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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide for RuneScape       >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering            >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Challenge (Puzzle) Rooms

Magical Construct Power Crystal, Gaps and Guardian Sphere

If you hate the mysterious shades that plague every level of Daemonheim, then you probably won’t like this challenge room. (In fact, as I write this, I am reminded of a particular individual from the RuneScoop forums who groans every time he encounters one of these!) You must activate a monolith in the center of the room and wait for it to charge up, while mysterious shades appear and try to knock it down. If you recall any of the “protect the NPC” tasks from RuneScape quests in the past, this is the same idea.

When you enter this room it initially appears empty, and it won’t have any regular monsters in it. It may have resources such as mining ores around its periphery, and trees on its walls.

In the center of the room is a four-sided monolith, with the left-click option “Activate”. Clicking the monolith causes a progress bar labeled “Monolith charges” to appear, which slowly increases over time. The monolith itself shows how much of a charge it currently has by a pulsating glow that climbs up the monolith in 25% intervals as the charge goes up, like a thermometer of sorts. You can also click the monolith to check its exact charge status (though there’s not really any need to do so).

Standing in your way are mysterious shades, which the room generates at random intervals. These are identical to the ones you find in normal rooms, except that they have no drops, and they are not initially aggressive to players. The number and level of these shades depends on the floor’s difficulty setting and the combat levels of the players; larger teams can encounter rather high-level ones.

When shades appear, they initially attack the monolith with magic balls of energy; each one that hits knocks down the monolith’s charge level by a few points. As soon as they are attacked they will retaliate against the player who attacked them and ignore the monolith.

When the monolith reaches 100% charge, the doors are unlocked and any shades still in the room dispelled. If the shades are able to bring the monolith’s charge down to zero, then they disappear, the monolith’s default action changes back to “Activate”, and you have to start over.

• Skill Requirements: None.
  
  
• Tool Requirements: None.
  
  
• Overall Difficulty: Moderate to High.
  
  
• Added Difficulty for High Latency Connections: Low.
  
  
• Danger Level: Moderate to High.
  
  
• Time Required: Moderate to High.
  
  
• Monsters in Room? No (except ones that are part of the challenge).
  
  
• Resources in Room? Yes.
  
  
• Impact of Team on Puzzle: High.

The key to this challenge is to attack every shade that appears as soon as it appears. Keep an eye on your minimap for yellow dots appearing, and move towards them. The shades show up completely randomly; you can have three appear in a short time, or long periods with no new ones being spawned, though usually only one or two come at a time.

Even though having a bunch of them attacking you may be dangerous, you need to distract them from the monolith or it will never get charged, so be sure you attack them all. Once all of them are on you, then focus on finishing off whichever has the lowest level or is the most damaged already. Also remember that once the monolith is fully charged, the shades will disappear: you don’t need to finish them off.

Since these shades are the same as the ones you encounter elsewhere, I’ll refer you to their monster page for overall tips and suggestions. Since you are fighting so many of these shades, it pays here to take extra steps to protect yourself. In particular, put on high magic defence armor if possible; if you don’t have any, then at least take off any platemail armor. You can also use Protection from Ranged or Deflect Ranged to help spare you some damage.

If you are having trouble keeping up, consider using Piety or Turmoil to kill the shades faster.

This is one challenge that definitely “scales up” with team size or difficulty. On a 5:5 map, a monolith room can represent quite a challenge indeed. However, many of the players who have trouble with it only encounter difficulties because they use poor tactics on the shades, such as fighting them with heavy metal armor. In large teams, this can be one of the more dangerous and resource-consuming challenge rooms.

It is recommended that if possible, the entire team participate in fighting the shades. On a 5-person team, it can take all 5 players much less time to finish this that it would take if only 4 try to do it.

This fight really depends a lot on luck. Sometimes you get only one or two shades at a time, but in other rooms you can have as many as 5 appear at once! One tip to consider is that if as soon as you start you are bombarded with a bunch of shades, it may be better to leave the room, let the monolith discharge fully (which unsummons the shades) and start over.

There is a rumor that if you start the puzzle and let the shades immediately knock down the monolith to zero so it resets, that the next time the shades will be a lower level. I have not been able to confirm this yet.

Magical Construct Power Crystal, Gaps and Guardian Sphere