I have always been interested in trying out zek again, I think I might move an alt or two there. Where can I get current info about how to pvp with a necro or mage.
PvP on Vallon was glorious; back before the devs abandoned pvp. The merger to the Zek abomination destroyed the communities on all of the previous pvp servers when all were thrust together and forced to abide by the now non-existent community standards and expectations. Zek has been fighting a losing battle, pun intended, ever since.
My favorite server of all time was discord. It was PVP and classic EQ. If you died you went back to level 1. That server was the best experience I have ever had in EQ. When you killed someone you could loot their entire corpse.
Most of you reading this with the attitude of "I will stay where I am ahh nice and relaxing" are probably playing 'hayday '. The rest of you need to give it a try already!
I seem to recall back when Heroic characters were first offered that there was a push to get people to come to Zek. There were gank squads sitting in Feerrott the Dream cackling gleefully at the huge piles of dead heroics that died before the players clients ever saw the zone. I was going to give it a try myself but I had been suspicious so I created a level one and immediately left the tutorial for PoK before going heroic. Frankly it sucked. The community there presented itself as little more than a pack of ignorant sociopaths who ultimately were baffled when all the fresh meat disappeared. I'd PvP'd on some of the early team servers and could navigate around fairly well but to be honest it was just boring. The game environment couldn't keep me engaged and I suffered more deaths from NPC's there than I ever had on a blue server. Understand I'm not saying that all or even most PvP players are ignorant sociopaths but those sort definitely constituted the welcoming committee and there you go. Maybe if some of the players who were interested in actually having a population could have been bothered to maybe keep the jackals off of new people just arriving in the world things may have been different but that's not the way it is.
To be fair, the largest guild on Zek at that time, which was also the #1 raiding guild then, did exactly what you asked for. They constantly sent people to F2 to try to protect the blue players who were coming over to Zek on heroics. The problem is that even a heroic Shadow Knight with a burn button can nearly one-round any other heroic, so there just wasn't any way to protect the blue players. They were dead within seconds of zoning in. So, as is often the case in so many situations, a few deeply anti-social people were able to ruin things for a much larger group with better intentions.
This was it for me. I finally quit when enchanter mez was completely broken for a long while (as in, it didn't work, which at the time was really the only thing enchanters were useful for in PvP) and it wasn't getting fixed. I'm assuming it eventually got fixed but it would not even surprise me if it hasn't because development seemingly just gave up on that server. The people talking about the hacking thing really don't know what they're talking about. Yes, there were some people that actively used hacks in PvP but they would inevitably get banned. Because support for the PvP server was slow to non-existent it took quite a while for some infamous warpers to get banned but they would eventually (even if they stopped doing it due to logs finally getting viewed). If you actually really cared about the longevity of your character you would never actively hack to grief in PvP as it would be an inevitable death sentence of your toon since it is so obvious. Plus everyone would eventually come to know who these people were and they'd get booted and boycotted from guilds. The vast majority of the griefing hackers really didn't last long. Some very few lasted surprisingly long, and were well known, and one can only assume these handful or less of people had some kind of connections to not get banned for so long. Some of these guys are absolutely right about people generally claiming hacks due to ignorance. I got accused of warping on many occasions due to using shadow step potions, instant gate potions, etc. on my magician. For all of my play time, magicians were a weak class in PvP, but I enjoyed it as a challenge and would overachieve by always coming prepared with things like this. Even surviving against obviously much stronger classes was a thrill. In its hay day though a lot, if not most, of PvP happened in groups. So basically the weaker classes would play more of a support role to the stronger classes which, being one of the support classes, I certainly found it fun. I also literally never boxed while playing PvP but found solo play far too boring on blue servers so I had to start boxing. I definitely am still disappointed that the community and then development turned its back on PvP in EQ but, what can you do? I suppose we can reminisce in pointless threads like this
