Dark Secrets of Ekatrix the Black (English Version)

Williams@bosst

268 Posts

#1 · 16 November 2022, 17:53

Quote from Williams on 16 November 2022, 17:53
Versão em Portugues

Polska wersja

Surely most of you have heard of The Tainted Souls Quest, which was introduced in update 10.80, which was 7 years ago. Especially since the final boss of this quest - Ekatrix is in the Bosstiary, both Tainted Caves and the quest itself have gained in popularity recently.

Let me recall briefly what the quest is about.

We must explore the caves beneath the Venore swamps and, using the sacred antler talisman, " redeem" 100 tainted souls that a mysterious witch is using for some kind of black-magic ritual. After that we can kill the witch - Ekatrix the Black and (if we redeem 100 souls again) it can be repeated every 20 hours. In the cave, we can also find a book that explains in detail the process of cursing souls, as well as their redemption:

So we have redeemed 100 souls and killed the evil witch who was behind this terrible practice. But let us ask ourselves.
What reward did we actually get? No quest/reward box, no achievement. In fact, only the opportunity to kill Ekatrix, whose loot well... It's not impressive. Maybe we should consider if this quest has a second meaning, a continuation or an alternative ending?

It is a good few years ago that I started to visit the Tainted Caves on a fairly regular basis because of my project to get the stuffed toad from the witch, and the consequent theory according to which it can be obtained also from Ekatrix. Recently I have also done the quest 30 times while getting points for the Bosstiary. So I can say that I know this area quite well and the research I did years ago was useful while writing this article.

Let's start our analysis by looking at one of the teasers of the 10.80 update, which concerned the Tainted Souls quest.

Note the appearance of the cave, we'll come back to that in a moment. The description seen in the 'Notes' section of the teaser is also very intriguing in hindsight. "I am not sure if killing her will be enough to remove the curse". In my opinion, this is a direct allusion to the fact that the quest does not end with killing Ekatrix! Feeling the thrill yet? Perhaps we are close to discovering something new after 7 years!

Now, let's look at the cave in which we face Ekatrix.

In the screenshot above, I have marked the most interesting objects we can find in the cave. I will describe them briefly:

2 shelves and a leaf basket. An ideal place for something to respawn. For example, an item which would be a clue. Unfortunately, every time I looked there they were empty.

Skull candle. Placed in what looks like an extinguished campfire. It cannot be put out or picked up. Unusual object.

Regular skull. I wouldn't write about it, at first glance it's just a regular skull. But now look at the screenshot from the teaser. It's not there! Quite suspicious.

Large cauldron. It almost begs for something to drink from it. Or, on the contrary, to add/insert something there. Particularly noting the item next to it. Unfortunately, it seems that no interaction is possible.

Potion stand of blood. The first thing that comes to mind is using it on the cauldron. But of course, this is not possible. Instead, we can drink the blood in it, pour it out, or fill the vial with blood again or another fluid.

Exit teleport. It is not suspicious. After all, we have to get out of the cave somehow. The only thing I can think of is the possibility that it could have moved us to some other place as a result of some undiscovered action we would have performed in the cave.

Let's return to the question of an alternative reward for completing a quest.
First of all, let's consider the simplest possible solution - stuffed toad as loot from Ekatrix. That is, a chance for a fairly valuable item usually worth around 2kk, which could be a pretty good reward for such a daily quest.

There is only one problem - we have almost 28k kills on Guildstats, and I have never seen a screenshot of anyone showing looting a frog from Ekatrix. I have also searched the net and the entire Tibiabosses screenshots database - out of almost 16k ss, there are only 8 from Ekatrix and none of them show this loot. Well, this raises suspicions.

What if the Ekatrix pattern loot was copied 1:1 from a regular witch? Let's have also a look at the witch loot stats from Tibiopedia:

Here we have almost 52k kills (of which at least 15k of mine) and only 1 looted toad. This shows that the classification of the rarity of loots ending in very rare in various Tibian wikis does not reflect reality at all. This loot is extremely rare. What does this mean? If the Ekatrix loot is exactly the same as the witch loot, then with 28k kills it is possible no one has ever dropped a toad. It seems that we can neither confirm nor disprove this theory at the moment.

