[Tanking Guide] Your First Instance - Fort Rotulor

To join an instance just go to your Party Settings panel, select Fort Rotulor from the list and click apply. As you can see in the panel you can only do each instance a limited number of times per day. For example, Fort Rotulor can be done 5 times each day.

Fort Rotulor is your first instance. At level 15 you can go there and I recommend going there as soon as you feel ready. I did it at level 22 and it was just too easy. Although I would suggest going there with at least 3 items from the Defender Set (the one you get from Obsidian Shards) so you have some defense.

There's 2 bosses and only a large room with monsters. The last boss only shows up after a few minutes of entering the instance. There is nothing significant about the two bosses. A bit of AoE, specially from the last one. If you need more information on what to expect from the instance you can visit the Forsaken World Wiki which has a lot of information on this instance.

So since there is nothing to explain about the bosses I'm going straight for tanking basics. Depending on your level you'll be lacking on some skills. The first skill and most important that you will need on all instances is... a healer. I'm serious, you will need heals. If you have a Priest in your party then he is the best candidate but Vampires and Bards are good alternatives. Make sure you have a dedicated one which brings food and mana pots with him. If he starts asking for Mana Pots right after the first boss or if he keeps letting you under 50% on the first boss, then consider leaving that party and try another.

The other skills are the ones you learn from Cain, your trainer. The most important ones are:

1. Mental Focus.
2. Counter Strike
3. Blessing of the Stoneman
4. Hard Smash

Mental Focus

This is your most important buff. It grants you extra threat and has some synergies with other skills. Make sure you have this buff up all the time. If you ever start losing threat and your target starts focusing on other players it probably is because you forgot to keep Mental Focus up.

Another wonderful thing about this buff is the other buff (Fury) you gain by having it up combined with monsters attacking you.

Counter Strike

This is the skill I use most. Hard smash is good, specially if you have Mental Focus up and it's cooldown is reduced to 3 seconds but it's a bit of mana waste unless you are struggling with threat or want to do some DPS on a boss or something. For this reason only, I stick to using Counter Strike a lot more than Hard Smash. It has 3 main advantages over Hard Smash:

1. Gives you a free stack of Fury, which is great when you want to quickly build those 10 stacks of fury.
2. Does around 50% more damage than Hard Smash. Also, with talents, it has the same cooldown (3 seconds). pretty short cooldown.
3. Gives you another Buff: Guardian Mode. This gives you more defense at the expense of attack. It is a direct trade of X points of defense in exchange for X points of attack. Very much worth it and something to keep at 3 stacks when doing any boss.

For mana conservation I suggest using it when Guardian Mode is about to end.

Blessing of the Stoneman

This is your typical 30 minute buff. Gives you a bit more of defense and damage reduction. Make sure to have it up, specially before a boss fight. But apart from that it's not a critical buff, like Mental Focus.

Hard Smash

A damage skill. Nothing much more to add about it. Use it whenever you want to build some quick threat or when you want to bring a monster down faster.

A Last Note

Make friends with the good healers you find and also good and friendly players. Good Damage Dealers are hard to find too. They will be the ones you want to poke to join your party when you are online.

Jobs, Vigor and Energy

To learn new Jobs in Forsaken World you need Job Points. You get these by following main quests and at a certain point you get one Job point as quest reward. You will get a total of 6 Job points as you level up.

Your first three Job points come from talking to Alberti the Job Tutor. He will give you a quest which rewards 2 Job Points. You will need to answer correctly to 2 questions he makes in order to get the third Job point. The correct answers are always the bottom choices. The next Job point you get at level 20 after following the main quests until General Sutherland sends you to talk to Marrick in order to reach another map zone (Sea of Oblivion).

You can spend these Job points in the professions recommended by the New Player tutorial (Botany, Cooking and Alchemy), completing the quests the Rosemason gives you. But you can ignore them and save the Job points for other professions. If you are indeed a new player, such as me, I honestly recommend sticking to these professions. They give you the basic consumables you will need to keep leveling.

There's an excelent Guide for professions on the Forsaken World Forums, made by cashholder11. I really recommend checking this out.

