My guide to ldon from a rangers perspective

khalysta · Can't Stop Posting Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 641

This is word for word what I posted on the rangers glade so its geared towards rangers but works for everyone.

The nda was lifted recently so here is a little guide to get you up to speed on release day and help you out a bit. All of this was in the beta so if it doesnt go live for some reason well then my apologies in advance. This is just a guide of what I saw and what you can expect to see when starting in ldon.

First things first, joining the wayfarers. Ok first thing you want to do when you log in on release day is to go to your start city. If you are kos there are options to join the wayfarers but I think you have to go our to WK or rathe mountains to find them. I'm a wood elf so naturally I went to greater faydark. Upon zoning into gfay Enyaanuia Windancer should talk to you and tell you to come meet her in kelethin. She is at loc neg 520, neg 560 inside the tavern. On the eqatlas map of kelethin this is platform 24 with trueshot bows. Anyways talk to her following her quest hints within the bracketed boxes. Take notes of what she says especially with names and other things that seem important. Now head off to one of the adventure camps. The camps are in Butcherblock, EC by shady, North Ro, south ro and everfrost. Butcherblock is your closest choice by the way. She will have told you who to speak with so hail one of them and they will ask you a series of questions. Answer them and get an adventurers stone. The adventurers stone is a charm only augment that grows in power as you help the wayfarer brotherhood. As you do more and more adventures and help the wayfarers the charm will grow in power much like getting flags in pop and watching your Intricate Wooden Figurine grow in power. Expect to do many adventures before this gets to be powerful. Anyways you should have gotten the charm augment now and a faction hit as well as seeing a message about becoming a great adventurer. These same quest people respond as you do more and more adventures. Keep coming back and hailing the charm people to get the updates to the charm augment as you progress along. If you destroy the charm augment hailing them gets you another one so dont worry about losing it. You should now be part of the wayfarers and ready to do adventures and use their transport sytem.

Now that you are part of the wayfarers you can use their transportation system. Much like pok books this system moves you between wayfarer camps quite quickly. Just hail the magus in each camp for instructions and some lore about the transport system. Basically all you have to do is /say zonename and you get taken to the wayfarer camp in that zone. So /say butcherblock takes you to the middle of the wayfarer camp in butcherblock.

Each wayfarer camp is very similar. You will find 1-2 adventure recruiters, 1-2 adventure merchants, an augmentation sealer(looks like a forge), a soul binder, a raid recruiter, a magus, a soul binder, 1-2 quest related people and a few other npcs. You get adventures from the adventure recruiters so be grouped up with 4-6 people and be ready to go. Once started you have 30 minutes to get to your destination and magically enough once you are in the proper zone your compass gets a nice little blue bar to guide you to the spot. By the way it is recommeneded to use /hidecorpse all because each entry is also the gy and in beta had about 30+ corpses stacked outside. At first the adventure merchants will be empty for you. You have to prove your worth in each area to get the ability to see better and better items. So the more you gain in each area the more you will see on the merchants. All spells are bought off the merchants so if you dont like the spell you dont have to buy it Smile

The higher the level spell the more it costs. For example pack shrew costs 72 points. Obviously if you save your points you can buy very nice items. Expect to save 500+(probably more like 1k+) points to get really nice stuff for most of you(i say this for most of you. time/elemental people probably wont find much at all on merchants except maybe at some really high point total that most on beta never got to). As you progress keep going back to the merchants and quest people to see more stuff or to get more information. You really have to balance your adventuring to the different zones to see everything possible.

OK now that we got through becoming a wayfarer adventurer and the camps themselves its time to learn about the adventures themselves. This part is slightly skewed to the level 65 person. Sorry but I just dont know much about the lower level adventures but expect them to be similar to zones you would go to for xp. Ok adventures come in two flavors normal and hard in difficulty. Also you have the option to do one of three adventure types. The three types are collection, rescue and assasinate. The easiest one is collection. You go in and just collect a set number of items to reach your objective. These are often very quick and honestly your best source of points. My next favorite one is assasinate. What happens in these missions is you clear 60% of the zone to spawn a boss mob and then you find him and kill him. The zone will give you hints as to where he is located by giving messages to its direction. This kinda sucks because you dont have to rely on tracking anymore to find it but we still have a good gauge on distance and location which is better than the zone guides in my opinion. The last mission type is rescue. As the name denotes you have to rescue someone from the dungeon. The only problem is you must clear the path or the person stops and wont continue until the mobs are dead. So make sure you clear everything on the way to this person or else you may get slowed down on the way back to zone out. There is no respawn in the dungeons so as long as you clear everything this usually isnt a problem. As I said before there are two difficulty levels, normal and hard. Normal for a 65 is like doing pov, hoh, tactics or bot. The bosses in each should be like one grouping named in bot. Hard is like doing earth or fire. Expect the trash mobs to hit for 800ish and named to hit for 1100+. If you want xp the best spots are the hard levels but if you want points its fastest to do normal levels. An elemental/time geared group can do two normal adventures in the time it takes to do one hard netting 24 more points. Normal 65 adventure gives out 50 points and hard gives you 76. All adventure types are given 90 minutes to complete and should be more than enough time for a well balanced, cohesive group. So basically compare normal adventure to going into bot and hard adventures to earth or first castle in fire.

