Originally Posted by 'Ishar',index.php?page=Thread&postID=170986#post17 0986
hmm...currently between MMO's. (Playing neither EQ nor WoW for some reasonl, lol), but i have to ask...why 9 characters? I can understand up to 6...but 9? kinda an odd number.
You must have been out of EQ for a while :P EQ now has Fellowships, which are kinda like a mini-guild although you don't get to give it a name tag. The max number you can have in it is 9. People are trying to get it raised, which would be nice. Also, I can make three groups consisting of 3 of my box accounts in each group, then have each account summon their mercenary and I would have 18 toons under my control (merc's actually do their own thing, so I don't have to actually control them).
Group 1
Rogue, Tank and shaman. With merc healer, merc healer and merc healer. Two merc healers should be enough, but 3 just incase.
Group 2
Cleric, druid and chanter. With merc healer, merc tank and merc tank. One healer in there so I don't have to worry about healing my box healers. Cleric will heal tank mostly...just incase.
Group 3
Mage, Mage and Mage. With merc healer, merc healer and merc healer/tank. Once I get all mages up with full AA's pets, each of those pets will probably tank better then my box tank. Get adds? Send a mage pet and move away. Merc healer will keep pet up no problem. Much easier then mezzing. Also, shamans have a very good knock back root....so say, I got two mobs on my tank or whatever. Shaman cast his AA knock back root, mob gets tossed back out of agro range and is hard rooted for a good 2 or 3 minutes. No need to mezz, mem wipe or anything.
i'd be interested in hearing about how the stop and PL thing works for you. Tho I always thought it was kinda the opposite, i never actually tried to max AA's before leveling.
My shadowknight and mage number 3 are now level 48. Should take me another hour or 2 of /play to hit lvl51 on both and then I will switch to 100% AAEXP. I expect to get 15% to 20% per kill and at level 51, mobs die fast. I can probably go through 4 or 6 mobs at 51 in the time it takes me to do 1 at lvl80. When AAEXP first came out, most people were already max level and at first AA's were really 'alternate". However AA's now play a big role in how effective your characters are and a max level character with zero AA's, especially a tank class, cannot function. I leveled the warrior to 80 with no AA's. He was unable to tank much of anything.
How do you stand ressing all 9 chars and looting after a fubar, then all the meming and rebuffing, hehe. with my 6 chars, it would take me approximately 20-30 minutes to recover from a wipe.
You know get a pop up window on death for return to bind point or wait for res..without zoning. You get maybe 5 minutes before a timer goes off and you are sent to bind. You always respawn with full gear and spells memmed now. ( You can also mem spellset's. On my X-keys, I have hotkeys devoted to spellsets. Hit my BUFF hotkey and my character will mem the spells I picked out for that spellset name. )just need to res to get exp back. No need to loot your corpse anymore. Also, shamans and druids now get an AA to do a no exp. res. So like if my cleric dies, I can summon/res my cleric back to camp with my shaman or druid, then the cleric will exp. res
anyway, if your curious, I did SK, monk, cleric, shaman, bard, and mage. Managing 3 melee's isnt all that horribly difficult. And honestly, the best thing about the bard for me was the way their mez worked. I didn't like the whole timeing spell's thing with the enchanter, and rather enjoyed the whole 'play mez song at add and forget' lazyiness. Anyway, a possible neat thing you can do with the bard + enchanter is have the bard play mez song at a mob, while the enchanter charms it and buffs it. (It works pretty good; i did it for a few enchanter friends when they would hang out with me.) Tho, you might be right, 2 mages is probably simpler...I dunno if i could give up the whole ezmode mez tho.
I can box the warrior, rogue and bard, but I didn't think it was too effective and it took a whole lot of effort. I like easy. Also, mobs hit in the 3000's in many places I plan to do, mezzing and charming (which I use to do with my chanter alot back in PoP) would get you wiped easy.
Kinda have to wonder if a non-traditional group would be at all effective in that game. ie, stacking mages or such. sk / shm / 4 mages? lol. (or maybe add in a cleric and drop a mage, i cant see living without the whole res stick). oh, another class to consider, even though its yet another melee, is a beastlord. thier pets are awesome, and their slow is pretty good. The only reason i switched from beastlord to sham is on account of panther. (i have a distinctly melee heavy group: SK, monk, bard, and shaman/mage pet. Hmm, come to think of it the sk / shm / 4 mages would have 6 pets and 1 melee, thats alot of panther goodness. (or puma or whatever it is called, its been awhile...the sham spell that adds a proc to melee abilities).
Mage pets are the uncontested best pets in the game. Mages are like their own little group. Would be nice to have a beastlord for the buffs, but beastlord pets cannot tank anything close to new content and yep, they are melee and I'd have to play beastlord as a melee otherwise he is just a really gimp shaman. With proper AA's, mage pets can stand up to mobs better then many player tanks and the mage actually has heal spells of his own to keep the pet up. Mage air pets also stun mobs quit often, which will help my tank tank better. I can eyeball it with just one mage air pet and see it takes less healing effort to heal, can't wait till my two new mages get high level pets and see what the results are.
eh, if i was gonna do 9 , i'd probably consider a second druid (or two wizards) just for ease of transportation. though I suppose you can just fellowship the other 3 wherever yer going. what the hell do you plan to do with 9, lol. it would drive me crazy being unable to exp grind everyone at once. (or, rather, having to exp grind twice as much lol. I toyed with the idea of doing 10 in wow (due to auto follow working across groups, mainly, but the idea of doing everything twice drives me crazy. maybe i'm lazy.)
I guess you did know about fellowships and I should edit my first reply, but too lazy :) Yes, fellowships, PoK portals and 3 mages CoTH makes traveling simple. I normally run my rogue, my druid and my mage #1 to where ever, make a campfire and then campfire the rest in. Very easy. I thought about making a wiz instead of the mage, but I think the mage will be the better box account for me. Wiz has big nukes and ports. Have a guildmate that boxes a wiz alot and he spends too much time ressing his wiz because the wiz always grabs agro.....big nukes. Mages nukes are pretty good and combine it with pets, they do about as much if not more DPS and they don't grab agro as much. Right now i am only leveling the SK and new mage, but once all are up around lvl75, I will level up as a full group of 6. I have a core, which is my rogue, tank and shaman. They are always in the exp. getting group. I alternate the last three spots to what account has lesson's of devote (exp. bonus AA) up and which are behind in levels or AA's to catch em up. Leveling 6 would be simpler, but this isn't so bad, especially since 9 characters (3 mages!!) increase group DPS output considerablly. The three outside of exp. group might not be getting exp, but they add to DPS
Oh, and a final thought, if your planning to hit any kind of raid content, well, isnt defensive (fromt he warrior) sort of...critical? SK will do in a pinch, but there were several things that I had a really hard time getting done that woulda been much easier with a war. (there was an instance quest thing where the 'boss' hit 2.5 times as hard as the rest of the instance, and tanking that on the sk was kinda rough, took a couple tries. with a war woulda been cake, just defensive hehe.
Most raids in EQ that I would do are not a simple pull mob and kill. Too much moving around, usually a ton of adds. Of the ones I can do, gearwise...it's pointless. Flag wise.....all flags are waved pretty much with level. Most zones are now unlocked except for current expansions. I had plans of doing Shyra, which is a simple pull and kill and had drops that could be usefull, but the new expansion now has group mob's that drop just as good if not better stuff, so no need to do Shyra, which would take alot more effort from me.
anyway, good luck.
Thanks
