Ah, okay. So for RNG, 2H isn't a situational tool or alternate style — it's just flat-out inferior? Oh! Another question! (sorry ) Is it worth keeping all weapon skills up for the purpose of proc-swapping? Or is your weapon skill irrelevant if you just want to proc something? Like — in GenChat someone linked some high-level 2HB (I think) that procs a 70% slow (!). If a WAR just wants the dmg reduction from that, could they swap it on with no 2HB skill, and still proc it, then swap back? Or would all the Miss / Dodge / Parry / Riposte / You Are Incompetent spam prevent the procs from ever going off? That... is a remarkably logical reason to put Quiver in 1st bag slot. Of course, I've been manually-swapping my arrows out of my 100% WR bag and back into the quiver every time I restock... /sigh. And yeah the cap seems to get lifted in stages. Not sure of exact breakpoints, but I definitely cap at 10 points (during Gloomingdeep), 20 points, 30 points (I think this is up to level 20ish since I was hitting this hard in CR), and (I think) 40 points? per swing until some random midlevel when it seems to switch to sky-is-limit point.
At some point it's worth maxing all your weapon skills. But with new characters I just focus on the ones that I'm using. Because it's easier to afk train weapon skills overnight in one chunk than taking time to do it while leveling.
Totally agree, but I'm kind of a dork and take an odd kind of pleasure in micromanaging skillups while leveling so far. I've even got bloody Begging maxed now thanks to an /attack off /attack on macro. It's more gameplay curiousity — like whether I should imagine RNG as a furious little DW blender always, or if it goes BER-style big scary axe mode sometimes.
Back when I played as a kid, the damage caps actually limited the weapon stat itself, and I sort of remember it was limited to 10.5 (allowing 21 damage until level 20), then 20 (allowing 40 damage until level 30), but it was calculated before strength, so ogres before level 20 could sometimes hit for up to about 24 damage, for instance. At level 30 I believe the cap was entirely lifted. I wonder if its still this way today, but probably not. Odd my memory holds that for 15 years.
I used the MPG trial 2hb for a while, even after getting epic 2.0, until I had some equivalent for off-hand on a Rng. So it's definitely ratio, but rare to get a really good ratio 2Her compared to dual-wielding. The Woodman's Staff is a great twink weapon. Octavia used it for many levels on her Ranger. I don't ever remember the caps being displayed, but that sounds about right for a 100 or lower Strength. I could hit 30s with a 15 dmg 1Her pretty often with 150+ Str < level 20. Skill and Attack work in there also, but Attack has two components like AC. One for to hit / avoid and one for damage / mitigation. As your skill with your primary weapon goes up, you'll see you displayed attack go up. Offense skill also applies. Then there is buffs, and worn +Attack. See Secondary Modifiers (Mod2s) from Samanna. Yther Ore.
For the life of me it took a while to remember the name: Worldwalker's Staff http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=32480 Arrow wt is for the whole stack. So a single stack of 100 arrows weighs 0.1 stones, so no real need to put light-wt stuff like that in a 100% WR bag, unless that's all you have. Once you get everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/EQ:Endless_Quiver AA just having a quiver in an inventory slot is all that matters. With EQ I just use the quiver to store different single arrows for different things. Personally, I don't even use a quiver any more, and would rather have the loot space when farming, and basically only use arrows for pulling most of the time in groups. Should be lots of threads at eqoutrider.net on quivers and haste. There are lots of claims as to how quiver wr affects bow delay / haste, but you can always find bows that when parsed don't match the formula. Or used to be able to anyway. Maybe since they fixed the Prescient Fleeting Quiver some one has. Yther Ore..
Rangers get an AA called endless quiver. If you have that AA, most arrows are not consumed and you only need 1 arrow. Start farming highland lions in north karana for high quality lion skins - they are rare. I believe that the highland lion spawn cycle has been changed so that if you slaughter the zone, more will spawn. Or you can level up a bot and park it in the zone. I'd try to find a GM tailor to do the combine for you. If I remember right, the trivial is pretty high on that quiver and tailoring is probably the hardest tradeskill to max out. Maybe farm a couple of extra skins and the tailor won't charge you for the combine. Dual wield is almost always better DPS than archery. The exception is for mobs that can be headshot. Even with the nerfed headshot, it's hard to beat that DPS. When using headshot, swap for a fast bow regardless of it's damage. I believe that bow of the destroyer is still the fastest bow in game but it's hard to get at low level (or high level if someone's camping it.)
