Xena was now entering into the final portion of DQ3's gameplay as she traveled to the realm of eternal night known as Alefgard. It's always a bit jarring to go from the tense clash with Baramos into an open world scenario once again, as Xena would spend the next few hours roaming around the new world map collecting medals and stat-boosting seeds without any real urgency. My prior solo characters rushed over to Cantlin as soon as possible to unlock the Metal Wing Boomerang from the final monster arena. That wasn't a weapon that Xena could equip, however, and therefore I saw no particular need to attempt the monster arena until she'd had the chance to collect more of the new critters here in the underworld. Instead, I sent Xena eastward to the town of Rimuldar which is probably the one that's most difficult to reach from the starting area around Tantegel. Rimuldar's weapon shop had multiple pieces of new gear for Xena to test out, starting with the Bastard Sword and its 113 Attack value. This is the best weapon that the Warrior class can equip before hitting the postgame, or at least the best weapon that doesn't bear a terrible curse - more on that in a minute.
Xena was also able to equip the Flame Armor which I decided to equip for the moment due to its high Defense rating. This armor naturally protects against ice spells and ice breath attacks, which would make it fantastic against Zoma if the Shimmering Dress wasn't an even better choice. Then in the shield slot Xena had an embarassment of riches since she could equip nearly every shield in the game. This Silver Shield had higher Defense than anything in Xena's possession so I purchased a copy, only to be quickly outdone by the Power Shield sold in Damdara which had a higher Defense score and cast the Midheal spell when used in battle. Then the Mirror Shield in Kol had even more Defense and 20% odds to reflect hostile spells back at the caster, though I still preferred equipping shields with lower defense but some kind of elemental protection for most bosses. I also wanted to farm a copy of the Shield of Shame which had refused to show up earlier, though that would have to wait until seeing the Franticore monsters in Zoma's Citadel.
Next up was the long process of sailing around the world while looting it of its various hidden treasures. There's a lot of good stuff to be found on the inner sea surrounding Zoma's hideout so I went there first with Xena, notably grabbing this Sword of Ruin in the process. This weapon has an even higher Attack of 135 and carried an increased chance to critically strike. Unfortunately, as the name suggests it also bears a curse with 25% odds to cause paralysis in the wielder, with the user simply wasting their turn doing nothing much like a Goof-Off character's antics. I tested out the Sword of Ruin with Xena since it can only be used by the Hero and Warrior classes, and while the damage was slightly higher than when using the Bastard Sword, it wasn't enough of an increase to be worth the Final Fantasy 5 Chicken Knife effect of wasting 1 in every 4 attacks. This is due to the way that the math works in DQ3: going from 113 Attack to 135 Attack sounds like a lot (20% increase), but when you add in Xena's 500 points of base Strength, the actual increase in Attack was 613 to 635 (less than 4% increase). That was obviously not worth throwing away a quarter of all actions for Xena, ah well.
She also sailed southeast to the Sanctum at the corner of the map where the Blessed Bikini could be found nearby in an oceanside secret spot. The Blessed Bikini does not carry any elemental protection from spells or breath attacks, however it did have higher Defense rating than anything else in Xena's equipment bag (even higher than the Dragon and Flame Armors) while also healing her HP for each step taken. This was better than any of Xena's other options and amusingly she was now restoring both HP and MP from her equipped Goddess Ring. Who needed an inn? The Blessed Bikini also changed Xena's appearance into a two piece swimsuit, though that had little effect because the default Warrior outfit was already a chain mail bikini. I think that she may have been MORE covered up when using this alternate sprite design.
Here's a picture of Xena while wearing the bikini armor for the curious; I moved her over to the other party slot so that the interface wouldn't obscure her sprite design. I was amused at how Xena carried her Bastard Sword outstretched in a single hand even though that weapon type was always used two-handed in real life; I guess Xena was just that much of a badass, heh. Anyway, Xena's exploration of the world map took several hours to complete and wasn't that interesting to report on so I'll stick to the highlights here. She picked up several dozen of the stat-boosting seeds and gained more than two dozen levels in the process, maxing out her health at 999 HP sometime around Level 75. I ended up with a whole bunch of Seeds of Life and Stamina that never needed to be used and Xena could have easily reached 1200 HP if the gameplay didn't have that artificial limit.
