| On the Wasp attack:
You probably don’t need any help here, but I have noticed one cool boon with the timing if you play it just right. After you’ve graduated, take the quest and right away head off for the picnic grounds. Don’t search the guild or go after anything else. Go kill the Wasp queen, and skip through the cinematic by pressing ESC. Run back to the Lookout point and interact with the statue. The timing should work out that it’s pointing at Greatwood, so you can run over there, go in the nook, and get the Piercing augmentation way early in the game. Once again, we don’t really care about the item, only the fact that it can be sold for 1500+ Gold. If you want, go run around Greatwood and get the Will Master’s elixir.
On the Fishing Game:
It can be kind of a pain to get a fish big enough (30+ Grams) to get the silver key for the contest. One trick I’ve found is that you can keep fishing at the spot where the ripple for the moonfish appears. Even after the ripple is gone (and the one next to it), you’ll keep getting moonfish, which tend to be bigger than regular fish. One or two tries here usually gets you a fish big enough, rather than the half-dozen attempts it can take with normal fishing sometimes. Another trick is all you have to do is walk out of the fishing pond (after getting the golden fish and the silver key) and return to activate the contest.
On Trading:
I will offer some advice on making the well known ‘buy all the potions/gems, sell all’ trick work for you most efficiently. Extra levels of Guile will help of course, but they are NOT necessary. At this point in the game, you can get by with just Guile 1 and still make enough money to make life easier. I go back to the Guild, sell off all my Rez potions and the Piercing Augmentation. With the capital from that and the Wasp quest, you should have enough to buy the guild shop out of Will potions. Even with Guile 1, you can get the trick to work, quadruple your money, and buy a vastly better weapon. Personally, I go for the Obsidian Longsword. I don’t think it’s worth going through the trick however many times to get a master weapon at this point. The bandits/guards you’ll face at Orchard Farm and Greatwood Gorge will die in two hits to an Obsidian Longsword and two hits to a Master Axe, so why give yourself carpal tunnel.
One thing I have noticed is that your attire can affect your profit margins significantly. One time I tried to do it with Dark Villager gear on and Guile 3. I was only making about 8 gold per potions per iteration, which sucks. I changed into Apprentice gear, and the margin went up to 25. I’m not sure, but attractiveness seems to play a role, so it may be worth investing in a Normal Haircut and Normal Beard to boost those stats. Speaking of Apprentice clothing, you can always sell off your Villager gear at a clothing shop to raise some extra cash and just wear your Apprentice get up.
More stuff on early trading: The guild shop may be a good shop to do the trick, but he’s not the best. He’s a good place to get your quantity up, cause after a while you want to get as many potions as you can to pull off the trick most efficiently. I’ll buy him out, check when he’s going to restock, go off to Bowerstone, sleep a few days, go back and buy him out again, just to get the number of potions up so I’m making twice as much money each time I do it. One note on going to Bowerstone for the FIRST time, it will turn the clock BACK to morning. So even if you go in at night, it doesn’t jump ahead, and the guild shop won’t get re-stocked. The time goes backwards.
Speaking of Bowerstone, the shop keeper here is actually one of the best places to do the ‘buy all/sell all’ trick with Will potions. You need to come to him with plenty in hand to make it work though. Buy him out even though it’s expensive, and sell your 60+ potions back to him at a reasonable price. When you buy them back from him though, you’ll notice he sells them for like 21gp when he has an excess amount, which is better than the 33 the guild shop sells them for. This means your margin on each iteration is even better, making you more money even faster. He’s also a good spot for another reason, because he’s so close to a Cullis Gate, which I will explain further below.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that the Skill experience you get from trading and doing the ‘buy all/sell all trick’ IS affected by your Combat Modifier. This can be a serious benefit for your XP. I will go off somewhere, get my combat modifier up, and port back to the shops before I do the trick. This will translate into some nice bonus XP when timed correctly. The best I’ve ever gotten was upwards of 344,000 Skill XP on one trade that happened very luckily. I had collected a bunch of Emeralds, gone through the Hobbe Killing Contest, and the Hobbe Cave. Since I had been to Oakvale I already had upwards of 100 emeralds in stock. I went to the Darkwood Demon Door, the one with the combat challenge. I took the challenge and got my Combat Modifier to 25+. A trader spawned, and I had to go run after him after killing all the Hobbes. He was an Emerald trader, so I went from like 100,000gp to 1,000,000 (I was making 70,0000+ per iteration focusing only on Emeralds) and got 344,000+ Skill XP in one go. Pretty sweet eh? The tricky part is getting the right trader to spawn. I tried to do it again with another character after the Escort trader quest, but before the Hobbe Killing Cave quest, and the wrong trader spawned.  |