====== Buffs ====== ==== How to Increase Your Health ==== I am able to run around when doing serious combat grinding with 700+ health using the following: * Two combat skills at level 80 (skills give you bonuses to max HP) * Disappointing Corn Surprise or Treas (relatively easy high level foods to create) * Endurance level 60 * Ruggedizer or Make Me Strong Juice or Never Die Juice (depends on situation) * Alcohol barrel buff of either +15 or maybe ~25 HP? (again, different buffs for different situations) * Rubywall Crystal +Inv gear * Symbol of Hate Made Manifest Amulet. +60 Health and -30 Power * Meditation buff using Dalia or other flower Meditation buffs When you hit level 30-40 and have some time, go to the Ranlon Cave and just tank Ranlon for an hour every couple of levels and you'll find yourself keeping Endurance closer to your skill level. Also, the Fae Bears in Eltibule and fighting and surviving the bears in the Fae Realm itself can be beneficial. The Animal Nexus cave also has some hard-hitting bears. If you carry and use Ruggedizers, keep in mind you might want to also bring an UnPig Juice along with you. I've been using Ruggedizers for ~1 year in casual play and I've turned into a Pig maybe twice. When the game says that it is rare, it really is pretty rare. I think it's a worthwhile buff to always have on you, honestly, just make sure you farm up some unpig juices first so you are prepared. As I got further into Cheesemaking the safer "Never Die Juice" uses "Sweet Whey" and gives the exact same buff (meaning it doesn't stack) as the Ruggedizer. There is an amulet called the "Symbol of Hate Made Manifest" that gives you +60 HP at a cost of a -30 to Power. If you use Snacks and Nature Appreciation buffs from flowers, you aren't going to have an issue with Power, so it really just turns out to be a free +60 Health buff which is quite huge. I would highly recommend using that amulet if you need health for tanking as a solo, even if it's at level 50-60 and you have combat skills at 70. At high levels there are better necklaces, but this is one of the more powerful necklaces in the game for solo players, in my honest opinion. ==== Increasing Speed/Sprint for Travel ===== Please note that these skills mean much less for players now that we have horses, however I'm leaving it here because there are still instances where speed gear is useful (most notably, the World Boss event) Early players will have options like Windstep Shoes (+2 Sprint) and an Amulet of the Rugged Traveler (+1 Sprint) available to them if they need Sprint speed, but there are further buffs and changes that mid and high level players have that are worth noting as many players may not realize just how easy some of the early travel options can be obtained. One such buff comes from Shamanic Infusion, the level 46 ability -- Shaman's Deer Foot Infusion -- will provide a +1.5 Sprint Speed bonus. When playing Psychology, you can also get speed buffs for when one of the abilities, Positive Attitude, is on cooldown and one such buff (+4 Sprint) is on boot items, meaning that you could have the buff on a collected pair of Windstep Shoes around level 40 or so, when you should be partaking in Casino Daily runs where you are likely to get such shoes. If you put the Shamanic Infusion buff on a pair of these, you will have a whopping 2 + 4 + 1.5 = +7.5 Sprint from just one item alone. (It's important to note that you can get a +4 Sprint from Positive Attitude to your helm item as well.) Another notable Sprint option for mid-game and on comes from Battle Chemistry. While Battle Chemistry isn't available till after you have hit level 50 in Alchemy, most players won't have much difficulty doing that unless they completely neglect the skill. You can level it quickly buying cheap components off of the Buy Used tab on vendors. If you have bones you can turn them into bone meal for some of the cheapest and easiest levels, in fact. Once you do have the skill, the "grind" to get to level 29 in Battle Chemistry isn't too difficult and can mostly be done in a single afternoon if you already have a high level combat ability you can use with it to grind XP. At level 29, you will have access to the Extra Toes 2 ability which will give you a Sidebar ability you can cast after you enter every new zone to have an additional +3 Sprint while in that zone. There is also a temporary Haste Concoction ability that you can use on your combat bar every so often for an addition +6 Sprint burst. Other abilities with speed buffs include Shield, Druid, Fire Magic, Lycanthrophy, and most of the animal forms