The underground itself is also worth a look as it is quite unusual. It is by no means a good place in terms of exp, but it is certainly interesting in terms of loot due to the gloom wolves and the gloom wolf fur, which is a valued imbue item. I have thoroughly explored the swamp fragments that are scattered throughout the caves. I have tried using a shovel on them (knowing that in certain places in Tibia it is possible to extract items from the swamp), as well as fishing with a fishing rod. However, this did not produce any visible results.

While researching the final cave I also noticed an interesting fact. Well, the gloom wolves have an area bleed attack, which is in the shape of an X. And the 2 gloom wolves that always respawn in the cave together with Ekatrix are ideally suited for some experimentation. Ekatrix is not immune to bleeding damage. So I tried to kill her with the help of wolves. Ekatrix has 500 hp and we only have 10 min to kill her. That's not a lot of time to kill her that way, so I helped the wolves a bit:

I wonder if the developers creating the quest foresaw this possibility of killing a witch. Maybe you should try this method and manage to kill her with wolves entirely?

I've also made an attempt to do it:

But failed due to lack of time. It is doable, but with 2 wolves hitting the witch simultaneously. That would be quite hard to set up using fire fields. Additionally, wolves hit themselves with the bleeding area attack so you have to watch out, as one may easily get killed by another.

Let's discuss one more theory. If we take a look at Tibia Library entries for Tainted and Redeemed Souls, we can notice some interesting facts.

What I think is most interesting is the excerpt from the description of Redeemed Soul:

"Souls delivered in such a way are by all means thankful towards their liberator."

What if the souls trapped in the cage have some function to perform in the boss room? Perhaps if the Ekatrix came into contact with the Redeemed Souls it would have some unexpected effect? Let's check it out. We should remember, however, that the Redeemed Souls disappear 30 seconds after appearing. So we have little time to test it.

Unfortunately, I did not notice that the close presence of Redeemed Souls had any effect on Ekatrix. But perhaps it needs to be done somehow differently and/or use these souls differently.

To conclude, I have left something I discovered quite by accident and which theoretically could be some kind of clue as to the continuation of the Tainted Souls quest.
When we are taken to the cave with Ekatrix, in the cage in the upper left corner we find some Tainted Souls. This is what it usually looks like:

But as it turns out it is not always so! I have visited this room about 100 times, but the following situation has happened to me only once - tainted souls were not in the cage at all! I realised this after some time because I always kill Ekatrix first and then use sacred antler talisman on souls in a cage. And yet they were not there.

I only have the ss above, but you can notice that my questlog doesn't show that I started redeeming souls again. They were not in the room at all.

I also managed to find a video on youtube which shows such a situation. Take a look:
https://youtu.be/nYEDQ1cUAWM?t=1463

What does it mean? It doesn't look like a bug to me, but rather a strange mechanism that triggers very rarely. Could it be that the room, or the witch herself, has some kind of altered properties in case tainted souls are not there right after we enter? I think that this is a kind of proof that not everything about this quest is yet completely known and investigated. I have been trying over and over again to recreate such circumstances in order to investigate it better but without success. I have also noticed, that if at an empty cave we stand by its southern wall, 2 souls respawn in a cage. These are really very strange properties for a "boss room", don't you think? Last, but not least, the caged tainted souls can be influenced:

At the very end, I left a curiosity (thanks Mogh). Ekatrix is presumably an allusion to the character Bellatrix Lestrange from the Harry Potter universe. What does this suggest? First of all, the name. Ekatrix - Bellatrix. Also, Bellatrix's maiden name is Black. So is Ekatrix's title (the Black). We also know that Bellatrix specialised in torture and was an extremely cruel witch. And our Ekatrix casts curses on tormented souls.

