Techknow:Mage Macabre Guide

About

My guide on the Macabre Olympiad guide anyone towards completing it on a Mage Human or High Elf. Why another guide? The quest will have you go through so many monsters that are element resistant and immune, which requires mages to be versatile in magical elements. Unfortunately this makes Mages weak due to spreading skill points everywhere and take much longer to kill monsters than other races that focus on a single melee element. I am going to figure out a way to optimze a Mage's skills, spells, and equipment to beat this quest.

There are a lot of details I found that I feel are essential to Mages not in the main guide that I will go over here.

Despite writing this guide I feel it will not give anybody who is reading this a significant edge. Before beating the quest the farthest I gone was the 17th map until I got stuck and killed by a Cacodemon (but I dodged death and lost no XP!) and also ran out of Pixie Dusts. It took me 4.5 hours to get to that point - this is truly a marathon!

Challenges

Currently the server resets every eight hours starting at around 12AM PST. Diamond golems and boss monsters take the longest to kill, to optimize on the amount of time I spend I will need to kill fast as possible for any type of monster and spend as little time recovering (taking breaks to eat, uncurse items, swap gear). This is mostly because in my first few attempts I didn't have the right build at all so I hope this is the one that works for me and helps other mages too. This is a huge problem because at the beginning of the quest there is a map full of diamond golems that must all get killed, which is not the a Mage's strong point (took an hour for me!). Killing bosses one at a time (Kalidemons and up) also add up too.

The other major challenge for mages is being able to spell cast as efficiently as possible, which requires a lot of positioning to get to the right position to attack the enemy without being attacked back, and if necessary to group enemies to kill them at once.

Skills

As a level 26 Human Archmage, my character has 101 skill points to spend, 20 Mediation, 100% Extra Mana, and -5 to skill weapon skills but staves and whips. So here is how I allocate them:

Skill Point Allocation
Skill	Before	After
Find Weakness	17	17
Lore	10	13
Water Magic	12	10
Earth Magic	11	11
Dodging	9	5
Fire Magic	5	10
Air Magic	6	6
Spirit Magic	7	7
Mind Magic	2	2
Life Magic	4	4
Strength	2	2
Spirit Travel	6	0
Merchant	5	0
Evocation	2	2
Sneaking	2	1
Death Magic	0	10

I spend a lot of points on Find Weakness to get high critical chance (50%), and the rest of my skills allow for power offensive spells at a cost of defense. Dying is not an option so I try to get the best possible offensive for a human character. High Elves with this setup will save 30 skill points on the magic skills but have 25 less skill points than humans so they come out slightly ahead, they could spend it however they like to get a bigger advantage.

Sneaking (I left one to use lockpicks) and Merchant don't help me at all in killing monsters, and if I die I have to start all over so I also do not have to bother with spirit magic (I can use an amulet of lifesaving if I am fast enough to save XP). I only really need dodging against diamond golems, all other monsters should never be within melee range, so I will reduce it somewhat and use agility gear. Finally I noticed with Icestorm which uses Water Magic it doesn't save another spell cast against enemies that die on 2 or 3 full Icestorms so I can reduce that a bit. I free up a lot of skill points for Lore, Fire and Death Magic to get Dragon Breath and to replace my rod for a more powerful DB that doesn't have a cooldown.

Some told me that the damage for Sandstorm is capped at 7 Earth. I find this to be incorrect, when I had only 7 Earth instead of 11+2 Earth I was getting less messages that said "You cut Diamond Golem badly" and more that said I was doing no damage. I do think high Earth is essential in order to spend less time with Diamond Golems and to still deal decent damage against the bosses.

Spells

For this quest my mage will have the following spells:

Spells
Spell	Helpfulness
Dragon Breath	Essential
Icestorm	Essential
Sandstorm	Essential
Mana Shield	Essential
Fly	Essential
See Invisible	Essential
Resist Water, Fire, Shock, Petrify	Essential
Bless	Essential
Stone to Flesh	Essential
Speed	Recommended
Invisibility	Recommended
Firespray	Recommended
Major Healing	Recommended
Cure Blindness	Recommended
Cure Poison	Optional

Some insight of my choices: DB is my most powerful spell and will be used against the boss monsters, Icestorm (and firespray) will be used as my next powerful spell against regular enemies. Sandstorm will be used against enemies immune to both fire and water, mainly diamond golems and is the cheapest offensive spell in case I need to regen SP. Mana shield is the primary defense mechanism for Mages to absorb 90% of damage with SP with 7 Spirit (2 Mind to give it enough duration to avoid too much spell interruption). Fly is needed to avoid traps and to move fast around the maps. Of course high resists are needed, 75% or higher for all elements. Bless is a must have to uncurse items on the go - my build requires gear swapping and boss monsters will spam curse.

