Azira
Arcane
Welcome back dear readers! Last time was an introduction to the game and the mechanics of it. This time we will go proper spelunking where I abuse the advantage of ranged attacks to clear the first two dungeons, we hire some NPCs to give our group a proper headstart, and we finish off by just peeking about the first dungeon on the next map.
Plus, we'll also advance the plot ever so slightly and visit the freaky, elderly, bearded fellow from the intro.
Oh, and it turns out that I did uncheck the "include frame rate overlay on screenshots" box, so I can't really explain why that annoying yellow number insisted on showing up for most screenshots in the first update, but apart from the first few screenshots of this update, we should be rid of it. I decided I didn't need to see the yellow number to know that FRAPS is running in the background after all.
Alright! When we left off last, we'd just landed near Ironfist Castle and gotten the bow skill for our mighty group. The training left us drained of cash however, so we go sight-seeing. With that name for the town, a castle is bound to be nearby, and that is just what we find!
Inside the castle we don't find a wise king or MILFy queen, instead we find this guy:
A bored little prince, rattling off about wanting to go see the circus because castle life is so dull.. Nothing bad can come from this, right? ... Right?...
Also, Uncle Archibald will be important later.
For now though, we can't get much more out of Nicolai, so we turn to the distressingly gaudily dressed fellow beside him:
Score! 5000 sweet coins for turning in the starting letter! Sweet, this will let us buy bows for the rest of the party.
Also, red-robed Wilbur Humphrey gives us our first promotion quest! Earning this promotion will boost hp and sp, IIRC, so we will definitely be completing this.
I didn't take any screenshots of exploring the rest of the town or buying bows. Mostly because I was too lazy and also because it probably wouldn't be too interesting. Instead, I took a screenshot of our return to the New Sorpigal map!
Not sure why I did this, to be honest.. But properly equipped with ranged weaponry, now the time has come for our intrepid four to brave Goblinwatch!
Dungeons are most of the time rather straightforward. This one even more so. Just inside the entrance we turn right down a corridor, and shortly thereafter we find ourselves in a room surrounded by a handful of goblins. They're easily dispatched however, and we start looting what we can. In a niche in the wall, we find a chest:
This chest contains the code we need to progress further, and also the code they want back in town hall.
We could just return to town now and pick up the reward, ignoring the rest of Goblinwatch. I'm an obsessive completionist however, so our aim is to clear every dungeon we stick our business into.. M:
Even if we do encounter winged, flesh-sucking monstrosities such as this one. Flying enemies are annoying, they're often harder to hit than land-based ones, but often also more frail. These buggers can disease you though, so try to take them down quickly..
Just beyond these Suckers is a panel however.
I wonder if the scroll we just picked up can help here? There's supposedly more than one solution, but I type in the one that I remember using way back when:
Aaand, the way is clear! Or at least the walls have moved back, which just means the monsters hitherto trapped behind the walls can now come out and disease poor DR.
He doesn't look too pleased with this..
We take advantage of poor AI and the architecture of this place, in this instance standing behind a wall, luring critters out a few at a time by walking forth and having them pass their corner. The AI tries to take the shortest route, and if that means the enemy gets stuck in a corner, you're safe from those enemies until you move close enough for them to parse a route out of the corner.
Cheesy it may be, but it makes clearing large dungeons less of a hassle, by reducing the amount of times you need to rest due to being overwhelmed.
I wonder if the developers of ME3 have ever been attacked by one of these?
Goblinwatch is quickly fully mapped and explored:
And our group turns to leave. Battered and wearied, but not beaten.
Upon our return to New Sorpigal we find an interesting NPC that can boost money found
We decide to rest up however, and hire an NPC that will boost our merchant skills, so we can make more cash from selling loot.
It's important to note that we can only have 2 hired NPCs around at the same time. Compulsory NPCs that we pick up for the completion of quests do not count against this total.
Clearing Goblinwatch meant xp gained. Xp enough for several levelups!
