mard's 7f Journal

Context:
The 7fing community is a relatively small community, and nowadays it's even smaller. A lot of 7fers can't seem to find duos. But wait -- what if you were your own duo?

After hearing that jootf used a foot pedal at 7f, I got inspired to try to use a foot pedal to "self-duo" at 7f. Although I see people doing duo 5-6 mages quite often, I've actually never seen anyone self-duo 7f. I figured it would be interesting to log my hours as I 7f with myself and try to improve. I'm also curious about how many mesos/exp one can expect from duoing at 7f.

Goal:
gain exp (and mesos? maybe)

Entry #1 (1 hour):

Thoughts:
Although 7fing isn't really known to be a source of mesos, it's interesting to see that you actually can get some mesos here (of course, it's not going to be like mage farming, but exp is the main goal anyways.) I got about 8.8m after 1 hour. I'll see what it stabilizes to after I log more hours. The main thing to look out for at 7f are the earring int 10's which you can sell for ~1.4m ea.

In terms of exp, I got 50.3m on mardi and 48.3 on mard for an epm 60. I placed mardi (lvl 153) on the right and mard (lvl 183) on the left, since I'm prioritizing getting exp for my bm. Nevertheless, I think this definitely can be improved since I'm still getting used to duoing with myself. Although 50.3m eph on mardi is actually not bad (it's a little less than what I'd expect to get with a good duo if I'm just focusing on mardi only, or about the same with an average duo, at least on the left side), 48.3m on mard definitely isn't great. I still have a nontrivial amount of int (9x) on mardi, so that's another "free" source of improvement in epm, but I want to see how much I can push the epm just from improving at client management for future sessions.

 

Yes, that's correct: I'm using two computers to do this. Otherwise, there isn't really any benefit to using a foot pedal. The main issue with trying to duo 7f using just one computer is that even if you macro a move 3x that doesn't give you a very long buffer to adjust your character in case it gets knocked off the bookshelf. Switching between your two attacking clients as well as managing a HS mule (and potentially a SI mule as I'm using or a MU mule if you want to get even sweatier) would simply just be too hectic and you would lose way too much epm trying to do this. I've tried doing this with only one computer and I was barely managing to get ~40m epm on both characters. I honestly don't think it's possible to self duo 7f with only one computer unless you're using 2 warriors or 2 shadowers or some combination of the two. The other attacking classes simply get knocked around way too much for you to be able to reasonably manage multiple clients on one computer. And honestly the main reason this is even possible with my current setup is because I'm using one warrior. I'm not sure if this is even possible with two archers/sairs, but maybe someone can prove me wrong.

So then, I thought, if only I had more hands... But wait, I guess I have some feet that can do something too... And so I decided on using a foot pedal so that my feet could do something too

Actually, I only use one foot pedal which is used for attacking (it basically just holds down y as long as I have my foot on the pedal, which I set to a 3x polearm fury macro). As a bowmaster you get knocked around a lot at 7f so I have to mostly spend my time managing my archer's client, but for the most part I can just hold down fury for my drk since it has stance. Since I have my buff mule clients open as well on my main computer I can tell when my drk gets knocked off and adjust him accordingly.


(The red circle indicates where my drk normally stands, and he would normally get knocked to the left, so I can see when this happens using either my minimap on my main attacker or my buff mules, since as you can see their field of vision allows me to look at what my drk is doing. Although he'll typically get knocked off before the 100 attack window buffer, if he stops attacking then I can see that on my screen too, which answers your question about the 100 attack window buffer. The pink circle and arrows show where I try to place my bm, and I find that my bm just gets knocked everywhere so I have to adjust it quite a lot.)

So in the case that I notice my drk (the red circle) get knocked off, during the time I go over to adjust his position, I can just hold down arrow rain on my archer while I place my drk back at the red circle location. To be honest, I don't think there would be much of a benefit to using more than one pedal (for example a pedal corresponding to left/right/buff) since there are simply way too many things you have to do on your second attacker anyways. The main issue is you'll have to jump back onto the book shelf and then make sure your character is facing left which I can imagine will be pretty hard to do with a foot pedal, and it's not that big of a deal for me to just hold down arrow rain on my main client as I go over to my second computer to adjust my drk. During the time I'm holding down arrow rain on my archer, it probably won't stay on the bookshelf, but that small window of time where it's not "optimally" hitting the most monsters possible (since it's not able to hit the top two fish on the right side if it's arrow raining on the floor) is not too big of a deal since this doesn't happen that frequently.

If anyone's curious about what the foot pedal looks like, it looks like this:

and it's called the iKKEGOL USB Foot Switch Singal Pedal Footswitch on Amazon. Not sponsored btw*

 

Entry #2 (40 minutes):


Thoughts:
I did a short 40 minute session, but honestly I was performing worse than yesterday. I got about 51.4m eph on my drk and 53.6m eph on my bm for an epm 30 test which is significant improvement over yesterday but I was doing this with GM buffs so I didn't have to worry about hsing myself (I was still using an SI mule though) which explains the exp difference despite worse performance. I didn't end getting up any earring int 10's on either character which dropped the meso gain/hr to about 8.4m/hr, but I'm still not really complaining since mesos are not the goal here. I was about 30 minutes into the session before I realized that using phoenix actually helps significantly with clearing the right side mobs on my bm, but I still kept forgetting to use it even in the last 10 minutes (the epm 10s I did for the end of the session were 49.8m eph for my drk and 54m eph for my bm). I think for future sessions remembering to use phoenix will be a simple way to help with improving the epm, although we'll have to see.

 

I had a busy last week so I didn't get to self-duo 7f, but I got a quick hour in today.
Entry #3 (1 hour)



No earring int 10's today which was a bummer, but at least exp showed some improvement. Got 53m eph on mardi and 49.7m on mard which is still improvement over my first session I attempted in entry 1 (and comparable to my second entry on gm buffs). Again, I placed mardi on the right and mard on the left. This time I remembered to keep my phoenix up as much as I could in between mob respawn times so I wonder if that's part of the reason for improvement. I think I might try to switch sides for the characters since it definitely feels like my dk is swinging at thin air a lot of the time on the left. Perhaps it's not worth it to have the bm on the right even if it might suffer from some exp loss if I place it on the left. I suspect that the bm will get a bit lower eph on the left, but mard will probably get significantly more on the right. An experiment for next time!

 

Probably won't be updating this journal for the forseeable future (honestly I'm kind of lazy to update the spreadsheet and keep track of the numbers), but I've achieved my goal, which was to show that it's viable to 7f with yourself. I think it's always interesting to experiment and try new things, and perhaps I inspired some readers to incorporate foot pedals into their gameplay. Although the credit for the idea goes to joot

As for the exp/hr, as I mentioned in my previous post, my suspicions were correct in that I was better off putting my bm on the left and dk on the right. When swapping the characters, I was getting about the same eph for my bm (hovering around 50-55 for long epm tests) but my dk would get significantly more exp on the right (about 60m eph). I'm sure that as I get higher leveled, reset more int on my bm, and become a bit more proficient at this strategy that the exp will only go up from here. Perhaps I'll make an update in the distant future if there's any significant improvements to note.

Thanks for reading