Destiny Online: Halo Paladin

Chapter 37: Blazing Valley

 

On the second day, Nocturne continued leveling until Level 16 before calling it a break.

It was almost dark in the game, so everyone returned to town to rest up. They planned to venture into Blazing Valley at first light.

After getting back, Beitang Meng told everyone to have dinner earlier. The party would gather at first light and venture into Blazing Valley.

The party disbanded for a while as they returned to their own businesses.

A quick thought later, Nocturne decided to buy some recipes and all kinds of cooking ingredients at the auction. He wanted to increase his Culinary mastery and have some good food.

Ever since Nocturne unlocked the achievement system, he was able to see the criteria to unlock each of the achievements. There were some rarer but difficult achievements that could boost his own stats or give him rarer items.

Even though the stat boost was not high, if he was able to complete all of it, it would be quite a considerable boost.

On top of that, he would get a certain amount of achievement points when he unlocked an achievement and even though he still had no idea what the points were for, it must be useful since the game devs decided to implement it into the game.

After cooking all the dishes, he went offline earlier for a real life meal before coming back to meet up with the team.

When the party got together, Beitang Meng distributed the potions and dishes to everyone. She even got a full set of gear for Nocturne, on rental of course.

She prepared the gear for him so that he could run the dungeon better, he had to return it after the run.

“Nocturne, you haven’t run Blazing Valley before right?”

“Yeah, not even once.”

“Okay then, you will need to finish the prerequisite quest first. You can also try a normal and hard mode to get yourself used to the dungeon and train your teamwork. And, you can swap out your Thorny Halo for Meditation Halo, it will help the healer a bit.”

“Noted.”

The prerequisite quest for Blazing Valley was simple, it was just some errand-running and story-listening.

From what he got from the NPC, the background of the dungeon involved a bunch of traitors from the alliance. They somehow got into a cult and kept doing strange things in the alliance. One of them, a spellcaster, tried to control the natives of a volcano to turn against the alliance.

As for the details, it was too long to be put into words.

When they got into the dungeon, they saw an alliance NPC fighting off a bunch of fire hounds around the corner. The party helped the NPC and got a quest from him.

“Adventurer, are you the reinforcements that I’ve longed for?”

“Yes.” Only Nocturne had not yet completed the prerequisite quest, so he got closer and initiated the chat.

After listening to all the chat, Nocturne got three quests. All of them were simple, all he needed to do was kill all the enemies in the dungeon.

Then, Nocturne pressed on with his party and officially started his dungeon run.

In front of them was a long pathway and several small fire hounds were chewing on something on the ground.

Wind&Rum charged forward and casted Provoke, the others followed tightly.

The starting monsters were nothing special, other than some larger fire hounds appearing after the smaller ones, the party pushed on easily. They soon made their way to the first mini boss.

The first mini boss of Blazing Valley was a large fire hound called Adarogg.

Adarogg was covered in dark red fur except for its legs and back, which had bright red fur instead. Its fangs were protruding and there were two large spikes on its back.

“The first boss has two skills. The first one is Hell Dash, it will randomly lock on to a target and perform a charge attack. Everything caught in the charge will receive physical damage. After some tests, the range of Hell Dash is 5 yards for normal, 7 yards for hard and 10 yards for sudden death.”

“The second skill is Fire Breath. It will continuously breath fire at the target with the highest aggro and cause large amounts of Fire damage. This skill will change its target with aggro, it can’t be evaded, so prepare some Fire Protection Potion.”

“The difficult part about the boss in sudden death is that we have three melee classes. If the boss uses Hell Dash on either of us, I can try to escape with Sprint but you two will have to endure it, which will increase pressure on the healers; the boss will also breath fire right after charging, so if it burns the weaker classes, the two of you must Provoke it immediately to distract it. Priests will have to use instant heal at that time.”

Before engaging the boss, Beitang Meng explained the boss’ skills and told him what he should be careful of. Then, the fight began.

The boss in normal mode was not as strong, plus Nocturne’s party members were experienced and had good gear, so it was not much of a problem.

Meowmeow Tang touched the body and got a piece of green gear. Beitang Meng kept it.

Normal mode dungeons had lower drop rates compared to higher difficulty dungeons.

The party pressed on and the monsters before the second boss changed from fire hounds to armed orc soldiers.

The armed orc soldiers appeared in pairs, and each of them had a Slam skill. It was not as painful since it was just a normal mode dungeon but in the sudden death mode, their attacks were a lot higher.

Nocturne and Wind&Rum each took on one of them. The party cleared them up swiftly and made their way to the second boss of the dungeon: Dark Shaman Koranthal.

It was a giant orc with dark red armor. Beneath its feet was a complicated dark magic array and it was casting some spells when the party came in. It seemed like it was controlling the magic array beneath its feet.

“The second boss also has two skills. One is Elemental Distortion, it will shoot a magic arrow with Dark damage randomly at a player, it’s homing so it cannot be dodged, but it is a channeling skill, so it can be interrupted. We usually stop him when the channeling is almost done, so it will lessen the pressure on tanks and healers.”

“The second skill is Dark Storm, it will summon Dark elemental balls from the sky for 15 seconds. The area of effect for the elemental balls is 7 yards for easy, 10 for hard and 12 for sudden death. You will be able to spot where it lands based on the signal on the ground.”

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The difficulty with this boss would be dodging the elemental balls. The balls had high damage and no players could survive multiple hits at once. On top of that, the balls flew down at high speed, so the players should be focused on dodging instead of dealing damage when it happens.

The fight happened. Nocturne got hit by the Dark elemental balls due to the fact that he was new. On the second time, Nocturne concentrated on dodging and managed to dodge it all.

However, in sudden death mode, the area of effect would be larger and he was not too confident at dodging it all.

Beitang Meng’s dodging skills impressed Nocturne. Her attacks were done in an orderly fashion and she was able to interrupt the channeling perfectly every time. She never missed any attack and she was able to dodge Dark Storm with ease.

Nocturne found a sense of beauty in her movements, as though she was a moving art piece.