Warring armies, rapacious bandits and opportunistic monsters all conspired to make the lives of commonfolk in Velen miserable; burning houses, waylaying travelers, confiscating food and preying on the unfortunate. If all these evils weren’t enough, even the spiritual wellbeing of the peasantry is under siege, as some vandals have also seen fit to defile the shrines of local deities. This page will provide a walkthrough for the quest Defender of the Faith in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, providing the location of all three shrines and what you’ll find at each one.

Quest Objectives¶

Starting Defender of the Faith¶

To start this quest, you merely need to stumble across a distraught old peasant fussing over a toppled shrine east of Blackbough. You’ll likely find this as you progress the main story, as following your visit to Heatherton during The Nilfgaardian Connection you’ll pass by this area en route to either the quests [Bloody Baron] or [Hunting a Witch]. Talk to the old lady and pick the option “Lemme help you.” to fix the fallen cult statue, and the lady will implore you to find and fix the other two. Respond with “I’ll fix other shrines if I come across them.”, which is sufficient to start this quest.

Find the Other Shrines¶

The rest of this quest is simple enough, in theory - follow the roads south from Blackbough and you’ll find the other two shrines along the roads running a loop around the southwestern edge of Velen. In practice, however, this is quite a long and potentially dangerous quest, as the last shrine you need to repair is just west of Frischlow, an area which is as far away from Blackbough to the south as the outskirts of Novigrad are to the north. The roads are generally safe enough, but there are serious exceptions to this rule, and as a rule of thumb the furth you stray from the middle of Velen, the more powerful enemies become. The northernmost of the two remaining shrines is easy enough to reach, but the southernmost one is quite far afield and dangerous enemies lurk en route, ones a low level Geralt cannot reasonably fight at this time.

Shrine Near Duen Hen¶

The aforementioned northernmost of the two remaining shrines, this is simple enough to reach. Just follow the roads a good distance southwest from Blackbough to reach Midcopse, then south to reach the Duen Hen signpost. En route you may run afoul of some Bandits (Lv7) and the odd Endrega Worker (Lv9), but otherwise the only mandatory fight is with an Endrega Warrior (Lv11) near the shrine itself. Don’t let its level scare you - it’s easily dispatched so long as you use the active Quen sign, as its damage output is generally quite low. Squash the bug, untip the shrine, and you’re most of the way done with this quest.

Shrine Near Frischlow¶

As for the third and final shrine, it’s quite a ways south and east from the second one at Duen Hen. If you follow the road south you’ll eventually find the Byways signpost, but at the apex of a hill separating the two signposts you’ll enter the territory of a Griffin (Lv25). This beast is no joke, being a sufficiently high level to one-shot you if you’re not ridiculously over-leveled yourself. That said, you can simply run from it, dodging constantly to avoid its attacks - it should eventually leave you alone when you get near the aforementioned Byways signpost. Riding Roach through the Griffin’s range will also help you escape more swiftly. If that all sounds too risky, however, (a reasonable deduction, in all honesty) you can always avoid the Griffin entirely by taking a boat. You’ll find a small vessel northeast of the Duen Hen signpost, and you can use it to sail southeast, then south, down the coast until you’re near the third shrine. This isn’t the worst idea, as both the signposts near the third shrine - Byways to the west, Frischlow to the east might be too dangerous to use without first clearing the enemies nearby, so not only will a boat get you past the Griffin, it’ll get you back north to relative safety.

In any event, assuming this is the third shrine you’ve visited you’ll find a bunch of men standing around - clearly the vandals that have been damaging the shrines in the area. Talk to them and you’ll find out they’re a bunch of self-righteous college students from Oxenfurt, keen to put their teacher’s secular values into practice. They’ll even badly misquote Nietzsche at you, depending on what dialog choices you pick - somebody at CDProjekt had a bone to pick with philosophy majors, it seems.

Despite the depth the students try to display, this conversation only ends one of two ways - either you let them continue to vandalize statues, failing the quest, or you put a stop to their efforts by force. Assuming you want to complete the quest, this devolves into a physical altercation, albeit an odd one, as by default Geralt will use his fists to subdue the students, and they’ll respond in kind. This is not, however, a non-lethal fight, as the pools of blood that appear under the students when defeated will attest to. You’re also not prevented from using signs, which makes this an odd fistfight. If you draw your sword, your opponents will arm themselves with clubs, and it’s generally faster and easier to defeat the overzealous students with weapons than with your fists.

Defeat the Students (Lv9) however you wish and the quest will end. Aside from a bit of EXP, you’ll get no reward aside from whatever you loot off the bodies of your foes.