Kirsti’s Hints for New Fallen Sword Players
Welcome to one of the most fun and addictive games out there. Do feel free to message me in game (Actions – Find Player – Erish) if you’ve got any questions, and I’ll do my best to help. In the meantime, with a bunch of people coming across from Knighthood, I figured I’d put together this handy guide with advice for beginning to explore the world of Fallen Sword.
Right now, the guide covers the following area - click on a link to jump to that section.
Getting started | Killing things | After each combat | Hints and tips | Leveling up | Banking and gold | Weblinks | PvP combat
How to get started
As with Knighthood, the Wiki is a great source of information, as are the forums. But if you’re ready to just jump in, these are my suggestions:
- In the left hand menu, click on “World” then “view Map”. This is your main ‘action’ screen, and you might want to add a toolbar link/bookmark so you can quickly jump to this page.
- You’ll find yourself on Krull Island. Click the area marked “Misty Mountains” to get going.
- To see where you are, you can click on the last of the little “Quick Link” boxes below the map area, and a pop-up window will show you the whole realm that you’re exploring, along with a handy little ‘you are here’ dot.
- More detailed maps, including marks for quest locations, etc. can be found at www.fallenswordguide.com . And here is the link to their map for the Mountain Path area where you’ll want to start off.
How to kill things
- To the right of the map square is a list of “Actions for Location”. If there’s a quest or a stairway or a shop, it’ll show up first. Then you may see some little green person-shaped icons. These are the monsters (or ‘mobs’ in FallenSwordSpeak) on your square. Next to the green icon will be their name, then a little ‘eye’ icon, then three icons with swords. The name just tells you what they are. Clicking on the ‘Eye’ icon will open up a description of the mob along with their level and stats for you to see. To begin with, you want to be looking for rats to kill.
- The three sword levels are how much stamina you want to use to attack the monster. You only ever want to use the lowest one – that way you can get the most out of the stamina limits that you have. So click on that first sword box and the screen will change to a combat window, showing you what goes down between you and the rat.
- Any hit points you lose in that combat session are automatically regenerated, so you don’t need to worry about healing!
- A red icon and a name means that another player is in that square. Clicking on the eye by them will take you to their profile, so you can see their level, their stats, what gear they’re wearing and so on. Clicking on the sword will give you the option of attacking that player. This is known as PvP (player vs player), and I’ll discuss the reasons why I don’t advise it as a good starting strategy later on in this page. Kill rats instead. Then natives.
After each combat
- Check in your backpack to see what you have looted from creatures that you kill. You will find all kinds of items showing up along the way. Compare the statistics with the gear you’ve currently got, by holding the mouse over the item in your backpack. If what you have found gives you more attack or damage (these being the key statistics you need to worry about), then put it on by clicking on it in your backpack. Old items you can either try and sell on the Auction House, but it’s mostly easier just to drop them and keep the backpack space .
- The amount of XP you get per kill is linked to the difference between your level and the level of the monster you’re attacking. Try for monsters who are your level or 1 or 2 higher. Killing rats when you’re level 3 or 4 is a waste of your stamina! Use the ‘level fast’ guide on the Fallen Sword forum to find out where you should be and what you should be killing at each level. If you're still killing rats at level 3, you're losing out on xp and slowing down your progress. Go for ogres and trolls instead!
- Get into the habit of repairing your equipment after every 5 or 6 fights either by hitting ‘r’ on the keyboard, or clicking on the second of the five ‘quick link’ boxes in the main screen. This stops you from losing stats due to your gear degrading.
Hints and tips
- The better your equipment is, the more it will boost your stats, and make it easier for you to kill things in one hit. This is your goal, since having to take two swings means you are using twice as much stamina for the same amount of xp. If you find that you are missing the monsters, then your attack is too low. If you are hitting them, but not doing enough damage to kill them in one strike, then your damage stats need boosting.
- The ‘level fast’ forum thread, along with this pdf guide is a good outline for what kind of gear you should be looking to wear. Search the Auction House for bargains, since low level gear is outgrown fairly quickly and lots of people sell it off cheaply.
- It’s worth trying to get a gear ‘set’ wherever possible, since this adds bonuses to your stats. The most useful one is Elite Hunter, which gives you more XP per kill. At early levels, this is best achieved by looking for the Infernus Armor for when you hit level 5.
- Buffs (this is FS slang for skills) – try not to hunt without them. You can level much more quickly with buffs like Active Learner (AL) and Librarian (LIB) which increase the XP you get from each kill. There are also buffs like Enchant Weapon (EW) which will boost your attack strength. If I’m online, feel free to message me and ask for buffs. The other people who posted on the KH forum thread are also worth checking their profiles to see if they’re online, and then ask for buffs to help your hunting. You can also often ask on the irc channel for buffs and people will give them for free. Otherwise, look in the shout box (on right hand menu) for people selling them.
