DUNGEON DIVES: The Breachwood!

Hey, geeks and gamers! This is MediumHadronCollider, aka Pellasmith, bringing you guys the first in a new series on guides--Dungeon Dives! In this series, I’ll be running through the need-to-knows on all the dungeons in the game of VALKYRIE: monster types, loot drops, and all the tips and tricks you need to deal with its bosses! Today, we’ll be starting with the dungeon that tends to be most players’ first.


Into the Breach

The Breachwood is just a few miles east of Lumberg, VALKYRIE’s starting town. Deep in the Silverwood forest, this dungeon is an alien forest of its own that lurks beneath the surface of the world of Tiresia, harbouring various plantlike and animalian lifeforms that have been mutated by the residual energies left behind by an ancient war. It’s heavily Direblood-aligned, which means that its monsters tend to be versatile, aggressive, and prone to underhanded techniques; its first floor is a great introduction to just how deep the behavioural nets for enemies and NPCs in VALKYRIE can really go, and many a player’s first brush with Ambush monsters and genuine strategy on the part of the game.


In terms of loot, this dungeon is nothing special, at least until the very late game. It’s a good source of Torn Creep (the drop from surl creep), Breachroot, Ensoul Ash, and several drops that make for some good early-game armour sets (Sekhraum, Ravage Creep, and Atlas Elytra), but there are much better dungeons to farm once you have the ability to run dungeons multiple times on one rest. If you’re looking to focus on crafting or brewing as support skills, though, it’s definitely worth running the dungeon until you’re ready to leave Lumberg for another city--Torn Creep is a base component in a lot of potions, many of which you’ll need to brew in copious amounts to progress through the Alchemist Milestone track, and selling off Sekhraum armour sets is a great way to fund your progression through the early stages of the Crafter Milestone track.



Monsters: Floor One

The first floor of the Breachwood is rife with two things: ambushes, and poison. A party member who can cast Antidote, or failing that a hearty supply of Antidote potions, is a must for any beginners looking to venture into here for long--the thing about Ambush monsters equipped with poison is that it’s pretty hard to avoid being poisoned by them.


Breach Viper  (Ambush, Abomination)

A very common spawn on the first floor, the breach viper has a very annoying habit of dropping down from the dungeon’s ceiling and wrapping itself around a target’s head with its Coil attack. Its Intellect is surprisingly high--it can pretty consistently identify major threats and act to disable them, and it’s able to co-ordinate with other breach vipers, or even certain other types of monster entirely, to wreak havoc on an unprepared party.

While annoying, the random status effects it applies to targets with its Entropic Fang ability is actually somewhat of a detriment to the viper. They don’t seem to have a great grasp of which statuses they’ve actually applied to their victims when they attack them, short of very obvious and visible conditions like petrification, and among the statuses they can apply are Rage (which is has so many advantages to the affected creature that there are dozens of spells and items that let players give it to themselves) and Calcify (a less-severe form of petrification that boosts your defences and, again, many players often want to give to themselves). Just bringing an Antidote user (any status applied by Entropic Fang counts as a ‘poison’ effect) is enough to deal with the worst that Entropic Fang can offer.

Overall, the main counter to breach vipers is staying on your guard. It doesn’t actually move that quickly if your Dexterity is worth a damn, and the raw damage it deals is low if it doesn’t luck into a brutal Blight or Wither effect with its Entropic Fang. Avoiding its opening attack and then hitting it a couple of times should be enough to deal with one.


Surl Creep (Ambush, Plant)

Another very common spawn on the first floor, the surl creep is the first in a series of ‘creep’ monsters that can be found across the three floors of the Breachwood. Like the breach viper, it’s an annoying ambusher--but it actually has pretty high Strength and Dexterity attributes, at least relative to low-Milestone players, so it’s a lot more threatening! These monsters tend to attack from the ground, popping out of hidden burrows in the walls of the dungeon to grab you by the ankles. It has a pretty low Intellect, but it’s able to tell how large and slow you are based on the vibrations left by your footfalls; my parties have seen some success in tricking it and its stronger relatives by having heavy tanks take very light steps, while our lightweight casters stomp around in the back. Realistically, though, your best bet is pretty much the same as the vipers. Keep your head on a swivel, be ready to dodge a sneak attack--especially if you’re already engaging another monster--and, if your teammates get grabbed, be ready to jump on them and attack the surl to free them.


