The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 18: VIP Benefits And Other Convenience Tweaks

Welcome to a new project, experiment, challenge or whatever you wanna call it. Normally experiencing the content with well-geared toons, I figured it would be quite interesting to approach the game from the perspective of a casual player. How does it feel starting from scratch and build up a character without the help of your mains? How long does it take until you are geared enough for the latest endgame content? Welcome to the Lowbie Diaries, it should be fun!

Today I want to talk about those little tweaks and hints that make life a bit easier along the Sword Coast. It’s not exclusively a lowbie topic, but I’ve compiled the tips that I really got to appreciate the most while playing this character.

The first and most obvious of course is the VIP system. When it first arrived I realized it was great, but didn’t really knew what to make out some of the VIP benefits you could summon, because on my mains I don’t normally run into situations where I would need a vendor or salvage anvil. And although it’s helpful to be able to bring up the bank and mailbox anywhere, it’s not really an issue to store stuff and do inventory management before logging out.

But as a lowbie it feels like you always need to clear some bag space. I’ve talked about the problem before. Since I can’t really dodge crap loot because I need the gold for repeatable campaign tasks, most of them dungeon key ones, and you might want to save some RP for the next double event, the limited slots fill up awfully fast and most of the time I couldn’t even do one one full round of Sharandar quests without being forced to come back for a vendor in between. I’m only VIP level 4 right now and really looking forward to the salvage anvil and vendor to be able to clear my inventory whenever I need it. A budget alternative to the vendor is Aurora’s Catalogue, which you can pick up for merely 60k on the auction house. You need to sacrifice an artifact slot, but in the solo grind that’s not crucial and you are then able to sell loot every 180 seconds.

What I do already enjoy is the signpost. Of course it let’s you zone from everywhere and generally makes traveling quicker, especially without an epic mount, but lately I’ve also discovered its worth in the daily grind. In Sharandar I normally run the Quickling Den for the daily, because Quicklings for some reason have a superior chance of dropping the Feydark Crystals. After completion, I don’t leave the instance but activate the signpost to directly travel to Sharandar, saving most of the way back. Same can be done in other daily lairs in Dread Ring or Well of Dragons. You are also able to quickly travel back to Caer-Konig after completing quests in Icewind Pass or Dwarven Valley.

I have touched on the next cheat back on my first lowbie run. Even if you are not part of one of those illustrious elite PVE channels, there’s a simple way of getting into a decent Tiamat run. Just go to the door, inspect a few guys and keep those 3k+ toons monitored. Most commonly the channels announce the timer 10-15 seconds prior, so what will happen is that at a certain point those toons start heading towards the door, wait for a few seconds and then enter. Even if you can’t completely anticipate the timer this way, you can still enter when they start to enter and most likely end up in a decent instance. Announcing oneself as 3.5k in the zone chat and asking for a timer is not generally a good hint because, if at all, you’ll only get troll answers.

Last but not least you should be thinking about buying yourself a Ring of Ambush. You probably will eventually get one if running Demogorgon frequently as well, but the blue versions are selling around salvage value on the auction house. Next to enabling you to run some instances just passing by all mobs (Thayan Shelter, Phantasmal Fortress etc.) and drawing less aggro in group content, it’s simply great to not having to care about engaging mobs while riding through zones and getting demounted from three hits. The Ring is currently bugged I guess, because mobs simply don’t see you no matter the distance, but even if fixed it should still represent a decent convenience upgrade.

See you next week!

The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 13: First Dungeon Runs And Bag Space Money Grab
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 14: Refining and Mote Grind Madness
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 15: Campaign And Gold Issues
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 16: Finishing Campaigns And Gear Goal Update
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 17: Tiamat Loot Luck And Epic Demogorgon

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