Wani's Guide to Amoria PQ

[Wani]

Legal disclaimer: This guide is written by me, Christopher "Wani" Kennard, and is only to be used on Sleepywood.net, Nexon Forums and boOM forums. If you copy any parts of it, give me permission and link to the most updated/sleepywood version of this thread.

This is my first time writing a guide, so bear with me, help me out if things are unclear or misleading. I'll also update this with screenshots when I get around to taking some. XD

So, you've just got married, and you want to try out Amoria PQ, but you don't know what to do. Or you've done a few and you want to try your hand at leading. So, hopefully, here's everything you need to know!

Requirements:
Party of 6 people.
All members must be L40 or higher.
All members must be married. You don't need to be with your spouse though.
You need at least one male and one female to complete stage 1. It will let you in with a single gendered party, but it's impossible to finish the PQ.
If anyone disconnects or dies before the boss, you can't finish the PQ.


Recommended party
While the level limit is 40 or higher, the boss itself is a level 95 monster, so obviously a party of level 40 people will never succeed.
So, for most people, being level 70 is recommended. L90 or higher is best (especially for warriors, who will have trouble hitting geist balrog below L80)

The best people to take are hermits, because of the way Geist Balrog tends to fly around everywhere. They're the fastest at navigating the map, so will take down the boss the fastest. In any case, either a hermit, or anyone with haste is almost essential for the boss. It's very tricky to kill without the extra speed and jump that haste gives. Priests, of course, are helpful for heal, but the boss gives terrible experience, so holy symbol isn't really a must. Bless can be helpful for lower levelled warriors. And, of course, Dragon Knights help with hyper body and roar, for luring it and clearing stage 1 the fastest.


Before entering
Before you enter the PQ, you need an entrance ticket. You obtain the entrance ticket by bringing 10 Lip Lock keys (dropped by Indigo Eyes and Crystal Boars in Purplewood Forest I and II, right before the entrance to the Amorian Challenge)
Indigo Eyes:


Crystal Boars:


You can only get one ticket every 6 hours. Which means if you're in a rush, you can get a ticket, do whatever you need to do, come back 6 hours later, do a PQ, get a new ticket and go again straight away.
It's also a good idea to get your keys (and ticket if you feel like it) before you look for a party, so you save people time.

Make sure you don't talk to Amos when you have your ticket and you don't yet have a party, because you'll find yourself stuck in the entrance to the PQ.


So, once you have your party, everyone talks to Amos to enter the entrance. The leader should enter last, in case a party member can't enter for some reason, so they can find a new person. If you or your party find yourself stuck inside the entrance, either get your buddylist or guild to help, or just log in on another character to ask people in channel 1 for help.

Once everyone's inside, the leader talks to Amos and you're inside!


Stage 1 - Magik Mirror
This stage is simple. Firstly, talk to Amos. He tells you to pick one of three portals. Talk to him again and the three portals actually appear. The correct portal is randomly chosen, as far as I can tell. So, just guess, then everyone goes inside the correct portal and you're in the bottom half.

OGM Spoiler!

Ignore the two regular looking portals at the end of the top platform, they're pretty useless

There are two rocks at either end of the platform you arrive on. These are portals to two areas. Females go in the left one, then males go in the right one. Quite simply, kill every monster in the sections. When every monster's dead, talk to the Glimmer Man and he'll summon a giant fiarry to kill. This spawns in the top right of the male section (Apparently it can spawn in the female area, but this is incredibly rare, if it actually does happen), so have someone wait there to kill it. It drops a hammer, so pick that up and return to where the Glimmer Man is, and go in the portal next to him. It takes you up to his Mirror. Drop the hammer on the Mirror and pick up the glass shard that drops. Give the glass shard to the Glimmer Man and the stage is cleared.
From the Mirror, jump and it'll take you back up to Amos. Everyone needs to talk to him to move on to the second stage.


