The Exile's Path

Day 2 (26.04.2016)

Continuing the Adventures
The next day, I played more like a retard than I have in months—ranging from confusion with the quest chain to wasting reagents pointlessly and accidentally selling good gear. It's also worth mentioning that all locations in the game have a random reset time of 8-15 minutes after exiting; consequently, any unnecessary idling in town means you have to travel back to the location again.
This stagnation led to my character level significantly exceeding the level of enemies in quest locations, and exp gain practically ground to a halt. I lost a lot of precious time on this, but somehow I managed to grind through the second act. For the reasons mentioned, there were no difficulties there, but I did find two very useful abilities.


Here we have a sort of manual AoE shotgun that liberally supplies enemies in melee range with fire shot. The trick is that skill damage is significantly increased against ignited targets, sometimes allowing me to one-shot elite packs. I immediately realized that with proper leveling, this thing could not only finally ensure safety in close combat but also take down some bosses—but more on that later.
The second ability was a standard meteor shower, which helped, ahem, basically everywhere it was possible. The downsides: you can't cast while moving; the advantages: high damage, low mana cost, and a large area of effect. With this set, there were no problems completing the second act.
Oh, and I also liked the abandoned pyramid location and this death machine. However, the boss seemed quite weak for a final one; in reality, I was just too much overpowered.

A video of the softcore walkthrough on the highest difficulty level (note the number of random deaths):

And the soundtrack is totally awesome.


Third Act
Now this is where the real action started. Again, in one place I managed to get lost and spent another hour autistically clearing abandoned city blocks (which, by the way, are very well made):


However, I remember this act for its much more extensive amount of content, rewarding loot, finally a decent number of reagents, and a few other things worth mentioning.


PvP
Yes, yes, starting from this act, daily quests become available to the character, encouraging various online skirmishes. I can't say I was very surprised by this "innovation," but for obvious reasons, I was worried about its successful implementation in games like this—and unfortunately, my worries were justified.


In short, it's done poorly. Firstly, standard PvP zones (and the general arena) for low levels are capped at level 28, while others (29-100) are forced to stew in one big mixed pot. After running into a few 70+ duelists, I almost gave up hope, but I managed to "reach an agreement" with one who allowed me to complete the PvP kill quest. As for class balance—as expected, everything works on the principle of first strike/stun/freeze; whoever is faster wins. Therefore, hunters shooting homing arrows across the map dominate most, Wizards are next in line, and brutal frenzied warriors, ahem, well, yeah.


Health and Mana Potions
I forgot to mention this important point at the beginning; I'll write it now. To put it simply—potions and elixirs also need to be collected, but they have a distinctive feature: they gradually restore after killing enemies. This is done, naturally, for one purpose only—to allow heroes to withstand long fights while limiting their heals during boss encounters. However, the ability to use teleport scrolls in battles still doesn't appeal to me much—you can't heal yourself, but nothing stops you from bailing back to town and hiding there. Overall, these items play a decisive role at the start of the game when the character constantly lacks both HP and mana, but they don't help mages much on medium and high difficulties—mana regens itself, and HP drops to zero anyway, so restoring it is pointless.


Labyrinth
I must devote a separate couple of paragraphs to this—I won't hesitate to say—magnificent invention of the latest update.
The essence here is very simple: during the game walkthrough, the character somehow manages to enter various hidden locations, usually located in different dungeons or caves. The task is simple: solve various puzzles, bypass clever traps, and complete all six trials on the way to the main labyrinth. Having played plenty of Prince of Persia back in the day, jumping over traps and playing with levers wasn't a serious obstacle for me, so I successfully completed all trials by the third act. And that's where my LABYRINTH happened.
This trial is an analogue to the top difficulty level in this game, and honestly, I have no idea how to adequately complete it on Hardcore or Ruthless difficulty.
The Labyrinth is a huge location, in size equivalent to one and a half acts, divided into several randomly generated dungeons packed to the brim with the strongest monsters and clever traps. Moreover, some rooms are artificially populated with own-outright unbeatable opponents, and the monsters perfectly match the obstacles located near them—earthworms between flying hedgehogs and darts that trigger when the hero runs past—it's at least amusing.
The next important point: you cannot leave the labyrinth. AT ALL. Until death. After dying, the character returns to town, and the location resets. Given its size, this is equivalent to losing several hours of painstaking work, which sometimes makes blood boil in the veins and the chair seat burn with a hot flame.

1) First attempt.
Successfully smashed the first part of the labyrinth, but in the second, I entered some strange catacombs where I met a gloomy masked demon whose name, unfortunately, I didn't find. This monstrosity successfully passed through narrow doorways despite its build, moved at a speed equal to the hero, and guaranteed 90% HP loss per hit. After jumping away from it across the entire dungeon and aggroing every mob pack I encountered, I shamefully wiped after running out of health potions.

2) Second attempt.
Put movement speed boots in my inventory, took a 40% movement speed potion, changed abilities to fast fireballs, added cast speed stones to the meteor shower, and added teleport to my abilities—it became much easier to progress. I didn't meet the masked monstrosity again, although I burned with desire for revenge for my wipe, but overall I stopped having problems with strong monsters. And teleportation is just a great thing—I can't imagine how I would have passed millions of spikes popping out of the ground without it.
Everything was going well, and I even defeated the first stage of the final boss (who appears twice during the labyrinth run to "push" the player forward, heh), but like any self-respecting adventurer, simple greed ruined me.

Taks-taks-taks, what do we have here? Mmm, behind this door there are surely countless treasures and great legendaries—let's go find the key! -> didn't notice a spike platform in front of the wall -> frantically pressed teleport and flew into a flying hedgehog that ripped my little witch to atoms, heh, well. Meanwhile, this was ~2/3 of the labyrinth, and I was properly tilted.

3) Third attempt.
Considering that there are time-based rating tables for completing the labyrinth, I was absolutely dissatisfied with my run, even though I successfully completed such a challenge on only the third try.
I leveled up teleport, stood for ten minutes before every trap to understand the pattern, skipped difficult monsters, and missed all possible goodies and hidden locations just to reach the finish. The only achievement can be considered completing the quite difficult boss waiting for me at the end of the labyrinth on the first try.

I specifically picked a video from Normal; only, for some reason, I still had spike platforms in the middle of the map (and HP three times lower), but anyway, for beginners, the boss looks quite difficult. However, he seemed beatable to me, if not for the fact that there was a long labyrinth behind my back, which really got on my nerves.
Music.

Anyway, after defeating the boss, I was given a key to a chest with yellow-blue gear, lol, what a reward; on the other hand, it's absolutely deserved for my run. I will definitely try to conquer the labyrinth on the last difficulty when it becomes available—that's where the real fun will be.
Among interesting things, I got the ability to choose a secondary specialization (like a subclass), for which I chose Elementalist (for obvious reasons). Having received a very powerful boost to fire damage, now I can burn everything around even more!


Results: Day 2
Playtime: ~20 hours (24h total)
Character Level: 40
Experience Gained: ~18.000.000
Number of Deaths: 3
Overall, the day was spent in vain; although I completed the second and third acts, including the labyrinth, geared my character fully in rare equipment, and farmed reagents, this could have been done twice as fast for sure. But at least I truly realized the power of hardcore players—those guys are made of steel.
The last death, as expected, was on the final boss.
And everything would be fine, the fight isn't hard and the opponent is weak—but a nasty debuff that fills the whole map with radioactive waste and guaranteed kills any player got me. Essentially, you could hide from it in a small zone before the boss, but he also one-shots me up close, so not an option. Either way, the second day is behind me.