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.