Stage 2 - Heart Strings
This stage is the one that most people get stuck on. There are three portals that take you up to three strings. (Press up on the portal, then jump to be teleported to the string. Make sure you hold up to actually grab the string)
The leader will call out numbers (500, 410 etc), these are the amount of people that need to be on each string. So, 500 is 5 on the left string, 0 on the middle string, 0 on the right string, 212 is 2 on the left string, 1 on the middle string, 2 on the right string.

The leader stays down the bottom and when everyone is on the strings, the leader talks to Amos. He tells you if it's right or wrong, and if it's wrong, he gives you a clue (same or different) that tells you what to do next.
You have 7 tries to get the right combination, if you get it wrong, a lot of "intimidating" monsters are summoned, and you just need to kill them and keep trying. But I haven't had these summoned on me, well, ever, when I've been leading.
For simplicity, Aborts made this chart:

( http://www.sleepywood.net/forum/show....php?t=1309636 for his thread about it)

Now, I'm a problem solving whore, so I wasn't satisfied with a chart, I needed to know what was happening. So, you can skip this bit if you don't care and just want to stick with the chart, but I think it's still interesting and useful to know how to actually solve it without a chart. (Note that my method below doesn't follow the same routes as Abort's chart. The routes I use when I follow are slightly faster than his, but it doesn't matter.)

Stage 2 - Heart Strings - In detail
Like I said, Amos gives you two clues (three actually, but two mean exactly the same thing), same or different. Same means one of the strings has the right number of people, different means no ropes have the same number of people.

The best place to start is 500, ie everyone on the left string. From there, same is the best, because that means either the middle or the right rope has 0 people, which means it's a simple combination. So, next thing to try is 410. If this gives same, either the 4 is right, or the 0 is right. (The 1 can't be right unless you clear, because that would mean the 0 is wrong, which means that neither of the middle or right strings have 0, which means 500 would give different, not same. Does that make sense?) If you get same, next to try should be 320. If this gives same, just keep moving people one at a time to the middle rope (230, 140, 050) until you clear. If it gives different, that means the right rope doesn't have 0 on it, which means that the middle has 0, which meant that the "same" 410 was saying the 4 was correct, so the correct combination is 401.
If 410 gives different, it means the middle rope has 0. It also means that the left rope doesn't have 4, so the next to try is 302, then keep moving people to the right rope until you clear. (203, 104, 005)

If 500 gives different, it means the middle and right ropes have at least 1 person on them. So I usually try 041, but it's usually easier for inexperienced leaders to try 050. If 050 gives same, that means the left rope has 0 people, so from there, you try 041, 032, 023, then 014. One of those will clear.

In my experience, most of the time, you'll get a combination with one empty string. I'm not sure why this is, it just is.

If you tried 050 after 500, and 050 gives diff, I'd suggest just following Aborts's chart above, or a similar method.

If you tried 041 after 500, things get a little bit tricky. If you get same, it means either the 0 is right, or the 1 is right. Afterwards, try 032. If this gives different, it means the 0 is wrong, and the 1 was right. So it'll either be 311 or 221. If it gives same, it means either the 0 is right, or it's 131. I had 131 once, and it confused me until I realised what had happened. Try 023, if that gives different, it's 131, otherwise it's 014.

If 041 gives different, it means the 0 and the 1 are both wrong. So try 113, then 122, then 212. One of those will clear.


And that ends my section on stage 2. If this is confusing to anyone, let me know what's confusing you, and I'll try to fix it.


(As an aside, this is exactly the same as OPQ's sealed room stage, so you can use these methods for either APQ or OPQ)

Once you've cleared stage 2, go through the portal on the door to stage 3.

Stage 3 - Twisted Switcher

This is the other stage that confuses people. It's similar to Ludi PQ stage 8, in that there are 9 boxes, and you need 5 people in the party to be on the correct boxes to clear the stage. It's different to stage 8 though, in the fact that it gives you clues if you're wrong.

There are 4 boxes up the top of the stage, and 5 down the bottom. Have everyone go on the top boxes, and one person on the left most bottom box, then click Amos to test that combination. If you're wrong (Which happens almost every time), a bunch of boars and slimes are summoned. Don't kill anything until someone's counted the number of slimes. The number of slimes is the number of people in the correct place.

