Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

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Mikel123
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Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

Post by Mikel123 »

Here's a second installment of Tips and Tricks, updated with some new info.

First, see the original post of tips:
viewtopic.php?p=133279#p133279

Second, here is a pretty in-depth look at weapons and weapon types:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=24145#p214745

Taming

Many people are torn between using dragons and white wyrms. Which is more effective? White wyrms have a stronger melee, and of course can throw some pretty strong spells. They also move pretty fast. On the down side, they will occasionally cast Mass Curse and cause you and any other dragons to autodefend against them. It's hard to break them away from fighting each other in these instances, and it wastes precious time if you're trying to farm as efficiently as possible. Dragons move pretty slowly, and don't really cast meaningful spells, but on the plus side they have an occasional 40-point unblockable unresistable firebreath attack. For this reason, I find them to be the more efficient hunter to farm with. With training, which just happens naturally as they fight enemies over and over, their increased wrestling and tactics begins to make up the gap between their melee skills and that of white wyrms (dragons I believe start in the 80's of each, wyrms in the 90's).

Where should one tame dragons? I find the following place to be ideal, on the southwestern side of the first level of Destard:

Image

From the top of this ledge, you are able to tame the dragon without it having line-of-sight to cast spells or firebreath on you. In practical terms, this means you can use less reagents healing yourself, you can have the dragon be at full health while taming so it's not vulnerable to attack from other dragons or players, and most importantly you can keep your Magic Reflect active so you are initially quite safe from a PK attack.

I also like to attack dragons I tame (just double click in War mode, I don't mean actually hurt them). This keeps them "attackable" instead of "criminal". This has some positive implications for gating them back to town and healing them up without turning criminal yourself.

Along the same lines, it is very helpful to be guilded as a tamer. It makes your dragons guard you as "green" rather than "gray". And again, there are other positive implications to this if you accidentally get aggroed by a pet dragon in town.

Stables, incidentally, will still accept your commands even if you're a murderer, a dread lord, or currently under criminal timer. I believe this is a bug.

Have you ever seen people running on a horse, stop, hop off, hop back on, and keep running? They're refreshing their pet's stamina due to an era-accurate bug. The way to do this is to ensure the pet is "in follow mode" (tell it to follow you, and take a couple steps to confirm it's following you). Then hop on it and ride around. When you get a message stating it is getting fatigued, step off it and step back on. Any pet in follow mode gets its stamina constantly refreshed to 100%, so the act of hopping off and then back on will refresh it. Here's a macro I make for each of my characters... press Record and:

Double-click yourself (to hop off)
Pause 1000
Double-click horse (to hop back on)

You can hit that when you get your fatigue message and your pet will be refreshed without having to worry about being in war mode and accidentally attacking it, etc. Be sure to re-record when you die or get a new mount.

Have you ever seen people running around on frenzied ostards? They have by far the most dexterity and stamina of any mount, so they can run the farthest without requiring a refresh. But, players without taming cannot control them, so they can't command them to follow. You can get around this by having a tamer "friend" you to a frenzy, and then tell it to follow you. As a friend, you can ride the frenzied ostard, and since it's in follow mode the hop-off/hop-on trick will still work (not that it matters much with a frenzy, since almost no one uses them and they'll run out of stamina 3 or 4 times before you run out). As long as you don't try to command the pet, it will work perfectly.

Meditation

Here is a table of the number of seconds per mana point regained in various full sets of armor:

Code: Select all

seconds/pt	25int	 100int/nomed	100int/100med
Cloth	     5.75	  3.00	        1.00
Leather	   7.00	  4.25	        2.25
Studded	   7.00	  5.75	        3.75
Dexer	     7.00	  7.00	        5.50
Plate	     7.00	  7.00	        7.00
These are approximations; I tested with a stopwatch and rounded to the nearest quarter-second. Clothing has no impact on meditation rate, nor does GM/exceptional status or magic status.

What to take away from this? I'm not sure. Except that there's not much point in being a "med dexer" who wears any kind of armor.

Armor

First, see the FAQ pages on armor and magical properties of armor:
viewtopic.php?p=1325#p1325

As I mentioned above, I see little point in wearing armor and caring about meditation rates, so I look at armor solely from the standpoint of Dexterity loss and AR.

There are three potential suits of armor I would suggest considering: all plate, the "dexer suit", and a hybrid.

An invulnerable suit of plate armor would cause a dex loss of 17 and would provide 62 AR according to the numbers in the links above. In practical terms, it would prevent an astounding 41 damage per hit, on average. An invulnerable dexer suit (chain body and legs, ring arms and gloves, studded gorget, close/norse/helmet) would have 0 dex loss and provide 48 display AR. It would prevent an average of 36 damage per hit. Of course this varies, as neck shots (7% of hits) could block as little as 20 damage, hitting the weak studded gorget. But the average is 36 damage blocked.

Lastly, we have the hybrid suit. I think the best tradeoff between dexterity and AR would be using plate chestpiece, plate arms, plate gorget, chain legs, ring gloves, and the usual close/norse/helmet. This would give you -8 dexterity but provide 53 display AR and reduce damage by an average of 40 points. In other words, it would give you 9 dex more than a full plate suit, at the cost of only 1 damage per hit on average. Plate legs and gloves are abysmal in terms of their dexloss-to-AR tradeoff, and I would never suggest using them.

There are supposedly some advantages to using female armors, and armor that covers multiple areas, but I was unable to reliably test the effectiveness of this.

