recommended level for Last gift from a brilliant mind

[CannonGerbil]

My party is 11th level right now, and I'm about a third(?) of the way through act 3. My main character, a bloodrager, has a +21 to attack during rage. I walk into the last gift from a brilliant mind quest and the first enemies I fight have AC around 33, which gives me a 40% chance to hit them, which is about expected for a moderately challenging encounter. Yeah it's annoying that they have regeneration nullified by electricity AND spell resistance which means you can't just jolt them, but that can be gotten around by just whaling on them until they go down and then coup de gracing them.

Then once you get past the big door, you run into five enemies with 44(!) ac. My MC can only hit them on a natural twenty, and they are immune to dismissal which is my go to whenever I run into an enemy too strong to take on conventionally. And of course they all have spell resistance and regeneration/elec so even chain lightning doesn't work half the time.

The question is, what is the recommended level to take on this quest, or is there some trick to it that I'm missing?

[fox5s]

Sounds like you are talking about Blackwater. There's a whole thread on it here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1184370/discussions/0/3841053085026132722/

TL;DR it should be one of the last things you do in Act 3. You probably want to be around level 13.

Specific tricks depend on your Mythic Path. And it sounds like if you are at only +21 to hit, you are missing some buffs or need to debuff the enemy. I'm not gonna copy and paste what I said in that other thread but you will probably find it useful.

[D-Black Catto]

I didn't have problems tbh, playing on daring. do you pre buff properly? what pre buffs are you using? what spells do you use against them, did you try pits and other ones that target their saves rather then them directly?

[CannonGerbil]

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

I didn't have problems tbh, playing on daring. do you pre buff properly? what pre buffs are you using? what spells do you use against them, did you try pits and other ones that target their saves rather then them directly?

My party is Sosiel, Ulbrig, Arushalae, Lann and Nenio. My buff routine is shield(mc only), enlarge person, heroism, true seeing, bless, feather step, hurricane bow (Arushalae), aspect of the falcon (Arushalae) and death ward, If I know I'm going into a tough fight, I'd drop haste on the whole party and pop righteous might and prayer before engaging.

And no I actually stopped using Pit and similar spells awhile back because I was having a horrible problem with friendly fire where I'd cast pit on some enemy, get my fighters in position to gang up on his ass when he climbs out, and oops the range of pit is larger than I expected so two of my fighters end up right in the pit along with them. Most of my in combat spells are stuff like Slow and Rainbow Pattern that only affect enemies only, or disintegrate/ phantasmal killer/ dismissal scroll to take out high value targets. Oh right I forgot I swapped out disintegrate for chain lightning when facing the mooks and the guys in the big lava chamber are immune to electricity.

[D-Black Catto]

Originally posted by CannonGerbil:

My party is Sosiel, Ulbrig, Arushalae, Lann and Nenio. My buff routine is shield(mc only), enlarge person, heroism, true seeing, bless, feather step, hurricane bow (Arushalae), aspect of the falcon (Arushalae) and death ward,

you need more, just from top of my head

haste (very important)
cats grace/owls wisdom/whatever also help
burst of glory
protection from evil/chaos
protection from energy(if enemies are using it)
blessing of luck and resolve

hmm, who's your mc again? what mythic path? personally i found sosiel useless, but if you want to carry him for rp purposes its fine. my mc was inquisitor so she had cleric spells but if you dont have a cleric sosiel might be fine....

and dont forget to summon some summons right in the middle of your enemies so they can fight them and not your characters

no comment about pits, sounds like skill issue. do you know you can use dispel ability to remove pit whenever you want?

[CannonGerbil]

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

haste (very important)

Yeah I usually drop haste on my party, either immediately before a big fight if I know one is coming up, or during the first round if the guys I'm fighting are more powerful than I expected. I don't do it for every fight because I only have four hastes on Nenio and I would like to make them last as long as possible.

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

cats grace/owls wisdom/whatever also help

all of my main party already has belts of + whatever so I don't think that helps much.

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

burst of glory

Yeah I think I'll add that to my "tough boss fight" buff spell list. If I recall I didn't use it because it's a round/level spell and I already had prayer for my sosiel buff spot.

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

protection from evil/chaos

I keep forgetting to use this actually. probably because it has a fixed duration and doesn't scale like other similar buff spells.

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

protection from energy(if enemies are using it)

yeah this is one of the spells I use. Usually it's protection from fire so nenio can fireball without worrying about friendly fire, but if I switched it over to protection from electricity in this dungeon so nenio can cast lightning bolt to get rid of that pesky regen.

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

blessing of luck and resolve

I don't use blessing of luck and resolve because the bonuses overlap with bless, and also death ward takes care of most of it.

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

hmm, who's your mc again? what mythic path? personally i found sosiel useless, but if you want to carry him for rp purposes its fine. my mc was inquisitor so she had cleric spells but if you dont have a cleric sosiel might be fine....

