Memories of the Ancients – Pillars of Eternity Quest

This guide is for the main quest line in Pillars of Eternity. The guide has a walkthrough of the area.

Background

You’ll trigger this quest when you arrive in Breith Eaman.

Walkthrough

Your goal in this quest is to finally confront Thaos. To get to him, you’ll have to make your way through Breith Eaman and Sun in Shadow, fighting a collection of spirits and animats along the way. At the end of Sun in Shadow, you’ll discover a large Engwithan machine. When you approach it, Thaos will appear, and no matter what you say to him, you’ll have to fight him.

You won’t be able to position your party for the fight — the game will do it for you. Worse, Thaos will start out by knocking you down and calling to Woedica for help, which will cause Woedica’s Judge and Woedica’s Headsman, the two statues flanking the Engwithan machine, to come to life and assist him. So you’ll start out immobile and surrounded, which is never good.

The first thing you should do is put your two best tanks on the two statues to distract them. Hopefully this will allow you to move your squishier DPS characters to someplace safe. Next, you should focus your attacks on one of the statues — such as the judge since it seems to cause more problems. If you attack Thaos, then after taking him to about half health, he’ll fall to his knees and become immune to damage. Then when a statue dies, he’ll stand back up at full strength. He’ll do this for both statues, so there isn’t any point in attacking him until they’re both down (unless you just want to put somebody on him to interrupt or disrupt him in some way).

When both statues are dead, Thaos won’t have any more tricks. He’ll still cast powerful spells, including Cleansing Flame, Pillar of Holy Fire, and Dominate, but if your party is still in decent shape after dealing with the statues, then you should be able to wear him down quickly. Thaos won’t drop anything when he dies, but you’ll have to make a decision about his soul: you can return it to the Wheel, you can banish it to Breith Eaman, you can destroy its memories, or you can end its existence. This is just a role-playing decision, so pick the option you like the best.

Finally, you’ll need to head over to the Engwithan machine and decide what to do with the souls Thaos captured. You’ll have all of the options suggested by the gods — including Skaen and Wael, if you met them — available to you. When you pick one, the game will end, and you’ll get to see how things turned out for all of the major characters and locations. Congratulations for completing Pillars of Eternity!