Shadows: Awakening Walkthrough Discussion

LV 1 Blue Slime said:Yeah, I hoped I would like this game but it's terrible.

I followed a YT vid to get that last totem and then I completed the associated sidequest. I then went through the Espionage dialogue options again and the missing option "The final curse of the Conclave is broken" was there, after which the achievement popped.

No worries as it's all sorted now, but yea, you may need to restructure things assuming I didn't inexplicably screw something up.

I hate to be a hassle and I can't imagine you remember, but I'm stuck on page 2 of the Extreme playthrough, near the top.

After the Imperial Tomb IV, the instruction is to go to Fallen Eagle Fortress. Whenever I try to enter, Carissa simply says "we should not be here." Any ideas?

I remember lighting a beacon at the border camp in the easy playthrough that wasn't mentioned this time. And one of my Ch2 main quests, "Help Kiri return to Kallisar," recommended lvl 9, says to Light the Beacon in Border Camp. I guess I'll try this to see if it advances things.

Edit: lit beacon, talked to Kiri, then the Border Camp leader to advance questline, Now I can enter the Fallen Eagle Fortress. Not sure if this is the wrong path for future achievement completion, though.

If it's the quest I'm thinking of I tell you to ransom her off instead of doing it the nice way :
Pick the top dialogue option until the top is "I need assistance escorting a furless cub to Kyallisar", instead choose "There's a valuable hostage in the pass you should capture and ransom." You'll get a cruelty point, and the Devil achievement."

That should result in the fortress being open, though obviously they won't like you as much as if you sent Kiri (I think is her name?) back nicely. It's done for the devil achievement, but I have no clue if it affects anything else to be honest. I want to say no, but it's been almost two years since I did it. Maybe since I forgot to mention lighting the beacon, you didn't choose that option at the time and that's why it wasn't open? Only thing I can think of. I'll fix that.

Hey again. I'm unsure about something else now in the no puppet death, offline, hard, oldschool playthrough.

Just got to the Ziggurat of the Sun. You need to pass 3 trials to open the door forward. One trial requires letting a puppet die. This isn't mentioned at all on the page for this playthrough. Is there another way past this or does it not count against the achievement?

Edit: I let the wasp die and I've just left him dead in my party for now. I'll keep a save right before the trial in case I need to go back and do something differently; pushing on for now.

And just to be clear, once I’m done with the playthrough and have defeated the final boss, I then reconnect to my network, launch the game, the game should update, and the achievements should unlock?

There's no way to get around it, it won't stop you from getting the achievement. I have no clue whether still having the dead puppet will affect things though. I assume the code is something as simple as ignoring the death on that map, but who knows.

As for when they unlocked, they actually unlocked for me awhile I was downloading the patch on the dashboard, I didn't even have to get in the game. Sometimes they don't until you start the game, and sometimes they stealth pop. Really seems to vary game to game, or situation to situation. I'd say check after you donwload the patch and if they haven't shown up load the game up and see what happens.

The wasp is now alive in my puppet list at the green healing area thingy. It was replaced by Cassandra in my active roster shortly after the trial (then a boss, then the Cassandra encounter) and when I went to take her out of the roster, the wasp showed as being alive. It had previously been dead in my active roster. So I never had to revive it.

Thanks.

As always a great walkthrough. I'm sorry you did not enjoy the game more. I played the first two games in the series that were PC only: Shadows is Kult: Heretic Kingdoms & Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms. In fact, there is a lot of overlap between the first part of Awakening and the second game, Heretic Kingdoms. You have a much better idea of who the bad guys are and what their agenda is if you've played Heretic Kingdoms.

I thought I'd start with the physical disk and play offline. The reason I did so was I believe I will have the system save file when I go online for the two other playthroughs.

I finished the Jasker's run old school with no puppet deaths. I went for the 'best' ending where you fight two final bosses. Later, I reloaded the save I made in lower K & did the other ending with good karma. Afterwards, I used a turbo controller to shift back & forth between realms to make sure I did so 10K times.

