The Endless Trial has really made twinking come out in full force. For the LONGEST time I’ve heard players and guildies alike pine over the dreams that one day we would be able to /xpoff, and stay in T1 forever. Here gameplay is simple and killing is gratuitous. Crowd Control is extremely limited and mostly set aside for Tanks, Morale abilities are effective without being overpowered, and every class fills a role on the battlefield without being overshadowed. I’ve seen pretty much every class excel at its focused archetype when left in the hands of skilled players. Although I prefer taking a class well out of it’s archtype, i.e. melee Runepriest, an equally skilled and geared player will easily be able to rock out significantly better numbers that I would ever be able to, but it’s fun!

First off, and most importantly is getting your level up to R10. Fairly simple, and every player will have no issues doing this over time, although a few tips will get you there slightly faster. You’re only going to have a handful of abilities, and typically at r10 you’ll receive your archtype defining ability. For Tanks this is Guard and Hold The Line, Healers get Rez, MDPS get Charge and an AoE Detaunt or Stealth+Sneak Attack, RDPS is a mixed bag of damage or utility abilities.

Don’t forget to also use all of your renown points as well, for ranged classes go with Ballistics or Intelligence, Healers feel free to take your Willpower, but melee I would recommend Weapon Skill as the abundance of players stacking Armor talismans will make this worthwhile and by the end of the guide, your STR stat should be really damn close to the soft cap.
Your second goal to achieve is gear. Oh sure, most players will be more than happy to run around with their Decimator set and Vengeance gear, along with 4 of the +10 wounds accessory pieces, but the real twinks are going to value the blues with empty slots instead, and blue accessory pieces too. Are you running around in T1 with a +% crit chance weapon? No? Well then…

There are four main ways to go about collecting your uber-gear.

• Zone influence rewards, gained through RvR and taking battle objectives
• Lair boss drops, who drop a helmet, main hand weapon, and off hand weapon/shield/book/chalice
• Random mob drops, new to the Endless Trial are repairable slotted drops.
• PQ rewards, both bags and influence rewards

Influence for EvC will be the easiest to attain by far. If you’re an RvR kind of person, you’ll most likely get all three of these by the time you hit 10/10 anyway. This gear is some of the best, but not in every instance, you’ll just have to figure that out on your own. I’ll come back to this in better detail later.
This is where the third step comes into line. Once you have figured out what gear is going to give you the most return, you have to balance around stat caps. The stat cap is something T4 players are more familiar with being 1050, but for each Tier it gets lower and lower. The trick to working with the cap is simply to get as close to it as possible, and dump the remainder into other stats that enhance your survivability. Oh, and I should probably mention the cap for stats is 320, armor is set at 75% (anything more pads against attackers armor mitigation), and resistances are capped around 40%. These are just “soft” caps, so you can dump significantly more into them, it’s just you’ll  be getting half the return value, but sometimes this isn’t a bad thing.

Once you pass a soft cap, any additional points dumped into it will be cut in half, excluding armor which works a bit differently. The benefit to this is the small handful of abilities that can reduce your stats and resistances. Even though your contribution to stats is cut in half, the debuff still takes from the total amount of points you have spent in the first place. Example, your STR is at 340 (20 over cap), and you’re debuffed by 60, instead of losing the full 60 points of stat, you only lose 20 (doubled from being over the cap), and another 20 (bringing you under the cap). Even so, it’s something I try to avoid as those stat points are better spent in defensive stats (INI or TGH) for casters/ranged or WS for melee armor penetration.

Having nicely balanced stats is what separates a well twinked toon from someone endlessly dumping everything into their main damage stat. If you aren’t understanding why from the explanation above, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to enlighten you further.

 

The fourth point to make is the necessary crafting to get all of the potions and talismans you’ll need to nicely polish off your game. Being on a trial account, you simply won’t have the opportunity to use the auction house and snatch up the overabundance of loot available. Sure you can grind out a few gold and beg a full account players to run there and retrieve items for you, but chances are there’s gonna be a markup, and that won’t come cheap.

Talisman Making and Scavenging will get you the talismans you’ll need for both DPS (STR, BAL, INT), HPS (WIL), and Armor. You’ll be missing out on Salvaging along with Weapon Skill, Wounds, Initiative, Resistances, and Magical Essence (mat for tali making) but those aren’t really that important. The reason I say this is because you’re going to need to break down a LOT of gear to attempt to get these blue mats, and beyond that you’ll need a “special” crit to convert it fully into a purple talisman. Surely it’s possible, but nowhere near as efficient. Your talisman making agenda should consist mainly of your prime stat, and armor.

Stats cap out at Rank 6 and +17 or +127 for armor. Use everything else during your quest for the epic drops, and save up enough +17/+127’s to throw in your final set. Once you have all these in place, you can respec to your longer term crafting profession. Alternatively, if you’re like me and have a 200/200 Talisman maker, you can down-convert all your high rank materials to R1 mats, and pump out tons of pretty much anything you need. This would really be the
only viable way to get your hands on those Salvaging-Only +17 talismans. Also to note along that line of thinking, you can just as easily downgrade Crit talismans to T1 levels as well…
Apothecary and Butchering will get you everything you need for potions buffing stats and armor, along with heal, HoT, and absorb potions. The alternative to Butchering is Cultivating, which will only net you the seeds you can find from a standard merchant. These are GTAoE napalm or snare, thorns, and a couple other utility effects. Nothing in Cultivating is really worth taking at any tier, and short of them all getting massive buffs in the future, currently they’re rather useless. With all that being said, Cultivating had in previous patches seeds for damn near everything. These seeds still exist, but you can expect to pay quite a bit to get your hands on them as most players don’t recirculate them freely. They no longer drop out in the wild, making them excessively valuable.

