Age of Wushu is an open world, open PVP, F2P kung-fu MMO. It's a very open sandbox, and it's very feature-rich and complex.
This is practically required reading. The in-game tutorials of AoW are somewhat helpful at best. You're in the same boat as every new player in AoW. They're all just as bewildered as you are. This guide should help to alleviate the feeling of being lost, hopelessness, and dread you will experience in your first few hours. However, the majority of you have played DF. These feelings should be nothing new to you, and you'll get used to it eventually. If you need additional help, you can PM or ask in guild chat. My in-game name is colorvision.
Character Creation
After you've made an account and you first log in, you'll be taken to a character creation screen. Before that, you'll be given a choice of servers. We are located on the Blue Dragon server. Character creation is not important. Customization is about the same as any other game. There are sliders and you move them. That's about it. However, the most important thing in character customization is gender. The Shaolin school only accepts male students, and the Emei only accept females. You will not be keeping your newbie clothes much longer than the first 30 minutes of the game.
After customization, you'll be taken to a screen that has you select a story. This does not make too much of a difference, other than starting location and the storyline. The rewards all are the same, except for the Nameless Sword storyline. The Nameless Sword Storyline gives you a unique internal skill but there's no reason to use any internal skill other than school internals. You should pick "A Scholar's Legend" since it starts you in Chengdu, which is where all of us are. There will also be an option of controls once you get put into the actual game. Chose the "special controls" options. It's not actually special, it's just WASD to move, space to jump, right mouse to block, and left mouse to interact. You'll see that right mouse to block is problematic, because it's also how you turn the camera. You can change this in the button settings, though.
Quests and Autopathing
In the upper right hand corner of your screen, you should see a task tracker. If not, hit the scroll button under the minimap to reveal it. Click the green names on quests and it'll take you to your destination. This is called autopathing. Autopathing is your friend, and you'll use it a ton. According to the new task you've gotten, you can hit F9 to hide players and to show only NPCs. This isn't very useful unless there are like 25 people around an NPC you want to talk to, and even then autopathing will make you automatically talk to a NPC you path to. When you're talking to your father, Gu Cheng, click the little rolled-up scroll button to have him give you a quest or to continue dialogue. The door icon leaves the chat interface. You'll also see the rewards for completing the quest. These rewards can be money (bound liang only), items, experience, and reputation.'
Eventually you'll get taken to a shifu. He'll teach you awful, awful skills that you should never use. Ever. The shifu will give you your first internal skill, Self Recollection. Follow the tutorial the game gives you and learn. If you don't follow the tutorial, right click the skill book (more commonly called a script) to learn it. From there you can preview it to see it in action, but there's no point in doing that for an internal skill. Just click "okay" or whatever rough equivalent to that there is. I haven't learned a skill in a while since I've learned all my school's sets, so I'm not entirely sure on what the exact wording is. The shifu will then have you cultivate your internal skill. Internal skills are the game's equivalent of levels (or class, you could say). Schools also function as classes but we'll get to them later. To cultivate it, open the martial arts skillbook by pressing K or clicking on the book icon on the bottom of the screen. Click the top tab, then "Jianghu Internal Skill". Press the cultivate button and you'll be at level 2 of Self Recollection in about 5 minutes. After you complete this quest (I don't believe you actually have to finish cultivating Self Recollection to level 2 to complete it) talk to the Shifu again. He'll send you to a man named Chi Huiye. Autopath to Chi. You'll be taken to another scene so there will be a couple seconds of loading screen.
