Chibi-Reaper
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Re: [LP] Might and Magic 6, You'd have figured 'Pirates', right?
Alright. Decisions noted, acted upon.
Unfortunately, the spears we have really aren't that great, so points or no Torg is still hefting that cutlass. Bonus to-hit chance is the deciding factor, though it's not like we intend to be in melee combat much.
Now since we're going to Bootleg Bay, we could go by boat. It's a travel time of three days. Unfortunately, the ship to that region doesn't set out until Tuesday, so we'd be cooling our heels a couple of days.
Walking takes five days.... so, it's not like either option gains us any time.
The deciding factor is the fact that gold is at this point still a resource we'll be feverishly clutching at for a while. Everything is so expensive at this level, and enemies drop so little....
We'll walk it.
Before we go, though, time has passed, and we're heading uphill anyway to buy disarm expertise, so we might as well check the shops, right?
And it's convenient we did.
I buy this right up.
And it gives me an excuse to talk about Black Potions. They include a mystic brew which dispels all unnatural aging at a slight stat cost, powerful curatives of both health and mana, and a tonic which infuses your body with artificial levels, all three of which cause you to age before your time. Black potions are very nice, but at a cost.
What is most important about them, however, is that Black potions include Stat Essences. You can only get the effect once, but for the most part, drinking one of these will add a meaty fifteen points to a stat, but subtract five from its opposite. Personality, as you can see, opposes Speed, while Might opposes Intellect, and Accuracy is the rival of Luck. Endurance, however, is where there's a shift, as with seven stats there's going to be an odd one out. The essence of endurance adds fifteen to the stat, but subtracts one from every other.
If you drink all seven essences, you recieve a net gain of 15 to endurance and nine to every other stat. This may not be in your best interest! A Knight, for example, is better off drinking the essences of Might and Speed and completely ignoring their counterparts. They gain fifteen points in the stats they like, and lose a little in stats that have no application for them anyway.
It's not hard, if you remember the formulae, want to spend the time experimenting, or have access to the internet, to just take your initial payment from Potbello in new sorpigal, set up camp outside the general goods store, and brew all the black potions you could ever use right there.
I won't be doing that. In fact, in this play-through, I won't be brewing any essences at all. I may brew and use the other potions if I need them, though. But as far as Essences go, they're only fair game if found in a chest or shop.
I haven't decided who will drink this one, yet. The only one who might not want to is Selias, who needs the personality, and.... maybe Torg, but only because I can't recall if letting your stats get down to zero or below has bad effects.
We also buy everyone the Bow skill, if only because MP is still low and runs out, but arrows are infinite. We still sometimes don't want to profligately waste our caster's magic juice.
And like a flash, we're off through the depopulated Lizardman camp to Bootleg bay.
And tell the truth. With a name like that, you're thinking 'pirate cove', right?
Definitely pirates. It's gotta one hundred percent be pirates.
Spoiler.
Not a single enemy pirate on this map.
But there's tons of extra ethnic Cannibals! .... for some reason, I'm noticing that a lot. It's, uh... I'm sure they don't mean anything by it?
In any case, I'll note that this is totally an ambush set up along the main road up here. I literally hit the 'Stop, turn based combat time' button the second the map loaded, and they were already right on top of me. Unfair.
In any case, Cannibals come in male and female but, unlike Peasant NPC's who have small but distinct differences in various things between the genders making the men flat out superior (Also Misogyny!?), the only notable difference here is whether the witch doctors are pelting you with bolts of fire or swarms of angry and stinging bees.
Not gonna venture onto the islands off the coast just now, but I'll kill a bunch of Cannibals before I'm through. We need cash for when we get to Free Haven anyway, it's no biggie.
There's a town, with a few shops, but the bay contains a grand total of only two trainers, neither of them Masters. So the only notable thing...
.... is that the inn is run by peaceful, completely inoffensive, slightly drunk goblins. Which means the whole Goblinwatch thing could theoretically have been handled diplomatically! Rather than with mass murder. The quest mechanics don't allow for it though.
)
We also make heavy use of this spring outside of town. For some reason, there's a rewarding sound and a shower of sparkles over your portrait the first time you drink from it. Interesting. It also restores 20mp per sip, so we keep coming back as we burn out the cannibal camps. Truly a fountain of magical power.
