I have been away for 10 years. I started playing on a new server.. I have no souldstones/stuff like that on Europa. My question is. What skills to put on my mule to help fund me to get a house & get other toons geared and able to kill stuff.. Thanks.
-
Hail Guest! We're looking for Community Content Contribuitors to Stratics. If you would like to write articles, fan fiction, do guild or shard event recaps, it's simple. Find out how in this thread: Community Contributions
-
Greetings Guest, Having Login Issues? Check this thread!
-
Hail Guest!, Please take a moment to read this post reminding you all of the importance of Account Security.
-
Hail Guest! Please read the new announcement concerning the upcoming addition to Stratics. You can find the announcement Here!
Returning Player Craft Mule Question
- Thread starter DarknessDemona
- Start date
- Watchers 1
Hi and welcome back
From a returning vet coming back after 3 years, my answer would be : I don't think that a mule is the best char for that.
Now to be able to craft the high end stuff that sells and brings money or is good enough to equip your fighting toons, you need ingredients that are only dropped as loot on MOBS, some of them very powerfull.
You would also need to be able to imbue the stuff you craft, and to raise imbuing at high level (120) you also need a LOT of gems (that is still doable with a miner if he read the "mining stones" book that costs 10k gp as he can mine some), ingots to craft armor parts to imbue (again miner) and also looted pieces of gear to unravel to get magical residue and enchanted essence.
So to raise one of the most useful crafting skill on your mule (imbuing) you would need another toon to be able to kill stuff and provide for him.
To have decent loot to unravel you need to kill mid to high level mobs or low level if your toon has high luck on his suit ... that's not the case of a new toon or returning after 10 years and would require imbuing to craft some suit...
To be honest I don't really know how I would do if I had to create a new account (or close to it) in today's UO economy, where everything is quite expensive and to be really efficient a toon needs high end stuff....
The easiest way is to find people to help you get on your feet, returning vets are usually very welcome on all shards and most people are happy to lend a hand, some useful stuff or advice.
Otherwise I would begin with a dexxer,if your mule has smith and/or tailoring craft him a basic but strong suit (resists as high as possible so as close as 70 as possible, weapon with high "DPS" Damage Per Second) go kill easy stuff to get money, give crappy loot to my mule to unravel (raises imbuing and gives one of the ingredients you'll need later).
When you loot some piece of armor with better properties than your crafted ones, improve your armor/weapon.
Probably others will have better advice (I'm returning myself as I said) but I still think that the mule route isn't the best to begin with. That's one of the changes I regret most on UO !
Still to answer somewhat your original question, as of what I see on a crafter/mule to provide good suits/armors :
I would have 120 blacksmith/tailoring/imbuing GM mining at least. Note that at Gm mining you'll get some of the imbuing ingredients while mining.
Even better if you could have lumberjacking/tinkering/carpentry at GM level, but that would exceed the max skillpoints so at that point you would need soulstones to swap between some skills.
Tinkering allows you to craft some nice jewels that can also be imbued for extra properties, and to craft your own tools for your other crafts.
Carpentry, because some armor/weapon pieces are now made of wood and are quite powerful and can be imbued on top of it.
Lumberjacking to provide wood to the carpenter and tinker, and because at Gm level you can get some of the imbuing ingredients while chopping wood.
Another thing to consider if you have a boat or when you'll be able to afford a boat : fishing.
As long as you only fish with your pole (as in are not tossing one of the new special fishing nets) the worst you can come across is a water elem/see serpent/seep sea serpent, a decent mage/archer fisher can easily dispose of those.
At high fishing level (80 and up, sometimes even before) you'll get some MIBs (message in a bottle), when you open those you get a message giving you the locations of a sunk ship, go fish there and you get a nice unlocked treasure chest with more than decent loot and money and no guardian. So again the worst you could get while fishing the chest is the usual sea/serpent, deep sea serpent.
Way easier than T-Hunting and will give you better loot than low level T-maps.
As a bonus while fishing with high level fishing (80+) you get sometimes 2 of the imbuing ingredients.
I hope all this will help you some, and good luck out there !
Jeza
From a returning vet coming back after 3 years, my answer would be : I don't think that a mule is the best char for that.