Tox Charger (Proud, Beast)

Though they might look like harmless deer from afar, an encounter with these can easily prove the most challenging fight before you reach the floor boss. They generally appear in herds of three or more, but their Proud keyword means that their stats--and aggression levels--are enhanced the fewer of them are around. With just one, that boost is 150%. Add in their Toxic Charge attack, which triggers their Wild Mantra of Vile Glory (applying poison increases one of their Attributes at random), and a tox charger that finds itself alone at full health can be a serious challenge for a whole party of six.

Here, the counterplay is simple: try to spread damage between all the chargers in the herd, so that when they start dropping, each charger is only a couple of hits away from dying even if one does manage to get to the full 70% bonus. Do keep in mind that tox chargers do try to counter this themselves; the ‘alpha’ one, or the one with the highest stats, will often deliberately hang back while its lessers charge in suicidally, and try to avoid attacks until it feels it has built up a sizeable stat bonus. In such an event, try to use ranged or control spells to whittle it down or bring it into the fray.


Lesser Buzzerd (Airborne, Abomination)

Twelve-winged crosses between birds and some kind of hellish mosquito, the lesser buzzerd is what I call a rush attacker: when it sees you, it will rush to your position and start attacking. Though its overall health pool isn’t very high, meaning you have a good shot at just killing one before it even reaches you, it does have a particularly annoying Wild Mantra--its Bloodsucker means that any damage it deals to you with its ‘bite’ attacks will heal it for one hundred percent of that hit. That means that they can be deceptively resilient if one gets into range to start attacking you.

This creature ends up being a test of aim for the casters and Dex DPSes in your party; even though they have pretty massive Dexterity of their own, they don’t tend to dodge much, if at all. If your ranged hitters can track their approach and finish them off, or at least hold them down or leave them one hit from dying, before they can get to your front line and start draining their blood, then you’ll beat them. If not, well, you’d better try to unload all the damage you can in as short a time as you can manage, or you’re getting wiped.


Glowerweed (Plant)

A rare ‘support’-type monster, the glowerweed doesn’t do much on its own; it’s got a vicious melee bite attack, which deals more damage to anybody who’s bleeding or poisoned, but since it is rooted to the dungeon floor it is unlikely to be able to use that attack against anybody who knows what it does. The true utility of the glowerweed is its buffs and debuffs--it can apply low-order Rage and Regeneration to the monsters around it, as well as a blinding/deafening Flashbang that works particularly well against the sensitive senses of beastkin players.

Generally, at least on the first floor, the best way to beat a glowerweed that’s powering up a whole bunch of monsters is to take down the other monsters first. It may seem counterintuitive, but the glowerweed has a pretty ridiculous health pool for a first-floor enemy, and high innate resistances. This balance shifts somewhat when you reach the second floor, where the other monsters around it tend to be the bulkier ones, though they get more conscious of protecting their glowerweeds at that point.


Araka Lurker (Ambush, Gutless, Insect)

A pretty rare spawn on the first floor, though they appear in much greater numbers on the second floor. Pretty annoying: their Void Bite leaves behind a lasting poison effect that deals more damage the longer you go without curing it, and they have the ability to turn invisible at will, making their ambushes particularly hard to spot out. They are Gutless, which means that they’ll almost certainly flee if they only have other Gutless creatures as allies… but that means that if you’re fighting one, you’re almost certainly also engaged with another monster.

My strategy is to rely on Area of Effect attacks to handle these monsters, especially point-blank ones. Lurkers generally don’t have any ranged attacks, the araka lurker being no exception, and the araka lurker in particular has a very low life point total. If it goes in to attack you, even if it is invisible, hitting a solid Thunderclap, Firewheel or similar should kill it easily. And again, having Antidote is enough to deal with Void Bite.


Orias, Blackheart (Dungeon Boss)

And now we come to the boss for the Breachwood’s first floor. A giant spider-golem made out of earth, Orias happens to be the first clear indication of the conflict that spawned the Breachwood in the first place: he was a war machine created by the sekh, the race that ended up losing the war, by binding a spirit-type-thing into a particularly cleverly formulated husk--a pile of dirt that the spirit within could reshape into whatever its sekh commanders ordered it to.

