Feedback on duoing 10-40ish

[Tagamogi]

I finally got a friend to play PG with me (yay! /fireworks), and I wanted to do a long and boring report of my fuzzy feelings on how we've been doing and a couple newbie issues I've noticed secondhand.

Background
My friend is an experienced and skilled MMO player. He played PG for a bit a couple years ago but dropped out due to real life stuff before he got much further than frying pigs.He started playing a new character a couple weeks ago, and I've been trying to give him the "good parts and cool loot and notoriety" tour of PG, hopefully without spoiling his exploration phase too much.

We started playing together when he was about 15 sword / 8 mentalism. I initially brought a 4 fire / 6 psychology alt but dropped her in favor of my main playing 23 rabbit / 35 unarmed when my friend was around level 20 and it became clear to me that my alt would not be able to keep pace. I love, love, love the flexibility in PG that allows us to play and have fun and challenges with level ranges like this.

My friend has been doing a bit of exploring and questing and crafting on his own, but has primarily leveled by duoing with me. I've been focused on finding level-appropriate dungeons for us. In my opinion, the outdoor zone mobs are usually spread out too far to really be worthwhile for even a mini-group. [Which is not a problem, just saying.] We did pick up several kill quests in Eltibule while we were passing through and spent a little bit of time camping the cat altar there while doing the bear kill quest a few times over.

Dungeons
We started by going into the crypt for the first couple chests, plus the puzzle storage chest. ( I finally, finally figured out the hints for unlocking that chest after always brute-forcing it before. That was certainly a triumphant moment of its own. Anyway: ) The next day, we went back to the crypt to try Ursula and did vaguely ok against her, although it seemed pretty obvious we wouldn't be able to defeat her. At that point, I felt a bit stuck: The only dungeon I felt we could really do was the first 2 chests in the crypt again, and repeating that would get pretty old and defeating the spiders leading up to those chests was already getting too easy. So, I decided to dump my alt and bring on my higher level main so we could give the goblin dungeon a try, even if we wouldn't be able to use the loot yet.

In my opinion, it feels like there is a bit of a hole in the 15-25 dungeon level range. I expect the South Serbule update will address that. I thought about doing the brain bug cave or the Myconian cave instead of moving straight on to Eltibule. However, the brain bug cave isn't all that high level and the only boss there is unkillable at level unless someone has stun. It's certainly worth visiting once, but not really a multi-visit combat xp dungeon. Tne Myconian cave suffers when compared to the goblin dungeon: The mobs give less usable gear, the chests give far fewer usable items and I really don't want to try the bosses in there since their curse scares me.

So, goblin dungeon it was. It's one of my favorite places in the game anyway. Dense mobs, scary fights, great loot and challenging bosses that you can try without worrying about curses. I like how I can actually see how I gain in power by trying the mob-dense area to the left again, or Algapa or the mantis room. Duoing the goblin dungeon feels just as fun as soloing it. It's also great (maybe too great?) xp, and it felt like it didn't take a lot of time at all before we could actually start using the level 30 loot we'd collected.

We alternated the goblin dungeon with some other places: Back to crypt, brain bug cave for quest now that we had someone who could stun, Myconian cave minus Tremor and Tidal, and eventually a couple trips to the boarded up basement. The goblin dungeon is the place we went back to over and over, though. Primarily because it's fun but also to level Goblinese. I feel like we almost went there one time too many: The last time, with both our primary combat skills now in the low 40s, we were able to kill Graz with ease and it didn't feel like much of a challenge anymore. However, we needed to go back so that my friend would be able to level his Goblinese. I think the problem with the Goblinese is just that we skipped South Serbule - I think if he'd done a couple rounds of goblin killing there, his Goblinese would have outpaced the Eltibule goblin dungeon faster. Now that his Goblinese is finally 40, I'm really looking forward to moving on and trying new places.

One word on the crypt: We went back there after a round or two of the goblin dungeon, and killed Ursula with ease. We moved on to kill her daddy with some difficulty and a near death.We then proceeded to clear the whole energy keys hallway with great speed and no problems at all, and based on that, I let myself be lured into the fight of doom at the end of the hallway. We lost. Of course. With our fire shield potions from Ursula still in place, we actually got the armor of the rhino down but didn't do any damage to his health before my friend died. I ran like the rabbit I was and miraculously escaped alive and uncursed. We tried again after a rez and the next attempt went even less well. What I think would help with that fight would be a way to fight the rhino guardian without constantly having to worry about adds. The rhino is very very bad on its own. Having a couple adds to start with and potentially more repopping during the fight just makes bad become virtually impossible. ( I have said before that I like the crypt the way it is and I do. I'm even starting to enjoy being squished by the rhino by constantly underestimating it. Still, I think a fighting chance at the rhino would also be nice... ) [ I "solved" our rhino problem by temporarily unbunnying and introducing it to my level 70 skills. That curse is just too ugly to live with. My friend was willing to give it a shot, but I couldn't face the idea of his inventory space running out even faster.]

