Cobrahn Information

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					**Cobrahn Beginner's Guide: By Ztinktoof **
      
       
         

Referenced : Ztinktoof.

A big )smooooch( to those special people who took me on adventures beyond my means. You know who you are. I tried my best to stay alive and make it fun. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I.

A special thank-you to Mihey for taking the time to check and post corrections to various details.

A tip-of-the-helm to everyone who responded to my Cobrahn threads in the DZ newsgroups. I hope I captured your knowledge with some accuracy.

A bow-with-great-flourish to Jester, Buo and Morgar for special contributions included here.

Introduction

Cobrahn is an advanced player's segment that offers many new adventures, gear, character stat building quests and coin. It can also be a good benefit to the intermediate player who is still interested in playing in the Nork segments, but wants to build up the character a bit faster than can be done just in Nork.

It is a difficult and dangerous segment, and in many ways is a different gaming system than Nork. So some advanced planning is recommended to take full advantage of the initial adventure.

Before You Go

Steve Quest: Recover Lost Hits Minyte: Small archer in the Timmy Town caves. They cast liminv before attacking so can be a pain to locate, but are easy to kill. Wolf: Easy kill on forrest floor. Bear: Somewhat more difficult on forrest floor. They can poison. Ogre: Nasty forrest critters. Some throw a returning hammer at you. Not too difficult to kill. Rattlers: Ack! Bad monsters! I've seen them in the forrest around the climb to Tree Town. They are invisible until just before they attack and have hit me for up to 300! Wolfbat: These wander the forrest floor and look like brown wolves with wings. I was told they are very dangerous, so I just run from them. I was told they cast SCARE that makes you run uncontrollably for awhile. Experience level 18+ to pass through portals. Weapon skill 15 or you may have too much trouble hitting things. Also, you can run afoul of the skill system that might have penalties for attempting the segment at too low a skill. Max or near max hit points! Very important, especially for psi-users. Psi-users may want to bring over a MUZI or UZI. If possible two regen items make a big difference. Wear one amulet and hold the other amulet in hand. A glowing hit point helm for combat stun protection will also he helpful in the early going. Not much else is needed. You will gear up at the stores to get started. About 20k in coin to carry with you to buy some starter gear. You won't need more as even a short hunt in Cob will yield 200k+ in coin. If you do not have upper GH, you need to arrange an escort, DEX or trip to the Nork-7 portal that is east of the slicer lair. With max hits and stun protection (level 13 twigs from upper GH), you should be fine running through that level to the portal. An escort or a DEX from the portal point to Timmy Town. You can run there too as I did, and I'll give some information on how to do this later on. If you die before getting to town, you will be resurrected in the Tree Town. A gift of padded scale armor. A fungus robe would also be very useful. These are difficult for a new Cob player to get, but will greatly increase your survivability and enjoyment. An escort for the first +100 hit point quest (Drizzle Quest in Tree Town). Getting There There are two portals to Cob and both leave you at the same point: on the forrest floor near an NPC called Boone. There is a “free” portal and there is a “pay” portal. The “free” portal is on Nork-7, behind the slicer lair. It is a short but intense run to the portal, so you may want to get an escort or be fast drinking IH bottles. Stun disc protection is highly recommended for sprints thru N-7. Buy or beg an upper GH pStun twig for the occasion. Study a map to see exactly how to get there. It is no special trick. You just have to know the path. The “pay” portal is the south-most portal in the Upper Guild House. No trick here. Just walk through it. You want to start in “Timmy Town”, so named after the child who wanders the streets. If you get killed before making it to town, you will restore in the “Tree Town”. It is still a short, but very dangerous, walk to Timmy Town from there, so get an escort before coming over. The upper GH portal landed me on the forrest floor, near the NPC called Boone. I wore some spare RD scales (not that they blocked anything in Cob >gringrinCombat Helm: any common helm if you opt for the greater blocking of a Cob helm over the combat stun protection of a Nork hit point helm. Respirate Helm: It looks like the Nork respuirate helm, but it does not tie. Water will not be a problem for you for sometime, but these are good loot. Pick them up and sell them. Red Sash: 4/4 red combat sash. There are blue sashes but I don't think they have any special properties. Black Boots: black combat boots. The ones I found are 2/2. Not too difficult to find. They tie when you pick them up. Gray Boots: gray fur (cold resistance). I lockered a pair in case I ever needed them. Leather Gauntlets: leather +1. Common and better than nothing. Black Gauntlets: glowing exotic metal +3. Random drop. A