The first stage of the Orias fight is basically a giant spider monster. His primary attacks are Earthwake, Slam, and Petra Crunch, and he has a ‘support skill’ in the form of Sekhroot, which empowers his Earthwake and Slam at the cost of mobility. Earthwake itself has several variants, depending on how many legs he’s Sekhrooted with and the relative positions of your party members, but generally speaking your best bet is to stay split. Orias is at his most terrifying when he’s using Earthwake as a mobility spell, surging along to run you over in a tidal wave of dirt, but his instinct is to establish zones of control by surrounding your party members with torn-up dirt first. By staying apart, you can make that job much harder.

Stage two triggers when he drops to half health or lower. He’ll embed himself in the ceiling, and start attacking with columns of dirt and projectile web attacks--while it’s much easier to land a critical hit on him in this state, especially as a ranged character, be aware that you’re on a soft timer during this phase. Each wave of columns will fall faster and fade faster than the last, as Orias establishes firmer control over the cave’s walls, and he’ll eventually start Earthwaking down the sides of the cave, adding to any damage to the floor that he established in the first phase, and making dodging his ranged attacks even harder. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where the columns drop almost instantly, and vanish right after, which is almost always a total party wipe.

Like any boss, Orias is a pretty tough guy to beat--don’t be discouraged if you get wiped in your first couple of rounds against him, even with all the tips and tricks in this guide! He’s far bulkier and hits far harder than any enemy you’re likely to have met by this point in the game, and his control over the terrain in his own boss room is pretty high up there, even if you look at higher-tier bosses on second and third levels and so on. Keep at it, and your rewards will be a pile of valuable alchemical ingredients and crafting materials. Petra Venom is a key ingredient in potions of Patina, Calcify and Petrification, three extremely potent effects; Sekhraum can be used to craft items in the Sectomancer armour set, a rare caster-friendly armour set that doesn’t impede your Dexterity at all; and the Umberkar Heart, though it may be one of the weakest legendary drops in this game, is still a legendary drop at a point in time where you’ve probably never even seen one before.


Monsters: Floor Two

The second floor of the Breachwood is markedly more difficult than the first. While nothing on this floor short of the area and floor bosses rise quite to the level of Orias in damage output or resilience, there are quite a few nasty control-oriented enemies down here that can easily pin a party down for a heavy hitter to wipe them out. The presence of the long-buried River Hathor gives many of this dungeon’s biomes an aquatic subtype, adding to the variety of foes that you may encounter on your way to the Pseudodragon.


Thanks to the undead that start cropping up on this floor, area damage (particularly of the fire and pure varieties) rises in prominence for anyone looking to clear this floor as quickly and easily as possible. Undead control is also a valid, if somewhat niche, strategy to pursue here. For equipment, I would also suggest silvering any melee weapons, which provides some helpful pure damage against undead while also protecting the weapons themselves from acid damage.


Pysie (Fae, Airborne, Aquatic, Gutless)

Like most untamed bodies of water in Tiresia, the River Hathor is prime territory for psyies. As spellcasting monsters, they have annoyingly varied movesets; without a high Intellect, you’re unlikely to glean more than two or three of its Common spells. That said, however, there are a few favourites that you’ll almost always see, and a few spell types they almost never touch. For example, they tend not to learn outright defensive spells, instead opting to rely on their more physically threatening allies to protect them and impede attackers.

A favourite spell of pysies across the entire game is Silence, an effective way at shutting down both back-line casters and melees who rely on spells to empower themselves and engage their enemies. The counter there is archers and spell deflection (e.g. Mirror effects, Scapegoat, clone effects), and spells with Alternate Cast options (including spells given Taciturn!). Since pysies almost exclusively engage their foes near the bodies of water that they live in, another favourite for pysies is Geyser; casting it on the ground beneath a river or lake obscures the exact location it’ll come out of, denying players precious milliseconds of reaction time in order to get out of the spell’s path.