You can learn Botany, Cooking and Alchemy from the Tutors at Freedom Harbor's Craftsman Fair (check picture for location on the map).



Gathering Job: Botany and Fishing

Botany is a simple farming Job. You will walk around the world and collect plants. These are a good source of Player Money if you sell them at the Auctioneer. So, if you are a noob like me, don't forget to gather those plants once you come across them. Use some to get experience in alchemy, if you wish to keep/learn that profession and sell the rest at the Auction House.

Unlike World of Warcraft, where fishing was quite boring and demanded your full attention, in Forsaken World you can just go to a fishing zone and click the fishing skill. Just sit back and watch your character fish wonderful things. But there is a catch, of course. Each fishing will cost you Energy, so you can't just fish forever.

Crafting Jobs: Alchemy and Cooking

These are your professions for creating consumables: potions, food and drinks. Alchemy makes potions which you can use during combat, such as mana or health restoration. Cooking makes things to restore mana or health outside of combat. At the first levels I recomend using the mana and health 50.000 restore potions you receive on your first 5 levels. These will despawn after just 1 week and I doubt you'll be going through them under that time unless you are a really hardcore player. Still, you should get familiar with crafting potions and food for your later leveling since you will need a certain Job Level to learn some recipes. In order for you to avoid some crafting pain later on I really recommend that you keep doing some crafting while leveling so you don't fall back too much.

Vigor and Energy

Vigor is used to make things, so it's a vital part for all crafting Jobs in Forsaken World. Once you access the crafting window of one of your crafting professions, which you can access by clicking on your Job icon on the top-right of your screen and clicking on the crafting profession button you wish, you can start doing any of those recipes you have. For each one you spend ONE vigor point. You will be limited daily by the amount of vigor you have and how fast you can get it.

Energy, is used for gathering professions: fishing, botany, mining. You consume 1 energy for every plant you collect or every time you hook your fishing pole. You can get more than one item each time you collect a plant, though.

Since you restore vigor/energy at a rate of 12 per hour while playing and 3 per hour while offline (with a limit of 8 hours offline), you will restore at least +24 vigor/energy up to +264 per day (if you played 24 hours, of course). So far I haven't seen an automatic logout mechanism, so there's nothing preventing you from leaving the game open while online and restore your vigor/energy to full in just a few hours.

I've read that there's also the possibility of vigor/energy restoration potions, but I haven't been able to encounter these yet.

Happy crafting and gathering!

Gear, Obsidian (Ruby, etc) Shards and Identifying Items

As soon as you get to level 15 and open your Reward Box you'll get 12 Obsidian Shards. Well, you might wonder what they are for and it took me a while to find out. They are used to BUY gear. If you play World of Warcraft, they work almost like Badges/Emblems. To buy the gear you need to go to Freedom Quay, the Pier in the south-east side of Freedom Harbor, just before Charlie's boat.



Shards

Beware, you will also spend Soul Coins to purchase the gear. For Obsidian gear you will need 4 shards for each piece of gear and you can get: Chest, Hands, Legs, Waist and Boots. There's 3 vendors: Beginner, Standard and Advanced. The beginner, which is the one you will first talk to, sells gear for Obsidian, Ruby and Sapphire Shards, you can select the type of shard from the Tabs on the left side of the vendor window. I recommend getting the gear as soon as you can. These are excellent gear pieces and will give you a serious boost to your damage and defenses. One catch though, to take full advantage you will need to use Scroll of Sages to unveil the hidden attributes. You can still wear unidentified gear but you will not gain any of the hidden attributes. You will notice an item has hidden attributes because it will say "Unidentified".

Gear Identification

One thing you need to know about Gear identification. The stats discovered by your identification scroll are random. This means that you can re-identify gear. I haven't done it yet, but you get an interface to do so at your Blacksmiths and Armor smiths in Freedom Harbor. To use a scroll you simply right-click it and then use the mouse pointer to click the item you need to identify.

As far as I know there's only 3 ways to obtain a Scroll of Sages:

• The Fishing Event, which requires you to visit Nousen the Big-Eye in Fossicker's Plain. I believe this is the only way to farm the scrolls.
• Quests. You get them as reward for some quests but this is far from a decent place to get these scrolls when you need them.
• Buy them from other players, which includes using the Auction House.

