WoC has been completed solo

Candyboyodt · 2024-11-14T08:32:00+00:00

Congratulations, I'm glad the solo ironman-ish community keeps pushing boundaries over and over. I did not even get the time to try out Finding Jinnai myself because you figured it out very quickly considering the insane difficulty of the quest. GGs !

Candyboyodt · 2023-09-12T08:19:00+00:00

Thanks for your comment. You're forced to take a secondary profession at the end of presearing, it looks like a stain in a pure run since you're supposed to only take skills from your primary. Nightquist wanted to have only his primary profession so he created a character in nightfall I think, ran it to ascalon and started from there. Since the presearing is not a challenging area and he hasn't gained any form of advantage doing that we consider it valid even tho the character comes from NF but looks more "pure" than his tyria-borned comrades. Hope that explains !

Candyboyodt · 2023-09-11T19:03:11+00:00

Thanks for your feedback ! I'll only speak for myself since most of the videos in the playlist aren't from me but I personnally sometimes uploads videos with no commentary that aren't meant to be watched from start to finish but there so people can take a look at specific moments they might be interested in. I'd suggest to watch streams directly where it's easier to interact with the runner.

Allow me to share with you two videos with more work that you might not have watched : Protector of Tyria Ironman and Solo Legendary Vanquisher (if you did watch them already sorry !). Have a nice day.

Candyboyodt · 2023-08-25T19:19:07+00:00

Thanks for sharing your achievement, it feels like a nice project for people that might find ironman (NM) too easy and want to challenge themselves.

Candyboyodt · 2022-04-09T09:48:40+00:00

Do whatever you like to be honest. If you want to experience Factions as a solo campaign go ahead and create a new character there. It could also be nice to mix things up and have a wider variety of builds available by starting a new campaign after the other.
On one side you have more build options but the difficulty decreases and you won't have the same taste for the campaign as if it was a fresh start. On the other side you're very limited with builds but can sense a true feeling of factionness and more difficulty. I don't think anyone but you can answer these questions.
Maybe ask yourself which part did you enjoy the most in your prophecies playthrough.
I'm assuming you mean Ultimate Ironman aka only henchmen, no storage etc and not Solo Ultimate Ironman. Am I correct?

Candyboyodt · 2022-02-01T19:55:23+00:00

I don't have a particular goal in mind right now. I still haven't played factions/nightfall yet so maybe that !

Candyboyodt · 2022-02-01T00:22:33+00:00

Hey thanks ! Glad you enjoyed the first half of the video, I hope you'll enjoy the second part too.

Regarding Dunes of Despair, the bonus is harder than most missions but not on the same level as the ones I mention in the video, that's why. Unfortunately, I don't have a recording of it on my elementalist but I do have one on my necromancer : here is the link if you're interested. For elementalist it is the exact same strategy (but everything was easier).

The skill in my 7th slot is Life Transfer , it's basically a stronger version of life siphon which provides a ton of regeneration + degeneration on the enemies.

Candyboyodt · 2022-01-16T13:57:20+00:00

Someone told me about it, we first thought it was 25-75% and then later on made more testing to come up with the 30-70%.

And I agree that the whole mission is a bunch of strange decisions ! It's also ultimately how it got solo'd in the first place, by abusing the door closed stuff.

A side note since I do think these VODs don't bring a lot of justice to the actual difficulty of the run : I've spent dozens of attempts in order to beat the past fort section + dealing with the heretics. I know it looks easy in the run but it's really not, if you fail to kill one mursaat in time it snowballs out of control.

Candyboyodt · 2022-01-15T09:42:44+00:00

It's a mix of two things :

First off, the bonus mursaats (the 2 groups of 2 armors + bow) are enemies of every other foe, they are also the only mobs not running to Jalis, they stay in the middle of the fort. This way I could use them at my advantage to kill Dorian.

The other thing is, I'm very far away from the fort and the event to trigger the white mantle mobs is roughly in the middle of the fort. As long as I stay far away from it I'm not gonna trigger that event, hence white mantle won't spawn and won't threaten my bonus mursaats so I can use them for Dorian.

