Talk:Ardford summit/@comment-128.61.126.39-20170118051907

The hidden port quest of the Merchant Guild represenative is extraordinarily tough. Has anyone had trouble with it? (Not sure if this is the right place for such a comment.)

If anyone else is having trouble, maybe here's some points which can help:

- Bring a ton of consumables, especially Mana potions. Enemies can drain the mana of your spellcasters, but you need your spellcasters in order to damage the enemies.

- Kill the Moths first! They alternate between draining ~200 mana from one of your spellcasters to debuffing your entire party with random debuffs (including Sleep, Paralysis, Confusion, Stun and Sexbind). They're weak to lightning and can be easily killed via physical attacks... if they don't incapactitate you first. Equip every pin you have. Fortunately, they apparently need to drain mana in order to use their debuff attack, and they only target spellcasters. If your spellcasters run out of mana, the moths can't do anything, and your fighters can kill them.

- The squids don't have any exceptional characteristics. They tend to attack twice per round, and use a party-wide sweep attack roughly 50% of the time. Kill them next. You can use just about anything to do so, but conserve any remaining mana on your spellcasters.

- The Adaman Snail is just disgusting. From a practical perspective, you can only kill them using Lightning. (They're highly resistant to physical damage and they are immune to poison. No idea if other tactics work.) It sometimes hits for decent damage, but it occasionally uses an ability called Withdraw, which debuffs your entire party's attack and magic attack. You need someone who can counter-buff these traits, or otherwise get rid of them, in order to be able to kill the snail in under ten minutes. This is what you need your spellcaster for (Robin is pretty good, but avoid using the Lance version of her spells unless you have mana to burn). Qum can buff the magic attack stat, but she tends to have her mana stolen and end up with Sexbind. Not sure what the right party is.

- The last encounter at the north end of the docks (a stationary monster icon on the waterside) consists of exactly four snails. Robin and Qum are probably good inclusions here.