Idlechasing for priests

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Warning.png WARNING: This page contains information about idlechasing, which now returns less xp and is no longer possible by sharing experience in a group due to changes[1] to the game.

Since the change all commands that give xp typically return 20 times (or less) the cost in GP and command xp is no longer shared.
The creators have proposed missions as a way to gain experience without combat.

Personal idlechasing that gives 20 times the gp cost is still possible and these pages still contain interesting information on using commands, keeping in mind the differences outlined above.

(This is written with the idea that you've already read Idlechasing, and know the basics of how idling works.)

Priests have a unique constraint, in that our idling is best done at our high altar. Consecrating and scouring must be done at our high altar, while bestowing is most convenient for idling while at our high altar (since the easiest way to incorporate it into an idling alias is to ward an item using Divine Guard, then scour the ward from it so that the item can be used again). All is not lost, however, since there's one specific spot that's good for this kind of idling: the priests' guild tower in east Bes Pelargic. There, there are high altars for all seven deities, and none more than six rooms apart. If everyone in the group follows each other, and there aren't more than two or three priests doing this, the priests can easily go back and forth between their high altars for the two commands that need to be done there (consecrate and scour). This takes a little more attention than normal idling, but the hassle can be minimized if you put consecrate and scour in their own alias, like so: 

 alias xpaltar consecrate gappic symbol;scour wards from xptarget

...therefore reducing the amount of time that you need to spend at your high altar.

For idling that mixes 30x commands with other, lower-return commands, it's best to figure out the minimum number of commands you need in between the main ones to make the main ones give full xp, rather than relying on the five minute timer--that way you're using as little gp as possible on lower-return commands. I've found that I can use seven commands ( take your pick--mine are perform solo, serenade, play, peek, hide, unhide, and palm) that take 10 gp each, then Divine Guard, then bestow, consecrate, and scour, and that does the trick. (With 4gp regen, this is slightly under four minutes' worth of gp.)

Notes on commands

Bestowing

Bestowing a ritual is a 30x command whether you bestow it into a faith rod--or, more conveniently--as a ward.

Bestowing a ritual into a faith rod takes the same amount of gp it takes to perform the ritual, as well as that amount of deity points.

Bestowing a ritual as a ward--after performing Divine Guard or Divine Sentinel on the item--takes an amount of gp that may or may not be the same as the amount of gp it takes to perform the ritual, but it doesn't take deity points and can be done anywhere.

Bestowing a ritual either way takes whatever components it would take to perform the ritual normally.

The highest-bestowal-cost ritual tested so far is Divine Hand, at 180 gp. It's slightly dangerous, as scouring a Divine Hand ward can sometimes put you into the butchers' guild freezer, where you can freeze to death if you're not paying attention[1]. It's therefore a good idea to have the scour command at the end of your at-altar alias (so that it doesn't interfere with the consecrate) and to do it at a point where you'll have enough gp to passage out quickly. Or, for somewhat lower return, you can use a different ritual--see the Scouring section for suggestions.

Here's a list of various rituals and the gp it takes to bestow them as wards:


Rituals which can't be bestowed as wards at all include Divine Guard, Divine Sentinel, Raise Dead, Remember Place, and Resurrect.

Missing: Stasis, Great Stasis, and rituals not granted by Sandelfon or Pishe.

If you're not idling at your high altar, you can still use this one if you:

  • Have a lot of consecrated items you want to ward or don't mind warding (incense works well for this as it comes pre-consecrated) or
  • Have low enough fa.it.sc that you'll fail the bestow the majority of the time (Whether you succeed seems to be related more closely to the difficulty of the ritual than to the amount of gp it takes; for example, I succeed at bestowing Divine Hand far more often than Endless Halls.) or
  • Have access to Summon Fluff, as the fluff comes into being pre-consecrated to your deity. If you're using it from a rod, you'll need to pray with about 200 gp for each use to avoid draining the pool.


Method for saving DP

If you are using Summon Fluff from a rod, you can reduce your deity points usage lots by making one ball last for 4 idle runs. I came up with the following rotating alias to achieve that: 

alias sf sf1

alias sf1 perform summon fluff from baton; draw knife; cut my ball; cut my halves; sheathe blade; put 3 quarters in container; alias sf sf2
alias sf2 get quarter from container; alias sf sf3
alias sf3 get quarter from container; alias sf sf4
alias sf4 get quarter from container; alias sf sf1

From this, you can simply do your alias as usual with: sf; perform divine guard on my quarter; bestow <ritual> on quarter.

