A guide for new players

Also, you can look at the wiki, particularly for stats of items, monsters and such:
http://wiki.chronicles-of-blood.com/index.php/

There is also a pvp guide at :
http://www.kongregate.com/forums/153-chronicles-of-blood/topics/319469-pvp-guide
for those interested in pvp (highly recommended!)

More advanced players can look at:
http://www.kongregate.com/forums/153-chronicles-of-blood/topics/324708-build-making-a-guide?page=1

Still a great read, especially for pve advice:
http://forum.diviad.com/showthread.php?991-Unoffical-Guide-for-new-Players
(theres a link in there to an old equipment guide too)

How does monster attraction work?!

When you click that ‘Hunt’ button, one of your bait (pearls, rubies, sapphires, or diamonds) will be consumed, and attract a random monster. pearls tend to attract the weaker mobs, rubies have a higher chance of attracting rare/stronger mobs; and sapphires/diamonds have the highest chance of attracting the strongest mobs. This knowledge is useful when hunting for certain mobs to fulfil certain objectives.

E.g. you want to kill 10 zombies to get broken valentine’s heart. you would choose pearls in this case, since zombies are weaker mobs.

Dreadmanes count as elite mobs, thus rubies are your best bet to attract more.

How do I get more bait? I’ve run out!
blood rubies are obtained as drops, or by disenchanting (basically, scrapping) certain items that might be useless to you otherwise. blood pearls can be bought from Coraline – club noir —> Coraline.
Blood sapphires are available by transmuting 10 blood rubies for 1 sapphire. Late game sapphires are used to purchase many items, so it might be a good idea to save rubies to turn into sapphires for that purpose.
Blood diamonds are available through donating/trading with other players, and are for most purposes equal to sapphires; the only major difference being that diamonds are tradable

I ran out of bloodlust! How do i get more?!
This game uses an energy system, where bloodlust regenerates over time. Certain items will increase your max bloodlust (meaning if you go afk and come back, you will have more bloodlust to work with), and some (like the blood surgeon servant) increase the rate of bloodlust regeneration.
if you have 75 sapphires, you can use them to buy a bloodlust refill; you also get 3 free bloodlust refill potions as a beginner gift (available at items —> misc).

Ok great. But how do I win? I clicked attack and the match ended and I don’t even know why I won/lost!

The winner of a match is decided by whether you or the opponent does more damage in 5 rounds (draws are ruled against you).

Wait THIS SUCKS,fights should be to the DEATH
While this may sound logical, consider a fight between you and a healing mob, both of you outhealing the other’s damage output. would you like to be locked into a match lasting forever after you click speed attack?

But how does battle work?! Where do these damage numbers come from? Pulled out from some orc’s backside?!
Battle proceeds as follows:

1.) Each round, you and your opponent will get one hit on each other. Damage done is based on your weapon damage (which has a small range), your buffs (which sadly, you won’t have any early game), your RAGE which is a stat that boosts attack damage, and your opponent’s CONTROL, which reduces attack damage.

Attacks can be dodged, evaded (special proc), or deflected (special proc, see below). Servants also have a chance to intercept these attacks for their master, negating the attack,

2.) Your PROCS ‘roll’ for a chance to activate. Procs are basically effects from your equipment that activate randomly with certain probabilities. For instance, meat cleaver has the Rend 1 proc. Thus every round, Rend 1 will have a chance to activate and inflict its effect (physical damage over time).

Note that some procs are special and proc at different times (start of combat, end of combat), or require special conditions (frozen status effect, for example). However for starting purposes it can be assumed that all procs you will encounter are of the standard kind that activate in the middle of combat during a combat round.

Also note that you can see the effects of procs (including those on your vampiric powers) by hovering your mouse over the small icon next to the proc (for instance, hovering your mouse over that small red square next to the Rend 1 will show “does physical damage over time”)

3.) If either you or the opponent is dead, the match ends with a deathblow. Otherwise, combat continues until round 5 and the winner is the one doing more damage.

At any time before the end of combat you can choose to activate:
1.) Vampiric powers. All vampiric powers have ‘feats’, which are basically active effects. These feats range from damage (immolation) to healing (blessing of the elders) to a huge variety of effects (dodge on the bad omen vampiric power)
These feats have a cooldown, usually of 30 mins. Late game, you will gain the use of equipment with the attunement proc which has a chance to reset the cooldown of all your vampiric powers at the start of combat.