have at least one speed option. You can [[http://wiki.projectgorgon.com/wiki/Haste|see more on the wiki Haste page here]]. Just remember to build at least one "Travel Loadout" that is designed to have high Inventory and Sprint on it, bind it and your combat loadout to keys (I use [, ], and \), and you can switch between combat skills and that loadout as needed. Again, this isn't really necessary since the introduction of mounts, but you may still want a Travel Loadout focusing on inventory space. For a lot of the veterans of PG, high inventory speed loadouts are a convenience worth grinding for. As a newbie or demo player, you should NOT be focusing on this, however. Instead just work on getting your first two combat skills to max level. ==== A Story About Cheese and Mushrooms ===== === Cheesemaking === As you get to maxing out your second combat skill, you might find that you are spending a lot of time and/or money on Gardening and if you have the bottles, it might be better to consider using them to pull milk out of mobs and to start leveling Cheesemaking instead. These buffs are generally "better" than regular food buffs as they give higher amounts of Max Health and both Health and Power for the snack versions. In fact, if you can afford to drop like 1150 per stomach or so at going rates right now, you should really consider this option. There was a recent patch that, along with the new Povus Zone, introduced new buffs intended to help creators and users of regular Cooking skill foods with survival in the new zone against the Ratkin. These have been, in my honest opinion, very welcome changes as the Max Health buff isn't as necessary as the physical damage mitigation in this particular zone. I still find myself often running Cheese as a snack, but for the meal I do use regular foods like the aforementioned Disappointing Corn Surprises, Dinobites, or Rustic Meatsterpieces. These meals give that critical Crushing, Slashing and Piercing damage mitigation that you need to survive the Ratkins and Orcs in Povus. These are also particularly good foods for leveling or grinding loot at the Plateau in Rahu. One of the needed components for some of the midlevel Cheeses is also the Ratkin molds, which used to be pretty rare, but aren't rare anymore and are easily farmed in the Rahu Sewers or Povus, where most players are grinding high level combat skills anyway. You may notice you have a huge stock of Sweet Whey as you level this skill or make some of the better cheeses. This can be used below in the Never Die Juice recipe. === Mushroom Farming === Of course, to get all the Field, Blood, and Mycena Mushrooms you need for making Cheese, I would encourage you to start working on Carpentry right away and stocking up on both Oak and later a boatload of Maple Wood. You will want to be able to get to the point where you can make Oak Wood Frame Boxes and later, Maple Wood Frame Boxes for the Epic Crop Mushroom Box. These will be used, along with various substrates and mushrooms, and using the right one of the [[eltibule#phases_of_the_moon|Phases of the Moon]] to make dozens of mushrooms out of just one source mushroom. Most of the material needed to make substrates can be found on Mushroom Jack. Remember that things like eyeballs are technically "organs" and spider legs count as "limbs". These are used to grind Mushroom Farming up to ~25 where you can use the good Mushroom Farming boxes. The more "exotic" substrates are made with stuff that can be found in the various [[serbuledungeons|Serbule Dungeons]] like Fulgurite from a Charged Pig in Carpal Tunnel and Ectoplasm from Command Ferrows in the Brain Bug Cave or the mobs in Borghild. Even at the higher levels of Mushroom Farming, the importance of the Maple Boxes, in particular the Epic Crop box, cannot be understated. These are very effective ways to get large amounts of mushrooms without putting in much investment, and Maple Wood is very freely found in Eltibule and Kur. === Never Die Juice === If you have been leveling Cheesemaking, you may find that you have an excess amount of Sweet Whey around level 80 or so. You can put it to good use making Never Die Juice which you can store either in a Carpentry Box or Small Box of Space or even your Saddlebag along with other buffs. You'll need: * Bottle of Sweet Whey * Field Mushroom Flakes * Brain * Fire Dust The Fire Dust can be purchased off of "Buy Used" tabs or farmed from the Fire Sheep and Fire Spiders. Brains I get from Mushroom Jack's Buy Used tab (or hit up the Brain Bug Cave), and Field Mushrooms you are probably already farming using Mushroom Farming.