Act 3 - Chapter 8: Zaramoth's Horns

Primary Tasks
* Ascend to the top of the mountain
* Defeat the Archmage

Secondary Quests
* Spirits of Aranna

Enter the hall to the east and fight your way to an elevator. You may note some Eyes of Zaramoth statues scattered about. Hitting them causes them to shoot a highly damaging beam of light. This technique is not important now, but will be later.

The elevator takes you down into a prison, where you quickly come to another elevator that takes you up to a platform with three other elevators. The Agallan Obelisk in the center of the platform grants 30 seconds of invulneratiblity when used. Your party must be close by to be affected, so Regroup around the obelisk before clicking.

The southwest elevator leads to a treasure room with the Chant of Power. The northeast elevator leads to ranged and melee sanctuary doors and an incantation shrine where you can use your shiny new Chant. The northwest elevator takes you to nature and combat mage sanctuary doors and another elevator that puts you back on the main path, right at the Lower Zaramoth's Horns teleporter.

Yay!

You can now quit and take a potty break. When you're ready to continue, head north from the teleporter. After the long bridge is a room with three doors. North and west are small treasure rooms. Go east and keep fighting your way until you get outside. Just past the bridge, to the south, is the final Spirit of Aranna. An incantation shrine is just a little way to the west.

In this area there's a secret room with a mimic in the southeast. Look for the lever on the back side of a nearby column. There's another to the south side of the incantation platform shrine, find the button on the wall and collect the Chant of Chaotic Skill inside.

That's it. There are no more side areas. No more side quests. Take the southern door and begin a long (and possibly arduous) slaughterfest until you reach the archmage. There's a teleporter right before you enter the Archmage's Chamber. This is the last teleporter in the game. If you quit the game, or your entire party dies, after this point, you will have to return here and do everything again (except for the Archmage fight).

The archmage fight takes place on a platform surrounded by obelisks. You can use the obelisks yourself, but the archmage uses them too and therein lies the problem. On his own, the archmage is not that difficult. He's got 90,000 health, but he won't do much damage to your party.

The missiles he summons out of the obelisks are something else entirely. Every so often, the archmage will "convert" an obelisk to his own use and it will start firing out missiles. These missiles are instant death for any character they touch. They move slowly, so you can dodge them, but if the archmage converts a lot of obelisks, you're in big trouble.

Make sure you have a nature mage with a resurrection spell and some rez scrolls for the other characters in case the nature mage bites the dust. You can "redeem" an obelisk the archmage has converted by attacking the obelisk. However, in the long run, you are better off simply unloading every power in your book on the archmage himself.

This is likely to be the longest, most difficult battle yet. Once he's defeated, the final battle is waiting at the top of the stairs.