Animist Guide

Guild Location:

Main Guild Location:

  • Continent: Desolathya
  • World Location: Upon leaving the Desolathya ferry, "travel west" from the road to the first intersection to go north. Then go west and you will find the guild right by the lake.
    • Note: There are totems for the Animist guild on all the continents, but you need to join the guild at the Desolathya location.

Guild Requirements:
  • Good Religious background
  • Good alignment
  • Must be maximum level in one of the following guilds:
    • Ghost Liberators
    • Monks
    • Templars

Disclaimer:

  • The guild allows you to train a spirit mount to ride, and to split your soul off to be an additional offensive/defensive member of your party.
  • Only Ghost Liberators can train both those skill groups.
    • Monks can only split their souls
    • Templars can only learn the spirit mount skills/spells
    • In addition, there are some spells, such as "Cure Serious Wounds" that only Ghost Liberators can learn.
  • My main character is a Monk. Therefore, this guide will focus exclusively on the soul splitting part of the guild.
    • While I'll add information about the spirit mounts as I learn it, all that info will be based on second-hand sources.

My Overview of the Guild:

This is a secondary guild that provides powerful bonuses for melee characters who have already completed a primary guild. While it offers a small number of healing and buffing spells, its primary focus is enhancing front-line survivability, whether fighting as part of a party or as a solo damage dealer. For most players, joining the Tarmalen, Druid, or Nun guilds is a better choice for stronger healing and back-row damage options. That being said, since so much of the power of this guild is based on the reputation of your soul companions, it helps to put at least one level in the guild so you can start building up that reputation while you then focus on other caster guilds. Long story short, for players who solo, this guild is a very strong choice, and it is favored by high level players as it can create extremely strong tanks, but it takes a lot of EXP and grinding to really see the benefits of this guild.

Pros:

  • Eventually this guild provides a huge increase in survivability and damage
    • Your soul companion or mount is a big damage sponge. Hits it takes are hits that are not targeting you or other party members.
    • Your soul companion can also start to do a lot of passive damage with its attacks, letting you focus on other skills and spells during a fight

Cons:

  • If your soul dies, you might die
    • This adds a level of stress and another health pool to manage during a fight
    • Even you you survive your soul dying, you will need to wait around 30 minutes to re-summon it.
    • This is especially a problem when you are just starting out and your soul doesn't have a lot of defensive skills trained.
  • Maxing out your soul companion requires a MASSIVE amount of experience
    • Do you have too much experience and don't know what to do with it all? Then this is the guild for you!
    • Expect to invest millions of EXP into your soul companion to make them survivable and do decent damage.
    • You will likely spend more EXP on your soul companion than on yourself when advancing through this guild.
  • Increasing your soul companions stats requires a MASSIVE amount of money and sacrificial equipment
    • This is also for the players who have too much money in addition to experience! :p
    • Every three days you can pay money to sacrifice gear. Your soul companion will permanently get the stats of that gear (up to a max bonus of 200). 
    • If you sacrifice super expensive equipment that gives +25 con (costing millions of gold), you can quickly level up your companion
    • If you sacrifice only semi-expensive gear giving +3 con, it can take six months to max out your companions stats.
  • Very little ability to self heal
    • Being able to train cast heal is nice for Monks, but don't expect to be able to cast anything stronger than "heal light wounds".
    • It is strongly recommended to invest a few levels in Tarmalen first before joining this guild so you can have better self healing options.
  • You will need to spend more time healing to get your soul companion back in the fight
    • You soul companion will take damage, and if it dies you might die.
    • At the same time, your soul companion takes a long time to regenerate on its own. You really need to heal it between fights to avoid exessive downtime.
    • Therefore you will really benefit in taking around 8 levels of the Tarmalen guild to gain access to 'Cure Serious Wounds' at a decent level.

Animist (Monk) Quick Start Guide:

