Boggotin's Guide

From LSWiki

Hello, I am Boggotin, currently a lvl 114 Troll Aligned Aisenshi-Insei-Te, Fianna, and Soulburner bonded to a Shlyma and a Spider Monkey.

The main purpose of this guide is to help newbies out with some general tips and tricks I've learned as I've played Lost Souls. However, there may be things for players of all experience levels as there isn't enough time in our lives to become experts in everything in Lost Souls.

Contents 1 Starting Out 1.1 Character Concept 1.2 Character Creation 1.2.1 Culture 1.2.2 Attributes 1.2.3 Skills 1.2.4 Alignment 1.3 First Steps 1.3.1 Aliases 1.3.2 Getting Around 1.3.3 First Few Levels 1.3.4 How to read your Character Sheet 1.3.4.1 How Tough Are You?

Starting Out

Character Concept

There are far too many skills and spells and powers and everything in this game to be able to do everything. And if if you did find a way to do everything, all you'd really be able to do was everything really poorly. What you want to do is focus, come up with a concept for a character, then try to build that concept. Throughout this guide, I will talk about the concept I used and how I came to where I am today with it. My concept was a Ninja Troll.

Whatever your concept, take some time browsing the Guilds to find one that most closely resembles your concept. For me, this was the Aisenshi. More specifically, I decided to specialize in unarmed combat which made me the Aisenshi-Insei-Te. Once you've picked a guild, pick a race that helps your concept, for me since the race was part of my concept it was easy. For you, it may take a bit of research with Races. Compare the skills that your chosen guild uses with the high stats of the various races, try to pick one that seems to correspond well.

An example of this is my Fomor who is also a Shemsu Sutekh bonded to a Bat (Empathic Bond) and joined the association Sodality of the Nine-Spoked Wheel. My concept with that character was to create a Demon who maximizes the use of his Qlippotic Affinity, previously known as Unholy Taint.

Character Creation

Culture

I started my troll in Losthaven, I recommend you start there as well, in fact start all of your characters there until you get comfortable enough with the game to branch out. The town gives you everything a new player needs to succeed.

Attributes

For your starting attributes, maximize and minimize as much as possible so that your attributes that best support your guild choice are maximum. Here's why: The way the attribute increasing works in this game is that you get 5 points to invest every level. When you first start investing, you get a 1:1 ratio into your attributes. As you invest more and more into a specific attribute, that ratio drops. For instance with 237 points invested into my Dexterity, my ratio is currently 0.49, so a little worse than 2:1. This decay does not take into account at all what your starting attribute were, just how much you've invested. Therefore your starting attributes are all just free points into the attributes that matter to you, make them count.

Disclaimer: Starting attributes do have some effect on your attribute gain, but the signifigance is so small that it's barely worth measuring. If you invest 2995 points into attributes that are 60 apart from each other, the lower stat will get 18 more points over the 2995 investment. 2995 points is 599 levels worth of points.

One last note: If you set your final stat to something ending in 5, you can get 2 specialty points out of it before hitting any diminishing returns on point spending. More on specialty points later.

Skills

What you put points into initially doesn't really matter here at all in the grand scheme. Eventually you're going to train your skills up as much as possible, this is just giving you a head start on a few choice skills.

From my experience, the skills that actually improve your quality of life are these four: Orienteering, First Aid, Literacy, and Anglic. If you can get all of these at 30 minimum at the start then you'll find the start much smoother. Orienteering will let you use the command: 'determine location' work well enough to actually determine where you are (as long as you have a compass) First Aid will let you actually provide some health back to your body locations with the command: 'treat me' Literacy will make it so all the written books and signs are actually readable (if your character can't read it, the game doesn't let you see what it says either) Anglic is the most spoken language in the MUD, most NPCs you'll need to train with understands it

Alignment

There are two things to worry about in this game, Ethics and Alignment. Ethics changes very slowly and always moves towards your current Alignment. Alignment changes very quickly and always moves towards the actions you are taking. For instance if you kill a bunch of evil people you will become more good. Same goes with Order vs Chaos.

You want an alignment and ethics that match up with each other, that gives you the most experience. The farther they are apart, the less experience you will get. The incentive is to maintain an ethics and alignment that are in accord.

The easiest way to do this is to actually pick the outliers, fully good or evil, fully ordered or chaotic. Picking something in between and trying to maintain it will just cause you grief, and there is enough grief from other sources, no need to give it to yourself.

When considering what you want to go for, keep in mind if your intended guild or association(s) have any restrictions. For instance, Boggotin is in Aligned which have many Forms (Aligned). These forms get weaker and weaker the farther you are from fully Ordered. You'll get to a point where you can no longer use any of them if you stray too far towards Chaos.

Additionally, if your character concept and guilds have no bearing on your alignment, I recommend Saintly/Ordered. Here's why: Evil NPCs in this game don't care about each other, Good NPCs do. If you go into a room with a bunch of S/O NPC and attack them, they'll most likely all help each other out, and even call in friends in the area. After you're gone, they'll put up wanted signs and remember who you were and attack you on sight if you come back. Evil people don't think twice if you attack their friends, heck sometimes you can even kill one in the same room as them and they'll just sit and watch and say "Not my problem". They won't usually call their friends, and they're definately not going to waste their time with wanted posters.