As you can see, each levelup earns us 5 skillpoints at these low levels. IIRC, levelling up from 11-20 will earn 6 skillpoints a pop, then 7 for 21-30 etc.
Here's the skillcharts after those levelups:
DR has a leg up due to horseshoes being spent on him. But we develop the bow skill for everyone but Sir Dicksmoker, which instead pumps the ID skill. ID lets us identify loot found, making this a real moneysaver, and Dicksmoker is the one with the best bow and accuracy anyhoo, so the fewer skillpoints doesn't really hurt his efficiency in combat.
We then return to the town hall, turn in one quest and get another.
We will be clearing out that temple in a later update. It's not the abandoned temple mentioned in the start of this update I'm afraid.
The skillpoints spent means we can also train Sir Dicksmoker to become and expert identifier!
This should suffice for now, so he can now focus on his other skills. Once we start running into stuff he can't identify, he'll pump this skill some more.
I decided to clear some more of the overland map, and in one corner I meet an NPC that has some thoughts to share on Light Magic.
Light magic is indeed strong. It has some nice buffs, and in this game, light and dark magic aren't mutually exclusive...
Just behind this NPC is a shed containing a rather weird looking man, talking about stuff that seems to fit ill with a high fantasy game..
In the Time of Wonders, people built blasters. Right. And this guy knows how to use them, even if he has never seen one. Right.
...
This is not the last we'll see of this character I'm afraid.
Still on the overland map we encounter a type of enemy that has ranged attacks of their own; mages
The tactic used so far, of entering turn-based combat and just holding down the attack key isn't as attractive when battling other ranged attackers.. The most effective tactic here is strafing while attack. It seems our attacks are much more accurate than those of the enemies, meaning we dodge most of their attacks while they drop like flies.
Anyways, I promised more than one dungeon, correct? This is the second one:
The loading screen is almost removed as soon as it's loaded on modern computers.
This abandoned temple is a bit nastier than Goblinwatch. The abandoned temple contains poisonous foes:
It's prudent to try and keep a distance, while pelting them with your strongest attacks. Presently, that just happens to be our bows, so that's convenient.
Inside the first room with the cobras, we find our first quest item in this dungeon:
Off to a good start, even if Lindblum did get poisoned.
We also encounter our friendly neighborhood bat, though I don't recall this version actually posing a significant risk, despite its name:
Deeper inside the dungeon, we come across a little girl out on her own. Naturally, we take her along so we can help her get back to her mother. This isn't that kind of game..
We can now see an arrow next to the NPC portraits, meaning we have more than two NPCs in tow. Talking to the child doesn't help much however, so we should just return her to her mother first chance we get.
This dungeon is large, and features teleporters:
They teleport us back towards the entrance, which is useful. They don't teleport us into traps, which would have been amusing.
There was a strange guy back in New Sorpigal who wanted these eggs.. So think of them as gold coins in another shape, not as potential baby-eating monstrosities in the hands of a possible lunatic.
That represents the third and final quest we had in this abandoned temple. From here on I just cleared out the last critters before returning to town.
The abandoned temple was much bigger than Goblinwatch. So big in fact, that we cannot see the whole map at the same time. Also, Sir Dicksmoker is the only one left standing when we leave the dungeon, even though we abused ranged attacks and poor monster AI.
We encounter an NPC that speaks of one of the most useful spells in the game:
We visit the temple for some quick healing. This is just to illustrate just how powerful and useful the temples are:
This was just basic health lost and unconsciousness. More serious conditions are more expensive to heal. But the temples can take care of just about anything, as long as you have money to spare.
We turn in our quests and take a look at the award screen:
Before "achievements" were thought of, this game kept track of noteworthy stuff you had done, so you could lovingly stroke your e-peen while poring over the heroics you had done. Popping moles, retarded AI andachievements awards. This game was truly next-gen!
After some loving strokes were had, we found another air master NPC!
Flight spell means a revisit to the NWC headquarters, and therefore potions for making stat-boosting black potions!
Each of these stat-boosting potions can only be used once for each character. If you use them all, each stat gets boosted permanently by 9, except for endurance which receives a 15-point boost.