2.) Servant attack. All servants can attack once a battle, at the cost of bloodlust (some servants require 0, and are prized as -0BL servants, since they can attack for free damage). Usually if your servant is not a -0BL servant, you would avoid using it unless it would reverse the outcome of a match (i.e. if you are losing by a little bit). Note that servants can be blocked.

3.) Bloodshield. Activating the bloodshield consumes a piece of bait, to absorb some damage taken. if you are using pearls this is pretty much free (5 credits), so feel free to use to your heart’s content. With rubies you would have to be more judicious with their use, as with servants, use only to reverse close matches.

The above 3 effects must be effected before the end of combat, so your last chance to activate them is round 5.

Stop. What was that about RAGE and CONTROL?
Rage and control are two of the primary stats a vampire has (the other being constitution). Clicking the ? at the top right while at your vampire’s screen will show the following:
You have three stats which all start at 10 at the beginning of the game. You get two stat points every level.
Rage: The damage you inflict
Control: The damage you can absorb (i.e. reduce your opponent’s damage)
Constitution: The amount of your maximum blood (the HP equivalent) and your chance to resist abilities (i.e. procs of your opponents will have a lower chance of activating)

More importantly, these stats are required to equip items. For instance, frost dagger, a lvl 7 weapon, requires 14 control; so if you want to craft one at lvl 7 you will require 14 control to do it. These stat requirements are independent of any boosts from items – for instance, a ring might give you +1 control, but it does not count to the requirements to equip/craft frost dagger.

The stat requirements of the items available can be found here:
http://wiki.chronicles-of-blood.com/index.php/Consolidated_stat_point_requirements

OW! I’m out of blood. What do I do now?! I can’t heal this game is so stupid!
Not so fast! If you look at the blood bar (red, at the top left of your screen), there is some text saying “HEAL” in red. Clicking on that will heal you (at some small cost to your credits) back to full blood.

OK, i’ve read all that, i know how the basic gameplay works, but how do I WIN?
What you have to realise is that you start as a lvl 1. In a region full of mobs higher lvlled than you (initially at least), you need to maximise your strength. In other words, to gain victory, you need to leverage your:
1.) vampiric powers
2.) equipment
3.) bloodshield
4.) servant
Firstly, you should try to avoid hunting if your vampiric power(or powers if you get hold of another scroll to learn a second power) are on cooldown. Never go into battle unprepared. Try to get hold of powers we consider ‘nukes’,that is, powers that inflict damage when activated. Examples are:

Immolate (if you started as fire you already have this!)
Diablerie (from PvP)
Last Stand (lucky drop from nightly rewards)
Grave touch (tradable)
Path of the righteous (tradable)
Soul strike (tradable)
Purge (tradable)

Ideally you would like two nukes, but one + something else would be fine. You can ask on the chat for more guidance on which powers to use.

Powers are learnt by reading scrolls. The first scroll read of that power will teach you the power (lvl 1), you need 10,25,50, and 150 for lvl 2,3,4,5 of the power.
(to achieve lvl 2,3,4,5 of the power, you also need lvl 11,21,31,51, respectively)

Note that the last 4 powers are mentioned as tradable. The scrolls teaching you these powers are tradable, meaning people can give them to you! Try asking nicely (people don’t like trolls) and with luck someone will be willing to give you a scroll.

Basically nukes act as a safety net, due to the immense damage (relative to early game) they inflict. Against a mob you must win against (dreadmane/necromancer/lord of the undead perhaps?), where you are losing at round 4, activate a nuke (or 2 nukes if necessary) and win the match!

Leveraging equipment means maximizing the power of your equipment. Go to club noir —> merchant and purchase storebought weapons/armor (buying tab). It is an improvement over that pissy butterfly knife you started with. There are two key equipment upgrades:

Weapon: At 5, meat cleaver/grave scythe. At 7, frost dagger is great. If you were lucky enough to loot hells tongue from dreadmane, its a great equip at lvl 8 which is about equal in power to frost dagger. You can consider lifestealer at 9 too, as it is about equal power to frost dagger and hells tongue.