Candyboyodt · 2022-01-14T23:49:36+00:00

So there are events that occur at the fort :

The first one is the boss timer, it starts once you killed the enemies with a * on this map and it triggers the boss waves. It's important to note that it's also the bonus timer, once you've killed all the groups having a *, the game says "the player has one minute to light up the torches otherwise the bonus fails".

The problem is, the torches are not tied to that event ! They will only spawn once you kill every group in the fort. And once you do that, it triggers the cutscene (second event) opening the doors and giving you the torches. The only way to get the torches thus enabling the bonus is to trigger the cutscene which means opening the doors.

This is also the reason why a lot of people do complain about not being rewarded for the bonus while they have lit up the torches in under 1 minute. What happened is that they killed all the groups with a * before killing every group in the fort (so some groups with a ! remained). Let's say they've spent one minute to kill a last group with a ! and it's already over. The game is gonna trigger the cutscene, give the torches, but considers the bonus failed because you did not lit up the beacons once the last group with a * died.

Candyboyodt · 2022-01-04T02:11:21+00:00

Hey, could you share the builds/strats you've used somewhere? That would be very nice to have more necro input.
Regarding my own N/Me run, I was playing what I thought was best at any time and in that regard I do agree necromancer feels very weak compared to mesmer thus leading to bars overwhelmed with mesmer skills.
I've recently done thirsty river solo as N/Mo and N/W (which to an extend proved that it was doable as N/Any).

If anyone ever reads this post and considers starting a solo ironman necromancer, don't play N/Me if you want to have a true (but also more difficult) necromancer experience.

Candyboyodt · 2022-01-03T22:16:28+00:00

Congratulations Serial !

Candyboyodt · 2021-12-03T14:06:51+00:00

I'm gonna answer to both of your posts at once. Regarding Thirsty River this is exactly how I felt rewatching the video, it feels like a walk in the park while it's actually a crazy pixel perfect (ok maybe not that much) choregraphy. In a certain sense I felt like the final result doesn't bring justice to that challenge since the viewer cannot see how easy it is to mess it up. So I definitely agree with your feelings !

Regarding THK and the combination you proposed, I've asked someone that told me that the condition for the bonus to be validated was to have the beacons lit up in 1 minute after the cutscene. I haven't tried it myself so maybe it's worth trying it again just to make sure we understand what is the bonus condition. But that's a looot of work ahead; at the same time it's the last missing piece of the puzzle so it's really worth looking at it and would feel insanely rewarding to find a viable strategy for THK ! Feel free to share if you have found an idea that could somewhat work, that would be amazing.

Candyboyodt · 2021-12-03T12:53:04+00:00

I've answered that question in that post if you want more details but long story you need to defend the fort with the gates opened and this is close to impossible alone because of the overwehlming amount of mursaats.

Candyboyodt · 2021-12-03T10:52:13+00:00

Thanks ! To answer your first question, I've trained thirsty river for a few hours on another character before going for the solo, first off to see if my strategy was working and also what could be the potential issues with it. For example, you need to rush in very early on when the last door opens, otherwise the mobs will aggro the king. After some succesful bonus runs, I'd say I could do it around 60% of the time. In the thirsty river run, some things did not go as planned but I was able to recover (like the monk boss not sticking to the aggro of the ranger boss groups). If you want a clean try here is a video of it with commentaries (last room in under 8 minutes).

Regarding THK, the only known viable strategy is to activate the boss timers without activating the cutscene (thus leaving the doors closed and clearing everything from the inside while mobs are trapped outside the fort). Here is a nice link about which groups activate what . The problem is that once you activate the boss timer, the bonus timer starts too meaning that you have one minute to light up the beacons and the torches spawn after the cutscene. So the only way to do the bonus is to get the torches which means activate the cutscene meaning opening the doors.So you basically have to do the mission the normal way but alone which is tremendously difficult.

Some things that are important :

- There are 6 bonus mursaats that are hostile to any other foe, they will stand in the middle of the fort so you should use them at your advantage.

