How to start playing Lineage 2: a guide for absolute beginners

What Lineage 2 is, how official and free servers differ, what rates and chronicles are, how to install the client, create a character and read the interface, plus the player slang a newcomer hears from the first minutes.

In this article I will try to tell those who have never played Lineage 2 what it is at all, share the basic knowledge of the game and then, once you have settled in a little, give a few tips on how to behave in this world. We will look at everything a beginner needs on the example of the Interlude chronicles, which are fairly simple compared with the later ones.

What Lineage 2 is

It is a massively multiplayer online game made by the developers of NCsoft in the early 2000s. In fact it is a whole world with its own rules and laws, which is very interesting to explore, and exploring it will take not one hour of play but far more.

In technical terms the game consists of a server, which runs under the supervision of some people, and the game clients installed on the players' computers. The players connect to the server, and all their actions go through this server and are remembered there (written to the server database). Servers are either official, run by NCsoft and its partners, or unofficial, the so-called free servers, that is, pirate servers.

Here is the first piece of player slang:

What the chronicles are

When the developers created the game, they already understood that without developing the content their game would be doomed to fail, so from time to time they add new territories, new races, new quests, new branches of character development and much more to the game. Each such content update is usually called a chronicle, although not every update had the word "chronicle" in its name. And with this notion we have come to the difference between the official servers and the free ones.

How official servers differ from free ones

On the official servers everything works the way it should and the way the developers made it. Playing on the official servers costs a monthly fee: if you do not pay for the next month, you will not play.

The official servers run only the latest chronicles, and this is exactly why the free servers are popular: many old players do not want to play the latest chronicles, where the developers have changed and overcomplicated a lot, so such players look for a free server with the chronicles they like and play there.

The free servers never give in full the content that was on the official servers of the old chronicles, only approximately, because even if a server build was stolen from under NCsoft's nose, all the bugs that were on the official servers come along with that stolen build. After that the official developers fix the bugs, and in the stolen build the bugs remain. Of course the makers of free-server builds fix them, but only approximately, because they have no exact data.

Server rates

Server rates are a kind of multiplier in the game by which the amount of goodies you get as a reward for some action is multiplied. For example, for completing some quest at x1 rates you are given a certain amount of money, and at x10 rates that amount grows 10 times. This is one more thing that attracts players to the free servers, because on the official servers the rates are always only x1 (under certain conditions a player can raise them to x2, but no more). On the free servers the rates are all sorts, from x1 to x100500 and beyond, so impatient players choose not x1 but the rates at which they will play faster and, as they see it, with more fun. It is a debatable matter, but it is of no interest to us in this article.

The most popular chronicles

Which chronicles to start with is up to you; for a first look, as I wrote above, I recommend Interlude.

The game client and logging in

Now we move smoothly to the game itself. To play you need the client of the chronicles you are going to play. We go to a file-sharing site and download the game client. There will be many clients of the same chronicles from different free servers; I advise you to download the clean client from NCsoft. You will keep the client in an archive, and if something starts glitching, you can always unpack it into a new folder.

We unpack the client on the computer; in principle any folder will do, but it is better if the path to the client files has no names with non-Latin letters, so it is not a good idea to unpack it into a folder with a name in Russian. After installing the client you need to install the patch of the server you are going to play on. I remind you that the client must be of the same chronicles that run on the server you liked.

The patch is, as a rule, the same kind of archive with files as the client, but these files are already set up for the server you will play on. That is, with the patch of one server installed you will not get onto another: another server needs its own patch. The patch files are unpacked into the game folder, replacing the old files.

The game is started with the file l2.exe from the system folder, and only with it. As many times as you run this file, that many windows will load, and in each window you can load a separate character. If I am not going to chat with friends in the game but have decided to level, I usually load 5-6 windows, but first things first: one window is enough for you to begin with.

You can even start the game right away. If on start the game screen takes up the whole monitor, press Alt and Enter together: the screen will shrink and you will be able to stretch it as you like.

The last touch before entering the game: you need to register an account on the site of the server you have chosen. Do not forget to write down the login and password on a piece of paper after registering, and on another piece of paper write where the first one is, and on a third... Just kidding, but sometimes a piece of paper really helps, especially if a lot of time has passed since you last entered the game. When creating an account there is no need to invent a login with your in-game name: you will think up names for your chars once you are on the server, because each account can hold up to seven characters.

Player slang explained:

So, the choice is made, the account is registered, and the client window is waiting for the login and password.

We enter the login and password; if everything is fine, a window with the server rules appears. It is a pure formality, anything can be written there. We confirm and go to the server selection window. There may be just one line if there is one server, or several servers may be listed if there are many, and then you need to choose the server you want to play on. As a rule the list shows the server name, the chronicles and the rates, so you will not go wrong. There may be another case: one server but several entry points to it from different countries, for the players' convenience; then you can choose any of them.

