Part 8: Big Decisions, Part 2

Update 08: Big Decisions, Part 2




The reason I was turning down all those other characters was because I wanted Flamdring. Now I head back to Alvar to get the three artifacts I found ID'd, because aside from the bow they were all beyond Ithilgore's ID'ing proficiency.



The Archangel Wings are an excellent cloak for Necromancers and Dark Elves(assuming your Dark Elf ever casts any spells), the resistances are good on everyone and the feather falling... is pointless on everyone since there's no point where you can do a skip or anything by letting every party member but one die. You get access to full-party Feather Fall super early in any case. Maybe if you're doing some sort of no-elemental-magic run you could slap it on a priest, let the priest survive in a few places, and then have them resurrect the rest.



Spiritslayer is decent IF you're bringing a Knight, but that requires either associating with the dickhead Dragon Hunters or bringing along the one guy who got stuck in the Temple of the Serpent way back near the start of the game, but at the same time, dual-wielding swords will almost certainly get you better returns than using spears.



The Blade of Mercy is decent except that Necromancers are kind of shit at using daggers. If it was usable by vampires or dark elves, it'd be a decent weapon, but for necromancers... bit of a shame.

Now, we're going to the Ravage Roaming to find Korbu's crypt.

To destroy his remains for good and prevent the vampires from resurrecting him, right?

...

...to destroy his remains for good and prevent the vampires from resurrecting him, right?

Ha ha, no, we're getting paid to get those back in primo condition.



I can already see the advantages of travelling with a party of hardened adventurers. I've got excellent protection close to hand-
Ooooh, Jasp! He called us excellent!
It's nice to be travelling with someone who appreciates us.
-free, high-quality healthcare-
Listen, wyrm, I'm healing you only because it's my holy calling and my powerful ethics would not allow a party member to die. Don't push it.
-and having a mage who can Town Portal really does spare the old wings. Very cozy.
I was somewhat worried by how quickly and easily Flamdring had adjusted to travelling with us after we killed all his neighbours. Would he adjust to someone else that easily, if they suggested he betray us?




The Crypt of Korbu is this brown terrain pimple that was guarded by all the wyverns the first time we got to the Roaming.




Oh! Oh! Everyone, I see traps! Watch your step!



Mmmm, and I believe that's about fifty hit dice of angry efreeti coming our way. A slightly more pressing issue.

This encounter absolutely pantsed me the first time I came in here. The Efreeti are not fucking around, and if you aggro all of the ones in this entry chamber at once, they're pretty capable of dunking on most parties, because it's relatively easy to get through the wyverns, and then the Efreeti just suddenly bump the difficulty level up.


While they're more fragile than dragons, easier to hit than dragons and do less damage than dragons, three things make them more challenging. Firstly, you're fighting them in a phone booth where it's hard to dodge them. Secondly, about every third of their attacks is instead a Fireball which, being explosive, will hit the entire party at once. Thirdly, their resistance to Physical damage, which will, aside from dragon breath weapons, probably be your biggest damage source, of damage dealing. The first time the party walked into this encounter, none of them walked out, and the second time, where it worked, it only did so because I clonked half the Efreetis and then ran out again for a nap(the Efreetis being too polite to walk out the door and shiv everyone in their sleep), before coming in for the rest.




I thought genies were supposed to give you wishes! I didn't wish for this!
I confess, diary, during some moments of our quest, I had rather wished something like this on Maylander, but the Efreetis seemed to be quite egalitarian in how they dispensed violence to everyone, so it probably wasn't my fault. Probably.



You there, dictionary servant, I require healing!
Settle down, you blaring basilisk, you're hardly the only one.
That sort of attitude will not earn you a tip.



Even the successful fight against the Efreeti leaves the party pretty well dinged up, but at least the traps are quite easy to circumvent. If you just walk to the side of the chamber, they're so trivial to jump across that I never fucked it up and, thus, aren't quite sure what they do. Knowing MM traps, though, probably something explosive.




Inexplicably, the exit is a blank wall that functions like a door. The weird thing is that it doesn't show up as a secret despite Ithilgore having enough Perception to spot the traps earlier(and all Perception or Disarm Traps in a given area will ALWAYS be the same difficulty. I still can't believe that something as basic as "how do Disarm Traps and Perception function" aren't explained in the manual for the damn game. It doesn't do it for MM6, 7 or 8 as far as I'm aware.



