Part 5: The Worst Maze

Update 005: The Worst Maze



Back on the scene in Ishad N'ha.



Rondor got enough mangling done at the end of my last session of play that he's ready to become a barbarian. Now, this gives him no access to magic, but ostensibly makes him beefier and better at hitting things, though I have no idea how much or whether it actually changes things at all. At this point all of my three fighter-primary characters are reliably hitting whoever they want to beat to a pulp as it is.




I also finally recall that I have Galian's letter and hand it in for the final church quest in Ishad N'ha. We gotta find some guy in a vague location and give him a letter telling him that his life's quest is purposeless. Cool.



I don't have any other town errands so I decide to go check out the Stout Mines in the southwest of the Shire. The main reason to go there at the moment is that Scanthril wants us to kill someone called Raskalion, which, while we don't know it in-game yet, will reward us with the item Trap Option needs to become an Assassin, which is the best place for a rogue starter character to end up.




Thankfully the sun starts rising while I'm trudging through the meadows, giving me a chance to see the swarms of worgurs, ratlings and trolls at a distance before they get all up in my business.



Oh and this big fucker is still out there.



Constantly butting in where he isn't wanted.




Shitting fire at me from out of sight because I guess he's just kind of a dickhead like that.




Goddammit you fucking reptile go away. The worst thing is that once you're close enough for him to spew fire, it's literally undodgeable, the actual stream of flame is just an animation, not representative of any actual projectile you can avoid. Thankfully he does less damage than you'd expect, and always seems to target Kuros, who starts to become golden-brown and crispy, but is one of the three party members best suited to tanking a shitload of pain.





I also just want to re-iterate that I deal with fights like every five minutes, even though they're usually resolved by Trap Option and King Gizzord blasting them with Meteor and Iceball until they're all dead, and letting Sophia getting a bunch of kills on low-HP enemies so I can promote her to a barbarian, too. It'll only be a brief pit stop for her before paladin or samurai, but there's no reason not to drag her through that class.




Oh for fuck's sake, a SECOND one.




Well, I think I lost it, now-



Goddammit.



So this dickhead, this absolute prickmeister, is a unique enemy with no unique drops or bearing on the story or any quests who hides in the air, OF COURSE on a narrow path where the tree crowns obscure him completely, but since they're just decoration he can easily blast you through them.




He kills Gizzord in a nasty alpha strike and then lands on top of the party, partially clipping into us, which is a bad idea on his part since now instead of throwing spells into the sky at a moving target that might be missed, it's on the ground where we can turn him into drumsticks with a side-order of XP.



And since Hierophant now knows Resurrect, Gizzord doesn't even have to miss out on the fun. Thankfully it also brings people back at max HP, which is a nice touch.




I confess it baffles me a bit, because the name sounds like it's meant to have more meaning than just being some random enemy.




As it is, it really just exists as a big feathery hint that you've finally found the Stout Mines which are hidden at the end of some narrow, twisty woodsy paths.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnidpSdXdUA

So what I don't get is why the Stout Mines' airlock guard is inexplicably given this kind-of-Italian name when nothing else about the dwarves is Italian, none of them have any Italian naming or behaviors or anything. It feels like half these names are in-jokes or just picked at random.

Now, we can either go find a Writ somewhere or we can go find him some booze. Now, you might think we could just go back to town and buy some booze, but no. I can get Hierophant so drunk the bartender starts getting worried, but I can't actually buy a bottle of booze to bring along. Instead I need to go do an optional sidequest if I want to get some alcohol for this short drunkard.



Anyway, back out we go.






There's this random little copse just around the corner which has the corpse of Scanthril's original agent, with a Writ for the mines conveniently next to him, just lying around. It baffles me how they give you a big long runaround quest to get some booze for the guard when you can literally just walk five minutes away and completely obviate the need for it. It isn't even hidden in any way except in the general way W&W hides everything from you by having a terrible automap that only vaguely delineates the border between open ground and solid trees.




Now I could just turn around and go back to the Stouts, but now I've gotten started I want to do a bit more exploring. I also want to try and see if I can't promote Trap Option out of his cursed garbage Bard class before we hit them, and he just needs like one more level for that. Now, as I'm walking around I get some flavour text and...