Chi will have you attack one of his students. This is your introduction to combat. Combat is very important in an open PVP game like Age of Wushu. But first (unless you've already done so) you'll need to add your combat skills to the skill bar. Like Self Recollection, the Shallow Kung Fu set, what you will be learning, is essentially useless. You'll only use it for this portion of the tutorial. Open your Skillbook, go to the second tab, and click "Barehanded Skill Set". This will show you your barehanded sets, and you'll only have one for now. Shallow Kung Fu. Click Unarmed Normal Attack once and drag it to your skill bar on the bottom. Note: if the Skillbook is too close to the skillbar, for some reason you can't add skills to the bar. Just drag the skillbook up if this happens. Follow the instructions you're given. You'll learn blocking. Then you'll learn a block skill, which is a new type of skill. Block skills modify your blocks to give them special properties. For instance, the block skill you're given reduces damage after parrying. Not very useful, is it? The actual block skills you'll learn after the tutorial are great, though. The block skill I use, from Emei's 3rd set, gives rage when you parry, making it the most useful block skill in the game, probably. It all depends on your playstyle though. After this, you'll learn about Feints. Feints break blocks. They're very, very useful. Then you'll learn about Rage skills. Rage skills use rage, which you earn from fighting, to do things. Some of them do large amounts of damage. Others reduce the amount of damage you receive for a period of time. Others give your group bonuses. Your rage bar is under the health and internal force bars. You'll see it glow red and burst into flame as you accumulate rage in a fight.
Finally, you'll learn about meditation. As far as I know, there's only one meditation skill and I don't think you can cultivate it. Meditation just restores your HP and internal force back to you. It doesn't sound good, but it can be very useful after a fight. I suggest you place it on the very top skill bar. The very top skill bar shows up no matter what bottom skill bar you are on. Put things like meditation, break meridians and arrays in there. (Break meridians is the suicide skill. You can use it in a pinch if you get caught while spying, for a quick teleport back to your home city, and more. You can buy it from the martial arts shifu by pressing "purchase secret" in the chat interface. It costs 100 wen, which is almost nothing, even for a new player. I also suggest you buy Vigorous Strides, which is a flying skill. Vigorous Strides is a passive speed boost while flying.)
You'll get a quest to get wine for your shifu. You end up getting mugged and thrown into a well. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but just go along with it. You'll get thrown into a well. Click on the book next to the skeleton to get your first real flying skill. It's double jump. Follow the icons along the walls that conveniently lead to a way out of the well. After this, there'll be more story. Go along with it. It's just to make sure you know what you're doing with flying skills. You'll then learn how to use hidden weapons. You won't use hidden weapons unless you become a member of the Tangmen school or learn their dart skills. Just go along with it, you know the drill now. All you have to do is kill some wild dogs and report back to the hunter. Don't use these darts ever again. They really only do damage against small animals. It even says so in the description. This is also a good time for a word about NPCs. Killing NPCs in this game is
useless. There is no XP gain from it. There is no such thing as vendor trash. The only reason you should ever be killing NPCs is if you want materials like flax and coarse cloth. Animal NPCs can be skinned by a hunter to get materials. Sometimes, you also just want to beat up dudes for the hell of it. There are really boring, crappy side quests that you can do every day that have you kill x amount of NPC. Additionally, there is PvE content. If you don't fall under any of these categories and want to kill NPCs, don't do it. It's a waste of time. (This mostly applied to pre-release Age of Wushu. Now you get Chi from fighting which you use to level up meridians, but you get a bonus to fighting PvP and fighting in PvE content, so why would you do it anyway?)
Schools
Finally, after all that tutorial, you'll get to schools. In a game of a lot of choices, this is your most important choice. You can't switch schools once you've chosen. If you're really, really indecisive, create some alts and try out each school before deciding which one to choose on your main.
Schools are basically the classes of the game. Except there aren't
really classes and you can learn any skill in the game. You just have to steal it during the script-stealing event or buy it for exorbitant prices from other players if it's not from your school. Additionally, you can only level up internal skills that aren't from your school to level 30. You can level up all of your schools internals to level 36 (there are 3 internal skills for each school). This doesn't sound that big of a deal, and it isn't, but it's a pretty decent difference. Also, schools function as a sort of mega-guild. There are school wars, player leaders, and school events.