I have not attempted to launch the game or install the patch. 33 of the 37 achievements have already unlocked during a 35 min span. Five have not and it's been a couple of hours with no movement. Tomorrow, if they have not unlocked, I'll launch the game forcing the patch to install and see what happens. The four achievements that have not unlocked are:




It's not a big deal if these don't unlock because they're easily obtained in the Evia & Kalig playthroughs.

Unlike you, I'm enjoying the game. I plan to do both Evia & Kalig on extreme. The only time I felt challenged on Hard was in chapter 2 where you have to fight a boss who alternates between demon & sword. You have the option of avoiding the fight, but I was going for Angel (that hasn't popped yet) & didn't want the bad karma.

In contrast, the final bosses were a piece of cake. If you buff up all the equipment (I used Jasker (Crystal Bow), Zombie, & Carissa) with demon damage & demon protect essences depending on the type of equipment plus freezing resistances; you can pretty much ignore everything & take Mara to the woodshed. Graabak is even easier especially if you have beast essences buffing your equipment. Carissa picked up this obscenely powerful sword, Sword of King Kapu III. With it, her attack rating was just over 2000. After activating the Zombies twirling fists & switching to her, she absolutely decimated Mara's final form. The hardest part of the fight was rolling the boulders.

Healtti said:Like you, I enjoyed the game.

Your comments are spot on wrt builds. Although I've only done Jasker so far (Old School, Hard, no puppet deaths); the comments you make wrt Evia apply to him as well. With the right resistances & damage buffs, the end bosses are cake walks to use your metaphor especially Graabak for the 'good' ending.

I'm actually looking forward to an extreme run with Evia. I wasted a lot of resources on my hard run incrementally improving weapons and equipment. I know what to look for now & I plan on optimizing that aspect of the game. Essences are key. Before I activate a hexmark, I save. If I don't like what I get, I reload the save & give it another go. That way, I have the right essences to build the right resistances & buffs into the weapons, armor, & accessories.

LV 1 Blue Slime said:The achievements should unlock just by going online. They are tied to your profile. Once the local profile synchs to the global XBox Live profile, achievements should pop. It takes a while.

In my case, as I said earlier, four achievements did not pop. They were:




Apparently, Dracon Tamer was glitched when the game came out. I loaded up a save file & put Dracon in my party. When I switched to Dracon, the achievement popped.

The other three have not. I can understand the two that required save file manipulation not unlocking. I was surprised Angel was glitched. It’s pretty straight forward & Jasker was a goody two shoes. Not a big deal because they should unlock thru normal game play once I do the two remaining playthroughs.

Great walkthrough, as I said before, even though I’m doing in ass backwards.

Allgorhythm said:I just finished an extreme run on my new account and it was far less difficult/annoying than I remember it being the first time I played through this game. Sure, the first couple of chapters were annoying as I was low level and weak and everything has so much health, but it got a lot easier as time went by. I think I really didn’t pay close attention to how to really properly upgrade your weapons and armor then. I followed your advice by reloading saves for as long as I could usually bear in order to get the essences that I wanted out of hedmarks. I prioritized increased attack speed, chance to slay, life steal, and critical chance in weapons and it made a huge difference.

And I found that sword that you mentioned using on Carissa, but I had actually made a sword that was even better than that with 15% IAS, 8% critical chance, 15% life steal, and 6% chance to slay. She was an absolute monster for me. I never bothered with her when I first played the game because blue slime had said that melee was so bad on extreme, but once you fully outfit her with a ton of block chance, a ton of evasion chance, and a great weapon, she’s just a total beast in pretty much every aspect of the extreme playthrough.

I’m doing my Jasker hard, no puppet death run now. I started on the base version of the disk game, played for a few minutes, created a save, then updated the game so I can play the rest of the way online as it’s believed that that should be sufficient. This way I don’t have to play offline and hope the achievements pop after I reconnect to Xbox live.

From 2nd half or so of my extreme run, I basically just use the devourer and Carissa, with Evia really just being used to create a golem and spam her spells but never as a real damage source. There were times when I used Urshak to pick things off in the distance as I was clearing areas but Carissa and the devourer were my main work horses. End boss was super easy.