I, uh, I think the burial grounds are right around here, buddy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXd-UHhF66k

I'm amazed by how he just stands there and lets it play out while I murder all the spectres. Also that Howling Banshee could definitely have gone worse, with its ability to cast instakill Face of Death and the scream that attempts to Frighten and Paralyze all party members. The skill he teaches Hierophant is Arcane Void, a talent that grants him a 25% resistance to "magic damage" which remains vaguely defined.




So in the small graveyard just behind Jathil, where the ghosts came from, there's a chest which I pop open to receive a nice full suit of platemail which goes to Sophia. Her chainmail goes to Rondor and, with a spare helmet, the Masque of Death goes to Hierophant.



It, uh, has some scaling issues with his wider model.

In any case, I get back to exploring as I have two more locations and one more NPC to find before I head back to Ishad N'ha and then to the Stout Mines for real.






This unassuming cave is where the BEAST OF BRONZE resides, and it would be a very bad idea to go poke at it until we've got our Stout-related bullshit out of the way.





Around a bit more wooded terrain, the mountainside continues. It's impossible to make out what the descriptive text is talking about because the angle is bad on seeing it from the ground and also the draw distance, but there's a mountain path up above that you can fall off and earn yourself like ten minutes of retracing your steps in addition to probably mangling half the party from falling damage.




The reason to come here, though, is so we can find Torin! The Bushi Dojo's first quest for all the Japan-themed classes is to go bring him an arrow so he can try to shoot Erathsmedor out of the air. He's also got... an accent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI5FOyV2qXg

On the bright side, I think with the Toad Village and Torin out of the way, we've about tapped the well on stupid racist accents in W&W. Though not on bad dialogue in general.




On the way back to Ishad N'ha, I also run across a quest objective. I have no idea where he's hiding or if something in particular triggers him, but I think he only spawns once you've picked up the Writ for the Stout Mines which is an odd trigger.






Like most single opponents in the game who don't have magic, the ability to one-shot party members or AoE attacks, he goes down like a chump.




Alright, back to do some housekeeping and then into the field again.



Kuros gets a reward for bringing Torin his arrow, and a quest to go find Torin's dad, Grunaxe who's been missing for years.



Sophia joins Rondor among the barbarian crew.




Hierophant finishes up his Ishad N'ha cleric quests and gains access to some more training options. Each guild has a selection of traits that can only be learned by training, not from quests or class changes.

The Oath selections makes you resistant to, respectively, magic and melee, and vulnerable to the other. Crusade gives you double XP for killing undead, but I'm pretty sure we're past most of the big undead concentrations in the game already. Quickspeak is literally faster spellcasting, so a pro pick, and Healer is a bonus to ALL HEALING DONE so also a pro pick. Mages and Clerics also get access to Cabalist and Occultist which lets them enchant items. I've never played around much with that before, but I guess this time I will, just in a vague attempt to keep the other guys caught up. Each school of magic has an Artifact of X spell which gives access to enchanting items with that school's powers.

If you guess that nothing anywhere seems to define what, say, "Powers from the Spirit Realm" actually are, mechanically, you're 100% correct, though.



While attempting to see if I could just, like, buy a bottle of wine from the barkeep, I get Hierophant absolutely wasted, and the barkeep tells me A) that entering the mountain cave without Dragon Armor from the Stouts is certain death and that B) someone in the Stout Mines has been drilling into the king's treasury. That latter thing definitely seems like something we want a piece of.



And then I go to train Trap Option as a Ninja. Now, the quest is to enter Shurugeon Castle without "awakening the sleeping spirit" and dropping the drawbridge. FAQ's around the place says this means you must get in there with NO FIGHTS AT ALL. What they miss, however, is what happens if you've already been there and dropped the drawbridge ahead of time since whatever spirit it is you're meant to not wake up won't have spawned if you don't have the quest.



If you do that, you just get the promotion right away. I'm clearly a genius master of this game and not an idiot who gets trapped in mazes for several hours.



Anyway, skipping over like fifty dead trolls and Kuros' new skin grafts after another encounter with Erathsmedor and we're back at the Stout Mines, this time to actually do something in there.





Welcome to a downright sadistic dungeon experience.




It won't be immediately obvious what's so bad about the Stout Mines, because the first two levels which, of course, feature no enemies(unless you decide to fight all the Stouts, which I'm pretty sure you can do for fun). You've just got mine corridors and mine lifts up and down.







The first level is just a few twisty tunnels and two chambers where some Stouts are going about their mining business.