There are good, neutral, and evil schools. This doesn't mean anything, other than that there are rules, but breaking rules is not a big deal and you will do it all the time. Good schools really don't like it if you do things like kidnapping (that is an actual feature in-game), murdering, stealing, and killing your fellow school members for no reason. Neutral schools dislike the same things that the good schools dislike, but they care less. The only rule in the evil schools is to not kill your fellow members. Also, none of them (except for the perverts in Wanderer's Valley) like it if you run around naked. If you break rules, you earn discipline. This is not good. Once it reaches 100, you get teleported back to your school and get a stern warning. You also get a 15% debuff to the power of your attacks. You can get rid of discipline by repenting. Repenting basically involves you standing on a pole for a few minutes in time-out until you decide to leave.
There are some restrictions on schools. Only men can be Shaolin, and only women can be Emei. Shaolin are monks (obviously) and Emei are nuns. They don't wear really really ugly outfits though, they have pink outfits instead. If you want to be a Scholar, you have to have a Social life skill. To join the Beggar's Sect, you have to have the Beggar marketplace skill. The coachman will tell you about each of the schools you click on, so there's no need to explain that. Once you've decided (choose wisely) you will be teleported to the school and you will begin your school quests. You'll probably be in the school by 5 minutes time, but the school quest is basically an extension to the main storyline. After joining a school, you can start the actual story. You can (and will) do the school and main storylines at the same time.
When you join, you'll receive your school's first skill set and their first internal. Learn the internal and follow the quest to complete your first set. Also once you join a school you can learn the gathering professions. You might want to teleport back to town to learn them, or you can just wait a bit. Also you'll be able to claim your first title! Click the portrait icon that just popped up. Click the icon that says "Claim now" and claim it. You'll get an identity outfit for your school and a title.
If you want to claim your new title and clothes now, go to the character screen by pressing C or clicking the little person on your HUD. Go to the scroll tab on the bottom and click the school tab at the top of the new screen you've opened. Click your new title, then click the "use title" button. For example, if you're Emei, you should now have "Little Martial Sister" as your title in blue letters on top of your name. To get your identity outfit on, go back to Equipment. Open your inventory and click to drag your new outfit into the "Identity clothes" slot. Then check the identity outfit box at the top. You should now have a new set of sweet clothes. (Your identity outfit doesn't change with the equipment you wear. If you ever want to go back, click "Jianghu costume".)
Life Skills
Life skills, the AoW equivalent to crafting, is divided into 4 categories. The gathering skills (fisherman, miner, farmer, woodcutter, hunter), manufacturing (tailor, herbalist, poison maker, chef, blacksmith, craftsman), social skills (musician, weiqi player, calligrapher, painter) and marketplace (beggar and divinator). You can learn all of the gathering skills and one each of the other skills. Divinator is VIP-only but it's also apparently a buggy mess. The gathering skills are self-explanatory. For the manufacturing skills, tailors make armor (there is no metal armor in AoW), herbalists make pills, chefs make food that gives you nutrition and stat bonuses, blacksmiths make weapons, poison makers make poisons, and I think craftsmen make bags, jewelry, and handles, along with other things. Musicians and weiqi players (weiqi = Go) use their abilities to help with group combat. By playing music or using maneuvers they give bonuses to their group or debuffs to the enemy. This is very useful in dungeons. Calligraphers combine skill book fragments into actual usable scripts with a balancing game. Painters make paintings and annotated skill books. Paintings give bonus life skill XP to people.
If you want extra life skill XP, you have 3 options: challenge your shifu, do the daily tasks, or just plain use the skills. You can only challenge the manufacturing life shifus. Challenging your shifu is a lot like Bejeweled. It's a gem game, except you use the gems you collect to attack, parry, give yourself bonuses, etc. This is also how you do advanced manufacturing. Advanced manufacturing gives you more of the finished product but you need to destroy a certain amount of skulls. The introductory quest to manufacturing explains challenging a lot better than I can. You can also challenge other players for even more XP.
Instances
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Instances are the dungeons of AoW. There are two types of instance: forbidden and martial instances. You'll be doing a martial instance for the story line. Talk to the herald. Form a team by pressing N. Talk to the Herald to receive a challenge letter. Accept the letter. Normally you'd fight a random boss, but this time it's always the hardest one, the Jade boss. The people at the lowest part of the pyramid are the weakest, and get tougher as you go up. Loot scales accordingly. For this instance, you don't need to do it with anybody else. There will always be a very powerful NPC that will help you fight. Without him, you'd be dead in the water. Just follow him around and don't stray too far. Watch out for the boss. Bosses in AoW have huge health and sometimes attacks that do a pretty good bit of damage. These attacks will devastate a newbie like you. Just let the NPC do all the work.