First Steps

Aliases

I strongly recommend reading Power Aliases. But a few simple things that aren't in there, or my take on what's in there.

1. Some commands have an extra word for no real reason. Well I suppose there is a reason, and that reason is the show hierarchy.
   1. set alias wealth to show wealth
   2. set alias buffs to show effects
   3. set alias traits to show traits
2. Some commands are just very common, you'll use all the time, so alias makes them easier
   1. set alias med to treat me
   2. set alias here to determine location
   3. set alias ka to kill all
   4. set alias lt to look for thugs
   5. set alias kt to kill thugs
   6. set alias lo to look for olaris
3. And you're really not going to want to walk everywhere manually, so head over to Xailor's Speedwalks and start the aliasing
   1. I recommend naming your speedwalks as starttodestination, for example
      1. lhtohb = Losthaven to Halfmoon Bay
      2. sttolh = Shadow Temple to Losthaven
      3. stptoog = St Paed's to Og
4. Finally, everything you don't want to have to rebuild for your other characters, share that alias
   1. start sharing alias here

Getting Around

I don't mean sexually, if you took it that way, talk to Trixie. What I mean is how to get around the world of Lost Souls. There are two things here, either you're in a location, or you're on the main world map.

• If you're in a location, go to Locations and Landmarks, find the location you're in and pull up the map and look at it. If you know you can type the name of where you are without errors, just type it into the search box on the left and pull it up directly.
• If you're on the world map, it is broken up into a double layered coordinate grid of X, Y, Z. The entire world has coordinates, and then the specific zone you're in. You can use both to get around, just use whatever is comfortable and pay attention if you're using the wiki to get around, whether it is giving you global or zone coords.
  • X coord is first, which is west/east. East is positive.
  • Y coord is next, north/south. North is positive.
  • Z coord is last, up/down. Up is positive.

First Few Levels

I like to explore about 5-6 locations, get some levels and then go and do At'lordrith's Riddle. This makes just about every character you could create get into the double digits for levels, kobolds can hit around lvl 14-15 I think. The reason you'll want to explore first is that the higher assim races will actually lose a bunch of experience if you just start with the riddle quest. The riddle quest gives a whole bunch of experience parsed out over small doses, so it is great for low level characters. Additionally it is a prereq for Verynvelyrae, which is actually a very newbie friendly guild to learn the MUD.

Locations on my initial explore list:

1. All parts of Losthaven
2. Fort Shantaari
3. Stillwater
4. Halfmoon Bay - looks complicated, but it has a distinct pattern, so actually really quick/easy to explore
5. Temple of Discordia
6. Vasbarghad - Move quickly here, the NPCs will attack you if you linger
7. Muspelheim - Once you can fly, NPCs will not attack you
8. Og
9. Caern Argnash
10. Temple Bloodmoon

Most of these places are also on my kill rotation for S/O characters, more on kill rotations later.

If you also follow this new character format, you can get 10-15 levels rather quickly (<45 min), and it doesn't take anything other than walking around the world and answering some riddles. Once you're done, you can go idle in the Losthaven Chapel with Xaolyn and spend your points while planning your specialties.

How to read your Character Sheet

There is a lot of information in this game, even more information on all the various screens that have to do with your character. Really what it all boils down to is how tough are you to kill, and how much damage do you deal?

How Tough Are You?

Raw Hit Points
Create another alias: set alias limbs to show limbs. Seeing a pattern yet? Then type limbs. You'll see how many hit points each of your limbs have, there are two main things to get this higher: Hardiness and Supernal Durability. The former being very easy to get and train, the latter being much more difficult to acquire and train up, but much more effective.
Hit Points per Second
Just having hit points is great, but keeping up with the damage being dealt is even better. Most characters have a natural healing that is slow enough to not even consider in battle. However, there is Regeneration, which was part of my character concept, that if you raise high enough will be good in combat. Most people however just go after spells or charms or other abilities that heal. Whatever the source, you want to think about some way to give yourself a heal in battle, it will make your life easier if you have one.
Resistances
Type: show skills resistance. Most likely you'll get the message "You have no Resistance skills". You'll want to work on this. Resistance skills can be more important than your raw hit points, they reduce the damage you take from each attack of that type, and there are dozens of different types of damage. The big three for most things you fight are:

1. Crushing Resistance
2. Piercing Resistance
3. Slashing Resistance

Almost everything in the game does one or more of those as part of the damage they deal, so resisting a percentage of it is great.
Affinities
Having an affinity for a damage type is even better than a resistance, not only will it reduce the damage you take, but once you get an affinity high enough, that damage will actually heal you. Additionally, if you are dealing that type of damage through some sort of spell or effect that you create, it will boost your damage.
Getting Stunned Sucks
It seems that there are different levels of stunned, but basically it means you aren't attacking or defending, both of which are bad for you. To help with this, you want Steadiness to avoid being stunned at all and Resilience to reduce the time you're stunned. Alternately you can find something that will give you Paraneurism, and put nothing into these skills.