Guide - A New Players Efficiency Guide to PvP viability

xpiher

Time for another guide folks. Why you might ask? Well the game has change a ton since launch and with the new custom role patch its incredibly easy to misspend prowess if you are looking to get to PvP "viable" status as quickly as possible. Furthermore, I've seen many new players coming into the game over the last two weeks who wanted to get to PvP "viable" status as quickly as possible without spending "a life time" PvEing. Without further ado

Basic Information
First thing a new player must know is the mentor system. The mentor system is AV's way of trying to encourage veteran players to help new players level. While the mentor and apprentice are online at the same time, the mentor will receive free prowess every time the apprentice receives prowess with activities such as mob skills and mob feat completion rewarding more prowess to the mentor. This continues until the apprentice "graduates" by reaching 40,000 prowess. The reason its important for the new players to use this feature right away is that many mentors will give new players detailed advice on how to play the game, they usually supply the apprentice with basic gear, and often time will help the apprentice complete feats. Sometimes, this even leads to being invited to a clan!

The second thing a new player needs to know is how to spend prowess. The order to spend prowess in is buying skills, leveling stats stats, purchasing boosters, and then finally leveling skills. The reason for this basic order (more on that later) of leveling is that this is the order of power for you character. Before we get into more detail we need to talk about some basic things. First, the game has a diminishing return effect on prowess farming that doesn't affect feats. Once you get past a certain level of prowess (30k-50k depending on the action) will start to give you less and less prowess to the point where prowess per action: mob kills, harvesting, crafting individual items, etc, becomes useless. Second, investment into skills and stats have diminishing returns on power with increasing prowess cost per point invested. To be clear, this means that instead of a linear power curve, most of the power rewarded from stats is front loaded to the point. Now with that out of the way lets continue. 

Viable Status
Lets talk about what this means before going into more hard details. Viable status does not mean you'll be able to go toe to toe with a veteran player: they understand the game more than you and are probably more skilled at playing the game than you. What viable status means is that the point where the majority of the losses you incur will be because of bad play, not because of your character. It means being able to hold your own, character power wise, in a group and actually helping out. Do not misunderstand, there will be some situations where, once you hit viable status that you will lose because your character was weaker. However, you'll still be able to win against players with much more prowess than you because after a certain point more prowess doesn't grant additional character power anymore, just additional play style options to chose from. 
 

Just playing the game
THIS IS AN EFFICIENCY GUIDE. Its designed to get someone to "viable status" as quickly as possible. Like most games, getting there the quickest isn't the most fun. If you can't be bothered following everything in this guide (the afk trawling, leaving mob feats incomplete, etc) you can still "just play the game" and get to PvP viable status relatively quick (quicker than it takes to get there in other mmoRPGs). Simply remove the trawling guide aspect and incomplete feat aspect and use the rest: crafting, stacking repeatable feats, and the scrumling dungeon and, if you play super casually (less than 10hrs a week), you should still reach the viable point within 2 months of playing. The difference is that you may want to do some low impact activities while you can devote your full attention to the game such as harvesting. Harvesting will not only give your resources, but it will give you easy prowess and slowly work your way to completing the harvesting feats which give huge amounts of prowess once completed. Remember, the more prowess you have, the more builds you'll have unlocked, and the more builds you have unlocked the better you can adapt to balance changes (without spending money) or help your team by filling in.

Prowess Gaining
There are two accepted methods to efficiently gaining prowess. I'm sad to report that both are boring and tedious. Luckily, they are fairly quick. These methods are farm the same feat mob until you have killed 179 of a certain mob and then move on to the next mob, and afk trawling. As mentioned above, diminishing returns (DR) do not affect prowess gained from feats, but if you complete a bunch of feats you'll trigger DR much quicker and thus gain less prowess per kill on monsters. Thereofre, if you leave your "master mob slayer" feat at 149 and move onto a the next mob you'll gain more prowess per kill, maximizing your prowess gain potential while still gaining enough prowess to purchase your initial skills. 

Now the trawling. Trawling is the highest prowess pay out in the beginning of the game and it can be largely done afk in any safe zone. If you don't care about actually "playing" the game and just want to get out and PvP as quickly as possible this is your best method. However, trawlers are expensive for a new player to obtain. The going rate on the market (auction house system) right now for a trawler is ~10k (assuming you can find a seller). So how is a new player to make that much money in as little time as possible? Easy! Repeatable feats. 

Repeatable Feats
A couple of months ago AV added a much requested feature to the game repeatable feats. Repeatable feats give both prowess and items based on mob difficulty and time investment. There are some that are designed to be done in a party, some that are designed to be completed solo (daily), and some that are designed to take the course of a few days/week to complete (weekly). You can access this menu by pressing "J" on your key board or the feat icon while in GUI mode (pressing escape by default). As a new player, you can only realistically do the easiest one, but even these give good rewards. 

