Taking a Look at Demon Assault

Yesterday I wrote up an article about the first of the quests from Update 27: Trials of the Archons and today I want to write about the second quest, Demon Assault.  The quest giver for Demon Assault is a NPC named Vachel.  Like my first run through The Archons’ Trial, I was accompanied by Hellbanisher and Khamels and I was running around with Erdrique (Level 15 Rogue) during this first run.  Shortly after talking to the quest giver we found ourselves back on Shavarath once again.

The Crawlers taking on the demons of Shavarath in the beginning of Demon Assault.

As you can guess from the name of the quest, the main premise of the quest is to defeat swarm after swarm of demons that are brought forth from various portals that open up across the small zone.  Another aspect of this quest is to recover a page from a special codex, the Codex of Infinite Planes.  This particular quest is very different from the first quest in the chain.  Instead of surviving and passing through various trials, you instead have to defeat a number of demon invaders that are teleporting out of various portals while at the same time looking for the codex page.  We took this quest on at heroic elite making it a level 15 quest.  The monsters we fought were primarily dretches, flesh renders, fire reavers, ice flensers, fiendish trolls, fiendish troglodytes, jariliths, tieflings, and hezerous.

Erdrique and the gang preparing to cause some problems for the Demons of Shavarath.

The swarms from each portal were quite challenging for us at times.  Especially when the Shavarath Blades started to spin around and hit us.  One thing we did, was to drag the enemies out of the range of the swirling blades.  In some instances we were able to range the tiefling casters as well, staying out of range of their annoying spells.  By doing so we were able to stretch out each wave of enemies which made the fighting much easier.

Traveling through the tunnel to locate the demon prison.

We did have an interesting scenario happen to us though.  Shortly after we made our past all of the waves, we talked to another NPC named Dae who directed us into two separate directions.  One was the final boss fight and the other was to an optional to explore the demon jail.  Well, Hellbanisher first went to the end fight but quickly came back because we decided to do the optional first.  However, as we started off in the opposite direction, the red named glabrezu, Kerchac, teleported to us and so we actually defeated him before we went to do the jailor.

Dealing with the swarms of demons.

Now looking at the DDOWiki, there appears to be three optional objectives however I only remember encountering two.  One of these is to talk to a NPC named “Mythant” and when you do that you get to fight a the Marilith Jailor.  That fight was pretty interesting although it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I was thinking it would be.  Once the jailor was defeated we zoned out to the where the last fight was supposed to take place but we didn’t know what we were going to find because we had already defeated Kerchac.  Well, as soon as we zoned in, the dungeon alert immediately went off and we found ourselves in the middle of a swarm of fire reavers, flesh renders, and ice flensers.  The dungeon alert jumped up immediately and we soon found ourselves as soul stones.

Here comes a marilith!!

We were able to reach the nearby shrine to get back up, but it took us a number of other attempts for all of us to get the chest among these respawning mobs.  Needless it say it was quite interesting!!

I found this particular quest much easier than The Archons’ Trials.  There weren’t any traps, as long as you were able to stay clear of the swirling Shavarath blades.  We were also able to think out the waves strategically, which wasn’t quite possible in the large battles in the Archons’ Trials, although there were many more battles here, as you would expect.  The end chest with the respawning mobs was quite irritating.  We almost gave it up.  Now I’m not sure if this was compounded by the fact that we accidentally started the end fight early and didn’t get back to the chest until after we completed an optional.  I say this because I’m thinking that the mobs in the final area kept spawning even though we weren’t there.  I wonder if it would have been easier if we had entered the room and completely the fight as planned.

Overall though, I found the quest fun.  I liked the layout and battles.  Thanks for reading everybody and happy hunting in Shavarath.