Equipment

Equipment
Item	Helpfulness
Staff of Earth/Fire/Death (+2 to element, low WC)	Essential
Wizard's Hat	Essential
Golden Breastplate or Robe of the Magi	Essential
Gray Dragonscale Mail	Essential
High agility gloves (I use +10 Gauntlets of Dex)	Essential
High agility cloak (I use +7 Cloak of the Bat)	Essential
Enchanted Girdle (+3 or up)	Essential
Whip of Many Thongs (+0 or up, I have a +2)	Essential
200 Pixie Dusts	Essential
1000+ Vials of Water, 500+ Sulfurs	Essential
700 Powdered Dragon Bone, 700 Ashes	Essential
Two or more Rods of Destruction with 100+ Charges	Essential
2 Rings of Whip Mastery/Perfect Whipsman	Essential
Ring of Iron Will and Strange Ring	Essential
50+ Foods and/or Magic Mushrooms in a Bag of holding	Essential
Rod of Summon Golem with 200+ Charges	Essential
Unicorn Horn	Optional

Pretty much standard equipment for RDing. Do bring more reagents than you think you will need. Don't forgot to set your button bar to quickly ready spells and wear equipment!

Getting to the Olympiad

Getting to the start of the Olympiad is a task that can consume a lot of time into the quest itself so I like to go in depth on what you can do to save as much time as possible. I have spent almost two hours on this so saving time here is a high priority.

Finding the dirt hole should take no more than 15 minutes, if you gone through the maps in Macabre enough you may have noticed a couple maps where the dirt hole can be found, so I would try to search those places first before starting to search every other map. If you have to search the Elven houses do it in a clockwise order from the first map, the last map will be the one right before the minatour map. The dirt hole will always be visible even when something is over it. I don't know if that is true for big monsters, just in case I always kill the venus fly traps and huge minatours.

Once you find the dirt hole and go through the lead and iron golem maps, you will find you must kill everything in the diamond golem and mage map. Both types of enemies can be a real pain to deal with. Diamond golems are immune to fire, water, shock, petrification, and death ray, so melee methods are required. The best way I have found to deal with the diamond golems is to group as many as you can (3 is a good limit, 4 could trap you in one place), run away from the golems, and cast sandstorm and apply destruction rods until they die. They can wander around and if you see them then they will approach you, this is good for one golem (especially if it is a badass) because you can whip and sandstorm at it for a while before your mana shield runs out. Mages can stop time which can be supremely annoying, however this means no one can cast spells. Luckily a mage will go down quickly when you whip it to death which also resumes time! Note that you cannot summon creatures here!

The next maps will contain mostly Medusas and Kalidemons, respectively. Just run around and kill the medusas because the map is a bit of a maze. The Kalidemon map is bigger so I will try to group two of them before murdering both with dragon breath, otherwise sandstorming it could take a minute, and you have to kill over ten of them which also adds up on time.

The Kalidemon map and the next map each contain a random boss, which is always characterized by this: It will be an Arch Dracolich, Cacodemon, Riagor, Reaper, or a Demon Lord and upon death it can drop an artifact weapon. ADs, Cacos, and Reapers are immune to Cold but vulnerable to fire and can cast death ray, and DLs are immune to fire, resistant to cold, and can also fire death ray. Riagors are cold and fire resistant. All of them are not cut resistant which makes Dragon Breath the primary spell to kill them and Sandstorm as the best alternative. You can summon golems here and you should do so to keep the boss occupied! When you kill the second boss you can enter the big crevice to get to the start of the Olympiad, and hopefully you get here in about an hour.

The Olympiad

The other quest guide covers the maps pretty well. The only things you need to be careful of other than boss monsters are Dark Wisps, Black Dragons, and Maelstrom. The first two can stop time, but are easily dealt with by your whip, and Maelstrom can cast death ray. Use your summon golem rod to group enemies and blow them away with DB. I find the first 18 maps much longer to finish than the rest due to all the boss monsters, but if you can make it this far you should be able to finish the rest!

So how did I do? I managed to get to the start of the Olympiad in 1 hour and 15 minutes of server time (was up for 14 minutes when I logged on), got to the 16th map two hours later, and finished the rest in another hour (with the help of another player) so it took me about 4 hours. I didn't run out of reagents but I used at least half of what I brought.