Skaars Guide to Free Account'in

So youve decided to make a free account, congratulations, its a different path than going the paid route, one that requires a bit more patience, but is rewarding in the end once you have maxed your little freebie sitting in the portal. but getting there and getting there the best way is 2 different things.

Before we begin on your crits though, lets go over accounts. in order to do a free account properly, you will need bigs to kill things for you, some of which, like getting gear, is easily enough acquired by just asking in chat, however some things you will need to farm make it considerably more useful to have your own bigger crit to be in control of the killing yourself. some of you may have old paid accounts, some may have currently paid accounts and are just experimenting with the free side of life, and some of you will have none, and must start from scratch. i will walk you through the starting from scratch portion, and anyone who doesnt need to do that can skip down to the part of actually growing your free.

So building your big. lets start out by saying that drakkar, with the incredibly shrunken player base now, is no longer a single crit game. there are apps that will allow you to multibox far more and with relative ease, but even without the use of said apps it is almost a requirement to run atleast 2 accounts now and split screen them. we will begin here with the first crit, or as we will refer to it from now on: your Throw Away Barb. barbs are the easiest crit to grow, require the least amount of work to gear and get good enough to kill, and are the best crit for lairs at 50/30 and below. even after you are threw the throw away stage you will most likely still be running a barb just for this fact. so lets get started with your TAB, rolling it on up, pick your most clever barb name, hit enter, go to your stat screen. since this is your TAB, were not going to worry about maxing the stats, or what race you choose, just get yourself 18+ str, 18 agi and click accept. now you are in the nork school and ready to go start killing things! in true barb style. but first we need to get a weapon, and dedicate to the barb class. there are many maps on websites to find the exact location, but the barb trainer is in the woods to the E of town, become a barb, check. now for a weapon, there are many good weapon choices for a barb, and when you get around to making your main barb you will probably skill up some of them as they will do more damage, but the absolute staple and most important skill on a barb is thrown, and with our TAB that will be all we focus on. now the only issue with this is that there is no thrown weapon in any of the stores in nork, so this is where you will need some help for your TAB. usually just saying "can anyone help me get a throwing weapon for a new crit" in lobby will get you a response from someone and that someone may even be willing to get you some other starter gear as a bonus, just remember to be patient in waiting for your response and what is offered, we dont want to appear greedy or unapreciative. so were now a barb with a weapon, lets go kill shit right? well first we have to set up our throw macro and barb macro. theres plenty of macro info on websites, so i wont detail that here, but just know we gotta set up the macro for throw or we will skill that weapon in its regular category, and we need to set up those barb macros as they will be the essential part of our crit in the near future. now that we have them set up though, we are ready to go rage! down to n1 for our first kills. lets wander around here and get our feel back for the game, get to where we feel comfortable with the attacking and drinking and looting processes, and get us some exp/skill. you should be able to get yourself to 7/6 in n1 in a couple of hours of playing, and this is where we will now move on to n3, harder crits, better exp/skill. we want to fool around down here until lvl 10, then to n4, get lvl 13, and now we want to max our TAB's hp. now the amount you saved from looting up to this point honestly wont make much of a dent, however, the amount you need is pocket change to most players at this point, and many of them have no use for coin anymore and will be happy to part ways with it. ask again in lobby if anyone can help you with some coin for lvl 13 hp doc, and you should be maxed in no time. were now lvl 13, have 347 hp, were ready to head down to n5. lets fool around in here for a few levels until were at lvl 16. so now we are level 16, should be skill 12 or 13 as well, doing well at killing, were surviving everywhere we have hunted to this point. now its finally time to break out those barb macros we set up if you havent played around with them previously. Zerk and Arg, zerk makes yor barb go beserk, from fidgity up to frothing at the mouth, up until now the only real benefit of zerking has been AutoBalm(automatically drinks an IH at 1/3 hp) BUT now at lvl 16, we gain +4 str at froth when zerked, more str= more damage. we are finally ready for n6! arg is the command to force the barb to attack while zerked, at lower levels just clicking the zerk button will do this, but as your barb gains more control over itself arg will become your primary form of attacking. at this point we are basically rinse and repeating up to 25, so i will simplify the break down a bit. n6/n7 up to lvl 20, at lvl 18 you will gain HP at full zerk, will become VERY useful, at lvl 20 you will gain +4 attacks at full zerk, beneficial but not near as important as the HP was. now were lvl 20, its time for cob and cob gear, once again, we will need to ask for help in the lobby for this. there are 5 things specifically we are after here: SAS fur, lori robe, kaldor robe, nin helm, forged hammer. anything you can get beyond those is just gravy. with these 5 things, we are ready to head back to nork and start the long grind to 25. i would reccomend start with what you know, n6 and n7 will be cake with the cob gear, if you get bored there, or dont feel its quite enough exp, km4 is another great place to head to. any time you can get into a party in km5 or n10 you want to do this, its the best exp a free can ever get, and your barb at this size will actually do quite well there, just having to walk them to those places is a total PITA for you to make it a constant spot. so fast forward a few levels of work, were now 25/20 atleast, we ask some poeple to help us out with CC items to get access on the barb. we are FINALLY ready to start building our actual bonfide badass frees!!!

