Leafiara (prime)/Mechanical Musings/Rags to Riches: The Rings of Lumnis Story
Preamble
Since 5118, Elanthian adventurers have traveled each year to the Needle of Pentas on the Isle of Ornath to participate in the Trials of Lumnis, a series of puzzles and trivia to test their logic and knowledge. Likewise, since 2018, the Rings of Lumnis event has presented GemStone IV players each years with tests of their own thoughts, raising questions such as "Is this for me?" and "What do I stand to gain?"
The short answer for most people is "extra experience at accelerated rates," but fully explaining just how much so--and the other alternatives--is another matter. These are reasonably complex mechanical questions, which is one reason that the Rings of Lumnis event struggled in its earliest days. Wyrom recounted the following history on Discord:
Wyrom — 03/20/2021 RoL took a pretty heavy time investment for its debut run. Probably more so than most events. A good chunk of live events is planning and scheduling. For RoL, it required lots of coding, more so than Duskruin. It also had heavy QC, more so than EG. The initial run was a flop, so much that it came off the official Simu event list for the next year. But because players were asking for it, we just turned it on. There were tweaks that happened, but I don't really see us doing anything major with RoL again. We want to add more puzzles, but I'm fairly certain the unknown factors like solving puzzles led to its initial flop.
However, as the title of this article implies, Rings of Lumnis would go on to perform as a stellar event by any measure. Wyrom would later state the following:
Wyrom — 06/14/2021 Major events being Duskruin, RW, and EG. Though RoL outperformed everything this year, so we probably should reconsider that event. Wyrom — 10/11/2021 Years and years ago, RoL got pushed into the minor event category, so we though[t] about having it always available. But it then blew up, and there is no way I can label it as a minor event anymore.
What happened in those years between? Let the story unfold as we dig into the details of Rings of Lumnis, starting with its signature item.
The Spiritual Ring: Supercharging Players and the Event Itself
Since the beginning, the quintuple orb brooch, an account-bound pinworn item acquired only at the Rings of Lumnis event, offered players a choice of five benefits:
- Planar: A larger experience pool capacity for half an hour.
- Spiritual: Instant experience absorption.
- Elemental: Improved odds with luck-based Adventurer's Guild bounties.
- Chaos: A random selection from the other four, but up to 10% more effective at it.
- Order: Increased bounty point rewards for half an hour.
This article will eventually cover most of these benefits, especially since now you can have them all and it's no longer your choice of one, but I'll start by focusing heavily on the obvious:
For most players who participated early on, and even to this day, the Spiritual benefit of instant experience absorption immediately jumped out as the most attractive.
Exactly how attractive is it, though? The thresholds for benefits as of this writing are as follows, assuming one is buying from a premium subscription:
Rings of Lumnis Runs Exp Per Rub X/Day Uses Daily Exp Yearly Exp Simucoin Cost Premium Dollar Cost 10 100 1 100 36,500 1,000 $8.69 (of a $9.99 package) 30 200 1 200 73,000 3,000 $23.99 (of a $34.99 package) 55 300 1 300 109,500 5,500 $42.30 (of $49.99) 100 390 2 780 284,700 10,000 $74.07 (of $99.99) 300 595 3 1,785 651,525 30,000 $223.05 (of two $99.99 and one $49.99) 750 761 4 3,044 1,111,060 75,000 $535.71 (of $999.99) 1,250 869 5 4,345 1,585,925 125,000 $892.85 (of $999.99) 1,850 944 6 5,664 2,067,360 185,000 $1,321.42 (of two $999.99s) 2,500 1,009 7 7,063 2,577,995 250,000 $1,785.70 (of two $999.99s) 3,250 1,084 8 8,672 3,165,280 325,000 $2,321.41 (of three $999.99s) 5,000 1,259 9 11,331 4,135,815 500,000 $3,571.39 (of four $999.99s) 7,500 1,509 10 15,090 5,507,850 750,000 $5,357.09 (of six $999.99s) 12,000 1,959 11 21,549 7,865,385 1,200,000 $8,571.34 (of nine $999.99s)
The short of it is:
As long as you play enough to use the Rings of Lumnis brooch's Spiritual benefit, it offers by far the game's most efficient bang for your buck to improve experience gain.
I could even go further and argue that it offers the best mechanical gain of any pay event. I realize this is a bold claim in the face of Duskruin, but even the most powerful flares only have a chance to activate while the Rings of Lumnis brooch offers high value in a guaranteed form. In fact, let's run that comparison of the most powerful flares to a similar price spent on the brooch:
- Duskruin's xazkruvrixis metal, which has flares that instantly kill creatures, costs roughly $952 worth of bloodscrip.