My MC is a bloodrager, mystic path azata. the freedom bolt thing is useful but it's not enough to kill all five of them, and I only have five uses of it. And yes sosiel is mostly for the cleric spells, though he can also use soulshear so he's my back up in case nenio couldn't get through spell resistance this round

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

and dont forget to summon some summons right in the middle of your enemies so they can fight them and not your characters

Yeah, I'll take that in mind. Usually tanking isn't a problem for me because between Lann, Arushalae, my bloodrager, Aivu and Ulbrig I can put out somewhere north of 400-500 hit points of damage in a single round. My problem with this fight isn't the tanking but the fact that their AC is so damn high I only have a 5% to hit for most of my characters.

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

do you know you can use dispel ability to remove pit whenever you want?

Yeah, that works for stuff like cloudkill where I can just wait for them to path through the cloud to come to me, or stuff like burning entanglement or fireball where it's a one time thing and I can just make sure my party isn't in the blast area when I fire it and/or mitigate it with stuff like protection from energy or featherstep. The problem with pit is that there's no "protection from getting pitted" spell and if you fall in, even if you dispel it next turn it's still one turn lost for a member of my party, possibly two depending on how the turn order goes.

[fox5s]

Sounds like you are missing a source of Barkskin and Communal Delay Poison. It also sounds like you are missing a source of Evil Eye. I got through it by double stacking Protective Luck on my tanks, Evil Eye on the dangerous demons for -8 to him, and once things were stable, more Evil Eye for -8 to their AC to allow my DPS to work through them.

All this was mostly needed only for the Demons. The Humainoids and the Salamanders didn't need the minus to their to hit and my DPS didn't NEED the minus to their AC. Except for the tower shield guys. But by the time I'd get back to them, the fight was already over so it didn't matter.

[Homer Morisson]

Blackwater sucks big time anyway... unbalanced, boring.

The key is to use Electricity against those Cyborgs.

[fox5s]

Originally posted by Homer Morisson:

Blackwater sucks big time anyway... unbalanced, boring.

The key is to use Electricity against those Cyborgs.

I disagree on both counts. First, it is balanced for where you should be at the END of Act 3. Yes, they give you access to it early, which you could say is unbalanced. But overall, it's fine.

Second, Electricity just disables their fast healing for a bit. Yes, they also have vulnerability to it but many of them (demons and minotaurs) still retain their resistances to it and they will mostly pass all the saves unless you have truely devoted to being an Evoker. Their fast healing isn't that big a deal if you are focusing them down one at a time. It doesn't even recover them from a single hit from any of your DPS characters.

IMO Blackwater exists as a difficulty gate that you can test yourself on to make sure you are ready for the Abyss. One that is technically optional so you can just skip it. Assuming you brought someone with a high enough UMD when they try to trap you there.

[Homer Morisson]

Fast Healing disabled is the key thing to defeating them though, and makes the encounters much easier to deal with, especially with Chain Lightning.

Blackwater also doesn't exist as a gate, as it's not official dev content, it's from a backer who pledged at the "Create your own quest" level, which is also why it's so jarringly worse than the official encounters and "dungeons".

What I agree on is that, yes, happily you can just ignore it, as, again, it's not part of the official content and thus doesn't really add anything relevant to the game, even the units you can get for your armies are boring and do not match at all with any of the Mythic Path's units, again, jarringly juxtaposed to the entire setting, as the game doesn't take place in Numeria.

[fox5s]

Originally posted by Homer Morisson:

Fast Healing disabled is the key thing to defeating them though, and makes the encounters much easier to deal with, especially with Chain Lightning.

What do i care about a simple Fast Healing 10 when I can do more than their HP in a round with Arueshalae? And If i don't get that one guy and he heals for 10? Well I'll just finish him off anyway when I get back to her turn. Yes, it's annoying. Key to defeating them? Meh.

If you are already doing Lightning damage or can easily switch over to it as OP said he did, great. If not, meh. Don't sweat it. Just tank and spank them. Target priority is important but otherwise, they aren't THAT special.

[Homer Morisson]

You need to disable Fast Healing as you otherwise simply cannot kill them, they stay alive indefinitely.

No idea how you never noticed this... it doesn't matter how much damage you pump into them, as long as their Fast Healing is still active, they won't keel over.

*That* is why you need Electricity Damage to disable it.

Dunno about playing on brainafk difficulty, but with everything cranked to max and enabling enemy special behaviours in the settings, that's definitely the case, has been on all three of my runs where I did Blackwater.

[Raikon]

Electricity, or adamantite. Everyone forgets that second part.

[Moo]

If you are able to unlock the exit door, then I think you should be fine. You can leave and come back and rest as much as you need to beat it.

[Moo]

Originally posted by Raikon:

Electricity, or adamantite. Everyone forgets that second part.

I've always resorted to using coup de grace to finish them off.

[Gracey Face]

This combat zone only gets more difficult as you get further in to it. It's pretty easy with an optimised party but if you're using companions it'd probably be hard (never use default companions myself).

That being said +21 AB at lvl 11 isn't that good, assuming that's your buffed AB. You should have something along the lines of;
lvl 11 : 11 BAB
22(26) STR: 19 AB
Rage: 21AB
Wep Focus: 22AB
Heroism: 24AB
Outflank: 28AB
+2/3 weapon: 30/31AB

These are all (with the exception of rage) long duration buffs and innate abilities that you should almost always have going.

With your short duration buffs on top of this you should have ~40AB.