Making the potions takes some time and effort however. Here's all the recipes:
And here's the stats of our heroes after quaffing a whole lot of black potions:
Yeah, I know. So I made a complete batch after the first visit to NWC, and that batch went to Sir Dicksmoker, hence him being just level 4 in this screenshot. The rest of the crew had to wait until we had the means of going back, explaining them being level 6. They're much more badass now however, so the 2000 gold for hiring the NPC was well spent.
A look at the quick reference chart:
Still not quite the talk of town, we need to work on our reputation and fame, but we can now reliably hold our own in combat.
Basking in the afterglow of making those potions, I can't believe our luck as we stumble over yet another very useful NPC:
He imparts some knowledge about the Lloyd's Beacon spell which will turn out to be extremely useful when spelunking (for quickly returning to a temple to heal up, then warping back to the dungeon), but more importantly, he let's us cast the town portal spell, so we can hop off and buy ourselves some very nifty spell skills..
First though, I finish clearing the overland map and find our friend Falagar.
Falagar actually tells us exactly what we need to know to advance the plot! We need to find out what is needed to stop the devils, and to do that we need to consult an oracle. Things never being this easy seems a given, and indeed, we need to gain the support of several important nobles first.. Many quests loom on the horizon, but they loom side-by-side with the opportunity to accrue phat lewt and l33t 5ki11z. Pardon my leet-speek. It's horrible, I know.
Anyways, we teleport to a town I will look into in greater detail when we're actually supposed to be there, instead I'll just leave you with these two screenshots:
Having cleared the New Sorpigal map and gaining access to the most important spell-skills in the game, we return to the New Sorpigal map, ditch the town-portal casting NPC (20% drain on gold found is a bit too steep for my tastes) and travel on foot to the Castle Ironfist map.
I'll end this update with a screenshot of a new type of rag-head enemy, and our next dungeon:
Note: after learning the light and dark magic spell skills for both Lindblum and DR, our party was broke, so we didn't buy any spellbooks of saids schools. We'll have to wait a while, and in the meantime I intend to build the merchant skill of at least one of our characters, as some of the spellbooks cost more than 20.000 gold.. M:
Plus, we'll also advance the plot ever so slightly and visit the freaky, elderly, bearded fellow from the intro.
Oh, and it turns out that I did uncheck the "include frame rate overlay on screenshots" box, so I can't really explain why that annoying yellow number insisted on showing up for most screenshots in the first update, but apart from the first few screenshots of this update, we should be rid of it. I decided I didn't need to see the yellow number to know that FRAPS is running in the background after all.
Alright! When we left off last, we'd just landed near Ironfist Castle and gotten the bow skill for our mighty group. The training left us drained of cash however, so we go sight-seeing. With that name for the town, a castle is bound to be nearby, and that is just what we find!
Inside the castle we don't find a wise king or MILFy queen, instead we find this guy:
A bored little prince, rattling off about wanting to go see the circus because castle life is so dull.. Nothing bad can come from this, right? ... Right?...
Also, Uncle Archibald will be important later.
For now though, we can't get much more out of Nicolai, so we turn to the distressingly gaudily dressed fellow beside him:
Score! 5000 sweet coins for turning in the starting letter! Sweet, this will let us buy bows for the rest of the party.
Also, red-robed Wilbur Humphrey gives us our first promotion quest! Earning this promotion will boost hp and sp, IIRC, so we will definitely be completing this.
I didn't take any screenshots of exploring the rest of the town or buying bows. Mostly because I was too lazy and also because it probably wouldn't be too interesting. Instead, I took a screenshot of our return to the New Sorpigal map!
Not sure why I did this, to be honest.. But properly equipped with ranged weaponry, now the time has come for our intrepid four to brave Goblinwatch!
Dungeons are most of the time rather straightforward. This one even more so. Just inside the entrance we turn right down a corridor, and shortly thereafter we find ourselves in a room surrounded by a handful of goblins. They're easily dispatched however, and we start looting what we can. In a niche in the wall, we find a chest:
This chest contains the code we need to progress further, and also the code they want back in town hall.
