Mhoire Castle
Difficulty: 150+ for melees, 200+ for non-melees
Level Restriction: 125+
Timer: 13 Days
Can be Solo'd? Yes
Rewards: XP, Luminance, Mhoire Treasury keys, titles, Mhoire coins
The Mhoire Graveyard has been a dangerous place for some time, but it's especially dangerous now that the Mhoires' flying keep has emerged. Perhaps you can get on the Mhoires' good side if you break as much of their curse as possible?
Step 1: Preparation. Completing this quest accomplishes a few things and you can easily break this quest down into manageable pieces.
Step 2: Flaming Brands. Before you can go storming the Mhoire Castle, you need to prove your worth to the Gargoyle gatekeeper. In order to do that, you will need to find 3 flaming brands (i.e., candles) held by 3 Mhoire Champions who happen to have been destroyed by Rytheran. Fear not - you can summon them back into existence in an undead form by using a Strange Jewel, so that's your first order of business. However you choose to get to the Graveyard, make sure you are buffed up and ready to fight your standard GY fare - bludge and fire weapons, plus whatever you use to kill Ghosts (ghost slayer?). Run to the southwest exit and on your way, target the yellow dot on your radar at 66.5S, 44.7W. You will grab the jewel and an untranslated note that you don't really need. As soon as you have the jewel, get out of the Graveyard so you don't get yourself killed. To summon the 3 champions, you need to use your gem near their final resting places. They will appear with a small escort that you shouldn't bother killing (they respawn immediately). The first champion is close to your current position - just outside the rock wall separating the GY from the Direlands spawns. Move to 66.5S, 45.2W, close to the tree near the wall, and use the gem. If nothing happens, move around a bit and try it again - you can use the gem over and over again, but you will have to wait 3 seconds for the cooldown timer to end. When you successfully use the gem, Lord Hendrel will spawn, with his 2 Wight friends. The Lord himself is a souped up Blade Sorcerer, so watch out for his war magic. Dispatch him and loot the brand from his corpse. There are 3, so this part can be done with a small group pretty easily. Next stop is Lady Saliane who bit the big one in a crypt in the northern GY. Run up to 65S, 44.2W and enter the southwestern bunker. Kill the Corrupted Dread and then move behind the small altar so that your back is toward the far wall of the crypt. Use your gem and you will summon the Lady, who is a Spectral Dread, and two little frost elementals who do nothing but spam nasty frost wars. That altar will shield you from the wars from the Lady's friends, but you will have to deal with her attacks yourself. Melees shouldn't have much trouble, but anyone without great melee D or a shield will get clocked by her melee attacks. An alternative approach is to summon the Lady, run out and jump on top of the bunker, and debuff her. When she is prepped, hop down and just outside the entryway of the bunker. Shoot her to your heart's content. If you stand just right and use arcing attacks, her wars will harmlessly hit the stairs while you beat the stuffing out of her. Loot her brand and move in to the final champion, Lord Trimere. He lives underneat the castle, so from the Lady's bunker, run north and turn west as soon as you get out of the GY area. The Lord fell just north of a broken pillar at 65.1S, 45.5W. He is a Pyre Champion and will have a couple Pyre Minions with him. The good news is that ranged types can perch on said pillar and hit him with impunity. Hitting his shield with Tusker Bait is a great idea if you can. Dispatch and grab his brand. Now that you have 3, it's time to turn them in. Hopefully it is still daytime - it if isn't you may want to wait for dawn. When you are ready, run to the temple building on the hill in the northern GY - the building where you summon the portal to Lord Mhoire's crypt. In fact, you will be giving your brands to the same Gargoyle - the one to the east of the temple. Hand the brands - order matters (but I don't remember what the order is...). If the Gargoyle doesn't accept your first brand, give him another one. Once you turn in all 3, you will receive 100M XP, a Mhoire Coin, and flagging to enter the Mhoire Castle. Conveniently, the Gargoyle also summons a portal behind you - target it and use it to enter. The portal takes you up to the floating castle, which is not safe at all. Run NE and look for another portal leading in to the castle's interiors.
