Date: 09-22-2009 Views:

The Panic Cave

Are you brave enough to explore the depths of the Panic Cave?

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Rumours have surfaced about a mysterious cave in Desert Scream, with a fantastic treasure hidden at the end of it. Several parties of explorers and treasure hunters have left to try to claim this treasure for themselves, following in the footsteps of the famous explorer Showarai. None have returned.

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The authorities of the colony in Desert Scream has ordered an investigation of this matter, to determine whether or not a threat exists in the cave the local inhabitants now call 'Panic Cave'. Rumours of strange noises and rumblings from deep within the earth has only made a quick investigation and report even more essential. It is now up to the bravest warriors to venture into the cave, to discover what happened with the lost explorers.

Are you brave enough to go where none have returned from?

• Entry Requirement
  • Character Lv. 110 or above
  • Battle Style Lv. 11 or above
• Entry Item
  • Explorer’s Journal
  • Drop Area : Lake Side / Mutant Forest / Pontus Ferrum
• Entry Location
  Desert Scream (X: 126, Y: 109)
• Added intro Dungeon Quest of Panic Cave
  • Single Dungeon
  • 3 Types by difficulty
    Easy / Normal / Hard

[Video]

[From The Tester's Blog] (test server)

My first impression of this short dungeon is rather simple: This one is harsh, and very well-named. You better heed the quest descriptions and ingame clues, or you will be punished You are going to have to be fast, and confident in handling your character if you are going in here.

Of course, you all know by now that the dungeon comes in three different difficulty levels, and you have to choose which one you want to try. Even if you are level 170 you can choose to run the dungeon on easy mode, but from my personal experience bragging rights will come from finishing this on hard mode. It is always hard to make accurate comparisons of the actual difficulty level of the dungeon from the test server to the live server, due to the nature of the characters we use while testing. Even with that in mind I think that the vast majority of the completed runs will be on easy and normal mode. Normal mode should prove interesting enough for any decently-geared level 150-ish character - and I say this as a personal guesstimate, nothing else. You will have to try the dungeon for yourself in order to judge what hard mode is going to be like.

Hard mode... now that one is going to prove to be a lot more interesting. I am certain that the dungeon will be finished on hard mode on the first day of the update - for one it's really short, only 20 minutes, so you can try many times - but you will have to be very confident of your damage output and survivability if you select the 'hard' option. Try it on easy first, just to get a feel for the dungeon, before you ramp up the difficulty to hard, although that is of course just my personal advice.

I can also urge you to at least try one run before scurrying off to Youtube to try to find a complete guide for the dungeon. It will be more fun that way, take my word for it. But that's enough of that for now.

Panic Cave is short, fast and brutal. You do not have the option to use an Odd Circle, so once you die you are out, which is simply due to the way that the dungeon is made. It's a narrow, winding cave (or tunnel, if you want to be more accurate) leading down from the surface deep beneath the rocks of Desert Scream. There is also a rather surprising amount of life down there, at first... I also think that you should not let the relative ease of the first sections lull you into a false sense of security, because it does start out rather smooth and easy - relatively speaking now, of course The boss itself, once it appears, is really big, and I think the word 'huge' is appropriate to use here.You can catch a glimpse of it on the gameplay video I linked to above. The developers also borrowed some of the newer developments that we first saw used in the Forbidden Island dungeon, so be prepared for anything.

And of course we will have to talk about the drops in the Panic Cave. I am not going to get too specific, or give examples of what drops in there because you simply cannot compare the drop rate on the test server with that of the live server (it's much lower on the ITS, before you ask), but I will talk about the bound drops again. The new binding drops appear to be limited to the Panic Cave for the vast majority of the cases, so be warned that if you enter the normal or hard versions of the Cave you will get something that is bound in some way, either as character bound, or as character binding when equipped. Apart from cores, of course, but weapons and armour are bound. I can also say that it might well be worth farming that dungeon for a while - you never know.