You can ask for help with crafting materials, but again, don’t treat it like you have a divine right to be helped; be gracious! Its not the end of the world if you can’t craft frost dagger. You can also buy/trade for meat cleavers if it comes to that

Armor: If you have the materials, shadowskin,necromancers cloak, and embrace of darkness are all pretty good. As above, you can seek help with crafting materials. Shadowskin is good enough – the other two are only if you really get lucky with the materials and want something stronger

Servant and blood shield: These are mentioned together because they are both used the same way – to reverse the outcomes of close matches. It won’t happen often, but when you are losing by a razor thin margin at round 4, and are reluctant to use your nukes (because the mob isnt important enough), using either servant and/or bloodshield helps.

Loot, items, and crafting
Ok, great, you know how to fight! But just how exactly do you get equipment?
Just as in a standard rpg, you can get equipment by:
1.) Looting them
2.) Buying them (some equipment can be storebought or traded with other players)
3.) Crafting them

With regards to r1 (the Region you are in right now), loot primarily refers to raven’s cowl (helm), raven’s claws (gloves), hells tongue, a dagger drop from Dreadmane, and meat cleaver, a drop from Dreadmane and Spectre. Necromancer also drops skin jacket (a body armor) if you are really lucky. Meat cleaver is also tradable, which leads into the second point.
Lastly (and most importantly), the merchant has plenty of craftable equips (besides the storebought stuff that will tide you over until you can get your hands on a better equipment)

The most important craftable equips are the frost dagger/lifestealer(meat cleaver is better than grave scythe, but grave scythe isnt too bad) as far as weapons go, and skin jacket, necromancers cloak, and embrace of darkness. As mentioned earlier, do your best to get hold of any of these.

Gameplay style
What was outlined above is primarily a pve style. To summarise, early game you will be hunting until you need to use your nukes, then going afk to regenerate bloodlust and powers, using storebought equipment until you can get the equipment upgrades at lvl 5 (and 7/8 for frost dagger/ hells tongue)

For pvp, refer to the pvp guide at:

PVB

I would discourage PvB early on for two main reasons:

1. Bosses are tough. OK, that was kinda obvious. They take an immense time investment and you’ll have to use your valuable nukes on them to chisel them down, nukes which could be used in pvp or to hunt strong mobs in pve

2. Boss loot early on tends to be useless. There are some very nice boss drops, but the odds of getting them without loot bonuses is absymal. So bosses tend to just be exp bombs without any accompanying increase in strength (heck, you dont even get materials). The WoC and Scroll drops are irrelevant because doom is a late game power, and the WoCs require a large number to be of use.

Nevertheless, if you feel like bossing, just hit them every half an hour with your two nukes. If you have excess bloodlust, equip your best proc based powers and just keep attacking.

Bosses are divided into two types: epic, and coven. Coven bosses are available from lvl 11 onwards in region 2 onwards, while epic bosses exist in every region (and are thus in theory, available at lvl 1).
Bosses require summoning items (in region 1, the Desecrated earth, a drop from waste ghoul/dreadmane for epic bosses).

Epic bosses will be one of three types (except for the portal bosses, but you should not be in there as a beginner anyway)
In region 1, the bosses are:
Oscadraconis
Bheron (quest boss; killing three with the quest active finishes the quest)
Xonia

Remember to heal before each attack There is a hefty 60 Bloodlust penalty bosses DB you! Heal early to avoid grief.

Navigating the UI

This section will provide an explanation of what the stuff under each tab does.

Vampire —>

My vampire: Leads you to your vampire page, where you can see your equipment, stats (and assign stat points here), credits, victory points, blood badges; as well as your messageboard.
There is also a very useful box at the bottom, which you can use to see other vampire’s profile by typing their name in. This is useful if you want to see what equipment they have, if you are a PvPer, or if you wish to look at someone’s setup to copy it.

Talent tree: Leads you to your talent tree. Talent points are earned through fulfilling certain objectives (which you can see my clicking on the “earned talent points” tab). The talent calculator lets you construct imaginary builds with a fictional 41 talent points.

Weapon Proficiency: Shows you your weapon proficiencies. Weapon proficiencies level up as you use a weapon (+1 exp every combat regardless of pve/pvb/pvp), and confer benefits on you as you level them up. Note that if you level up sword proficiency, you wont get that bonus unless you use a sword!

