from annwn.info/tips (April 19, 2010)
Tips and trivia
Creating characters
- You cannot create a character that begins with the letters 'M-E'. This prevents certain issues with targeting other characters and targeting yourself.
- You cannot create a character that contains 'A-S-S' anywhere in it. This is because people tend to be jerks if you let them.
Items
- Postal vouchers are transferable, as they do not have the 'nouncurse' flag. Just cast remove curse on it and you can give it or mail it. You can now also have it CPKed off you!
- Eating a maleficarum root while in combat will never kill you directly. Thus if you are trying to drop a floor in the The Proving Grounds, it is best to eat your root while in combat.
- Eating a maleficarum root while in combat will never kill you directly, even outside the The Proving Grounds. Thus you can't use one to deny an opponent a kill in PK. In fact, because it will cast extinction on you, eating one while in PK combat will only help your opponent.
- Autolooting Gordon in Dungeon Avarice is a dangerous proposition. You may loot the Ring of Darlatha, a no-identify, no-uncurse, no-drop, no-remove, no-rent item with negative stats that equips itself automatically from your inventory, and that doesn't seem to frag very easily.
- Schlepping all over the world to get seeds and harvest branches in order to obtain the dragon tooth necklace in Ogre Village is a real pain. Fortunately the willow branches on the ground in the wilds work, too.
- The hailstones that are created by the 'ice storm' spell are actually vanish-death, no-save level 133 maces with the frost attribute.
- You can buy 2 stamps and use "mail <recipient> 2.stamp" to mail a stamp. This is desirable where you have mailed somebody something to forge and they happen to be at a clanhall post office where a stamp vendor is typically absent.
- For a much improved hydration experience, buy a vial of lamp oil, empty it, and fill it with water from any fountain. It will hold fifty ounces of water and last much longer than a leather skin.
Combat
- It's not too hard for a non-Archon to silence an Archon hunter. Hand it a coin, wait for it to start casting (usually silence), and then either backstab (best) or counterspell it.
- If you don't want to lose good gear, don't wear good gear in CPK.
- Blind fighting affects your accuracy whenever you can't see your opponent, such as when you are blind, the room is dark, or a mob is invisible.
- There is a 'PK-multiplier' on damage of one-half. Any damage done by a player to a player is only half what it would be on a mob. In fact, a 'double damage' room is actually a 'normal damage' room. Thus, non-PK damage is unchanged in a double damage room.
- You can throw a mixture/flash bomb and also cast a 2-second spell like poison in between rounds without affecting attacks or defenses the next round; but only if you throw first then cast. Throwing and herald bloodthirst both take a second to do but have a hidden 1 second "soft lag". Bash and kick on the other hand, takes 1 second to do but has a hidden 1 second "hard lag" which effectively makes it 2 seconds to do. Herald death takes 0 seconds to do and has no lag. Examples of what I mean:
- throw flash, cast poison = no loss the next round
- cast poison, throw flash = loss of attacks/defense next round
- bash, cast magic dart = no loss the next round
- kick, cast poison = overcast by 1 second
- bash, throw flash = loss of attacks/defense next round
- herald bloodthirst, throw flash, herald death, magic dart = no loss the next round
Game Mechanics
- Rooms on the vmap are normally lit rooms. However, at night during double new moons, you'll need a light to see anything.
- Casting 'detect magic' will allow you to see your current saving throws under your 'affects' list.
- At one point, you could stand on people's rocking horse, even though they were owner only, and take them for a joy ride. Too bad you didn't know that before they changed it.
- Global shouts cannot be heard from within the realties
- When waiting around for the Iron Worm, it is good to 'set refuse-items on" so that nobody slips you a token just as you type 'give token ganuk'. Actually.. having refuse-items on by default is not a bad idea.
- The Riddenmast ferry? surveys as A well-crafted coaster ship fights the current'.
- who can take a variety of arguments, and they mostly stack. So you can do who 30 90 shaman ogre, which will list all the shaman ogres online between level 30 and 90. Other arguments you may not realize are available are immortal, notaway, and patterns with * and ? as wildcards.
- You can pay your vendor while dead.
- If you set a snare, search and disarm it; the same place cannot be snared again till the disarmed snare decays away.
- One can check whether a room is recallable by typing "clan gohall checkzone" without actually recalling. This is especially useful in places like Dungeon Avarice.
- One can check if a person is shifted anywhere in the world by adding them to the ignore list and then checking the list. Shifted people show up as (In Disguise).
- Recalling from the 'Arcane Archipelago' worldgate (sometimes called "Arcane/CTF") will bring you to the Traveler's Retreat, and recalling from the so-called "Keep" gate will actually take you to Dungeon Deceit. This situation is made even more confusing because the Western Beltane gate is sometimes called the "Deceit" gate for historical reasons, but actually recalls to Takhtin.
- who notaway will list everyone online that is not away. who away will list all the players online that have names beginning with 'away'.
- The Y'goth Hunter has the keyword ygothhunter, and the Balrog Hunter has the keyword balroghunter. That is nice if you want to track one but not the other.
- The command "get <item> corpse" can be improvised as "get <item> <name>" in case you need to loot from a specific corpse. This is especially useful when multiple people have died in CPK and you need to make sure that you're looting the right corpse.
- You can fly over snared, CoF and CoT rooms using a carpet, broom, or a wooden rocking horse unharmed.
- Hiding while you're sneaking suppresses the room echo about you going into hiding.
- You can use vendor search '<spellname>' to search for a scroll on sale, that way you don't really need to know the name of the scroll.
- To determine if somebody really is AFK you can just add them to your notify list and check the list. The system will display their idle time along with their online status.
- If you're in the maze of twisty passages in ethereal void, if the down happens to move into the room you're at you'll see the message "You hear a loud rumbling sound as a passage down opens!". Go down and visit the hermit!
Ticks
Having a tick timer plugin, or being able to time ticks mentally can be very beneficial.
- Mobs that are aggro usually only re-aggro on ticks. If you calm or flee into a room with aggro mobs, they will attack when the tick goes off. You can use this to your advantage.
- You regen on ticks. If you are fighting a hard mob and need to sleep a lot, fleeing slightly before a tick, sleeping as the tick occurs, and then going back in to fight for the remainder of the tick will allow you to maximize your damage and minimize your downtime. Also if you need to do a "full heal" in the minimum amount of time, sleep as the tick occurs, stand, cast your healing / buffs, then sleep again as the next tick occurs. No need to stay asleep between the actual ticks.