Want to get those Implants in?

So, here you can post your favourite ways, tricks and tips to laddering, getting those elusive implants in, not just for RK but let’s see what you have for SL too.

AO Ladderer - Implant laddering tool - baduizm

This tool has been around for a while but I just never made a thread. I use it when trying to quickly twink up low-level chars.

Here’s the GitHub repo: [https://github.com/davghouse/AOLadderer]

Here’s a link to a direct download of the current version: https://github.com/davghouse/AOLadde...rer-v2.2.0.zip.

You pick your desired implant setup and input your buffed abilities/treatment, then you get a ladder process back with the exact implants you need to equip. The readme has more info, like there are a few things you should be aware of to get the most out of the tool. For example, Explosif’s effectively add 20 to all abilities for the purposes of equipping implants because you only need 1 ability at a time. Just swap their colors around if the ability requirement changes. So if you have Explosif’s you should add 20 to all abilities at once on the ladderer, even though you can’t get them all at once in reality. (But you also need to be careful not to add 2.5 Treatment trickle, since only the Int/Psy and Agi/Sen pillows add that much, not Str/`Sta.)

Let me know if you have any questions/run into any problems/have any ideas for improvements, thanks!

re: - baduizm

2 Likes

Remember Dredd’s guide? I do! It’s still relevent, just add new items to the mix, process is the same!

I make no apologies for posting all of it, in it’s day it was one of the go to guide’s andeven now, you can transfer this logic right up to level 220.

Dredd’s Step by Step Guide to Low Level Twinking.

Updated with Advanced twinking section as of July 31/2010

Link to Blog page with Screenshots and video walkthroughs:

Table of Contents:

  1. Introduction

  2. For Those on a Diet:
    A. Round 1
    B. Round 2
    C. Round 3
    D. Finalize Implants
    E. If you are Level 15

  3. The Long Version:
    A. Definition of a Twink
    B. Spending IP
    C. What it Takes to Twink
    D. Buffing Items for Twinking
    E. Common Items to Equip at Level 15

  4. Beginning the Twinking Process

A. Leveling up, Twinking NCU

B. Sassyblade at Level 10: Twinking for Real

C. Round 1
i. NCU
ii. Stamina
iii. Agility
iv. Computer Literacy
v. Treatment

D. Round 2
i. Stamina
ii. Buffing Armor
iii. Implant Laddering/Stacking/Leveling
iv. Agility
v. Treatment
vi. Computer Literacy
vii. Treatment Library
viii. Map Navigation
ix. Treatment

E. Round 3
i. Stamina
ii. Finalize if you’re staying at Level 10

  1. Sassy at Level 15:

A. Round 1
i. Stamina
ii. Agility
iii. Treatment
iv. Crypt Collar
v. TiM Scope (if you’re a ranged twink)
vi. Treatment
B. Round 2
i. Stamina
ii. Rockcrusher Gauntlets
iii. Guardian Tank Armor
iv. Temple Shoulder Pads
v. Special Stat-Boosting Armor

C. Finalizing Implants
i. Arms
ii. Wrists
iii. Ear
iv. Right Hand
iii. Detour
iv. Chest/Waist
v. Eye/Head

  1. Final Equipment Setup:
    A. Sassy’s Final Equipment
    B. A Word about Armor Overequipping
    C. Final Weapons

  2. Final Thoughts:

  3. Advanced Twinking Techniques:
    A. The Stamina Only Chest Trick (aka- Strength Chest Trick)
    B. The Stamina Based Right Hand Trick

  4. Equipping a Crypt Collar:

  5. Equipping The TiM Scope:

  6. Equipping a 6 Slot belt on a low Level Trader/Agent:

  7. A Speed Twink Project:

  8. Introduction:

I’ve played this game for a while now and figure it’s time to give something back in recognition of all the help and tips I’ve gotten from people over the past two or three years. Hopefully this will benefit some people as I have benefited from others. The intent of this guide is to give a basic outline of one possible technique of twinking fairly decent implants and equipment on a low level character. I’m planning to use a Froob toon and walk through a sample build in a fair amount of detail- using all Froob equipment and a minimum of expensive and rare items. The original title of this guide was going to be something like “A step by step guide to twinking level 50 to 70 implants at level ten to fifteen”. At first I was planning to make a lvl ten twink. Then I realized there are a fair number of things you can do at level fifteen that you can’t do (or are significantly more difficult) at level ten. So I figured I’d do both. I’ll start off by walking through building a level ten twink and get all the basics done, and get her quasi-finished, and equipped with level 70ish implants. Then I’ll level her up to fifteen and finish her off with slightly higher implants and some common items, equipment and armor for that level, such as Crypt Collar, GTA and Rockcrusher Gauntlets. Those items can be equipped at lower levels of course, but this not meant to be an uber twink guide- just a basic outline that covers the basics of implants, NCU, twinking/buffing items, and the process of putting it all together. This guide is intended to provide the tools for anyone interested in low level towers, pvp and rocking-the-subways to be able to do so. It would probably be overstating things to say that everyone can make a lvl 10 twink with lvl 70 implants. It does take some amount of cash and resources to make a solid toon, and if your highest toon is lvl 30 and you have 300k in credits, you will have a hard time following this guide .

Edit: This sample project worked out better than I expected in the end. Sassy got up to QL80 implants at level 10 and some QL90s at level 15. I used basic buffing items and if you have better than I used for this, or if you’re a paid account, you may go higher .

The basic process outlined here, while specifically aimed at levels 10 to 15, will apply very nicely at 24/25 and right up lvl 60 if you wish (especially if you’re making a Froob temple twink). As you get higher, things get more complicated as you begin using symbiants, perks, research, etc… So- don’t try using this guide as a template for your 165 twink .

Why you might want to make a low level twink in the first place:

There are a number of benefits to making a low level character. Things tend to be much cheaper at low levels and you can experiment with different wild and crazy configurations without spending too much time or money. If you want to try making a Bureaucrat with a steel beam, an Enforcer with pistols, or a melee Agent, low level can be the way to go. If the setup stinks, it’s no big loss . Also at low levels it’s much easier for a Froob to be competitive against paid toons. In general it is also easier for a low level toon to become more relatively “twinked”. For example, if you equip level 70 implants at lvl 10, you’ve gotten implants 7 times your own level. If you equip lvl 200 implants at lvl 75, you’re just under three times your own level.

I should confess- I feel a little bit like a magician giving away the secrets to all his tricks. There is something to be said for figuring out all these things on your own but at the same time, the more people who have the ability to make a good toon, the more competitive and interesting low level pvp might be. If everyone has the ability to equip decent implants on their character, that should shift the focus from raw equipment levels to choice of set up, configuration and skill of the player.

Our Test Subject:

The subject of our twink project is going to be a Solitus Female named Sassyblade. I wanted to do something a bit different, and I came across a Die Kleine Nadel in a backpack the other day and then a Kid, as well as a Newland Fish Knife which gave me some ideas. So, the subject of this twink will be a piercing-weapons Enforcer, who will hopefully end up with GTA, Temple Shoulder Pads, Rockcrusher Gauntlets, Rhinoman Armor, and some combination of piercing weapons around QL 45-55 (un OE) at lvl 15. Sassy is already at lvl 10 and semi-twinked and set up for using an E-Blade. But I’ll strip all her equipment and do an IP reset of a couple skills and start over from scratch as I walk through the process.

  1. For Those on a Diet:

If you don’t want to read all through this, here is a “lite” version of the entire twink process- geared towards a lvl 10 twink.

A. Round 1

NCU- get as much ncu as you can quickly without doing any implants. Get a second memory chip for your Blackmane’s belt, a Medsuit and a Ring of Nucleus Basalis, and level it up as high as you can. Try to get around 30 NCU.

Stamina- Get Stamina as high as you can. Get Concrete cushions on and get your Leg, Waist and Chest implants as high as you can with Stamina in all three slots- keeping them all Stamina dependent. Aim for QL30-45ish implants in all three slots.

Agility- Get Agility as high as you can- put in a foot implant with Agility and something else to make it Stamina dependent- then take out your waist and put in one that has Agility instead of Stamina. Use QL30-45ish implants. Then put on an Agility Rifle- QL1 or as low as you have. Cancel your Stamina buffs and cast Agility instead.

Computer Literacy- Put in a Head, Eye and Right Hand with Computer Literacy- all QL30-50ish, make them all dependent on Agility. Put in a QL45ish Ear implant with Intelligence and Concealment. Put in a 3x belt and as high memory chips as you can, hopefully around QL50ish. Put in a Wrist NCU implant here if you have one. Should have around 72 ncu give or take a piece of Carb armor.

Treatment- Take out the CL imps, and put Treatment in the Head, Eye, Right Hand- QL30-50ish, based on Agility again. With all this new Treatment and NCU, cast SFA and level up your Ring of Nucleus- hopefully to around 19 NCU. Total NCU is around 82 now.

B. Round 2

Stamina- Get Stamina as high as you can. Ditch the rifle and put the cushions back on. Cancel all agility buffs and cast as much Stamina and Treatment as you can- something like Essence of Gargantua, Stamina boost, Treatment Expertise and Specialist Treatment makes good use of the NCU. Use Carb armor to fit as many buffs as you can. With these buffs you’ll be around 130 Stamina/341 Treatment. Ladder up your Leg, Chest and Waist again to get them as high as you can- with Stamina in all three and all dependent on Stamina. Aim for QL65ish implants. You’ll want to start putting Sense and Cold AC in your waist as well as your ability implant from now on.

Agility- Get your Agility as high as you can. Take out your foot and put in a QL70ish foot implant- Stamina dependent again. Take out your Stamina waist and put in an Agility waist- make it require Stamina to put in. Put in a wrist implant or two with Rifle skill to help get on our QL40 Tsakachumi Rifle. Get that rifle on, cancel your Stamina buffs, and get your Agility buffs back in.

Treatment- Ladder up your Treatment implants. Aim for about QL70ish implants in the Head, Eye, Right Hand.

Computer Literacy- Take out those implants and replace them with Computer Literacy implants one at a time. Get around 60-70ish CL implants in. Should have around 166 Computer Literacy with Intelligence boost, CL expertise, QL4 Tutoring Device, and parts of the Omni Grey Suit. Swap in your 4x belt and some QL 65-70ish Memory Chips.

Treatment Library- Install a QL30 Treatment Library

Map Navigation- Put your treatment implants back in and then take out the Head, Eye and Ear to put in Map Navigation implants. Get on the Omni Grey suit, Buff sense and ES, go buy all the maps and map upgrades you can use. Might be worth spending a few points to get to 130 for the Monsters Upgrade.

Treatment- Get all your QL70ish Treatment implants back in.

C. Round 3

Stamina- Get the cushions back on, buff Stamina, get your Leg, Chest and Waist as high as you can and get your Stamina as high as you can. Aim for QL70-75ish Implants

Agility- Get your Agility as high as you can. Take out your Foot and put in a QL80ish foot.

If you are level 15 and/or want to equip GTA, Crypt Collar etc… Skip ahead past the finalizing implants process

Finalize implants- At this point you would have your abilities and Treatment high enough to get in a few QL80 implants- 164 Stamina/405 Treatment. From here you would finish off your main weapon implants. Usually this is the arms for melee profs, and wrists for ranged. Try to keep your ability boosting implants in as long as possible. You probably want to do Stamina or Strength based imps first, then Agility. This is really variable but you might do Right Arm, Left Arm, Left Hand. Switch to Agility buffs- do Right wrist, Left Wrist. Now if you’re using a Rifle, you might want to do your Eye and Right hand. (Implants are decreasing in quality now as we take out Treatment implants). Then switch back to buffs for Stamina. Put in your final Waist and Chest- do whichever gives you the most benefit first. Then finally put in your head. You may want to vary that order, but that is a general guideline.

  • Put on your armor
  • Put on your big pointy stick and go beat up some fleas
  • Done!!

If you are Level 15-

Crypt Collar- If you were level 15 or at least high enough to try this, now would be the time to put in your Crypt Collar. Put in a QL83ish waist with Bio Met. Your Chest should already have Bio Met/Str/Stam- QL76ish. Switch to Agility Rifle, take out your treatment head and put in a head with Bio Met. Get all the Bio Met buffing items you can find. Put on the Soft Pepper Pistol, Omni Executive Suit, Get BM Mochams, 132 Wrangle, BM Expertise. Spend points until you have enough to get the Collar on. With that collar on, you should be around 143 NCU.

Guardian Tank Armor- If you are around level 15 and wanted to equip GTA, now is the time. Naturally you will want to get your Stamina and Strength implants as high as possible. You will need the Touch of the Gripper, and QL85-90ish implants in all the Str/Stam slots. You will need to make up any missing stats with buffing armor and items, so the higher you can get your implants, the less buffing armor you’ll need.

Rockcrusher Gauntlets- If you’ve gotten up to QL90ish implants in, you’re pretty near the max from an implant point of view. From here you’re basically on your own to push the imps a bit higher if possible and get the buffing items and armor needed to get these on

Now go back and finish off your twink with the implant finalizing process above.

  1. The Long Version:

A. What is the definition of a twink?
People use the word all the time, and I’m sure we all have an intuitive sense of what a “twink” is and we know one when we see one. But for anyone new to the game, I offer a couple of definitions. From common usage I think a fair definition of a twink might be:

“A character who, through the aid of buffs and buffing items- has been equipped with implants, armor, weapons, and equipment far above what could normally be expected in a character of that level”.

Or, perhaps:

“A character who has been equipped with as close to the highest level of implants, equipment and weapon possible, given the limitations of the mechanics of the game”.

