The frist time I got three shells, I took 'em to the ship builder. He made 2 helmets and 1 breather. This is a problem. Now what I need to knoe is how many crabs do I really need? I'd like to take my 2 fighters and a healer at least. Also I noticed that some crabs don't give a shell. What is the ratio of that happening?

Stupid crab thing..

One crab shell gets made into either a helmet or a breather - so if you want to only take 3 characters you will need a total of 6 shells altogether.

Try pickpocketing the crabs to get shells.

I don't know what the ratio of a crab dropping a shell or not is -
I (being lucky) never had any difficulty finding enough shells to take my whole party to Collasium. I'd just sailed around and when my scout said there was a crab in the area - we'd jump overboard and go looking.

Wyv

I figured that was the ratio...So if I want everybody 12 crabs (where's the DDT?) Thanks...I thought thais was was true...I just hoped there was some other trick...I just wanted to complain.... :D

A few other tips:

1. If your character has iron lung trait, then they can breathe longer underwater and don't need any ugly scuba gear.

2. If you're brave, you can take fewer characters into Coliseum first - there are quite a lot of crabs inside.. grab those shells and then go back to Brimloch Roon and pick up your other characters..

3. If you don't want to spend hours fishing for crabs, then make use of the game bug where when you drop an item and it reappears simultaneously in the shop's inventory. i.e. find one crab shell, go to a guild shop, go to your character's inventory, select the shell and drop it, go back to the buy option at the shop and buy two shells.. repeat and you can buy four shells.. repeat again for eight shells.. just make sure you have enough empty inventory space and some gold..

Good luck.

Oh my god a cheat....*blush*.... :D I'll have to try that one.

Oops! My version doesn't seem to have the bug described. Or I'm not doing it right. Oh well I guess it's the hard way.

You don't really need to take your entire party to the sunken palace.
i took two characters that had all the skills i would possibly need.
One was a Warrior->Barbaria->Paladin who could cast all the healing etc. spells i needed and was an uber-fighter.
The other was a Rogue->Ninja->Samurai who had lock picking, offensive spells etc. and was also an uber-fighter.
They did fine, i just ran out of inventory space!!