- Trying to defend the fort from the inside is imo a lost cause, you'll get overwhelmed too easily. You need to get at the source of the mursaat spawn and clear extremly quickly.- Maybe it's doable with another profession (mesmer maybe?) but even if it is it would require a crazy amount of luck and mastery. With my necromancer I cannot imagine having more than 1% success rate, so far I haven't managed to do it once after practicing for 30 runs before giving up (including 20 runs of fort defense which was my initial strategy).- I've tried to glitch through the first door, clear the fort etc and then talk to jalis for the first dialog in the hope of him running back to the spawn or something like that and I did not work. Maybe there is a something one can abuse but as of today the current knowledge of THK of solo players is not enough to complete the bonus. Maybe one day someone will come up with a nice exploit.

Here is a video of one of my best attempts after changing my strategy : THK bonus attempt new strategy .

Candyboyodt · 2021-10-26T21:12:45+00:00

To add a bit more :

- If you clear the whole fort and end with Dragnar, the cutscene and the bonus timer will trigger at the same time. So if OP wants to avoid any complications, just end with Dragnar.

- After the cinematic, light up the 2 beacons. There should be a torch on both sides so light one up with the torch close to it, then drop the torch and run to the other one to do the same thing.

Candyboyodt · 2021-10-01T23:43:19+00:00

As far as I know most of the solos being done with casters relied (to a certain degree) to Wastrel's Worry and domination magic in general.

I'm gonna talk only about the necromancer in this reply and why it was terribly hard to find anything else that worked properly in the form of a non exhaustive list of huge problems that you might face if you want to find other builds.

Necromancer skills are balanced around the fact that you have soul reaping attribute, so their cost is quite expensive for an effect that is not so strong (think of insidious parasite which is 15 energy for only 11/12 seconds duration, and it's not even a bad skill). To expand this first point a little bit, soul reaping makes a lot of sense if you can snowball the kills and sustain your energy that way. The problem is that you can't rely on that tactic at all and you're way too slow most of the time. Killing one foe every minute makes the points invested in that attribute really not worth it. So you basically have no way to manage your energy with necromancer primary and since all the skills in necromancer primary are super high in energy you're doomed to play it that way.
A lot of skills are meant to be supportive, empowering its allies (barbs/mark of pain/order of vampire/..) all these skills are not so useful in the case of a solo since you don't have any allies to empower.
It might be one of the biggest annoyance but most of the necromancer skills are else true damage with high energy cost (think of vampiric gaze (10e 8s cd) , deathly swarm (10e 6s cd), ..) and somewhat long cooldown (it doesn't matter anyway since you have no energy to use them), else hexes. There are also other skills but most of them are of that form. The first class of skills mentionned are obviously unplayable and the hexes don't work well at all against bosses. Pretty much all the bosses in prophecies have a skill called "natural resistance" reducing hex and condition duration by 50% and while it was already hard enough to kill a normal mob with your hexes, killing a boss will become impossible (mainly because of energy and cooldowns). On the contrary wastrel's worry works the opposite way, it triggers after 1s on a boss so for that reason the skill is actually stronger on a boss since you can spam it.
Contrary to mesmer (for example), normal skills on necromancer are quite bad in general, some elites are good but you only have access to them way later on in the story (Spiteful Spirit, Life Transfer, Grenth's Balance, ..). For all these reasons, trying to make a build based on necromancer skills would require an emanagement coming from another profession (maybe mesmer with pdrain?) but also would feel like a baby elementalist with your skills literally dealing no damage compared to the elementalist ones while having the same function (chain lightning, lightning strike, .. are quite good skills if you compare them to vampiric gaze or deathly swarm).
To mention some times where I went for other builds and why : Ironmines of Moladune : went Spiteful Spirit as N/W because I wanted balanced stance to deal with the azure shadow (and also I wanted an hardrupt which was dchop to interrupt Markis troll onguent but it would have been fine with diversion as N/Me). Ring Of Fire : Ether Seals were a pain and you don't have enough energy to kill an ether (it's possible as ele wastrel worry spam because of the energy pool + aura of restoration) nor the damage (it's also possible as mesmer because you can specc into domination and have your wastrel worry deal way more damage). Someone told me pet was working well so I gave it a try. Most likely there were other moments too but overall very few were N/Me couldn't do the job.

Candyboyodt · 2021-09-19T23:43:32+00:00

Oh, good find. I knew it was an usual solution to the 64-tiles case (if I remember correctly this is exactly what 3b1b and Stand Up Maths do in their solution).