My guild: Shows you your guild page
My diary: Shows you a log of your past 20 combats

Grimoire: Shows you the monsters you have defeated, a list of their procs, drops, and variety text about them. Cool!

Blackbook: PvPers should know about this already; the blackbook is used to save vampires’ names inside for easy attacking. Primarily used for weak targets; can be used just to stalk people, if you really feel like it.

Nightly rewards: Every 23 hours, you get a FREE chance to “prey for blood” which will give you free loot.

Saved setups: directs you to the setup page. You can save setups you create “pvp, pve, pvb; for instance”. The first slot is your pvp defense setup and the setup saved there will be used when people attack you (if no setup is saved there you will defend with whatever you equip). The last 15 slots are free and easy. Once saved, setups can be loaded by clicking on the squares corresponding to their number (hover your mouse over the squares to see the names you gave the setups, if you can’t remember what they correspond to).

Items —>
Weapons,armor, accessories, glyphs,servants, coffins, mounts will all lead you to a list of the stuff you have belonging to that category. Nothing surprising there

Bait will lead you to a page showing you all your bait (blood pearls/rubies/sapphires/diamonds) you can choose which bait to equip at this page. Note that bait is also part of your saved setups!

Scrolls: Shows you all the scrolls in your inventory. Scrolls can be read to learn vampiric powers, disenchanted for rubies, or traded/gifted from this page (trading and gifting can also be done via the community tab, more on that later)

Vampiric powers: The powers you learnt via reading scrolls can be seen and equipped here.

Words of Command: Shows you the words of command you have accumulated. Some WoCs can be disenchanted, traded or gifted.

Gems: Nothing surprising, shows the gems you have

Misc: Shows you crafting materials, potions – Bloodlust refill potions are accessed here!, special items that unlock other areas, etc.

Club Noir —>
Merchant: Buy and craft items here. Note that equipment only shows when you are at most 4 levels below, i.e. a lvl 7 frost dagger will only be visible at lvl 3 onwards (and not craftable until 7, of course). This holds for coraline and battlemaster as well

Servants: Use your WoCs to obtain servants here. You can also see how many you have and how many you need to get the servant here, as well as the servant effects. If you have a servant (e.g. zombie), it wont appear on this page (so you will only see blood surgeon, vampire bat, and undertaker)

Coraline: Purchase pearls here. Blood rubies and blood diamonds can be transmuted into blood sapphires here. Blood sapphires are used to purchase bloodlust refills as well as a whole myriad of stuff, ranging from equipment (most of it is a waste of the sapphires, but lucky gun last goodbye at lvl 51 is great), to cutting gems (at jewelsmith, more on him later), to even crafting certain items (not early game, thankfully)

Jeweler: Cut raw gems into gems which can be socketed into your equipment. Sapphires go into blue sockets, amethysts into purple, and emeralds into green sockets; simple enough. Cutting requires some credits and sapphires – the best being the 400 blood sapphire ones (cutting sapphires will give you -1 BL cost for pve/pvb hunts, fantastic!). Gems will drop from coven bosses if you are lucky, and can also be purchased with blood badges (which coven bosses reward you with) But all this is mid/late game, so for now, sadly save your gems from the free gift and move along…

PvPers will know that victory points can be used to purchase gems here. This can be done using the ‘purchase’ tab in the jeweller section

Battlemaster’s store: Purchase equipment with victory points. Simple enough.

Thaumaturge: Ghost inks can be used to purchase inscriptions (usable from items —> misc) to strengthen your equipment. Each piece of equipment can only have one inscription active at a time, and reinscribing destroys the past one.
I recommend, as with gems, that you save your free ghost inks, and move on…

Buffs: Purchase 24 hr buffs with credits. Expensive, and useless until late game (and even then most people dont purchase them anyway). Move along…

Premium items: The donate page. Don’t like it, just dont look at it. For donors, remember to click ‘use token’ after buying the tokens with kreds.

Quest —>
PvE/PvB: directs you to the region’s quest npc who gives you quests. The rewards are shown on the right side of the quest. Quests have cooldown, usually 1-2 days (or 3+ for more difficult quests). You can have one PvE and one PvB quest active at the same time.

