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New player quick start guide - Varak - 01-25-2016
I wrote a guide last week that covered tailoring and macro’s and how to use that to start building your gold stash. Please review that document if for nothing else to learn a bit about macro usage. There is a beginners guide here that shows how to get connected and has some templates you can use to guide you in spending your 700 points wisely. There is also a “starting out in lost lands” guide that covers a lot of the same information here (starting stats, building stats before leaving town, etc).
This guide is about setting up a self-sustaining squad of fun characters in very short order. It gets you playing the game quickly, so you can enjoy the game a bit in the build process. The self-sustaining part is the key to keep your costs low which (along with a money making skill) will lead you to riches quickly. Just remember there are many ways to skin a cat. Don’t feel like you need to follow this guide verbatim. Make your own way. My goal honestly is to show you a couple options and introduce a couple critical steps (like stat building, multi-clienting, and character synergy) that will hopefully enhance your enjoyment in the game on your first few days and keep you here long term.
The first thing to know is you get 3 accounts to use on the shard. All three accounts can be run simultaneously. In your first days on the shard I highly recommend keeping all three accounts working hard at all times. A couple of accounts should always be macroing (passive play), while you are actively playing another.
The second thing to know is power hour. It boosts your ability to learn a new skill very high. It’s an hour long, and it refreshes every 24 hours. They are great for any skill honestly but you generally want to save power hour for expensive skills. It cuts down on the costs of learning by quite a lot, so using it on costly skills saves money. Simply put some skills are free to raise (evaluate intelligence, anatomy, etc), some skills are reasonable to raise (meditation, etc) and some skills are expensive to raise (magery, poisoning, etc). Starting out you’ll want to hit the free skills heavily, the reasonable skills often, and the expensive skills only when it’s necessary and preferably during power hour.
That’s the basic premise, now let’s get to work. You’ll need to create 3 characters to start (one on each account). We are going to start with a crafter, a dexxer, and a bard. Some people would definitely argue a tamer instead of bard, but I prefer the bard. It’s has very good control (much like tamers), does less damage (usually), but takes a lot less “active” time to level which is key to getting the character playable fast. The first stop for every character will be the stables for herding. Herding is the quickest and easiest method to 100 STR which is necessary for any character stepping outside of the city. The reason it’s best is you can “use” the skill roughly every second, where most stat raising skills only activate every 10 seconds. You don’t have to be a math wizard to notice that using a skill 8-10 times as often leads to quicker gains. Herding is there purely to boost stats in this instance. Mining is a goo secondary skill to raise strength. Snooping and musicianship are great for raising dex. Evaluate intelligence and spirit speak are good for intelligence. Camping and herding are good for all stats.
Let’s start the bard first. Go to the screen and choose advanced. You’ll want 50 magery/49 provo/1 herding. As established above magery is expensive to raise, so as a default I nearly always choose magery. This character will be a heavy magic user so I usually throw 40 points in intelligence, with the rest in str. You can drop him in just about any city, but I usually do Moonglow. We’ll use Britain for this example. Go to the stable SW of the west Britain bank. Since you took 1 herding you have a shepherds crook. Equip it, and pick out a nice looking cow and macro herding (click record macro in razor, flip to game double click the shepherds crook, then click on the cow, then click yourself, flip back to razor, stop the macro, add in a 1-1.5 second delay, click loop , click play). When you flip back to the main screen, you should see blue text (skill gains) being spammed and you know it’s working. While he is building his stats, let’s move onto character two.
Character two we’ll do the crafter. Start him out with 50 blacksmith/49 tinker/ 1 herd. You can certainly go 50 tailor/50 magery, or 50 bow/ 50 X. It’s really a dealers choice. Essentially you want a crafting character to make money and support your other characters. I’m suggesting 50 black smith / 50 tinker because I am assuming you are wanting to bash some heads in. A 50 blacksmith can make an AR 25 dex suit and a decent weapon which is perfectly fine for bashing some skulls. He’ll go to the same spot in BRIT, and go to the same stable, doing the same thing macroing herd. We are dropping everyone in brit mainly because it’ll be easy for all three characters to interact.
