Gideon's Guide to Tracking Events! Just in time for Easter 2015!! This is essentially a 3 part guide: Part I: Events Mega Guide! How to have fun and succeed at UOR Events! Part II: Gideon's Guide to Tracking Events Part III: UOR Event History Loot Guide 2.0 I'll be honest fellow UO:R-ers - I once felt that the Tracking events were stacked against me. I would head out into the wild with a short window to play and would come home after a few exhausting and frustrating hours searching the world with a handful of kills and a mountain of disappointment. I didn't understand how others could be successful and attributed their success to a variety of factors: too much time on their hands, insider knowledge, or worse. I was wrong. There is a lot involved in these events and I'm writing this guide to share with you what I've learned. Hopefully this will inspire others to participate in these events. I feel that they are rewarding and fun. They can be frustrating but also addictive and competitive. It's great to see Britain come alive with activity as folks search far and wide for leprechauns, turkeys, elves, and cupid minions. Most importantly, it can be a windfall. I would highly encourage all new players to participate in these activities - don't wait until later! Start on the next event! With luck you can land a few key drops which can get you to your next objective - a new house, new outfit, or new maybe your dream CTF weapon. So check it out, UOR - Gideon's Guide to Tracking Events! Before getting started, however, I'd like to refer you to this picture of a Coconut Crab: Now that I've got your attention, let's get started: Part 1: Character Build Essential Skills: 100 Magery - You will be Marking and Gating like crazy so you must have 100 Magery. 100 Meditation - See above, Mana will be your limiting resource so 100 Meditation is mandatory. 100 Tracking - Tracking is the bread and butter for finding the monsters. 100 Detect Hidden - Detect Hidden grants a bonus to Tracking vs. creatures with Hiding and/or Stealth. Recommended Skills: 100 Hiding - This skill is handy mostly for breaking aggro so you can Mark / Gate. 100 Resist - Many of the event mobs are Magery users and survivability is important. Important vs. PKs also. Optional Skills: 100 Eval Int - Not particularly useful for the main purpose of this character but if you've got free points, Eval Int is always a great pickup for a Mage. 100 Wrestling - Survivability vs. both Monsters and PKs. 100 Stealth - Makes it harder for others to Track you. Might be useful in avoiding PKs. 60 Stealing (Real Skill) - With 60 Stealing you can enter the thieves guild and purchase the disguise kit. This might be helpful if you want to keep your identity hidden. Stats: 100 Strength 25 Dexterity 100 Intelligence You could drop the Strength and add more Dexterity if you really care about Mind Blast but our goal is to avoid pvp as much as possible. Carrying capacity (regs, runes, gold, and loot) and maximum mana are our primary concerns here. 100 Int is non negotiable as it impacts both your maximum Mana and your Mana regeneration rate (passive and active). We rely a lot on passive mana regeneration since we want to use Tracking every 10 seconds, giving us no time to Meditate. Besides, we're constantly on the move! One of my Scouts: Part 2: Character Loadout Horse Full Barbed Leather 150+ Mandrake Root, Black Pearl, Bloodmoss, Sulfuric Ash 50 Other Regs Trapped Pouches Greater Refresh Pots Bag with 50 or so Unmarked Runes Part 3: Drop Point You'll want to have a Drop Point that you recall back to and stock up on supplies. This can be a bank, house with Secures on the steps, etc. But you'll want to have 2 runes back to your Drop Point just in case one gets blocked for some reason. At the Drop Point you'll be unloading Rares, Gold, Gems, and other loot if you're into that kinda thing. So make sure you've got plenty of room or a fast way to quickly move that stuff to another secure location. You'll also use your Drop Point to restock. You'll want to have a mountain of regs here to quickly restock as well as some extras of your other equipment - potions, armor, etc. You'll take a bit of melee damage from time to time and enough of that will break your barbed suit. I keep a few extras around so that my scout doesn't become a glass cannon. Wasting regs and mana on Greater Heal isn't efficient and hurts our scouting! Drop Point w/ Extra Supplies: Part 4: Runin' Alright so you're Scout is built, loaded, and has a base to work out of. Now it's time to get down to the mechanics of Scouting. http://www.uorenaissance.com/map/index.php This is the world and you will eventually memorize it's geography. You can either use that one, or you can go full tilt and download a version of the