Arelith

I mentioned this place in another thread. I did some more exploring of the place, all the way to the bottom of the Cathedral. We were 5 in total, all level 30.

The place is absolutely deadly, we had people with fairly high AC, haste and concealment and they still came close to dying pretty often. We were super careful only to fight one group at a time, had we fought two, we would probably have died.

The biggest offenders are definitely the Cathedral Knights. They have a lot of HP, they deal a lot of damage and they have really high AB, I saw 57 quite a few times, dealing over 100 damage on crits. You can't really burst them down, because they also have quite high AC, our group was sitting at around 50ab and was not hitting them fast enough.

As for rewards: after being close to dying severals times, over an hour long journey (including sailing, getting to the Cathedral and finishing) by the end we had an Adamantine vein (which I assume can be mithril or arjale too) and three chests, none of which was Runic. This means that all loot is pretty much all up to chance. If you don't have adamantine, chances are you won't be getting more than anything worth all that effort.

For comparison, the Manor of Mourn is also challenging but a lot easier for well prepared and a group of our size. But it can be run much faster and at the top are potentially two adamantine veins and one runic chest.

Agreed that the Bastille is tough.

It's meant (from what i can tell) to be a really challenging area for folks who wish to push themselves, and at that it succeeds.

It's also massive, and takes quite a while to do if you wish to do it all, and, whilst the rewards for doing so aren't comparable to shorter and simpler epic dungeons, overcoming the challenge of it is a reward in and of itself.

Unfortunately, this reduces the desire to re-do the content, so it rarely sees use.

There are some ways to make it a little easier to do as a player, and some of it depends on party composition. I won't go into them because there are some things folk need to work out for themselves, or at least find out in game, but it is, regardless, a definitely difficult dungeon to do.

The challenge rating is super high and I love it. The server needs more places of similar difficulty not less. Sometimes you are in a party with 12 max level people and the majority of the current dungeons would be too much of a breeze.

The Lost Bastille is not one of those dungeons. Bring resurrection scrolls.

The biggest thing I don't like about the dungeon is how long it is. It felt like it was meant to be a MMO raid with multiple bosses, except it doesn't save progression as you pass through it. I found that to be a lot worse than the difficulty of it, I don't think the difficulty was out of line. Every time I thought we were close to the end, it kept going. At hour 4 I did not want to be there anymore. I wanted to log out. The end was not in sight.

There's shorter high-difficulty content out at sea that I think does it better, where you need to prepare for it ahead of time to do it, but it's a small island you go through.

I agree that high difficulty endgame is cool, and it makes sense for boat content to be that way. You need a crew to sail and probably have a few people with you. I just can't stand areas that take hours to go through.

when you have a group if 12 anything is easy

But the majority do not, 2-3 would be standard, 5 is super lucky.

The length starting to feel like other mmos lol, yeah...

The bastille is probably the single hardest dungeon on Arelith, it can be cleared with some amount of ease with a good party but it really feels designed for 4-6 people. You really do need to have a strong party of characters and you actually do need to use your spells intelligently, it's one of the few places that actively rewards you for proper spell management.
I really do like it as a dungeon but yes, it really isn't close to as rewarding as it should be given the last boss has a staggering amount of AB and well in excess of a thousand life (He's more accurate than a PC can be, even with truestrike active). It's generally just an issue with most dungeons really being a poor return on your time and effort, especially with a large group.

I believe the place is challenging but not entirely unreasonable considering it’s meant to be absolute high-end content. Yes you need a group, yes you need to prepare, yes you need to be careful, but we’re not here to always breeze through any place - where would be the fun in that? Managing with a group without a bard, however, tells me it’s in an okay place.

That said Cathedral Knights are over the top and should have their AB and/or AC reduced. Several of them with 57AB (death attacks) and a similar amount of AC and a lot of HP on large trash mobs (up to 10 creatures per?) makes them feel way overtuned.

I don’t get the comment about not being able to save progress in that place. You literally get keys that you can take and use to return another day and continue with the next part. That’s as close to „saving“ as you can get on Arelith.

Personally I have not done this dungeon, but if it is this difficult I hope it maintains its difficulty but we can revisit the idea of strong, unique loot (not in the sense of artefacts but in the sense of named gear) that can compete with best-in-slot gear or unique consumables like the ones Sailing offers.