Lock Mastery wedging boxes

[Tgo01]

I've been saving up my plated boxes in my locker for when I get the wedge boxes tasks from the guild. However I just got to the point where I learn to repair lockpicks and I haven't gotten a wedge task since. Are there no more wedge tasks and I can safely open up those boxes to free up some locker space? Or will I see those tasks come up later on?

[DaCapn]

You'll still need some plated boxes for when you get to vial extraction so you'll want to save some. Also, if you open the plated boxes with 407, you can use them for relocking reps (though it's a bit of a waste and/or a crapshoot since you don't know if it's rep-worthy).

Here's a player's archive of Tsoran's site with a calendar of reps:
http://www.cmnservicesgroup.com/tsoran/lm.html
Or, go to archive.org and look up tsoran.com

[Tgo01]

Thanks for the link, very helpful.

Why is lock mastery such a bitch to master? :(

At the moment it's not too bad, just the usual audience/tough boxes and repairing lock picks. Not at all looking forward to extracting trap components. BIG SIGH!

[subzero]

Why is lock mastery such a bitch to master? :(


Quite easy, Watson! The reliance on randomly found boxes with random traps and lock ranges just drags the process out a bit.


Not at all looking forward to extracting trap components. BIG SIGH!

What sucks the most if when you've got the traps and fail to extract them. Almost as annoying as when you finish a task and find out you're left needing one fucking point to get the next rank.

[DaCapn]

It has gotten a measure worse over time since there's far less people coming to the picking spots to get their boxes opened.

Focus on caster & undead type creatures for boxes. I've qualitatively found that they give a larger proportion of trapped boxes. Others have stated similar experience. I did pretty well with my wizard farming illoke in the stronghold for boxes.

[Velfi]

Components is the fun part of lock mastery.

Once you finish them though, there's pretty much nothing to it as you should have a good handle on where to get boxes that meet your rep criteria by then.

[Tgo01]

Quite easy, Watson! The reliance on randomly found boxes with random traps and lock ranges just drags the process out a bit.

I mean why did the GMs make it such a bitch to do these tasks? I don't mind the audience/tough boxes bit (even before they "nerfed" the audience reps I still didn't mind them) but it's stupid to expect people to go out and find so many particular trapped boxes. Plated boxes weren't too bad, considering you just needed 1 or 2 at most per task. But what about jaws and other shit? Don't those come in 4+ rep blocks? Blick.

I also hate how many reps you might get for the master challenge tasks, I've gotten up to 8 so far. Considering each game is a minimum of around 5 minutes that's upwards of an hour or more for one task where you're just sitting in the same room. Granted I use a script...but still! Someone give me my binkie!


It has gotten a measure worse over time since there's far less people coming to the picking spots to get their boxes opened.

Yeah, I don't even bother sitting at the usual picking spots anymore, those are always dead.

[subzero]

I mean why did the GMs make it such a bitch to do these tasks? I don't mind the audience/tough boxes bit (even before they "nerfed" the audience reps I still didn't mind them) but it's stupid to expect people to go out and find so many particular trapped boxes. Plated boxes weren't too bad, considering you just needed 1 or 2 at most per task. But what about jaws and other shit? Don't those come in 4+ rep blocks? Blick.

That seems to be the design for all guild skills, really, but I believe they further intended lock mastery to take longer for RP reasons... gotta really make sure your character knows his craft, eh? And as Capn said, things are definitely different now than when LM was released.


I also hate how many reps you might get for the master challenge tasks, I've gotten up to 8 so far. Considering each game is a minimum of around 5 minutes that's upwards of an hour or more for one task where you're just sitting in the same room. Granted I use a script...but still! Someone give me my binkie!

It gets worse, but honestly I love the picking contests. It removes the random aspect of having to find an appropriate box(es) for a task. Even when I was stashing boxes, picking contests were good because they help keep that supply goin and if you do it right, you aren't going to lose very often at all. That and it provides a nice little break from manually picking (of course, I was still hunting for boxes on another character a lot of the time, but let's not worry about the little details!).

[Tgo01]

It gets worse, but honestly I love the picking contests. It removes the random aspect of having to find an appropriate box(es) for a task. Even when I was stashing boxes, picking contests were good because they help keep that supply goin and if you do it right, you aren't going to lose very often at all. That and it provides a nice little break from manually picking (of course, I was still hunting for boxes on another character a lot of the time, but let's not worry about the little details!).

True, the contests are a nice little break.

[DaCapn]

Those tasks were ridiculously easy, they just fucked with my bounty schedule.

[Berubeo21]

Find yourself a sorcerer buddy who can phase boxes and go out on box hunts while doing bounties(most cant do this till higher levels so..). Build up a pile of 25 or so boxes, ive gotten lucky sometimes and finished 2-3 tasks on one pile of boxes by just dropping the traps/picking and choosing. Another thing is make friends with people who do alot of warcamps, trying to do lock mastery alone on your own boxes you find alone or sitting in the east tower waiting for boxes is a bitch, specially during the trap component stages.

[Tgo01]

Finally got to the part of lockmastery where you have to extract components. At first I thought it wouldn't be so bad because the first task just asked for one needle/jaw trap and I happened upon a needle trap like 20 minutes later, extracted it and handed the task in. Then the next time I got a component task it asked for just one also, easy I thought. Yeah, that was 3 days and about 50 or so boxes ago.