Yeah.
That... really needed to be there. For sure. Just to remove all ambiguity that they might not be serious, I guess? In any case, doesn't look like the last people to walk up this road fared as well as we did.
There's some bones scattered around the ground that we could pick up I suppose and probably should have, but don't. Someone in Free Haven wants to buy bones. Like these. I can't, or rather don't want to, imagine why.
We can also get food from the cookpot.
Though. I'm not sure. Uh.
Probably shouldn't think about that too deeply.
Instead of thinking about it, we raid this camps mostly-negligible treasure and swing back east past the empty circus, I don't know why they decided 'SURROUNDED BY CANNIBALS' would be a good place to set up shop sometimes, and find an easy obelisk.
The message makes no sense at this point. Gotta find them all!
There's also a dungeon right next door.
This is an interesting one.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's the sole dungeon in the game, unless you count the arena, that you don't get a quest-prompt from outside of it to go exploring. The only quest for the dungeon? You have to go inside to pick up.
It makes the dungeon easy to miss, or pass by.
Also.
The quest-giver?
Also kind of easy to miss your first time.
Because he's a wall.
Well, technically speaking, a powerful elemental of hot and molten stone.... in the shape of a wall.
A freaking wall.
Nope. I'm out. For more reasons that one. That strange monster he's talking about? Will definitely wreck our shit at this level. And there's more than just goblins to contend with in here.
We can come back after a few other dungeons, maybe. For the time being, let's go kill another camp of cannibals.
There's a bunch of them right south of the town.
And right after I take this screenshot, at least six Witch Doctors fired spells all at once, all of which hit way on the high end of possible damage, and I don't have time to take more pictures as I turn a complete 180 and run right back into town, going for the temple and heals. Little expensive, particularly when they're waking up unconscious people, but I don't have the time to stop and raise them to positive health just then.
I still kill them off, but it's a fight in the town and I can't use splash damage fireballs because they're going to kill the stupid damn peasants who have no qualms whatsoever about a couple doze cannibals pitching their campsite not a hundred feet outside of town!
Meteor shower would have been a great way to handle that. No shops sell it until Free Haven. Oh well.
.... Hope they didn't plan to eat that.
And it's a little unnerving that in large part that's because she doesn't look at all preserved well. I mean, she's turning blue. That's just disgusting, full of rot and bacteria.
Should have let the damn cannibals die of horrible wasting diseases instead.
Disgusted for all the wrong reasons.
Their treasure is pretty decent though. Directly increasing spell points isn't bad. Though, it's kind of debatable whether it's better or worse than increasing a stat that increases your mp.
Mostly depends on how high your stats already are. Low stats, where you can find a nice ring with a boost in the twenties and get a couple thresh-holds past by, stats are better, usually. Unless the equipment increases your mana by more than the stat would, but that's less likely.
Later on, though, when you could equip an artifact with +30 to a stat or more and still not cross a borderline, directly adding health or mp is usually better.
Especially when you get some nice increases. This doesn't sound like much, sure. But keep in mind, a fireball costs eight mp, and our biggest max mp is in the sixties, still. Altogether, eleven more mana is a nice increase.
Both go on Latrio, since his max mp has been lagging behind the other two a bit.
We also pick up some other stuff, but...
At this point, my patience with all these cannibals and lizardmen runs out, and we practice the time-honored art of ducking and weaving as we just ignore the rest of the enemies on the mainland, running past them to Free Haven.
This is a mistake! As you will soon see.
Once again, land travel has obligingly left us right in aggravation range of a group of enemies on the other side. At least this time it takes pity and doesn't have them literally right on top of us.
You get the same ding and flash from getting here as you do from drinking from that Fountain of Magic earlier. At this point, you're judged worthy, and a wide new world is waiting for you.
We're not ready for it. Not by far. The game doesn't expect you to be here at this point, and the enemy spawns on the map completely stop pulling any punches.
Those dots to the north? Mages. "Oh, like the ones in New Sorpigal", you say? Well. Yes. But also no.