In terms of actual damage-dealing, they do have a preference for lightning damage, which gets enhanced by all the water they throw around, and direct telekinetic manipulation of water (which tends to deal bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage, depending on the shape they sculpt it into); so effects that redirect or absorb lightning damage, and buffs to your PHYS RES, are the way to go there. In damage taking, they’re extreme lightweights; and thanks to their high Intellect, they actually have some idea of how much damage your party is putting out. I’ve seen pysies dip well before their meat shields are all dead, on occasions where we manage to take one down very quickly.


Ravage Creep (Ambush, Plant)

The ‘bigger brother’ of surl creep, ravage creep is much more aggressive and violent; rather than trying to isolate party members and drag them off in different directions, the ravage creep tends to engage with Venom Whip and then a series of slamming attacks, hoping to knock aside and overwhelm even the sturdiest of front-liners with a full-on assault. Though this attack pattern costs it all of its stamina, forcing it to take a rest right after, in practice this often throws party lines into total disarray, allowing accessory monsters to break through and get at backlines during the creep’s recovery period.

In my experience, the best way to deal with this strategy is to strike back just as hard during the initial assault. Most monsters tend to be hesitant about charging in if their targets have proven that they’ll react to a violent ambush with equal violence, especially if that first counterattack badly cripples the ravage creep, which they’ll be relying on to shore up their attack once it’s regained some stamina. As for maximising your damage to the creep, fire and frost damage are extra effective against Plant-tagged monsters, and bludgeoning tends to be weak.


Rootlers (Ambush, Plant, Dryad)

Corrupted dryads that were supposedly enlisted during the war against Sekhet, these monsters have long since adapted to life in a close-to-lightless cavern; they’re totally blind, navigating by sound and scent. This makes them particularly susceptible to falling for Camouflage (which actually dulls the sound you give off, as long as the rootler is out of the effect’s detection radius), but almost unaffected by Invisibility (which does not). They’re pretty slow and bulky, and they have a nasty Wild Mantra that roots you to the ground for a few seconds after every attack they hit you with.

When fighting one, it’s best to focus on hit-and-run tactics and dodging their hits; while they do have a low-order regeneration Wild Mantra as well, it probably shouldn’t be enough to outstrip a defensive level of damage output unless your character is really badly optimised. Like other plant monsters, they’re weak to frost and fire, good into bludgeoning. Take care for their Acrid Reflux--once engaged, the rootler loses most of its defensive stats and its ability to attack, but gains a lot of movement speed and will explode when killed, dealing heavy acid damage to everything in a middling radius around it.


High Beetle (Territorial, Insect)

Defensive monsters with a Wild Mantra that more than halves damage taken from their front. Watch out for their Charge attack--it’s not particularly fast, but their high Strength means that if it connects, it can pick you up and pin you into a wall, dealing double damage and potentially screwing up your party's formation. They tend to be weak to mobile DPSes, who can get behind them and strike at their much weaker hindquarters.


Wallhuggers (Ambush, Abomination)

Really nasty creatures that like to lurk on the dungeon's walls and cave ceiling, Camouflaging with those surfaces so as to be almost undetectable from much further than melee distance. They’re essentially one-trick-ponies, but it’s a really annoying trick: they apply Petrify to anyone who gets close. Unlike the petrification from Orias’s bite or a breach viper’s Entropic Fang, this doesn’t count as a poison effect, either: you’re either Purifying this or down a party member until the Petrify runs out on its own.

Besides Purify, there aren’t a lot of counter options here. A tank with sufficiently high MAGI RES can shrug off this Petrify effect nearly instantly, but you’d have to invest pretty heavily in that stat to reach that point at the level you’d be expecting to want to farm this dungeon. Some Milestones can give you advance warning of a lurking, invisible foe (think Direblood’s Danger Sense or Everwatch’s Think Ahead), and there are spells that can pierce invisibility (like True Sight), but those have somewhat restricted availability for my tastes.

Luckily, a wallhugger’s stats are absolutely abysmal, so one shouldn’t pose any threat to a party once it’s blown its Petrify and has to wait to use its next one… and at least a Petrified party member doesn’t have to worry about taking much damage until they’re turned back.


