So I finally GM'ed LP last night. It's not hard to do, but some patience is required. I'm going to share a few things I learned during the process below... some (or all) of them may have been covered in this thread already, it's been a while since I read it. Hope it helps some of you though.
1. Get Stealth
You can drop it later, but it saved me more times than I can count, particularly in places like Evil Mages and Tera Keep. After you pick the chest, stealth away one square, double click it to pop the trap, and then you can loot the chest from there. Then stealth to a safe recall spot to your next chest.
2. Click the Chest
After you recall in, you can single-click a chest you think is pickable even from across the screen. You want to see "a wooden chest" or "a metal chest" as the description, as that means it is pickable and has not yet been picked by anyone. If you see "0 items, 0 stones" (or any other number), it's worthless to you, so go to the next one. This will save you a lot of unnecessary stealthing around wasting time.
3. Rings Are Good
Most of the necklaces and clothing you will get is garbage, but you should still take it anyway because occasionally there's a good item in them. The rings, however, are always (or almost always?) a good item (teleport, invis, etc) in my experience. If you see a ring in a chest, take it *first*. If you don't, someone else surely will
4. How Many Chests
Early on, I did not record the number of chests it took for a .1, but based on gut feel, I suspect that I would get .1 LP every 10-15 chests on average.
Starting a 98.5 I logged every chest I picked, and here are the results:
98.5 - 30
98.6 - 10
98.7 - 11
98.8 - 1
98.9 - 36
99.0 - 5
99.1 - 10
99.2 - 32
99.3 - 5
99.4 - 11
99.5 - 39
99.6 - 6
99.7 - 36
99.8 - 20
99.9 - 14
100.0 - 36
Note that those are CHESTS picked, not picking attempts. The picking attempts won't really matter since you can't control that, and attempts will depend on simple variance based on your picking skill. You can control how many chests you pick, obviously.
So from 98.5 to GM, I picked 302 chests. That works out to an average of 19 chests per .1 at that level, with a high of 39 and a low of 1 chest for a .1 of skill.
So with the slightly lower earlier average, and accounting for statistical variance, you're probably looking at between 700-800 chests to GM it from 95.0. The unfortunate part of that isn't the fairly high number, but rather the fact that you will be limited mostly be the number of unpicked chests you can find - there is a lot of competition for these chests in my experience.
5. Start Early
As I mentioned, your skill gain will largely be limited by how many unpicked level 4 chests you can find. I would often start at server up (around 630a central time) and I would typically find 90% of the level 4s waiting to be picked. Later in the day I'd be lucky to find 20-30% of the spots unpicked. Early bird gets the chest.
6. T2A
I also found the T2A chests were considerably less competitive. I could often just camp them, pick, empty chest, repeat if I didn't have time to recall around. I don't recommend camping Tera Keep tho, as it's a no-recall zone and many of the reds there apparently have tracking.
7. Evil Mages, Daemons, Drakes, and Balrons
If you weren't aware, all of these critters agro incredibly fast. You do NOT want to try to squeak off a recall standing within a tile or two of any of them, or you'll be OooOOoo'ing with the fishes.
8. Set a reasonable goal
Like I mentioned earlier, patience is the key to GM'ing this skill. If you just try to blow through it quickly, you're going to be very frustrated. Early on, I tried to set a reasonable goal for skill gain... something like 0.1-0.3 per day. Even with that, sometimes I met the goal and sometimes I didn't. But the key is not to burn out and give up on it because you didn't get 1.5 in a day or some such.
9. Asshole Alert
Many of the pickers you will encounter are good folks just looking to gain skill. There are a few, however, who will try to either PK you, or reveal you so that you're killed by MOBs while looting your chest. Of these, I remember the following names:
filch
Mia Lock
Rumple Fourskin (red who camps chests waiting for LPers to PK)
If you encounter any of these, be careful and/or bring in a PVP'er to dispatch them.
10. Emptying Chests
Yes, it is true that emptying the chest will make it respawn faster. Actually, technically, emptying it only makes the current chest *despawn* faster, arguably leading to an earlier spawn for the next one. In my experience, the difference between emptying the chest and not emptying it was a mere few minutes.
Now, you should consider that you're putting yourself at some risk to empty a chest, because in many cases you'll be throwing worthless stuff on the ground, alerting anyone nearby to your presence. Yes popping the trap also alerts someone to your presence, but you do that one time and if they're not there to see it, there's no additional risk to you.
If, however, you spend 2-3 minutes emptying a chest by throwing things on the ground, you've got a lot longer window where people can discern that you're there. I'm not saying never do it, I'm just saying consider the circumstances and whether the additional risk to you (slight though it may be) is worth the few extra minutes it will take to despawn the chest.
I think that's about it folks. Good luck in your quest to master this skill, and thanks to all of those who posted earlier in the thread about where to find the level 4 chests. Without that information, this skill would have been immeasurably more difficult!
Good luck!
Whitley
surround yourself with tables and use invisibilty.invis items
