Xena finally had her hands on a ship and could begin to explore the wide watery world. I discovered immediately that fighting the denizens of the oceans was not the cakewalk that it had been with some of my previous solo characters. While the Mermen and Sea Slimes weren't too bad, the Man O' War jellyfish were an extremely common opponent that caused all kinds of problems for Xena. Those little white jellies were individually frail but had a small chance to paralyze on each attack, plus a chance to call for more Man O' War reinforcements. Xena was still limited to hitting a single target at a time and she could quickly find herself overwhelmed by swarms of the annoying things. Battle after battle would see Xena get paralyzed sooner or later, followed by the jellyfish breeding themselves out of control, with Xena forced to flee or else get whittled down by their unending attacks. Was she seriously losing to the Man O' War jellies, of all things?!
I needed to do something fast since those little critters are everywhere in the ocean. Fortunately there was a weapon available that could turn the tides of combat:
I searched through the long list of weapons and armor that were available in drops from the sparkling and secret spots across the overworld. Eventually I hit upon the Dragontail Whip, a weapon with 62 Attack that unlocks upon turning in 50 mini medals or alternately can be found in an isolated sparkle location. This was not the most accessible spot, located southwest of Grimland on a tiny island corresponding to what would roughly be Banks Island in the Canadian Archipelago on the world map. Xena fought her way over to this tiny rock and claimed the Dragontail Whip along with the Dragon Shield, which would be useful later for defending against fire and ice breath attacks. It was the Dragontail Whip that mattered right now though, since this was the first weapon with the "whip" property that the Warrior class was able to equip. Warriors can't use the Thorn Whip or the Chain Whip or the Beastly Bullwhip or the Morning Star or the Spiked Steel Whip... but they can equip the Dragontail Whip for some inexplicable reason. And that mattered enormously because the Dragontail Whip had the "group" property associated with its attack:
Finally, finally, FINALLY Xena could now hit more than one thing at a time! 
Her new whip basically functioned the same as the boomerangs that I was used to using on past characters, except it could only hit a single group of opponents at a time, with each successive target taking about 20% less damage than the one before. Even though sometimes the whip would falter if every monster on screen happened to belong to different species, this was still an incredible improvement at taking out masses of low-HP targets. Those Man O' War jellies that I was just talking about? Their reign of terror was short-lived as Xena's new weapon flattened them in waves, easily taking out half a dozen of them at once since the jellies only had 64 HP. The screenshot above captured Xena knocking out five of the seven Sea Slimes that had spawned on board, leaving two redlined opponents that were wiped out on the next round. Suddenly the random encounters had gotten enormously easier to clear!
Xena's damage output had always been excellent due to her massive Strength growth, she had been held back only by that single target limitation. Much of that restriction had now been removed and the amount of damage that she was taking in each fight plummeted immediately. It turned out that Xena was indeed a sturdy character, she had been taking a pounding only because it took forever to wipe out her enemies by stabbing them one round at a time. Her greater offense translated into vastly improved defense as she was now frequently killing things before they could ever get a chance to act. I had been somewhat worried that I was doing something wrong with this character in comparison to her peers - nope! She just needed a better weapon on hand.
With her new whip in hand and feeling a bit like Wonder Woman as a result, Xena began the long task of scouring the seas of their various treasures. She started by clearing out the Mediterranean and then ventured south down the western coast of Africa into the vast southern ocean. The ghost town of Theddon sold Xena a copy of the Magic Armor which was a straight upgrade from her previous Magical Skirt, with the same spell defense property along with 21 additional points of Defense rating. Then she traveled to the icy expanse of the Shrine of the Everbird where I snapped a picture of Xena testing out her newest Warrior ability. This was Sword Dance and it was by far her best skill to date. Sword Dance inflicted four Strike (physical) slashes at 60% Attack damage per blow, with the four targets chosen randomly. I had noticed previously that multiple attacks dealt at lowered damage tend to be very powerful in DQ3, especially for solo characters that function with higher levels and more Strength than usual due to gobbling down all those Strength seeds. The unusual damage formula employed by DQ3 also serves to limit the effectiveness of really high Attack values, meaning that it's typically better to hit four times at 200 Attack than one time at 800 Attack. And, even better, Xena's damage could be further boosted via Oomph Powder to double the damage from any melee skill.