  1. Finish your primary guild
    • You need to max out your primary melee guild first before joining the Animists
    • Note: You don't have to have any of the skills/spells trained up though. You just need to have all of the levels completed.
  2. Join the Animists guild. 
    • The abilities you have available to you will be dependent on what guild you
    • This quick-start guide will assume you finished the Monk guild.
  3. Read the animist tutorial once you join
    • Command: animist help tutorial
  4. Focus on studying 'separate soul' and training 'sever soul' and 'soul channel' first
    • These are the core spell/skills of the guild. 
      • Separate soul lets you create a soul companion. 
      • Sever soul gives you a chance to not die when your soul companion is killed.
      • Soul channel makes your soul's skills/spells more powerful
  5. The next goal is to build up reputation for your soul so that you can train skills for it.
    • Initially prioritize "survivability" skills such as 'soul heal'. You can also try training up parry and dodge, but 'soul heal' should be your initial focus.
    • If your soul seems to be doing alright, then move into offensive skills such as attack, martial arts, and ki attack in that order.
  6. Once you start rolling in the EXP, consider training the soul abilities 'target', and 'critical resistance'.
  7. If you have money to burn, start sacrificing equipment to increase the stats of your soul companion.
    • Your soul companion will permanently take on the stats from the equipment
    • You can do this once every three days. So starting early helps.
    • Maximum bonus per stat is 200
    • Alchemist rings are a good item to use for this... If you have tons of money, multi-stat equipment can also be helpful to quickly raise their stats.
    • The general consensus is to prioritize increasing your soul's constitution first, as that will keep both of you alive and allow it to be a better damage sponge.

Other Guild Help Pages:

  • Tazliel's Liberator/Animist Guide: Link
    • Mostly information about the Liberator guild, but it has some information about Animist mounts as well.

Soul Companion Management:

Setting Things Up:

  • Unless you are going into a high damage situation where you are likely to die, make sure you have your soul summoned at all times as it can gain reputation just by hanging around.
  • When you summon your soul make sure you immediately use 'animist soul follow' so it will follow you around. This setting will persist across soul summonings, so unless you tell your soul to stop following you, you only need to do this once.
  • Turn on your soul's short score on using the 'animist soul sc' command so it will alert you about its current health. This is super important so you don't accidently die by letting it get too beat up. You only need to do this once.
  • Set your soul mode to heal
    • Command: animist soul mode heal
    • This will provide the most survivability for your soul. As you advance its skills and stats you can later change the soul mode to something more offensive if you want.
Important commands:
  • animist soul sc: Your soul will report when its health changes. You only need to turn this on once and it will save over boots.
  • animist soul follow: Your soul will not follow you until you use this command
  • animist soul call: If you ever get separated from your soul, this will summon it
  • animist soul rep: This will let you know how many reputation points your soul has. Since reputation points dictate how much you can train your soul, once this starts to get large enough it will tell you its time to go back to the guild to train your soul more.
  • animist soul score: This will show you the current skills, reputation, and bonus stats your soul has. Basically it provides more info that using soul rep.

Interpreting You Soul's Short Command:

  • You'll often see a short nickname before your soul companion's health:
    • Aka: Your soul companion: nh (65%) ++
    • You can tell what that nickname is by using the 'nickname nh' command.
    • Long story short though, the nickname just reflects the percentage value of your souls health. Aka nh->noticeably hurt
  • The plusses and minuses after the sc report indicates which direction your soul's health is changing and by how much.
    • As you can imagine, minuses '---' are bad as your soul is being hurt, while plusses '+++' are good.

Sacrificing Armour for Soul Companion Stats:

Location: In the animist guild, go N, N, NW to the room with a well in the middle of it

Details:

  • You can sacrifice a piece of armour (weapons don't work) once every three days.
    • In the well room you can type 'check' to see if sacrifices are off cooldown
  • Any stats (STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS) that the armour provides will be granted permanently to your soul companion.
    • Each stat can be increased up to a maximum bonus of 200 per stat
  • When you sacrifice equipment, you also need to pay gold based on the sacvalue of the item
    • I bought an alchemist ring from a merchant for 70k. I then needed to play 64k additional gold to the well to sacrifice the ring.
    • Yes, this can get quite expensive.
  • Money for the conversion will first be taken from your inventory, and then your bank account.
    • So make sure you have all your high value coins in your purse so it will take gold from your bank account instead
  • Sacrificing equipment also gives your soul training points:
    • Looks like I got 10 training points from the alchemist ring I sacrificed.
  • To sacrifice a piece of equipment type: 'convert <item>'
  • To see you soul's current bonuses type: 'animist soul score'
Strategies:

  • There's some newbie equipment you can farm yourself that provides (1-3) stat points.
    • For example the racoon hat from the newbie playground grants +4 STR which makes it a great option. Also the sacvalue is not very high.
  • Player made alchemist rings are also a good option if you want to buy equipment and get bigger bonuses

Reincarnating as an Animist:
  • Great news: Your soul's reputation (training points) and bonus stats from sacrificing equipment will save over between reincarnations. So you won't lose any progress.
Soul Skills and Abilities:

