Shining Slash: On Fire

Not really a Tanking guide, but like all dungeons, basic knowledge of the dungeon will help everyone out.

Once Nochsana becomes unavailable at 29, you might be feeling the lack of dungeon running fun. Look no further, because the elusive Fire Temple is available within a level, and will tide you over for a good 8 levels (at the outside).

At level 30, you can enter the Fire Temple. No quests mention it until 32, so you'll need initiative or friends in the know to even find out about it in the first place. From the little I can gather on the Asmodian entry quests, there's a fairly obvious entry chain that leads you around a bit and requires a group. There's a guide on that quest chain here. For the Elyos, it's even less obvious and almost feels like an afterthought. At level 32 there's one quest, starting from Hannet, that gets you to run around Elysea tracking down her lost love. After traveling to the Verteron Observatory, and talking to a few people in towns in the Eltnen desert, you travel back to Hannet, who sends you to the never before mentioned Fire Temple. Following a few blue links in your quest journal will tell you that the Fire Temple's entrance is beneath Kyola Temple, a high difficulty mob area a short run south of the Golden Bough Garrison.

Kyola is under the ground, with a single staircase heading down to a central chamber that branches into three rooms all filled with mobs that most people won't be able to solo effectively until 32+. A bit of exploration will reveal a door in the right hand room, at the far end. You might get lucky, but odds are you'll have a party and be at the door before it becomes apparent that you can't actually get in without being attuned. But all is well, for attunement is within your grasp! Fire Temple Keys drop from all of the mobs underground in the Kyola Temple, with a very low drop rate. Each drop can only be looted by one person, so you need one each. Expect to kill 30-50 mobs before seeing one. That said, spend an hour in there with a full group and you'll likely get one key for each party member. At night time, the Raging Obscuras outside around the entrance drop keys too, at what appears to be a higher drop rate.

Once you have your key, use it in your inventory to receive a quest, that leads you back outside the Kyola Temple to the cluster of NPCs just outside. Hand it in, and wham bam you're attuned to Fire Temple. With this quest completed, you can dart back inside to the Fire Temple door in the right hand room, use it, and zone into the dungeon!

Fire Temple is different from Nochsana in a few ways. Instead of having set bosses, only two bosses show up every run, and several bosses spawn randomly throughout the dungeon. Which bosses show up is determined when the first person in your party zones into the dungeon. Secondly, it's possible to skip a large number of the pulls in the Fire Temple. It's entirely possible to sneak through at higher (much higher) levels only fighting one or two mobs on your way to the final boss. Additionally, the last boss has a 100% chance to drop at least one green item, which is at least an improvement over the Nochsana General's disappointingly small chance to drop anything at all.

Finally, the dungeon's lockout timer is 30 minutes, instead of 18 hours. Kill the boss, walk back out, disband your group, reform it, walk back in and everything will be reset. Kill the boss again, repeat. Thus, you can actually farm the Fire Temple for xp, if you get a dedicated group.

Inside the dungeon, you get a quick warm up in the form of two fire elementals, one large and hard hitting, one small and not so strong, with a third patrolling back and forth down the corridor they're blocking. A bad pull will see you fighting all three, while it's possible to take down each one on their own without any real difficulty. As I've mentioned in the past, the Tank should always initiate each pull. The mobs in the Fire Temple hit particularly hard, and with the amount of healing going on, your Healer will build a lot of Enmity, which can be hard to deal with if your Tank hasn't got the bonus Enmity from being the person to pull. CC is worth it in here too, making pulls smaller for a time, easing the load on both the Healer and the Tank, and generally providing practice at not breaking the CC for your party. Hit a mob that's been turned into a tree or is asleep, and it'll hop up and start hitting people again, so be careful.

The first room looks intimidating at first. It's possible to run through without pulling anything, but that requires some luck and good timing for each member of your party, which you can't guarantee, so pull the two elementals just to the left, then the patrol in the middle. That clears the path to the end of the room, which is being guarded by two large elementals and a patrol. If you're unlucky, then one of the two guaranteed bosses in the dungeon, Silver Blade Rotan, will be patrolling rapidly up the corridor as well. Try to get him alone, since he hits hard and takes a while to kill. It's possible for Rotan to be here, but there are two other paths he can take, which are determined when the dungeon is loaded.

