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Using Your Backpack |
A section on how to use a backpack? Don't you just put stuff in it and pull stuff out? Well, yes. You do. But your backpack is more than just a semi-secure place to tote your goods, it is also one of the prime means of organizing your important secondary equipment and an inexpensive platform for enchants.
The new player will quickly discover the benefits of having a backpack to hold all those treasure tidbits dropped by monsters and NPCs defeated in combat. Some will carefully place each item into the pack as it is found, others will wait a while and load many items into the pack at once. Both will smile with the ease that selling off their hunting gains by dragging the backpack to a shopkeeper and selecting Sell provides. One drag, one click and presto, the money comes rolling in.
Players will also quickly discover an added benefit of the backpack: security from thieves. Most thieves are completely unable to pick-pocket items stored in a container. By putting all their hard-earned treasure in their backpack, a player is safe-guarding their gains and securing their financial future.
A more seasoned player will make note of the security the backpack provides, notice vulnerability of the non-reusable supplies, i.e. gold and mana crystals, in their inventory and, putting two and two together, begin to store their accumulated non-reusables in the pack along with all the found treasures. And it works. A couple clicks and your available gold or your available mana is replenished. The player soon realizes that replenishing his mana in this manner, i.e. pulling the whole pile of mana out of the pack and then returning all but what is needed back, is inefficient. Far wiser to store the mana in small, usable piles and just pull out a pile as needed.
But then late one night this seasoned player will unthinkingly sell-off the contents on his pack and suddenly be hit by the realization that he just took a bath. Although mana sells one-for-one, gold does not and any gold this hapless player had in his pack when its contents were sold has provided only a 50% return.
Even the careful player that never makes the sleepy-eyed mistake will find the process of pulling the mana and gold out of the pack and then returning them back to the pack after selling off a tedious task, particularly since one must take the time to separate all that mana into nice, useful size piles (500 - 1000). Many players will give up on the whole idea of storing their non-reusable supplies inside their packs at this point. Safer to simply run home more frequently and keep their extra supplies safely inside their strongbox.
Other players will come to the conclusion that if one backpack is good, then two are even better. Use one to store the gold and mana and a second for all that good stuff one intends on selling next time they wander into town. Of course there are the ever-present thieves to consider and only one pack can be equipped and thereby made safe from being stolen. Obvious conclusion is to equip the pack that contains the most value. The second pack is largely safe anyway, right? Thieves tend to steal from the gold and mana piles more than the rest of the inventory don't they?
Yes, they do. But to many this is more of a risk than one cares to be burdened. Safer still to put that second pack inside the first where it is nearly immune from the advances of strange and lecherous fingers. Only problem is we have returned to being vulnerable to that sleepy-eyed mistake, only now it is worse. In selling off a pack that contains another pack the contents of the second pack, i.e. the pack inside the pack, are completely ignored. Talk about taking a bath. But, as long as one is very, very careful and religiously removes the second pack before selling the contents of the first, all is well. And if one chooses the second pack as the pack to hold all the treasures to be sold then one is quite unlikely to make the dreaded sleepy-eyed mistake as the routine of selling off will require the pulling that second pack from inside the first.
While this is a good arrangement, it is too involved for many of the less patient players. Impatient seasoned players will often keep their non-reusable supplies inside their equipped pack and simply let the spoils of war build up in their inventory unchecked. These players will either then turn off the Selling Dialog, eliminating the sell confirmation, and quickly drag each item to the shopkeeper in succession until all items to be sold are gone. (Careful impatient players will remember to turn the Selling Dialog back on immediately upon completion to avoid a quick sell of an important piece of equipment one only intended to repair.) Players who have reached a level where each and every gold piece that comes in is not soon needed to keep themselves going will often keep several packs in their house and occasionally go home to unload their booty into these packs, building up a sizable bank of unsold items to be cashed in at their leisure. Market day can be quite a boon to these players.
Backpacks are more than a safe place for carrying those valuable supplies, they are also an important platform for enchantments. Conventional wisdom says that each and every piece of equipment worn or otherwise equipped should be enchanted with both Strength and Dexterity (Empower and Nimbleness). That's two spells right there and on some very rare magical items one can get very nervous about placing upon them even more enchantments. Far better to risk a less valuable item to multiple enchants. Enter the backpack. Cheap, easy to replace and free from taking most forms of damage during combat. A prime enchanting platform. Typically the backpack is used to hold many of the shield spells in addition to strength and dexterity. If one is a little bit of a gambler, and has more than a little gold, one can come up with a 7-banger pack that holds all five shields. That leaves only Immolation and Regeneration, the remaining 2 enchantments in the Must-Have suite, to be distributed among your armor.
Backpacks, more than just a purse, can be a life saver. Have you told your pack how much you appreciate it lately?
http://www.realmoracle.com/backpack.htm
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