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Castle Age: Vargulis posted: Tue 2015-07-21 02:17:43 tags: gaming
On May 15, the new monster "Vargulis, First Brood" was introduced. Vargulis's loot fills a niche for players with not-so-deep pockets before the outrageous investments required for best-in-slot weapon (3-stage alchemy from Cronus Astaroth drops) or armor (3-stage alchemy from Thanatos Reborn).

Vargulis's drops set a new bar for damage requirements in the "rare" category, being more in line with "legendary" loot requirements on previous beasts. These drops make it possible for semi-casual players to score an assortment of second-best gear in a slow-kill.

Arguably the most interesting "rare" Vargulis drop is Flamebound Halberd for the weapon slot. Optimally forged, it's good for 130 pierce, and almost certainly much easier to acquire than the previous second-best weapon, Elite Warbringer Longblade with max 110 pierce. The best-in-slot weapon, Cronus Astaroth's 3-stage Astaroth Blade alchemy, is simply not realistic for the vast majority of players, so for most of us, Flamebound Halberd is effectively "best in slot that I can realistically attain before a new best-in-slot weapon comes along". And hey, it's not even a project, just a straight-up rare drop.

In the glove category, Vargulis drops Flamebound Gauntlet (max 125 pierce), quite a bit better than the previous second-best Elite Warbringer Gauntlet (80 max pierce), and the Death Rats project alchemy Deathgauntlet is still firmly out in front (200 max pierce).

In the armor category, Vargulis drops Flamebound Armor: much better than Commanders Bone Plate; better even than the first-stage alchemies of endgame projects, and only 10 resist behind the Death Rats project Deathmantle for much less hunting investment. There is still a good reason to build the Deathmantle though, which we'll talk about when we get to Vargulis's alchemy projects.

In the helm slot, Vargulis drops the Flamebound Helm. The curious thing about this item is it packs intrinsic pierce, but helmets take resist forge items onry. BUT there are no 2-slot helms with resist until the best-in-slot Elite Retribution Helm, so even though the Flamebound has pierce, with forging it is still the solidly second-best resist helm.

The final gear drop in Vargulis's "rare" pool is Flamebound Boots, a pierce-oriented item marginally better than Warbringer Greaves and marginally worse than Elite WB Greaves. Nice, but nonessential.

This brings us to Vargulis's two alchemy projects. In the Magic gear slot there's a 3-stage Sparkflame-Pureflame-Magmaflame path magic, starting out as a very marginal improvement over Succubus Kiss (+10 fire pierce but better att/def), and ending up as +50 fire pierce. In the off-hand slot there's the Flamebound Guard-Defender-Destroyer path, initially 40 intrinsic resist and a forge slot and ending up as 90 physical resist, 25 fire resist and 2 slots.

Before the 2nd and 3rd alchemy stages of the off-hand were fleshed out, I figured there was little point in chasing Vargulis once you collect all your rare drops of interest, instead staying on the Death Rats + Cassandra path for Gorgons Heart (80 resist + 1 slot). And Deathmantle is still a worthwhile goal: it's at least semi-realistic for a semi-casual player, where the best-in-slot, 3-stage Thanatos Plate is simply not realistic for anyone but unicorns. But Gorgons Heart crosses the line of realistic goals, and anyone who could afford the FP expenditure to chase it may just as well chase Vargulis's Flamebound Destroyer shield instead.

Vargulis's 2 alchemy projects are 3-stage nightmares with overlapping tracks. The off-hand first stage is "Flamebound Guard", which requires 5 each of the 3 epic drops and 10 each of the 2 legendary drops. The assured drop threshold on those legendaries is about 200 million damage, which also assures 3 epic drops. So statistically, you're probably going to need to kill more like 25-30 just to get 10 each of the legendaries, which means you'll be sitting on a trove of 75-90 epics.

The first-stage magic project will siphon off those spare epics, and then some, because you need 15 of each of 3 types of epic drop to create the stage 1, "Sparkflame".

You will need THREE Sparkflames AND a Flamebound Guard to create the stage 2 magic, "Pureflame". And then you'll need to do that all over again to combine two Pureflames into the final stage, Magmaflame. So that's probably 50 to 60 legendary-threshold kills, and I don't even know how to calculate how many additional epic-threshold kills you'll have to do for the extra Sparkflames. Is it worth it for a magic-slot item with 50 fire pierce? I really don't think so.

The second- and third-stage off-hand alchemies follow the same pattern: stage 2 "Flamebound Defender" is 3 "Flamebound Guards" plus a "Sparkflame" and stage 3 is two stage 2s. So you're looking at a minimum of 6 stage-1 shields, 150-180 Vargulis kills at legendary damage threshold (200M). If you did one every DAY, burning massive FP in coordination with other monster-hunters, it would still take 5-6 months. I had my fill of that crap with Death Rats, thanks.