I played EQ from original until Scars of Velious came out and am looking to get back into the game. 3 Questions #1 - how do mercenaries work? Are they basically like pets? #2 - quickest way to get plat?? I wanna twink my guy out with best possible gear at every level and am well off in real life so can afford it $$$ wise but what's the best way? Buy Kronos with station pts and sell on marketplace? Any other method? #3 - in your opinion, what's the most valuable class for raids now that would be fun to level up by myself
1 - Allakhazam's and Almar's sites have guides for Mercenaries. They are somewhat similar to pets, but different mechanic. They are more like automated group mates who level with you, cast level appropriate buffs and spells and gear, and can be upgraded, and you can have a pet and a merc at the same time. 2 - Plat depends on your level on where to go. Hill giants still have lots on them, but I like heading to Dulak Harbor. If you have an older account (which will be Silver status at least) so you will have a bunch of Loyalty tokens (inventory screen, rightmost panel is Alt.Currencies which has Loyalty listed at the top. You can use that at the loyalty merchant in PoK by the stone to Crescent Reach, if you have Gold status you can buy bags of plat (15,000 or so plat, random). You can also spend $18 of real life money, and buy a Krono which you can sell in-game to other players. The amount you get is server dependent, but is still a fairly good amount of change (about 40k on Vulak, 290k on FV as examples).
#1 They are a lot like pets, but get their own group member slot, and other than 3-4 modes, and setting yourself as main tank, main assist, and puller, you really have no way of controlling exactly what they do. #2 If absolute quickness is your goal, Kronos can indeed be a quick fix. If you want something anyone can do, as long as you have RoF expansion, can wander around grabbing collectibles at a very low level. #3 valuable and fun for raids, in one class, now that is a tough one.... As far as valuable go, all classes can be that played correctly, but classes constantly sought out tend to be clerics/warriors/paladins, and then sometimes pickadps class. As far as fun goes, I find the role of SHD rather fun in a raid, I fill in just about every area besides healing. Could be OTing, could be MTing, could be leash tanking, could be kiting, could be pulling, could be mass add control, could be DT scapegoat on queen, lame ranged dps, all sorts of things really. It really depends what you like to do for the fun part though, that is highly subjective.
You can buy Krono for real money and then sell them to players for lots of plat. You can then buy nice stuff in the bazaar. You can also buy gear for Station Cash. It's the same as level-appropriate Defiant Gear, I am told. Defiant is excellent stuff and you're highly unlikely to see better until level 71+. If you do the Hero's Journey quests, you'll get all the gear you need and tons of xp for free. What classes are desired for raids is specific to the individual raiding guilds. Check the billboards in the Guild Lobby and ask around right away to find out which guild on your server raids at the times you're available and ask them what they need. They'll probably have helpful advice for you as well. If you really want to be able to buy the best gear with real money, consider the Firona Vie Server as most everything, including raid gear is tradeable/buyable there.