Around New Sorpigal, the odds were more likely you'd see apprentice mages than anything else. There were scattered Journeymen of course, but an actual full-blown mage is few and far between. Here, the encounter rate is almost reversed. I've never seen a single apprentice on this map, myself. With that said, while there's a fair number of Journeymen, most of what you'll find is Mages. And lightning bolts. Lots of them.
Leaving them aside, the map also contains Archers.
I don't get close enough to screenshot an archer. They come in groups, you see, and if there's a group then there's probably at least one Fire Archer. Possibly more.
The basic archer has 35 health, 14 ac, deals 1d6+1 damage per arrow, and has some basic elemental resistances to fire, cold, electric, and poison. In simpler terms, Archers, the weakest of that set of three, are equivalent in danger level to Lizard Wizards, the most dangerous of the lizardman set.
Master archers have 93 health, close to triple their basic comrades'. They also have 16 ac, more of all the resistances an archer has, and can choose between a normal arrow that does 2d6+2 damage, or a burning arrow that does 3d6.
A single Fire Archer, if you're fortunate enough to see just one at this level, has 171 health, 22 ac, more of all the resistances than Master Archers and a little bit of pure magic resistance besides, and can choose between firing a normal arrow dealing 3d6+3 damage or a burning arrow dealing 4d6.
As if that weren't enough, they can cast a fireball with a skill level of five. Which means 5d6 damage to everyone in the party. All at once. There's some random chance to it, but they seem to lean towards pitching fireballs more often than not.
And it goes without saying that, being talented archers, even if they don't fling spells at you they'll be hitting much more often than they miss.
We want to be in Free Haven. We really do! But we won't be dicking around a lot, here.
That said, as long as we don't draw the notice of things that can feasibly, alone, kill three out of four of our party in two castings.... we really do want to be in Free Haven. It's the adventurer's bottleneck, but it's also the 'Big City' of Enroth. There's a lot of spell guilds potentially containing every last spell for all of the possible magical disciplines we can have at this point, this is where you can feasibly start purchasing the nicer stuff though it'll be more expensive, there's a ton of skill trainers, 14 experts and three masters, there's two coach companies, which means four horseshoes, which I divide up between tim and Latrio (Air and WATER MAGIC)....
And there's Osric Temper. Foremost Knight of the realm. Unlike Ironfist and Mist, which are very much geared towards Paladins and Sorcerors, the Lords really stop being super specific at this point. They can't afford to, in many cases. Osric lives here, in this castle.
We are in NO hurry to do his council quest. The dude wants us to kick down the door to a single-room outpost filled with devils and charge in swinging. That's... not something we can feasibly survive at this level. Much less succeed at.
That aside, he offers Knights possibly the easiest initial promotion quest in the game, questionably tied with sorcerors. As long as you know what to do in both cases. It's uncertain, because the sorceror quest needs you to actually leave the region and almost definitely get in a fight.... but while it's unlikely you'll get in a fight for this one, and you don't have to go far, if you do get tangled up in battle along the way you're likely to die.
Still, easy rank.
We ignore all the other guilds after this to charge directly to the guild of WATER. Everything else aside, there's a spell we very much want.
And they have one in stock.
But here's where I realize my goof. I misremembered prices. The book is about twice as expensive as I was thinking it would be, and so while I thought Merchant was going to have us sitting comfortable on a little extra, we're actually short.
Now, we don't have to have Town Portal right now. We can't use it to its full potential until Latrio hits Master anyway. But we want it really bad.
Other things for the moment, so I set this down for a few minutes, and we carefully skirt the edges of getting-attention-of-deadly-arrows to reach a pub nearby.
Is it really that easy? ... Can't be, right?
It's absolutely that easy.
Welcome to being a Cavalier, Torg. You'll notice you just shot up by about thirty max hp. Also, while you don't get gold for this, you do get some hefty experience for this level. Unless my math is wrong, everyone could gain two levels right now, and are close to a third.
He also offers an advanced promotion quest, to Champions, buuut.... that's right up there on a list of 'thinges what arre goinge to gettte us gutted like fish forre ye market and no mestake'.
We'll come back to that one later. Much later.