Now, before we begin the process of actually building our frees, we may want to take a little time to plan out how many and what type of crits we want to run with, the more crits we make, the more time commitment it will require, but also the more areas we can kill and survive in as they grow. lets start with a bit of a tier system for what classes we need, and we can decide on how many we want to make based off that. A tier: Barb, this is the best and easiest crit to grow in freebie world, most damage, least amount of work, heals itself, has ridiculous HP compared to the rest. very easily the best class for a free, BUT we have one in our TAB, so if you decide to backburner the barb until you are ready to RR the TAB thats completely understandable. B tier: Ment, squishy as hell, will die in alot of places without support, but the single most useful class in game, MT alone is worth it just to taxi your party around, but disc's like ES and ABS are lifesavers for non barb crits, certain lairs require depleteing them to kill, and ments will do a tremendous amount of damage once they have some tiers. drak's true "glass cannon" class. Thief, the ability to kill from the shadows is a very useful thing by itself, but when you factor in that as a freebie you are still very much killable in alot of places you will be hunting, its even more useful, add in the ability to pick locks for doors that close every 2 hours, and that should you manage to DP to a lair on the other crits theres a good chance the thief can get your gear back, and its easy to understand why this class makes the second tier list. C tier: Healer, pretty self explanatory, never going to be a damage leader for you, but keeping everyone healed up and being able to CC them should they die is a pretty good thing. MA, at skill 30, with good gear and stats, an MA will rival the barb for pure damage, however the MA has to be on the hex to do it, so loss of points for the lack of versatility in damage there, they are more easily killed and harder to gear than the barb as well, BUT the pool chi's are awesome, minorpool is basically an IH with how quick the rounds go by, and majorpool will give him more HP than your zerked barb, making how much more damage they take than him workable. D tier:(these are outdone by the classes above for everything they do, the only real point to play them as a free is if you like the class) Pally, will never have the hp of the barb, will never do the damage the barb does, and now that the game has a guaranteed hit feature, they no longer can be geared up as a free to be untouchable, fun to play, fun to disarm crit, but in terms of actually serving a purpose he is outclassed by the barb and even the MA in every way. FM, even weaker melee crit than the pally, PSI wise will never come close to the damage the ment does, makes a great taxi, and after you grow one to a level high enough, they are fun to kill small lairs with as you can cast and slash, outside of personal enjoyment though, this is without a doubt the worst free class to play.

