Excelsior

After talking to a couple of people it seems there are a few things that some people just didn't know.....

So I am going to put a few down now so to enlighten people.

If i miss anything or make mistakes please feel free to point it out.

Neverending run.
hold down the right mouse button and when you are running click the left button then release both, you should nowbe running but without holding the RMB down. single clicking either button will stop it.

Item tags
Pressing CTRL + SHIFT will bring up item tags, ideal if a corpse falls behind a wall!

All names
Using Show All Names (available from the keybindings menu) will bring up names of monsters on the screen, also helpful for finding your corpse under mountains of corpses.

Special Abilities.
On many shards now it frightens me how many people do NOT use the special abilities on weapons.
Ok...Many are useless, but some (Like bleed, concussionblow and disarm) can be real lifesavers. Use them!

Scissors can be a godsend.
Use scissors on leather to make it lighter.....I saw one player yesterday dragging a mass of uncut leather when he could have used a pair and saved half an hour of click dragging!
Same goes for wood/boards

Spells and spellcasting
Chivelry is a fighters greatest additional weapon.
Same goes for certain necro spells. The Vampiric Embrace spell gives a 20% life leech to ALL melee attacks. And thats NOT to be sniffed at!

Missed something that someone said onscreen?
Use your journal, it will keep a track of any and all text entries that appear on the screen. (No need to keep asking for repeats)

Dragging a whole pile of stuff
holding down the SHIFT key while dragging will allow you to drag a whole pile in one go

Raising Peacemaking the easy way
To raise peacemaking there is no need to target monsters as it is NOT rated against difficulty.
Simply target yourself and you will peace everything within a radius, this safe to do in town and will take you all the way up to 120

If I think of any more I'll add them.

no peacing self doesnt take u up to 120 after gm u have to start peacing tougher things from what i remembr

In that case this shard differs from the norm....

If I get a peace PS I will test it

i did the peace to 120 on my self .

so did i do the peacing 120 on myself... how i did it actully, was near animals... delucia would be best bet

Speaking of leather, carry a Butcher's War Cleaver when you're out gathering. Dbl clk the cleaver and target the corpse you are gathering leather from and it will automatically be placed in your backpack already cut up. That was by far one of the neatest tricks I've learned.

where do you get a butcher's war cleaver?

kharn wrote:where do you get a butcher's war cleaver?

my vendor, or other Recipy smiths (recipies for specific weapons are gotten from the Peerless bosses)

Actually it doesn't have to be a war cleaver, Any bladed Weapon works for collecting hides and meat

She said "leather will already be cut when it goes in pack" if using a butcher's war cleaver. Havent tried this but will when I find a butcher's war cleaver

approach me in-game, i have aquired the recipy

Here are a few additions to this thread. They are mostly on the side of "stuff people may not know" rather than shortcuts, though there are some shortcuts below. I see many players running around not knowing this stuff and it pains my heart because a lot of it can be found with a little initiative and basic reading around.

First off -
http://uoex.net/wiki/Commands
It's surprising how many people ask things without having read the wiki first. Hopefully whoever reads this post looking for help will check it out as well, many vital commands are covered above.
It seems to have been updated by someone since the time I joined and first read it - it now covers many more useful commands and is structured more clearly. A huge thank you to whoever updated it, it's great now compared to what it was before. [Edit: Seems that it was BlaZe Budd who did it, thanks!]

Secondly -
Regarding the butcher's war cleaver, I read on Stratics (if memory serves) that holding a skinning knife in your hands and then using it will do the same thing, but it seems that is also not implemented here which is a shame. The occupied weapon slot isn't such a big deal when everyone can be a tamer.

Now, on to the shortcuts and tips, starting with one very very important one that I am constantly surprised that new players can overlook:



There is no skill cap here. You can be Grandmaster (or Legendary if a power scroll is available) in everything except Spellweaving (which is not implemented), if you invest the time into skilling up.

