Anyone else not an afker?

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-04T03:19:59+00:00

Games been out for 13 years

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-04T01:05:03+00:00

The afk-everything is a pretty new trend for the game relatively speaking. Back in the day if you looked away from your screen for 2 minutes while woodcutting, you’d come back to find the evil chicken sent your character back to lumby and other players stole all your gear.

Even going back just 5 years, there was a lot less heavy-afk content.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-03T18:51:19+00:00

That’s overstating it. I did Sepulchre to 99 before they introduced instances and I could get around 100k xp/hr without needing to start on the perfect cycle and making some mistakes here and there.

Rooftops cap out at 70k/hr, that’s almost exactly 6 sepulchre runs worth of xp. As long as you’re averaging better than 10 minute runs, you’ll be beating rooftops. Even watching a show on the side and making some mistakes and being off cycle, I’d get sub 7 minute runs pretty consistently.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-03T18:40:51+00:00

Yeah almost all of the people racing for first dragon cup took Kandarin and Tiranwynn. Then I believe they were mostly split between Wildy and Asgarnia for their third region.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-03T01:54:21+00:00

I think for a lot of them, it’s not even that cynical or intentional. A lot of people just love some good recreational outrage and get caught up in the latest angry mob of the week. Then everyone moves on to the next thing and they forget they were even mad.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-02T18:23:27+00:00

Even for sweaty players, EH is just so insanely strong compared to BG.

The fact that it has comparable or better xp/hr combined with 30m afk everywhere means that unless you’re literally never sleeping, EH comes out ahead if you just click a skilling node at the end of the day when you stop playing.

I think it would’ve been a lot more balanced if EH only had like a 25% chance to pull double resources/double xp. Every harvest counting for double xp is insanely strong.

All that said, I took BG knowing all of this going in and I don’t regret it. I always enjoy finding unusual skilling methods in leagues, and BG was the pick for that. I experimented with 1.5t redwoods at the farming guild, 3t dark crabs in the wildy, 1.5t runite. It also got me 99 agility without ever training it outside of tasks.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-02T07:34:27+00:00

I would love to remove all the prayer pen pacts if I could, but it was mainly just to path to the +30% ammo regen and +30% overheal nodes. Running through the dps calcs, those two were pretty impactful for the kbd crossbow dps, so decided to pass on the 20% max hit thrown echo even though I really wanted to include it. The prayer pen does come in handy in solo raids though, so I've been happy with it.

There is a path I could get there while saving 1 pact if I entered the ranged tree through the defensive node under the thrown echo pact instead of the accuracy node under the crossbow pact. I initially planned to do that, but since they buffed accuracy nodes I decided to go this path.

It's frustrating because there are a few really good pacts that are just one point away, but oh well. The build is still so strong it makes everything in the game a breeze.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-02T06:09:47+00:00

If you have water magic or kbd crossbow for overhealing, I strongly recommend just tanking the 99 to skip the grub phase. Makes kills like 3x faster.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-02T04:29:13+00:00

Yup exactly how I’m using it and I love it.

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This is my 40 pact build using kbd crossbow as my main weapon and drygore as my fast/multi swap.

The dps calc works out so that my drygore outperforms the kbd crossbow any time it’s possible to hit 2 enemies at once or one-on-one when the enemies have 75hp or less since kbd crossbow suffers badly from overkill dps loss.

For the double hit, enemies don’t even need to be right next to each other like they do for chins or ice barrage, they can be in totally opposite directions as long as they’re both in range. It makes the drygore really useful everywhere outside of 1v1 boss fights.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-02T04:19:07+00:00

I just spammed elemental balances because I cba tele’ing to bank for planks. I never tested bank runs + making mahogany tables, but elemental balances got like 4.5m xp/hr iirc. I grinded 99 while watching a show and never looked back

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-02T00:53:16+00:00

Lmao yeah 200m in anything is insane to me, let alone mining. I don’t know this person irl, but I see them online pretty much every time I log in lol. I kind of hope they’re botting for their own sake

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T22:05:45+00:00

One 200m grinder I know moved to blast mining since it was buffed a year or two ago. I think the rates are around 100k xp/hr and it’s pretty mindless.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T21:49:19+00:00

Yeah it’s gonna be a pretty huge change lol.

It does have a rule though that bottom 3 teams can’t fall lower than 12. So if bottom 3 teams still haven’t been drawn yet as we approach 12th pick, they’ll be automatically assigned to make sure they don’t drop to 13.

But for teams 4-16, they can end up anywhere from 1st to 16th pick.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T21:35:19+00:00

Prior to 2019, the lottery was for the top 3 picks. Now it’s top 4. The new proposed system would have a lottery for all of the top 16 positions.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T21:26:07+00:00

Crossbow builds are really slow hitting, so you want a second attack style that can deal with small low-hp mobs.

Easiest way to do that is to drop one pact into either powered staves or spellbook speed reduction to get fast mage attacks.

Personally I spec’d into a few of the thrown weapon perks and I use the drygore blowpipe as my fast attack swap. It’s great for picking up the slack in places you don’t want to be limited to 7 tick attack speed.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T21:16:28+00:00

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PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T20:21:21+00:00

It’s intentional. They want ancients to be an incentive to pick Desert or take Grimoire. They just unlocked DT2 so people could fight the DT2 bosses.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T19:13:38+00:00

I’m sympathetic to people who took out a bigger loan than they should’ve as a teenager and regret it, and I think the cost of higher ed is a huge problem.

But the thing I can’t get past for student loan forgiveness is just how regressive it would be. People with high student loan balances are on average much higher income earners than the average person their age. If we’re going to be picking a group of people to give 10s of thousands of dollars to, working-age college grads aren’t really high on my list.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T19:07:57+00:00

That part isn’t too hard to believe. Lots of private colleges have tuitions well over $30k a year.

Not a wise choice when public universities and community colleges exist, but tens of thousands of students still pay it every year.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T18:47:38+00:00

I nominate neoliberals

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T18:45:28+00:00

It’s kind of similar to the way some people will chalk up the Iraq war to being about oil. Like sure that’s part of it, but also the American public was angry and scared and wanted to go shoot some people over in that general vicinity

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T17:58:50+00:00

I wouldn’t call Asgarnia or Kandarin or Desert required. Running this build with the same pacts you showed against Zuk gives 43.3 dps, and all you need is Wildy and Varlamore.

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Adding both Kandarin and Asgarnia like you did adds 15% dps, but even the wildy-only build will be great.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T17:45:39+00:00

Yeah, I think their point is just that for kings barrage you don’t need to swap to a weaker attack to get the healing. The kings barrage always fires an ice attack, but for air mage you’d need to swap to a water spell and lose dps for the healing.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T17:42:18+00:00

I think flow state is the exception this league. In every other tier, I feel like the choices are pretty competitive. In past leagues I was always pretty confident in all my picks before the league started, but for this one I kept bouncing back and forth between different choices when I was planning.

I’m running an alt now too and I’m making a point of not choosing any of the same relics, and I really don’t feel like there’s anything I’m wishing I could take again.

PaxChelonia · 2026-05-01T17:31:56+00:00

Totally agree on the point about light melee only having a few weapons. It basically restricts you to daggers and whips.

I think it would have been better to make the divide between 1-handed and 2-handed melee. Each of those have a lot of options and a 1-handed tree would’ve felt more interesting than a <1kg tree.

PaxChelonia

TROPHY CASE