Latest revision as of 23:26, 6 November 2022

Paw'D is an online multiplayer game, in which you play as canine-like creatures. If you are completely new to Paw'D, a great way to get started is to simply read the comic on the main page.

On the second page, pick the name of your character by typing it into the form on the second panel, and its gender by checking the box. You can also get a new colour by clicking the dice on the side of the form. Once you are done, click the arrow - this will check if the name is still available, create your character, and lead you straight to the game.

Before you start your adventure, you will be shown the Terms of Service, asked to pick a password, and select a character class. Right now, there are four classes: Warrior, Priest, Mage and Hunter. The Hunter is the newest of the four classes, and although it has been already designed, it is still a work in-progress. It is unlocked and available for creation once a character on your account reaches level 32 (as one of the other three classes). After that, you are all set, and continue the story playing in the Jungle of Midnight Mountain.

As you play, your progress is constantly saved. So, if you want to take a break, you can always return right where you left off by clicking the red "Play Now" button on the top of the page and entering the name and the password you just picked.

The Jungle of Midnight Mountain serves as a sort of tutorial area - it will teach you the basic controls that you need later in the game. Don't worry, you won't be fighting (though you will be running to avoid a few monsters), and you can try as many times as you like.

So, how does Paw'D work?

• In Paw'D, you complete quests, fight monsters and brave dungeons to become stronger:
  • Each adventurer has a character level. Fighting monsters and completing quests awards you experience. If your experience bar fills all the way up, your level increases.
  • Whenever your level increases, you get a skill point, and several stat points. Skill points let you learn new abilities in your skillbook, while stat points let you increase how much damage you do, how much health you have, and so on.
  • Pick skills and stats that you think you need. You always can reset your skills and stats, so you are not locked in to your choice.
  • Completing quests and fighting monsters you run into on the way is the best way to gain experience.
  • When you start your adventure, you select from several fur colours and patterns. You can later dye your fur to get any colour you want, and change to a variety of fur patterns.

• Combat
  • Your character has health and a secondary resource, such as mana or fury, which is used for spells and special abilities.
  • If your health reaches zero, you are knocked out. There is no penalty for getting knocked out, you won't lose experience or items.
  • While knocked out, other adventurers can revive you (using a priest's Revive spell, or a Potion of Life), or you can choose to continue on from a nearby safe zone. If you choose the latter, the server will attempt to find a nearby place where you are safe. You will get knocked out during your adventures, and it has no negative effect on your character.
  • Most monsters that have no more targets will reset: They return to where they were before they engaged, ignoring everything on their way, and regain full health.
  • You do not receive damage from merely touching a monster. Monsters specifically use attacks on you to deal damage.
  • Characters can be friendly (green names when hovered), neutral (yellow names) or hostile (red names). Only hostile monsters attack you on sight. Neutral monsters will retaliate if you attack them. Friendly ones cannot be attacked.
  • Combat starts simple (as you don't have that many abilities at first), but if you want a challenge, later dungeons will get quite complex.

• Pets
  • Any adventurer can obtain pets through quests, shopkeepers, and trophies.
  • Pets assist you in battle, and you can take control over how your pets use their skills.
  • When you fight with your pet, your pet gains experience just like you, and will level along with you.
  • Pets don't abandon you - once you get a pet, it'll stay yours forever. If it gets knocked out, you can just revive it.

• Silver and Gold
  • Completing quests and selling items to shopkeepers rewards silver and gold. One gold coin is equal to 100 silver coins.
  • You can trade with other adventurers, by right clicking them and selecting "Trade". Both players can pick what items they want to trade (you can also select nothing). You have to click "OK" to finalize your part of the trade (and so does the other player), so you see exactly what you'll get before you click on "Trade".
  • You can also mail other players letters or packages with items at any mailbox. There is a small silver postage for mailing.
  • All villages have an auction house, where you can put items up for auction, with a minimum bid and optionally a buyout price. Other players can bid on the auctions, or buy them out by bidding as high as the buyout price. The auction houses of all villages are linked together.
  • Unlocking the storage system in Ashaya Village lets you store items you want to keep but not carry with you. Guilds also have a storage - the guild bank - that guild members can use.