Armor sets and Gear Choices

You will notice that the items from the Shard vendor have special attributes when you equip more than one item of each set. Use this to plan your gear choices. You will get Chest at level 10, Pants at level 12, Waist and Gloves at level 14, Boots at level 15. This repeats at level 20 for Ruby shards. Meaning you will get the Ruby Shards Chest at level 20, Legs and Shoulders (the new item!) at 22, Gloves and Waist at 24 and Boots at level 25. So if you are getting close to level 20, you might want to skip buying the Chest (since you'll get it as soon as you hit 20) and buy the rest of the Obsidian set. In order to maximize your set bonuses you should only switch to the next set if you have at least 2 pieces of it, so you don't lose any set bonuses for nothing. This is only valid, of course, if you have the full set and just want to upgrade to the next tier one.

The most important stat for Protectors, as far as I understand them so far, is Defense. This is equivalent to Armor in World of Warcraft and judging by some very basic tests I did it has a huge effect on how much damage you get hit for. For example, losing 20% of my armor resulted in getting hit for something around 30 instead of 3. So when upgrading sets you should also make sure you get that 3-set bonus as far as possible without losing the 3-set bonus from your previous gear set.

That's all about Gear and Shards. Check out my next post coming very soon!

Beginning a Protector

Hello,

I recently decided to give Forsaken World a try since I had to depart from my beloved World of Warcraft due to my demanding job, all my side projects and not wanting to spend €12 a month on a game I was getting tired of. So I started my first character, a warrior which is now level 19 and a mage which is level 11. I started playing with my cousin and since he created a healer I just felt it was my duty to create a TANK.

In this blog I will tell my story and the challenges I came across while venturing as a complete n00b in the lands of the Forsaken World.

In Forsaken World universe, probably because it is still new, you don't find a lot of HELP like you have in games such as... World of Warcraft. Most of the help information around the internet is spread around dubious forum posts, general purpose blogs or fan sites which are too general specially since I'm just a beginner. So this is why I decided to start this.

So here we go, let us make a mighty Protector in the Forsaken World. We start in the server selection screen. You can select any server but one with a low PING is probably better. If you are playing with friends you need to make sure to start all on the same server.

After selecting the Server you need to log in. If you don't have an account you can easily create one. Once you have logged in you are presented with the character creation screen. Here you just press "Create" on the bottom-left of your screen and you're ready to begin. Protectors are unique to a special race called Stonemen and as the name suggests they appear to be made of stone (which is handy for a TANK). Also in the initial screen, before pressing the "Create" button, you should be aware of the REALM selection list. This is a list of REALMS on the server you previously picked. You also need to select the same server as your friends if you wish to venture together. You can still invite to parties and talk to them, but you won't be able to see them in the world and as far as I know you won't be able to fight the same creatures.

Creating a character is simple and doesn't take much time if you aren't too picky on how your character looks. I believe the random button deliberately tries to make your character as ugly as possible. Once you have created your character you return to the character selection screen where you can select one and press "Start".

Two things you need to be aware when you begin:

1. The amazing auto-walk which, in my opinion, is an awesome thing specially if you are like me and believe your time playing should be doing things instead of just walking from place X to place Y to deliver a quest. Nothing like a toilet break while your character goes from one quest zone to another.
2. The start up tutorial is very good and will give you a decent overview of things. So if you're like me and skip a lot of quest texts and stuff, be a bit patient and make an effort to read the tutorial pop-ups and info text just to get a grip on the game basics.

One more thing about the auto-walk. It tries to find the shortest path between you and your selected objective. To activate this you can:

1. Open the map (M key) and click anywhere on it.
2. Mouse over a quest, wait for the pop-up text to appear and then click any of the bright-green text that shows up. Beware that it can either be your objective or the person that gave you the quest.

That's all for now. Keep doing the initial quests until you are level 10. After that things get a bit trickier and there is a lot of information to absorb. But I will leave that for following posts.

Enjoy the Game