Potions come in a variety of different crit levels and effects. You can also buy potions from the RvR Quartermaster by using up Recruit Medallions. DO THIS. The RvR Quartermaster heal potions do not use the same cooldown timer as the crafted potions. This means in a tough fight, BOTH potions can be used in quick succession which should be able to take down any other player not doing the same, or let you survive long enough to flail at a healer to give you some love. The blue stat potions can boost you around 30 points for up to an hour (and with the right mats you’ll make 5 of these at a time), armor is similar boosting up to 260-ish for an hour as well.

One thing to keep in mind however, stat potions will overwrite other stat potions. You can only have one running at a time. Armor shares it’s slot with Resistance potions, so you can only have one of four defenses running there as well. This is something to keep in mind depending on your class and stats. Are you a tank? If so, you don’t really need a whole lot more armor, so use a resist pot. Are you a healer? Chances are you may have a resist buff you can hit yourself with, so use an armor pot. See how that works? Now, if someone hits you with a buff, it doesn’t remove the potion, just the stronger buff standing takes precedence. Also, potions persist through death, while buffs do not. If you’re separated from your buffer, or the effect wears off, you’ll still have the potion keeping your stats floating high.

Right then, enough of all that nonsense. Let’s get into specifics about where to find the phat loot. Well, for Order anyway, it probably translates to Destro just as well.

Norsca!

For the Endless Trial players, you’re going to be very limited in the various amount of ways you can attain gear. For the most part, you’ll want to be hitting the Ch 4 PQ’s in Norsca. The actual rewards from finishing the PQ’s are lackluster, and the influence rewards aren’t all that stunning either except the purple bag, but the real loot you’re looking for is the repairable Prudent, and Worthy gear that drops at random from the mobs. Champions, Heroes, and Lords have a significantly higher chance of dropping these pieces which makes advancing the PQ to further stages worthwhile. You won’t be able to find these on the more common database sites, or at least I haven’t found any yet. They’re new additions to the loot tables for T1, and they drop all over the place. All of them are slotted, and have considerably better stats that the renown gear merchant Vengeance items. The blue weapons can even rival RvR influence rewards in overall power as well.

You’ll also want to keep an eye out for Gale-Runners and Wanderer shoulders or helms, or if the stats on those aren’t worth your time you can go with War-Torn for an empty slot and great resistances. One of the WH’s in my guild has a full set of War-Torn which give him resists way past the soft cap and mitigation into the 50% range. There are also blue versions of these, Storm-Coursers and Intruders, and purple versions, Tempest-Riders and Interlopers. Don’t worry too much about these however, the difference between the greens and purples are a mere 2 stat points, and 8 resists. Hardly worth the time to grind when you could be killing people instead.
So that’s it? Well no, not really, that’s all the Endless Trial players can accomplish unfortunately. To finish out the rest of your twinking you’re going to need access to the rest of the game as well. Of course, that isn’t going to stop me from sharing a few more secrets!

Next up are two lair bosses found in Ekrund and The Blighted Isle respectively. Obviously if you’re on a trial account, you won’t be able to get over there, but for the rest they’re easy enough to do with 3 people.
 I have no idea what happened to this video it’s gone now

As you can see I’m not only a novice at youtube-ing, but these bosses are really not that intensive when you have decent gear. The drops are probably the best possible for T1 unless you’re trying something aside from your normal spec, like a DPS healer, or a BAL stacked axe-throwing Slayer, or something like that. However they’re not the last bit of gear you’ll be looking for.

If you’ve got a toon that can make their way to Altdorf, then you’re all set for some bargain hunting on the Auction house. Okay, really there aren’t going to be any bargains at all. Everything in there is going to be marked up to the moon (because people are greedy), and it’s just a fast way to get geared. However, some people LIKE fast and have LOTS AND LOTS of money to blow on it. Well, I’ve done my share of poking around the AH, and you will occasionally find a pretty good deal on something that you haven’t seen dropped yet. I would actually make this my last stop after a night of whatever just to give a quick look-see what’s inside. Not something everyone can do, be it lack of gold, or lack of sub, but it fills in the slots decently enough.

The final stop on this trip took me out to the Shadowlands for the Chapter 5 influence reward. There you’ll find a r10 blue chest or gloves with a talisman slot in it. The stats are quite good, and the empty slot seals the deal.
I haven’t checked to see if every character has equally good stuff coming from there, but for my RP it was a chest, and Slayer it was gloves. I found the below PQ to be fairly easy and rewarding to get influence without getting owned. Also, if you have butchering it’s a real treat.

So that should do it! Everything that I’ve gathered (except the super secret Fallout Guild secrets), whilst running about in the T1 Endless Trial should be here. Take what you will and apply it to your own experiences.

Cheers!