Wednesday, January 30, 2013

013 - Beginners Guide : Tip 4 - Learn to farm

A good drop during farming

Bigpoint profiles Drakensang Online as a free to play mmorpg.  There has been much debate whether DSO is really free to play or not.  For me it is certainly possible to DSO for free.  But if you want to compete with the best, you will need to invest some $$ or learn to farm.

What is farming ?

What is farming actually ?  Underneath the definition taken from mmoterms.com

The act of accumulating currency or items by constantly killing a mob or repeatedly performing a series of actions.

In Drakensang there are 2 reasons to farm.
  • The first one is to obtain Crystals of Truth, andermant, health potion or blue essence. This is done by clearing, mostly lower level, dungeons.
  • The second is to obtain unique items.  This is done in group by killing a boss over and over again until he/she drops the unique item.

To measure is to know

If you want to start farming it is good to know what to expect.  The question you should ask yourself is where do I get the most of the wanted item(s) in a certain amount of time?  The only way to know this is to note every drop you got and do some statistics on them.  After a while you will notice that not all dungeons have the same droprate. 

note : I will give the droprates of several dungeon in one of the next posts

Keeping statistics about droprates has a few other benefits too.
  • If droprates change you will be able to know soon.  This was the way I know droprates at gorga normal has changed, despite what Bigpoint says.  Read the post about the end of gorga normal farming
  • You will farm more because you will farm in the best places
  • You will farm more because you will often do an extra run to get more number for your statistics
  • Keeping records makes farming less boring.  To be honest, this is not the most exiting part of the game.
Best way to farm at Drakensang Online

Underneath a way to farm for Crystals of Truth, andermant, and so on.  Unique farming, at bosses, is different.

  1. Find the map of a low level dungeon.  You can make one yourself (screenshot and paint) of the wiki pages can help you too.
  2. Study the map and try to figure out the shortest route possible to cover the entire map.  Quick runs are important because you can do more runs in the same amount of time.
  3. Start clearing the map.  While doing so, make note of your drops.  Excel is a good program for this. (make your notes first on paper, import them later in excel)
  4. While clearing, pay attention where the treasury chests are.  Make a mark on the map where there are.  You'll see that the chest are not in the same place every time.  But they do have dedicated 'slots' which are worth reminding so you can find them easily in the future.
  5. Take notes on how long it takes to clear that dungeon
  6. After 5 runs or so, start studying your results.  Use the formula function in excel to calculate the average drop of a certain item per run or, even better, per hour.
  7. When you've done this for several dungeons, you can decide which one is the best for you.

2 comments:

  1. Great thread. I am new to the game and look forward to doing this in the future.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good post, thanks for the help!

    ReplyDelete