Long story short, Sword Dance was a fantastic skill that I knew would see some use against upcoming bosses. The biggest downsides were the random nature of what happened to be attacked (obviously not a problem when dealing with single opponent bosses) and the late date of its arrival. Xena didn't learn Sword Dance until Level 37 which would have been nearing completion of the gameplay in a non-variant party setting. Even as a solo character benefiting from quadruple normal XP, Xena still didn't learn this skill until she had already obtained the ship. Believe it or not, there were still three more Warrior abilities yet to be discovered, with the first of these arriving shortly thereafter at Level 39:
Metal Slash was a much more situational skill which was only useful when metal opponents showed up. The ability deals 150% Attack damage to metal enemies and also cannot miss these enemies which otherwise benefit from very high evasion. I don't really know why the DQ3 developers bothered to create an ability that can only be used in such rare circumstances, as there are exactly two monsters with the "metal" tag in the entire game (plus another two in the postgame dungeons). When Metal Slimes did appear, it was better for Xena to use Metal Slash than anything else since it would always hit and could sometimes deal 2 damage as pictured. The Metal Slimes only have 3 HP which meant that this ability was a real help in downing them. Then again, there are only a handful of places where the Metal Slimes can show up and Xena didn't need to grind for higher levels so this ability was almost entirely pointless in practice.
In terms of the wider plot, Xena had begun her quest for the six orbs needed to awake the magical bird Ramia. She had sailed from the Shrine of the Everbird east to Lanson and then all the way to Lozamii, followed by returning to this world's version of Europe to claim the remaining sparkle/secret spots that Xena hadn't already visited. I solved the rock-pushing puzzle in Edina yet again to claim the Bottomless Pot, then sailed through the frigid waters at the north of the continent over to claim the Ultimate Key. Xena had some tough random encounters while fighting her way through the gigantic forest in Siberia but was indeed able to hold her own against these nasty opponents with the help of her whip and frequent uses of Sword Dance. The whip was better against really big groups of enemies while Sword Dance was superior at taking out one or two enemies, especially if they were classified in different groups.
Once Xena had the Ultimate Key, she teleported back to Lanson to tackle the dungeon of Gaia's Navel. This is the one place in the gameplay where the player is required to use a solo character, which is an interesting challenge under normal circumstances but very, very easy in an actual solo game. It's also the only spot where Xena was able to ditch the Hero's coffin that she otherwise carted around everywhere, allowing me to take this picture above depicting Xena as a true solo adventurer. (One downside of the combat screenshots is that readers are usually seeing the zoomed-in view that doesn't capture the solo characters themselves, though I was used to seeing that long mane of curly purple hair in every battle.) Xena fought her way down to the bottom basement without issue where the Chiromancer boss was waiting for her:
This guy is a spellcaster and appears together with a Madvlad minion who will try to Sap away the player's defensive rating. The Chiromancer generally relies on its spells for damage and likes to spam Frizzle (52-62 fire damage) and Swoosh (26-46 wind damage) which caused me to bring double Asbestos Earrings on Xena along with her Magic Armor and Magic Shield. This resulted in the Chiromancer dealing zero damage whatsoever from Frizzle and only half damage from Swoosh to neutralize most of the threat in the boss fight. More importantly though, Xena wasn't some frail wanderer who had to turtle up defensively and hope to grind out a slow victory. She was instead a mighty Bodybuilder ready to pummel anything that stood in her way; I opened the combat by using Oomph Powder and then she went to work with Sword Dance. The first Sword Dance eviscerated the Madvlad and landed several hundred damage on the Chiromancer. The second Sword Dance struck with all four blows against the boss, hitting for an incredible 897 damage (!!!) and flattening the poor boss. Just so we're all clear, the Chiromancer only has 940 total HP which meant that Xena missed a one-shot kill by a tiny margin, sheesh.
