DAOC MB'ing

[Morganti]

I know a few people around have MB'ed DAOC and I was curious about setups and overall MB'ing feedback for the game. I'm an old player currently playing with a 3man group in lab mostly (we still pwn!), but I have multiple accounts and have even tried a 3 animist setup in rvr (in lab...it didn't go well....casters + lab = bad juju). Anyway, most of the rvr multiboxing I've seen (I'm looking at you Fat N Bad and Team Wizzy) are solely based on no targetting pbae setups. PVE is of course not bad to multibox, but RVR is a different bag. Is everyone pretty much in agreement that ae mez + pbae is the most viable and/or only solution for multiboxing in DAOC?

As a quick aside, 3 animists bombering one guy from the obelisks (taking into account bomber pathing) is freaking halarious! DI3 + healers will not save you from that, but 1 kill and then a group wipe wasn't fun :/

[JamieW]

It depends on what you want to accomplish, and what you can do as far as bots. Here's my take on it.

Melee character multi-boxing is no good for RvR with the need to face, manage style chains, etc.

Casters have 2 main issues:
1) being interrupted
2) facing to cast

AE/PBAE damage helps with some of this by removing the need to face what you're casting at for PBAE. And by using a round robin quickcast scheme, you could win the interrupt war against an enemy ae caster to free up your team from being interrupted to death.

Pet-spam as an Animist (FnF shrooms more than bombers) used to be a viable method for Team Animist in bridge farming/keep battles, etc. But the restrictions on number of active shrooms in the area, and changes to the bridge structures have limited that.

I used to 2-box Necromancers in the BGs (mainly in Molvik and then in Cathal Valley). I tried it out in NF a couple of times, but by the time I had gotten them up and going, issues with pet pathing over West Beno Bridge along with a lot of my friends leaving DAOC didn't lead to much time. I always felt that Necromancers in a 3 or 4-box situation would be extremely powerful if played right as an alternative to the PBAE caster groups in RvR.

You have the following advantages over other spellcasters:
1) Necros don't have to face the target to cast. The pet automagically does the facing for you. Just /assist on the other boxes and cast away!
2) Buffed up by a good cleric bot, they are uber strong against melee. If melee gets in on your pbae caster team, if they can get some interrupts going, you don't have a whole lot of time to react before they kill you, since you're squishy. I've taken on full melee-based groups and won before. I had the time to interrupt and/or kill the healers while the melee beat on me, and then switch over to the dps.
3) Some of the pets are mez immune. And if you use the ones that aren't, you have a self demez that is uber quick to cast. That means you can save Purge to use on some other areas where necros need it more.
4) Can have DOTs that interrupt on every tick. These are castable uninterruptable or as a PBAE. Which means that you can lock down the enemy casters/healers pretty well while you dps down the others.
5) Power-tap can provide 300+ power per hit in RvR (its capped in PvE), and you have power-xfer. So you can act as your own battery
6) Lifetaps is primary damage source and you have a self heal over time buff. So you up your survivability a lot.
7) RR5 + ML10 Crystal Titan is pretty fun (you can summon one of these guys in 2 or 3 seconds, not the 10-15 seconds it takes a normal caster). You can deny an area around you to any enemy players unless they want to be hit by 3 or 4 crystal titans.

There are more advantages of a necro over other spell casters, but those are the major ones above.

But you do have disadvantages:
1) The pathing issue mentioned above. Around some bridges, it seems that your necro-pet will want to run off in the other direction. And then oops you are defenseless and buffless.
2) Take up more buffs on each necromancer, so you may need more buffbots than you would with a more traditional group
3) Mobility is limited because you can't use boats to get around. Although Agramon started cutting down on this problem.
4) General difficulty getting used to running a Necromancer. Some people have a hard time with just one, and so running multiples can be an issue.

I'll have to see if I can dig out my old Cathal Valley 2-box Necromancer video to post back online somewhere and share sometime.

[Morganti]

Thanks for the insight Jamie. Unfortunately we are currently playing hib, but any future switches to alb and I may try the necro angle. We also mainly play in Lab, which means horrible pet pathing/porting problems. I had to shelve my RR7 BD back when we were playing more mid expressly for this reason. Definitely an interesting angle though...I'll keep it in mind.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I half-ass multiboxed DAoC until about the time Catacombs hit. Most of it was run-of-the-mill Animist plus 3 bots plus a couple friends in group. I did multibox 4 24 shamans in the 24 BG for a weekend before I left for wow. Let me just say that AoE disease x4 = WIN. Holy shit I wish we had targeted AoE dots in wow. :P

[Hor]

I used to love boxing bone dancers, was fun seeing a literal army of undead attack people.

[Nisch]

I 6-boxed DAOC for a while (about a year), I had various teams, all rangers, a chanter/bard team, all vamp team, etc

Not nearly the support in DAOC as there is in WoW, but there are some nice things such as /face and /stick that doesn't break in combat.