She completed both of the optional side dungeons in the underworld, with this picture being taken from the Craggy Cave since I don't think that I've captured an image from that area previously. Random encounters were trivial since nearly everything that Xena came across would die to a single usage of Multislice. She was dealing around 300 damage to everything on screen and there are few monsters that had enough health to survive a casting of Multislice. The Craggy Cave did have one interesting new form of equipment: the Hate Mail which was another cursed item. The Hate Mail can only be equipped by the Hero and Warrior, with the property of reducing all spell damage by 75% (!) at the tradeoff of 33% odds to paralyze the user at the start of each round. I actually thought that this might be usable for an upcoming boss fight though it was clearly impractical for the moment when trashing random encounter mobs.
Once the whole world had been explored and Xena had added two dozen additional friendly monsters to her team, I returned to Cantlin to tackle the final two arena tiers. Xena was able to benefit from having a much wider selection of monsters available thanks to having cleared the entirety of Alefgard outside of Zoma's Citadel. I had even gone halfway up the Tower of Rubiss since there were two friendly monsters inside that I wanted to use in these combats. This allowed me to select a team of Polly the Chimaera, Green Giant the Green Dragon, and Mercurio the Mermaniac who all had monster levels around 50. This team proved to be far stronger than the Slimes and Prestidigitators that I had been forced to use with previous solo characters. The Green Dragon hit extremely hard and had tons of MP available (handy since the monster AI loves to waste them) while the Chimaera and Mermaniac were both healers who could keep the team in a safe position on health. I set both of them to the "Focus on Healing" tactic and together they were able to keep everyone from dying across the tier 8 and tier 9 battles. Whereas my previous solo characters had to reroll these fights repeatedly until getting lucky, this team managed to win both of the arena tiers on the first try and without anyone dying in the process. The whole arena sequence was much, much easier for Xena and it's good to know that exploring the entirety of Alefgard can trivialize this arena challenge if necessary.
I also want to highlight how Xena's stat gains from leveling started to fall off noticeably at extremely high levels. Her Strength growths remained solid thanks to the combination of Warrior class and Bodybuilder personality, though even they had decreased from 4-5 points at earlier levels down to 2-3 points here at the upper tiers. Everything else was basically garbage though as this screenshot highlighted. Health was capped at 999 which made the Stamina stat completely pointless, and then when Wisdom failed to increase it meant that the MP category also remained static. Elsewhere, Xena gained a whole 1 point of Agility and 1 point of Luck, which I guess I should have been happy to see because there were some levels where she gained no Luck at all. Fortunately she had indeed managed to hit the hidden Luck target that Xena had been working towards the whole game: the final expected Luck is 328 at Level 99 and Xena was just hitting that value (she had 327 Luck after discounting the +50 Luck from her Elevated Shoes). It looked as though her stint as a Lucky Devil back earlier in the game had worked as I intended, with Xena sitting solidly in the "normal" Luck category though well short of the 360 Luck she would need for the "high" Luck grouping.
