Serpent Temple or Castle Ruins?

[woodelf]

Keeping with Steve's earlier theme about choosing between the temple and the toads I figured I'd ask about this choice as well. About 60% of my promotion quests now involve the temple and the rest revolve around the Ruins. I tried the temple, but my priest doesn't have cure poison yet and it didn't go well. My party is lvl 8 or greater with a warrior, barbarian, rogue, priest, warlock, and wizard. Can I handle the Ruins and build up my priest this way? Should I make my priest a monk and get some quick levels?

Thanks in advance

[carg]

You need to have finished Serpent temple before you can finish the castle ruins. And the ruins are harder, so if you have trouble in the temple, just walk around a while with monster spawn on frequent on the west side of Ishad Na; that might help earn some Xp and items. But don't go beyond the abandoned house with the ratlings yet. Do try to get cure poison as soon as possible, but in the mean time you can buy some cure poison potions at the temple and you'll find several in the temple too. For the time being you can keep most priests friendly by keeping the wizard Kreug happy.
But if you change your priest to monk you won't be able to learn vine magic, so that's no option if you want cure poison. (And make sure to get the 6th level spell cure too, before switching away from vine magic.) Well, actually you can still learn vine magic, but only at half your skill so that doesn't help.

As the previous respondent noted, you need Cure (Poison) spell urgently & I would recommend Exorcism as well. Monk quest is tedious (my Ratling was a nacked Bard the last time for all levels to be Monk thereafter).
In my last run I cleared the temple up to the Naga (collecting coins for first Pawn shop quest), then did the Warriors' Guild quest at the Castle, then the second Warrior's Guild quest at the mine (looted the treasury to get money) before finishing the Temple (and the Temple guilds quest), then the Temple guilds quest & second Pawn shop quest in the Castle followed by the last Temple guilds quest & the first BD quest.
At that stage had Crusade available, made all of my party to paladins at next promo and got extra points in the castle .....
[Does your Wizz have Meteorstorm or Firestorm or your Warlock Icestorm ? You need something like that for the Amazoni Mantraps west of IN & Cure (Poison) - else do not go to far out on the western side.]

[woodelf]

Thanks for the advice guys. I ended up paying for some potions and did clean out some of the Temple, but sadly I need about 12K exp before my Priest can get Cure Poison. I did run into a Mantrap and the result was quite expectedly a "reload". And to answer Pascha's question about my wiz/warlock; neither of them have those spells so I have some leveling up to do.

I have one other question: I think I mistakenly switched one of my warriors to Samurai as soon as I could and I'm finding out that I'm a long ways from completing the necessary task to become one. I'm actually a little fuzzy on what exactly needs to be done. Should I cancel this action and become something else for now?

Thanks

[carg]

You'll need to go beyond the mantraps to become samurai. If you know what to do you might try to storm past them, but otherwise you'll probably do the serpent temple and some overland mapping first. So there is enough time (read Xp) to go through a different role if you want to first.
12K Xp is not that much if you meet enough mountain spiders by the way.

Woodelf, you can leave the Samurai quest standing until you get the baton (if you do not want to become something else first).
A potentially quick way to get Cure Poison is to make one char Ranger and pay for the early levels vinecraft, then at level 5 ranger [14,505 exp] you will have Cure Poison.

Yes, if you have not triggered the Amazoni Traps, you can get plenty of exp from mountain spiders - more than 700 each at hard, ie more than 2,000 on often/hard because then they come in bunches of three - just keep at the western side when you go out east of IN & do not get past Scanthril.