Introduction

For about a year, I have been thorougly absorbed in an awesome MUD called Legends of Kallisti, which is, in my opinion, the best MUD on the internet (but in all fairness, that is probably a lot biased, since it is practically my main MUD nowadays). In this article, I will detail the things that make Kallisti awesome, and hopefully give you a good reason as to why you should play it.

Growing a Character

In Kallisti, in order to get past level 50, you need to acquire things called hero points. In days of yore, you also needed to get MLR, or multilevel requirements, by redeeming an item called a shard of the legends, but that system has been deprecated. But in order to acquire hero points, you need to meta stats and your hitpoints, health, and mana. The reason why I find this to be a great experience is that you don’t need to kill massive mobs to get fame (Alter Aeon is a a good example of this), nor do you need to remort (a concept that I don’t really understand, but in all fairness, I haven’t really delved in to a MUD that has this system). But you dont’ really have to start your meta journey at level 50, either; you have the option to start out early, with the lower bound being at level 20, so you could conceivably have a level 80 character at level 20, a concept that I find very interesting but haven’t tried out.

Infinite Replayability

When you attain level 58, you have the option to have a bloodline character. This affords you a few benefits: gaining stats on hyour previous character, having better base stats on the child, and, most importantly, having something that will keep you hooked to the game. At present, I have 8 characters: a monk, an assassin, a necromancer, a dreadlord, a samurai, a templar, a paladin, and a ranger. Each class has in it a certain set of charactistics that make it unique: monks, for example, make okay tanks but are puny when it comes to the solo experience. Samurai, on the other hand, have a great solo experience, and given that they get access to the dodge gear earlier than monks, make superb tanks. It takes a bit of experimentation to find a character class that you click with, but once you find your grove, Kallisti is a very awesome place to be.

An Awesome Community

When I first joined Kallisti, there were some accessibility issues, such as the lack of MSDP and some odd ways in which the score was represented. But since then, we have come a long way indeed; the game has gotten so awesome now that I have a hard time remembering what the old days were like. Aside from having an awesome dev team, the older players are allways willing to help out the new players, so getting started isn’t that hard of a problem.

The Paragon System and Gaining Experience Bonuses

Are you in ready for a great challenge? Then make yourself a paragon! As a paragon, you can unlock benefits for all the characters on your account, namely an experience bonus that starts out at level 30 at 1% and stops at level 60 with a cap of 4%, with a very important gotcha: if you die, you restart at level one. Okay, this isn’t necessarily true, as you get experience when you die to get back towards the level that you died at, but man it does make for a great etchasketch. I use the paragon to try out things, to see how a class will feel should I decide to make a more permanent character out of it. This is how, for example, I got interested in making a samurai character; when I was a little more web behind the ears, I used to die as a paragon a lot, because I was using classes that were not geared so much towards paragoning much less soloing; at the time I think I was a prophet. But once I had tried a samurai, I found that paragoning was easier. In general, i would advise a new paragon to start out as a fighter, get to level 50 to get the free out of combat recall, and then experiment with classes as a paragon.

But paragoning is not the only way to get extra experience bonuses. You can also go hardcore, where you lose your gear when you die (don’t worry, you can generally do a corpse retrieval unless you got killed in a truly nasty area), and become an outlaw and player kill. So if you got a level 60 paragon and were both outlaw and hardcore, you would have a hefty 11% experience bonus.

Conclusion

As you can see, Kallisti is an awesome MUD to try. You can have infinite replayability, get really large characters, and have extra bonuses. If I have succeeded in piquing your interest, checkout the game here. Furthermore, if you are a blind player and want a good sound pack and set of features (it isn’t strictly for blind people, others can use it as well), then check out my Kallisti pack for Tintin. In the meantime, happy mudding!