Character three is more of the same. This will be a dexxer so start him with 50 healing/ 49 magery/1 herd. I view the 50 healing as necessary, the other 50 is flexible. Along with magery being expensive, it’s also very necessary to move around quickly and easily. Give it some consideration. You guessed, it send him to stables to macro herd. Stat’s wise I usually start with roughly even parts str/dex but it doesn’t matter.
I’d consider using your power hour for the stat raising process on one or two of the characters. I personally did it on the crafter so I could get him to the mines faster.
We are 15 minutes into the game, and have some time to kill until your first character is done raising stats. If you aren’t on IRC, get on it. Say “hi” at least. I’m personally not very talkative on there, but it’s your platform for connecting with other players. Use it. Players will help in various ways. Players also know quite a lot about playing the game. One person in particular I would connect with is APOC. He runs resist sessions pretty frequently that is free to new players. Magic resist is important for most fighting builds. Ask him nicely to join one of his resist sessions and you will GM a skill that usually costs 60K or more to raise for free, usually on three characters at the same time. It’s a great service he provides to new players. I’d highly recommend it. I’d also take some time to research some mining macro’s.
OK we are an hour in and crafting boy has strength in the 80’s or 90’s which is fine. He’ll get crazy strength gains from mining, so it will finish up naturally playing the game. You could certainly go straight to the mountain, and use power hour for str/mining gains as well. Anyway, grab some shovels and some tinkers tools. Buy them if necessary. Head out towards the stables again, but follow the road heading west. When you get to the mountain you should see a forge. You’ll use this to smelt your ore. If you researched the mining macro, put it to good use. I use a target relative location one, and have one for each direction. The macor is there really to eliminate most or all the clicks, which makes mining much more tolerable. Drag your ore from spot to spot as it will be way too heavy to carry a decent load in your pack. Once you run out of shoves/picks, take your ore to the forge and smelt it. Use the ingots to create a second tinkers tools, then make the rest into shovels to mine yet more ore. Basically after an hour or two you should have 1,000-1,500 ingots and 60’s-70’s mining. Be sure to shear some sheep in the big pen with your dagger as you run back into town with your ingot load. If you can’t find the mountain, pull up UOAM one fo the other items you should always download before playing this game. It should be pretty obvious which mountain I’m talking about. Mines are always preferable IMO, but mountainsides in guard zones are much safer for the player new to the game. One quick note when you smelt ore if you “fail” your stack is halved. So your first few bacthes you probably want to separate out 2-4 piles of ore and smelt rather than whole piles. That way you ensure you have “some” ingots to build more shovels from.
Two hours in and your provoker should have some decent stats now. Maybe 90+ str and some decent INT. let’s get him started on his money skills. Go to the outside of the stables. You’ll see a few cows in pens on the outside. Start a provo macro (use skill provocation, target the gray animal, target yourself, double click instrument). You are choosing a penned in animal so he can’t actually attack you. That’s why a lot of people like Moonglow. It has a zoo with a lot of penned in animals. Put in a 1.2 second delay in after the provo, but before the music (double click instrument). Now you will want to put in a “for loop” (8), a 1.2 second delay after the double click, and then an “end for” after the delay. Basically what we’ve done is make a macro that provo’s about once every 10 seconds, and then plays the instrument 8 times (maximizing downtime between provokes). Your musicianship will GM pretty quickly this way. Once (s)he GM’s music, pull out the music portion of the macro and change the timing on the delay for provoke to 10.5ish seconds. You are going to let this guy macro this way day and night until he hits GM. One quick note, to get provoke working you need to have double clicked a musical instrument once. It’s weird. Just get used to double clicking the instrument every time you log on first thing so provoke is always ready to fire.
Two and a half hours in and your Dexxer is probably ready now, but let him macro for a bit longer. If he is 100 str but middling, dex switch over to snooping your provoke characters pack to max dex. Grab the crafter. He should have 1.5K ingots on him, and make some wool. Head to the tailor shop and turn the wool into bandages (spinning wheel the wool, loom the yarn, cut the bolts with scissors, cut the cloth with scissors). Head to the forge, and start turning those ingots into a decent dex suit. You just want to be able to create the item at this point (usually ring gloves, ring arms, chain legs, chain tunic, bascinet, and buy a gorget from selling a couple extra items). It doesn’t need to be exceptional. You should get a couple decent suits out of it. Finally give the bandages, weapons, and armor to your dexxer.
