Dungeon 9 Turn 27
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Kamau blocks the attacks of all the nearby monsters, including the rat, which seems fairly content to cooperate with the undead. Kamau takes only 1 damage from their combined assault, but is also predictably paralyzed.
Ricki and Lara work together to destroy the ghast. The pets all attack one of the ghouls, but narrowly fail to bring it down in a single turn. Botanya’s pipes fail to have any effect this turn.
Luckily, none of the defeated ghast’s equipment is damaged before it collapses.
Botanya: keep playing the pipes
Ricki, Lara and Pets: Team up on the Ghouls and the plague Rat
Courtesy of Siv:
Kamau: Be Paralyzed
Ricki: Attack an undamaged Ghoul (ghoul 2)
Lara: attack plague rat so that poison resistance kicks in.
Botanya: pipe ghoul 3. Stay close to debuff them.
Flytrap: attack damaged ghoul (ghoul 1).
Mushrooms: don’t attack
Another unfortunate turn. On the off chance all enemies target lara, we have her provoking the unintelligent rat so it procs her poison defense which will give her 12 defense this turn. This should avoid any chance of remorse. Sadly, this will take us another turn to clear which brings us to an important discussion topic: our priorities.
Possible priorities:
Clear dungeon (kill boss)
Loot treasure room (3 chests)
Kill sword ghast
Retrieve puzzle chest if unlocked.
Recruit Cyx (unknown)
Kill cobra
Turn 40 is our time limit since we have 5 zombies between us and the boss. Dealing with another 4 would be very risky of a character death.
Things to be aware of:
Not knowing cobra’s stats make it a high risk. Based on Sally, it probably just drops a unique item.
Cyx is unknown how to recruit. Of the available spots his item could be, it may be the treasure room.
Killing sword ghast may not unlock the puzzle chest there are 3 other tombs unopened and we don’t have the time to get them all. Killing him costs us 3 turns
Getting to boss/treasure room takes us 7 turns. That is for moving, clearing traps and killing 2 groups of zombies.
Looting treasure room will cost us 2-3 turns.
Now we have 2 turns of killing ghouls to decide what we want to focus on afterwards.
My preference is just to go for loot room and boss. Story Wise, I do want us to succeed in stopping the plague and I want to see botanya’s level up.
Post your thoughts below. More perspectives welcome!
I agree with with treasure room & boss fight.
Trying the large sword ghoul would have been nice, but it’s very likely too risky at this point
Possibly the imp even could have info on Coccyx and/or be the thing we need to “find” (then persuade or kill or make a deal with or whatever) in order to convince him to join us. But yeah, with things being as they are (we don’t even know how to get there, if the doors in the Necromancers basement don’t connect, as some people are suspecting), that musing it a pretty moot one. -> NO on Coccyx (unless/until we learn something new)
I absolutely agree on doing the boss (and doing him SOON, as I previously already mentioned, but I can understand wanting to check for lenses). YES
For the puzzle chest, we’d need to kill the claymore ghast first, which is most likely too time consuming, so NO to both of them, I guess.
Kill cobra: I’m sure there’s something going on with it, but I assume we’ll find out in the dungeon wrap-up stream. risky, time consuming and uncertain rewards (if any) -> NO.
Which leaves the “treasure room”. I’m in favour of getting more stuff, IF the time allows. so that’s a “MAYBE”, depending on how the turns in between go/whether or not we got the time.
I am on board with the first four priorities. Just imagine that swoval in Lara’s hands, enchanted with poison. That’s almost worth levelups on its own.
More seriously, we still haven’t found lenses that would help us deal with the boss. That is concerning. Perhaps the spider chest has some?
As for the cobra, maybe if we get some extra time in the dungeon after the necromancer is gone?
About the treasure room, and the boss, I have been thinking that maybe we could have Kamau CLEAVE the golem and the boss for one turn, while the other three slip past, open one chest, take a punch from the stalkroach, move the opened chest, open a second chest, then next turn Botanya opens the last chest and the others join the fray. We would need to have some inventory spaces arranged for that.
