2019 In review My First Year with M3rciless
Posted Dec 23, 2019 5:38:15 GMT -7
Post by Cheeserules8 on Dec 23, 2019 5:38:15 GMT -7
Wow what a year!
I wanted to take the opportunity at the close of the year to reflect back on all that has happened for me in game over the past year (2019).
I came back to RS3 late in 2018, sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving. I had not played the game in 10 years so you can imagine how different everything was for me. It looked familiar yet it felt like a totally different game, there was a Double Exp event going on, pulse cores, prismatic stars, treasure hunter keys, bonus exp, loadstones everywhere the list goes on and on and don't get me started about all the changes made to combat.
However after about a month of coming back to the game, mostly thanks to some new coworkers, I was doing a slayer task for greater demons in the upstairs level of the Brimhaven dungeon. Here I saw somebody using soul split and combat abilities I had never seen before and instead of just telling me to go google it myself or look it up on the wiki the actually told me and invited me to join the clan.
I hesitated about joining a clan for a number of reasons. The main reason being when I played the game years ago clans were not all that great or useful, most of the time is was pking and bossing and doing stupid fun stuff with friends. Now we have citadels and so much more that actually make clans a huge part of being a successful player.
However I decided to accept the invitation and at least see what clan life was like now. Over the next few weeks I learned about the citadel, started capping regularly, joined our discord and before I knew it I had new friends in RS3 and a great way to talk to them (even if my headset was on backorder for a few days I was able to at least listen and type responses as needed) that wasn't the teamspeak of old days.
Now that I had a great base of new friends I still had to learn and start catching up on 10 years worth of new content plus all of the old content I had never finished previously so I had no clue where to start.
So I decided to start with a little bit of everything and see what I liked and set some goals from there.
So I started with finishing all of the quests that I had started before but never finished. This got me some good experience and rewards and also exposed me and let me explore a lot of the changes to the game.
After I finished all the quests I had started it was time for skilling which timed out perfectly, the mining and smithing rework was launching so off I went, pickaxe in hand. Due to the changes in the rework and another DXP coming very soon I had made a plan to get 99 Mining, my first 99 skill and then use the ores that I mined to get 99 smithing done for free doing burial armor sets in the artisans workshop or possibly even make some money if I had extra ores.
Before I knew it I had 99 mining done with and looking at how much time I had I decided to go for 99 smithing before dxp. Some clan mates also encouraged me in this decision and helped me plan getting 99 herblore done on DXP which only cost 200m gp but more on that later.
So away I went to the artisans guild smithing all the ores I had stocked up. I started with cannonballs because I was betting on the price of coal to skyrocket when the rework hit. Sadly after the rework the price of coal dropped so I was stuck with ~15k coal from my kingdom of Miscellania. So instead of selling it for a fraction of what it was worth the day before I decided to mine iron ore, make steel bars and make cannonballs. This went a long way in funding my 99 Herblore and was a huge encouragement to me since I still felt totally new to the game and suddenly was easily making more money than I ever had before.
After all the cannonballs were done I smelted all the ores into bars and started making burial armor sets, buying as many rewards from the artisans guild as I could. Before I knew it I had my first two 99's and skilling pets and a new set of Elder Rune +5 armor that I proudly made myself. I finally felt like I was catching up in the game, or at least starting to understand it again.
Next was DXP weekend. This DXP was very odd for everyone because they had just done a DXP weekend maybe a month or two before this one. This meant that nobody had the time necessary to stock up on common materials and merchant them. This actually helped me quite a bit because that meant that the price of herblore materials didn't rise as high as they had in the DXP a month or so ago.
So for the low price of 200m I went from 60 herblore to 99. I had bought all the herbs as grimy since they were cheaper that way and cleaned them myself for some easy exp. I also got all my vials of water for free from portable wells.
When DXP came I was ready to go, I had all my vials of water, clean herbs, presets ready and secondary ingredients.... except for grenwall spikes I didn't realize you need 5 of those per pot but luckily I caught it in time and was able to buy enough to finish.
Grinding out 99 herblore during my first true, ready for it, planned out DXP went amazingly fast using super sets to extremes to overloads. Before I knew it I was running dungeoneering floors with clan mates to get to lvl 75 so that I could unlock Priff and all of its wonderful contents.
A few days after that DXP I was ready for Priff and also finished getting 99 Thieving because safecracking is OP.
At this point I was back to the game for maybe 2-3 months and went from no skills above 89 to three 99's and 2 skilling pets plus all the level requirements for Priff.
So now I went back to questing to unlock Priff. Once I had it unlocked I decided to go back to skilling to get all the levels required for quest cape. Once I had those I went and got the quest cape done. It was a ton of fun and after a few weeks of questing after work I had the quest cape and I felt so accomplished. I wasn't a max player but I had something that other max players in the clan didn't even have. I'll be honest I loved the bragging rights that came with having the quest cape in this clan.