Take the dexxer out to the graveyard and start bashing heads. Use the fence to make sure you are only fighting one at a time at first. You don’t have any weapon skills, so it’s going to take a while to get a few kills in. Collect the bone armor (it’s better than what you are wearing), and sell the weapons. If you see a lich run. You should have a bandage macro running in the background (use an “if” statement to check for health and poison every couple seconds, and bandage as necessary). Have fun bashing in skulls. If you’ve said Hi on the forums, there’s a good chance someone will toss you a silver weapon which does double damage against the undead which is very handy.
We are about 3-4 hours into the game, and we’ve got a dexxer for bashing skulls, a bard for making money, and a crafter to make stuff/money. You are well on your way to making a good living and having fun.
As you move forward you are going to continue to develop all three. There’s good ways to attack any of these, but I’ll lay out a few plans here.
For the crafter, I would suggest reading the new player tailoring guide. You’ll make more money in less time than smithing/mining but you’ll need some money runebooks, mark scrolls, and buying tailoring skill. If you’ve made friends somebody might be willing to hit a rune library and build you cloth runebook for you (I certainly will if I am on). As he hit’s 70+ in blacksmithing he’ll start getting BOD’s. Save them up, it’s basically a minigame within the game with some cool rewards. Tailoring give’s BOD’s as well. BOD’s can often be sold for cash, so have fun with it. Heck make some BODs’ and get some cool items for your new house you bought with all that money.
For the provoker, you’ll want to fully develop his musicianship, and provocation skills. I would highly recommend developing his magery skills as well. You really need at least one character with a high magery to mark runes, gate into and out of dangerous places, etc.
Since Provo and music are free to raise you’ve essentially created a PVM juggernaught for free. You can literally take him anywhere to hunt. You have 100% chance to provoke a mob onto another mob if both skills are GM’d. This pays very well if you say provoke a dragon onto another dragon at 700 gold and a couple hundred in jewels with every kill. With that fast cash coming in, you’ll want to build out your magery skills (magery, resist, evaluate intelligence, and meditation). All of them will increase your survivability for when that one provoke goes very very wrong. Eval is free to raise, and easy to macro. Make sure anytime the character isn’t being actively played you are gathering skills. Meditation and magery build as you turn your dragon/lich lord/ air elemental/elder gazer/cyclops cash into regs. Your Provoker is a great character to use in the daily town invasions as well, which can be very lucrative and pad that bank account. (S)He’s really a money making machine.
Ah the dexxer. I always enjoy dexxers. There’s just something satisfying about slashing open a trolls chest with a katana, or crushing the skull of a skeleton with a war hammer. I purposely didn’t pick a specific dexxing skill because quite honestly, I really think you should choose the one you enjoy the most. If you went with a bow crafter instead, I’d recommend archery. If you are stuck and want me to choose for you sword has the katana which is the fastest weapon, and halberd which is the hardest hitting weapon. It’s a good fallback. There’s a few things common to all dexxers you should consider. Anatomy raises the damage you deal, as well as damage healed by your bandages. You’ll want to macro it to GM whenever you aren’t actively playing your character. Healing/anatomy allow you to cure poison when both are above 60, and resurrect when both are above 80. The best way to raise healing is to find a lot of people taking damage. Thankfully, if you’ve connected with APOC for your resist session, there will be tons of people there taking damage to heal and Apoc usually has a nice pile of free bandages as well. Use this time to raise not only resist, but your healing skills by bandaging everyone (via macro of course).
A couple quick caveats. For training fast weapons are best. Is easy to see a weapon swung every 1.5 seconds will gain twice as fast as a bigger weapon that swings every 3 seconds. Always use obstacles. Always. You can use them keep mobs off you (magery, archery). You can use them to get that pack of 5 earth elementals hung up so you can kill them one at a time, etc. Obstacles are very much your friend regardless of the type of character you are playing.