We don’t know if golem will attack immediately as soon as it sees us walk by or if we’ll just get a ! Warning.
My guess is that it’s designed to make us have to fight golem after we’re in the treasure room cause it would attack when we try to leave.
The golem is looking towards the stairs, that means per how to play that he’ll likely attack pronto. There may be a small chance he takes an extra turn to do so. Safer to leave him busy.
Owlbear look a direction a do a ! As a warning first
Oh yes, you’re right! That means we have a better shot at the treasure room tha I thought.
i think to recruit cox we need to kill snake, reason he hate living and probably because of cobold who create cult in the tomb
That’s a thought, certainly, but I’m sure he would have told us so if that was the case?
About possible priorities after this fight (and looting the sarcophagus at hand):
Clear dungeon (kill boss): We need this for bound levels and abilities, let’s do it!
– There will be another 3 zombies created at turn 30.
– There already are two undeads and
– two (lootable, but also skipable) trap-chests (and several floor traps to avoid) between us and the floor with the necromancer and his “little pet”.
– We also want to pick up the stake Kamau left in the “cellar” room (above the snake).
– And we possible want to do some inventory management before that fight.
Loot treasure room (3 chests): We cannot loot it after finishing the dungeon, thus we can only try to do this before fighting the necromancer. I would like to try to pass the Necromancer’s floor and first go into the loot room (beware the stalk roach), but I would also like to be prepared for a fight if passing that floor is not possible.
Everything else:
– Kamau, Lara, Mushroom 1 and Mushroom 6 each have a point of infection. Ricki even has 2 points of infection.
– Kamau has 3 points of remorse, just 1 left, with 2 he “leaves” the dungeon.
– Kamau has only 5 HP left.
– Mushroom 1 has 1 (one) HP left.
– Flytrap 1 has 1 (one) HP left.
– Lara as well as Mushroom 6 are missing HP.
– There are only 4 empty slots in our inventory (redistribution of heavy equipment to Golly pending).
TLDR: Skip everything else, get us out alive!
So I believe that ? chests typically correspond with colors of other objects in the dungeon. So the one we opened in the kobold warrens was rust-colored, and rust was the key to opening it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that ? chests are the exact same color as a color that’s rarely used. For instance, the one in dungeon 2, the tavern, was the exact same color as the broken glass on the floor, so likely doing something like cleaning all the broken glass would have opened it. The farmlands one was the exact same color as the tomatoes, so we probably had to eradicate all the sentient tomato plants.
We don’t see a lot of enemies that are the exact shade of green that the ghasts are, so chances are that killing all the ghasts should open it. What concerns me is that the zombie rat’s tail is also this exact shade of green, so we may need to kill it, too. Also, this most recent ghast was inside a coffin, so there may be more that are hidden inside the remaining coffins.
I really, really want to recruit Coccyx. An undead archer? How can you pass that up? Imagine how useful they are in specialized dungeons. We’ve got a water dungeon coming up. Imagine having a plant, a mushroom, and a skeleton for that. Oxygen would hardly be an issue! Plus a long range ally is also welcome. One thing to take note of is that maybe the thing we have to find to recruit them isn’t an object that will convince them, but rather, the passageway they used to get up to that floating platform. They must have gotten up there somehow, right? And if that’s really the goal, you could cheat it and Web Wall up there.
So here’s my thinking. If we kill the dungeon boss, it’s going to end the dungeon OR change the time goal. Now if we get to turn 40, we’re screwed, so if there isn’t a clear path to recruiting Coccyx by the time we get close to that, tough titties–we don’t get them. I say the first thing we do is clean up this set of four floors. We can be done with this floor in two turns, then realistically take about four turns to get rid of the other enemies here; most notably, the remaining ghast and perhaps the zombie rat. That brings us to turn 33, and the chest will likely open and we can also loot it. If it doesn’t open, skip it.