Getting the quest cape also provided me with insane amounts of exp from all the lamps along with full access to every area of the map.
This meant that going forward I had every method available to finish maxing. So now to finish maxing I took full advantage of this and made quality of life upgrades like the pickaxe of earth and song, augmented crystal tools, even high level areas like the uncharted isles were extremely helpful. Although at the same time some skills like hunter I did a little slower but in doing so I was able to make lots of gp by trapping grenwalls.
Fast forward through the summer and suddenly I had a lot of things done, I was getting close to max, I already had the quest cape, I had a lot of anachronia unlocked and upgraded, I had a number of the area tasks completely done, I was making money and updating my gear to be current with stuff from this decade (looks like its about to be out of date again lol)
Rolling into the end of the summer I could have maxed quite easily if I had kept pushing but I wanted to slow down, enjoy the journey, make some money and get some quality of life improvements done. So I spent some time getting more area tasks done, buying upgrades from the Arc rewards store like the bonepicker upgrade, getting dungeoneering rewards like Bank at ED's, filling out my slayer toolbelt, getting better combat gear for all 3 combat styles etc. This also allowed me to stock up on my last few skills and get them ready to max during the annual fall DXP.
When the fall DXP came this year it was done differently, instead of a single weekend of DXP that counted down if you were logged in or not, players were given 36 hours to use over 10 days. This meant that you could log out and use the bathroom, hang out with friends, eat food with family and even sleep. All without having to worry about wasting precious DXP hours.
With about half of my 36 hours spent I hit max and was thrilled, I celebrated going into the max garden and unfurling the last of my banners and entering the max guild for the first time surrounded by wonderful clan mates that had supported me and helped me along the way. It was a great experience and I can't wait to celebrate the next clan mate who maxes.
Since then I have been finishing a few more area tasks, enjoying new events like the Yak Track event, and working on 120 skills and other new content like the Ranch out of time.
Overall it has been a wonderful and amazing year. I accomplished way more than I ever thought I would over a lifetime of playing RS3 and I did it all in less than a year! I honestly believe it is due to the amazing people we have in this clan. People who will help, guide and support you and also push you out of your comfort zone and laugh at you... or is it with you? Either way I'm so grateful that I've found a home here in M3rciless and I can't wait to see what 2020 has in store!
I wanted to take the opportunity at the close of the year to reflect back on all that has happened for me in game over the past year (2019).
I came back to RS3 late in 2018, sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving. I had not played the game in 10 years so you can imagine how different everything was for me. It looked familiar yet it felt like a totally different game, there was a Double Exp event going on, pulse cores, prismatic stars, treasure hunter keys, bonus exp, loadstones everywhere the list goes on and on and don't get me started about all the changes made to combat.
However after about a month of coming back to the game, mostly thanks to some new coworkers, I was doing a slayer task for greater demons in the upstairs level of the Brimhaven dungeon. Here I saw somebody using soul split and combat abilities I had never seen before and instead of just telling me to go google it myself or look it up on the wiki the actually told me and invited me to join the clan.
I hesitated about joining a clan for a number of reasons. The main reason being when I played the game years ago clans were not all that great or useful, most of the time is was pking and bossing and doing stupid fun stuff with friends. Now we have citadels and so much more that actually make clans a huge part of being a successful player.
However I decided to accept the invitation and at least see what clan life was like now. Over the next few weeks I learned about the citadel, started capping regularly, joined our discord and before I knew it I had new friends in RS3 and a great way to talk to them (even if my headset was on backorder for a few days I was able to at least listen and type responses as needed) that wasn't the teamspeak of old days.
Now that I had a great base of new friends I still had to learn and start catching up on 10 years worth of new content plus all of the old content I had never finished previously so I had no clue where to start.
So I decided to start with a little bit of everything and see what I liked and set some goals from there.
So I started with finishing all of the quests that I had started before but never finished. This got me some good experience and rewards and also exposed me and let me explore a lot of the changes to the game.
After I finished all the quests I had started it was time for skilling which timed out perfectly, the mining and smithing rework was launching so off I went, pickaxe in hand. Due to the changes in the rework and another DXP coming very soon I had made a plan to get 99 Mining, my first 99 skill and then use the ores that I mined to get 99 smithing done for free doing burial armor sets in the artisans workshop or possibly even make some money if I had extra ores.
Before I knew it I had 99 mining done with and looking at how much time I had I decided to go for 99 smithing before dxp. Some clan mates also encouraged me in this decision and helped me plan getting 99 herblore done on DXP which only cost 200m gp but more on that later.
