Overseer Guide

Is there a newbee guide to using the Overseer feature for someone that doesn't know anything about it? I saw one that started with "When you start the overseer program...". But what if you don't know how to start the overseer program? And does program imply that it is a separate application? It is launched from the EQ client or some other way?

Thank you in advance for any and all helpful comments. I plan on using the Overseer feature as an FTP player (if that is even possible)

Inside EQ can use /over to pop it up, go through tutorial, then just focus recruit tasks first until you get all agents that can be obtained via recruit/conversion, run the Conversions on all duplicates

Paying for anything inside of it like recovery of agents or insta completion of tasks is a waste cause the task completions fails more then letting it run its course so you waste your dbc

I found Bonzz to be pretty good at explaining it.

https://www.bonzz.com/overseer.htm

Lots of players buy packs from the marketplace to get more agents but you will eventually get all the agents you need without buying those. There is only one pack you really need to buy and that is the beginner pack but you only need to buy it because it is the only way you can get Fippy. It can wait till much later though.

I never "pay" to finish early on any of the quests.

It's definitely worth doing Overseer since the exp gains can be significant later on. I think the only difference with FTP accounts is that you can only have 3(?) quests running while the paid/silver accounts can have 5.

The quests are different categories that can have different rewards. The quests also take different lengths of time: 6, 12, or 24 hours. When the quests are complete, you have to go back into Overseer to claim the rewards from the quests and start new quests. Right now, you should probably focus on quests which fit your schedule. For instance, if you can generally be in EQ to do Overseer every 12 hours, then just doing 12 hour quests will help you progress fastest since you'll always have quests running. All you have to do is start the quest and then come back at the end time to claim the reward.

The most challenging time in Overseer is going to be at the beginning when you're trying to build up the pool of agents. Different agents have different skills, and different quests need different skills. Make sure you do the Recruitment quest every time. This quest will give you more agents. For the other quests, click the Auto Fill button to have Overseer fill in with the best agents for the quest. If you don't have the right kinds of agents for the quest, pick a different quest. Since Recruitment is a 12 hour quest, doing other quests that are also 12 hours will be more convenient. If you have quests running of all different lengths, the timings all get off and you won't be able to start them all at the same time.

The agents are in 4 different levels: Common->Uncommon->Rare-Elite. The Recruitment quest gives you Common agents. You may also get bonus Common agents from quests. It's up to you to do conversion quests to convert 3 agents of one level to 1 agent at the higher level. So you convert 3 Commons to one Uncommon, 3 Uncommon to one Rare, etc. As you level up in Overseer, you'll get harder quests that need agents at the higher level. Deciding when to convert and how many to convert is where you'll have to make some decisions. Don't convert too often or else you won't have enough lower level agents for a task. You'll have to make sure you have enough agents at each level so you can do the quests. A common newbie mistake is converting all the lower level agents up to higher level. That leaves you with a few high level agents and no lower level ones and you won't be able to do many quests.

It's a little confusing at first, but you'll get the hang of it quickly. Once you get your Overseer quests to max level, you can get 5%+ XP per day from it. That may not seem like a lot at 85, but it's really helpful when you're 100+.

Just a couple minor points....

For the first one, definitely do recruit quests early on, but I'd stop long before I got EVERY agent available. You'll be getting plenty of new agents through critical quest successes. I'd say, once you hit about 50% of the common agents (about 54 of 108. The other 36 common agents can only be gotten through recruitment quests only available during certain events), you can stop doing recruit quests. When offered recruit quests for uncommon, rare, and elite agents, definitely do those if you need the agent, and probably even if you don't, unless you only have a very few agent slots still unfilled.

As far as using DBC for early completion of tasks, it works just fine if you're just using it to finish missions that only have a little time left, like when you're trying to have them finish while you're actually online. It costs maybe 3-5 DBC to finish a quest an hour early, and if you're subbed and get 500 DBC a month, it's a very minor cost. What DOES cause issues is if you start a mission, and then try to immediately finish it early. Those fail every single time. The ones you finish just a little early, I've never had one fail on me, out of about 50 times where I've done it.

I've never paid to recover an agent, and the only time I've ever even run recovery tasks was that time in early '22 when agents weren't recovering at all on their own.

I recently wrote a guide for this and had posted in the TLP section

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17bzq_EZnqYRgBkJMApPqXfEdXlX3fbS2KkVD9nQFu4A/edit?usp=sharing

Guildies on thornblade have found it helpful

I have paid to finish early when the quests were going to complete after I had to leave for work and I had extra DB cash.

This. It never hurts to burn that odd 275 DB cash that's sitting around

Or the odd 20,000+ odd DBC sitting around, in my case

...how!? lol

Well, at $5 a month he logged in once a month for 333 years or he bought it with daybreak cash.

i had over 20 K , DBC as well when overseer started ...., many years ago DBC went 3 for one, and i bought a lot , we could use them for subs as well,

so i used some when overseer started , i still had over 20K , to spend

500 free DBC/month for subbing.

I rarely buy anything in the store, nothing there really interests me.

Last month, took the crate they offer for 500DBC right when you redeem them. That's the first DBC I've spent in years, other than the occasional 2-5 DBC to finish an Overseer quest to make the finish time more convenient.

Last time I spent $ for DBC was when they offered the 3 for 1 deals (maybe 10-12 years ago).

Only takes 40 months, if you don't spend it

Here's a thread on these forums about the basics: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/overseer-guide.263883/

That is definitely a good brief overview, I do think one correction worth pointing out, is there a recruitment quest available every 12 hours, not 48. Big difference being able to try and get 2 recruitment quests in a day then every other day, especially early on.