Gyn's guide on the Earth Clan

Author: Gyn
Source: Gyn's guide to Earth clan on proboards

Playing the shapeshifter class will involve a lot of time spent in form where you have to be active and unidle. The automatic sending of commands to the game (including keeping yourself unstatued with timed commands or triggers) is illegal on Ancient Anguish. Illegal activity will be dealt with harshly and you risk losing your character and all the time spent raising it, 'tell dibbs demotions of shifter'.

Soloing fast in earth clan forms

Fluon and mimeon are both crazy good forms with two really fun mechanics - absorbing stuff, and a fluxuating health pool. I'm not going to write anything as comprehensive as dafeon's class guides, but i'll try to explain how the forms are interesting and what to do to get the most out of them. I'll start with a description of the absorb mechanics, then fluon play, then finally mimeon play.

Absorb and your health pool

Both fluon and mimeon can absorb things, and the mechanic is the same for both. You can absorb items from your inventory, absorb items from the ground, and 'absorb all' from the ground. Absorbing increases your max hp AND your current hp, by the same amount. In fluon and mimeon, your max hp cap is a really high number - as a level 31 dwarf with a couple of sturdy traits, I can have up to 450ish max health. You also have a max hp minimum, down to 100ish hp. This means if you play too recklessly you can be sitting at 100/100hp. You can also 'absorb ground' to get a small amount of health and max health, for 20sp.

The amount of health you gain per item depends on the item. Valueless items give nothing. Weight is a larger factor than value - an gem that sells for 1000 but has a weight of 1 gives you almost nothing. Armour and weapons give more than misc crap - i think a neville silver sword gives more than a silver mirror, despite the mirror weighing a lot more. A high difficulty weapon is worth more than a low difficulty weapon. Items that give a lot of health are platemails (very heavy and generally very good armour applied to many places at once) and high difficulty weapons - generally stuff you get for killing high level enemies :D You can also absorb corpses (higher level corpse = more hp) and money (mo money = mo hp, but this is a very inefficient way of getting hp).

What do you do with the bonus health from absorbing? It's used for your abilities, different in either form. Using abilities costs max health. So in general the pattern goes:

Get high max health -> Use max health for abilities on a monster -> Kill monster, now at low max health -> Absorb the equipment, now at high max health And repeat.

This means, and this is important - some monsters you kill drop MORE than the cost to kill them! Things with lots of heavy armour and weaponry and ideally a low max health will be worth more to absorb than the cost in abilities to kill them. Some will be worth about the same amount, some will be worth slightly less. A lot of what were for me route kills (fubs and fairy ring for example) actually carry nothing! It really flips the game on its head in a lot of ways, and forces you to think up a new route which will keep your hp high enough to kill everything on it.

One other very important thing about absorb - other than the max hp cap, there is no limit. There's no tolerance, no hunger meter that gets full the more you absorb. If your max hp is lower than the cap, you can absorb. That's it, forever. This makes it a powerplayer dream, as long as you have stuff to absorb you have infinite health, and since health also means abilities, infinite abilities. There's no 'In the first 10 minutes I pulled 200k, but then I was extremely stuffed and drunk and had to use eastroad inn for the next 10'. If you've got fuel, you can keep going.

Putting all this together has made it quite easy to tweak and optimise my play and route. If my route is working, I know I should be able to kill on it forever and not have to stop to bolster up my heals. I know that since my health is also used for abilities, if I use my abilities constantly I can kill things faster than not using it, and since there's no downtime if the route is right I want to kill things as fast as possible. So I put together strings of kills that, while using my abilities every turn, I can kill really quickly and absorb and maintain a high max hp. With there being no downtime, I can accurately judge a lot better how much damage I am doing, if one route is stronger than another route, and the exact costs and gains of killing a monster. If I get a higher xp/hour doing x rather than y, I know that x is better, rather than thinking 'maybe i just played worse in y'. There's still SOME randomness - randomness in absorbs, missing attacks and abilities, random eq being in the route adding to my max hp, stacked kills - but it's much less than for most classes.