For now, I've been running around off camera, and our merchant isn't near high enough to make a profit off of resale yet, but a skill of 7 in water means a seventy percent chance of successfully enchanting things, and some of the stuff we've been picking up is barely good enough to get an enchantment. If we didn't pay, then it's all profit, and a few extra gold.
Torg ends up swapping their armor with an identical set that instead buffs resistance through that.
Eventually, I give up and go kill those mages I mentioned on entering free haven. It's a painful fight.
And in between, as I look for healing wells I miss by a bit. The one I want for health is on the green.
This one gives permanent Might increases.
Unfortunately, there's a maximum, and while I'm not sure where the cap is, Torg is above it. A shame, since they're the one who really wants it most. Additionally, you can only drink 8 times before the well runs dry. I spread the points out among the mages as best I can.
Then I go back, kill the last of the mages, loot the rest of the bodies, and buy that Town Portal spell.
Once Latrio hits mastery, that thing is going to be our big go-to for transportation. There's a hireling that can cast it at that level once a day.... but fuck them. They want a whopping five thousand gold in advance pay and half of everything you find.
Better to be able to cast it on our own, even if that currently leaves us with only slightly more than a hundred gold in spending cash.
Which is why we can't really level up just yet, even sitting on a heap of experience.
Now.
It's March. And the Shrine of Personality is in a place called Silver Cove. We can now get there by coach or boat, but when it comes down to it, actually getting to the shrine is gonna be....
Well, it can be done. But it's iffy. Getting back out again, alive, is even more iffy. Good thing death is cheap!
Maybe we don't want to probably throw our lives away on a pilgrimage only Selias benefits much from, though. And alternative option is that, if you haven't guessed, we've fulfilled the requisites for Sorcery Advancement. We just have to get ourselves back to Mist and talk to Al.
Or we could pick a quest you like and do that. Comes down to it, there's more than a couple available to pick up in Free Haven! They're pretty much beyond our ability, though, really. Pick from something we've already seen! ... Uh, that isn't the Fire Lord's place. Gonna need to hold off a bit on that one. ... Stupid Ogres. Stupid Fallen Defender, with its stupid scads of HP and powerful attacks and its stupid, stupid immunity to physical damage....
Alright. Decisions noted, acted upon.
Unfortunately, the spears we have really aren't that great, so points or no Torg is still hefting that cutlass. Bonus to-hit chance is the deciding factor, though it's not like we intend to be in melee combat much.
Now since we're going to Bootleg Bay, we could go by boat. It's a travel time of three days. Unfortunately, the ship to that region doesn't set out until Tuesday, so we'd be cooling our heels a couple of days.
Walking takes five days.... so, it's not like either option gains us any time.
The deciding factor is the fact that gold is at this point still a resource we'll be feverishly clutching at for a while. Everything is so expensive at this level, and enemies drop so little....
We'll walk it.
Before we go, though, time has passed, and we're heading uphill anyway to buy disarm expertise, so we might as well check the shops, right?
And it's convenient we did.
I buy this right up.
And it gives me an excuse to talk about Black Potions. They include a mystic brew which dispels all unnatural aging at a slight stat cost, powerful curatives of both health and mana, and a tonic which infuses your body with artificial levels, all three of which cause you to age before your time. Black potions are very nice, but at a cost.
What is most important about them, however, is that Black potions include Stat Essences. You can only get the effect once, but for the most part, drinking one of these will add a meaty fifteen points to a stat, but subtract five from its opposite. Personality, as you can see, opposes Speed, while Might opposes Intellect, and Accuracy is the rival of Luck. Endurance, however, is where there's a shift, as with seven stats there's going to be an odd one out. The essence of endurance adds fifteen to the stat, but subtracts one from every other.
If you drink all seven essences, you recieve a net gain of 15 to endurance and nine to every other stat. This may not be in your best interest! A Knight, for example, is better off drinking the essences of Might and Speed and completely ignoring their counterparts. They gain fifteen points in the stats they like, and lose a little in stats that have no application for them anyway.
It's not hard, if you remember the formulae, want to spend the time experimenting, or have access to the internet, to just take your initial payment from Potbello in new sorpigal, set up camp outside the general goods store, and brew all the black potions you could ever use right there.
