010 - Tips & Tricks 2 : Lost Truth Event - Tactics

Yesterday a Lost Truth Event started.
You can see the announcement on the Drakensang Online forum here.

Lost Thuth Event

I farmed 550 pure viscanium in the first 9 hours, including making up my tactics, eating and having a break.  Once I had my tactics I farm around 80 (60 to 100) pure viscanium per hour.  In this way the whole event will take me around 40 hours of playing time to complete ... sic

I want to share the way I do this, solo, probably it helps others.

Because I'm level 40, viscanium only drops from worthy monsters.  Playing in a PvE area doesn't seem good because it's too crowdy.  Others can easily take your kills (and viscanium) away.  So I choose the temple sector to farm.

Secondly the Temple Sector is good for farming anyway.  Besides the viscanium it will yield a reasonable amount CoT, andermant, gemstones, health potion and blue essence.  You will encounter some level 40 monsters which give the possibility of a unique drop. (I will do a post about farming and drop rates in different dungeons soon). There are also 3 quest you can do while farming the Temple Sector.  These 3 quests will give you around 1 gold each run, the higest amount of any dungeon.  Because of these reasons I prefer the Temple Sector over a lower dungeon.

1) The first thing I did (and always do with an event) is map the sector I want to farm.

Temple Sector

2) Then I farmed the whole map without geodes.  That gave me 20 pure viscanium.  Because there are 5 geodes in the map which give between 1 and 10 pure viscanium (at average the drop rate seems to be 3 pure viscanium per geode) it was soon clear to me geodes are important.

3) I also located the place where the Gravel-Gobbler Gnome was and confirmed it is in that spot every time.  I takes 200 blue essence for me to kill it. (stats with blue : 770 dmg and 1.5 attacks per second)  I take blue to speed up things a little bit. (and because I farm enough, no need to buy)

Gravel-Gobbler Gnome

4) short route :  When I have less then 5 pickaxes I take the short route.  In this way I try to do as many Gnomes as possible to build up the amount of pickaxes.  No need to go the long way if you can't open the geodes.  This route takes about 10 minutes ( measured from city to city).  I'm not sure how many viscanium it yields me.  I guess it must be around 5.

long route : When I have 5 pickaxes or more I do the long route.  This route gives me 20 to 25 pure viscanium and 80 unpure which can be at Shady John in Kingshill for 4 pure.  This gives me a total of 25 to 30 pure viscanium in a little over 20 minutes.

5) Reset time dungeon.  Every dungeon needs to reset himself before you can start with a new map.  For the Temple Sector this seems to be 4 minutes (probably this is so for all dungeons). 

6) Second gnome.  Because I need to wait around 2 minutes before I can reenter the Temple Sector I go to Mount Suvius and kill the Gnome there for extra pickaxes. (I ride with my horse to the spot, again to speed up things).  On the image underneath the location of the gnome is marked with a yellow star.

Mount Suvius

This map was taken from the wiki page where you can find the maps of all dungeons with the stones, geodes and gnomes marked.

7) Drop rates :
Stones :  40 opened, 16 pure viscanium (33%), 24 unpure viscanium (66%)
Geodes : 39 opened, 21 * 1 pure viscanim (~50%), 18 * 5 pure viscanium (~50%)
Gnome : 27 killed, 17 * 1 pickaxe (63%),  9 * 5 pickaxes (33%), 1 * 10 pickaxe (4%)

8) Thoughts :  I haven't played in group yet. I'm not sure it's better, but I think you can sweep the temple sector in 10 minutes (or less) with a group.  That way will give you 20 pure viscanium in 10 minutes or around 80 per hour (including the reset time of the dungeon) which is equal to my 80 per hour.  This figure ignores the geodes because viscanium only drops for those opening the geode, not for the whole group.

But in groups you have always a lot of dead time (and I hate that).  You need to wait for others to exit the dungeon ect. ....  Probably the real number will also be close to 80 pure viscanium per hour.  But again, I haven't done it, so I don't know for sure.