Guide or bunch of tips by Kharadus General tips on starting out to those who are familiar with the basics

but wonder where to go from here: 1. Guilds Tzarakk is the one I recommend for starting out with, Riftwalker is a completely viable alternative for those preferring more caster-oriented setup but I have little real knowledge of it so I wont go into it. Tzarakk info can be found at: http://www.megami.com/batmud-tzarakk-guild/ Tzarakk is a well-rounded guild, requiring relatively little exp to do decent with. Its very durable compared to most any newbie tank setup due to access to a mount that soaks considerable amount of damage, particularly once Combat Riding has been trained reasonably high. Tzarakk tips: Train Harvest Soul to maybe 40-50%, using it you can easily heal up your mount relatively fast. To use it you must have a corpse of a mob that has its soul intact, so if your mount gets low, turn off your rip_action and dont tzarakk chaosfeed on the corpse, instead use soul harvest in the room the corpse is in. Races to consider a) Orc Likely the best candidate currently. Their racial frenzy speeds up skill-usage in combat, allowing Rampage to become a lot more efficient offensive skill. Orc has tremendously good exprate which is one of the biggest considerations when choosing race as an exp-making tank that likely soloes a lot, while also having good size and fine physical stats. They also see in the dark. Counteracting their allergy to light is easy enough by studying the Greater Darkness spell provided by the disciple guild. b) Lizardman A fine choice, arguably not as great as orc but offers higher dmg output. Lizardman has high exprate, sees in the dark, eats corpses, has high racial armor class (commonly known as the protection messages in the eq command) and they have access to a racial limb attack, namely their tail. If you prefer using the chaotic spawn while doing exp, lizardman is an extremely good choice, as they retain reasonable exprate while spawned and their racial limb is added to the Clawed Strike skill which is for lower level players the biggest benefit of using the spawn form. c) Minotaur The biggest damage dealer of the races I suggest, though Id recommend the above 2 choices over minotaur until you get access to a secondary guild at a reasonable level. Minotaur is big, thus hitting hard, and their racial limb, the horns, are one of the better damage dealing racial limbs. Same benefits for Clawed Strike apply that are mentioned above in Lizardman section. Exprate is massive issue in my opinion, and thus makes minotaur far worse choice early on. What to do with levels: Disciple + Tzarakk take a total of 30 levels to max out, so thatd leave you at lvl 45. To boost this guild setup further Id personally recommend taking 1 level of Navigators (with ceremony youll have access to teleport without error with reasonable chance of success) and 3 levels of the Evil Priests, just to get your Cure light wounds spell to a higher percentage. This would be the setup Id recommend for lvl 49 player who wants to grind house growth points. It is