Am I allowed to look at this? These ladies are hardly wearing anything!


Bafflingly, the next chamber is filled with Nagas which are, compared to the Efreetis, super weak weak. I can see starting off a dungeon with weak enemies and then advancing to tougher ones, but front-loading with an absolute dickpunch and then letting the player just waltz through the rest? Just why? They're a lot more fragile, worse resistances, less powerful attacks... they do have a ranged attack, which would make them a bit harder to deal with except that, well...




We braced ourselves for the onslaught of the Nagas and fended them off with great violence but... something wasn't right. The fury of the battle passed much too quickly... that couldn't have been all the nagas we saw when we first opened the chamber... where had the rest gone?



The peculiarities of the MM "AI" "pathfinding" means that about half the nagas will inevitably navigate into these little sarcophagus nooks all around the room, climb on top of the sarcophagi and then promptly get themselves stuck in the geometry.



You can ogle these hardly-dressed herpetons later, I've spotted the way onwards.






I'll say, Korbu knew how to get himself buried. Guarded by Efreetis and Nagas, a set of traps and no less than three hidden doors.
Someone's been littering in here, though. Look, there's paper all over the floor!
Oh, be sure to pick that up, it might be his contractor's brochure. I'd love to know who did all this work.



So here's one of the rare times where the game requires you to think a bit and doesn't immediately hand you the answer, but does in fact allow you to find it. We've been finding this vampire's diary entries for a while now, and one of the last ones we found was...



Each note mentions the next place she plans to head, and the Cyclops' Larder is the only place we've yet to visit. So it allows us to, at least, make an educated guess about where to find her next, though it may just lead us to another clue-note.

It seemed we would be heading back to Ironsand again but the vampires of Shadowspire had requested that we gather up Korbu's sarcophagus as well...



I'm an old, frail man, you couldn't possibly make me carry it.
"The" Jasp Thelbourne was weak and frail when it suited him, and I was weak and frail all the time...
I shan't destroy my spine for this sinister project. Bring along the sarcophagus if you must, but I won't sacrifice my body for it.
I'd help but, um, I'm carrying... ten swords and two suits of platemail. Do you want me to drop those?
Goodness, no! Those are worth money!
Tsk, very well. Behold as I, Flamdring, effortlessly carry this sarcophagus.




I like that the sarcophagus is, in fact, fucking huge. Time to town portal back to Alvar and then walk to Ironsands and deal with the cyclopses. Cyclopes? The many one-eyed bastards.





In the southeastern part of the Ironsands there are a LOT of cyclopes around, so, hoping to speed things up a bit, I sweep in low over the first mob and drag them towards the second mob... and discover that apparently there's a limit to how many NPC's can be "active" at once, as a number of cyclopses just stop moving as the two mobs get close enough to each other.




And I spend so long murdering all the cyclopes from the air that the lighting engine abruptly shifts from day to night-time while I'm busy piling up more corpses than grains of sand in the desert.


The reason this is possible at all is because the cyclopses have no ranged attack, which is a bit odd, because I distinctly remember them hurling boulders in the Heroes games(and their attack animation here is literally them hurling boulders! It's like the Dark Dwarves having crossbows but being melee attackers...). In terms of raw stats and damage, they're about as threatening as Nagas, but their ace in the hole is that all three tiers have a chance of Paralyzing if they hit you, which means that you should always cheese them as much as possible from a distance, since their landing a couple of lucky paralyzes would have much the same effect as their landing several save-or-die attacks. In any case, out here they just exist to die for my amusement since I've taken to the skies.




Look at all that carnage, now no one can stop us from busting into the Larder.




Ooooh, what do Cyclopses eat? I'm kinda hungry, and since we're in their Larder...
I had to patiently explain to Ithilgore that what Cyclopes mostly ate was us, so if he found any food lying around, he wasn't to touch it.
Awwww... I thought it was going to be a dungeon full of apples and stuff.




