Hey guys. Been trying to start up in P99 but I haven't the best time trying to get started on a fresh character with nothing banked and also in my part of the world i find it hard to find groups. The economy is such that affording any gear/upgrades while affording spells limits my characters progression. I came and signed up here for two reasons. 1. I miss PoP (everything up to PoP was my favorite. The game lost me an expansions, maybe two, later) 2. (after finding out botting is fine here) I wanted to try botting a small team to enjoy my slow grind through the game once again. I've done a bunch of googling about box teams and there are many posts about it already so rather than make another "Whats the best 3 or 4 box team" thread i thought i would narrow down the questions and criteria specifically for me and what i'm trying to achieve. I'm after a 3 or 4 box team to solo grind through the group content of the game. I'm in no rush and want to go back and experience all the zones and parts of certain expansions that i never fully got to see. I've never raided or been right up in the end game content. The game was too grindy with my timezone/limited time for me to get the the end and attempt it. My two main character both started epic chains (1.0) but never finished them. I'm slowing learning MQ2 and E3 and although it's not particularly complicated, it is however very broad with less than adequate documentation. The community here has be very helpful so far. Thank you. I have several questions to help me boil down the group i wish to play. Ive tried a few suggestion from my searching but always feel like one more bot will round it out or find out the group comp is designed with mercs filling in the other spots. 1. Can tanks (any of the three) be played as a box? Just about all my experience in the game has been playing Enchanters and Bards. I rolled some lowbie monks, rogues and a few others in live but nothing past say... level 20/25. I have no experience with tanks (and most melee) period. 2. Having said point 1. , can then a Mage pet be used to tank the content i'm after. A lot of (semi) recent posts about pet tanking are relating to Live and they have been nerfed. What kind of fruit will pet tanking bare for me here? 3. I'm not really pigeon-holed into any specific classes although my one wish is ease of use. I'm more comfortable with casters (what i usually play in any game given the choice) but would gladly learn something new. 4. Typically (most often, as far as i can see) people suggest Tank/Shm/XXX/XXX. The last two some combination of DPS and support. Sk seems to favor a casting group while warriors melee. Sk's come with casting to maintain aggro (or help hold it) while warriors have a metric crap ton of AA and discs to pop, from my reading. If i am to add a tank to my group and as per question 1, i need to play that character, which one would provide me the easiest learning curve? 5. Monk is the least gear dependant of the melee and also bring some decent DPS to boot as i understand. Also has the ability to pull singles and also tank (given that i'm not chasing old raid or top tier content). Could this be an option and would a monk be better for my needs assuming the mage pet will not suffice after a certain point in the game? I realise what level of gear he/she will be wearing will play a large role in that... There are also Beastlords...? 6. I see a lot of people boxing druids... My understanding is that they are lack luster in any specific task (healing, buffs, dots, nukes etc) what is their popularity? Is it simply the amount of tools they possess of one class? Ports, buffs, DS, some ability to heal, DPS..... It that the main draw to boxing them? 7. Setting up (semi) automation. Do you bother with editing the character ini's every so often as you're leveling to update the spells they use for healing/debuffs and the like or should i use basic console commands on macros to get by while i get the first X amount of levels? Currently i've only done a bit of testing in the tutorial of a few different group compositions to try and learn a bit about the programs and setting up different classes as bots. I seems to be trying to get my head around coding the bots more than i'm actually playing at the moment (not really a bad thing) but i'd like to get some playtime in soon. The whole reason i decided to come back and play the game, after all... Thanks for reading, look forward to some discussions. Cacofonix
Playing from the tank is just easier, not required. I usually will play from one of my tanks and switch to bards to pull if need be. Since you have mentioned you played ENC a lot on live, you would probably be more comfortable switching to the ENC if you need to mez etc. e3's mez feature works okay, it needs some TLC to get it working very well though. You could play from your ENC and everything would work, but I would still recommend playing from the tank, it's just easier (I know a lot of people who used to play from another "main toon" me included that eventually switched to playing from the tank since it's just easier)
I’m just starting out myself, and I’m having a great time with a 5-box group of SK/CLR/ENC/MAG/DRU. I honestly expect I’ll add a SHM soon to fill out the group, but I’m having a blast. I play from the SK, and I’m controlling most of my bots using /bct commands, rather than relying on a lot of auto-engage setup. I 3-boxed for years on Live without using MQ2, so this feels perfectly comfortable for me. Just hit 40 last night on my first 3 toons, and 38 on my added two. I kinda wished I’d just have gone ahead with the SHM when I added those two, but hindsight is 20/20.
But I love shammies and the buffs they bring . This is really the first time since I started boxing all those years ago on Live that I haven’t had a shaman in my setup, or at least available to log on for buffs. That said, you’re not wrong about the bard...but then I have 3 plate toons to gear up, vs having 1 chain class to soak up the full set of defiant chain that’s dropped. Not sure what I’ll do yet...did I mention I love shaman?