And in case there was any doubt, both 'broken' achievements popped for me after completing the Hard Old School playthrough online.

I first reinstalled the game offline, started a Hard Old School run, and played until I got Jasker. I made a manual save, went online, launched the game to force the update, then continued from there as normal.

The third achievement in this run, Jasker's story achievement, popped in chapter 5 when I reached House Malfagon in Kyallisar.

I also had several puppet and Devourer deaths but just reloaded my last save- no need to dashboard or anything like that.

vSully said:I try to be objective. I have no preconceived preference for melee or ranged. In fact, just recently, I completed the The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition (Windows) Walkthrough for both console and windows. I present it as a one playthrough approach on Supernova difficulty with ranged-only combat. Here, though, ranged is time consuming. Even Blue Slime who vastly prefers ranged complains about how tedious it is to kite enemies with ranged.

You must have done some impressive crafting to come up with a sword better than the Sword of King Kapu III--it's an absolute monster.

vSully said:That's very good to know. If I had been certain one could go online after starting the game offline from the disc, I would have done it. There are advantages to the upgraded version after all.

Congrats on completing the game on @vSully v2. That's a phenomenal TA ratio not to mention the current 100% completion. What's next?

Allgorhythm said:This screenshot shows my sword compared to the Sword of King Kapu III as well as my Devourer's weapon. I found the key with both of these characters was to get as much IAS and lifesteal as possible, which allowed them to go toe to toe with pretty much anything, especially with Carissa who had like 44% chance to block and 24% evasion. Slay was super useful throughout the entire game against any enemies that were susceptible to it, but I took it off the Devourer's weapon shown which I made at the very end specifically for the last boss. Sword of King Kapu III has better base damage than my sword but the extra skill damage and little bit of lightning damage on it are nowhere near as good as big lifesteal and either extra crit chance or crit damage (which help fuel lifesteal to keep you alive).

Allgorhythm said:Shadows Awakening put my past my first big milestone of 10k gamerscore, which is the lowest filter option on the Ratio leaderboard. I'll be first place there by a large margin once the stats update.

It's a long way to 50k gamerscore for the next filter tier, so my goal is to get there with the highest ratio possible (and 100% completion, of course). I haven't really crunched the numbers but I'm hoping I can keep a 10 overall ratio after the ~40 more games I need to complete to get there. The current first place with >50k gamerscore is just over a 5 ratio, so I should easily crush that when I finally get there. IT might take years, though.

vSully said:Your picture jogged my memory. If I remember correctly, you used the anvil in one of the Imperial Tombs to do the crafting. The Imperial Sword is one of several imperial weapons you can make.

vSully said:I'll definitely keep an eye open for when the stats update. For the 50K, what you need is for some high ratio games to go on GamePass to become ultra high ratio. The biggest impediment seems to be the scarcity of games with a ratio > 10. Good luck--I'll be in your corner.

Allgorhythm said:No, it was much much simpler than that. The part you mentioned is part of an achievement (I don't remember getting actual usable gear from there) but not necessary for general gear upgrades. Literally all I did was find the base weapon as a random drop (or maybe I bought it from a vendor) and add the essences I wanted to it.

And just to reiterate again for anyone reading these comments- Carissa is an absolute S-tier goddess. Load her weapon up with lifesteal, IAS, slay chance, then her other gear with block chance (3 items), and evade (4 items) and she can go toe to toe with basically everything, even on Extreme. Save before using Hexmarks and reload until you get the essences you need, which is tedious but makes a HUGE difference.

I got impatient during my Hard run where I was diligent in clearing enemies out to maximize xp gain, but at around level 24 in Ch5, I did the gauntlet/waves of enemies in the Border Defenses area, then I literally ran through Sura Wastes to Red Smoke Mountains, skipped everything including Imperial Tombs and the Ice Cavern, Killed Valkarin in the Oracle Area, then ran through the new Fallen Eagle pass using the "save as cutscenes spawning enemies start, then reload save" to skip all those encounters. I did this same thing in Kyallisar and beelined it to Mara, then decimated her with Carissa and the Devourer at like level 25.