Can anyone give me opinions on where the most profitable farming spots are for a provoker? Side Q: does eval int effect strength of energy vortex? Or duration? Thanks!
Eval has no effect on summons at all. Popular provo farm spots (expect PKs) Arctic Ogre Lords (Ice Dungeon) Blood Elementals (Shame) Elder Gazers (Covetus & Shame) Balrons & Daemons (Hythloth) (slayer instrument probably helpful here) Liche + Liche Lord (Deceit) 2x Balrons (Inner Terrathan Keep Throneroom) Good spots with less PK activity (Might even earn more GPS at these spots in long term) Arctic Ogre Lords Outside Ice dungeon in (t2a overworld) Succubus Room (Hythloth) Executioners (Wrong) I would suggest you try something else. Generally provocation gets you money because you get get 2 high dps monsters to kill eachother, or at least 1 high dps monster to quickly dispatch lower level monsters. When there is no high dps monster, you can just get a huge number of "duels" going and as long as there are new monsters you can keep going. There are a few places where it's very dangerous to hang around. Even tamers may have difficulties in the middle of it due to the sheer number of monsters in a confined area. But a provocationist can get away with controlling the spawn and get many battles going. The best of these spots I think is the battleground outside the Terrathan keep, and also starting the champ inside the terrathan keep. Either of these two spots have so many mid-high level monsters, that you can get 40 fighting 40 at any one time and make some huge gold per hour if you can stay attentive and control the spawn. If PK's come, and your bard has hiding (which many recommend you don't get on a bard), and you're a competent player who knows their way around the area and how aggro works etc.. you should not only live, but likely make the PK kill themself. Tricks like running into the spawn and hiding so the non provo monster track on the pk that is a second behind you and then waiting for an opportunity to simply recall (makes the provo monsters all instantly aggro the pk) work well. It's a great place if you're a good UO player. If you're not a good UO player, it;s a great place to learn to be one.
Sure: Use skill: Provocation That's it. If you want to carefully control the spawn, do it yourself. No macro that does provocation, next target, etc will work very well in situation like this.
Titan valley is another good spot if you want to avoid PK's. Destard is great for bards.. but you'll be dealing with PK's all of the time. When I farmed Destard I'd throw a blade spirit down to distract the dragons/drakes and then just work on provoking them. Keep throwing blades down to speed things up.
I cannot stress this enough: NEVER use macros to provo. They will get you in trouble more often than not. My bard used to pwn thera swamp, and all I used was a hot key for provo and ctrl+shift. That’s it. You will need a fast horse for running for your life.
I've been YELLING about the profitability (and fun) that The Lost Lands (T2A) can be for over a year now. I can't seem to get players out of their safe-space-echo-chambers and try a new setting to save my life. GET TO T2A DANG NABBIT! MORE GPH THAN YOU THINK!
Get GM hiding ASAP and controlling spawns is easy. I can easily go behind the wall going to Balrons in Terathan Keep and provoke 4 or 5 Avengers and Matriarchs on each other without dieing and its pretty tight back there. Provoke 2 and immiadely hit my self invis macro. Or just run around a wall and hide. Also unless ur AFK its impossible to get PKed on this server with show incoming names. Then theres easy mode camps like Succubus and EGs where they gotta open up doors to reach you.
If you successfully provoked 2 mobs onto each other and nothing else has you targeted, you can simply tab in and out of combat and hide. No need to cast invis or run behind a wall first. Most of the time i just hide right on top of the provoked monsters so when one of them dies, i can check what they have or id stuff on their corpse before next one pops up.
There are really only a handful of 'farmable' spots. Titan valley is great for Provo tamer, Colossus can be handled by one client. Ophidian keep in the desert. Can spawn the ophidian queen. Terathan keep/ ophidians west of Papua. Titans and Colossus spawn throughout the desert. Ancient liches in khaldun. Gph will vary depending on spawn, and your ability to kill.
First time I went to cyclops valley, I died two minutes after being there from a PK and got all my gold taken. Was that just bad luck?
Well, hotspots are always contested and visited by pks, unless you are an experienced hunter you WILL die. Now, to be an experienced hunter, you need to get experience, so: - Go to those hotspots, bank oftenly, expect to die (meaning: dont get frustrated) and learn how to hunt and rotate through different areas. When im out farming I dont simply stay at one place the whole time, most probably will be cleaning them and rotating between a few. Go to a rune library, check for books named Hot Spots, High End, Outdoor Spawns, etc try them out according to your build (I dont hit Destard dragons with my dexxer) and take notes on them: Gold, trafic, respawn time, strategic geography, etc and you will start to have some clues and make your own farming route. I advise this because its a fun task imo. I enjoyed going around testing spots and finding which worked better for me. Also, there are lots of places "out of the grid" and for these I recommend you traveling around, simple as that. Maybe the spots that work for me wont work for you (because timezone, build, profile settings, macro/hotkeys, experience, etc) and won´t make any value when you hit a place I recommend and end up dying constantly and getting frustrated. Therefore, GPH means nothing without the experience. Trying alien formulas = 0 GPH.
I recommend this build: Hiding, Provocation, Musicianship, Magery, Meditation, Resisting Spells, Tracking You'll want a bard with these skills for holiday spawns. Since it's a PVE character, there is no reason to have eval. If what you're fighting can't die from energy vortexes, you shouldn't be fighting it. There are a few tricks to kill mobs that dispel, to allow you to use EVs to kill them (recall away, keep poison on them, etc).
Yes, I've been there quite a few times and sure, I've gotten killed and looted. But I have definitely made more than I lost. To Fisu's point, it's all about knowing when to bank, what your safety number is (how much gold you think should be the max you farm before you bank) and building efficient organizer agents to recall/gate to bank, dump loot, and get back to the farming spot. I can usually gate to a bank and get back to farming within 7-10 seconds as long as my bank isn't full.
Well.. my main goal when i goes to a farming spot is to get a boost.. so as a bard. you should understand what kind of bosses you can kill without pets... Thats why i recommend Theratam swamp, efrets, gargoiles and executioners. If you are in a hour you are meeting so many pks ou can go to not so watched spots just to farm gold: phoenix(at delucia passage), ice fiends, daemons cage(is how i call a place inside hytlot) and if you have eval, red mages at fire dungeon are not bad too... But if you want hunt cheap and ready to fight against a pk i recommend: provo, peace, music, eval, resitst, medit, magery. with this char you could have a very profitable hunt at balrons, blood elementals, destard, ice, cyclops valley, linch lords and etc..