B. Spending IP:
You will want to plan your twink out a bit and decide what you’re trying to accomplish before you level up. Whatever your goal, you want to be careful as you level, not to spend IP on things that don’t serve your desired outcome. If you’re planning to make a twink based on evades it will be different than one based on max armor AC. Quite often the end goal revolves around getting on a specific weapon or item, and usually the highest nanoskills and health. It is probably best to keep your end goal in mind and save some IP to make sure you can accomplish it. I know of more than one person who was nearly finished working on their twink, and then discovered that they had spent all their IP points by maxing all abilities and evades and didn’t have enough Dimach to get their weapon on, or forgot to put points into Body Dev.

If you’re twinking for a certain level, I would stop spending IP points on all but a few skills 4 or 5 levels before you reach the level you want to be. There are only a few things that you always want to max out all the time while leveling. At low levels I always keep Stamina, Agility, (sometimes Strength/Intelligence), Treatment and the main weapon skill maxed out, but the rest don’t need to be maxed. (I used to always max Intelligence, since it adds trickledown to Treatment but I’m wavering on that too if you’re really short on IP). Save any spare IP until after you’ve finished doing implants and then spend the points where they can be most useful.

You’ll notice some omissions here that you may have heard differing opinions on. Often you hear that you should always max out Computer Literacy. That’s not necessarily true. I would stop about 3/4 from maxed out until you know that it will really help. Let’s say you have 178 Computer Literacy after implanting and buffing- and don’t have it all the way maxed. That’s enough to get on a 4x belt and some QL75 memory chips (22 ncu each). Suppose you max out your Computer Literacy and you could get up to 205, which would allow you to equip QL87 chips (24 ncu each). Is that really worth it? It might be if you really value ncu, but first you would have to go and find the memory chips of the right level and you will spend IP on 27 points of Computer Literacy for a gain of 8 ncu. The choice is yours- whether you would rather have 27 more in evades/nano pool/First Aid etc… or 8 ncu. If you really want to cram in all the buffs possible, then you may indeed need that 8 ncu.

For other skills including most of the weapon specials- I would recommend the same approach. Even if it’s an important skill, like Fast attack or Burst, keep your skill about 3/4 from max until you know how much you’ll need after doing implants- and if you have the IP to spare- by all means go and max out burst . With nanoskills, there are quite often big jumps in skill requirement from one nano formula to the next in the same line. You might want to save some points and only spend them once you know what you’ll need. The way I see it, every point I don’t waste on a nanoskill I don’t need, is a point I can put into an evade or nano resist or something .

C. What it takes to Twink:

Patience:
I put this first because there is nothing more frustrating than being all excited to work on your new twink and then being totally unable to find an Agent, Enforcer or Doctor etc… to get your buff so you can put some implants in. It is also equally frustrating to run out to the temple to get your GTA and find three other teams of Keepers, Soldiers and Panther Enforcers out on a camping trip of their own . If anything happens to completely put your twink on hold, it can sometimes be a good idea to go and play somebody else. Go log your 75 Engineer and kill some dynabosses or do some missions or something .

Credits:
No matter how you look at it, it will cost you a fair bit to get seriously twinked. Most of the cost comes from making custom implants, so you can save some here if you already have a collection of implants you can use as you work your way up. I kept track of my credits at the beginning and the end of this twink project and the total cost came to just over 4 million credits. I spent a fair bit extra on way-higher-than-necessary shiny clusters from the Superior shop cause I was too lazy/impatient to run around to find lower QL ones. There were a couple times when I used a QL190 shiny cluster when a QL85 one would do, just because that was the lowest one in the shop and I didn’t want to run around. You might get that down to 3 million if you are more frugal with your spending. I don’t know if that sounds like a lot or not. I imagine half of you just choked on your Red Bull at how insanely expensive that is, and the other half said “Is that all?” Keep in mind that will probably be less than the cost of many weapons- Icebreaker, Pump Trainee, Perenium- so the cost is all relative.

Friends:
Ok, you don’t have to actually like them, but it does help to have higher level friends, orgmates and acquaintances who can give you a needed Essence or Superior First Aid or whatever. Friends can also help you get items you need from the Temple, Foreman’s, Smuggler’s Den, Crypt of Home etc…

The Ability to Acquire Custom Implants:
I’m not sure where to put this, but one very important thing you’ll need is the ability to get custom made implants. Whether you do this yourself or have orgmates who can do it for you, this is probably the single most important part of twinking. It is the most time consuming part and extremely handy to be able to do it yourself, and extremely inconvenient to have to rely on someone else do it. I would HIGHLY recommend making an alt who can be your implant maker and minor tradeskiller. They don’t have to be a super high level toon. You don’t need to make a lvl 220 Engineer to do your implants. If you’re making a lvl 15ish twink, you could probably get by with a lvl 60 to 100 tradeskiller. To combine lvl 100 implants, you would require 400 Nano Programming. To clean lvl 100 implants you would require 470 Breaking & Entering (and 100 NanoProgramming). The cleaning aspect comes into play when you want to level up implants to a specific level- more on that later.

Alts:
This may even be better than having friends . With Froob accounts, you can quite easily make two or three toons who can buff you with all your needed buffs. I personally have a couple of paid accounts and several Froob accounts. My main implant maker is a lvl 141 Nanomage MP. She used to be my main but I switched to Atrox. Now she has Nano Programming and B&E maxed and implanted and can make and clean implants up to lvl 200 (with fixer B&E buff). I also have a couple of doctors who can cast SFA, IC etc… I have a Froob Agent at lvl 137 who can cast almost anything I need through False Profession (with Mochams usually). She has spent more of her life as an Enforcer than as an agent I’m sure, casting Behemoth and Prodigious Strength for my twink projects. I also have a lvl 140ish Froob fixer for casting GSF- as making implants involves a lot of running around .

Clicksaver:
http://www.halorn.com/clicksaver.html
This is a third party tool used for pulling missions (also known as “rolling”) automatically- in an attempt to get a specific item.

Nano Nanny:
http://nanonanny.timezulu.com.au/
Contrary to what its name may imply, Nano Nanny really has nothing to do with nanoskills or nano casting. It is a third party program used to help in figuring out implant layouts. I used to use Nano Nanny extensively for figuring out implants and the requirements to create and equip them. However, I switched to Nillan’s skill emulator long ago, and now I just use Nano Nanny on rare occasions when I need to know what body locations a specific skill or ability goes into.

Nillan’s Skill Emulator:
There are other emulator/implant configuration- type tools out there, but this is the one I use most often- even though it’s a bit out of date and doesn’t have current items in its database. This is what I use to find out the specific requirements of an implant and what skills each implant will give at a certain level. With this tool, you can create entire characters virtually, and add in armor buffs, perks, weapons- and it will show you the results of your virtual twinking. So, there are two main things I use this for. The first is to plan out an entire character from scratch- basically brainstorming. The second is during twinking itself. I use it constantly to calculate exactly what level of implant I can equip with a given ability and treatment. More on this later… Not sure where you can get this any more- might have to do some Google searching.

Note— I have two versions of this program and recently discovered that the older version has some inaccuracies when calculating nanoskills. As far as I can tell it’s accurate otherwise. The new version seems to be accurate, but also tends to crash occasionally if I try to sync all implants to the same QL with empty clusters in some implants…

This is getting hard to find, but I found this link. You might find other versions out there.
http://www.geocities.com/ao_nillan/S...tor3Beta4c.zip

D. Buffing Items for Twinking:

Here is a list of useful (but not exhaustive or exotic) items that any Froob would be highly benefited by. I would consider most of these a must-have. You can do without some, but the more you have, the higher the ultimate potential of your final twink.

Concrete Cushions:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=125456

You really want to get a pair of these in lvl 10 or as close to that as you can. These add 8 Str/Stam each and are essential to getting on high level implants, GTA, Rockcrushers etc… at low levels. These can be rolled with Clicksaver.

Omni Med Suit:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?cmd=search&name=Omni-Med+Suit

This is a no-brainer. The full suit adds 78 Treatment. Don’t even bother twinking without one . These can be rolled with Clicksaver, but it’s probably easier to make an Omni alt on a Froob account and buy them with that toon.

Omni Special Issue Suits:
These following suits of armor are available as quests from the Omni Tailor (not sure if anyone else gives these). If you bring him an undamaged Rollerrat tail, he will give you a piece of armor according to your breed. According to Auno.org, this is the breed breakdown:

Opifexes get Intern-Op.
Solituses get Grey.
Atroxes get Black.
Nanomages get Executive

The Omni Intern-Ops suit doesn’t add any useful twinking bonuses so I haven’t included it below. If you are interested in this armor, I would collect a bunch of Rollerrat tails (or pay a new player to get them for you- better to give them a job than have them begging for money and request missions from the Tailor, until you have what you want. If he gives you a mission for a piece of armor you don’t want, just delete the mission and keep asking until you get the boot, or sleeve or whatever you need. The armor is actually ok for a very low level, but we’re mostly interested in the mods that help in twinking.

Omni Special Issue Grey Suit: http://auno.org/ao/db.php?cmd=search...ial+issue+grey

The Grey suit adds 1 Computer Literacy and Map Navigation per piece. It may not sound like much, but 6 points of comp-lit has made the difference in getting a 4x belt on more than once. We’ll use Map Nav in the middle of the twink project. Don’t want to spend points on that if we don’t have to. Also adds Pistol, Shotgun and Fling.

Omni Special Issue Black Suit: http://[http://auno.org/ao/db.php?cm...al+issue+black

The Black suit adds 2 points of Body Dev per piece which can be useful when getting on the Temple Shoulder Pads.

Omni Special Issue Executive Suit: http://auno.org/ao/db.php?cmd=search...ssue+Executive

The Executive suit adds 1 to each Nanoskill per piece of armor. These 6 points can help in getting on the crypt collar- or saving IP so you don’t have to spend as much if you don’t have any other reason to put points in Bio Met.

Tsakachumi Rifle:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=124343

This is commonly known as the “Agility Rifle”. At QL40 it adds 20 to your agility. From QL 1 to 39 it adds 5 to your agility. It may be helpful to have one of each of these at level 1 and 40. They can be bought in shops or rolled with Clicksaver.

Buffing Armor:
This is another essential part of twinking. There are three types of buffing armor that I commonly use- four, if you include Miy’s armor. Sekutek, Nova Dillon, and Kirch Kevlar armor all buff stats and abilities.

Kirch Kevlar buffs Agility, Sense and Psychic
Sekutek buffs Agility, Strength and Intelligence
Nova Dillon is the only one that buffs Stamina, and buffs all base abilities
Miy’s Armor buffs everything somewhere, and is starting to get more common. Use it if you have it

Kirch and Sekutek begin adding 2 to each ability at QL26. Nova Dillon begins adding 2 to each ability at QL35. At low levels you’ll likely want to get as close to those without going under as possible. All this armor drops from Dynabosses (sometimes team mission boss loot). I acquired a nice collection while out at level 30-60 dynacamps. I’m actually pretty cheap- so I didn’t want to pay for a pump shotgun when I made my first Pump Trader a hundred years ago, and ended up collecting quite a bunch of nice buffing armor, as well as Omni Life Guard and Omni-Pol Trooper armor in the search for that gun.

Solid Steel Hydraulic Legwear/Gloves: http://auno.org/ao/db.php?cmd=search&name=hydraulic
Both these items are quite useful, and although nodrop, they aren’t too hard to acquire. The gloves add 4 Strength, and the pants add 5 Stamina. They are available through the Nodda Greg quest. You can find a guide to that quest on Anarchy Arcanum, and I’ve made a video walkthrough and posted it on my accompanying guide page as well. (http://dreddstwinkguide.blogspot.com/)

Here is the direct link to the YouTube Video:


Modified Omni-Armed Forces Training Helmet:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=245661
It’s forever since I’ve done this quest, but I think it’s the Blake quest you get from the guy outside the Rome Blue Basic shop. The modified version adds Stamina, which is much more useful than just intelligence.
Ring of the Nucleus Basalis:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=202717
This ring adds NCU and can be leveled up based on treatment. NCU tends to be tight at low levels and this is invaluable in getting your buffs in as you twink.
Carbonum Armor:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=162432&ql=16
As a twinking tool, this armor can also be used to get more buffs on your toon. If you are short a few ncu, you equip a few pieces of this armor, cast your buffs, and switch back to your medsuit. This armor is also the standard all around decent armor with good bang-for-your-buck for low levels. Ordinary Carb armor adds ncu, nano initiative, and max nano, Omni-Carb (Omnifier added to normal Carb) armor adds max health to that. Storm Carb (Clanalizer) adds nano resist instead of max health.
At QL 16- Carb armor begins adding 2 ncu per piece
QL 44- 3 ncu per piece
QL 73- 4 ncu per piece
ie: a full set of seven pieces of QL44 Carb will add 21 ncu.

Ring of Essence/Endurance:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=269191
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=269189
These rings come in all levels (as far as I know) and can be useful for twinking if you can find them low enough. These are borderline to what I would consider “common” equipment. However, if we’re talking about a semi-new Froob player, chances are they do enough missions that they may pick one or two up.
Second-Hand Old English Trading Co.:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=123855
This is the “Intelligence pistol” which adds 5 Intelligence per gun at QL1.
Galahad Inc T70 Beyer:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=123950
Adds 20 Computer Literacy at QL44. Requires a fair amount of Full Auto for low levels, especially if you’re not spending points in FA otherwise, but sometimes worth it if it gets you to a belt with more slots.
OT-Windchaser M70 Quartz:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=124147
The “Treatment rifle” which adds 10 to treatment at QL22. Rarely useful at low levels as the limiting factor is usually the abilities, not treatment.
Rebuilt NCU Wrist Implant:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=204980&ql=40
These are tradeskilled from an Outdated NCU Wrist Implant and drop from Dynabosses- not sure where else. They add NCU, (and Max Nano) and can be very handy in QLs 30-50 for the extra ncu to squeeze in your buffs. They aren’t overly rare and you’ll probably come across a few if you’re out killing dynabosses for armor/weapons. I’m sure I left a few to rot before I knew what they were.
Treatment Library:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=161770&ql=30
These are tradeskilled items that add Treatment and First Aid. Helps to get an extra couple levels of implant on your twink. Put one on every twink you make! Guide on how to make them on Anarchy Arcanum: http://arcanum.aodevs.com/gadgets_treatmentlibrary.html

E. Common items to Equip at level 15:

Guardian Tank Armor:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=204748
The almighty GTA. One of the most talked-about, controversial and coveted low level items in the game. Drops from the Guardian of Tomorrow in the Temple of Three Winds. It’s rare enough to be a nuisance to get, common enough to be attainable and is often seen as the true sign of a low level twink . In some ways GTA is more of a statement than just armor. For better or worse, GTA does send a message. If you have GTA on a lvl 15 (or lower), people will know that you must have a certain level of implants and equipment in order to wear it. There’s only so bad you could be and still be wearing GTA at lvl 15 .