I won't be doing that. In fact, in this play-through, I won't be brewing any essences at all. I may brew and use the other potions if I need them, though. But as far as Essences go, they're only fair game if found in a chest or shop.
I haven't decided who will drink this one, yet. The only one who might not want to is Selias, who needs the personality, and.... maybe Torg, but only because I can't recall if letting your stats get down to zero or below has bad effects.
We also buy everyone the Bow skill, if only because MP is still low and runs out, but arrows are infinite. We still sometimes don't want to profligately waste our caster's magic juice.
And like a flash, we're off through the depopulated Lizardman camp to Bootleg bay.
And tell the truth. With a name like that, you're thinking 'pirate cove', right?
Definitely pirates. It's gotta one hundred percent be pirates.
Spoiler.
Not a single enemy pirate on this map.
But there's tons of extra ethnic Cannibals! .... for some reason, I'm noticing that a lot. It's, uh... I'm sure they don't mean anything by it?
In any case, I'll note that this is totally an ambush set up along the main road up here. I literally hit the 'Stop, turn based combat time' button the second the map loaded, and they were already right on top of me. Unfair.
In any case, Cannibals come in male and female but, unlike Peasant NPC's who have small but distinct differences in various things between the genders making the men flat out superior (Also Misogyny!?), the only notable difference here is whether the witch doctors are pelting you with bolts of fire or swarms of angry and stinging bees.
Not gonna venture onto the islands off the coast just now, but I'll kill a bunch of Cannibals before I'm through. We need cash for when we get to Free Haven anyway, it's no biggie.
There's a town, with a few shops, but the bay contains a grand total of only two trainers, neither of them Masters. So the only notable thing...
.... is that the inn is run by peaceful, completely inoffensive, slightly drunk goblins. Which means the whole Goblinwatch thing could theoretically have been handled diplomatically! Rather than with mass murder. The quest mechanics don't allow for it though.
)
We also make heavy use of this spring outside of town. For some reason, there's a rewarding sound and a shower of sparkles over your portrait the first time you drink from it. Interesting. It also restores 20mp per sip, so we keep coming back as we burn out the cannibal camps. Truly a fountain of magical power.
Yeah.
That... really needed to be there. For sure. Just to remove all ambiguity that they might not be serious, I guess? In any case, doesn't look like the last people to walk up this road fared as well as we did.
There's some bones scattered around the ground that we could pick up I suppose and probably should have, but don't. Someone in Free Haven wants to buy bones. Like these. I can't, or rather don't want to, imagine why.
We can also get food from the cookpot.
Though. I'm not sure. Uh.
Probably shouldn't think about that too deeply.
Instead of thinking about it, we raid this camps mostly-negligible treasure and swing back east past the empty circus, I don't know why they decided 'SURROUNDED BY CANNIBALS' would be a good place to set up shop sometimes, and find an easy obelisk.
The message makes no sense at this point. Gotta find them all!
There's also a dungeon right next door.
This is an interesting one.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's the sole dungeon in the game, unless you count the arena, that you don't get a quest-prompt from outside of it to go exploring. The only quest for the dungeon? You have to go inside to pick up.
It makes the dungeon easy to miss, or pass by.
Also.
The quest-giver?
Also kind of easy to miss your first time.
Because he's a wall.
Well, technically speaking, a powerful elemental of hot and molten stone.... in the shape of a wall.
A freaking wall.
Nope. I'm out. For more reasons that one. That strange monster he's talking about? Will definitely wreck our shit at this level. And there's more than just goblins to contend with in here.
We can come back after a few other dungeons, maybe. For the time being, let's go kill another camp of cannibals.
There's a bunch of them right south of the town.
And right after I take this screenshot, at least six Witch Doctors fired spells all at once, all of which hit way on the high end of possible damage, and I don't have time to take more pictures as I turn a complete 180 and run right back into town, going for the temple and heals. Little expensive, particularly when they're waking up unconscious people, but I don't have the time to stop and raise them to positive health just then.
I still kill them off, but it's a fight in the town and I can't use splash damage fireballs because they're going to kill the stupid damn peasants who have no qualms whatsoever about a couple doze cannibals pitching their campsite not a hundred feet outside of town!