actually the setup in which I soloed 85m as a lvl 49 gnoll (shouldve picked orc ) tzarakk, with 1 added navigator and 1 added priest level due to rebirth. When you eventually make the choice of graduating in the house, taking 1 more Navigator level (for a total of 2), and a few more priests levels (to a total of 7 or so) is the way Id recommend. If you hit around level 60, you could also include roughly 9 levels of Reaver, this would allow you to garner reaver energy (their reputation that is crucial in that guild) and also give you access to Axes skill. About the offensive skills available to tzarakk: a) Rampage a 3 round skill, that takes it efficiency from (atleast) the following factors: Trample %, Polearms(or other fitting weapon skill) %, Throw Weight %, and your mounts size (either directly or through trample). Rampage is a mediocre skill in and off itself, due to the long casting time, but if you are an Orc it suddenly becomes your best tool, since their racial lowers the cast time to functionally 2 rounds. So use this and train relevant skills if you are an Orc. b) Trample 2 rnd skill that costs little ep and does reasonable damage. If you are not an orc, and are not using Chaotic Spawn, this is your go-to choice. c) Clawed Strike 2 rnd skill that requires the user to be in Chaotic Spawn form. This skill starts off as very weak, but as you kill monsters while in Chaotic Spawn you gain spawnreputation which increases the amount of tentacles that are added to Clawed Strike skill on use. It doesnt take long for one to get 3 tentacles, at which point this is already a good, fast and ep-efficient damage source. Once the amount of tentacles grows, it becomes even better, and races with racial limbs (lizardmans tail, minotaurs horns for example) are added into the skills damage, so if you went the lizardman route it is very much worth it to consider using Chaotic Spawn as well. Clawed Strike ends up being the highest damage output of all skills tzarakk has available once certain amount of spawn reputation is reached. Whether to use Chaotic Spawn or not: Personally I think its not worth it, the loss of exprate (you get 75% of your races regular experience gained) is not countered by the benefits. This is upto personal preference though, and there is a specific scenario where it is nice. The Special Case: Tzarakk benefits greatly from farming Beastlands, since upto a point the souls there are big enough to make your mount grow. Thus, if you ever end up farming beastlands Id recommend doing so in Chaotic Spawn. The passive damage spawn form does is handy for such small enemies, and while you are feeding souls to your steed youll also get efficient spawn reputation as you kill the monsters. This, however, is not terribly efficient way to make experience, so it should only be used early on when wanting to speed up mount growth. Getting mount to decent strength fast: The mount gained from Steed of Tzarakk starts off as a weak donkey, but theres an easy, efficient way to make it grow several sizes fast. That is by farming Beastlands, an area in Laenor which has massive amounts of small monsters (100-1000 exp range or so). Just summon your steed, mount it and start killing stuff, tzarakk chaosfeeding the souls. You can get your mount upto a horse-size very fast here, at which point it is already strong enough to take some beating. I grinded upto a unicorn almost solely here, but thats not necessarily all that required.

The importance of Cure light wounds , or why to take a few priest levels: Clw boosts your regeneration speed by a huge margin, using it whenever out of combat and low on health is the way most evil_religious soloers regen, and getting the spell% higher than the amount give by just background by getting a fewl levels in Evil Priests is highly beneficial. Boons/Banes: Even without access to taskpoints you can get boons by getting banes. If you arent familiar with them ask about them in house-channel or newbie-channel before experimenting, some of the banes are extremely punishing and not worth taking at all. However, getting your endurance point regeneration booned is very, very helpful, you can get +2-3epr by taking a the boon with a bane and then strengthening the boon with another bane. Its the most efficient boon you can get access to without Taskpoints.

Generic tips about gearing up, or I got all this money, what am I gonna do with it):
While Tzarakk is purely an offensive tank, good for soloing or partying exp, the game In its current state favors the use defensive gear at least while soloing. Defensive items shouldnt cover your entire gear though, just the important slots. Following are affordable items that are worth considering for different slots: Weapon: Tzarakk can only really use polearms, luckily cheap and efficient polearms are aplenty. For smaller races, good choices include ruby long spear (around 250k cost likely), homing spear (getting one of these is very, very handy as while it also hits decently it also has teleport without error spell that can be invoked from it, teleporting the user to their starting location every hour or two, this one runs around 300-400k) and a long-tipped pole (this does magical damage in favor of physical, it runs around 600k or so, it also requires larger race to wield, unsure if mounted orc can use). Multislot armor: Your best bet for your chest, arm and leg slots is to go for a multislot armor. A merchant made Diamond O-oyoroi is very affordable at around 40k gold or so, offers great prots for the price and gives decent coverage, which are the two things you wanna look for in chest/arm/leg combinations). Id recommend using this simple piece for a long time, while upgrading your other slots with more expensive gear. You can use this all the way until you can afford for example an amazon battlesuit, which uses same slots, offers great prots and high +avoid, but it is a longterm investment with likely around 3m cost. There are other choices you can consider on multislot armors, but I believe the diamond o-yoroi is the perfect longterm use one while you upgrade other items. Other, even more slot covering choices include Dragonscale Mail of the Chaos Lords (+high con, takes hand slots in addition to the chest+helm+legs) and for example armour of dragon scales covers most of the body(hands and feet included iirc, has slighty variance in versions I think, with +combat sense, +physical resistance).