That's all in this article, but our adventure doesn't end there. We encourage you to do your own research. Tibia is still full of mysteries and the Tainted Souls Quest seems to be one of those which, despite 7 years of quest implementation, is still waiting to be fully discovered.

Sources:

https://www.tibia.com/news/?subtopic=newsarchive&id=3194&fbegind=1&fbeginm=5&fbeginy=2015&fendd=31&fendm=5&fendy=2015&flist=10111110

https://www.tibia.com/library/?subtopic=creatures&race=taintedsoul

https://www.tibia.com/library/?subtopic=creatures&race=redeemedsoul

https://guildstats.eu/bosses?world=&monsterName=Ekatrix

https://tibiopedia.pl/monsters/Witch

https://tibiopedia.pl/quests/The_Tainted_Souls_Quest

https://tibiopedia.pl/monsters/ekatrix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYEDQ1cUAWM

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/harrypotter/images/b/ba/Bellatrixi.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150810175219&path-prefix=pl

Special thanks to Makadamia for the fitting banner <3

Versão em Portugues

Polska wersja

Surely most of you have heard of The Tainted Souls Quest, which was introduced in update 10.80, which was 7 years ago. Especially since the final boss of this quest - Ekatrix is in the Bosstiary, both Tainted Caves and the quest itself have gained in popularity recently.

Let me recall briefly what the quest is about.

We must explore the caves beneath the Venore swamps and, using the sacred antler talisman, " redeem" 100 tainted souls that a mysterious witch is using for some kind of black-magic ritual. After that we can kill the witch - Ekatrix the Black and (if we redeem 100 souls again) it can be repeated every 20 hours. In the cave, we can also find a book that explains in detail the process of cursing souls, as well as their redemption:

So we have redeemed 100 souls and killed the evil witch who was behind this terrible practice. But let us ask ourselves.
What reward did we actually get? No quest/reward box, no achievement. In fact, only the opportunity to kill Ekatrix, whose loot well... It's not impressive. Maybe we should consider if this quest has a second meaning, a continuation or an alternative ending?

It is a good few years ago that I started to visit the Tainted Caves on a fairly regular basis because of my project to get the stuffed toad from the witch, and the consequent theory according to which it can be obtained also from Ekatrix. Recently I have also done the quest 30 times while getting points for the Bosstiary. So I can say that I know this area quite well and the research I did years ago was useful while writing this article.

Let's start our analysis by looking at one of the teasers of the 10.80 update, which concerned the Tainted Souls quest.

Note the appearance of the cave, we'll come back to that in a moment. The description seen in the 'Notes' section of the teaser is also very intriguing in hindsight. "I am not sure if killing her will be enough to remove the curse". In my opinion, this is a direct allusion to the fact that the quest does not end with killing Ekatrix! Feeling the thrill yet? Perhaps we are close to discovering something new after 7 years!

Now, let's look at the cave in which we face Ekatrix.

In the screenshot above, I have marked the most interesting objects we can find in the cave. I will describe them briefly:

2 shelves and a leaf basket. An ideal place for something to respawn. For example, an item which would be a clue. Unfortunately, every time I looked there they were empty.
Skull candle. Placed in what looks like an extinguished campfire. It cannot be put out or picked up. Unusual object.
Regular skull. I wouldn't write about it, at first glance it's just a regular skull. But now look at the screenshot from the teaser. It's not there! Quite suspicious.
Large cauldron. It almost begs for something to drink from it. Or, on the contrary, to add/insert something there. Particularly noting the item next to it. Unfortunately, it seems that no interaction is possible.
Potion stand of blood. The first thing that comes to mind is using it on the cauldron. But of course, this is not possible. Instead, we can drink the blood in it, pour it out, or fill the vial with blood again or another fluid.
Exit teleport. It is not suspicious. After all, we have to get out of the cave somehow. The only thing I can think of is the possibility that it could have moved us to some other place as a result of some undiscovered action we would have performed in the cave.

