Tips for Unfair difficulty

[kirill-busidow]

Lets share tips.

1. Avoid combats if you can (stealth) and level via quests/traps.
2. At character start make caster and conserve spells. You can make tank but with 2 starting companions, you dont have any dps (gnome and bard do no damage on Unfair).

[Meepichi]

switch to normal and save yourself some grief. :)

[Insanity_184]

3. Pray to Groetus cause your end time will come soon.

[amiablequinn]

I've done a bunch of prologue restarts on unfair, my 2 cents:

1. Get used to reloading. An Ironman Unfair run is currently impossible (or so improbable that you would have to be the luckiest person on earth). There is just too much RNG at low levels and the deck is too stacked against you.

2. Cheese strategy: prologue companions cannot die permanently, so stealth far away and have them plick away at the bad guys, when they die move in and they will rez (hopefully far enough away that they will reset the encounter. Does not work on fights in the throne room and after.

3. Pet classes are by far the easiest. Sacred huntsman, Druid, mad dog, fey sorcerer. The pets are pretty beefy and can be used to tie up those archers. I recommend a mad dog barbarian optimized into strength.

4. Carry everything you can to Olegs and don't level up your main character until AFTER you recruit a full set of custom companions. The companions they give you are just too non-optimized to be effective. Sad but true.

5. Make many saves at different points so you can reload and try other options.

6. Charge/attack from a distance, catching enemies flat-footed will make them much easier to hit.

[shaki92]

Unfair is unfair, but its doable. Not with story companions tho, you need to buy yourself a min-maxed party. Cheesing with something like multiple druids makes it easier, still hard but with good party it's not worse than trying to play challenging/hard with story companions.

[1 (all muted)]

So, lets begin.
Getting proper build on unfair will reduce S/L to alot. So your main should come with animal companion (mad dog). Linzi become Sylvan sorcerer, with magic missile and mage armor, Valerie - fayspeaker druid.Gnome - 1 lvl in fighter for heavy armor and tower shield.

Prologue is descent, always come stealthed and start your turn with 2 gnomes autoatacking, with some luck, they can one shot sometimes, but even getting out most of hp helps. In last battle kill 3 assasins, Amiri will come out and kill everyone.

Olegs bandits, oleg at start can kill 0-5 bandits. Lure rest to traps with pets and kill 2 archers, annoing, but doable battle.

Pets are almost essential, to take down, split opponents,. For example,split enemy with pet, make them chace him, while rest of your army atack second half. you can split someone in a boss battle and kill all his minions prior him.

As for walkthrough, after olegs bandits, get fullplate and go for your 5th companion in tomb.

Then technic guild, give valerie, before exiting, pass all checks for 400+ exp. Technic guild is pretty easy, if you focus on mage, did it on lvl 2.

Get Octavia and Rengar and you are ready for spider cave. Leave your hardest tank, while spamming flaming hands with octavia and alchemist fire with rest. When 3d swarm come in, true strike -> shoking grasp with rengar, he should die in 2 hits.

Its preferable, that you get as many exp as possible, before technic guild, bcs. exp is shared.Its also preferable to do spiders at 3, more spells, less material wasted.

Great Oak. If you mastered the art of splitting with pets, you can declare war to both, otherwise final battles will be very hard (untill you are lvl 4 at least), also, their alchemists, get 30 ac with mage armor, so killing them prior is top priority (Linzi and Octavia with magic missile helps, also mage armor negate magic missile, another reason to kill him prior rest) with splitting they become easy as cake, or you can be neutral and get exp from savescumming rest encounters, resting for 1 hour, which is easiest but most annoing choice.

[amiablequinn]

Can you talk a little more about save scumming rest encounters? Do you do that on the open world map or in a zone?

[1 (all muted)]

Open world, need to save load till you get atacked, in open zone, they often promt a dialogue.

[Arden]

I have a lot of fun in unfair difficulty. It's brutal if you are doing it wrong but absolutely awesome and rewarding if you get your strats right! Great tips so far so here are mine:

1. Save yourself some time and frustration (or a lot of it) and roll ranger with 18 str, 18 dex and at least 11 in wisdom, dump all int and cha. If you master the out of combat charge technique, this guy will consistently 1 shot the starting enemies. The tutorial becomes a breeze.

2. The 3 cats fight and bandits before oleg is really annoying - remove the armor from Amiri and kite them while everyone else shoots them from afar. Your ranger will make short work of them with the composite bow.

3. The first level up will make or break your run. If you opt for hit chance and masterwork weapons, you are looking at +8, +9 on your ranger and amiri, +6 on linzy with ranger. So +10+11 with buffs. The enemies that matter have 26-27 dc, so you are looking at maybe 25-30% chance to actually hit something which is not good enough.

4. So on level 2 get true strike on everyone - Amiri gets pet for kiting with sacred huntsman, Ranger goes inquisitior, linzy goes wizard and buy a 5th companion - 2h fighter/cleric with 20 str and destruction domain for true strike is the smoothest here. Now you are looking at 100% hit chance with prebuffing and the game becomes at least 200% more enjoyable. With that party you will roll over the tartucio fight and all non ambush fights with a couple reloads now and then.