Also, Sword Dance is *NOT* the strongest Warrior ability! 
That was coming down the pipeline soon enough.
Xena had mostly finished up exploring the Old World at this point and therefore shifted over to the largely empty New World continent. The traveling peddler who runs an item shop in Grimland had several useful items available for purchase, starting with the War Hammer and its 81 Attack rating. The Warrior is the only class in the game that can equip this massive hammer and it would be the best single-target weapon for some time to come. The merchant was also offering the Raging Bull Helm (which had no special properties but slightly higher Defense than what Xena had been using) along with the Flame Shield. This gave Xena a large collection of different shields she could equip: the Flame Shield (anti-ice), Ice Shield (anti-fire), Tempest Shield (anti-explosion), Magic Shield (25% spell defense), and the Dragon Shield (25% breath weapon defense). I typically went with the Magic Shield as the best general purpose option but there was lots of room here for customization depending on the specific opponent to be faced next.
Eventually Xena reached Level 43 which was one of the big milestone points that she had spent the whole game working towards. This level unlocked the Multislice ability which is truly one of the best abilities in all of DQ3. It was quite simple in how it operated, dealing 100% Attack (physical) damage to all foes on screen. In other words, this functioned like a far superior version of a boomerang attack, one that never lost any of its damage output for hitting multiple targets. It also didn't require that Xena equip one of the limited selection of boomerangs (which tend to have low Attack values compared to their contemporary items), as she could use powerful weapons that were intended for single-target attacks to damage everything at once. This was a sign that Xena was starting to hit the extremely strong lategame portion of the Warrior's gameplay, flipping from spending the whole early game unable to hit more than one opponent at a time into a new area-of-effect powerhouse that could always smash everything on screen.
There was a perfect opportunity to test this new ability in the form of the Theddon boss fight for the Green Orb. I had saved these Dying Fire and Phantasm enemies until unlocking Multislice as this is one boss that demands the ability to hit multiple targets simultaneously. There are three Dying Fires and three Phantasms in this combat and both of them can summon more reinforcements to the clash; Xena made sure to bring her anti-spell Magic Shield and Magic Armor along with double Aerofoil Earrings to completely negate the wind element damage from the Dying Fires. It became obvious right away that the monsters couldn't damage Xena at all, making the whole combat all about whether she could wipe them out faster than they could spawn reinforcements. Xena buffed up with Oomph Powder to double her damage and then went to work with Mutislice: the first such attack hit all six enemies for 360ish damage each, instantly wiping out the Phantasms. The Dying Fires were a bit sturdier at 559 HP apiece and they prolonged things by going nuts with the reinforcement summoning, spawning in about eight more Dying Fires over the course of the battle. Xena stayed calm and kept on Multislicing, having to reapply Oomph Powder one additional time but otherwise two-shotting the evil flames over and over again. They finally paused their reinforcements to launch an attack and that was that, the boss fight concluded with barely any damage taken at all.
The unlocking of Multislice completely changed how I approached combat with Xena. Now there was no need even for the Dragontail Whip any longer, which had certainly been a big upgrade but was still limited to targeting one "group" of enemies at a time. It also did less damage to each opponent hit which weakened the effect when fighting large groups of monsters. Multislice had no such limitations and it allowed Xena to hit everything on screen instantly and with no damage reduction, plus she could equip weapons with higher Attack rating like the War Hammer to boot. Thus there was really no reason not to Multislice the enemies in every single random encounter, which almost always wiped them all out on the first turn of combat. Xena had enough Strength by now to hit her opponents for 250 damage on average and virtually nothing had enough health to survive that in this portion of the gameplay. It was a case of Multislice, Multislice, Multislice, and more Multislice as the random encounters now sped past at record speed.
