Hints for solving the "Paying Debts" quest (no spoilers)

Paying Debts is a very important Forgotten Gods quest for meta-gaming reasons - but when I went back to a Twitch stream to thank the streamer for giving me a very mild hint that got me to complete the quest, he and his chat went out of their minds (to my surprise!) with the idea of me having completed it without needing to follow a guide, as everyone there had done. The quest is challenging and unlike anything else in the game (except for maybe "Hidden Wealth"?) but it's made harder by oversights from Crate, which I'll get into in the final section.

Introduction and how to first get the quest

This is the only section that will contain outright spoilers. If you already have the quest, you can skip this safely.

Paying Debts is a very important quest because it ultimately unlocks access to the fourth of Grim Dawn's challenge-dungeons, which are considered major content for the game and the end-game. This dungeon, The Tomb of the Heretic was the main focus of patch v1.1.5.0 ("Grim Dawn’s largest free content update ever"). It is, however, the only one of those that you can't just randomly stumble upon, instead requiring a convoluted scavenger-hunt, in keeping with the setting of lost secrets and hidden wonders of Forgotten Gods' Korvan Desert.

How to get the quest: Riggs in the Conclave of the Three (Forgotten Gods' first and main hub area), will throughout the story give you gifts but warning you that he may collect on your debts some day. Simply check back with him often, accept these gifts and talk to him again once you beat the main storyline. Once you do, the quest starts, with a vague hint.

Finding the Seals of Morgoneth

The first step is by far the hardest. I will give you hints in order of least spoilery to most spoilery but never going into outright spoiler territory. Read one hint or as many you need at a time, try to solve the scavenger-hunt and come back if you need more hints.

Check the next section if this still isn't enough for you.

1) Check your quest log for hints on where to find the first seal (talking to Riggs again doesn't yield any information).
2) Make sure to explore with your minimap activated and pay close attention to it. Moving the camera angle manually may also allow for closer inspection of certain areas.
3) The hunt has nothing to do with: blue-orb decorations; sacrificial altars; a hidden note in a hidden cellar; or "hidden" world-map regions.
4) Check the seal's descriptions for help finding the next seal.
5) All of the seals can be found in the first half of the Forgotten Gods' map (in-between Conclave of the Three and Vanguard of the Three)
6) Check the name of world regions, named areas and dungeons that might look similar to the content of the previously-mentioned clues.
7) "Devouring sands" refers to one area in the game where mouths can be seen protruding from the sand.
8) "Howling abyss" might describe one of two areas in the game where you can see a deep canyon and hear howls of canine monsters.
9) The first two seals can be found in the general vicinity of the Korvan Sands - either there or in a neighboring named world region.
10) All of the seals require you to find secret corridors, passageways and/or entries that are "hidden in plain sight": not shown on the in-game map but which can be seen and found by paying attention to cleverly-disguised terrain and objects - just like other secrets areas.

"I still can't find the Seals" :P

If you've honestly read the hints above and tried to find them and still failed, don't be too upset. Check out this spoiler-heavy guide that will tell you exactly where to go and what to do. Crate Entertainment made this quest fairly challenging and perhaps even unfair (see last section for some discussion on why I think this). Everyone I've talked to about this say they read a guide, so you've tried more than most!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTU4Wgp1okI

Once you've found the three Seals of Morgoneth

Not recommended reading until you've found the seals and explored further.

Once you've found the seals, it's pretty straightforward from there. If you check your quest log, it says Riggs has "informed you of a Lost Oasis beyond the Valley of the Chosen" and that becomes one of your quest objectives. Since the game outright tells you this, I don't consider a spoiler to say that the entrance to the Oasis is south and east of the Valley of the Chosen riftgate.

Progressing through the Lost Oasis will get you to the Tomb of the Heretic in the same way that progressing through the areas in each act will lead you organically to the next act. If you've gotten this far, it should be nothing new to you. The Tomb itself functions like any of the previous challenge dungeons, so you'll need a Skeleton Key to get inside and once you're in, you can't portal out or come back in again until the next play-session.

Thoughts (rant?) on game design

Not recommended reading until you've found the seals and explored further.

As I've stated before, I think by far and large most players haven't finished this quest without looking up spoilers, even when it was first released with path v1.1.5.0. It's a given that a lot of action-RPG players wouldn't necessarily be interested in the scavenger-hunt "minigame" but I"m sure a lot of others, especially those more invested in the game, lore, story and overall roleplaying aspects, have tried, failed, given up and decided to look up a guide so they could get to the much-advertised newest challenge dungeon in the game.

