Xenowars | Defense, Dungeon, And Dung
Chronicon | Act III Moving Forward
Once I made it to Act III I felt like I was finally moving forward again. I was a bit ahead of where I was after losing my saved files. My gear was starting to round out nicely. I was happy I stuck with it and started over.
There was a little bit of the second act I had to finish off. I made quick work of that and downed the final act boss without much trouble. Things were starting to get a little too easy to the point I was starting to wonder again if it was time to up the difficulty.
I decided for the time being to not do so. It was kind of nice to just be splatting everything on the screen in seconds. Far too many ARPGs these days no longer give you that quick kill and massive backs of creatures. I don’t want to sit around for 20 seconds fighting three creatures. I want a giant pack and to pop them like a balloon in seconds!
Act III is also when moving forward would sometimes get a little confusing. Sometimes you would hit a locked gate that you could not move forward on. There was no built-in path in the game and even the quest lost updated telling me to find a different path forward.
Other times you would run into something that was locked and you had to guess how to unlock it. It was usually some kind of short puzzle in the area. You however had to guess the what and how without many clues if any at all. Other than there was something slightly off if that.
At one point I ended up getting a lot of upgrades with a massive increase in health. It was to the point I did not feel like I could be killed even if I went AFK.
At this stage of the game, I was also getting a lot of upgrades. Sometimes I’d upgrade the same slot two or three times in twenty minutes if that. As such when I did get an item I could socket a gem into I did not bother.
While I have been picking up a few gems and I’m still a bit bummed out about my entire collection from before being gone. They do have some level requirements on them so it’s not like I could not just go get a high-level one and give myself some massive boost.
This is also when I started to skip over checking outside areas. Unless I had an exact side quest taking me there. I wanted to move the storyline forward. I do expect at some point I’d finish the main storyline before hitting level 100.
That alone almost makes me want to just do everything including the side areas. I however still feel a bit like I’m trying to make up for lost time so I’m just skipping stuff if and when I can. Perhaps at some point, I’ll have some fun checking in random areas when I work on fishing off leveling.
For now, however, I was still quite away from level 100. At least this game gives you lots of boss battles to break things up with. On the normal difficulty I was on not a single boss fight I felt gave me any kind of struggle
They all went down just like this rather ugly thing. This was some kind of test chamber zone and it did give me a bit of a creepy vibe when I was fighting in it. Not as bad as I was expecting for a place with that kind of name.
The boss did not drop any upgrade and I quickly made my way to the next section. After a while, I did stop to play around with the in-game item filters. I was getting a little tired of other class-only item drops. It would take me a couple of attempts to get the setting right since there were two different sections with the same filters in them.
One thing I’ve noticed is quite a few zones in this game seem like something fun to clear out if it was closer to Halloween. They just got that spooky yet playful vibe to the zone set and the creature's looks. Including that one rather orange-looking ooze thing that died before I could even find out what it was.
It was not long before I finally hit this dreaded Courtyard in Act III. It’s fine once you have done it before and can recall how to open the gates. Otherwise, it takes a couple of moments to recall how in the daylights to get through the puzzles in there.
Some of them were not that hard to crack. You just had to click one button and the ground close by and the gate would open. This Perculiar Statue puzzle however took a little trial and error to realize what was going on.
The best way I can describe it is if I understand what is going on. You trying to light each of the five statues. To do so you have three different buttons. The button in the middle can turn on the light source for each of the on positions. The buttons on the far left and right move the trigger for that light. You can’t turn on the light without the trigger that you can’t see on that statue.
You at least get a content clue of where that light trigger is. As if you push the button when the trigger is on a statue that is already light up it will turn it off. While that tossed me for a loop for a short moment it did not take long that was a way to work out where the trigger was and from there I could move it to the next statue I needed to light up.
After you get all of them light up. The gates unlock and you end up going towards one of them to check out what occurred. It’s not that hard once you realize what is going on. Otherwise, I could see someone wondering what they are missing if they just keep turning off the same light over and over again.
In a short while, I was off to fight a king. He had troves of piles of gold for me to sweep up afterward. The strange thing about piles of gold in this game they give you crystals instead! Since crystals are the main currency.
Final Thoughts
Before calling it a night I ended up grinding a couple more levels so I could unlock my ultimate skill. You can only have one total and Demonologist would be the only skill tree I spent enough points in to unlock the final skill to select anyway.
Demon Spawn has a bit of a cooldown with it. It also uses a heavy chunk of my mana making it a bit of an issue with the reduced cooldown timers it gives me. Resulting in quite a lot of mana issues. I’ll be putting a little more focus on getting some mana upgrades to try and resolve this in the future.
Other Content
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Chronicon.