5. Oleg fight as said from the poster above, reload till the initial explosion kills the 2 archers, kite a couple of guys in the traps, cast your true strikes on amiri and hammir and charge them into the big guy for the instagib. Your ranger will snipe the archer behind even without true strike. Kite the rest of the melee with the pet if it survives. Bokken will survive this fight and do a lot of damage, might take a couple reloads.

6. Level 3 is another make or break - we hit consistently with true strike, flanking and masterwork weapons so the choice is all rogues with accomplished sneak attacker for the massive damage boost or hit chance. Both can work but I feel rogues is the stronger pick here. Valerie goes full fighter tank mode with full plate+1 and defensive fighting on.

7. From level 4 on you go for hit chance till you stabilize.

Hope this helps to save you at least a couple of hours of reloading time :P (probably a lot more than that!) Oh and early game avoid ambush fights unless you can prebuff - you are not going to win those!

[Qiox]

Originally posted by kirill-busidow:

Lets share tips.

1. Avoid combats if you can (stealth) and level via quests/traps.

Enemies in the 1st tutorial area have +12 perception. There are very few builds options that can have Stealth high enough at level 1 to not get spotted immediately.

Originally posted by kirill-busidow:

2. At character start make caster and conserve spells. You can make tank but with 2 starting companions, you dont have any dps (gnome and bard do no damage on Unfair).

If, as you say, your companions have no dps, and you are a caster who conserves spells, how do you expect to kill anything during the tutorial?

You have 19 enemies to kill. Good luck with that.


Here's step 1 on how to make a guide to playing on Unfair difficulty:

1) Actually play the game on Unfair successfully then make a post describing what you did.

[saice]

I gave unfair a shot (because come on you have to at least try it once). What I learned has been cover mostly all ready. My 2 cent on the subject.

Get used to using your party as cannon fodder. No really make a caster or range guy of some sort and stay WAY in the back and let them die for your cause. As a note arcane guys (and devine with magic domain) get Hand of the apprentice this lets you basically throw your melee weapon. Also attacking ranged from stealth is huge for opening shots. It makes all the bad guys flat footed and means you can often alpha strike at least one guy down.

Outside of that ... yeah get a full custom group the story npcs all are not optimal. This normally is not a huge issue but with Unfair you HAVE to min/max to have any hope.

All that said I do not suggest doing Unfair right now. I think it will be fun to do later after I have completed the game once or twice took some notes and then can plan an optimal path. I need to underscore that unfair is just that UNFAIR it is not balanced in anyway everything has their stats boosted far higher then you should be able to deal with. RNGus is you god learn to prey to them. I am not sure unfair Ironman is possible right now. One because there is not a lot of info on what is optimal and what is optional and these are huge things needed to do such a combo.

[1 (all muted)]

@Arden
True strike strategy? good idea, shouldve though about it, since i use it ocasionally with regnar on high ac encounters.

For sneak atack its actually better to take a level in Vivisectionist alchemist, so you get mutagen aswell and true strike at lvl 1, but need 11 int, without spell failure.

But in long therm, pets will out tank valerie, even at lvl 6 with mage armor and barkskin 37+ ac, having 3 pets like that will make fights trivial, same goes with flank bonuses on sneak atack.

P.S. stealh charge is op :p

[Arden]

@all muted

Those are very solid tips, I'll look into the vivisectionist for sure, although I am not a huge fan of having a pet horde in my party :P

Another solid cheese is to summon monsters of any level to absorb the first round of hits of the enemy leaving them wide open for your melee but that requires additional prep time. Most of the enemies will die in the first round so this will make the encounters trivial as well.

By the way those are all early game tips, guys. I am playing only on unfair and restarting a lot to maximize the default party efficiency. If you have already completed the game on other difficulty, you can create a full custom minmaxed party at level 2 which makes the unfair difficulty rather unfair to the AI, lol :P

[dolby]

Well right now i have two problems with Unfair+hardest setting...
The first one is you need to rest like after every fight more or less and game doesnt let you do that... Thx to some timed quests ect... so thats a pain in the ass...got to save spells and time so thats lots of reloads that arnt needed... annoying...
2. Its the bugs... Range mobs shooting through walls and corners and hits that roll over armor and still do not hit... Then there is the problem of enemies ignoring collision meshes they just run pass your front line like its not there...
You cant do that and you get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ by AoPs if you try anyway... again reloads... and stuff like that.
Random crappy rolls are the last thing...but yea...
So my tip is get some patience as you will reload a lot who ever is saying different hes never played unfair+ maybe hard but thats like night and day...
I dont know what its with pet strategy but if that helps and you want to cheese, well its your game.
Why would one want to play on unfair if you do that is beyond me.

[Faceplant]

use enlarge person &or glaive on non tank melee fighters to attack from a space away and keep aggro on the tank.

[Thalaton]

Originally posted by kirill-busidow:

Lets share tips.

1. Avoid combats if you can (stealth) and level via quests/traps.
2. At character start make caster and conserve spells. You can make tank but with 2 starting companions, you dont have any dps (gnome and bard do no damage on Unfair).

I am in the last Chapter on Solo unfair Run but i started on challenging , then switched to hard and in Chapter 2 to unfair.
I play an Arcane Trickser now LVL 19. And the most important spell (after the invisible thief ability) is greater shout. Without this spell i dont think its possible to solo the unfair difficulty. The wild hunt guys are really tough and the most dangerous encounters. I tried 20 - 30 different builds on LVL 19 against them and only builds with greater shout could beat them.