Enshrouded and Swinging Through the Kindlewastes Hollow Halls

The thing with Enshrouded is that they gave you the glider… but they also really expect you to you use it from time to time.  They even make you use it.  But we’ll get to that.

We got together again on Sunday afternoon and, having finished the Nomad Highlands Hollow Halls the previous week, we thought the Kindlewastes Hollow Halls might be next on the list.

The Hollow Halls are the “real” dungeons in each “zone” of Enshrouded, or such has been my observation.  We haven’t found anything else that matches them for that sort of content.  The has been overland content, whole cities to investigate.  And every spire has been a puzzle to master.  But other undergound content, mines, catacombs, the repeating Sun Temples, those have all been somewhat short events.  The Hollow Halls are the dungeon crawl experience.

In order to get into all but the first one you need a key made with materials picked up from the previous version.  We came up short on that after the last run, so during the week I slipped back into the Nomad Highlands Hollow Halls again to clear out a few rooms of mobs for drops, until I had collected enough to go back and make the key.

Key made and in my inventory, we were at least covered on that front.

Now it was a matter of finding the Kindlewastes Hollow Halls and then getting there.  When we were all on I was wondering where on the map our destination might be when Potshot said, “How about the big question mark on the far east end of the map.”  Sure enough, there it was, right in front of me, right where The Collector marked it when we finished the last run.

You can even see a marker there on the map, a little black mineral icon that I use to mark iron deposits on my map, so I had nearly been there at some point.

That left the getting there issue.  Our closest base was at the Far Away Fray Tavern, which is where I walked from to get to that iron deposit.  But that looked to be a journey.  What looked more promising was the Kindlewastes fast travel spire.  It looked like we could cover much of the distance to our destination by gliding, so off we went to give it a shot.

On the image above there is a pair of green arrows, which showed the path we mostly took.  Part way through the first glide it didn’t look like we were going make it across that shroud area, so we dropped down early to size up the next glide, taking a few minutes out the clear the Sun Temple at the red diamond on the map.

The second glide had a narrow window for success… and I managed to blow it, landing on a ledge down below with no way to get up.  So I fast traveled back to the top of the spire to give it another try.  Having been on the ground, I diverted to some high ground… that sun temple was somewhat ironically built under a big knob of landscape that kept it from ever being within direct view of the sun… rather a sunless temple… which put me much higher than the previous launch point along the green line.  So then I totally overshot where Potshot and Ula were waiting, but we were able to reground and carry on, following a road around that may or may not correspond to that blue arrow.

But we made it, rolling up on the usual red marble edifice that marks the entrance to a Hallow Halls franchise.

There I was able to use the key we had prepared to enter into the place.

Once in, it was the usual preliminaries of smacking down a couple of mobs and making our way to the initial teleport pad.  There are generally at least two… though last week we had a plethora of them in that one huge room… one new the entry to put you into the dungeon proper and one at the very end to send you back to the first one.

This one sent us to the first flame shrine… respawn point… beyond which we can to a balcony overlooking an open area quite a ways below us.

Looking around did not turn up anything hand like stairs, ladders, grapples, ledges, or other methods for descending down to the floor level of what looked like an arena… where we were in the nose bleed seats.

It was clear that we were meant to glide on down into that big LZ… and it turned out to be a hot LZ, practically a wrestling cage match.  But we got down there and got ourselves stuck in.

During the fight I noticed that some of the bads had the icon above them that had been previously on the glowy bits we had to find to unlock barrier doors.  That was fine with me.  If nothing else, making an aggressive mob the key that unlocks a door makes them all the easier to find.

It was a hectic fight, with lots of mobs.  All the mobs in this dungeon were around level 25, while we were all around level 30, which meant we were not over matched… but levels are as distinctive in Enshrouded as they are in, say, WoW where a mob five levels below you is a cake walk.

I read somewhere that their design philosophy was that disparate levels between players shouldn’t bar people from playing together, so while a lower level player has fewer skill points applied… and your build makes a big difference, more so that levels… they can still run with you.  So being about five levels ahead helped, but not so much as you might suspect.

When the battle was over, we got the big Barrier Unlocked message, so we had killed all the right mobs.  Also, Potshot had gone down in the scrum, his caster build being less well suited to a battle royale in a dungeon.

