Everquest - Live Servers

Elidroth said:

Holly was great to work with.. She honestly fought for the integrity of EQ with upper management (Ponytail) when he was trying to force us to sell power. She comes from the same background as a lot of us on the team did, in that she was a player first before joining SOE, so the games actually meant more to her than just $$$.

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Can confirm. I really enjoyed any conversations i've had with Holly, ingame or otherwise; she's very passionate.

I last played EQ during LDoN. I'm thinking about making a character on a live server to see how much content I can work though that I missed over the years. I'm wondering a few things:

1. How far can a J5 merc take me? I don't mean how high in level, but how far in content. Can I clear though Empire of Kunark? Rain for Fear? Seeds of Destruction?
2. Someone mentioned to me in the TLP thread that i wouldn't be able to request progression instances solo with a merc, and that I'd need at least one other character. In what expansion does this start? if I had two accounts and two mercs could I spawn these instances?
3. What's the best character setup for this? i was thinking Shaman with a tank merc, but would SK or BST with a healer merc be better? If I used two accounts what classes would be best for this?
4. I know about all accounts being treated as subs on Test, but assuming I wanted to do this on Live, and needed 2 accounts, would 1 sub and 1 silver account work, or do they really both need to be subs?
5. The reason I'm hesitant to do this on test is because if I get to cap and decide I want to continue with current content I suspect I'll have difficulty finding a guild or group. Am I right about that?

Three or four years ago, Test was always active enough to get groups. I don't know what the playerbase is like today. There are definitely some great things about it.
-Free subscription, so boxing multiple accounts isn't a hurdle.
-Double EXP Rate. This is a huge boon to anyone coming back to the game to see and experience content and doesn't want to devote months & months to do it. This rate stacks with their Holiday double EXP weekends and potions, so you can get some crazy experience gains going.
-Money is "worthless", since people can just copy real PP from live servers over to test, move it to another character, rinse-repeat. So, you can buy what ever your heart desires.

Merc's generally Heal much better than they Tank or DPS. I mean, they are serviceable in those roles, but you will hit a wall where they aren't as effective as you want them to be. I would definitely let the Merc be your healer. Then you can take an active role as the tank/puller, with some added utility or DPS as your second box. Something like a SK, Paladin, or Monk. Then pair them with an Enchanter, Shaman, or Bard. You will have the foundations of a very solid group.

Thanks Fight. That’s very helpful. What about the progression instances? How many accounts and mercs are needed to spawn them.?

Not certain on that. The only time I remember needing to spawn an instance was for Anguish and Epic 2.0's, I think you needed 5 real players.

Ok. Thanks Fight. I checked with some other folks as well and was told that you can usually get around this by having logged out characters from your accounts in the group. So, if I had two accounts I could add alts on those accounts to the group and then log them out to boost the number of group members. Just thought that might be helpful for someone down the line.

Yep, that's how I farmed my 2.0 orbs.

Alasliasolonik said:

Test server is still pretty alive and groups are everywhere. Joined the current raiding guild and killing shit and doings quests everyday! Just did 100-105 this past werk which kinda sucked but level 105 is just a MASSIVE power increase and quite fun.

Giving your pet level 106 heal proc items is pretty fun for doing the 700 billion progression quests.

And monks are super broken right now so you can do the old raids with 6 people and get some pretty nice stuff.

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I was looking at jumping over to test as well. How are monks broken, currently? Have been looking to dust mine off, but they haven't really shined in previous expansions...

What's the easiest way to delevel a character these days? I know Faceless had a zone related trick on Test, but I don't remember the details. Looking to get down to 75.

McQueen said:

What's the easiest way to delevel a character these days? I know Faceless had a zone related trick on Test, but I don't remember the details. Looking to get down to 75.

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Uh are Essence Emeralds still a thing?

Or you can just get bound near a cliff and jump off.
A lot.

I was 3 boxing on test for a little bit and enjoyed it, but then I heard instances are broken on test? Some of the folks on there were telling me that they break every so often and then don't work again until the next server restart. Is that accurate? If so, that seems like a pretty big drawback.

Ronaan said:

Uh are Essence Emeralds still a thing?

Or you can just get bound near a cliff and jump off.
A lot.

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I bound at a guard in Argath. Took a couple minutes.

I some how went from I just wanna log into FV and mess around to having 4 boxes at level 85-90 over the course of 2 weeks and want to add another 2 to fill the group out.