map you prefer. Or go even more nerdy and print up a version! Personally I have a pretty high resolution map that also has The Lost Lands, Wind, and the dungeons. I'll leave you to figure out what kind of map you prefer to use, but a map is essential! As you familiarize yourself with the world I'd suggest adding notes to your map - spawn points, interesting locations, locations w/o spawns, etc. Here you can see I'm using the UOR website map and I've picked a portion that's a particularly tough area to scout - the area around Sacrifice Shrine NE of Vesper. This area is rough because it's friggin huge and it's got all those inconvenient water ways that make you run in inefficient patterns. However, I've found tons of bunnies, leprechauns, and turkeys here - so you gotta scout it! So here's the plan: Optimize your Scouting by marking a rune at an endpoint and imagine there's a radius around which Track + Detect will find targets. I'm not super familiar with how far Tracking will go so there's some modification possible with the radius. If you want to be faster in your runs, use a larger radius. If you want to be more thorough, use a smaller radius. It also probably varies from event to event depending on if the monsters have Hiding and/or Stealth. This gives an idea of what you're trying to accomplish in your Scouting. Sweep across the map and track every 10 seconds. If you Tracking efficiently - ie, not near the coast and covering as much land as possible with each use, you can hit large areas in short amounts of time. In the above image I've done a huge land mass in just about a minute of game time (6 uses of Tracking). Make a macro to use Tracking, wait .2 seconds, and click the appropriate target type (ex. easter bunnies fall under animals). This way you can run while Tracking without needing to stop - every second counts! Even better, put this hotkey next to Recall. You'll be using both a LOT. Each time I find a target, I pursue the target (taking me off course), mark a rune, kill, track once at my current location in case there are other nearby targets, then return to my previous course where I left off. Once you've scouted the world once you'll have a set of runes like shown below. Notice that I don't bother naming them or putting them into books. That's primarily to save time - both in marking and recalling, however, there is also the fact that - You will die. That's just a fact of life during these events. You don't want to waste time and you don't want to set yourself up for a big loss. So instead of investing a lot of time into naming runes, organizing them, etc. and just helping out some PK who manages to kill my scout, I've just got some random bag of runes they'll hesitate to investigate and even if they do, won't be able to make sense of my organization. Those aren't even organized by geography really but I'll leave some things propriety secrets for the time being. Part 5: Milkin' You will alternate your time between Scoutin' and Milkin'. Scouting the world involves systematically exploring the overworld, dungeons, and lost lands looking for new locations of spawns. While scouting you'll come across targets at or near previously marked locations. You can adjust your existing runes if you feel they need to be better positioned so a recall + Tracking hits the locations you've seen nearby with spawns, or you can mark new runes. I'd put a little mark on the map where you find a mob, however, so that looking back you can begin to find patterns. Ultimately, the fewer runes you have, the better. You don't want to waste mana and time recalling just a short distance from another mark. If you can hit both with a single recall + Track, that frees up valuable time to hit other areas of the world. After you've fully scouted the world, you begin Milkin' those runes. Cycle through your runes, tracking, mini-scouting (running in a short circle pattern around your rune to hopefully hit wandering mobs), and killing mobs. Milkin' a full set of runes can take a long time - especially if the monsters are difficult to kill. Once you've done a full circuit of your runes, start again from the beginning. If you took long enough, the monsters might have already begun respawning. If not, enter a scout cycle to refine existing runes and hopefully locate new locations of spawns. Part 6: Know Your Enemy There are several Tracking Events on UO:R historically. Here they are: Valentine's Day During Valentine's Day you don't need to Scout very much. You'll want to locate minions and archers of Cupid in the overworld which can drop scrolls. The scrolls can be used at the Valentine's Day Champ Spawn Shrine in front of Wrong dungeon. You will spend almost all of your time during Vday at this shrine working the spawn which also