Boxing isn't the problem. The depth of progression is. Back when LDoN was new (and for a few expansions after), pick-up groups were quick and easy to come by because pretty much everyone had the same gear and tons of people were still leveling up to max and thus AAs weren't much of a focus. Today, a latest-expansion mission requires a well-progressed group (top-tier group gear from the previous expansion, near max worthwhile AAs). How in the world does a group know that some rando on the LFG tool has any of that? And if they do, why are they LFG and not easily grabbing a group in their guild/alliance? People don't want to take a risk on someone's power-leveled alt at level 115. Sure that's fine maybe up to level 85 or 90, but after that, most groups want someone they KNOW will perform.
Are you talking about CoV T1 Type 5 augs? Tanin Gleamstone pays 350 Restless Marks for each type 5 aug. You can farm Morwenna Undertow for the Seaglass Curio and trade them in to Tanin for another Type 5 such as Chunk of Glowing Health in a 3 to 2 conversion rate.
This "interesting" thing is that they figured this out in TBL. Almost all the missions in TBL, even those based on the raids, could be done in parts. So a lesser equipped/powered group could do the first part, med/rest/wait for adps, then do the next part, etc. And a power group could just go from part to part to part. Same content, but it allowed various speeds. The part of TBL that wasn't really adjusted well for lower powered groups - the Smoke trials - have folks just trying to get through for credit and cheese and then are really never done again. Hard group level content gets ignored the second it becomes irrelevant. The missions in CoV and ToV could have easily been modified to make them more playable for a variety of groups. For crusaders, there is no reason why they could not have made the mission dragons just sit until activated, allowing lesser groups to work their way through it. Heck, they did it on Vulak mostly. In ToV, no reason each giant in Restless Assault could have sat waiting for activation. Or Icebound wait for players to charge/pull after Toejam dies. Or when AoW ports up, wait until he is activated. But when all you do is pare down raids for your missions as content, you don't get much depth. And as Minimind stated well, makes folks shy to just form a group for them.
Depending on which programs you are talking about, no they are NOT 'allowed'. 'm-q-whatever' is not and never has been allowed. i-s-boxer/win-eq/ginna/parsers/item collectors, etc ARE allowed.
Uh. So you want to take away a form of character progression that can be achieved by actually playing the combat portion of the game. No thanks. I've updated my full type-5 aug-set every expansion since TBM. Why? What the hell else am I going to do. Max level. Max AA. Max Heroic AA. Best available type 7/8 augs. Fully evolved evolvers. Best personal choice of type 18/19 augs. Admittedly I seem to be a rare case in that I only have one main character that I keep geared and skilled at the best achievable level. It's good for the game, too. For the first 3 months or so of each expansion, I: EoK: I don't remember what I did. RoS: Formed pickup groups for Cactus nearly every day. Lots of people joined and others got TAs. TBL: Boxed (2box) the hell out of PoFire missions. Lots of TAs given away. 2207 Fettered Ifrit Coins remaining and I'm sure I bought a few bags. ToV: Boxed (2box) the hell out of Griklor once I figured it out. It was fun figuring it out. Had a couple regular players joining me for it as well. Many many TAs, gear, augs, and ore given away. Due to having success selling the attuneable gear, I continued to do this one for most of the expansion duration. 16145 Froststone Ducats remaining, again after a few bags. CoV: Never could box Zlandi alone, but adding one additional dps character worked. Did the mission with a merc tank, box healer and one pickup dps over 150 times (that's about 2 times a day average for about 3 months: typically once in morning before work, once at night after work, occasionally none, occasionally 3x a day when I had the opportunity). Bound in WW, this mission typically took less than 15 minutes from the first thought of doing it to /kickp task, including recruiting a dps. Gave away lots of gear, augs, ore and TAs. The lack of attunable loot or other reward made me stop this one when I finished with my type5 set.
Stop right here !!! Do not go away! you HAVE TO teach me how to do Zlandicar with tank mercenary!!! I got maxxed tank merc and Defender's Vigilant merc gear. It folds in a couple of rounds from Zlandicar. Tell me your secret !
Had no idea a merc could successfully tank zlandicar. That's quite the feat! I have done zlandi with mage pet tanks a few times, but that can be pretty sketch.