Confusing Stuff
It might be nice if there was a better in-game explanation of what mob vulnerability means. My friend asked me what it meant that some of his abilities did more damage to vulnerable mobs and the only reason I was able to answer the question is that I happened to be idly browsing the Wiki a month ago and ran across an explanation of it. Prior to that, I'd played in blissful oblivion. Sure, I'd seen the sword icon pop up but since it often happens at the beginning of a fight, I figured it meant I'd just gotten aggro or the mob was especially mad at me or something like that.

Neither of us is quite certain about how group loot is supposed to work. This is likely just in the user error category "too lazy to look it up." We did figure out how to set loot to free for all in-game, so that takes care of our current needs really. It's sometimes unclear though if a named mob dropped separate loot for every group member or not. We are also uncertain whether magic items are really supposed to be based on the group leader's combat skills or if we've just gotten unlucky or if it's bugged. (I'm leaning toward bugged and filed a bug report.)

My friend didn't realize that he could buy more bank slots from Hulon. That's the first time I've seen that newbie problem, so it might just be one of those random oversights.

Best Moment
My friend got the quest to tip players from Pennoc and worked his way through figuring out how to tip someone and that names are case-sensitive. However, he got stumped on one particular tip where no amount of spell-checking and making sure the person was within tipping range helped. We eventually figured out the cause of the problem: He was trying to tip somebody's pet rat.

( Not Hector. I'm sure Hector would have known to accept the money but this must have been a new and untrained rat.)

Inventory
My friend is constantly running out of space. As an illustration, our grouping time yesterday went like this:

We logged in and spent about 10-20 minutes waiting for him to clear out his bags from our last trip.
We did the left wing of the goblin dungeon and left to sell. He did a big round trip hitting Yetta, Hogan's Keep and Sie Antry while I waited around in Eltibule Keep grooming my fur.
We went back into the goblin dungeon, went straight and killed Algapa and Graz and hit up the associated chests. He ran out of space early on and passed me things to carry around for him.
We went back outside and I traded him his items back to sell. He waddled to Yetta and once he cleared out the overflow, went on another grand trip to Hogan's Keep, Sie Antry and finally back to Eltibule Keep to sell more stuff to Yetta that he'd accumulated during his trip. In the meantime, I groomed my fur. (It's awesome not to be able to sell stuff. It almost makes me forgive Yetta, my soul mate and potential bride, for not being able to see past my current furry form.)
We made our way to the boarded up basement. I veto'd his plan to hit up the Eltibule Crypt again on our way over on the grounds of "where are we going to put the loot?", so we just killed a few mantises and snails and worgs aggroing us along the way. By the time we reached the house, his bags were full again and he traded me his spare stuff.
We cleared the basement, finished with completely full to overflowing bags for both of us, died to get back to Serbule and logged off with our inventory still a mess.

Total gaming time was almost exactly 3 hours. Having to do bag cleanup 3-4 times during a 3-hour period really strikes me as excessive.

Part of the problem is that my friend did most of the looting for the party. He did, however, know enough to leave junk like flour and white items on the corpses and I think with just him looting, we actually ended up with less junk than if I'd looted more since I tend to be more attached to random items I find. Part of the problem is that he hasn't learned yet how to really clean out his inventory before a dungeon run. ( After he figured out about Hulon's storage and got most of his inventory moved to the bank, I offered to hold some things for him before we went into the crypt again and was rewarded with 4 stacks of salt bought by mistake and a few Goblinese cards.) In my opinion, the biggest part of the problem though is that the number of attractive, useful items in PG far outstrips the available space. Which brings us back to our usual inventory discussion. I'm aware of the dev's opinion, but since I'm curently getting such a great view of how newbie inventory tends to work out, I think it's worth posting.

[ShieldBreaker]

I found this to be an interesting read, was surprised Hector got a mention. :) I think players get a lot of growing pains learning the systems. You can get by not understanding the ins and outs of the combat system, but once you start trying to figure out what mods to use and what they do you start getting a handle on the combat. And learning what to loot and what not to is tough. On the storage side, I keep junk now because I've basically got open spaces, where the spaces are is my issue, not that I don't have enough. I got 10 spaces left to get in the council bank but I never get surplus of cash, always another ability to buy. Those 10 bank storage would help with crafting stuff and secondary weapon set which I might want here or there. But what to keep and what not is something that is learned over time. But I am very guilty of going on dungeon runs with far too little open spaces, and trying to phlog on the go. Of course this is short term also, because I get more choosing and more willing to just drop stuff once I get my augmenting xp recapped.

