My experimental blog about playing a newborn Ranger.

Well it took a bit longer to hit 105 on my shaman run I thought it would. I finally hit it last night but pretty much had to go to bed afterwards. So today after getting home and making dinner I went in and fiddled around with his hot keys and spells etc. it took me while to get things set up the way I wanted, but after I got things pretty close it was time for a good old fashioned scouting ahead mission to test things out.

Here are my thoughts and results from just the one mission. I set him up to basically be a slower / extra dps with his pet, Lynx, and fast dots. I'm not sure I was all that blown away. You see last week I discovered that keeping my 2 wizard mercs on burn really wasn't much trouble. The mobs die pretty quickly now between that and the ranger dps. My hotkey was set to assist the war, pet attack, counterbias slow, Lynx, fast DoT. That was what I eventually thought I was going to end up with. At first I tried a malo/cripple 2 in one spell, then 2 regular dots then two fast dots. It just is not mana efficient enogh to cast the long lasting dots because the Wizard mercs kill things so fast. After trying out a few different combos of what I wanted to try I settled with key that looked something like this

Assist warrior
Pet attack
Cast counterbias slow
Lynx/lion
Group HoT

I also made a key that's more heal intensive that looks something like

Target warrior
Healing surge
Group HoT
Second group HoT
Healing surge

Also made one that is just 5 healing surges.

Copied a few hot keys from the awesome post in the priest forums on AE slowing / debuffing.

Made another key that auto follows the ranger and also casts group cheeta and group invis at the same time.

Still need to perfect a couple different things but all in all he's helping the group much more.

After that I didn't really want to get into anything serious so I figured I'd at least just go start the 1.5 prequest for the shaman. Got a couple of the hails done and am working on some stupid faction stuff. Epics are daunting quests for people who don't really like questing, but I'm just going to try to eat this elephant one bite at a time.

Kind of a busy week for me so I'm hoping I can get a good chunk of the epic done in the playing time that I have. On a great note my trader is raking in cash from all of that RoF gear I got from Kael I also had a couple type 5 augs from TBM that I got from mobs in the HA's sold one for 150k. CHA CHING!
Nice to have a source of income.

See you guys in Norrath!

You are referring to the "Shaman Hotkeys" post in the Priest section of the Class forum? Truly, a great post.

Yeah sorry that was worded funny. The shaman post in the priest forums. Just for the record I make almost all my posts from my phone and the iPhone auto correct blows donkey you know what's so if words in some of my sentences make absolutely no sense that is why. I don't always proof read all my posts even tho I probably should. I always cringe when I go back and read posts that I didn't have time or didn't feel like editing.

Autocorrect is one of the remaining joys of insanity in the world.

If you really want to experience the full joys of autocorrect - try typing in two languages in the same post.

What a weekend... I'll start from last Thursday... So my job can get pretty crazy. Long story short we had back to back emergencies and I was at work from 8am on Thursday morning until 1pm on Friday afternoon. A breezy 29 hours. Once I got home I crashed out until about 2:30am Saturday morning.

What else would I possibly do besides wake up in the wee hours of the morning and play Everquest? I was thinking I might go camp some augs or start off in TBM and get some good gear upgrades. After logging in I remembered what I was doing last time I played. Shaman Epic.... Gross....

Well screw it. Might as well start this madness. I began the journey of the 1.5 prequest where I left off last time. Which was like hailing 2 NPC's. Put it this way. I stopped for breakfast, and lunch, and by stopped I mean made food, and ate in front of the computer. At 3:30pm, 13 hours later, I got called back into work. Literally I needed 3 more pieces and to do some hails and I would have been done with the prequest and the entire 1.5. So off I go to work, but it was a quick stint. I was back home by 7pm. I was really sick of this questing stuff but I perservered. By 9pm or so I had my 1.5 epic in hand.

I should mention that while asking a question or 2 in general while on my shaman I sparked some interest from someone in a high end raiding guild on bristlebane. Circle of Legends. Within about 5 mins I was invited on all 3 characters. Hurray for me! However I still need to talk to the official recruiter officer.

