Loc Muinne (Roche)

Chapter 3: Loc Muinne (Roche)

For Temeria!

All roads lead to Loc Muinne now. Your first task is to find a way to get into the city, so you can track down Síle and Letho. Begin by following Roche and helping him kill harpies. These fights should be fairly trivial for you, especially if you’re using the blood sword. As you work your way down the winding mountain path, you eventually come within sight of an encampment of knights from the Order of the Flaming Rose. You must pass through their camp to proceed.

Before you follow Roche in, though, take a right and head up the mountain path that leads to a dead end. There’s some valuable treasure tucked away here, if you can defeat the two arachi that guard it. One spawns in front of you and the other behind you. While fighting a pair of arachasae in such a narrow area would be deadly for a lower-level Geralt, you should be able to handle this quite easily. You can use Quen to mitigate an arachasae’s poison attack and your attacks should do tremendous damage. You can simplify the battle by dodge-rolling past one of the two arachi so one blocks the other in, though it’s a matter of chance if an opportunity for this ever presents itself.

Once you’ve defeated the arachi, loot the area just behind them. You should find a great many orens, some random loot, and the silver sword Deithwen. While Deithwen is not the chapter’s strongest silver sword in terms of pure damage, its +25 percent damage to large monsters and +25 percent damage to gargoyles come in handy during many of the side quests in Loc Muinne. You may want to hold onto it or begin wielding it immediately, so you can use it during these specific quests. You pick up a better silver sword in the course of these side quests that you can then use to finish the game.

Once you’ve picked up Deithwen, head back to the Order’s camp and speak with one of the guards. Unless you are playing the PC version of the game and meet certain requirements, you are allowed to enter the camp when Roche vouches for you. Explore the camp thoroughly. You can find a significant number of training dummies here (if you still need the Experienced attribute), as well as quite a lot of random loot. You can pass freely from the camp and into the city.

For now, you need to head toward the town square. On the way, you encounter a group of Nilfgaardian bounty hunters who want to arrest you. Take advantage of your build’s strengths when battling human opponents to defeat them. You probably want to prepare for this battle with potions and by oiling your sword blade if you can. This battle can be a little dangerous, mainly because there’s a combat mage leading the party that’s good at hitting you with fireballs while you’re swordfighting the armored soldiers. If you have levels of Feet Work, try rolling around to get at the mage before picking off the knights. This approach really only works with the extra rolling speed you get from Feet Work—at default speed levels it’s too hard to catch up with him.

Once you get to the town square, you can start focusing on side quests. When you get tired of side questing, return to the town square and speak to Roche to progress this quest and the other quests that relate to the main plot.

Loc Muinne

Now that you can take a breather to explore, you discover that Loc Muinne is unlike any of the prior environments you’ve explored in the game. It’s a massive area, easily the size of both Flotsam and its surrounding forest. Parts of the city are crowded and teeming with life, while others are infested with monsters. Most of the city’s points of interest are divided between the town square and amphitheater areas, with everything else often serving as hostile territory.

Amphitheater

The main attraction of this area is its merchants. If you spared certain characters you had the chance to spare or kill earlier in the game, you may encounter them in this area, too.

Falas

Falas is a craftsman and has a really good shop list, despite not being listed as a merchant in your in-game mini-map. The most notable things he sells are diagrams for the various colors of meteorite ore, a few unique weapons, some really good armor enhancers like the steel plate enhancement, and magic wraps. He also sells the diagram for the diamond armor reinforcements, which offer +2 and are relatively easy to make at this point in the game.