Shadowbug (Undead, Insect)

Pretty aggressive insects that seem to be undead versions of the araka lurker. Like the lurker, they turn invisible and have Void Bite… but unlike lurkers, they can fly, and have absolutely no issue with avoiding projectile attacks and taking evasive manoeuvres to safely close the gap with a target and attack them. As undead, they’re also harder to put down when grouped with certain spellcasting enemies: when killed, they leave behind a vestige that monsters with Raise can bring back to “life,” respawning them at a lower level.

Like the araka lurkers, AoE is your friend here. Give special thought to fire and pure damage: finishing off undead with either of those damage types will destroy its vestige, too, making it impossible to raise again. There are also Antibody potions that may be worth investing in if you’re making repeated runs down here--getting one for Void Venom from Lizzlewhizz to give to your primary tank could save you a lot of mana on casting Antidote.


Ashosalaum (Undead, Gutless, Insect)

The undead husks of sekh themselves. Like pysies, they’re spellcasters, though with a particularly necromantic bent: to a tee they all know Raise and Rebuke, while other wizard spells and Evershroud spells are also very common. Take care for Horror, a pretty brutal control spell: although it moves slowly, ashosalai tend to partner themselves with rootlers and wallhuggers, giving them openings to land it on players who’ve already been locked down. They also almost always appear with shadowbugs and araka lurkers.

Although it is rare, in larger parties or platoons it is sometimes possible to encounter multiple ashosalai at once: this can prove a serious headache, since if they get the chance, ashosalai can and will Raise each other from the dead over and over again, until all of them are dead or your party’s been wiped. To avoid this, use much the same strategy as for shadowbugs: area of effect spells and fire or pure damage.


Blue Ooze (Aquatic, Slime)

Like most slimes, these monsters don’t have a whole lot going on: with a whopping Intellect of 1, they can discern friend from foe, and that’s about it. That said, they have pretty prodigious health pools, amplified by the Slime’s intrinsic resistance to both physical and magical damage, and deal constant contact acidic damage in addition to their Pseudopod attacks. Generally, they’re at their most threatening when supported by ravage creeps or psysies; some pysies have been known to augment their blue ooze allies by launching them at players with Geyser spells.

One big thing that can get players on their first fight with a blue ooze is weapon health; the blue ooze’s acidic body does damage metal and wooden weapons, and can result in your best one getting broken while you’re stuck in the middle of a dungeon. There are a couple of options to avoid this; some materials are immune to acid damage (silvered and gilded weapons are great, and relatively cheap compared to, say, getting a battleaxe made entirely out of mithril), and most spells that enchant a weapon do also give it flat damage reduction against all sources, including the constant low burn from stabbing an ooze. You can always just carry the materials to repair your primary weapon around with you, too.


The Sekhedendron (Area Boss)

A dryad… thing made entirely out of petrified wood. A personal unfavourite of mine, and not just because I like dryads and think the backstory for this thing is a terrible crime against one: it’s a really hard fight. The Sekhedendron itself has a monstrously high effective PHYS RES and MAGIC RES, since its Wicked Mantra essentially means it’s petrified at all times without any of the usual downsides: resistance shred and pure damage are basically the only ways you’re ever going to hurt this thing. Add to that the fact that it summons wallhuggers and throws them at people like projectiles, and you’re basically racing to see if you can blast enough damage into this thing before your whole party is petrified.

Other moves the Sekhedendron uses are Stone Spears and Rootbind, often in conjunction--if it lands a Rootbind, it’ll almost always try to follow up with a Stone Spear, and it tries to position the stalagmites left behind by Stone Spear in such a way as to cut off routes to avoid Rootbind. It can also summon rootlers and other corrupted dryads, but does so less frequently: I’m pretty sure doing this costs it health for some reason. Unlike other Plant monsters, the Sekhedendron has no special weakness to frost or fire damage, and no particular strength against bludgeoning. I guess petrification averages out those particular qualities.


The Oozing Sea (Area Boss)

There’s not a whole lot to say about this area boss. It’s basically just a particularly large and powerful slime, with the power to summon other slimes to its side, and a ranged attack (Eye Darts). The Eye Darts are not particularly powerful, though they do slightly Daze anyone they hit (and give a short-term Dex buff to any slimes they hit). Do beware that the slimes that the Oozing Sea summons can come in a variety of colours--red, green, white, black, purple and blue, which deal fire, poison, frost, necrotic, lightning and acid damage respectively. Keep your distance, and dodge the darts, and you’ll make it out of this fight.


