Boggotin's Guide

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Hello, I am Boggotin, currently a lvl 114 Troll Aligned Aisenshi-Insei-Te, Fianna, and Soulburner bonded to a Shlyma and a Spider Monkey. With a special guest appearance from Sithaz my lvl 203 Bezhuldaar Ringwielder, Zetesa, Weapon of Vengeance, Sodalist of the Nine-Spoked Wheel, Wandslinger, Explorer bonded to an Apagion and Cadagion.

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.

Spoiler warning: information below includes details, such as solutions to puzzles or quest procedures, that you may prefer to discover on your own.


Contents

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.

Sithaz, my latest master creation started out a lowly kobold because they have the highest assimilativity which means the highest base experience point gain. The reason I did that was because Sithaz was born to be a Bezhuldaar someday, and to become a Bezhuldaar one needs to level up to level 200 and then visit Kurd the Vivictionist and ask him to make you a Bezhuldaar. I really didn't have a guild in mind for the Bez when I created Sithaz (but I had 200 levels to figure that out). Also, if you want to get technical with it, Sithaz started out as a Chaosborn, immediately vivi'd to a kobold, and then 200 levels later became the Bez.

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. Sithaz also started here in Losthaven.

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 compared to 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. Since Ethics change so much slower, what that means is that your XP penalties will be awful for awhile if you are trying to cause a permanent shift in Ethics.

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?
  • show skills vit
  • show skills wil
  • show specialty access vit
  • show specialty access wil

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 might boost your damage. Take a look at the help files for the spells and skills to see.
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. Note: There are other skills like Pain Tolerance that also help with being stunned, I just wanted to give you the big two here that show up under constitution.
Getting Hit Sucks
If you never get hit, you don't have to worry about any of the above. But how do you do that? Simple answer is you can't, some monster in the game is going to be able to hit you regardless, however the best you could hope for is to dodge or deflect a vast majority of the physical attacks of the NPCs you fight.

  • show dodge rating
  • show deflection rating with 'whatever you gots in your hand' - for boggotin this is: show deflection rating with tessen

In addition to trying to get both of these as high as possible, you'll also want a high Tactics as that will help your character determine which is better to use in a given circumstance. Some attacks can't be dodged, some can't be deflected, some can't be fully dodged or fully deflecting. Tactics helps your character know what's what.

How Deadly Are You?

This one is a bit tougher to figure out, as there are 100s of ways to attack in this game. In general, you're either attacking or casting spells. If you're casting spells, you want to get your spell ratings higher along with the affinity skills for that damage type. If you're attacking, you want to look at the following two screens:

  1. show attack rating with
    1. For special attacks, you'll toss a 'special' in there after the show
  2. show damage rating with
    1. For special attacks, you'll toss a 'special attack' in there after the show

On the first screen the attack rating, it shows how well you will connect. The higher the better, and you'll want to pay attention to pretty much every line. The goal here is to find the lines that giving you the best ratios, and try to maximize those. For attack rating, a high rating will actually carry over into how much damage you deal, so for me personally, this one is more important.

On the second screen, the damage rating, it shows how hard you connect. Again, higher is better, but this one only matter if you actually connect.
Important Things to Remember

  1. Skills that you have no training in will not show up at all, try to get at least some points in every skill in the game to see if it has an effect on your attacks
  2. Skills that you are not using currently will not show up at all. Hard to explain, but basically if there is a skill that only affects some enemies, it won't show here
    1. Do your show attack rating and show damage rating commands during combat, after the fight is over, scroll back up to see what skills affect that monster.
    2. Don't just worry about the skills that are always in effect, there are some skills like Anatomy that help with damage against almost everything
  3. Consider the ratios and the current points in each skill. The first point into a specialization gives 40 more skill points as opposed to 30 or 20. Do the math.
What is the relationship between attributes, specialties and skills?
  • Your character has base attributes: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Willpower, Intelligence, Charisma, and Perception.
    • These attributes do have effects on your attacks and spells and all kinds of stuff, but they aren't the full story.
    • For every 10 attribute points you have in a specific attribute, you get 1 specialty point to spend in that category.
      • Specialty points increase the maximum your skills can train up to.
  • For most skills the starting maximum is 40 (some are 0, some are double 0)
    • When you add the first or second specialty to a skill, it increases the cap by 40.
      • For skills with max 0, the first point makes the cap 40, then read above.
      • For skills with max 00, it takes 2 points to make the cap 40, then read above.
        • Supernal Durability is a 00 skill, and it's described differently depending on who you talk to, this is my attempt at explaining how it works.
    • When you add the third or fourth point, it increases the cap by 30.
      • Adjusted by 0 or 00 skills.
    • When you add the fifth point and beyond, it increases the cap by 20.
      • Adjusted by 0 or 00 skills.
  • The farther away from your maximum, the faster the skill will train when you use it or seek a teacher/trainer.
  • Trainers/Teachers will not train/teach you multiple times in a row, unless you use it or train it with someone else, but there is a sneaky way to get around this.
    • If you have 4 specialty points you want to put into sword with a new character, do these steps:
      • Find a sword trainer and train sword with no points specialty points spent
      • Add one specialty point and train the sword again
      • Repeat step 2 until you've added all your intended points and trained afterwards

What to do after the Riddle Quest?

