Believe it or not I was thinking about this question before @skaggy_the_poet replied to my twitter call for blog topics for today. Mostly due to 2 things, one Samius is now level 14 which means Gh time and @tobril shot me a link (again via twitter) to a ddo.com forum post, Forums are down for me atm, so I dont have a title but here is the link….

I once saw an animated gif of a 2 man team solving the maze, I think it was by Mr Cow… I will see if I can dig up a link some time. (isilmerel: just tweeted me the link To Mr. Cow’s animated gif)

Any way, this life has been one where I have soloed a quest or two I didn’t think was soloable. Namely The Tomb of the Shadow Lord..This is what the ddowiki has to say about this quest.

“Requires extra player(s)/hireling(s) (mandatory: the party has to split several times in order to pull simultaneously several pairs of levers) “

But with the aid of a hireling and Dim Door, it was/is totally soloable….

There is no such note on the Crucible’s wiki write up, but that doesn’t make it soloable. Thinking through the maze, however, I do think it could be done with a hireling. The trick is understanding the maze and how the doors work..

Each valve controls a set of 3 doors. A door can either be N-S or E-W. Using the valve puts each door it controls in the opposite orientation. Each set of 3 doors has 2 doors that share their default orientation, and 1 door that is odd man out.

For example the three “I” doors (red in the map above thanks DDowiki), if the valve is set for its default you will see that the two most east doors will be in the N-S orientation and the third door will be in the E-W orientation. Solid color means that the door in its default orientation (off), two black lines means the alt (on) orientation.

Now you can use a hireling to camp the valves and switch it back and forth as long as YOU keep the valve targeted yourself. This is where you can get into trouble as you have to pick up crests, but if you keep the door directions in mind, and the path you need to take, you should be able to set the door your working with before locking yourself into a corner.

For example when you are getting the most northern crest, You are working with the I doors. You want to be sure the South I door is in the N-S orientation, or back to its default. Then you can Dim Door.

So soloing the Crucible should be very doable, with a hireling and at least 2 Dim Doors, one behind I and one behind K.

Of course you also have to be able to make the swim, and work the top part of the maze (you have lots of time as long as your fast).

I will try to solo it tonight, watch my twitter feed (@samiusgurobo) for completion details.

❤