opo-opo crown - sand diggers (ancient salt)

[aoreem]

hello, I have most of the items needed for the crown, except for ancient salt and lucky egg... does anyone know how to get to the sand diggers in quicksand caves?

thanks

[Choup]

Hi Aoreem,

There's only 4 Sand digger, all near he same spot.
To go there, you must enter Quicksand Caves from West Altepa, in the SW corner of the map, South of the little oasis (sorry at work so i don't have the right position, but it's out of the map).

It's the same entrance you need to use for Zilart Mission BCNM.

When you enter, don't open 1st door, but follow the way to the right. It will lead you to another door on right side of map. Open it and go straight to another door. Past 2nd door, fall down the hole and you should drop on the 1st Sand digger. The 3 others are close to this one, you can't miss them.

They are easy for a lvl 70. I duo them with a Paladin without trouble.
Good luck!
Choup

[Aniga]

These things are a pain -.- I killed 40 of them tonight and no Salt. Gonna get THF up to 15, sub that, and try again.

[Yoss]

Sorry for bumping this

2 questions:

Could I solo the worms @70 decently easy...are there any anticans/cacti close by that'll agro, etc..?

Is either of the 2 doors you have to go through a weight door?

I'd rather not drag people to help with such a horrid drop rate on this.

~thanks

[Vilurum]

You have to go through two weight doors, so unless you're a galka you'll need to bring someone along at least to get you there.

They're soloable at 70. There's one solo in the area you drop into, then one in the middle of a room with about five (?) Girtabs, an Antican Antesignanus and an Antican Triarius (the BLM and RNG versions never spawn here, it's always one of each of these), then on the far side of that room there are two - generally spaced a ways apart, sometimes not - in the hallway which eventually leads back out to Altepa for you to leave.

By soloable I do mean BRD-soloable, meaning you will probably want to maintain Stoneskin and sleep it occasionally (and therefore don't use Dia or Requiem). If you stay close to it so it can smack you, it won't nuke you with its strong earth spells. It'll be easy prey (and almost certainly still aggro) at 70.

And yes, the drop rate is hideous. However the enemies there (the worms and also the scorps/antica) are quite nice for skillups up to the 190's or so. Very easy kills (AOE silence from antica notwithstanding), not hard to hit with 150+ skill and madrigal.

You could probably convince a small skillup party in the low 60's to come here. Especially if it's mostly mages, because if they just melee, the kills will take long enough that the respawn on the three worms won't seem so bad.

(The worm in the room, you should ignore unless you have a huge party that can clear out the room, or a BLM or RNG who can stand in a safe place and snipe.)

[Yoss]

Thanks for the info, it was really easy to get to.

I ended up getting help from a whm & sam, so the worms died really quickly. We tried requiem + dia II on the middle one, but it just took too long to kill...so we stuck to the 3 around the edges. If you had a rng, blm, sum, rdm you could kill the middle one no problem.

Awful repop time, somewhere around 15 minutes I think. I think I got pretty lucky, it dropped on around the 9th-10th worm. The sam had /thf sub, no idea if that helped oO

Definitely solable at 70 if you had too, and because of the area you could even just run out of range instead of having to sleep it to keep requiem going. Altepa zone is also right there, so if mayhem ensued you could escape easy.

[Vilurum]

Running out of range is fine, just beware of Bind + nuke, especially if you don't have Erase.

[UnnamedGalka]

These things are a pain -.- I killed 40 of them tonight and no Salt.

40 worms and no ancient salt? Really?

I got my ancient salt off the very first Sand Digger I killed...didn't think it was such a rare drop :sweat: Wow, guess I got real lucky then.

Well anyway, the best thing to do is to muster up all your patience and just keep killing them. The salt is bound to drop sooner or later.

[Miriamel]

I got my salt off the first digger too. We're still on it, we got 2 salts in about 12 diggers now. I'd say it could be worse.