This guide assumes that you understand how to create a Castle Throne and capture servants, but have questions about which missions to send them on and how the system works.

Servants can be captured using Dominating Presence form. This form is rewarded through the main questline and allows you to 'charm' a humanoid and take him or her back to your lair. You can access it through the quick wheel like wolf form or other vampiric powers. Once in Dominating Presence form, you can use 'Kiss of the Vampire' (default keybind R) on a low health target to dominate them. If successful they will become charmed and you can return them to an empty servant coffin to make them a permanent servant!

The purpose of sending servants out on missions is to passively gather resources, even when you're offline! Once you have discovered an area on the map, you can send your servants to that area to gather resources.

Send your servants to areas that have desirable resources for your stage in the game. Good choices are typically resources that are time-intensive or difficult for you to farm efficiently. Early in the game you might need more whetstones, so you could send your servants to the Bandit Armory area:



Another bonus of sending servants to gather resources is that they can raid anywhere you've discovered on the map, regardless of your castle's location. So you can have them 'deliver' resources from the Cursed Forest right to your doorstep in Farbane Woods.

2 hour missions yield roughly 3x more time efficient profits than 24 hour missions as long as someone can be online to harvest the resources, and as long as none of your characters get injured (more on that later). Try to send your servants on as short of a mission as possible, depending on when you'll be back online. HOWEVER: the most important factor by far is keeping them out in the field as much as possible. For example:

• Playing during a long afternoon? Send them on multiple 2 hour missions
  
• Going to sleep? Send them on an 8 hour mission and gather their resources in the morning.

Mission rewards scale linearly with the number of servants, so sending multiple per mission is often a great idea, especially in areas that reward a unique resource. Example: if you only send one servant to an area that can receive up to three servants, then you're 'locking' that area out (from that castle) for only 1/3rd of your potential profit. Sending multiple servants on a mission together will also grant them a bonus to their mission success chance. More on that below.

Servants can succeed or fail on a mission. This success chance is calculated by comparing the difficulty of the mission (600 in the example image below) against the Gear Power level of each servant.

Succeeding means they will deliver resources to your castle. Failure means they will die. You can then resurrect them for a small blood cost, but you will lose all the gear on that servant. Servants can succeed or fail independently even while on the same mission. ALWAYS drive your success chance to 100% before sending servants on a mission, because losing gear can be a huge burden.

Each servant evaluates his or her success chance independently i.e. two characters with 300 Gear Power don't 'add' to each other and become able to succeed at a 600 difficulty mission.

You want to drive mission success chance to 100% using a combination of

• Servant Type (area type expertise, zone expertise)
  
• Servant Gear (and gear efficiency coefficient)
  
• Multiple servant party Bonus (25%)

Keep in mind that if you're sending servants on a shorter (2 or 4 hour mission) you'll need to offset the -20% mission chance called 'riskiness' resulting from sending them on a short mission. This simply offsets each servant's success on that mission.

Servants have two important attributes: an area type expertise and a zone expertise.

Servants gain area type expertise based on their blood type, which makes them skilled in farming a different type of area. For example, Mosswick Village is a settlement area but the Bandit Armory is a Military area. The blood type and corresponding area types are below:

• Settlement (Worker)
  
• Military (Warrior)
  
• Sacred (Scholar)
  
• Tenacious (Brute)
  
• Tracking (Rogue)

Note that the blood percentage rating for a unit translates into gear efficiency, a coefficient scalar on their base gear level ranging from 1-25%. More on gear level below.

They will also be skilled in farming one of four different zones: Farbane, Dunley, Silverlight, or Cursed Forest. Usually a servant is skilled in farming the zone in which they were captured. Always send servants to their corresponding zone.

In the picture below you can see that Lucy had Scholar blood type so she is Sacred and can raid Sacred areas like the Dunley Monastery. She was also captured in Dunley Farmlands, so she has zone expertise for that zone. Her Gear Power level is 451, which is a result of the gear I have on her scaled by her expertise (which comes from blood %).

Servants use only the gear power statistic from the gear you give them, so they will ignore all special effects, set bonuses, and affixes on gear. To be specific, servants gain power from:

• Armor (Chest, Boots, Legs, Gloves)
  
• Ring / Amulet
  
• Weapon

Each of these represents about 1/3rd of a servant's total gear level. Don't throw your old gear away! Give it to a servant.

You'll only need to equip gear good enough to send a servant where they need to go - any more is a waste.

It bears repeating from above - your servant can die and lose its gear if its mission is unsuccessful; this is why you should always send servants on 100% success chance missions.

Getting injured means that servant must stay in the castle for a specific amount of hours before going out on their next mission. They will hang out in your castle and you can click on them to see what humorous injury they've sustained in red text on their status page.

Injuries seem to range between 2-8 hours. It's difficult to discern the probability array for those values, but I believe it's still more efficient to send your servants on as short of a mission as possible, assuming you're online to send characters back out immediately once they recover from injuries.

The injury chance only increases by 10% (between 20-30%) between 'safe' and 'unsafe' missions; this is a relatively small increase compared to the relative gain in efficiency.

Good luck! Have fun sending your charmed (and charming) servants on missions throughout Vardoran. This system is designed very well - I find it enjoyable and I hope you do too :)