At 8 MP per casting though, wouldn't that simply run Xena out of magic points in a real hurry? Fortunately there was a solution to that issue as well: recruiting 50 friendly monsters had not only delivered Xena a collection of ten stat-boosting seeds, she also obtained the rare Goddess Ring as well. This accessory is intended for spellcasting characters since it awards 33 Wisdom (completely useless on Xena) along with the property of restoring MP over time as the character walked. The MP restoration was relatively slow but it was enough to keep Xena ALMOST self-sufficient on casting power, in practice slowly losing magic points over time as she gained back 6-7 MP and then spent 8 MP in the next random encounter. The rate of loss was slow enough that she didn't have to worry about using MP restoration items and that was good enough for me. Xena took off the Meteorite Bracer in order to wear the Goddess Ring, as feeding her something like two dozen Agility Seeds had made her fast enough to move first in combat regardless. And that's all that Agility does in this game; higher ranks of Agility don't increase evasion or anything like that so there was little benefit to equipping the Meteorite Bracer now that Xena was fast enough to outspeed virtually everything.
Xena spent time clearing out everything of value in the New World, including founding the Immigrant Town (which became Pittsburg after I named the Merchant character "Pitts") and raiding the Pirate's Den. Once all of that was finished, she returned to Jipang to confront the Orochi while using Multislice to clear out everything in the fiery dungeon leading up to the big snake. The Orochi only uses fire-based breath attacks (no fire elemental spells at all) which meant equipping the Dragon Shield and double Asbestos Earrings along with the armor with the strongest Defensive rating possible (at the time, the Earthenwear armor since Xena couldn't equip anything in the armor slot yet that reduced fire breath attacks). All told, this equipment setup was enough to reduce the Orochi's physical attacks down to 1 damage apiece while cutting the damage from its breath attacks by 75%. This is a very, very easy boss to itemize around and every solo character should be able to run this thing over.
And run this thing over is exactly what Xena proceeded to do. For both of the two Orochi battles, she used her standard Oomph Powder to start and then got to work hacking it to pieces with Sword Dance. The Orochi looked like it was in terrible pain when I captured the above screenshot, getting slashed four times at a combined total of 1100 damage. The Orochi has a grand total of, uh, 2300 HP in the first fight and 3300 HP in the second fight - ouch! Xena therefore came just short of two-shotting the Orochi down in its Lair, a boss fight in which she took a grand total of... 3 damage. I'm not exaggerating, the Orochi dealt all of 3 damage to Xena from a triplet of 1 damage blows. 
The boss refight did very slightly more damage from a Wildfire that hit for 11 damage but I think that Xena could handle it, heh. Three Oomph-boosted Sword Dances left the Orochi on critical health and a normal Sword Dance finished it off afterwards. What an absolutely crushing victory even if this was an easy boss.
Xena had explored everywhere that it was possible to travel normally in the overworld and therefore began the first part of the Silver Orb sequence in Manoza. In addition to the usual hidden seeds to be found throughout the castle town and in the surrounding wilderness, Xena also had the third monster arena to challenge with her army of friendly critters in tow. This arena holds the tier 5, tier 6, and tier 7 opponents to be faced and this is where the rival Pokemon teams can start to get pretty tough if the player hasn't been snapping up all of the recruitable monsters. I decided to use a slightly different team this time around, opting for Steelie the Metal Slime even though its stats were nominally lower than some of the other options. Steelie was essentially an unkillable tank, dealing low damage but never taking more than 1 damage per attack and having immunity to all elemental forms of damage. Along with an offensive spellcaster in the form of Cloud and Healie the Healslime, this team cleared its way past all three tiers without breaking a sweat. Watching the rival monsters attack and either deal 1 damage or miss entirely against Steelie was more fun that it should have been.
