Lockpicking 95-GM

[morgan1109]

I have a Provo/Music/Mage/Med/Carto/LP/Hide treasure hunter. I’ve done on the order of 50 level 5’s, and an ungodly amount of level 4’s. I probably die about every 20th map which is to say not often enough to really care. More times than I care to admit the deaths happen on islands with silver serpents. Those things are harsh and way to fast. They tend to wander back more than others when you try to drag them off. Islands with silver serpents scare me a lot more than any level 5 chest does.

Having a mage that can cast gate and access to a treasure map library makes any death a 2-3 minute annoyance at best (3 minutes if you need a new mount). For those who want to say “well how do you gate with if a bunch of mobs are standing on a chest?” The answer is you don’t. Nearly every place a treasure chest spawns has another treasure chest location within 1-3 screens. Just gate in and out through a nearby chest location.

The keys to not dying and doing it on one build are four fold:
1. Control the spawn – you need either taming or barding skills. These things hit hard. You need to make sure they don’t hit you…ever…


2. Bring a mount. Seriously. Those level 5’s chests have some nasty things. Sometimes even when properly provoked they may lash out at you anyway if you are close by. Don’t be close by. Plus the level 5 poison. Yikes. You can’t mine with a mount (dig up a chest). You take it a safe distance away, near a landmark so you can remember its exact location. Tell it to “stay”. You invis it so grays won’t attack it. Then start digging the chest up.


3. Run! Or teleport as soon as the monsters spawn. Get out of there! They take two seconds to react once spawned. Use that time to get as far away as possible (preferably in the direction of your mount). I’d also advise having a couple magi trapped boxes. It’s rare but every once in a while on that first sprint away, one of the mobs will cast paralyze. You need to keep moving, so break that hold immediately, then Hide/Invis. After about 15 seconds any spawn that followed you, will work its way back to the chest. You unhide, reveal your mount and you have all your enemies at distance. If you are fast enough, you can still have the chest spawn within sight. Pull up all their health bars while you wait for them to wander back. I know you can go without hide, but I really prefer hide here. The invis spell will root you for a small bit. I like the instant hide.


4. Finally assess. If you were fast enough you should have a clear picture of the spawn. If not run up and hide close enough to see the full spawn, but far enough away to not draw attention. Prioritize your kills. The build doesn’t have resist and level 5 poison blows. So ranged casters usually get the first provoke, then run/hide if necessary. Then poisoners second and so on. Once everything is provoked, use the poisoners to poison everything (maybe save an ogre lord back – use paralyze – for the new spawns as you pull stuff out).

Another key is having a newbied musical instrument. You can create a trash character if you want just to get one. If there is a healer nearby, there’s no need to call a gate in from your second account. Just go get your rez, get ready to play that newbied instrument that stays with you. If there is a mob standing over your body just provoke it. Then run up/hide/loot your corpse. Yet another reason I really like having hide in the build. You don’t need regs or a ring to hide. Now you can loot at your leisure and are full strength again. Heal yourself up, and decide if you need a new mount or not. If it’s a nearly fresh chest, go ahead and grab the mount quick. I don’t know why people say if you die getting set up is so hard. It’s literally 1 or two provokes, and a hide. Skills you should be very familiar with the use of.

Fast movement keeps you from being poisoned/hit/casted upon quite effectively. Ask any PVPer how much easier it is to kill someone on foot versus on a mount. If you don’t bring a mount, you probably will die quite frequently on a level 5. If you keep them at range and attacking other things, there is little risk.

The final note I want to leave you with is paralyze. Learn to love it. It will save you many deaths. Once the first spawn is cleared, you have to get close to that chest to clear it. Monsters spawn close to that chest as well. You won’t have distance on your side like you did with the initial spawn. Pick it, open it, then cast paralyze. With the paralyze cursor up start dragging stuff into your bag. Since the items in the chest aren’t a target, the paralyze cursor will stay up as you loot. If something spawns (say a dread spider) you have paralyze pre-casted. Immediately target the spider and dump your pre-casted paralyze instantly. You should be able to apply that paralyze before it reacts to you. Then you can provoke it onto something. If nothing is around to provoke it onto, let it chase you a bit to get it away from the chest. Then paralyze it again. While he is paralyzed, keep using your chest clearing routine with the pre-casted paralyze until you can find him a dance partner.