Unless you are dead set on roleplaying a certain character type, throw out any ideas of being a "noble knight", "cunning rogue" or "sagacious wizard". None of these archetypes are a good idea to follow exclusively, because you can be all of these and more at the same time!
Notably, the quickest route to a respectable level of strength is to be a tamer/bard/spellcaster using Cleric magic (via Spirit Speak) to heal your pets and Discordance to debuff creatures while your pets destroy them. Running around with a weapon and full plate mail is not a good idea before you have a very respectable level of gear.
Also note that you can max out Meditation, Focus, Hiding, and Stealth here - so wearing high quality leather armor (or Mage Armor versions of heavier armors) is very important. Focus is not affected by armor in the slightest, it's just included since it functions similarly to Meditation (half the mana regen, but also affects stamina regen).
As long as you are wearing meddable armor, mana should be a non issue for healing purposes even at only GM Medit and Focus. Then on top of that you can pile on Mana Regeneration (1 point of mana per second, per 10 points of regen), Hit Mana Leech, and Necromancy's Wraith Form which applies a mana leech to your attack/Lich Form which boosts mana regen insanely at the cost of slight constant hit point loss.
Remember that Stealth only works when wearing minimal plate mail, even at 120 skill.
Edit:
Mage Armor won't affect hiding adversely. I previously included stealth but after some testing of my own I found my movement impeded even by mage armored plate mail while attempting to stealth, though hiding worked as normal.
Therefore, aim for as much leather gear as you can if you intend to make use of stealth very often.
Keep in mind you can still remove and switch gear without many restrictions, so if you are wearing only one or two pieces of heavy armor nothing is preventing you removing them before you stealth (though if you're trying to do so in the heat of combat it may be inconvenient without 3rd party help such as Razor).



[cs <spellname> requires that the spell name has no spaces in it. The command is not case-sensitive. For quick access to Cleric spells, you will need to use this command. Learn it and love it.

[cs TouchofLife and [cs SacredBoon are your two most potent healing spells, I cry inside whenever I see people trying to keep pets alive with Greater Heal (Magery) and standing at point blank range using bandages. That's the way it goes on OSI, but definitely not here.
[cs Purge is for curing poisons and curses - also note that Touch of Life and Sacred Boon bypass poison and mortal wound debuff conditions, so you need only cure a poison if it is causing significant damage to your pet, or the fight has ended and you want to clean up.



Faster Casting is capped at 4 (2 for Magery). Faster Cast Recovery is capped at 6.

Quite self explanatory. These are THE most important stats with regard to healing, since it increases your healing output massively. Aside from latency and your actual Spirit Speak skill level, not much else affects how much healing per second you can throw out with Cleric spells (oddly enough, Divine Focus seems to reduce the potency of your cleric spells instead of doing what it the description says - I need to test this in more detail).
Regarding reasonably common/inexpensive gear, you can find the following FC/FCR items:

• FCR 1-3 on Rings/Bracers/Earrings
  FC 1 on Rings/Bracers/Earrings
  FC 1 on non-Spell Channeling Weapons and Shields
  > Note that a "normally" spawned Spell Channeling item has a -1 FC malus! Non-artifact SC weapons/shields should almost never have a positive faster casting bonus! At best you will have no change since the -1 FC penalty and the potential (random) +1 FC property cancel out.

There are many more potent (and costly) artifacts or crafted items to be obtained with greater magnitudes of FC and FCR, but if you are reading a new player help guide those will be out of reach for a while. Names to look out for include: Swords of Prosperity (1 FC, spell channeling, dual-wielded swords), Arcane Shield (1 FC, spell channeling, order shield), Ornament of the Magician (3 FCR, 2 FC, bracelet), Royal Hive Boots (1 to 3 FCR, boots).
The above items also have several other potent stats on them, and there are many more to be found...



If you have a mass of health bars out (eg. if you run with multiple pets or like to drag your target's health bars up),
and you want to separate one of them from being "stuck" to the rest:

• 1. Hold down ALT
  2. Click once on the health bar that you wish to drag off and then release the mouse button
  3. Release ALT
  4. Drag the offending bar away, it's now unlocked and you can reposition it, or close it without closing the other bars

When at an NPC vendor, shift-double-click on an item to purchase all of their stock for that given item.
Thanks Blaze for bringing this to my attention.



