Hi guys,
For the first time I’m going to play through the Ashes of Malmouth. But before I do I’m wanting to do the challenge dungeons of Port Valbury + Bastion of Chaos which I’ve never done before!
So what general advice can people give to help me avoid death! I am playing softcore but want to try keep my first death away for as long as possible!
Thanks
PV is miserable because in addition to floor damage everywhere (which is % of hp, not aether damage for some reason) there’s also roving aether tornadoes which will fuck you up just as bad. For these reasons and the fact that the map is a monochromatic 3D labyrinth, plus it takes forever to do, most people just skip it.
BoC is pretty standard. It takes a while too but the only thing you really have to “worry” about are the chaos traps that pop up. Just avoid them, keep your eyes open, don’t pull too much and you’ll be fine. Shar’zul has a fire wave attack he telegraphs, you probably wanna get out of the way.
For Port Valbury, capped Aether and Vitality resist (the last one is specifically for the tornadoes). If you are melee lure enemies to outside of the aetherfire, most of the aetherfire can easily be avoided. The last boss pretty much requires capped elemental, aether and poison resist, overcapped to be more safe. Don’t try to facetank them for too long because their damage piles up fast.
For Bastion of Chaos, just capped Vitality, Chaos and Fire resist. Chaos traps do next to no damage and there’s hardly any danger in the whole dungeon. For the last boss, watch out for his axe double swipe attack and his fire shotgun.
Max aether and chaos resistances, preferably overcap them at least at 30. Craft some royal jelly potions. A couple of them give you hp reg and royal jelly essence increases your hp and mp by 10%. They are amazing to boost your survivability; use them specially just before fighting the bosses. Pay attention to your surroundings. Watch out for traps and enviromental hazards. BoC has crystals that spawn often and throw some attacks on you; PV has aether-scorched ground and aether-vortex. If you are not careful you’ll have a bad time.
Ignore Yawgmoth, PV is awesome and challenging.
Don’t go through the windy path with the damage water. There’s a winding path above it that will get you to the boss at the other end without dying from the water.
For PV, overcap aether by 40, that’s how much those bosses that drop MI belts reduce your resists by. Should be noted that they reduce ALL resists by 40, so yeah, carry some resists potions.
In PV, do not stand still for any length of time. Tornadoes will literally spawn out of thin air to fuck your shit if you loiter.
BoC’s boss Shar’zul also likes tornadoes, specifically gigantic blazing ones. If he summons that thing, get away from it ASAP.
Oh, also in regards to PV: yes, it’s not the easiest place to navigate, but try to keep a rough map in your head of the stairways and egresses and so on because chances are you will have to do a lot of backtracking/doubling back/etc. to avoid spawned tornadoes that just won’t despawn. You can try and run through them sometimes, but the damage ticks pretty hard and pretty fast and the tornadoes will give limited chase. You can actually kind of bait the tornadoes out of choke points sometimes, but this isn’t reliable (sometimes they just kind of mill about instead of following you)
Side note for BoC: most of the crystals actually aren’t particularly scary as long as you aren’t heavily engaged with mobs at the time, but there’s one kind of crystal attack that really hurts. Trying to remember which one it is, think it’s the “red shockwave” one or the “dozens of red projectiles firing out in a circle” one. The “bloody Tsunami wave” one is pretty non-threatening, the meteor shower one is also fairly meh.
Got through BOC pretty easily so just PV to do thanks for all the feedback so far 