I stopped playing about halfway through Luclin's time period (Arlanna, a mage on Bristlebane server) and am now returning to the game. I have been playing for the past week as a Paladin on Bertox server and am enjoying the game enough to subscribe and become an all access member. Now that I have a grip on the game I will be rerolling (though keeping the paladin as an alt). Now, on to the questions and thank you all in advance! 1 - I am going to be dual boxing my AA account with at least one F2P account. I plan on making a mage as one of the accounts and pet tanking (in case you couldn't tell by the username I was a big mage fan). What is a good combination with a mage? I'm looking for it to be something other than a cloth wearer. What would be a good merc combination for dual boxing with pet tanking? 2 - My system is a laptop. Windows 8.1 64 bit, 4GB Ram, AMD A8-6410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics 2.00 GHZ. Is this enough to dual box? How about triple? If it's enough to triple what would be a good 3 party group to compliment my mage with mercs? Again, I would prefer all different armor types simply so I could make the most use out of the defiant drops. 3 - Is there a guide to all the various slash commands? I've seen posts where people talk about using /melody and /alt act but neither of these were described while I was playing. Maybe they were in a tutorial quest? I dunno. 4 - Crescent Reach or Glooming Deep? How about old world newbie zones? I don't want to level too fast, but don't want to crawl through levels like I did back in the day. 5 - Cake, pie, cookies, or ice cream?
Non cloth partner for mage, druid by a mile. Snare, ports, evacs, heals, huge damage buff for mage, great debuff for mobs to make pet tanking easier. One of the best 2 boxes in the game. Run tank/healer merc, use the druid for DPS and fill in heals on tough fights. Macros....this is a real rabbit hole, and there is a lot to discuss. I'd suggest using the search on here for "boxing" threads, I have many posts detailing macros as well as boxing combos. There are also some good resources on the web. http://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/eq:macros for example, google will find a lot of stuff for this. You should be able to 3 box on that, I can 3 box with no problems on a very old computer, just give it a try. You don't need any special software, just multiple accounts. I open them all in window mode, and just click on the character I want and then hit hot key. You can also alt/tab, but I find the combination of going directly to the character I need and hot keys to be a bit faster and less fumbly. More important on 3 box teams when you want to go directly to the correct character. SET YOUR BACKGROUND FRAMES PER SECOND TO 60!!!! This is very important. If you don't do this, /follow won't work very well, this largely fixes the problems with follow. It defaults to min, so it's something you have to change. It's in the advanced options page for display I believe. Go through the entire tutorial, get all the gear, it's actually pretty great gear considering, and you'll probably end up with some of the pieces into your 60s given how sparse defiant drops are. Once you get out of the tutorial, go to PoK and buy the lowbie jewelry if you have the plat. Makes a huge difference, will run you about 50 plat per character. The merchant is right in front of you as you zone into PoK the first time. Good luck!
3: Commands, but probably still not all of them: http://eqwiki.net/wiki/Commands http://www.onlinegamecommands.com/everquest/everquestcommands.htm This thread explains some things: https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?posts/3194968/ 4: With All Access you can select Crescent Reach or the original Start City. That will determine your Origin and Return Home location. You can enter the tutorial by pressing the Enter Tutorial button on the character select screen, but that won't change your start city. General path / advice is to do the tutorial and quests to start with. It's great learning method (although lots of dialog box reading) and provides great starter gear. Then generally Crescent Reach and some of the beginning Hero's Journey Achievements (/ach in-game command), often followed by some in Blightfire Moors. If you've already done this enough, you can go back to your original start city, but it most likely will be barren, and the quests are very old world. If you're into doing it the old way, however, that is the way to go, and skip the tutorial all together. The tutorial gear is better than most top end original raid gear. Yther Ore.
Levelling is much faster than you may remember in the lower levels. However, time to get to max level isn't much different from what it was in Classic, Kunark, PoP, etc (level caps 50, 60, and 65). In each case, the last five levels can take quite a while. As Yther said, All Access gets the choice of starting zones, F2P only Crescent Reach. I would advise doing Gloomingdeep on each character, the first time to read all the screen of text, then each time after to run through the quests to get a full set of gear, which will happily last you to 60 or higher, especially with a tank merc to take the damage. Don't worry too much about Defiant drops, because there is some sort of rule that the RNG can never give you an armour type that you need (honestly, it really does feel like that) - and you can use the /claim for some Defiant at strategically chosen levels. If you want to go back to home cities after that, be my guest. It will be slower to level, and you will miss out on Hero's Journey achievement rewards, but that too can get boring if repeated too often. Because of the fast levelling, you won't meet many people to group with (rarely more than once), even in the HJ zones. So it's a good idea to guild up early, even if it i's just for chat and advice.
Enchanter is the top, or tied for the top, as far as two boxing with a Mage goes. There is literally no group content that can't be done by a Mage enchanter combo, especially so when you factor in mercs. You said other than cloth, but since your going to be pet tanking, Plate and chain is meaningless, other than rangers since you wont be able to melee. Like wise monks are out. Druids are the second best / tied dependent on view point to box with a mage. Wizzys fall into the third. with the use of mercs you will fly up though the levels. warrior mercs are OPed until 60 ish. Zones don't really matter as long as your not switching zones every other level. all of the above, rolled into one inescapable delicious treat
Pineapple Upside-Down Cake with the center filled with Coconut sherbet covered in oatmeal cookie crumbs? Once it came to me after trying to imagine such a concoction, I had to post it. Yther Ore.