Game Systems
Experience and CultivationThe way XP works in AoW is one of the main differences from other games. Experience isn't gained from killing things or by doing a ton of quests, so there's no real grinding for XP. You get XP from spying, patrolling, instances, even just running around and jumping on things. There's a ton of other ways to get it besides these, too.
Experience is converted automatically into cultivation. Cultivation is what you use to make your skills better. You can only cultivate so many points at once, but XP pills, patrolling, script defending, and more all speed up cultivation. XP pills, despite their names, don't give you XP. They make you cultivate XP faster.
Internal cultivation is passive cultivation. It converts experience to cultivation over time (the other two cultivation methods don't use XP, as far as I know). Speed it up with XP pills. A good XP pill can get you from 210 cultivation a tick to 920 a tick. Turn internal cultivation on when you aren't using the other two methods.
Martial arts practice is spending money to get cultivation. You can spend 100 bound liang a day on martial arts practice and an unlimited amount of unbound money on it. There are 3 drugs at the bottom of your screen. Always, always go for the most expensive drug there is. Martial arts practice is basically just luck. You'll almost always get a really big amount from the big drug at least once, but you could get it every single time or none at all. There's not a lot of ways to spend bound liang, so just spend it on martial arts practice.
Team practice is probably the best way to earn cultivation. It's tai chi turned into a really easy rhythm game. You'll see people in school chat calling for people to join TP at the school's sacred spot all the time. There's a maximum of 10 people in a TP session, and groups will almost always start at that time, because it's less efficient with less than 10 people. TP sessions will generally do one 25-round TP and one 10-round TP. This will put you at 100% fatigue. At 100% fatigue, you'll no longer get cultivation from TP. Fatigue resets at midnight server time, so everybody does TP right after midnight. To join a TP session that hasn't started yet, find the person with the icon over their head. Click them, then right click their portrait to join the TP session.
Sacred spots increase your cultivation level. Sacred spots depend on schools. Doing TP in a sacred spot can get you an additional 20% bonus, and that's a good 30000 or so cultivation points just from doing it in a sacred spot. You'll get a quest from your school headmaster that will take you to your school's sacred spot and will explain TP to you.
PVPBeing an open PVP game, PVP is quite important to Age of Wushu. Anyone can be attacked anywhere. You are never, ever safe, not to say that the whole game is a grief fest.
If you want to kill somebody, you're going to have to turn on Jianghu mode. To do so, you'll have to click the shield button next to the picture of your character. Click Jianghu mode. You can now attack anyone you see. You should probably enable the Guild and School restrictions, as well as Camp (Camp being your team).
You will also most likely get involved in PVP during certain events. Spying, patrolling, cart running, school wars, and so on all have PVP elements or are based on it. There are also assassinations. You may get a popup asking you to go to the Twilight Village instance. Always say yes! This will make you an assassin. You get to run around with your own team trying to prevent the instance runners from killing the boss. Even if they kill the boss, you still get a reward, so there's no point in not doing it. The event fills up very fast, so you have to be really quick to do it.
Crime and PunishmentKilling other players gets you infamy. After you reach 2000 infamy, your name will turn red. If you are killed by a constable while you have over 2000 infamy, you'll get sent to jail. Constables are players who have become bounty hunters. If you're killed by a player, you can set a bounty for them and the person will generally be dead within 5 minutes. If a wanted player enters a scene, everybody there gets a message about them entering and it also details their location. Jail time is determined by how high your infamy is.
If you've accumulated over 8000 infamy, your name will be purple. Instead of going to jail, you'll get sent to death row. After a waiting period of 3 days in jail, you'll be executed. Execution gives you, besides the jail time, a day-long debuff that effectively prevents you from fighting other people.