PvP: directs you to the battlemaster. Besides taking up his quests here, you can also use the pvp wocs (nosferatu/gothic girl/ voidspawn) here, if you have gathered enough, to get the servants)

Map
Travels between regions, nothing special

Community —>
Guidlist: Shows a list of guilds, arranged by total power (total member level). Other options of arrangement can be selected (date created, by alphabetical order). Requests to join guilds can be made here.

Underground market: Leads you to the underground market (UM). Here tradable equipment and items can be bought and sold for credits. There is no limit to the number of trades you can make here, but there is a 10% tax on credits if you are the seller i.e. selling at 100k will net you 90k if the item is bought.

The tags here are pretty much self explanatory

Trade: This section is probably the most confusing. Here, you can select an item from a list of tradable items you have, and quantity, and enter a vampire’s name, as well as select an item and quantity you want from him. He will recieve a notification that you have sent him a trade request and can accept/deny it. When you send the offer, the items are removed temporarily until the trade is accepted/rejected/cancelled (by you). You can also look at your trade offers (sent and recieved), as well as trade log here.
You can have 15 trades every 24 hours.

Gift Like trade, except you do not specify what you want and the item is given for free. Each gift you give counts as a trade made.

Chat, twitter and forum direct you to the COB chat/twitter/forum, obviously. With regards to the forum, most Kong players prefer to use the kong forum anyway. The COB forum accessible via here is mainly used for enquiries, bug reports, and donation problems, as wellas to meet other COB players on facebook and AG.

Work In Progress: Gameplay tips and more advanced mechanics

1.) If you have multiple servants, place the servant with higher intercept chance as the active servant! Intercept basically means the servant blocks an enemy attack for you, and is the only difference (besides being able to attack) between active and passive. Note that this may not apply if your servant is a -0BL servant and you prize the free attack more than a higher chance to get an intercept.

2.) When afk, equip all the stuff that boosts your maximum bloodlust (zombie and coffin, primarily) and bloodlust regeneration (boots, blood surgeon).
If your bloodlust is 320/320, unequipping zombie will give you 320/300; the +20 is still available for use!

3.) Use saved setups! Make one for pvp, one for pve, one for afk, and fill up the pvp defense setup!

4.) You can equip a blood diamond if you have one for bossing/pvp, which will give you 5% bonus crit rate. Just don’t accidentally use it on pve…

5.) Save your nukes for monsters that drop good items! Use the grimoire to see what items the monsters drop, and use the wiki to check out their stats.

6.) If you wish to attract certain mobs to get their drops, if they have a quest for them, take it! It increases the attraction rate of those mobs as long as the quest is active (and also gives you a small bonus for finishing the quest). For instance, if i wanted unholy essence (which drops from lord of the undead) i would take the quest and keep hunting until i have all the essence i want, then turn in the quest for my reward.

Coven Bosses

What are coven bosses?
Coven bosses are team efforts, basically. Bosses are summoned with the use of ‘orbs’ (summoning items available in every region from r2 – forest onwards); and last for 3 days.
During this period of time, up to 20 people can join.
In the first 60 hours, players can do up to 100% of damage. If at any time, every player (all 20) does at least 75% damage, the boss dies prematurely and loot can be collected.
In the last 12 hours, the boss enters execute phase. Players can do unlimited (sort of) damage. A total of 1500% damage is required.
A boss only dies when the 72 hours expires and the total damage is 1500%; or if 20 players all do 75% and above damage.

e.g there are 19 players on the boss. all of them have done 75% except one who has done 20000% to the boss. the boss will only die when the 72 hrs expire; or if someone JOINS and inflicts 75% damage, in which case the boss will instantly die before the deadline

How do I enlist more people to join this glorious cause?
The boss has a link at the left side in a box. Copy that and paste into the chat box; people who see it may decide to join it to help you out. Guildmates can see coven bosses summoned by guildies in the “lifefeed coven bosses” page.
Its also good etiquette if you are sharing on chat, to mention the level, whether its a talent tree boss, and resistances (resilience 20 = physical resistance, innoculation 20 = poison resistance, etc. a boss always has resistance to the damage type it deals, so thats a good indicator to check its typing)

Why kill them?
Coven bosses drop loot, namely:
blood badges, which are used to purchase certain equipment (check the wiki for more info)
gems
scrolls
WoCs
Boots

Coven bosses are the most common sources of boots, which reduce bloodlust regen time by 15s per cycle; so all players can try and get some early game.

