Choose My Adventure: The final push to level cap in Throne & Liberty

This is probably one of the few times in my personal history with Choose My Adventure when I hit the level cap in the game I’m playing for the month. So it has happened in Throne & Liberty, as this week saw me hit the maximum of level 50 – and hitting that point a bit sooner than I expected. Though the 20 levels’ worth of head start I had certainly helped.

I admit that I had already kind of did what the polls had ultimately suggested I do before the results were becoming clear. I was doing a bunch of level 40 dungeon runs in the hopes of getting to the next level milestone that would progress the story. But as it turns out, that wasn’t really quite the XP fountain I was hoping it would be, so I didn’t end up spoiling the poll request.

Also I was primarily going for a wand weapon drop, which I did get after about six or so runs.

As I found out from last week, these dungeon encounters were getting more and more stern in terms of mechanics, which made failing them hurt just a bit more, especially considering how dungeons work. See, when you die in a dungeon, that’s it; nobody has a way to resurrect other players, and the entrance to the boss fight is otherwise walled off until there’s a full party wipe. Combine that with mechanic failings continuing to result in one-shot kills and it starts getting pretty serious – but not so serious that we couldn’t learn, and in one run we even managed to succeed in that dungeon after one player ragequit.

By the time I had gotten comfortable with that dungeon and gotten the item drop that I was farming it for, I was perhaps half a level away from the next story quest line, so that’s when I decided to follow the in-game suggestion to do some zone quests. These things had been left to the wayside rather frequently as I’ve level up through the 30s and 40s, so this seemed like the right moment to try them out.

This ended up being both a smart and a bad decision. It was smart because ultimately I got some pretty chonky XP gains as well as desired growth materials, not to mention some interesting if sometimes frustrating puzzles, but it was bad because at one point I entered another open world event but forgot that it was at nighttime, which meant it was also an FFA PvP affair. But hey, at least this time it took players five or six button presses to lay me out instead of two. I even managed to fire off a couple of skills myself before I was stomped into the dirt. I guess that’s sort of like progression. Probably? I wasn’t about to investigate further and elected to just let the little gremlins be.

Being turned into PvP paste aside, I found it was overall a pretty good time in-between story portions, but after then it was time to get back into the main narrative, and finally it looked as if I was heading back in to dealing with the primary baddies that were supposedly in opposition to me at the start of this whole MMO. I don’t really know (or care) how they came back into the picture again, but the final stories had me taking on this Arkeum Legion directly, stopping them from attacking a library, freeing a giant sky whale from its restraints, and taking on an apparent major general of its forces. It all ended up with the NPC Clay, who I hasten to point out is one of the most unassuming-looking dudes I have ever seen, being a stone-cold badass once again.

So there I stood. Level 50. The current cap of the game, with a cliffhanger for the story and an extremely fluffy epic-tier robe. And it looks as if a lot of the game is now really opened up to me. My first instinct was to start prodding at the next levels of the Taedal’s Tower just to see whether my upgrading spends were effective at higher level challenges. I’m happy to report that appears to mostly be the case, though it wasn’t without some difficulty, as once again the boss fights started to get tougher and tougher in terms of mechanics, which I found to be a very pleasant surprise.

After a few level climbs up the tower, I kind of entered into a state of decision paralysis. There are obviously more tower floors to climb, but then there’s weekly tasks, more contract stuff to do, the Gate of Infinity, and some new tiers of co-op dungeons as well, all with the aim of growing my equipment and ability levels. There are also very likely some open world events to be had that don’t involve my being in PvP, though I’ll very likely need to seek out a guild in order to experience any of that. And I’m frankly not really willing to do that when I suspect servers will probably start to consolidate in some point in the near future.

So basically what I’m saying is that I’m going to need a bit of guidance in order to see what’s what in endgame. And that means the polls are once again open.

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Since next week will mark the final time I’ll be checking out T&L for this column, that also means that we’re going to have to consider where to head for next month’s series. So let’s try to narrow that down a bit, shall we?

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Polling will close up at the usual time of 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, October 25th. It’s time for us to experience endgame together, but make sure you also keep an eye on Carlo’s Four Winds series: He’ll have a lot more to say about T&L over the next few weeks and you should always collect multiple impressions instead of hitching your decisions and thoughts to just one writer or “influencer.”

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.