Edit- Since the 17.8 patch, you can appear to be wearing ANYTHING in your Social tab, so the visual implications of wearing GTA are somewhat irrelevant.

So, how good is GTA as actual armor? If you read forums and item listings you will find comments from “GTA rules!” to “GTA sucks!” Frankly both of those must be qualified. GTA definitely has its place and rarely does it actually “suck”. For any level under 21, GTA is the best armor I know of with very few, very specific exceptions. Some people make a case for the ICC bodyguard cloak being better. For the most part, if you have enough Str/Stam to keep the cloak at 100% then you’ll have enough to keep GTA at 75%. You’ll get 390 ACs from GTA (and +20 health) and 300/250 AC from the cloak . If you have enough to keep the Bodyguard cloak at 75%, then you’ll likely have enough to keep GTA at 50% etc…
Requirements for OE on GTA:
100% you need 153 Str/Stam =520 AC
75% you need 115 Str/Stam =390AC
50% you need 76 Str/Stam =260AC
25% you need 38 Str/Stam =130AC

(These were figured with a calculator- haven’t verified if they round up or down in game- plan on one higher to be safe )

I admit there are rare cases where the bodyguard cloak will be better than GTA for pure ACs. If your Stamina is between 109 and 114 and your Strength is between 98 and 114 then yes, you will have the cloak at 100% and the GTA drops to 50%. Even then, GTA has 260 AC on all damage types and the ICC cloak will have some 300AC and some 250AC modifiers- not that much better.

Once you hit level 21, then the Exarch robe becomes the back armor of choice until you are high enough level to keep GTA out of OE, and you prefer the ACs to the snare/root resist from the Exarch Robe.
Rockcrusher Gauntlets:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=204758
THE gloves of choice for low levels. They add damage, Strength, Max Health and a bit of brawling. Drop from the Curator (and probably others) in the Temple of Three Winds.
Collar Casero De La Cripta:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=246125
Another must-have low level twink item. Drops from almost everybody in the Crypt of Home dungeon. If you are making a lvl 15 twink you may want to farm tokens to get the second token board which is better than this in some areas. The 30 ncu and the initiatives of this are quite useful. This will end up being overequipped, but even at 0% you still get most of the bonuses. This can be equipped at extreme low levels on a Trader or Agent, due to their ability to use drains. Every other prof can probably equip this without too much drama at level 15. My lowest non-Trader/Agent so far with this is a level 10 Froob soldier.

Temple Shoulder Pads:
Barrow Strength: http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=204653
Withered Flesh: http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=204698
These are the best shoulder items for a very large level span. They drop in the Temple of Three winds, from Windcaller Yatila and the Reanimator, as well as a couple of the major bosses from time to time.

HUD Upgrade: Enhanced Target Acquisition:
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=156773
This is also known as the TiM Scope- drops from TiM in the Biomare dungeon- also called Foremans and The Longest Road. This is almost a must-twink for any ranged prof due to the sweet ranged initiative +180. With enough ncu, you can equip this on most ranged profs at least as low as level 15. More details on this later... If you want the crits and Aimed Shot bonus at the expense of a much slower attack time, you can equip a high level targeting scope instead of this. IE: http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=160633&ql=275 .
  1. Beginning the Twinking Process

Whew- that preamble took a lot longer than I thought! Hopefully we’re all set with our items, friends, alts, cash and buffing tools and ready to finally start twinking!

Leveling up:
How you get to your desired level is entirely up to you, but I will make a couple suggestions for getting there safely and quickly. Since you’re making a specific twink with a specific level and purpose in mind, there’s no need to spend a lot of time on Noob Island. I would recommend getting the first two quests done from Brandon Thorn on the beach. Get your lightbar, and Blackmane’s belt and chip. If you just do these two parts, you’ll be very close to level three. I would suggest hitting level three and then join Omni, and march off the island. Even if you’re a die-hard Clanner, there are a lot of twink items that are Omni only. If you start Omni, you can go buy a medsuit if you need one, then do all your twinking in Borealis, or warp to your favourite Athens twink spot- finish your toon and then switch to Clan at any time.

I should clarify a point here. If you are going to be leveling on your own, and/or are a new player, it would be best to level to at least five and do many of the noob island quests. Leaving at level three will likely be too low unless you have friends to help level or cast OBs on you. You will also want to get the nano-kit for your profession and possibly the Shiny Band for a few more health.

Twinking NCU:
Once on the mainland, the fun begins. Before you go off to level, or be powerleveled , you might want to get a bit of ncu before you run into the subway and bash fleas. It is actually quite easy to get a respectable amount of ncu with a ring of nucleus and a medsuit without doing any implants. The reason for the NCU is so we can squeeze in an essence and maybe a HOT so we can level in the deep reaches of the subway without too much fear of dying. You’ll need a med-suit and a Ring of Nucleus Basalis. They are semi-expensive and usually go for around 500k, but if you’re short on cash and ask nicely, you might find a subway twink more than happy to show off his “mad skillz” soloing Abmouth, and let you have the ring. If you’ve equipped Blackmane’s belt and the chip you got on Noob Island, you’ll have 13 ncu already. See if you can find a memory chip that’s about the same QL as the one you got from Antonio Stacklund, and you’ll be up to 15 or 16 ncu. Max out your treatment, put on your medsuit, have a doctor cast Specialist Treatment and Treatment Expertise, hit the surgery clinic (in almost any shop) and your treatment will be around 253. Now level up your Nucleus ring by right-clicking on it until it won’t level up any more. You should end up with a ring that gives around 13 ncu. Put it on your right finger, and voila! You should have around 28 - 30 ncu total without doing any implants. With this quick boost to your ncu, you should be able to fit a good sized essence and/or HOT and stay alive while being leveled in the subway (or SL if you go that way).

B. SassyBlade at Level 10:

Twinking for Real:
Here we go, finally starting work on Sassyblade herself. As I do this twink job, I’ll explain the rough outline of each step first, and then go into more detail for anyone who wants to follow specifically. Since Sassy is already level 10 and was set up for an E-Blade, I’ve just taken all her equipment off and used her only IP reset. Hmm, didn’t realize she only had one… So, she has some wasted IP in 2HE, but we should still be ok.

Here’s the basic order- extremely simplified, in which I normally do implants based on abilities/stats when doing a standard low level twink:

NCU, Stamina, Agility, Computer literacy, Treatment, Stamina, Agility, Computer Literacy, Treatment, Stamina, Agility, Treatment.

My twinking process can neatly be broken down into rounds. The whole process will probably take three rounds of implant upgrades to max abilities and treatment and get everything done. Then we’ll level up to 15 and do another round or two, and finish everything completely.

For anyone new to twinking, each implant you put in your body will be dependent on Treatment and one of your Abilities such as Agility, Stamina, Strength etc… Each implant can hold three clusters, each of which will boost a different skill or ability. Each skill and ability can also be implanted only three times, once each in a shiny cluster, bright cluster and faded cluster. The locations for where you can put these clusters are pre-set so you can’t just put a strength cluster in your head for example.

The locations for the main implants of interest are:

Treatment: Shiny head, Bright Eye, Faded Right hand
Stamina: Shiny Chest, Bright Leg, Faded Waist
Agility: Shiny Leg, Bright Foot, Faded Waist
Strength: Shiny Right Arm, Bright Left Arm, Faded Chest

As we start working on implants- you will have to resist the inclination to quickly throw in the weapon implants and go fight. The weapon implants are actually one of the very last things we’ll do. Before we can equip optimal weapon implants we need to first get our base ability and treatment implants as high as we can. During this process we’ll also do our NCU and equip other miscellaneous items. I should also note that almost every implant in the body can be made to be dependent on Agility or Stamina, so you don’t necessarily have to worry about maxing all abilities. (You don’t always have the choice of choosing between those two, but one of them will almost always be an option) Sometimes Strength is used but I would guess that about 80% of my twinks have all their implants based on only Stamina or Agility. This applies to all breeds and all professions. Even if you are making a heavily nano-skill dependent character, you can be almost guaranteed to be able to make all the nanoskill implants either agility or stamina based. In all my low level twinks, including MPs, Doctors, NTs, and Crats I don’t think I have a single implant based on Sense, Psychic or Intelligence. This is actually a great benefit since it is generally much easier to get buffs and buffing items for Stamina, Agility and Strength. Even if you are a Nanomage, the breed differences at low levels are insignificant enough that is still it generally better to make all implants based on Agility, Strength or Stamina. There are some minor sacrifices- if you really REALLY want Matter Creation and Nano Pool in the head, you may be able to equip a QL30 implant that ends up being dependent on Psychic. But, if you are ok with Matter Creation and Ranged Init, or Matter Creation and Sense in the head, you may end up with a QL70 implant that is dependent on Agility.

C. Round 1:

i. NCU is first in that list, and that’s the exact process I just walked through up above with the level 3 example. I’m going to get Sassy to that point- Blackmane’s belt, two ncu chips and a Ring of Nucleus equipped.

Point of interest: The minimum amount of NCU you’ll need to get the maximum QL of implant in is 117. This will allow you to fit: SFA (37), Essence of Behemoth (47), IC (26), Treatment expertise (4), and Stamina boost (3). If you can fit all that to do your Stamina implants- Agility takes much less. If you have more NCU than that you can always add other buffs that trickle down to treatment.

ii. Stamina:
For this phase we’re going to try and get in the highest QL of chest, leg and waist as possible, all with Stamina in them, and all being dependent on Stamina.

Details
Now that we have 30ish ncu, we need to equip the concrete cushions. This required a 1hb and Heavy Weapons Expertise in my case, plus Stamina buff for one extra trickledown. You could also use Thug’s Delight- the Enforcer startup nano. It buffs 14 1hb, and only uses 1 ncu.
With the concrete cushions equipped, cancel the 1hb and Heavy Weapons and any other buffs you cast to get them on. Now we have to determine the best combination of buffs to make the most efficient use of our 30 ncu. It looks like we have lots of treatment (around 260) so the best bet seems to be a combination of Stamina boost, Essence of Brave Challenger, and Enlarge (Doctor Buff)- with no treatment boost. This brings us to 88 Stamina and 231 Treatment.

Now I refer to Nillan’s Skill emulator to determine what quality implant that will let us equip. If you click on the “implants” tab you’ll see all the slots for all clusters in all body parts. Throw some clusters into a slot and start levelling up the quality until you find out what you can equip. We can use the leg as an example. Put Agility in the shiny slot, Stamina in the bright slot, and Body Dev or Max Health in the faded slot. Now if you keep bumping up the quality, you’ll see that we have lots of treatment, but only enough Stamina to equip a QL 42 implant. Unfortunately, the standard shop only sells implants in 10, 20, 30 and 50 around this range. You have two options. You can go with the QL30 implants or run around the back of the tradeskill area, and look at the machine in the back room that has random implant QLs in it. For our case, we’ll just use a QL30 leg implant. Once we hit QL50 or above implants we can level the implants up to our desired level by adding clusters and stripping them back out with a disassembly clinic. More on that later…

For now, as you can see from the skill emulator, a QL30 implant will add 7 Stamina and 12 Agility. After we put in that leg, we now have 95 Stamina/232 Treatment. That one extra point of treatment comes from trickledown from Agility.

Now if we look to the chest, we can see from the skill emulator that 95 stamina allows us to equip a QL45 implant. For this one, I ran around to a couple shops to check the random implants and found a QL43 chest. In this implant I put Strength (faded), Bio Met (bright), and Stamina (shiny). If you only put in Strength and Stamina, you will come out with an Agility based implant, and we want them all Stamina based. If you notice- your Agility is probably only around 48 . This brings us to 111 Stamina/232 Treatment.

The next implant we’re going to do is the waist implant. Plug in a stamina cluster to the faded waist slot in the skill emulator and bump up the QL. We’ll find that we now have enough Stamina to use a QL53 implant, but not enough treatment. We’ll go with a QL 30 implant for now. In this implant you can put just Stamina, or Stamina/Sense/Cold AC (or Fire AC). The reason for Sense in the waist is also a bit of trickledown to treatment. At this early stage it’s not so important, but later on, we’ll always be putting sense, Cold AC and either stamina or agility in the waist slot.

After we put in a QL30 waist implant our totals are 116 Stam/232 Treatment, with a QL30 waist, QL30 leg, and QL43 chest. As I look at the numbers, that last bit of stamina from the waist isn’t necessary since we don’t have enough treatment to go higher anyway, but this is the basic process for higher levels so we’ll stick to it for demonstration purposes .

This brings us to the end of the Stamina session.

iii. Agility:
This is a very short step. We are about to switch to making implants all dependent on Agility, so we are now trying to get Agility as high as possible instead of Stamina. We already have a leg implant with Agility. We’re going to add a foot implant and swap our current waist for one that adds Agility. Find/make the biggest foot implant with Agility in it (Stamina dependent), and then take out the Stamina waist, and put an implant with Agility in it (also Stamina dependent).