bit uncommon, but you will find a few soon enough. Yellow Robe: +5 yellow robe. It doesn't say if the adds are offensive or defensive. It also has innate fire protection. It is a bit of a rare drop, but is a very nice piece of gear. Like other Cob clothing, mine seemed to absorb some weapon damage other than MA attacks. You can see the NPCs wearing the yellow robes. On occasion, bigger players will lure NPCS, that wear the robes, to town and kill them there. When the corpse rots, the untied yellow is left on the ground. I am told that lifting an unsearched corpse will cause the robes to tie, so that is why the NPCs are lured to town before they are killed. Pick one up and wear it. Wearing TWO yellows is considered very good combat protection for Timmy Town caves. Shield: steel with exotic metal. Good blocker and it has +2 adds. NPCs that wield them are common. Rings: loot! Most gemmed rings have no adds and don't tie when you pick them up. They sell for a lot of coin! A rare gemmed ring will tie. It has combat adds but I have never seen any better than 1/1. Leather rings tie when picked up, but sell for very little coin and don't seem to have any adds or protections. I leave them on the floor. Small Black Pearl: This is a rare drop and is used in the Infravision helm quest. (See quests below.) Definitiely locker it if you find one! Be aware that there are larger black pearls, but those are just loot. Silver Rock: Another rare drop that is used in a quest for a permanent strength potion. (See quests below.) Locker away for future use. Gems: loot! All gems are worth good coin. Pick up and sell them all (except the black pearl. See Quest Helm above.) CON Pot: slender yellow-looking bottle carved from an emerald. It contains two swigs of a constitution potion. It will raise perm CON +2 for each drink, up to 18. Make sure you close the bottle after taking a drink or else the second swig will spill out when you locker it. Monsters There is quite a range of difficulty, and the bigger critters will usually IH at least once during a fight. Few charge, so a hit and move strategy is useful for psi-casters, halberd users and range weapons. The MAs are the worst critters in the caves. They are very difficult to hit at skill 15, and were clobbering me, sometimes for 300 hits, even with the good starter armor and robe I was given. I suspect that armor damage absorption does not work against MA attacks, as the MAs continue to hit me for the same damage range as when I was not fully geared. Their JUMPKICK attack hits less often and for less damage than their punch. So if you are a psi or hally user, attacking and moving is a good strategy to force them to use their less powerful attack. They can jumpkick from 4 hexes away! To make matters worse, they constantly taunt me: “Look! Another City Dweller! Twig out or die!” I hate them! Don't fight them in a zoo of monsters. Try to get them one-on-one and heal often. Next in line would be the katana wielding NPCs. They hit quite hard but are much easier to hit than the MAs and die much faster. These will also jumpkick from 4 hexes away. Most everything else wasn't too much of a problem. The staff wielding NPCs are the best! One shot kills and a quick 14k to 18k in experience! There are rumors of rare 50k+ super-critters, MAs and short sword fighters, that hit extremely hard but seem to always carry some rare item, like a yellow robe, perm stat pot or gripclaws. I encounted one MA that nearly one-shotted me with a punch (and I had 700+ hits at the time!) and I could not land a weapon on him, so I ran as fast and as far as I could away from that area. Probably was one of these 50k+ super critters. Skill, Experience, Coin Solo skill gain is just average at level 15 skill, as it takes a few blows to drop most things. I can do better in certain areas in Maeling and Aleria. But partying is a big plus for skill gain here, especially given the great experience and coin to be had! The couple of times I partied, my skill gain really jumped as we dropped the critters nearly as fast as they could regen. The range of experience is about 6k to 24k for a kill, but most critters yield around 14k experience. You might do better in some areas of Aleria and Nork until you get a bit more skill or a Class A Cob damage weapon. A “short” hunt nets at least 300k in coin if I focus on collecting gems and rings. In Nork, it was a struggle to keep ahead on training, but in Cob this won't be a worry for sometime. All-in-all, I think this is the #1 reason why players should consider coming to Cob, if just to get ahead on training before returning to Nork. It is also the easiest way to max out a second character since you will quickly collect enough coin to feed the Nork hit doctor. Hunting Timmy Secret Caves After a bit of exploring, I stumbled upon the Timmy Secret Caves. To get to the secret caves, start in the N-S door to the IH seller in Timmy Town and go directly south down that long hall. You will come to an area with some stairs to the SOUTH, and a partial rock wall to the WEST. Do NOT go down the stairs. It is very dreadful down there! Instead, go WEST through the wall and wander that small, empty cave complex, going SW as best you can, until you come to a hex that looks like a pile of collapsed rocks. Then CLIMB