We could just return to town now and pick up the reward, ignoring the rest of Goblinwatch. I'm an obsessive completionist however, so our aim is to clear every dungeon we stick our business into.. M:
Even if we do encounter winged, flesh-sucking monstrosities such as this one. Flying enemies are annoying, they're often harder to hit than land-based ones, but often also more frail. These buggers can disease you though, so try to take them down quickly..
Just beyond these Suckers is a panel however.
I wonder if the scroll we just picked up can help here? There's supposedly more than one solution, but I type in the one that I remember using way back when:
Aaand, the way is clear! Or at least the walls have moved back, which just means the monsters hitherto trapped behind the walls can now come out and disease poor DR.
He doesn't look too pleased with this..
We take advantage of poor AI and the architecture of this place, in this instance standing behind a wall, luring critters out a few at a time by walking forth and having them pass their corner. The AI tries to take the shortest route, and if that means the enemy gets stuck in a corner, you're safe from those enemies until you move close enough for them to parse a route out of the corner.
Cheesy it may be, but it makes clearing large dungeons less of a hassle, by reducing the amount of times you need to rest due to being overwhelmed.
I wonder if the developers of ME3 have ever been attacked by one of these?
Goblinwatch is quickly fully mapped and explored:
And our group turns to leave. Battered and wearied, but not beaten.
Upon our return to New Sorpigal we find an interesting NPC that can boost money found
We decide to rest up however, and hire an NPC that will boost our merchant skills, so we can make more cash from selling loot.
It's important to note that we can only have 2 hired NPCs around at the same time. Compulsory NPCs that we pick up for the completion of quests do not count against this total.
Clearing Goblinwatch meant xp gained. Xp enough for several levelups!
As you can see, each levelup earns us 5 skillpoints at these low levels. IIRC, levelling up from 11-20 will earn 6 skillpoints a pop, then 7 for 21-30 etc.
Here's the skillcharts after those levelups:
DR has a leg up due to horseshoes being spent on him. But we develop the bow skill for everyone but Sir Dicksmoker, which instead pumps the ID skill. ID lets us identify loot found, making this a real moneysaver, and Dicksmoker is the one with the best bow and accuracy anyhoo, so the fewer skillpoints doesn't really hurt his efficiency in combat.
We then return to the town hall, turn in one quest and get another.
We will be clearing out that temple in a later update. It's not the abandoned temple mentioned in the start of this update I'm afraid.
The skillpoints spent means we can also train Sir Dicksmoker to become and expert identifier!
This should suffice for now, so he can now focus on his other skills. Once we start running into stuff he can't identify, he'll pump this skill some more.
I decided to clear some more of the overland map, and in one corner I meet an NPC that has some thoughts to share on Light Magic.
Light magic is indeed strong. It has some nice buffs, and in this game, light and dark magic aren't mutually exclusive...
Just behind this NPC is a shed containing a rather weird looking man, talking about stuff that seems to fit ill with a high fantasy game..
In the Time of Wonders, people built blasters. Right. And this guy knows how to use them, even if he has never seen one. Right.
...
This is not the last we'll see of this character I'm afraid.
Still on the overland map we encounter a type of enemy that has ranged attacks of their own; mages
The tactic used so far, of entering turn-based combat and just holding down the attack key isn't as attractive when battling other ranged attackers.. The most effective tactic here is strafing while attack. It seems our attacks are much more accurate than those of the enemies, meaning we dodge most of their attacks while they drop like flies.
Anyways, I promised more than one dungeon, correct? This is the second one:
The loading screen is almost removed as soon as it's loaded on modern computers.
This abandoned temple is a bit nastier than Goblinwatch. The abandoned temple contains poisonous foes:
It's prudent to try and keep a distance, while pelting them with your strongest attacks. Presently, that just happens to be our bows, so that's convenient.
Inside the first room with the cobras, we find our first quest item in this dungeon:
Off to a good start, even if Lindblum did get poisoned.