There were some useful rewards for winning these arena challenges: nine more stat-boosting seeds, two Prayer Rings, roughly 85,000 gold to inflate Xena's bank account, and then a genuinely useful new weapon. That was the Dragonsbane Claws which had slightly more Attack (87 to 81) over the War Hammer and could only be equipped the by Hero and Warrior classes. The Dragonsbane Claws also supposedly did more damage against "dragon" opponents, which sounded really cool but only affected 8 total monsters in the whole game, none of them bosses. I suppose Xena got a modest damage bonus against those Wyrtle and Wyrtoise things but this extra property wasn't much to write home about. Then she cleared her way through Manoza Cave where nothing of interest took place, Xena killing a bunch of the trapped treasure chests with Mimics inside and claiming the Mirror of Ra plot token item.
That brought her to the worst boss in the game:
As I've written in past reports, I have no idea why the developers decided to make the Boss Troll so strong relative to the other bosses. This stupid thing has 5500 HP (double the Orochi and higher than Baramos), gets two actions every single round, and doesn't waste its time casting spells that can be resisted with the proper equipment. Instead it uses constant physical attacks which, worst of all, can critically strike using the Troll's "Desperation Strike" for massive damage. Critical strikes (mostly) ignore the player's defensive rating and can easily hit for 200 damage at a time, in a game where there is no item that restores more than 80-90 HP and the player healthbar is hard capped at 999 HP. Obviously the player is intended to be using a full party here with a healer that can cast spells to offset the Boss Troll's damage, which unfortunately isn't an option for many of the solo classes. This whole situation is probably an unintentional oversight on the part of the developers but the Boss Troll represents a dire threat that every solo character must work hard to overcome.
I wanted to get some more data on this boss and specifically if there was any AI scripting that the developers had put in place for its attack routines. My plan was to throw away Xena's first attempt at the Boss Troll and simply defend for as long as possible. Would the Boss Troll use all of its attacks immediately, or were some of them held back in reserve by the developers, only to be activated when it dropped low on health? Nearly all of the bosses in Octopath Traveler were programmed that way and I was curious if Dragon Quest 3 would work the same way. In this area my hopes were dashed almost immediately: the Boss Troll was willing to use everything right out of the gate while sitting on full health, including the dreaded Desperation Strikes. I had previously thought that the boss didn't use this ability until falling low on health, but nope, that was completely wrong. This finding will make the Boss Troll *MUCH* harder for some solo classes, since every attempt at the boss could get wiped out immediately by a series of Desperation Strikes, but at least I now had more knowledge about how this thing operated.
OK, no more playing around. It was time for Xena to break out the final Warrior class ability which she had just learned at the ridiculously late requirement of Level 48. Cutting Edge is a single-target ability that deals massive damage to its target: 300% Attack damage to one opponent! Seriously, that in-game descriptive text was just pathetic ("an overhead swing that can inflict a good deal of damage") and drastically undersold the power of this endgame blow. Cutting Edge is fully boostable by Oomph Powder and together they allow the Warrior class to hit for 6x normal damage in one of the game's highest damaging forms of attack. Xena had been dealing around 250 damage with her standard melee attacks which should translate into 1500ish damage if the math lined up correctly. It was time to test out the Cutting Edge:
Oh yeah, that did the trick! 
A titanic hammerblow rained down on the Boss Troll and "inflicted a good deal of damage" which was right in line with what the numbers had predicted. Cutting Edge completely trivialized the rest of the Boss Troll encounter since the green creature couldn't keep up with Xena's damage output. She had buffed up with Oomph Powder on the first turn of the fight and then started blasting the thing with Cutting Edge. Three rounds of the attack inflicted roughly 4500 damage, followed by having to pause to refresh Oomph status after a low roll on the 3 turn duration, followed by a fourth Cutting Edge finishing off the boss with a victory. The troll used two Desperation Strikes in a mere five turns of action (much more often than it typically breaks out those crits) and it still was nowhere near enough. Cutting Edge was simply too strong.
Hopefully the reader can start to see why the Warrior class becomes so ridiculous after unlocking all of its abilities. Multislice powers through random encounters with ease, hitting everything on screen for high damage and outperforming the boomerang attacks used by other classes. Then for single-target bosses, the Warrior can fall back on Cutting Edge which trivializes pretty much everything. I didn't even need to itemize properly for these opponents as Xena could probably kill everything faster than they could kill her just by spamming this move. It was such a contrast to the weak early game for this class that's it's hard for me to put the transformation into words. Our ugly little duckling had grown up into a beautiful swan.