The Tower of Rubiss was equally uneventful with Multislice, Multislice, Multislice cutting apart everything in Xena's path. For the boss fight at the top, I equipped her with the Dragon Robe and Dragon Shield plus two Asbestos Earrings to defend against Baramos' breath attacks, which together would completely nullify all damage from Inferno. I planned to use the Staff of Strife for Bounce to eliminate enemy spellcasting and then hopefully count on Xena's high Defense to tank the physical attacks from Baramos. Time to get started:
The Soul of Baramos fight did not play out quite the way that I was expecting. Xena started out by using the Staff of Strife for Bounce protection and then buffed up with Oomph Powder on the second turn. However, the two Ashdemon minions were more annoying than normal this time around as they both cast Kabuff to boost the Defense of the whole enemy party. Double Kabuff increased their Defense rating by 25% and reduced Xena's damage by an even larger percentage, enough that it would require three Multislices instead of two castings to wipe out the minions. This also provided enough time for the Ashdemons to cast Oomph onto the Soul of Baramos which doubled his Attack value and that legitimately was a real problem. The Soul of Baramos has a "smart AI" that stops casting spells if the player puts themselves in Bounce status and for whatever reason this boss chose to use mostly physical attacks, rarely wasting time on Inferno breath attacks that dealt no damage. Baramos hit for roughly 30 damage from a normal attack, which became 60-70 damage when boosting with Oomph, and even Xena's 999 HP started to run out in a hurry when Baramos attacked twice on the same turn. Now Xena was far from helpless and could hit back very hard indeed:
The Soul of Baramos only has 4300 HP and this Oomph-boosted Cutting Edge landed for 1988 damage so the boss couldn't last for long against this kind of punishment. Two such Cutting Edges were enough to finish off the combat when combined together with the damage from the earlier Multislices. It had not been an easy fight for Xena though, with her health down in the "yellow" range thanks to the punishment from those accumulated melee blows along with a single Desperation Strike that Baramos had landed earlier in the fight. (Interestingly, the damage from the monster crit had *NOT* been doubled by the minion Oomph spell which was a major blessing; getting hit for 400 damage from one attack would have felt super unfair.) In retrospect it might have been better not to use the Staff of Strife at all, since Xena had to waste two rounds establishing and renewing the Bounce protection only to shift Baramos away from spellcasting and over to melee attacks. The real solution here would have been equipping the Shield of Shame to cut physical damage in half - if only the stupid thing had dropped earlier!
There was nowhere left to go except Zoma's Citadel which Xena was now able to reach courtesy of one very colorful Rainbow Drop. This final dungeon is quite large and packed full of dangerous monsters, some of which were sturdy enough to survive a casting of Multislice and therefore live long enough to inflict some damage. Xena's current equipment setup had no elemental protection at all which meant that she simply tanked damage from enemy Kacrackle and Kasizzle spells, then healed it back via the walking regeneration on the Blessed Bikini. There's a miniboss fight on the first floor against a sequence of Stone Guardian statues, three pairs of them fought in a row with no opportunity to heal. These stone opponents are dangerous because of their ability to critically strike and Xena found them to be rather tricky since they could debuff her physical blows with Attack Attacker and had enough health to survive even an Oomph-boosted use of Multislice. After the first pair, I swapped over to using Cutting Edge instead which was strong enough to one-shot them and limited Xena to facing a single counterattack at a time. She won without further issue and continued onwards into the citadel.
There were a number of useful treasures to be found on the lower floors of the dungeon, especially the Shimmering Dress armor. I mentioned this in my previous solo Monster Wrangler report, but this item is basically the reason why it's necessary to play these characters as women instead of men: it has one of the highest Defense ratings in the game along with 33% damage reduction to all spells and breath attacks. This was finally something that outclassed the Blessed Bikini and Xena swapped back to her old visual appearance. The Sage's Stone was also handy in case Xena ever needed to heal in battle, with infinite uses of the Multiheal spell, and then I was hoping that the Franticore flying lions would finally drop a copy of the Shield of Shame. They were a common enemy in Zoma's Citadel and I crossed my fingers as Xena proceeded deeper into the bottom dungeon levels. Just as she was nearing the final floor, the above message popped up and a Shield of Shame appeared! 
I was about to head back to the entrance area and grind for the thing which now wouldn't be necessary - excellent!
