How to Farm Istan

PALAWADAN

This is the big money-maker in Istan. In short, if you want to farm Istan, you need to do this event, period.

The Palawadan meta-event sees players zerging their way through the city, killing champion enemies, completing events throughout the city, and opening chests called "Supply Stashes" that spawn after an event in the city is completed. Most of your profit will be made from opening these Supply Stashes, so the basic objective is to open as many of these as possible.

Palawadan always starts every 2 hours at dusk on the map, which is 45 minutes past the hour, so you'll often see people say it starts at "xx:45" to accommodate everyone's different time zones. For the purposes of explaining the cadence of events in Istan, let's say our example Palawadan event starts at 2:45 PM.

There will frequently be commanders leading Palawadan groups posting on LFG to get as many players helping as possible. You'll start seeing these groups post about 15 minutes before Palawadan, around 2:30 PM. Once you join a group, you'll simply spend most of the meta-event following the zerg and killing any enemies you come across.

In the map below, each area of the city is labeled, and potential spawn locations are marked with small coded boxes.

GATES: The first event spawns right at 2:45 PM. Two champion enemies will spawn and need to be taken down. Ideally, everyone in the zerg is mounted on their bunnies before the champs spawn, so that the players can use the bunny's attack to do Crowd Control (CC) damage and bring the break bar down fast. You'll want to kill the champs in quick succession - focusing one down while the other is still near full health allows the remaining champ time to resurrect the fallen one. If you see a commander calling for more damage on a specific champ, follow their instruction so the zerg can more quickly move to the next event.

NORTH CAPTURE POINTS: There are two capture points on the north side of the city that require players to stand in the control zone while fighting powerful champion enemies. The zerg will focus on one capture point at a time, so stick with the group. Every champion enemy you help defeat will drop one of the supplementary profit sources from the event - Palawan Phylacteries. You'll want to help kill as many champs as possible to net as many of these bags as possible. For this reason, it's helpful to the group if members of the zerg target each champ to make them more easily visible in the middle of the chaos, helping more people get a hit on them.

Certain champ enemies, namely the Hierarchs, are infamous for their "swirly bowl" attack which sucks players into a vortex and does massive damage, usually enough to down most players in a single hit. These attacks occur when the Hierarch reaches 75% and 25% health, at which point the attack begins to charge, and the Hierarch's break bar is available. The zerg can stop the attack from happening by focusing CC damage at that moment, so make sure to hold your CC attacks for that break bar. You can also avoid the attack entirely if you dodge at just the right moment, though that takes a little practice to get the timing right.

Once the point is captured, the zerg will usually stay behind to finish off any remaining champ enemies. At this point, two Supply Stashes will spawn nearby. Again, these are the biggest money-makers in the event, and you'll want to loot these as soon as possible once the champs are dead, especially because Supply Stashes that you've already opened will re-spawn again after 10 minutes, allowing you to loot them again later during the event. Once you loot those, move with the zerg to the second north capture point, rinse and repeat for 2 more stashes.

TEMPLE: There are 6 champ enemies inside the temple, however none of them drop Palawan Phylacteries. Follow the zerg into the temple, swarm each champ, and for each one killed a Supply Stash will spawn nearby, for 6 stashes in total. There aren't any special tactics for this part, just zerg down the champs, loot the Stashes, then move to the next event.

STATUE: The zerg should next move to the statue of Palawa Joko. More champs that drop Phylacteries will be there, so make sure to tag each champ while dealing damage to the statue. Commanders might ask the zerg to stack directly at the feet of the statue - this is to speed up the statue phase by drawing the champs close to the statue so everyone's damage is hitting the champs and the statue at the same time. After finishing the champs and the statue, loot 2 more stashes, then move to the southern control points.

SOUTH CAPTURE POINTS: Just like in the north, there are two more capture points on the southern side of the city. Follow the same procedure you did for the north, tagging and killing all champs, and looting stashes immediately. One quick note - for the south-western control point, it's possible for one of its associated Supply Stashes to spawn far to the south eastern side of the city, close to the docks, so don't fret if you can't find two stashes right next to it. Once you capture both points and loot 4 more stashes, it's time for the docks.

THE DOCKS: This phase is probably the most involved of all the events in Palawadan, though the concept is relatively straight-forward. Once you complete the south capture points, three corsair ships will appear in the harbor, and the zerg will need to sink them. There are numerous cannons all along the docks, and the group should man as many as possible. Because most zergs enter the docks from the south, few players usually spread to the northern cannons, but you should absolutely spread out to cover the northern cannons early to prevent the corsair ships from destroying them before the zerg moves north to finish the last ship.

