Guide to Alternate Zakum Jump Quest

Im actually considering to do this (slowly) for 4-5 characters straight too, just wondering a few things. The total only took you 25 hours for all 4 characters? if yes, what is your line up or sequence? I have a lvl148 bishop and lvl98 DK with dragon roar, planning to use them both to multi farm those untradable maps, tradables i will buy from time to time accumulating them. BS is good to door all characters as well. Did you took all four characters at the same time? For those untradable drops, is it only one per character (on quest) or the drops are seen unique or appears differently for all 4 characters at the same map? Thanks in advance!

 

I feel like I’m somewhat qualified now to make a post on this thread.

I want to firstly give a special mention to the Staff for making this alternative quest available for an idiot like me who cannot jump, and secondly to @Dave Deviluke for compiling this informative guide that I’ve used many times now.
To date, I’ve completed my 7th character with The Long Road (lol). I love it so much that I’ve even started offering this as part of my PreQuest Services (please God don't actually buy from me )

I’ve been wanting to post this for a while so let’s treat this as a part-review and part-reply to the person above, and hopefully with my experience, I can pass on some tips on how to complete this more efficiently.

This questline really isn’t as bad as it may seem even though at first it may look daunting, yes it can feel long and tedious at times but I enjoy grinding and hitting monsters for long duration of hours, so this wasn’t an issue for me. But I must say, if you are not prepared to put a shift in, then don’t attempt it. Also, having an AoE mage will be a HUGE help for most parts. If you are planning to do this with a melee or ranged character without any mages then it will definitely take longer so, do factor that in.

As stated in this guide, you needed to have Zak Pres Stage 1 completed, which is the one with the chests/rocks for the keys - easy.

My first tip would be to purchase what you can from the tradeable list to save time, because you will probably lose the will to live midway through anyway especially if you’re doing this for the first time and you’ve already spent several hours trying to attempt the Zak JQ And depending on your funding and luck, you should be able to find most ETC via FM Owl, I think @Dave Deviluke also gives away some of the required ETC for free. And you might already possess some of these in pocket such as the ores. If you do not have that luxury, then I’m afraid you will have to farm everything - I had to do that on my first character for the most parts as I was poor.

I’ve listed below of my comments against each ETC required:

• 1 x Flaming Feather - buy it
• 1 x Moon Rock - buy/craft it
• 1 x Star Rock - buy/craft it
• 600 x Iron Hog's Metal Hoof - takes like 1 hour
• 200 x Firebomb Flame - buy or ask Dave
• 100 x Mateon Tentacle - farm, takes like 5 mins
• 500 x Plateon Helmets - farm, takes like 20 mins
• 200 x Red Essence - farm, takes like 10 mins
• 30 x Drake's Blood - buy or ask Dave
• 1 x Dark Crystal - buy/craft it
• 1 x Power Crystal - buy/craft it
• 1 x Wisdom Crystal - buy/craft it
• 1 x Dex Crystal - buy/craft it
• 1 x Luk Crystal - buy/craft it

• 200 x Blin's Flame - Untradeable

I see somewhere in this thread that someone gets 1 drop per 50 kills, I don’t know if they’ve increased the drop rate since or just extremely unlucky. But I average about 7 kills per drop for this, so I can finish this in under 2 hours. These guys take 2 hits to kill (from 1st form into 2nd form) and I’m sure they have quite high acc requirement so you might struggle to hit these if you are closer to level 50 unless maybe you’re a dex build or something. The map is quite awkward as it has a small single platform on the top left acting as one of the spawn points. So ideally, you would have a bishop doing Gen+TC from left to right on the bottom and the character with this quest active can clear top left to keep the spawn up, then you can go around the map every few minutes to loot the ETC and recycle this process. You get a really good amount of steel and dex crystal ores from this part which are valuable ETC to keep.

• 1 x Dragonfire Ring - Untradeable

This is a strange one personally for me, I’ve had this drop once in just under 5 minutes, and I think the most I’ve spent farming this was 1.5 hours. So, I guess it’s just all RNG. But I must say, I’ve never had a problem with this ETC, I seen people above that said this can take several hours so I’m not sure if the Staff have tweaked something since. You get a good amount of dragon skins during this and they are valuable to keep. Personally, I wouldn’t use an AoE mage for farming this, if the character with the quest active is strong enough to kill fire drakes, then just use that client to kill/loot because this ring is a unique instance therefore it’s just a hassle flickering between clients to see whether it’s dropped or not. What I would also say is sometimes the ring can be easily missed due to the color/background, so do pay attention to what's dropping and maybe play on a bigger client size/full screen.

• 200 x Dragonglass Shards - Untradeable

Now onto what I would say is the worst section of the quest. There are several maps where you can farm ice drakes for this ETC, I like to use Drake’s Area, which is the one that Snack Bar spawns in. I highly recommend that if you are strong enough, to kill this area boss for the monster card which activates an increase in drop rate for 1 hour each time it's picked up. Whichever map you decide to farm is your preference, pick wisely as you will be spending few hours here. Drake’s area is a big map, so you will need to kill everything in a circle rotation and recycle this process for hours. In my personally experience, the drop rate for this is very low therefore on average I take around 3 hours here to collect all shards. You can use an AoE mage for this part if you wish but personally, I just opted to just kill the ice drakes with the character with quest active. I found that using my bishop to kill then loot with my other client was too much of a “start/stop” especially dealing with a map this size with many maneuvers needed. You also get a very good amount of dragon skins and drake’s blood from here. I average about 200m worth of dragon skins per character each time I do this quest line so it’s good money too on paper.

Travel Time - try to cut this down by having VIP teleport rocks readily available, during the whole questline, there are a lot of moving around continents and talking to NPCs. Luckily, I have the luxury of either having these places already saved on my rocks, or I have other characters that I can teleport to who are close by these places. I would highly recommend that you do the same as this will reduce the overall time spent on travelling, and you can use this time saved on where it most matters.


@voonzhefong
Although technically on paper you can do this questline with multiple characters at the same time, it is not something that I would personally recommend as I struggle to see the time savings in doing so compared to doing them 1 by 1, to be honest, you can't really do them "simultaneously" anyway! Reason for that is because of the unique instance behaviors of the untradeable ETC. If you are using a mage and partied up all of your characters in 1 party to try help speed up the farming then it doesn’t really work due to the fact that once you have this questline active, the untradeable ETC are no longer unique to the single characters within party in the map meaning all of them see the same ETC and only 1 of them can loot it. You would still need multiple rocks for continental transitions, and you would still need to farm or buy the same tradeable ETC x4 or whatever. If anything, it would slow me down trying to manage so many clients, so I just don’t see the benefits. But you do what you feel the most comfortable!


My final conclusion is that I do get a sense of achievement every time I complete this questline and on average this now takes me under 6 hours per character, and I’m totally ok with that as I’ve spent longer trying to attempt that JQ If you possess multiple mage farmers then this will be even quicker, but having 1 bishop is enough to speed it right up.

Thank you for reading if you've made it this far

 

DAMN man this is super super helpful, guess at the end the best i can do is hoe around more in FM until i buy all my etc's needed for all 4 characters, distribute them properly, complete first prequest, and then babysit them ONE BY ONE for the 3 untradable etc parts. Nothing shorter than that already I guess. Still a big help so i know this route will be the shortest given I cant possibly pass the tedios jump quest without breaking my keyboard and risking my blood pressure lol. i came to enjoy the game, not suffer =(