The Goddess Unleashed

The Goddess Unleashed can also only be obtained via its secret vendor recipe, and this time the riddle was made a lot, lot harder.

Three to wield, pure and fine,
Eclipse eternal to align
Exquisite full and true.

Three to save, risk reward,
Two exalted, one encored,
Counting all in equal due.

Three to help, each matured,
All beloved by the third,
All imperfect sums of two.

I knew the community would already have seen a screenshot of The Goddess Unleashed and therefore know the mods and flavour text, and that they would be told that it always has six linked sockets.

I also knew people would look back on the first riddle for insight on my methodology, which is why I deliberately used a different style of riddle this time around.

This recipe is intentionally expensive and difficult to obtain the ingredients for, because it generates a very powerful item with guaranteed six-linked sockets. For a video showing its power in action, check out the end of this post. Note that no community members were told the details of the recipe. We made sure it stayed a secret so that no-one would have an unfair advantage when solving it.

The riddle is intentionally very difficult and even slightly vague, since the previous one was solved so easily. In fact, we went so far as to design the recipe to specifically resist the "brute-force" approach of throwing every possible option into the sell window, which was a large part of how the previous riddle was solved so quickly.

So let's break down the riddle and see how it works.

First of all, 9 lines in the riddle, 9 mods on the item, and 9 ingredients to the recipe. Three stanzas of three lines means three groups of similar items. You will notice a pattern of threes both here and on the item. Also, The Goddess Scorned is obviously required.

Three to wield,
Stanza 1 describes three items you can wield, fairly obvious as three swords, given the context of upgrading one sword into another.

pure and fine,
These items must be 20% quality and uncorrupted.

Eclipse eternal to align
"Eclipse" refers to The Goddess Scorned, whose flavour text mentions "An old flame renewed can define our eclipse". "Eternal" is an Eternal Sword; just like the previous recipe, this one requires a base type of the resulting item. These two swords must "align" with the item described in the next line, which is why this line doesn't end with a comma.

Exquisite full and true.
"Exquisite" is an Exquisite Blade, which is a high-level curved sword with similar art. The sockets of the other two swords must align to the sockets of the Exquisite Blade. "Full and true" means it must have six linked sockets, and by corollary the other two swords must each have three linked sockets. Since three-links form an L shape, it isn't immediately obvious how two three-links should connect to form a six-link, so we actually relaxed the restriction of the previous riddle and decided to consider the colour of the sockets only, not the order of them for this recipe.

Three to save,
Stanza 2 describes three currency items, that you have "saved" i.e. not spent.

risk reward,
When used, these currencies each have a random effect that may be good or bad.

Two exalted, one encored,
A blatant red herring (the previous riddle also had one) that suggests Exalted Orbs. It really means that two of these items are high-end currency relevant to the Goddess. They are not exactly specified, but there are only a few possible options and it is very easy to brute-force the answer anyway: a Divine Orb and a Blessed Orb. The "one encored" is a repeat from the previous recipe: an Orb of Fusing.

Counting all in equal due.
You will need a certain number of these currency items. What number? 3, of course. What else would it be? And again, easy to brute-force.

Three to help,
Stanza 3 describes three items that "help": Support Gems.

each matured,
The gems must be leveled. Not necessarily all the way to 20, though.

All beloved by the third,
"The third" refers to The Goddess Unleashed, whose flavour text reads "I am the third". The gems therefore are "beloved" by that item, i.e. they grant effects that the item does. This is deliberately somewhat vague, but there are only a few possibilities to experiment with. The required gems are Added Fire Damage, Increased Critical Strikes, and Blind.

All imperfect sums of two.
The most dastardly of clues, each gem must be "imperfect" i.e. not both max quality and max level. They must also be sums of "two", the two defining quantities of gems: quality and level. But what is the value of the sum? Given "imperfect" ruling out 20/20, the range of possible numbers is therefore 1-39. There are really only two conceivable numbers: 3 and 33, and 33 fits better (as a "sum of two" it has two digits, and so more threes). So the level and quality of the gems must sum to exactly 33.

The complete recipe:

• 1x 20% quality, uncorrupted 3L The Goddess Scorned
• 1x 20% quality, uncorrupted 3L Eternal Sword
• 1x 20% quality, uncorrupted 6L Exquisite Blade with matching socket colours
• 3x Divine Orb
• 3x Blessed Orb
• 3x Orb of Fusing
• 1x Added Fire Damage support gem, whose level and quality sum to 33
• 1x Increased Critical Strikes support gem, whose level and quality sum to 33
• 1x Blind support gem, whose level and quality sum to 33

Additionally, the Eternal Sword and Exquisite Blade must not be Unique.

This recipe is by far the most evil, grandiose, ridiculous recipe in the game, so it is not surprising it took so long to be discovered. We intentionally made it this way, hoping it would take a few weeks… which turned into a few months, and only after I started dropping hints in the forum.

The riddle and recipe hunt has been a real rollercoaster. Four months is a long time for it go unsolved, and I have learned some valuable lessons about how well the community handles my riddles. Thank you all for your patience, ingenuity, out-of-the-box thinking, and paranoia. I was very impressed on all counts.

If there is ever a new riddle that needs writing, I will be ready.

Finally, a video of The Goddess Unleashed in action: