Where and How to Use a Provo Mage

Hi all,

I have a question about what places are better or worse to use a Provo Mage for earning gold. A week ago, I was getting killed at Covetous by harpies and after some advice, raised her skills and stats and paid more attention to LOS and things like that. I'm not dying now. I attribute a lot of the death to not being young any more and not understanding aggro very well.

For reference, current skill set is: GM Music, Provo, Eval, Med, Resist, Hiding and ~80 Magery.

Now, I have begun exploring other places. I have been working through Shame and I wanted to ask if (A) Level 1 and some Level 2 is just a better place for a Provo Mage or if (B) I just do not know how to use one efficiently.

My short experience has been as follows:


Level 1 - pretty easy, lots of earth elementals, easy to provoke on to one another and lead to another space if they are alone
Level 2 - dull copper elementals the same as earth, air elementals a little bit trickier since they attack with magic if you need to lead one to another elemental, but usually together so not a big issue
Level 3 - poisons are tough and wipe out air and fire easily, or at least mine did, so hard to get them near enough mobs to whittle them down; mages drop much more gold, but I keep getting one to a room and thus need to get them to chase me to another mage. I keep getting the Evil Lord Mage or whatever in the main room, solo, and no one to provoke him onto.
Level 4/5 - haven't tried yet.

The short of it being, seems way easier to handle melee creatures since I can stand back, nuke them down if needed. I made more money on Level 1 than any other level, I think 5k my first run in about 45min (I know that is peanuts vets!) but then on Level 3 I might get 2k in an hour because I am waiting for mobs to get close enough to each other to provoke. Frankly, it wasn't efen worth it, I can make way more gold killing rat and lizard men for hides to sell to other players. Maybe level 3 is just a tricky level and the gazers in level 4 and bloods in level 5 is where it's at. Or, again, I have no idea how to use a Provo Mage. I come from a long history of melee combat and this stand back and stay the hell away from the fight is a challenge.

My thinking is this is a process and I just have to go and experiment in different places and find what works best for my style, just want to see if i am on the right track or if I need a lot of lessons in effective Provo Mage useage.

(@El Horno - I know you offered to show me balrons and I will absolutely take you up on that when i see you on some time and I know I can be in game for awhile, uninterrupted)

Hey Edward!

The guild can take you out and show you the ropes next time we are all on together. Mob aggro management, solo farming, fighting casters and LoS are all intricacies that come with your build; but they are all learnable and and manageable.

If I dont see you before you go out hunting again here are the first things you need to have set up.
1. Always have Magic Reflect up. Set up a hot key for it, add the scrolls to your restock agent. Always have it up no matter what. If you need to run away and wait for debuffs to end their cooldown before you can cast it again, do that.

2. Have potions set to hot keys. Yellow, orange, red. Clutch heals, cures and refreshes will get you out of a jam.

3. Have you main spells hotkeyed: G-heal, Cure, Teleport, Paralyze, E-bolt, Explotion, Poison, Weaken, Bless. getting these committed to memory will do wonders for your hunting game.

4. Have some magic trapped pouches on you , and set their use to hot keys as well, so you can easily get out of Paralyze when its cast on you.

Know your entrances and exits and what environmental items block LoS. All of this comes with experience and exploration.

You can pull mobs together by going to war mode, attacked them just by double clicking them (which triggers their aggro on you) and then kiting them close enough to you/eachother to be able to start provo. With magic mobs they will be casting on you as they kite, so again, Magic Refl and your pots will come in handy until they within LOS of each other to provo.

Hope this help! We will take you out hunting as soon as we can! Make sure you ask around in the guild IRC chat for help too.

~Krake

Krake speaks the truth. Also, keep in mind mobs chase quite a bit here, so you can kite them being all the way to the edge of the screen, a little too far for their casting distance.

I would suggest:
1.- Shame Elder Gazers, big buck for your time. EG's spawn in pairs in 2 different compartments. You can even step out to wait for them to respawn. BIG TIME spot for PK's. Have that recall macro ready.
2.- Shame Blood Elementals, even bigger bucks for your time. 3 different "pairs" spawn in a relatively close area, and another pair not far to the SW. EVEN BIGGER TIME spot for PK's. Know that you will not always get away, and are fine with that.

Both of those are great as you will have almost 100% success rate with GM instruments. No need for slayers, except I do suggest a blood drinking/ele ban for deseased blood eles. For Elder Gazers/Beholder no instruments of glory hole eye poking have been introduced yet, sadly.

Balrons are GREAT money, and they will make your blood rush!! Mostly because (1) pk's will fall on you in no time flat or (2) you're running for your life because you keep failing provos. Both Hyth and Thera Balrons spawn pairs. Slayers are a must.

Destard is fun and can be big $$$ too, but I don't fancy the open layout, and provo break after running offscreen to bring in more mobs.

BUT, if you want THE best $$ for your time as a pure bard, IMO, do Thera swamp/balrons rounds. This I do not suggest to new players, as you need balls of steel, to be pretty stupid, AND to enjoy running to the star chamber as a ghost to jump the moongate to town often. Oh, it might also be useful to be A VERY GOOD BARD. But it is the only place that comes even remotely close to what a tamer farming (not champing), can make.

Thanks for the advice Krake. I will definitely hit up the PS crowd for some hunting trips. Of your recommendations, I was really only doing #1 - I always have MR up and that has helped. I Am not doing any of the others but will spend time when next on to set up some hot keys for all of those items you mentioned.

Pirul, thanks for the suggested hunting zones. It looks like I didn't make it to the most profitable parts of Shame

I have already seen my share of PKs and escaped all of them so far. The escape macro is ready to go at all times.

you may not be up for some of them quite yet, but you will be shortly. things that spawn in pairs are ideal for provoking

eldger gazers
dread spiders
blood eles
arctic ogre lords
regular ogre lords
balrons
shadow wyrms
titans/cyclops spawn despise
demons at fire usually two on the roof

All this is good advice.

My two cents is to farm stuff that does NOT dispel. Magical creatures with a lot of HP take FOREVER to kill each other if they dont also have a powerful melee hit.
For example, lich's, lich lords, daemons, titans exc... They all will take a long time to kill each other without some help.
Dragons, ogre lords, artic ogrelords and stuff like that on the other hand do not dispel. That means that when youre killing them you can throw an energy vortex or a summoned daemon into the mix to significantly speed up your farming. Plus itll be much less boring.

Good luck.

Well Pirul, you were right about gazers. I setup my hot keys and went out and made 10k in 20 minutes last night.

And then I learned 3 valuable lessons:

1) make sure you re-enable your hot keys before you go back to the dungeon. Not doing say can result in death very quickly.

2) make sure once you retrieve your GM instrument off your corpse you double click it so you aren't using your back up instrument and thus fail the provoke. This can also result in death very quickly.

3) Re-learn #1.

I was pretty pissed at myself after having to take the loooong walk back to Yew moongate for the third time. But I went back this AM and made another 10k in 20min so I'll take this as doubling her bank size and a few painful but needed lessons.

You want "practice"?

Pack light and go work a minor champ spawn. Progress in your skills is verified by your ability to advance the spawn levels.

You've got it pretty much nailed down when you solo barracoon.

Do Titans dispel?

They do. BUT, if you go to Cyclops Valley in t2a (which is also very profitable) you can put a wyvern on them, and the poison from those will chew through cyclopses and titans FAST.

What's the PK frequency in that valley? Haven't been there on this shard yet.

Not sure how it is now. I assume it's hot.

hidden live trackbots and ghostbots everywhere

The new crop of pk's are quite bad though... if you want to farm, farm them.

Wait, I know ghosting is not allowed, but hidden trackbots are?

Got a tracker? If not hop on test with a couple of accounts and play around... you'll be amazed at the weird places you can track dungeons from,

Overall... meh. Ya can't hide like a mouse and play the game to avoid pk's. Next thing you know you're farming sheep in town.
Fight or recall to the next spot.

Very low in comparison to the other farm locations mentioned, its one of my go-to places when I fancy taking my Mage/Bard out hunting. Always lots of spawn and its rare to find anyone else there.

I +1 on Cyclops Valley as a good spot for bards!

I'll have to try it then. Only thing is I doubt you'd top the gold/hr of Bloods. But that spot has been getting hot lately.

ask @Redding

alternative answer: everytime, everywhere!

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