DOWN. You can climb back up. Gear Bubble Shield: This is a fancy-looking version of the round, green ogre shields. It is green with gold trim and a gold bubble in the center. I found one on the ground after killing a large mob. There was a lot of trash on the floor at the start of the fight, so I am not sure if it is random treasure that is dropped when you strup the corpse, or if you can see the NPC weilding it as it may have been dropped from a fight before I got there. It ties and is suppose to be better than the exotic metal steel shield. Yellow Robe: +5 yellow robe. Same as is dropped in Town Caves. You will see MA-type critters wearing it: NPCs and cavedwellers. Rings and Gems: Same good loot as in Town Caves. Monsters Critters are the same as in the Timmy Town Caves except for the addition of “cavedwellers”. They look like the archer minytes in the Town Caves except they use MA skill. The MA NPCs seem much easier to kill on this level than in the Town Caves, but you don't have the easy staff NPCs of the Town Caves on this level. This is a good place to hunt when the Town Caves get busy. There is a shade that roams the northern part of the dungeon. She dies easily, but is invisible until she attacks. She will try to stun you then blind you. A GH level 13 pStun twig kept me safe, but luckily I had a few pBlind potions in my sack as she easily blinded me. It is rumored that the shade occasionally drops some nice items, like rings and a white protAssault robe, but I haven't seen anything good drop yet. Timmy Town Quests Merton Quest: Padded Gear Merton is the item padder just SW of the main lockers in Timmy Town. He will pad scales, helms and yeti fur with either bear fur or yeti fur. This adds extra protections to the equipment. Yeti fur padding gives a bit better protection than bear fur, but bear fur is easy to get and gives good adds. A padded helm is a simple quest that isn't too difficult to solo and it yeilds a nice piece of gear. Get an extra “exotic metal” helm from the dungeon floor and locker it. Now drop down to the forest floor and carefully look for a bear. Kill it and tan it to bear fur. The tanner is just north of the main lockers/Nork portal in Timmy Town. Bears are easy to kill. Everything else can be mean to you, so be careful. Now take the helm and the fur to the padder. Hold the helm in your right hand and the fur in your left hand and press his talk head. You will be given a 0/3 padded helm that really helps with armor blocks. If you can get help killing and tanning a yeti, the yeti fur padding will get you a 0/4 helm that is even better. Vogelweide Quest: Infravision Helm You need to find a small black pearl in the Timmy Town caves. It is a rare random drop here, but is more common in the Secret caves. Get an escort to the helm trader in the Timmy Caves. It is a long, meandering walk (the cave complex is quite large), so it is easy to get lost. Hold the pearl and click the trader's talk head. He will trade the pearl for a helm that looks exactly like a common helm, but when sensed, it will have an on-contact level 17 Infra Vision spell. Now get it padded. Yeti fur is best so you get 0/4 adds. It also causes the helm to “glow”. Not really sure if this represents extra protection on the helm. Maybe combat stun protection? ??? Quest: Strength Potion Rarely, a silver rock will be found as random loot. It is traded to an NPC for a strength potion. I am told the trader is up some stairs in a cave that is in the NW corner of the forrest floor. The potion gives you +1 permanent STR up to 21 that will follow you back to Nork! I have a rock lockered and some day I'll track down the NPC. Timmy Quest: Atonement I stumbled upon Timmy in my travels and in less than a minute I was atoned back to g/g. You click on his talk head, then go find his mother and click on her talk head. This after about 6 months of struggling to find Betty and fooling with the strangeness of the Talinar quest. Some things in Drakkar are just plain inscrutable! Zebulon Quest: Training (“Chit” Trainer) This is a special “quest” for upper Guild House subscribers. Just west of the Timmy Town north locker, there is an NPC who will sell training scrolls. Empty your right hand and tell him the name of the training you want. For example: “zeb, halberd”, or “zeb, mentalist”. He will withdraw 1meg in coin from the bank if you have no gold in your sack and place a scroll with a picture illustrating the training you purchased. Take the scroll to the upper Guild House trainer (NE corner), hold it in your right hand and click on the trainers talk head. He will sell you training and give you experience worth about 1/2 the coin value! So a 1meg scroll will get you 1meg in training plus around 500k in experience! Not a bad deal. Some short testing with charisma leads me to believe that the chit trainer will give you some bonus experience for each point of charisma above 14. Going from CHA18 to CHA21 seems to net me about 10% additional experience. I would need to do some rigorous testing to be absolutely sure, but for now, I suggest wearing +CHA items when trading the scrolls. Samanella Quest: Poisoned Weapon Any weapon can be poisoned. First find a bottle of poison. It is a common drop in the caves. Seek the NPC in town that is holding a bottle