| Subject: Good housing information from a post on the Blurry board... then my rant at the bottom. |
Author:
Larq
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Date Posted: 08:14:16 10/30/01 Tue
In reply to:
Bard
's message, "Guild House" on 05:43:10 10/30/01 Tue
From: Klaxon
ID: f3Vxknh4AlI
Date: October 30, 2001 at 02:14 am
Subject: Housing FAQ (Long)
As I was chatting with our illustrious monarch today, the server-wise message went out announcing that housing was going live....finally!
Elphaba and I spent the rest of the day/evening chasing down writs for our two houses and one for a friend as well. Of course, we then had to spend some time decorating the inside of the house using the hooks. Man, that was a lot of fun and I was surprised how much "pride of ownership" I have in my little cottage! :)
In any event, having perused the board here, I noticed that no one has of yet addressed some of the requirements, etc. associated with the new houses, so I thought I'd give it a whirl since I spent the day acquiring the "expertise."
First off, you need to find a neighborhood where the houses are actually up for sale. Elph and I had our eye on some beachfront property near Yaraq but they weren't for sale yet. We found a little forest community near Nanto instead (full now!) and I suppose we can just wait for our "dream house" to come on the market. My only suggestion is to consult the Sybex guide (bad) or track down the URL of that site someone posted with an interactive map of all the houses (and their owners!)....check AC Vault as it was a recent post and has been bumped extensively.
Now, except for Wren, no one here is going to buy a mansion since you need to be a monarch to get one so I won't go into details about those here. Perhaps if we don't have our guild mansion by Saturday, we can plan a mass hunt for writs? As they are no-drop/no-give, I'm not sure how problematic that may be; i.e. Wren may have to pack them all herself since I'm not sure mansion purchases can be done by more than one person. For houses and villas, the owner him/her-self must physically do the purchasing.
Specifics....
Houses cost 300k pyreals, 1 Writ of Refuge, and 1 Iron Heart. Once you have all these items in your inventory, go to a house "on the market" and interact with the gem outside. You can tell if a house is available simply by clicking on its gem outside. The gem also rises off its pedestal once it is owned. In addition, once a house is owned, you may not approach it unless the owner has made it "open"; you'll bounce off a "force field" which interestingly does NOT apply to monsters so keep your mules in the basement! I played around with casting spells at people inside houses through windows and found no barrier to doing so, but I didn't test this extensively.
Anyway, back to the purchasing...place the items into the gem's "invetory", click "Buy", and watch the fireworks! The upkeep on houses is 30k pyreals/month and you may not pay in advance. You can check when your rent is due by accessing the "House" tab on the map panel display.
I wanted to buy a villa before I saw the purchase price. I'm decently rich for a mage (hahaha) but that would have nearly wiped me out since I had to afford 2...and as it turned out 3 (since my friend is poor!) houses. They go for 2 million pyreals, 5 Writs of Refuge, and 1 Gold Wasp Wing. I'm not sure of the monthly rent on them as I forgot to check that when I was snooping around.
As for what drops the Writs....as the server message alludes to, "knights, missionaries, and inquisitors" are the targets. From talking to the Agents, you can find out that they are looking for either a Ring of Mummified Skin, a Crest of Falatacot, or a Quiddity Crystal. I'm assuming that each of these exchanges 1:1 for a Writ, but I haven't tested this with all three. Incidentally, these items are also usable as magic items, at least the Crest is.
As the server message indicates, you can find the monsters that drop the items in the north and south Dires, the Obsidian Plains, and they also talk about the "deserts and the forests." Since I am LS'd in the south dires near the D-note emissary, I started there. Here's where 6th Sense comes in handy for those of you who have it. I don't, but Elph does. It made our subsequent job so much easier and less of a crapshoot.
