For now, this will just be the place to store some information I’d like to remember about my character to perhaps build upon one day.
DOB: March 14th 2014
Temple completed after 113 days, on July 6th 2014.
Temple completed during the night while the deity was sound asleep (final brick origin unknown, possibly Bricked monster, most likely bought from the trader as she had over 2000 gold to start with)
Level at time of completion: 34
Number of quests at day of completion: #159
First quest post temple (despite being #160, disappointingly not an epic quest): guild change quest. Prat. Promptly cancelled as AMCW rocks ^^
Number of Arena fights recorded at temple completion: ~350 (win/loss ratio ~225/125)
Alignment at time of temple completion: Pure Evil!
First dungeon and Ark log: July 7th 2014, with the kind help and guidance of Kingdada, Hammrsgl, Hyper Bolus and Para Bolus.
The 100 log countdown begins on May 08th 2015!
Below are some tips for building your Temple and the Ark. Another fantastic source for tips on these subjects is Kingdada’s page on godwiki I definitely suggest checking it out, a lot of the tips regarding dungeons came directly from him or his guide :)
Temple building tips:
1) Vote in the ideabox religiously, you get double prayers (50% basic prayer instead of the 25%) and it’s your bread and butter as a non-payer. Ideabox is also a nice way to contribute to the game and can be pretty fun on its own :)
2) Hit Arena every chance you get. The entrance fee is 50% GP, but if you vote in the Ideabox, you’ll make that back from the town prayer as soon as you get out. There’s a possibility of a free brick on entry, a free brick if you don’t match (pre-temple it’s rare however with the new rules), 3 bricks for the winner/loser and the priests praying back 15% per turn, making your fights a lot cheaper. A win will get you a brick (or 3, as said above), a charge and 100% GP on exit and most, if not all of your opponent’s gold.
3) Brick-oriented Arena tips:
a) 3 charges and 100% GP is your optimal situation for the Arena. If you’ve got that (or more) and your Arena cooldown is ready, hit that button. However, if you can tell it’s gonna be a while until you accumulate that much, send your hero/ine in anyway for the chance of a free brick on entry, 3 bricks for the loser or simply an opponent that doesn’t fight back (you’d be surprised at the number of those). You can win with less than that pre-temple, but you’ve gotta learn to…
b) Pick your battles. Learn to read your opponent’s alignment and win/loss ratio. Keep in mind that it’s better to lose a fight by not doing anything than to lose and waste everything you have, making you spend the rest of the day accumulating. Don’t worry about losing, you get your 50% back when you get out and you can accumulate a charge (if you don’t already have 3) or dig for a boss! Basically, live to fight tomorrow. Or rather, in 4 hours :)
4) Pure Evil! baby, yeah! – I’ve started out as a good character. However, in the Arena, Punish is your friend and so are the Strike voices. Encourage prolongs a fight, Punish ends it. You want to end it. If you’re fighting an active character, Encourage will use up all your GP. With Punish, if you can (see above) pick your battles, you won’t be wasting all your GP on every fight and will be able to easily keep your 3 charges ready for every fight most of the time. Throw me a PM if you want some more specific advice/explanation on Pure Evil! and Arena, there’s too much to go into it here.
5) Melt that gold – the basic idea is using an Encourage or a Punish when you’ve got 3000 gold or more. However, according to available data, it’s a 1/3 chance, so you’ll be using 75% GP on average to melt a single brick. This is why I’d recommend against using charges to melt bricks, instead using only your available GP at hand.
6) GP managment – by far the most important thing to keep you going. Let’s go over some basics:
a) Your hero will only pray after selling their loot in town. They sell loot under following circumstances: when they’ve gotten to a town with at least 50% (rounded down, so 12/25, 6/13 etc.) of their inventory full, when you send them back to town via God Voice, when you finish or cancel a quest, and after the Arena.
b) If you vote in the Ideabox consistently, you can always rely on getting at least 50% GP back, possibly more if your hero has gold (although they’re fickle with how much they choose to sacrifice so try not to rely on it, at least until you get a feel of how it works).
So, how to use this information:
- 0% GP – wait for a prayer. Don’t waste those charges.
- 50% GP – check your inventory. Does it look like you’re gonna get to town soon for a prayer? If so, wait. Otherwise, either try to send them back to town via a God Voice or just hit it in hopes of free stuff.
- 100% GP – got 3 charges? Hit the Arena. Don’t have 3 charges? Again, are you close to a prayer? If yes, accumulate and wait, otherwise, hit it and hope for either some free bricks or an easy fight. Once again, choose your battles.
7) Digging for boss monsters – digs are pretty awful for bricks as a non-payer. Bosses can be hard, you’re relying on the kindness of strangers (not to mention their existence to begin with, time-outs are not uncommon when digging for a boss) and most importantly, bosses don’t tend to carry a lot of bricks (a few types can even destroy them). Digging mostly relies on melting the gold you get from boss fights and as I’ve said above, that takes a lot of GP. So when to dig? Rarely. My personal conditions for digging were 3+ charges, 100% GP and just out of the Arena. Check Godwiki on God Voice and how to dig (hint: spamming won’t get you there often), don’t waste more than 50% GP trying to dig and… be very careful about getting involved if you see your comrades are AFK. Don’t waste charges on bosses (unless it’s actually worth it, which it rarely is), Arena’s a far better place for them.