The trick with merc tank is someone has to be able to take that opening hit, it makes it hard; but once its going and the tank is on it...
1. Tank Merc on aggressive. 2. 3 player toons. Cleric (never tried shm/dru). Dps. Dps. 3. 1 x dps, 1x healer, or 2x dps merc. Maybe start out with healer, move to 2x dps as you need/succeed. 4. Player who activates fight will get initial 1-2 sec beatdown. Use a short-duration frontal immunity disc before starting. I use Bulwark of the Brownies on Ranger. No healer target switching necessary. 5. After ~2 seconds, merc takes over. He starts with Fort, switches to Stand. 6. Spam heal and dps. 7. Win in less than 3 minutes. You must finish before tank's Stand finishes. It's a dps-gated fight. A million is probably doable but cutting it close, 1.2 is better. It's really that easy. Additional note: If you're one of those debuffing healer types. Stop. Don't do it. Just heal. You must start healing early, and you cannot miss a beat healing. Full spam heal.
Ok, I just won Zlandicar with my group. Using the tank merc was instrumental. Here is the rundown: 1. BST activated fight with all the defensive options one (warder shielding, DI up, Protective up etc. All short-but-awesome defenses). Zlandicar hit him and soon (in couple of seconds) switched to tank mercenary. 2. Healer mercenary was the only healer in the group. 3. BRD was singing the best defensive and adps songs, autoattacked when I was able to switch to his window, and used all the burn hotbuttons on the hotbar. 4. Switched to ZRK and went on a full burn. Second zerker (real person) joined the bloodfest wth the full burn. 5. BST went on full burn with Bloodlust and used h2h weapons with all 4 proces being lifetap and used Blooddrinker aura. 114 seconds later - the win. Both zerkers broke 2 mil each in under 50 secs. Zlandicar took 250 mil damage. max hit on BST - 115,363 3 top tanks: BST ate 1.9 mil damage in 41/81 hits , warder took 569K damage in 16/24 hits, tank merc took 444K damage in 9/12 hits. BST was tanking most of the time. Merc was important for initial survival. After that he was basically useless. Merc healer was enough to heal the group and top-off BST. Thanx for the tip.
This is an interesting idea. As you say, at least on FV, it's the same box crews selling the TLs, and I would bet a good majority of people just buy them instead of trying to get a group formed to do them. On FV, the scripted boxing problem is so bad there are even multiple raid boxing crews, and one of them is played by a single person I believe, who literally boxes 30+ accounts at once on raids. I think it's too far into the game's lifecycle to make a major change such as this, but it would be interesting to change the paradigm a bit. I don't have anything against boxers, I box a 2nd account most of the time, but I don't use any programs or anything, and to me that just isn't that fun. But if people want to do it more power to them. The issue is it has become so widespread on some servers that it's gotten to be a running joke and affects the game negatively for others on the server that don't want to run 6-10 accounts at once using multiple programs.
I'm going to be super blunt here, as I've had my own frustrations with how the game has been designed over the last few years. If EQ can't be successful without cheaters, then it doesn't deserve to survive. That is because it would mean that it isn't entertaining enough for there to be sufficient people willing to play it straight to support it. I mean, seriously. If a game isn't fun enough for people to want to play it without cheating, then it just isn't a good game. People can argue and debate back and forth forever about what tools constitute cheating and what doesn't, and whether Daybreak/Darkpaw has done enough about it in the past or is willing to do enough about it in the future. But no one can escape the basic principle that the game should be fun enough without any tools not explicitly enabled by the game engine (such as maps and custom UIs and socials). Anyone that thinks that more than that is needed in order to enjoy playing EQ would probably be better off finding a different game that had everything needed to enjoy it built in.
Nice run. I can't account for how you tanked that without glyph, honestly, with just a healer merc. Maybe you got lucky with ping pong, and obviously reduced the chance for rando spikes due to short duration. Zland is a beast to a non-disc non-plate tank. Would like to hear of your future success rate. Did tank merc die btw?
Yes to all of this. It is quite frankly ludicrous to make it an "achievement" to have to deliberately fail a mission mechanic and yet win anyway. The fact that you won at all is reward enough for that. And I also agree that missions that are part of progressing through the expansion's story and lore should not be so difficult that players are beating their heads against them and getting super frustrated. I've been taking a break from EQ1 for almost two months now because I got tired of failing even RoS missions with my main 115 3-box team. And then I have alt teams that are level 115 that can also struggle with certain progression quests even in EoK because they don't have the right combination of classes. Not to mention failing a ToV partisan quest over and over again because of a bug that causes merc or pet tanks to break the script. (Last of the Storm Boars).
