Fae's guide to Mad King's Lab.
Warning: Contains Opinions of a crispy 8 year vet who just wants everyone to have fun <3. It’s a fun place, really! Bad groups make the baby Fae cry :(
Class to bring: Pick something mobile, tags a lot of things, and above all, mobile. Last year you’d see thieves and mesmers a plenty. Engies work too! Flamethrower and jump boots. Whee. A mediocre thief (that’s me!) should have no problem with 500-600 bags an hour. If you’re getting around a stack per half hour, you’re doin’ great. Even if you’re getting a stack in an hour, that’s cool. As long as you’re having fun. You don’t have to be OpTimAL on a damn festival farm.Just throwing out some numbers here!
Magic find! Go to your guild hall, and get the magic find buff from the tavern. Remember all those banners you got from the boss blitz event? Time to use em up! Halloween poops out magic find food and utilities, so don’t really need to stock up before hand on these, just open a few ToT bags and you’re good for the whole 3 week event.
Throw a Stamina and Speed sigil on your weapons. Endurance recharges like crazy, and speed sigil gives you all the swiftness. I refer back to point one. Be mobile. Be very mobile.
Don’t be afraid to play with your traits. You’re not looking for big DPS here, you’re looking to tag things and be mobile.
Some groups will ask you to take off trinkets so your DPS isn’t as high because you’re one shotting things. The downside to this is when you fight Steve (The big skeleton with the chainsaw, we call him Steve. He looks like a Steve okay). It’s polite to do this, or you can just be mindful and tag things once and move on. You only need to do like 1k damage to the mobs to get credit, you don’t need to unleash your full raid ready DPS rotation. Tag and move on.
Autoloot mastery is key. If you’re close to getting it, use this time before halloween to work on it. Otherwise you either end up leaving loot behind or you’re the one left behind.
And most importantly, if you’re new to the lab. Don’t worry! It’s not scary. It’ll be a learning experience of how to keep up, and how to run in circles. You probably wont be pulling in big loot gains, but that’s ok. Just learn from others. See what classes people are on, see what weapons they’re using. Remember you’re scaled up here, so good time to level up a class :D
Getting into a lab instance! LFG fun times.
Lab can hold about 25 people. If you see a group in LFG with more than 25 people, just move to the next one. Or enjoy spamming “join instance” i guess?
Commanders will generally keep their lfg up because numbers can dwindle pretty fast. Don’t nag them to take their listing down. Just stop trying to join the big ones.
🚨🚨Controversy time! Alarm bells. Woo.🚨🚨 If you’re there for profit, you want a lab that only does mob doors. Maybe vet doors at a push. But ignore “all doors” groups. Killing the big bosses takes way too much time. Sure you get some extra one per day loot, but you could have done like a full loop if not two in the time it takes you to to kill that stupid boss. No one is bringing their A game to fighting the bosses. People will die in droves to the Lich’s Retaliation, and it’s been 8 years and people still don’t know to stand in the viscount’s candy goo (but only a little bit) so they don’t explode. Don’t have high hopes for pug intelligence in the lab. Haha, looty man go brrrrr.You’ll sometimes get a daily to kill a boss, and that’s cool. Go do that.
And finally, when you join an instance and there’s a group going on. Go join them. Don’t open random doors, don’t decide “i’m just gonna sit in the middle and afk farm!”. By all means use a mount to catch up to the commander, but you MUST dismount, rather than use your number 1 skill to engage. You’ll do too much DPS and be hated for the rest of the time you’re in that group.Don’t be that guy.
Tips for commanders and everyone else.
For the love of god, go counter/anti-clockwise. When you get to the point of getting to the South East loot door, you do not want your zerg passing through the boss door just to the north. Because someone will have opened it and he’ll just be chilling there. You do not want to pull your little brainless zerg through the boss to get to the mob door. Please, please, please go anti-clockwise.
Since you can’t just do mindless loops on the outside, you have to go into the middle to give things time to respawn. Generally you want to go in either the north and south sides, or the east and west sides. Decide right now if you’re gonna be a north/south or an east/west and stick to it. Basically go in to the middle at west, do a loop of killing the mobs there (please still go anti-clockwise) and head back out the west the way you came in. Then when you loop around to the east, go in to the middle and do a loop of mob killing there. Again, back out the way you came in. If you’re taking over from another commander then try to keep the same pattern they did.
Don’t try to outrun Steve. It’s not gonna happen. If he appears, you go kill him. No buts. If you’ve told your group to take off trinkets, this fight will take a while.
You only need to go to the SW corner when the door is up, otherwise just take the little shortcut to the side.
Simialrly, don’t go backwards. If a door pops and you’re less than 5 seconds away, sure, maybe consider it. But everyone on that loot train is on auto pilot and watching netflix on their second monitor / mobile phone / tablet. You doing a 180 out of nowhere isn’t gonna win friends.
And finally, commanders, give your groups a little break once in a while. We’re all responsible gamers here! Maybe after an hour just give em a 5 minute break up at the centre. Don’t be salty if people still wanna farm the centre mobs though. General tips to everyone, if you need to go pee or whatever, just go find a safe place and go. The group will move on without you and that’s ok, you’ll catch up. The same goes for the commander. If you need to bail for 5-10 mins it’s cool. Most groups can run on auto pilot. Maybe hand the tag to someone temporarily, just like, communicate with your group.
Tada. Yes I’m crispy when it comes to the lab. Thanks for asking. But yeah, some tips for everyone to have happy fun times.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