Let's return to the question of an alternative reward for completing a quest.
First of all, let's consider the simplest possible solution - stuffed toad as loot from Ekatrix. That is, a chance for a fairly valuable item usually worth around 2kk, which could be a pretty good reward for such a daily quest.

There is only one problem - we have almost 28k kills on Guildstats, and I have never seen a screenshot of anyone showing looting a frog from Ekatrix. I have also searched the net and the entire Tibiabosses screenshots database - out of almost 16k ss, there are only 8 from Ekatrix and none of them show this loot. Well, this raises suspicions.

What if the Ekatrix pattern loot was copied 1:1 from a regular witch? Let's have also a look at the witch loot stats from Tibiopedia:

Here we have almost 52k kills (of which at least 15k of mine) and only 1 looted toad. This shows that the classification of the rarity of loots ending in very rare in various Tibian wikis does not reflect reality at all. This loot is extremely rare. What does this mean? If the Ekatrix loot is exactly the same as the witch loot, then with 28k kills it is possible no one has ever dropped a toad. It seems that we can neither confirm nor disprove this theory at the moment.

The underground itself is also worth a look as it is quite unusual. It is by no means a good place in terms of exp, but it is certainly interesting in terms of loot due to the gloom wolves and the gloom wolf fur, which is a valued imbue item. I have thoroughly explored the swamp fragments that are scattered throughout the caves. I have tried using a shovel on them (knowing that in certain places in Tibia it is possible to extract items from the swamp), as well as fishing with a fishing rod. However, this did not produce any visible results.

While researching the final cave I also noticed an interesting fact. Well, the gloom wolves have an area bleed attack, which is in the shape of an X. And the 2 gloom wolves that always respawn in the cave together with Ekatrix are ideally suited for some experimentation. Ekatrix is not immune to bleeding damage. So I tried to kill her with the help of wolves. Ekatrix has 500 hp and we only have 10 min to kill her. That's not a lot of time to kill her that way, so I helped the wolves a bit:

I wonder if the developers creating the quest foresaw this possibility of killing a witch. Maybe you should try this method and manage to kill her with wolves entirely?

I've also made an attempt to do it:

But failed due to lack of time. It is doable, but with 2 wolves hitting the witch simultaneously. That would be quite hard to set up using fire fields. Additionally, wolves hit themselves with the bleeding area attack so you have to watch out, as one may easily get killed by another.

Let's discuss one more theory. If we take a look at Tibia Library entries for Tainted and Redeemed Souls, we can notice some interesting facts.

What I think is most interesting is the excerpt from the description of Redeemed Soul:

"Souls delivered in such a way are by all means thankful towards their liberator."

What if the souls trapped in the cage have some function to perform in the boss room? Perhaps if the Ekatrix came into contact with the Redeemed Souls it would have some unexpected effect? Let's check it out. We should remember, however, that the Redeemed Souls disappear 30 seconds after appearing. So we have little time to test it.

Unfortunately, I did not notice that the close presence of Redeemed Souls had any effect on Ekatrix. But perhaps it needs to be done somehow differently and/or use these souls differently.

To conclude, I have left something I discovered quite by accident and which theoretically could be some kind of clue as to the continuation of the Tainted Souls quest.
When we are taken to the cave with Ekatrix, in the cage in the upper left corner we find some Tainted Souls. This is what it usually looks like:

But as it turns out it is not always so! I have visited this room about 100 times, but the following situation has happened to me only once - tainted souls were not in the cage at all! I realised this after some time because I always kill Ekatrix first and then use sacred antler talisman on souls in a cage. And yet they were not there.

I only have the ss above, but you can notice that my questlog doesn't show that I started redeeming souls again. They were not in the room at all.