I didn't start boxing until TSS when only one or two of my old friends and guildmates were left still playing the game. This was before mercs. I then took a break from EQ at that point, trying EQ2 for a few years. That game didn't have mercs yet either, so I started 2 boxing after a while, but not because I felt that I had to. (EQ2 is much more solo friendly by design.) I've been trying EQ2 again for the last couple of months, and I somewhat enjoy it more, but I'm still well short of the level cap and haven't gotten to some of the bigger changes that come along with that from when I last played. Basically, for me, boxing is a matter of my playstyle and circle of friends being different than when I was playing EQ in the glory days from 1999-2003. Then, I could log on and be in a group with at least some people that I knew fairly quickly if a group is what I wanted to do. My guild or I would join friends in larger guilds and we would even occasionally raid. But eventually, I just wanted to be able to log in and start doing something productive without having to wait or to join a pick up group with people I didn't know and then feel obligated to stick around as long as they did because they needed me to tank or whatever. EQ just stopped being solo friendly enough to match my time schedule and desired playstyle without boxing.
aa malo and aa slow are fast cast and can be cast in between spell casts easy, so well worth to cast them without missing a ** beat healing **
I agree with this, as well. Quests that you can do part of in one short session and then continue later when you have time is a preferable mechanic to me than putting almost everything desirable (currency and loot drops) in missions that have to be completely finished in order to get the reward. Bring some balance to how you can play the game and progress your character, please.
Did 3 more DN missions. Mercs never died. Basically - BST healed himself with lifetap weapon proces due to Bloodlust discipline, which is Duration: 42s (7 ticks) 1: Increase Worn Proc Rate by 10000% This ability, when activated, grants a 100% chance that your weapon's magical effects will trigger during melee combat for 42 seconds. Also used all melee-absorbtion AA's / disciplines (last under a minute typically). BST never was in danger , and during the fight the merc barely casted anything but group splash heals. In fact BST overhealed himself for 518K. Just a leather SK-wannabe, good for first 60 secs then poofs. BST took 6.43 mln damage and was healed for 5.92 mln damage basically ending at partial health every fight. Warder took 4.05 mln damage, did not die, was healed 50/50 by merc and proces/buffs. Tank merc took 2 mln damage in 4 fights, healed by merc and group proces. GamParse is wrong on calculating fight duration because Zlandicar doesn't actually die, so the parse keeps going even after the mission updates at 4%. Individual logs show the zerkers fought 34,33,62,45 seconds. One failure between missions 2 and 3 due to misfire, one ZRK didn't melee at all, and BST died at 64 sec mark and Zlandicar killed the group (not included in the tables). Combined fights damage table Damage ByTotal% of TotTimeDPSSDPSHitsMax HitAvg HitDmg to PCNPC Max ClassRank Total 973,259,021 100.0 393 2,476,486 2,476,486 19074 2720086 51025 15384509 117117 0 ZRK1 359,225,000 36.91 340 1,056,544 914,058 2188 2720086 164179 104322 0 Berserker 1 ZRK2 309,294,128 31.78 343 901,732 787,007 2252 2531958 137341 94820 0 Berserker 2 BST-MT 186,417,945 19.15 393 474,345 474,345 7370 342356 25294 6434573 115363 Beastlord 3 BRD 50,718,074 5.21 370 137,075 129,053 1766 549932 28719 102379 0 Bard 4 BST`s warder 33,096,917 3.4 351 94,293 84,216 1075 105885 30787 4053598 84690 BeastPet 5 Tank Merc 22,978,813 2.36 353 65,095 58,470 961 47418 23911 2310010 77457 Warrior Heals received by BST, 1280 lifetap proces total in 4 fights HealeeActual HealFull HealOver HealCount Total 5916163 7136676 1220513 1306 BST 4949275 5467974 518699 1280 Healer Merc 865514 1567328 701814 16 BSTS`s warder 81991 81991 0 7 A steadfast servant 19383 19383 0 3