  1. Sit in town and spend all your specialty points
    1. show specialty points
    2. show specialty access 'target attribute'
    3. set specialty degree in 'skill' to 'level'
  2. I recommend getting your combat skills to a point where you can kill a halfmoon bay thug reliably
    1. You can find trash on the ground and sell it then train your skills
    2. You can go into the Losthaven sewers and kill rats to train your skills, work your way up to cats and skaven
  3. Once you have spent your points and can kill 1 HB thug reliably, you're ready to begin the process of leveling, you have many options for how to gain experience
    1. Go to a merchant and say "arbitrage opportunities", he'll give you some items to collect and bring back for experience
    2. Type show quests, find one you haven't done, look at the wiki's Quests and figure out how to do it
    3. Go kill stuff - more on this shortly
    4. Go explore stuff
    5. Do challenges - find a traveler and ask him to give you one if you aren't a traveler yourself
Challenges

If you are S/O, you should be doing a bunch of these. They can be a pain, but the rewards are immense. The glaring reason they are so important to do in my mind is the free training of skills (including skills you don't have yet). The biggest area where this comes into play is with resistances. Doing a bunch of challenges will train all your resistance skills up to around 40 eventually, making your character that much tougher to kill. For character with supernal durability, this will give you free advancement in that skill, another huge benefit.

Killing Stuff

You have this thing called a "Kill Log". Basically the game keeps track of things you kill and puts in on this list. The more things you kill of the same type get added to the list under the same line but additional occurences. For example if you kill 4 kobolds, you'd get 1 entry of kobold with 4 occurances. Eventually, the number of times you kill the same thing will decrease the experience you get for it, and with enough of the same, they'll be worth next to nothing. Unique ("named") NPCs always count as their own entry. Your kill log can hold 30 entries (currently).

  • You don't know what category the thing you're killing falls under to know if it is going to be a new entry or just another occurence
  • The only way to know if something is on your kill log is to kill it and see if it is being affected by the kill log
  • When you have a full kill log and you kill something new, it picks a random entry on your log and removes it

What does this all mean? - Get yourself a Kill Rotation, and make it big, the higher your level, the longer your Kill Rotation needs to be.

Kill Rotation

If you're killing NPCs as a large source of your experience, you'll want to not take large penalties from your full kill log, so you'll want to kill a wide variety of enemies in order to continually refresh this kill log. Boggotin's Current Kill Rotation and why: Nothing -> Okay -> Good -> Better -> Great -> Amazing on the experience

  1. Vargan - Good experience on the bottom 2 levels, also a wide vareity of targets so I actually run through the entire pit for kill log considerations
  2. Muspelheim - Good experience from the fire giants, and there are 3 named giants here that give great to Amazing experience
  3. Sinbyen - Great to Amazing experience ratios on all floors, but they are tough monsters, fight what you can take. Go 1 north, 10ish east from the entrance, then down.
  4. Vasbarghad - Okay experience outside the walls, Good experience inside the first wall, Better experience inside the second wall, Great experience down below
  5. St Paedric's Monastery - Good experience, I think it is good kill log consideration for the varied races
  6. Og - Better experience on the chief, I kill a couple other ogres while I'm there for kill log purposes
  7. Caern Argnash - Better experience on Brantiss, it swarms so you end up killing a bunch of stuff real fast, I do it for kill log purposes
  8. Lair of Flametooth (Global: -58, 29, 0) - Great experience and loot
  9. Temple Bloodmoon - Okay experience, but they swarm by the dozens of varied races, I do it for kill log purposes
  10. Gurbodax - Okay to Great experience based on floor, I just do the floor right above the town
  11. Halfmoon Bay - Okay experience, Better on Blackdog, I do it for the varied races, only killing thugs, for kill log purposes
  12. Shadow Tower - Nothing to Amazing experience depending on floor, I clear as much as I can for kill log purposes
  13. Bartziluth - Great experience and loot

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting places to add either for easy of kill log clearing or to get great->amazing experience. For kill log clearing places, you just want to burn through quick resetting your log. For the experience places, you want to kill a bunch of occurences till the diminishing returns start to slow your progression. It is a balancing act between kill log clearing and experience gathering.

Developing a Character

There are many, many ways to build a strong character. I will not even come close to touching them all here, but this is a living guide that I intend to improve upon as I learn more. For now, here's some things to keep in mind when trying to make your character stronger.

