Room of Consciousness instance, Thanatos Tower, etc.

I've been doing a bunch of adventuring around with Hinamizawa:


The main thing we took on was the "Banquet of Heroes" questline, which involves going around in Prontera castle and doing a bunch of random npc interactions and storyline stuff:

Eventually you unlock the ability to do the "Room of Consciousness" instance dungeon, where after some storyline stuff you do some very easy battles, followed by two major boss fights.

This is the first boss fight.  While this guy doesn't do much damage (aside from maybe one attack), he actually is tanky as all heck.  You can actually cheese him by casting turn undead or yggdrassil leaf on him, but unfortunately we didn't have a priest on hand.  Later on we figured out that if you lure these bosses between the two helper NPCs, they help do additional damage, which helps.  For now, though, we just autoattacked for a good handful of minutes.  Thankfully fire does extra damage to it, and during the fight I leveled up my spellfist to level 10, so my autoattacks were actually doing quite a bit of damage.

It still took a while though....

Then Bijou is the real boss.  Unfortunately Bijou isn't a pushover, and actually does significant damage, along with its minions.  Plus, Bijou has this nasty colt bolt attack (as well as frost diver) which basically one-shots any of our characters.

We failed the instance, but tried again later.  Unfortunately, every time any character dies, Bijou resets to full HP.  We ended up winning by simply cheesing it -- having my soul reaper simply walk around in circles, and letting the NPC helpers do all of the damage (slowly).  It =worked= though, in the end, and we got a hefty amount of exp as rewards.

After that we took on some random Eden board quests.  Here's us in Juperos, fighting mechanical enemies:

We also explored around ice dungeon a while, hunting the ice titans and other enemies here.

There were some merchants setting up shop at the entrance of this map, buying the NPC drops.  I'm not sure if these prices are actually better than the NPC prices, I guess maybe I should learn to check that first.

After that we tried some of the higher level gramps quest.  The Nagas here were pretty easy for us to kill, but the other enemies do a ton of damage to us real fast, so that was causing us a bunch of problems.

We went back to Eden board quests, this time going to Thanatos Tower to hunt various enemies.

We actually wandered around in here for quite a while, eventually getting all the way to the 4th or 5th floor.

It was pretty cool seeing this much of a dungeon which I had maybe never really even set foot in before.  It's a good reminder that RO has a ton of content that I've really never bothered to see before.  Unfortunately we basically party wiped up here, but that was OK as we had accomplished most of the hunting quests we set out to do by this time anyways.