For other slots:

Feet: A nice, easy choice is a pair of melkior moccasins, they are usually sold in pairs, one of them gives +infravision and +3str, the other gives +water walking and +3str. For a cheaper pure +str oriented choice the dragonskin boots str version from judas are likely 50-100k on sales. Look for other cheap alternatives. Gloves: Im unfamiliar with lowcost choices, I think there was a quest reward 4str gloves from the Evil Witch (lq 32),from costlier ones good ones include gauntlets of lust ( maybe 600-800k price, +3dam

+10charisma wis, requires female to wear or so I think, or maybe it was male), and yaboz gloves +5dam, around 1.5-2m cost I believe. Bracelets: There are multiple types of relatively cheap str bracelets you can likely find on sales or in brokers, go with those. Belt: belan belt is relatively cheap 150-250k +2-3dam (think it was black spiked belt in full description) Helm: Decent early choice is the +5str helm from high overlord in snow devil area, it shouldnt cost much at all maybe 30-40k, after which you can eventually upgrade to a Blood Crown, 3-4dam for around 300-400k or so. For this slot Id suggest eventually saving up to a black horned helm, which is +con +avoid, and runs around 2.5-3m as a long term helm solution. Amulet: Variety of good choices, for infernal amulet is +10ecrits(I think there was +2dam +7ecrits version too) for 100-300k(depending on version), brooch decorated with a blood-red ruby 150-250k (+2-3dam +vampiric blow) for example. Neck: best bet is the spiked adamantium collar (2-3dam) for 200-350k or so. Cloak: Id suggest getting the Woodmans Mantle, this is a great cloak with +7 or 8con, it offers nice coverage and runs cheap at maybe 300-400k. Other choices could be a short dull black cloak (+3 resist all or so) for 300-400k, or Cloak of chilling death, +3dam for around 800k. Rings: an affordable good choice is the sparkling emerald ring, which is 2-3dam and runs for around 150k nowadays.

There are of course other viable choices, explore them at your leisure, these are just some suggestions of decent options. Item-swapping aka. swap-sets: The longer you play the more the importance of swap sets increases. Early on its already a good choice to get your hands on some +hpr or +spr items and learn to use the eqset command and create swapcommands for yourself for when you are regening. I wont go into too much detail here, just offering some guidelines on how to approach itemswapping early on. Tzarakk has a relatively unique situation where a raw tzarakk can benefit equally well from hpr and spr in swap set, so you should aim to buy light weight cheap pieces of either to slots you can, instead of focusing on one or the other, as your hpr will functionally benefit from spr as well with more cure light wounds casts. I wont go into details on specific pieces, but if your eye catches a cheap spr or hpr item that doesnt weight too much, consider investing in it. It makes a noticeable difference in particular while soloing.

2. Other guilds? Many of the tips above are to an extent applicable for other solotanking guilds. Id recommend considering orc or lizardman as the choice of race for most such reincs. Many of the item choices apart from weapons should be helpful for most any smaller tank guilds. Riftwalker: Im under the expression that riftwalker, a magical background guild, is very newbie friendly and solofriendly, but I do not have personal experience with it and can thus offer little advice on it. Tarmalen: Pure tarmalen is rather lackluster in todays environment in my opinion. However if you party a lot, for example with a friend who shares your playtimes, you could consider for example a monk with 10-15 tarmalen levels or liberator/templar with 10-15 tarmalen levels to boost your regeneration in parties as even with a bit of tarmas (15 is already enough to max Minor Party heal and Unstun). However if making such a reinc you should invest in cheap spr pieces for an spr swap. In particular a templar with 12 or so tarmalen levels and maybe 1-2 navigators could function reasonably well as templars get a skill that make certain spells hit multiple targets instead of 1, so your cure light wounds and unstun would be cast partwide. However these multihitting spells never hit the templar himself, so to benefit from such itd have to be atleast a 3-person party.