The cannons have a 1-skill for firing a cannonball at the ships, and a 2-skill to create a reflective shield over the cannon and its user. If you're manning a cannon, you should be spamming the 2-skill all the time, as the shield has a 10 second duration, and the shield skill has a 10 second cool-down, which means you can permanently have a shield up to protect you from the ships' cannons.

In addition to the cannons, players not manning them can assist by flying onto the ships themselves to deal damage with their normal attacks. Any attacks that stack vulnerability on the ships help a lot, because the friendly cannons firing on the ships will get a boost to their damage as a result. So if you can stack vulnerability on the ships, do so.

After each ship is sunk, two stashes will spawn on the docks near where that ship was anchored. Once all three are sunk and you've collected the 6 stashes, it's time for the final fight in Palawadan - a showdown with Archon Iberu.

ARENA / IBERU: You'll find Iberu waiting for you in the middle of the arena. Once you're there, everyone in the zerg should make sure to kill the adds that spawn to help Iberu, because they can heal him, drawing out the length of the encounter. With the adds mitigated, Iberu still hits hard, and there will be deadly energy beams dropping from above that can melt your health very quickly, so pay close attention to your positioning in the fight.

Just like the champion Hierarchs you fought earlier, Iberu has his own swirly attack at 75% and 25% health. It can take out a huge chunk of the zerg in one hit, so it's very important for everyone to save their CC attacks for those moments and spike their CC damage as soon as the break bar appears. Very efficient zergs can kill the break bar in less than one second, making the encounter very smooth and relatively easy, and allowing more time after the fight for everyone to loot more stashes.

Once Iberu is "re-dead," 8 stashes will spawn in the arena area. Get ready, because now it's time to make the big bucks.

LOOTING PHASE: Observant readers will note that once you loot the 8 stashes in the Arena, you've looted all 30 stashes that spawn during the event. However, as I mentioned up above, Supply Stashes re-spawn every 10 minutes, which means by the time you've killed Iberu, the stashes from the first northern control points you captured should have re-spawned and can be looted again. This is what makes the event so profitable, because you can accrue a large number of supply stashes just from running back through the city and opening the same ones again.

Be careful when running back through the city, as arrow carts have conspicuously appeared now that can cripple you and slow you down tremendously. Use mounts like the raptor or jackal to quickly evade those attacks, and if you're having difficulty, make your way to one of the water canals below where you shouldn't get attacked.

Some players also use alternate characters during this phase to come back through the city and loot even more stashes, so if you have alt characters you can use, the number of stashes you can collect is mostly limited by your amount of determination. Go grab as many as you can to make the most money. Simple as that.

One very large note to add to this though is the fact that there is a cap on the number of stashes you can loot. There has been a lot of discussion in the community about how precisely the cap works, but from what I can tell I believe it is an account-bound cap of 80 stashes collected during a dawn-dusk cycle (every 2 hours from one start of Palawadan to the next). I'm fairly certain the 80 number is right, but I'm less certain about the window of time in which it's counted, so take that with a grain of salt.

Regardless of the specifics, you'll know if you hit the cap if you open a stash and one near you suddenly opens on its own and is not lootable, or if you see the chest icons on the mini-map disappear altogether. The cap enforces a temporary cool-down period of 15 minutes, meaning you cannot loot stashes from any source (Palawadan or Great Hall) for 15 minutes, and any stashes that spawn during that time remain un-lootable after your 15 minute timer expires. You can try using an alt character to see if the stashes are lootable for that one, but if you don't have that ability then you'll simply need to wait until the cool-down timer expires.

ESCAPE PHASE: After the 30-minute timer for the main Palawadan raid expires at 3:15 PM (in our example), a new 5-minute timer appears saying it's time to escape the city. If you're in it to loot as many chests as possible, don't leave just yet! You can still run through collecting more chests all the way to the buzzer, but you will have to be even more careful doing so now because new AoE attacks will randomly spawn around the map dealing large amounts of damage and slowing you down a lot. Avoid those at all costs, and continue opening stashes until the clock hits zero at 3:20 PM.

At that point, you'll quickly lose health automatically, be killed, and teleported out of Palawadan. But it's OK, because you got lots of loot, and even better, the Great Hall event starts immediately!

• Step 1: Participate in Palawadan Event
• Step 2: Participate in Great Hall Event
• Step 3: ? ? ? ? (Now what?)
• Step 4: PROFIT!