibly high damage, requires perfect and constant repositioning and is, propably, the most difficult of all megabosses in a straight-up fight, even tougher than Belranga (at least that was my experience on normal).
We eat some hot razor skewers and start an attempt - I try to work with Nomad's Brigadine and legendary/mythic unique scepters for a bit, but while I am able to get in a little bit of damage, it soon becomes clear that I don't have the class resources to keep Triozum and the party alive long-term. Maybe with a chanter in the party there would be a realistic chance. However, I have already decided against switching up my party setup, so I end up resorting to a pretty powerful exploit. One special anti-Dorudugan-item that I still found to be available during my vendor tour was the Thundercrack Pistol. I put the charged field enchantment on it, which slows down recovery of heavily armored foes (Dorudugan is considered to be such a foe). However, this effect is re-applied every time you weapon-switch back to the pistol (this is true for a variety of weapon/shield-based effects in general, though I have never made use of this broken mechanic before), and for some reason it does stack with itself, turning recovery essentially infinite - which means the megaboss can't attack or use abilities anymore since he's stuck in recovery all the time. Now, to execute that for the duration of this very long battle, I make use of the customizable AI (something I haven't dabbled with before) to get Triozum to do constant weapon switches.
Dorudugan is, after his first hit, essentially helpless - the others shoot him down with their scepters. This strategy is quite reliable, but pretty much as clear-cut of an exploit as there is - unlike all the brilliant inspiration/salvation of time/barring death's door shenanigans, where you could argue that, yes, this is how these mechanics are in fact supposed to work, despite them making you essentially immortal (and since the devs have seen them being used during pretty much all The Ultimate runs which have been officially submitted for acknowledgement, they are clearly aware of them):

Spoiler

However, unless you're willing to at least use those established "Ultimate" strategies, I wouldn't recommend going up against megabosses in any case, at least not in a no-reload game, especially not on PotD. The DLCs would be a more reasonable choice, you don't need any of these "advanced" mechanics for them, though the Oracle of Wael will certainly be a challenge.

As a fun extra bonus, I also decided to board the Deck of Many Things, the highest level ship in the game (you don't gain all their items if you do this, so it's not recommended unless you know exactly what you'd get and what you still want). The captain is level 22, so I expected this to be a serious battle - but it was actually super easy, easier than pretty much any of the DLC battles:

Spoiler

That's it for now. I hope these thoughts on the DLCs/Megabosses might be helpful for some future runs in case anyone thinks about tackling them. I may return to the thread if someone else starts a new run, maybe in order to continue the Oracle run that I had put on hold.