The question is, are the learning curves so rough that it discourages players from starting and continuing, and if you flatten out the learning curves do you undermine the experience and advice the long time players can give and take pride in.

[kazeandi]

Transmutation should be introduced much earlier in the game, maybe with an NPC next to the Survey trainer. It helps keeping the inventory clean, but until you get to that point, you'll suffer a lot.

[takatoka]

thank you Tagamogi !! an excellent read, and an encouragement for duoing with new players .. kudos .
i also agree there really does need to be another midlevel dungeon

[Tagamogi]

The question is, are the learning curves so rough that it discourages players from starting and continuing, and if you flatten out the learning curves do you undermine the experience and advice the long time players can give and take pride in.

Good question. As far as I'm concerned the only learning curve that really matters is figuring out how to pick up a sword, swing it at a skeleton, enjoy their snarky comments and collect your loot. The tutorial has that pretty well covered. All the rest is really just gravy. Fun gravy, usually.

A lot of PG feels very intuitive to me. For example, I think the damage types and resistances are well done. The damage type of an ability is available from the beginning, and then at some point you get anatomy and enough skill to figure out which mobs are resistant to what type of damage, and then you can gradually put the pieces together yourself and decide which of your abilities would be good to use against that mob.

My friend also figured out the rage mechanics on his own and quite quickly got very good at preventing the bears in the goblin dungeon from getting off their nasty rage attack.

Shouting for help is another mechanic that's reasonably easy to figure out. Just the vulnerability was giving both of us problems for some reason.

In terms of learning curve, I think it was rather unfair of me to complain about not knowing how group loot works since I didn't even bother actually reading the complete in-game explanation. I was play-testing for those people who don't bother reading more than one sentence at a time, ok? ;)

Inventory is more a matter of attitude than learning curve, I think. My friend was doing just fine leaving wolf teeth and worthless green amulets on corpses until I started whining about shamanic infusion and leveling my jewelry augmentation. I'm still thinking about this one. It is actually very, very fun as a newbie to walk out of a dungeon with overflowing bags full of shiny new loot. It doesn't bother him that he has to waddle for a bit, and it didn't bother me when I was a newbie. My complaint here is more along the lines that post-dungeon bag cleanup is a never-ending chore that's cutting into our playtime. This is actually less of a problem for me when I'm soloing since I kill stuff more slowly on my own, so it takes me longer to fill up my bags and by the time my inventory is full, I'm usually ready to take a vendor break anyway.

Anyway, both of us are having a lot of fun, in case I wasn't clear about that.

[Crissa]

I leveled 15-30 in the mushroom cave. The crystal cave is also 10-20 (it's supposed to 15 but that poison can get nasty) as is the brain bug one; the starter cave back in south serb could also be another place tho much lower.

The next one I know is Goblin; I can solo in there now at 40 but at 30 I was doing groups. I still can't take the bosses.

Although I can tank the bosses in the Crypt 'cept the last one, doesn't mean I can kill them.

[Tagamogi]

I leveled 15-30 in the mushroom cave. The crystal cave is also 10-20 (it's supposed to 15 but that poison can get nasty) as is the brain bug one; the starter cave back in south serb could also be another place tho much lower.

The next one I know is Goblin; I can solo in there now at 40 but at 30 I was doing groups. I still can't take the bosses.

Although I can tank the bosses in the Crypt 'cept the last one, doesn't mean I can kill them.
When you say last boss, do you mean the second floor boss, the rhino guardian by the spider or Khyrulek (first floor)? Just curious. I find it really interesting how the difficulty of a dungeon can vary widely depending on party makeup and available combat skills. You are mostly cow, right?

I'm permanently scared of the crystal cave. I went there as a newbie, probably around level 5 and in white gear, and got annihilated by a couple slugs and a skeleton wizard. While mobs there should theoretically be easier for me now, I still don't trust the place. :p

[Tagamogi]

I might as a well add another report since we did a couple new places last night:

Kur Tower
This wouldn't have been my first pick for level progression after the goblin dungeon, but we wanted to get phrenology for my friend. (He definitely wants to stick with mentalism and had looked up the phrenology trainer on his own.)