Protection [Magery, 2nd Circle] can be used to prevent spellcasting from being interrupted by melee strikes.

This spell, like Reactive Armor and Reflect Magic, persists indefinitely until recast to toggle it off. In any situation where you cannot afford to be interrupted during casting (for example, if you know that you will need to heal yourself while being attacked by several mobs in the near future) toggle it on to make your life immeasurably easier.
Note that, however, you will lose the following. Numbers are based on 100 Inscription skill.

• 10% Physical Resistance (Can still reach 70% with more gear, high Inscription reduces penalty slightly)
  30.00 Resisting Spells Skill (Not really a big problem, high Inscription reduces penalty slightly)
  2 Faster Casting (Not affected by inscription skill, also see the following note)

>> IMPORTANT: The faster casting penalty applies AFTER the cap. What this means is, if you are at the cap of 4 Faster Casting and 6 Faster Casting Recovery, you will have equivalent of 2 Faster Casting with Protection active. Even if you wear +100000 Faster Casting gear, the hard gear cap of 4 will take place first, and then the -2 FC penalty comes into play. Take heed, don't stack too much Faster Casting, and if you are healing your pets on a boss which is only attacking your pets, consider disabling Protection so you can throw out heals more quickly - it may spell the difference between victory and defeat.
>> EXTRA NOTE: If you find your resist values have changed without you changing any gear, try toggling Protection / Reactive Armor / Reflect Magic, to see if that is the cause. All 3 of these spells modify your resists in some way.
Edit:
At 120 Inscription I now lose 9% Physical Resist, 29.0% Resisting Spells Skill, as opposed to 10/30 at 100 Inscription. Not really an amazing difference but an upgrade's an upgrade. The FC penalty is, of course, still -2.



Don't neglect your spellcasting skills. They often have 1 or more useful spells.

This is not a comprehensive list, but below are some spells from the various caster skills that are useful. I won't cover Druid spells since the book costs 200 ED (that's the equivalent of 6 million gold on average, if you bought ED at 30k gold each in-game, or 20 bucks donation).
Spells in bolded orange are the most important ones.

• MAGERY
  There are a lot to list since Magery has 64 spells, but I'll cover a few of the most useful ones.
  Clumsy - use on self or pet to raise Magic Resist, works all the way to 120 (130 for pets)
  Protection - for the reasons given above
  Bless - a very potent short-term combat buff for personal combat, not really needed if using pets for hunting
  Telekinesis - included so that I can point out many dungeon chests have their trap explosion radius reduced to a mere 1 tile
  Teleport - handy for getting to hard-to-reach places, but is quite sensitive to z-axis/line-of-sight
  Recall - see Chivalry [It has been brought to my attention that Recall will allow you to access an occupied tile, unlike Sacred Journey. Therefore it is still worth using, if you can stomach your weapon dropping out of your hands if it isn't spell-channeling. Note that you won't have this issue very often if you Mark smartly. If you lack a spell-channeling weapon, it would be best to use Sacred Journey until you get a "This location is blocked" message, and then attempt to Recall to the same spot. This would save you the most time overall.]
  Invisibility - a safe-escape spell, macro it on a panic button along with "wait for target" and then "target self"
  Mark - the only way for a non druid to mark a rune
  Reveal - gets a special mention for finding the Shadow Knight in Doom Gauntlet, unless you have Detect Hidden skill
  Energy Field - a good blocking spell, if you can find a place where it creates a chokepoint
  Gate Travel - to never fizzle Gate you need 115 Magery
  
  Chain Lightning/Meteor Swarm and Earthquake are situational spells when you need to throw out some AOE damage in a hurry. They aren't amazing though.
  