So away I went to the artisans guild smithing all the ores I had stocked up. I started with cannonballs because I was betting on the price of coal to skyrocket when the rework hit. Sadly after the rework the price of coal dropped so I was stuck with ~15k coal from my kingdom of Miscellania. So instead of selling it for a fraction of what it was worth the day before I decided to mine iron ore, make steel bars and make cannonballs. This went a long way in funding my 99 Herblore and was a huge encouragement to me since I still felt totally new to the game and suddenly was easily making more money than I ever had before.
After all the cannonballs were done I smelted all the ores into bars and started making burial armor sets, buying as many rewards from the artisans guild as I could. Before I knew it I had my first two 99's and skilling pets and a new set of Elder Rune +5 armor that I proudly made myself. I finally felt like I was catching up in the game, or at least starting to understand it again.
Next was DXP weekend. This DXP was very odd for everyone because they had just done a DXP weekend maybe a month or two before this one. This meant that nobody had the time necessary to stock up on common materials and merchant them. This actually helped me quite a bit because that meant that the price of herblore materials didn't rise as high as they had in the DXP a month or so ago.
So for the low price of 200m I went from 60 herblore to 99. I had bought all the herbs as grimy since they were cheaper that way and cleaned them myself for some easy exp. I also got all my vials of water for free from portable wells.
When DXP came I was ready to go, I had all my vials of water, clean herbs, presets ready and secondary ingredients.... except for grenwall spikes I didn't realize you need 5 of those per pot but luckily I caught it in time and was able to buy enough to finish.
Grinding out 99 herblore during my first true, ready for it, planned out DXP went amazingly fast using super sets to extremes to overloads. Before I knew it I was running dungeoneering floors with clan mates to get to lvl 75 so that I could unlock Priff and all of its wonderful contents.
A few days after that DXP I was ready for Priff and also finished getting 99 Thieving because safecracking is OP.
At this point I was back to the game for maybe 2-3 months and went from no skills above 89 to three 99's and 2 skilling pets plus all the level requirements for Priff.
So now I went back to questing to unlock Priff. Once I had it unlocked I decided to go back to skilling to get all the levels required for quest cape. Once I had those I went and got the quest cape done. It was a ton of fun and after a few weeks of questing after work I had the quest cape and I felt so accomplished. I wasn't a max player but I had something that other max players in the clan didn't even have. I'll be honest I loved the bragging rights that came with having the quest cape in this clan.
Getting the quest cape also provided me with insane amounts of exp from all the lamps along with full access to every area of the map.
This meant that going forward I had every method available to finish maxing. So now to finish maxing I took full advantage of this and made quality of life upgrades like the pickaxe of earth and song, augmented crystal tools, even high level areas like the uncharted isles were extremely helpful. Although at the same time some skills like hunter I did a little slower but in doing so I was able to make lots of gp by trapping grenwalls.
Fast forward through the summer and suddenly I had a lot of things done, I was getting close to max, I already had the quest cape, I had a lot of anachronia unlocked and upgraded, I had a number of the area tasks completely done, I was making money and updating my gear to be current with stuff from this decade (looks like its about to be out of date again lol)
Rolling into the end of the summer I could have maxed quite easily if I had kept pushing but I wanted to slow down, enjoy the journey, make some money and get some quality of life improvements done. So I spent some time getting more area tasks done, buying upgrades from the Arc rewards store like the bonepicker upgrade, getting dungeoneering rewards like Bank at ED's, filling out my slayer toolbelt, getting better combat gear for all 3 combat styles etc. This also allowed me to stock up on my last few skills and get them ready to max during the annual fall DXP.
When the fall DXP came this year it was done differently, instead of a single weekend of DXP that counted down if you were logged in or not, players were given 36 hours to use over 10 days. This meant that you could log out and use the bathroom, hang out with friends, eat food with family and even sleep. All without having to worry about wasting precious DXP hours.
With about half of my 36 hours spent I hit max and was thrilled, I celebrated going into the max garden and unfurling the last of my banners and entering the max guild for the first time surrounded by wonderful clan mates that had supported me and helped me along the way. It was a great experience and I can't wait to celebrate the next clan mate who maxes.
Since then I have been finishing a few more area tasks, enjoying new events like the Yak Track event, and working on 120 skills and other new content like the Ranch out of time.
Overall it has been a wonderful and amazing year. I accomplished way more than I ever thought I would over a lifetime of playing RS3 and I did it all in less than a year! I honestly believe it is due to the amazing people we have in this clan. People who will help, guide and support you and also push you out of your comfort zone and laugh at you... or is it with you? Either way I'm so grateful that I've found a home here in M3rciless and I can't wait to see what 2020 has in store!