Almost immediately, I found a "Void Knight," which is the "knight" referred to in the server message. S/he is a shadow, level 153, and is about as easy to kill as an Umbris. The ones I saw subsequently spawned with 3 Umbris Shadows. We killed about 5 of them after running around the south dires for about an hour and getting our tails debuffed to hell and back. That's pretty standard but I mention it because it bears on what we decided to do next. We did not get any writs from the Void Knights, though we helped kill a 6th one and the fellow who looted it gota Ring of Mummified Skin off of it...his first kill...go figure! :) So, for what it's worth, look for "big" shadows in the north and south dires (presumably the Ob Plains as well) and kill the Void Knight (exact spelling for 6th Sense users) for the Ring of Mummified Skin.
About this time, we heard from a friend that he had encountered a "Falatacot Missionary" (exact spelling) in the forest area W-NW of Glendon Wood. He said it was pretty easy to kill since it was only level 55 (approxiamte...I can't remember for sure), so we decided to give it a whirl since our luck wasn't doing so well hunting the knights. We spent the next hour exploring this forested area and found quite a few of the spawns. Again, this area is the green forested area on your map that is NW of GW....it has 2 yellow dots in its midst; one of them marked the old shadow child "castle" from way back.
The missionary seemed to spawn most typically with 2 Lich Lords and 1 Risen Soldier. The missionary was undead so bring your fire weapons/spells. Within an hour, we had found three "Crest of Falatacots", which are the items you exchange for Writs with the housing Agents. The drop rate seemed better than the Void Knights and it was certainly less dangerous for us...mid-50's mages/meleers. Perhaps the exchange rate for the Mummified Ring and/or Quiddity Crytal is better than 1:1, but someone else will have to provide that information.
The last monster is the "Grand Inquisitor", a virindi type that I've heard spawns on the Ob Plains. I didn't get a chance to verify this. As such, I don't have any level information on them. I know they drop the Quiddity Crystal, but that's about it.
Lastly, a note on the hooks and the chest(s) inside the houses....The chest holds 26 items but it ALSO has a space for a standard pack, which increases its capacity to 50. What a bargain! As far as the hooks go, it took me some time to figure out how to use them. I was not able to mount any weapons or armor on any of the hooks. This may be because I only tried no-drop weapons or it may be because I didn't try the "right" hooks for the job. I need to test this further to see if I was making a mistake or if there's a bug. Some of the hooks will accept certain items while others won't. For instance, you can mount a torch on the wall, but you can't affix it to the floor. Needless to say, the Sybex manual comes up very short in addressing a how-to with the hooks. All the furniture items seem to work fine, so you can still have a blast decorating! I know Elph and I did! :)
Also, PAY YOUR RENT IMMEDIATELY. When I first bought my house, I logged for a bit and when I came back on, I got a message saying that my house had reverted and all the items inside had been lost. I house recalled (really cool!) and found that everything was OK, but I still went ahead and paid my rent right away. There are definitely some bugs left to work out because when I logged subsequent characters on my account on, I got the same message though nothing was awry at my house.
There are a slew of commands you can use to manage your house guest list and who has rights to enter and use the storage chests. You can find out all these commands by accessing in-game help, by checking the manual that comes with the game, or reading the Sybex manual.
Well, that's about all I can remember right now. Hopefully, people who find additions to what I've written here and/or errors will post under this thread so we can have one comprehensive Housing FAQ thread for folks to access.
Oh! One last thing....when you get your house deed, try wielding it by placing it in the slot you use your orb in. It can be wielded and it looks like a big important package from UPS or something! Hahahaha...have fun and feel free to contact me or Elphaba in-game for help.
Klax
Also, it's important to know that ONLY THE CHARACTER WHO PURCHASED THE HOUSE CAN RECALL TO IT. This is contrary to what most people had previously thought (that each character on the account could recall, which would make it easier for low-level mules to go home).
And the writs have a very low drop rate. And they're on difficult-to-kill monsters. If the houses didn't have the level restrictions, I could see that the monsters' difficulties wouldn't be a big deal. But, say that my level 21 archer wants to buy a house. She can't kill the monster herself and Larq can't transfer the writ to her (seperate accounts, so it would actually be necessary). I do see the value in the no-drop/no-give aspect in that it doesn't put a exploitative trade value on the supply side of the writ, but.. *sigh*
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