EQ2: Use exixting 80 Warlock to mentor or start afresh

Hi All,

New to the forum, but I have dabbled in multiboxing before, I have a lvl 80 Warlock with mythical and reasonable gear and I was just wondering whether to start afresh with a new 3 box setup or powerlvl 2 characters through the levels with my lock,

My concerns if I do this are, the 2 lvl 80's I create will be lacking in AA's and also skill ups.

Anybody done this before and thought hmm I have 2 'worthless' lvl 80 characters here and have to chase their tails effectively going back mentoring again to gain AA's.

I have messed about mentoring my lock and the xp gain was insane (with the 300% bonus as well of course) I knocked off lvl 1 - 20 on the new character in about an hour, and that included doing a few quest hands ins 8|

Thank you for reading any advice much appreciated

Namass

I wanna help but honestly ... i dont really know i have played EQ2 for a few months but never really got into it :( sorry

Hrmmm..this kind of scares me.
Once you get to 80, you can't gain AA's any longer other than mentoring?

No, you still gain AAs, it is just that the easiest way to gain AAs is to do so by killing named mobs. Most of the time people accomplish this by going through all the low-end content for easy named kills that they didn't get before. The catch is they have to be xp-bearing to give AA...so you have to mentor to an appropriate level so the nameds are no longer grey. You still get AAs from quest turnins, collections and such at 80, grey or not. At 80, you also get AA xp converted from what would have been Adventure {kill} xp.

Namass, one thing to consider, the alt on your main account will gain XP faster than 2 fresh toons on the other account since you have a max level toon. Using the warlock mentored down will keep the main account from quickly and constantly outleveling the 2 new ones. You'll also get the bonus of easy travel with ports. You can always turn off xp if you're leveling too fast to get anything done.

I have a 24 warlock who i was using yesterday in "The Caves". I mentored him down to my 10ish crew. It seems he was still able to use a lot of the higher level spells. Also some of them were masters and addept3s ect. He was one shotting groups of orange mobs with his AEs. I pulled a yell con ( 3 up ) Named and i could not get agro off my lock with my tank. 8( It seems that even when they get leveled down, they are more powerful than a normal toon who is in gear he gets from loot and quests at that level.

I'm wishing I had a high level tank with epic armor and upgraded skills to mentor down, hehe.

Mentored toons are much, MUCH more powerful than they level they mentor to. All gear and spells scale to a percentage of what they should be, but that is still way more powerful than anything you would have had access to at that level.

My husband is bringing his 70 SK into my group of 50s, things are going to get very interesting tomorrow.

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Originally Posted by 'Khatovar',index.php?page=Thread&postID=182861#pos t182861

Mentored toons are much, MUCH more powerful than they level they mentor to. All gear and spells scale to a percentage of what they should be, but that is still way more powerful than anything you would have had access to at that level.

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It's too bad WoW never implemented anything like this. It's a great idea.

On the very odd occasion, I have stacked a group with 80s to PL a newby from 0 - 80 (did a mage and a fury as I just wanted to see if they were any good at 80)

Leveling was incredibly fast as I had 4/5 x 80s mentoring - I personally am from ol' skool (UO/EQ1/DAoC) and like grinding so I just sat in dungeons and pwn'd

All the 80s had a mix of epics / legends and all fully adp3/mastered, each having 180+AA - so they weren't too shabby...

Several problems which occurred - how do I explain this...
1) scaling
- Imagine a level 10 character - put that level 10 in all the latest and greatest lvl 10 epics and masters then put it against a lvl 10 mob - of course the mob just 'melts' - BUT - they still only have available spells up to level 10 and their gear (even if epics) are designed for level 10 mobs
- now the problem is, get a mastered/epic'd level 80 and mentor to level 10 - this character will not equal a mastered/epic'd lvl 10 character - it will equal a fire breathing, mob destroying juggerernaut as the 'scaling' of spells and AC et al is not the same as a level 10 with a masters and level 10 gear - it will be 'godmode'
- another thing - a 'normal' level 10 character has say 10 spells - a level 80 has say 30 spells - all these spells can be used if mentoring to level 10 - even if you only got this spell of uberness at level 80 - you CAN still use it if you mentor to level 10 - of course level 10 mobs aren't designed to be attacked with a level 80 spell (even if it is scaled) so they melt