The walls have these little ore deposits you can bust open if you find a pickaxe, but we won't have one of those for a bit yet. It's nothing major, mind you, just that something like 2 in 5 of them have a gem of some sort inside, so if you bust open all of them, it can be a decent payday by the time you're done.




The workers don't really have any real dialogue, mostly they just tell you to shove off and that they like their king.




Level 2 has more points of interest, by which I mean two points of interest by which I mean literally one point of interest you can interact with unless you want to aggro all the dwarves.





The one thing you can interact with is Freyedies' throne room. The descriptive text goes on about how it's made out of marble and beautiful and etc. but it's just the same generic rock texture as the rest of the mines, so it falls a bit flat.




The guards next to the door are the ones you need to hand the fighters' guild invitations to, to complete the relevant quest. This, of course, means you have to sit through the guard repeating: "How nice, I'll consider this" except far more verbosely once for each character you had that started out as a fighter. But with that done, it's time to go harass royalty.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCFdkgfGLw

Freyedies is reasonably verbose and says that once we got kill a bunch of mentally ill dwarves, we can risk getting set on fire to get some asbestos armor forged by the dwarves so that getting set on fire won't be a threat again in the future. The dragon armor is required to progress in the game and also provides extremely good fire resistance, but is otherwise not particularly superior to generic plate.

So what's the other interesting, but non-interactible location on this level?






You better believe I'm gonna get access to Freyedies' treasury before I'm done with this place. It wouldn't be a proper RPG playthrough if I didn't.




So we've got two tram lines, as Freyedies mentioned, the one on the right can't be used until we fix it, so we are, of course, gonna use the left one. Just gonna hop on the tram and pull the lev-



Turns out, if you don't "use" the tram like a vehicle or a horse to hop on, it'll just zoom off without you. Goddammit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx0q1lfveiY

Really love that little weird-ass geometry-clipping spin at the end.



Hoo boy. So now we get to the bad part of the mines which is also almost all of the mines.






Now you might wonder: What's up with those last two screenshots? Then compare the minimap to what I'm actually looking at. In one I'm seeing a corridor not on the map, in the other I'm seeing a corridor on the map but a wall in the real world. This is because the BIG BRAIN GENIUSES who made this game decided to make a dungeon section split up inlike... I wanna say four or five layers, displayed with only two actual layers of map, so good fucking luck finding your way around, buddy boy.

It's made further confusing because the levels aren't exactly separate, most of them you can reach just by climbing ramps OR by using elevators. So it's just, ugh, hell to navigate. I think I spent like an hour just running around in circles on this level. To its credit, getting out again is as simple as taking sufficient up elevators and then getting a bit lucky. On the other hand, actually finding the two relevant objects in this section of the mines is more luck than anything else.




It doesn't help that the levels are almost entirely devoid of landmarks, and the tunnels, of course, are all gently curving rather than being at right angles or something else that would help you navigate.



At least the place has some new enemies! In addition to upgraded slimes, worgurs(now they can disease you!), bats(imagine if they could shoot fire!), spiders and ghosts(now with fireballs to throw at you), we've got the aforementioned insane miners.




Your first job when fighting them is to clear out the front line and engage as many in melee at once as possible, so they have a chance of swinging hammers and picks at you rather than throwing fucking hand grenades. They drop gems semi-regularly, as well as their picks so we can start cracking open ore deposits.




This mine section has about three or four little mining areas with ore deposits(or, hell, to be honest there might be fucking ten or twenty and I just missed them. I literally cannot explain how fucking lost I got in this place), but little otherwise of interest, except for two of them.







One has this little side area which has a switch for switching the tracks on the first split on the right-hand tram line. You'll want to go ahead and flip that one over as soon as it's found so you can get on the route to getting a headache and also stealing Freyedies' treasure.




This is probably the worst thing to run in down here, grenade-throwing guards hiding behind chunky front-liners and thus having no motivation to stop throwing grenades and close to melee. Thankfully I had enough left in the mana pool to just blast him over the heads of the spiders.




Also it turns out the reason this dungeon is so hyper cursed is because the idiot dwarves found a stash of graves somewhere and started desecrating them for funsies, the little dickheads. Anyway, this is the second room you need to find down here.



Go open the chest for some non-spectacular loot, and then turn 90 degrees to your left.



You see that non-noteworthy brown stick lying next to the non-interactible brown items on the ground just sort of casually in a corner? That's the iron rod you need to fix the other half of the tram ride to continue the game.