Creating a character

We choose the server and the game screen appears, which will show all your characters on this account. For now it is empty, and we go on to creating our first char. We press the "Create" button at the bottom right. A new screen opens with the menu of the character's parameters in the top left corner.

All the other parameters, such as sex, hairstyle, hair colour and the face, affect absolutely nothing, especially since with certain items you can change these parameters (except sex: the sex is changed only for money by the server administration). So we pay no attention to them.

We create our first character without overthinking it: as a rule the first character is abandoned later, once the newcomer has figured out the game and understood all its subtleties. After creation the character appears on the screen with your characters.

You may often be called a noob in the game. Do not take offence: a noob (from the English "noob") is just a newcomer who understands little in the game.

First steps in the game

The character is created, and we let it out into the world. All new chars appear in special newbie locations; next to them there will be only two NPCs and first-level mobs. We look around and get used to the game interface.

There are three kinds of creatures in the game:

NPCs and players are considered friendly creatures by default, so if you target them (to target is to click the creature once with the mouse, pointing the cursor at it), the cursor changes to an icon with a little face and a speech bubble above it, meaning you can talk to this creature. If you still decide to fight them, you need to click on the creature while holding Ctrl.

All monsters are hostile by default, so when you target a mob the cursor changes to a sword, and the mob can be attacked without pressing Ctrl.

When you target any creature, an extra window with information about it appears.

When you have targeted someone, two little circles appear to the right and left of the creature's name. If they are blue, you are taking no hostile action against the creature; if red, you are attacking it. You can attack from far away, and then your character will first run up to the creature and start hitting it only from attack range; to break off the attack it is enough simply to stop, and the attack will be interrupted.

The time has come to kill your first mob. We double-click the first Gremlin we see; your char runs up to it and starts beating it on the head with whatever you have in your hands. When the mob is finally dead and has fallen, it disappears a few seconds later, and a few items are left after it (or not: it all depends on the drop chance, which depends on the mob, on the items and, by the way, on the server rates we talked about above).

Drop or loot is what falls out of a mob. The word "loot" came from other games; in Lineage people usually say "drop". The drop can include money, which in this game is called adena, whole items, parts of items and the resources needed for crafting, all sorts of potions and other useful and useless stuff.

For killing mobs, as well as for completing quests and for some other actions in the game you will get, besides the drop from monsters, another reward.

EXP: you get a certain number of experience points from each mob, and your experience bar (the grey one) grows until it reaches 100%; then you are given the next level, and the experience bar is reset to zero.

The game interface

The window with information about your character (from top to bottom):

There is one more value that grows with every mob and completed quest, but it is not shown on this screen. It is SP (from the English "skill points"). You will spend skill points on learning various skills, and there will never be enough of them.

The halo with a blue arrow above your char shows where you need to run to complete some quest.

The shortcut bar

Now about the shortcut (hotkey) bar. In Interlude it consists of three rows of 12 slots each. Into each of these slots you can put a skill, an action, a macro and so on, so as not to dig through various menus and to have the most common actions always at hand. The bottom row is controlled by the function keys F1-F12; the other slots you click with the mouse. To the right of the shortcut bar there is a padlock icon: by closing it you lock the filling and clearing of all these buttons. To add a new action to the bar, unlock the padlock and drag the new action onto the bar with the mouse, or remove an unneeded one by dragging it off the bar. Above the padlock there is one more icon, a curved arrow. With it you can turn the bar horizontal or vertical. I always turn it vertical and move the bar all the way to the right so that it does not get in the way. You do as you find convenient.

What you can put on the shortcut bar straight away. Here is how it looks on mine: as soon as I create a character, I set up its bar this way.

The top row: invite to party, leave party, recommendations, trade with other players.

Invite to party. Player slang:

Leave party. It is enough to click the icon with the footprints, and you will leave the current party.

Recommendations. The icon with the thumb up. The game has a recommendation system. If you target a player and click this icon, you add +1 recommendation to that player. As recommendations accumulate, the player's nick gradually turns blue, and when it reaches the maximum of 255 recs, the nick becomes completely blue. You can give at most 9 recommendations a day from each char; the recommendations are renewed every day. The number of recommendations received from other players is unlimited.

Trade with other players. Having targeted the player you need and clicked the trade icon (two hands shaking), you start a deal to exchange or hand over some items from player to player. The players must be standing close: if you send a trade to a player at the other end of town, it will not work.

On the middle row of the bar I usually put the "Sit" button straight away, and in the last place I put a slot with shots, which are switched on and off by right-clicking the shot icons. A common mistake of newcomers: after entering the game they forget to switch on the shots, and then, after a couple of hours of leveling on mobs, they start to realise that something has gone wrong and remember about the shots.