of poison. He is SW of the main lockers. Hold your weapon in the right hand and the bottle in the left and click on his talk head. The weapon is imbued with level 23 poison and will poison a critter when you hit. This is helpful when you are small, especially against hard-to-hit martial artists, as their life force will drain during all those rounds they are blocking your pitiful attacks. But as you become more skilled, you probably will want to use a non-poison weapon as when a critter dies due to poison damage you do not receive experience or skill for the kill. Most times you will be able to kill the critter with weapon damage before it dies to the poison. Returning to Nork You cannot return to Nork with Cob gear. Your character will be stopped before entering the portal and a warning message will appear. So the first thing you have to do is locker all you Cob stuff. There are lockers close to all portals back to Nork for your portalling convenience. In Tree Town, there is a return portal to Nork Town. Easiest way to get to Tree Town is to use the PSLAM trick I mentioned earlier. If you have GH access, there is a portal in the Timmy Town main locker room. Locker your Cob gear then step through to the guild house. Fungus robes are currently being allowed to pass through the portals back to Nork. I am not sure how much of their Cob properties they retain once in Nork. Something to research I guess. If you have GH access, definitely set a SECOND twig in Cob before using the portal. Then place the spare twig with one of the twig holders. Should you be killed and stripped, you can rest assured you have a twig directly back to Timmy Town instead of needing to navigate the surface forrest. Class-Specific Notes The following is advice from various sources about specific classes. I can only vouch for Paladins, but from what I have seen, the advice seems very sound. Paladins Skill 15 can hit and kill things in the Town and Secret Caves, but Nork remains your best place to skill for now. You won't be able to kill things fast enough to beat the skill to be had in various Nork dungeons unless you get a party together of players with skill and experience close to yours. Use the caves as a great way to coin and max your weapon training, then head back over to Nork for some serious skilling. Upper Guild Hall access is a big plus because of the chit trader. Use +CHA items to get your charisma up to 20 before trading the chits as it seems to give a bonus to the amount of experience the trainer will give you. I could not measure a bonus to paid training for high charisma, but the extra experience makes the effort worth putting on +CHA items. Morgar's Advice for Mentalists Skill 15 MINIMUM. If you ain't skill 15, don't bother coming over. PERIOD, END OF STORY. The floor in Timmy is littered with twigs, 4 types, Critcure at level 20, Fireball at 25, Icestorm at 25 and Icestorm at 20. USE THEM!!! Your spells are next to useless in the beginning. With these twigs you can fireball/icestorm the crits down to a point where you can finish them off with espear/assault. Of all the crits in timmy 1, the ones most troubling aren't the MA's. Surprisingly they are pretty easy to kill off with espear, although most crits over there seem to have at least one instant heal on them. Mace carrying crits are probably the most troublesome. They sometimes look like the old n-5 Magic casting npc's. Sometimes not. These mace carrying crits are immune to nearly all of your spells. (They can be poisoned tho), and they aren't worth a lot of points. Since they don't seem to hit me all that often, I leave them to last when working on a zoo, and finish off these crits with a weapon. WEAPON!!!! Get yourself a weapon, I use a curvy longsword, its a +5 sword found on timmy -2, ties, hits for a ton of damage. I've only got a 9 LS skill, but having a weapon to fall back on is essential. Between twigs and a sword I'm able to keep my zap usuage to a manageable level. Remember you don't want to kill crits with the weapon, use it when eps get low, or when faced with a mace user. Until you've been geared up by others, avoid heavy zoos. Padded GD Scales, 2 yellows, graagh rings, Padded IV helm. Your definitely going to be using a lot of instant heals. But once you have the gear above, you'll suddenly find yourself surviving even large zoos with only a few hits instead of every other round. And the really nice thing is that with the exception of the graagh rings, none of the gear I've mentioned is all that special. The drizzle hp quest and the iones/juntes hp quests are manadatory. Thats 200 extra HP for you to fall back on in combat. Have someone help you with these two, they aren't hard, but they will require someone to guide you through them. If you can get a graagh hally, you'll be able to trade that in also for an additional 100 hp. And the graagh rings are 8/8s!!!! Buo's Advice for Healers It is said that Cob is about gear, what appear to be true, but the real point is that Cob is about friends. If you want to play eficiently yuou need gear and to have gear you need friends. Come to Cob with two regen devices and all zaps you can have. Try to start with some Cob gear and at least with one of the 100 cob HP quest. Regretabily, I can not help you in the HP quests right