Anyway, having found that, I proceed to get lost for another half hour or so as I try to figure out whether there's anything else worthwhile down here.




More desecrated graves...




Some ghosts angry about their desecrated graves... and while they're distracting me a Rabid Worgur sidles up and nibbles on Hierophant's ankle, getting him diseased. But because there's no fanfare when it happens and the icon is exactly the same as for nausea, I don't notice it until he starts losing stat points. Thankfully I get "lucky" and he only loses one point of fortitude and a little bit off the top of his max HP before I'm out of the dungeon.

I'd also like to point out that this group of undead enemies is like 90% resistant to the spells that specifically target undead enemies, Dispel Undead and Dust to Dust. Because fuck you for playing this game, I guess.



Also packs of five enemies at once that can throw fireballs suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.




I do eventually manage to find my way out again, though.





Considering that this is a ride you have to make at least once to complete the game, and like another three or four times to exhaust all of the mines content, how did no one notice that going back up the track to the terminal would consistently clip your viewpoint down through the floor? Did they not care? Did they not have time to fix it?




Anyway, there we go, slotting in the fresh lever rod to fix the right-hand tram to go. While I take that ride down the tracks, let me illustrate why this is so hellishly conceived.



Getting to the first track switcher isn't bad, then you ride down the tracks and get to the second switcher. Back up, to the first switcher. Back down to Raskalion and the Treasury. Then when you're done with that, back up, down to the first switcher, back up, down to the second switcher, back up and then down to the first switcher again. It's hard to convey how much of a dumb time waste it feels like. Especially since the sub-area with the second track switcher has nothing else of relevance. It could have been cut entirely and just left you to deal with a single track switcher, thus saving vast amounts of backtracking.

Aaaaargh.





Trust me when I say that there's nothing you're missing here except fifteen minutes of tunnels looping back on themselves.






Flip the switch.





Fight the giant crab guarding a pointless healing pond considering how easy it is to just heal up your party with even a single cleric, which, no, doesn't cure conditions so Hierophant is still rotting away.

And then I snip out a bunch of backtracking to the first switcher station and riding down the tracks again.






Pleasantly enough, the Raskalion/Treasury section is very bullshit-free. There's a single path which leads to a small underground lake, and if you walk along the shores of that, you get to the only interesting thing there.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ROO95_KlI

One thing I feel is interesting is that the game never outright tells you whether Raskalion or Freyedies is in the right, though we'll get some hints to let us make up our mind before this episode is over, and I feel like they largely land in support of Freyedies being the fuckface. I feel pretty bad about having to kill Raskalion, honestly, but I would like Trap Option to be as useful as possible.

Also turns out Freyedies was part of continuing the digging in the Cursed Stout Graveyards, and thus cursing a shitload of dwarves and then sending us to kill them. What a dick.




It's pleasant that Raskalion already did all the hard work of hooking us up with easy access to Freyedies' treasury. He also seems more interested in Freyedies being robbed than getting rich himself, as he doesn't demand a cut of anything you loot from up there.







The treasury is, sadly, a bit underwhelming. Most of the chest contents are just... normal loot.




They do contain gold bars, but honestly the gems we've been prying out of the walls and collecting off the trapped miners we murdered are worth more than the gold bars are.




But holy shit, I finally found an equipment upgrade for Rondor! It only took, uhhhhh... about twenty hours of gameplay to find an axe-type weapon better than the first one I could buy in the starter town shop! Christ. I think Kuros is on his fourth sword by now, Sophia had an upgraded spear since about six hours in, and if Hierophant had been using hammers/maces since the start of the game and not just since his Paladin promotion, he'd be on his third or fourth upgrade, too.

Of course no one notices us doing all this. I think if we went out the vault from inside, they would get extremely pissed, but since we don't, they don't give a fuck.




I want to re-iterate that I genuinely felt a bit bad about this. Raskalion seemed like he was a decent dwarf.




Also it would've been interesting if the Sinking Lake actually WAS cursed and would have given you some problems getting your gold out but... no, it's not. I think Raskalion was just lazy.

Anyway, back up the tracks to the first switching station, down to the second, back up to the first and THEN down to the last section of the mines.





Trust me when I say you missed literally nothing on that whole switcharoo except me discovering that the ghost spawns weren't tied to a single cave but were in fact just really rare and could pop up anywhere to ruin my day. Fucking ghosts.




At least this place looks a bit different and also isn't a crappy maze.



