| On Silver Quests: In keeping with the speed run theme, I don’t go on any of the Silver Quests. No Hobbe Killing Contest, No Hobbe Cave, No Hero Saving. You’d think this would make it a lot harder due to lacking some experience, but I found it not to be much of an issue.
On Maxing out Spells: Due to no Silver Quests, the build I described above gets altered a bit. I used to be able to max out Physical shield before going to Twinblade’s camp. When on a speed run, this has to wait until after the Find the Archealogist quest in Witchwood. After rousting him from his hiding place, I learned you can speed things up by not warping back to the Hero’s Guild. I just continue on my way to Knothole Glade, stopping by the Temple of Avo to max out my Good rating and to get the Sentinus. Whenever you accept a new quest it erases from memory the last place you ported to. So instead of going back to the Guild after finding the Archeologist, you can continue on to Knothole Glade, facing very few enemies. When you make it there, the gate becomes active for you. When you go back to the Guild, and accept the quest you can warp directly to Knothole Glade. It’s also here when I get level 4 of Physical Shield.
On starting out: So as I edited my initial post to indicate, I figured out it is possible to get the Obsidian Long sword before even taking your first quest. After finishing my training, I go and buy out the Guild shop of potions. Rather than going on the Wasp menace quest, I head to Bowerstone. Once there, I get the Normal Haircut, Beard, and Sheriff mustache to max out my appearance. I steal the Ages of Might potion and buy a fishing rod and spade from the item shop. I then sleep at the Inn for two nights, and warp back to the Guild. I buy the restocked Will potions, and do the buy all/sell all trick enough to buy the Obsidian Long sword.
After getting the Sword, I take the Wasp Menace quest, but before going to the picnic grounds, I fish for the Ages of Skill potion. Normally I would ignore the chance to fish, but I found it too be really helpful in just one minute.
At the Wasp quest I found a neat little trick can happen sometimes. Once the Wasp queen shows up, if you kill just 1 or 2 of the wasps she sends after you, you can then go after the Queen herself. For whatever reason, she is somewhat immune to your damage until you either kill all the little wasps, or she is able to spin off and send some more wasps at you. Even though she is immune, if you hit her repeatedly with the Obsidian Long sword, your Combat Modifier will continue to rise. This doesn’t happen perfectly every time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But on my record run of 2 hours and 22 minutes, I got my Combat modifier up to 13 on my very first quest; I then used both the Ages of Might potion and the Ages of Skill potion.
13,000 Skill and Might XP are really handy this early in the game. I get my Strength pumped, my Guile and Speed up, and get enough gold to buy the Master Great sword. The following quests are pretty easy cause you’re one-hit-killing all the bandits.
Finally, because I was doing a speed run, I skipped the Temple of Skorm and Skorm’s bow. I find a Master Longbow with 3 sharpening augmentations does just fine for taking down Jack of Blades. Once he is dead, I opt to kill Theresea and keep the Sword of Aeons. This gives you a massive boost of bad karma. After that I kill all the Prophets of the Fire Heart, and if needed, eat a bunch of Crunchy Chicks. This will make Berserk 4 available, which I use with Multi-strike to finish off the rest of the quests.
Thanks for checking out my Update, and good luck with all your games.
Cheers again,
Ebon  |