Details
With our skills at 116/232, we are in the same boat for the foot, as the waist we just put in. We can look for a random implant in the back room or go with a QL30 from the basic machine. I found a QL35 foot in the back room and put Agility in the bright slot, and Evade-Close-Combat in the Shiny slot. Agility is the only important cluster at this point. The key is that we end up making the foot so that it requires Stamina to put in. If you put in all three clusters, you will end up with an implant that requires Agility to put in. Usually, Agility plus one other cluster of your choice will make it Stamina dependent. You can experiment with this in the Skill emulator, before you go and make the implant.

Now we have to take out our waist implant that has Stamina in it, and put in one that has Agility. I grabbed a lvl 30 waist from the shop, and put agility in the faded slot. Now we have Agility implanted in all three of its slots.

Now we are going to take off the concrete cushions, and put on our lowest level agility Rifle. We’re also going to cancel our essence and any other Stamina buffs and cast Feline Grace, Agility Boost and as much treatment as you can fit. In Sassy’s case, she has 30 ncu and that’s enough for Feline Grace, Agility boost and Treatment expertise, but a few points short of adding in Specialist Treatment. So, I put on three pieces of Carb armor, which brought my total to 36ncu, enough to cast Specialist treatment as well. Now after swapping the medsuit back on in place of the Carb, I’m left with 102 Agility and 291 Treatment.

iv. Computer Literacy:
Our next goal is to get as much Computer Literacy as possible and upgrade to at least a 3x belt. Computer literacy happens to go in the exact same implant slots as Treatment: Shiny Head, Bright Eye, and Faded Right hand. All of these can be made based on Agility.

Details
With our current stats, we’re just short of being able to use QL50 implants so we’re still in the position of using QL30 implants, or hoping to find random implants of the right QL in the back shop. Another option would be to equip some agility buffing armor at this point. I’ll do this the hard way for the sake of demonstration and get to buffing armor later .

I took a quick jog to the random implant shop and found a QL49 head, QL35 Eye, and used a normal QL30 Right Hand. Remember the goal is to make these all dependent on Agility for the moment. The Eye is fine with just Computer Literacy, but the Right hand needs another cluster to make it Agility based. If you throw in a weapon cluster like Full Auto or Pistol to the Bright slot, you should have an Agility based right hand. The head is fine with just Computer Literacy, but as a rule, I also put Tutoring in the faded slot when implanting CL. This will add a bit of flexibility if you are just a couple points off and need to use a Computer Literacy Tutoring Device.

Now that you have your Computer Literacy implants in, cancel your Agility and Treatment buffs (if you need the room in your NCU) and cast Computer Literacy Expertise, Tutoring Expertise, and Intelligence boost (and NS if you’re not Froob).

Tutoring may not make any difference, but if you’re tight, a QL4 Comp-Lit Tutoring device will add 2 to your Computer Literacy.

With all those buffs and the QL4 tutoring device active, Sassy has 131 Computer Literacy. There is more we could do to push that up, but we have enough CL to get a 3x belt on, and not enough to get the lowest 4x belt on, so I won’t bother with the extras at the moment. Things we could do are: Implant intelligence in the ear- adds one or two to trickledown at this level. Equip Intelligence Pistols- a couple more. We could equip the Omni Grey suit, which would also add 6 more. So, the 10 or so extra would still not get us up to the magic 161 CL for a 4x belt.

The lowest Belts of each # of slots and the requirements for each:
3x- QL30 requires 76 Computer Literacy
4x- QL60 requires 161 Computer Literacy
5x- QL100 requires 251 Computer Literacy
6x- QL160 requires 351 Computer Literacy

Now you’ll want to hunt around the Basic shops and find a 3x belt and some memory chips that have close to a 131 CL requirement. I found a 3x belt but the closest ncu chips I could find are QL50 and require 121 CL.

Changing the belt:
In order to upgrade the belt, you have to have all the memory chips out of it first. Make sure to have all your buffs running before you take out the memory chips . Also make sure to have your new memory chips and belt in your inventory- not in a backpack! Now, we’re going to take out the two memory chips and HOTSWAP the belt. Do not bother taking the old belt off. After you’ve taken out your memory chips, simply right-click your new belt and it should take the place of the old one.

I don’t know why there seems to be so much controversy on whether you can hotswap an NCU belt, but you’ve been able to do that ever since I’ve started playing the game around three years ago- up until now, at patch 17.7. Of course, you can’t hotswap a belt if you have memory chips in, and it probably won’t work if your new belt is in a backpack, but you can indeed hotswap a belt in place of another one. You can even hotswap memory chips if you like. If you want to upgrade your memory chips but not the whole belt, then you can just place a new chip over another in your belt, and they will swap places. One thing that has changed as of a few patches ago, is the ability to re-cast running buffs in your ncu if you no longer have the ncu to hold them. That has made low level Trader twinking a bit trickier, but still possible to get a 6x belt on a very low level Trader/Agent.

After the belt swap, put in your new memory chips. At this point Sassy has 72ncu with a Carb helmet on.

NCU wrist implant:
While we’re here with all this Computer Literacy, we can equip a Rebuilt NCU Wrist Implant if you have one. They require CL and Treatment to equip so now is a good time. I have one in QL38 which adds 5ncu, so I’ll equip that in the left wrist now.

Treatment:
Now we should have lots more room for buffs. We can cancel our Computer Literacy buffs and in this case, I cast SFA, Feline Grace, Agility Boost, and Treatment Expertise.
We take out our Computer Literacy implants and put Treatment imps in those same slots.

Details
I went and got four more implants. I got a QL38 eye, 49 Head, 30 Right hand, and 49 Ear. The ear is for intelligence which trickles down to Treatment. Clusters for the implants are as follows:

QL49 Head- shiny Treatment, faded Sense (sense for trickledown to Treatment),
QL38 Eye- Shiny Rifle, Bright Treatment, Faded Assault Rifle.
QL49 Ear- Bright Concealment, faded Intelligence
QL30 Right hand- Bright Assault Rifle, Faded Treatment

The eye has Rifle, as a forward-thinking move for the next time we do Agility implants. We’re going to be equipping the QL40 Tsakachumi Rifle instead of QL1, and any extra Rifle and aimed shot will help to get this on easier.

With those implants and buffs we’re now at 389 Treatment. That would be enough Treatment to equip QL81 implants but our abilities aren’t nearly high enough to reach that yet.

Level up the Ring of Nucleus:
With our new plateau of Treatment, we should be able to level up the Nucleus ring quite a bit. Take off the Ring and right click it as high as it will go and re-equip it. In Sassy’s case, it leveled up to give us 19 ncu. That’s only one below the max for that ring. Sassy is at 82 ncu total now wearing the medsuit and a Carb helmet.

D. Round 2:
Now we’re back where we started- ready to start twinking Stamina again, only with more NCU and Treatment.

i. Stamina:
We can cancel Feline Grace now, equip the concrete cushions instead of the rifle, and get in as many Stamina buffs as possible. At this point it might be worth putting on some Carb armor to get as much room as possible for Essense, IC, Treatment etc… Our goal here is the same as the first time- get Stamina as high as possible by switching the Chest, Waist and Leg.

Details
Sassy needed to buff 1hb and heavy weapons again to get the cushions back on. Once they’re on, cancel those buffs. As to the best combination of Stamina and Treatment buffs- this may vary, but in this case, it worked out to be: Stamina boost, Essence of Gargantua, Treatment Expertise and Specialist Treatment. That all adds up to 82 ncu, and is a good place to start. We now have 129 Stamina and 341 Treatment.

ii. Buffing Armor:
We haven’t done any of this yet, and this is a perfect time to start. As you notice, we have an excess of Treatment and a shortage of Stamina. Now we can start swapping off pieces of medsuit and adding armor that buffs Stamina instead. The head is sort of a free slot, since there is no medsuit piece there. So, once your buffs are in, put on your Omni Training Helmet- that adds 3 Stamina, and your Solid Steel Hydraulic Legwear: +5 Stamina. Now we’re at 137 Stamina and 327 Treatment.

iii. Implant Laddering/Stacking/Leveling:
This is going to be your first taste of implant laddering, or implant stacking. We’re going to put in an implant- leg for example which adds Stamina, which will allow us to put in a higher QL of chest implant which also adds Stamina. Then we put in a waist implant which adds more Stamina, which brings us back to the leg again. Now we remove the original leg, and we should be able to put in a bigger leg with the stamina increase from the other two implants. Then we go back to the chest, take out our original implant and put in a bigger one still etc… You can do this a couple of times until you reach a point of diminishing returns and/or you run out of treatment to go any higher.

As for leveling up implants- for any implant at QL50 or higher, your implant may increase in level as you add clusters to it. That is a great benefit as it lets you level implants up to the exact QL you need. If you search around on the forums, there are guides out there which can tell you specifically how much an implant will level up at each level. Above QL100, implants can go up by at much as 2, 3, or 4 levels for each cluster you put in, depending on the NanoProgramming skill of the person making them. At this level, it’s nice and simple as each cluster you put in will raise the quality of the implant by 1 level.

See the video guide for a demonstration of Implant Leveling and Implant laddering at this exact point. I won’t go into as much detail since it’s on the video . Direct Link to The YouTube Video Walkthrough- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o3V9JNIzg4.

To summarize quickly-

First I took out Sassy’s lvl 30 leg which left enough Stamina to put in a lvl 63 leg. Then I took out the 43 chest implant, and put in a 61 Chest. Took out the 30 waist (which still had Agility in it). Put in a 66 waist. Took out the 63 Leg. Put in a 67 Leg. Took out the 61 Chest. Put in a 66 chest. That’s about as high as we can go at this point, because Treatment is again starting to be the limiting factor. As you can see, there’s great benefit to be had from leveling up implants in this fashion. We’re already at 67ish implants and we haven’t even maxed out our NCU to hold Behemoth, and haven’t maxed out our treatment implants.

Strength- This may not be necessary, but we can put in some Strength implants here. This can be useful because some of the buffing armor you will want to use requires Strength to wear. I grabbed a right and left arm implant (QL50ish), inserted Strength, Swimming in the right arm, Strength and Matter Met in the left arm, and threw them in.

iv. Agility:
Same as before- we’re going to twink Agility as high as we can.

Details
We have 152 Stamina and 342 Treatment while wearing the Omni Training helmet. This lets us equip a lvl 70 foot. I leveled one up to that exactly. Our first level 70 Implant!!!

Now we take out the Stamina waist and put in a QL66 waist with Agility/Sense/Cold AC.

We need to get the QL40 Agility rifle on now. Could be interesting.

In order to get the Rifle on, we need 193 Rifle and 97 Aimed Shot. I equipped a full suit of QL16 carb armor which brings Sassy to 94ncu. With UA, TTS and rifle expertise we’re still going to be 8 points short on rifle, and not enough ncu to finish that off with a wrangle. I will have to implant rifle in the right wrist.

So, without any rifle equipped, I cancelled all Stamina buffs and cast FG, SFA, Agility Boost and Treatment expertise. This will let me equip a lvl 60ish right wrist which will give us more than enough rifle skill to get the agility rifle on.

With the rifle buffs described above, we can get the rifle equipped. Now we’re ready to go and do some agility based implants, and try to get on our 4x belt.

With a full suit of Carb we have 94ncu and can fit SFA, Treatment Expertise, FG, and Agility Boost. Since we still have a fair bit of extra space, I’m going to cast Enhanced Senses, Intelligence, stamina and Strength boosts, and Essence of the Brave Challenger. Only ES and Intelligence boost trickle down to Treatment, but the Str/Stam boosts may help us equip buffing armor based on those skills.

v. Treatment:
This is a combined phase of sorts. We will want to get Treatment as high as possible by laddering the Head, Eye, and Right Hand- in the same way we laddered the Leg, Chest and Waist for Stamina. Then we’ll want to switch those for Computer literacy to get our belt on. Then we’ll work on Map Navigation, and finally back to Treatment. In this phase you’ll find that at first, you have lots of Treatment due to the ability to fit SFA in your ncu, but not a lot of Agility, so we’ll make extensive use of buffing armor here.

Details
I’m going to put on a Sekutek helmet in QL32, for the extra 2 Agility boost. I’m going to start by removing the QL38 eye, and get a bigger Treatment eye in there. Without that eye Sassy has 139 Agility and 381 Treatment. Here’s where the skill emulator and Kirch Kevlar/Sekutek armor starts to pay for itself. Keep adding buffing armor and removing medsuit pieces to get your Agility up, and keep track of your Treatment as it comes down. Essentially this is sacrificing Treatment for the sake of raising Agility. Each piece of medsuit gives different amounts of Treatment, so try to remove the ones that give the least bonuses first. The boots give 6 Treatment, and the gloves give 10 Treatment, so start by replacing those with Kirch or Sekutek. If you still have extra treatment, keep going with the Legs or sleeves. They all give 14 Treatment so it doesn’t matter which you remove between them. Keep checking the skill emulator and trading buffing armor for medsuit pieces- bumping up the QL of the implant until you reach a balance between Agility and Treatment.

In Sassy’s case, I replaced four medsuit pieces with buffing armor- the boots, gloves, legs and one sleeve. Now Sassy has 147 Agility and 338 Treatment. Now we put in a QL70 eye with Treatment, Rifle and Assault Rifle.

Take out the QL49 head, and we can equip a 69 head, with Treatment and Sense. Take out the right hand QL30 and we can equip a QL72 hand in its place- by adding one more piece of Sekutek to the other arm. The right hand has Treatment and Assault Rifle clusters.