Vendor Purchase Prices

As a lockpicker and treasure hunter, you're spending gold to ID things (charges ain't free). Regardless of the value of an item to players, if you've IDed it then it will be worth your while to pick it up and sell it to a vendor. This is easy using the Sell Agent of Razor. I always sell all weapons, armor, and beneficial jewelry (Cunning, Night Eyes, etc.) that I don't keep myself. I find negative jewelry (Feeblemind, etc.) to be not worth the pack space. Likewise, I didn't find making trips to the tailor to sell a Doublet of Strength worth the weight of it in my pack or the recall regs.

Here is a list of the additional gold you'll get for each enchantment on a weapon or armor. This is in addition to the base buy price of the weapon/armor:

Code: Select all

Durable	3
Substantial	12
Massive	27
Fortified	48
Indestructible	75

Accurate	6
Surpassingly	24
Eminently	54
Exceedingly	96
Supremely	150

Ruin	6
Might	24
Force	54
Power	96
Vanq	150

Defense	6
Guarding	24
Hardening	54
Fortification	96
Invulnerability	150
Random Notes

Bows can shoot a distance of 12 tiles, while spells can only be cast at a range of 10 tiles. This does have implications for certain barriers in dungeons.

A dropped footstool will block progress of both players and NPCs/monsters. Monsters like dragons that will destroy boxes upon contact will not be able to destroy the footstool however, so these can be used to pen monsters or animals into locations for a brief period of time (stools decay after about 30 minutes of being untouched by a player).

Items of spell reflection use one charge when equipped. For the next 5 seconds, they will reflect the first spell that targets you (all subsequent spells will hit you as normal). After 5 seconds, a second charge will be used, and the item will again reflect the first spell targeted on you. If no spell is targeted, the charge is still gone. Area spells like Meteor Swarm, Chain Lightning, and Earthquake are uneffected by reflection, as is Mind Blast (it doesn't care who casts it, the effect is the same, so even though it is technically reflected, the effect is the same).

Items of spell reflection can be very powerful, especially if they can be put on without any indication on your sprite (like, earrings, bracelets, and even doublets if you're wearing a robe). Set an Arm/Dress outfit called "reflect" and set a hotkey for "Toggle reflect". In fights against mages, you can get some kills when you take a halberd hit down to 50% and your enemy goes on the offensive, targeting their held explosion and then casting energy bolt. Remarkably, even though there is the parry animation when a spell is reflected, many players don't realize their Explosion got reflected and will continue to cast their next spell. Your job in this case is to cast energy bolt as well, so in short order they will be hit by their explosion, your energy bolt, and you will be hit by an energy bolt. After they die, be sure to undress your reflect item.

How do you get to 15,000 fame? Easiest way is of course by killing monsters. I find Ice Fiends to be the best, having a grossly small number of HPs and not moving that fast. White wyrms are not too bad either - they move incredibly fast, so be careful, but you can easily take advantage of the ledges where they spawn to stay out of the way of their claws while your summon beats them down.

How do you get to -15,000 karma? Easiest way is to kill a glorious lord over and over. They needn't give you a murder count, you lose the karma upon killing them. Note that this is era-inaccurate at the moment; era references state you cannot get down to Dread Lord via this method. They also state that you do not lose karma from killing another player unless you are reported for the murder.
Last edited by Mikel123 on Thu Jan 06, 2011 2:27 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Mikel123
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Re: Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

Post by Mikel123 »

saved

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Mens Rea
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Re: Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

Post by Mens Rea »

This will be really useful for newer type people. Well done.

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Re: Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

Post by archaicsubrosa77 »

That is full suits of leather you have there...
You need to break it down to articles...pieces of armor because the gains would be quicker.

I noticed you hardly have any loss of passive meditation with only a leather cap on for example.
(the Nostradamus look is in this season :lol: )

The female armors are supposedly able to be worn under regular male armors which can be removed if they are being pummeled by a dexxer/macer for instance and lose their effectiveness being able to change out without breaking stride.

I have heard of people hiding leather under plate for several reasons. A ten second delay on stealing is one.

Dress macros are a Razor feature for a reason.
Last edited by archaicsubrosa77 on Mon Jan 03, 2011 2:00 am, edited 5 times in total.
Derrick wrote:I wish it were possible that a mount could be whacked while you are riding it, but to the best of my knowedge it is not.

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Re: Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

Post by Chim »

nice

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Re: Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

Post by SighelmofWyrmgard »

I missed this when it first went up.

You and I don't always see eye-to-eye, but credit is always justly due where credit is justly due: a very concise and well-reasoned follow-up to two other concise and well-reasoned guides; top shelf.

I like the numbers in the Med section: your posted observations "feel right"; I wish I had the time/ambition/inclination to run a complete survey.

Again, well done.

SS
SighelmofWyrmgard wrote:
uosa44 wrote:For sale, by original owner:
1 Human Brain, never been used, only slightly damaged, still in original packaging.
$1, obo
FTFY.

SS
uosa44 wrote:The inability for this person to respond in such a crazy manner proves my point.

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Re: Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

Post by archaicsubrosa77 »

SighelmofWyrmgard wrote:I like the numbers in the Med section: your posted observations "feel right"; I wish I had the time/ambition/inclination to run a complete survey.
Let's see the hands of those people who would kill SiegeHeilWormbard's provo dexxer if they seen him :lol:
Derrick wrote:I wish it were possible that a mount could be whacked while you are riding it, but to the best of my knowedge it is not.

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Re: Tips, Tricks & info (part 2)

Post by nightshark »

Another tip I'd like to mention regarding taming. While you're hunting, it is often a good idea to give your drags/WWs an "all follow me" command to refresh their stamina. As they fight they will eventually "swing" slower and slower, as their stam drops. It's not only a good idea for horses!
<green> grats pink and co. .... the 3 of you f---ing scrubs together can blow up a bard. IMPRESSIVE

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