OK, time for a quick moment of silliness. Zoma's Citadel contains another cursed weapon named the Double-Edged Sword and this thing is indeed the weapon with the highest Attack value before hitting the postgame content. I mentioned above why the 135 Attack on the Sword of Ruin wasn't worth having to deal with its paralyzation effect, not when the base Strength stat was doing most of the work in calculating Xena's physical damage. The Double-Edged Sword carried an even more ridiculous curse to make its 148 Attack not worth considering: the wielder of this weapon takes 25% of the damage that they inflict! For the Warrior class and its near-total inability to heal itself, this was a certain recipe for Xena to kill herself with reflected damage. I went back to Aliahan and tested the evil sword by buffing up with Oomph Powder and then using Cutting Edge on a very unfortunate Slime. Xena dealt 3100 damage against this lightly defended target... only to hit herself for 786 damage in return. That, uh, did not seem like it would be very helpful against Zoma and his upcoming boss gauntlet. 
Anyway, Xena had to face off against four bosses in succession starting with King Hydra:
This monster that downed Ortega tends to be easier than the other ending bosses and Xena was well equipped to hack off its multiple heads. I thought about what equipment to bring and decided on the Shield of Shame along with the Shimmering Dress and double Asbestos Earrings (unfortunately the Warrior class had no interesting options for the helmet slot). I could have brought the Dragon Shield to remove the damage from the Hydra's Inferno breath attack completely, however I thought it was better to bring the Shield of Shame and cut physical damage in half while the Shimmering Dress and Asbestos Earrings were together enough to reduce Inferno's damage by 83%. It normally deals 80-100 damage which was cut here to a minimal 13-17 damage, with the Hydra's melee attacks now hitting for about 20 damage instead of their normal 40. None of that was very scary and the Hydra also wasted a bunch of rounds trying to frighten Xena or put her to sleep, none of which worked. For her part, Xena used Oomph Powder and then began hitting with Cutting Edge for 2000 damage at a time. Three rounds of that were enough to drop the monster with Xena still having 879 HP remaining - easy stuff.
I decided to get a little bit silly for the Soul of Baramos refight. Rather than use the same equipment setup or rely on the Staff of Strife for Bounce defense against hostile spells, I instead equipped Xena with a SECOND cursed item in the form of the Hate Mail. As I mentioned above, this item cut enemy spell damage by 75% at the cost of having 1 in 3 odds to paralyze Xena on any round of combat. Along with the Shield of Shame and double Asbestos Earrings, Xena had 50% resistance against physical damage, 75% reduction of spell damage, and 50% reduction of enemy breath attacks (Inferno in this case). My hope was that this would be enough defensive protection to absorb the occasional wasted round due to paralyzation.
The plan was sound enough though Xena ran into some ugliness in terms of RNG luck while executing it. The Soul of Baramos was completely locked out from dealing physical damage, attacking and hitting for 5 damage at a time thanks to his low Attack rating. This boss is essentially a spellcaster and didn't do well when confronted with such a heavy Defense setup; I really should have used the Staff of Strife to force his AI routine into using physical attacks that went nowhere. Instead, I simply had Xena use Oomph Powder and start caveman smashing with Cutting Edge. The Soul of Baramos liked to spam the Kaboom spell and its Inferno breath attack, each of which landed for damage in the 40-50 range. That would never have been sufficient to defeat Xena before she could knock over Baramos except that, ummm, the cursed effect started kicking in. The cursed penalty started kicking in *A LOT*. Xena was all setup with Oomph buff in place and she had her Cutting Edge attack nullified once, then twice, then three times. That forced her to refresh Oomph Powder and meanwhile Baramos was chipping away at her healthbar. The boss landed first one Desperation Strike for 100 damage, then a second one, and Xena was still fiddling with being cursed. All told, she failed to attack FIVE TIMES due to the curse effect and died as a result, when any one of those Cutting Edges landing would have won the fight. Sheesh! 
That seemed like really bad RNG luck so I tried the fight a second time. Oomph Powder on the first turn, then three Cutting Edges with none of them failing via curse effect: Xena won the battle on the fourth turn with 791 HP remaining. Wow - have I mentioned that DQ3 seems to have more randomness to its combat engine than a game like Octopath Traveler?