All of the solo classes thus far had been hitting Level 50 right around the Boss Troll and Xena was no exception. (That pattern will falter down the road since some classes have higher XP requirements and I expect some of them to need to do serious level grinding to get past this opponent.) The standout stat for Xena was unsurprisingly her Strength, which was slightly higher (351 to 339) than my solo Hero had possessed at the same moment in time. That was the prime benefit of the Bodybuilder personality, though Xena had paid for it elsewhere by having poor Luck even with her stint as a Lucky Devil and truly appalling Wisdom. She was doing great in the key stats of Strength and Resilience though, and she was "good enough" in Luck for the moment, which was all that mattered. Who cared if the Hero had 100 more points of Agility at this point in time? Xena was already fast enough to out-speed her opponents and excess Agility above that didn't matter. Note as well that I had equipped the Mighty Armlet and Weightlifer's Belt to add a combined 29 Attack (and a very temporary Paragon personality) for the Boss Troll fight. This was probably a mistake and most classes really do want to go with extra Defense from a pair of Spirit Bracers; I just wanted the damage screenshots from Cutting Edge to look as cool as possible, heh.
Defeating the Boss Troll gave Xena her own personal Mod Rod, which I used in the Faerie Village to purchase 500 copies of Special Medicine. That's not an exaggeration either: those things only cost 70 gold and I wanted a full supply of the items in case Xena needed them since she had no spellcasting for healing whatsoever. I also took the time to collect the dozen additional friendly monsters that can be recruited using the Mirror of Ra, which could have been done before fighting the Boss Troll but there had been no particular benefit for Xena from doing so. Then she traded in her Mod Rod for the Lover's Locket to reveal the small Ghost Ship dungeon:
I don't think that I've shown a picture of this place before which looked fantastically spooky here in the HD-2D remake. The monsters inside the Ghost Ship were a mixture of undead and watery foes, with these pictured Squidzillas being the toughest opponents for Xena. They actually required two uses of Multislice instead of dying in a single hit like everything else, though they did pay out more than 2000 XP apiece for Xena's efforts. She found the Locket and used it to pass Olivia's Promontory and then grabbed the Mountaincleaver sword from inside the Shrine of Shackles. Before heading off to the volcano in the Necrogond, I made a detour back to the Immigrant Town of Pittsburg to see if the Yellow Orb event had triggered. To my delight I found that this event had indeed taken place: Xena was able to claim the fifth orb after the Merchant overseeing the town had been thrown in jail. This was relevant because unlocking the Yellow Orb also upgrades the weapon store inside the Immigrant Town to its highest tier, with the little shop that previously only sold basic herbs now having some powerful stuff available. Xena was able to purchase the Silver Shield and Mythril Helm which both had upgraded Defensive rating over her current gear, along with the Dragon Mail that had high Defense and 25% reduced damage from both fire spells and fire breath attacks. I hadn't been sure if it was possible to unlock the Dragon Mail before completing the Maw of the Necrogond dungeon and this confirmed that it was indeed available.
This Dragon Mail would immediately see use against the next boss:
The Garboyle was reminiscient of the Orochi for being a boss that can largely be solved by equipping the correct items ahead of time. This flying creature loves to spam a mixture of spells and fire-based breath attacks which prompted Xena to erect a twofold defense. For the Garboyle's spells, she made sure to use the Staff of Sentencing to cast the Bounce spell, which would reflect all incoming spells right back into the face of the creature. That took care of the Boom spell (explosion element) and meant that Xena could itemize solely to defend against fire element breath attacks of the Garboyle, Wildfire and Inferno. The combination of the Dragon Shield, Dragon Mail, and double Asbestos Earrings completely neutralized those breath attacks and left the Garboyle unable to do anything other than launch weak melee attacks. Once the Bounce spell was in place, Xena could use her standard Oomph Powder into Cutting Edge offensive setup; I had earlier found with my solo Monster Wrangler that it's not too hard to keep two buffs in play at once, though going up to three tends to become too unworkable. Cutting Edge hit for 1400 damage at a time and made short work of the Garboyle's 5200 HP. It was nearly dead after three such blows and I had Xena hang around defending until the Garboyle killed itself with a reflected Kasizz spell - hah! That was a fun way to take out this easy opponent.