We did surprisingly well in Kur Tower, and made it to the phrenology trainer with careful pulls and no deaths. The experience of controlled pulls and small fights felt very different from my previous solo tactic there which consisted of collecting clumps of zombies and seeing whether the fire dot from my battle chemistry pants would kill them before they could kill me. I really missed my aoe this time around, but I'll concede that being able to kill hook beasts instead is also very rewarding.

After visiting the trainer, we explored the first floor a bit more and things got more chaotic. We got stuck in a death loop involving respawns, adds, wanderers, multiple skeletons, ice slicks and, of course, zombies for a while. I think my friend got a bit frustrated around wipe # 4 or 5, but I didn't really mind since in my mind crazy adds and dying is what Kur Tower is all about. I think it will work better for us once we gain a few more levels and can kill faster, though.

My friend got a new helmet, plus some gear he couldn't wear yet (loot seemed to vary from 35-50, and he's about 44 sword / 39 mentalism now, with the mentalism holding him back from better gear). I got no loot at all since there are no chests, and all the random loot was based on his combat skills. Not really a problem since he's been tanking, though, and I like my goblin dungeon outfit.

We also tried the second floor which seemed far, far easier to us since we were fighting at most two mobs at the same time. We were able to take down Keerla with what I consider to be a fine combination of experience and skill: I warned him about the adds in her room and he pulled Keerla without them. The fight was very very close for us and featured healing bombs and extra first aid kit usage. We definitely would not have been able to kill her with the adds. I incautiously poked my nose around the corner after the Keerla fight to check if the adds were still there and got to enjoy being a flaming and near-dead rabbit for my trouble.

Given how much being set on fire hurt, I don't think we would have done well in the graveyard but we were unable to try it due to the ice wall. I'm wondering now though: I have used the ice bypass spell but still have the scroll, too. If I traded my friend the spell, he should be able to get through. However, bypassing the barrier is part of Landri's quest. So, if he used the scroll while not being on the quest, would he still be able to complete the quest since the barrier goes away permanently once opened? It would be a really interesting test, but I don't want to screw up ice magic for him (or me, if I try dropping the quest and re-getting it from Landri at my current quest point of barrier gone and Lomas still alive.)

Oh, as an aside, my friend developed frost bite during our trip to Kur Tower. I had buffed us both with +5 run speed from battle chemistry, but the snow hare mode was only available to me. I made it over to the tower with about 15-25 body heat left. We went pretty straight from the fire by the zone entrance to the tower, with a couple stops for talking to corpses and one ice block. This is going to be an interesting playstyle change for me - after some initial experimentation, I'd decided that emergency fires are a pointless waste of my inventory space since battle chemistry can get me to the next warm spot in plenty of time. Now I think it may be time to start packing them again.

Animal Nexus
We had time for one more dungeon after Kur. I've been itching to take us to Under the Hand before we outlevel it completely, but my friend has the usual newbie mantis phobia. I was wavering between Under the Hand and the Animal Nexus, and tried to sneak my way around the mantis problem by asking him if he'd rather be squished by snails or trolls. He still picked trolls, so Animal Nexus it was.

Animal Nexus is another of my favorite dungeons and duoing it felt very similar to soloing it. We did quite well, in my opinion. We had a couple deaths due to the mob density and a truly epic wipe to a spy portal when we realized that none of our currently equipped abilities - slashing, crushing, trauma, fire, electricity - could damage it. After we died, my friend switched abilities and very satisfyingly one-shot the portal with precision pierce. [ He hasn't met Malvol yet, so precision pierce is the only piercing ability he has. He's been following my advice and befriending Hogan, but since I didn't tell him why, he hasn't been trying as hard as he otherwise might and is still only at friends with Hogan. We did get him Decapitate thanks to a couple lucky scroll finds,at least. ]

Fights throughout the Animal Nexus were tense, but we were usually not in immediate danger of dying. The Magnifier at the end was a different problem. We pulled him with a troll add and surviving that fight involved using pretty much every available heal on cooldown and still feels like an amazing accomplishment to me. Right at the end of the fight, one of the other green bears spawned and attacked us before we'd fully recovered. The bear focused on my still-armorless friend, and I tried a frantic spam of stuns, rabbit's foot and first aid to keep him alive. Miraculously, we lived and proceeded to loot the two bosses. In my excitement over the Magnifier dropping oregano as his main loot, I buried his corpse in what I can only describe as a pure noob moment. But hey, we were about done anyway. We killed the last two regular bears in the room, walked towards the final chest and ... the Magnifier respawned. Thankfully, without an add he was a bit easier the second time around but I did get to use my very last first aid bomb.

Long story short - very fun dungeon. A bit too nail-biting at our current level for a repeat xp dungeon imo, but I look forward to coming back in a couple levels. After I get more first aid bombs. And preferably an armor restoration skill.