On turn 34 we get everyone to the room with the necro. If they let us pass them to the three chests and imp, let’s all get past them and start unlocking chests. There must surely be a Coccyx item in that mess. Only other place it could be is that chest near the owlbear.
IMPORTANT!!
Now, here’s why I think the Cyx item is NOT in that owlbear chest, and is instead a means to get up to him. We’ve got barriers, and we know those barriers are near the entrance that the guards use. And when we recruited Mac, it triggered the guards. Mentioning that this dungeon has an entrance that guards use is too much of a Chekhov’s gun for them not to show up under specific conditions.
Now, let’s look at the layout of the dungeon. It’s designed so that we have some time to do stuff while the guards break the barriers. We get punished if we go for that chest, because even though it probably has a really useful item, it also requires that we eliminate two barriers, thus decreasing our time against guards. And as soon as they’re through, if we’re fighting the necro, we’re essentially trapped in that lower section waiting to die. In the kobold warrens, the dungeon was designed so that we had a method of escape if we get jumped (the miner kobold that can tear down walls, and the secret entrance) and the second half of the dungeon was linear so that there’s little chance of us dead-ending unless we get greedy with chests. Placing the boss in a dead end would be too punishing. There has to be a means of escape.
Also, there’s the fact that Cyx got nervous when we headed over to the necro, NOT when we went up the ladder to the owlbear. If you really want to test this, we could have a character pretend like they’re going up the ladder and see how they react.
Anyway. My theory is that the imp teleports us to his platform, and it is an alternative means of escape that will be needed when the guards arrive, and we need to Web Wall from the platform to the start to get out of there. The other possibility is, of course, that I’m dead wrong and it’s a phylactery containing Cyx’s soul or something, which we can threaten to smash if he doesn’t cooperate with us. That would actually be kind of interesting. Like Ricki has to use an inventory slot to hold onto Cyx’s soul jar as a bargaining chip.
Interesting idea on the soul jar.
I disagree with going after big sword ghast – it’s getting too time consuming if we want to also try to recruit Cyx, especially since killing this ghast doesn’t guarantee the chest opens (if there are more ghasts hidden in closed tombs).
I’m sorry, but all the wanting in the world to recruit Cyx is not going to do us any good until we find out how.
Also, whenever we tried to use ranged combat it didn’t work out so far, because usually there’s nothing stopping enemies from getting into melee range and kicking the crap out of our archer/crossbow-wielder, … and if we are going to use Kamau to interpose (which would allow the ranged combatant to stay ranged), then we could just as well use melee weapons (also without risk of getting hurt back for the non-Kamau team members), which more often than not deal a crapton more damage than any of the ranged options we have found so far.
And still in addition to that: ammunition. Cyx seems to have an unlimited supply while he is our enemy, but as soon as he “works for us”, I’m certain we will have to fiddle around with arrows/bolts and inventory space, too. It is possible that he has some sort of magic item on him (e.g. a magic quiver that will grant him unlimited arrows, as long as he uses them to shoot and not trying to sell to Paws or something like that), but I feel like while such an item may exist in LSNs dungeon eyes world, we would still have to find/earn it and not get it delivered with the archer character right from the beginning.
So while Cxy has been a major annoyance (I’m glad we did bring some defensive gear from the beginning on, though or we would have remorsed out so fast) in this dungeon, it is because of certain circumstances (special dungeon layout – archer platform over multiple rooms, so he is able to follow us – and special rules for Cyx while he is an enemy – enemy able to move to a “new” room and still shoot at us, seemingly unlimited ammo, …), which will most likely not apply to Cyx, once he is on our team, seriously diminishing his usefulness.
I still really want to recruit him, too, but I’m not willing to try out all kinds of crazy, time consuming stuff, thus risking that our team does not successfully finish the dungeon. If we get some kind of hint, some info, anything to go on on, that might change, but for now, all I can sensibly do is pretty much hope that we will run across him in some other dungeon again and that we’ll get a chance to recruit him then.
Yo that gold stuff is paying for someone’s college