Step 3: Castle Trials. Once inside, you can relax for a moment. The drop is safe and here you will find 3 NPCs. Two give out tasks and one asks you to destroy a shade of Rytheran to help purge the Mhoires' curse. Conveniently, you can work on all 3 at the same time. To fight Rytheran, you need to prove yourself a true champion of House Mhoire, and to the rather sadistic Mhoires, that means surviving ridiculously difficult trials. This is the part where you should work by yourself and where you should invest in a flame protection rare. If you try this with other people, you will likely need a second rare and if you try it without a rare, you'll just die over and over again, no matter how good you are. Have a look at the map before you start - the dungeon is a very large squared off ring shape and you are currently in the NE tower. You need to complete trials in the other corners of the ring to advance. The connecting sections are filled with interconnected small chambers guarded by random spawns of GY monsters. Most of these spawns are small and can be easily defeated if necessary, but most of the time, you can sneak past spawns you don't want to fight. Before you get started, there are a few things to look for. First are yellow dots on your radar. These could be one of two things - Guardian Statues or Spectral Fountains. Both are worth stopping for, as one of the two tasks is a statue kill task. The Spectral Fountains are rather odd things. When you use them, a variety of things can happen. You can receive a single-use Mhoire Treasury key (Good!), you can be teleported into the northern reaches of the castle, you can be teleported a mile over Ayan, you can receive a heal-over-time buff, or you can be struck down with Weight of the World. Although a couple of these are annoying, unless you are in a huge hurry, you might as well use the fountains. The last thing to be looking for are piles of bones. If you destroy these, you can loot rings for the second task in the castle (10 = a Mhoire Coin). They also occasionally drop Mhoire coins or keys and best of all, they don't fight back. Now that you know what to do, it's time to head to the trials.
Step 3a. Southeast Trial. From the NE tower, make your way southeast as best you can and go down a ramp. You will find yourself looking into a big room. Head to the south exit and proceed south as best you can through the mazey small chambers. Eventually you will hit another big room. Look for another exit on the north wall (you came through one) and go through it and upwards. Continue south and west and you will reach the Southeast tower and your first trial. Have a look at the room before you start - you should see a stupidly large number of flaming skull war spells flying around and about 8 little fire elementals. If you hit one of the skulls (or get too close to it or run into an invisible one or look at one the wrong way...), you will take a lot of damage, but you will likely survive... unless you were fire vulned. Then you're dead. Your job is to run in to the mess of flying skulls and monsters, talk to the Gargoyle statue, and then waste fire elementals. Do this in two stages. First, dispel and run to the blue statue at the far end of the room. When you are traveling through the flaming skulls, the best way to see what's coming is to use the map view, which is defaulted to numpad Enter. This will give you an overhead look so you can see what's around you. Carefully run out to the statue, use it, and then come back to the entryway. Now you need to kill and then immediately loot 10 of Fire Elementals in order to pick up 10 crystallized flames. If you happen to kill one during its wind-up animation, it may not leave a corpse, so you could need to kill more than 10. Also, the corpses decay very quickly, so use them as soon as the monster drops. Regardless of what class you are, you want to be killing the monsters as close to the door as you can, so you don't have to worry about the skulls. Melees, be careful about sticky melee, as the little guys are a bit flighty. You have exactly 5 minutes to get 10 flames. Once you are done, talk to the Gargoyle statue again to complete the task.
Step 3b. Southwest Trial. From the SE large room, you will want to make your way west as best you can. When you reach the next big room, find the second exit on the east wall (again, you came through the other one) and make your way northwest as best you can. At the top of the final ramp is the Southwest trial room, replete with another set of flaming skull traps. There should be a Gargoyle statue directly in front of you. Talk to it and it will give you a sword. The statue will also tell you what to do with the sword. You must purify it in several of the flaming braziers on the far side of the room. Each has a character trait on it (loyalty, honestly, etc). Give the sword to the trait the Gargoyle says to give it to and then read the green message the sword gives you after you purify it the first time. Take it to that next brazier and repeat as necessary. Be aware that you may be asked to give it to the same brazier more than once and you might give it to the same one more than once. You have 5 minutes to finish off this task, but that shouldn't be a problem. Again, use the map view to see what's coming around you. Fortunately, you shouldn't be vulned in this trial, so you can afford to take a hit. Once the sword tells you it is pure, give the sword to the Gargoyle and you will be done. Congrats - the remaining trial is a snap compared to those two.