We collected 5 tufts of fur between us during the dungeon run which seems about right, based on my previous experience there and the increased fur drop rate since then.

Newbie Stuff
Halfway through the Animal Nexus, my friend asked me the interesting question of whether he should have an offhand item equipped. It turned out he'd been playing without anything in his offhand slot at all. I'm not quite sure how this came about - my best theory is that since he was doing sword/unarmed before he got mentalism, he didn't equip anything initially becauses it would have hurt his unarmed skillset and then didn't realize the rules had changed when he switched to mentalism.

We talked about offhand and mainhand items, and I think he's still a bit confused about what's what. (So am I, in some cases. I can never keep the claw vs cestus definition straight in my mind.) It might be nice if each weapon indicated whether it was offhand or mainhand in a standard label place on the item, so that it's possible to easily tell what it is without equpping it. And of course, both of us really hope for being able to dual-wield weapons some day.

My friend also missed both Psychology and Riger on Anagoge which we discovered when I tried to trade him a junk shield requiring 1 Psychology. I think that's another of those random oversights. I'm pretty sure he had it when he initially played a couple years ago. He'll go buy the psychology book instead now - I think it's really nice design that there are multiple ways of learning the skill.

Obligatory Inventory Report
It didn't feel so bad last night. We wasted a good half hour before getting started since my friend hadn't cleaned out his bags yet. He'd been farming boars for that last boar tusk and told me that while he had no particular interest in being a bard, he couldn't wait to see what Rappanel was going to do with those boar tusks. Elves...

Our second inventory sorting break was between Kur Tower and the Animal Nexus. We were also dealing with phone calls and pizza at the time, so while it took a while, it didn't feel like an inventory problem this time.

In the dungeons themselves we ran out of space pretty quickly, of course, but it felt like we were moving pretty efficiently.

[kazeandi]

Funny that you mention Kur tower, that's where I spent some time yesterday, too.
I too think that the entrance level is much harder than the basement. I went there with Fire/AH, my guildie was Fire/Nec, so we had ample AOE and just the right sort of damage for the ice blobs and all that undead stuff. Guess it's much slower as melee.
Once you're downstairs, the issue of odd groups of low hp zombies, high hp skellies and annoying mages disappears and it's easy to read small-scale fights.

[Crissa]

When you say last boss, do you mean the second floor boss, the rhino guardian by the spider or Khyrulek (first floor)? Just curious. I find it really interesting how the difficulty of a dungeon can vary widely depending on party makeup and available combat skills. You are mostly cow, right?U/Psych; I was U/Cow or Psych/Cow for awhile but got bored. I meant the last version of Khyrulek, the one with the crystals. I couldn't hold him. I could hold the Rhino, but gosh I wasn't doing any damage, spent most of my time halfway up a wall.


I'm permanently scared of the crystal cave. I went there as a newbie, probably around level 5 and in white gear, and got annihilated by a couple slugs and a skeleton wizard. While mobs there should theoretically be easier for me now, I still don't trust the place. :p
While Crystal Cave comes early, if you're playing through, you get poison resist potions from another quest about that time (it's a super-easy alchemy that takes a potato) and then the place is a breeze.

[Tagamogi]

Ok, time for a dungeon duoing update for the last few weeks. I was actually at a bit of loss what to run after my last post when our skills were about in the 39-45 range - it seemed to me that that we'd already tried all the dungeons that we could reasonably do at that level and there was no particular benefit to going back, and that the next set of dungeons I could think of would be too hard for us (Borghild, Wolf Cave, Winter Nexus came to my mind). That might have been more perception than reality though. What we actually ended up doing:

Under the Hand
We rather outleveled it at this point and were able to kill both bosses with ease. All the stuns in this dungeon felt really annoying though. I don't normally mind it soloing since I'm focused on all the lovely snails who might drop snail shells for me, but duoing when it was clear we would be able to kill the mobs easily if they'd just stop stunning us long enough to get an attack in was tedious.

I don't normally see other people in this dungeon, so I think other players might feel the same about it. It seems the dungeon could use something to attract people and make them want to come back after they kill the bosses once for notoriety.

Borghild
Most of the dungeon felt startlingly easy compared to what I'd expected. With a bit of range from mentalism for the faces and stun from unarmed for the ghosts, we waltzed through the dungeon without problems, and handled adds and chest traps with ease. (Not "too easy", just not all that difficult. ) The bosses were another story altogether. I'm not sure if the bosses are actually too hard or if we were just unlucky since every single boss happened to be highly resistant to our main damage abilities.

