I can box 18 on an hp laptop not meant for it.. lol For real.. 4gig ram and the vid card the motherboard came with. First group.. get what makes life comfortable is what I did. War/Ench/Bard/Druid/Rogue/Cleric.. highest dps? no. But it cut my dependence on buffs from others, and gave me ports for quality of life and lets me accomplish what I find interesting.. From there.. do as you feel, run the content you want to and do your thing.
I upgraded recently and now have a ryzen 3900x 12 core with 32gb 3200mhz ram. It smashes it, playing 54 no problem. Cost me just shy of £1000 but used my old case and gfx card. I was due an upgrade anyway!
This is a great post, i'm building my 5th group right now, but I think 4 groups is optimal, and mainly i'm carrying a little extra "fat" in the form of too many porters, and a few classes I enjoy having for flavor (necro, ranger). I'm pretty sure I can lean my raid compo down to 24 if I get smarter on wisely using teleport/translocate spells and kicking out an excess wizard or two and druid. Also, please take Apollo's advice. Very spot on. Don't burn yourself out by taking on having only rogues rather than spreading the DPS among monks and berserkers. Monks have the great aura, great DPS, and both classes have epic 2.0 quests that won't make you want to quit playing, unlike the rogue. I love my rogues, but the epic 2.0 quests is brutal and would rather not do it more than I have to. For leveling I usually do kurns 1ish-20 with damage shield blessing of spike and blessing of temperance cast on my 6 noobs, I just keep my high levels around for the occasional rez or buff refresh. At level 20 I buy the initial spells/songs/bags and set the basic bot.ini s for the new characters. Karnors basement is great from 20-50 because the mobs don't flee. Just ensure that your noobs get a slight amount of damage, for example using a bard song. At 50 update spells and bot.ini. From 46-62 I use PoP zones like Plane of Disease castle Courtyard and Crypt of Decay to get to the low 60s. Update spells and bot.ini at 62. At this point I am using the above mentioned method of taking 3 high DPS chars and mixing with 3 noobs. I usually use my prima-rogue, shaman, berserker and combine 3 noobs into that group. Sometimes I log out excess melee DPS who have a tendancy to kill steal, such as secondary rogue. I am interested in trying out the PBAoE method that many people use, for example, wizard, wizard, enc +3 noobs. But I'm not so convinced it's actually a faster/better method. Then I finish 62-70 in Halls of Honor. Some people may like to use GoD zones in this area as well. Gear is a whole nother topic. When I started fresh on the server I stuck with 12, and earned my way through Ornate Pop Gear, and PoP mini boss weapons drops, such as 3 of the 4 towers in Bastion of Thunder, mini bosses in Tower of Solusek Ro. Then I slowly clawed my way through early GoD content, which was a fun challenege. But I think you would be better of learning the OoW group content, which I didn't do, and then joining other raids, with 12-18 you will easily fit into someone else's group compo and just keep your ears open, or better yet join Dragons of Asia and try to find partners for your progression.
Why do you have an enchanter in you aoe group? Wiz, wiz, the 4 you want exp on. It is far better than a single target dps group if you are able to handle the mass mobs. Why do you have a shaman in this group? 2 or 3 of your best melee dps and 3 or 4 noobs you want to level. You can also do things like add to the nonkos section of your inis to make your out of exp grp melee not steal kills. Have them not backstab, not use poisons etc. This way you don't have to log them out. Getting a berserker to be better dps than a rogue requires a perfect storm. It needs to be like a 45 second fight in which you use burns (basically no fights) other than that a rogue will shred zerker dps. A monk takes a crazy amount of work to out dps a rogue. If you don't want to do much work while still having the best dps in the game you should only make rogues for your dps. That wouldn't be as much fun, however. I agree their 2.0 quest is horrible. I did 1 and I'll never do another. Their poisons are what makes them dps machines, their weps obviously contribute, but it doesn't matter nearly as much and zerker or monk weps so 2.0 is not at all needed.
