How To Avoid Dying In CPK
How to avoid dying in CPK, By Trithalos
Contents
ENTER CHAOTIC PlayerKill Area (Loot Limit: Unlimited, Level Loss Chance 100%)? (y/n)
Long ago, growing up and hero’ing in the Order of Eternal Champions town I listened, bugged, and asked as many questions as I could regarding CPK. Back then they were the most powerful EQ town and allied to one of the most powerful CPK groups, Mythions 88 and Urimar’s 68. In effect I had a great “childhood environment” to learn a lot of the aspects of med. Many players put up with my childlike questions and provided a great catalyst to improve my med play. Players like Elander, Jabari, Mythion, Taloc, Therac and Keirgar to name a few. I also bore the brunt of a Tharspasm on multiple occasions as he was not a fan of my casual willingness to try new things without having a clue of what I was doing.
The base set of knowledge I gained there allowed me to enter situations with a different perspective, granted large room for experimentation, and drastically improved my gameplay and knowledge. This set of knowledge has enabled me to control my CPK environment. To date, these rules have never failed to keep me alive. All of my CPK deaths were either a direct acceptance of the risk of a dice roll or a failure to respect these rules.
With that said, before hitting YES at the prompt, I recommend the following:
Principles:
1) Being good at CPK and being good at NOT getting CPKED are two very different things.
Being good at avoiding death will allow you more opportunities to learn how to kill others. Not to mention enjoyment of the bonus rewards CPK areas have to offer. What would you do with an invulnerability suit?
2) Before entering CPK you should have the following things in order
a. Purpose
b. Directions
c. An Escape plan
d. Sanctuary is far less important than the above 3.
3) Upon leaving CPK you should take a quick reflection. Did anyone see you? Are you auctioning equipment right after running it? Who’s aware of your activity? Are you becoming predictable? Are you making yourself a target?
4) Get to know the zone’s choke points.
Anything which inhibits your movement is a choke point. Mobs that take a while to kill, anti-Flee rooms, move drain, blocker mobs, doors you must go through. All of these areas for pause are where CPK’ers will focus on setting traps at.
5) Get to know the zone’s hidden mobiles keywords.
If you know all the mobs and where they can hide and where they don’t this will allows you a great advantage explained later.
6) Get to know the zone’s agro mobs and detects.
Is the mob aggressive? Can it see invis? Can it see hiddens? Test it out by standing in the room invis and then hidden. Mobs which can detect invis and hiddens are called stake busters. Rock Toads and Ogre Warriors will attack any hidden player therefore any hidden in their room likely isn’t a player and if it is, they’ll have to move or get hit.
7) Learn all the door keywords and if they are searchable or not.
1) Rathernols trapdoor in bloodstone
2) Castiack Wall
3) Fire Giants Picture
Feel free to mud mail me your guesses or answers for the answer.
Rules
1) Before entering the zone, “c sense presence” a known mob which always loads. If it doesn’t show up, it’s either dead or the zone isn’t popped. If the zone isn’t popped, no one can be inside. Try a different mob to be sure.
2) If the zone is popped, we should assume someone is here or has been here. We will use helm everywhere, even non-cpk rooms. Using a helm is superior to casting for multiple reasons. NEVER ENTER A ROOM BLIND. Assume any room you don’t see has at least 2 hidden players in it spamming your name. There’s a reason a cpker will have a totally base set worth 12mil but will make sure they buy a 60mil hf helm.
a. It’s less lag.
b. It can’t be fumbled.
c. It’s 0 mana.
d. You can do it while engaged.
Always helm then move back to digest what you saw. No reason to be a stationary target counting hidden when if they are players, they may have helmed you as well and will come running.
3) Scout everything possible before beginning to kill mobs. Don’t waste time killing mobile 1 and 2 only to find out mob 3 is blocked by a stake. May as well scout first then run. There’s been a few times I’ve been on a stake where because the person failed to scout and assumed they were safe since they’d been in the zone for 30 minutes and dropped their guard. Other CPK’ers historically have failed to scout an entire zone and setup their own stake a few rooms away from a rival group. These situations always lead to a slaughter.
Also if you scout before killing, and you find someone, you can leave without them ever knowing what you were going to do. The less the enemy knows, the better.
Before scouting, make sure you have sanc, manashield, and maximum images. A high level mage scout is pretty much impossible for a stake to deal with.
When scouting, you are navigating through the zone assessing and processing hiddens. Assessing a hidden means, “should it be there?” and processing means, “is it the probable mob or is it a player.” The following tips will allow you to do this effectively.