Now for the third and most difficult opponent of the group, the Bones of Baramos, an enemy that outclasses Zoma himself in most respects. The Bones of Baramos has a preposterously high Attack value of 545 and wears down the player with repeated physical strikes while regenerating health at a fantastic rate (300-400 HP per round). It can only be beaten through burst damage that overcomes the regen factor and takes advantage of the low health total (2960 HP) on the undead creature. I was still in experimentation mode and decided to test out yet another cursed item with Xena here: the Mask of Implacability has a truly insane Defense score of 255 - the second best option for Xena was the Great Helm with 67 Defense! This was enough to get Xena up to 890 Defense while also wearing the Shield of Shame to cut physical damage taken in half. Surely that would be enough to rein in this monster's attack, right? Not so much: it was still hitting Xena for 40-50 damage at a time even into that ridiculous Defense rating. Then there was the "inconvenient curse" to consider: the Mask of Implacability put Xena into permanent confusion status where she refused to follow my commands in battle. She kept wasting each round trying to run away, or standing around in place, or attacking without using Oomph Powder or Cutting Edge. Long story short, this zany idea didn't work out though it had been fun to try.
Instead, Xena equipped the Shield of Shame for its physical resistance along with the rest of her normal defensive gear and prepared to face the onslaught. With no elemental damage on the Bones of Baramos to worry about, I had swapped Xena over to the Spiked Armor for this battle, the item with the unique property of reflecting 50% of physical damage taken back onto its attacker. I found that Xena was now taking roughly 80 damage at a time from the boss; knocking 40 of that damage back onto the Bones of Baramos was relatively minor, but every little bit helped in chipping away at that regeneration. There was no room for subtlety here, no clever tricks that Xena could employ, it was simply a matter of buffing up with Oomph Powder and then going to work with Cutting Edge. Xena's task was made harder when the Bones of Baramos used Attack Attacker, the Monster Wrangler ability that debuffs physical damage by 25%. Any decrease in Xena's offensive output was super dangerous here since she was essentially swimming upstream into a hostile current by having to deal with that regeneration every round.
Fortunately Xena had a ton of Strength accumulated over the whole game along with a very, very strong ability in Cutting Edge. Even after being debuffed, Xena was still hitting for nearly 1500 damage at a time which was more than enough to overcome the ticking regen on the Bones of Baramos. Two Cutting Edges came up a little short of getting the job done, then the third one was enough to seal the deal. Xena therefore won the battle at the start of the fourth turn of combat, with the Bones of Baramos having only taken three total rounds of action up to that point. Yet Xena won the boss fight while sitting at 414 HP, having taken nearly 600 damage in three rounds on a character with high Resilience that was also wearing the Shield of Shame (!) The Bones of Baramos is absolutely insane and it's not much of a stretch to say that this is the most dangerous foe in the whole game. I have a lot of different thoughts about how to get other solo classes past this guy but I'm not eager to try them out.
Xena was a strong enough solo character that I decided to try something different against Zoma:
I refrained from using the Sphere of Light as the player is supposed to do, instead running the whole climactic boss fight against "blue Zoma" instead. This version of the boss is relatively similar overall but has slightly higher base stats, does not cast the Kaswoosh spell or use the Channel Anger ability, and most importantly regenerates about 300 HP per round. This package makes blue Zoma a tankier opponent than the default version (which lacks any health regeneration) while also counterintuitively making blue Zoma weaker from an offensive standpoint, limiting him to a single elemental form of damage (ice) and removing the dangerous Channel Anger buff to his magical forms of damage. I itemized Xena accordingly: she went back to the Shimmering Dress along with double Antifreeze Earrings for 83% resistance against both ice spells and ice breath attacks, while also sticking with the Shield of Shame for 50% physical resistance. I thought this would work better than using the Flame Shield for complete ice protection at the cost of taking full physical damage from Zoma's attacks.