I also managed to find a video on youtube which shows such a situation. Take a look:
https://youtu.be/nYEDQ1cUAWM?t=1463

What does it mean? It doesn't look like a bug to me, but rather a strange mechanism that triggers very rarely. Could it be that the room, or the witch herself, has some kind of altered properties in case tainted souls are not there right after we enter? I think that this is a kind of proof that not everything about this quest is yet completely known and investigated. I have been trying over and over again to recreate such circumstances in order to investigate it better but without success. I have also noticed, that if at an empty cave we stand by its southern wall, 2 souls respawn in a cage. These are really very strange properties for a "boss room", don't you think? Last, but not least, the caged tainted souls can be influenced:

At the very end, I left a curiosity (thanks Mogh). Ekatrix is presumably an allusion to the character Bellatrix Lestrange from the Harry Potter universe. What does this suggest? First of all, the name. Ekatrix - Bellatrix. Also, Bellatrix's maiden name is Black. So is Ekatrix's title (the Black). We also know that Bellatrix specialised in torture and was an extremely cruel witch. And our Ekatrix casts curses on tormented souls.

That's all in this article, but our adventure doesn't end there. We encourage you to do your own research. Tibia is still full of mysteries and the Tainted Souls Quest seems to be one of those which, despite 7 years of quest implementation, is still waiting to be fully discovered.

Sources:

https://www.tibia.com/news/?subtopic=newsarchive&id=3194&fbegind=1&fbeginm=5&fbeginy=2015&fendd=31&fendm=5&fendy=2015&flist=10111110

https://www.tibia.com/library/?subtopic=creatures&race=taintedsoul

https://www.tibia.com/library/?subtopic=creatures&race=redeemedsoul

https://guildstats.eu/bosses?world=&monsterName=Ekatrix

https://tibiopedia.pl/monsters/Witch

https://tibiopedia.pl/quests/The_Tainted_Souls_Quest

https://tibiopedia.pl/monsters/ekatrix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYEDQ1cUAWM

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/harrypotter/images/b/ba/Bellatrixi.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150810175219&path-prefix=pl

Special thanks to Makadamia for the fitting banner <3

Tynusiiaa@tynusiiaa

27 Posts

#2 · 18 November 2022, 02:25

I walk around there and explore. IfI find something else I will let you know. For now, I dropped only Necrotic Rod 😀

Monte@monte

85 Posts

#3 · 18 November 2022, 12:48

That was an interesting read for an afternoon coffee. Never been there, but thanks to the article I think I'll need to pay a visit to Ekatrix Lestrange.

Meadek@meadek

1 Post

#4 · 18 November 2022, 19:57

As always Bosst, it's a pleasure to read your research. I'll definitely pay a visit to Ekatrix these days 🙂

Deosz@deosz

5 Posts

#5 · 20 November 2022, 20:41

At this point, I have killed 26 Ekatrix and can confirm that the Witch Hat is among the loot. So we can assume that Stuffed Toad is also a loot (but the chance is as low as looting it from a regular Witch).

Makadamia@makadamia

707 Posts

#6 · 21 November 2022, 00:17

Sorry for the off-topic, but!

Guys (@tynusiiaa and @deosz),

When commenting on the English version of the article, use English so that non-Polish can also understand your comments.

Thanks!

PS. Yeah, I just translated your posts.

Makadamia@makadamia

707 Posts

#7 · 25 November 2022, 21:18

I'm glad I haven't started my Bosstiary with Ekatrix yet, because now I'll never look at this boss the same way again! xD I admire your ability to pay attention to detail and your great knowledge background to interpret the little things. This is really impressive!

And by the way, the fact that content designers create allusions to characters from movies and fairy tales in the names of bosses and NPCs, among others) is excellent. I love such easter eggs!

Thanks for a super read! 🙂

Williams@bosst

268 PostsTopic Author

#8 · 26 November 2022, 14:49

Thanks everyone for the positive feedback. I have a strange weakness for tibian witches so it was a pleasure to write this article. 🙂

User bonatras gave me some interesting information on discord. Apparently, the Ekatrix boss room doesn't reset when another player enters. This is another strange abnormality of this place.