Truncheon of Doom is the best War slow. And yes you watch for it to proc and land, or set up an Audio Trigger for it. On most slow proc'ing toons, I set up Audio Triggers for the common Shm, Bst, Enc slows as well, so I don't waste time using a lower ratio proc weapon. You can find the trigger text, by clicking the effect on the item display (Tepid Deeds for the Truncheon), and at the bottom it lists the emotes. Use the cast on others emote, without someone part. So for tepid deeds it's "slows down". I think I use "slows" to cover most of the Shm slows. There are two really good slows for Rangers. The 2nd half of the epic 1.0, Earthcaller and Swarmcaller. Both 50% slows, Earthcaller with a DoT also, but off-hand only, so may proc a bit less than a primary hand or 2Her. It's not bad once you have Weapon Affinity 5 or better AA. Fixed Endless Quiver (EQ) link: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/EQ:Endless_Quiver Yther Ore.
if by chance you do choose to go beastlord, be ready for the higher end game and s metric butt ton of AA cause thats when youll want to go with macros and keybinding religiously.
That only worked with the old headshot system, which was like a crit: The more times your bow fired, the more headshots you got. Since the nerf, it works like a proc: The proc rate per minute stays the same regardless of delay.
Question. (surprise!) In EQ2 I had to keep my melee swing timer visible and fit actions / spells in-between melee swings to avoid reducing DPS / procs during a fight window, because if an ability was activating when a swing was scheduled to go off, it would suspend the autoattack swing until the casting ability finished activating. Does EQ1 have similar rules about timing swings? If so, is there a way to turn on a visual swing timer? And branching from that... I keep getting ST and AE nukes as Ranger. These have no CD — am I supposed to be using these in combat? What are they for? Like SHD and BST have these 30s-CD, 0.5s-cast meganukes which I assume are supposed to be fired on CD. But the RNG nukes are spammable, which is confusing, since I thought I was supposed to be meleeing (or bow'ing if at range). That's what made me wonder about swing timers, am I supposed to be weaving these RNG nukes in-between swings?
Early nukes are lower level Druid nukes. So. They can be chain cast, but don't offer much if any boost to dps compared to just meleeing. Yes casting pauses attack, but generally only worth worry about casting in between swings with high delay 2Hers and short castiing spells, where you can fit the entire spell cast in between the swing times. Years ago it was more of a problem, and I don't remember exactly what they did any more to fix it, but basically something along the lines of the swing timer is paused is it's suppose to go off while casting, but remembers where it's at when the casting finishes. i may be off, but that's I recall it. Eventually Rng get the short casting, long refresh nukes that are specfically Rng and not a Druid copy. Archery is another timing you may want to try cast between. Like a long distance pull with arrow or /autofire then a nuke or DoT. There are lots of old world techniques that are just crappy imitations of Druid techniques with archery added in to try to make up some of the DPS differences. With today's gear, I generally only cast on pulls and to snare or root crowd control until we get the 0.5 cast 30-sec CD nukes. Basically do spells when you need them or when there's a pause in archery / pulling. Once you get a real damage DoT that doesn't draw tons of aggro like Flame Lick line does, I generally cast one or two of the best ones on incoming and fast nukes when I can fit them in, and snare when <50% health. I've found with today's gear you lose more dps on long casts due to melee interruption than you get from the nuke or dot. You can try it out all different kinds of ways and may find certain techniques work in differing situations. In general though, duration spells on incoming, although when you first get a real DoT, the tank merc may still be having problems pulling aggro off of you. Eventually you get a series of Aggro reduction spells which help, so you can keep the dps up and still not get aggro. Alot of the problems with Rng is they get so many high aggro spells. Snare, Flame Lick are really high; Proc buffs going off nukes your casting; Chaining lots of DoT builds up aggro over time, especially when combined with melee combat. Over the years, I've found Kick is often the tipping point on maintaining a balanced aggro. Luckily later on we get a series of huge damage kick disciplines that also reduce aggro. So what I'm rambling about is: Just use spells as needed (Snare / Root / Dispell / etc.) and to practice while fighting. At least until higher levels, and try to keep melee going as much as possible for the DPS. Yther Ore.
