The Treasure Hunter

By Dreadlord Lestat, June 2010

So, you want to be a treasure hunter? Do you dream of finding long lost treasure? Are you prepared to fight the guardians left to protect that long lost treasure? Ancient wyrms, blood elementals, lich lords…oh my! If you have answered yes to both then you are ready to start down the path of the treasure hunter.

Where do I start? There are 2 skills that define the treasure hunter, Cartography and Lock Picking . You use cartography to decipher the treasure maps that you find and you use lock picking to open them once you have dug them up.

There are other skills related to assist in treasure hunting but are rarely used since the templates are very crowded. These skills are Detect Hidden, Remove Trap, and Mining.

Character Creation

You first need to figure out what skills to give your treasure hunter. I will give you a few of the most common templates and I am going to assume that you are using a new account and only have 700 points to play with. If you have a veteran account with the bonus skill points then you can tweak the templates as needed. This also does not go into using power scrolls (except for the tamer template) or jewelry. I will leave that up to you to figure out how you want to tweak the templates.

Pure Treasure Hunter

100 lock picking

100 cartography

100 detect hidden

100 remove trap

100 mining

100 fighting skill

100 fighting skill

There are people that will tell you that you are not a treasure hunter unless you have the first five skills in your template. This template is on the weak side since you don’t have much offence, in other words, it’s not for trying to solo the higher end maps unless you plan to lead them away. This template is more for people who are role playing a treasure hunter or people who do guild treasure hunts and won’t have to fight the guardian spawn.

Bard Treasure Hunter

100 lock picking

100 cartography

100 music

100 provocation

100 peace making

100 discord

100 magery

This is a nice template because you can provoke the spawn onto each other, you can peace single spawn, and can discord spawn to keep things even. With magery, you can also summon earth earth elementals and have them help you fight. You can also drop either peace or discord and evaluate intelligence to make you magery spells stronger. Another option is to drop both peace and discord and add eval and meditation but of you go this route then might as well just drop down to the next template and go with that.

Mage Treasure Hunter

100 lock picking

100 catography

100 magery

100 evaluate intelligence

100 meditation

100 Resist Spells

100 mysticism/spell weaving/necromancy (your choice, they all have pros and cons)

There isn’t much that needs to be said about this template. Cast, cast, cast…….and cast some more. Most players running this template summon earth elementals and attack with them to hold the agro and then cast on the spawn as well. You can also summon energy vortexes but the advantage to the summoned earth elementals is that you can give them commands while the energy vortexes just do their own thing which at the wrong time can lead to your death.

Tamer Treasure Hunter

100 lock picking

100 cartography

100 animal taming

100 animal lore

100 Veterinary

100 magery

100 meditaion/evaluate intelligence

This is a powerful template if you use a high end pet. You will have to take away from magery or med if you want to be able to control a dragon or cu. You will need to scroll to 110 tame and lore.

Melee Treasure Hunter

100 lock picking

100 cartography

100 archery/swordsmanship/fencing/mace fighting

100 anatomy

100 tactics

100 healing

100 bushido/ninjitsu/chivalry

This is arguably one of the tougher templates to solo the high end treasure maps with. With this template, it is definitely a good idea to try and lure the spawn one by one to take them out.

Stats

I cannot really tell you how to set your stats because it depends on your template and how you play it so I will leave this part up to you.

Treasure Maps

You can find all you need to know about treasure maps here

Finding Your Treasure

There is two ways you can do this:

1.    Look at the map and compare it to the world map and narrow it down to a location and go to that location. Then make a local map and narrow it down and start digging. This page is a little more in depth on this method.

2.    Go here
and find your location, start digging

Many shards have rune libraries with the map locations that you can use in conjunction with this map link. You can find some of the rune libraries here

Digging It Up

I would suggest working a few level one chests to get acquainted with everything before going to the tougher chests. When you dig up your chest, you will also dig up guardian spawn. Levels 2 and higher will spawn 4 guardians when the chest is completely dug up.

Once you start digging, as long as you are in the correct location, you will see the ground start changing to dirt and see the chest start to rise out of the ground. You need to precast invisibility but do not target yourself until you see the entire chest pop up. There is a very, very short delay from when you see the entire chest appear to when the guardians spawn. If you have timed it right, they will be standing around you and start to wander. If you did not time it right then you are either running for your life or you were revealed and are now running for your life.

Once you have killed the guardian spawn or led them safely away you need to open the chest. Use your lock picks on the chest. Once the lock has been picked, you need to be very careful as the chest has been trapped. You can use the skills detect hidden and remove trap or you can move 7 tiles away from the chest and cast telekinesis to set off the trap. After it has been removed or disarmed, it is safe to open the chest.

Now you are ready to loot the chest but be careful as you do, guardians will randomly spawn as you remove items from the chest. What I like to do is “work the chest” which means leaving one item, I usually leave a single scroll, and then you drag it a little ways from the chest and let it go, it bounces back in the chest and you can spawn some extra guardians for fun and extra loot.

I hope this has been informative and have helped you start out in the exciting world of competitive treasure hunting. I will be posting some tutorial videos on conducting treasure hunts in the near future.