Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Tera CBT is Over! OBT HERE WE COME!~

Hi peoples!  This is Wretched Calx.  TERA CBT is OVAH!  Yeah no more feeling special!  Next up is the Name Reserve on the 13th, Open Beta Test the 19th - 23rd, and Head Start April 28th through May 1st!  w00t! 

I've learned a few things on my travels through Beta-Land.  A current rumour I've heard is that we'll be leapfrogging straight to the platform that KTera is on.  Sounds like rumor mill fud to me, but who knows?  That'd be awesome!

Anywhoo,
I'd like to make a place to record what to do as I level through the game.  Here are some good hints that may save you a few hours of grief, but mostly serve as my own personal notes on what to do or not to do in the game!! 

*  When crafting potions, don't be afraid to pick up some recipes for ores >> ore powder.  Oftentimes it's worth sacrificing some of those ore just to gain a level or two up to the next 50 tier, so that you can begin to craft new potions.

*  To craft potions which are instaheal, you must first craft elixirs which are HoT and then combine them.  You will get more instaheals than HoT potions, but the gold costs for buyable mats become rather high!

*  When leveling, instance as much as possible, and for the most part stick to the Story quests.  They give tremendous XP. 

*  The best Route would be to run Normal Quests/BAMs up until you hit the instance for that level,
--Then run the instance as much as possible until people won't let you into their group due to your making them ineligible for quests. 
--Then at that point, do your Story quest which will be RIDICULOUSLY easy, and yet will STILL REWARD YOU WITH MAD XP!!  Do this in between instances, but:
--Don't forget to save the STORY quests at the next higher instance level for AFTER you can't do the instance anymore.   Their XP reward is still just as large and will make your getting to the next instance tier much easier.

*  INSTANCES ARE KEY!!  (moreso than in other games imo)

*  BAM turnins are great, and in many cases give Catharnac (guild quest) rewards also!

*  Your guild needs Catharnac rewards to level up, so feel free to donate these to your guild if you'd like.  Remember you can spend them 30 at a time for a single XP+ for 5 min potion, but really the time spent isn't worth the reward if this is what you're aiming for.  Just give em to your Guild Master, for great Justice!

*  GET EVERY SINGLE GUILD QUEST YOU CAN!  They stack infinitely and wont take up any of your normal quest space!

*  Many times, the Greens of 3 levels above you are equal to your golds.  Unless it's cheap, don't bother buying gear as you can EARN IT easily through quests!!

*  I've learned that many quests will tell you the rewards upfront, so oftentimes quest chains won't be particularly rewarding if they don't so so in the beginning.  Shop for quests and get the ones with the most XP, and the best GEAR!! 

*  There are often different zones for the same level.  Do the best quests in a zone, and then change zones and do the best ones in that zone.  It's much better than laming around collecting crap gaining less XP.

*  Gear stats from lvl 33 blues up to lvl 36 pretty much DOUBLES, so BE SURE TO GET YOUR CR GEAR ASAP!

*  I think infamy starts at 9 lvls below, but it could be as little as 7 lvls under you.  Keep your ganking to 7-6 lvls below you for ultimate control of your pvp.  Remember, Surprise is often the most useful advantage you can have!

*  Killing MOB's (mobile objects, some wack ass old EQ or something term for baddies) in an instance will lower your Infamy by 1.  Also you can lower it by just going to sleep for the night.  Wake up and it's a couple hundred down.

*  Killing people 10+lvls below you will give you 150+ Infamy!  That's 1 person for 1 night's work of reducing infamy!  Unless we're on a lowbie killing spree, it's often more beneficial for YOU to let them stroll by without killing them!  (consider bringing them to low health and letting a mob kill them, whoever strikes the last hit will get the infamy)

*  As soon as you land in a populated area (Pirate ville, Lumbertown, Elinu Land, some others)  Be sure and use your evade skill immediately.  This will give you the edge for all the people ganking at the platform and will allow you a crucial few seconds to get free, even if you can't see them before you land, they may be there!


That's all I can think of for now.  Happy ganking, and may the tearz of carebears flow freely!

-Wretched.Calx

Tera PvP, Tera Ganking, Tera Crafting, Tera PvP System, Tera Open Beta, Tera Closed Beta, Tera Potions Guide, Tera Crafting Guide, EnMasse Tera, Tera Leveling Guide, Tera Lowbie Guide, Tera Leveling How-To, Tera Crafting Tutorial, Tera OBT CBT, Tera PvP Infamy Guide, Avoiding PvP Infamy, How to lower infamy, how to level up quickly in Tera

Broken Mods, Papyrus Debugger, and You! An unhealthy tutorial

So your skyrim isn't working?  You paid $500 for a couple of brand new SLI or Crossfire cards, not to mention the raw dough spent on a shiny new processor and flaming-hawt ram, and you're pissed.  Well...  Maybe it's not your hardware.