  NECROMANCY
  Remember you will lose Karma by casting Necromancy magic, this can take you all the way to Dread title (assuming you have the fame to display a title at all).
  Corpse Skin - situational, increases fire/poison damage that the target takes, but also increases it's physical/cold resists
  Curse Weapon - grants 50% Life Leech to your weapon for a short time
  Wraith Form - grants special Mana Leech to your attacks, (Spirit Speak/5)% of magery/weapon damage you deal is stolen from the target, unsure if it drains from the target too, but if it has no mana you leech none
  Lich Form - for training healing (constant life drain on you that won't kill you) and increasing mana regen
  Vampiric Embrace - grants great Life Leech to your attacks constantly
  Summon Familiar - the Horde Minion loots items off the ground for you and puts them in its pack (accessed like a pack animal), though it does use one control slot and cannot be commanded - it just attacks what you attack
  Wither - an amazing point blank AOE spell, but has a small radius
  
  CHIVALRY
  Requires Tithing points at an Ankh as reagents. With LRC, you will not lose Tithe, but you still need enough base Tithing points for the spell you want to cast.
  Divine Fury - Part of the fighter's Holy Trinity of buffs, has a short duration, also fully refills stamina when cast
  Consecrate Weapon - Part of the fighter's Holy Trinity of buffs, has an ultra-short duration
  Enemy of One - Part of the fighter's Holy Trinity of buffs, has a medium duration, remember to recast it when switching to a different enemy type, and don't use it when fighting many different enemy types due to the penalties it invokes
  Holy Light - if you don't want to use Wither you can try this spell, it's not as good but is still a PBAOE
  Sacred Journey - a Recall spell that doesn't unequip non-spell channeling weapons, just like all Paladin spells
  
  NINJITSU
  Ninjitsu leveling is greatly eased by having high Stealth skill due to many spells using it.
  Animal Form - the forms with increased run speed let you stealth at humanoid running pace, and you can shift to/from animal form while stealthed, but note you cannot cast most other spells in animal forms
  Shadow Jump - lets you teleport while in stealth mode, without breaking stealth, and does not seem to require additional stealth checks here unlike what the tooltip states
  Mirror Image - grants a (Ninjitsu Skill -30%) chance (maximum 90% at Legendary) to divert one attack to the Mirror Image, requires one follower slot per image, *very* useful in certain situations
  Focus Attack - grants a damage increase to one attack, and unlike what the tooltip states that it increases hit chance of that attack, it actually increases the chance to proc "hit effects" on your weapon to 100%, which can be quite potent with mana or health leech, or a spell nuke proc!
  
  BUSHIDO
  Bushido is mostly leveled to let you parry with 2-handed weapons. Remember that it permanently reduces your shield block chance! Bows are a very good weapon choice here, so this is not really a huge penalty if you want to min-max.
  The spells are not particularly useful. There are only six of them as well so it's easy to test and pass your own judgment.
  
  CLERIC
  Cleric spells use Spirit Speak as their base skill, and Tithing points as the reagent. The gump is accessed via saying "I pray to the Gods". As stated earlier, use [cs macros to cast them quickly and easily.
  Angelic Form - boosts your strength, dexterity, intelligence, mace skill, healing skill, and anatomy skill by (Spirit Speak / 5), for a maximum of 24 at Legendary, and increases regeneration, cannot be used with Necromancy forms
  Banish Evil - destroys undead and demons, will not work on every single undead or demon, target disappears, granting no corpse or fame/karma gain, use it if an undead/demon that you can't or don't want to kill attacks you
  Touch of Life - as mentioned earlier, a vital healer's tool
  Sacred Boon - as mentioned earlier, a vital healer's tool
  Purge - as mentioned earlier, a vital healer's tool
  Restoration - the best resurrection spell since it causes no fame loss unlike bandages/magery/ankhs/healers

I recalled another very noteworthy thing.
I've rarely seen people use this item, and it is one that can potentially save you so much pain or loss and you don't even need to actively trigger it. However, it requires three skills at a high to very high level to pull off successfully and four to use at the greatest levels of mastery.

EGG BOMBS!!!
(Oh look, big rainbow text for emphasis, I'm telling you - this item is WORTH it)
This is a major plus for the Ninjitsu, Hiding, and Cooking skills. High Stealthing is also very recommended, but not 100% necessary.
They all work in delightful tandem to create this absolutely wondrous item.
With judicious use of Razor and a decent stock of Egg Bombs, you can avoid death in 99% of situations, unless it's a one-shot kill.
Interested? Then read on!

