Forsaken Kingdom: The Missing Manual

Each boss you kill for the first time hands you one accessory from the "Gift of" set, and the set goes up in rarity with the boss. Four bosses, four rings, seven deadly sins minus the three Blizzard ran out of time for. They are one-time: on my archer run I killed three bosses and got nothing, because I already owned those three. So beat it once with whoever is strongest, collect all four, and the only reason to go back is fun. There is no per-hero reward and no full-completion bonus that I can find in the data or in the thread.

The set

Boss 1: Gift of Greed+5 Damage, +5% Attack Rate. Your basic attacks against enemy non-Hero units grant a small portion of the damage dealt as gold.

Boss 2: Gift of Sloth+7 Hit Points Regeneration. Grants you the Sloth Aura, reducing the movement speed of nearby enemy units by 15%.

Boss 3: Gift of Wrath+10% Critical Chance, +15% Critical Damage. Attacks against the wearer have a 5% chance to grant you Unfathomable Rage, increasing your Attack Rate by 100% and Movement Speed by 20% for 4 seconds.

Boss 4: Gift of Pride+6 All Stats, +18% Spell Critical Chance. Grants you the Curse of Pride, which reduces the damage of nearby other friendly units within 400 range by 15%.

Save outside the arena. When the run ends, walk out of the Forgotten Hollow area and save in normal Act 2 before you touch anything else. Saves taken inside the mini game carry its effects with them, which is how I ended up with a black screen and a corrupted save. The forum has the same bug report.

Enemies stream in from every side. Kills drop experience orbs and gold. Each level up pauses the game and offers a hand of perks with WoW rarity colors: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary. Higher rarity means a bigger number of the same stat, so the forum habit of "take the orange one" is usually right. Luck pushes the rarity roll upward.

The run tracks Player Level, Kills, Items Collected, Damage Dealt, Damage Taken, Damage Prevented and Time Survived. The game force ends the run at the 40 minute mark and the UI shows a countdown. Lighting the fourth obelisk completes the quest. Killing the fourth boss does not end the run on its own.

Each hero enters with a signature weapon in slot 1. Garek gets Relentless Cleave, a spinning axe that follows him and pushes enemies. Anya gets Withering Fire, black arrows that auto fire at nearby enemies, one target per arrow. The third starter weapon in the data is Hammerfall, a hammer that bounces off walls, which lines up with Leonid. Your campaign HP carries into the arena, so leveling Health before entering is a real option if you are stuck.

Multistrike plus flat damage is best on fast, many-hit weapons. Flat damage is added to every hit and Multistrike adds extra hits, so both compound on weapons that hit often: Withering Fire, Serpent Ward, Hammerfall, Moon Glaive, Ball Lightning, Fan of Knives, Chain Lightning. On a one-big-hit weapon like Rain of Chaos, flat +2 damage on a 300 damage meteor is noise, and a multistrike proc is one extra meteor instead of a stream of extra arrows. If you are going arrows, yes, Multistrike and flat damage are the right pair, and Strength (percent damage) is the third leg once your base numbers are bigger.

Force is a positioning stat, not a damage stat. It scales knockback distance on every push weapon (War Stomp, Shockwave, Earthquake, Impale, Storm Bolt, Water Elemental, Stampede, Land Mines) and the bounce travel on Hammerfall, Ball Lightning and Living Missile. Take it when your plan is to never get touched: a build built on pushes wants enough Force that the crowd never closes, and bouncing weapons get more wall hits per cast. Skip it when your damage is single target or your sustain comes from Lifesteal, because enemies you keep pushing away are enemies you cannot hit. The forum soft lock (nothing could reach the player) is what the far end of this stat looks like.

Duration is the clearest: every "lasts for" weapon gets more ticks or more hits. Cooldown is for everything, and it is the only stat that does equal work for a meteor and for an arrow. Area only touches weapons that damage a region. Range matters for anything that must reach a target first, including arrows, and does nothing for weapons that spawn on you.