- Quests can be a fun way to get equipment, xp, gold, and to explore the Fallen Sword world a little. There's a quest guide on the Wiki that is sorted by level and tells you where to go and what to do; you can also find a step-by-step walkthrough for each quest in the Fallen Sword Guide database.
Leveling up
Firstly, congratulations! You've gained a level! This should hopefully be happening relatively quickly in the early stages of the game, especially if you're one-hitting monsters, using buffs to gain xp, and using your stamina wisely.
- Your level up points: you will get two with each level. I strongly suggest that you place them only in the areas of Attack and Damage. All the other areas of your basic stats can be boosted sufficiently by the gear you’ll wear.
- Attack decides whether or not you hit a creature; damage says how hard you hit it. The advice I was given was to put points into damage and attack at a 2:1 ratio (2 damage points for every 1 attack point) until I reached an attack level of 20. From then on, all points go into damage
- You will also get 5 skill points for each level. I suggest you do nothing with these until you reach level 25, at which point you can put 100 of them into the Active Learner skill, and then buff yourself.
- You can then decide which other skill you want to develop. It’s better to have one or two fully developed skills rather than 10 or 20 points in a half dozen skills. Useful ones for attack are: Enchant Weapon, Fury, or Beserk. Useful ones to get more gold or items from your kills are Find Item and Treasure Hunter. There are defensive buffs for if you are expecting to be attacked (i.e. you do a lot of PvP or bounty hunting). Your call really. There are various threads on the forum discussing the merits or otherwise of different skills, so have a read through and decide what'll be best for how you play the game.
Banking and Gold
- Carrying a lot of gold will make you an obvious target for other players looking to attack someone. So make sure that you deposit your gold in the bank to keep it safe.
- You get one bank deposit a day, that will let you save 25% of what you’re carrying. So to maximize this – message me or Anjuli, or Sardonica, or Bear1178, or any of the other people who posted their Fallen Sword name in the KH forum – and ask us to lend you 300% of your gold. You can then make a bank deposit. Do this as quickly as possible and send the gold back, since that much gold will make you a very tempting target to anyone doing player vs player (PvP) attacks.
- To find out when your bank deposits will re-set, let your mouse hover over the gold icon in the top menu bar. The bottom of the popup window will show the server time when you’ll get a deposit again. Server time is also in the right hand menu bar, so you can calculate how that differs from your local time.
- To make quick gold: go to the Timoth’s Wares shop in the mountain path. Buy as many Wood Axes for 5 gold as you can carry. Put 2 of them up for auction in the Auction House. I’d suggest a starting price of 600 gold and a buy it now price of 1000 gold. Watch them sell like hot cakes. Repeat as often as you’re in the Mountain Pass area.
- You might want to hang on to one axe for yourself if you think you might want to do the quests. The reason these sell so quickly is that you need a Wood Axe for a level 20 quest, Building Bridges. By that time, people are in another area and very few want to spend the stamina and time to travel back to the mountain path. So yes, it’ll use a backpack space for a while, but it’ll save you time and money in a week or so.
Web Links to know
Player vs Player
- I don’t do PvP, so have very little advice on this – but can connect you with people in the Dark Siege guild who do, if you’d like to go this route.
- I avoid it for the following reasons:
- It’s possible to get experience and gold and level quickly without it
- Fallen Sword has plenty to offer without attacking other players
- PvP runs the risk of you being attacked in return, or (worse) having a bounty set on you. With a bounty, you can be attacked by any players, every 2 minutes rather than every hour, and can lose a lot of XP and gold very quickly
- If someone attacks you without provocation and you lose, it’s reasonable to ask them to return any gold that they stole. If they don’t, then you are justified in placing a bounty on them. If you want to do this, message me, or any of the other players who posted in the KH thread (Anjuli, Bear1178, or Binarus are good people to start with) and ask them for help. You’ll need one Fallen Sword Point (FSP) to buy tickets to place a bounty.
- If you take a bounty, or if you attack someone else, it’s generally polite to only use 10 stam hits, so you do less damage in the fighting process. It’s also considered polite to return any gold that you take, along with some extra to cover the repairs that your target will have to do to their gear. This can often save you from being bountied in return.
Hopefully this will help you find your feet in Fallen Sword and have as much fun here as I’m having. I strongly suggest Dark Siege as a great guild to join – it’s full of KH exiles, including Mike Heffernan (Binarus), and supports adult players who want to have fun and progress quickly. You can message Binarus in game and ask to be considered for Academy training at lower levels, or apply for full membership once you hit level 40.