The first thing to do in this stage is to find out which of the bottom boxes are the correct ones. So, everyone stays up the top, while the person on the bottom goes on each box, each time counting the slimes and saying how many appeared. This number will never vary by more than 1, and if it does, you've miscounted. The boxes that spawned the bigger number of slimes are the right boxes. So, for example, you might get something like 23332 (ie, 2 then 3, then 3, then 3, then 2). The three middle boxes spawned 3 slimes, which is more than 2, so the three middle boxes are correct. Once you know which boxes are correct, have people move from the right of the top side (and the person already on the bottom) to the correct boxes.

Also note that the smaller number is the amount of people on the top boxes, therefore 5 minus that number (Do a little maths people :P ) is the number of correct boxes down the bottom. Once you've found that many correct boxes, the rest of the boxes are incorrect, so you don't need to check that. Also, if you found the smaller number of incorrect boxes, the rest of boxes must be correct. (ie, if you find 232, checking the rest of the bottom boxes will always give 23233 as the final result, so you also don't need to check the rest)

Then you check the top boxes, simply by having people move along the top until you clear the stage.

Now, unless when you were checking the bottom boxes, you got 2/3 slimes, every time you're checking the top boxes, you'll always spawn 4 slimes. If you don't, or if you try every combination of top boxes and don't manage to clear, you've miscounted on one of the bottom boxes. Go back and try again.
If you were checking the bottom boxes and you were spawning 2/3 slimes, you'll almost always have 4 slimes spawn, except one combination will give 3 slimes. This combination is the one where both people on top are in the wrong place, so have them both move to the boxes they weren't on.

When you clear the stage, no monsters are summoned, and everyone goes in the portal at the right to the next stage.

Stage 4 - Last Man Standing

This stage is simple. There are a lot of monsters, and they all drops 1 code piece. Give 50 code pieces to Amos to clear the stage.
The most common way this is done, is to have each party member except the leader collect 10 pieces each, and each gives theirs to the leader. That reason is why I refer to it as "lazy stage", the stage where I sit on my ass and go AFK for a minute while everyone else does the work for me. ^_^;

When you clear this stage, you're immediately taken to the next stage. Make sure you and your party members have you're prepared for the next stage before you clear it.

If you're leading, when you talk to Amos the second time, he takes the code pieces from you, then starts talking. Don't click End Chat, or you have to collect pieces again. Which is just annoying. I did this once <_< Oops.

Stage 5 - Fluttering Hearts

This is most commonly known as "run stage", because what you do here, is you run. You run to the right, and hit open the gates on the way. Monsters follow you, doing between 5 and ~100 damage. These also knock you forwards, so you can use that to move a little faster. Big lava jets shoot up from the ground and they do ~300 damage, so if you don't have a healer, you may want to use the lesser hitting monsters to avoid taking too much damage.

At the back of the monsters are a lot of Rombots. These are what you're running from. They do around 10,000 damage, so unless you can take that sort of a hit, don't try to hug them. If you die, your party can't complete the PQ, and it's a good way to get people annoyed at you. Don't be too worried though, these don't move too quickly and are never too close behind you.

Before entering this stage, you might want to equip a hitting weapon (I <3 my green skis), especially if you're a hermit or bowman, to hit the gates open, any spearman or DK should cast hyper body (Spearmen and DKs should recast at least once during the stage, the stage usually runs slightly longer than the time hyper body lasts for), and clerics/priests should try to keep everyone healed. If you're not near your cleric/priest, use your potions.

Once you have six people at the right end of the map, standing around the door, the leader clicks Amos to clear, then everyone clicks Amos to be transported to the final stage.

Stage 6 - Love Hurts

OGM Spoiler!

I love boss map names XD

This is, of course, the boss. You appear in the top left of the map, where you can buff up, use potions, make sure everyone's ready. All six people need to be standing on the platform (If you're jumping, it doesn't work), then the leader clicks Amos to transport everyone to the boss.

Geist Balrog has three forms, the first two are simple:

Phase 1:

OGM Spoiler!