So what I try to do with earth forms is 'benchmark' them. I kill for an hour with no interruption or idling, as little downtime as possible. I try to record a standard run, without stacks or epic kills or exceptional luck or spending money, just playing full on for the full hour. That gives me an actual number I can use to see how I'm doing in the form.

FLUON

Fluons are the easy form. They are tier 2, so you'd probably think they're worthless like panther or nelitos, but actually they have a lot going over mimeon. Mimeons in general play with a much reduced max hp, fluons get to play with the full amount - in my case, a full 450hp. They have natural medium armour, while mimeon has to pay for their armour. They have a built in light source, so you can just go straight to killing. Since you're not carrying anything of weight, you dodge like a mofo. They also have a natural +50 fire resistance, which is imo the best resistance in the game. To name a few: dwarf pally, ancient red dragon, razar, evil overlord. Typically massive hitters reduced to nothing.

Going against them: They can't pick stuff up. Oh well. Since you'll be absorbing everything after each kill rather than picking up and selling, this isn't a bad thing at all. If anything it reduces the buttons you have to press. It does mean certain areas are off limits to you. Not just the standard areas you might think, but areas with locked and marginally strong doors are off limits too, since you don't have anything in your inventory to weigh yourself down with. You can reach a lot of the areas with a basher, but this is a soloing guide so: Just ignore them and hit the stuff you can hit. I wish I could take down boris and steal his gold, or summon riognach and astaroth, but it's not on the cards.

Nothing can go wrong as a fluon. You have 450hp. If you throw a fireball at an opponent every round, it will in general die before you do. You'd have to take on a few things without absorbing to get into any trouble. Honestly, it's the safest class in the game. If you take on something that can do more than 30ish damage a round (hawkeye on a good day maybe?) you MIGHT find your current hp dropping faster than your max hp. To fix this, follow it by taking on something that doesn't do 30 damage a round and you'll be right as rain.

Aliases

i do all my mimeon and fluon stuff on the 1 2 3 4 keys, with an alias to change what the keys do.

flu = do alias 1 roll large fireball, alias 2 throw fireball at opponent, alias 3 drop 2000 coins

So I type flu, then every round of combat I do 1 2

p = absorb all
ab = absorb
x = absorb corpse
z = absorb ground

Generally you hit p p after each kill to eat the corpse and all the equipment. Not too hard with fluon. If I need a boost to finish something off I absorb ground.

Traits

Worth a special note, the +10 thrown weapon trait helps fluons a bunch. It makes your fireballs more damaging but still for the same cost (more efficient!)

Levels

Levels don't really seem to be a factor, other than, you know. 450hp. I can throw gigantic balls, which others might not be able to throw, but I could do that around level 25-26. I can't throw SUPER GIGANTIC BALLS yet.

Honestly advice-wise for fluon? Just keep throwing fireballs until stuff dies! It's really easy, really safe, and can make exp really fast. The last benchmark I did for fluons was around 650k, and the most I've made in fluon was nearly double that.

MIMEON

Mimeon is WAY HARDER THAN FLUON.

Okay so mimeons are the third tier form, and following the shifter tradition this means we can carry stuff now. We can't use weapons or armour from the world, but we can make weapons and armour out of ourselves. We are the T1000 basically. It's a great form for skilling, relaxed soloing, tanking, bashing, whatever you need. But really hard to use!

As a mimeon you can make three items - your weapon(s), your armour, and a bag. Each thing you make reduces your max hp cap. You can also increase the size of the items in question, making them bigger, protect more, do more damage, etc. These increases also cost you max hp cap. The cost is extremely prohibitive, and it increases the more you improve the item. A full set of maxed armour costs my over half my hp pool. When I was a lower level I couldn't even complete a full sized two-handed warhammer, i simply didn't have enough hp :D I can make one now, but I would have a max hp of around 140 doing so, with a minimum hp cap of 131. Ouch!

So as you can imagine, level is your friend here. Having a large enough hp pool to play in is really important. With the method I use to solo, you could do it around level 25. But the higher the level, the more comfortable you will be with it.

For soloing in the fluon style, I want to leave as much max hp as I can, and also give myself big damage. As such I forgo getting armour or a bag, and the weapon I use is a two-handed spear. All the weapons have different size caps, and spear is one of the lower ones that I can also use two-handed and that shifters also skill quite fast. The redonkulus enormous two-handed club does a lot more damage but also costs a lot more and leaves me with no wriggle room in terms of hp. A full sized spear gives me around 240 max hp, so about the same as I start the game with anyway.

You want to increase both the size of the spear and the weight of the spear. Size alone won't cut it, spike damage is hugely improved by weight.

Mimeons have another ability called mend, which costs a small sp drain for a big hp regen. Normally an amazing ability, but for this method we keep it off. We also don't buy smokes or meds. We stay as naked as the breeze, with just a spear in our inventory. It keeps costs down, it keeps button presses down, it keeps dodge high, and at some point we WILL mess up and require hp healing, at which time we can eat at the eastroad inn and get our sp back too. With relaxed mind 3 you can live off the land in mimeon, just eating free heals in different areas to keep your sps up. Since we're not using sps for anything other than staying in form, it's not important!

(Note, I do not do this but I probably should BUY TWO POTIONS and hold on to them for emergencies. Extra heal potions that is)

Aliases

Play is once again two buttons every round! Only this time I use 2 and 3 instead of 1 and 2!

mimsolo = do alias 1 dotimes 100 spike shifter_weapon, alias 2 increase shifter_weapon, alias 3 increase shifter_weapon weight

So I hit 1, and that puts me in a dotimes of spiking the weapon (note: shifter_weapon is a working alias for ANY shifter weapon. Shifter_armour SHOULD also work for the armour! This makes aliases waaay easier). My client blocks all the 'you are already spiking' spam, and I put on some a green colour when I'm already at max weapon size and an orange colour when my hp is too low to increase weapon size/weight. So what I tend to do is spam 2 and 3 (increase weapon/weapon weight)until I see a colour, and then make a decision on what to do based on that colour - if it's green chill out, if it's orange absorb something. Every now and then I hit my breakdo alias and 1 again, to make sure it keeps going forever.

Damage efficiency is a bit tighter on a mimeon, it costs me more hp to do damage than fluon. Because of this I generally absorb things one at a time, so I never hit the max hp ceiling and lose potential healing (a number of times i've hit absorb all and absorbed something that would give me 120hp, and only got 3hp from it because i was near the max). In general I get all and drop all after every kill, and only absorb when necessary in mimeon.

Because you don't have armour or any heals on you and a rather low max hp, you'll occasionally get into a rough spot. I just tend to run and heal up in these spots at the moment. Where to heal up? Why, there are many eq sellers sitting around waiting for you! Buy your maxhp back up to cap, and fill up your current hp back to max at eastroad inn, and get back at it. Worst offender for me on this is linnhe, there are times where I miss 8 hits i n a row and still have a really high max hp but really low current hp, so I can't absorb for healing. (Note, I do not do this but I probably should BUY TWO EXTRA HEALING POTIONS and hold on to them for emergencies.)

Current benchmark for mimeons I did this morning:
Session summary:
Time: 59 minutes and 52 seconds.
Monsters killed: 159
Experience gained: 534,951 (8,935 exp/minute, 3,364 exp/kill)
Gold gained: 19,517 coins.

It used to be 400k with 15k cash so I'm doing something right!

That's actually the guide. That's it. :/

THE TLDR VERSION:
-Get marksman trait for fluon
-Use two-handed spear with mimeon
-Use abilities every single round
-Work out a killroute that gives you no downtime

Okay hope that helps! If anyone wants to bash or tank for me, let me know because I really want to try these forms out in non-solo roles!