Ultimate has been added! It’s… sadly not finished. I have work tomorrow so I can’t finish all of it tonight, gotta’ add all the images and colors and fancy stuff! Hopefully I can finish it up tomorrow.
Holy F*cking crap this is huge lol. You obviously put a sht ton of work into this. It’s nice…and rare…to see a game that has such a good community, and awesome devs too. Thanks man…props 
Very detailed guide! I will definitely use this for my new hardcore guy. Thanks. 
Updated the formatting to make it easier to read and added a few user suggestions and reworded a few paragraphs to hold more detailed info and less jumbled sentences…
I wanted to add a lot more / revise a lot more tonight, but work isn’t letting up on me! I promise to get this whole thing done by this weekend haha. Once again, I thank everyone for their support and suggestions! I put a Thank You section in the OP for you all!
Updated once again! Bastion of Chaos has been added! I even added a few more sections here and there and fixed the last bit of formatting.
I will be updating The Hidden Path tonight or tomorrow! Port Valbury will have to wait until I do another run or two of it this weekend. I really hate that place but I will make sure I know what I’m talking about before I put it into words.
+10 - Excellent guide. Well written and formatted, chock full of common sense advice (for the noobs). Some of it even a no-brainer for SC.
I had long planned on one day writing an in-depth guide of some sort but never could muster the willpower. Good job, ForgottenKane.
Very nice and just in time as we are about to reach the end of act 4 for the first time!
Thanks for the effort put into this guide, from Fellowship of Three!
Just finished up The Hidden Path! I made a last-minute decision to cut out all the parts about finding it since that’s kind of the point of the quest and the magic of it. Just added all the parts you need to know to survive. I really, really enjoyed The Hidden Path the first time I did it and I didn’t want to ruin that for other people.
This is a really good guide. Well done.
For boss fights, it might be worth mentioning Ungoliax , the Gloomweaver (Forgotten Basin). She’s a kill quest and next to a shrine in vet normal, plus she has a DOT that can catch a newer player off guard (at least if she’s at range).
As one more boss fight of note, the Outcast can surprise a hardcore character.
Non-obvious but potentially useful tips …
Benevald and Isaiah Redden are very useful sources of components for players, with Isaiah also being useful for ointments and Benevald also useful for amulets / medals / … At least for a first run through, they are excellent resources.
Very few new players will randomly find Benevald, so it might be particularly useful to mention him.
It might also be worth mentioning that armor absorption is sneaky good for characters with good armor totals, with one or two completed scaled hides being an effective way of making armor do more for your character.
Finally, the oft-repeated principle of finding “two % RR sources + 1 flat RR source” for elite+ might be worth mentioning.
I guess you need to cut this off at some point, though, and refer to others’ resources to keep the length under control.
Insanely great guide, I appreciate it a lot! Hopefully you’ll continue to update it. I didn’t even know there was a maphack mod thing lol, why isn’t it updated anymore?
Just reformatted everything to make it a little easier to read, fixed a bunch of links (yes, Grimtools links were added for items too @kidpid), and added a few suggestions (thanks EnjoyTheJourney for reminding me!)
No clue why it stopped, but it’s still mostly accurate so I used it for a while. Now I know most of the game like the back of my hand after so many hours so I don’t use it anymore… But if you only have a few hundred hours in the game it’s pretty damn useful. Also, thank you!
I have an addition that might come in handy - i did not find it here.
Pretty much anything possible is mentioned in this awesome guide to prevent death in Hardcore, but what if you accidentally get surrounded for example, even though you watched out. Or you face a group of Heroes that are really imba for you. Something like this. And here is my 2 cents:
If you find yourself in a situation where you feel really scared and you are not sure if you can survive, especially in Sot, BoC etc. - just freaking leave your finger ready on the Esc button. If things turn out very bad (and they do very quickly usually), you pause the game with the menu and just leave the game. I used this one time and it definitely saved my char from disappearing permanently.
Its such an obvious thing… but i bet most of you guys would think about that way to late, before you can press esc or pause the game with space bar, youre already dead. so if you enter a hard fight, keep the Esc option ready in mind.
Hope that helps, everything is better than losing your char that has many hours on it.
I mean, that is something you can do, but it almost feels like cheating to me. If you don’t want to lose a character when you die, then just play SC. Hardcore is supposed to be punishing in my opinion.
Maybe I’m just old fashioned with my roguelikes and permadeath games.
No, youre absolutely right, but yesterday for example, i tried Valbury my “Beastmaster” Conjurer on Veteran Hardcore. It was an experiment in which i would have died very very quickly in flames of valbury. i decided to leave then.
Imho everything that is in-game without any console commands or heavy glitches is no cheating at all But i absolutely get your point.
