1. Go get WineBottler and install both the wine and winebottler applications. You may be able to do it with just wine, but I didn’t try.
2. Spark up the winebottler application and click the “Add empty prefix” buton.
3. Name the prefix, choose where you would like it to live, and save it. I named the new prefix “RoM” and put it in my home directory so I could easily find it.
4. Now fire up the wine application. You should now see a wine glass on your top tool bar. Click it and click “Change Prefix“. Double-click your new runes of magic prefix and confirm. Close that window.
5. Click the wine glass again and click winetricks.
6. You have to install 3 components, but I had trouble when installing them all in the same go, so I installed in two passes. I first installed vcrun2005 and wininet and hit apply. Then I opened up winetricks again and installed ie6.
7. Go to the the Runes of Magic site, find the “client download” link on the left nav bar. Scroll down to the “Multiple file Download” section and download all of the files.
8. Place these files in your <PREFIX>/drive_c/ area in a new directory. In my case, I created the directory with, “mkdir -p ~/ROM/drive_c/install”. You can just surf around in finder and create the folder there if you like.
9. There may be a better way to do this part but this works. Click the wine glass icon again and click “File Manager“. Select “Run” from the file menu and browse around to find your ROMSetup.exe. Run this to install the game. After the lengthy install process, launch the game from the last prompt in the install process. Prepare for a long patch process (which happens automatically).
10. After the patch process (takes an hour or so on my fast connection), go ahead and start the game.
11. I haven’t figured out how to make a launch icon yet (I just started using winebottler today), so I use wine’s file manager to launch the game. You will want to launch “Runes of Magic.exe“.

That’s it. After launching the app and clicking “start game”, it will take about a minute to get the login screen. I had to set the graphics fairly low, even on a MacBook Pro. I’ll update this post when I figure out a more elegant way to package this up. This was my first pass and since it’s fairly easy to get it running, I figured I’d share.

Edit: You can make a batch file in your <PREFIX>/drive_c directory called rom.bat. My rom.bat looks like this:

Then just start wine, click the wine glass icon, click DOS Prompt, and type “rom” and enter.

When I started looking around for quests, I remembered why I lost interest in the game before. At level 43, I had finished most of the quests I could without grouping up. The daily quests are nice though. They got me over the hump to level 44 and opened up some more quests. I was having a hard time advancing though as it was hard to kill monsters 3 levels higher then me needed for the quests.

The solution I came up with was to do some cheap upgrading of my gear. I spent about 400k gold and ended up almost doubling my damage output. If you’re leveling in RoM and are running into killing efficiency problems, I suggest spending a modest sum to upgrade your gear. The first thing to do is find a nice arcane transmutor guide as you can’t get good gear cheaply without it. In my case, I “tiered” my weapon up, I bought a cheap “Vahto’s Spell” accessory set which has a 15% magic power bonus, and I spent about 100k on vendor refining stones and made sure all of my good gear was +2. Since Vahto’s Spell set is considered an end game set, I will probably work on getting some nice stats on it (but not too nice yet).

With all of these upgrades, I can now kill mobs of my level with one flame spell about half the time. The mobs I need to kill for quests (3 levels higher then me or so) fall after two or three flame spells (6 to 9 seconds). I never seem to have mana problems although I expect that to change when I get into instances.

I wonder how many folks have given up on RoM because of the complex weapon upgrade system. I like the system because you can really tailor your weapon to suit your needs in a lot of ways, but I’m sure some folks are completely put off by the amount of information you have to keep in your head to upgrade gear. The WoW system of enchants probably suits more people.

Why am I leveling the mage side first? It’s a lot easier and faster to farm the dailies on a mage then a priest. Also, as I approach end game, the mage side will do all of the material farming for crafting. I’ve been testing out Area of Effect spells in conjunction with Discharge. That seems to produce good results. Sadly, the mage is pretty fragile, so I can’t just stand there and mash Purgatory Fire. I actually have to move away at the same time. Some day, I’ll use AoE for farming, but I have to get better at it (stop dying).

So how will I level any other alts like my warrior/knight? I’ll use a similar strategy as above. I’ll level both sides until I have some nice elite damage skills for the side with the higher dps (if there are any nice skills), and then level the high DPS side to 55 as fast as I can, then use high level dailies to level the slow side.

I haven’t used any XP potions except the ones which come in the bags. Since they’re only useful in combat, I may use them on the priest side for when I’m collecting the furniture bonuses (the link is to a post full of info on furniture) for training points. Those bonuses are also only collected in combat.

Also unlike common WoW gems, runes can be combined to make different runes. Here is a table with the different ranks, and what you have to combine to make new runes. The simplest combination is to take 5 runes of the same type and level and transmute them into one rune the next level up. For example, you can take five vitality II runes and make one vitality III rune. The more complex transforms require you to combine 2 runes of the same level but a different type. This will produce a totaly new rune which may or may not have the same attributes of the runes used to make it.

There is a cost to combining runes. One uses the arcane transmuter to combine runes and each time you combine runes, you use up a charge. You start with ten charges when you gain access to the transmuter at level 10. To get more charges, you have to buy them. Each group of 10 costs 300 tokens in the item store. 300 tokens is 3 days worth of daily quests (10 dailies each produce 10 coins for a total of 100 tokens per day). You can also just create an alt, level it to 10, and use those charges. It takes me about 2 hours to level a character to level 10. I’ve heard of people leveling them much faster. The point is that you should plan out the runes you want carefully. Be doubly sure that the runes you are converting are producing the runes you really want. It’s easy to waste a lot of charges, especially on the higher rank runes. I wasted about 5 charges on a fountain rune which only fits accessories. I have no accessories with rune slots. I could drill one with a scroll from the item shop (kind of like the belt buckle in WoW only more general), but that’s pretty pricey for the level of gear I have.

Runes are one of the many fun surprises in RoM. In the future, I hope to write an article on refining your equipment, and another one on “tiering” your equipment. Refining is pretty easy, but tiering is fairly complex and I don’t understand all of the details yet because I haven’t done any tiering.