Table of Contents
Combat Skills
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS!!! I will edit this later with more stats/info as I find time. I'm mostly focused on crafting and other meta skills and have been since the start. Maybe someone else should run this section.
I do have some comments here at “Which Two Combat Skills Should I Use” regarding skills that are good for leveling other skills. Players that are asking themselves the question of “What is the best skill to start with in Gorgon?” should click the above link to see a breakdown of the newbie skills. The short answer is to just choose either Sword/Psych or Unarmed/Mentalism or some combination of these four skills when starting to see how they like the game with them, and then swap out at level 30-40 if the skills aren't interesting to you anymore. It will takes you a few days to go from Level 1-40 in a skill but a month to go from 40-90 in a skill due to the resource costs. That's how difficult the progression gets, so getting a couple skills to 40 to test them all out and see how you like them is actually pretty easy and highly recommended till you find what you like.
It's also worth noting that unless you are hardcore player, the “holy trinity” of tank/healer/dps doesn't entirely work the same in Project Gorgon. You can certainly group up like this, and there's tons of group content in the game, but skills like Priest and Bard are two of the best healing abilities in game, but extremely difficult to level together solo, they also both rely heavily on channeled abilities and generally speaking you only really want one channeled ability. Skills like Pig, Priest, Mentalism, Psych, Warden are good skills when paired with damage dealing skills. You may want to level support skills like these separate from each other when playing solo, however, even if you end up pairing them together when doing group content.
If you are a player that ALWAYS plays in a group with one or more friends, you can very easily go two supports for combat skills, however. There's a slight bonus to XP gain if you primarily group with at least one other player all the time.
Getting your first two skills to level 50 quick
Professor Cat created an excellent video for those of you that want a quick guide towards getting your first two combat skills to level 50 (he recommends Psychology/Fire Magic, likely due to the significant damage these both due early on). He also very conveniently gets exactly the materials needed early on in specific cases (I'm sure some of this was kind of scripted, but it's important to note you can always ask other players for help, especially if you just need a few items to get an NPC's Favor to that next level). Keep in mind he's a veteran player with several characters 90+, so you probably won't go as fast as he does, but I do have to admit that these two skills and the routes he takes in this video is probably the single fastest way to get two skills to 50.
My only major recommendation separate from the actions he does here is that if you are a brand new player you should stop after getting Psychology on the island and definitely enjoy the other quests and things on tutorial island using Sword or Unarmed instead of heading straight to Serbule keep to get Fire Magic if this is your first character. He rushes the “Ursula's Earrings” (a human racial item that gives a huge benefit to fire damage) and very luckily gets a cheap white “Ring of Increasing Anxiety”. You probably won't get as lucky as he does, though I will admit it IS possible to get Ursula's earrings without too much difficulty, even at a super low level. Having Fire Magic a few levels behind Psychology because you stayed on the tutorial island is fine, by end game the gap will be minor and mostly ignorable.
My “minor” recommendation separate from what he does here is that keep in mind this is a very combat-focused run. You'll want to stop to take advantage of things like crafting, specifically you might want to get your Cooking skill a little higher to get both Marna and Joeh's favor levels higher so you can open up even more inventory space in Serbule. You also might want to take advantage of getting Alchemy higher and using Fire Magic in the Mushroom Cave to get more money/credits/favor with Mushroom Jack. Mushroom Cave is a pretty nice money-making dungeon early game, which you'll want to hit up occasionally for the crafting items and to sell some of the stuff you get there.
I think probably the thing that is the best about this specific guide, however, is that he intentionally goes to locations that are very good locations for leveling Fire Magic and aside from Serbule Crypt and the Goblin Dungeon, all of the other combat locations he goes to are actually not super frequented by other players, meaning it's easy to farm those locations. In particular, the Ranalon Lake area, Serbule Sewers, and Carpal Tunnels are locations where you won't often see other players or have to compete for kills. Same goes for the Yeti Cave area he goes to near the end of his combat skills run, that's an area that only ever really sees a few groups doing their Daily Runs.
So why is this guide important? Professor Cat gets two combat skills to level 50 within only 16 hours of gameplay. With level 50 in two combat skills you can do pretty much anything in the game except end game content. While most players are going to do this much slower and likely over the course of their first week or two, the point of the video is to show players that the first 50 levels of combat skills are really quite easy to get. Many of the complaints on Steam are about the economy and requirement to use the Favor system to progress in the game, but the reality is, you can level up combat skills really easy, so yeah, the other parts of the game are where it gets hard.
And some of us like that the game is designed this way. You can quickly get your toes wet into any two combat skills, but if you want to really focus down and get those skills to max level, you gotta start using the Favor system, you gotta get into crafting, you need to start exploring what all the game has to offer. Unlike typical MMOs where you grind the same enemies for days, the “grind” in Project Gorgon is exploring, crafting, and doing all the non-combat stuff to unlock better skills and levels.
After grinding four combat skills to level 90+ and playing over several years I sat down one day and just decided I wanted to see what Spider was all about. There was a patch that had made it so Spiders could use Battle Chemistry, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Because of synergy levels I was already at like level 15 in Spider and level 40ish in Battle Chemistry, so I went for it. In under two weeks of causal play (4 hours during the week, maybe 8 hours on the weekends), I had both skills to level 80+.
That's the importance of doing all the other Favor grinding with the NPCs, you can essentially unlock faster pathways to learn new skills if you want. Very few of the people playing this game stick with just two combat skills, everyone always has another build they want to try out and level on the side. Maybe one day you'll like that side build so much you make it your main build. Unlike other MMOs that either flat out do not let you try other skills, Project Gorgon does. That said, remember that some skills are definitely “choose at your own peril” options like Werewolf and Druid.
Project Gorgon really is a different kind of game, and some of us like it that way. Play the demo first. If you don't like that there are other systems other than just combat in the game, don't buy it, you'll be disappointed.
Power Leveling
Professor Cat created a follow up guide to his other video that talks about traveling skills in use for powerleveling. This guide covers the things you'll want to know about powerleveling. Combat skills that do AoE are good for powerleveling. So are having travel skills that increase your speed (or a horse and relevant Riding skill).
Credits
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgNun1gQYAI (Professor Cat's guide to getting to level 50 in Fire/Psych on a new character quickly)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFebAqutBo (Professor Cat's guide to powerleveling in Project Gorgon)