2) When you get your toon from 0 - 80 - their skills will be useless - as an example, a character is able to gain 5 points in a skill per level - 80 levels x 5 = a max of 400 skill points for a skill - lets use an example of defense - so at 80 you 'should' have 400 defense - if you have less than 400 defense, a level 80 mob is more likely to either crit you or one shot you
- therefore, you will have to basically sit your toon somewhere, having grey mobs whack it for a while till it skills up to 400 (a good place being the TSO dungeons assuming you have a level 50 to cap the dungeon) - this can take some time
- now defense skills are relatively painless (i.,e., just grab a pile of grey mobs) the problem is for skills like disruption (the mage damage line) - why is this a problem? well - the mage hasn't been able to get a spell off for 80 levels as the bunch of 80s (mentored) have basically melted the mob before it even got close to the mage - so this means you have to find a bunch of greys - and spam spam spam spam spam s p a m /gag spam....s....pp..f..e..as..asdf.w.fgq.g.qfv.vds. /PUKE - now it's not just as simple as going back to a level 50 TSO dungeon as you will find that to get from say 0 skill to 5 works BEST on level 1 mobs, 5 - 10 work BEST on level 2 mobs etc etc etc - you CAN do the grey 50s but results MAY be slower and a lot of resists etc

3) you miss out on a lot of AAs - this is the real bummer with grinding in dungeons - yes, the levels comes thick and fast - but the AAs? no...once you have the disco and have killed the names and maybe completed the odd quest - there's nothing else left but grinding
- therefore, to get AAs you MUST lock which defeats the purpose of having a bunch of 80s pling the nooby

IMHO - and the way I have done it for ages now - start a new char - get to 10 - the instant you ding 10 - lock - do all the quests possible (use the wikia to get the quest timelines for each zone and tick them off as you go)

I have personally found that locking till somewhere between 32-35ish used to be enough (pre-bonus exp patch) - from there I unlock and just keep doing quests normally - this WILL get you pretty close to 100 AAs at level 60 (the current cap) [TBTH most times I actually waste about 2 AAs as I am stuck at 100 and still not 60 yet - hence why I say about lvl 32-35] - post exp patch, mobs give more exp now so I am now locking till about 40ish just to be sure - a good rule of thumb [pre-patch] was 3 AAs per level locked - so the math...

level 0 - 10 = 0 aa (quest and names below 10 do not give aa - any disco discovered at this time is lost)
- level 10 - 35ish = 3AA x 25 levels = 75 AA (locked)
- level 35 to 60 is 25 levels at about 1+ AA per level unlocked
- 25AA + 75AA = 100AA = cap at 60

BUT now there is more mob exp so I would increase your locking from 35ish to 40 (maybe even a little more)

Now assuming you made 60 and are 100aa - do KoS which is good for say 20 more, RoK is good for 20, Moors is good for 10 - so you SHOULD have about 130-150AA - this will allow you to fill the class line of AAs (70 aa) and the subclass (70aa) and start on the TSO AA page - you WILL have a very nice base to start doing some nasty damage no matter what class you play

If you don't do this - hope you like grey quest grinding

Is a lvl 80 character - with only say 80-100aa totally nerfed? - Hmmm....in pre TSO dungeons - no - you can get away with it BUT you will be missing the odd uber spell and you may be disadvantaged (i.e., you may use more mana for a spell line or have less HPs etc) - it SHOULD be ok if it's not a critical class (i.e., the main tank with a few AAs = a tank who WILL NOT hold aggro - full stop - no aggro holding = dead healers, then the rogues, then the casters, then the tank = ol skool DAoC FG death spam)

In TSO dungeons - your f%^&ed - don't care if the entire group is in full epic / masters - if you only have 100aa a piece your f567ed - good night buh bye thx4coming

Which means - you will have to go back and do allllllll those quests you missed on the way leveling if you want those chars to be worth something

/lock at 10 - do it - no problems with having the 80 lock mentor though - but he'she will be mentoring a 'locked' char

There is a bonus with bringing your warlock into a locked group - that being the warlock can do all the quests he/she missed thus earning more AAs for it plus all the undiscovered disco et al

Ugh.. thanks for the info Noxxy.

I just dinged 17 on all my toons last night..and only have about 6 AA's on all of them. :S
Guess I better lock now and try to get some more. I just keep finding "one more mob I need to kill..if only I had one more level..."

Hey Frosty,

Good idea re the locking but all is definately not lost as your char is so 'young' - be easy to make up a few - from memory - by level 20, you should have ablout 20AA, from this point on the amount of AAs you have will always be > the level you are

I have posted another very short thread (to prevent hijacking this one) re my thoughts on the amount of end game AAs to aim for which may be worth a look