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Quests: pains and pleasure + Questions and comments.
Since I had made it my part-time goal to get my honours list up and discover what's out there, I've been experiencing many of the quests lusternia has to offer. Having experienced some of the most painful and agonizing sequences I never dreamed I would face, as well as some of the most wonderful storylines that I wish others could see to understand the depth of lusternian lore, I decided to share some of these experiences here to perhaps inspire others and give some feedback to coders for future quests (or fixes for current ones). This will also be rather helpful to people getting into quests, as there is little information that can be found about them as is.
Feel free to add your own pains and pleasures.
Note: This arent walkthroughs, these are basically just summaries, hints, and general information about a quest and how to start it up.
This will be the list of quests I have completed and written below, it will be growing with time so i'll place it in a closed box.
Simply consider me the quest critic.
[spoiler]
Tolborolla Valley, A.K.A Daughter of Rivers/Ackleberry Commune (raiting 3.5/5)
Scorpion Caverns / Grand Mother Scorpion (rating 4/5)
[/spoiler]
Feel free to add your own pains and pleasures.
Note: This arent walkthroughs, these are basically just summaries, hints, and general information about a quest and how to start it up.
This will be the list of quests I have completed and written below, it will be growing with time so i'll place it in a closed box.
Simply consider me the quest critic.
[spoiler]
Tolborolla Valley, A.K.A Daughter of Rivers/Ackleberry Commune (raiting 3.5/5)
Scorpion Caverns / Grand Mother Scorpion (rating 4/5)
[/spoiler]
1
(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
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That said, for these puzzles which you find yourself having a significant-lack-of-fun with, you can generally go to an online solution tool and just get the answer. I generally prefer to work it out myself (it's more entertaining to me that way), but having the ability to work around the issues can be quite helpful.
Tolborolla Valley is located roughly northwest of Estelbar's location (path 9529). It is pretty much the incarnation of the Ackleberry 'lost' commune, where Tae'dae and Furrikin have come together to make a small village. In this village, they are able to enact a ritual to summon 'The Daughter of Rivers', which is basically like the epic quests performed by Serenwilde and Glomdoring to get a vision from Moon and Night. I definitely recommend this quest to all Furrikin, Tae'dae and Ackleberry lovers, as it allows you to get a taste (quite literally in a way) of how the Ackleberry functions (not to mention information over it).
HINTS AND ADVICE:
- The perhaps most painful part of this quest is finding out how to even start it. Sadly 'secret' exits arent uncommon for quests in Lusternia, and this is no exception. To start, you will have to find the font hidden in the village, where Hoopah will be residing. The font is located in the village itself, to a southeast exit. Once there, you will find Hoopah asleep, a simple prod should wake her up and you can begin the quest. Once you do, everything else should relatively fall in place.
- Later in the quest, you'll be informed to gather 2 pies and 2 cloaks, one of these pies will be an apple pie and sadly few apples are even found in the valley. The best I could do was wait for respawn to collect more, try to work your tasks around this coming situation.
- Remember, later on you have to collect threads from the bird by tricking it....dont kill it, it wont drop any...trust me >>.
RATING:
Since this quest doesnt border on painful to the point of a nervous breakdown, and is generally straightforward in procedure, as well that it makes you feel like you discovered a hidden secret of lusternia, i'll have to give it a 3.5/5 raiting.
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Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
She slew Aestra, the golden pegasus, and brought her heart to Morgfyre, the Legion.
That's how you do those quests properly, @Siam! Talk about blasphemy.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
Quite a quest this one, filled with history, lore, and then some. It is quite the process, but nothing too overly difficult, sadly the ending is quite the let-down and could make you regret all the work done. As for a brief history listen, the Scorpion Caverns are where followers of the Great Spirit Scorpion reside deep below. They revere scorpion for her strength and protection she has given them. Their main priority in life seems to be: To live in peace.
Hints and Advice:
- Similar to many of the lovely quests of lusternia, to begin this quest you have to first find the 'hidden exit', else you'll be running around in circles for hours. To get to the giant scorpion caverns (no the freakish crawler creatures on top are not the scorpions), you have to take a DOWN exit near the eastern center of the caverns (For future reference, you can utilize this map to help figure out exactly where: http://www.lusternia.com/sites/lusternia.com/files/maps/full realm map.png). Once you go all the way down, there is ANOTHER secret exit (love you too quest makers) which will lead you to the hidden dracnari and lucidian monks, and of course the wise lady, a.k.a their leader.
