The Carved Cave
Yes, it's the Sword of Lost Light quest, one that goes back all the way to release. It was meant to be run by an allegiance, but it's still pretty awesome solo, if you've got the stats for it. It starts off with using my house chest to mule all the keys onto Kalixia. Then we visit Iquba (bartender at Qalaba'r) and Tibri (she of the fire spear) to gather intel. Together, the clues we gather lead us to the Carved Cave. I could look up the coordinates of the cave, but I'm feeling adventurous and decide to find it myself from Tibri's directions. It's a bit of a walk west of Al-Jalima, involving some mountain climbing (always an annoying prospect in AC,) but I find it without getting lost. On the way, I find a lifestone where a shadow armor crafter has set up shop, a dungeon that I make a note to come back for later, and an exploration marker.
Once I'm there, the cave itself shows up some very appealing level design. It's multi-level, with reasonable foes (not a challenge to me, but then again I'm almost twice the recommended level for this quest), and enough locks to be rewarding without being impenetrable to someone without lockpick. Basically, you run around a large, multi-level room full of monougas and skeletons, searching for a key. This unlocks a tunnel that leads you to another big room where you have to find another key and do some jumping. Then it's down another tunnel that spirals deep down to the final room, where you find a surprise:
Yes, at release this dungeon was the only place in the game where you could find shadows. They didn't appear throughout Dereth until a few months later. Cool, isn't it? Well, I think so.
Victory earns me the seventh and last Lost Light Key, and a portal in the chamber takes me right to the main event itself:
The Halls of Lost Light
I don't want to call this dungeon a letdown, because it wasn't. The aesthetic design is good, and the difficulty level feels about right for someone who's half my level. It's a decent climax to the questline. But it's just not as interesting as the Carved Cave. It's essentially linear. There are branches, but they're false choices: all roads lead to the end, and every possible path uses each of the seven keys exactly once. At the end, you battle the Guardian of Lost Light and some other creatures in a fairly hectic fight. Victory earns you a badass sword and shield with unique models. Neither is useful to me, but I pose for a quick screenshot anyway:
Then I use them to decorate my wall. They look a lot smaller up there, I must say.
Anyway, as I mentioned, after this I decided to pick up some contracts and get to work on them. Results, unfortunately, were discouraging. Aun Ralirea is doable, but tedious because Ralirea is a random spawn. I check the wiki for advice, and find a quote from Severlin (a Turbine employee who frequents the official forums) that says, basically, "camp the spawns". Uh, really? Dark Majesty came out in 2001... nope, no excuse for this kind of slipshod design. I say "Eff this" and run Frozen Fury instead, only to get absolutely murdered by the Drudges in the first area of the dungeon. Making matters worse, my sleeves AND leggings drop on my corpse! I have to go back for them, but in my experience walking into a dungeon that's already killed you once means getting killed again. However, I have an idea. Risky, but plausible. I head back to the dungeon, dodging most fights along the way. After getting in, I ignore the drudges and burn rubber towards my corpse. They swing on me repeatedly, but I can handle their melee for a few seconds without dying. Once I get to the corpse, I open it, grab my armor -- leaving the drop items behind -- and as soon as I've got them I double-click the Gem of Worth I got back in the Assault Weapons quest. Success! I get out alive with about 60 health to spare.
After that I take a quick run through the Serpent Clan Training Camp, because I need to burn off some vitae and want another gem in case I have to make a quick exit sometime. Also, I need to remind myself I don't suck at this game. I take a crack at Assault (Low), but it turns out similarly -- although less fatally -- to the Frozen Fury quest; a long trek through the wilderness, ending in a dungeon I am nowhere near prepared for.
Deciding that contracts are not my style, I instead decide to run a questline that I want to: The Undead Mechanic quest. This is a fairly old quest which was intended to add purpose to some old dungeons that weren't being run a lot. Basically, there's a set of 20 little machine pieces in dungeons of varying levels around Dereth. The quest involves grabbing them all and bringing them to an NPC on Marae Lassal. Sound like fun? Okay, let's get started. First stop:
Filos' Doom
I heard some minor lore once way back when that a grocer had used this dungeon as a storehouse or something. This explains why random foodstuffs spawn all over the place. The dungeon is laughable easy with my current stats. The closest thing to a boss is a level 8 skeleton, and every enemy goes down in one shot. Still, the floorplan isn't bad, with a lot of lever/door action and one tricky one that opens via a pressure plate, letting enemies rush you from behind. I find the Alloy Device and get out quick. Since this makes for a lame post, I poke around Rithwic and do some sightseeing.
Dungeon Gallery Tower and A Drudge Nest
These two dungeons are also lame lowbie content, and I tackle them mainly for completeness' sake. They're at least interesting aesthetically, though. The Gallery Tower is, as the name suggests, a large underground tower with tunnels and catwalks. I get the feeling it was intended as some kind of ad-hoc PvP arena. There's also a corridor that holds several different paintings, which would have been interesting before you could buy them and hang them in your house.
The Drudge Nest is about as simple as dungeons get. It's a single, large cavern with some drudges, nothing more. Still, there's something magnificent about it. A kind of grandiosity in that huge, cavernous room. I beat up the drudges, looting nothing of importance, and then head on.
A Stable Rift
This is a worthy quest, but also a little lame. Basically, out west of Rithwic, near an exploration marker, is a portal guarded by a pair of rifts: bundles of energy wearing virindi-esque masks. Kill them, and you get a message indicating that you've "changed", which flags you to enter the portal. Beyond is a dungeon full of Dolls of level 20-60, and an occasional Rift. It looks pretty awesome from the screenshot above, but honestly? Not so much. There's two problems: one, it's about twice as long as it should be. Two, it's totally linear. Annoyingly so, actually. It has this obnoxious habit of giving you 4-way intersections where two paths immediately dead end, making them glorified corners. That may sound like nit-picking, but after the twelfth time you arrive at a junction, look around, and confirm that yes, there's only a single way onward, you start to get the feeling the level designer is laughing at you.
The boss is a unique Virindi named Dirrich, who drops in interesting bracelet (The Shackles of Obedience) and an Obsidian Shard. On the description's prompting, I turn the shard in to a scholar at Zaikhal, who somehow manages to interpret from it a journal which tells of Dirrich's interactions with a rebellious Virindi named Aerbex. This all ties into the game's second-year story arc, and we might hear more or if someday.
And that's it. Sorry if this was a lame entry, but the first few stages of the Undead Mechanic quest are like this. So I'll do my best to spice them up with interesting side-trips as I go.
My current stats:
Undead Mechanic Quest is an awesome quest once you start getting into the harder dungeons; can't wait to see you tackle the rest of it!
ReplyDelete