The number of pieces you can cut a fluve into depends on its size.

Scouring

The important thing to keep in mind is that if you're scouring a ward, you can end up triggering that ward. So, whatever ritual you're bestowing should be one that you don't mind triggering this way. Divine Hand is a reasonable choice, since it won't harm you directly to trigger it--and most of the time, even if you do trigger it, you'll only end up back at your high altar. Some of the time, however, triggering a Divine Hand ward this way will send you to the freezer of the butcher's guild in Ankh-Morpork, where you can freeze to death if you're extremely slow to passage out (it appears to take around 18 minutes to freeze to death). So, this is not a good option if you're inattentive. (You can, however, create a colour or sound trigger for the "You feel a bit chilly" message you get shortly after you enter the freezer.) Rituals that are slightly lower-cost--but safe--include:

  • Agoraphobia, 135 gp: will not inconvenience you as long as your high altar is indoors.
  • Major Shield, at 120 gp: will only result in you being shielded if you trigger it.
  • See Alignment, at 135 gp: will have the same effect as if you'd performed See Alignment normally. Harmless.
  • Sparkling Shelter, at 150 gp: same as Major Shield, except you get the Sparkling Shelter shield.

If you sometimes fail to bestow the ward, but don't want to break the scour part of your alias, a good thing to do is to follow the "bestow <main ritual>" part of your alias with trying to bestow a smaller, easier ritual (twice, if necessary). Demoralise is a good choice for Sandelfonians; Devout Inquisition is a decent choice for others (triggering Devout Inquisition gives the same result as if you'd performed the ritual normally). (This doesn't interfere with anything if you succeed in bestowing the main ritual, as the second and third bestows will just fail and consume no gp.)

While you can technically scour places as well as wards, this is useless as it uses no gp and gives no xp.

Consecrating

For incorporating consecration, there are three options:

  • Use the wearable symbol (narrow ivory bracelet, fluffy ball, thimble, square stone, line of shark teeth, brass feather, black medallion) of a deity other than yours. These can't be reconsecrated, but you can spend gp trying. Holy relics are the same way.
  • Have three or more unconsecrated items that join into a special pile object. Seeds or threads from a spool of thread are ideal. Once the consecrated item has been returned to the pile in your pack, it will lose its consecration.
    palm a thread from pack;consecrate thread;slip thread to pack
  • Have a large number of unconsecrated items. If all your items are already consecrated--or if you just want to keep your alias uniform--the cheapest and most convenient way to do this is to use a book of cigarette papers, and just 
    tear paper from book;consecrate paper
    . For this method, you need to keep an eye on things so you know when you run out of papers--I usually consecrate the book itself, then drop and bury it when that happens. There are twenty papers in a book, so depending on how long you plan on idling you may need more than one book. Remember not to consecrate the book first--if you do that, all the papers in it will be consecrated as well. This can be nice if you want a way to keep track of how many iterations you've done.
  • Hattites can use the totem ritual to get an endless supply of unconsecrated party hats (the totem leaves them behind when it departs).
  • Use one or two items and pass them between priests of different deities.
  • Have low enough fa.ri.sp skills that you fail the consecration.

Ritual burial

This isn't entirely suitable for idling, for the obvious reason that you need a steady supply of corpses, but it's worth mentioning that if you fail your ritbury (though not if you successfully start it and then stop partway through), you or someone else can make another burial attempt for more xp. It's more difficult to bury more corpses at once.

Notes on rituals

Since rituals give the same xp return as non-guild commands, the main reasons to include most of them are 1)you're in the tm zone for that ritual, 2)you don't have enough commands that use skills you want to tm to round out your alias, or 3)you want to use up that last bit of gp that you can only use on faith commands.

Divine Guard

See above notes on bestowing.

Healing rituals

It might not seem like you can easily incorporate these into your aliases, but it's entirely doable if you can get ahold of an item you can injure yourself with.

One of the most convenient is broken glass; handling it will do a small (under 100 hp) amount of damage. Just taking it out of a container and then putting it back in doesn't seem to be enough, though--you have to hold it for a few seconds. Therefore, it's easiest to set up your alias to take it out of a container, do a ritual, put it back, then cure yourself. You can get broken glass by throwing things at street lights in Ankh-Morpork to break them, although this is vandalism and can get you a jail sentence of a few minutes.

