Are Hill giants the way to go for cash during first couple weeks?

I did a lot of testing with this mechanic in my aradune days, and there's some nuance to this that people seem to ignore.

1) It only works on dots that have a DD component upfront. Mostly this is just EB spam, but they have a couple of others. They also have much higher "total damage" dots that they cannot use to cheese. They're more or less restricted to EB and VotS.
2) They cannot overwrite the DoT to stack the "damage credit" effect.
3) The DoT's "future damage" will not be included if the mob has less HP than the total DoT damage. So if you/your party deal 51% of the mobs total HP before the DoT is applied you are still safe.

So, let's say you have a mob at 60% HP, and a necro/shammy EB's the mob at that exact moment, and his EB would have dealt a total of 65% HP, you can still claim ownership by simply dealing 11% damage before the DoT expires. The DoT cannot deal "overkill" damage towards kill credit.

The problem most people face is just that EB ticks very hard, and very fast, so it's the main spell they're using anyways. The bots also stack them so the nuance is more or less meaningless in most situations. And when bots stack them at the same time, it's impossible to beat unless you have a similar number of people doing some hard nukes before they even land a single EB.

They really need to reduce giant mob coin drops to the amount that other mobs of the same level drop. Then this wouldn't be such a big deal and it would lower the inflation on new TLP servers greatly.

Scumbag spotted, easy ignore

DM me your in-game char name so I can get on ignore where it matters

You are probably better off going some place where you have a high volume of mobs with little to no competition. Hill Giants were over camped and it was often difficult to get any. Thought you did have the benefit of people not looting everything (fine steel and other gems) that you could run around and loot.

Hill Giants are great if you get there first, but then you won't be the first to 50. If you're a solo player I wouldn't really consider it. If you got a whole box crew then why not.

Yes i believe charm wiping threat was also how it was since the outset and I believe it was an intentionally designed mechanic. They changed it because it gave disproportionate power to enchanters in contention over named mobs.

This is clearly a case where the same should be done.

And I play a shaman, so don't @me with your excuses. The ability to instantly get kill credit on a full hp mob is absurd. It should give the full threat not the full dmg credit, and if it gives the full dmg credit that should 100% be changed.

Also as a shaman player, try me, shamans are still some of the fastest burst dps in the game. Ebolt only lasts 36 seconds, combine that with their passable nukes and a shaman can contend with most classes.

100% should be nerfed, there's no question. Since the absolute most toxic players abuse these mechanics it would be healthy for the game, just as the charm nerfs were healthy, and i didnt enjoy those.

Sorry but someone pointed it out earlier. If they had designed Hill Giants to drop the same amount of pp and other loot as other MoBs in other places, instead of making them rich, you would have anyone abusing game mechanics. That it happens is just bad zone design and I see it happening in other zones.

Also Charm Nerfs weren't healthy. They is no excuse for a game developer to allow a mechanic to be a class defining feature for years, only to change them mind one day and nerf that mechanic to oblivion. That isn't healthy, that is rage inducing for all those player who invested 100s of hours into the class because they enjoyed the how it played.

Nerfs should always be the last resort and should be reserved for truly game breaking things. Not because one class is slight OP or another class is jealous about something another class can do.

stop lying about charm being "nerfed into oblivion"

Charm needed nerfs. Frankly it's still too powerful. When the optimal group comp is 3-4 enchanters, puller and healer, you know the class is broken.

I am a big time charmer and have to be honest. The nerf was hardly anything for me. I thought I was going to be bummed I heard it was 30% less damage and my charms are still destroying everything.

No hill giants are not the way.

Ancient Cyclopes is the way. 1 Krono for the ring of the ancients. More than 1 krono for the first week.

Tip of advice if someone charms the ancient cyclopes, use a dispell. It breaks charm. Also, if you keep the ancient cyclopes moving out of range of the charmer its harder for someone to land a charm on them.
Also, if invis lands on a person charming that is outside of a group, invis breaks charm too.

FYI those playing on Vaniki, gulf of gunthak, dulak harbor, many other zones will be available.

Chanter best dps through PoP. Other classes start to catch up a bit towards the end.

Dont forget ice giants boys. Plenty(3) of giants there to fight over.

Yet in all my time in EQ, I have never seen a group using this "optimal composition". Not saying it has never happened but apparently not enough that it was a rampant problem. Also it seems to me the biggest complaint about Chanter charms was that people got jealous of its ability to solo group content without really realizing the difficulty of actually pulling that off means to most Enchanters. I know I was never good or patient enough with my Chanter to pull off those kinds of things and considering how many bad chanters I ran across, I doubt many of them could either.

Also let's facts here, it had no detrimental effect on any other player, in fact nerfing the charm ability just meant everyone who ever group with a Chanter also got nerfed since they lost a lot of DPS in the group once the nerf hit. Point is that they could have been left alone.

I guess one could argue that the way DoTs apply damage does have a detrimental effect to players in a few outlier cases like the Hill Giants where bad zone design reigns supreme, but I have never seen it be a major issue outside of a few cases. Do those few cases justify a nerf. No I don't think so.

Depends on how much a Krono is going to be worth the first week. A good player can make 1.5 to 2k an hour at hill giants including selling the fine steel weapons. How many AC rings do you think you can get every hour? It's not like they're spawning like candy.

I had a 4 chanter cleric bard group on Agnarr in the hole in classic. I was the cleric. We ran out of mobs of course, and when we got trained in retaliation by other groups that wanted us dead, we were grateful for the free pulls. Like, drop 30 mobs on us, we'll be fine.

I am not doubting that these sort of groups happened, what I am doubting was how much it happened. I also tend to look at class distribution as a possible factor for a nerf. If Enchanters had a massive population compared to other classes AND there was a mechanic that made them very powerful, then there might be a cause for a nerf but from what I experienced, there were many other class who were played much more often than an Enchanter. Heck back in 2000, I can only recall grouping with a Chanter a few times because on the Brell server they didn't seem to popular. Anyway my point is, they could have left charms alone and it wouldn't have caused issues in the grand scheme of things.

However I am going to close this argument here because we have completely drifted off the topic of this thread.

Dot agro is already bad enough as it is compared to other forms of damage and there is no reason to make it worse. The dot should land threat that equals the amount of damage that is credited when it lands and whenever it does damage.

Players cannot dispell charms cast by someone outside their group. You cannot invis someone unless they are in your group.

He's not wrong though. CS considers DPS race to be the determining factor not FTE so while its a jerk move, you should expect it because its within the "letter of the law" and it WILL happen on anything even semi contested.

Where are you getting your information? You cannot dispell someone's charm outside of the group nor can you invis someone outside of the group.