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WAR: Early Gathering Guide
MMORPG.com Warhammer Online Correspondent Patrick Buckley writes this guide to the early stages of the gathering professions in Mythic's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
Warhammer Online: A new game, a new adventure, a new set of professions to explore and max out. And now, here’s the question that is on everybody’s mind… Where can I go to max out my profession the fastest? The answer to this question: Nowhere. That’s right, in WAR; there is no place to easily max out your profession compared to another one. There are, however, places you can go that seem to be slightly better for leveling. At least it seems so for two out of the six professions.
WAR has a total of six professions at this current time. Scavenging, butcher, and salvaging are the three “gathering” professions while apothecary, magical talisman making, and cultivating are your “production” professions. Yes, cultivating gives you items used in other skills, much like the gathering skills, but to cultivate, you need several items to produce something. I digress.
Like I was stating earlier, there is no specific place where you can power level your gathering profession. Because of this fact, there is no way to power level your production profession without the help of a guild or lots of money. To this fact, we look for places where you can level faster than normal but would definitely not qualify as power leveling compared to other games. For these instances, let’s look at how we are able to gather, as well as where to gather in all three tier one Order starting locations.
How to Gather
Gathering is easy once you put your mind to it. Whether you are a butcher or a scavenger, the dynamic for gathering is the same. After defeating an enemy that has some type of loot, shiny gold particles will glow above the corpse and your cursor will turn into a golden hand. By right clicking while your cursor is a hand, you will now pick up, or view, what item can be retrieved from the corpse. All money is automatically placed on your person while items are listed. If you so choose, you can hold down the shift key while clicking and the item will automatically load into your inventory if there is room. Once the item is retrieved, your cursor will change from a gold hand into a gold wrench (or a gold cleaver for a butcher) and flies will start flying above the corpse. In cases of a scavenger, this will only occur while looking at a humanoid-type corpse while in the case of a butcher, these will only happen to bestial creatures. You can now click. You will notice that a small timer bar will run across the bottom of your screen. Once filled, a small screen will pop up showing what item you were able to forcibly remove from the corpse. In the same way that we were able to auto loot normally, you can auto loot while scavenging/butchering a corpse by holding the shift key down while clicking your mouse. The items that will pop up from doing this will be random, but will normally be consistent with the type of creature they are. Beasts will drop fangs, horns, and claws, while humanoids will drop talisman items, fungi, and random equipment. The greater majority of everything that drops will be a useable item for either one of the production professions.
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Elves Tier 1
The Elves have an easy start off as far as having a good hunting ground for scavenging. Right off the bat, there are Dark Sprites and Dark Elf Infiltrators in the Moonrise Forest prepared to give their items to you. Both of these humanoids are rather easy to kill early in the game. Just make sure that you do not get mobbed, or you may wind up in a world of hurt quick. Dark Sprites will drop a lot of cultivation items. Dark Elf Infiltrators will drop a lot of leeches, which can be used for healing potions when given to an apothecary.
Being an Elf butcher is difficult, yet easy. The difficult part about being a butcher Elf is the fact that most of the beasts on the starting island are of higher levels. Don’t lose faith though. Being a butcher is easy due to the amount of beasts on the Elf starting island. You have bears, wolfs, scorpions, and cold ones to fight with. All of the primary drops from these beasts are aimed towards an apothecary for stat increase potions.
Empire Tier 1
The Empire also has an easy start point. Just past the cannons to the left of the start village is a field with three different types of Chaos in close proximity. Luckily enough for an Empire scavenger, all three of the enemies hand out the same rewards when your skill is used on them. They all drop cultivation items, but mostly apothecary items used for healing potions are dropped. Every once in a while, a talisman item will drop from a Raven Hellmaster.