Now to be able to craft the high end stuff that sells and brings money or is good enough to equip your fighting toons, you need ingredients that are only dropped as loot on MOBS, some of them very powerfull.
You would also need to be able to imbue the stuff you craft, and to raise imbuing at high level (120) you also need a LOT of gems (that is still doable with a miner if he read the "mining stones" book that costs 10k gp as he can mine some), ingots to craft armor parts to imbue (again miner) and also looted pieces of gear to unravel to get magical residue and enchanted essence.
So to raise one of the most useful crafting skill on your mule (imbuing) you would need another toon to be able to kill stuff and provide for him.
To have decent loot to unravel you need to kill mid to high level mobs or low level if your toon has high luck on his suit ... that's not the case of a new toon or returning after 10 years and would require imbuing to craft some suit...
To be honest I don't really know how I would do if I had to create a new account (or close to it) in today's UO economy, where everything is quite expensive and to be really efficient a toon needs high end stuff....
The easiest way is to find people to help you get on your feet, returning vets are usually very welcome on all shards and most people are happy to lend a hand, some useful stuff or advice.
Otherwise I would begin with a dexxer,if your mule has smith and/or tailoring craft him a basic but strong suit (resists as high as possible so as close as 70 as possible, weapon with high "DPS" Damage Per Second) go kill easy stuff to get money, give crappy loot to my mule to unravel (raises imbuing and gives one of the ingredients you'll need later).
When you loot some piece of armor with better properties than your crafted ones, improve your armor/weapon.
Probably others will have better advice (I'm returning myself as I said) but I still think that the mule route isn't the best to begin with. That's one of the changes I regret most on UO !
Still to answer somewhat your original question, as of what I see on a crafter/mule to provide good suits/armors :
I would have 120 blacksmith/tailoring/imbuing GM mining at least. Note that at Gm mining you'll get some of the imbuing ingredients while mining.
Even better if you could have lumberjacking/tinkering/carpentry at GM level, but that would exceed the max skillpoints so at that point you would need soulstones to swap between some skills.
Tinkering allows you to craft some nice jewels that can also be imbued for extra properties, and to craft your own tools for your other crafts.
Carpentry, because some armor/weapon pieces are now made of wood and are quite powerful and can be imbued on top of it.
Lumberjacking to provide wood to the carpenter and tinker, and because at Gm level you can get some of the imbuing ingredients while chopping wood.
Another thing to consider if you have a boat or when you'll be able to afford a boat : fishing.
As long as you only fish with your pole (as in are not tossing one of the new special fishing nets) the worst you can come across is a water elem/see serpent/seep sea serpent, a decent mage/archer fisher can easily dispose of those.
At high fishing level (80 and up, sometimes even before) you'll get some MIBs (message in a bottle), when you open those you get a message giving you the locations of a sunk ship, go fish there and you get a nice unlocked treasure chest with more than decent loot and money and no guardian. So again the worst you could get while fishing the chest is the usual sea/serpent, deep sea serpent.
Way easier than T-Hunting and will give you better loot than low level T-maps.
As a bonus while fishing with high level fishing (80+) you get sometimes 2 of the imbuing ingredients.
I hope all this will help you some, and good luck out there !
Jeza
As Jeza said, a crafter is great, but unless you plan on mining a ton of ingots to sell them you will have a tough time getting what you need to imbue a decent suit..
