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Hey Zenga I recognized your avatar from Nodiatis and looks like you got pretty high up the tops lists... did you 3 box or just play the 1? I was thinking of starting a Guardian/Priest/Rogue group to go big boss hunting since they recently buffed melee vs. black mobs, especially piercers. I had a blast playing solo a long time ago but I'm sure like every game it'd be more fun boxed and I'm all WoW'ed out for now.
Hey, that should be me yes :)
Well first off i was the only capped player at 60 for like a month, and got to 70 cap as nr 2. Think that i should still have the most pkk's in that game :D
I leveled zenga to 60 solo. Then I started to make more alts. Until i got 15 capped accounts at 70 (playing 9 simultaneously). My luck was that i was one of the fastest levelers and thus i could buy my account upgrades with ingame gold. Today that's almost not possible.
For 1 toon you should drop 300$ to get all upgrades. And then you can still only play 1 hour a day with RTT (full speed). Once your rested time is over you will play at 1/6th of the xp/drop rate (which is in fact the normal rate). But i assume you know that :)
The amount of money that people spend on that game is really crazy. There are many (i can name at least 30) who have spent over 5k $. You can basically just buy ingame gold through the time card system without having to play a lot and still having a kick ass account. Which is not the kinda game i like.
What turned me down is that i had leveled so much toons, and the game manager makes changes out of the blue that affects every build. If they would offer a free way to redistribute some skills, fair enough. But no. After 10 times i was done. The latests feature is: you can change your color in chat for 5$ ;D
Again the concept of the game is awesome for me, and i've had great fun. But everything is centralized around spending money. And if you want to be competitive you can't but spending as a new player.
If you are happy with the limits of a standard account (5$ per month per toon) then you'll have a blast. But advancement is very slow.
As for group makeup, the fastest way regardless of your class:
0-25 use a bow (lvl 9 epic, lvl 13 or 14 rare one, lvl 20 normal one).
from 25 switch to dual wielding and get yourself a pair of zombie claws (lvl 28 epic slashers). There is no real need to lvl the secondary slashing stats and waste xp there, just keep your slashing level on par with the mobs you fight. Do that until lvl 40 i'd say. You will burn through all mobs that are 3-4 levels higher than yourself. At 40 new skills unlock and it's time to specialize imo. Thats the fastest way with 3 guys.
However that's more brute forcing and not really fun or the idea behind an mmo. Piercers are still kinda low damage weaps (except for the epic lvl 64 ones) and not on par with slashing / crushing in the end game. But what i find fun in nod is to build hybrids. Especially in a 3 team you can give your guys an off spec regardless of their main role.
The class bonus (like 5% healing bonus) is really not that important. Most important is the gain / loss you get for your main stats. That is the xp you get per kill you make i.e. when you kill a mob as a priest while melee is active you get the normal xp - 17%, if you have recovery active you get normal xp + 20%. Important to not is that recovery is completely useless, even as a caster. A 2nd thing to not is that aggro works really weird and remains mostly random. Fighting high bosses where your tank is not the target will cause you have to escape the fight, and rejoin it till your tank is targeted. Now you will only spend max 1% of your play time fighting bosses. They only drop loot the first time you kill them, and it's usually a piece that you sell to a vendor. The best loot (epics/rares) drop from random mobs, or can be crafted. This means that leveling a healer is quite useless most of the time. So my suggestion:
tank: guardian using whips with all beastmastery skills up. This is simply the best tank in the game. With the bm skills up the healing from pets is insane, not to mention that while farming the whip+pet combo does above average dps. And the guardian class bonus is one of the very few that are really worth it. So for bosses or challenging mobs use a shield, for others use dual whips (whips = slashing weapon, so you need to level are slashing related skills).
healer/caster: at the low levels casters suck. I was the first to level a dps caster to the cap, and he became instantly the best dps in the game. This is because many the high end gems are crazy. Also direct damage gems hit a +5 mob more frequently than melee or archers (and obviously dots). Now with the accuracy patch from a few weeks ago that is not longer the biggest advantage. Thing with casters is that you need int and cnc (both magic stats). Which leaves you only a limit amount of points to spend in mst, thus you have a very small mana pool. Since red gems require mana, i find white/black magic way more useful. The melee damage from your staff can be decent, but i never leveled it. I put all points in melee in pst (energy), thus creating an insane energy pool. As you can have 3 gem pouches, you could use one for healing gems and another for DDs, depending on the situation.