Post temple hints (work in progress):
So you’ve got a temple now. A couple of things get easier from now on – pet resurrection, leveling, guild boosting, charge hoarding… and so on. Here’s a few how-to’s:
Dungeons:
Preparation – preferably, you want a couple of friends with you… “actives” (as opposed to AFKs) make dungeons a lot more fun, not to mention easier. You should also have as many charges as possible (you should have 3 charges, 100% GP and “full” health at the minimum) and ensure you have enough time to complete a dungeon – they can take from 10 to 45 minutes or so. Don’t leave mid-way if you can avoid it.
If you’re looking to match your friends, the best way to go about it is to synchronize the time you send at. If your clocks are synchronized to the world clock (most digital clocks nowadays are), you can just set the time by using the “past the hour” format (for example, :33 means 33 minutes after the current hour). Time zones are not a factor this way.
Health – when you enter a dungeon, you will receive a 33% heal. That’s 33% of your maximum HP. So if your max health is 300 and you send with 190, you will enter the dungeon with 290 HP. Aim to have this at maximum, not only so you could save on GP, but also to avoid getting killed by traps if you get an Anti-Influence dungeon.
The Driver – this is the popular name for the person sending out voice commands in a dungeon to direct the group through the dungeon to find the treasure. This “job” can be split among more than one person, however, please – don’t mess with the driver. Don’t send out a random command. If you suspect the driver went AFK, ask so via PM or a voice command. Sending more than one voice command to the group will get them to go to a “random” direction (generally, not the direction any of the people sending the commands said to go to). This can get the group into trouble (exiting the dungeon by accident, running into a boss or a trap unnecessarily etc.). When you see a person willing to drive, you may want to toss them a friend invite – these people are few and far in between.
How to drive – here’s a hodgepodge of hints if you want to drive yourself. It isn’t a hard task, though it can be made difficult by a couple of factors like lag, playing Godville on the phone (weaker, not as easy to use UI) etc.
1) “It’s in the corner” – I’ve thought of having this as my motto for a while – it was my main method of looking for the treasure. The treasure will always be surrounded (ie. be adjacent to, directly, not diagonally) by 1-3 walls. Furthermore, it is only adjacent to a single wall in one case – when there’s more than one “Treasure boss” (btw, these are very rare, so you’ll want to be looking for 2-3 walls 95% of the time or so). So look for walls, look for “passages” (a square that has walls to north and south or west and east) or “corners” (a square that has walls to south and west, north and west etc.).
2) Directional hints – it’s an arrow. Follow it. One thing to keep in mind is that direct directional hints (f. ex. “the treasure is west”) mean that if the treasure is 5 steps away from such a hint, it is in the direct path. After 5 steps, the line spreads and it can be one tile/square to the side as well. The further you get out from a direct hint, the more spread the search area is. However, you will likely find it while there’s a one, or maybe a two tile spread. Keep in mind that this affects the non-direct hints too. If you’ve got a hint that says northwest, the treasure can’t be 1 tile to the north and 6 tiles to the west – or you’d have gotten a hint that says west.
3) Dodging bosses – you’ll generally want to hit as few bosses as possible. Unless you’re on a mission to resurrect a pet (although it takes a pretty high level pet to require boss hitting unless you’ve got a Hoarding dungeon), you don’t want to be wasting charges on unnecessary fights. How to dodge a boss? Quite easily. Watch the dungeon entries for boss hints (“Human imprints are being beaten out of the next room” and such) and when you see one, go back a tile and go around to determine which tile the boss is in. Then, if you can (there are such things as unavoidable bosses, or even just those not worth avoiding due to the alternative path being too long), just go around it. Keep in mind that while the bosses cannot be adjacent to each other (in the surrounding squares that you can directly move to), they can be diagonal from each other. Boss hints will also give you a general idea of where to go towards the treasure as they will usually be lined up in the direction of the treasure. You can use them instead of, or complimenting the hints (especially useful in Hurry, Hotness and, most importantly, Uncertainty dungeons).
Keep in mind that the treasure is not only guarded by a treasure boss, but also usually by traps. If you’re dodging it, be aware that you’ll very likely walk through a trap or two. Even if you go right through the treasure boss, you’ll sometimes have to go through a trap to get to the treasure itself. As far as Solitude dungeon is concerned, 1-3 traps will replace the bosses locations.
