Welcome back.

In today's blog I will finally take a closer look at the two new dungeons, the Panic Cave DX, and the Altar of Siena b2f.

If you enjoy discovering every part of a dungeon yourself, and working out what to do and where to go, then perhaps you should stop reading right here :) I will of course try to be deliberately vague on some aspects of the dungeons, since this is not meant to be 'The Complete Guide to Dungeon X', but it is inevitable that some information will slip through. You can also check out the gameplay video hosted on MMOsite, over here: video.mmosite.com/display.php



The Panic Cave

My first impression of this short dungeon is rather simple: This one is harsh, and very well-named. You better heed the quest descriptions and ingame clues, or you will be punished ;) You are going to have to be fast, and confident in handling your character if you are going in here.

This dungeon comes in three different difficulty levels - easy, medium or hard -  and you have to choose which one you want to try. Even if you are level 170 you can choose to run the dungeon on easy mode, but from my personal experience bragging rights will come from finishing this on hard mode. It is always hard to make accurate comparisons of the actual difficulty level of the dungeon from the test server to the live server, due to the nature of the characters we use while testing. Even with that in mind I think that the vast majority of the completed runs will be on easy and normal mode. Normal mode should prove interesting enough for any decently-geared level 150-ish character - and I say this as a personal guesstimate, nothing else. You will have to try the dungeon for yourself in order to judge what hard mode is going to be like.

Hard mode... now that one is going to prove to be a lot more interesting. I am certain that the dungeon will be finished on hard mode on the first day of the update - for one it's really short, only 20 minutes, so you can try many times - but you will have to be very confident of your damage output and survivability if you select the 'hard' option. Try it on easy first, just to get a feel for the dungeon, before you ramp up the difficulty to hard, although that is of course just my personal advice.

I can also urge you to at least try one run before scurrying off to Youtube to try to find a complete guide for the dungeon. It will be more fun that way, take my word for it. But that's enough of that for now.

Panic Cave is short, fast and brutal. You do not have the option to use an Odd Circle (an item that allows you to resurrect where you died, with 40% of your HP restored), so once you die you are out, which is simply due to the way that the dungeon is made. It's a narrow, winding cave (or tunnel, if you want to be more accurate) leading down from the surface deep beneath the rocks of Desert Scream. There is also a rather surprising amount of life down there, at first... I also think that you should not let the relative ease of the first sections lull you into a false sense of security, because it does start out rather smooth and easy - relatively speaking now, of course ;) The boss itself, once it appears, is really big, and I think the word 'huge' is appropriate to use here.You can catch a glimpse of it on the gameplay video I linked to above. The developers also borrowed some of the newer developments that we first saw used in the Forbidden Island dungeon, so be prepared for anything.

And of course we will have to talk about the drops in the Panic Cave. I am not going to get too specific, or give examples of what drops in there because you simply cannot compare the drop rate on the test server with that of the live server (it's much lower on the ITS, before you ask), but I will talk about the bound drops again. The new binding drops appear to be limited to the Panic Cave for the vast majority of the cases, so be warned that if you enter the normal or hard versions of the Cave you will get something that is bound in some way, either as character bound, or as character binding when equipped. Apart from cores, of course, but weapons and armour are bound. I can also say that it might well be worth farming that dungeon for a while - you never know ;)

Here's two images from in there, just to give you a general feel for the atmosphere of the dungeon.











The Altar of Siena B2F

The other big dungeon, and from the start I can say that this one really impressed me. You can clearly see the way the developers are improving with every successive dungeon, and this one is no exception. It's longer than average - you get 1 hour and 20 minutes to complete it - and also more complex than the B1F version. They have taken the general feel of the B1F dungeon, and made it a bit darker and heavier, using much more green tones and plants especially in the later stage of the dungeon, as opposed to the brown stone from the first one.

The first thing that struck me was how far you had to move into the dungeon to receive the first chest. Both the Forbidden Island and Altar of Siena B1F dungeons had you facing a boss from the moment you entered, with no mobs around them (at least at first). This one is different, and you will have gone through several encounters and quests before you even see a chest. The dungeon is also harder than the B1F version, although not quite as punishing as the Forgotten Temple B2F. You have several optional side-quests to discover - no, I am not going to give an exact number - and the results from some of these will make the dungeon even more challenging. More rewarding as well, yes, but more challenging, which is a very good thing.

Another aspect that you will quickly realise is that the developers played around with the debuffs from the bosses, amongst other things. I can think of one particular place that is going to prove a real challenge on the live server, and you will have to plan your party to compensate for this. You will also find firegates, and plenty of them. At first they appear similar to the ones used in the Forgotten Temple B1F, only blue-white, but there are one or two... improvements ;)










You will also notice that the major opponents inside the dungeon not only speaks directly to your party, but also to each other. This is quite fun to see, so look out for that. I can also just urge you to read the quests very carefully, because you will find clues to the hidden quests concealed in the normal quest text. I know there is a rather large part of the playerbase who simply click through the quests as fast as they can, not bothering to read it - well, I guess none of them would be reading this blog in the first place - and it is of course your choice, but if you want to get the most from this dungeon take the time to read.

OK, I think I cannot say too much more about this dungeon without moving into major spoiler territory, so I think I will stop here for now.

Oh yes, and I've been meaning to mention this for a while now. You now receive a title for completing both the B1F and B2F versions, Contamination Curer for Altar of Siena B1F, and Rotten Seed Judge for the new B2F version. One gives +1% Experience on the level 2 one, and the other gives +1% Pet Experience for the level 2 title. I'm also still waiting for ESTsoft to get back to me with some questions from the previous blog entry, I did not forget about those, I just have not received any decent answers yet.

If you have any questions, as always feel free to ask them in the comments section - I do try to answer as many as I can.



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