Rebirth Alpha from a Wizard's eyes

Rebirth Alpha

Rebirth Alpha is a "daily" quest (actually, a series of quests) which needs a squad of six people, and all squad members must be between levels 40 and 55. Level 56+ people can not join. People below level 40 can not join. And, people much below level 50 probably should not bother because rebirth alpha is typically too hard for them even if they have "good" gear.

If you do well, you will take something like 3-4 hours. If you fail, you will not take so long.

In this quest, you first talk with a Khatru Pup to get your duty badge (you can do this once per day, and duty badges can not be traded). Then, you talk with a spiritual disciple with your duty badge in hand and get a rebirth order for rebirth alpha. You can find a spiritual disciple beside the elder of archosaur. You can find another by the elder of thousand streams.

To take this quest, you squad up with five other people and your squad leader takes a quest from the spiritual disciple which takes you into the valley of reciprocity. There, your squad leader must trade your six rebirth orders in to an NPC which starts the main quest.

But if anyone has not done rebirth alpha before, after you arrive in happy valley but before the quest is taken, new people should visit happy valley (by using the blue teleporter) and then come back (using the first quest on the "Return to Battle" pillar). Things will get hectic later, so getting your bearings early can help.

When the quest starts, the NPC you will be defending gets spawned (she is a Wraith Harpy, and appears on the platform). Your job will be to defend her from wave after wave after wave of elite monsters and bosses.

When you die in this quest, you do not lose any experience. And you probably will die. And, when you die, you do not get the "go to town" dialog. Instead, you usually are instantly sent to happy valley. If you die in happy valley you get sent to thousand streams and can not come back.

Unfortunately, monsters that were attacking you before you die can sometimes still hit you when you get resurrected in happy valley. If this happens -- if you "die when you are dead" -- you get kicked out to thousand streams. Once this has happened, usually other people will start dying, and even if they do not get kicked out they typically will keep dying and the quest fails.

Also, if you try to return to one of the other battles, you get kicked out to thousand streams.

A typical rebirth alpha squad will consist of two teams, each team will have a wizard, a cleric and a barbarian. Wizards will tank and kill things, Clerics will keep their wizard alive, Barbarians will keep their cleric alive. You do not have to do things this way, and you do not have to completely succeed to benefit from this quest. You might substitute a good bladesmaster for a Barbarian -- you get blademaster physical defense buff this way, if you can find one that can be useful and stay alive.

The main quest has seven subquests.

Stage 1 ends when you kill Mori and gives you 20k exp and 4k spirit (i am giving approximate numbers here).
Stage 2 ends when you kill Beautiful Tail and High Pitcher and gives you 25k exp and 5k spirit.
Stage 3 ends when you kill Boxer and gives you 52k exp and 10k spirit.
Stage 4 ends when you kill Duljamin and gives you 73k exp and 14k spirit.
Stage 5 ends when you kill Mossey and gives you 120k exp and 26k spirit and a mirage celestone or maybe a mystical tome fragment.
Stage 6 ends when you kill Snowball and gives you 128k exp and 28k spirit and also gives you a mirage celestone or maybe mystical tome fragment.
Stage 7 ends when you kill Napolong and gives you 179k exp and 37k spirit and gives you a mystical tome fragment or a mirage celestone (with even odds of each).

In addition, after each wave, a small guy with an umbrella on his head will spawn beside your wraith harpy, if you kill him (he does not have much health and does not seem to attack), he will drop a lot of coins (which increase with each stage) and maybe some potions. After the first stage, he can also drop beautiful shards. He will be level 50 so if you have lower leveled people on your squad one of them should kill him to slightly improve your drop chances. Roughly speaking you should expect coins somewhere between your spirit gain and your exp gain. A typical complete run might give your squad 2 beautiful shards, one being an elemental shard (which might be useful for level 100+ crazy stone, if that were ever implemented) and one being a useful shard.

Rebirth Alpha also has a special item: celebeans. When you start the quest, six NPCs will spawn, one for each kind of aura. If someone gives them celebeans, they will give you their aura or increase the level of their aura. If you want to complete all stages, you will need auras.

