Part 30: Bonus Update 16.5: Winterkill

Bonus Update 16.5: Winterkill

It's another close one this time -- a margin of just one vote, in fact -- but it looks like we'll be doing the Cave of Illusion next. Suits me!



Winterkill is another small and straightforward town. Once you've cleared out the ghosts and collected all the treasure in the beds and potion bottles, the only real points of interest are the well and the guild.

Not very many new spells to cover today, but the ones we've got are mostly pretty good. Let's see what we've picked up.

Winterkill Sorcerer Spells

Elemental Storm: 100 SP + 10 Gems. Pounds all the monsters in front of the party with a storm of magical energy, inflicting 150 points of a random damage type to each monster.
150 damage is pretty good: enemies in Clouds of Xeen with more than a few hundred HP are rare. Being able to hit all enemies in front of the party is nice, too. On the other hand, the SP cost is huge, and the random damage type makes it problematic against enemies with multiple resistances.

Inferno: 75 SP + 10 Gems. Engulfs one group of monsters in magical fire, inflicting 250 points of Fire damage on one group.
You can think of this as either a stronger, more expensive, Fire-elemental version of Mega Volts, or a multi-target version of Incinerate. Either way, it's easily powerful enough to last your Sorcerer through all of Clouds. It might be a while before Flench has enough SP to cast this: I'll try to feed him some Intellect boosts.

Teleport: 10 SP. Sends the party up to 9 squares in the direction the party is facing, regardless of obstacles.
Finally! The next best utility spell after Lloyd's Beacon, and it's all ours. Essential for reaching certain locations: in fact, you can't finish the game without either a spellcaster or an item to cast Teleport. There are a few areas where it just plain doesn't work, but everywhere else it's great for bypassing traps, hazards and obstacles or just for getting from Point A to Point B faster.

Winterkill Cleric Spells

Holy Word: 100 SP + 20 Gems. Completely removes the animating magic of the Undead, returning them to the dust from whence they came.
I'm not sure whether this spell actually kills undead outright or just does a very large amount of damage, but either way, it's effective, although expensive and not 100% guaranteed to work. There's just one problem: we've already wiped out most of the undead in Clouds of Xeen, so it's not much use to us any more. It's good for clearing out the Temple of Yak or the Tomb of a Thousand Terrors if you had trouble with them, though. Despite Lord Xeen being a skeleton dude, we cannot in fact just walk up to him and kill him with this spell.

Mass Distortion: 75 SP + 10 Gems. Increases the weight of your opponents, effectively removing half of their hit points.
Probably my favourite attack spell in the game. It's got a high chance of success, and seems to be effective regardless of an enemy's power or resistances. This makes it an excellent choice against tough enemies.

We've now seen the vast majority of spells in World of Xeen, but not quite all of them. There are a few spells that aren't sold in any of the five towns in Clouds of Xeen: they're either given out as quest rewards, or exclusive to Darkside. Some of them, like Enchant Item, we've seen already; the rest will be covered once we have access to them.