I was in your situation not too long ago and I did the following. made a sampire
I Started a character with 50 swords and 50 necro. and a little chiv. Tithe your starting 1k gold at a shrine. I headed to brit graveyard and chacked skeletons while raising chiv, tactics, and swords and parry / bushido.... did this until I was around 60-65 skill in each skill.... with the gold from skeletons/zombies shades ect i bought necro regs and a full necro spell book. I then headed to ilsh near where the titan dungeon is... There is an area outside where around 3-4 ettins spawn at once. with a stock of necro regs I worked ettins until around 70-75 skill.... i had saved up around 60k in gold by this time. I then started piecing together a suit. i used heart of the lion, fey legs, and brightsight lenses... I improvised on stuff i found cheap on vendors to get a suit with 70% phys and decent resists. I was gifted a sould seeker then at 75 skill i moved onto cyclopse..... these thigns hit hard but with the hit life leech on the wep, confidence from bush, close wounds from chiv as well as curse wep from necro staying at full health is easy... once i hit GM swords / tactics these guys were easy. even in my total newbie gear i killed these at a shocking rate. Cast enemy of one, consicrate wep and honour my target and use lightning strike every swing when your not using a special divine fury and then just hit my curse wep macro and chiv heal as needed. once you reach 99 skill in necro you can cant vampiric embrace. this makes you very resistant to poison as well as meaning you now leach life every time you do damage! ok... so your now a gm in the following - Swords/tactics/parry probably around 90 bushido and depending on how much you trained gm necro. people will argue where to go with chiv but i wouldn't have less than 90 myself. you will have saved up a bunch of gold killing titans and cyclopse and even though you are in rubbish gear you still kick but... investment time.... on chat advertise for 110 tactics/parry/swords... these are imho the first stills to take over 100. most people will hand over a 110 without asking for any gold but if not they should be very cheap... now your suit needs attention... there are a couple of really effective budget suits. ( the best of sampire suits will be in the hundreds of millions.)
although I spent may weeks making my sampire suit pieces and farming artifacts you can be very effective with either of the following...
Darkwood armour set / corguls sash / mana phasing orb (or totem of the void) and a ring and brace with 15% hci/dci and 8 str and dex with some damage increase and a quiver of infinity!
Virtue armour set / corguls sash / mana phasing orb (or totem of the void) and a ring and brace with 15% hci/dci and 8 str and dex with some damage increase and a quiver of infinity!
seriously... this stuff is cheap but will do the job very well... I like the Darkwood set personally
once you have a half decent suit you can start hitting the abyss, i started out with the goblin mini spawns.... the critters are repond (soulseeker does the job) and they drop goblin blood (used to make repond slayer) and essence of control (used to imbue SSI) as well as decent gold... once you are compy with this then try the rats.... they drop essesnce of pestilence and a whole host of other imbue ingreds, seeds of renewal, abyssal cloth, crystal blackrock and crysal shards! to name but a few... also for each of the champions there is a chance of an artifact! the gold and ingreds will needed by your imbuer and also the stuff these critters drop as loot will give you magic essence and magic residue when unravelled.
If you are stugglling to get necro regs then go to the tomb of kings in ter mur... kill the undead guardians and take a bag of sending, they drop good gold, half decent items to unrav and loads of necro regs!
basically all the imbue major ingreds caan be farmed in the abyss... essence of order at the lava caldera, dilligence at the wyvern mini spawn and so on and so forth...
a sampire can kill anything and averything in there, solo if needs be but I like to hunt with others (its one of the M's in MMorpg)
Once you have a big stash of ingreds then get to work on your crafter! metal armour just doesn't pack the same punch as either leather or woodland armour so I would either work tailoring or carpentry first. Imbuing is very easy to get to 120. it doent need to be expensive... there is a popular sitr hat is a uo guide... called uoguide..... it got a great method on there and it works too! i used scrolls of alacrity and it took me a total of around 5 hours to hit 120 from 50.
imbuing as a beast to master though and you will spend more time working out base pieces and crafting that perfect resist spread than imbuing... lol.