Put simply, there really are no surprises in any chest you have control over, and therefore no deaths. Death’s come from not having control. A silver serpent wanders into your operational area when your provoke timer hasn’t reset. You bring someone along and they get themselves in trouble (which you have to stop your routine to cast para/heal/cure/rez). You forgot to precast paralyze, or you tried to pick up to many things before reapplying paralyze to that spider. You get to close to the collector of souls and he decides he would rather hit you instead. Those are all examples of losing control, and they will get you killed. The process is really is no different than a level 3 chest. The only difference is you no longer have any margin for error anymore, so you better not make a mistake.

As long as you don’t make a mistake you should be able to better my once every 20 chests death. Those deaths typically come because I get a bit lazy/cocky and make one of the errors in the paragraph above.

As a side note, I never had stealth when working lockpicking. A good chunk of the level 4 chests are static spawns (they spawn on exactly the same tile). You can cast gate – hide- dbl click gate- and pick away. Once you unlock it, you take one step and immediately hide. Then pop the chest and loot while hidden. If the chest moves, you do have to wait out the 10 second hide timer after the gate, then sprint to the chest and hide before anyone notices you. It’s a bit of a pain, but you’ve always got that open gate close by if you need to get out quick. I don’t consider stealth essential to leveling lockpicking, but I can certainly see the merits. I was just to impatient. I couldn’t use detect hidden either. I wanted those 60 points to bad, so I just kept letting my level 5’s pile up until lockpick was GM’d then did them.

[Treysta]

Given that A) there's a good chance I've done more level 5 maps than the entirety of this thread combined and B) the level of misinformation in this thread is off da chizzarts, I present to you:

Tricky Treysta's Very Difficult PVE Content Guide™

Step 1) Locate the map tile.
Step 2) Make a macro that digs and then jumps on your horse and hides the moment the chest mobs spawn. The macro is not difficult to make. Use your brain!
Step 3) While hidden, drag the monster's health bars out and group them in logical order.
Step 4) Run in a circle around the chest and provoke the monsters. Spam magic reflection if there are balrons or lich lords up.
Step 5) Try to provoke two tough mobs together and then run the shitty ones into them. (poison and balrons do the most damage, use these to cull the rest rapidly)
Step 6) Loot the chest with a loot macro and run around the box paralyzing and provoking mobs as they spawn. If too many spawn at once, back up from the chest.
Step 7) Axe the chest (or not)

Congratulations! You're now a professional maphunter who doesn't have to port in a bunch of dragons every time he wants to do trivialized PVE content!

edit: didnt even read the thread, it looks like morgan covered a bunch of the stuff i just listed. NO REGRETS.

[Kasper_Valentine]

On the topic of lockpicking level four dungeon chests....

1) Is it worthwhile clearing the crates which spawn near some of these chests...?
2) Is the quality of the loot (in terms of the magical qualities on the items) entirely random or do higher chests give higher level enchantments...?

Danke !

[fox_phyre]

I have looted from the crates and lower level chests near the Level 4 Chests, because after a while all the gold/gems/magic items start really mattering. The higher level chests have the ability to have rings in them, but every chest can have good loot. I don't know the loot table for different chests though, just anecdotal stuff.

[ReptilianLover]

I usually do if it is right there. I do not go out of my way to do it. You can get some arrows from doing it. Anything that is not a chest gives you some non-magical items in it as well I think (sometimes I find non magical items in my sorting bins), but this should not be a problem because ANYONE who does dungeon chests MUST have an auto-id macro set up...

[Treysta]

For level 4 chests I recommend use a restock macro to grab everything in the chest. There's no point in leaving anything if you're just clearing out the level 4 chests due to the long respawn timers. All the junk from the chests stacks: gold, gems, scrolls, arrows, regs, and bottles (have a macro to consume all types of potions and spam it as you go, you'll be left with empties that you can stack up). All the equipment is put in a bin to be sorted by an autosorting macro at a later time. Note that the entire process can be macroed, from recalling to picking and from looting to dumping, and of course sorting.

As for loot quality, I'm not actually entirely sure. Someone probably has stats on it, but my gut says that the chest loot beyond the obvious additional gold and gems is indeed weighted by chest level.

[ultra]

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