The biggest dungeon of the game was next in the Maw of the Necrogond. The massive underground cavern seemed to pass by quicker for Xena, perhaps because I'm getting used to the dungeon layout by now, or maybe because of the way that Multislice decimated the monsters so badly. Even against the strong enemies lurking inside, there were very opponents that could survive a single casting of the ability and for the most part everything collapsed like wheat before the scythe. And I use that analogy quite literally because the animation for Multislice would hit the monsters from left to right, causing them to collapse in order just as if a massive blade had been swung across their collective midsections. This was particularly amusing when I caught the animation halfway as in the screenshot above, getting to enjoy those humorous death animations based on the Toriyama monster designs. The only enemies that could survive a casting of Multislice were the Trolls (with 400 HP) and then the Wyrtoises who had a lesser 192 HP but very high Defense and 25% physical resistance to reduce their damage taken. Everything else fell in a single blow and the random encounters sped past quickly with Xena taking little in the way of damage.
There was an interesting armor found in a treasure chest on the second basement level. This was the Spiked Armor which had a higher Defense rating than anything that Xena currently owned along with the unique property of reflecting 50% of physical damage taken back at the attacker. The Warrior is the only class other than the Hero who can equip this armor and it sounded fantastic for a solo character who would always be the one tanking incoming damage. However, I found it to be a bit underwhelming in practice: the main goal for solo characters that can't heal themselves is to mitigate damage taken, not get blasted with heavy damage so it can be reflected! The Spiked Armor didn't have any elemental or breath attack protection on it which made it a suboptimal choice for most boss fights. I tried using it for random encounters and it didn't do that much there either, useful to get Trolls to kill themselves if they pulled out a Desperation Strike but otherwise not too noticeable. While Xena held onto the Spiked Armor for potential use later, it didn't impress me as much as I'd hoped.
Then there were also these Infanticore monsters that looked like evil flying lions with six legs. These things could drop an item that I wanted very badly for Xena, the Shield of Shame that my solo Monster Wrangler had used to good effect. The Shield of Shame cuts all physical damage taken by 50% at the cost of passing on that damage taken to another party member... which would be no one for a solo character like Xena! This would obviously be really useful and after clearing the Maw of the Necrogond, Xena returned to the dungeon in the hopes of farming one of these shields. My online reference source stated that the shield was a 1 in 32 drop from the Infanticores which meant it shouldn't be too hard to turn up. Well, either I was insanely unlucky at getting that stupid shield to drop or more likely my online source was incorrect. I killed HUNDREDS of those stupid Infanticores, enough that Xena leveled all the way up to Level 65 in the process. She also found three different Seeds of Defense at 1 in 64 drop odds from the Wyrtoises that appeared alongside the Infanticores and a Garish Garb at the same drop rate from a Goodybag monster. I strongly suspect that the online reference source was incorrect and that the Shield of Shame actually has 1 in 256 odds of dropping based on how many monsters that Xena killed without seeing the rare item appear. Since my solo Monster Wrangler had gotten the item to drop here I knew that it was at least possible, but I decided to move on with Xena rather than waste any further time chasing after this phantom.