Quail, you anthrophagic antagonists, your judgment has arrived!
Mage, does he have an off switch? I think he's giving me tinnitus.
Much to our disappointment, no, Maylander did not have an "off switch," unless maybe we pushed him off a bridge.
Ah, let the boy have a hobby. Some day he'll discover girls or board games and he'll calm down.





A descent into darkness! What horrors lurk below? What deviltry? What cr-
Maylander? Did you get stuck for a word? You can use "badness!"
...
Huh, not responsive at all. Did anyone see what happened?
Oh, one of those one-eyed fellows crept up and whacked him. I incinerated it, of course, but it seems to have stunned him.




Yeah, Maylander gets to experience this dungeon paralyzed and silent because I didn't notice a single cyclops sneaking up on the party and of course it whacked the one person in the group who can actually cast Cure Paralysis.





The kitchen has a similar shaft to the one the entry hall has, and if you drop down...



You get a room containing fucking nothing whatsoever. Probably a victim of rushed development.




Back upstairs, a lever in a closet(of course positioned so that when you look inside, you can't see it, you have to walk to the very bottom of it and turn around to spot it at all, dick placement, NWC) opens a secret door revealing an elevator descending into the bowels of the Cyclops Larder.





Oooh, cages. Do you think they're keeping any cool animals in them?



I'm afraid not, little one, these are just common human peasants such as you can see anywhere.

You can open the cages and let the peasants out, but they don't even thank you for it or otherwise respond to it, or have any dialogue, which feels a bit odd. Maybe like the human peasants hanging out with the medusas in MM6, this is actually a weird but consensual thing.





In a chest among the cyclopses' cages, we found Ciatlen's final journal entry... which was a bit of a depressing one, though it did at least indicate we had found the right place to look for Korbu's remains. I was rather glad that Maylander was still paralyzed, as he'd almost certainly have said something gloating and tasteless about the evil destroying themselves.





A last batch of cyclopes guard the final cage and the dungeon's final chests, behind a few traps that you can effortlessly jump over.




One chest contains a Potion of Rejuvenation for removing aging. Now, MM6 had a shitload of age-causing ghosts in the Mire of the Damned and a few dungeons. MM7 had a ton of aging ghosts in the Barrow Downs. MM8? Has nothing at all that causes aging except casting Divine Intervention. Still, I suppose, if you cast it too much, Rejuvenation potions are the only way to undo it.




Well, that's rather odd, isn't it?
What's odd?
Look closer at the bones, child. If Korbu simply "laid down and died," why would there be a stake in his chest?
It was an interesting mystery. I supposed I could see Korbu using his vampiric might to stake himself... but perhaps that was all a myth, a story, to deceive other vampires into abandoning their unlife? It was certainly not something I had expected to find or see.




Have I mentioned how much I love that I can actually Town Portal to Shadowspire? How much better it is than anything about the Murmurwoods? And how much I hope you guys will vote for me to side with the Necromancers because they feel like they're so much not dickheads like the priests?




This promotion is pretty damn important for Vampires. GM dagger skill is a nice boost to their power and having their spell abilities upgraded to Master means you get access to a lot of important buffs/protections/cures either as a backup or if you're entirely choosing not to roll with a Priest of the Sun.



I can't believe you simply left me paralyzed while you helped revive a legendary vampiric villain.
Indeed, it's baffling that we managed to do it without your aberrant alliteration.
I could see where this was going and encouraged everyone to settle down. We had put it off for long enough and now we needed to make a choice... there was no decision but to side with the Dragons over the Dragon Hunters-
Thank you!
-but as much as it upset Maylander, it was less clear cut in the fight between Shadowspire and the Murmurwoods.

VOTE

Short of getting Arachne promoted to a Lich and a few minor sidequests like finding an exciting puzzle box, we're about done with things to do other than continuing the main storyline. We can't even go find the Obelisk treasure or complete the Arcomage championship because the storyline is required to give us access to the final overworld area.

Priests of the Sun or Necromancers?

I really want the vote to go for the Necromancers, but I'll obey the way the votes go!

And as usual, if there are any party members you really want to get rid of or other changes you want me to make to the lineup, go ahead. Dyson Leland is a required recruit for the next part, however... so...

Should Dyson Leland replace Maylander or should we double up on clerics? And if so, who are we dumping to make space for him?