Rat infestation piles: Important?

[Dreepa]

Those optional rat infestation piles you can destroy to get stuff: Are they important?

Cause atm I just skip them, cause the fights are so boring and never ending.
Yet I don't know if I they are super important later in the game for something in the story.

[Usikava]

Not for the story, though they yield lots of influence and most importantly it's the only place where you can get ingredients for making oils (You need to destroy growths to get more of 'em). You can buy oils now but they are scattered throughout the regions and only sold by 1, which can be frustrating if you plan on a specific build.

[Keith 'Blood' Hanson]

If you want alchemist supplies? Super important. If not? Just burn the main nest.

I find it kinda interesting as I throw a molotov on the nest mother and everything is on fire and now YOU are on fire.

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You can craft really powerful potion that will buff your weapons. Those crafts need stuff you found in there (and nowhere else) but I guess you can finish the game without those potions.

[Keith 'Blood' Hanson]

Yup, rat nests are the only way to actually craft oils. Oils on weapons can give you some pretty ridiculous effects.

[Gregorovitch]

Unlike most RPG where if you apply oils etc to weapons they last for one hit or one encounter of whatever, oils in this game give a permanent buff to the equipment they are applied to. These buffs are significant.

To make oils you need plague samples and the only way to get those is to do these rats nests, of which there are a limited number.

The plague samples themselves come from the pillars spread out across the ghastly locations. You have to take pillars down, they yield I think one or two samples each, while you are being constantly attacked by the rat swarms. There seem to be usually about six of these pillars per nest.If you get bitten by the rats too much you get the plague which required an expensive potion to cure.

So against these rat swarms AoE is king so I keep three 2H weapons with sweep AoE attacks in my camp chest for my three melee who normally use 1H and shield. It's very useful to have at least one archer with the infantryman ability too, they will account for three rats each per turn as well. Also I believe you actually get extra XP per rat deleted in these nests , so that might be another significant bonus for doing them. I don't suppose it's a lot but then again there are a lot of rats if you hang around long enough to knock over all the pillars.

Ghastly places these rats nests, I used to avoid them like the plague (....groan.....). Until I discovered the oil buffs were permanent. Now when I craft some new gear it off to the next local rats nest I trot.

[Keith 'Blood' Hanson]

I got some Inquisition weapons and head down there with torches and molotovs. I get very large 'burn the heretic' vibes when I do these missions. Completely clearing these is pretty good, getting 15 mats to be able to make oils is no joke.

[Dreepa]

Are the rats sites limited in the game? Like in total.
Or do they always respawn on the mission board after a while?

[Usikava]

They are limited and don't respawn on there own anymore, though you can make a potion that will spawn new own on the spot where old one was.

[Keith 'Blood' Hanson]

I thought they do respawn eventually. The potion just makes it happen more quickly?

[Usikava]

Originally posted by jakl201:

I thought they do respawn eventually. The potion just makes it happen more quickly?

They did before, but I thought when they added potion they removed respawn, though I can be mistaken.

[Keith 'Blood' Hanson]

The potion from the tooltip just says it makes them respawn within 8 hours. So its good if you want to grind mats. I would *assume* this is how it should be working, having longer respawn timers, because making folks wait until mysteries rank 7 to be able to get mats would be...Annoying.

[Park Ranger]

Screw alchemy, what you really need is to have like 4 archers and farm rats for claws or whatever. I can get 400+ from one fight, could even more, just get bored. You don't really need 4 archers, but they really help. Destroy nests, put all fighters together near main rat (not ot close), put archers to overwatch and farm farm farm. Or you can have melee fighters with legion swords that allow you to run through enemies. There are different strategies, so pick your poison.

[Usikava]

Originally posted by jakl201:

The potion from the tooltip just says it makes them respawn within 8 hours. So its good if you want to grind mats. I would *assume* this is how it should be working, having longer respawn timers, because making folks wait until mysteries rank 7 to be able to get mats would be...Annoying.

Well at first they didn't respawn at all, then they added respawn timer. And then added potion. I'm on month 23 on my EA playthrough so most should have respawned already though they didn't. That's why I assume respawn was removed.

Well you can buy oils now and they leave you hanging until level 4 for lectern so....

[glenn3e]

The ones in Ludern is supposed to respawn. It respawned for me recently

[Keith 'Blood' Hanson]

Originally posted by Usikava:

Originally posted by jakl201:

The potion from the tooltip just says it makes them respawn within 8 hours. So its good if you want to grind mats. I would *assume* this is how it should be working, having longer respawn timers, because making folks wait until mysteries rank 7 to be able to get mats would be...Annoying.

Well at first they didn't respawn at all, then they added respawn timer. And then added potion. I'm on month 23 on my EA playthrough so most should have respawned already though they didn't. That's why I assume respawn was removed.

Well you can buy oils now and they leave you hanging until level 4 for lectern so....

True, they are a bit pricey to buy though. Although I guess you could just use the thieving exploit to get around that. Also remembering who sells which one is a pain.

As others mentioned though its the only spot to farm for worms and you can get ALOT of fangs from them. And you don't have to bother remembering which apothecary has which oil. *Also* also you need to make at least one to unlock the concentrates. Some of these oils at 100% are silly strong.