drops scrolls. So really you only need to Scout in the sense of this guide to get the first spawn up and running as far as I know. The 4 lesser types of monsters can be easily killed with blade spirits. The harder 4 monsters will dispel and require either a dexer or tamer to take down quickly. None of these monsters hide and all are aggressive to players. All show up under NPC humans. Lesser Mobs: Cupid's Rookie Archer - ranged attacker, no magery, very weak. Cupid's Apprentice Archer - ranged attacker, no magery, very weak. Minion of Cupid - melee attacker, no magery, very weak. Servant of Cupid - melee attacker, no magery, very weak. Tougher Mobs: Cupid's Archer - ranged attacker, dispel only, strong. Cupid's Veteran Archer - ranged attacker, dispel only, quite strong. Warrior of Cupid - dispel and decent magery, strong. Sorcerer of Cupid - dispel and high magery, quite strong. Saint Patrick's Day Leprechaun During St. Patrick's Day, Leprechauns spawn in the Overworld, T2A, and some dungeons. Killing leprechauns is the primary objective as they drop rare loot. They die easily to summons, dexers, and tamers. I've seen many players carry piles of Energy Vortex scrolls with them as they hunt to kill them quickly. There is only the one type of leprechaun - they hide, use melee attacks only, can teleport, and are aggressive to players. Leprechauns show up under NPC humans. Easter During Easter there have typically been 2 types of enemies - Easter Bunnies and Fluffy. Finding Easter Bunnies is the main objective as they drop Easter Eggs on the ground behind them as they wander around. Fluffy is the Easter Bunny's dragon protector which will spawn if the Easter Bunny is damaged. The goal of the event is to collect Eggs, not necessarily kill Easter Bunnies. The recommended strategy for this event is to roam the over world (via scouting and milking as described previously), locating Easter Bunnies, and collecting their eggs. Easter Bunnies will only drop so many Easter Eggs before going dry and then they will need to be killed. You will need to dispatch both the Easter Bunny and it's Fluffy protector - they are tethered together. The Easter Bunny isn't particularly strong. It uses melee only and can be easily killed by a dexer or tamer. I do not believe they are able to dispel summons. Easter Bunnies show up under Animals. The Fluffy protector is a whole different story as it's essentially a beefy White Wyrm which means it packs a powerful melee and very high magery - very often casting Flamestrike and easily dispelling summons. Tamers are advised against Fluffy, however, dexers have been known to take them down. Fluffy shows up under Monsters. Both of these monsters can drop rare items and rare hued furs when skinned - make sure to skin them! Thanksgiving This is a standard track-and-kill event. Locate the turkeys throughout the world as shown below and kill them. Dexers and tamers work very well. There is a more extensive guide located here. Christmas The overworld event is high risk, high reward. Thieves and PKs will be everywhere so I recommend working with some other players, hitting locations fast and depositing your loots in the bank quickly. Dexers, bards, tamers, and mages can all be effective during this portion of the event. Holiday coin, Christmas Scrolls, and rare items are the reward - so get busy! For a more in-depth guide, see this link. Part 7: Tips and Tricks Keep Reflect up at all times. It is great vs. the monsters themselves, random monsters, and PKs. Gating in another character to kill the monsters while your scout runs to find another target can speed up your hunting. Discordance is very effective versus some of the tougher monsters! It's more effective to wait until your current target is dead before using tracking again so you don't have that target in your list of choices. There is less competition during non peak hours! Posted by Dalavar: Tracking hits 100 tiles in all directions. Splitting the world up into 100x100 tile squares could make your hunt even more efficient. Posted by Dalavar: You can drop the 60 stealing and remain in the thieves guild and use the Disguise Kit - just don't leave the guild or get any murder counts!
IIRC, it's around 100 tiles in each direction that you can track at GM. And I think in testing I found that it looks 100 tiles in all directions (even diagonal). So what you want to do is divide the world into 200x200 squares, recall to the center of each square, and track from there. Of course if you're getting more than 12 results of the creature type you're looking for, you need to use smaller squares I guess. Also, if you have 60 Stealing for the disguise kit, you can actually drop it down to 0 and still use the kit as long as you remain in the NPC guild.
