First of all, my feelings on portal spell mules are colored by my experiences on HG. The priorities here on Darktide are obviously different for a whole host of reasons.

Some weeks ago I had proposed a "summon anywhere" mule for The Source on Darktide to help with portal camping, allegiance outings and such, but there was little interest in it. My experiment on HG with Bill Hodag has resulted in a fun tool which allows us a flexibility unknown to other players in AC there, but I dunno if it would be as helpful here. I tend to think it would be because of the ability to tie to a location which ISN'T camped by portal campers, but as I said, there's been little interest in doing this.

But I digress. ;)

The current discussion had to do with recall mules that are basically suped up shoppers, something I confess I hadn't really thought much about. My current shopper is a quickness 100 mule specced in melee defense, run, missile defense and dagger, the point being to survive a run to a taper town and return or @lifestone with her cargo.

Blue Rabbit:
10/100/100/100/10/10

She is not intended to ever get to level 2. In fact I don't WANT her to. She @lifestones and runs into Yanshi to shop. I don't want her to ever drop more than one item, or need more than 24xp to work off that 1 point of vit.

I hadn't really considered the idea of a recalling mule, and have thought a little about the advantages of such a creature.

What's the point? Well, a shopping mule that could have 100 strength, not need to RUN everywhere (just need to make that run once, right?) and recall back to your main standing by the lifestone/portal.

Traditionally, my HG portal mules look like this:

100/10/10/10/100/100 with specced' Creature, Item and trained in Life and Mana Conversion in order to macro them high enough to be able to summon.

This DT mule doesn't really need to summon, just carry stuff and recall. Well, carrying stuff isn't as simple as it sounds. You'd be surprised how fast that 100 strength gets used up.

Ok, with Item and Creature specce'd our primary magic skills are 60 apiece. This is enough for level II buffs right out of the box. What does that get us?

Well, lvl II buffs get us at least 15, more like 17 points to those magic skills. That 60 school is now 77 at level 1 and frankly that's high enough to force through a III with comp burn so we're ready to macro if that's what we want to do.

But also look at this... 77 is certainly high enough to cast recall with fizzles, so we now have a level 1 casting recalls at 0 xp. Not bad...

However, there are some problems. The tapers are in Sawato. We are in Yanshi. How do we get to Sawato when we have a 10 run? If we move points from Strength to run to get there, how do we carry stuff? Don't forget, somebody has to cash in those trade notes!

Frankly, this is going to take a little thought. Obviously the 100/10/10/10/100/100 template isn't going to be practical for this task. We need someone who can survive the run to Sawato, yet still be able to recall once they get there. Let's take try this:

50/30/10/70/100/70
Spec: Item, Creature
Train: Mana Conversion, Staff, Melee Defense, Assess Person
Race: Ghar

This gives us a skill of 53 in each school, still enough to reliably cast level II's "out of the box" and buff enough to just barely recall. I imagine recalls would be reliable at level 2 after spending up the Item skill a little. We have enough strength to
carry stuff, a little life to survive anything we don't evade and enough run to get away from most of the stuff we're likely to encounter on the trip to Sawato.

This is just off the top of my head. What do y'all think?