Level: 80
Experience: 1,000
HP: 100,000
MP: 500
Accuracy: 150
Avoidability: 30
Weapon attack: 200
Weapon defense: 420
Magic attack: 305
Magic defense: 450
Minimum damage to knock back: 3,000
Spawns on death: Geist Balrog Phase 2
Immune to poison
Weak to holy

It's effectively the same as Jr Balrog, but with more HP and does much much less damage. Should be taken down in seconds.

Phase 2:

OGM Spoiler!

Level: 100
Experience: 1,100
HP: 300,000
MP: 500
Accuracy: 180
Avoidability: 40
Weapon attack: 230
Weapon defense: 500
Magic attack: 400
Magic defense: 450
Minimum damage to knock back: 5,000
Immune to poison
Weak to holy

It's the same as Crimson Balrog, again with more HP and much much less damage. Try to kill it quickly, it's kinda annoying if it runs away on you.

I've never seen someone killed by first or second phase, but hey, always a first time, right? Someone post a screenshot, I'd love to see it XD

Then, comes the real fight.
Phase 3:

OGM Spoiler!

Level: 95
Experience: 5,600
HP: 1,500,000
MP: 5,600
Accuracy: 175
Avoidability: 35
Weapon attack: 300
Weapon defense: 600
Magic attack: 430
Magic defense: 500
Minimum damage to knock back: 2,000
Immune to poison
Immune to holy
Immune to fire
Immune to ice

Can we all say worst HP/exp ratio ever?

Anyway. This boss isn't terribly difficult, but it is annoying. Its magic damage does 1300~1500 damage, so make sure you can survive that. Its physical damage is around 600~700, so if you're a magician with less base HP than that, don't sit on top of it.

It has a few abilities outside of its attacks. Firstly, the most annoying, IMO, is it can teleport to another point on the map. It'll usually teleport back to where it was, and when it does teleport, it does a magic claw looking attack at the same time
Secondly, it can dispel. This is what kills most people. When you get dispelled, unlike Pap or Pianus, not everyone will be dispelled at the same time, so you'll usually need to ask your party member to give you whatever buff you need (Usually haste or hyper body).
Next ability, is probably the most annoying. It can do physical or magical invincibility, making all hits turn into 1's. This is usually when it escapes and you need to wait for that to run out, then you have to chase after it, and lure it back down to the bottom.
Last ability is one to turn itself nearly invisible. I don't see the point of this, really.

There's not much strategy to the actual attacking. It's the map layout that the strategy is in. It's made up of several platforms that are all teleports. Use these teleports to navigate the map (Or flash jump if you're a hermit). If the boss is too far away from everyone else, use a ranged attacker to hit it a couple of times and lure it back to where it's easy for everyone to kill.
Also, note that because of the way it moves, you'll usually only have 2-3 people together, so you probably won't be being healed, or be near enough to be rebuffed if you need it.

With a party of decent attackers, the longest it's taken me to kill it is about ten minutes (excluding my 50 minute near-solo when I was in my early 8x. That was hella fun though :D). The shortest was in less than 150 seconds for all forms (Thank you, Scotty for your awesome L156 hermitness XD), but this should be much faster with 4th job skills.

When Geist Balrog dies, it drops a fang. The leader picks up the fang and gives this to Amos to clear the stage.

IMPORTANT: WHEN AMOS TAKES THE FANG, THE LEADER MUST CLICK NEXT AND NOT ESCAPE OR END CHAT OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT. If you do, the fang disappears, but you do not clear the stage and you cannot complete the APQ

After it's cleared, if you have 3 males and 3 females, each one needs to click Amos to be taken to the couples stage, otherwise the leader clicks and takes everyone to the bonus stage. Make sure the party is ready (haste is casted, hitting equips are equipped, etc), then take everyone through. Otherwise, couples stage!

Stage 7 - Amos' Vault for Couples

If you have 3 males and 3 females, you're taken here automatically. However, you can't do this unless you have 3 pairs of spouses. If you don't, the leader needs to talk to Amos twice to be taken to the regular bonus stage

Otherwise... couples stage! An effectively useless stage!