Advancing will require either a bit of jumping skill or just having Lavawalk and dropping down for some non-negligible falling damage and then walking to shore.



It's also worth noting this cave that's above and behind where we entered.






It's the first place I head after reaching the end of the broken tram line.





Another little lava lake.



Guarded by lava pups! That's right, you might've expected some sort of MONSTROUS MAGMA MONSTER when Freyedies was talking about the BEAST OF FIRE but instead it's just hellhounds. Shame we gotta kill 'em instead of petting 'em.







Like so many other enemies, they're kind of underwhelming, though. There are really only three of them and almost no monster spawns in these lower mines, except for the occasional flock of firebreathing bats.



And then it's just a matter of hacking up some ore deposits scattered around for a glob of blue ore to hand in to Freyedies. It's even possible to find some in an adjacent cavern where you don't even have to fight the Heck Hound Family for them, or you could just run in, tank a bit of the damage, dig up the ore, and leg it back out again.





The alternate cave is this little ledge which you can reach by just sort of casually... walking up a vertical wall. It seems extremely unintended.




With that done, the actual getting out is easy enough but a bit non-obvious. See, you can't, as far as I'm aware, get back up the broken rail line you came down on.






Instead you have to climb up the path that lead to the hellhounds and jump on to the top of the entrance and drop down for some minor falling damage. It seems to be the only way out but it also feels janky and unintended, but then again, "janky and unintended" is how most mechanics in this game feel.






The idiots guarding the treasury haven't noticed me breaking open every chest behind them or throwing fireballs at the Squix inside. Morons.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X83asJ8f8eU

Now, while googling a few things related to the mines, someone pointed out that you can hand Freyedies some Dragon Ore, pickpocket it off him, and then give it to him again, and he'll give you new Dragon Armor each time. So if you invested in the pickpocket skill that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever useful at all outside of this one niche application as far as I'm aware, here would be its time to shine.

Said post also revealed that the "time to forge" would be like ten seconds, but I figured maybe it would be an in-game day and left to do other stuff. But it's fine and cool as we have another place to handle in the next update which does not require Dragon Armor to deal with.



Now to go get our reward from Scanthril.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpR3Puv5hUk

So there's something interesting and easily missed here, which I feel like was maybe planned to be a bigger thing for the game originally. If you remember back in the first update, we met Gorthius, a member of the Circle which was self-described as being kind of a Robin Hood-style "from the rich to the poor"-thieves' guild. When Gorthius died a few seconds later, we find a letter from Elyssia(priestess of the Snake Temple) proclaim that his death was ordered by the Hand.

From the throwabout line about "one for the Hand and none for the Circle," I gather that Raskalion was another member of the Circle, stealing from the undeserving rich to redistribute their wealth.

Between that and Freyedies' general attitude towards his mines(what with the digging in the burial grounds and all) and the poor crazed miners stuck in the burial ground, I feel like he might not actually be the good, just king he's portrayed himself as!

Still, we got our, uh, blood dagger. The assassins' dagger is the best off-hand weapon in the game, but is consumed upon being used to turn a thief class character into an assassin. You can also abuse it to learn Deathstrike, W&W's version of Wizardry's Critical Strike, up to level 12, but that requires some borderline-cheaty shenanigans to do, so I'm not going to bother(and also I only learned about it after this update).




Time for the end-of-update bookkeeping!



Firstly I sell off about 10k gold worth of gold bars, gems and gear I don't plan on equipping, which is real nice and will pay for a good deal of training. About 1.5k of that goes to curing Hierophant's bad case of the black plague.



Then promoting Trap Option to an assassin. Besides ostensibly superior basic stats, this also gives access to Fiend magic on top of the Moon magic that both Ninjas and Bards get.



And lastly, sitting through the same dialogue from Damosh three times about how he wants our three warrior types to go fight a super-giant in the north. At this point we've got a number of quests pointing that way, Damosh's, the thieves' guild quest to find the Band of Boars and the wizards' guild quest to find the Idol of Aku, so heading north seems like a good way to pass the time while Freyedies hammers out our asbestos platemail.

But once he's done with that...

Is It Guillotine Time?

Evidence seems to indicate that Freyedies is an unjust ruler and hoarder of wealth. Should the party ice him? Rewards will be a general feeling of justice and also if he drops his MAGIC HAMMER I can give it to Hierophant to show off with. Generally the game doesn't bother with making outdoors NPC's invincible, so I'm pretty sure he's perfectly killable.