So I'm not doing as bad as I thought

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Fluid, Jan 20, 2018.

  1. Fluid Augur

    Understand I twink my Magician pets like nobodies business. My pets are usually better dressed then my character. So I leveled up to 42 on my alt magician in the giant fort in the Frontier Mountains. Stuffed Giant Lord's Tunics<GLT> up the kazoo and Lumberjacks Caps to match. Made a quick trip to squash some gnolls in Split Paw to grab a few other items like mask and belts. I even do stuff like summon a Ring of Flight because it provides an extra ~4 AC even though the elemental stays on the ground. So I go to one of my favorite spots in The Burning Woods and immediately do a bad pull, yellow and dark blue. They spank the elemental and I flee screaming like a little girl. This happens a couple of times before I figure the old aggro range I got used to several years ago on live may have been expanded. GLT vendor sell for 50-60 pp a piece so it is an expensive way to play the game. I tried a water pet and the only difference was it took MOBs longer to kill it. Damage rate was much higher then I could heal so the end is inevitable. I can't out damage consistently because of resists.

    So as usual, coordination seems to strike me once every 19 seconds. I summon yet another fire pet but forget to use my focus torch. I had already given it Woe & Envy from Glarion the Wicked along with the GLT so I just filled out all the other slots and decided to have another go at it. I gate into BW and the spot is oddly absent of MOBs. I do find one and a clean single pull followed by fire pet giving it a righteous beat down. I don't think the fire pet went below 90% health. So I run around the ruins looking for another easy mark and there is a group of ~4-5 equal to higher level players taking the spawn. I target their fire pet and it fishes the fight at ~20% health. So not wanting to disturb their camp, I log out and get another character into the fray. I feel better now. I was beginning to have serious doubts about the efforts I put into my pets but I feel validated now! :) I love this game.
  2. Finnster Elder

    I'm glad you're having fun the way you play.
  3. snailish Augur

    Mage life on live now, mage life on live since TSS, mage life on live since OoW-DoN vs. mage life as it was in classic are really such different things. So many changes to the game and the class, nearly all of which is an upward power curve over the eras.

    Old posts of 2001 era I have seen mages talk about chain casting pets to solo. [someone will post "that was boss fights" but I'm not recalling that is was in those posts. After all, there is old posts of druids being proud of taking 30-40 minutes to solo one Umbral Plains mob for possible armor]

    My original server mages were ultra-rare in the casual grouping game by PoP, and even uncommon in casual raiding guilds. I don't have first hand history of #'s of mages active in raiding guilds. I do recall summoned pet toys being sporadic rather than steady supply... a few years later this was never an issue. Any live server I have played since mid-2000s mages are the boss class.

    How did a Kunark era mage solo (based on historical posts, not memories of leveling a mage in easy Kunark on live post-TSS? Maybe some other posters could give some insight here. Maybe progression servers are closer to that than some of us think?
  4. Fluid Augur

    First character I created was a mage. Rumor got started that if the pet did any damage in a group, the experience for the entire group was cut by 40-50%. Oft times I was told I could only group if I got rid of the pet or didn't summon one in the first place. The user base is much more knowledgeable now. I think it took several months before people even figured out how to run an Enchanter. They started off thinking of them as an combination under powered wizard with a weak mage. In original I don't think we had Breeze so Clarity at 24<?> was a long way off, months of heavy play. There are still a few 'common knowledge' and 'conventional wisdom' beliefs around that are wrong but they are fewer and father between then the old school rumors. I don't think there is a class in the game that I haven't thought the person running the character knows more and does a better job of running them then I do.