The Nephthyrian (Area Boss)

This enemy is pretty scary. Named in the lore as the originator of the ashosalai, the undead sekh priests that litter the deeper reaches of this floor, she was supposedly considered so dangerous to the sekh that they originally sealed her away entirely; it was only the invasion of the dragonborn, and their subsequent arrival at the underground doorstep of the city of Sekhet, that finally pushed the sekh queen to release her, and allow her to re-summon her undead minions in a last-ditch effort to defend the city.

And they may well have been right to--the Nephthyrian is a monstrous boss fight, even for a high Prestige Two. Though she’s squishy compared to the other two bosses (especially the health sink that is The Oozing Sea), what the Nephthyrian lacks in defenses she more than makes up for in strategy and sheer spellcasting power. Most bosses encountered at level ~72 have maybe one or two Epic-or-above spells at their disposal; the Nephthyrian commands three, and has the mana base to use all of them in one fight if the need calls for it. Endless Host opens a portal to another dimension, through which a quite literally inexhaustible army of undead will pour, until either the caster of the spell is slain or the spell is dispelled through outside means (like a Purge spell). Siren Song is a Legendary-tier area-of-effect charm; though it has a relatively short range, it can seriously interfere with any melee attacker’s attempt to take advantage of the Nephthyrian’s shallow health pool and assassinate her before the fight goes on for too long. Finally, Chain Lightning is a powerful area spell that she specifically plans around by summoning undead with inherent resistance to lightning damage, usually sectid Stormcloaks.

Generally, a balanced party should try to put their casters and ranged DPSes on marking the Nephthyrian herself, and their front line on clearing away her adds. The casters’ job should be dispelling Endless Host, and preventing her from casting new ones; fortunately, the spell is a ritual, and so she won’t be able to cast it if she’s fielding consistent pressure from enemies that can strike her at a distance, or getting randomly Silenced or so on. The front line’s main job is to give the back line the space to keep their focus on the Nephthyrian. Fire and pure damage weapons are practically mandatory here--they prevent all her ashosalai adds from resurrecting the other adds (and each other!) with Raise!

There is technically a cheese available with putting a Mirror (or a similar defensive effect) on a high-damage carry and then having them teleport into close quarters with the Nephthyrian before the fight has even really begun--the idea being that she won’t be able to cast Siren Song to stop the ‘assassin’ without casting some other, minor effect to clear the Mirror first--but to pull it off a character would have to be able to slay the Nephthyrian in one hit, while simultaneously being able to survive any damage spell she might cast to bypass the Mirror, such as a point-blank pentacast Chain Lightning. It takes a pretty ridiculous level of minmaxing to pull that strategy off, even at very high levels; I’ve only ever seen one party manage it with any kind of consistency.


Anansium, the Pseudodragon (Dungeon Boss)

Finally, we come to Anansium, the Pseudodragon. It’s hard to give a specific analysis of this boss’s strengths and weaknesses because, well, this one happens to adapt to whatever actions you take during it. Damage types, strategies, even things as abstract as your party makeup and choice of utility spells can alter what its abilities are, thanks to its two Wicked Mantras: Protean Form and Elemental Thirst.

Elemental Thirst is perhaps the more iconic ability, and the one easier to strategize around; using any kind of elemental damage on Anansium--lightning, frost, fire, thunder, etc.--will regenerate some mana for him and trigger a transformation, giving Anansium access to a slew of spells and other abilities that match that damage type. It’s important to note that elements that count as physical damage, like thunder or acid, still do trigger their own unique Elemental Thirst form. Because each form has so many changes, it’s hard to give a complete list, so I’ll just go over the highlights--

• Lightning - Dex goes way up. I think there’s a Wicked Mantra involved, but I haven’t been able to trigger its tooltip, so that’s guesswork on my part. It starts using hit-and-run tactics, and gains some kind of lightning-based teleportation where it can choose to move directly behind anybody it strikes with lightning damage.
  
• Fire - Strength and Fortitude both go up. Like a blood dragon it starts regenerating HP, increased briefly whenever it takes damage (which means you should try to use a few heavy hits, not many weaker ones). It doesn’t gain the blood dragon’s fiery touch, but does gain its fiery breath, which it uses liberally.
  
