Overview
This guide focuses on getting you one of the 201 Gold Stars (and last obsidian skulls) and makes light work of what is considered one of the hardest levels. It will only cover the Face of Madness level, the setup I used for the characters, their placement, and when I boosted them.
Intro & Welcome
Good day! Welcome to my first guide on Steam. This guide will cover what is often considered one of the hardest levels in DQ. It is meant to get you one of the final elusive gold stars / obsidian skulls.
This guide will cover how I placed my skills for my party, when and where I placed the units to beat the map, and when I boosted them. All accompanied by screenshots (aside from the boosting) no less.
Party Setup (Skills & Items)
Let’s start by going over the skill placement for the party. All of my characters were level 60 to accomplish this. Please note that for each character class, all of them had identical skill placement.
Azra:
Beserkers:
Archers:
Healers:
Ice Mages:
Knights:
Dragons:
For Azra’s books, I used Slow End and Book of Blood.
For items, you can line up the items to my screenshot using their bonus. Two small notes. 1) I don’t believe the item placement itself mattered that much aside from the primary archer Ketta getting the bow that applies light (and her being the solo archer on the far left coming up). 2) I have all items applied since I got the 201 stars before I took my item screenshot. I did upgrade all weapons before upgrading armor for the most part. Whichever item you are missing thanks to this last obsidian skull, it won’t make that much of an impact as long as its not the Gilded Death+ (bow that applies light)
Unit Placement
Again, I figured a screenshot helps the most for this rather than my going on and on and having anything I said open to interpretation. Yes, this is a screenshot heavy guide. I am going to give you the starting and final unit placement now, and the description of getting from A to B in the next section.
Eventually, you will end up here:
Boosting & Final Unit Deployment
So, you know from the section above where we start off this battle. The Blue path is the most dangerous path in this, and the Yellow is the least so.
1) Work on leveling up your archers in the upper middle right, your ice mages along the blue path, and your middle five knights first. I tried to level up my archers primarily, but getting the 4th level on knights was pretty important too. The lower right hand ice mage is equally important to hit 5 to maximize her freezing skills early game.
In between this step here is where you will encounter your greatest challenge. The first instance of the blue blob guy who comes through the blue spawn point. He splits into three blob guys who phase and also split into a ton of tiny rushers. This challenge right here of stopping them will be the hardest part of this map’s gold star. Try to save your fireball, the knockback, and frenzy for this one spree if possible. Use lightning on anyone getting close enough that your dragon’s can’t just NOM on. Do not let that first group of rushers hit Azra. As long as you get past this point, it should only get easier from here.
2) Finish leveling up those archers, ice mages, and knights.
3) Level up the Dragons to Roar.
4) Place more Dragons, and all other units aside from Beserkers. (refer to Final Placement screenshot from previous section)
5) Level up everything. This should be pretty easy by now.
6) Place those Beserkers and max them out. The are really only to apply more damage to Zelemir, and were clustered to maximize the use of Frenzy.
The map should just progress itself from here on out. You will want to use the fireball whenever it is up. When Zelemir is in the middle hole in the map, go ahead and use Frenzy. If you really want to speed it up, at this point go ahead and just nonstop blast Lightning at Zelemir to add to your team’s damage. He should be dead by wave 80 to 85 with this. Definitely by 100.
7) Replace anyone who gets knocked out.
The End
Hopefully this guide helped you in what proved to be one of the most difficult maps. I know there were some YouTube videos covering this but I could not seem to get by using them. This was mostly due to my lack of patience to try to step by step emulate every single thing that they did. That and there was far too much micromanagement in them earlier on. I felt like the path I developed here was far easier aside from that one tiny hurdle near the start of the first large blue blob guy. It did take me three or so attempts to adjust the use of skills timed right to get past that. My unit placement might have shifted a tiny and the boosting might have differed slightly in those first few waves prior to that. You will find a small combo in here that will work for you to get you from step 1 to 2.
Any comments or suggested edits, feel free to let me know in the comments or send me a message. Thank you and best of luck!