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Of the three Order races, the Empire butcher can do the most with domestic animals found nearby. Near the wheat farm just west of the chapter one PQ; there will be a farmhouse with several Potbelly Boars. There is also a Bighorn Oxen roaming nearby. These domestic animals will drop both blood and fleas for use in cultivating and healing potions. As far as wild animals go, you will be able to find bats, spiders, and wolves further down the road, but at manageable levels, unlike the Elven beasts.
Dwarfs Tier 1
The Dwarves have a slightly harder spawn point for optimal gathering. You have to make it past the Ironclaw Squigherders in the Barren Reach and down the steps onto the bottom part of the Ancestor’s Gorge. The bottom of the gorge is preferable due to the closeness of merchants just over the bridge, as well as a rapid spawn point. The Goblins and Orcs here will give you lots of cultivating improvement items such as spores and higher level watering cans. Every once in a while, a low level talisman item will be dropped by the Ironclaw Big Uns. Almost no leeches will drop for healing potions.
The Dwarven butcher has by far the easiest setup for leveling. The variety is extremely lacking, but the abundance of Squigs right outside the starting location, as well as the low levels (1) make this a prime area for leveling. One of the major drawbacks is that these Squigs drop only enhancement items for cultivating and apothecary crafts. Seeing how that isn’t really a big concern for leveling, this is still the best, and only place the Dwarven area has to offer.
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So, Which Is It?
The truth is that there is no best place to level a butcher or a scavenger. There are better places, as well as places you can go to find certain items. Like if you wanted larger healing potions, you want to hunt Potbelly Boars, Squigs, Wolves, and Bighorns for all the ingredients needed for a good one. The leveling will just come with the hunting. Good luck!
I protest bias against Destruction! Where are the Orc, Chaos and Dark Elves? If anyone knows how to butcher it's them!
On a serious note, I've seen other people comment about the scarcity of Rank 10-40 mat drops for Apothecary using either Gathering skill compared to the Rank 50+ mat drops. Some comment on where to find these (for every race) would be useful.
Since I've only been on the Order side I can't really give a good idea of where to hunt these materials for Destruction, but in the Dwarven chapter 2 area (the PQ near the caves, not the stairs) is a great place to find the level 10-40 drops needed for apothecary. Most of the items dropped are level 10 and 25 leeches as well as the water used in making the healing potions.
Honestly, all around, this has to be one of the most pointless "news" pieces I've seen on this site. Anyone who's actually played the game will know that "leveling" scavenging and butchering skill is as easy as just using it on whatever you kill as you progress through the chapters. It hardly needs a "guide."
It would be much more intelligent to discuss the difficulties of cultivation, and the actual mechanics of apothecary and talisman making.
Rank 1 mats from the vendor are good (assuming you haven't farmed up a ton already just as you kill) until skill 25-30. Assuming you've been butchering every level 1-10 mob as you've moved from Chapter 1 to 2 and beyond, you should have a good chunk of 25's to work with to get you to 50.
You shouldn't run into Apothecary leveling issues until 100 to 115 when working towards 125, and that really only applies to Chaos Chapter 10, 11, and 12 when the quests for beasts are few and far between. That means going out there and slaughtering a bunch in the right level range even though you don't have quests for them.
In defense, there are people that play this game that enjoy grinding away at gathering materials. Yes, your way is probably the best and easiest way to gather resources when it applies to your style of gaming, but there are others that like the simplicity of hunting in a single area where they can dominate NPC critters.
These kind of articles are tricky. Too basic and you're essentially telling people playing WAR, what's already in the manual. Personally, I'd like to see a little guide on what gathering and crafting skills work best together for those who haven't bothered much with it so far.
One tip I'd include is if you want to craft, then make sure you get your skills up to level 50 as soon as possible, as once you leave Tier1 the level of the items you loot shoots up. This is particularly relevant to Apothecary, Cultivation and Talisman Making (and poss Magical Salvage), which require more items and more time investment to level.