• Grouping
  • You can group up with other adventurers to do quests and dungeons together. Simply right-click another player (either their character, or their name in chat), and select "Invite".
  • Typically all quest items drop for every group member, so playing in a group does not slow you down - quite the contrary.
  • Loot and experience in groups is shared.
  • Different loot modes, such as "Loot Pool" (everyone indicates what they need and what not, and the system decides who gets what) and "Loot Master" (one group members distributes the loot) are in place to share valuable drops within a group. The default is "Loot Pool".
  • You can chat by typing in the chatbox. What you say will be seen by anyone around you.
  • By starting your line with "/p ", everything you type after will be sent to everyone in your group. You can type "/s " to switch back to public chat.
  • Curse words are comicfied (#$@!) by a simple word filter. You can turn the filter off in your options. Having the filter on is no excuse for trying to bypass it.

• Dungeons
  • Dungeons are home of the most difficult monsters, and are a main source of the best items in the game.
  • An instance (a copy) of a dungeon is created for you and your group when you enter it. You don't have to worry about someone else interfering with the fight - it's just your group - and the boss.
  • When you start a boss fight, the map with the boss is locked until either the boss is dead, or your entire group is knocked out (and the boss resets). You cannot get "reinforcements" during a boss fight.
  • Once a boss is killed, it stays dead until the dungeon resets after 20 hours. Later dungeons will reset after longer periods of time.

• Armor and Weapons
  • Armor and weapons can be bought from shopkeepers, obtained through quests, and from killing bosses in dungeons.
  • Most valuable armor will bind when obtained. Bound items cannot be traded (but they can be sold to shopkeepers or destroyed).
  • Armor and weapons must be repaired eventually, otherwise they break. They do not degrade, however, and they can be repaired even when broken. You can repair in any village, and you are told well ahead of time that you need to repair soon.
  • You can make your armor tougher and harder to break by refining it.
  • Spirit Bottles are rare items dropped by many monsters that you can use to enchant your armor.
    • What a spirit bottle does typically depends on what monster it dropped from. If you hover or click a spirit bottle, it will tell you what kind of armor or weapon it can enchant, and what its effects are. The Item Database is a good place for searching for spirit bottles.
  • Right-click (or Ctrl + Left-click for the client version) and select "Lock to bag" to lock and unlock any item/equipment in your inventory to prevent it from accidentally dropped, or sold to an NPC. However, once the equipment has been enchanted or refined, it will unlock itself. Simply just re-lock it again.

• Battlegrounds (PvP)
  • You can fight other players in Schwartzwald Castle, and in Battlegrounds.
  • Battlegrounds are team-versus-team battles with other players in the same level bracket (11-15, 16-20, ...) as you.
  • You can queue up for battlegrounds after level 15, by clicking on "Game", then on "Queue" and then selecting the battleground.
  • Battlegrounds start after at least eight players in your level bracket queued (a 4 versus 4 battle).
  • You obtain tokens not only for winning, but also for losing (as long as you participated). Of course, you obtain more tokens for winning.

• Trophies
  • Difficult or unusual feats award you trophies (also known as achievements).
  • You can see which trophies you have obtained by clicking on "Game" and then on "Trophies".
  • You can track your progress with some trophies by clicking on a trophy, then clicking on "Track Trophy".
  • Trophies mostly serve as a record of what you have achieved, however some of the more difficult trophies also have other rewards, such as pets, armour or titles.