Wizard's Perspective

If you are a wizard, you are going to need to absorb a lot of damage in these quests, this means you need good gear. I was losing 30% of my armor's endurance in one stage, which means I need to make a trip to happy valley between stages, to repair my gear.

Your main tools during rebirth alpha will be Dragon's Breath and Stone Barrier and Glacial Embrace. Pyroshell might also help but I did not see any fire spells other than from the first boss, but I have never completed stage 4. Dragon's Breath uses 100 chi and barrier uses 30 so you will need a lot of chi. You should make sure you have full chi when you start, and you will need to gain chi quickly. To keep your dragon's breath running, you can use a mana charm, sesame yuanxiao or soothing orbs or a lot of medium mystery potions. If you use level 6 dragon's breath I can easily imagine you needing 300k mana for a complete rebirth (maybe 3 full stacks of 100 medium mystery potions or 50 soothing orbs). In my opinion, you should not try to conserve mana supplies -- staying alive and doing the best you can should be a higher priority. You should also be wearing a guardian charm and you should expect it to take some significant damage, though hypothetically speaking good gear and a good team can keep your charm safe.

You will also be facing monsters which bleed (and poison, but bleed seems worse to me) so you should have cauterize on your genie for when your cleric can not purify you fast enough. You will also get sealed and other stuff, so good luck...

Chi

You can not just put up a dragon's breath and rely on your charm to keep things going. Stone barrier only lasts 15 minutes, and some waves have ranged water damage monsters and so on... And if you are using apothecaries (either for mana or for occasional bursts of health) you will need to take down your dragon's breath so you can use them. So gaining chi will sometimes be really important.

You will have several sources of chi:

Duels -- do NOT duel once the quest starts, because duels disable a lot of your healing supplies.

Auras -- your party can get chi auras which will really help, but they should not be your highest priority.

Spells -- spells are great for chi, but take time and mana. You can also use your normal attack if you have fee time. If you do not have any monsters handy (which will happen, occasionally), you can control click on a selected NPC and attack them (this will not work if you are blue named on a PvE server).

Your best spells for chi building are:

Emberstorm. Put this on a function key hit it multiple times quickly (or hold it down -- i am not sure if the game specially detects held down keys or if key repeat makes this work for me). Emberstorm will give you 20 chi and only takes a second. You will typically take 50 to 150 damage when you use emberstorm this way but that's nothing in this context. The big disadvantages of emberstorm are its short range (6m) and its long cooldown (15 seconds). If you have enough time to use emberstorm twice on one wave of monsters, you might doing something wrong. But, still, 20 chi in one second is very nice. This spell also has a bigger damage radius than Dragon's Breath so works well for pulling aggro onto you, just before you start.

Will of the Phoenix. 15 chi in 2 seconds (technically in one second but you can not do anything until your casting time completes), AoE, knockback, this spell is beautiful, but it also has some limitations -- it only has 10m range and has an 8 second cooldown.

Hailstorm. Hailstorm gives you 15 chi in 3 seconds. Hailstorm is also an AoE spell which sometimes freezes opponents. Use this one when you have 3+ monsters in its range. Hailstorm has a 12 second cooldown and decent range (but not great range, because of how much you did not level it). You only need level 1 hailstorm.

Pyrogram. Everybody has pyrogram, and 15 chi in 2.3 seconds is decent (though emberstorm is better). But Pyrogram's best feature, for chi building, is its 3 second cooldown.

Gush. Bleah, only 10 chi in 2 seconds. Gush is sort of like hailstorm for chi generation except you are only damaging a single target and gush's range will be better.

