Just completed the Mine of Malan Vael and would highly recommend to everyone who has finished the original game and wants another short adventure with tougher fights and puzzles. Thank you for the dungeon!
It took me about 7 hours (but food was no problem), found 12/15 secrets and 3 skulls.
What I liked:
-this is a high quality dungeon. it could easily have been released as an official add-on for the game imo.
-some puzzles were tough, but mostly fair
-new items, new tiles set
-faster leveling and lots of skills books works well for the shorter adventure
What I'd like added:
-quick action bar that is, for example, present in the latest version of the master quest.
Problems:
-there's a few puzzles i had trouble with even after figuring out what to do:
1. the one that i think requires you to recognize musical tones from rooms to match them with a North, S, E, W riddle. I didn't want to start recording the tones to compare and I'm not good with recognizing/remembering musical notes so I just had to try out all 24 combinations of the riddle (of course it was only the second to last one that worked).
2. on the first level there's a puzzle that requires stepping quickly on pressure plates to enter through 3 gates. even after I figured out what to do I physically could not do it fast enough on my computer (until I used the cheat engine to slow it down to 0.8 - then I did it on first try). I also had lots of problems with these fast, timed puzzles in the original game, and I'm starting to think that somehow the game runs too fast on my computer because this puzzle is obviously not that hard and I've seen people do puzzles like these on youtube with relative ease and it doesn't even seem like they have to nail everything perfectly like I do on my computer. I dunno. But yeah, maybe you could slow the doors down a bit in case there are differences in how the game runs on different machines.
-i missed 3 secrets; I think a secrets guide would be great for people who play the dungeon in the future; usually I like to play through the levels on my own, but then check afterwards to see what I missed (in case there was something important).
Other notes:
i used a pure fire mage this time, and i liked him more than my air/ice mage from the original game (lots of damage, except against fire enemies, but I had the fire shield for them). ogre was no problem for my sword fighter, unarmed rogue, missile rogue and fire mage (i understood the hint that you were supposed to ice bomb him and run, but that looked a lot harder than just killing him). arena battle was tough (mage died), and final battle was tough (mage died again), and the contaminated room was pure hell until I figured it out with one surviving member (fighter with serpent bracer) - and even then it took all my potions, and made we want to rage quit because it just felt unfair. but once i knew what to do and where everything was, i reloaded and re-did it without too much trouble (mage died again of course). and man was i pissed off after leaving that area and heading over to kill the uggardians when two of those poison shooting baby-herders flanked me from nowhere.