Another option is a black pine box: opening it without disarming the trap takes about 200 hp.

Note that different "cure ___ wounds" rituals don't appear to count as different rituals for command xp purposes--performing cure light wounds, then cure serious wounds (for example) will result in getting less than full xp for cure serious wounds. Heal does seem to count separately, though.

Holy Sacrifice

A useful, if modestly dangerous, ritual, which you can read about here. Because of its nature, it's only suitable for idling if you're willing to pay attention (and have the bonuses to pull it off), but it can give you an effective gp regen rate far beyond what you can achieve naturally. Warning: If you go net-dead while sacrificing, you're likely to bleed to death, since you will continue to bleed until you either die or reconnect and staunch the bleeding. Note that even attentive groupmates can't save you if this happens, since net-dead players can't be healed with rituals, or bandaged.

Longsight

A good target for longsight is an npc who's always--or nearly always--alive, such as:

  • Althea
  • Guild npcs, such as Aqua, Jim, Sol
  • The LAG ("lag"), who respawns instantly when killed.
  • Mesa Boogie ("mesa"), who runs away whenever he's attacked.
  • Pewsey, who just gives you a cold if you attack him.

You may want to change your target as you advance your skills, for better tm chances.

Relief

This takes all of your gp, and turns it into gp to give to someone else. It costs about 20 gp immediately, and the remainder of your gp at the end of the ritual. Relief no longer drains the hit points of the ritual's performer. Relief is more immediately helpful to the target of the ritual than to the one performing it, as it seems to only give xp for the first 20 gp.

Totem

A very easy ritual that practically guarantees you a target. This is incredibly useful if you want to incorporate commands that need a target (such as peek, plant, or serenade), or want to perform rituals on someone other than yourself (for example, if you're trying to tm the faith.ritual.x.target instead of faith.ritual.x.self skill, or if you want to incorporate a ritual that can cause the target to attack you). Keep in mind that if you attack your totem, or do something that would cause it to attack you, it will dissipate. In other respects, though, totems are superior to sheep shearers as targets, since they can't be killed or thrown to other people, and they follow you automatically.

You might also want to summon a totem to make other rituals more difficult.

You can use Dust Devil in the same way if you have high enough skills to consistently succeed at it.

Example Alias'

Example 1

GP: 390 

hide
unhide
conceal my staff
unconceal my staff
get whistle from <container>
blow whistle
play whistle
perform solo with whistle
serenade human 1 with whistle
slip whistle into <containter>
get rock & hammer from <container> into left hand
chip rock with hammer
put rock & hammer in <container>
perform divine guard on pebble
bestow divine hand on pebble
bury pebble in me

This is the best xp generation alias, the concept is to fill the 9 15x filler commands needed with the lowest gp expended, so the 30x commands can be fired off as much as possible.

Other 10gp commands such as the following can be substituted depending on the players failure rates on hide and conceal
palm <item> from <container>
consult <map>
read thaumometer
point thaumometer at < enchanted item>
peek human 1

Holy Sacrifice Example 1

Example 1

GP: 520 

staunch bleeding
staunch bleeding
staunch bleeding
hide
unhide
conceal my staff
unconceal my staff
get whistle from <container>
blow whistle
play whistle
perform solo with whistle
serenade human 1 with whistle
slip whistle into <containter>
get rock & hammer from <container> into left hand
chip rock with hammer
put rock & hammer in <container>
perform cure light wounds on me
perform cure medium wounds on me
perform divine guard on pebble
bestow divine hand on pebble
bury pebble in me
perform cure medium wounds on me  /*This is a backup/extra healing incase you weren't fully healed*/
perform holy sacrifice

Other 10gp commands can be substituted
This alias' has more than the standard 11 commands, this is due to reseach done by me on a friends hattian priest, because the alias is fire repeatedly, so often more commands are required to stay off deminishing returns

Note
Using holy sacrifice is not like any other idle alias' the goal is to have as close to 0 gp after holy sacrifice is cast as possible to make the most of the rituals gp generation.
Commands may be substituted for higher gp commands or rituals as needed to achieve this goal

Notes

[1]Testing this out with a new character, it took 18 minutes to freeze to death. However, this might vary, and stat drops begin before then.

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