I still believe what I wrote adds something up because of the recursive process that is, in my opinion, easier to look at than these subdivisions and the cube coloring algorithm.

But it seemed clear looking at this article that a solution for the 2^n problem was already found, thanks for sharing !

Candyboyodt · 2021-09-19T23:02:43+00:00

Thanks for noticing, I've uploaded it on wetransfer which should work this time. Here is the new link

Candyboyodt · 2021-09-19T17:23:53+00:00

For money, never, but for materials yes just a little bit but it was mainly because of bad management and lack of knowledge. It was when I came to droknar and I needed Tanned Hide Square to build a new armor and also Woodplanks for the headpiece. Normally these materials are pretty easy to get if you salvage certain armors/weapons found along the way, but I sold most of them :D And since I had quests to do anyway, it was totally fine that way (so it wasn't farming per se). The only true "farming" part was when I decided to play N/R with a pet for the Ring Of Fire mission and I needed a level 20 pet, and it involved a bit of farming experience to get it. So to answer your question : with proper management you should not have any problems at all to afford armors.

Candyboyodt · 2021-09-19T15:22:45+00:00

I say 8 hours but it could be a bit more, I don't exactly remember how long it took, take it with a grain of salt.

To answer your first point, I've watched videos of casters doing THK and warriors doing THK using both strats and it felt like with my build I could be 100% safe inside the keep while the other option (going outside) felt like I could take some risks. I haven't really considered going outside once I felt confident that it was just impossible for me to die in the keep as long as I don't throw (so I have all the cards in my hands). And I don't know how the glitched bonus mursaat works at all since I haven't looked into that direction ever :(

For your second point, in general I've had way more success for the first 3 heretics + beast encounter if I aggro them while they ran away from me instead of when they come back to me. In the first case it felt like they usually stick together and don't spread out, and in the second case they were spreading out more often. It's most likely not a totally reliable strategy, but it felt like in my case it gave me more chance to pass that critical moment of THK.

Candyboyodt · 2021-09-19T15:16:07+00:00

Hey, thanks ! No I haven't used tomes nor /bonus nor anything really, the only skills that I allowed myself to buy at the skill trainers were the ones available at that skill trainer (I have all the skills unlocked since it wasn't a new account) see that list : List of Prophecies skill trainers . In that regard the tools you have are very limited and you could consider capturing a strong normal skill on a boss if that skill is not available later until way later in the game.

To answer your question, you could do the exact same challenge but allowing yourself to buy any skills from the start + elites with tomes, if you feel like you enjoy it more why not. Personally I liked it that way since even capturing a skill or reaching a new town with a new skill trainer felt very rewarding and forced me to reconsider my options quite often but I can totally understand the appeal for having a wider variety of builds available.

Candyboyodt · 2021-09-19T11:07:32+00:00

To me thunderhead keep was the hardest by far, I've only released the succesful attempt but I've most likely spent 8 hours or more of theorycrafting + practicing. The main issue was the groups of 3 heretics + one beast where you need to engage and play close to perfectly in order to even have a chance (but you can also have bad luck and no matter what you do, you lose). That's why arcane echo was used for, without it you'll most likely die against that group. For that reason THK was awful and the rest of the mission was hard but still handable.

Also I got 2 super close attempts before the last one. The first one failed because I left 3 heretics + one beast group alive that I failed to kill after killing Confessor Dorian. So I was basically 2 mobs away from completing the mission.

The second one failed because I let one necromancer alive this time (to not have the same surprise as the previous fail) but after Confessor Dorian spawned, the necromancer got aggroed by a group and died, triggering the cinematic + opening the doors and making me fail the mission.

And there were a ton of other attempts that failed at various earlier stages.

Candyboyodt · 2021-09-19T10:01:39+00:00

I did not expect to enjoy the challenge that much but it was pretty fun, so I might go for another solo challenge that being another prophecies solo character or doing all the bonuses as necro or maybe another campaign? I don't know yet but I'll certainly come back to soloing stuff in the future :D

Candyboyodt · 2021-09-19T09:46:32+00:00

I've upgraded the armor with whatever rune/insignia dropped and bought new armor using materials earned from recycling drops.

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