MoneyYou've probably noticed by now, but there are two (technically three) currencies in AoW. There is bound and unbound liang, as well as gold.
Bound liang is earned by doing quests, spying, cart running, selling items to NPCs and other events. You are going to have a ton of bound liang. Spend it freely. You can use it to buy items from NPCs and you can spend some on martial arts practice to give you cultivation. Not that bound liang is useless, though. Some NPC-bought items are very useful, such as horses. Horses are 200 liang a pop and the ones you buy from horse merchants only last 7 days. However, you can earn enough (with some to spare) to pay a horse off in a single day from spying alone.
Unbound liang is much, much more valuable then bound liang. It's used for trading with other players. Your main source of unbound liang will be selling items to other players and kidnapping. Begging can also net you some unbound liang but be careful with who you beg to.
Gold is a special case. It's the super-special, amazing currency you can buy from Snail Games to buy cosmetic items. People who bought the Deluxe version also get a nice amount of it included. You can technically convert gold directly to unbound liang, but it's a ripoff. Don't do it. You're better off buying a cosmetic item or horse from the store and selling it at a stall.
KidnappingKidnapping, along with trade, is your main source of unbound liang. It also gives some bound liang on the side, enough to cover the price of the kidnapping drugs.
If you want to start kidnapping people, you'll first need to buy kidnapping drugs from a NPC general store. You'll have a wide variety of options for kidnapping drugs, but just buy the Level 10 drug and never look back. When you fail to kidnap someone, you'll be stunned for 30 seconds. During these 30 seconds, you can be attacked without consequences by anyone. They'll get some reputation and Good points for doing it. The Level 10 drug has the lowest chance of failure.
After buying a kidnapping drug, you'll need to find an offline player who is working at a job. These players will have blue titles above their heads. Click on them, then open your inventory and right click the kidnapping drug. After you successfully drug the person, you'll automatically stuff them into a sack. Right click the sack to equip it. Now, anyone can kill you. Call your horse and make a mad dash for a NPC store owner, or the Darkminded Trafficker if you're doing a mission for him. Once you're there, talk to them and sell the player to them. Stronger players are less likely to be knocked out but give better rewards when kidnapped. You can't kidnap a player that's been kidnapped in the last 6 hours, unless they've payed the ransom. You can only kidnap once per hour.
From 19:00-23:00 server time, you can sell kidnapped players to the Darkminded Trafficker. He'll give you a mission to kidnap a player from a certain school, and more money than normal if you succeed.. It sounds very easy, but it's not. The majority of offline players (in Chengdu, at least) are newbies who haven't selected a school yet. Chances are, if there is an offline player from the school he wants, the player's already been kidnapped.
Players who have been kidnapped will no longer receive money or extra experience from offline jobs for the next 6 hours. You can pay a ransom (that actually doesn't go to the kidnapper) to start getting money again. You really don't earn a lot from offline jobs though, so it's not like it matters.
Besides the obvious money, you'll also gain two things that aren't very good. If you're in a Good school, you'll receive 10 Discipline points for kidnapping. You'll also get one Evil alignment point for doing it, but it fades over time and doesn't actually do much.
Screenshots
The game looks pretty great, especially at ultra settings.
Overlooking the Emei school:
Chengdu:
The outskirts of town.
Shaolin school:
Scholar's Academy:
Carriage ride to the village
Beggar's Sect:
Spying on the Beggar's Sect. This was my best run of spying yet; I got 9 out of 10 pieces of information, even while I was revealed.
Other Resources and Notes
Beginner's guide. The tutorial in-game doesn't really teach you anything, and it's also filled with broken English. Use this instead. It even has pictures, which the guide I made lacks.
Official Age of Wulin guide. While it was made with Age of Wulin in mind, the content still applies to Age of Wushu.
When you create a character, select "A Scholar's Legend" backstory. You'll be spawned in Chengdu, the busiest city in the game. It's also most likely where we will be based.
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Topic: Age of Wushu/Wulin: Everybody was Kung-Fu Dancing (Read 44723 times)