It can be a real pain discovering you've either got to sit by a merchant and waste gold on basic ingredients or head back to Tier1 to farm low-level mobs. Ironically, this is exactly what Mythos wanted to avoid, and in on the most part they do.
In my experience, you don't really have to try leveling your Butchering and Salvaging to 100. I'd also be interested in some useful tips on leveling apothecary and cultivation.
As I'm focusing on Apothecary (atm) I'd be interested in answers to questions like:
1.Should you vary potions (or whatever) you make to level faster or just grind out the same one?
2. What potions (items) can you make at higher level (100+)?
3. Volatile vs Stable - is there a gain to taking the risk?
4. What extra ingredients really make a difference to duration, quantity and quality?
5. What a the best (that you know of) healing main ingredients?
6. What kind of random effects can happen when brewing potions?
7. What difference does an expensive glass vial make to the brew?
This, again, is my opinion, but generally people who appear to frequent MMORPG have prior experience of playing them, so I reckon you should take it up the assumed knowledge up a few notches.
Look forward to reading some more stuff on WAR. Playing and enjoying it right now. ;)
1) It doesn't seem to matter. As long as the main ingredient is 0-15 from your current score, you'll almost always gain a point. From 16-25 away from your current level and you're less likely to gain. 26-50, essentially forget it. :)
2) Basically every spell in the game has an analogous potion. This goes beyond "thorns" into all sorts of stuff normally reserved for specific classes. You'll see those crop up at and beyond skill 150.
3) For leveling, there's no gain. If you want to use the potions yourself or sell them at auction, there is an obvious gain. Also, certain ingredients like Redbelly Ticks create particularly unstable potions that show on the meter as "unstable" but really are pure fail and will cost you vial after vial unless you push it up into the green.
4) That's a tough question as it really depends on what your source is. Waters tend to be better stabilizers than plant stabilizers but not always better than gores, for example, but that's not a hard and fast rule. Usually, the higher the level of the ingredient, the better it is at whatever it does when compared to another ingredient of the same type.
5) Again, tough question. The healing potions are effectively quantized; you use too "good" an ingredient and you push the heal into the next level range. As a Butcher, I use the Ticks and Leeches, but the former can be a pain on stability. Then again, they also pop out potions of quite high levels. Unfortunately, the only thing that matters to leveling the skill is the level of the main ingredient you use, not the product.
6) Random effects? Multiple potions, variant potions (longer duration, more efficacy, etc.), but it's not like cultivation where you can get a totally wild outcome.
7) There are two types of "glass vials." The first, and probably only ones you've seen so far are the normal vendor ones and the ones from PQ bags. There are four levels of these guys available to the general public, two from merchants, two from PQ bags, although all four can be obtained if your guild is of sufficient level to get them in the Viper's Pit. I'll talk about the second kind of vial later.
Now, when using a higher level vial, your stability and potion level automatically increase. For example, if you use a level 1 main ingredient with the level 50 vial, the potion meter usually starts out at orange, instead of red. This makes it easier to stabilize - which means more additives.
The second kind of vial are the "Touched" vials. They are used for specific potions post 175. For example, if you ever get a vial called "Chamon Touched Exquisite Glass Vial," you'll know you've got one of the epic potion vials on your hands. The fact that the name is in purple helps, too. :p
8) The question you didn't ask: Which is better; Butchery, Scavenging, or Cultivation?
Answer: Butchery and Cultivation are primarily tied to Alchemy. Butchery gives Cultivation ingredients as well, which is a pain since Cultivation is a Gather, not a trade (so stupid, in my opinion). Scavenging primarily gives Talisman making items with Cultivation items secondary BUT draws up the oh-so-needed stabilizing waters Alchemists need. Unfortunately, a great alchemist needs access to all three of these Gathering skills. If you want to tradeskill in WAR, prepare to spend a lot of time at the Auction searching for ingredients. If you're particularly masochistic like me, you can level three separate characters in Butchery, Scavenging, and Cultivation.