- The quest focuses around completing the tasks of two high ranking members and two low ranking members. One of the high rankers will state she can construct you an ankh, the other a bowl, you will need both. Dont bother harvesting the crawlers one set at a time on top, just kill them all at once.
- Once you have both ankh and bowl, you can start influencing the scorpions. Note, the members will say you have to be 'holding' the bowl and ankh type that represents the scorpion color, but that doesnt actually mean you have to WIELD them, simply have them in your inventory.
- Once you have all the poison, you give the bowl back and will receive the password needed to enter each of the secret caverns to awaken one of the 'Old Ones'. Before doing such, it is advisable that you speak to one of the low ranking members (whom happens to be standing at the statue of scorpion outside the residents) and he will say he lost the journals. Now would be the opportune time to collect the journals from the sand worms
- Once you have awakened the old ones and handed their journal over, you have to solve the puzzle (What would a lusternian quest be without a puzzle??), It's fairly simple...and slightly morbid since followers of scorpion will literally sacrifice themselves to begin the process. To get this lovely helpers to give their life for you, you'll have to assist the last low-member, whom seems to be a gardener that can give you a special item to bring these monks in line. As for the puzzle, note that you are given several colored gemstones and have to get the sequence of colors right. You can touch a colored gemstone more than once, and the sequence doesnt even have to include all the colors given, so dont worry if you're attempting to get them all included.
- Once you have the last item, gained through the puzzle/ritual, you can go back to the wise lady and you'll get the "amazing" prophecy..i'll let you figure that out.
Rating:
Fun quest, but ending is a let down. Since it gives you such insight into the Dracnari and Lucidian past, and how the aggressive creatures came to exist within the caverns, as well as history into Tzaraziko and Mother Scorpion, I got to say it's pretty neat. 4/5
The best thing I can say about this quest is that the syntax is clear. There's no hunting for the right commands to do things.
Now, let's start with the things that contribute to making this the worst quest I've done in Lusternia. First of all, it's just mindless bashing. There's no interesting or engaging components to it. I like the Mystlike quests and this is very much not one of them. You just kill a bunch of things, turn them in, and wait for them to respawn. There's an additional frustration in that there's two timers to wait out, too. You not only have to wait for the beasties to respawn, but you also have to wait for the people who take their corpses to decide they're willing to be useful again. This takes longer than it takes for the beasties to respawn by a big enough margin that you can lose corpses to decay waiting for them. You can stock them up to the last corpse needed for them to do their thing, at least, so it's not terrible. Just an irritating and seemingly pointless nuisance.
That wouldn't be too bad on its own, though. It'd be boring and have not leave any fun-oriented reason to do the quest, but it wouldn't be terrible. The worst thing about this quest is the random failure chance. Every batch of corpses (mildly more than one clear) gives you an item that you turn in to another person. You then have a fifty percent chance of getting progress and a fifty percent chance of getting nothing at all. There's nothing you can do to influence that. There's just a failure chance with no player input to it at all. This, more than anything else, contributes to making this an awful quest.
There's no lore to redeem it, either. You just kill stuff and deliver it to the obvious places without any idea why or what it's for. This is a missed opportunity. There could have been so much cool stuff about gnomes in here, but as it is the only lore amounts to gnomes being jerks and blaming other people for their personal failures.
It's sickeningly long, too. 225 kills in the absolute best case scenario, which comes to about four clears of the area. Not bad until you take into account the fact that you have to wait for respawns between each clear, but even then it's just sort of trudgingly bad. But, you're not going to get the best case scenario. 450 kills (about eight clears) if you roll poorly on half of the failure points. More or less than that if you're lucky or unlucky. I can say from experience that there is very little in Lusternia that is more depressing than failing all of the rolls for a given clear.
I'd like to reserve the 0/5 rating for a sort of hypothetical worst possible quest, and this could be made worse by increasing the failure chance or making it longer, but at the same time I don't really feel comfortable giving it a rating above that. That would imply that this is worse than other quests by far less than it actually is. So, final score from me, 0/6, would not quest again except that you have to do it twice for the aetherepic.
To me, the problems with this quest really come to the fore when you consider that it is part of the aetherepic, and when done as part of the aetherepic it must be done "all at once" (you can't work on some of the other quests when doing the aetherepic chain because the second time 'round, it forces you to go in order one-at-a-time).