First off, what the egg bomb actually is. It's a medium sized, white round icon that looks like a rather doughy egg-like blob. It doesn't stack, and weighs in at 1 stone a piece. This limits how many you can carry due to the 125 item limit in your backpack.

The Egg Bomb is crafted with high cooking skill. 90 Cooking allows you to begin attempts. At 120 Cooking, you cannot ever fail at creating one.
The materials involved are 3 units of Flour and 1 Egg. You can buy both from Baker NPCs.
20 Eggs and 3 Sacks of Flour (which hold 20 units inside each) will make 20 Egg Bombs, assuming you don't botch the cooking process. They are thus extremely cheap to produce en masse. 120 Cooking is a tedious but not difficult process that will take you at best a few hours to perform, at little cost, considering the cooking Powerscroll is very cheap due to lack of uses compared to other skills. This one use, however, is absolutely worth the investment.

To USE an Egg Bomb, you need 50 Ninjitsu. There is no skill/success check involved, it is just a simple hard-capped check to see if you have enough Ninjitsu to use the bomb at all. Once you macro up to 50 Ninjitsu you may as well bring it to 85 or a little higher, which is when you can start Death Strike spam to reach 100 (or more). This is not important regarding the use of Egg Bombs though so you can skip >50 Ninjitsu if the bombs are your sole desire.

After you've used the Egg Bomb, you are hit with a shadowy flamestrike effect and a loud hissing sound which looks and feels extremely slick, and now comes the awesome part - YOU AUTOMATICALLY MAKE A HIDE CHECK REGARDLESS OF YOUR COMBAT STATUS OR PROXIMITY OF HOSTILE ENEMIES. This of course means that for maximum effect you should have GM Hiding. After using an Egg Bomb you may not use another one for the duration of the Hiding skill cooldown - a short cooldown for so powerful an item.

Now - putting this all together, what makes the Egg Bomb so potent?

With the aid of Razor, you can create a looping macro that looks like this:

• Pause 1.00 sec
  If ( Hits <= [insert value])
  Double Click (egg bomb (2809))
  Pause 2.00 sec
  If ( SysMessage "You must wait a few" )
  Pause 20.00 sec

• Line 1 is the part of the macro that is spammed. As you can see, it is merely a 1 second wait before the macro loops unless the first "If" conditional is triggered.
  Line 2 checks if your health is below a certain value. What this value is, is entirely up to you. Since I follow the doctrine of "sit back and heal combat pets", I will set this at 150 out of my 200-ish hit points. Basically if I've taken a hit from any creature of note, the macro will trigger with at most a 1 second delay.
  Line 3 uses the actual egg bomb - this is a "double click by type" command, so it will use any egg bomb in your bags. This is necessary since the bombs are non-stackable and consumed on use.
  Line 4 pauses the macro for two seconds after clicking the bomb, and lets the macro loop back to the first step, and attempt to use a second Egg Bomb (since you are still injured but now hidden).

At this point the macro will run Lines 1 through 4 again. However, since the Egg Bomb is on cooldown, you will get the system message: "You must wait a few seconds before you can use that item." upon Line 3 re-triggering.
After the two second pause of Line 4, the macro proceeds to the second "If" conditional.

• Line 5 checks for the aforementioned system message, with a truncated check for the words "You must wait a few" from the system message category.
  Line 6 lastly pauses the macro for twenty seconds. You should not need this much time, but this time will be used to carefully Stealth (or take one Stealth step and then Ninjitsu Shadowjump) away from the monster that you just hid from (which is where 120 Stealth comes into play), and then healing yourself to full and patching up any damage that your pets will have taken in this recovery time. Without Line 5 and 6, the macro would repeatedly loop until you healed yourself above the triggering threshold for HP, possibly using extra egg bombs if you take too long to get clear and heal yourself (as well as spamming your chat log).