Now about getting the money for that trawler. As a new player you can easily complete the scrumling dungeon repeatable feat with just some beginning level warrior gear (metal armor and 2 weapon). This will give you a total of 500 gold, 30 of each basic (iron, leather, cloth, and wood) refined material, and 31 prowess for approximately an hour (2 tops as a BRAND new player) worth of farming. Now, you can either convert this first patch into some more basic gear (not recommend) or you can sell it on the market (AH) right away and earn some quick (day or two tops) cold hard cash! The going rate on basic refined materials, on the North American sever, is: Iron 100gc per, Cloth 70gc per, Leather ~75gc per, and Wood ~55gc per. This means, if you convert the materials you just gained into gold by selling it on the AH, you just gained ~9000gc. Just completing this daily feat one additional time should net you 19k which is plenty to buy your first trawler or give you enough resources to get a couple of newbie gear bags made.

Once you have have enough power to take on higher ranked repeatable feats it is highly advisable to focus on those WHILE also completing your normal feats as this maximizes your time since you'll be completing 2 or more feats at once. For example, there is a repeatable feat for villains and terrors and there is also a standard feat for ice elemental. There are two type of ice elementals less (villains) and greater (terrors). If you focus on completing the Ice elemental feat completely during the week you should also complete your repeatable villain feat granting you an additional 737 prowess. 

Prowess Spending
As a player who is looking to get into PvP play as quickly as possible it is imperative that you spend your prowess right unless you don't mind spending ~5$ on a respec. The first thing you should do is watch some PvP videos of the best PvPers of the game and try to find a build you like and imitate it by buying all the skills, leveling the appropriate stats, and buying the appropriate boosters. Some builds can be found in the Theory Crafting section of the forums which detail how to spec for the builds. Use it.

If you don't want to use other people's builds and like coming up with your own then you need to know what stats affects stats have. Below is the run down
 

• Str = Weapon damage, warrior skills, HP
• Dex = weapon attack speed (minor), bow and dagger damage, skirmisher skill, and stamina
• Int = Staff damage, elementalist skills, and manna regeneration
• Wisdom = Total Manna, common skills, and primalist skills

Now, the typical build at end game is all stats leveled to 100, 4 boosters (usually mixed between 2), and all skills used leveled to 100. However, as stated above this isn't required to be viable due to front loading of power and what level skills become "useful" at. Some skills, like evade and stampede, are useful without spending and prowess in them, others you want to level to at least 50. Your primary stats on the other hand, need to be leveled to 100 for maximum effectiveness of your build. It doesn't have to be done right away, you can get away with some build having your primary stat leveled to only 90 if you take 3 booster, but you won't reach maximum damage potential/skill efficiency if you do this. Below is the typical cost for a standard viable (not max) hybrid build minus skill leveling cost which various depending on skills slotted.

• Avg price of a full set of skills (8 common + 1 ultimate) = ~5000
• Primary stat 100 = ~18200
• Primary stat booster x2 = 400
• Secondary Booster x 2 = 1200
• 3rd booster = 800 (not necessary but may allow a 2nd build to be opened up)
• Secondary Stat to 90 = ~12000
• Remaining stats to 50 - 70 = ~3720 - ~9600
• Transfers (Heal self, HP -> MP, Stam -> HP, and MP-> Stam) to 75 = ~1800
• Total = ~43,120 - ~49,000

Note - for a non-hybrid build, the cost goes down substantially as you don't need a second stat to 90, only 70. A more "pure" class (class consisting of skills of mostly 1 school and mostly 1 weapon type) can be as low as ~35000


Summary: Putting It All Together (TL;DR)

1. Look for a build you like to play
2. Do the scrumling repeatable dungeon 2x
3. Sell the materials gained from the scrumling dungeon on the AH and buy a trawler
4. Trawl in any body of water in a safe zone. Remember that any body of water that connects in the same grid square counts as a single node
5. Buy the skills in your build
6. Trawl, afk harvest, or craft while completing PvE feats. For maximum efficiency, leave the master level (150 mob feat) incomplete until you have surpassed 30k prowess. To further increase your prowess gain, combine weekly repeatable feats with standard feats.

Addendum
Harvesting
When you first start the game, harvesting is largely an AFK activity and very low impact. By low impact I mean you don't really have to pay attention to the game while you do it so you can focus on other things. Its a great way to supplement your active play time with additional prowess gains as well as basic material gains which you can then turn into prowess by crafting.

Crafting Feats
Crafting feats are another great source of prowess especially if you have reach the point of diminishing returns. I did not include it in the initial guide because I don't consider it very efficient when first starting out because of the high cost of completing each feat. However, you can begin working on your crafting feats as a new player by making your own armor when starting off by using the materials you gain in by completing the scrumling dungeon feats as each armor type (and most armor sets) has feats for completing a whole set, 100 pieces, and 500 pieces of armor that reward pretty good prowess.

Etheom

Thank you for posting this guide. It's loaded with great advice to reference.