Getting Around in Paw'D

• Guilds
  • Whether you previously had experience in an MMO before or this is your first time playing one, the one thing that eludes players is joining a guild. If you are not the social type, you don't have to interact with a guild as you join.
  • Early on, you want to decide a guild that best accommodates you. A guild that was created only weeks ago with few online players, whom has no guild bank or page may not offer the same kind of assistance.
  • Guilds offer many advantages to a player. Whether it is information, assistance with a dungeon, or simply quality of life, a guild has you covered.
  • The guild bank is a collective storage designed to store items by other members, and offer to those who need it. If there is a material you need or a potion you want, chances are that the guild will freely distribute it to you. Note that most guilds establish a limit for items depending on your guild rank, meaning you'll have to ask someone with a higher rank to get it for you.
    • The guild bank can also store gold. Depending on your guild rank, you can use the guild's funds to cover the cost of repairing your armour. Some guilds might establish a limit on how much gold you have taken from the guild or how much value in items you've taken from the guild bank.
    • The guild page allows you to repair your armour, access your personal storage, your mailbox, the guild bank, and the auction house from anywhere so as long as you have a Guild Page Whistle (usually available for everyone, retrieve from guild bank). Note that the whistle will not work if you're not in a guild, or your guild has not added a page yet. The page can be purchased for a one-time fee at the Guild Master.
• Guardian Stones
  • One of the main objectives for the player is to obtain Guardian Stones. Guardian Stones provide a one-time permanent boost to stats, experience gain as well as a variety of other effects. There are currently four of them to find in the game.
  • Guardian Stones appear in the form of splinters from defeating bosses in major dungeons. Usually dropped by the final boss in the dungeon, or through a treasure chest at the end.
• Quests, World Events, and Events
  • The world of Paw'D is full of quests, but may pose a challenge to actually completing all of them, as NPCs are scattered all over the place. Backtrack across familiar maps, search old NPCs, and new ones hiding in unconventional areas. Find items dropped by monsters to start quests that might lead to other quests to unlock areas that you couldn't get in before. You might want to consider a few friends to help you out, and an experienced player to walk you through.
  • Randomly in the world, you'll encounter all sorts of strange quests with a timer on them. These are World Events, quick quests that net you a lot of exp in exchange to be scaled down to a certain level when you do them. These may help ease the burden of farming the same old monsters over and over again.
  • Events in the real world such as Christmas, Easter, or Halloween also happen in Paw'D. Look for special quests in villages such as Saliko, Ashaya or Blackwood that only occur during that time. Gather all sorts of event tokens to spend in event shops.
• Unlockable, Purchasable, and Optional Features Later On
  • There are many things later on in the game that can be unlocked for free as a result of quests, already available from the get go or costing you a ton of gold. Some are necessary purchases, while others can be optional choices. In both cases, they are there to enhance your experience of the game.
  • In later battles, walking around with only one skill set will leave you vulnerable and unable to adapt to a variety of situations. Purchasing sets start out cheap, but increase in price the more you have for that class.
  • Later in the game, you'll find that your amount of space to hold items is quite limited. Purchasing Bags can help increase your inventory space and weight on the go. Purchasing more storage at Andy also helps too, but is quite expensive. Guild Banks can be a third option as well.
  • You can dye your fur to get any colour you want for a fee, and change to a variety of default fur patterns drawn by other artists or the game master himself. You can also create your own custom fur pattern, but it comes at a pricey one-time cost.
  • Want to wear a variety of fashionable equipment, and wear equipment that actually benefits your class? Costumes can help players feel good about their strength in battle, and look good as well for a one-time purchase.
  • In a quest line in the second village you go to, you eventually gain the ability to have equipment sets. This feature helps put together an outfit of equipment together without having to individually go through your inventory for equipment. Another quest line around Ashaya unlocks the ability to dye your equipment.
  • Later on in the game, you'll come across class stones. This expensive feature can get your character to play as another class (you have to level it up again starting from 1) to become a jack of all trades. You still keep your previous class, and can switch back to it at any time on the fly through the same button meant to switch skill sets.
  • As you get to the quest lines in Blackwood, you'll eventually stumble on your very own free room. Like houses, you can decorate them to your heart's content with decorations and furniture. If you ever want a room with more space in it, you'll need to purchase a room for a heavy price.
  • As you clear places around Paw'D, you'll stumble on little chests with CDs in them. They can be used to build a collection of music for your jukebox (obtained as part of a quest in Blackwood Caverns) in your room.
  • Finally, if you have nowhere else to place your money in, you can look towards pets (purchased at some shops for gold). Secret Santa & and setting up your Christmas tree during the Christmas events can net you some neat toys to play with, but is unfortunately one event that many often miss and regret later.

Contributing to Paw'D

• Paw'D is a small community. It's efforts were made possible thanks to the contributions of players throughout the years since it was first released.
• You can help by inviting people who may be interested in the game.
• For long-time players, you can help by adding information to the wiki and continuing to assist other players in-game.
  • You can also help contribute to the world through the development of custom maps/quests/items, which may become part of Elyssia some day (just ask for permission to the map editor by sending a ticket in-game). Other suggestions may be welcome on the forums too.