Ooooh gosh... yep... there you go, level 29, Flaming Arrow, 30 / 0.5 melee nuke. Just a few levels above my current bag of prepurchased PoK spells. Oops. And yeah right now I just go Healer Merc and facetank, because it may be slower or whatever, but it's honestly way more fun than sitting around watching the Tank merc solo things. Since if I even breathe on the mob, instant aggro. (why doesn't Jolt start until level 50...? I mean seriously, ROG got Evade at... 3). I did notice that Flame Lick / Snares / dots are insane aggro, though. Because I use them to auto-hold aggro when me & the healer merc have 3-4 blues beating on me. Way easier to hold aggro than WAR... at this level, anyway I like the idea of weaving nukes between arrow shots, though. Although, these Defiant bows shoot really fast so it'd be kind of tricky.
EQ1's animations aren't tied to your attacks in any meaningful way. With haste effects, your melee rounds will be much faster than the animations can play. Hybrids will 'store' their next auto atk if it would happen during a spell cast time. Combine that with the fast cast time of most hybrid spells and there's no real reason to worry about auto-atk and spell casting conflicts for hybrids. And the fact that spells do a hell of a lot more than one attack round. Not sure on your level, but in general you should be using your spells all the time as a hybrid. Hit your non-spell abilities and do your combat movement during the global cooldown between spells, then cast again as soon as you can. Auto-atk isn't the important part of EQ DPSing. Just get close, turn it on, and then focus on using your other spells and abilities.
Actually I thought of one use for these spammy nukes — when an annoying mob Slows me and I'm attacking really..... realllllly.... sloooooooow.... ... it actually kills things faster if I just spam the DRU loaner nukes.
That's what I was talking about situational. In the old days, I loved the vs Summoned nukes, 'cause they were high damage and low mana, and could out do melee dps (assuming the summoned had the hitpoints to take chain nuking). It may still be that way at certain levels with defiant weapons, as they're not nearly as great ratio as the AC/HP of defiant armor. In other words, there's always better ratio weapons than defiant to be had, even in group content, but raid level ones are really nice. Yther Ore.
Okay a bit late on this, but I was annoyed at not knowing exactly what my unarmed H2H is for choosing weapons on MNK (bouncing around a little right now, narrowing my melee pref. down ). Chopping out the useless info and compressing down Dmg / Dly into just Ratio, the increase per skill point starts to look suspiciously linear or near-linear. I think a simple TREND() function in Excel can tell you your H2H ratio at any given skill level to a reasonably-accurate number, at least as a lowbie. If so, that means yes — quest / achieve rewards and even /baz aren't always as good as going unarmed, and even when they are an upgrade, it drops off fast as you level. Unless having the extra 10-20 STR / DEX is worth the tradeoff (but from the way you guys talk about ratios, probably not).
Normal stats on one piece of gear are worth roughly nothing beyond the extra hps or mana they give. At some point, the flat damage bonus on 1h weapons starts making lower delay weapons better than higher delay ones with a same or better ratio. By level 50, that bonus should be enough to affect your weapon choices.
I'm not sure if it works that way or not. The original parser didn't say whether or not they tried it at in betweens and didn't get any difference or not. I go with the assumption they change at the skill levels listed. And basically only go twinked out martial weapons to start with and 1hb to keep skill up. You could go twinked 2hb to start with also, just to be better ratio and keep skill up. If you're finding stuff that will only out do the ratio of bare fists for a level or two, probably not much reason to upgrade for that short of a time (with how fast lower leveling goes, even at your causal pace). At least not till 65, where you may slow down to experience the wide variety of places in game then, and the epic 1.5 is very nice, and the Secrets of Faydwer group dropped weapons, one in particular, even out does the epic 1.5 at 65, but not by 70, or the 2.0. I don't look at stats, unless two weapons are pretty even ratio (the same, or within 1% difference). Proc's on the other hand I may count as more valuable than ratio, especially for Warriors and aggro generating procs, but the ratio still has to be within a few % difference. Like Brutish Blade of Balance and I forgot what offhand were considered the best aggro pair for a long time, even with several lower hate proc, and better ratio weapons. Yther Ore. Yther Ore.
Epic 2 (to wit: Kreljnok's Sword of Eternal Power) was the offhand of choice in BBB's era. Warriors that couldn't get BBB used Fleshbiter (oo that +Ripo mod was sexah) from Uqua, the Ocean God Chantry Raid; everyone replaced their primary (whether BBB or Fleshbiter) with the Notched Blade of Bloodletting from Arch Magus Vangl when their guild's progress made that available. Since the epic carried the most current agro mod until the very rare Indicolite Twin-Buckled Girdle from Redfang in the Demiplane of Blood Raid, warriors were "stuck" with epic for a very long time.