We also encounter our friendly neighborhood bat, though I don't recall this version actually posing a significant risk, despite its name:
Deeper inside the dungeon, we come across a little girl out on her own. Naturally, we take her along so we can help her get back to her mother. This isn't that kind of game..
We can now see an arrow next to the NPC portraits, meaning we have more than two NPCs in tow. Talking to the child doesn't help much however, so we should just return her to her mother first chance we get.
This dungeon is large, and features teleporters:
They teleport us back towards the entrance, which is useful. They don't teleport us into traps, which would have been amusing.
There was a strange guy back in New Sorpigal who wanted these eggs.. So think of them as gold coins in another shape, not as potential baby-eating monstrosities in the hands of a possible lunatic.
That represents the third and final quest we had in this abandoned temple. From here on I just cleared out the last critters before returning to town.
The abandoned temple was much bigger than Goblinwatch. So big in fact, that we cannot see the whole map at the same time. Also, Sir Dicksmoker is the only one left standing when we leave the dungeon, even though we abused ranged attacks and poor monster AI.
We encounter an NPC that speaks of one of the most useful spells in the game:
We visit the temple for some quick healing. This is just to illustrate just how powerful and useful the temples are:
This was just basic health lost and unconsciousness. More serious conditions are more expensive to heal. But the temples can take care of just about anything, as long as you have money to spare.
We turn in our quests and take a look at the award screen:
Before "achievements" were thought of, this game kept track of noteworthy stuff you had done, so you could lovingly stroke your e-peen while poring over the heroics you had done. Popping moles, retarded AI and
After some loving strokes were had, we found another air master NPC!
Flight spell means a revisit to the NWC headquarters, and therefore potions for making stat-boosting black potions!
Each of these stat-boosting potions can only be used once for each character. If you use them all, each stat gets boosted permanently by 9, except for endurance which receives a 15-point boost.
Making the potions takes some time and effort however. Here's all the recipes:
And here's the stats of our heroes after quaffing a whole lot of black potions:
Yeah, I know. So I made a complete batch after the first visit to NWC, and that batch went to Sir Dicksmoker, hence him being just level 4 in this screenshot. The rest of the crew had to wait until we had the means of going back, explaining them being level 6. They're much more badass now however, so the 2000 gold for hiring the NPC was well spent.
A look at the quick reference chart:
Still not quite the talk of town, we need to work on our reputation and fame, but we can now reliably hold our own in combat.
Basking in the afterglow of making those potions, I can't believe our luck as we stumble over yet another very useful NPC:
He imparts some knowledge about the Lloyd's Beacon spell which will turn out to be extremely useful when spelunking (for quickly returning to a temple to heal up, then warping back to the dungeon), but more importantly, he let's us cast the town portal spell, so we can hop off and buy ourselves some very nifty spell skills..
First though, I finish clearing the overland map and find our friend Falagar.
Falagar actually tells us exactly what we need to know to advance the plot! We need to find out what is needed to stop the devils, and to do that we need to consult an oracle. Things never being this easy seems a given, and indeed, we need to gain the support of several important nobles first.. Many quests loom on the horizon, but they loom side-by-side with the opportunity to accrue phat lewt and l33t 5ki11z. Pardon my leet-speek. It's horrible, I know.
Anyways, we teleport to a town I will look into in greater detail when we're actually supposed to be there, instead I'll just leave you with these two screenshots:
Having cleared the New Sorpigal map and gaining access to the most important spell-skills in the game, we return to the New Sorpigal map, ditch the town-portal casting NPC (20% drain on gold found is a bit too steep for my tastes) and travel on foot to the Castle Ironfist map.
I'll end this update with a screenshot of a new type of rag-head enemy, and our next dungeon:
Note: after learning the light and dark magic spell skills for both Lindblum and DR, our party was broke, so we didn't buy any spellbooks of saids schools. We'll have to wait a while, and in the meantime I intend to build the merchant skill of at least one of our characters, as some of the spellbooks cost more than 20.000 gold.. M: