New players can't group in this game

Hi everyone,

I started playing during the bonus experience week. I picked a defiler shaman to start out with, thinking I would get groups. I joined a big guild that helped me out with my newbie questions. I spent the last week slogging it out, leveling up this slow *** defiler - doing the kunark ascending and pop signature quests in hopes I could group after getting to the last level.

I hoped I could get groups in dungeons leveling up and queued in the agnostic dungeon system, but there was no one doing them, so I leveled up the hard way. Someone kind took pity on me, and boosted me a bit at lower level.

The 95-100 leveling experience is extremely tough. Getting those five levels is a pain but it can be done.

I finally got to level 110 soloing this class, and wanted to group, and was informed that my hit points needed to be 20 million plus and my potency and other stats such and such. I looked at my stats and I despaired as I only had 3 million hit points and was unable to group. That's was with the mix of free gear given in the box in plane of magic at level 100 and a mix of quest gear I got leveling up.

I asked how do I get my stats up? I was told to get the orange adornments at least level 4, championship, glory, witness and juxtaposition. The level 4 orange adornments require doing 190 or so runs of this instance called a proving ground. It is a robotic instance where you are given an avatar and mash buttons to kill content. It finishes up in at least twenty minutes if you are new and you can get the run down to 7 mins or so I've been told. You can only run this instance once every three hours. To effectively farm this instance, you need more alts to keep doing it over and over as the marks you get from it are account wide. But it's a mind numbing tedious task!

It takes 850 marks to get a level 4 rune. You get 18 marks a run on a gold account. That's 48 runs. So if you do one run a day it takes 48 days to get one rune. Now there is a weekly quest that gives you a few more. Most people who log in, log in after work and probably would only be able to get one run in a day because of the lockout. If they use the 100 boost from the last expansion, they can run it twice probably a day. That means a rune every 24 days or shorter if you do the quest. I think you can only use alts level 100 plus.

I tried going into the proving ground on a level 25 toon to see if I could. When I clicked the proving ground portal my client crashed. When I logged back in I was somehow in the middle of thundering steps zone with mobs beating on me. The proving ground system I've heard is extremely buggy too.

Anyway, that means you are stuck paying a subscription for four months before you can actually play the group game.

The last expansion added level five of these runes, and now you can get those runes commissioned by another player who grinded out the recipe. Now the commissioning system allows a player to make a no trade item I think but I've never tried it.

One forum post I read said the materials for one rune cost 8 million plat. A krono is 1.6 mil plat at the moment. So five krono will get you a level five one. That's what the forum post I read said and not sure if the prices have gone down. So it takes twenty kronos at 18 euro each, which is nearly 200 euro to actually start this game grouping after you reach max level.

People on this forum tout that you can make hundreds of thousands harvesting a day and that you can grind out the money harvesting or doing solo instances for the materials if you have a soloable class. That's quite fine, but I got my harvesting up to 625 and managed to get a few rubicite ore and darkstones and the most I made was like 20k after hours of harvesting.

It's a pile of hogwash really.

Alts? Not a chance in this game!

This game is great and I enjoyed the 1-110 run during the bonus week. But the thing that got me most was choosing a healer to solo level up, only to be put down when I eventually reached max level and told to buzz off - you aren't getting a group yet.

Seems to me this game is completely newbie unfriendly and completely alt unfriendly.

Locking the group content behind a massive grind wall or pay 200 euro up front is not my idea of fun.

I can't afford the 200 euro to get these runes and I tried grinding out the proving grounds for a while but it's not really fun anymore. I also tried grinding money through harvesting. Nothing really appeals to me to get these runes.

I just wanted to leave a message to new players who come to the game like I. I'd recommend choosing a soloable class like a necromancer to consume the content. After that - well I've highlighted what you need to do to get into the group game. If that's acceptable for you, by all means continue playing.

The fastest way to get your hitpoints higher is AA. If you're less then 10m hitpoints at lvl 110, there are some easy changes you can make to your AA to get to at least 20m
On your first prestige page, go double conversion (that means go down far enough on each side to get the potency to crit bonus conversion and on the other to get the crit bonus to potency conversion)
On your dragon AA page, put 10 pts into the hitpoint boost (first bubble 2nd column) and 10 pts into the personal ward in the same column (4th bubble down)
On your second prestige page, make sure you have 8 pts into enhanced vigor (first bubble in the left-most column) and put 8pts into the potency boost on the same page.

I totally agree with you, the pg runes last expac was a way of upgrading your toon, yeah we grinded them till our eyes bled, but they should not be needed to start PoP heroics. Every expac ive seen, the time line has given you the gear to participate in group stuff. You can get to 20 mill health without them, you can also heal all heroic content (Dunno about expert) without them.
Its just that people wanna do these boring grinds quickly so they pick the better geared player.
This years eths...fine i thought just need couple 100 coins for the runes, not fussed about the BP, no need to sweat it. and yay in true db fashion class runes are hidden behind a massive puke inducing grind!!.
Its making me want to log in less and less.

Don't even talk about the epic 2.0 that most groups insist you have... and its massive faction grinding! Oh wait... I just mentioned it!

Ok, I modified my AAs and I have 9 millions hitpoints now and 32% potency. I don't think that is enough still to do groups with.

No, its not. They want you to have 20 million or more. Many groups do heroic runs (or tougher) and some bosses do a zone wide pulse of damage that's 20 million so if you are below that, you are outright dead, no matter where you are in the zone. That's not even talking about how much potency they want you to have as well as your epic 2.0 as well. You have a long boring solo road ahead of you, with no surety of grouping on the way.

Good luck. You will need it.

You should look at this thread, and vote with your cash.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/unfair-ehtereal-event.585683/#post-6512197

What is your character's name? If you're willing to share I might be able to give some more specific advice to help. One of my mains is a defiler.

Edit: Have you finished the PoP sig line? Have you done all three factions? The former gives you a few nice items along the way and the later unlocks a very nice secondary item and mount.

The groups aren't necessarily being elitist. There are actual minimum Resolve requirements, and if you don't have that much Resolve, you take a LOT of extra damage:

Suggested Resolve for Heroic and Event Heroic zones:

• Tier 1: 378
• Tier 2: 471
• Tier 3: 558

The hitpoint requirement is about 40K hitpoints for PoP heroics (tanks need ~50K, or ~60K for brawlers). Some of this can come from AA. See EQ2 Library's article on Double Conversion & Max HP for a good discussion.

Anyone can get enough stats to do groups if you are willing to make the effort:

(1) GEAR: Get refined rares, make them into mastercrafted gear, then experiment every piece to Visionary. Level 105 Mastercrafted armor has +24% Resolve per piece. Plain mastercrafted armor is better than the stuff you get from the box at the Spires, and most of the stuff you get doing the PoP factions. If you have better gear than the mastercrafted, use that.

Using easily obtainable harvest-boosting gear, you can get enough rares to make all your gear in a day or two, especially if you use Tradeskill AA and get Potion of Bountiful Harvests from your Tradeskill Apprentice:

• Tradeskill Tree: 5pts each in Ample Harvest (+25% chance of Bountiful Harvest), Trim Reaver (+1% chance of rare harvest)
• Tradeskill Prestige Tree: Seasoned Harvesting (+5% rare harvest chance)
• Tradeskill Far Seas Tree: Far Seas Harvest Technique (+1% rare harvest chance, mythical harvesting), Experienced Reaping (+50 harvesting skills)

Refined rares boost some of the stats and requires a crafter with the Tradeskill AA enabling Salvaging/Refining. Or buy them.

Experimentation lets you selectively boost stats. If you're not a tradeskiller with all the AA (TS Prestige AA: Experimentation and TS Far Seas AA: Seasoned Experimentation) and equipment (The Hand of the Maker, Gaggelu Pearwood familiar) that boosts experimentation, you might want to hire someone to do it for you.

(2) Adorns: Add a mix of Planar Adornment of Health (+20.7% Max Health) and Planar Adornment of Raw Power (+109.8% Potency) to every possible piece. These white adornments are player crafted from the Planar Adornments recipe book. They require 1 Planar Mana, 2 Infusion of the Planes, 7 Planar Fragment, 5 Planar Powder, and 50 Celestial Coal.

To get the manas, harvest a bunch of darkstones, use mass production to craft a bunch of Tome of the Planes, and transmute those. Or have a weaponsmith (rubicite ore) or woodworker (storm ent heartwood) make Ruby Heartwood Crossbows and transmute those. Or hire someone, or buy them on the broker.
It's best to do your own transmuting so you can run Solo zones, then transmute the junk loot and Planar Transmutation Stones to get infusions, fragments, and powders. You can level your transmuting fairly fast. there's a guy named Londiar Inygad in all the main cities who gives a daily transmuting task.

Obtain any orange, green, and cyan adorns you can manage, too, try not to have any unadorned slots. Yun Zi sells some white, orange and cyan adornments for zero copper and doing his easy exploration quests. Some orange adorns are dropped in solo zones. Green adorns are all player-crafted, and even older green adorns are better than an empty slot.

You can hire player crafters to make some orange runes for you: Rune of Championship [V], Rune of Juxtaposition [V], Rune of Glory [V], or Rune of Witness [V]. If you already have [IV] runes, don't upgrade. For each, you'll need an Essence of Magic, 20 Planar Fragments, 40 Planar Powders, 100 Infusions of the Planes, and 5 Celestial Coal.

(3) PROVISIONS: You need to get you some very good food and drink, plus snacks that provide good stat boosts. If you don't happen to have a provisioner, ask your friends or in the Crafting channel to commission a provisioner to stock you up with food.

======== just this much will probably get you group-worthy ========

If you haven't got the recommended HP and POT yet, try these.

(4) TEMP ADORNS: Get a big stack of Maintained Tinkered Insight (crafted by tinkers, natch!) and apply them to every one of your armor pieces to get +25% Potency x 7. If you're a tank, you might want Maintained Tinkered Coating (+15% Max Health x 7) instead. These last for hours and they're cheap to make.

(5) TEMP BOOSTS: Get Cybernetic Powerlinks made (also tinkered) and use the buff to further boost Potency. They require 2 rubicite each, but are good for three charges and a +300% Potency buff for your whole group. Or use Cybernetic Forcelinks (+25K ABMod, +50KMax Health for whole group). These last for an hour.

(6) INFUSION: Infuse your gear (AFTER adornments). Not just with the random infusers from instances. You'll get around +500 STA and +65 POT on each layer when an item is fully infused.

If you use ACT, I find it's easiest to drag the infusers to a hotbar so you can just click the key and point to infuse, and use two ACT triggers so your eyes don't glaze over. The first tells you when the current infuser doesn't work any more, the second beeps when an infusion is successful:

<Trigger R="try using a different infuser" SD="Needs different infuser" ST="3" CR="F" C=" General" T="F" TN="Player" Ta="F" />

<Trigger R="You have infused" SD="" ST="1" CR="F" C=" General" T="F" TN="Player" Ta="F" />

Deity Modifier Layer lets you spend plat to do deity infusion. EQ2 button → Deity → Infusion tab. Drag an item to the box, then start clicking the green circle until either the item is completely infused, or your budget has been reached. Unless you're plat flush, I'd wait on plat infusing until you have something really good you'll be keeping a while.

Physical Modifier Layer is something you completely control. Dropped and crafted infusers apply to this layer. The stats that can be modified are STA, ABMod, POT and Crit Bonus.

After a while, you get a message like, "This infuser can't infuse this item". How do you know what CAN be used to infuse it? Look yourself up on Dragon's Armory. Click an item you have equipped, click the Infusers tab (below the paperdoll), then expand Physical Modifier Layer. Expand a stat, and you will get a list of which exact infusers can be used on that item. Repeat for all infusable stats. (Note: if an item doesn't have CB, you can't infuse CB. Similarly, if the item has no ABMod, you can't infuse ABMod)..

Deepforge Handcrafted infusers use common harvests. Twark handcrafted infusers need Thaumic Material but are otherwise common raws. Bloody Tooth infusers need umbral pelts. Once I've used as many of those as it will take, I salvage the junk that drops doing PoP instances, then make Reconstructed Planar Infusers.

I feel ya, and I'm definitely not even new. Lol mats for the white adorns cost me 400k. And I'm still working on experimenting my gear

As Sigrdrifa so excellently points out, you have months of solo work to get into groups.

You can get into guild group heroics far earlier though. As a defiler, you are viable at around 15m hp heroics. It will be hard, but you will learn a lot. People are always willing to help guildies if they show they are willing to help themselves.

Yep, finding a good friendly guild will make that all much easier. Guilds and friends are much more willing to take lesser geared folks and help them get stuff.

Heck, im in a casual rp guild and they take a worthless SK as melee/spell dps! We are tanks but I play how I want and they encourage it! We are here for fun, after all! Fun, while a state of mind, is also where you find it!

It takes months to get to a good grade for group play in this game. At this stage I think most peeps just don't realise that

Sad, but true

However, join a decent guild and the misery can be reduced!

The amount of stuff that "needs" to be done is a bit overwhelming for a new player. They should at least add an easy way to get epic 2.0 for 1 toon on new accounts.

And we have a channel that is composed of people from quite a few guilds and we do the Heroic runs for fun. If we wipe, we wipe, as long as we have fun that is what matters. We started as a rag tag group that had trouble with the trash but we have improved greatly since then. We do not have a set group, anybody on in channel can go no matter what and everybody offers to sit out if someone else is on that was not present for the last run. We also help each other with epic 2.0 stuff and even things prior all the way back to the beginning, someone is always willing to lend a hand.

The separation in power / character strength is only getting larger thanks to implementing so many time sinks / grinds / limited time ethereal events. A major majority of players are at end game - and not *just* doing end game content: they've finished Epic 2.0, all the prerequisite timelines, spent a month in PG's grinding tokens and have invested more time in crafting / tradeskilling.

Really - your best option at this point is to be pro-active in game finding a guild who's willing to guide you along your path. You will be expected to do some research of your own though. If a guildie says, "hey, you should reforge out of XX stat and into YY stat " you should be able to understand what they're talking about - and more importantly - *why* you need to reforge.

An example:
P2 "i need moar dps"
P1 "hey, I see you have 234234 in spell reuse, you need to reforge into casting speed"
P2 "what's reforging"
P1 "there's a reforging NPC in your home town, go see them and reforge your gear"
P2 "idk what my home city is, what's the NPC's name"
P1 "you didn't equip any of the quest adorns yet either"
P! *tabs out and google info*
P1 "his name is Bob, and he's on the city docks"
P2 "i'm at the docks, what does all this mean"
P2 "should I reforge out of crit bonus?"
P2 "whats an adornment"
P2 "ahh, man this is too complicated i'm done" *logs out*

P2 on the forums " teh gamez is too hard, plz give me stuff and things"


EQ2 doesn't really have a user manual. Players rely on 3rd party websites, other players and this forum for detailed information about some features in the game. Some features are very lengthy to explain: like reforging. Or adorning.. Or ascension scrolls.. so do some reading on the topic of interest, it will help you a lot.

Or, there's always the "throw real world money at it" solution, if you're so inclined.

But seriously - just find a good guild that you mesh with, same humor / play times / etc.

It's not freakin' months, Chicken Little. Weeks, yes. Months, no.

EVERYONE, not just new players, had to get to 378 resolve and around 40K hitpoints to be able to do heroics. I started this expansion late due to health issues, and just playing 2-3 hour a day, I managed to visit Yun Zi, get in the harvesting and solo zones, make white adorns, and make temp adorns to get me to a condition where I could start RAIDING, all within about four weeks.

Harvesting/Getting MC Gear: Two to four days of harvesting should give you the materials you need so you can either craft yourself useful stuff OR hire a player crafter to do it for you -- either option is significantly less expensive than buying stuff from the broker.

Why Refining and Experimenting? If you can use refined rares, that adds 10% to several stats on mastercrafted just to start. If you can get the items experimented (someone else can do it for you if it's before the items are attuned) then I generally add +10% Stamina, +5% Stamina, +5% Potency, +2.5% Potency, and +10% Basic Stats (you can experiment an item up to five times).

Why Solos Are Good Things: The first advantage of running solos, other than the process of mining junk loot for transmutable/salvageable stuff, is that they give you some basic understanding of the regular heroic zones. Yes, heroics have slightly different strats and mobs, but the solos are good preparation. Similarly, the duo zones are good preparation for event heroic zones.

AND running the daily solo missions gives you the coinage that you can then use to BUY HEROIC GEAR from vendors in Coliseum of Valor. You won't need to obtain a whole set of heroic gear as I've already explained, but there are a few very nice items one might want to obtain. There's even a Torden giant NPC who sells T1 raid gear pieces in CoV.

As a player is getting better gear for Event Heroics and Ethereal Coin runs, they can be running T1 Heroic weekly quest groups, which is heroic grouping! Then you run some solos and harvest a bit when you aren't in a T1 group.

Those walls of text where you tell people what they want to do, however, make their eyes bleed and are very intimidating. I took one look, got to the second item on the list and thought no, I just don't have the time or the will for all this.