The Final Ascent – Dungeon Siege II Quest

This guide will walk you through the “The Final Ascent” quest in Dungeon Siege II. We will go through all the steps to complete quest.

Map

The Final Ascent

This quest is much like the last one. You’ll have to travel through a portion of Zaramoth’s Horns so you can battle a boss at the end. The difference is that in this case, the boss is Valdis (#1), and defeating him will end the original Dungeon Siege II campaign.

Valdis is a level 40 elite with 90,000 hit points — just like the Archmage. However, unlike the Archmage, Valdis is tricky to defeat. If you run up and start attacking him when you first spot him, nothing will happen. You’ll discover that Valdis is immune to all damage. So what should you do? Well, without any other options, the only thing to try is to hit him with the Eyes of Zaramoth in the room (#2).

Note: If you haven’t played with any of the Eyes yet, then know that attacking them and doing enough damage to them causes them to shoot out a powerful laser. In this case, the Eyes shoot towards the center of the room.

The best way to hit Valdis with an Eye of Zaramoth is to put your party into mirror mode. Then just camp your party right in front of one of the Eyes. Valdis has a long attack sequence where he’ll swing his Sword around and do massive damage, and so the idea is to draw him to the front of the Eye, and then run behind the Eye and attack it while Valdis is still swinging. If you manage to get him to stop in the right place, then the laser from the Eye will knock him over.

The first time you knock Valdis over, he’ll summon some Qatall soldiers to help him out. The Qatall soldiers should be pretty easy for you at this point, so either ignore them and keep trying to knock down Valdis, or else wait for Valdis to start swinging his sword again, and then run away and fight the soldiers while he’s busy. Once you’ve knocked down Valdis three times, the Azunite Scholar will show up.

The Azunite Scholar will reveal that he isn’t quite the helpful entity that he presented himself to be, and he’ll steal the Shield of Azunai from you. However, he’ll also demonstrate that he isn’t a friend to Valdis, either, and at the end of the cut scene, Valdis will be without his Sword and you’ll be without your Shield, and you’ll be able to fight each other in earnest.

Without his Sword, Valdis will start fighting like a spellcaster, and he’ll use a variety of spells against you. Provided that you have a reasonable amount of resistances, then Valdis’ attacks shouldn’t be all that bad, and your nature mage should be able to heal you faster than Valdis can damage you.

Every time you take off a third of Valdis’ health, you’ll knock him down, and the altar on the northern end of the room (#3) will crumble a little. At various times, Valdis might also summon some more Qatall soldiers to help him out, or create some mirror images of himself and somehow heal himself completely. As far as we can tell, there isn’t any way to counter this, so just keep attacking him.

Once you’ve gotten Valdis down to under 1000 hit points, the altar to the north will completely break up, revealing a big Eye of Zaramoth inside. Valdis will go immune to damage again once you’ve dropped him to a single hit point, so guess what you’ll need to do. That’s right, you’ll need to hit him with the new Eye of Zaramoth, and the exact same strategies that worked before should work again. When you hit Valdis with the Eye, he’ll keel over dead, dropping a bunch of items for you to loot, and the Azunite Scholar will say his goodbyes. Then when you go through the portal that appears, the quest will end.

Note: Going through the portal will take you back to Kalrathia, no matter which version of the game you’re playing. To move on to the next difficulty setting, or, for Broken World, to move on to the final act, you’ll need to exit the game and click on the “Single Player” button on the main menu screen. From there you should be able to select the character, the difficulty, and the campaign you’d like to play.