Old Hunting Style

Hello, Tibians Old Guard! It's been some time since our storyteller wizard told his last tales in "Tibia Nostalgia series – episode 1". In that occasion, you had the chance to recall the old haunted area so-called Triangle of Luring and the attacks of wild creatures lured from the Plains of Havoc into cities.

This time he will make you recall a bit about the old hunting style, in a time travel to Tibia 7.1-7.2 - eleven years ago. Things were much different, to name but a few: A knight would use ultimate healing runes to heal himself while hunting; an experienced level 40 mage would use a skull staff or a fire sword to hunt rotworms while making sudden death or ultimate healing runes to sell in "Trade Channel"; and finally, a sharp paladin would use sudden death runes along with a crossbow and bolts to kill demons, the strongest creature that existed back then. Those are days to remember! :-) Of course, we can't talk about this topic without mentioning some things first. Check it out!

Teamwork to kill a dragon - that wasn't something uncommon.

(Artwork by Combi)

• Small range: there were only 68 creatures in whole Tibia in 7.1 client. Bosses? A distant dream!

• The ten strongest monsters were: Demon , Warlock , Behemoth , Dragon Lord , Black Knight , Hero , Giant Spider , Dragon , Necromancer and Priestess . In Tibia 7.2 six new monsters were added to this list, including Banshee , Orc Warlord , Orc Rider , Ghost and two others.

  

• Creatures could be lured as far as your character would resist. They could also be "roped" as many floors up as possible and would fall into hidden holes. This was used as a strategy to kill the hero single spawn in Edron, for example, as you will see in the video.

• Monsters didn't have haste or were so "smart" as now. In fact, when Tibia 7.2 was released in December 2003 they became smarter than they were before: they could re-target, walk diagonal, run away from you (e.g. Orc Shaman , Necromancer ) and possibly some of them started to walk through fields by this time - so they could not be trapped so easily as before.

• If you were in the upper or lower floor from a monster, it would stay still. You could go down/up, attack it (not needing to wait two seconds) and return - I remember we used this strategy to kill Giant Spider in the Plains of Havoc temple without getting attacked.

• The Summon Creature spell was frequently used to hunt because even existing few monsters they were stronger than most players of that time, so they would use e.g. Orc Leader to hunt Dragon or Demon Skeleton to hunt Necromancer - sometimes with a group of 4, 5 players. Awesome!

• There were only two premium cities: Edron and Darashia - so, sure, not enough hunting grounds for the number of players online - which was between 600-800 in most worlds.

• The most popular ones were: Plains of Havoc, Dragon Lairs, Orc Fortress and to the almighty players Demons, Behemoths and Heroes in Edron.

• As you can imagine or remember, many hunting grounds were crowded. For example, there was a queue to kill giant spiders in PoH in some servers.

Training... It's quite fun to talk about it! Many players would train hard to get incredible 75/75 skills before starting their hunting adventures - while others would do anything to get a powerful two handed weapon instead, such as a giant sword to level up fast - there was no level restriction to wield weapons. Others found it boring to train - this didn't change much along time; what has changed is the way people increase their skills.

• Obviously the convenience of target dummies or offline training were in distant times. In PvP worlds you could find the so-called "training centers". People gathered together to train attacking each other or summoned monks. Was a great way to chat with friends, make runes (even paladins could make HMM runes to sell) and get food by fishing - without worms, of course.

• In the picture above you can see players training without skulls. The "Duel mode" along with the skull system was introduced straight after, within Tibia 7.2.

• The problem was that anyone could join that mode and thus kill players without getting a skull. It was improved few months later in 2004 with the introduction of Party mode.

• There was no skill bar, therefore every advance was kind of exciting.

• The training weapon of paladins were spears - heavy (20 oz), indeed, but didn't break. On other hand, there was an annoying "reality fact": once you attacked something with a spear it stayed on the floor and you needed to pick it up again!

  
  Classic lonely training with slimes using spears in Non-PvP servers.

• Many mages liked to stay in peaceful places such as near depots to make runes - their largest source of income (even though mana points regenerated 1 by 1 =P).

What to say about weapons and equipment to hunt? ;-)

• How to get a good weapon? There was no market. You had to negotiate things with other players through the trade channel (now the empty advertising channel) and through #Y (yelling). Once you found an interesting item being sold, you needed to meet the player in question in his city or combine a meeting place like the dwarven bridge or Thais boat.

• In most servers the prices of good items were extremely expensive. Have a look at some prices back to January 2004:

• However, in older servers (Antica), you could buy e.g. a demon shield three times cheaper.

• What is worth to mention is that trade channel didn't have the two minutes waiting period and muting didn't exist, this means... SPAM!

Planning some hunts or quests sometimes lasted days. Seriously! If you didn't play back then, you may be wondering why people were accepting UHs and SDs as payment for items in the quotes above. Simply because NPC's didn't sell runes. The sale of runes was the source of income of most mages.

• A backpack of Ultimate Healing runes costed around 2.5k and one of Sudden Death runes about 4k. A level 11 druid with magic level 11 could make UH runes. Players needed magic level 4 to use them. And why all vocations would buy it? Potions were introduced four years later - in December 2007.

• Even knights used UH runes to heal themselves while hunting. The strength of offensive and healing runes was mainly based in level rather than magic level - different from now. That's why all vocations used UHs, HMMs, GFBs, Explosions... added to the fact that paladins didn't have spell areas, and knights could only learn Berserker (Exori).

• As for mana, there was the so-called vial of manafluid (some players saved some until today) which could restore your mana in 50 to 150 points and were sold for 55 gold coins each.

• Stacking?! This came ONLY in 2010! A backpack of runes was occupied with 20 runes with 1 charge each. Actually some runes had more charges but you could only know it by clicking on look. HMM had 5 charges. Organising your hunting backpack was really really time consuming

We could mention many other things that were different back then, and what seems incontestable is that Tibia has immeasurably evolved along all these years. From a small area to a HUGE map with all kinds of possibilities.

From 14 to 79 game worlds (data collected before the first world merges).

And to finish, here's some more data related to that topic (June, 2014):

It's that old story, my friend: even if not all changes were positive to the community's eyes, even if some players attempt to deny, the game has evolved - and evolved to better.

The possibilities, the amount of different things you can seek or do today in the game is astonishing.

Even though, for most of those who have been around for ages the amount of joy we get by recalling and reliving those old days can't be compared.