Our properly done frees, what a journey to get here and still SO much journey to go haha. lets start with the rolls, where we didnt care about race or stats too much on our TAB, we now do. almost no matter what class you choose(the one exemption being Pally, needing a city dweller to get 18 natural will) you are going to want to choose Outcast. the reason for this is they are the only race that can naturally get 19 str and 18 agi. why does this matter you may say? for the little number beside the roll numbers in the roller. the one next to str is your natural "to hit" bonus, the one next to your agi is your natural "to miss" bonus. as a free, you will never get to the point a level 75+ crit does where you are literally untouchable in areas, so having these bonuses is a pretty big advantage. we wont worry about any of the other stats, as they are all relatively easily fixable. the only 3 that arent easily are will, luck and char, as a free, char means absolutely nothing to you, it dictates the cost of hits and the cost of skill training, both of which you will not need. luck is, well....luck, i have yet to personally find much value to it, i have crits with 3 luck that have alerian rares, and crits with 18 luck that dont, from my personal perspective, it makes no influence on your regular gameplay. the only one that does, but is also the only one you can get pots for, is willpower. they are considerably more rare than any other nork pot, but they do exist and they do drop, so i dont find it to be a stat to concern myself with UNLESS rolling a pally. so we got our crit rolled up, we got our str/agi bonuses, time to put that TAB to work. depending on what class you chose for this new crit, we need to max stats/ep/hp. so our TAB is about to go journey into ML and M3 until we have all the stats to their max, if we rolled a psi crit we are going to coin/ask for coin in lobby to max his ep, and we are going to hit every dragon, ML, and m3 to get ourselves major maxed at lvl 1. now major maxing is dependant upon the class, if you chose barb, you will max at 200, and have no problem being over lvl 13 hp max when you rest, if you chose ment, your major max will be 120 and you will almost certainly be under lvl 13 hp max. there is a way to avoid this, and our TAB is capable of doing it, but fair warning, it is time consuming. we can round yellow max from FS rd in n6 at lvl 1, unlike majors, this is a total cap of 250 hp no matter the class, however, you will be checking the FS RD every few hours to maybe get 1 yellow to drop, so needless to say it takes a while. if your in it for the long haul and dont mind spending a few more weeks in n1 racking up skill on the baby, go for it. if that sounds like just too much work with the amount of time commitment your already planning on, dont worry about it, you can still fix it at lvl 17, just means a few more swords at that point. so we have everything maxed now, its time to start the leveling process, during our time collecting pots for maxing, we should have gained some exp and skill, so lets go ahead and use what we got, make sure to stop at lvl 13 if you have that much or more and verify that you are above free hp max, but most likely you will be. our next goal is to get this crit leveled up to 17, and we now have a secret weapon for that. party sidekick, using this with the TAB will bring our new crit temporarily up in levels, and make it where it can survive in much harder places where the TAB can do the killing for faster gains. so we are now 17/13 atleast, it is time to start our most time consuming grind of this journey...bero'ing.

So before we even get our first sword, we will need to gain CH access on both the new crit and the TAB if you havent done so already. this means we need 2 uthers, 2 chips, and 2 bresh's. now the TAB is capable of killing these, though it will be a long and messy fight, and he is not capable of MT'ing the baby in to get the gear anyways, so asking for a ride and some help for this one is recommended. so we get ourselves some access on both, we make it into CH, now we have one last step before we can start maxing, if you didnt already grab one when gaining CC access on the TAB. in order to open the door to bero, we need a mujaba key. its going to be a bit of a walk, but the TAB will have no problems killing him. now i have made a walkthrough for the maxing process as well as the maxes per class on Hawks website, so i wont go into that too much here. kill the guy, take his sword on the new crit, stockpile them, once you have a lockerful trade them in for the cups, kill durgon so you can safely walk to the pools, and drink. now what i dont have on hawks website however is that his respawn time is 2 hours, and that you will need somewhere around 100-150 swords to fully max. so if we robotically and systematically killed him every single time he spawned, it would take us somewhere inbetween 200-300 hours to finish this, even that sounds like a long process, but most of us are not robots, so we will have times we are sleeping or working or just burnt out on drak that we are not killing him, so i would say this process taking you a month or 2 would be a better timeline to look at. what i would recommend is that every time your about to log off, just go park the 2 of them in CH, this way when you log on next, you can go kill bero the first time and then move on with your day of exping/skilling. if your going to be on for several hours, somewhere after the 2 hour mark go take a quick "kill bero" break and then continue with your day. if you use it as just an extra thing to do, your time wont be quite as obvious, where if you just sit the crit there and dont use it until you finish maxing, this process will get tiresome and tedious and you will probably be tempted to give up on it. this is how we will end up with the best HP a free crit can get though, so stick with it, look at the time its taking as just preparing you more for when you finally are finished. now, lets take a look at why this will yield us the best hp: barb bero max is 615 at lvl 17. the lvl 19 cob hp doc max is 623. 8 hp difference with 2 levels of resting to gain, meaning as long as you dont rest that barb with 4 con and thus get shit hp rests, we should be looking at 630+ hp at lvl 19, depending on what the + is there, you are potentially even over lvl 20 max, and as long as you rest smart with 18 con and get good hp's, you will always be over the cob hit doc max at that size. now for those of you rolling up a free out of boredom/curiosity as break from your big paid crits, your probably saying "what difference is 7 hp really going to make?" and as a primal when your hp becomes based on your con, thats absolutely true, those base numbers can get cover up quick and easy with gear. however as a free and depending on the class of the crit, 7 hp can definitely be the difference between being 1 shot or not in places/lairs.