DPS: another caster will win here at the high end game. But playing 2 casters at the same time is almost not possible. A warrior crusher or a paladin using slashers is a good choice here (for the aura's). Anything will do. Also an archer is a valid choice, since they have a skill to increase accuracy vs high level mobs. Anything will do except a piercer :D But obviously a piercer can do well as well.
Take in mind that casters require way more skills that you need to level than a melee/archer class.
As far as boxing goes: using special software for it has little to no advantage. One can use AHK to start combat on all toons or to walk across the map. But since that is pixel/position related, you will have to put your game window in the same position all the time. I played 9 accounts manual usually (12 sometimes) and i was doing fine and had very little downtime.
So on a final note:
I've had great fun in the game and dominated it until the cap was increased to 80 to a point where it was no longer fun. The gm took some very weird decisions screwing over complete builds (often crafting related). Plus the ever increasing price of time cards vs ingame gold made me no longer having fun. Since it's a realy money sink for most players (not for me, as i've played the game from the beginning and could do everything with the gold i made) and with the recent security issues, it's not a game that i would recommend to friend any longer. Which i used to do in the past.
Anyway, have fun and if you have some questions, just fire them.
Btw if you want help with a rogue/piercer you can message decker ingame. Tell him i send you :)
Oh i forgot to mention runes. They give you all kinds of bonuses and they are clan based. So you want to be in a good clan to make use of those. Not gonna explain the system behind the runes and how clans obtain them as that is another crazy story.
If you want a guild with top runes, let me know and i'll get you an invite. I also have a pile of gold i never used and don't mind to give some to a fellow boxer. It won't make you rich but should get you through the first levels without a problem.
I don't think there are any security issues, i've had about 10 friends lose their wow accounts to "hackers" and my one friend who lost his nodiatis account admitted to me his password was the same as his account name... ya he's retarded.
I have to think about PvP now that they just announced 3v3 arenas, the only mmo i really played for pve was EQ :) Since it's pretty fast paced I was thinking a caster is out of the question but I still want to use AoE taunts on a tank for some game control in PvP, do you know if anyone has done that successfully yet?
Hahaha just reading the patch update from last night. This basically illustrates what i've said: they change a certain way to do things out of the blue screwing over people. Meaning there was no such thing as aggro, and maintaining that. It was at random and the aggro would stay on the person. It's been like that for almost 2 years now. People have set up their builds according to that principle. A tank didn't need any magic (cnc) to land his spells. With this new patch all in a sudden the whole mechanic changes. Thus people have to completely redistribute / relevel new skills. And that's not for free at all (the grind to update is worth another 100$ in tc's, and a good month long if you want to compensate. Not to mention that caster now needs lots of defence in order to survive an attack from a boss. Also worth mentioning is that taunts on high creatures almost never land.
The arena's, dunno what to expect there. But if you are facing a caster you want definately a tank with shield (as it can silence the opponent according to your testudo level) + it can reflect the casters spell, and obviously a taunt. Also 3 casters with their best spell available from start will pretty much rape everything. You only need some luck that you are not attacking the shield guy. A macro can help here. But casting the spells & targetting on 3 casters ... thats sounds like impossible to me. It's gonna be interesting for sure.
The taunting works fairly simple: just have a pouch full with taunts and click it as soon as it appears in play. And all should attack you.
added: seems he understood my rant and changed it so that taunts no longer need cnc to land (which they used to do, whatever they claim), which requires little rebuilding for tanks. my caster rant stays valid though.
I went ahead with guardian priest rogue since I think it'll do decent in PvP and PvE and be easy enough to play, priest is on the main screen. Their little personality test clearly showed my true multiboxing nature though heh.
Enjoy it i'd say :)