All-rogue groups only still qualify as "best dps in the game" if it's assumed you have a Mnk and especially Ber /tgb'ing their lvl 68 discipline buffs on them. Cry Havoc alone justifies making a Ber for a team, and that's only one of a few group-wide effects. I agree that Ber is only better DPS class-for-class in very quick DPS situations, but Rog adds very little to the overall group dps unlike a Ber (which is why I suggested rolling one to start & eventually expand on). It's not really fair to talk about it in terms of completely negating poison damage as there aren't any mobs (I can think of off-hand) who in particular have especially high poison resist, but you do run into quite a few raid mobs with high resists across the board, and it's worth noting that partial resists can occur more and more the higher lvl your target(s). In addition to their high dps, they're also rather high-agro being a dual-wield class and adding the proc(s) on top of it, which can be an issue for new Tanks just starting out. I think it's fair to say having more than one out-of-the-gate is probably a bit much to manage in terms of agro control unless you've already got high lvls to help supplement & PL you. My suggestion was more agro-inspired than loss-of-DPS inspired (though there is some), so sorry for any confusion there. I think once you've got a good core team for Buff/Aura/Disc stacking, you can focus more on min/maxing future groups. Definitely need to have some key stuff already though to make the most of additional group(s). Again like I said before further up the post, there is no single one "best setup", so some of it boils down to personal preference & I completely acknowledge that. My thoughts were that starting off it's easier to have more options than attempting to singularly exploit (not illicitly) any one class for a bulk of your overall strategy.
Word. Rogue only dps would be boring, but the parses would be pretty I'll have to check my parses because I don't remember any resists from rogue poisons, I wasn't looking for that though. I think cry havoc is good for monk/zerker, but not especially so for rogue. Their dps is like 60% or so from poison and only 40 from weps, making atk buffs less effective. They obviously still make a difference. I don't consider any class other than monk, rogue, berserker, wiz to be a dps class (and I'm being really kind to wiz here). So when I say all rogue dps that wouldn't mean you couldn't have a ranger, for instance. In my mind they are just for their atk buffs. But if one was to go so heavy on the rogue dps then you are right - having a zerker for their buffs would likely be worth it. I also think that with TSS+ expansions zerker will rule dps. But that's farther away than Pantheon
And yeah, rogues are a huge pita when starting up because they do so much dps that they take aggro quite easily. Especially if your tank is a war because their aggro early on is really bad (knights aggro pre 50 is pretty bad as well as mobs don't have enough hp to make their stuns/ac debuffs etc. effective enough). Warriors take a lot more work to get the same level of aggro as a knight. Knight is basically buy spells and win. I still hate them for raid tanks, however! I feel that if you literally just send your warrior in and then count to 5 before assist your life will be easier. But that is really not a good option for exping.
I'd have to disagree and say that Cry Havoc is great for any class that melees, regardless of whether or not they can pull additional dps out of procs or other means (like Rogue). Many people already know this but to recap: Melee agro is calculated as Weapon Base Damage + Weapon Damage Bonus; per swing (regardless of whether it's a hit, miss, or crit). This means that any stackable effect (like Cry Havoc) which adds to critical hit chance will also add to overall DPS without generating a single point of extra agro. I think this makes it invaluable & absolutely classify it as a "must-have" effect for overall group composition. This is also why classes like Rogue will often out-agro classes like Ber; any dual-wield class will innately generate more agro. More attacks = more agro (unless you're doing something silly like comparing endgame 2-handers to tradable bazaar-level dual-wield setups). Spell damage agro is 1 agro per point of damage, so effects like bardsong stacking which can increase DD damage from rogue procs will also add to the agro they generate. Not so with Cry Havoc. (I'm not suggesting not to use both, however, only that Cry Havoc is insanely good for any type of melee class)
There are bard songs that can increase proc damage? I only found aggro to be a problem on my warrior during exp sessions before I could ae. Never during raids. So lowering my aggro from dps was never something I had to focus on. Also I thought your leet pally had all the aggro? =D Why focus on lowering dps aggro when knights are beast aggro generators?
As far as bardsongs increasing proc damage, I was under the impression things like Ancient: Call of Power affected procs & that's what I was referring to in terms of dps-increase on spells (tho I can't say I've ever really looked at it as this is the only way I can think of off-hand to increase spell/proc damage from rogues at all). I'm not certain what else you're trying to get at. Paladins are unquestionably some of the best agro classes in the game, particularly at max level; but I don't see what bearing that has whatsoever to do with whether or not to use Cry Havoc on Rogues. It's not lowering dps agro at all; it's increasing dps without adding *additional* agro (making it viable for even less ideal agro tanks). Seems like a pretty obvious choice to me. Just because Paladins are beast agro doesn't mean that I'm suggesting while starting out they can out-agro anything else no matter what you throw at them. They're merely as good as you can hope to get out of a tank for single/duo target agro; some compensations may be required.
I was pretty far off on this. I guess I haven't looked at my parses in a while. This statement is accurate for rogues at around PoP elemental gear. For maxed out rogues it is more like 20-25% dps from poisons and all procs and the rest from weps. So this means that atk buffs are more effective once maxed out than I thought, but still less so than on a zerker or monk.