Hackusations may be rampant, but so is hacking. It is not an inevitable death sentence to warp. There have been ban waves now and again throughout the history of the third-party program in question, but it has been a very, very long time since a warp detection ban wave on Zek. I just don't know how anyone can make statements like the above. There was a good 5+ year period on Zek where an entire crew of 20+ people (<Vendetta Elite>, etc.) just cycled through different guildtags, multiple toons they would just buy and play until they got banned, and come back and hack some more. One of these guys actually hacked the gamewide MotD, and in return for him showing SOE the related vulnerability, he was given a BiS zerker on the condition he didn't transfer it from blue to Zek. Of course, he transferred it the next day, and was banned a few days later, but he just kept playing on other accounts. If you quit before Mez was disabled in PvP, you missed most of this. The Rubicon got crossed at a certain point when pre-compiled cheat programs were readily available from subscription websites on the cheap. That happened well after Mez was taken out of PvP. It would be nice if the community enforced standards against stuff like this, but there just aren't enough active players to do. Even <Ascending Dawn>, the legendary guild that killed the Sleeper, had to take on the above hack crew toward the end of their run to keep their numbers going. I once used 120 SS pots in a single 1 v 1. I've had more than my share of false accusations based on shadow step, or on using rocket boots to get altitude and cast from above people on the Z-axis. That's one thing. It's quite another when you've just hit 5 SS pots, lyre leaped, rocket booted, wound up on the other side of a mountain, and 0.5 seconds later the same shadow knight chasing you from the zone in pops on top of your head and burns you. If you really want to know whether people are hacking or getting banned, just pay the $9 a month or whatever it is these days to join one of the popular hacking software forums. Go to the bans/suspensions subforum (they all have them), and have a look-see. I'll bet a steak dinner they all show the same thing: Warnings that active hacks are used at your own risk due to past ban waves, but zero evidence of any such ban waves on Live servers in a very long time.
This logic I can't wrap my head around at all. The PvP aspect of the server always drove my PvE ambitions further. I can only assume you actually gave up fairly quickly after initially being discouraged. Mind you there is, if I'm remembering correctly, a 4 level range limit to PvP now, and you no longer lose your corpse anymore. Corpse runs were at times ridiculous in the past when you had people camping you. It's hard to have much understanding of frustrations after personally striving through that period of the game having zero friends on the server I was on at the time
Yea, there is a bit of a misunderstanding here (you're right about the mez timing). I personally considered Zek dead and went on my way muchhh earlier than 5 years ago. I couldn't tell you the exact time frame though. I was speaking in terms of disappointment that people were very anti-Zek even when it still had a feasible playerbase and some GM presence. Let's put it this way, Obama was not even president yet when I up and left Zek. I randomly would log in there just to check it out and that's all but I transferred my main characters off. I can't even fathom how people continued on that server then, and even less so now.
Well, you made a very good choice about when to get out. And you're right, the number of hackers at that time was totally under control. It was comparable to the TLPs now. There were a handful of people totally determined to hack, but the obstacles to doing so were sufficient enough that the overwhelming majority of people never encountered them, and if they did, a ban was sure to follow.
What was the last update to zek? When was it last mentioned in the patch notes? I think it was 10 years ago.
Heroics were born with ..like a 3 minute invuln buff right next to the book. As far as zoning into a place to lvl that is why you gather a group of friends for your adventures. There are several instances etc you can play around with and learn from other players how to pvp. Its all in good fun.
I think the zek haters are a funny lot. Great and boisterous opinions on something they have never experienced. True Zek has had some issues (lvl 1's using lvl 100 clickies, aoe's in raids(these have been fixed)) Zek is not balanced... well other than clerics, if you know how to play your character (and most of you anti-zek lot have no clue how to play your character) can kill any other character. I find the community there much less toxic than TLP servers. If someone tries to train you or camp steal on pvp, at least you can do something about it. Thank for the negative comments from the keyboard commandos. Kier, I wouldn't want these people anyways, they would be the toxic addition to the server. Zek is not for mindless buttonmashers.