I think there are three main problems with Crate's design approach here, the first ones being that the first clue was too weak and the first hidden passage was too well-concealed. These two combined make the start of the quest, the part where the player should be the most energetic towards, an immediate brick wall that I can understand would make many instantly give up.

Once I hopped into Mike Fic's stream and he confirmed that I was searching in the correct general area for the first seal, it got me back into searching and after I found the first seal, I didn't need any more hints between there and completing the quest. That's just bad design, clear and simple: a quest's difficulty should ramp up, not down - players who solved all but the last step are much more likely to keep trying and solve it on their own than players who can't even get started, those will just immediately give up, and fairly so. Maybe this was a deliberate attempt for the designers' part to present this immediately as an ultra-hard puzzle or something similar but I believe that ,if so, the intention itself is misconceived.

I also think that any puzzle, especially in a game that is not mainly about puzzles, should have multiple hints. Paying Debts' breadcrumbs boil down to literally two words or a sentence at most with each step - like the first step's "devouring sands". More clues are needed because if a player doesn't get your first clue (potentially because it's a bad one), there needs to be a backup there, not a roadblock.

I won't say it's a major point but something that really gets in the way of players genuinely trying to beat this on their own is the almost absurd quantity of red herrings (false leads). One hidden quest available only in Ultimate difficulty has clues that any player would be forgiven in thinking are meant for Paying Debts instead; there are "magically sealed" Sacrificial Altars that are probably related to a faction quest and have nothing to do with Paying Debts despite the fact that Paying Debts is LITERALLY about unlocking magically sealed things using magical seals; you can look at the world map and find multiple regions you haven't been to yet and you'd be excused in thinking finding a way there is the first step on the journey - nope, nothing at all to do with our quest; and finally several "decorations" throughout the Korvan territory almost shout out "this is significant" but they never turn out to be, they just look neat.

Any player who decides to pursue any or all of these red herrings may "waste" hours of playtime with no success or further clues to show for it (but perhaps a healthy amount of bits, experience and loot though)! Some amount of fumbling around is par-for-the-course in any "detective" story or quest but it becomes blatantly unfair when you have an abundance of false leads but only a tiny legitimate clue.

It is impossible for me to think that all these red herrings are intentional by the developers. Not only it would be a terrible choice to give players so many ways to be confused and so little on the way of actual clues but also all of those things were in the game before this quest was even added on a later update - almost guaranteeing that they are completely unrelated. Players who came into the game post-patch (at the very least myself and 5% of players according to recent Steam reviews), wouldn't know the difference between old content and that added by the v1.1.5.0 patch.

Finally, the last and perhaps major blunder in Paying Debts design is the fact that so much rides on it: it is a mandatory and involved task that is required for you to access the largest chunk of game content outside of a commercial DLC for the game. Of course players want to get to the newest challenge dungeon and while putting a small bump in the road to make the way there more interesting is a fine idea, making it so that most players straight out failed and looked a guide up is awful! Take the Hidden Wealth quest on Act 3 instead: yes, you can easily spend one hour looking around one of the biggest maps in the game (prior to Ashes of Malmouth), especially given (again) the poor clues you get to work with, but that quest doesn't extend the storyline of the game or gates a major piece of content behind it! No, it's a single Hidden Spoils chest behind a breakable wall. I mean, a guaranteed epic is pretty good that early in the game but still... why would you make your game's most involved quest by far also the one that players most IMMEDIATELY want to get through to experience your newest, coolest piece of content - an entire dungeon and a self-appointed challenge too?!

Paying Debts could be a great gimmick leading to a great chunk of end-game content but I'm afraid it missed the mark, whatever it was trying to do. It's not hard to imagine the same idea being done better and becoming a superb appetizer before the main meal. I would love to see how many players did it on their own versus how many had to look-up a guide versus how many people outright never played the final challenge dungeon either because they couldn't find or solve this quest. I think the results might be wild!

Being the only person I know to have done it on my own (with a very minor hint that I was in the right path), I did enjoy it past the first seal but as a game designer I can't help but look at this squandered idea as one huge missed opportunity. It might have been fun on Discord for an hour or two as people were trying to solve it together on day 1 but if that was the goal here, it was a self-serving one as there are no traces on the Internet to be found of anyone appreciating it, only quick-and-dirty spoiler guides meant to bypass it entirely.