We wiped on Venenae in the basement in no time at all and by the utter lack of damage we were doing to her, it was clear there was no point in retrying her even with more poison resistance.

Kiralem seemed almost possible - we did some very careful pulling to try to get him alone but always got an extra add during the fight that made it just a bit too hard for us. After wipe #2, we hooked up with a fire/druid player. With his help, we got Kiralem down pretty nicely, even with 3-4 adds in the fight. It was still a somewhat difficult fight due to the adds, and we had one player death. It felt fun, though.

Going back to Venenae, the fire/druid player nuked her down in maybe 10 seconds, while I watched open-mouthed.

Our try at the Forgotten Loading Golem went a bit less well. Neither my friend nor I could really do much damage against the golem and I at least was pretty useless against the crystals as well since I was all melee. So, I settled for trying to stun the golem as often as possible, while my friend focused on healing our lovely fire/druid dps. We got the golem down to the point where he spawned the mini golems which turned the fight from "maybe we can do this" to a wipe. Since the golem curse is incredibly annoying, our new third party member got someone from his guild to come out and annihilate the golem for us (thank you, Sims!!!).

Kur, try 2
Not much new to say about this - we were able to do both the first floor and the graveyard nicely. We killed Gravamux in a reasonably matched fight, then wiped on the rhino tower of doom due to rhinos and, well, doom. Or possibly more rhinos.

Winter Nexus
I had to try this but when it took us 3 attempts to get the Thorn of Decay down for the key, I had a pretty good indication of how the dungeon was going to go. And yes, we wiped several times in the first room before giving up.

( The Winter Nexus is kind of an interesting place to me. I'm up to 29 winterprizes from the Animal Nexus sitting in my bank now, and I have zero use for them since I still haven't gotten past the first intersection in the Winter Nexus. Now that the level cap is 70, are people still bothering to run this dungeon? )

Yeti Cave
This is apparently the dungeon I should have started with when I couldn't think of a place for us to try earlier. When we finally made it out here, my friend sliced through the yetis on the first floor like butter. It felt like our usual fight involved me hopping in, getting one kick off, getting stunned, and then my friend killing both yetis on me before the stun wore off.

The second floor of the yeti cave felt really nice and challenging, though. We worked our way through the elites pretty well before dying to an unfortunate 3-pull and calling it a night.

I would like to go back to the second floor but between the yeti cave being a bit out of the way and the long way through the more boring first floor, we haven't really had an opportunity. We did go back to the cave a second time, but managed to wipe before actually getting to the fun floor. Apparently the first floor yetis are less easy when we leap into a clump of 5 of them...

Kur Tower, try 3
With my friend's new pain bubble, we managed to one-shoot most of the rhinos and successfully ascended the rhino tower of doom. My friend reached 50 in mentalism on the way there, and promptly equipped some new 50/50 gear which I think helped a lot as well.

At the top of the tower, we were able to get Lomas by himself and managed to kill him on our first try, with my friend spamming his rage-reduction abilities and me bunny-tanking and spamming my apparently rage-increasing abilities. ( I always seem to end up with those fire dot mods on my gear. It's not on purpose. I think.)

I feel a bit like I've won the game now. Ice magic had been eluding me for a long time. :D

Wolf Cave
We made two short trips out to the Wolf Cave, one before and one after Kur Tower. The first time, we just went in to chat with Malgath, and then tried going a bit further into the main cave. We managed to kill a few elites but then had problem with one or the other of us dying and not being able to get back together.

The second time, we came for Hoplology, and decided to give Timothy a try. Or two. Or five. Towards the end, I had some problems seeing Timmy since he was hiding behind our tombstones. I'm proud to say we eventually got him down, although I wouldn't care to repeat that fight for a while.

Crypt, Second Floor
I left this one till late since I didn't really want to live with Khyrulek's curse, and I felt we'd used up our high-level player interventions in Borghild.

The second floor of the crypt was still mildly challenging for us, even with our skills in the 48-55 range. The fire sheep and snails were gratifyingly easy, but my friend ended up almost dying in the fight with Khyrulek and friends when he was battered and stunned by the rhino. I like the rooms in the crypt since they make it pretty hard to see what is in a room before starting the fight - we were definitely a bit more careless than we should have been when engaging Khyrulek, and we later got another fun surprise when charging that single super spider.

Oh - when we killed Khyrulek on the first floor, the portal to the next floor despawned before we'd finished looting everything in her room, so we had to wait around to kill her again. Not a huge deal, but it might be nice if the portal lasted a bit longer.

