The Castle Saalus. With the departure of the two short-run saalus comes this new Saalus dungeon. Along with the Saalus changes, expectations were high for this Castle Saalus in spicing up the boring Saalus daily runs …
… but nope, this dungeon sucks. A proper party would be able to get this dungeon faster than the other two Saalus (Mausoleum and Canyon Saalus), but with a party of leavers, AFKs, players who wait in the middle for the boss, players who only solve 1 cube and die and wait around, players who generally don’t know how the dungeon works, and more, this dungeon takes the longest to do despite how short it technically works. Many would prefer the other Saalus dungeons than this one, and in all honesty, this new Saalus dungeon failed to deliver anything.
If you do queue for Saalus and get this dungeon, JUST QUIT AND REQUEUE.
OR
If you have friends who can co-operate, players who do know what they are doing, want to clear Saalus as fast as possible, etc etc, then read on …?
I write this thread with the intention of wanting to gather and share information on how to clear this failure of a Saalus run (I mean, easiest way is to just quit and re-queue) and make it the fast Saalus run that it should have been. Also, it may be a thread of reference when IMC realizes how bad this Saalus run is and attempt to make it better.
The Castle Saalus
In this Saalus run, players spawn in the middle of the map and are required to pick up dies located in the map above, and run around to interact with 3 cubes to find the matching pieces. Bosses will spawn with every time you match a die and cube together, a total of 3 bosses (Moyabruka, Mothstem and Plokste) that you will have to kill. After killing all 3 bosses, a final boss (Werewolf) will appear and killing it will complete the run.
While the number on the die remains in the same place on every run, the cubes that matches the dies change on every run. On top of that, monsters spawn everywhere, disturbing you from interacting with the cubes and dies, making your run tricky enough. On top of that, any bosses spawned will run after players while you attempt to match some dies and cubes. Adding salt to injury are players who don’t even help the party in any way, or players who simply wait for the boss, or players who abandon trying to match die with cube and rush to boss, not helping again afterwards. All this really makes for a frustrating run if not everyone co-operates. After running this dungeon alone consecutively (since Saalus run isn’t wasted upon leaving), I want to start off by giving some tips to clearing this dungeon:
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If possible, please run this with pre-made parties of 4-5 players, where everyone splits up to help cubes. or groups split up into 2, one for matching cubes and the other to help clear mobs, up to a total of only 2 players in a party picking up dies. I would prefer the later method for reasons I’ll explain somewhere below.
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If you run with auto-matching, do a favor to everyone and help out, or tell everyone in your party to skip Castle Saalus altogether.
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A helpful tip, a cube and die of the same number (location) will not get you a boss, don’t waste time on it (Eg you pick up die (4) and interact with cube (4), it won’t match)
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Another helpful tip to finish the run faster, the interactions for solved numbered dies and cubes correspond to each other,
For example,
You grab a die at (1), you solve the die with a cube at (5), the die at (5) should solve the cube at (1) or so I tested for all my runs. With this, a person who solves one cube and die can easily solve another cube and die, technically solving 2 cube-die pair, and you only need another cube-die pair by luck to get all 3 bosses up in less than a minute. I did solo runs many times with this in mind and managed to get all 3 bosses up in less than a minute or so alone. However, in a party where everyone grabs the die and attempts to solve, this becomes impossible and you may need to tell members in your party to co-operate or something (like, you solve cube 5 with die 1, and die 5 is missing, you can call out "person with die 5 please go to cube 1). The die number is indicated on the number of dots on the top of the cube, just like a normal die. -
If the tip above does not work, it’s very likely someone dropped a die at that location and you picked it up assuming its of a different number, so please check the number on the die.
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Also, in any instance, one cube only matches with one die, so you don’t need to try and match a new die with a cube that already matched with another die (Eg, you match die (3) with cube (4) and pick up (6) afterwards, don’t go to cube (3) and (4) since both of them are paired).
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In every instance, the cube and die pairings are always random. For example, you may be able to match die (2) and cube (3) and vice versa in one instance, but that matching may not work in another instance (may be die (2) and cube (1) and vice versa instead).
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Just a video to show what I mean about the pairings. In the video, I take die (2) and move to solve cube (1) and someone brought die (1) to solve cube (2)
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The more players in the party doing castle saalus, the more monsters that spawn. I solo-ed this run and I only see 6-8 monsters in each room or so.
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To all mounted players, the reason why you can pick up a die but can’t interact with the cube is because for some reason, you need to dismount to be able to interact with the cube.
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Again, it’s better for everyone to participate. Please help finish the run and your dailies faster, it helps everyone.
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Don’t go to the middle or start fighting bosses until all 3 bosses appear, or if your party really lacks that DPS (unlikely most of the time).
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The bosses normally chase after the player that summons them, please run away and not solo it somewhere your party can’t find you. Just continue solving cubes and dies and run to the centre when all 3 bosses spawn.
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It’s a good idea for the players matching the cube and die to take opposite directions when matching, like one person goes clockwise and another goes anti-clockwise solving the cubes.
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Chronomancers, please reincarnate the final boss Werewolf, because that’s where the blessed shards and silver drops.
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Push comes to shove, just quit the run. No one wastes any Saalus runs upon quitting, so no harm done.
Please leave feedback on more advice so more players know how to go about this dungeon quickly and we waste less time on this deceptively long dungeon run that was supposed to be the quickest run to do.