That’s still too much for me to think about, lol. Totally new to MQ2, so it’s been a learning experience getting comfortable with more than 3. I’m having a blast now though, and CoM is getting wrecked
I had a really smooth ride in p99 because I got lucky finding groups, early on anyway. Also I picked a Necro which can solo easily the rest of the time. Make sure you only buy your key spells. For me it was lich, pet, lifetaps, and a DoT. A lot of the other stuff I didn't bother with because I was poor. And I didn't buy spells every level, sometimes I would only buy 1 at a spell level, sometimes I would get none and just press on to the next spell level (especially at low levels when it goes so fast). Also I didn't need gear because the magic does the work, melees have a harder life. Money is kinda pointless trying to get until level 20 something because you would be lucky to make a plat from a kill. But at some point you end up getting fine steel weapons from mobs and if you are determined you can horde bags full of them and make good money (each fine steel sells for a few plat). I saved up about 300p and went to EC tunnel and did an auction for any cheap newbie gear. Several people felt sorry for me and/or were really generous so they just gave me a bunch of items they had lying around. I ended up with almost an entire set of stuff! Also a lot of the people you group with are old timers who are rich and just playing twinks, so I was in a group in Oasis and I was talking to a guy in my group about how I couldn't wait to get some more money to buy my level 20 something spells. Another guy in the group just handed us both 500p each. To him it was nothing because high levels are really rich, but to me it let me buy every spell all way to 50 ish. And by that point I was making good money myself. The community is really good there, I had a good time. I only quit because single boxing gets kinda boring after you are used to multiboxing, and also people kept telling me that epics and high end gear was basically impossible because there were was a guild blocking everyone else from making progress. So I just quit. That said, I still think p99 is the nearest anyone can get today to classic EQ. This server is good for that. I quit at PoP originally, so I had never seen most of PoP and any of LDON, GOD, OOW, etc. So I started on PEQ a few years ago because I just wanted to see all these zones and do all the progression. I doubt there is any better way to do it than PEQ. You could do it on Agnarr or something with real people which would be fun too, but you would have to level up the slow way and you would need regular raids and there would be people getting in the way etc. At least in PEQ you just level up fast and do it all whenever you want it and not many people will be in the way because POP is old content on PEQ. There are some servers you might like which have actual "bots" by the way which are like programmed characters that work on emulators. It is kind of like a mercenary but better and you can have lots of them. I have never played there but it seems like it would be good for someone who just wants to play one character and see all the game's content with bots to help out, and you don't have to go through the trouble of learning macroquest. Also there are a lot of "Easy" tweaked servers that weaken the mobs so 1 character can kill most content and a single group can do raid content. Check out EZ Server, Addicted Dads BETA, VoG, and maybe some others. IMO it would be well worth considering doing this in real EQ on the regular Live servers. The levelling up experience is a lot faster now because they made the game a lot easier, you can also even buy a level 85 character which you can then use to quickly power level your other characters. If you have any old accounts, there is a good chance you will have at least one of those level 85 boosts for free. Also you don't need to pay to play EQ now until you reach about level 100. Also with mercs you can get an easy ride through the levels. The tank merc is especially strong, it requires no setting up, you just buy it from an NPC and it joins your group and kicks ass. The only issue is that they can't go in raid zones, but you can outlevel the raid zones so much that you can literally solo older raid content with a single character. If you got good at boxing 3 characters, you would only need to get them to something like level 80 ish or 90ish and you can kill everything in PoP with ease. PEQ is a good option as well though. I did it exactly for the same reason as you. I wanted to see PoP (and a few others), so I made an army of characters and got good with macroquest (E3) and slaughtered my way through expansion after expansion. It is fun. It takes a lot of time and effort and learning to do it though because E3 takes a lot to learn and you have to regularly tweak it every time you level up and get new spells. Multiply it by multiple characters and you end up spending a lot of time tinkering in .ini files. It depends how you want to play though. Multiboxing is more about you manually playing each character yourself, it can be really hard but so much fun because it is intense. You engage with your tank and do some taunting, quickly switch to your healer and start some heals, then quickly switch to your third guy to do some damage or whatever. Then you have to quickly get back on the tank and do more taunting and repeat the routine. It can be a bit stressful but for me it was really fun. When you use MacroQuest (or E3), all this changes because you don't get to play them anymore. The characters will instead play themselves. This means that you may as well just have a full group of 6 because you don't have to do anything with them (except give them items when they drop). You can even level up multiple groups and have an entire raid that basically plays by itself, all you do is lead them somewhere and tell them to engage and you kill entire raid zones by yourself. The downside is that I didn't feel like I was even playing the game anymore. It was more like just pointing the bot army at stuff and pressing KILL! I prefer manually boxing. But with manual boxing you are so much weaker than an automated full group. So it depends what you want to do. For this reason I play real EQ and PEQ and some others too, because I do whatever takes my mood. I am one of the few people in the world who doesn't actually like raiding. I just think group content is more fun, with real people. Raiding has a lot of waiting, a lot of people to manage, a lot of rolling for items, a lot of un-fun stuff. Doing it with your own automated army is a lot better though, but still, some of it I find to be a bit of a pain. That said, I think doing the epic weapon quests is one of the most fun things I've done in this game. I got to go to the depths of great dungeons and find rare mobs and there were some brutally difficult battles that I had to overcome. I had friends help me (on another server), but you could do it yourself easily on PEQ or with multiboxing anywhere. And again, you can just outlevel content so much now that doing an epic 1.0 with a bunch of level 70 characters would be super easy. Or do it at level 60 with 1 group to be a LOT more challenging and fun. Hope this helps. I come and go a lot but feel free to ask me anything and I can help. I went through learning E3 a few years ago and I still have a huge amount of tips and notes from various PEQ people here that I would gladly share.
I'd take the mag out of there and add the shaman. They really add to the group and almost important as the tank next to the clr.
For his combination I'd stick with the Mag for the dps and utility. He already has a ench. Shammies shine when you have a heavily melee stacked group for champion / panther. If not they do not add much utility at all in your proposed group composition.