To maximise loot chance, do more damage! you need at least 50% damage to loot a boss (but with reduced loot chance)
at 100% you get 1% more chance;
125% 2%;
and at 150%+, 3% more loot chance

Last Stand (flucky drop from nightly rewards) did you mean fluky as in nonsensical random? wasnt flucky a character on anamaniacs?

Good guide helped me understand the game a little better, I am lvl 7 and started on Saturday, I started to play mainly because of the contest but since I already have a ps3 I am just hoping to get the Dead Space game. This game is a lot of fun once you figure out how to play.

Well, I’m new to this game and I got here due to the contest.
I must say I’m surprised that there are so many negative reactions to this game.
Of course I haven’t gotten very far yet (still just level 2), so there’ much I don’t understand yet but I don’t find it impossible to achieve something in this game.
I find this game quite intriguing and I’m pretty hooked now :)

Thanks for your guide, I’m looking forward to the reserved entries.
Your tip about the bloodlust used by servant attacks helped me. I browsed the wiki but there’s so much info there that I overlooked it. I’ll be more careful with using my servant now!

Perhaps you can understand the negative reactions better if you read some of the chat comments, one I saw was something like ‘i don need to read no fkn wiki to plae shity flash gaem. flash sucks’ At least his IQ is greater than his age. Probably.

Ah, the art of strawman arguments. The game IS shitty. I clicked for the artwork, fumbled around a bit seeing the World of Darkness reference, and now see it only as a pure, PUREST OF PURE “Pay to win” game. A bloodlust system that is absolutely requiring either:

1)Staying online for hours to get a bit, just a bit of XP in a retarded combat system against repetitive foes.
2)Spending money.
3)Every cool item either requires either MONTHS of online time, or cash.

I intend to click a bit and look around only for killing some time daily, and will do my best, never, ever to spend a dime on it, and pre-emptively warn everyone I know against playing this stinking turd.

Now mods. Whine and remove if you please. waves away

Originally posted by CanT2:

Ah, the art of strawman arguments. The game IS shitty. I clicked for the artwork, fumbled around a bit seeing the World of Darkness reference, and now see it only as a pure, PUREST OF PURE “Pay to win” game. A bloodlust system that is absolutely requiring either:

1)Staying online for hours to get a bit, just a bit of XP in a retarded combat system against repetitive foes.
2)Spending money.
3)Every cool item either requires either MONTHS of online time, or cash.

I intend to click a bit and look around only for killing some time daily, and will do my best, never, ever to spend a dime on it, and pre-emptively warn everyone I know against playing this stinking turd.

Now mods. Whine and remove if you please. waves away

lets see what can i say about your claims
1) i can get rid of 300 BL in 10 min, that would be 1,5k exp for me, then i make a break for 1 or 2 h(which regenerates 72BL per hour, enough for 6 new attacks) and fight agin which gives me 360-720 exp, thus i get 1 or 2 levels per day
2) I didn’t spend any money so far
3) yes thats how MMorpg work, either you work hard for cool stuff or you pay for it.

soooo, you intent to play the game, compalin about it and recommend noone else to play it …. cool we got a hatedom :)

A great Guide!!! Thank you for writing it all down. I wish I had gotten to read it 2 years ago when I started playing the game.
That said, I must note that I disagree with your take on the 24 hour buffs. I’m using them all the time and find them very useful. For pvb, one heroism and a buff to weapon damage can make quite a difference, regardless what level one is at. Pve, especially portal areas, the buffs make for a significantly higher success rate. Even in pvp when armed with buffs the success rate is somewhat higher and I can equip something that boosts the loot rate over something that boosts damage dealt.

i don’t know if any of you can help me, but the talent tree tab opens up to just the marble background for me. I don’t think thats normal.

For new-player bosses, if level 13 is still newplayer, I find bosses pretty useful. I join a coven boss pretty much continuously, and use it to “store” EXP when I am near leveling. That way I can make good use of my bloodlust instead of wasting it. Also at this level bosses go down in a few full bars of bloodlust. I also tend to try to consume bloodlust ASAP due to a packed schedule, so I like being able to use my nukes on a boss and grind PvP rapidly rather than attacking 4 times and checking. Your guides are excellent, this is pretty much the only thing I disagree with, and even that is situational, just throwing it out there for those like me.