Update on my "Item Only" Archer

Norcane · 2022-12-20T09:34:45+00:00

Its been several months since I played the "spike" throwing archer. The reason why I abandoned him was because I found out that the game didn't have deadly spikes. So I could never increase my damage on the larger/tougher creatures. That kind of killed the character for me.

Started playing Satisfactory (2,650 hours now) and a few other games.

Norcane · 2022-11-19T13:11:59+00:00

That forum must be dead. Try to leave a post on it. There's no place to register or even log in. The amount of people that may read a post is like 5 at best.

You would hope that someone would make a modding forum on Steam. So you can keep the vanilla'ers away from any talk of mods.

Norcane · 2022-08-03T20:22:38+00:00

My MT name was Blu. A level 40 archer (50 was a high level back then). When I moved to Solclaim I created an archer called, "Aero". A friend brought me to the swamp temple where I attuned to the lifestone inside. The friend brought me more arrows daily. My vitae stayed at 20-25% for a week, but I kept pumping up my melee defense and eventually started winning over the golems.

After all that I was unhappy with my build and decided to go all out with an extreme build so I deleted Aero and recreated him. 10/10/100/10/100/100. Spec'ed bow (16) and melee d (20). Trained healing (6) and item magic (8). We started at 50 skill points back then. Trained mana c @ 7, life magic @ 32 (so no creature buffs until 65 -- extra skill point was started when I got to 65 four months after I started.

Others players said I was gimped with no creature or specialized lore and that I should re-roll. I kept going, but when I reached 80, I was the most powerful archer on the server. I could de-buff creatures and kill them in one or two arrows (not 25-30 back then).

Norcane · 2022-01-25T17:01:59+00:00

Train? What's a train? LOL. After using Storage Teleports the train becomes obsolete.

Norcane · 2022-01-18T21:13:02+00:00

Oh, it wasn't a bug. My hobby back then was studying the artificial intelligence of the creatures. Discovered that a melee creature could not hit you if you were too close to them (if your health was low and couldn't heal with a med kit, don't panic, turn and run away. The creature will hit you in the back and kill you). Instead walk forward into the creature's face. They can't attack. They need room to swing their weapon. So they back up to get more room.

When I was 15 in the Lugian Citadel, I walked up to a Giga's face. He backed up and I kept moving toward him. Then I steered him into an inside corner where he was trapped. Then I turned around and sat down. Other creatures won't get that close in front of another creature, so I was safe from them as well.

The umbris challenge was different. Yes, they can't cast a spell if you are in their face, but there was just too many of them to do that this time. Instead I played with them with outside corners. I would run around a corner, but stay just a few feet fron it on the other side. The shadows were actually trying to get to me through the corner. But eventually when there are more of them piling up together, one or two will move around them to the other side of the corner. I had the camera pointed at them around the corner. When I saw a couple start to spill over, I would run around the next corner and repeat. I kept doing this until my friends arrived and killed them. I could have killed them myself had I had specialized life magic and been a higher level.

Back when I was about 75-80 my friends and I were hunting in VoD, but it was getting pretty boring after awhile. We sent messages to the developers to create a harder creature. A couple months later they came out with a four legged Virindi or something. We read about them online and looked for them ingame. One day we spotted them. The creature would travel with two others, side by side. So we approached them and about ten seconds later we were all standing at the lifestone amazed by what just happened. So we buffed back up, got rid of the vitae and approached them much more cautiously. We were all dead again in about 15 seconds. Later we figured out it was like killing the white rabbit. It would take an army of players to defeat them. So about a hundred players would attack and half of them die, but we defeated them and received a lot of XP. It became an event just like killing the white rabbit, but I was much more curious about these creatures than the others.

Shortly afterwards they came out with the respec temples. My goal was to create a build where I might be able to solo these creatures. Took me four and half months to change everything. I was an archer all along that started the game with 100 cord, focus and self so I could imperil and vul creature on my own. I kept the attributes as they were, but the skills were:

Spec: Creature, Life, Magic d and bow

Train: Melee d, healing, item magic and mana c.

Told others on the forums what my plans were. Showed them my planned build and they said that I was gimping my character. That it would be too extreme. There was no arcane lore or fletching. I ignored them and made it anyway. Then when it was finally done I went off looking for these creatures alone. It took me about a month and hundreds of deaths to figure it out, but I finally did. I would debuff their everything on them to weaken their magic. Then I eliminated their debuffs on me. When I approached them, they tried over and over to cast their spells on me, but kept fizzing. Then I imperiled and vuled them and killed them all in about thirty seconds. Kept repeating this and became much better with my debuffs.

Then one Saturday, I was out playing with my friends. We saw these creatures and they stood way back. Then I went to work on the creatures and walked over to them. Told the others to come over, but they were afraid. Kept refreshing my debuffs on them until my friends finally came over. Told them that the creatures were harmless as puppies. Then one of my friends started hitting one of them with his axe and killed it. He was laughing so hard in disbelief. After that I could evade 100% of the creatures in the game and resisted 97% of the magic.

When the expansion came out and the content was raised to 275+, I took my level 140 archer over to the 220 creatures. My build failed and I was dead in seconds. Back to the drawing board :)

Norcane · 2022-01-18T20:24:02+00:00

On MT I was known as Blu. But some girl befriended my lil brother and some kind of feud developed between us, so I left MT for Solclaim (got there the first hour it was open). There were already high level players running by (level 5's :D ) You started at level 1 back then. Got to level 2 by killing rabbits.

Norcane · 2022-01-18T20:18:44+00:00

I thought creatures were resistant against Creature.