If you need any further or advice or if you need a hand getting started I will help where I can, I play greatlakes but have chars on other servers too. PM me tell me where you play and if there is anything i can do to help I will. (except gift gold lol, ill gove items and the means to get what you need though)
I was in your situation not too long ago and I did the following. made a sampire
I Started a character with 50 swords and 50 necro. and a little chiv. Tithe your starting 1k gold at a shrine. I headed to brit graveyard and chacked skeletons while raising chiv, tactics, and swords and parry / bushido.... did this until I was around 60-65 skill in each skill.... with the gold from skeletons/zombies shades ect i bought necro regs and a full necro spell book. I then headed to ilsh near where the titan dungeon is... There is an area outside where around 3-4 ettins spawn at once. with a stock of necro regs I worked ettins until around 70-75 skill.... i had saved up around 60k in gold by this time. I then started piecing together a suit. i used heart of the lion, fey legs, and brightsight lenses... I improvised on stuff i found cheap on vendors to get a suit with 70% phys and decent resists. I was gifted a sould seeker then at 75 skill i moved onto cyclopse..... these thigns hit hard but with the hit life leech on the wep, confidence from bush, close wounds from chiv as well as curse wep from necro staying at full health is easy... once i hit GM swords / tactics these guys were easy. even in my total newbie gear i killed these at a shocking rate. Cast enemy of one, consicrate wep and honour my target and use lightning strike every swing when your not using a special divine fury and then just hit my curse wep macro and chiv heal as needed. once you reach 99 skill in necro you can cant vampiric embrace. this makes you very resistant to poison as well as meaning you now leach life every time you do damage! ok... so your now a gm in the following - Swords/tactics/parry probably around 90 bushido and depending on how much you trained gm necro. people will argue where to go with chiv but i wouldn't have less than 90 myself. you will have saved up a bunch of gold killing titans and cyclopse and even though you are in rubbish gear you still kick but... investment time.... on chat advertise for 110 tactics/parry/swords... these are imho the first stills to take over 100. most people will hand over a 110 without asking for any gold but if not they should be very cheap... now your suit needs attention... there are a couple of really effective budget suits. ( the best of sampire suits will be in the hundreds of millions.)
although I spent may weeks making my sampire suit pieces and farming artifacts you can be very effective with either of the following...
Darkwood armour set / corguls sash / mana phasing orb (or totem of the void) and a ring and brace with 15% hci/dci and 8 str and dex with some damage increase and a quiver of infinity!
Virtue armour set / corguls sash / mana phasing orb (or totem of the void) and a ring and brace with 15% hci/dci and 8 str and dex with some damage increase and a quiver of infinity!
seriously... this stuff is cheap but will do the job very well... I like the Darkwood set personally
once you have a half decent suit you can start hitting the abyss, i started out with the goblin mini spawns.... the critters are repond (soulseeker does the job) and they drop goblin blood (used to make repond slayer) and essence of control (used to imbue SSI) as well as decent gold... once you are compy with this then try the rats.... they drop essesnce of pestilence and a whole host of other imbue ingreds, seeds of renewal, abyssal cloth, crystal blackrock and crysal shards! to name but a few... also for each of the champions there is a chance of an artifact! the gold and ingreds will needed by your imbuer and also the stuff these critters drop as loot will give you magic essence and magic residue when unravelled.
If you are stugglling to get necro regs then go to the tomb of kings in ter mur... kill the undead guardians and take a bag of sending, they drop good gold, half decent items to unrav and loads of necro regs!
basically all the imbue major ingreds caan be farmed in the abyss... essence of order at the lava caldera, dilligence at the wyvern mini spawn and so on and so forth...
a sampire can kill anything and averything in there, solo if needs be but I like to hunt with others (its one of the M's in MMorpg)
Once you have a big stash of ingreds then get to work on your crafter! metal armour just doesn't pack the same punch as either leather or woodland armour so I would either work tailoring or carpentry first. Imbuing is very easy to get to 120. it doent need to be expensive... there is a popular sitr hat is a uo guide... called uoguide..... it got a great method on there and it works too! i used scrolls of alacrity and it took me a total of around 5 hours to hit 120 from 50.
imbuing as a beast to master though and you will spend more time working out base pieces and crafting that perfect resist spread than imbuing... lol.
If you need any further or advice or if you need a hand getting started I will help where I can, I play greatlakes but have chars on other servers too. PM me tell me where you play and if there is anything i can do to help I will. (except gift gold lol, ill gove items and the means to get what you need though)
Basara
UO Forum Moderator
Moderator
Professional
Governor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Wiki Moderator
UNLEASHED
Campaign Supporter
Firstly, characters now start with a base 120 skill points.
If you take the base template for Blacksmith, you get
30 Blacksmith*
30 Tinker*
30 Tailor
30 Mining*
Since you're talking multiple characters, it's obvious you're not on Siege Perilous (with its 1 character limit). So, that means you have access to New Haven.
