Hello,
I am a broke newbie interested in getting Lockpicking to earn some gold.
I want to ask how much value Cartography provides in terms of time invested/gold return/magic items return. I am interested in collecting magic weapons/armor for a different warrior template and am assessing the value of Cartography.
As I said, I am new and will not have a house for training or money to train magery.
As a starting template, do you choose 50 magery and what other skill will you choose? Cartography?
Also, there seems to be a myth to lock dex at 10. do you still keep dex at 10 after 95 lockpicking?
Please advise on which skills to develop first and what other skills to develop and in what particular order on the template.
What Magery do you need to hunt level 2 or 3 chests?
Can you survive with 50 Magery to hunt level 4 chests?
How does a tamer compare to this treasure hunter in terms of gold making speed?
I know that's a lot of question but please advise on a newbie.
A few days ago, I was naked with only a robe, red-lined (<40hp), walking and fighting a skeleton with a mace in the Vesper gravevard and got killed by a Red mage who cast Explosion on me and who was holding a Halberd when I turned into a ghost. Please take such ruthless killing activity into consideration when giving your advice. For example, do you have time to loot a chest with low magery/resist? Do you need to cast Invisibility to loot safely? Or is the skill Hiding sufficient?
Thank you and have a good day.
Lockpicking/Cartography
Re: Lockpicking/Cartography
As a starting template, do you choose 50 magery and what other skill will you choose? Cartography?
That would be just fine to start with just make sure to put at least 1 point into musicianship so you get a newbie instrument
Also, there seems to be a myth to lock dex at 10. do you still keep dex at 10 after 95 lockpicking?
I think the reason to keep it at 10 is so you can get to 96 or 96.1 real skill before having to start lvl 4 dungeon chests. So yes, you could raise it once you are done with gm chests.
Please advise on which skills to develop first and what other skills to develop and in what particular order on the template.
I assume you will be doing Magery, resists, med, provo, music, lockpicking and carto. If this is the case, I would do music provo first because they are free and will be able to make money quickly with those skills. Then I would try to be making some money to get magery macroed up.
From what I have seen, you could try PMing Wiseone here on the forums to get him to friend you to one of his houses so you can macro or you could contact Pirul about joining the guild NEW. They help new players out and get them on their feet.
What Magery do you need to hunt level 2 or 3 chests?
I would say at least 80
Can you survive with 50 Magery to hunt level 4 chests?
Not unless you have some other method of healing
How does a tamer compare to this treasure hunter in terms of gold making speed?
I would say the potentlial to make massive amounts of gold very quickly definitely goes to the tamer
I know that's a lot of question but please advise on a newbie.
A few days ago, I was naked with only a robe, red-lined (<40hp), walking and fighting a skeleton with a mace in the Vesper gravevard and got killed by a Red mage who cast Explosion on me and who was holding a Halberd when I turned into a ghost. Please take such ruthless killing activity into consideration when giving your advice. For example, do you have time to loot a chest with low magery/resist? Do you need to cast Invisibility to loot safely? Or is the skill Hiding sufficient?
You can't loot tmap chests while hidden. You can however loot dungeon chests while hidden or invised. A lot of people have stealth and hiding on their dungeon chest picker and just gate in to the chest location stealth to it and pick it all while invis. The only time they have to come out of invis is to cast telekinesis on the chest to set the trap off.
That would be just fine to start with just make sure to put at least 1 point into musicianship so you get a newbie instrument
Also, there seems to be a myth to lock dex at 10. do you still keep dex at 10 after 95 lockpicking?
I think the reason to keep it at 10 is so you can get to 96 or 96.1 real skill before having to start lvl 4 dungeon chests. So yes, you could raise it once you are done with gm chests.
Please advise on which skills to develop first and what other skills to develop and in what particular order on the template.
I assume you will be doing Magery, resists, med, provo, music, lockpicking and carto. If this is the case, I would do music provo first because they are free and will be able to make money quickly with those skills. Then I would try to be making some money to get magery macroed up.
From what I have seen, you could try PMing Wiseone here on the forums to get him to friend you to one of his houses so you can macro or you could contact Pirul about joining the guild NEW. They help new players out and get them on their feet.
What Magery do you need to hunt level 2 or 3 chests?
I would say at least 80
Can you survive with 50 Magery to hunt level 4 chests?
Not unless you have some other method of healing
How does a tamer compare to this treasure hunter in terms of gold making speed?
I would say the potentlial to make massive amounts of gold very quickly definitely goes to the tamer
I know that's a lot of question but please advise on a newbie.
A few days ago, I was naked with only a robe, red-lined (<40hp), walking and fighting a skeleton with a mace in the Vesper gravevard and got killed by a Red mage who cast Explosion on me and who was holding a Halberd when I turned into a ghost. Please take such ruthless killing activity into consideration when giving your advice. For example, do you have time to loot a chest with low magery/resist? Do you need to cast Invisibility to loot safely? Or is the skill Hiding sufficient?
You can't loot tmap chests while hidden. You can however loot dungeon chests while hidden or invised. A lot of people have stealth and hiding on their dungeon chest picker and just gate in to the chest location stealth to it and pick it all while invis. The only time they have to come out of invis is to cast telekinesis on the chest to set the trap off.
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freakystuff25
- Posts: 61
- Joined: Fri Feb 01, 2013 9:48 pm
Re: Lockpicking/Cartography
A lot of thanks to the very informative reply.
The last part about "they cast tekeness to set off the trap". Do you mean PKs can set a trap on a spawned dungeon chest? Or do PKs bring their own trap chest to allure you to open? So such trap chest can take a big junk of your health immediately?
Oh...after reading it a few times I think I understand. So most dungeon chests have traps built into it. And it will be wise to cast tekeness to set off potential trap before attempting to lockpick it.
The last part about "they cast tekeness to set off the trap". Do you mean PKs can set a trap on a spawned dungeon chest? Or do PKs bring their own trap chest to allure you to open? So such trap chest can take a big junk of your health immediately?
Oh...after reading it a few times I think I understand. So most dungeon chests have traps built into it. And it will be wise to cast tekeness to set off potential trap before attempting to lockpick it.
Re: Lockpicking/Cartography
Correct. If you pick a lvl 4 dungeon chest and don't disarm the trap, it will insta kill you upon trying to open the chest.freakystuff25 wrote: Oh...after reading it a few times I think I understand. So most dungeon chests have traps built into it. And it will be wise to cast tekeness to set off potential trap before attempting to lockpick it.
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Orion GM B^D
- Posts: 1680
- Joined: Thu Oct 13, 2011 6:35 pm
- Location: Trinsic
Re: Lockpicking/Cartography
Dungeon chests can be opened without taking damage if you are one tile away. Meaningfreakystuff25 wrote:A lot of thanks to the very informative reply.
The last part about "they cast tekeness to set off the trap". Do you mean PKs can set a trap on a spawned dungeon chest? Or do PKs bring their own trap chest to allure you to open? So such trap chest can take a big junk of your health immediately?
Oh...after reading it a few times I think I understand. So most dungeon chests have traps built into it. And it will be wise to cast tekeness to set off potential trap before attempting to lockpick it.
you are standing next to chest, take one step away, so there is one tile between you and the
chest, open with no damage. Casting tele is fine at times, but no need to expose yourself if you
dont have to.
When you are at 95 lockpicking from player made boxes, you will need to do dungeon
chests to get to GM. There is a runebook [95-GM] at Trinny Stone Vendors you can
use or remark for your own use. Post to find the 30-50-75 boxes you'll need to start.
Also you can pick a trapped chest, just cant set off trap until its unlocked.
Trinny Stone VendorsWiseOne wrote:I don't log on often, but when I do, I shop at Trinny Stone Vendors!
@Trinsic Moongate/Est. 6-2-12
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anonymouse
- Posts: 5
- Joined: Tue Feb 12, 2013 2:41 pm
Re: Lockpicking/Cartography
- Cartography is very cheap to train - especially as it levels - it takes under 10k to gm; the gain is not difficulty based so make any map you want. Go around and make a runebook of every cartography store on the shard and you can buy up a ton of maps really easy, or find a rune library with them premarked. Grab 5k gold and buy 120 maps, hide and macro for ~15 min until you are out of blank maps, sell them all back and buy new maps; repeat until you are out of gold, go to the bank and grab another 5k and that will last you until you GM. I would actually stop just shy of gm so that you can't decode L5 maps, and save them until you are able to pick them without detect hidden.
- Choose 50 magery, 49 cartography (more expensive than lockpicking to train) and 1 music/provo (for the newbie instrument).
Go to a stable and gm provo and music while you sleep or are at work, once they are gm you can work on hiding and lock picking (lockpicking only has a 1 second object delay so it levels quickly vs hiding).
Go to T2A and make some magery/lockpick/cartography seed money (total costs are: ~4k for a full spellbook, ~80k for gm magery, ~10k for maps, ~4k for picks) by provoking the ophidians west of Papua and north of terra keep. Practicing magery on them as well (lightning until you can reliably blade spirit and ebolt, eventually using energy vortex) .. they drop a ton of gems that you can sell in Papua along with the junk armor/weapons they drop. With a razor restock agent you can get to 94.9 lockpicking at the bank in Papua without any risk as you can bank and lockpick while hidden; create a 30/30 lockbox and a 50/50 lockbox with new characters, then buy the cheapest gm lockbox you can find (usually easiest to find a gm trapped box and set it off). After you hit 95.0 shown lockpicking, go mark the two L4 chests in the ice dungeon and recall to them on their spawn timers inbetween working other skills as they are both rather risk free gains; if you are bored run through the ice dungeon and pick all the lower level chests as well for regs/gems and generally shitty magic items.
- As it is your first treasure hunter, this is the starting build I would use:
100 magery, 100 meditation, 100 music, 100 provo, 100 lock picking, 100 cartography, 100 hiding.
When you get enough invis items from L4 dungeon chests you can look at dropping hiding for wrestling/resist. You might also want to look at dropping meditation for stealth when you are more experienced and have a second character for gating/summoning/resurrecting. Doing L4 dungeon chests with a second character with meditation to gate you there as you hide and gate in is very profitable, has little risk and L4 chests have chance to drop a L1-L5 treasure map for you to do later, as well as invis, reflect and teleport items that you can sell to people on IRC in no time. Stealth lets you pop and loot L4 chests without having to be revealed other than the explosion animation as well as stealthing in to potentially dangerous situations.
- It isn't a myth, keeping dex at 10 lets you get to 94.9 real lockpicking while at 25 a GM lockbox will only get you to 94.7 real. That is 2 less gains required to GM. The second you get to 94.9 you can bring dex back up to 25.
- If you are using the unlock spell - L1 chests open at 50 magery, L2 chests open at 100 magery, L3+ require lockpicking. Honestly I wouldn't bother wasting your time on treasure maps until you GM magery+provo+music+lockpicking, they don't make you much money unless you are doing L4/L5 and that is mostly off of mob gold/reg drops. It probably isn't worth your time to even bother with detect hidden, but it is up to you. If you are really quick and have your macros down, with gm provo/music/hide/meditation and only 50 magery you can do L4 and L5 chests but I strongly wouldn't recommend it at all as you will probably die a lot - especially without a second character to pop a gate and res you. See my L4/L5 chest method below and you'll see why you want to be gm mage/med/provo/music.
- My preferred method of L4/L5 treasure chests was to summon a few earth elementals (possibly with a second char before you secret him back through the gate - if you don't have meditation on your thunter) before digging up the chest and hiding. While the spawn are distracted going after the elementals, quickly pull up all their healthbars and provo the two most dangerous creatures on each other and then use an invis item. When your timer is up, provo the next two creatures on each other and reinvis again, rinse repeat. Watch all the healthbars of the mobs and reprovo them on each other to keep them all balanced - try and have them all poisoned if there is a dread spider or poison ele around as this really speeds things up. Now, with them all distracted, summon a daemon and start looting from the chest in to a bag on the ground, while provoking any new spawn. You want the last item in the chest to be something easy to grab like a shield or a pair of pants, you want to keep dragging and dropping it back in to the chest to milk every last mob spawn until the chest stops spawning more. Finish the last monster off with a summoned daemon and ebolts. Use an axe to destroy the chest and then go around picking up all the loot and dropping it your now incredibly overweight bag; gate to your house while dragging the bag with you, open the door, get inside and lock it, detect hidden and go through your loot in safety or grab another map and build up a stack of bags to go through.
> With a second char to gate/summon/res, your actual thunter is at very little risk.. just have 30 of each reg for blessing/curing/healing/ebolting/etc and about the same about of picks along with a newbified instrument/axe/shovel .. might be worth your time to create some dummy characters with lockpicking to get some newbified picks as well.
- You will need ~60 detect-hidden to pop a L5 treasure map chest at 95 lockpicking and then less as you level picking, at GM you can drop it entirely. Don't do any tmaps until you gm lockpicking and you are fine without any the wasted skill slot of detect hidden or you can try and supplement your L4 dungeon chest gains with L5 treasure map chest gains.