On the bottom row, which is controlled by the function keys, I put the buttons that are really needed all the time: picking up the drop on F9, attack on F11 and switching the target to the next mob on F12. These buttons are next to each other and are operated with one hand.

The menu in the bottom right corner

And it remains to talk about one more menu, which is in the bottom right corner. There are only four buttons there.

Button No. 1, the "head". Pressing this button opens a window with five tabs:

Button No. 2, the "bag". This window shows everything you are wearing at the moment as well as the inventory: the ordinary one, where all the items you carry lie, and the quest one, which holds only quest items. An item from the ordinary inventory you can equip, take off, hand over, sell, drop, delete or break into crystals (if you are a dwarf crafter). From the quest inventory you can only delete.

Button No. 3, the "map with a cursor". It is the map itself. In towns it shows all the buildings in the town, in the field the map of the surroundings, and in dungeons either the dungeon map, if the developers drew one, or nothing, if the developers forgot to draw it.

Button No. 4, the "hammer". Here we need only a few items. Macros, about which I wrote a separate article: Macros in Lineage 2: limits, the /delay command and ready examples; the game settings, where you can change the client parameters, for example lower the detail of object rendering to reduce the load on the computer and load more game windows; the parameters of saved screenshots are changed there too, the sound is switched off and so on; and the two bottom buttons: restart, to re-enter the game with another character, and exit, to close the game completely.

Buffs

Now you know almost everything a newcomer needs to know. Perhaps only one thing is left to tell: buffs. On its own your character is weak, weak at any level. And to raise its stats for a short time, such goodies as buffs were invented.

Buffs (from the English word "buffs") are spells that raise one or several of the character's stats for a short time. Standard buffs last 20 minutes, stronger buffs last 5 minutes, and there are buffs of 2 minutes.

Buffs can be cast by players of certain professions, the so-called buffers. On their own they are extremely weak and cannot fight, but they have whole sets of buffs for both fighters and mages. And this sort of nudges both you and the buffers to level together in a party: they strengthen you with their spells, and you quickly level them (and yourself), tearing all the surrounding mobs to shreds under the buffs.

Player slang:

Buffs come not only from players but also from various potions, some of which are either sold in the shop or dropped by mobs, and from scrolls, which are given as a reward for some events (buffs from scrolls last a whole hour). Mobs also drop the so-called herbs, big bottles: if you pick such a bottle up, it raises one of your stats for 2 minutes; the herbs were invented by the developers specially so that a player could level solo, that is, alone and without buffers. But there are few kinds of bottles, and leveling with herbs is dull all the same.

Mobs and the first village

Well, I have given you the basics; after studying them you can beat up some Gremlin mobs, gain a few levels, master the buttons on the shortcut bar and then move on to other glades, where, as it turns out, there are other mobs, already of a higher level. To begin with, hit mobs close to your own level: if you are level two, look for mobs of about the same level, because if at level two you attack a mob of level twenty or so, it will surely flatten you like a steamroller flattens a frog. As a rule the level is written above the mob, but you can estimate it yourself. When you target a mob, a plate with its description appears, and there, besides its HP bar, is its name. If the name is red, the mob is far above you in level; if yellow, slightly above; if white, about equal to you; if green, it is already three levels below you; if purple, the mob is well below you; if blue, the mob is a noob of a very low level. Keep in mind too that if a mob is far below you in level, you will get neither experience nor drop from it, and there is no point in hitting such mobs.

Mobs can also be aggro or non-aggro, that is, aggressive or not. Aggressive mobs have their level written in red above their heads; approach such mobs carefully, because they can aggro on you as a whole crowd. And there are also social mobs: the sociality of mobs is not written anywhere, but if you come up to such mobs and hit one of them, the other mobs social to it, even if they are not aggressive, will aggro on you anyway. Aggro and sociality work at a certain, fairly short distance from the mobs, but that you will learn in practice, and you will understand how to pull one mob out of a crowd and so on.

In the end you will wander into the nearest village, which is different for each race and is named rather plainly for each of them: Dwarven Village, Orc Village, Elven Village, Dark Elven Village. Only for humans the name is different: Talking Island Village. One might think all the other races cannot talk. And here you will have to learn a few more things:

Player slang:

If you have chosen the dwarf race, let me introduce one more name:

When you have leveled a little and gained a few levels, you will need to learn the new skills your character gets after certain levels. Go to the building of your guild in the village (for dwarves it is the warehouse or the smithy, for buffers the temple, for dark elves the dark elf guild, for orcs the orc guild) and look there for an NPC whose dialogue has the line "Learn skills". It is all simple there: you learn a skill and a certain number of skill points is taken from you; if there is still enough SP, you learn the next skill, and if not, you go to beat mobs again.

What to read next

In principle, let us finish our guide for beginners here, I have already written a lot as it is. For the further development of your character you can read my other guides:

The whole site is at your disposal, study it. Good luck, fewer flights "to village", more goodies and experience.

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