Batmud Newbie Advice: What you want and how to get it.

Introduction

BatMUD is a huge game with a long history, and designing a useful guide to help new players get their feet wet is a daunting task. I think that the best way to make such a guide is to list the primary goals of a batmud character, the things a new player will want to be able to do, why they are important, and then provide a few alternatives for getting access to those abilities. I'll try my best to be thorough without being pedantic, but the simple fact is that a fifteen year old game like Bat defies easy summary at every turn. As with all guides, I can't claim that all my advice is perfectly accurate, though I can promise that your chances of success improve a lot with a little knowledge.

Goals

Fundamentally, there are four things which new players will need to accumulate as quickly as possible. These are gold, experience points, knowledge of the game, and friends. It's obvious that nearly all players are after these things, but newbies start with absolutely no resources to draw upon and so face a difficult climb.

Gold

Gold is used to pay for guild levels and to buy equipment. Many new players don't realize just how important it is to buy better equipment from players. Even the cheapest weapons you can buy from other players do at least twice as much damage as the stuff newbies will find on their own. It is important say again that that you will usually not be able to get good equipment anywhere but from other players. You should especially avoid buying expensive weapons and armour from npc stores!

If you are fighting in a lot of melee combat, you should get better weapons as soon as you can. Good weapons are more important than good armor. If you can't see the reason for this, think of it like this: A weapon which lets you kill monsters twice as fast means you'll be taking about half damage from them. You can get weapons twice as good as your starting gear for very little gold, 40-160k for two such weapons at most, depending on what is for sale. Items which directly halve the damage you take simply don't exist at any price.

The easiest way for a most players to earn gold is to kill weak monsters in melee combat and sell their items to NPC shopkeepers. If you pay attention, you will begin to find monsters which have especially valuable items, and the rate at which you can pull in money will go up. Most humanoid monsters carry some coins on them, but it is by selling their gear that you will earn the most money. Many of the areas in the game that are limited to low level players are good places to earn cash. Places like the Pleasantville well, the newbie mines, and past the metal plates in the Arelium dungeons (A dangerous newbie area) can be good areas to earn cash alone or in parties without having to worry about higher level players interfering with you. Beware of any boxes you find on monsters! They are very often heavily trapped.

All area and level quests also give out cash rewards, sometimes fairly sizable ones. So doing finding and completing easy quests can also generate some useful cash.

Experience Points

The easiest way for a new player to earn experience points is not by killing monsters but to explore the game. Most rooms not part of a minimap of some kind are flagged as exploreable, currently batmud has well over 16,000 such rooms. Each time a character enters such a room for the first time it gets some experience, and the amount of experience earned for each new room goes up as the character accumulates a larger number of explored rooms. Exploration provides a huge amount of experience points for new players, easily enough to take a character over level 40 with fairly well rounded skills. However, exploration is also very dangerous. There are few areas in the game with no aggressive monsters, and plenty of those monsters are much more powerful than a new player and will block you from leaving combat. Learning to explore carefully and to accept the inevitable deaths that result are all part of the game. Furthermore, this easy experience will eventually dry up as you run out of easy areas to explore. You need to be able to manage this transition. How much experience can you get from exploring? Here's a copy of the chart from 'help exploring'

 ,--------------------------------------------.
 | Rooms visited          | Experience gained |
 |--------------------------------------------|
 |   100                  |      5000         |
 |   500                  |     85000         |
 |  1000                  |    300000         |
 |  2000                  |   1000000         |
 |  4000                  |   4000000         |
 |  6000                  |   8000000         |
 |  8000                  |  15000000         |
 | 10000                  |  23000000         |
 '--------------------------------------------'

Knowledge

Knowledge is the most intangible asset, but also the most important. BatMUD is very old, and there's a lot to learn about how it works. Learn how the game works by reading the ingame help files and player websites such as this one. Also be prepared to earn knowledge the old fashioned way through trial and error. One bit of advice: Keep a notebook file and write down every secret you learn, especially special syntaxes, area information, and tricks. If you don't, you'll wind up being one of those players who has forgotten more about the game than most people know. Take my word for it, this isn't as cool as it sounds when you're trying to remember how to do something.