4) Creating a search area – once you get a hint (assuming it’s not a direct one) and keeping in mind the diagonal rule, check when your second hint is due (first is usually around step 17-25, second around 35-40 [personal experience and off the top of my head – check this info if you will], keep in mind they appear faster/more frequently on Hotness and Hurry). With that in mind, try and make a square of a search area if you can. If you got a northeast hint, focus on going north or east first, then go the other direction, aiming to get a hint that will narrow down your search to a quadrant (my rule is 3-5 squares away from the hint, depending on how close I feel I am to the treasure). It’s better to get to a good position for your next hint than to walk into what would be your search area attempting to get closer to the treasure itself and get another one of the same hints – once you know where it is, getting to it is the easy part.
5) The diagonal rule – This is a new one to me that a guildie and a Russian GV player (Another Jessica) let me in on. Some dungeons (not all), the randomized ones, will have the treasure follow the so called diagonal rule. Basically, looking from the entrance (E on the map), you want to be going in one of the diagonal directions from it (NW, NE, SW, SE) and you’ll find the treasure more or less on that diagonal (up to two squares to the sides of the diagonal I believe). The dungeons that definitely follow this rule are the “newer” ones, ie. the dungeons that have a nook (X on the map) or a side quest. A lot of the dungeons fall into this category and it makes it quite a bit easier as you can just stick close to the diagonal right after you get your first directional hint.
Donations (Godville visits):
Once you have a temple, you will start receiving donations of charges and logs on return to Godville (they have to enter the city on their own, teleporting them via sending to Arena or using items like Motion Potion will not work). These however, are “impeded” by sacrifices, so let’s cover them first:
Sacrifices – When your hero returns to Godville with more than 10k gold, they will sacrifice that gold for experience (exception is the daily forecast which makes it impossible). You will sacrifice 10, 20 and 30k gold, depending on how much you have. The first sacrifice of the day (or rather, the 24 hour timer) will get you 3%XP per 10k gold (so 3/6/9% XP for 10/20/30k gold), the second 2% and the following will only get you 1% (it might be that this percentage becomes smaller on higher levels, but I haven’t noticed it yet). Therefore, if you care about your level, you should aim to try and sacrifice 30k on your first sacrifice.
Donations – Donations happen when your hero returns to Godville with less than 10k gold. At that point, they will receive one of the three donations – a log for the Ark, an accumulator charge or… gold. If my info is right, the log is on a 12 hour cooldown, the charge is on a 10 hour cooldown and gold is always available. You will NOT get anything if your hero returns to Godville more than once per hour.
How to use this info? Well, there’s a sweet little Voice Command, that I find to be the most useful one in the game – “back to town”. To use it to get back to Godville, you need to send your hero back before they reach Milestone 10. It is not always possible because you need to send the VC after your hero finds the right path (it is also not usable in combat) and they can sometimes look further than that. A quick way to get back to GV if you’re far away is to send your hero into the Arena, then return them to Godville after they exit and find the path. There is a limit (4 at the minimum I believe) to how many times you can use this VC and (as far as I know) it is limited by your quest – the limit resets once you finish it and get a new one. NOTE: “Cancel quest” VC will return the hero to Godville, but will NOT get you a donation.
Pet resurrection and how to keep your GP up:
This basically concerns the question of “when do I send my hero into a dungeon?”. Well, depending on your priorities, there are a few options. Basically, the idea is that your hero will return to whatever activity they were conducting before you sent them in. If they were out in the wilderness, they’ll keep going (unless you’ve died in the dungeon and are low on hp). If they’re returning to a town, they will continue on their way after the dungeon (can be useful if you want to max out the amount of XP your hero will sacrifice the gold for, if you’re sending them back to GV). But generally, the sweet time to send them is when they’re in town. Want a healthy hero after the dungeon? Send them during the first, healing phase in town. Want your hero to have the most gold to spend on equipment and skills? Send them in during the selling phase and they’ll keep selling the stuff they got in the dungeon.
Here’s the best – want them to not waste their gold before they get out of the town? Send them in during the praying phase. This has several upsides. First, if you’re on a mission to resurrect your pet, it will max out the amount of gold you have at the phase you need it (the pet gets resurrected during/after the prayer). This is the absolute best and easiest way to resurrect your pet and makes it hilariously easy until they get to a really high level (talking level 50+ pets). Also, even if you’re not looking to resurrect your pet, having lots of gold during the praying phase will mean your hero will have more gold to sacrifice to you in the prayer and get you more GP. If you’re voting in the Ideabox, sending during the praying phase will almost always get you a 100% prayer. Even without it, it happens quite often. This will allow you to keep your GP up and more importantly, use any useful artifacts you find in the dungeon (most importantly, Praystations and Sacrificial Lamps for accumulating charges).
As a side note, the pet resurrection cost in gold is around 415g/level (it varies depending on the level of the pet, higher level pets are cheaper to rez and get down to about 400g/level I believe, while low level pets are more expensive per level).
Another way to keep the amount of your charges up is to get a few buddies for AFK Arena dueling. If you’re not bothered by your duel score, having a few friends to fight with will keep you with a steady supply of charges. If you’re having trouble finding partners for it, there is a forum thread on the subject where you should be able to find some.