Congrats on your accomplishments, both in clearing it and demonstrating to your friends the power of pure fighter.
Thank you :]
Once I get my own solo tactician dark urge run going it would be interesting to compare notes, see what encounters were particularly tough for which builds;
With my build, although mostly due to the fact that I played solo, there were three fights that were a challenge. Mild spoilers, so other readers, be careful.
The first big one was Grym, as you can't use multiple people to kite the bigboi around efficiently, coupled with running unusually low CON for a Fighter meant I could die in 1 Stomp (which is his weaker damage AoE spell) in one hit if he doesn't roll low or if he misses. Eventually I ended up developing a strategy for him, so I'm sure I could oneshot him now, but in my very first clears, he only died on the 5th hammer strike due to some abominable RNG rolls.
The second was Raphael. As I wasn't two-weapon fighting, and I went into my run with the intention of never respeccing ever, I couldn't equip Orphic Hammer + Blood of Lathander for the fight and be efficient, so I never destroyed any of his towers, and I ended up with a loop of trying to keep his monsters low enough HP to use them for Invis procs while also putting some damage on Raphael before Invis moments. I had to drink a LOT of Invis potions for that one - this was the fight that made an already satisfying pick even better, which was Mobile :P Since I couldn't use Bonus Actions to Jump around.
The last one, which, funnily enough, stems from being grouped was the final gauntlet with the Emperor all the way to the Netherbrain. Given I purely built myself around solo play, I would either have to tank a lot of damage which I couldn't, or be in Invis and all the mobs would move to the Emperor and decimate him. I knew the challenge of this part ahead of time, but I was biting my nails HARD praying for good mitigation rolls.
There were of course also some smaller packs of mobs here and there that are a headache - f.e. in the Gith Creche, as I found out, some of the NPCs have access to Hold Person, which caused a lot of headaches given the fact some of them also have access to Githyanki Parry at the same time, or in the Defiled Temple with the 3 Goblin Bosses and Minthara, where you can choose between getting destroyed by the goblins or getting Hold Person'd by Minthara depending on how the game feels.
over time I could see the info building up on an effective “morphling” build which utilizes respecs for different scenarios and thus is able to do the run in “Ironman” mode with no save scumming allowed.
Oh, my next idea was to have a run with:
-No respecs
-No savescumming
-No vendor resets (Hireling level up or 0-79 resource Long Rest abuse, but can still use 80 resource Rests)
-Solo party
-Tactician
-Any origin
-(Preferably) No death - although given the RNG of any DnD style game this might be unavoidable, especially with my current routing where I attempt to kill Shadowheart with damage low enough that it can roll 0, whereas she can slap you hard enough that she'd kill you even if you put all your points into CON on Explorer.
Admittedly, I'd love to have extra toggleable difficulty increases, and/or NG+. I'm thinking of making a custom Tav, as I have abused Deathstalker's Mantle quite a bit. Probably gonna make a Fighter again... shit's too fun for me. I am also thinking about creating "morphling" builds as you put it, but I have to play all the classes extensively first, so that one won't come for me till much later. So, yeah - if you do end up with results, feel free to shoot a message and see where we can both push each other :]