4) If you see a hidden, say at turn in fg, type “consider meazle”. You’ll get a confirmation back that it’s either easy for you to kill and is indeed a meazle. Or it will miss which means the hidden is not a meazle and probably a player. If there’s 2 hiddens in the room, you only need to consider 2.meazle. You don’t have to check each one. Some people use emotes like “high5 meazle” and you can do that too if that’s your style. Make sure to move while doing this and stack commands. {e;e;con 2.mea;w;w;w}
If two people are spamming trip in a room, the most “points” they can cover are 2. There’s a total of about 16 ‘pulses’ between trip lag. Leaving you with 14 open windows to get your two commands off, consider, and move, if you stack it. Let’s say they do hit a trip, if you have 8 images, that’s a 1 in 9 chance it hits you. Even if it does get to your player, trip is a 50-60% success rate. Total all of this up and if you stacked commands it’s a less than 1% chance of being hit. Go ahead, do the math. {.0083} Ambush brings this up because it’s irrelevant to images but no one has thieves these days.
5) If you see a hidden and it’s in a spot where only a certain # can load, like the well in estate, you can sense p 4.reaver, if it’s alive, you can safely say all the hiddens are the normal expected reavers. If not, you know the reavers have been killed and replaced with players.
6) If you see a hidden in an area where if a player were to hide, they’d have to be invis due to wandering mobs, you can dispel your detect invis and see if the hiddens still show up on helm. If they don’t, you know it’s an invis player.
7) Always open a door with the least amount of lag necessary and move as you do so. Pick door, move 4 rooms, check where, was anyone on the other side spamming open door, south? Go back, open the door, move out of the way, did anyone flinch? Go back, helm what was past the door, any hiddens?
8) If you must search open a door, do so with a formation and put yourself in the back row so you cannot be tripped and if the enemy tries to bash they’ll only hit the guy in the front row. They’ll have to hands and that’s one less person trying to stun you! Get a charmy or a buddy to help. If you have a buddy, the form leader should walk in, the other guy should search, and the formleader should immediately run out of the way and hit “where” incase enemies are on the other side are waiting to move when it opens. If you can’t get a charmy or a formy, you can hide at the door for 3 minutes and then search it open and run away and hit “where”. Chances are the enemy will drop their guard if you disappear from where for a while. However, this is still risky as you may fail your hide and be on the entire time.
9) Watch where. The entire time you’re in, you should be checking where every 4th round or so. Every “where” attempt is a scan at trying to find someone trying to rush you. Note just because you only see someone on for 3 seconds, doesn’t mean they are far away. They could have shadowed successfully to within 3 rooms of you.
10) Always be moving. The more distance you cover the more your enemy has to cover. The more they have to cover, the more risk they have at being spotted by you.
11) Always sacrifice your corpses. Enemies like to “c loc corpse” to see the room names of where you’ve been and try to grasp where you’re going next. Don’t tip your hand.
12) When killing things, helm periodically for “hiddens” which suddenly move closer to you. A player may be lucky enough to dodge your “where” but they still can’t avoid the helm.
13) After icing a mob, immediately move out of the room, check where, then go back to loot. Sometimes players will camp close by and try to cherry pick you after a mob. Either way, known mob locations are ‘hot spots’ or “choke points” we mentioned earlier and should be treated with extreme caution.
14) Minimize your time in CPK. Try to obtain your objective as fast as possible while obeying the rules. The longer you stay the more likely someone will spot you. The more you get spotted, the more likely they’ll try to sculpt a plan to hit you. Also, If you’re known for being quick you’ll force the enemy to be hasty and screw up.
15) Escape with a menthol potion. Make a macro to “quaff menthol” so you can hit it as soon as you see someone pop on where, or as soon as a player engages you, or if a mob is about to kill you. Don’t flee, don’t c word, just hit your macro and menthol out of there. No other command is safer.
a. Quaff menthol can’t be fumbled. Believe it or not, fumbling “c teleport” or “c word” has lead to the stripping of many great players.
b. You can quaff a menthol while sitting, resting, any status. The only spell you can cast while sitting in combat is recall and transport. This is important as trip/bash put you into a sitting status until a melee successfully hits you causing you to stand up. This gives you an advantage because the beginning to all trip traps are only a few people engaging you which means it isn't likely a melee will pop you up. They also cannot trip a sitting person. So you could be sitting, not in lag, while enemies are getting "You cannot trip because target is already down." but not able to cast c tele because "You cannot cast this while sitting" and your opportunity to escape is missed when Rzael changes from trip and lands a bash on you.
c. No mana? No problem.
d. Muffled? No problem.
e. nstore a menthol in your inventory and make sure it’s there before you go in.
f. Make sure your macro works.
g. Practice it. Sounds silly but when you get surprised panic can set in quick and lots of people have typed q maethol where they should have safely ported out med instead processed, “You do not have that item.” Or “You must be confuse.” And then were tripped before their next command went through.
To recap. None of this has anything to do with fighting another player this is only stake avoidance and death protection. This is a lot of work but by following it, it makes you nearly invincible. Having a another player with you doubles your odds of seeing someone on where and makes it safer to walk around as stakers will have to worry about which person to spam and how to get a hands off.