Keep this macro running during combat (it doesn't interfere with anything else, since most of the time it is a simple 1 second pause) and you will be extremely safe. The only thing to watch out for is: if you use a skill that invokes a long skill cooldown such as Peacemaking, you will be unable to use the Egg Bomb until you can validly use another skill! Exercise caution. In most cases when simply standing around healing your pets, you will never be ineligible to instantly use an Egg Bomb, just be wary of breaking your hidden state too soon after it triggers!



And there you have it - unless you drop from maximum health to dead in one second, an Egg Bomb is a surefire method of saving your hide and making whatever is attacking you refocus on your pets, as they should be doing in normal circumstances.
Their inability to stack is a little bothersome, but the low cost and weight means you can trash them all (or some of them) in a pinch to carry more loot. Just keep them all in a small pouch or bag (I prefer the slightly larger but dye-able bags) for ease of organization, and you can mouse over the bag to monitor your remaining number of bombs at a glance.


Edit:
Here's an updated version of the macro which covers a situation where you may not be aware that you are attacking a creature in the heat of combat - in such a case you would continue autoattacking, since Egg Bombs do not automatically disable your war mode toggle (unlike the Shadow Strike special attack, for example).
This version should be as close to failsafe as possible, apologies for the earlier version having a glaring hole in it.

• Pause 1.00 sec
  If ( Hits <= [insert value])
  Exec: Toggle War/Peace
  Pause 0.50 sec
  Exec: Toggle War/Peace
  Double Click (egg bomb (2809))
  Pause 2.00 sec
  If ( SysMessage "You must wait a few" )
  Pause 20.00 sec

To record the "Exec: Toggle War/Peace" lines, you must set it to a key binding in Razor (under the Hot Keys tab) and use that - it will not recognize you merely pressing the Tab key in-game.

What this does is toggle through war/peace mode twice.
If you are in peace mode and autoattacking (by means of the auto-response to a creature aggroing you), then you will enter war mode (and still be attacking) and then peace mode (stopping your attacks).
If you are in war mode and autoattacking (for the same reason as above or by manually double-clicking a target), then you will enter peace mode (stopping your attacks) and then war mode (but you won't be attacking anymore).
Then the egg bomb fires and you will be hidden *and* not attacking - and therefore safe that your hiding will not be disrupted, short of area-damage/damage over time that would disrupt any form of hiding and not just egg bombs.

It does add a 0.5 second extra delay to things, but this can't be helped since it seems putting two "Exec: Toggle War/Peace" in a row doesn't work perfectly. It needs a little delay to account for latency, I suppose.

very nice

and your right ppl tend to forget this one
just as many forget the usefulness of bushido confidence spell

Rune wrote:very nice

and your right ppl tend to forget this one
just as many forget the usefulness of bushido confidence spell

Ah, that's cool, I had already read the tool tip and tested the spell, but largely discounted the overall usefulness of the spell because running with pets, one doesn't get hit even one time on a good hunting session.

I included some evasive spells like Mirror Image because there are times that you -will- get hit, and hard, while performing certain actions like Garg-harvesting resource elementals which MI can mitigate with a bit of luck. In this case the MI would have a 90% chance at 120 Ninjitsu to divert the first instant hit that the elemental lands on you when it spawns, after which it should be peeled off to your pet by guard mode.

Confidence sounds really nice... *if* you're playing a character that is taking the hits.
How much does it heal for, does this amount scale with bushido? I'm at 100 myself, haven't gotten around to momentum striking the last 20 points yet.





Oh, here is another one that was on the towncrier message for a while, but after it was removed, many people seem to have forgotten it, and many new players who join the shard never get the opportunity to find out about this.

The house gates teleporter (red shield) and house gate tiles can be accessed via double clicking as long as they are in range. Line of sight is not necessary. The same holds true for the other end of your house gate - you can double click the gate when you are inside your house and return to the House Gates room, ignoring line of sight between you and the gate.
The red bucklers, however, which take you to the side wings, still need to be stepped on to function.

Saves a lot of weaving throughout the closely packed tiles, as was the original intent - just putting this here so that perhaps more people who missed the original run of the message can see it and find out about it, to save them some time.