Now that we have three QL70ish treatment implants in, we can take them right back out and put Computer Literacy in there instead . Getting the higher treatment imps will let us equip higher CL imps- which is why we did that first. We will use them again though. We’re almost at the max of what Treatment can be for us. If we were to put the full medsuit back on at this point, we’d have around 425 treatment- enough for QL88 implants if we could get our abilities that high.

vi. Computer Literacy:
Take out the Treatment eye, and put in a QL71 CL eye. Take out the head and put in a QL69 Head with Tutoring and CL, and a finally take out the right hand and put in a QL68 with CL and Assault Rifle (or pistol etc…) After getting all those in we are at 138 Computer literacy. I should have also bumped up the ear implant to QL70ish, with more intelligence trickledown to Computer Literacy, but I don’t think we’ll need it. At this point, we’re ready to buff CL expertise, Tutoring Expertise, use a QL4 CL tutoring device, put on the Omni Grey Suit, and we should have enough CL to equip our 4x belt. If we need more, we can also put on two intelligence pistols, but I think we’ll be fine without- and the rifle is a bit of a pain to get back on .

With that done we’re at 166 Computer Literacy- enough to equip a QL61 4x belt- (requirement of 163 CL) Then I found some QL67 memory chips and equipped four of them.

vii. Treatment Library:
While we have 160+ CL, we should equip a Treatment Library. I install one of these on every toon I make. It’s almost free Treatment and there’s not a lot else you can do with your Utils #2 slot. Unless you can get one of an odd level, you’re stuck with QL30 or QL50. We will be using a QL30, which will add 3 First Aid, and 4 Treatment.

Now we can put in the Treatment implants again, Since we laddered a bit to get them in there in the first place, we may need to put in slightly lower implants and then work back up to the QL70ish that we had in there a few minutes ago. We can cancel the CL buffs and get re-cast with SFA, FG, Agility etc… and put the medsuit back on.

viii. Map Navigation:
Here’s one of the more boring sections, but useful if you want to see things on your map . The Map Navigation clusters go in the Eye, Ear and Head implants. We’ll start with the ear, making it Map Nav and Concealment. Again- concealment makes the implant Agility dependent. For the head and eye, only Map Nav is needed to be Agility dependent. We put in a QL72 ear, then a QL71 Eye, then a QL60 Head. Could go higher, but I’m getting lazy . Now we can put on the Omni Grey suit again, and make sure to get Enhanced Senses and Sense boost. This puts us at 101 Map Navigation. To get the Monsters Upgrade we need 130 Map Nav, so it will be your choice whether you want to spend any extra points on that. Besides that, go through the list of Maps and get all the ones you can use- that you don’t already have from your startup pack. Pick up the directional arrow, machines and people upgrades for sure. I don’t think I’ll spend the extra points to get Sassy up to the Monsters Upgrade at this point. I might rethink this when she’s at level 15 and we can get higher implants in, and may have more IP to spare.

ix. Treatment: When you’re done with Map Navigation, take out those three implants and once again put back your QL70ish treatment implants. I also took this opportunity to put in an overdue QL72 Ear with Intelligence and Concealment.

E. Round 3:
Here we are again. Ready to do More Stamina and this time we should have enough NCU to really max this out. Take off all your agility buffing armor, and put your full medsuit back on. Now Sassy has 428 Treatment and we can level up the Ring of Nucleus one last time, You can stop once it has a 405 Requirement. It will keep leveling a couple levels higher than that, but won’t get any more ncu than 20.

i. Stamina:
First let’s take off the agility rifle and put back on the concrete cushions. We have 111 ncu now, so we’ll need to use some pieces of Carb armor to make up the necessary 117 to max our buffs. A full suit of Carb and Sassy has 125 ncu. If you’re following along, hopefully you are close to that- at least up to 117. Cast Behemoth, IC, SFA, Stamina boost, and Treatment Expertise. If you have any extra ncu, cast anything that adds trickledown to Treatment.

Details
With the Hydraulic legs and Omni Helmet, Sassy is at 153 Stamina and 409 Treatment. We start all over with Stamina and see how high we can go. Since we have Agility in the waist currently, let’s take that out and start there. We can’t quite make a QL76 waist yet, so we’ll put our old QL66 Stamina waist back in. On to the leg. We take out our QL67 leg and put in a QL72 leg. Then we can take out the QL66 chest and put in a QL69. As you can see, we’re getting much less increase, and hitting the limits of our implant laddering. Next would be the waist, but Sassy is still one stamina point short of getting a QL76 waist in. We do have lots of treatment so we could swap in a piece or two of buffing armor, but the only armor I have that buffs Stamina is Nova Dillon- which requires sense and Agility to put in. I do have other items I could use, but for the sake of this example we’ll stop the Stamina buffing process here.

ii. Finalize if You’re Staying at Level 10:

This is essentially the end of the major twinking process. With this setup now, we have 164 Stamina and 405 Treatment. That’s enough to equip QL80 implants in any stamina slots. Since I’m going to level up Sassy to 15 and finalize her there, I won’t bother finishing her weapon implants at this point. I’ll quickly throw in some QL80 implants to the Left arm, and foot, and the Touch of the Gripper in the right arm and go level her.

If you were going to stay at lvl 10, you would continue by putting in all your weapon implants, specifically any that don’t require you to take out any of your treatment, agility or stamina implants. Save your ability and treatment implants for the very end. So in this case, you’ll notice that you can equip the Touch of the Gripper. The order you would most likely follow would be to finalize any implants that will be stamina or strength based. Usually this will be the arms, left hand and foot. Foot can also be agility based if you fill all three slots. Then you’ll switch to doing agility implants- which typically is the wrists if you’re a ranged prof. Then you carefully start taking out the main buffing imps and replacing with your final desired implants- while trying to get the most bang for your buck. Skip ahead to the final implant process of Sassy at 15 to see how I finalize her implants.

Well, that’s it! If you’ve followed along this far, you have probably come close to or surpassed QL80 implants at level 10, along with a 4x belt and 100+ ncu. There are many places along the way that we could do better than this. There are many items that buff substantially more than the basic items and armor we’ve used here. There were a couple times during this project I was tempted to pull out a ring of endurance or piece of Miy’s Tank Armor just to make this a bit easier. But for the sake of using the most common items possible, I resisted . There are also some cases where the basic pattern of “rounds” that I use isn’t the very best way to go to get the absolute highest implants in. That may come out later in an advanced class… As a hint, there are times when you can get more stamina from the chest by making it Strength dependent instead of Stamina. There are times when it’s beneficial to make the right hand Treatment and Computer Literacy implants Stamina dependent instead of Agility. But for now, we’re going to go level up Sassyblade and see how far we can take her at level 15.

  1. Sassy at Level 15:

Ok, here we are, ready to do it all over again. We’ll probably find that we won’t be able to increase the implant QLs too terribly much above what we could to at 10. Our ultimate goal here is to get on slightly higher implants and equip the Crypt Collar, GTA, Rockcrusher Gauntlets, Temple shoulder pads, and finalize imps and armor- then equip weapons and we’re done! I’m not going to bother retwinking Computer Literacy.

A. Round 1:

i. Stamina:
Same drill as before, only we already have our ncu done. Put on your concrete cushions, get all the stamina and treatment buffs you can fit and see if you can ladder up your stamina implants- leg, chest, and waist.

Details
Now that we’ve leveled up again, make sure you’ve maxed out Stamina, Agility, Treatment and possibly Intelligence and Strength. I know we have enough IP and will almost certainly need the Strength for the Rockcrushers. I’ve maxed all of those (as well as Piercing and Body Dev. We’ll spend the rest of our IP as needed during or after we do implants

With Sassy in a full suit of carb she has 127ncu, enough for SFA, Behemoth, Stamina boost, Treatment expertise, and IC (those are the important ones). Besides that I also buffed, Str, Int, Agility, and Sense boosts, since she had the extra space.

With the full medsuit on (and OT helmet) we have 175 Stamina and 441 Treatment. We’ll equip the Hydraulic pants and start with the leg implant. If we take out our 72 leg we’re left with 165 Stamina which lets us equip a QL80 leg. As a side note, I’m going to move everybody from the Advanced shop to the Superior shop, as we won’t likely need many more implants lower than QL70 and it’s starting to get annoying running around to the higher shops to get higher clusters.

The chest is next and we are able to equip a QL76 after removing the QL69.

The waist we can now upgrade to QL76. Not enough Stamina for 86 so we’ll leave it at 76.
Did I mention that the ability boosts increase on the 6’s in the faded slots? Ie. 56, 66, 76 etc… That’s why we’re not pushing the leg to 84 or 85. There’s no increase in the ability until 86 so that won’t help much until then.

ii. Agility:
Now we’re ready to implant Agility but only the foot this time. In Sassy’s case we take out the 80 and put in an 88 foot. This is going to be a very short step as we’re about to see if we can get the Crypt collar on next which changes our plans for the waist implant.

iii. Treatment:
At this point we’re going to make a slight departure from the usual pattern. For simplicity’s sake I start twink projects by making all the treatment implants Agility based, but the right hand can actually be made Stamina based if you put in a shiny cluster (Martial arts or Trap Disarm), and in this case I’m going to do that here. Take out the 72 Right hand and put in a QL87 hand, and in this case we’re also better off with the Medsuit pants instead of the Hydraulic Legwear.

iv. Crypt Collar:
We already have Bio Met in the chest and we will be putting it in the Head, but we’ll put BM in the waist at this point- QL84 to be precise.

Now we cancel all our stamina buffs and get on the +20 Agility Rifle. We still have in our rifle implants in the eye and right wrist, leaving us to cast UA and TTS. Now cancel the rifle buffs and cast FG, Agilty, SFA etc…

Treatment- we’re just going to level up the eye implant here quick before we put in a head with Bio Met and go for the collar. This time the eye will have Rifle, Treatment and Pistol (QL77). We’re going to equip a soft pepper pistol so we don’t want to have to spend points in pistol if we don’t have to.

Right Wrist- We’re also going to re-do our right wrist, and add pistol and rifle this time QL77

Head- Now we implant Bio Met in the head slot QL75, and we get ready to put our crypt collar on.

Before I go all out with this and put the pistol on, I’d better do the math. We need to make 470BM for the Crypt Collar- which reminds me, I have to go get one… Ok, found one .

The available buffs are: BM expertise (20), 132 Wrangle, BM Mochams (140), pepper pistol (14) and Omni executive suit (6), plus any trickledown from intelligence boost (NS if you’re not Froob).

Ok, it was a bit of a dance to get it all done, but we’re there. Sassy needed to max out Bio Met completely, put on the suit of Carb armor for the ncu, get BM Mochams/Expertise, Intelligence boost, get a 132 wrangle and pistol expertise- put on the Omni Grey suit for the extra few points of Pistol skill (I know- could have just spent a few IP on Pistol too . Equipped the Soft Pepper pistol and Old English Trading Co.- switched for the Omni Executive suit- 5 pieces, and equipped the Collar. Whew!

(I know there’s some other helmet out there that buffs BioMet , but I don’t have one and I’m not quite sure what it’s called )

Now we should have lots of NCU for further twinking. Sassyblade is now at 143 NCU with the Ring of Nucleus, Crypt collar and one +5 ncu wrist implant still in. We can put our medsuit back on. Re-equip our Agility Rifle and get back on track.

We can also take out the Head and Waist implants right now since they’re buffing Bio Met which doesn’t help us at the moment.

Realistically, we’re almost done, but we should max out treatment once more and then go back to Stamina/Strength and try to get our Rockcrushers and GTA on.

v. TiM Scope: (If you’re a ranged twink)
If you’re making a ranged Prof and want to equip the TiM Scope, this might be the time to do it. I won’t go into great detail for this, but you now have lots of NCU and will want to do this before you start finalizing your implants. The scope requires 394 Rifle/319 Aimed Shot.

The Aimed Shot skill can be easily attained by equipping a normal targeting scope (requires only Perception Skill to equip) which has a large AS boost http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=205620 and hotswapping for the TiM scope once you have enough skill. If you don’t have a Clan Solitus over lvl 205 (which I don’t you can implant perception and get as much as you can with buffs, then equip the highest QL targeting scope you can find (QL 100+ sold in shops or as rewards in missions).

If you still need TTS to make enough Aimed Shot, then you will need more NCU for the next part. The potentially needed buffs are: 132 Wrangle (58 NCU), Unexpected Attack (42 NCU), Take the Shot (47 NCU), and Expertises (4 NCU each). That’s 155 NCU if you need all those. If you don’t need TTS, then you will only need 108 NCU.

The final factor for your calculations- assuming you can make enough Aimed Shot skill from a scope and TTS: the available buffs for Rifle Skill are 132 + 120 + 20 for a total of 272. I point that out because that means you only need to make 122 Rifle Skill from implants and other buffing armor etc… This is assuming you haven’t spent any IP in Rifle at all, and assuming no benefit from trickle-down. If you can equip QL80ish implants you’ll get 90ish Rifle skill and if you have some spare NCU for Feline Grace, Enhanced Senses, Agility Boost etc… you will come very close to equipping the TiM Scope without spending any IP at all! If you’re actually using a Rifle and have spent points in those skills, you will have an easier time. If you’re a Trader or Agent, you can of course, drain up for the rest of the Rifle Skill. I just point that out as I never dreamed of equipping this on my ranged profs in my early days as those stats just seemed ridiculously hard to attain. Now that I’ve discovered/been taught some of these techniques, I don’t make any ranged prof without this . (Unless they’re really low- and not an Agent/Trader)

Back to Sassy:
If it hasn’t already, this is where twinking becomes a pain in the butt . We want to really max out treatment now, but we’re short on agility since we have none in the waist. So we want to get that 76 waist back in. First we have to put on the rifle to get our current treatment head back in.