So after completing my 1.5 my new guild mates offered to run me thru CoA real quick to get my globe (needed for 2.0) I happily accepted. It was really quick, took like 15 mins.

I need to back up here a sec and just say that the shaman 1.5 and the prequest was a lot of BS. I mean it was just a ton of S you had to do. I just want people to realize that lol. Luckily I didn't really come across any really effed up spawns or loooooong camps. I think I actually got pretty lucky on a couple rare spawns. Anyway, it was a ton of work. At one point I had to get my alchemy up to 100. Which for my brain meant that I had to do the alchemy trophy quest also. So that was about a 90 minute detour there. I got it though, so suck it EQ

Okay, so after I had my globe I was going to just smash out the rest of the 2.0. My goal was to do the prequest the 1.5 and 2.0 all in one day. Life had other plans tho. I had to work an overtime shift at 7am Sunday. After starting the first couple of steps on the 2.0 I started reading ahead. Wow. A whole S ton of S that needed to be done for the 2.0. I called it a night.

Today after work I came home and decided to press on. Hungry, and exhausted I clicked the log in button and immersed myself back into the world of Norrath. I made a bit of progress and then another road block hit. Everquest started having server wide lag. I struggled thru and tried to deal with it but zoning was taking a good 5 to 10 minutes and with this quest stuff I was constantly having to zone. At this point I accepted my fate that I was probably not going to finish my shaman epic this weekend. I went and laid down and almost instantly fell asleep. I woke up a couple hours later and ate dinner that my wife had made. Feeling refreshed a bit I decided to log back in and see if the lag had subsided. It had.

Back to work.

I'll spare the specifics other than to just say "You have completed the achievement Epic 2.0"

I'm gonna label this weekend a success and go to bed.

Night!

First, congratulations on epic 2.0 and the new guild! Second, hooray for guilds!

Enjoy the raiding.

Everquest won tonight....

Okay so the lag the past 2 nights has been a sad thing. I'm usually not one to rage out on these sort of things because I can't imagine there's anyone from DBG suiting around wishing and hoping that all their games and servers would just lag out and make people miserable. That, and I don't know enough about the computer IT world to know if fixing it or stopping it in the first place is feasable. I'm sure with enough money it probably is. Anyway tho I still got a couple things done.

During the first lag session I emailed the recruiter for my guild and filled out a proper application just to sort of follow protocol. After that I signed up a Magelo account to be able to sync my character up. Next I downloaded GINA but I really have no clue how to use it yet. After that I took a break and went and hung out with wifey for awhile.

When I came back a couple hours later it felt like things had cleared up just a bit but just to be sure I took some time to clear out my bags and organize my bank a little bit. My bank is still a terrible mess. Anyone else have that problem? My bags are pretty well organized but it's almost like when you were a kid and your mom told you to clean your room so you just shoved everything in your closet. That's how my bank feels.

After that it was kinda late already but I decided to go checkout what looked like a double aug camp there in breeding grounds. 1 for the shaman and 1 for the ranger. When I arrived in the zone I invis'd up and headed to the spot where the place holders were. I started clearing and everything went smoothly. Must have cleared out about 20 to 25 little baddies before respawn happened.

I went to make about a 3 pull that some how turned into a 6 pull. No problem tho, they were all either blue or light and my warrior could handle them fine. I start clicking his Pain Doesn't Hurt disc and AE agro stuff but nothing is firing. Okay so now I'm REALLY pressing them. Nothing. Lag again... Ranger dies, shaman dies, and eventually my AE agro stuff fires but not my defensive stuff. Warrior dies.

After being stuck on the loading please wait. . . Screen for about 5 mins straight I just Ctrl + Alt + Deleted and went to bed.

You win this round EQ gods, but the fight is not over.

What happened then?

DerangedRanger please send me an in game mail at Test.Nothobitses at your convenience. I really like the blog and want to converse with you in game when you have time.