So, anyways, you need a 100 chi for dragon's breath or 130 chi for a defensive spell plus dragon's breath. If you have never seen a wave before, you should go for 130 chi and cast a defensive spell once you know how they will attack you. Here is a plausible attack sequence:

pyrogram, gush, hailstorm, pyrogram (switching targets to something moving), will of the phoenix, gush (switch targets), pyrogram, gush, emberstorm, Stone Barrier/Glacial Embrace, Dragon's Breath

This will get you attacked so you can see which defensive spell you need (but you might wind up having to deal with several kinds of monsters, together). Note that you are NOT trying to kill things yet. You are trying to build chi, and you are trying to keep your cleric from being killed. You will have some help from your barbarian, but you are getting heals and your barbarian is not so you need to be protecting him also. In other words, you should probably be switching targets every time you channel gush and every other time when you channel pyrogram. You want to be making monsters mad, so they come attack you.

This sequence also unfortunately takes almost 24 seconds to complete, so you may want to do another will of the phoenix just before you cast your defensive spell, or if you are happy with your current defense and expect it will last long enough you might want to cut out the final pyrogram+gush. If you already had enough chi, you might want to go straight into Dragon's Breath right after you use Will of the Phoenix, but I think you should always use emberstorm just before dragon's breath, because it will help you pull aggro and unless you had all the chi you could hold, its 20 chi will help you later.

If you can end your dragon's breath before all monsters die (but when most of them are dead), you can build your chi naturally, when you are cleaning up the loose ends.

You might also want some sickle leaf tea, for an extra 50 chi.


Auras

In rebirth alpha, you can have up to 3 levels in various auras. Level 1 costs 500 beans, level 2 costs another 600 beans, level 3 costs another 700 beans.

To get auras you will need celebeans, and you have several sources of celebeans:

After the second wave of monsters, chests spawn in happy valley (and some spawn around the corner in happy valley). Non-aggressive monsters will spawn next to them which will also drop a few celebeans.

Also, the squad leader can take a bean sprout quest from an NPC standing in happy valley. (Note: do not change leaders or you fail the entire rebirth quest. Make sure your squad leader is not a wizard nor a cleric and make sure your squad leader has a good connection.) This quest involves a lot of running, so you want someone with good movement speed running this quest (and tigers have the best movement speed of anyone in rebirth alpha). After running this quest, the person running should use town teleport to get back to the start of happy valley. I believe this quest can be run multiple times, but since only the squad leader can take it, you would need teleport incense to get the squad leader back with his beans in a reasonable time.

After each stage, a chest will spawn in the combat zone. Digging this chest will get enough beans for an aura.

The best time to collect beans is whan bosses arrive. You will only have to kill one boss at a time, and you can stretch this time out to almost 15 minutes. (If you take longer than 15 minutes, the Destroyer arrives and you lose.) So keep track of time (the quest itself is timed so you can use the timer from your "track quests" to keep track). You should also get a 10 minute and a 5 minute warning about the arrival of the destroyer. Ideally, you should kill each boss after the 5 minute warning so a team can go collect celebeans during the boss fight.

Choosing auras

Attack auras help you kill things faster which helps you stay alive. I think you should ask whoever is dealing with your auras (typically your squad leader) to max your attack aura first. Attack auras can make the early stages almost deceptively easy.

A chi aura will give you an edge on starting battle. You are going to want a chi aura sooner or later.

Health auras also help you stay alive, and in rebirth alpha you can only get a level 3 aura. So you will want health auras after you have enough attack aura. I think you should max this one when you can.

Defense auras sound nice, and can help but apparently they only help your physical defense and do nothing for your magical defense. So you want defense auras but do not expect too much out of them.

Mana auras are great, since they will help your cleric heal you and will help you keep your dragon's breath running. And, other people have recommended we get mana auras first. But if you want to succeed and if any people on your squad have not successfully completed rebirth alpha yet, I think you should probably not get mana auras until later. This should be an economy aura, not a survival aura.

Combat

There are two places where you can set up: On the ramp leading up to the harpy wraith, or in the canyon leading into the open area right before the harpy wraith. You can also advance further out, and get the monsters early, but if you advance too far you do not benefit from auras, and things get complicated. A running battle leading back to the canyon might be fun and helpful (you might use will of the phoenix, run back until your skill cools down then will of the phoenix again), but I have never tried this. Note that there are two paths and monsters will typically alternate between them. Also, in stage 6, you will probably get a double wave where a different kind of monster will follow each of the two paths.

