Chapter 13 #2
Raven stands tall at the front. Her latest armor is lithe and deadly looking, small blades lining the outsides of her arms, up the fronts of her legs, and around the curve of her hips.
Her weapon is still a giant war hammer, but the two halves of the hammerhead float, and in the center of them is a small purple flame, as if the hammer itself has an engine heart.
The piece of equipment I need from Vaults is a small thing, a neckpiece that will crank my agility stat to the sky.
Once I have that, I’ll be as well geared as any of the top DPS players.
Ash’s character, Faustus, stands behind Raven.
He’s tall, like Ash, but his hair is wild and deep purple and goes down to the middle of his back.
He wears a black mask with strange blue light glowing behind the eyeholes.
His weapons are a black short sword and an ethereal dagger; both complement his build.
Where Raven is built for head-on damage, quick hits, and big payoffs, Faustus is made for stacking drain damage.
Healz’s character is short, barely half Faustus’s height, and wears big goggles and an even bigger conductor’s hat. He has modified his armor to look like a chef’s white coat. I think this makes him a goofier person than I expected given his attitude toward me in our first dungeon together.
Zoo just looks like a guy. He appears to have taken the tank role to heart and slammed all his character creation sliders to one hundred for any stat that made him bigger.
He looks like a linebacker. Short dark hair.
Thick armor. Shield and sword. It would be boring if I didn’t understand the utilitarianism of it. Zoo is here for a mission, not for fun.
Okay, it’s still boring.
[Ravenweal]: Who’s marking?
[Faustus]: I can.
[Zookini]: I’d rather. Tank calls the shots
[Faustus]: Fine with me, boss man
[Healzzzorz]: buff up
[Zookini]: Switch to voice chat
I change over to Discord and get into the voice chat.
I obviously know what Ash sounds like, and I’ve grouped with Healz enough by this point that I recognize his voice—thin and a little reedy—but Zoo is new.
The voice is deeper than Healz’s, but still a generic man voice.
About what I expected after seeing his character.
We cast every stat-buffing ability we have, eat our stat-buffing food, drink our stat-buffing potions. I turn on my aura that causes enemies to move slower when they’re near me.
Vaults is an instance that takes place in the Dream, the collective human subconscious where the characters of Children of Hypnos face some of their most harrowing enemies.
This is one of the few instances in the game that has no tie to events in the books, though.
We have to go through five dreamspaces teeming with powerful nightmares.
In four of them, mini bosses guard keys that open the fifth, where the final boss waits.
Each mini boss has a different puzzle you have to solve before you can defeat them.
You can do the mini bosses in any order, but there is a generally accepted order that makes the runs smoother: Eye, Claw, Tail, Fang.
Zoo takes us into the dreamscape where the Eye waits.
The Eye is literally that: a huge floating eye that can freeze you in place if you’re in its line of sight.
The trick here is to stand on various platforms throughout the room as they light up to lower the barrier around the eye, opening it to attack.
Waves of nightmares strike as you try to do this, making it dangerous for the party to split up.
Zoo moves at a breakneck pace. My keyboard clacks under my fingers.
It takes all my concentration, but it isn’t impossible.
While we fight, we keep up a steady stream of chatter, calling out what’s happening and what we’re doing.
I narrowly avoid getting caught in the Eye’s beam and dash behind it as soon as the barrier is lowered, unleashing my chain of attacks for maximum damage.
The Eye goes down. We loot the rewards and the key and move on to the Claw.
This one takes the form of a nightmare raptor, red and twisted, with claws sprouting from every part of its body.
It moves quickly and hits hard, but it’s squishy.
Here, the group kites the Claw while the fastest member runs around the arena and hits switches to trap the Claw in place.
Once it’s trapped, we wail on it until it breaks free. Rinse and repeat.
I volunteer to hit the switches. I have to move fast, hit them at the right time, and keep myself safe from smaller nightmare enemies while I do it, so it gives me the opportunity to showcase a lot of different skills. No problem. The Claw dies. Rewards, key.
Next is the Tail. This one usually takes the longest, because the Tail—a giant turtle-looking nightmare with spikes coming out of its shell—has a huge amount of HP.
When the Tail retreats into its shell, it ejects a rush of offspring the party has to deal with while the main body sprouts a long, muscled tail out of one of its shell openings and starts slamming it around the battlefield.
The idea here is to lure the offspring into the tail’s path, crushing them.
Inside the offspring are little incendiary souls you can chuck at the Tail to damage it and make it come back out of its shell.
As DPS, my job is to do as much damage as possible to the Tail while it’s out of its shell, then not get killed when the offspring arrive.
Because the tank keeps the aggro of the Tail’s tail, it’s Zoo’s job to lure it and kill the offspring.
Sometimes your job is to stay out of the way.
I need to make sure I show him I can do that too. I know when I’m needed, and for what.
“Three shell phases,” Zoo says in the voice chat. “That’s pretty good.”
His voice is not quite as flat as usual. He might even be happy.
“Best I’ve ever done in Vaults,” says Ash, much more supportive.
We grab the rewards and the key and move on to the final mini boss: the Fang.
This is the one that drops the neckpiece I need.
The drop rate is low, but I’m hopeful. The Fang takes the shape of a panther made of black smoke that disappears and reappears across the arena.
It does this at specific points on its health bar, though, and Healz has an add-on installed that pops up a warning on our screens when it’s about to disappear.
The points where it reappears are fixed, so the tank, healer, and one of the DPS players start running to the next spot before it teleports.
The second DPS stays back to do as much damage as they can.
Because my build gives me more survivability than Ash, I volunteer to stay behind.
In its second phase, the Fang starts making copies of itself when it teleports.
These do not have fixed points, so we have to figure out which one is the real one.
Usually that means running around and hitting each one to see which takes damage, but resourceful players figured out a workaround.
There’s another add-on that will find creatures on the map if you type /locate [name] into the chat box.
This add-on only recognizes the real Fang as the creature, so when you type it in, it ignores all the copies.
Ash has this add-on, so he’s in charge of calling out which one is real. We wait for the copies to appear, then Ash runs the command and tells us which way to go.