Winterblight Cavern

Azalea Shrine

Winterblight Cavern

Winterblight Castle

## Introduction

Winterblight Cavern located to the north from main village, placed after small forest zone.

Winterblight Cavern has 4 main chambers: Frozen Foyer, Aurora Passage, Crystarium and Edge of Winter, and each of them has 4 types of challenges to begin with.

You have to interact with Cavern Guide NPC to activate certain rooms in Cavern and begin monsters' spawn.

Each chamber has sets of unique mobs and transitional boss, which has to be defeated to summon main and final boss of the Winterblight Cavern, Tiamat.

Main goal of Cavern gameplay is to finish each room challenge without death and kill certain amount of monsters, which gives random amount of Relics - kind of "progress currency", which is used for areas' bosses summoning.

Only the player who opened the chamber can deal damage to monsters of that area, and that same player must also set foot in the chamber area to be able to actually harm them. This is implemented to prevent sniping enemies from far away. And if the monsters run outside the chamber area, they'd be teleported back to where they first spawned. Hence hit-and-run strategy is possible.

While other players can't directly harm enemies in the chamber, they still can apply debuff and do other interactions to enemies. Because of that, supportive builds are very much welcomed.

Relics given by each challenge being re-randomized each game, but there are basically once set of possible values:

Doing all of them will give you a total of 20000 Relics.

You need 2000 for each of 4 transitional bosses, and 4000 for Tiamat summon. So with maximum potential luck you need only 6 chambers to score needed 12000 Relics, or 13 chambers if you're very unlucky.

In case if you finish every single challenge in a single run, you'll be able to summon special final boss, Realm Breaker, but you have to do it before Tiamat summon, because Tiamat sequence removes Cavern Guide NPC and finalizes Cavern progress in current run.

The cost of summoning for Realm Breaker is 8000. If you add this value with the score for Tiamat, it's exactly 20000 Relics. So you're guarantee to summon all of the bossess assuming you did all 16 chambers.

You can set power level of each challenge in each Cavern area, but maximum level possible is determined by difficulty and winterblight stones used on winter altar. To get beyond level 20 challenges Legend Difficulty and 3 winterblight stones active are required.

Bosses also have their difficulty level. Transitional bosses use average number of cleared rooms in their area, and Tiamat at the end gets average number among all killed transitional bosses. Realm Breaker takes average value of all cleared rooms and challenges as his level.

Every 1 level of the room selected will increase the enemies HP, Armors, Pierces along with Pure damage resistance. This also affect the bosses you spawn after.

The scaling for their pierce and resistance is as following:

Enemies.WINTERBLIGHT\_CAVERN\_BUFFS\_PER\_CHAMBER\_LEVEL["roshpit\_armor"] = 0.2 Enemies.WINTERBLIGHT\_CAVERN\_BUFFS\_PER\_CHAMBER\_LEVEL["roshpit\_magic\_armor"] = 0.2 Enemies.WINTERBLIGHT\_CAVERN\_BUFFS\_PER\_CHAMBER\_LEVEL["roshpit\_armor\_pierce"] = 0.2 Enemies.WINTERBLIGHT\_CAVERN\_BUFFS\_PER\_CHAMBER\_LEVEL["roshpit\_spell\_pierce"] = 0.2 Enemies.WINTERBLIGHT\_CAVERN\_BUFFS\_PER\_CHAMBER\_LEVEL["health"] = 0.5
if damagetype == DAMAGE\_TYPE\_PURE then filterTable["damage"] = filterTable["damage"] \* 0.99^chamber\_level

This means, for every 1 level of the chamber event, enemy will gain 20% more attack power, armor and pierce and 50% more health of the base value, and 1 layer of 1% pure damage resistance that stack independently. We can then simplify them all to the following formula:

Toal basic stats = Base stat x (1 + Level x 0.2)
Total Pure damage resistance % = 1 - (1 - 0.01) ^ (Level)

So for example, at level 20, your enemies will have 1 + 0.2 x 20 = 5 times more attack power, armor, pierce and 1 + 0.5 x 20 = 11 times more hp, as well as 1-(1-0.01)^20 = 18.2% pure damage resistance.

## Basic Chamber Events Description

"The chamber is populated with many non-aggressive mobs."
"A half dozen Gelid Soultakers patrol the chamber."
"Waves of enemies spawn from dimensional portals. All creatures have 1% health regen per event level, up to a max of 20%."
 Aurora Passage
 Crystarium
"The chamber is populated with many non-aggressive mobs."
 Edge of Winter
"The chamber is populated with many non-aggressive mobs."

## Bosses

 "Dragon Sweep"
 "Crystal Breath"
 Pure Strike
 Mega Steadfast

"Perform additional attacks on a short delay."
 "Binding Zeal"
"Attacks additionally launch at all enemies within range."
AOE RADIUS: 1300 1600 1900

"Realm Breaker steeps an area in dark resonance, damaging enemy units inside based on their max HP."
 "Radeon Orbit"
 Pure Strike
 "Crystal Meditation"
"Perform additional attacks on a short delay."
ADDITIONAL ATTACKS: 2 3 4

## Danger of winter cave

This part of Winterblight map is considered the most gruesome content in the game for 2 main reasons:

1.) Enemies stats are abnormally high. Even higher than hard challenge-modified monsters and bosses.

2.) There are way too many different kinds of enemy, and each of them also possesses many different passives and ability.

The following articles will be a deep dive into each of the areas and its chambers.

## Chapter 1: Frozen Foyer - The welcoming

You're immediately greet with many types of enemies in the small chamber, however, the threats in which you should pay attention to are Winter Centaur, Mana Null, Blood Wraith, Pantheon Knight, Drill Digger and Gelid Soul Taker.

Winter Centaur themselves are already pretty tanky due to Steedfast, but stunning them also give them 90% more damage reduction or the duration (and it also secretly activate against many other different source of control effect or forced effect). As a result, if you're not fighting them directly it will drag for a very long time. Their main threat being their stun spell. With great numbers, they can chain stun you permanently to death. Avoid dragging too many of them at you if possible. It's also a problem trying to outrun them if they chase you as they also possess another spell which will boost their and their friends movespeed. These centaurs punish builds that rely or accidentally have control effect that will activate their passive, as well as being vulnerable to stuns with no other ways to cease fire.

Mana Null are very annoying as they have a mobility spell that warp them around you unpredictably, on top of having pure strike and % mana drain. They also don't take damage until all of their mana are gone, which will only be reduced when they take a damage instance. If your build has low hitcount and is not very mobile to catch up with them, or has even a slight mana regen issue, you'll have a very uncomfortable time.

Blood Wraith are mean. Their Blood Might passive gives them gigantic total attack power based on their current HP and your missing HP. They also possess a curse spell that if placed on you, whenever you cast a spell after that, it will remove a great portion of your HP pool, completely ignore any protection effect. As a result, their attacks hit extremely hard and will punish any builds that rely on spell spamming.

Pantheon Knight if attack you, they can release an aoe beam that will deal heavy pure damage based on their attack power and also disarm you. They really like to punish close-range melee attacks build.

Gelid Soul Taker has 2 lives. Their first life move slowly, attack slowly and their attack damage isn't very high either. But slaying them for the first time will make them invincible and release many waves of old & annoying enemies you previously met in Winterblight Shrine, before turning berserk and attack you agressively in their second life. They also possess a passive that launch ice particle at you all the time, deal damage and massively slow your movespeed and attackspeed. They more or so punish the player for letting their guard down and not watching what's happen than their build.