Future
We are planning on resetting our levels by switching to ice magic. If we were continuing at 50+, I think we would be in another spot without that many dungeons available. We'd probably be doing yeti cave second floor for a while and turning in Maligno's skull while we are at it, and a bit of the wolf cave, but that's about all I can think of. Winter Nexus may be worth trying again in the high 50s. I have never tried Dark Chapel but I suspect we'd need a bigger group than 2.

50+ isn't necessarily a bad spot - there are always outdoor mobs too, and the Rahu desert has a nice mob density. It just feels like there are fewer dungeons around than at 30.

Money and Inventory
If I'm tracking correctly, I have given my friend 75,000 councils in cash so far. Plus some items, but since I've been getting stuff from him too, I'll consider that an even exchange.

Since I'm not sure what exactly he has been spending the money on, I don't think I just want to say "newbie leveling is too expensive." But ... maybe? A little? I'm not sure. I know he got the level 50 unlocks for sword and foraging during the training sale weekend, but those are the main expensive items that I'm aware of. He has been doing a bit of surveying on his own and filled work orders in Serbule, Eltibule and Sun Vale. I'd guess that he's gotten all cooking recipes from Fainor which can get pretty expensive but it seems he's been mostly just focused on sword/mentalism and the necessary favor for that. On the other hand, since I've been dragging him into dungeons, he might have been leveling a bit faster and needed money more quickly than he normally would.

Inventory is continuing to work much better now that my friend is out of the newbie phase. Or maybe he spent all the money on bank slots? ;) The main inventory delay I noticed recently was him running all the way out to Ser Arif in order to deposit the skulls he's saving for phrenology. Which may be playing the game as intended but really made me wish he'd just make a storage alt since it would be so much quicker.

[Khaylara]

Very detailed feedback. Small observation, you are right, there are way less options over 50 than at 30 ish. That is most likely because for years 50 had been the cap level so there's obviously more content under 50, I think they need time to catch up on the group dungeons but for duoing under 70 the gazluk caves sound like good minidungeons to run:)

PS props to your friend for using the actual storage, maybe their patience will run thin at some point but still mad props for using what he has available without resorting to mules.

[Silvonis]

I just wanted to drop a note saying thanks for sharing your experiences and that I look forward to reading more about your adventures!

[Tagamogi]

Very detailed feedback. Small observation, you are right, there are way less options over 50 than at 30 ish. That is most likely because for years 50 had been the cap level so there's obviously more content under 50, I think they need time to catch up on the group dungeons but for duoing under 70 the gazluk caves sound like good minidungeons to run:)


Yes, I like the Gazluk caves a lot. I'd probably wait until closer to 60 to try them, although I can't remember at what level I started soloing there, so maybe the low 50s would actually be appropriate for duoing. There is definitely still lots of stuff for us to explore. I took my friend to Ilmari the first time only a couple days ago, and he hasn't been to Rahu yet.




PS props to your friend for using the actual storage, maybe their patience will run thin at some point but still mad props for using what he has available without resorting to mules.
Yes, I rather admire it. But it also slows me down. :p

[Tagamogi]

Well, I might as well add another update, even if I don't have any Alharth-shaking insights. My friend and I took a longish game break, primarily due to real life reasons. When we started playing again, he decided to level up staff/shield and I decided to play ice magic/archery.

Dungeons Summary
Our first trip was through the sewers to the crypt, made rather easier than normal by my mid-30s level archery.

With my friend's skills in the low 20s and me at 20 ice magic / 36ish archery, we then decided to take on the goblin dungeon and blew through it to our happy amazement, killing both Orloaka and Agalpa before finally wiping on Graz. On subsequent days, we kept doing the goblin dungeon over again for loot and xp, killing Graz on all the following trips, and even eventurally working our way up to The Fog. The Fog was a somewhat lengthy and difficult fight for us, as were the hallways behind him. We each died a couple times in the hallways, and couldn't really get a good foothold - the elementals to the left weren't too tough but came in crazy clumps of 4-8, and the watchers on the right were rather hard. On the plus side, I finally dinged 30 ice magic just before our final wipe there and could finally equip all the gear I'd been accumulating during our previous runs.

It feels like we were running the goblin dungeon rather earlier than intended, but I think the overall difficulty of the goblins is still just right. We had advantages from my higher level archery, plus my friend kept wearing some of his Kur Tower gear for armor bonuses.

I think I mentioned this before, but it still feels like the goblin dungeon is basically the place to spend time in order to level and get gear. The other lower level dungeons are kind of fun, but there currently isn't much incentive to do them multiple times, imo. I love the goblin dungeon, but it would be nice if there were equivalent places.

We had a bit more time to play last Saturday, and ended up doing the goblin dungeon again (skipping The Fog this time), followed by the boarded up basement, followed by a badly needed dump session in Serbule, followed by the Animal Nexus.