• Frost - Fortitude goes up by a lot, and it gets Wicked Mantra called Heat Drain; hostile creatures having their Strength and Dexterity sapped away, a percentage going to Anansium. Luckily, even getting a bit of movement speed from its increased Dexterity doesn’t do much to counteract the form’s much lower natural mobility, so it does have trouble reaching back line party members… though spells like Polar Vortex and its Frost Breath attack can.
  
• Thunder - Strength shoots up. This is a pretty brutal form for melee attackers to deal with, even worse than the Frost; it launches a Thunderclap-like aftershock each time it makes an attack, and even though the stun chance isn’t necessarily that high, being stunned on top of potentially being staggered--or getting stunned even if you managed to avoid being staggered--can open you up to take an even heavier hit, which might trigger another stun and so on. It also gets a sonic ‘burst’ ability that can let it gap-close suddenly to casters or RDPSes (who are far more vulnerable to getting chain-stunned as described before).
  
• Acid - Dexterity goes way up, and scarily, Anansium gains Invisibility via Vision Slick. This form’s ranged abilities are at least far weaker than other forms, but it does gain a pretty harrowing melee-range combo that can easily decimate a party to make up for it.
  
• Poison - Fortitude and Dexterity both go up a bit. This form of Anansium has a pretty vile Wicked Mantra; Toxic Gas, which applies a debilitating poison on anyone in reach. It also controls the terrain around it with blasts that leave behind corrosive goo, ironically dealing acidic damage to complement the form’s spells’ poison.
  
• Necrotic - Fortitude goes up a ton, and it starts passively spawning ‘Dracoliches,’ which in practice end up being sort of like souped-up undead protodragons with a paralysing bite attack. Like other undead, they can be resurrected by Anansium’s Raise, but beware that there’s an added wrinkle; like regular protodragons, they can further evolve into a ‘blood hatchling’ form when they take fire damage, which is almost immune to fire damage. (Pure damage still works fine, though.)
  
• Pure - The worst of the lot. All three of Anansium’s physical stats are enhanced in this one, and its Wicked Mantra becomes Divine Right--all damage it deals is partially converted into defence-ignoring pure damage. In addition to spells that normally deal pure damage on their own, like Starlance and True Strike, it also gains some hefty defensive spells, including some of Sunsteel and Starlight’s best offerings--like the Legendary spell Divine Eye--and some prodigious self-healing.
  

Anyway, the main upshot here is that it’s really not worth dealing with any of these upgrades, even the comparatively weaker ones: so your best bet as a wizard or other spellcaster is just not to cast any spells that deal, or can deal, any kind of elemental damage! A balanced Arcana tab will have some number of buffing spells--focus on those and let your MDPSes and RDPSes carry this fight.

As for the other Wicked Mantra, Protean Form, that ability at peak Intellect simply reads, ‘Sufficient physical damage to Anansium will trigger a transformation, adapting based on the damage types and weaponry that inflicted that damage.” Unfortunately, that simplicity is highly misleading; everything about that tooltip, from the timespan that this ‘sufficient’ physical damage is recorded over to what transformations constitute an ‘adapted’ response to the physical damage that it took, has proven to be highly variable. A party that relies on heavy slashing weapons like battleaxes might trigger a transformation into a bulky, heavily caparaced form that absorbs slashing damage with ease… or a nimble, evasive form that ducks out of the way of heavily telegraphed axe swings! A party that relies on archers for most of their physical damage might see Anansium become a bouncing ball of launchable thorns, or a charging High Beetle-esque creature with what amounts to an impenetrable shield for a head, or manifest a Wicked Mantra that counteracts repeated waves of arrows, like Rippling Hide or Burning Blood. Worst of all, any party that combines damage or weapon types--i.e. most parties--can expect to see any number of these responses at once, mixed and matched to form a version of Anansium uniquely suited to your party’s specific makeup.

Although this is perhaps harder to predict than Elemental Thirst, it is still the lesser of two evils, in that triggering it repeatedly at least doesn’t let it use both brutal physical attacks and magic against your party… just the physical attacks. Try and adapt to its adaptations (having more than one weapon type you’re comfortable with is something you should try for anyway, it’s just even more extremely helpful for this boss in particular), and you’ll eventually hit upon a win!