All of this time wasn't a complete loss, however. I had been running from combats that didn't contain at least one Infanticore and I discovered that Xena never failed to escape, not even one time. I gathered from this that the running formula probably involves the party's level in some respect, as Xena's level was much higher than it was supposed to be here and that would explain why she was able to flee so easily. That's only a guess since I've been unable to track down how running actually works in this game. I also tested out the elemental properties of Xena's weapons: she had both the Thunderbolt Blade and Blizzard Blade available which should theoretically be tied to the lightning and ice elements respectively. However, that proved *NOT* to be the case, with the Wyrtoises having 75% ice resistance but still taking the normal 25% physical damage resistance instead when Xena attacked them with the Blizzard Blade. Clearly both the Thunderbolt and Blizzard Blades were still dealing physical damage and did not convert over to their nominal elements. This was in contrast to the Gusterang and Flametang boomerangs, which *DID* swap the elements of their attacks over to wind and fire when I used them with the Hero on other playthroughs. DQ3 seems to be really inconsistent in terms of how these items work, heh.
Xena claimed the Silver Orb for completing the Maw of the Necrogond and then unlocked the magical flying bird Ramia. I went through the trouble of claiming all of the remaining sparkling and secret spots which were worth about 25 more stat-boosting seeds, including 6 Strength and 5 Defense seeds. Useful as this was for building Xena's character, it's not that interesting to read about so I'll skip ahead to Baramos' Lair itself. The monster mix was similar to the previous dungeon with the addition of the beefy Living Statue enemies, who had enough health and physical resistance to survive the first use of Multislice. They were the only thing that didn't die instantly to this ability though which made for another easy dungeon. The only noteworthy piece of loot was the pictured Headsman's Axe which had another 9 points of Attack above the Blizzard Blade and the unusual property of 1/8 chance to critically strike along with 1/8 odds to miss entirely. I was hoping that this property would only apply to direct melee attacks, not abilities like Multislice and Cutting Edge, however that was not the case and Xena started missing a bunch of foes when she swapped over to this item. A modest +9 Attack (going from 558 Attack to 567 Attack) was absolutely not worth missing 1/8th of the time so Xena swapped back to the boring but reliable Blizzard Blade.
I took advantage of the teleportal outside Baramos' chamber to reconfigure Xena over to the same equipment setup as she had used against the Garboyle. This anti-fire breath defense would completely neutralize the Inferno ability on the boss while Bounce from the Staff of Strife would lock out his spellcasting. With that preparation out of the way, it was time to begin the boss fight:
Unlike his winged minion, Baramos has a smarter AI that stops casting spells when the Bounce spell is in effect. He occasionally used Dazzle but that was it, instead spending his rounds mostly physically striking along with using the Inferno breath attack. Xena had already nullified Inferno with her equipment while Baramos' melee attacks were hitting for around 30 damage at a time. That wasn't insignificant but it also wasn't going to kill Xena very quickly, not when she was starting the boss fight with more than 900 HP at her disposal. Baramos could be somewhat unpredictable because he would sometimes take only a single action in a turn of combat, then at other points he would act three times in a row which was obviously far more dangerous. This boss also regenerates 65-85 HP per round which could be troublesome for a longer, drawn-out battle in a solo game.
Fortunately if there was one thing that Xena had in abundance, it was raw strength as channeled through her Warrior class abilities. She made sure to put up the Bounce wall on the first turn, followed with Oomph Powder on the second turn, and then it was time for Baramos to ride the pain train. Cutting Edge was hitting for 6x normal damage which translated into nearly 1800 damage even after factoring in the high Defense on this boss. Healing for 80 damage per round was utterly insignificant in the wake of the beating that Xena was dishing out and she rapidly sliced apart Baramos' 5400 health. Two Cutting Edges dropped Baramos into the yellow range on health, a third one put him into the red area, and the fourth one finished him off in style by going critical at roughly 2% odds:
Well that was certainly easy! 
You would have thought that saving the world would be a little bit harder for a solo individual with no healing whatsoever. All of the damage that Xena had taken in this fight had come from physical attacks, and if she'd been able to procure the Shield of Shame, Baramos wouldn't even have been able to deal 100 damage against her. Hopefully Xena could get a copy of that thing somewhere in the upcoming underworld. Up next was Alefgard and the concluding sections of the gameplay - stay tuned!
