Quick guide for beginners
I thought I’d put together a guide for people just starting out. These are just guidelines, you are of course welcome to tweak according to your playstyle. Note that I’m not much into PVP, so if that’s what you want to focus on you may want to look elsewhere for advice.
Common abbreviations in chat (and in this post):
SP – stat point
FS – fair share
AP – achievement points
OS – optimal share
WR – world raid
QM – quicken mind
NM – nightmare
DL – dragon’s lair
LSI – leveling speed index
BSI – battle strength index
Quick overview:
1. Install the latest version of SReject’s DOTD raid script (yes, it helps immensely). I personally use ForceProjectX’s version (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/132408).
2. Put all your stat points from leveling into energy and stamina. 1 in energy and 2 in stamina.
3. Put any crafted stat points into stamina.
4. Do a single 1 stamina hit on as many zone 9 raids (mesyra, nimrod, phaedra, tenebra, valanazes) that you can to get cyan scale armor.
5. Try to hit FS on as many normal erebus raids that you can (600K damage).
6. As you get more stamina/equipment, start trying to hit FS on other raids, and at higher difficulty. The script will tell you what your damage targets are.
7. Once you hit LSI = 7, maintain LSI 7 and bump up defense to 2K (due to changes in the questing bosses as of 7/20/2012).
8. Proceed through quests on normal difficulty.
9. Auto-level/farm raids/improve attack/defense and maintain LSI.
Now for more details on each point.
1. Why install the DOTD raid script? Well, in DOTD you don’t get extra loot for doing a ton of extra damage on a raid (see tips for exceptions). Therefore, most efficient use of your stamina on most raids is to do a relatively small part (i.e. a fair share) of the damage for a raid, rather than trying to solo the whole raid yourself. So in order to optimally use your stamina, you need to join a lot of raids quickly, and the script helps you to do that by tracking which chat raids you’ve visited, and setting it so the whole page doesn’t get refreshed when you click on a link. It also changes the chat links so they are much more informative, by telling you the name and FS/OS of each link. It also keeps track of raids that get posted in chat, so you can go join them later if you’re AFK or something.
2-3. Why only focus on energy/stamina? When I first started I thought that putting too much into energy/stamina was a bad idea, because if I leveled up too much without improving attack/defense then I’d get farmed in PVP. But then I had my first two world raids, and realized very quickly that I could have hit the world raid a lot harder if I had more energy/stamina. As for the focus on stamina, a lot of the best loot comes from raids, so you want to be able to hit as many of them as hard as you can. Also, focusing on stamina lets you farm stat points much more easily, which later on easily makes up for the low BSI when you’re starting out. I can easily get 100-200 stat points a day from farming. Some people recommend skewing more toward stamina, which I can see being useful if you want to farm more, but in my opinion, since grinding the quests is required for some legendaries, having a decent energy pool is still useful. All depends on how you want to play.
4. Getting cyan scale armor (common and uncommon drops from zone 9 raids) will help you immensely to do more damage and survive the starting quest bosses. However, if you have planet coins to spare, the expeditions can give you a huge boost up equipment-wise. The current mystery pack contains Dao’s and Ariala’s equipment, which give a huge bonus to your stamina and energy, which makes leveling faster.
5. Hitting normal erebus’s are good because they give you flutes, and dragonsbane parts, which you can craft into stat points after the inital craft. A lot of people farm them also, so they are very common and are very unlikely to fail. Also, it only takes 600K damage to hit FS on it, relatively easy, which gives you one epic loot.
6. As you get more stamina and better equipement, you’ll be able to more easily hit the more difficult farming raids. Bellarius is the main one, because it drops glyphs, which get crafted into 5 SP at a time. Other underground raids (Maraak, Erakka-Sak, Wexxa, Guilbert) are also good for glyphs. Other good raids to hit are ones that drop pieces of the legendary crafts. There’s good guides on the DOTD forums for how to get those.
7. Once you get LSI around 7, with a decent set of energy/stamina gear, and haste/QM raids, you’ll start auto-leveling, where you don’t have to wait at all between levels. This allows you to hit the more difficult raids, such as the Dragon’s Lair, which require large amounts of damage in short amounts of time. Once you’re at this point, start putting stat points into attack/defense. I used to recommend 4 attack 1 defense, but with the more difficult quest bosses requiring more defense, I think I’d tentatively recommend bumping defense up to 2K, and HP up to 500. Holding off on adding HP is good to prevent people farming you in PVP though.
8. I’d recommend going through the quests on normal (as opposed to going back through each zone up to nightmare) so you get all the raid essences, plus you get some useful loot from the quests, and get a few useful things for sale in the bazaar. Unfortunately from what I’ve heard though, some repetition of the quests may be more necessary now with the more difficult quest bosses.
9. Once you’re at LSI 7, just continue farming buses/bellas/whatever you want, start collecting legendary equipment, replay the quests, get achievements, etc. Note that apparently up to 9-10K base def is required for the NM difficulty late quest bosses….
Other misc tips:
-Buy land in blocks of ten if you can. There’s other guides on how to buy land optimally. If you get enough land, gold becomes essentially meaningless later on, since you’ll have so much.
-20 stamina/honor hits do more damage and give more exp on average than 4 × 5 stam/honor hits. Similarly, a 5 stam/honor hit does more than 5 × 1 stam/honor hits.
-Don’t ever put poison or midas touch onto raids, unless you want to get made fun of. You might think “Oh, I’ll just put this on until something better comes along”, except only the summoner of a raid (or a guild officer, for guild raids) can remove magic, so your magic is taking up a valuable magic slot.
-Don’t repeatedly spam the same raid over and over in chat. That just pisses off the people that might otherwise join and help you. Most of the people that look like they’re spamming are actually posting different raids, helping out and letting other people join as many as possible.
-Don’t sell anything in the bazaar. Even if you need gold, you might need that equipment for obtaining drops for legendary equipment. Duplicates are also useful for equiping your colliseum team.
-Expeditions (especially when they’re on sale) are usually a good use for PCs, for getting a boost in equipment. Other good investments are limited time premium generals (e.g. fontella or faustus) or legions; they can add a huge amount of damage.
-Half of FS damage on NM raids is required to get achievements points for “killing” that raid.
-The exceptions to the FS/OS “rules” for raids are DL, Rhalmarius, and world raids. DL and world raids are tiered, so the more damage you do (up to a point) gives you better loot. Rhalmarius apparently gives you better loot the faster you kill it.
-Once you hit level 500, they add 1000 xp needed to every level so auto-leveling pretty much stops. I just hit 500, and it’s a little annoying, but it doesn’t seem too bad.
-Have fun! Remember these are just guidelines derived from my own experiences and discussions with people (thanks Oracle_Hunter!). Suggestions for changes are welcome!
