Part 9: Josef's Tunnels
The Nosferatu. Here's Vicissitude on the Nosferatu.
Vicissitude posted:
Josef is a Nosferatu. As you can see, he's butt ugly. This is not just a poor unfortunate soul, mind you. This is what happens to EVERY Nosferatu childe. Back in the day, Absimiliard and his brood were actually quite beautiful. They Embraced for beauty and aesthetic reasons. They were hedonists at heart, and this is pretty much why they were assholes. Caine's curse was to ruin their features and twist their bodies into something monstrous. All Nosferatu are hideous in their own unique way (in game terms, they have Appearance ratings of 0 and cannot raise it). To counteract this, they have the Obfuscate discipline. At lower levels, they can hide themselves from view and even walk unseen through even the thickest crowd. At higher levels, they can mask groups or create an illusory mask that others can see. Those that can't prefer to stay in the shadows, the sewers being a favored lair for broods of the ugliest of vampires, earning them the nickname 'Sewer Rats'.
They have the annoying ability to use Cloak of Shadows and hide during combat. Unless we use Heightened Senses, we'll just have to wait until they attack again.
We'll head left at this fork in the road.
And run into another mob. Did I mention that I love Feral Claws? The attacks are pretty quick, have a good chance to hit, and it seems that most enemies have very little resistance to aggravated damage.
Here's what the Nosferatu look like when they're invisible and we've got Heightened Senses activated. As you can see, there are two types of Nosferatu that we're running across. I call 'em hunchbacks and fighters. There's not any real difference between the two. They both only fight in melee combat, and cast buffs. Some fighters use weapons in combat, while the hunchbacks only use their claws.
Here's a sideroom very early in the dungeon. I found some Leather Armor in that coffin, but the bars cannot be interacted with.
Soon enough, the tunnels end and we enter some sort of dungeon you'd find in a castle.
This switch opens a room directly behind us, where I find a scroll of Walk the Abyss. We'll find out more about that spell soon, but if you remember, we also found one with the Femur.
A big thing about this game is that instead of fighting a few enemies that each present a good challenge, they make us fight a shit-ton of easy enemies. I don't know what they were thinking. ZerothK had a pretty good point on that.
ZearothK posted:
I think everything about the game makes more sense if you consider all the unnamed vampires to be Christof hallucinating something evil to fight. Just the ammount of blood all those vampires would need to go about their nights is absurd.
Up ahead, we find a barred passageway that we need to enter.
So let's explore until we find some way to get through.
We find this switch in the room after killing the Nosferatu. This gimmick is getting pretty tiring.
We head through this room...
And get ambushed by another mob.
Now is as good of a time as any to use one of our scrolls of Walk the Abyss, because Christof was the only one who has the Awaken spell.
We'll use the coffin to rest and increase our stats.
One dot in Eyes of the Beast, and Feral Claws for Christof. Also one point in Perception.
One dot in Awaken and Blood Healing for Wilhem, and 5 points in Stamina.
One dot in Spirits Touch, and 12 points in Perception for Serena.
Note that resting doesn't restore any health or blood or dead party members to life. Wilhem will bring Christof back to life...
...and we'll dump off some of the loot we've accumulated so far in our vault. Every character has their own vault, as you can see.
The doorway then disappears.
Now that we've got Spirit's Touch, we can identify items.
That'll be useful for us now, since we're fighting Nosferatu.
More tunnels.
More Nosferatu.
More exploring. I'm sorry about this. They really went too far with the dungeons.
Uh...
Thankfully, this dungeon is full of those scrolls.
Another hidden room!
What?
We'll give Christof the tome of Animalism, and give this eye thing to Serena to identify.
It's used like any other consumable. Now we have access to Animalism.
This item isn't really useful. I don't notice any difference when Eyes of the Beast is activated.
It sure looks weird.
New armor for Serena
After fighting a few more mobs, we come across another fork in the tunnel. We'll go left.
Then we gotta fight the Nosferatu on the other side, anyway.
We've got a pretty difficult fight coming up, so we're gonna use our other scroll of Walk the Abyss, sell some items to the blacksmith, and restock on blood potions and buy a couple scrolls.
Watch mini-boss fight
I decided to offscreen that stuff, because it isn't very interesting. That guy with the Scythe is a mini-boss.
He uses a spell called Drawing out the Beast, which raises the affected character's frenzy level to almost maximum.
This fight is pretty hard, because our party members will feed on each other when frenzied, and Othelios's regular attacks hit pretty hard.
Othelios decided to feed on his invisible Nosferatu friend. It's pretty much the only reason I got through the fight, because Serena is so inaccurate in combat.
"Battle Axe"?
Looks like a Scythe to me.
No thanks. We can't even use it if we wanted to.
Let's head right.
Watch
I don't know why that Nosferatu even exists.
This part of the dungeon is a really stupid puzzle.
Watch
I call it a puzzle because there are two doors to go through for each area in here. Each area has its own Chronicle of Caine. If we go through the wrong door, we go back to the previous area and have to walk a little bit more to get back to where we were. No enemies to fight. Clues about what doorways to go through are given in the Chronicles.
Watch
There's really not much to say about this part of the dungeon, but the lore is pretty interesting.
Watch
Watch
Watch
Finally. Here was the order of the doors we went through:
1.The Red Face
2.The Castle
3.The Tri-Face
4.The Waves
5.The Ankhs
Here's what the manual has to say on Ghouls.
quote:
Ghouls are mortal Kindred servants that have been fed vampiric blood by their masters. The ghoul does not age as long as it is supplied with vitae and gains some limited vampiric abilities (most notably level one Potence). Since they aren’t affected by sunlight as Kindred are, they make useful servants and protectors during the daylight hours. Most ghouls appear as normal kine, but some long-term ghouls develop side effects resembling their domitor’s clan weakness (i.e. a Nosferatu ghoul may begin sprouting unsightly boils and buboes.) Some ghouls may also learn one level of a Discipline their masters are familiar with, but this is very uncommon. Ghouls have use of any kind of weaponry usable by humans, along with their learned Disciplines.
Locked. To the left is another barred doorway.
The lever is about two feet away.
We can also open the other doorway. Utterly pointless.
Huh?
Watch
What kind of stupid one-liner is that?
Boss Fight
Vaclav is really easy. The gimmick is that he can't be hurt by normal weapons, but he's easy enough where Wilhem using Feral Claws can take him down alone.
Watch
Does Wilhem have 6 fingers on his right hand, or is that Christof's hand blending in?
Stunning character development.
This time we don't need Heightened Senses to go through this door in the wall.
There's no cutscene or questlog update when we pick it up. It's not even in our inventory.
Now we have to backtrack to a previous fork in the road.
That one. We'll head left instead of right.
The golden lane?
I don't know if that shortcut was open the whole time or not. We need to go back to the prince.
Watch
We all know that Christof wants to save as many ladies as he can.
Uh-oh.
I can't tell what "The Price" was. I didn't notice any difference in Christof's stats after the prince did that.
Fortitude?
The manual doesn't elaborate on how Feral Whispers works.
One dot in Fortitude and one point in Perception.
Obfuscate?
I've never found a reason to invent in Obfuscate. Cloak of Shadows is only useful as a defensive power, and even then Earth Meld is better for that sort of thing. There's no stealth attack bonus or something.
One dot in Feed, one point in Dexterity and wits.
One point in Summon Soul, and 10 points in Intelligence.
That's what we'll be doing next time.