Possibly, it's one of the 80 mods you installed... Maybe it's the shiny new eyelash replacer or that damned butt physics mod.  But you can't be sure, can you?  So you're about to go one-by-one and figure out which mod is crashing and lagging your game to hell, spending 4 hours enabling and disabling each mod until your game works a little better.  Well you've got another option.  Enter the Skyrim Papyrus Debugger-thing.

Papyrus will allow you to print out all the crap that your mods are mucking up!  But what do you do with it?  Well read on.


1.  First, Enable Papyrus Logging by opening your Skyrim.ini file located at [YourWindowsUsername]\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Skyrim.ini

2.  Find the [Papyrus] heading (or if it doesn't exist, create it at the end of the file) and add the following:


[Papyrus]
bEnableLogging=1
bEnableTrace=1
bLoadDebugInformation = 1


Now, Papyrus is enabled!  Now what?

3.  Enter your game.  If it crashes to desktop, hopefully it will log the errors you've encountered.  If this is the case skip ahead a bit to step 5.

4.  Play the game for a while.  When it starts lagging up or giving you problems, open console by hitting the ~ key (or `, depending on how you look at it) and type 'dps' without the quotes.  This will dump a log file to your My Games/Skyrim directory.

5.  Open up [YourWindowsUsername]\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Logs\Script\Papyrus0.log
(the newest log will always be appended with a 0)

6.  In this file, scroll alllll the way to the bottom.  Now, start looking from the bottom upwards.  If you're anything like me, you'll see plenty of errors and warnings thanks to the half bazillion mods all cohabitating not so peacefully.  You'll be looking in particular for anything that repeats itself more than the others.  Some mods will have a few errors, and that's okayish, but you're looking for that one little bastard that's ruining everyone's fun.  He'll show up alot, so once you find it, look and see if you can find a "EvilScriptName.psc" file.  It will most likely end in a "psc", because that's a papyrus script file.

7.  Now, open up your directory with all the mods zip files you've downloaded.  If they're in a dir with all your other downloads, move them to a directory all their own.  Or, if you're using the mod manager, find the mods directory which stores all your mods downloads in compressed format.  You can look in the NMM settings to find them.

8.  Once your mod zips are all in one format, open up Winrar and point it to that directory.  Now, if you're lucky, the psc will be inside a filetype called *.pex of the same name.  So click "find" and type "*ProblematicFile*" without quotes into the filename field.  If the file is ProblematicFile.psc, then just use ProblematicFile without the .psc extension.

9.  If you find it, go ahead to step 10.  If not, then your mod maker was a punk-ass and decided to include .psc files inside his .pex files of a different name.  In this case, do a search in your mod directory, instead using the string field, with "*ProblematicFile*".  Then hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and go to your WinRar.exe process, right click it and Set Priority to High.  This is doing a full-text search of alllll the files in the archives in the directory so it's going to take some time.  Grab a coffee, have a smoke, watch your dog chase his tail in circles, then teach that elegant lout to recite Shakespeare.  Seriously it'll take that long, so give it a while.

10.  Now you've located the damn pex file which uses the problematic psc.  It should give you the archive the file was located in.  Go back to your NMM and remove the bastard mod.  Then go and post on the mod maker's comments board that you want your money back.  Be sure to include a chunk of the log so he can fix it if he ever gets the time in between his Anime Mod XXX Lydia sessions.

11.  You're done!!  not really.  There are probably going to be several mods with huge problems.  Like I said before, many mods will have an error here or there, but you're always going to be looking for that one damn mod that loops hundreds of times looking for a sweetroll that just isn't there.

Hope this has helped save you a few hours of mod enabling/disabling and given you a nice look into the headaches mod-makers have to go through in order to give you such a nice user experience.  Remember they're doing this for free, so if you love the mod, go ahead and donate to your favorite mod makers.  Oh, and FFS buy the damn game.  Bethesda may not deserve it as much as they did for Morrowind (amirite?); but damn they got to have money to make the next game.  And I know we're all waiting for it.  Seriously.


- Wretched.Calx

Oh, wood-missles and leg-benders.  Yeah.

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