- A Rings of Lumnis brooch with 1250 runs of the Spiritual ring, which gives the user 1.6 million experience every year, costs $892.85 worth of event entries.
Let's put that 1.6 million experience per year into perspective.
A casual player who only plays exactly enough each week to finish their Gift of Lumnis earns about 1.9m annual exp ordinarily, so the brooch described above would skyrocket their exp gain to 184% of what it was. If starting fresh from level 0, they would reach level 61 within a year and level 95 within two years. Alternatively, if we look at a veteran or more hardcore player who's already capped, they would earn an additional 640 training points (if converting PTPs to MTPs or vice versa) or 32 Ascension training points every year from the brooch alone.
It boggles my mind that these brooches exist, but it's just as baffling to raise the question:
Why did this unbelievable mechanical benefit take time to catch on instead of selling like hotcakes immediately?
Playing It By Ear: How Rings of Lumnis got Better in Reality and Perception
Several factors held the Rings of Lumnis event back at the start, yet most are things of the past by now.
One was the uncertainty factor described by Wyrom near the start of this page. Asking players to solve puzzles by guessing at verbs or answering trivia by scouring the wiki is a taller mountain to climb than asking them to defeat creatures at Duskruin and Ebon Gate or search areas at Duskruin and Rumor Woods. However, these days the answers to the puzzles and trivia are widely known and available, including even a spoiler section on the wiki if one really needs it, making Rings of Lumnis more accessible.
Only being able to keep one of the brooch's five types of benefits active before 2021 also left many players advancing exclusively in Spiritual and not spending on the other types of puzzles, but more on that later.
One of the biggest improvements to the event, starting only days into its first run, was the addition of lightening and deepening notes as rewards. You don't--and never did--need to actually complete the Rings of Lumnis puzzles to upgrade your brooch. Merely entering the puzzle upgrades it even if you forfeit, ensuring that you get value for your Simucoins.
Of course, players soon realized this and some began just entering and forfeiting repeatedly, seeing little reason to finish puzzles they'd already encountered--if not also ones they hadn't. In response, staff added lightening and deepening notes as rewards for completion. (There are also more rare prizes like RPA orbs and most years have even had a handful of jackpot level prizes like unique lunar halos or spirit servants.) These notes allow automated lightening and deepening of your items on your schedule, so the Rings of Lumnis value proposition became not only getting experience (or, if preferred, one of the other benefits), but saving yourself or someone else a great deal of time that could have been spent waiting in merchant lines.
Almost the entire supply of lightening and deepening notes that are so ubiquitous in playershops today has come from players running Rings of Lumnis.
One thing that did and probably still does hold Rings of Lumnis back, however, is that substantial brooch benefits are predicated on some combination of heavy play, heavy spending, or heavy merchanting. My earlier example used the ~1.6 million bonus exp mark, which is pretty staggering, but it also costs almost $900 and not everyone's willing to spend that. So, even though you could spend (at the low end) less than $9 to get 36,500 bonus exp a year and ten lightening or deepening notes and that's technically a great deal, it's also a small enough benefit that it might not "feel" enticing to players. I could probably argue that brooch benefits aren't felt as a big impact until at least the $74.07 threshold of 100 runs for 284,700 bonus exp per year, if not the $223.05 threshold of 651,525 exp.
(As an aside, in case anyone is wondering, the Rings of Lumnis secondary market is historically nowhere near as robust as the Duskruin secondary market, in which players are frequently willing to sell entries for silvers. That does change a bit when event boxes are on the table, but as of this writing in 2024, the only time that happened was the 2023 Rings of Lumnis and it's not happening again this year.)
My personal take is that the core reason Rings of Lumnis took a while to catch on is that, even though the value proposition is great, it requires analysis and math to grasp just how great it is. It's caught on through word of mouth, charts, and analogies (for example, the $74.07 threshold is comparable to more than six and a half violet orbs every year!) since not every player is willing to look that deeply into it. After all, while the mechanical benefits are a min-maxer's dream, GemStone IV is a roleplaying game and many do play primarily for that reason.
...and that's a perfect segue to my next point:
The Hidden Benefits of Time Saving and Account Boosting
Until now I've been framing the brooch's instant exp absorption in the most basic terms: an additive benefit on top of your usual hunting, used by a single character. In reality, though, it doesn't need to be either of those things.