Frosticia? 4.5/5, easy. I haven't finished Mucklemarsh yet, be assuming it's just doing X completions of the minigame on there I absolutely love it. 4.5/5, which would be raised to 5 if the instructions were slightly clearer about the goal and if the controls were better. I would like to see a competitive version of it.
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He has brought the Song of Ail'Fae Runia to Faethorn.
He restored the sceptre to the Queen of the Fae.
----
He aided Mother Night's descent onto the Throne of Darkness.
He assisted the Priestess Ysun in venerating the essence of Moon.
He did raise the veil over the Hifarae hills and drive back Gromagh's horde.
He helped the centaurs of the Hifarae Hills drive out Gromagh's horde.
He helped the shaman Rynak vanquish the ghost-wolves of Verasavir Valley.
He did help summon the Great Cat Spirit to aid the Igasho Tribe of Hhuhur.
He brought balance to the Kiakodan Reserve, preserving it for future generations.
He woke the Old Ones and restored connection to Grandmother Scorpion.
He helped Tolborolla tae'dae and furrikin contact Ackleberry.
He succeeded in containing the Slaghora'ruin.
----
He has brought the Song of Ail'Fae Runia to Faethorn.
He restored the sceptre to the Queen of the Fae.
----
He aided Mother Night's descent onto the Throne of Darkness.
He assisted the Priestess Ysun in venerating the essence of Moon.
He did raise the veil over the Hifarae hills and drive back Gromagh's horde.
He helped the centaurs of the Hifarae Hills drive out Gromagh's horde.
He helped the shaman Rynak vanquish the ghost-wolves of Verasavir Valley.
He did help summon the Great Cat Spirit to aid the Igasho Tribe of Hhuhur.
He brought balance to the Kiakodan Reserve, preserving it for future generations.
He woke the Old Ones and restored connection to Grandmother Scorpion.
He helped Tolborolla tae'dae and furrikin contact Ackleberry.
He succeeded in containing the Slaghora'ruin.
It's okay @Ixion. I don't consider you a poser because you compile all the honours line for us allllll.
Let me just take a look here...
honours full ixion
Kalas Ixion, The Devouring Blade (Male Undying Demigod Changeling).
Request Denied.
okay
Let me just take a look here...
honours full ixion
Kalas Ixion, The Devouring Blade (Male Undying Demigod Changeling).
Request Denied.
okay
honours full siam
Saint Gathlyn's Orphanage comes to mind. It has a two-sided story quest, and it took me several sides to realize the 'dark' side is broken or just made to be extremely cruel and mad-inducing to the quester. The 'good' side is actually quite doable...to an extent.
I dont have much patience right now to develop a full report so i'll make a quick one on the 'Light' side of the quest:
As for the 'dark' side of this quest, well that's a lovely tale!
Firstly rather than kill the souls, you influence them, while shielding from snowcats that want to tear you to pieces. Once that part is done and you collect the snowcats for the crazy taurian (which btw you cant do beforehand because the snowcats are protected from damage), he'll ask you to influence the children and make them cry...but wait, to first get access to the mountain, you would have probably already have influenced these children in order for the old man in the garden to be happy and allow you entrance...so you'll have to wait for them to reset. Even if you didnt influence the children first, you'll still HAVE TO WAIT, because once you've completed all the tasks, the crazy taurian will ask that you complete the tasks of the 'fools' below...meaning that the old man in the garden will WANT you to influence the children to make them happy......It's maddening yes.
BUT that's not the worst part by fair! Nay. You see, The crazy taurians and souls are allied to Frost Spite, meaning slaying one makes you an instant enemy....yet the crazy taurian wants you to gather all the 'fools' below by completing their tasks..and the NPC known as Tamone wants you to kill 40 souls...How does that work you say? Well it doesnt. Either you kill and get enemied, or influence and are 1 man-short. Enjoy the insanity!
The dark side, well, shit. With 4 lirangshan mist uses, half a day desyncronizing light talisman and dark talisman stages, and timing everything perfectly, and a ton of luck, I did manage to see most of the dark side ending. There is no honours and the reward is crap as it turns out.
It was murder, pure murder. I attempted the Dark side 4 times before I realized it just cant work. Im glad it has no honors though...means I wont have to consider it in the future >>.
On to the next!