This is a great guide. I’ve logged over 2000 hours in hardcore and I’m sure I could have avoided a couple of deaths on my 40+ characters if this guide had been around when I started… lol. Most of my experience has been in Veteran and Elite with very little in Ultimate. I’m anxious to see the Port Valbury write up, because I’ve lost a 46th level saboteur (he felt like a glass cannon, so I shrugged when he died) and a 54th level witchblade in the skeleton key area on veteran mode. I almost cried over the witchblade because it was so unexpected against the final boss battle that had gone so well for other characters.
If you’re committed to playing all hardcore characters, then I suggest using a very tanky build as your “front runner” to gather lots of set pieces and empowered items that other characters can use. A pet-centric build like Pokémon’s Conjurer or the retaliation Warder build in the compendium worked well for me.
A word of warning on empowered items – you can’t mix them with non-empowered items and keep the set bonuses. I tried to plug an empowered defender shield into the guardsman set in hopes of keeping the +2 to soldier with much better shield stats… no dice… only an entire empowered set gives you the bonus (they should change the description of the items to add “empowered” to the set requirements).
I’ll make a plug for the defensive side of the devotion constellations (blue and yellow) if you use a shield. Granted skills like Shield Wall and anything with Menhir in the description have helped keep my builds tanky. Short circuit skills and items like Alchemist Belt, Guardsman Spaulders, Menhirs Will, and the Tortoise granted skill have saved my bacon so many times I can’t count.
I might have missed the discussion about Nemesis monsters in the main post. I recommend everyone keep their eye on faction rep with your enemies. If you stumble onto a Nemesis monster during an innocent farming run for aether crystals in the Wardens laboratory, it can end your hardcore run in a heart beat. Also, don’t take bounty targets lightly… they are always tied to your level, so they can be many levels higher than the surrounding mobs.
Thanks so much for putting this guide together in a very thorough and organized way. It reads like a labor of love for the game :).
Thanks! Also I haven’t gotten to writing the Valbury guide since I haven’t been able to run it again… until last night. Didn’t go as planned when I brought my Coldbreaker out thinking it would be a quick run to kill the boss and farm Decrees. Boy, it was much harder than I remember it being, nearly died a few times. Mind you my Coldbreaker build isn’t finalized/don’t have all the items yet, but it’s still solid.
I actually want to run it with a build I think is truly solid and has no problems before I write the guide. I want to know what I’m talking about before I put it into words.
Anyways, thanks for everyone and your support! I’m working on a few updates that I hope I can get to this 4th of July Weekend.
I just wished to give my sincerest thanks to the contributor’s of this guide, as a new player it is inspiring to see so much quality support for the game.
Awesome guide, i’ll try ASAP! Thanks!
Awesome guide, even at a glance
Will need to read it someday for sure even if I’ve finished Ultimate hardcore.
Just have something very important which even I tend to forget from time to time:
’ You don’t really need to kill everything to beat Ult. HC mode. ’
I’m saying this because I main a literal glass canon toon with 7,000-ish health even on ult (technicaly 10,000+ but that’s only when Turtle Shell is active).
I survived all the way till the end by intentionally not maxing out faction hostility and not fighting hard hitting enemies (like trolls) on this game mode if I can avoid them.
Also, I actually survived a run-in with the Sentinel from ‘The Hidden Path’ dlc.
The entire ordeal was a very harrowing experience viewed through a crimson-veiled screen- My hp bar was simply erratic and I actually went down to critical state more than a handful of times.
I survived by virtue of having at least 3 escape skills and 2 means of healing but really…it’s not worth it for glass canon classes to dance around in a claustrophobic room with enemies like the sentinel. Even that rare skill point felt like a consolation because I’m still in shock by how many times I came close to biting it in the span of mere minutes.
Always try out bosses and note the spawn areas of ambushes in normal or veteren mode, then assess your odds before tackling the threat on Ult HC.
And be doubly cautious if it’s an optional boss; swallowing your pride is a legit tactic given the circumstances
But if you are still insistent, then coop might be the more rational option.
Yeah, I used to have problems like that with ‘glass cannon’ builds, but as of recently I’ve realized what makes them still very viable in HC Ult: greens. If you get some good affixed greens to shore up your resists and missing stats (incorruptible Cronley’s ring of attack is a very sought-after ring, for example), then your ‘glass cannon’ build can now actually take a few hits before evasive maneuvers are necessary.
Otherwise the only thing I can suggest is deal with lowering your damage for some more tankiness until you get the gear.
Also, never, ever, ever make the mistake to go full cunning or spirit (unless you’re a full-cunning Blademaster). Physique is far too important for surviving on Ultimate…