Each male needs to talk to Amos to be transported into one of the three sections, then their wife follows them. The section you're put in depends on who clicks first (Left first, then middle, then right). Navigate each section (There are hidden teleports, use these) to hit open boxes. Kill the monsters that appear, then collect 35 code pieces that they drop. Give these to Amos to get some experience. To properly complete the stage, either the husband or the wife needs to give all 35 to Amos, while their spouse gives nothing. The experience is in the thousands, so at a higher level, it doesn't matter much to sacrifice to your spouse. :P
The first couple to bring in 35 pieces in the proper way (With one person giving 35 and the other not giving any) gets a chance at one of the untradable APQ capes, provided the other two couples also give 35 pieces.

However, there's still an unfixed glitch in the right most section. The top box in the right section cannot be opened successfully. There's no way to get all 35 pieces. Which is dumb, but oh well. I have no idea what to do, unless this has been fixed.

Once everyone's done, the leader of the party talks to Amos to take everyone to the regular bonus stage.

Stage 7 - Amos' Vault

This is the same as almost every bonus stage in almost every PQ. Hit open boxes, pick up what comes out. If someone else is hitting a box, don't start hitting it, it's just stupid. If something good comes out of someone else's box, don't loot it. You'll be marked as a looter, and you may find yourself ksed as payback, or just have people spam that you're a looter, which makes getting a party difficult.

Here's my current list of what comes out of the bonus stage. Feel free to help me expand:

Onyx Apples (What everyone wants)
Pineapple Chew (These used to be in demand, but are less so now)
Ceceilia Earrings (L60, Worth 150k at the NPC, getting a few of these isn't too bad money)
Moonstar Earrings (L45, Worth 50k at the NPC)
Celestial Earrings (L40, Worth 27.5k at the NPC)
Amos' Spirit Cape (L50, rare and blue, but nothing special)
Amos' Royal Cape (L50, rare and green, still nothing special)
Grape Juice (Heals 800 MP)
Amorian Rice Cookie (Heals 3000 HP/MP)
Reindeer Milk
Mushroom Miso Ramen
Elixir
Power Elixir
Victoria's Amorian Basket (Accuracy, avoidability and speed +40, but you can only hold 1 in each slot)
Diamonds
Gold plates
Black crystal ore
Diamond ore
Amorian Relaxer
60% scroll for gloves for ATK
30% scroll for Cape for STR (Thanks ArmorKing19)
30% scroll for Cape for INT (Thanks Laury)
30% scroll for Cape for LUK (Thanks Anii)
30% scroll for Cape for DEX (Thanks Advy)



Once a minute is up, you're taken to the exit. From there... well, generally people say the good loot they got, thank the party for the PQ and go on their merry way.

I hope this guide was helpful, feel free to help me make it more helpful, and good luck with your APQs!

(Thanks to Aborts for his stage 2 chart, and for Sauna for information and pictures of monsters)

[ArmorKing19]

I've gotten a 30% cape STR from bonus once.

[Wani]

Updated, thank you!

I know other scrolls are available, I'm just not sure which.

[Laury]

Nice guide; I especially like your extended explanation of 2nd stage.

I recently got 30% Cape INT from Bonus. And yes, BC ores do drop.

[tramieee]

i got a 10% scroll from bonus too
however i didnt have enuf time to pick up so i dont know what scroll it is ><"
only know it was 10% :]

[Anii]

I've gotten Diamond Ores and 30% Cape Luk from bonus. Reindeer milk and Mushroom Miso Ramen (Heals 80% of HP and MP) also drops. Can't remember what else other than what you've listed- I'll add more if I remember.

[MrSmartGuy]

How do you get the Amos capes?

[Wani]

Originally Posted by MrSmartGuy

How do you get the Amos capes?

I completely forgot to include that... They drop from the bonus stage, but they're quite rare. I've had a blue one drop once.

[keye]

Elixir and Power Elixir?

[Advy]

Hey Chris, I've gotten 30% cape DEX from bonus stage twice. >;o