So, with the agility rifle back on, cast SFA, FG, Agility/Treat expertise, put back in the QL69 treatment head implant

To recap, the relevant implants we have in now are:
QL77 eye with Pistol, treatment, Rifle
QL69 Head with treatment, Sense
QL87 Right hand with Treatment, Martial Arts
QL76 Chest with Stamina, Bio Met, Strength
QL80 Leg with Body Dev, Stamina, Agilty
QL88 Foot with Agilty, Melee Init.

Our waist is empty and we’re about to put that back in. It’s kind of a pain, but we cancel every thing agility related, buff up all our stamina stuff, and put the cushions back on. Put in our QL76 waist with Agility in it.

vi. Treatment:
We’re just trying to squeeze the last bit of treatment out of this. Now we cancel everything stamina related, put the rifle back on and switch everything back to Agilty .
Take out the 69 head, and with a mix of buffing armor and medsuit, put in a QL80 head with Treatment and Sense.

Now we can bump up the eye once more (last time I promise ). Take out the 77 eye, and put in an 81 eye with the same clusters.

B. Round 2:

i. Stamina:
Almost done here. About to get any extra points of Stamina/Strength before we try equipping the Rockcrushers. Switch the rifle for the cushions, cast all your Stamina buffs and any extras you can fit for Treatment trickledown. Ok, for the first time, we’re going to use Nova Dillon for buffing. It tends to be annoying since it’s based on Sense/Agility and sense is a pain to buff and not an ability that you want to max on every toon. However, in this case I’ll put on two pieces of 35ish Nova Dillon. You may have to juggle your buffs to get them on, but this allows us to equip a QL84 leg. If you refer to the skill emulator, QL84 is a key level, as both agility and stamina are increased by one point at that QL.

As I glance at the stats at this point, with running buffs I see that we’re at 188 stamina and 172 Str. I don’t have strength boost running, but that’s encouraging to see that we’re not far off getting the GTA equipped .

As we move to the chest- still with our Nova Dillon armor equipped- we can now equip a QL79 chest- giving one more point of Stamina.

And- even better, now we are also able to jump to a QL86 waist- for one more point of Stamina.

One last piece- the left arm. We already have the touch of the Gripper in the right arm from when Sassy was lvl 10, but now we can put in a bigger left arm. This is starting to look rather impressive, and will be indicative of the final QL of weapon implants we’ll be able to equip. We are now able to equip a QL90 Left arm. Take note from the skill emulator that we are one QL away from another point of Strength if we come up short for the Rockcrushers. ie: a level 91 left arm will give one more strength. Put in a left arm with Matter met and Strength.

I know we’re anxious to get the Rockcrushers and GTA on, but now is the time to start planning carefully how you’ll wind down your twinking. Keep in mind that after you equip the rockcrushers you’ll lose 10 treatment by not being able to use medsuit gloves after you have them on. So, at this point I would suggest putting any final stamina based implants you can to make sure you have them as high as possible. In Sassy’s case I think it will only be two, the left hand and the foot. For the record, these will be the implants you use for bragging rights . You won’t get any implants in higher than these so enjoy them . For Sassy, she now has a QL90 Foot with Agility and Melee Init, and a QL90 Left hand with First Aid and Fast Attack.

ii. Rockcrusher Gauntlets:
Now comes the real challenge. I don’t know how this is going to go, because I’ve never tried putting Rockcrushers on a Solitus of this level. Atrox has 9 more Strength and 4 more Stamina so it will be significantly easier to do this for them. Since I’m giving up so much in those abilities by not being Atrox, I reserve the right to pull out some extra buffing equipment of the rare and/or expensive variety. This is just so we can complete the project- knowing that you will have a much easier time, if you are Atrox and/or a paid account with perks and research, or just rich and have your own buffing equipment .

The key to this part is simply putting on as much buffing armor as you need/have to get on the Rockcrushers/GTA. Usually this will involve wearing a full suit of Nova Dillon, or nowadays, a mix of armor including various Miy’s Tank, Rings of Essence/Endurance, and possibly Lya’s Sangi armor, if you happened to camp for it during Halloween.

Don’t bother to include a set of gloves in your buffing calculations for the Rockcrushers. AO doesn’t let you hotswap clothes and keep the boost like it does some other items. It will calculate the ability without the glove- before it lets you put on the Rockcrushers. For example, if you’re using the Hydraulic gloves (+4 str) and you have exactly 210 Strength, and 191 Stamina, you can try to hotswap the Rockcrushers- it won’t work. AO will probably have a bit of a hiccup, maybe choke on a few numbers, and then tell you that your strength has to be 210 to wear them.

Ok, we’re starting to hit the limit here. With a full suit of QL35-40ish Nova Dillon, the Omni helmet, and a pair of Miy’s tank boots, we’re at 192 Str, and 193 Stamina. Now we can definitely equip the GTA as a froob Solitus at lvl 15 using not too crazy equipment.

The Rockcrushers are another story. I’ll see what else I can pull out to make up 18 more strength!

Ok, well, Sassy has the Rockcrushers on but it required almost all my twinking tools- and definitely diverges from the cheap/common item theme of the guide. Specifically she needed two Rings of Essence (QL70ish), Polychromatic Pillows, Miy’s tank Chest and boots (QL60ish). That’s still not too terrible, considering we used pretty common tools and equipment most of the way up. If you’d been using more advanced tools and perks etc… you would also have higher QL implants by this point as well. It’s safe to say, Rockcrushers are much tougher at level 15 than GTA- specifically for Solitus Froobs on a budget . Now that we have the Rockcrushers on, I would highly recommend putting your medsuit gloves and ALL your other gloves in your bank to avoid accidentally right-clicking them and unequipping your Rockcrushers after all the work you just did to get them on . (not that it’s ever happened to me of course .

Note- I just noticed a mistake I made. Instead of equipping the QL90 left arm, I accidentally put back the QL80 I had just taken out. That would only have added one Strength, but it all adds up

iii. Guardian Tank Armor:
Now, I’ll go back to Froob Mode. We have plenty of str/stam now, so equip the GTA without all that extra buff stuff and we’ll carry on.

iv. Temple Shoulder Pads:
Now we are going to implant Body Dev in the chest and waist and put on our temple pads.

We take out our current waist and put in another QL86 with Stamina, Body Dev, and Cold AC.
Take out the chest and put in a QL 70ish with Strength, BioMet, and Body Dev. We don’t need to max this out, as we’re almost at the requirement for the pads. Cancel Iron Circle buff if you have it running and Cast Prodigious Strength…

Once you have the temple pads on, put back in your stamina chest and waist. You may have to drop down a QL or two, as you’ll have less skill/treatment than when you first put them in.

v. Special Stat-Boosting Armor:
Now we’re ready to start winding down and carefully consider your final implant layout. In some cases it might be beneficial to equip an extra high level piece of armor at this point if it buffs a certain skill you need. In Sassy’s case Rhinoman Armor boots buff Piercing skill. If we wait until we’re all done twinking we won’t have nearly the Strength and Stamina that we do at this point. We’ll be giving up 6 points of treatment by not being able to use the medsuit boots, but if we can find a pair of QL80ish Rhinoman boots, it will add 8-9 points of Piercing skill. If we wait until we’re done we may only get on QL50ish or so. If you are 1hb, then you might want to find a high level sleeve and equip it at this point. Putting on one sleeve will take away 14 treatment but might be worth it. You do have to be careful not to gimp your treatment TOO much. If you put on two sleeves you’ll be sacrificing 28 points of treatment for all implants from now on. That’s about 7QLs of implant so weigh the priorities.

I have a feeling Sassy may be close to OE on her weapons and the extra three or four points may make a difference. I’m going to camp few Rhinomen and see what I can find .

After a few minutes of Rhinoman camping, I picked up a QL83 Rhinoman boot (+9 Piercing). For the sake of time and demonstration- rather than camp for a slightly lower level pair, I will again take the liberty of using some extra buffing equipment just to get them on.

C. Finalizing Implants:

With those boots on, we’re now ready to finish off this twink with our final implants. We’re getting really close to the end, and now might be a good time to put your entire character setup into the skill emulator and figure out what nanos you’ll need/want to be able to cast and make sure you will have enough skill to do so. In this case my original setup was to implant fast attack in all three possible clusters for Sassy’s setup. However, after playing around with the skill emulator I realized that Matter Creation would be quite low, with no place to freely implant it. This meant she would be limited to Essence of vitality and Bristling shield. If I implant MC in the right hand instead of Fast attack, she should have enough skills to cast Essence of Might and Shield of Sparks- more health and more ACs, and I’ll still be able to equip my weapons without that extra Fast attack.

As I finalize implants, and actually equip them in a character, I remove them from the skill emulator to keep track of what I’ve done and to make sure I don’t miss anything. Once piece of advice- put something in every body part! It doesn’t matter if there’s nothing of real use to you in your left wrist- put run speed and nano resist. Left hand- Put First aid and Fire AC- that will get you closer to the next highest health stim, or at least save you from having to spend some points.

i. Arms:
Now that we know what we’re going to do to finish off Sassy, we’ll start with the arms. (Remember we already have our final Foot and Left Hand in from before the Rockcrushers). They will both end up requiring Strength in this case. That’s not too common, but might work out well. Cast Behemoth, and instead of Iron Circle, cast Prodigous Strength, SFA, Strength boost etc…

We’ll do the right arm first, since it contains the shiny cluster for our main weapon skill. With the Gripper out we can equip a QL88 Right arm with Piercing, Brawling and Fast Attack. For the left arm we can equip a QL83 arm with Matter Met, Piercing, and Brawling- with a couple of Sekutek armor pieces.

We have to do one quick change. We’re going to switch our Stamina waist to an Agility waist quickly so we can finish off a couple of our agility based implants such as the wrists. Cancel Prodigious Str, and put IC back in. Then switch the 76 stamina waist for the 76 agility waist.

ii. Wrists:
Put the agility rifle back on, cast all the agility buffs, and equip buffing armor as needed. Take out our two wrists, and we’re going to put in QL80s. In the right wrist, Multi Melee, Sneak attack, and run speed. In the left wrist, Nano Resist, Run speed, Multi Melee.

iii. Ear:
We can do the ear right now. This will almost always be Psy Mod/Concealment. Concealment is just there to make the implant Agility based. Put in a QL80 ear.

iv. Right Hand:
Moving to the right hand, we’ll put in the final QL79 implant. It will be treatment, Matter creation, and Martial arts. Martial arts- simply to make it Agility based.

v. Detour:
I’m going to take a quick detour here, and equip the map navigation implants again. I don’t think IP is going to be a problem and I’d like to be able to see monsters in the dungeons. So, I’m going to put back in three Map Nav implants and see about getting that 130 Map Nav for the “monsters” upgrade .

Ok- hope that didn’t end up costing too much IP… Now we’re ready to finalize the chest and waist. Back to Stamina we go…

vi. Chest/Waist:
The choice between which to implant first between the chest and waist isn’t always obvious. We’re taking out our main buffing implants now and each one will get less and less in quality as we go. Sometimes you will want to leave your chest with strength and stamina, in which case this is a much easier choice. However, I would like to switch Stamina for Max health. In our case, Piercing goes in the faded waist slot, so we’ll do that one first to get the highest quality possible there. If we did the chest first, we’d have much less stamina when we came to do the waist, and our piercing would be lower.

So, we’re going to put in a QL84 waist, with Piercing, Max Health and Cold AC. Now we take out our chest- big drop in stamina here- and put in a QL71 Chest with Strength, Matter met, and Max Health. Could get a couple more points out of this by squeezing back on some Nova Dillon armor if we wanted.

vii. Eye/Head:
Chest is done- back to Agility rifle to finish off the last two implants in the head and eye. (If you are using Rifle skill, your shiny cluster will be in your Eye slot, so you may want to do it earlier to get it as high as possible) First the eye- QL75 with AS, SI, Sneak. Then the head with BM, and Sense- QL73, and we’re done!

  1. Final Equipment setup:

A. Sassy’s final Equipment: http://auno.org/ao/equip.php?saveid=100723

Now, you want to finalize your armor. In some cases you can choose the exact QL of armor you would like to be wearing. For Carb, CAS, Omni-Steel Ribbed, you can roll missions or check shops for the exact QL you would like to wear. I would suggest canceling all your OBs and see how high your abilities are with only self cast buffs. Then you can figure out what you can wear without being OverEquipped. This might also be a good time to make sure you can cast all your nanos. If not, hopefully you aren’t too far from your twinking buddies to go and fix the implants…

Final Stats:
Sassy has a mixed bag of 35-56 Rhinoman armor (plus the 83 boots). Her chest and legs are both QL56 which is 75% OE, but add a nice health bonus. I blitzed a QL35 Graft helmet and made her a CAS helmet which kinda matches style-wise . Sassy has 1231 Health without Mongo Slam and 1562 with. She has 950-1000ish ACs. She has 231 Piercing skill, and could equip slightly higher weapons without being OE, if you want to push it right to the edge.

B. A Word about Armor Overequipping:

Ok, I just did some more detailed testing on this as some of the numbers you’ll see below surprised me. I was also surprised to find that Max Health bonuses were affected by OE on armor. (You’d think I’d know that by now…) I’m sure I’m duplicating what is documented elsewhere, but here is what I found. I found that ACs, and Max Health are affected by OE, but Body Dev, Max Nano, Nano Pool, Skill bonuses and anything in the Speed IP section aren’t. I tested this with some Omni Carb armor for the Nano Pool, ACs and Max Health. I tested a Crypt collar for the speed and body dev etc… The Crypt collar was at 0% on the twink I tested and casting BM Mochams brought that up to 50%, with no change in health, nano pool, or any of the evades or initiatives. (Don’t confuse the lack of effect on evades with add-all-defense modifiers which are indeed affected by being OE. Ask any grid fixer . For the record, it looks like there is nothing in the Crypt Collar that is affected by being OE.