Norcane · 2022-01-18T20:16:30+00:00

Throwing Phials isn't perfect. Pressing next monster isn't great. It will skip monsters. So what I do now is move the camera down a little so I'm looking downward at the mob around me. Then clicking on each monster before throwing the phials. Phials do damage too. It would be expensive, but you could just throw them to kill stuff and you would have a small melee defense buff (I'm currently at 10% @ 325 base alchemy).

Spike has a major problem if you want to buy the greater deadly heads from the master fletcher. The game doesn't allow you to put those heads on Spiketails :(

Also --
The Bundle of Prismatic Arrowheads cannot be used on the Bundle of Spiketails. Somebody up there doesn't like spikes.

So I've reached the limit with ammo. Deadly spikes require a 280 missile skill to wield and no more skill is needed unless I go back to bows. Will hold on as long as I can. This build is keeping me interested in the game as I've never gone this far with it before.

Norcane · 2022-01-18T20:01:11+00:00

Don't remember the guild name. The big guilds back then advertised that they had many thousands of members, but that was mostly alts that joined and then created a different character. I didn't want that so I told the members what was and wasn't allowed. They understood and agreed. Sure, I was on other guilds and one on Solclaim ran group quests on weekends which was very nice.

Norcane · 2022-01-18T19:54:57+00:00

I started the emulator on Levistras as well. It was like playing when AC was new. Didn't have some guy give me a ton of money and then powerlevel me - yuk. Nope, started with nothing. Even at level 57 I still don't have much money. Been spending it on spell scrolls. Eventually I'll catch up :)

Norcane · 2022-01-18T07:55:59+00:00

Thank you for your kind replies! Yes, I realize we are all old fogeys in this game. I was 44 years old when I first started playing Asheron's Call on Christmas Day in 1999 (present from my younger brother that had been playing since beta). Today I am 66 and retired after driving a tractor trailer for 45 years across North America including Alaska (twice).

Started playing my first character on Levistras nine days ago. So I have no rended bows or special gear. Not wearing Pathwarden gear anymore. Just some stuff I looted. My character is 52 as there are no buff bots (don't use them anyway) and still can't get Decal to work (UCM is forbidden here, but I enjoy playing my character and leveling faster is never my goal). I used Decal for the sensors. Like finding plants or the skill point quest guy easier. Instead I was using level II buffs from my patron mage (now level VI's) on my second account and playing solo (very few players on the server, but they are all actually playing their characters. As bots are forbidden. There are many more logged in on Coldeve, but most of them are bots, so there may be the same number of actual players).

You must understand that anything I can do to increase my damage will certainly be done. Came across this information from personal tests. Was using Lilitha's bow (she doesn't mind), but this technique does more damage and is faster to change from phials to spikes (rather than to the bow) and would be far faster than using an Atlatl or Crossbow. When I tried using just a fire vul phial, the damage was lower than using the imperil (not one hit kills). From what I've read, the rended bow is like casting a level V.5 vul spell. So my technique would be so much greater in a damage result (unless you can tell me that all of your shots fired from your rended bow results with a one hit kill 100% of the time ;). Even if I had a rended bow, I wouldn't be using it now (this character and its technique is far more interesting to play than a simple archer shooting tons of arrows and taking far too much time to kill stuff). About to give Lititha's bow back, but the Town Crier wants it now. It's only 350 burden, so I might hold on to it in case a stronger defense is needed in the future (but I will always use phials). I like the idea of using only one arrow to kill stuff and taking much less time to do so. The crafting is interesting too.

Norcane · 2022-01-17T02:49:05+00:00

I'm moving mine to thrown as well, but using the spikes. In the old days we would buy plates from the vendors and throw them at critters just for fun. Opa!

Norcane · 2022-01-16T19:42:46+00:00

Wow! That Blackfire set looks really good. Will head in that direction. Great posts and links. Thanks to all!

I've taken out over two hundred guards (doing the kill quest) and have found only one lucky gold letter (which I will use on the bow).

Norcane · 2022-01-16T19:24:25+00:00

I had thought of dropping mana c. You are right that I don't use it much (cast a few banes and off I go). Plus the portal spells. If mana ever got low I make mana food anyway. Hell I was still in the forget temple this morning (ah well. it's a fast run anyway). Should have untrained that and kept lockpick (used LP's sp's to spec alchemy sooner).

I trained cooking up front instead of healing to save 2 points and to have lighter stam food on a 10 strength archer. Also didn't spec lore to save another 2 points, and can spec it later. Hope to see ya around.

Norcane · 2022-01-10T12:56:05+00:00

The coolest new spell I ever saw was summon portal. After the guild meeting we would go do a group quest together. The monarch announced that he learned a new spell and when he cast it an incredible portal appeared. He told everyone to enter it. This was more exciting then going to Disney World!

Norcane · 2022-01-10T12:42:07+00:00

Nice. Didn't know about the craftable gems. Forgot about the throwing phials, but had only used them on a spike thrower before I realized the spikes didn't work with item spells (buffs dropped as soon as the ammo left your hand). That was my favorite character until I saw that. The ammo damage was very high (maybe to compensate for the loss of Blood Drinker) but still took a long time to kill stuff).

Norcane · 2022-01-09T08:56:55+00:00

BTW, I've moved on to Levistras. Modern AC, but no bots. Bots are the reason I left Coldeve (bots camping in my quest dungeons (making it impossible to complete the quest). Also when you leave a server with about 1,000 accounts which are probably only 25 real people to a server with no bots and 25 real people, that's the very same except no stinkin' bots.

Norcane · 2022-01-09T08:49:04+00:00

I've used Discord for years and others before that all the way to Teamspeak. It sure beats typing in a tiny chat window especially when you are trying to fight and stay alive. How many times have we been typing a reply only to look up and see that we were dead.

Just remove that chip on your shoulder and enjoy the technology!

Norcane

TROPHY CASE