When I first wrote this sentence, I had been idling on a node in game for three hours and I just didn't sweat it or feel the pressure that I "should" be out getting exp. It doesn't matter anymore. I hunt significantly less often than several years ago because I'm doing other things--writing on the wiki, chatting on Discord, running Silverwood Manor events or Twilight Hall events, idling and talking with people--but I still gain exp matching the pace I've planned around.
It doesn't even require a huge number of Spiritual runs to feel way more at luxury. Most people hover in the realm of earning 1800 to 2500 exp per hour when playing semi-seriously, so even a fairly modest $74.07 brooch that gives 5,460 exp per week gives a player about 2.184 to 3.03 hours of leeway.
That said, a significant number of Spiritual runs--like, say, 1250 or more--can be a double-edged sword. Though it relieves the pressure of staying consistently active in the hunt-rest cycle, it can add the pressure of feeling the need to run through every Spiritual use each day. This can come in the form of, for example, one exhaustive power hunt with frequent absorbs, doing an instant absorb after each of the first X bounties turned in for the day, or participating in large scale group hunts like Reim or warcamps where exp flows like water.
Another benefit of the brooch is that, as mentioned before, it's account-bound rather than character-bound, so you can give uses to another character on a premium slot for any reason you like. When Sanctify was on the verge of being released, I had begun working on another cleric who was in her mid-10s and shifted some of my Planar brooch rubs to her for a couple of weeks to bring her up to speed and start sanctifying items.
Yes, I said Planar, not Spiritual. As nice as it is to have the freedom to shift gears and start heavily pushing a backup character with Spiritual if you want, the Planar benefit can also make a gigantic difference for a premium player who's really capitalizing on alt slots. Used carefully and split up across characters, you can more or less permanently increase the size of their exp pools. Let's break down Planar in the next section!
Maximizing an Upgraded Multi-Ring Brooch
Since 2021, players have been able to pay a million silvers to upgrade their brooches, enabling them to add runs in every ring and therefore have every benefit. Each ring has its own number of uses per day, however. Someone can have, for example, a brooch with 300 Spiritual runs to give 595 absorbed exp three times per day, 100 Planar runs to give half an hour of +390 exp pool size twice per day, and 100 Order runs to give half an hour of +390 bounty points twice per day.
Revisiting a simplified version of our chart...
Rings of Lumnis Runs Exp Pool or Bounty Point Increase Per Rub X/Day Uses Minutes Per Day 10 100 1 30 30 200 1 30 55 300 1 30 100 390 2 60 300 595 3 90 750 761 4 120 1,250 869 5 150 1,850 944 6 180 2,500 1,009 7 210 3,250 1,084 8 240 5,000 1,259 9 270 7,500 1,509 10 300 12,000 1,959 11 330
...the scaling on Planar and Order is nominally identical to Spiritual, meaning that 1 absorbed exp = 1 additional exp in the pool = 1 additional bounty point. However, while Spiritual happens instantaneously and is then gone, Planar and Order each last half an hour per rub.
In the case of Order, this means you can often get more than one use out of it. Rub the brooch just before turning in a bounty to get bonus bounty points, then complete another one within the half hour and get bonus bounty points on that too. Order is good at what it does, but I won't spend any more time on that since what it does is a niche benefit primarily helpful to players who need a steady supply of bounty points for enhancive charging or even fixskills (like, for example, if they fixskill every time Duskruin comes around or supply fixskills to wizards, clerics, and sorcerers working on improving their items).
The benefits of the Planar ring, while not as immediately and obviously attractive as the Spiritual ring, can be substantial. On the surface level, a Spiritual benefit of (just to pick a number) 600 experience instantly absorbed per rub likely seems far better than the equivalent Planar benefit of increasing your exp pool by 600 for half an hour and gradually absorbing that over time.
However, there are caveats and niche circumstances in which the Planar benefit can be better than the Spiritual benefit, depending on your playstyle and resources.
First, for every 200 exp in your pool, you absorb one more experience per pulse than normal. So, using our example of a Planar brooch with 600 bonus, you'd nominally have +3 experience per pulse for half an hour, which is 90 experience on top of the 600.
Better yet, though, a Planar boost can technically extend past half an hour if you time it correctly. By turning in a bounty right before a Planar boost expires, your saturated mind state will be based on the increased exp pool. In my case, this means ~2000 experience to absorb instead of ~1500, so I retain bigger experience pulses not just for the ordinary half hour, but also during the time it takes to absorb the the additional exp above and beyond what I would have had ordinarily.