Friends

Teaching how to make friends is beyond the scope of this guide, but it is very important to try and make some. Bat is a multiplayer game, and there's not too much point in playing such a game all alone. Some players go a long way indeed before realizing this. Especailly invite other newbies to party with you. Sometimes this will help you earn exp faster, sometimes you will have to take the time teach them some things, but it's always very good to have people to ask for help when you're doing a quest or down on your luck.

Guilds: Good newbie guilds for each background

This advice is primarily for anyone with less than 20M experience, particularly those who haven't gotten too far past 40% exploration. When deciding on what guilds to take, a new player should focus on how best to explore safely and to earn cash. Secondary goals include being able to do the easier level quests and being able to party with other new players. A newbie's primary deficits are in equipment and experience. Thus, a newbie should be interested in races and guilds that let them operate in spite of their lack of resources. I consider the ability to fight well with cheap or no weapons and to use the invisiblity spell to be key. Thanks to exploration experience, every background has an at least somewhat viable alternative for new players.

Civilized: Civmage/Shadow Sabre

A lot of players would probably say this is a strange setup to recommend to anyone, let alone a new player. The fact of the matter is that this setup works perfectly against all of a new player's worst disadvantages. Shadow sabres can fight very respectably with dirt cheap weapons, while civmages get access to some very helpful spells at fairly low levels. These spells include invisibility, floating disc, heal self, and a number of offensive blasts.

Begin such a reincarnation by first working toward 11 levels of civmage, which gives access to most of that guild's best utility spells. At higher levels civmages continue to get better offensive spells and quick chant, but at this point you will get much more advantage putting all further levels into the shadow sabre guild to gain access to strong offensive and defensive abilities.

Race selection for this setup is very forgiving, because there aren't many races which work badly with it. I suggest catfolk, dwarf, satyr, and gnoll as being better than average choices for this guild combination.

For starter equipment, get some spider sabres to wield as soon as you are able. These are inexpensive short blades which will help you dish out relatively nice damage, especially once you advance a bit as a Shadow Sabre. You have a wide selection for what to wear as armour. The diamond o-yorois that merchants make are popular among new players who can't afford equipment that enhances attributes.

Evil Religious: Tiger

I used to rank Tiger as being the best guild for newbies, but nowadays I tend to place it at number two, as most newbies simply aren't familiar enough with the game to pay proper attention to the guild rules. It's still has a lot of features for new players because it works fine with no equipment, offers invisibility, a healing spell, and has the best skill in the game for starting off combat with small monsters. It takes a lot of experience points to advance as a Tiger, however you'll have a much easier time getting that experience as one. The problem is that Tiger is a 'secret guild'. It's probably the biggest open secret in the game, which makes the situation all the more frustrating. All players with more than a day or two of playtime know about them, talk about them casually on public channels with no stigma whatsoever, know how to join, and know exactly what skills they get, but Tiger is still a 'secret' guild, and it can be relatively hard getting people to tell you where the NPCs to join at are. If you can't get someone to tell you where Akemi (who lets females join) or Tenji (who lets males join) are, you won't have much chance of finding them just by wandering the world, since they can show up nearly anywhere. I do suggest against whining for the location, as this is an assassins guild. Don't ask how to get in on the newbie channel either, you'll look like a fool (at best). Instead, casually ask for an akemi/tenji quote on wanted, and if that doesn't work, offer 10k or so. If you get the quote, consult one of the maps listed in 'help ferries' and get to that location. The npc joiner wanders, so you may need to scout around.

If you learn where to go to join and are about to reinc, you'll need to consider race selection. Barsoomian will give you four limbs to attack with and isn't a bad overall choice. Barsoomians have a lot of flaws, but they are a good race for you to earn cash and explore with, which are of course important goals. Other decent races are dwarf, catfolk, and orc.