The zones are extremely well done I must say as is the whole expansion. There are 5 different flavors of zones each with a few different types of maps. The different zones are Mistmoore Catacombs, Rujarkian Hills, Deepest Guk, Takish, and Miragul's Menagerie. The Mistmoore adventures start from butcherblock and then you run to lfay for the zone ins. Rujarkian hills starts in ec by shady and takes place in either north ro, oasis or south ro. Takish starts in the north ro camp but takes place mostly in oasis. Miragul adventures start in everfrost and all the zones are entered from everfrost as well. The guk adventures start in south ro in the grassy area and start mostly in upper guk. Again once you start an adventure and go to the appropriate zone you will see a blue line on your compass to find the adventure zone in. For rangers(druids and mages too) our strongest adventure is the Takish zones. These are full of elemental and summoned mobs so all those spells you thought were worthless well they arent anymore Smile

Mistmoore and Guk were made for pallys and sks since they are mainly undead. Miragul's has some undead as well but not nearly as much. In my opinion Rujarkian is the overall easiest dungeon set made up of goblins and orcs(the new models on these are really done well as are all zones). The mob spacing here is done the best and if pulling in your group or crowd control is weak this is the place to go since you get the least adds. Takish has rooms full of casters which makes pulling hard and you often get several mobs so bring crowd control. The other zones arent as bad as takish in mob spacing but there are some tricky spots still. All zones have lots of room for archery so no need to worry about that. There are some narrow passages with mobs but for the most part you go room to room.

On release day inspecting your items will show they all have a new slot on them. This slot also has a corresponding augmentation type. The types range from 1-6 and type 8. Time items have 1 slot of type 8 each. All other existing items get 1 slot of type 1 while existing weapons get a type 4 slot. Adventuring in LDon you will often find type 1 augments like +6 str or +6 sv magic dropping on group adventures. By earning points you will be able to buy various augments which get better depending on the point cost. Pay close attention to the slot types on your items and the slot type on the augmentation and make sure they match. For example you cant place a type 2 augmentation in a type 1 augmentation slot. Its kind of like spell stacking only for items.

Augmentation type summary:
Type 1: basically generic 1 stat increasing augmentation. These are usually pretty weak.

Type 2: these are a much better version of type 1. These can increase multiple stats.

Type 3: These are your item effects. You will find augments of type 3 having flowing though, haste and atk effects.

Type 4: mostly weapons procs

Type 5: more weapons stuff but I think these are more dmg related.

Type 6: again more weapons related stuff. I know there are several dmg augments for this type.

Type 8: the time only effects.

At anytime you can use alt-v to bring up your adventure window to see adventure/raid progress or to bring up your personal stats. Your personal stats shows your success/failure/percentage for each of the adventure types. There is also a leaderboard here for your server which I think is kinda bogus because you can see who has no life by the number of adventures they have done. Once again the more adventures you complete in each area and the more points you earn the more the quest people talk to you and you see more items on the merchants. So try to balance it out.

As to raids I participated in a few Time equipped raids so my knowledge is kind of limited here. These are very challenging for each level and are well worth doing for any guild. They seemed seperated into vt, elemental and time guild difficulty. I know in the time raids only augments dropped and they varied in flavor from having time effects, 35ac, 75ish hps and other goodies. I would expect there is more than this but they just didnt want us to see it all. Like I said though I only saw the time geared raids so my knowledge and scope of what to expect here is rather limited so feel free to try them out.

Well this is my guide to starting out a ranger in ldon. It really does work for every class but different race/class combos will have slight differences. This is a really worthwhile expansion I think and is worth the money and time to explore Smile

Edits: some grammar, spelling and late additions.

My guide to ldon from a rangers perspective

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