So far, the above two points can only make a case for Planar ever exceeding Spiritual, even in the most niche scenario, if someone is playing heavily enough to be online for the full duration of exp pulses.
However, due to how offline experience absorption works, arguably a far better use case than the above is using a Planar boost on the most infrequently played of characters. Here's an illustration:
Right before a player goes to bed, her level 15 character with a normal exp pool size of 900 takes on a bounty. When her normal exp pool fills up, she uses a Planar boost to increase it by 761, then fills her head again as she completes the bounty five minutes later. She turns it in, reaching a saturated point of ~2100 exp, then shuts off GS for the night. She only plays this character once per day before bed to finish out her Gift of Lumnis, so by the time she comes back, it's about 23 hours later. Using the offline exp absorption rate of 15 per 10 minutes, the character has absorbed 2070 experience. Crucially, if she hadn't used the Planar boost, then her saturated exp pool would have been around 1400, so she would have come back to exactly that much experience absorbed. In other words, the character gained a net benefit of 670 experience from this 761 experience Planar boost. However, she's not done. You see, the Planar boost lasts half an hour and we said that so far she only had it active for five minutes while finishing her bounty. Now she gets a new bounty and we'll say it takes ten minutes to complete and turn in, so she does that and shuts off for the night again, ending with ~2100 exp. This time she comes back to play 24 hours later and has absorbed all 2100 exp, which again is 700 more than she would have if she didn't have a Planar boost active. At this point she's now gotten a 1370 experience benefit from a rub of a 761 experience Planar ring. ...but the Planar boost still has 15 minutes left, so if she can finish another bounty in that time, she can get 2070 experience (by the time she logs on again tomorrow night) from this one Planar rub.
In reality, it's even better than that because this example doesn't mention the larger exp pulses or the increased instant absorption from bounty turn-ins with a bigger exp pool. Still, as nice as those are, they're minutiae compared to the overarching point:
On a character played only once a day, a Planar rub can be equivalent to multiple Spiritual rubs. If you can complete bounties quickly enough on such a character, it's essentially like permanently increasing your exp pool.
But let's step back for a second. If the character's brooch is good for an exp pool of 761, then it has four uses per day, so why does it matter that she can get 2070 exp out of one rub over the course of three days? What happens to the other eleven rubs?
Well, there are three broad possibilities. One is better than its Spiritual counterpart, one is worse, and the other depends (but will generally favor Spiritual).
In the example as it was written--a player who consistently hunts exactly seven times per week--the extra rubs are pointless and she most likely would have been better off going with Spiritual. The daily exp absorbed per Planar rub via offline absorption is 670 whereas Spiritual would have been the full 761, so Spiritual can only win if her hunts are typically short enough or against underleveled enough creatures that using a Spiritual rub is either A) unlikely to get its full amount or B) would likely leave her at noticeably less than a full mind by the time she's finished, therefore reducing the amount of exp instantly absorbed when turning in her bounty.
The second possibility involves stacking Planar rubs. If we changed our example from a player who hunts once per day to a player who hunts once per day except for Saturdays, when she plays anywhere from 4-8 hours, then she has her full exp pool permanently active due to gaining more hours of boost than she's using six days a week.
I've done this myself. With my earlier example of a mid-10s cleric, at one point I had stacked over eight hours of Planar boost by adding an hour (two rubs) each day while only hunting her once. Since she was a premium alt who had stocked hundreds of instant mind clearers over years of daily logins, I then basically just power hunted to blast through her early levels and get to Sanctifying. (And, yes, I said I stacked over eight hours--because, unlike conventional spell effects, Rings of Lumnis brooch benefits aren't constrained to a four hour and ten minute maximum.)
Barring a scenario like that with tons of mind clearers stocked ahead of time, though, a Spiritual brooch will still pay off more even for a player who only plays heavily once per week.
So the third possibility, and the one where Planar really does shine, involves premium accounts. If we used an example of a player who hunts four characters once per day each, she could split the brooch uses among them and basically they would all end up with larger exp pools as a reward for her item management juggling.
Having said all that, I'll reiterate that you can also just build up Planar and Spiritual on the same brooch!
[Note: There's still more to come since this guide hasn't covered the Chaos benefit yet! Didn't want to hold off for that, though, since this is perfectly suitable as a first draft covering what are by far the three most used benefits.]