A generally accepted good principle is to try and get your armor to be fully effective and not overequipped at all- to have the most effective ACs. However, I may be about to say something completely contrary to what you’ve heard, in that there may be benefits to having armor that is OE . Armor nowadays is a lot more than just ACs. There are all kinds of skill, nanoskill, and ability bonuses as well, which sometimes means armor that is a bit OE is worth it. As I did with Sassy’s boots, sometimes it can be useful to get the bonuses from the higher QL armor even if it is OE. In Sassy’s case she has 88 Strength and 84 Stamina self buffed. She could use up to QL41ish Rhinoman armor and not have it OE and drop to 75%. I also happened to pick up a QL56 chest and pants- which is about as high as she can use and not have it drop down to 50%. As I ran the numbers on whether to use 41ish or 56ish Rhinoman I came up with the following stats.

Comparing just the chest and pants:
A QL56 Chest and Pants at 75% OE will give: 122 max health and 316 AC.
A QL41 Chest and Pants at 100% will give: 128 max health and 308 AC.

It may be a little surprising that the ACs are actually better in this case- being able to wear much higher QL armor at 75% although the health bonus drops off a bit.

I’m going to run some numbers on Omni Carb armor and see what the stats come out to. If I take Sassy as an example, she has 102 Agility and 84 Stamina. She could use up to a maximum of QL34 armor and keep it 100% self buffed. She could use up to a maximum of QL46 armor and keep it 75% self.

The comparisons are as follows
The QL34 gives: 122 max health, 120 max nano, 14 ncu, 14 nano init, 755 melee AC
QL46 at 75% gives: 122 max health, 158 max nano, 21 ncu, 21 nano init, 752 melee AC

As you can see the health and ACs are about the same, but you get 7 more NCU and 38 more max nano + 7 nano init.

The moral of the story here seems to be that quite often there are benefits to using armor that is OE. However, if you’re gonna be 75% OE on your armor, don’t be just barely OE- go as high as you can without dropping to 50% OE. The other benefit of having OE armor, particularly if it is Str/Stam based, is that if you do grab an essence to go fight at towers or something, then you may also have more ACs if your armor jumps up to 100% with that boost.

C. Final Weapons:

I went with a QL 45 Die Kleine Nadel, and a QL52 Improved Tango Dirk. She could possibly go up to a QL55, but then you have to worry about it going OE on a simple thing like Strength (or other ability) buff running out- or a Strength debuff. I am not sure if that’s the best weapon setup yet- might be better to use two Tango Dirks and sacrifice the Sneak Attack since they’re quite a bit faster than the Die Kleine Nadel. I have absolutely no doubt that SassyBlade’s setup is not the best pvp or pvm option out there . Looking at everything here, I don’t see any real benefit to being Solitus over Atrox with this setup. Sassy might get an extra Mongo Slam or two with the extra nano pool, but Atrox would have a bunch more health. I doubt that Sassy would compare well in PVP against an Icebreaker Enforcer, any Pump Trader, or any number of other setups.

I will try to get some video of Sassy in the Subway to see how she does there. I think she’ll have no problems killing anything but Abmouth and possibly Vergil Aenid. She got challenged to and won her first duel today .

  1. Final Thoughts:

Well, that’s it! We’re all done our overly long and painfully detailed twink walkthrough. I just took Sassy into the Subway and I’ll let the video speak for itself. I readily admit that I apparently have no grasp of just how far is “far enough” for a Mongo Slam to be out of some mob’s range … Here is the video of our project on her test run.

Video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYef5dAEGrA

I don’t think this particular build is the ultimate pvp or pvm setup in the world, but with this quality of setup you can have some fun with almost anything you choose to make. I will add and/or edit as I see mistakes or areas which can be fine tuned. In spite of the ridiculous length this turned out to be, I hope it will serve as a useful reference to any who had the patience to suffer through all this gibberish . Happy Twinking!

  1. Advanced Twinking techniques:

I don’t have a whole lot to put in this section. I was hoping to have more to add in here but it seems I have only two things that fit into this category .

A. The Stamina-only Chest Trick:
This might also be called the “Strength chest trick” or something along those lines. There has been some discussion about why I recommend making all the leg, chest, waist and foot implants dependent on Stamina during the twinking process. The short story to this is that there are more buffs and buffing equipment available for Stamina than there are for Agility (Behe & IC= 47 vs. FG=25).

But there is something even better . What you CAN do once you’ve maxed out your other skills and are looking for that last few points of Stamina is to temporarily make the chest implant dependent on Strength- by putting in only a Stamina cluster. There are even better buffs for Strength than either Stamina or Agility. (Prodigious Strength and Behemoth= 67). You can also leave your Agility waist equipped for some extra trickledown to Treatment.

When you’re ready to use this technique, you’ll be aiming to get stamina a bit higher, and have strength implanted in both arms, and treatment maxed out. Pull out your chest- yes you’re losing the faded strength cluster by doing that, but you’re gaining 42 more strength through buffs than you would through agility. Now you put in a super high chest with only Stamina- then continue to rotate out your leg, waist and foot and get them as high as possible. Eventually you’ll have to put in a normal chest but for a while you get a huge boost in stamina with that being strength based.

If you’re doing this with fairly maxed out lvl 10ish toon for example, you’ll be somewhere around a QL75 chest before using this trick. By making that strength based, you’ll end up getting in around a QL91 chest (with just Stamina), which will hopefully allow you to get a higher waist and leg in for a couple more points of Stamina and Agility. Once the legs/waist are upgraded, you can go around again and possibly max out a few more imps before switching back to a “normal” chest. You’ll probably be able to put back a chest of about QL76 or 77 with the slight bump from the other imps.

Incidentally, this same trick applies to putting Sense-only or Psychic-only in the chest. A chest imp with just a Sense/Psychic cluster will also come out dependent on Strength.

B. The Stamina-based Right-hand Trick:
This trick can be used to maximize your Treatment and/or Computer Literacy if you’re just a couple points short of something. Up until now, I’ve talked about making all the Treatment implants dependent on Agility. This works well for laddering the head, eye and right-hand in a cycle until you can’t go any higher. Again, there is another way . You can make the right hand dependent on Stamina if you like. If you put in a faded Treatment Cluster, and something in the shiny slot- leaving the bright slot empty, you’ll end up with a Treatment (or Computer Literacy) implant that is dependent on Stamina. Like the above technique, this takes advantage of the excess of buffs and equipment for Stamina as compared to Agility. A fully twinked setup with an Agility based right hand, will end up with something like a 76/77ish implant on a lvl 10 toon. If you switch that to Stamina based- particularly if you’ve also just done the above-mentioned Strength-Chest-Trick and you’re maxing out your Stamina implants, you can get that right hand a fair ways up over 80. You may only get 2 or 3 points of Treatment, but that might be enough to go one level higher in some of your other implants. This is also mostly a temporary technique to get other imps a bit higher. You’ll probably want to put “normal” clusters in all three (or just the faded and bright) slots when you finalize your toon.

It’s been a long time since I’ve used this method for Computer Literacy and it’s a bit different since you’re losing treatment as you take out imps. Just keep in mind that you can make Computer Literacy depend on Stamina in the right-hand if it would benefit you to do so .

One caveat: This hand trick essentially relies on the difference in available buffs for Stamina being higher than Agility and will make the most notable difference for a breed/prof with higher Stamina. The difference between Stamina and Agility will be less for an Opifex, and thus, this technique will not have as dramatic a result as it would on an Atrox. If you happen to have Lya’s Sangi shoulder pads and/or your prof has some great agility bonuses through research or something, you might not find this technique worth it at all.

  1. Equipping a Crypt Collar on a low level non-Trader/Agent:

This section is more of a template than a guide strictly speaking- and this is also where I REALLY start to feel like the magician showing all his tricks . I have no doubt that some people will look at this and say “Oh- that’s all it is? anyone can do that…” The Crypt Collar requires 470 Bio Met skill to equip and at first glance would seem to be quite out of reach for anyone around level 10ish. It does take some solid twinking and some more expensive equipment but can be done quite low, especially for a Nanomage and/or paid toon. (Nanomage able to use Shades of Lucubration for a few points to BM through trickledown- and paid able to use NS, and some profs with Research lines for BM). A Nanomage with Shades will have a 5 point BM advantage over a Trox with White Sack (of the same profession/level).

The template is one I made quite a while ago while I was working on a lvl 9 Froob Enforcer so I’m a bit rusty on the exact process. I tend to make templates for things like this so I don’t have to re-figure the best setup when I do a similar job several months later. Equipping the Collar is fairly easy to do with a Trader or Agent, as they can drain for any BM they have to make up. Here is the setup I used for my lowest Froob non-Trader/Agent, a lvl 9 Atrox Enforcer:
Setup: http://auno.org/ao/equip.php?saveid=141523

Note that I wasn’t using QL400 Filigree rings like in this template- can’t specify QLs for some reason… I only had +3 BM rings so that’s one of the places you can improve on this setup. Don’t recall whether Pioneer Backpack was required- would only give one trickledown if at all.

I often use a QL51 Worn Soft Pepper Pistol for this (with an intelligence pistol in the off hand), as it’s easier to twink on having to only buff Pistol skill. However, that setup came out a bit short when trying to get on the collar on this lvl 9 Enf. Using the Pillow with Important Stripes, gives one more BM skill, and lets you use a Polychromatic Pillow in the off-hand for 10 more intelligence (as opposed to the 5 you get from an intelligence pistol). I should probably pause and call more attention that pistol setup as it’s almost as good and a lot easier to work with. A QL51 Worn Pepper Pistol requires only 251 Pistol skill to equip, which can be made with Extreme Prejudice (+120/43 ncu) and a wrangle. With 101 ncu, you can get a 132 wrangle in there and not even implant pistol or cast Expertise. With the Pepper Pistol and Intelligence Pistol in the off hand, you’ll only be two or three points behind this Pillow setup which will work just as well for all but the most extreme cases. For an exact template- copy this exact auno config above- ignore all the melee skills and switch the pillows for the pistols- done .Now- back to our regularly scheduled program.

With this Pillow setup, you have to pay more attention to the peripheral implants- as you have to twink to get on the Pillow and max BM with the same setup. Ideally you don’t want to waste IP on 1HB, Sneak, Brawl etc… so those are all implanted as much as possible, and buffed with Back Pain, Dirty Fighter, Thug’s Delight, Brutal Thug as needed. You may still have to spend a few points in Fast Attack or Dimach to get on the Pillow… I was also stuck just before coming up with this setup, needing one or two more points of BM. I finally noticed that I hadn’t put intelligence in the eye. After getting that figured out, I went about actually equipping the Collar.

As for specific process, You’ll need a lot of NCU, so start with your Ring of Nucleus equipped and wearing a set of Carb armor. Get all the buffs you need to get on your pillows.

Back Pain: 18 ncu, +64 Sneak Attack
Thug’s Delight: 1 ncu, +14 1 Hand Blunt
Brutal Thug: 24 ncu, +87 1 Hand Blunt
Dirty Fighter: 11 ncu, +45 Brawl
Wrangle: 58 ncu, +132 1 Hand Blunt

That would be 112 ncu total, and you can add some base ability boosts or IC/Essence etc… if you have room, You’ll need a little more ncu for the next phase anyway . With those buffs, you’re at about the max- and if you need any more points to get on the Pillow with Important Stripes, you may have to spend IP on the individual skills.

After you have your pillows on, you need to cancel all those buffs and get Bio Met buffed.

BM Mochams: 51 ncu, +140 BM
BM Expertise: 4 ncu, +20 BM
Wrangle: 58 ncu, +132 BM
Intelligence Boost: 3 ncu, +12 Intelligence (~3 BM)

That’s 116 NCU total- shouldn’t be too hard with a set of Carb and Ring of Nucleus maxed out. You can also Cast Psychic Boost (and NS if you’re a paid toon) for a bit of trickle down if you have the ncu. At this point we should be maxed out and it’s time to swap off the Carb armor and equip the Omni Special Issue Executive suit, Equip the White sack and swap the Ring of Nucleus for the Filigree ring. This should be it. However you arrived at this point, you should be just about maxed out in Bio Met right now and able to equip the Crypt Collar .

  1. Equipping the TiM Scope on a low level toon
    (hopefully ) without spending IP:

This one is also fairly straight forward and I’m not sure a video is necessary. I’m going to use a level 10 Solitus Froob as a sample but you can modify the process up to 15-25 etc… Again- this is one of those items that at first glance appears to have really high requirements, and may not have occurred to you to try and equip at all- on your level 15 Pistol Doctor or whatever. That was the case for me for quite some time .

TiM Scope

This is a good item for most ranged profs, even if you’re not using a Rifle, due to the +180 Ranged Initiative. Crit chance boost is also nice, but you can get that from a Range Meter if you have no use for the ranged init. Like the Crypt Collar, an Agent or Trader will have an easier time with this. A Trader can drain up to gain any points they are short of Rifle skill and an agent could do the same- but they would likely be using a Rifle anyway and have these skills maxed already. I’ll try to show how to do this without either of those benefits.

The process here is basically going to be first twinking Perception as high as you can, equipping a normal Targeting Scope, and then twinking Rifle and Aimed Shot and hot-swapping the Tim Scope over the Targeting Scope. The Targeting scope gives a large boost to Aimed Shot and the higher one you can equip, the less you have to worry about twinking Aimed Shot. If you have access to that Clan Solitus 205+ perception perk (I believe it gives at least 1000 perception?), you can equip a QL275 Targeting Scope without doing any Perception twinking at all. For the rest of us, all is not lost . There is plenty of room in the middle of the road to work this out.

The setup will be to configure your implants for maximum Perception and Rifle- triple implanting both of those, with Aimed Shot in the one slot that doesn’t conflict with Rifle.

