Necromancer Entrance Puzzle
Part 3
So, you've solved it once by figuring it out
yourself, right?
And you didn't use any lightning walls this time, right?
If not, do not read any further.
Solution:
Over the hundreds of years since the arena was last used, the enchantments
on the levers have blended and crossed over with one another. They still
work as designed, but each lever has additional side-effects:
- The one lever on the south wall activates/deactivates the center spire,
and raises/lowers all four outer spires.
- The four levers on the west wall activate/deactivate one outer spire
(if it's raised) and raise/lower the three other outer spires.
- The four levers on the north wall raise/lower two outer spires.
There are three main keys to solving the puzzle:
- first off, map out what lever does what.
- once you've got an outer spire lit, make sure you lower it to preserve
its state before you switch a lever which might deactivate it.
- to raise a spire without affecting the state of any other spire:
- find the two north levers which raise/lower that spire (call them A
and B).
- find the west lever which raises/lowers the same three spires as the
two north levers you just found (call it C).
- if the spire which is activated by lever C is raised and lit, lower
it using a north lever (call it D).
- pull levers A, B, and C.
- if you pulled lever D, pull it again.
Note also that you can cheat at any point by having a friend on the
arena floor cast lightning wall to activate a spire for you. However, as
with the purely lightning wall driven solution, that friend won't be able
to make the jump if his/her lightning wall activates the final spire and
solves the puzzle. As such, I'm not too concerned about circumventing the
levers in this fashion, because you'd have to know a fair amount about
the puzzle to set it up with lightning walls so that it would only require
a few lever pulls to complete.
In addition, if you're clever you can set up the spires with the levers
so that you only need one player to get into the necropolis (using lightning
walls, of course)!
Things to test:
- lever effects should randomize every time the lich is reborn or killed.
- rapid lever switching should be disabled (max of one lever pull every
two seconds).
- all levers should be stuck until the puzzle has been solved once on
the server. This should safeguard against guides teleporting up to the
north ledge and letting in their friends with the levers before anyone
has actually solved the puzzle legally. In addition, I will add a check
which prevents guides/guardians from switching the levers at all.