Monsters: Floor Three

Not really a lot of preamble here, since there’s really only one enemy on this floor, and just about every strategy for dealing damage that works is just as good (well, just as bad) as all the others. The ability to fly sticks out as a very valuable asset on this floor, which might seem counterintuitive given that this is an underground dungeon, but, well, you’ll see. Also of note are this boss’s drops: Breachling Flesh is a keystone ingredient for the legendary potion Mutagenium, one of the exceedingly few methods beyond the normal trio of Milestones, spell and gear to power up your character, though it only works once per character… and Sekhet’s Sorrow is a key ingredient in some pretty awesome “Hive Mind” gear, including the keepsake Bloodstone of the Sundered Hive.


The Breach (Dungeon Boss)

Conveniently for me, there’s only one monster on this entire floor--she just happens to be the entire floor. The Breach is the demonic superweapon that the sekh unleashed in their last-ditch last-ditch effort to at least make their invaders suffer as much as they were, and although it didn’t exactly work out that way, it did make for a really awesome boss with some fantastic drops.

Technically, since the Breach’s hitbox extends across the entire dungeon, sharing a single health bar, you could sit at the entrance to this floor and wail on the Breach until it eventually died. It would be by no means helpless to stop you--its Breachlings can leave its confines without any problem, and it has scream attacks that can leave its body--but it would be far safer than venturing inside it. Unfortunately, as damage “travels” across the Breach, going all the way to its beating core, it rapidly diminishes in value (notably, despite acting in many ways as their own independent creatures, damage dealt to Breachlings is also shared with the Breach in this way). Unlike any other damage reduction effect, this applies to pure damage, too, I guess for balancing purposes. Either way, if you want to kill this boss before the game is eventually discontinued and its servers go down, you’d better just bite the bullet and head into it.

The Breach’s internal defences get denser and more powerful the further into it you get. Like the Pseudodragon, Breachlings have Protean Form--but unlike it, they’re linked by a hive mind sort of situation, under the Breach itself, so that the adaptations of the Breachlings you slay at the entrance to the dungeon are applied to each freshly spawned wave of Breachlings that follow them, all the way up to the end. This acts in tandem with the Breach’s other Wicked Mantra: Bloodstaunch. For every point of health that it’s missing, the Breach’s stats--and the stats of all the Breachlings that inherit from them--are increased. Every blow you strike against the Breach and the minions that comprise it quite literally makes it stronger, and faster, and better at fighting you specifically. (It’s no wonder that the sekh thought to summon it to slaughter the dragonborn… or that it could only be sealed away, not fought off).

There’s not really a silver bullet here, unfortunately. It’s perhaps fitting that the Breach most closely resembles the Oozing Sea, as a giant mass of blue goo that spawns stuff--in the end, the Breach is mostly just a really hard mass of hit points to get through, just much more dangerous on the offensive side of things. Outside of Breachlings, watch out for Abyssal Lances--like Orias’s columns and the Sekhedendron’s Stone Spears, they’ll blast out of the Breach’s walls seemingly at random, dealing massive piercing damage if they happen to hit you. Flying is extremely helpful in the last room of the floor, the Breach’s core: there’s not actually a floor in there, just a gaping hole into the Abyss, and the only other option is leaping between Abyssal Lances as they’re launched across the chamber at you and your party members. Fun, but really quite difficult (especially if the Breachlings have adapted their own flying abilities). The other consistent move that the Breach will pull out is its deadly scream--not managing to resist that will land you with a very long-lived stun, as well as copious thunder damage. Fortunately, it can be blocked by a large array of abilities--anything that Muffles sound for you will do, though a barrier would have to curve all the way around you (since a scream originates from all directions around you when you’re inside the monster making it).


In Summary

Overall, whether you’re looking to make your first deep dive into the Breachwood or optimise your clear speed to farm that sweet sweet Hive Mind gear, probably the single best teammate you can add to your party is a Priest fork for Antidotes and Purifies. Fire and pure damage are also big winners, as is silvering (or gilding) your weapons. Don’t use elemental damage against the Pseudodragon, and you’ll be alright! MediumHadronCollider--out!