I make good use of campfires with my team, but a big part of boxing is getting good at moving your entire team together. You shouldn't be moving your team one at a time.
I 5 box. While I wouldn't mind lowering requirements I'm more than ready to admit it's quasi game breaking so to speak. Now that being said the fellowship cap is very much too low for modern eq. I have chars not even that old and with 2 year breaks who are still max AA - which means lots of alts which is normal for a lot of old school players. At the very least the number should be 16 or 18 at this point.
always wondered if the reason was guild banners. takes like what 16-18 guildmembers in zone to plant it. with fellowship that high you could run 3 to a zone rest campfire and setup a banner for rest of guild.
Two toons to set a fire would be nice, if only because of the number of times I've gated a toon to the GL just as I realized I forgot to set the return fire. Lifting the max number would be a nice QoL improvement for me, though. By now, so many people have so many toons 85+ that the original fellowship concept is just too small, and setting a guild flag takes way too many.
I honestly think it's not sooo terrible an idea after all. I box at times, and my fellowship has both live players and my boxes/ALTs in it. I'd love to have the ability to keep more of my ALTs, despite adding more live players - perhaps by having the fellowship not refer to characters but accounts or so, if "simply" increasing the number were for some reason not feasible. Being able to set a CF alone wouldn't, as was posted above, make mages nor their coth obsolete - but it would reduce the "need" for coth mules somewhat. And yes, it would be very convenient to have to move just one ROG instead of 3 to get to a safe spot deep inside a zone and set up a campfire. It's "bloated" fellowships because of constraints like this that so many people are asking for more slots mainly imo. The moving of more than one character at a time instead of using autofollow: That has not as much to do with "learn how to play", but more with what machine you use and WHERE you are moving through. I've found that, when i do not assign accounts to their individual cores, /follow regularly breaks. Granted, that might be reduced much if you have a faster machine than me, but i am posting from my point of view of course. So what i do is move as many at a time as i have cores. The other point is where you are moving them through - not everyone has double-invis or SoS, so moving a box crew CAN be tricky. Reducing the number of characters needed from 3 to two plus merc or even just one would imo be a QoL thing that many would appreciate. I don't see how that'd qualify for a "terrible idea" - just think of the moving-impaired live players (or women, mistaking left+right and all that); i can't count the number of times that i've become frustrated at other player's inability to bypass some mobs that my WAR easily can just by moving "intelligently".
I never thought campfires (fellowships) were "fine the way they are", ever. Not even when i "only" had two viable characters per account. And honestly, instead of having to organize my characters into primary and secondary and tertiary fellowships, i'd much prefer to give them all vitality with my main - not to mention my friends' characters; i'd love to be able to add some more of THEIR regular ALTs without making my primary fellowship "unuseable" for when i actually box-only. Since i cannot be in two fellowships with the same character at the same time, i see the increasing the numbers of slots as the only way to reconcile the different uses ppl have for a fellowship. It's unfair though to even name banner and fellowship with the same breath. Fellowships span guild bounds, and not everyone in a (real) guild can set banners - just to point out the two most obvious points.
Thank you all for ALL of your feedback. Yep, even personal attacks. Would really, really love to hear what Devs have to say as well about this. Your time to say what you really think Dev team, i can take it..........I promise
I'd just like to see the cap for members increase.. while I run 3 toons.. I have friends and guildies in mine as well.. long since reached the cap and have to drop an alt to bring someone else then repeat as needed.. very annoying.
If the issue is they don't want someone to wrack up vitality on an unlimited number of toons (maybe they see this as some kind of exploit or a potential for one) they could have primary and secondary members of the fellowship. The 12 primary members will be allowed to xp share but have an unlimited number of secondary members that just want to utilize the campfire itself and don't gain any xp sharing. If you remove someone from the primary slot their vitality goes back to zero to further prevent issues if this is in fact something they would consider as an issue.