now. I can handle you some newbie gear and I'll like to do so, but have in mind that I'm a totally green newbie too. For a healer, no individual crit is a real foe in Timmy Caves. Of course, 5 o 6 of them can have you killed pretty fast. Use the “lure an divide” tactic as explained for Ztinktoof. No crits in Timmy Caves are impervious to assault. Mace wielders appear to be so but they are not. Keep assaulting. If you are one of those healers that fight as a stick, re-think your tactics. Dancing/side-stepping is the way to go here; you can NOT stand in a hex letting the monsters swarming on you. Furthermore, keep yourself full healed all time. You will have more chances to survive if stunned and you will be regening EPs faster. Use AH (autoheal) when diving into big swarms. On the so infamous Timmy Caves MAs (“Twig or die”), they are pretty killable for a healer if you use the right tactic: dont let them come on you (dance, dance, dance); they will jumpkick you now and then but it is not a problem for a healer. Assault and down the monster HPs to 1/3, at this point stun him and start assaulting again. MAs ih, but being stunned they cant do that :). Party with a pally/barb/ma. For a healer, skill 15 is not a must be. Sure, having AH (autoheal) can give you an extra protection, but you can live without (actually, I use it only when not side-stepping -ie: when looting in the middle of the swarm). Im not using weapons and i have no hand for. Beyond Timmy Town Jester's Advice Here are Jester's suggestions for players once they get established and comfortable in Cob. Helms: Nork HP helm would probably be a better choice [over common Cob helm]. Do the Maggio quest in timmy town to get a black pearl that you can trade for an IV helm. The benefit of the helm you can get from Giant's keep is that not only does it provide combat stun prot, but you can also pad it with yeti fur and get combat adds of 4, which is not available from a nork HP helm. Nork Gear: All nork gear with the possible exception of phelm (for psi cutting), probe (for earthcrush prot), and chipper staff (for ment skill bonus) should be left in nork, as any of the garbage you could pick up off of the floor would be better than any nork gear for that slot. If you're wearing nork gear in cob, you might just as well be naked. Anti-Steve Amulet: At your first opportunity, get a crew to get you a Cthon egg which you can trade to an NPC in desert town that will keep you from loosing 2hp every time you die, and having to do steve. If you don't already know about steve, when you die, go talk to steve and he will ask for a crit, bring him a corpse of that crit, and he will give the 2hp you lost when you died back. Better Gear: After that, gear upgrades get a bit harder. Rings (8/8 from multiple sources, juntes, grraaargh, beetle, loriapi), Full Plate (from Beetle scales), 0/4 boots (from abner-trade lair SD scales, or jasper-trade aligator scales), sash upgrade (from Loriapi or Boris), forged weapon (trade normal weapon, kaldor dagger, beetle scales for one), Loriapi robe (psi cutter and prevents hp loss on hits from the big lair crits like lori, spectres, etc). Anti-Steve Amulet Quest: Protection Against Hit Point Loss Earlier, I mentioned the Steve quest to regain lost hit points. There is an amulet that will prevent you from loosing the 2HPs from a normal death. You need to hunt the Psi Tower and get a cthon egg that drops from the cthons. It looks like a large, reddish egg and it ties when you pick it up. This is a very dreadful place so you definitely want to get invited on a hunt with a bunch of experienced players. Once you have the egg, you need to trade it in the Desert Town. It is a short, but somewhat intense walk from the Timmy Town climb in the forrest to Desert Town. But it is worth making the walk with someone who knows the way so you can get familiar with the surface floor. Basically, you hug the mountains on your right after you climb down and head north. Most of the critters here are bears. Not too dangerous. The mountains will end and you will come to a stream. North of the stream is the desert, east is a swamp. You want to cross the stream and run NE across the desert until you come to the tent town. All sorts of nasty things are in the desert waiting to jump your bones. Don't loiter! The amulet trader is in a tent in the east part of town. I forgot to write down his name, but I seem to recall that he is holding an amulet that looks like it has a claw nail dangling from it. Hold the egg in your right hand and click on his talk head to trade for the amulet. Closing Advice Well, this is all the advice I have to offer on Cobrahn. I don't expect I will be adding anything on intermediate or advanced hunting, because your best source of information is actually participating on hunts with other players. So find a hunting partner or two! Make some friends in chat! I know a lot of people prefer solo play, but this is, after all, a multi player game. You will have an easier go of it with a few people beating on the monsters, and your experience and skill gain will be much better. There is more than enough loot for a small party of players in Timmy caves. Ask questions in chat and the forums! Knowledge is power. Enough said. - Ztinktoof —- > Source: Original mirror