In practice, Zoma mostly used his Kacrackle spell and C-c-cold Breath ability which were each landing for 20-25 damage at a time. Zoma rarely used his physical attack which was hitting for roughly 40 damage after being cut in half by the Shield of Shame. That damage output was pretty low and far, far inferior to what the Bones of Baramos had been dishing out, low enough that Xena could last for quite a while before running out of health. I followed the usual drill, Oomph Powder into Cutting Edge, and the damage race began to see whose lifebar would expire first. Zoma has 8300 HP and Xena was netting a gain of about 1400 damage per round (hitting for just under 1700 HP and then 300 of it being healed back), though she did have to renew the Oomph buff frequently as Zoma canceled it with his Disruptive Wave ability. It was still worthwhile to keep using Oomph Powder as Xena could always get two rounds of boosted attack, sometimes three rounds, and that more than payed for the round wasted reapplying it.
That's really all that I have to say about this boss fight. Xena kept buffing herself with Oomph Powder and slamming the boss with Cutting Edge; blue Zoma never changed his attack routine or broke out the monster critical hit from a Desperation Strike. Xena proved to be the tankier individual as she was still standing when Zoma's health ran out:
This may have even been easier than fighting against the default "orange Zoma"; I'll need to do more experimentation another time to check and see if the blue Zoma is completely unable to critically strike or if Xena had simply gotten lucky. It's weird how Zoma in either form is so much easier of an opponent than the Bones of Baramos, turning into more of an afterthought than a true final challenge. In any case, Xena managed to escape from the collapsing Citadel using the power of cut scenes and then had to watch the do-nothing Hero character get all of the credit for saving the kingdom. That guy was preening and posing with his sword, a dumb schmuck who was still sitting at Level 1 having never defeated even a single monster! The histories of Alefgard really goofed when it came to recording what actually happened in the time of Erdrick.
Here were the final stats for Xena at Level 99 while wearing her most common endgame equipment; these numbers are boosted by 50 Luck from the Elevating Shoes and 33 Wisdom from the Goddess Ring. Strength was by far Xena's best stat as I had always expected it to be, though notably even while running the Bodybuilder personality for the whole game she was still more than 100 points behind the stupidly overpowered Hero class. The Hero typically ends the game with 492 Strength against a mere 370 Strength on the Warrior class which meant that the Bodybuilder personality had very slightly closed the gap against my solo Hero's Vamp personality. The Hero also finished a full 100 points ahead in Resilience (which is one of the Warrior's best stats!) and 200-300 points ahead in Agility, Wisdom, and Luck. No one else can really compare with the Hero in any of the base stats and playing some of the other classes as solo games really drives home how ridiculous the child of Ortega happens to be.
Xena also finished the game at 334 Luck which was a near-perfect bullseye for my stat targeting. My goal had been to reach the expected Luck target of 328 at Level 99 and I had erred on the side of being cautious to ensure that Xena would reach her goal. The stint as a Lucky Devil worked absolutely perfectly and I was delighted to find that my predicted math had wound up right where I expected. I should be able to tweak the stats of future characters very precisely to ensure that they avoid wasting valuable stats in categories that they don't need while getting as much as possible of the stats they want. For example, Xena technically only had to be within plus or minus 10% of the Luck target (anywhere from 290 to 360) to get the "normal" Luck damage pattern. She could have sacrificed about 30 more points of Luck without penalty and channeled that into more Strength instead. However, this whole character had been trying to hit the 328 target as precisely as possible and Xena had done that beautifully so I wasn't bothered at all.
I believe that the Warrior is one of the strongest classes for a solo game in DQ3. While the early game was pretty rough up until unlocking whips for a source of multitargeted damage, the lategame Warrior abilities truly shined and trivialized virtually every boss fight. Multislice was outstanding for any situation with more than one opponent on screen while Cutting Edge dealt triple damage to a single target - it was hard to do too much better than that. This class was certainly much easier to take through the whole game than the solo Monster Wrangler! The Warrior class can't compare to the Hero class, but then, nothing can so that's hardly a fair comparison. I had a lot of fun playing through Xena's journey and I hope it was entertaining to read this as well. Until next time!