Tigers are martial artists, and so can function without any equipment at all. Still, it helps to have some. Primarily you will want equipment that adds to the martial arts skill. Silvery Amazon armours are a good and cheap choice for this. Once you get up to 100 martial arts, you might look into dexterity, damage, and spell point regeneration equipment.

Other Decent Guilds

Nomad: Ranger

Rangers are the traditional newbie guild, and fairly solid. Rangers get good hit points and a bunch of useful combat and exploration skills. It's also a solid guild for new and middleaged players because it lets you move about more easily and recover fairly fast. Use some spider sabres.

Nomad: Barbarian

Not really a good newbie guild, though not precicely terrible either. Rangers is simply much better for new players. Barbarians can get some nice abilities, but they take a lot of time and experience to develop, and the quests barbarians get are simply too hard without a lot of good equipment. Starting out as a barbarian isn't even all that effective a method of taking the long slow path to power. You just don't have the experience to kill stuff fast enough to improve your barbaric reputation all that fast.

Good Religious: Tarmalen

Tarmalen is viable only if you are agressive about making friends and partying with other new players. You can become a moderately good healer with relatively little experience, but it's still not a particularly easy climb, as you have very little ability to earn cash. You can take some levels in monks/templars for some combat/cashmaking ability, but that has it's own problems due to high experience costs. Neither of those guilds are very good without some tarmalen levels.

Magical: Mage

Magical isn't a very good newbie background, but being a newbie mage isn't totally hopeless. Once you've joined the basic mage guild, you get useful spells like invisibility, word of recall, teleport without error, force absorption, mirror image, heal self, and some basic damaging spells. These spells give you some useful abilities for exploring, fighting, and escaping danger. The first special damage type you should join is probably the acid mages. They can learn the lock biter spell, which can let you get past locked doors and explore more areas.

Evil Religious: Reaver

Reavers is a pretty solid guild, although it takes a lot of walking to get to it. Reavers use axes and polearms well and get a lot of offensive skills, so they can tank nicely. They also get a lot of blasting spells and some healing ability, so they can also act kind of like a mage. This makes reavers flexible and strong, and a solid newbie guild. Play a centaur, get some weapons, and enjoy.

The no-no guilds

There are certainly those who say any guild can be a good newbie guild. If you feel that way then feel free to disregard pretty much all of the information in this page. Anyway, the following guilds should be avoided at all costs by anyone who considers themselves a new player.

Spending Experience

Through exploration and combat you should start to pick up a bit of experience. This raises a question; where should experience be spent? Well, remembering a few cardinal rules should be of immense help to you.

Rule 1: Diminishing returns

Batmud has an extremely punitive system of diminishing returns for just about everything. The more of something you have the less the next incremental gain is going to benefit you, AND the more it will cost. This isn't true in every situation, but it does apply to an overhwelming majority of situations.

Rule 2: Few skills are critical

Skills (and spells) vary in usefulness, and only a small number are of such benefit you should consider getting them as high as possible, especially given the rule of diminishing returns. Learn which skills are going to give you the most bang for your buck and you'll be doing yourself a big favor.

Core skills for tanks of any kind are attack, dodge, and your weapon skill. These skills are worth investing a greater proportion of your experience in. Dodge is expensive, but is also one of the only skills in the game which doesn't suffer diminishing returns. Each point of dodge helps more than the point that came before it.

Secondary skills fall in two categories: Utility skills like hiking and camping, and skills that help you do more damage, such as tumbling attack and offensive skills. None of these should be neglected, but there aren't really any that are worth breaking the bank on individually. Instead, it is best to get as many as possible to moderate levels (50-60% or so) first. By then you should have a clearer idea what you need most badly.

Garbage skills do exist. These are skills that are almost never useful (telescope operation), or are sometimes useless to a guild that gets them. For instance, location memory is important to those with navigation spells, but overpriced trash for rangers. There are few skills that are always useless all of the time, but there are many which are of little use to most players. Still, even these skills I'd put up to 1-10%. Why? Well, such low levels are virtually free, and being able to at least attempt them might prove helpful. Plus it lets you play around with them and see if you might have misjudged them.

Last modified on: March 12 2008 07:19:27