Don’t Knock the Scroll (Or Do)

Recently, I went through my small army of characters in order to ensure that each of them was already in possession of a Mantle of the Worldshaper and a Voice of the Master in preparation for creating a whole slew of Master’s Gifts.  The result was a slew of running the Delera’s Tomb and Ruins of Threnal story arcs on a number of toons in a very short period of time.

In the process, I was reminded just how much time can be saved in the Abandoned Excavation (part three) of the Threnal storyline by simply having the ability to pick a mild-DC’ed lock, so that you don’t have to go hunting down the randomly-placed Silver Key, which (if you’re unlucky, and I always seem to be) can waste a lot of time and absolutely kill your speed run.

To that end – yes, I promise, there is a point! – I tracked down some Knock scrolls in the Marketplace arcane scroll vendor’s inventory.  Of course, there are wands which drop with higher Caster Levels (the most frequent one I see is 10^th), but at the time, there weren’t any available on the Auction House and I was too lazy to bother looking for one in my Buy Back tab.  Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Armed with this amazing Caster Level 3 Knock scroll, I sent my Spellbuckler (or is it Swashsinger?) bard back to Threnal to try and scroll the lock… and while I was dismayed it didn’t work, I was simultaneously cracked up that the Open Lock roll for this (admittedly readily available) scroll was only +3.

Plus three!!  A well-built first-life level 1 rogue using Rusty Thieves’ Tools can easily roll triple that!  (+4 for Skill rank, +3 for Attribute bonus [only requires 16 Dex], +2 for Rusty Thieves’ Tools = +9.  -Ed.)  Scrolling +3 is a joke!

And so, it became a point of interest, a pseudo-academic exercise, if you will, in order to find exactly where the “break point” of these scrolls’ effectiveness was.  It was clearly earlier than the Ruins of Threnal’s level-10 third arc.  But where, exactly, did it fall?

So, armed with a stack of 100 freshly-purchased scrolls, I sent my bard off in search of where they failed.

My hypothesis was that they would work on the locked door at the end of Necromancer’s Doom and not much else.  A handful of folks on Twitter seemed to agree, with the general consensus to my flippant announcement that I might make a ‘comprehensive list’ saying that it would be a very, very short list.

Success on a 1.  This is ruining my hypothesis.

Well, Necromancer’s Doom managed to succeed on a 1.  With Knock’s +3 bonus, that means the DC for this lock is 4 or less.  According to the wiki page I literally just found while typing this sentence, the suspected DC is 1.  Supported.

The next one that I could think of was the pair of locked doors in the “trap route” of Sunken Sewer.  This was successful on a 17;  according to the wiki information log, the break point is 16.  Which means the scroll would succeed on a 13, or 65% of the time.  Not too bad, yet.

Success on the second door in The Sunken Sewer.

Still.  Not.  Failing.  Ugh!

Moving up to level 3 content, the next one that stood out was the locked door at the end of The Swiped Signet.  This quest has a habit of making my right eye twitch due to the Quickfoot Casters’ obsession with casting Sleet Storm at every possible opportunity.  The wiki says the DC for this door is 8, which I succeeded with my scroll on a 9 (+3), so there you go.  Hasn’t failed yet… ugh.

Bear in mind, I’m also not going through each and every single lock, but roughly one-quest-per-level just as a silly experiment.

Ah-HA!  Failure!

I was drawing a blank at level 4 and 5 quests with locks that were a) readily accessible and b) not already part of a multi-part quest arc, so I jumped up to level 6 with Mirra’s Sleepless Nights.  (You can already tell I’m a very thorough scholar of pointless information, can’t you?)  Unsurprisingly, the chest in the first room with undead spawning in it failed on an 18 (+3);  however, the second chest with the cold trap actually opened with an identical roll.  I went through a bunch of scrolls on the first chest to roll higher than an 18, since theoretically, a 19 would have unlocked it, but ran out of patience first.

Darn… it worked.  On half the chests.

The second chest in Mirra’s Sleepless Nights with a slightly lower DC.

And finally, the desired result!

Finally, I came to the next lock on my list, which was in The Forgotten Caverns as part of the standard House Kundarak Locksmith’s Square favor quest bunch.  While not technically a “real lock” since there’s a key in a box about thirty yards away, I still gave it a shot, anyway.  And failed on a 20 (+3).  According to the wiki, failed miserably, too, since its suspected DC range is 32-47 (31 failed, 47 succeeded).  Not even remotely close.

45 Scrolls of Knock were wasted in this experiment.

So there you have it, folks, the door that finally broke the scroll.  Granted, there were plenty of locks I skipped, but this was an exercise in (mostly) silliness and real-world application and not a full-on inquiry.  In short, the take-away is that while Scrolls of Knock are not inherently useless, they do lose their functionality circa level 6 content (on Elite).

Plus, I got a blog post out of it with a bunch of pretty (?) pictures, so there.