Iron Soul Dungeon Starless Forest Guide (Tier 1)

Before you start

Talk to Gray to unlock the second weapon slot, and read the progression rules — the level-over-battle-power point applies to every difficulty below.

Difficulty by difficulty

Clear it twice before moving on, spending all your ore on weapons. Sandstone can produce a sword with 14 base attack depending on the variant, though most rare-material swords average out stronger. Once you have a decent sword, try the hell difficulty here and bank the dark cubes it drops.

Noticeably harder at first — and then it flips at level 10. Uncommon ore appears more often here, so this is where armour becomes worth investing in. Once you are level 10, running roughly 28 base weapon damage with any heavy armour set, hell mode is beatable and should hand you enough dark cubes for a light sword. Bless that sword to +3 and it will carry you through the next tiers.

Your first mythic ore. Hold onto mythic and legendary ore until your character badly out-levels it. This is also where a secondary weapon starts to matter — a heavy weapon is the recommendation, because its default ultimate provides damage immunity, and the level 35 heavy ultimate is a boss-deleter later on.

More resources, but the dungeon is long enough that it is a poor XP farm. Its hell mode drops painstone, the ore behind swords that stay on-tier through most of Frozen Valley — though the odds of collecting all three required pieces are low.

Magnetite becomes common. Replay it repeatedly hunting sub-stat rolls: a heavy chest piece with major HP matters a great deal in Frozen Valley, as does a good secondary. Hell mode here is your second and third shot at painstone.

Enemies that matter here

  • Elite crossbow goblin — ranged, stunnable, low health, with a long reload. Its bolts are fast, so dodge on the hand movement (about a second of aim), dash horizontally, then walk.
  • Elite axe goblin — no ranged attacks and non-stunnable, so you are forced to trade health. It gets stuck on props, which you can use.
  • Minotaur — slow, stunnable, huge health pool. Save these for last rather than trading health with them.

Full ratings and counters for every enemy are in the bestiary.

Bosses

No boss or miniboss can be stunned — they rest between attacks instead, and those rests are your damage windows.

  • Orc — an agile Minotaur with two abilities on roughly 8-second cooldowns. Raised arms and a straight-line telegraph means Heavy Slash; circular telegraphs on the floor mean a Leap is landing there.
  • Lava Golem — big health pool, low threat. Most attacks point forwards, so stay to its side or very close. Trading health with it is fine.
  • Dragon of Evil — Warning Roar is free damage time. Laser Beam is telegraphed by energy particles: do not try to dodge it from range, because it flicks its head faster than you can dash. Stay by its hip to bait melee attacks, and treat Firestorm’s long windup as your best ranged window.

Leaving Starless Forest

Frozen Valley expects level 15, 1,200 max HP, and a light weapon made of pure painstone (or one to two pieces of the ore). The Frozen Valley guide has the full gear check and the ore progression table.

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