sinsister something in cape sorrow

[john]

I ran across a sinsister something in cape sorrow. There is a chest to the side with two weapons (blood by it that suggest perhaps a scarifice) and a thingy in the middle that if i touch it i am stunned while a gazzillion undead eat me alive. Is there a clue somewhere how to grab those nice gems

[HeavyP04]

Ah, the Necromancers' Altar. Yeah, that one's a bit tricky, I haven't found any way to avoid the stun effect when you first touch the Stone. About the only advice I can give is to get some decent armor and buff spells or potions to let you grab the gems, outlast being whaled on by undead while stunned, and then sprint out of there.

[Painted Lady]

That is the one chest I've never been able to loot. The cost in expensive potions has never been quite worth it to me. Maybe I ought to trot back there right before heading into the Cow Palace - it would be interesting to see how a stronger character might fare.

[xolotl]

There's a number of tricks you can use to survive this one. I believe that you can cut down on the effective paralyzation time by using a Haste potion first, so the Undead have less time to move in on you. That combined with Invisibility should take care of the initial danger zone. Both would, of course, help in terms of getting out of the way once you're no longer paralyzed, too. It's certainly easiest if you have some kind of long-range attack, but even if you don't, the undead are so slow that it shouldn't be too much of a problem to herd them all together and then do a drive-by grab of the stuff in there.

Obviously if you're a mage, set a nearby Portal location and you can simply Portal out as soon as you've grabbed the stuff.

Fighter-type characters may do well to seed the area with some blackpowder kegs before activating it, etc.

[Antigrav]

Throw down a couple of oil potions to surround yourself with fire just before touching the stone. It won't hurt the zombies much but it will keep them away from you.

[Kreador Freeaxe]

I always just quaff an invisibility potion and grab the stuff and run once the stun is over, then work on taking the undead out individually.

[Randomizer]

High enough armor, in the 70+ range, and their chance of hitting you drops to 1%.

[Chromosapiens]

Another trick: Parry mode still works while paralyzed or stunned. It may reset to Normal combat mode initially, but you can set to Parry immediately after paralysis, and that may block enough blows to survive until paralysis ends.
Also, I've found that standing in one particular location (of six possible) when touching the chest/idol leaves an escape route between critters. (I'll leave discovering which as an exercise, because I am evil.)
Cover your head and run for it!

[IJBall]

Another trick: Parry mode still works while paralyzed or stunned. It may reset to Normal combat mode initially, but you can set to Parry immediately after paralysis, and that may block enough blows to survive until paralysis ends.

Huh - that's not supposed to happen with v1.05. Did you manage this trick while playing v1.04, or v1.05? (If you did do this with v1.05, I'll have to add this to the bugs list...)

[Chromosapiens]

Did you manage this trick while playing v1.04, or v1.05?

Oops. That's version 1.03. Sorry, I forgot I'm behind the curve.
I'm just a poor Mac PPC user who can't run 1.05 and didn't bother with 1.04.

[Incendax]

Invisibility potion seems to be the easiest way. Just chug one of them and stand there while the undead ignore you completely. Another option is just to hit the space bar REALLY FAST. The undead might get to take one or two steps at most before you've passed 20 turns, but you'll probably take some damage using this method.

[SpottedShroom]

I'd say that causing time to pass quicker than intended is an exploit and therefore cheating.

But as long as you're going to cheat... there used to be a really awesome way to exploit this bug:

http://www.basiliskgames.com/forums/vie ... 547#p34162

I don't remember if that got patched in the lasted Book II build, though. It probably still works in Book I, though, since there hasn't been a new release in a while.

[JyriErik]

I used 5 powder kegs around myself to make a wall around myself while paralyzed. Then I simply sniped the undead from my "impenetrable fortress".

Jyri

[Dbx]

This one is a tricky one, the way i looted it and killing all the zombies was: I used an invisibility potion rank 2 just before looting the gems, after that i ran away and killed them all one by one with my bow

[erikrick]

For a fighter type, laying down a blanket of Demon Oil and with only one or two open paths between the fire and you is a good way to corral the undead to you in reasonable numbers, but I really like the idea of using the barrels as a nice barrier, never thought of that.