New Haven has some quest NPCs that will be useful. Among other things, the NPCs can be paid to train you up to 40 skill (skills with a *) or 33.3 skill (tailoring)
Hesphaestus the blacksmith will give you a quest that will let you get gains of 0.2 to 0.5 all the way up to 50 Blacksmith skill
Jacob the miner has a quest that does the same for Mining
Amelia (I think that's the name) has one for Tinkering.
Hesphaestus and Jacob's quests each give a tool with 20 charges that recharges 1 charge every few minutes, and a +10 bonus to their respective skill when held (save them for special occasions though, or if you make a Treasure Hunter, give him the pickaxe for digging up the chests). Amelia's tool doesn't recharge, but has a LOT of charges (use as deco).
Arms Lore increases the effect of the bonus for exceptional crafting for weapons and armor. You'll get that up to 100 quickly, just from training the other skills.
Carpentry is probably the most materials/labor-intensive of the basic crafting skills, but you can now chop logs with your lumberjack to make logs, so it's no longer needed to have carpentry and lumberjack on the same character. IF you're gonna have an axer, put LJ on him and use him to gather your logs.
Imbuing is kind of hard to describe, and reforging (which is also based on it) even harder.
My suggestion:
If you take the base template for Blacksmith, you get
30 Blacksmith*
30 Tinker*
30 Tailor
30 Mining*
Since you're talking multiple characters, it's obvious you're not on Siege Perilous (with its 1 character limit). So, that means you have access to New Haven.
New Haven has some quest NPCs that will be useful. Among other things, the NPCs can be paid to train you up to 40 skill (skills with a *) or 33.3 skill (tailoring)
Hesphaestus the blacksmith will give you a quest that will let you get gains of 0.2 to 0.5 all the way up to 50 Blacksmith skill
Jacob the miner has a quest that does the same for Mining
Amelia (I think that's the name) has one for Tinkering.
Hesphaestus and Jacob's quests each give a tool with 20 charges that recharges 1 charge every few minutes, and a +10 bonus to their respective skill when held (save them for special occasions though, or if you make a Treasure Hunter, give him the pickaxe for digging up the chests). Amelia's tool doesn't recharge, but has a LOT of charges (use as deco).
Arms Lore increases the effect of the bonus for exceptional crafting for weapons and armor. You'll get that up to 100 quickly, just from training the other skills.
Carpentry is probably the most materials/labor-intensive of the basic crafting skills, but you can now chop logs with your lumberjack to make logs, so it's no longer needed to have carpentry and lumberjack on the same character. IF you're gonna have an axer, put LJ on him and use him to gather your logs.
Imbuing is kind of hard to describe, and reforging (which is also based on it) even harder.
My suggestion:
- Start with Basic Blacksmith template
- Train up Blacksmith & Tailor to 100, eventually training to 120 once you get the power scrolls (see the guides and FAQs in the subforum). Especially, learn about BODs, as they are a good source of money once you can do LBODs.
- Train up Arms Lore, Carpentry, Tinkering to 100
- Train up Magery and Mining towards 100, but once you start establishing other characters, you'll eventually want to move Mining to one of them (by retraining it, or getting one of the limited-use soulstone fragment tokens). Magery, you'll want to eventually have it to where about half the skill comes from equipment (+15 ring, +15 bracelet, +12 or +15 spellbook, and the Alchemy Talisman from the Britain Library, where you can trade in excess crafting supplies or some crafted items for points).
- Begin to train Imbuing once you have the other skills in the 90s.
- Eventually, you'll want to learn other crafting skills (Alchemy, bowcraft, cooking, etc.) Train these on another character, and when you get old enough to get soulstones, use them to swap out as needed.
- You'll want to keep Inscription on your primary mage, as Inscription adds a spell damage bonus, plus the chance to get special properties on crafted spellbooks is keyed to your Magery skill.
- Mining on my oldest Blacksmith (Smith not used as much because I don't have Arms Lore on him - have to shuffle skills with the next character for AL),
- Lumberjacking on a second (with Arms Lore, Bowcrafting and cooking, the latter still being trained)
- Maxed out Mining, Arms Lore, Tinkering, Smith & Tailor on two more (my primary characters on my second account), with two more on my 3rd account almost there (BOD runners from the days when BODs were much harder to get)
- Inscription on my mage,
- and lastly, Mule only has Alchemy, Tinker, Carpenter, Imbuing at max, enough Magery (with equipment) to cast the highest spells and craft carpentry add-ons, only enough Blacksmith and Tailor for add-ons and getting all BOD types, and 0 music (with gear that has a total of +45 music to put on if I want to craft instruments with carpentry)
Yeah sorry about that, I kinda got on my sampire train for a while there.