Im currently running bard, monk, sk, and druid and was looking for suggestions on the last two. My best guess would be 2 out of shaman, cleric, beserker, and enchanter but open to suggestions from people with more experience.

Also, I have never played beyond PoP so Im pretty lost on where to farm gear now that the defiant stuff doesnt really cut it or even where to level up. The amount of content is extremely overwhelming.

daly said:

Also, I have never played beyond PoP so Im pretty lost on where to farm gear now that the defiant stuff doesnt really cut it or even where to level up. The amount of content is extremely overwhelming.

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daly said:

Also, I have never played beyond PoP so Im pretty lost on where to farm gear now that the defiant stuff doesnt really cut it or even where to level up. The amount of content is extremely.

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For lvls 85-90, you’ll want to focus on the House of Thule expansion. It’s pretty well done, offers quite a bit of content and will get you good gear for your level. Once you hit 90 and get your gear set there, move to the Veil of Alaris expansion followed by Rain of Fear, which will take you to lvl 100.

From there, I went straight to Empires of Kunark to 105 and then Ring of Scale to 110, which is the current max level. If you’re in a rush to gear up, the recently added GMM zone for the 20 year anniversary has a fairly easy mission called The Darkness Howls that gives the best group gear possible for weapons and non visible slots. It’s fairly trivial at 110 for my 3 box plus 3 mercs crew so I’d bet it’s doable as early as 105 for a full group.

Vinjin said:

For lvls 85-90, you’ll want to focus on the House of Thule expansion. It’s pretty well done, offers quite a bit of content and will get you good gear for your level. Once you hit 90 and get your gear set there, move to the Veil of Alaris expansion followed by Rain of Fear, which will take you to lvl 100.

From there, I went straight to Empires of Kunark to 105 and then Ring of Scale to 110, which is the current max level. If you’re in a rush to gear up, the recently added GMM zone for the 20 year anniversary has a fairly easy mission called The Darkness Howls that gives the best group gear possible for weapons and non visible slots. It’s fairly trivial at 110 for my 3 box plus 3 mercs crew so I’d bet it’s doable as early as 105 for a full group.

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Ending up finding the HoT gear and bought as much of it as I could from the bazaar for my tank. The jump in stats from what was available before 85 and now was pretty substantial and it made 83-84 pretty difficult for the hot zone of that range.

Thanks for this though. Gives me a good guide of what to do going forward.

No problem. If you want my advice, take your time with the content. Between the zones, quests and missions, there's a ton to see. You've been away for awhile anyway and don't really need to worry about LFG with other players so you might as well enjoy the ride.

I had taken a 6 year hiatus from the game myself not too long after VoA was released back in 2011. I came back in 2017 and went the VoA - RoF - EoK route to get caught up with current players. At that time, the level cap was still 105 (since upped to 110) but it was good timing since Kunark was always one of my favorite eras in the game. They did a nice job on the remake, IMO.

There are three other expansions between RoF and EoK - CotF, TDS and TBM but I still have not spent much time with any of them so I can't really comment much. The current expansion is TBL and has a few incentives for going back and finishing older content so I may eventually go back and do those.

The biggest gripe by the player base is arguably that the # of zones per expansion has slowly deteriorated down to 5-6 zones per expansion, and several of them are usually recycled from the past. The dev team is little more than a skeleton crew at this point, but I do think they try their best to deliver given what they have to work with. It is, after all, a 20 year old game.

Tuco said:

Berserker and cleric, but six boxing effectively without isboxer or mq2 is really hard. No idea if you're using that.

Tuco's Setup (Critique Welcome!) | EverQuest Forums

So here's my setup. My hope is to collect it all in one place, get some criticism on it to improve, and maybe help teach someone else a few things. I...

forums.daybreakgames.com

Has a bunch of info on multiboxing.



Is a vid of me taking on one of the end game group encounters.

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Im currently using both. I think the mq2 optimization aspect of it is what is really hooking me in right now. I downloaded isboxer a few hours before you posted this. Currently just using it to size my windows and dont really feel that Im getting as much out of it as I should be.

I definitely need to start working on organizing my macros a bit better as my burns and firing off defensive discs in o fuck moments arent where they need to be.

Are epic 2.0/2.5s still worth doing for any of the classes I am currently playing or would they just get replaced post 105?