First, we’re going to first get Perception as high as possible. Get Karma Harvet, Blood Makes Noise and, as of the last patch, composite Combat Expertise. There may be other Perception buffs that are better- these are just what I used. Equip the Bracelets of Amplified Sound and as high of a Targeting Scope as you can. Switch to a GripoCom Rifle. This will get your Aimed Shot as high as possible. Cancel your perception buffs and get Take The Shot, Unexpected Attack and 132 Wrangle plus the ranged expertises. This will require a lot of NCU- 155 with these buffs. This can be done with a 4x belt, QL70ish Memory chips, Crypt Collar, Ring of Nucleus and a set of Carb Armor. Now you should be very close to equipping the TiM Scope if this all worked out- hotswap the TiM scope over top of the Targeting Scope and you should be good to go.

This is the setup I used, shown in the middle of the process, just before equipping the TiM Scope.
http://auno.org/ao/equip.php?saveid=160796

I didn’t put any armor in this setup. I left it blank to fill in with buffing armor as needed. For the Perception part, anything that buffs Sense (70%) or Intelligence (30%) can be added. Kirch Kevlar and Nova Dillon would add Sense. If you had Polychromatic Pillows or a Sense Rifle, you could use it during the Perception phase as well. For the final phase requiring Rifle and AS, Rifle is 60% Agility, 40% Sense. Kirch Kevlar armor works well for buffing armor if you need it.

The good news with this particular twinking task is that it’s not a deal breaker if you don’t have exactly enough skills to do any part of this. This process is assuming you’ve spent no IP in Perception, Aimed Shot or Rifle. You can spend IP as needed if you find a great Targeting Scope but are a little short on Perception. Spend a little in perception to get that on. If you end up a little short in AS or Rifle- it won’t kill you to spend a few points of IP if it will allow you to equip it.

For my specific process, it went something like this: with that basic implant setup, plus polychromatic pillows and some buffing armor, I ended up with 370ish perception after buffing. I added the Bracelets of Amplification which bumped that up to 390ish. I found a few scopes of different levels, and ended up with a QL167 scope- that’s quite a bit of overkill in this case, clearing the AS requirement for the TiM Scope by a large margin in the end. I cancelled the Perception buffs and equipped the GripoCom Rifle. With UA, TTS and Wrangle, this brought me to about 357AS and 400 Rifle.

  1. Equipping a 6 Slot belt on a low level Trader/Agent:

This will be a guide/visual walkthrough of Casting Bulk Trader and equipping a QL160 six-slot belt on a level 10 Froob Solitus Trader. For some people this will be old news and a trivial task to accomplish. For people who have never seen it done before, I hope this answers some questions I’ve seen on Forums and websites about what works and what doesn’t, regarding draining, hotswapping, timing, casting etc… There are a number of ways to do this with a variation on equipment and techniques. I’m aiming to show a happy medium of exotic vs. simple and Paid vs. Froob. If you have a paid toon with lots of cash and equipment, you’ll be able to do this at a much lower level. If you have a Froob account with a minimum of fancy toys, you may be doing this a few levels higher. This will hopefully demonstrate one possible process of getting this done, which can be modified to your specific situation.

Video Walkthrough on YouTube:

Equipping a six slot belt at level ten is not the most difficult of twink jobs, but it does take some amount of resources and equipment (and cash) to accomplish. I am going to assume that you have a good base of twinking expertise and can get to the base setups without walking through them specifically. (read the first part of the guide to get there ).

The first part of equipping a 6 slot belt is getting on a 5 slot belt. I’m going to assume you have already gotten on a 4 slotter and go from there. This is the setup I used to equip my 5x belt, a QL100 which requires 251 computer literacy: http://auno.org/ao/equip.php?saveid=157840 This setup is really not optimized at all and can certainly a bit more finely “twinked” if you need a couple more points. If you want to jump ahead and look at the setup for the 6x belt you can use that setup for both of these phases.

A few words about the Pioneer Backpack: It’s a very handy tool, but not necessarily the game breaker that it is sometimes thought to be. Essentially, a Pioneer Backpack gives you 150 Tutoring which allows you to use a higher level Computer Literacy Tutoring Device than you would otherwise be able to use. Some people seem to think that you need a Pioneer Backpack to use a CL Tutoring Device- or they think it will be insignificant without it and not bother at all. With a PB, you’ll likely end up using a QL50ish tutoring device (+13), whereas you’ll be using about a QL25 tutoring device without (+7). That’s a difference of about 5-7 Complit give-or-take depending how you twink and spend IP etc… If you would like to use a Focus Funneling Helper, you may have to work harder on twinking Tutoring to get one on. With a PB, you may be able to get two Helpers on, but I used only one for this demonstration.

As an alternative to the Pioneer Backpack, you might consider the “Senior Omni Intern-Op Coat” (http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=160926&ql=44). They appear to come in all levels up to 200, but starting at QL44 it adds +3 to Computer Literacy and Tutoring. That’s a good start to making up the difference from not having a Pioneer Backpack.

Equipping the Five-Slot Belt:
The Process itself is pretty straight forward. Running buffs are: Intelligence boost, Computer Literacy Expertise, Tutoring Expertise and as much wrangle as you need to cast Frequent Customer. Of course you can use MP Masteries/Infuses or drains to get the skills- bottom line is getting enough to cast Frequent Customer, the +55 Complit Trader buff. Make sure you have room in your inventory to hold the four memory chips we’re about to remove. Keep your 5 slot belt handy in your inventory- ready to equip. (It won’t work to do this from a backpack- must be in inventory).

  • Have another Trader cast a wrangle on you (or MP buffs or drain as needed).
  • Cast Frequent customer to make sure it works- that you have enough nano-pool etc… to cast.
  • double check your Computer Literacy skill. If you are using a computer literacy tutoring device, activate it and verify that your skill is high enough to get the 5x belt on (251 CL in this case) No need to panic on this, but don’t relax too much either- the tutoring device boost will only last for two minutes.
  • If your CL skill is high enough and everything checks out, cast Frequent Customer again (now you can panic ) and begin immediately un-equipping memory chips from your belt by right-clicking them in turn.
  • Once all four memory chips are out, right-click your 5x belt from your inventory to begin equipping it.

You have to get all four chips out of your belt and begin equipping your 5x belt before Frequent Customer runs out- which lasts for one minute . That wasn’t too bad. The timing gets tighter as you do the 6 slot belt and you’re un-equipping 5 chips and starting the belt in less than a minute.

After a couple minutes, your 5x belt will be on and you’ll be left with an empty deck with no ncu chips. The good news is that you still have computer literacy implanted and partly buffed. Begin putting in some lower level ncus until you get enough room to re-do the whole Frequent Customer thing- and then upgrade all your chips back to something in the range requiring 251ish Complit (about QL107ish) - or as high as you can go.

Equipping the Six-Slot Belt:
This will be a similar setup as before, with a more specific implant layout aimed at buffing nanoskills as well as Computer Literacy. Specifically, the chest has SI in the faded slot, ear has PM, right-hand and eye have TS as well as Complit. The rest of the implants are the same as when equipping the 5x belt. I have also equipped a Crypt Collar since doing the 5x belt. You could go straight to this setup and equip both belts one after the other if you plan better than I did and do the Collar first . In order to equip a 6x belt, you’ll need to cast Bulk Trader for the +160 Complit buff. That nano requires 456 PM, and 418 SI to cast and requires 30 ncu. This will mean buffing and draining quite a bit and about 220-230 ncu (exactly 226 in this case). There are ways to cast Bulk Trader using less ncu, but this is one way to go about it.

The setup I used for Bulk Trader:
http://auno.org/ao/equip.php?saveid=157961

This is a combination of Carb for the ncu and the Omni Grey suit for the CL buff. I planned it out to end up having one more Complit than needed, just to be on the safe side. There is some leeway here to make up a few points by juggling armor around a bit. In this case the chip removal process also went very well, with about 5-6 seconds remaining on Bulk Trader after unequipping all the chips. This would be enough time to swap out a piece or two of Carb armor for Grey Suit before starting the belt switch. That’s getting really tight though

After you start the belt equipping, Bulk Trader will run out almost instantly after. It’s ok for that to happen as long as you don’t interrupt the process. As long as you have the required skills when you begin equipping the belt, it should keep going, even if Bulk Trader runs out one second later. I’ve heard of cases where the belt will stop equipping after Bulk Trader runs out. I’ve never had that happen myself but it might be the case if you have lag issues or slow internet or something. I have had issues getting the memory chips to unequip fast enough to get 5 out before Bulk Trader quits. I once tried two or three times before I gave up on that. The specs say that memory chips have a 10 second equip time, so that should total 50 seconds to unequip, plus a couple seconds for the human element of clicking and reaction time. That should still leave a good 7-8 seconds to get the belt started, but I’ve had cases where there was at least a 1-2 second delay after the equip-bar finished for each chip to actually move out of the belt into the inventory.

When that happened to me I had to figure out how to do this process with only 4 ncu chips. This also isn’t too complicated. Basically, once you’ve cast Bulk Trader with your five ncu chips, you should have about 351ish computer literacy. At this point, don’t worry about swapping the belt just yet- go out and upgrade four of your memory chips to something requiring 350ish CL (QL132 is perfect). You’re actually not even really wasting time as you’ll want to have some good ncus in eventually anyway and you can use these chips in your final setup. I discovered that four QL132 ncu chips give the same as five QL107 chips- (from our 5x belt phase- a little more actually). Take out that 5th memory chip and do the same process with just four of the higher chips.

One last option to shave time is to use a Waste Collector NCU.
http://auno.org/ao/db.php?id=207260
This gives less NCU than what we’d normally be using, but it also has a 5 second equip time instead of 10. If you wanted to work in one or two of these to a five chip swap attempt, this may make the difference if your timing is tight.

Now for the process:
You’ll need to have an MP and a high level Trader handy for buffs, as well as a friend or an alt to drain from. You can go to a backyard to do this, but I’ve found things much easier if you stay in the shop and drain off a flagged friend. I used to go to a backyard to do this process and drain off leets and reets. However, I found that I had issues with running out of nano-pool and finding things to drain. Even if you have a couple high level toons with you, they can hit you with stims, but they can’t do the nano-kit if you’re in a fight. So you gotta kill whatever it is you’re draining before they can do that. Then you find something else to drain… Some of these higher drain nanos- (and Bulk Trader) will use over half your nanopool in one cast at this level. After a few times doing this, you’ve soon killed off everything near the entrance and you’re wandering around the backyard trying to find stuff to drain- all while waiting for your high level friend’s stims and nano kits to recharge. All that to say- stay in the shop and use the surgery clinic to charge your nano .

There are a variety of ways to do this but for this sample, the running buffs will start off as:
132 Wrangle, Time Space and Psy Mod Infuse and Expertise, Sensory Improvement Expertise, Intelligence boost, Computer Literacy Expertise, Tutoring Expertise.

These will be the running buffs for the draining phase. Once we have our skills high enough, we’ll cancel Time Space Infuse and get Sensory Improvement Infuse. SI Expertise and CL/Tutoring don’t need to be running now but if you have the ncu you can leave them going and not have to worry about casting later.

  • Get 132 Wrangle cast
  • Drain your friend/drainpet up until you have at least 456 Psy Mod, and
    328 SensImp (Sensory Improvement needs to be within 90 of 418- so that when we cancel TS and cast SI Infuse, we have at least 418)
  • in this case my drains needed to be Deprive-Advanced and Ransack-Major
  • Redrain your highest drains and keep them fresh to avoid running out mid process
  • Recast 132 Wrangle to make sure it is also fresh and won’t run out
  • Cancel Time Space Infuse, Cast SensImp Infuse
  • Upload Bulk Trader and cast it once to make sure you have enough nanopool- will take a surprising amount- but then again it is a QL96 nano
  • Double check your Computer Literacy skill. (Know ahead of time how much you will gain from your Tutoring Device).
  • Activate your CL Tutoring device- (and triple check your CL skill )
  • Cast Bulk Trader again and immediately begin removing memory chips. Right click them in turn as quickly as you can
  • When the last chip is out, right-click your Six Slot belt in your inventory and it will begin equipping- taking the place of your five slot belt. You’ll likely have a 2-6 second margin of error on this whole process- focus young Jedi!
  • Wipe the sweat from your brow, walk away from the computer and come back later when it’s all done equipping (at least 140 seconds).

With the new belt in and no ncu chips, you’ll have to start over again laddering up your ncus from scratch. You’ll probably be putting in some rather low chips at first- working up to casting Frequent customer, and then to higher chips and then to Bulk Trader and finally maxed out chips and whatever else you put in your belt .

  1. A Speed Twink Project:

This isn’t really related to the guide but I figured it might be of some interest as it shows all of the steps in a normal twink project. It’s been a long time since I made this guy, but I wanted to run through a whole twink job in one day- and end up with a toon capable of soloing Abmouth. The result is this lvl 21 Doctor using Fear-Forged Blades. I recorded the whole day’s work with Fraps and sped it up incredibly to fit it all in. I did cut out a fair bit of the implant making process as it’s the longest part and mostly takes place on my MP who runs off and makes implants and gives them to the Doc- who then equips them. That’s the one comment/question I’ve had about this video, about all the ready-made implants I had. Those implants in the backpacks at the beginning help to get started and build up to a base level of QL 70-90ish implants, but the majority of the implant process is all custom made implants. So, don’t worry if you don’t have a collection of old imps to get started. That’s not critical- just how I get the twinking started . Here it is- “ForgedSteel” from beginning to end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEhUSwIhHS8.

Last edited by Dredd; Jul 31st, 2010 at 23:59:30.

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Dredd’s guide is just massive. Hiorbit’s engineer guide is quite useful, too!