You can hug the wall around corners, pull mobs back to you to avoid fighting them with patrols, and generally be sneaky down the passage in front of you. There's an opening in the wall to the left, which can be used to skip some parts of the dungeon, but there's the ever present chance that if you attempt to cross the floating rocks that lead that way, you'll fall into the lava, which forces you to travel left down the lava path until you reach the way up or die horribly. At the first fork, the left path leads to the rest of the dungeon, while going forward and then right takes you to two dead ends filled with rock elementals, with a Shugo who to my Elyos eyes looks like he might be an Asmodian quest NPC, and two rare-spawn elemental bosses. Scour your minimap if you go down that way, and look for the mob with the unique name. Good luck. It's entirely possible that Silver Blade Rotan will instead be here, moving about rapidly, so keep an eye out.

To the left, a few gargoyle pulls and a couple of mugolems lead you to a large room with paths leading to (to the left) a room crowded with mobs that you should proceed carefully through, skipping as little as possible (since at low health the mobs try to run away and call their friends to help), (in front of you) a room where you'll find Denlavis, Hannet's missing immortal love and a variety of nasty pulls (avoid pulling the mugolem in the center, as it'll pull two out of sight gargoyles with it, as well as the two patrols left and right), and (to the right) the main path.

After that travesty of a paragraph, you have to clear your way to the right, or whichever direction you choose. As the two mugolems in the middle of the room make sneaking around without pulling rather difficult, clear out the gargoyle just around the right corner, then rush into the middle, CCing one of the mugolems or the patrolling gargoyle as necessary, and nuke them down. Silver Blade Rotan can be pathing through the room as well, so be sure to rush in at a point where you're going to have some free time before Rotan shows back up. Clear down the right hand path, being careful to pull mugolems back to your group (Inescapable Judgment is the only way, since they're immobile) when possible, and watching patrols. Again there's a room to the right, which houses a rare-spawn gargoyle boss, but the main boss is to the left, in a final large hall filled with caryatids and patrolling gargoyles. Kill as many as you have to in order to clear to and wipe out one of the sides of the room, then when there's no patrol near her, aggro the boss and run her back to a safe corner. Incoming fun.

Kromede the Corrupt is a level 37 Ranger boss (which means that if you go in at 30, she'll be resisting your abilities a lot), who does comparable damage to her main target as well as high AoE damage to your melee on a regular basis. Her Area Cause Wound (loving the Engrish) is a fairly straight up cast time point-blank AoE. It hits everyone around her for pretty high damage, but is easily healable. Kromede also, however, drops traps. They can be destroyed by group members who are quick (Gladiator AoE works great), but if they go off they do particularly high damage to everyone in range, which pretty much again amounts to your melee players. Finally, at low health she'll cast another ability (forgive me, but the name escapes me) which has a cast time, and hits for quite literally massive damage. From what I can tell, she targets the closest person who doesn't have aggro (the aforementioned Gladiator, probably!) and hits them for about 2.5k damage, maybe a bit more. If followed up by a trap, or an Area Cause Wound before a heal can get off, then it's a guaranteed death for at least one person. This is the most important time in the fight to be taking out traps. I think she can cast it again, so be quick at this point. She'll die soon, and you'll get loot (it's polite to resurrect anyone who's died before looting!), which in my experience is limited to a couple of green helms and a blue crafting item that can be used to make a handful of items (I'll update this post with links once I remember what it's called :P). There is, however, a slim chance that gold quality weapons will drop, which is fantastic. At level 30 it's easy enough to clear to her and win inside an hour, which then allows you to head back out and reset the dungeon, and clear to her again. Good xp and a chance at golds. Good luck!

Apologies for the serious lack of updates. In the mean time, enjoy this video of the boss fight, courtesy of Zot:



Do you like his videos? I like his videos. I wonder if he'll do voice commentary at some point? Who can tell.