I rolled a beastlord alt over the weekend and have been looking everywhere for some small tips on how to get started. If some seasoned beastlords could leave some "things I wish I knew when I first rolled my beastlord" type of tips here for me, or direct me to some recent guides for further research that would be awesome. I have seen a lot of threads/info about how to get going on a heroic beastlord, but I'm starting from level one and want to take my time to really learn it. Thanks for reading!
Stay in the tutorial until level 9 when you get your first pet. Get a tank mercenary and learn the mechanics of how the tank merc works. Try to save up a few platinum and purchase a 2 handed weapon with 20+ damage (delay doesn't matter) and give it to your pet. Your pet should now hit for 2X the damage on the weapon you gave it. If you gave your pet a 25 damage weapon, he will now hit for 50 damage. You will want to learn how to pull mobs and get your pet and tank merc beating on it. Before the current mob dies, have another one pulled to the tank and pet so they are constantly killing. For your personal weapons try to get the ones with the lowest delay. The faster weapons will help you keep work weapon skills up. You will also want to load up the lowest versions of your spell that have the lowest mana costs. You need to cast them a lot in order to keep your spell skills up to date. So you pull with a nuke engage with pet and tank turn on auto attack and begin cycling through your spells. Once the mob drops below 30% (this will depend on the mobs total health and the amount of damage your pet and tank dish out) go grab another mob and pull it to your tank/pet using a nuke. When the tank engages the next mob, check his health and if it low you can practice healing him. Once his health is up, cycle through your nukes/DoTs/FoL/slow/debuffs and get ready to repeat the cycle. You should blow through the lover levels....I think the level 39 pet was the last pet that would use 2 handed weapons.
Thanks for your reply Waldagar. Another question for anyone who may know, I noticed that I get spells at a relatively low level (and all the spells I have at the moment are defensive spells and a small heal), but when will I acquire other melee abilities other than auto attack? Also, what are these melee abilities called in everquest? In EQ2 they are called combat arts so I'm just looking for a frame of reference. I tried to look this up on my own but only found a list of spells for Beastlords. I'm used to playing caster classes (I have a wizard and magician but they are still low level too) and am still relatively new to Everquest so please bear with my newbie questions. I haven't had a lot of time to play lately so I am only level 3 so far, also I like to level slowly and get as immersed in my character as I can. I'm having fun so far though and am enjoying exploring the lands of Norrath.
You get combat abilities like kick (and slam if you are a large race) at low levels. You get additional attacks through AA (Alternate Advancement). If you look on your inventory window there should be a Skills button that will list all the Skills, but it should be pretty easy to see the combat ones. Many of the combat skills are passive and don't require a button press to activate. ...memory test here...think if you hit ALT-m it will pring up the Actions window. I think the second tab is the abilities one. On that tab you can make a hot button for your ability "kick" and copy it to you hot bar so you can spam it during combat.
the way you are lvling, slowly is not a big deal, yes learn your toon a bst is one of those sideline toons who are moreless a filler till roughly mid 70s when they start getting the good stuff, from here on is when you start taking great detail to your bst, i think at lvl85 or 90 they eventually have all 5 nukes and you can pretty much stop using dots. learning to set up your macro hotkeys and key binds wil be vital at the higher end cause like alot of classes i seriously doubt you wanna go hitting about 25 seperate keys all the time . as for now at the lower end, take your time, have fun learn the class, and keep you weapon/casting skills up so you dont suffer to much on the higher end. like said give you pet some weps to help him out...when pulling, to your pet/merc i personally dont use a nuke cause it has a higher agro mod and can be tougher for the tank merc to rip it off you, i personally at the lower end would just use a dot or a lower lvl debuff...just NOT flash of light. in a nut shell, just enjoy yourself and dont give up, and have fun. Welcome to Everquest.
Good idea. The bst class is easy and fun to play, however it's difficult to master. Go nice and slow and you'll learn all the little tricks and gems that the bst has to offer.
Check out the actions that you have available for your class. (Ctrl+A) Then check out the Melee Tomes available for beastlords. You can find those in the POK library. There's a window called Combat Abilities which you might not be too familiar with coming from playing casters exclusively. I don't remember the hotkey for it, but it's one of the buttons on the Window Selector.
Alt-C brings the combat ability window up; clicking on the S gives you the list of melee abilities available. From there, you can make hotkeys to stick on either the combat ability window or one of the general hotbars. If you're using the Zam spell list, that includes melee abilities. Look for the ones that are 0 mana & use a melee skill instead of a spell skill. I.e., if it says hand to hand, offense, or defense, it's a melee ability; if it says evocation, conjuration, or alteration, it's part of a spell. You can also tell by the item that grants it: spells will say Spell: X or Scroll: X, whereas melee abilities will say Tome of X. There are also AAs, which you can look through here. Long reuse abilities are called "discs", short for discipline, because most of the earlier ones have discipline in the name. YMMV on the spammable stuff; I've seen them referred to as discs, skills, or abilities.