The guide has been very cost conscious to this point. Essentially the only money you are using is on regs, which are used to build skill/heal damage/deal damage. We are pretty much self-sufficient from day one (although it’s never too early to start looking at potions and what they can do for your survivability, etc). I’m sure someone out there is screaming why? Well it’s because this game/shard has a couple unique characteristics and they cost money. UO is one of the few games where you can own land essentially in game. I can swing by someone’s house and say hi. So I tend to place home ownership as a fairly high priority. The home also provides many benefits. You can have two characters fight themselves with a third healing, etc. You’ve got a lot more options for building skill and storing items. The other reason is events. We’ve got the bard & dexxer for town invasions, but there are combat events every day. You are going to want a character that can compete. That means spending money on building expensive skills. So yes to fully experience this shard, I would place a high priority on building a PVP character. We’re saving up while having fun, so we can experience all the unique things this shard offers. If you don’t want to PVP no problem, you’ve already got a bard and dexxer to dominate PVM and a crafter anywayJ.
Hopefully you found some of this useful, and worth your time. Good luck!
Thanks,
varak
RE: New player quick start guide - Skynyrd - 01-26-2016
Nice guide thanks for taking the time to create it.
RE: New player quick start guide - Blyth - 01-26-2016
Great guide Varak.
Adding lock picking to your bard should also be considered. You can raise it to 95 shown fairly quickly and cheaply.
RE: New player quick start guide - Varak - 01-26-2016
Excellent point. You'd have to find the 30/50/70/GM boxes. They are easy enough to come by though if you are using IRC.
RE: New player quick start guide - Skynyrd - 01-26-2016
Is there a new player macro house on this server ? If so I would donate a set for people to train. They would just need to be friended to use the key .
RE: New player quick start guide - Skrap - 01-26-2016
There isn't I'm aware of, would also donate to this.
RE: New player quick start guide - Varak - 01-26-2016
When “the gods” and some other NEW folks came over from UOSA, I set them up in my patio. I made sure to co-own “the gods” though because I knew I wouldn’t be on enough to add people as they trickle over. I’m just not a good candidate to run that type of operation because I’m not on enough. I could team up with someone and help out though.
The main value for houses early is to macro safely (towns are pretty safe, but need private house for some of the better leveling techniques) & storage/transfer of goods. It’s tough doing it outside of a guild structure though. There’s no accountability.
• Anyone friended can access the goods you stored
• Anyone friended can unlock the door for their red or a friends red to kill you
• Anyone friended can herd a bear into the house to kill you and take all those juicy regs when you work magery, etc etc.
Stuff would go missing, someone would die as they macro’d. Then the property owner would have to spend their time and cash dealing with all the drama. Not fun. The internet proves demonstrably every day that when there is no accountability, people will act horribly. Not everyone, but enough people that running this house would be problematic at best.
I really do like the idea, and I do see how it could be run. You would have to set up a 10-12 Cabin (small house) Rental service somewhere. You’d want them all in one spot (for refresh purposes), the rent would actually be free. You would want it within safe distance of a town and moongate, with low spawn. You would only co-own one person per cabin, and you would need their forum names for contact outside of the game.
You don’t have to worry about the stealing or killing issue, as it would be because they added the person or they left their door unlocked (making them accountable). You would be able to set up 10 people for the same price as a Tower, with none of the drama and 10 people stepping on each other in the tower. New players would be more likely to run into each other as they tend to live in same neighborhood. The only downside is you would have to watch for decay. If they let the house go into greatly worn, and they don’t respond via private message in a week, you’d have to REPO the house & its contents for the accounts that go Idle. All you would need is 10-12 characters able to place a house, which could be problematic.
RE: New player quick start guide - Darwin - 01-27-2016
(01-26-2016, 02:59 PM)Skynyrd Wrote: Is there a new player macro house on this server ? If so I would donate a set for people to train. They would just need to be friended to use the key .
My Bank and Go tower in Yew has 100 trapped boxes upstairs so when one gets to 50.1 Detect Hidden one can GM in a few minutes.
RE: New player quick start guide - godescalcus - 02-01-2016
I'm new to this server and tried to follow this guide to start a few chars with herding macro, but it seems something's not working as expected. In the first hour I managed to raise to 65 str and 12 dex for one char from herding alone and the herding skill itself to 26.2. I'm not complaining, since afk macroing is allowed and I never liked the servers where you could 7xGM in a couple of days. But the guide seems to imply that gains would be faster. Has skill raising been tweaked since this guide was written?
RE: New player quick start guide - Rapture - 02-01-2016
That guide if from 6 days ago. It shouldn't have changed. Camping has always been the route I've taken.