My friend did the math and found out that using Fellowship XP you lose some EXP from the actual mob kill, I think it was 10 or 15%. That was the last time I ever used the Fellowship EXP stuff =P That means instead of 100% exp for the mob you end up with 90 or 85% and that's what's split between you and your members. I'm not sure if he was accurate with this math or not but I can't see a reason he would have to lie, he stopped using fellowship exp after that too.
IF you have near max on your primary box group for aa though sharing it to the secondary or even tirertary teams makes sense though.
I have never really used it although I have 3 toons who have been max vitality for several expansions. I only turn it on if one of my toons is max level and AA so he can give some xp to others. With that said I know people who use it religiously to level alts. I know the last bonus xp weekend we had before this a friend of mine took one of his ftp toons to BI and within a half hour he leveled them from 90 to 95 using fellowship xp. He is pretty damn uber though with all raid gear so I don't think these results will carry over for your average player but it does have value in certain situations depending on your play style. He only levels up alts using this method since there is no real time sink involved. I will have to interrogate him a little to figure out the secret to getting the most out of it.
The EXP feature of Fellows definitely has its uses - I primarily use my fellowships for transportation though =P. If you have chars in the fellow that are mooching XP there's less room for your group to port people! I'd love to see them "split" the fellowship feature. Give us a fellowship used for transportation *only*
"Capped" vitality (which takes rather long to get, mind you) on a character gives him roughly another lesson (somewhat more than that actually, and it's kill-based not time-based). I use it as a means to make playing my main (despite him being maxed) "viable" and when i switch to a capped character, i usually get 200+AAs (roughly 50kills) out of that, before i can (due to the 5AA per kill cap) even start thinking about turning on lesson. Back before the XP nerf on RoS release, capped vitality alone was enough for a level 105 character in a level 105 group to get the (capped) 5AAs per kill from giants. Currently, with the anniversary XP bonus and in RoS T2 from non-named mobs, the max for a meanwhile level 110 character from capped vitality was 4AAs per kill (again for at least roughly 50mobs before vitality was not applied anymore, but ofc steadily declining). In my fellowship, i have currently 4players of which 3 are raiding mains and one ALT with maxed XP+AAs that are all set to share and fill up the 4th player's and other ALT's vitality. The XP "loss" you get from having sharing enabled IS significant, but we only need to recover some XP from learning wipes, so we can afford that (of course, during the leveling phase directly after release, sharing is disabled for all mains). As a result, the 4th non-raiding player has his char maxed too soon (at roughly the same time as my main CLR box will be presumably) - and as a side-effect i can keep my ENC and SHD/PAL on "fast lane" the few times i can actually play them. I could live with limiting the XP sharing to 12 selected chars as we have it now, but i'd LOVE to be able to dismiss my secondary and tertiary fellowships (and invite a few more live players as well as select ALTs of the existing fellows) by having the max number increased significantly. Alas, i'm afraid that this is but wishful thinking :/ Hmm... I use the fellowship mainly to provide a faster means of recovery in the case of a wipe. And secondly to port some ALTs in to loot group drops that no main ever needs. As such, yes, for transportation - but not of a box crew, as i basically have to move my box crew somewhere in the first place. I think the boxers that use fellowships to transport full 12char complements around are rather few - but yes, the advantages of relocating a "camp" by simply moving 3 somewhere, planting a CF and calling in the rest can be handy i guess. Which use is predominant depends on the individual circumstances i guess, but imo even the possible "abuse" of moving 3 or 4 or 5 group complements of boxes around rather easily would not be a KO-criterion for increasing the total number allowed.
well this isnt true at all. my fellowship has 7 real life people in it, and we all coordinate our play times and we get a lot of a use out of the campfire feature. i think the only harsh reality here is that your gonna have to make a 4th toon to get any use out of campfires
Turn sharing OFF on the character that is burning up the accumulated vitality pool. Makes zero sense to leave sharing ON and dump a chunk of every kill exps gained right back to everyone else in the fellowship. Also, never use vitality for AAing, its damn near pointless considering the time it takes to fill vitality pool. AAing will deplete vitality shockingly fast. Use vitality for leveling, you'll get far more bang for buck.
