I am so sorry Noelle but you have officially been replaced. I feel confident that PizzaMaid will continue the tradition of using the big bashy battle mage, but I have a new main. Largely this is due to the fact that I made the mistake of looking at tier lists for Genshin Impact. For those unfamiliar with the concept, when a game like this comes out folks end up ranking the best characters and assigning them a value that depends on the specific list creator but S is usually at the top and then it cycles through the A/B/C rankings after that. Ever list that I found seemed to rank Razor as either S rank or A depending on who was doing the creating, and putting Noelle at C or D depending on the list.
After kitting him out with a decent weapon and some artifacts, I absolutely understand the ranking. Initially I was a huge fan of Noelle for her sheer tanky prowess and the ability to just stop taking damage. Unfortunately a lot of the encounters require you to kill X number of things within a time limit, which means you need someone with a significant amount of burst damage. Noelle is not bursty at all and Geo right now has very limited elemental reactions. Lightning on the other hand chains on water, fire and ice exceptionally well and when paired with the sword I am using that causes increased damage after an elemental debuff has been applied… I can just straight up shred things with the wolf boy.
The only negative however is that I find myself needing to eat to regenerate my health constantly. So I really need to get to Adventure Rank 20 so that I can unlock the free healer that is part of an event that is going on currently. Having someone that can top off the party would be extremely beneficial, but my new lineup tends to favor the main character, amber, razor that I spend most of my time on and Kaeya or Ice boy as I tend to refer to him as. Due to some lucky pulls I have them all equipped with four star weapons and am working on unlocking those further.
You end up unlocking a 4 star sword through Adventure Rank 10, but I found myself trying desperately to find a two hander. After some research I found a quest that would ultimately get me one. On a peninsula that is Southeast of Town there is place called Dadaupa Gorge. When you arrive there you will see the crossed trees in this watery valley and surrounding the trees will be three wind barriers and a chest inside them. There is no way to drop down from above so you ultimately have to figure out a way to drop the barriers. Unfortunately I didn’t think to take screenshots before completing this so you are just going to have to imagine the wind barriers.
Surrounding the camp are three Hilichurl camps that I have marked on the map with colored rings. Inside of each of these camps is an elemental pillar that you will need to activate. The Southwest camp will be lightning, the southeast fire and the northern camp is ice but that one is a bit tricky. Inside of that camp is a ring and when you approach it it will start an event. You will have 1 minute and 40 seconds to kill 10 monsters. These will range from frost slimes and a frost wizard to a wave of Hilichurls including one of those big brute types with the shield. Burst damage is key and the ability to exploit elemental weaknesses.
After dropping all three shields, you will be able to walk up to and open the chest in the gorge. There will of course be an assortment of random items, but there will be two guaranteed drops. The first is a four star Berserker’s feather artifact. Artifacts are randomly rolled but it should in theory always have attack power and then an assortment of random stats that may or may not help support that. I got one with defense, crit and hitpoints in addition to the attack power. It is the first four star artifact that I have found so far, and seemed to make a significant improvement in damage output.
The second guaranteed drop is Northlander Claymore Prototype, which can be forged at the Blacksmith into a Prototype Aminus. The challenge with this however is that the materials required are rather scarce. They can usually be found up in the mountains and in all of my travels and making a beeline for every type of ore/crystal that I can find… I have only gathered 13 crystal and 27 white iron. Thankfully I lucked into a few 4 star two handers off wishes, but I am likely still going to grind this out just to see how good the weapon ends up being.
I’ve found a few other of these outdoor puzzles that I am working my way through, but the solutions have seemed significantly less clear. I am sure I will post about them once I have them figured out. Hopefully the solution to the Dadaupa Gorge puzzle helps someone out there. Still greatly enjoying the game, but mostly focused on figuring out ways to raise my Adventurer level to 20 so I can unlock that healer.