Lets fast foward a few months, we have finally just turned in our last bero sword and gotten our hp maxed, CONGRATS!!! that was one hell of a grind, but you stuck with it and made it to the finish line. hopefully we have exp for lvl 20, but even if not, lets go ahead and lvl up once and head to cob. were now lvl 18 standing in cob tree town in all nork gear, depending on the class we are will depend on the gear we need, so i wont break down everything, but lets ask in chat again if anyone can help us get some starter cob gear for our crit. now the next thing we are going to need is some hp quests so we arent quite so squishy here in cob, 2 of them will require help from a big killing gra and kaldor, but 2 can be done just fine on your own and some fast running, so lets get the juntes ring and replacement done. we should now have atleast 200 floating cob hp, and some starter gear, now if your crit is a psi user, we need to max the ep with grubs. just another grind here, but this one takes far less time, and you should be closer to ep max at the start than you were for hp at the start of bero, so this will be a walk in the park in comparison. id recommend just farming the GD scaler level with your TAB, as this is the easiest level to survive on. so we have maxed our EP's now if we rolled a psi crit, weve gotten some basic cob gear, its now time to move on to the stats. there are several items in cob that can be traded for stat pots taking our max stat up to 21, each one drops in a specific area, and some are more common than others. depending on what class we are will determine what stats we want to hit. every crit should max str(nuggets in t2) just because that nin helm is so damn heavy lol, but if your an MA/pally/thief you will also want Agi(brass ring in dessert), a healer will want wis(saphire in DT), a ment will need Int(turnip in keep). now some of these places are also considerably harder than others, just to get to and also to survive, so go slowly at it. find an area you can survive and just farm that area, we have already done a ton of grinding thus far on our free, no harm in just a little more. once we have maxed our EP there is no need to stay lvl 18 any longer, so go ahead and rest up to help with your surviving.

Side note: there is one more stat max we can do, that will take our stats up to 23, dion. however this requires surviving the cob floor with all the dragons, and is very dangerous for lower level crits. i would recommend starting out at just the pot maxes, and later on when youve grown the free up a bit we can come back to dion.

So we are maxed up, got cob gear, and should be lvl 20 atleast by now. its time to do like we did on the barb and take that gear back to nork and start exp'ing. despite being 30 levels away from the max size our free can get, we are practically in the end game of his career now. find good spots to exp/skill, rinse and repeat. so lets get to growing. now there are a few things we still can get however, gear wise and others, and we will make pit stops along our way to get them. first up will be getting CC access once we hit lvl 25, we should have it on our TAB, so by this point you should know all the benefits it has to offer. depending on the class we chose there is also high end cob gear we can get at lvl's 25,30 and 35. vani, gk2, laz and lani. for the ones that apply to us lets ask for help again in chats once we hit these levels. the other thing we will need help with starting at lvl 35 is tiers, tiers are a NL disc that can brought to nork through the IR lockers by a big, and given to a free to learn. some are more useful than others, but they all will greatly outperform their regular disc counterparts. tiers start at lvl 35, and depending on the class will determine how many you end up with at lvl 50, your first tier should be our next goal to hit.

Now at lvl 35 and with our first tiers theres a few things we can do if we choose, we should be much more capable of surviving the dragons on the cob floor if you want to try your hand at dion, we should be able to survive ud3-ud4 with the TAB killing if we want to farm up some of the rare gear drops there, and we should be able to kill bero on our free now if we decide we are going to RR the TAB and bring them up correctly. depending on our class, the TAB may be our best killer, and thus we dont want to get rid of them, and thats perfectly fine, you may decide just to start a second properly done free to take its place. at this point its all a decision on how many crits you want to have, and how much time you want to dedicate to the long grind of this process lol.

i hope this helps for anyone looking to create some awesome free's

-Skaar