World 5 -- Valley Of Defilement
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General Strategy
An atmosphere of decrepitude, decay and disease, and constant rain with corrupted humanoids accompanied by insects, rats, and worse.
- Enemies in this world have mostly physical attacks including the giants' strong Physical attacks, and a limited Flame damage presence from fire brand weapons similar to those from Stonefang, but the real "joy" of this world is the large number of ways you can get poison or plague. There are almost no Magic damage sources in this world (there are some slugs in 5-2 whose short-ranged spit attack does minor magic damage).
- Any strong physical shield is good here. If you don't prefer the Purple Flame Shield it is not needed to counter the small amount of fire damage you will encounter here.
- The fire Long sword +1
- Keeping some Royal Lotus and Widow's Lotus in your hotkey list for use can be a life saver, as can the Antidote and Cure miracles
- Poison can either be cured, or if you have a lot of HP regeneration, you can just survive it until it wears off. Plague kills you dead very fast. Keep in mind that plague reduces the effectiveness of healing items.
- The higher your resistance, the longer it takes to get affected by poison and plague, so beef them up (note endurance gives poison resist, but the Luck stat raises plague resistance).
- Gloom Armor, Old Raggedy Robes, and Black Leather armor are the obvious options
- The Ring of Disease Resistance and the Ring of Poison Resistance are also useful items to equip
- Both of the unique hard-to-get weapons Istarelle and Bramd are in this world, and they both boost the resistances
- Most of the creatures here are vulnerable to fire, including all the bosses. Using poison attacks probably just tickles them.
- Bring your Dragon weapons, and use up that Turpentine you've been saving since Phalanx, and dust off that Lava Bow and try it. You can also buy the more powerful Black Turpentine from the vendor here.
- All the fire based magic is effective, and even the cheap to cast Fire Spray will do a lot.
- The environment is as much a challenge as the enemies
- All of 5-1 is traversing platforms to descend along both sides of a deep rift, where falling is of course, deadly.
- Most of 5-2 is a poison swamp, where you get poisoned just to say 'thanks for stopping in', and also you cannot roll and can only sprint at low speed although enemies move freely
- Part of 5-3 is a plague swamp, because they wanted to give you something to hate more than the poison.
- Of course there are also many narrow walkways and chances to fall to your death in 5-2 and even some in 5-3 as well.
- Visibility is not great, but you should still plan to use stealth and ranged attacks whenever you can. Bring a lot of arrows.
- The enemies in 5-3 have a short melee attack range, but will try to surround you. Try to stay on the move as much as possible, and use wide-area attacks or attack them from range. Enemies which have plague attacks are all melee range, so don't take chances up close.
- The large number of different vertical levels and walkways really invite you to scout and attack from safer areas
- The Giant Depraved Ones can look exactly like their smaller buddies with some tricks of perspective and distance. Notice the Great Club they carry.
- Parts of the topology of these areas is deliberately deceptive, and hard to get around. There are a couple of places a Crystal Lizard is visible as a tempting archery target, but it is in a place you can not access until you have lowered a plank to make a shortcut path. So don't shoot until you know you can get there to pick up the goodies.
page revision: 70, last edited: 23 Dec 2014 03:13