The boarded up basement was pretty reasonable difficulty for us, once we learned to be slightly more cautious with our pulls. We'd been aoe'ing up to 5 goblins at a time in the goblin dungeon (and sometimes more if we had some friendly adds), and trying to do a similar round-up in the basement was definitely fatal to us. Still, with a bit of caution, we cleaned up the place pretty nicely.

In the Animal Nexus, we used our favorite tank-and-aoe strategy and wiped miserably on the first pull. In seconds. Twice. :) We then decided that maybe our strategy could use some revision. My friend was careful to single pull the bears and I revised my spell bar to have a bit less aoe, and a bit less cold damage since oddly enough the polar bears appeared to be highly resistant to cold.
I really like how this gave me the opportunity to play around with different abilities - frostbite is super cool and I'd been missing out on it since I was loading my bar with aoe before.

With the revised strategy, we did quite well in the Animal Nexus. We had a problem just before the final room where we got stuck in a polar bear clump with random bosses adding. We wiped and ran back a couple times before we managed to clear things enough to single pull the last boss and kill him. Our final levels were about 37/36 staff/shield and 32 ice magic / 42 archery.

Skill Comments
During our adventures, I found myself out of power multiple times, using beachside blend + snacking bread which seems like it should have been overkill for the ability levels I was using. The problem might have been that I was focused on putting out the maximum dps possible without watching its power consumption. Now that I think about it, the power problem seemed less in the basement and in the nexus, when we were doing smaller pulls, and the credit for that likely doesn't belong to the red aster bouquet I finally remembered to use towards the end of the goblin dungeon. Still, I kind of feel that if I'm using a level 55 cooking recipe and level 30 aoe abilities, I shouldn't be running out of power?

For a two person group, tanking is working great. My friend is great at getting and holding aggro and doesn't take much damage at all (possibly due to the overpowered Kur gear, but he was holding up reasonably well in the Animal Nexus too, with a bit of first aid help from me). He also has some very crazy rage reduction abilities, and the poor polars in the Nexus never seemed able to fill up their rage bar past 10%. I think having him tank and me dps was more effective than both of us dps'ing - I'm pretty squishy, and I don't think we would have been able to do the bosses if we were both dps focused. ( I have never been in a 6-person group, so I can't compare, but for 2 and likely 3 people, having a tank appears quite worthwhile.)

I'm really enjoying ice magic. My main complaint with it that I have zero bonus levels, so it feels like I'm always lagging behind my friend who has multiple bonus levels for both staff and shield.
Also, it seems ice magic has so many fun abilities, it's very hard to limit them to 6. That's a good problem, though. :)

Archery has been the dps fun I expected. Surprisingly, carrying arrows isn't as much hassle as I thought it would be (it may help that my endurance is 70) and I don't have to make new arrows all that frequently. When I do though ... well, you look up the components for the expert's reservoir arrow and tell me whether you have them all on hand. :) I'm not precisely unhappy with the complexity of the recipe, but I found myself thinking "well, I'm sure glad I kept a stack of this random item on an alt" multiple times on the same arrow recipe.
It also feels like there may be 2-3 archery trainers too many. With my archery at 42 and my mangling shot at level 25, I had the nagging feeling that I must be missing something, but visiting the the 3 trainers in Serbule and the additional trainer in Sun Vale turned up nothing. Happily, searching the Wiki helped with that problem, but still ... 5 archery trainers before I'm even 50?

Anyway, long story short, duo'ing remains great fun for me and I look forward to wiping in some new places the next time we play. :D

[Crissa]

Yeah, my build can't even hurt the Fog and I'm approaching 50.

[Tagamogi]

Yeah, my build can't even hurt the Fog and I'm approaching 50.

The Fog seems like a fairly reasonable gate keeper to the tougher area behind him. I'm just not sure what level you are supposed to be for that area - I tried soloing it once around probably level 50-60 or maybe even higher. I was able to kill the fog pretty well with my build but the crazy spawn rate of the elementals behind the fog just overwhelmed me.

[Crissa]

The Fog seems like a fairly reasonable gate keeper to the tougher area behind him. I'm just not sure what level you are supposed to be for that area - I tried soloing it once around probably level 50-60 or maybe even higher. I was able to kill the fog pretty well with my build but the crazy spawn rate of the elementals behind the fog just overwhelmed me.
Well, the level of the greens is the target level of the zone. So 30-40.

My big problem with The Fog is that it seems nearly immune to bludgeoning which as Unarmed is kinda my schtick ^-^ Sure, it can't kill me until I suffocate, but that's a long boring road!