Meteor shower would have been a great way to handle that. No shops sell it until Free Haven. Oh well.
.... Hope they didn't plan to eat that.
And it's a little unnerving that in large part that's because she doesn't look at all preserved well. I mean, she's turning blue. That's just disgusting, full of rot and bacteria.
Should have let the damn cannibals die of horrible wasting diseases instead.
Disgusted for all the wrong reasons.
Their treasure is pretty decent though. Directly increasing spell points isn't bad. Though, it's kind of debatable whether it's better or worse than increasing a stat that increases your mp.
Mostly depends on how high your stats already are. Low stats, where you can find a nice ring with a boost in the twenties and get a couple thresh-holds past by, stats are better, usually. Unless the equipment increases your mana by more than the stat would, but that's less likely.
Later on, though, when you could equip an artifact with +30 to a stat or more and still not cross a borderline, directly adding health or mp is usually better.
Especially when you get some nice increases. This doesn't sound like much, sure. But keep in mind, a fireball costs eight mp, and our biggest max mp is in the sixties, still. Altogether, eleven more mana is a nice increase.
Both go on Latrio, since his max mp has been lagging behind the other two a bit.
We also pick up some other stuff, but...
At this point, my patience with all these cannibals and lizardmen runs out, and we practice the time-honored art of ducking and weaving as we just ignore the rest of the enemies on the mainland, running past them to Free Haven.
This is a mistake! As you will soon see.
Once again, land travel has obligingly left us right in aggravation range of a group of enemies on the other side. At least this time it takes pity and doesn't have them literally right on top of us.
You get the same ding and flash from getting here as you do from drinking from that Fountain of Magic earlier. At this point, you're judged worthy, and a wide new world is waiting for you.
We're not ready for it. Not by far. The game doesn't expect you to be here at this point, and the enemy spawns on the map completely stop pulling any punches.
Those dots to the north? Mages. "Oh, like the ones in New Sorpigal", you say? Well. Yes. But also no.
Around New Sorpigal, the odds were more likely you'd see apprentice mages than anything else. There were scattered Journeymen of course, but an actual full-blown mage is few and far between. Here, the encounter rate is almost reversed. I've never seen a single apprentice on this map, myself. With that said, while there's a fair number of Journeymen, most of what you'll find is Mages. And lightning bolts. Lots of them.
Leaving them aside, the map also contains Archers.
I don't get close enough to screenshot an archer. They come in groups, you see, and if there's a group then there's probably at least one Fire Archer. Possibly more.
The basic archer has 35 health, 14 ac, deals 1d6+1 damage per arrow, and has some basic elemental resistances to fire, cold, electric, and poison. In simpler terms, Archers, the weakest of that set of three, are equivalent in danger level to Lizard Wizards, the most dangerous of the lizardman set.
Master archers have 93 health, close to triple their basic comrades'. They also have 16 ac, more of all the resistances an archer has, and can choose between a normal arrow that does 2d6+2 damage, or a burning arrow that does 3d6.
A single Fire Archer, if you're fortunate enough to see just one at this level, has 171 health, 22 ac, more of all the resistances than Master Archers and a little bit of pure magic resistance besides, and can choose between firing a normal arrow dealing 3d6+3 damage or a burning arrow dealing 4d6.
As if that weren't enough, they can cast a fireball with a skill level of five. Which means 5d6 damage to everyone in the party. All at once. There's some random chance to it, but they seem to lean towards pitching fireballs more often than not.
And it goes without saying that, being talented archers, even if they don't fling spells at you they'll be hitting much more often than they miss.
We want to be in Free Haven. We really do! But we won't be dicking around a lot, here.
That said, as long as we don't draw the notice of things that can feasibly, alone, kill three out of four of our party in two castings.... we really do want to be in Free Haven. It's the adventurer's bottleneck, but it's also the 'Big City' of Enroth. There's a lot of spell guilds potentially containing every last spell for all of the possible magical disciplines we can have at this point, this is where you can feasibly start purchasing the nicer stuff though it'll be more expensive, there's a ton of skill trainers, 14 experts and three masters, there's two coach companies, which means four horseshoes, which I divide up between tim and Latrio (Air and WATER MAGIC)....