  1. You don't have to stay in the same guild your entire life, in fact, it's probably best if you don't
  2. Joining every association available is not usually the best idea
  3. Spending lux on multiple guilds and bonds is fun, but if you haven't thought it through can actually lead to a weaker character

Why Boggotin is the way he is

I wanted a troll that is a ninja, not because I thought it was the strongest, most overpowered idea, but because I really liked the character concept. This huge regenerating troll that is also as nimble as a ninja, striking with precision. I thought it was a fun idea, so I went with it. Boggotin was not my first character, was not my second. In fact, to even start troll you have to have a character level to 50 just to be able to pick troll from character creation. I also spent quite a bit of lux on Boggotin, so he's not an example of where your character will be if you don't spend lux. You don't have to spend lux to be powerful. I spent lux because I thought that Chaos did an amaizng job with this game after playing it for a year and a half, so I dropped him $500 one Christmas and spent the lux on Boggotin.

  • I chose Aisenshi because just about every character should at least start there, it intros a skill you'll want, works great as a first step for psychics, and has some maneuvers to get
    • Aisenshi intro's Combat Meditation, which although costly to get higher, is the best combat mode in the game. Once you've found out about it, you can then Autodidaction it
    • Aisenshi teaches 3 combat maneuvers, all of which you'll want to Memorize, but they can be used after you leave the guild. Really great for grabbing for unarmed Hawkmen
    • Combat Med, Meditation, and Philosophy all have chances to pop psi talents
  • I chose Aligned because there are a bunch of buffs you can give to a physcial fighter, including a great weapon and offhand item, and I can create most of my gear.
  • I chose Spider monkey (Empathic bond) because it hugely buffs some skills associated with unarmed combat along with giving me some of my best attacks
  • I chose Shlyma (Empathic Bond) because it buffs skills associated with unarmed combat along with giving me a great array of magic damage attacks
  • I chose Fianna because I wanted to see if it was worth the specialty points - Still undecided on that
    • Makes you a fey race, which opens the Fey Abilities, (see below category link)
    • Gives some buffs, was curious if they were worth it, specifically Fae's Grace and Prowrie's Strength
    • It was specialty point intensive, and I'm still not sure it was worth it
  • I chose Soulburners because it seemed fun

Why Sithaz is the way she is

I wanted to get to level 200 as fast as possible, and when I created the character your starting race mattered for which races you would be able to eventually change into. So I started as a Chaosborn in order to be able to make it to Bezhuldaar, then I swapped to kobold to make use of the 30 Assimilativity

Important Choices to Make

Permanent Guilds and Long Rejoins

Some guilds and associations can't be left after they are joined, be very careful with these guilds and associations, especially with an older character. In addition, some guilds and associations have long timers between when you leave them until when you are allowed to rejoin, some can't be rejoined. Again, things you will want to consider when planning your character.

Here is an example: Psionic characters have many ways to "pop" talents, one such way is to join Aligned and max out the form True Self (Aligned Form). However, if you join up with Aligned to get this, and then leave to go join another guild for some other reason, you will now incur a very long rejoin timer on Aligned. If you're going to make use of a guild that has a long rejoin timer, try to get everything you need out of the guild prior to leaving it, so you don't have to worry about this.

Conflicting Guilds and Associations

Some guilds and associations don't play well with others, there are the obvious good v evil and order v chaos restrictions, but there are also things like clerics can't join The Attuned. This wiki does a pretty good job of telling you what the restrictions are, so plan accordingly.

Spending too Many Useless Specialty Points

You may spend time with typing 'show users' and then doing a 'whois' on everyone on the list, in fact I recommend it. You'll see different characters that have different amounts of guilds and associations. You may think it's really awesome to have 14 tags on your character. Usually this is not the case.

A better way to develop your character and decide what to join and when is to see what the requirements are for joining, see what that association is going to offer you in return, and see if that is going to increase your power or decrease it. My Fianna join is a perfect example of where I may have chosen poorly. It was very spec intensive (I believe I spent 6), and so far the buffs I have gotten have not been what I think is worth 6 specialty points, especially from where I had to steal them.

  • Specialty points taken from something you have 15 points in, really isn't going to hurt you
  • Specialty points taken from something you have 1-2 points in, that is going to be very painful for the spells and attacks using those
  • Remember the first 2 spec points give 40 to max skill, next 2 are 30, and everything else is 20 per spec point

For Boggotin's Fianna join I had to steal points from a bunch of these 1-4 point skills that were adding to my Aligned Form Ratings, so my buffs from Aligned were reduced in order to provide new buffs with Fianna. Fey abilities do take some time to train up, so possibly I'll see benefit at the end, Boggotin is still in Fianna at this time, the jury has not reached a verdict.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.lostsouls.org/Boggotin%27s_Guide"
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