Once Potshot was restored and we had cleaned up the field, there was a question as to which way to head.  We had been in battle so hadn’t noticed where the barrier was, so it being gone wasn’t guiding us.  As it turned out, of the four paths off of the platform, three were dead ends while the fourth led to a flame shrine and a seeming additional dead end.

We went back to the other three and explored, even digging into some of the rubble and such, but no luck.  The point past the flame shrine was the the only option left.

We were also in the shroud in parts of this dungeon, which always puts a clock on your activities and pushes you forward.  Potshot, feeling brave, jumped into the unknown, gliding downward and out of sight into the shroud mist.

There was a landing zone at the far end, marked by several green braziers.

That was the pattern of the place.  We then had some mobs to fight whose defeat would remove a barrier.

And then we would end up at a flame shrine with yet another glide of faith waiting for us.

Between the second and the third we ran into the inevitable grapple/swing requirement.  This was a large room where the floor was that shroud lava that either kills you outright or runs down your shroud timer immediately, which then kills you.

Potshot was the champ on this one, getting it on his first try… only then to fall to his death trying to help Ula and I who had both missed the last swing and ended up landing on ledges below the target platform.

I managed to climb up to the main platform, only to fall and die myself, also while trying to scout a route down to where Ula had landed.  And Ula died trying to get up from her ledge.

There was a lot of dying.  I never once made all three swings and Potshot, after his initial success, didn’t quite make it a few times.

This became such a chore that it threatened to end the run as we comically fell over and over, depleting our food supplies and losing most of the loot we had picked up, as corpses lay unrecoverable in awkward locations.  If we hadn’t been stuck in shroud, which denies you fast travel, we might have all teleported back to base.

We took a bit of a break and, having clambered up from one of the ledges… I never once made all three swings and stuck the landing… ran further on and found the flame shrine so at least if I died I wouldn’t have to do the swing routine again… which was good, because I fumbled and died at least two more times exploring the room.  They were at the previous flame shrine, which was clear of shroud.

On returning Potshot got over to the platform again and ran up to the flame shrine with me.  The Ula made all three swings and was secure on the platform.  We led her up the grapple, climb, grapple to get up to the flame shrine.

Past that, we ran into the third and final long glide “hope there is a place to land at the end” challenge.

The previous ones were straight glides.  This one required some steering and some altitude control as there were things to run into… and when you run into something when gliding you are very quickly not gliding but falling and struggling to deploy your glider again.

I hit a few too many things and ended up dead.

Potshot too hit things on the way down, but managed to pull out a successful landing.  I managed to get there on my second try, warned of the obstructions I might hit if I was too high in the tunnel.  Ula made it in one.

And then we were to the flame shrine and peeking over into the final battle, which was two of those cyclops with the “throw you in the air” attack that then slams you into the ground and kills you if you don’t get out of the circle or deploy your glider in time.

You can see a couple of corpse markers out on the field already because… those guys suck.  If you get out to long melee range they have a one-two attack that knocks down three quarters of your health with each hit, and none of us had six quarters of health to spare.

We wiped a few times before we took another break, settled down, shared out the remaining health potions and food, and went in one more time to try and get them each on their own.

As the tank, if I can stay basically between their legs I can hit them and am too close for their big slash attack.  The tricky part is being tossed in the air, which means gliding off to parts unknown… at one point I mid-fight I glided down a side hall into a mess of skeletons who were apparently on their break or something and ended up having to fight all of them for a bit before returning to the actual main event.

Getting back in range is the hazard if it is time for the big attack, but once past that range it was back in and pounding.  And then you get bounced and have to glide again.  Also, the middle of that big square is green gunk that drains your health and stam…which killed me a few times while we were doing this, as I glided right into the middle and died before I could get out.  I think we all died in our turn in that last pair of fights, but somebody stayed alive to keep the current boss from resetting.

We did managed to take them both down in the last pair of fights.  That unlocked the final barrier that got us to the big chest at the end and the teleport pad that takes you back to the start of the instance.

And that wraps up the Hollow Halls for us.  We might want to go back and explore a couple of them.  There are all sorts of hidden locations within each, and I know we have only found a few.  While there is a red marble edifice for a fifth Hollow Hall, the door won’t open and there is no key available to be crafted yet, so we will have to wait for the next big game update before we’ll likely see it.