- I have made several GM tamers on this shard over the years and on others, they will make you a lot of money and are actually much faster to gm than lockpicking (start at the compassion shrine with 50, move to the swamps east of papua / delucia bulls and finally to the fire dungeon - put tames in each four corners on the roof of the huts in the fire dungeon and you can get to GM in ~3 days of extreme grinding from 50). They make more than a lockpicker per hour - but it gets close when you have a stack of L4/L5 maps saved up (dual dragons / wyrms in cyclops valley is very quick money), mostly I just used my tamers to fund characters that are more fun to play.
- Dungeon chests you need to have one space in between the chest and yourself to set off the trap without taking damage - don't bother wasting regs on telekinesis on dungeon chests. You can also loot dungeon chests while invis which is nice. Map chests you will want to step 4 tiles back and cast telekinesis on them to avoid damage and every item you grab from the chest will unhide you.
Read the Treasure Maps wiki entry for more information, but:
Cartography Skill required to decode a map:
Map Level 1 0% Cartography required
Map Level 2 60% Cartography required
Map Level 3 73% Cartography required
Map Level 4 91% Cartography required
Map Level 5 100% Cartography required <- lock your cartography at 99.x until you can pick L5 chests and you will know maps are L5 making it easier to sort.
Skill required to open a treasure chest:
Map Level 1 35 LP -- (or 50 magery)
Map Level 2 70 LP 50-70 LP and some DH (or 100 magery)
Map Level 3 80 LP 70-80 LP and 40-50 DH
Map Level 4 90 LP 80-90 LP and 50-60 DH
Map Level 5 100 LP 90-100 LP and 60 DH
A really good trick is using server-wars downtime to drop your cartography by buying up some useless skills and attempting to decode all your maps .. drop it from gm to just below and you can find all your L5s. Next downtime, drop it from gm to below 91 and you can find all your L4s. Rinse and repeat. Use a char with a locked 0.0 cartography and if they can attempt to decode it's an L1 map. At the minimum skill level to decode a map, it will usually take several attempts, giving you some leeway in your figuring out what maps are without accidentally decoding them.
- Choose 50 magery, 49 cartography (more expensive than lockpicking to train) and 1 music/provo (for the newbie instrument).
Go to a stable and gm provo and music while you sleep or are at work, once they are gm you can work on hiding and lock picking (lockpicking only has a 1 second object delay so it levels quickly vs hiding).
Go to T2A and make some magery/lockpick/cartography seed money (total costs are: ~4k for a full spellbook, ~80k for gm magery, ~10k for maps, ~4k for picks) by provoking the ophidians west of Papua and north of terra keep. Practicing magery on them as well (lightning until you can reliably blade spirit and ebolt, eventually using energy vortex) .. they drop a ton of gems that you can sell in Papua along with the junk armor/weapons they drop. With a razor restock agent you can get to 94.9 lockpicking at the bank in Papua without any risk as you can bank and lockpick while hidden; create a 30/30 lockbox and a 50/50 lockbox with new characters, then buy the cheapest gm lockbox you can find (usually easiest to find a gm trapped box and set it off). After you hit 95.0 shown lockpicking, go mark the two L4 chests in the ice dungeon and recall to them on their spawn timers inbetween working other skills as they are both rather risk free gains; if you are bored run through the ice dungeon and pick all the lower level chests as well for regs/gems and generally shitty magic items.
- As it is your first treasure hunter, this is the starting build I would use:
100 magery, 100 meditation, 100 music, 100 provo, 100 lock picking, 100 cartography, 100 hiding.
When you get enough invis items from L4 dungeon chests you can look at dropping hiding for wrestling/resist. You might also want to look at dropping meditation for stealth when you are more experienced and have a second character for gating/summoning/resurrecting. Doing L4 dungeon chests with a second character with meditation to gate you there as you hide and gate in is very profitable, has little risk and L4 chests have chance to drop a L1-L5 treasure map for you to do later, as well as invis, reflect and teleport items that you can sell to people on IRC in no time. Stealth lets you pop and loot L4 chests without having to be revealed other than the explosion animation as well as stealthing in to potentially dangerous situations.
- It isn't a myth, keeping dex at 10 lets you get to 94.9 real lockpicking while at 25 a GM lockbox will only get you to 94.7 real. That is 2 less gains required to GM. The second you get to 94.9 you can bring dex back up to 25.