Ideally you should repair your gear after every stage or after every other stage (by trading with a kettle in happy valley) -- if you go too many stages without repairing your gear, your gear will break and you will probably lose.

Bosses

Mori has a ranged fire attack and a melee attack. An arcane wizard with pyroshell and a cleric can easily tank him. Everyone else can go dig beans for 10 minutes.

High Pitcher hits harder than Mori but also can be tanked with a decent wizard and cleric. Unless you are having difficulty killing him, almost no one should come back from digging beans for Pitcher. However, when he is near dead your second cleric should come back.

Beautiful Tail does AoE posion. So having two clerics available can be handy.
Stage 2 ends with beautiful tail dies.

Notes for Clerics

You will need a lot of mana for this thing. I have no idea how much you need, but your mana requirements will probably be similar to wizard mana requirements. You will mostly be using ironheart and purify. You might also use chromatic healing beam when you or the barbarian are taking too much damage, but you should only use this when your wizard is having problems holding aggro and is not taking much damage. Most of the time you and your barbarian should rely on potions or charms or auras for your health.

If you have cauterize on your genie, that might help. I have not had enough experience with that stage of rebirth alpha to make useful suggestions.



Notes for Barbarians

Unfortunately a lot of monsters will have ranged attacks so they can get outside your AoE and attack you without taking damage or worse yet, start attacking your cleric. Your job highest priority is keeping that cleric alive. But you should NOT be pulling aggro. That's your wizards' job. If you see them about to die you can knockback to give them a moment of peace, but mostly you should be using your knockback skills to push monsters into wizard AoE. Earthquake can be a good genie skill, so you can knockback when Slam is cooling down. (You should also have cauterize on your genie and hopefully by the time the bleeding monsters arrive you should be practiced enough with how monsters react to Slam that you will not be needing Earthquake.)

If your clerics are not being attacked, and you do not see any monsters which are not being attacked, you can also try using your knockback skill to push monsters into the region where the wizards dragon breath spells overlap, where they will die much faster (and deliver much less damage) than anywhere else. But be alert for changing situations (like ranged monsters wanting to kite and running away from where you pushed them).

When you have nothing else to do, you might be tempted to take on some monsters in single combat, but please remember that your first priority should be keeping your cleric alive and your best way of dealing damage will be getting those monsters into both of the wizards' damage circles. That said, if you see any Increased Magic Resistance monsters, your wizards will not be very effective against them and you will probably need to help with killing them.

Notes for Everyone

Make sure you are tracking this quest, so you can see its timer. You have 15 minutes to kill each boss -- you do not get an independent timer for each boss, but when the first attack hits them a timer starts and you will get a 10 minute warning and a five minute warning (unless you kill the boss too soon). Boss killing time is when most people should be digging for beans, killing happy valley monsters for beans, and (for the squad leader) running bean quests.

If you do not get enough beans for your auras you will fail.

Other Guides

Thread which begins with a guide translated from russian
This guy apparently had completed rebirth alpha
A guide for rebirth gamma which has some information about auras (but beware: a level 1 mana aura was not enough by itself for me to keep my level 6 dragons' breath running so the numbers are not correct for rebirth alpha.)

Wishes

I really wish I had enough patience to stay level 55 until I completed rebirth alpha, but I doubt I will. I do not have a good schedule for working with the other people I can find with sufficient interest and capability for this quest.

Also, this would be much easier to plan for if someone made a list of which monsters where in each wave, along with their attack types. I wish I (or someone else) could make a list of all the monsters for each wave.

I wish everything I wrote in this guide is correct, but I am relatively inexperienced in Rebirth Alpha, and I might have mis-remembered something.

Quotes

Lost Qingfu: Actually I'm Dung Beetleman.

Bonehunt Spider: You exceeded the speed limit! Give me you driver's license!

Howling Shivan: Why aren't you vegetarians? I shall take revenge for my brothers!