Step 3c. Northwest Trial. Make your way back down to the SW large room and then head north. Find the second exit on the south wall and go up, making your way northeast. Your final trial is at the top of the stairs. Inside the trial room are a lot of Guardian Statues (the kind you need to kill for the kill task... convenient, huh?) and a few inanimate statues. Your job is to talk to the inanimate statue in the middle and then talk to the 4 others in a particular order. The trick is that the order is given to you in code. The easiest way to do this is to run in, talk to the statue, and run back out the way you came. That will accomplish a couple things. First, you will get your puzzle in a safe enough place to ponder it, and it will annoy the statues. The statues aren't really a threat if they are in melee mode, but if the whole room is casting war spells on you, you won't stand much of a chance. The good news is that once the statues go into melee mode, they won't ever cast wars on you again. With the statues safely annoyed, look at the message you got - specifically the last words in each. Here's the translation: DTLN = Air, DBTNK = Water, NTLN = Fire, and ZTNK = Earth (yes, I know the lengths don't make sense - those aren't really the translated words). Look at the last words of the middle 4 lines the statue told you (lines 3 to 6) and go to the statues in that order. Once you have talked to all 4 in the correct order (wrong order will teleport you out), you will have completed the task. If you somehow pick the wrong statue, you'll be ejected, so don't do that. I'd kill some Gargoyles while you're there to work on that kill task!
Step 4: Rytheran's Throne. Now that you have passed all 3 trials, it's time to take Rytheran down. This part is doable with a group, so you may want to find other people who are flagged before you try this. It is possible to solo though, if that's your thing. Return to the NE tower foyer and talk to the Shade of Antemy. He will flag you to enter the Great Hall portal nearby. Hop in. The Great Hall is another ring shape, but this time you are dropped in the middle on the south side. You can readily avoid everything in this dungeon if you like. Make your way around the ring until you are at the north end. Look for a killable door heading south and break it down. You should find yourself in a throne room now, with a throne at the far (south) edge of the room. Using this throne will summon Rytheran, 2 Wight Blade Sorcs, and 4 Wight Captains. Note that if you do this as a team, everyone must use the throne to be able to receive the reward. You can either have everyone use the throne at the same time or you can spawn him one at a time for the loot he drops. Rytheran himself acts like a big Blade Sorc. Killing the spawn isn't really worth it (unless you have a big team) because they spawn almost immediately. The way I did it was to move to the far end of the room and break down the killable door on the south wall, then use the throne. I then hid down the hall a bit from the door and debuffed Rytheran (he does not counterbuff, so debuffs = good). His friends couldn't reach me and eventually he and the Blade Sorcs started doing their no-mana dance and two of the Captains went brain-dead. I could deal with the other two Captains and Rytheran, but I had a good time luring the Captains into the hall behind the killable door and having it respawn, trapping them in the hallway. Rytheran himself has about 200k health, so he will take some time to dispatch. If you are a mage or archer, you may want to try the technique I did, but let the door spawn with you behind it. Then take shots at Rytheran. Be aware that war will travel through the door, so the Captains can hit you. When Rytheran falls, loot his corpse. He will drop some Mhoire Treasury keys, some Mhoire coins, and 9 green rings. Clean him out and make sure you pick up a green ring. Return it to Antemy for your reward.
Step 5: Rewards. If you were working on the two tasks, they are each worth 25M XP and a Mhoire coin. They are also repeatable once every day, so that's a reasonable way to earn coins at a steady rate. Each of the trials rewards you with a title (Knight of the <direction> Tower), but no XP. Turning in the green ring to Antemy will net you a whole lot of XP (50% of your level without a cap - I earned over 1.5 billion XP), the title "Champion of House Mhoire", 2 Mhoire coins, and a 5 use Mhoire Treasury key. The Mhoire Treasury keys open a very good chest in the Great Hall dungeon past the killable door in the throne room, so you will need to go through that dungeon again. It always gives at least 2 level 8 components, plus a random assortment of top-tier loot. My experience with this chest is that it is even better than your standard Mana Forge chest by a wide margin, but your results may vary. You will also earn 15,000 Luminance for your troubles.