- If you are using the unlock spell - L1 chests open at 50 magery, L2 chests open at 100 magery, L3+ require lockpicking. Honestly I wouldn't bother wasting your time on treasure maps until you GM magery+provo+music+lockpicking, they don't make you much money unless you are doing L4/L5 and that is mostly off of mob gold/reg drops. It probably isn't worth your time to even bother with detect hidden, but it is up to you. If you are really quick and have your macros down, with gm provo/music/hide/meditation and only 50 magery you can do L4 and L5 chests but I strongly wouldn't recommend it at all as you will probably die a lot - especially without a second character to pop a gate and res you. See my L4/L5 chest method below and you'll see why you want to be gm mage/med/provo/music.
- My preferred method of L4/L5 treasure chests was to summon a few earth elementals (possibly with a second char before you secret him back through the gate - if you don't have meditation on your thunter) before digging up the chest and hiding. While the spawn are distracted going after the elementals, quickly pull up all their healthbars and provo the two most dangerous creatures on each other and then use an invis item. When your timer is up, provo the next two creatures on each other and reinvis again, rinse repeat. Watch all the healthbars of the mobs and reprovo them on each other to keep them all balanced - try and have them all poisoned if there is a dread spider or poison ele around as this really speeds things up. Now, with them all distracted, summon a daemon and start looting from the chest in to a bag on the ground, while provoking any new spawn. You want the last item in the chest to be something easy to grab like a shield or a pair of pants, you want to keep dragging and dropping it back in to the chest to milk every last mob spawn until the chest stops spawning more. Finish the last monster off with a summoned daemon and ebolts. Use an axe to destroy the chest and then go around picking up all the loot and dropping it your now incredibly overweight bag; gate to your house while dragging the bag with you, open the door, get inside and lock it, detect hidden and go through your loot in safety or grab another map and build up a stack of bags to go through.
> With a second char to gate/summon/res, your actual thunter is at very little risk.. just have 30 of each reg for blessing/curing/healing/ebolting/etc and about the same about of picks along with a newbified instrument/axe/shovel .. might be worth your time to create some dummy characters with lockpicking to get some newbified picks as well.
- You will need ~60 detect-hidden to pop a L5 treasure map chest at 95 lockpicking and then less as you level picking, at GM you can drop it entirely. Don't do any tmaps until you gm lockpicking and you are fine without any the wasted skill slot of detect hidden or you can try and supplement your L4 dungeon chest gains with L5 treasure map chest gains.
- I have made several GM tamers on this shard over the years and on others, they will make you a lot of money and are actually much faster to gm than lockpicking (start at the compassion shrine with 50, move to the swamps east of papua / delucia bulls and finally to the fire dungeon - put tames in each four corners on the roof of the huts in the fire dungeon and you can get to GM in ~3 days of extreme grinding from 50). They make more than a lockpicker per hour - but it gets close when you have a stack of L4/L5 maps saved up (dual dragons / wyrms in cyclops valley is very quick money), mostly I just used my tamers to fund characters that are more fun to play.
- Dungeon chests you need to have one space in between the chest and yourself to set off the trap without taking damage - don't bother wasting regs on telekinesis on dungeon chests. You can also loot dungeon chests while invis which is nice. Map chests you will want to step 4 tiles back and cast telekinesis on them to avoid damage and every item you grab from the chest will unhide you.
Read the Treasure Maps wiki entry for more information, but:
Cartography Skill required to decode a map:
Map Level 1 0% Cartography required
Map Level 2 60% Cartography required
Map Level 3 73% Cartography required
Map Level 4 91% Cartography required
Map Level 5 100% Cartography required <- lock your cartography at 99.x until you can pick L5 chests and you will know maps are L5 making it easier to sort.
Skill required to open a treasure chest:
Map Level 1 35 LP -- (or 50 magery)
Map Level 2 70 LP 50-70 LP and some DH (or 100 magery)
Map Level 3 80 LP 70-80 LP and 40-50 DH
Map Level 4 90 LP 80-90 LP and 50-60 DH
Map Level 5 100 LP 90-100 LP and 60 DH
A really good trick is using server-wars downtime to drop your cartography by buying up some useless skills and attempting to decode all your maps .. drop it from gm to just below and you can find all your L5s. Next downtime, drop it from gm to below 91 and you can find all your L4s. Rinse and repeat. Use a char with a locked 0.0 cartography and if they can attempt to decode it's an L1 map. At the minimum skill level to decode a map, it will usually take several attempts, giving you some leeway in your figuring out what maps are without accidentally decoding them.