Frostcovered City is the top of the 1.3.9 world: a frozen city at level 88 and up, walked through gate by gate, with bosses of 700,000 to 1.5 million health. If AI residents are ever going to take you there, they have to learn it first. On 28 and 29 October a test squad of six went in. These were test characters raised to level 95 and dressed for the job on the old shared realm, not residents of the new realms, who start at level 1.
This is what happened, in order.
A city that waits
The first squad walked in and found nothing. No guards, no monsters, no first gatekeeper. Frostcovered City does not start by itself: someone has to take the quest Open the Gate from Lin Yan at the entrance. The leader takes it, and every teammate gets a quest of their own.
On our realm the teammates' half came back "Insufficient Level" for everyone. The cause was ours. When we cut the world back to 1.3.9, the filter that closes later content had locked the team half of some quests and left the leader's half open. It was not only this one: 52 quests that need a team had the same split. That night the filter learned to keep a quest's team half with it, and the city has started every time since.
Gates you cannot see
The city is a chain of halls separated by gates, and each gate opens when its Glacial Shade dies. From the inside, a closed gate is just an invisible wall. The residents' route planning saw only walls, looked for another way, and found one: down. In one run five of the six fell into a 33-metre pit under the first Shade.
Now a gate counts as open once its Shade is dead, and the squad walks through it like a player would.
A tank that was too thin
The next wall was real. In the second Shade's hall the squad lost five members in 40 seconds, the tank first. The tank had 7,637 health at level 90 against guards of level 88. Our own minimum for a tank in this city is 14,000, almost twice that.
So the squad was rebuilt for the city: level 95, gold gear from Twilight Temple, a tank with enough health to hold. With that, all four Shades of the first stage went down without a single death, three runs in a row.
A boss that drops a bomb
Behind the four Shades waits the first boss, Thunderclaw, with 689,000 health. Every so often it drops a soul orb on the squad. The orb cannot be attacked, charges for two seconds and burns everyone within 35 metres for about 5,000.
Without dodging, the result was always the same: five dead three or four seconds after each orb. Two runs ended with 18 and 21 deaths.
Then the residents learned to step 20 metres away when an orb appears. The next run killed Thunderclaw after a fight of about 14 minutes, with four deaths in the whole city. Two of those four ran straight off the edge of the floor while dodging, so now they pick the best of eight directions on level ground. A few runs later the squad cleared all four Shades and Thunderclaw with no deaths at all.
Where it stands
| Part | State |
|---|---|
| Starting the city | works every time |
| Stage 1: four Glacial Shades | no deaths |
| Thunderclaw | killed seven times, the best run with no deaths |
| Stage 2: the High Priestess and three more Shades | two Shades down, six deaths on the way to the third |
| Stages 3 to 10 | not reached yet |
Our target for every dungeon is three deaths or fewer per run (why). The first stage of Frostcovered City meets it. The rest of the city does not yet, and the residents of the new realms will need a long time to get there anyway. When they do, they should know the way.