Spawn table: Skeleton Warrior, Ghoul, Crazed Crab, Scarab, Cultist, Skeletal Orc, Skeletal Orc Grunt, Skeletal Orc Champion, Giant Skeleton Warrior, Mutant, Ghost, Shade, Aspect of Death, Infinite Wolf, Abomination, and a Hydra boss. Ghosts clip through terrain and barricades. Aspect of Death is the late game killer. A difficulty multiplier ramps with time and doubles if you take the Shrine of Courage.

The build that finished the quest for me. Garek, grab Spiked Barricades, Summon Golem and Serpent Ward as early as the runes allow, then find a corner at the end and stop moving. Walls block, golem taunts, snakes shoot over the top, axe cleans up. Ball Lightning and Earthquake in the last two slots. It is tower defense with extra steps.

1. Move fast and never stop hitting shrines. The first 20 minutes are a shrine route, not a fight. Every shrine is a reward on a timer, and the clock is 40 minutes, so a run that idles is a run that loses levels and items it could have had.
2. Take the shrines you can finish fastest. Patience, Butchering, Combat and the Swarm are quick for a melee build that already pulls crowds. Protection and Evolution are slower and cost positioning. Chance is a coin flip, always worth a toss on the way past.
3. Skip the Shrine of Glass unless it is minute two. Dropping to 1 HP with a full arsenal and 30 minutes of difficulty ramp behind you is how runs end. Early, with nothing to lose, it is free. Same logic for the Shrine of Pain once your health pool is big enough that 50% is a real number.
4. Stat priority for this build: Cooldown and Duration first, because every one of these weapons is a timed summon. Then Armor and Health. Strength third. Force last, since the barricades already do the crowd control and extra knockback pushes enemies out of the wards' reach.
5. Camp late, not early. Pick the corner around minute 25 when the spawn rate outpaces your shrine route. Before that, the corner costs you shrines. Keep a Pocket Portal or Kelen's Dagger for the moment the corner gets overrun.
6. Items that make the corner work: Healing Salve and Health Stone for sustain between golem casts, Branch of Thorns if you have stacked Block, Vampiric Potion for the slow health climb, Divine Poison for the bosses that eventually walk into the wall.

Multistrike and Strength first, Cooldown and Area second, Block only in the first ten minutes. Here is why.

1. Arrows are single target. Early damage is a function of how often they fire. Multistrike is the only stat that makes the same arrow fire twice and it applies to every weapon you add. Strength multiplies all of it. Those two are the archer's lands and mana: boring, always correct.
2. Crowd control comes from the arsenal. Grab two or three area weapons early (Chain Lightning, Forked Lightning, Blizzard, Disease Cloud, Earthquake are the cleanest) and let Cooldown and Area scale them. Withering Fire plus Chain Lightning plus Disease Cloud covers single target, chain and area. That triangle is the build.
3. Block is cheap insurance early. A 25 damage block erases a whole hit at minute 3. Past minute 15 elites hit for more than 25 and Block stops mattering. Switch to Armor and Health. If Branch of Thorns shows up, Block becomes a damage stat again.
4. Luck early, never late. Luck feeds every later rarity roll, so taking it when no orange perk is on offer compounds for the run. After minute 20 it is wasted.
5. Keep Force modest. Arrows do not benefit from knockback, and too much Force makes enemies orbit outside pickup range, which starves you of XP.
6. Archer items reward many small hits: Mask of Death, Reverberating Gem, Crushing Maul, Hood of Precision. Items that reward one big hit (Sturdy War Axe, Executioner's Brand) are Garek items.
7. Shrine order: Patience, Butchering and Soul Offering are free value for a ranged build. Glass and Pain are fine once you hold a Salve or Health Stone. Skip Courage unless you are farming kills. Treat the Wolf as a boss summon.

The obvious objection: Area does nothing for arrows, so why second? Because by minute ten your arrows are a third of your damage and the arsenal is the rest. Area and Cooldown are how the arsenal scales. Scale only the arrows and you clear the first two bosses and get buried by Aspects of Death around minute 25.