With regards to the crafting soulstones or at least soulstone fragmetns will be useful... on my crafter/soulstones I have 120 smith / imbue / tailor gm carp, gm tinker and alchemy, bowcraft - on my mage inscription and on my thunter mining. I swear one day I will gm cooking lol. the fragments are fairly cheap to buy (around 1.5m on GL) and they have 5 charges.... there is a one charge varient that you can craft using shimmering crystals but you would need to be able to farm a lot of them to make them usable IMO.
let me know what shard you play and I can hook you up with a few alac scrolls or some materials if needed.
With regards to the crafting soulstones or at least soulstone fragmetns will be useful... on my crafter/soulstones I have 120 smith / imbue / tailor gm carp, gm tinker and alchemy, bowcraft - on my mage inscription and on my thunter mining. I swear one day I will gm cooking lol. the fragments are fairly cheap to buy (around 1.5m on GL) and they have 5 charges.... there is a one charge varient that you can craft using shimmering crystals but you would need to be able to farm a lot of them to make them usable IMO.
let me know what shard you play and I can hook you up with a few alac scrolls or some materials if needed.
Wow so much to take in... Well lucky I do still have funds available and I have the knowledge to get my skills up.... The hardest thing will be getting the new skills down... And it seems taming a greater dragon on my to do list ... I appreciate all the help I play on baja and I hope to find a good guild who can help me learn more... I love the Idea of Sampire that's awesome!! Thanks again...
Actually got excited and made a Sampire......... BAD idea.. I cannot stay alive. Went to brit and the specters ATE me.. Went to Moonglow same thing.. No good vendors in baja that i can find.. This is crap!
Basara
UO Forum Moderator
Moderator
Professional
Governor
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Wiki Moderator
UNLEASHED
Campaign Supporter
Sampires are only good when their skillset are already complete. Before then, they get eaten alive.
The big thing about sampires is the "pires" part of the name. Vampiric Embrace requires 99 Necromancy to cast.
Remember the following things when training up a sampire:
The big thing about sampires is the "pires" part of the name. Vampiric Embrace requires 99 Necromancy to cast.
Remember the following things when training up a sampire:
- Most Repond (living humanoid) stuff does double damage to you when in Vampire, lich or wraith form.
- You got to overload some of the resists on your suit to compensate for the reductions from Vampire, lich or wraith form.
- If you ever use lich form, you'll need massive HP Regeneration, as you lose health as part of the process.
- Vampire form takes damage from healing spells that use garlic.
- You need huge amounts of mana, because you need to use evasion a lot, as well as frenzied whirlwind (when fighting groups) and lighting strike. Wither will be spammed a lot in crowds.
- When fully trained, your healing will come from Life leech (both from weapon, and from form when a vampire), the curse weapon spell, your suit, and Spirit speak. Don't rely on healing spells, and it's usually a good idea to have the Healing skill early on, then reduce it (by turning its arrows down) as you need the points in other skills. If by some chance you find a way to keep it (lots of skill points from equipment for all your skills), it will make your template even stronger.
- The alternative form of a Sampire is a Whammy (same skills, but optimized for Wraith Form), which requires less necromancy, but optimizing spirit speak.
- Sampires, when fully kitted out, skills are completed, and you get a full grasp on their strategy, can be used to solo peerless and champ spawns (from start through killing the boss). They are a broken template that IMO should have been nerfed more (hell, one ex-head of UO had no clue what the template is or could do, just THREE YEARS AGO), but they're now an accepted part of the game. But, there's a pretty steep learning curve for those that left before Samurai Empire to get to that point, as there's been 10 years of figuring out how to min/max necro use, and all the complications with learning to use Bushido. This isn't your daddy's tank in a heavy archer suit - It's to Pre-AoS and early AoS warrior templates, what a CTS-V is to a 20s or 30s Cadillac souped up for bootlegging.