And there's Osric Temper. Foremost Knight of the realm. Unlike Ironfist and Mist, which are very much geared towards Paladins and Sorcerors, the Lords really stop being super specific at this point. They can't afford to, in many cases. Osric lives here, in this castle.
We are in NO hurry to do his council quest. The dude wants us to kick down the door to a single-room outpost filled with devils and charge in swinging. That's... not something we can feasibly survive at this level. Much less succeed at.
That aside, he offers Knights possibly the easiest initial promotion quest in the game, questionably tied with sorcerors. As long as you know what to do in both cases. It's uncertain, because the sorceror quest needs you to actually leave the region and almost definitely get in a fight.... but while it's unlikely you'll get in a fight for this one, and you don't have to go far, if you do get tangled up in battle along the way you're likely to die.
Still, easy rank.
We ignore all the other guilds after this to charge directly to the guild of WATER. Everything else aside, there's a spell we very much want.
And they have one in stock.
But here's where I realize my goof. I misremembered prices. The book is about twice as expensive as I was thinking it would be, and so while I thought Merchant was going to have us sitting comfortable on a little extra, we're actually short.
Now, we don't have to have Town Portal right now. We can't use it to its full potential until Latrio hits Master anyway. But we want it really bad.
Other things for the moment, so I set this down for a few minutes, and we carefully skirt the edges of getting-attention-of-deadly-arrows to reach a pub nearby.
Is it really that easy? ... Can't be, right?
It's absolutely that easy.
Welcome to being a Cavalier, Torg. You'll notice you just shot up by about thirty max hp. Also, while you don't get gold for this, you do get some hefty experience for this level. Unless my math is wrong, everyone could gain two levels right now, and are close to a third.
He also offers an advanced promotion quest, to Champions, buuut.... that's right up there on a list of 'thinges what arre goinge to gettte us gutted like fish forre ye market and no mestake'.
We'll come back to that one later. Much later.
For now, I've been running around off camera, and our merchant isn't near high enough to make a profit off of resale yet, but a skill of 7 in water means a seventy percent chance of successfully enchanting things, and some of the stuff we've been picking up is barely good enough to get an enchantment. If we didn't pay, then it's all profit, and a few extra gold.
Torg ends up swapping their armor with an identical set that instead buffs resistance through that.
Eventually, I give up and go kill those mages I mentioned on entering free haven. It's a painful fight.
And in between, as I look for healing wells I miss by a bit. The one I want for health is on the green.
This one gives permanent Might increases.
Unfortunately, there's a maximum, and while I'm not sure where the cap is, Torg is above it. A shame, since they're the one who really wants it most. Additionally, you can only drink 8 times before the well runs dry. I spread the points out among the mages as best I can.
Then I go back, kill the last of the mages, loot the rest of the bodies, and buy that Town Portal spell.
Once Latrio hits mastery, that thing is going to be our big go-to for transportation. There's a hireling that can cast it at that level once a day.... but fuck them. They want a whopping five thousand gold in advance pay and half of everything you find.
Better to be able to cast it on our own, even if that currently leaves us with only slightly more than a hundred gold in spending cash.
Which is why we can't really level up just yet, even sitting on a heap of experience.
Now.
It's March. And the Shrine of Personality is in a place called Silver Cove. We can now get there by coach or boat, but when it comes down to it, actually getting to the shrine is gonna be....
Well, it can be done. But it's iffy. Getting back out again, alive, is even more iffy. Good thing death is cheap!
Maybe we don't want to probably throw our lives away on a pilgrimage only Selias benefits much from, though. And alternative option is that, if you haven't guessed, we've fulfilled the requisites for Sorcery Advancement. We just have to get ourselves back to Mist and talk to Al.
Or we could pick a quest you like and do that. Comes down to it, there's more than a couple available to pick up in Free Haven! They're pretty much beyond our ability, though, really. Pick from something we've already seen! ... Uh, that isn't the Fire Lord's place. Gonna need to hold off a bit on that one. ... Stupid Ogres. Stupid Fallen Defender, with its stupid scads of HP and powerful attacks and its stupid, stupid immunity to physical damage....
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