All I need to do is make sure 'lmas disarm on' is set and it will automatically try to extract traps, right? I have a script to pick all of my boxes so even if it's not setup at the moment to recognize when I've extracted a trap it's not like the script could possibly mess it up so I won't remove it, isn't the process all automatic?

Guess I just never realized how rare needle/jaw traps were, yeesh.

[DaCapn]

Yeah, just keep the extraction setting on and be patient, you'll get through it. It has been my experience that certain creatures are more/less likely to drop certain types of traps. Casters tend to have more traps in general. Undead often have more scarabs (probably the most common traps I see from the Lich's Landing and the Rift). I noticed that in the stronghold, Illoke tended to have lots of the various vials and tons of sphere traps. In general, the stronghold was a great place to farm boxes for the those last 10-20 ranks of LM.

As far as we know, trap extraction works as follows: if your disarm roll is successful, you get a roll to extract the trap. Extraction success is largely based upon LM ranks. You start by learning how to extract needle/jaw traps and you won't be very good at it. As you rank, you'll get much better at extracting them. My qualitative observation was that the extraction chance isn't uniform across all traps. That is, the longer you've known how to extract a particular trap type (in terms of LM ranks), the better you will be at them. So right when you learn how to extract vial traps, you won't be as good at extraction as you are at needle/jaw traps. Perhaps you end up at the same likelihood at mastery, or maybe my observation was nonsense in the first place.

It's not really known what skills/stats/spells factor in (if any), or if the difficulty of the trap even plays a role, but it's widely assumed that things which enhance your disarm roll will enhance your extraction roll. But that might just come from a "can't hurt" perspective. Personally, I suspect that LM ranks are the only factor. It doesn't seem like trap difficulty is a factor at all. Maybe there's a threshold where you can't extract though. For a wide range of reasons, I don't have meaningful observations here. But again, qualitatively speaking, I seem to have equal likelihood of extracting a -300 and a -50 trap.

[Neovik1]

What script are you using for picking? And guild work?

[DaCapn]

What script are you using for picking? And guild work?

Guild work is just a bunch of little tasks. Every time you get a task, record the GLD task messaging and write a little script for the task (like 10 lines for a lich script usually). You'll have a fully functional guild script in pretty short order. If you aren't familiar with scripting, it's a fine chance to get familiar.

Gib wrote a great guild script but he'll pretty much only give it to people who seem capable of writing their own in the first place.

[Tgo01]

Guild work is just a bunch of little tasks. Every time you get a task, record the GLD task messaging and write a little script for the task (like 10 lines for a lich script usually). You'll have a fully functional guild script in pretty short order. If you aren't familiar with scripting, it's a fine chance to get familiar.

This is what I did. I started to learn how to write scripts with my guild script so parts of it are really ugly code wise (the dreaded goto commands!) but after I got the hang of ruby a little bit it started to improve. The code doesn't look pretty but it works. It will automatically keep doing sweep, subdue and gambit tasks until it gets to a critter or partner task, also does challenge tasks against a footpad for lock mastery.

[subzero]

This is what I did. I started to learn how to write scripts with my guild script so parts of it are really ugly code wise (the dreaded goto commands!) but after I got the hang of ruby a little bit it started to improve. The code doesn't look pretty but it works. It will automatically keep doing sweep, subdue and gambit tasks until it gets to a critter or partner task, also does challenge tasks against a footpad for lock mastery.

Heh, my old illusion and rogue guild scripts are absolute disasters. They work, but good god... looking at them now I'm surprised. Hooray for all-nighters trying to write scripts!

[Tgo01]

FINALLY mastered lock mastery! WOO!

It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, then again it helped that I had an almost endless supply of boxes coming in.

[DaCapn]

I was at rank 30-40 for years. Eventually I just leveled my wizard a bit and script-hunted him into oblivion to get enough boxes to master. It's easy as long as you cheat.

[Kalishar]

Yeahhh, I'm only on rank 2 and this is by far the worst skill I've worked on. Master of all the other skills. It's not so much the difficulty of getting tasks done, it's more the piddly amount of points you actually get for completing them that is aggravating me the most.

Congratulations on mastering though, its quite an accomplishment

[Neovik1]

Guild work is just a bunch of little tasks. Every time you get a task, record the GLD task messaging and write a little script for the task (like 10 lines for a lich script usually). You'll have a fully functional guild script in pretty short order. If you aren't familiar with scripting, it's a fine chance to get familiar.

Gib wrote a great guild script but he'll pretty much only give it to people who seem capable of writing their own in the first place.


Yeah I started writing my own scripts for picking contest and calibration reps due
To the repetitiveness of it. I'm an application developer so I can write scripts, I'm just lazy sometimes and only write them when I have the motivation too. I can definitely understand why Gibs would keep his scripts to a select few. Once you release it people expect it to be supported by you and then when shit goes wrong for whatever reason the person that writes it get's flak. No good deed goes unpunished!

[Tgo01]

That's why I just write shitty scripts so I don't have to worry about people using them.

I did upload my shitty rogue script though if you want to try it, just requires you to edit some variables in notepad to make it work.

[Neovik1]

Sweet! Thanks for the info I'll have to check it out.