SKILLS:
  • Soul attack
    • Base chance for your soul to hit the target
  • Soul heal
    • Your soul can cast healing spells on itself
    • Based on WIS
  • Soul ki attack
    • Unarmed special attack
    • Based on STR and DEX
  • Soul blade training
    • Allows your soul to do more damage with longswords
    • May also increase your soul's chance to hit with longswords
  • Soul stun
    • Chance for your soul to stun the target
  • Soul slash
    • Special attack when you soul is wielding a longsword
    • Based on STR
  • Soul riposte
    • A counter-attack that is possible when your soul parries a blow. Not sure if it works if your soul is not wielding a blade.
  • Soul light
    • A light based attack.
    • Based on INT and WIS
  • Soul parry
    • The ability to parry attacks. Not sure if this works well if your soul is not wielding a blade.
  • Soul tumble
    •  Gives your soul a chance to hit the target if the target dodges
  • Soul martial training
    • Your soul will do more damage when it hits without a weapon.
    • Not sure if this also increases your soul's chance to hit
  • Soul dodge 
    • Gives your soul a chance to dodge
ABILITIES:
  • Flight
  • Target
    • Your soul with target your current target
    • Super helpful skill
  • Damage analysis
  • Critical resistance
    • Your soul will take less damage from critical hits
    • This skill will likely save your life at some point
  • Toughness
  • Element master
  • Quick combatant
  • Greater element master
  • Resist all
  • Super characteristics
  • Second attack

Animist Skill/Spell Guide:

Animist Focused Skills:

  • (Skill) Sever Soul
    • Description: By default, when your soul dies, so will your character. This skill gives you a chance to cheat death and continue living if that happens.
    • Training Priority: (High)
      • Your soul is going to die in big fights. This goes double when your soul is new and hasn't been buffed up yet.
      • This skill will save your life.
  • (Skill) Soul Channel
    • Description: This skill has an active and a passive bonus. The passive bonus makes your soul skills (heal, ki attack, light, and slash) more effective. The active use of this skill will let you command your soul to use one of the attacks/heals.
    • Training Priority: (High)
      • You will very rarely actively use this skill, but the passive increase adds a lot to your soul's attacks and survivability
    • Notes:
      • Actively using soul heal can be nice if you don't have a lot of spellpoints to spend on healing up your soul. For example if you have your ki powers all turned on. This will let you get back in the fight sooner.
      • I haven't found a good use of commanding attacks in battle though. I'd much rather use my character's attacks than command my soul to attack (which it will occasionally do on its own regardless.
      • Soul heal can only target the soul itself, not other party members.
        • Your soul companion casts 'healitus minimus' and it seems to heal around 5% of its health per successful cast.
  • (Skill) Soulspeak
    • Description: This will let you check the power level of animals before you challenge them in a totem fight.
    • Training Priority: (Very low/skip for Monks. Slightly useful for Templars and Liberators)
      • Totem challenges mostly help animists trying to get strong mounts. It is much less useful for Monks. 
      • It can help with animal aspects for high level Monks though, but you won't need that until you have nearly maxed out the guild
    • Notes:
      • Command to use this skill:
        • 'use soulspeak at $* about how strong are you'
      • If the animal is something you can challenge, it will respond with its strength.
  • (Skill) Totem Challenge
    • Description: This allows you to challenge and collect the spirit of an animal
    • Training Priority: (Critical for Templars and Liberators. Delay training it for Monks until they have maxed out the animist guild)
      • Totem challenges mostly help animists trying to get strong mounts. It is much less useful for Monks
      • It can help with animal aspects for high level Monks though, but you won't need that until you have nearly maxed out the guild.
      • You can capture animal spirts before you can use them so it can be nice if a good opportunity presents itself. But it doesn't provide any benefit until you've nearly maxed out the guild.

Animist Focused Spells:

  • (Spell) Join Soul
    • Description: Allows you to reunite your soul with your body so it will no longer be targetable.
    • Training Priority: (Low)
      • Usually you want your soul separated so it can earn reputation
      • If you are going to be doing anything dangerous/stupid you can always command your soul to wait somewhere and not follow you.
      • It's nice to have trained up a bit, but you probably won't be using this much (if at all).
  • (Spell) Separate Soul
    • Description: Allows you to split off your soul and have it fight alongside you
    • Training Priority: (Very High to 40%)
      • This is the whole reason you joined this guild as a Monk.
      • You'll likely only be casting this once a boot when you log in (or 30 minutes after you die and can re-summon your soul), so it's not critical to max this spell out. But it is a nice quality of life bonus to not have to cast this multiple times until you get a success.

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