Greetings! I am returning to EQ2 after a long hiatus (3 years), and looking for some suggestions on what I should work towards. I have a L70 defiler, basically mastered out through 70, with 100 AAs (those were the caps when I quit). Gear is about 1/2 from raids and the rest from misc grouping and quests. What I am wondering is: 1. Recommended AA setup for solo / grouping. Not setting up for raids, more smaller stuff. Looking for a balanced attack between personal effectiveness and good healing. I'm not looking for someone to say go 4-8-8-etc, but more along the lines of people saying "I like the dog line, and here's why." 2. What should I look for in my gear? +WIS seems obvious, as is mitigation etc. More what I mean are the specific bonuses, like Crit % or whatever. 3. Fun questlines to work on. For example, I've never been to Kunark. Should I just pick some Timelines and start thrashing them? Are there specific things I need to scare up in the long term? I've got an old-school carpet, is it worth questing through Lavastorm for the new carpet? 4. Fun evil dieties these days? Worth spending any time on this?
Manii Names wrote: 1. For non-raiding, I would go with WIS/STA primarily. If you're 81+, AGI (with the new endline) is also a must (the ward proc is amazing for any and all content). Also, after 81 get enough points to max out Ancestral Channeling for the shaman endline, as it is an amazing emergency ability for grouping as well as raiding. In the defiler tree, I would go with the traditional Cannibalize line. Soulward and Atrophyweaving are both also excellent lines. If you decide not to go for Soulward as an endline, I do suggest at least maxing out the AA's for Shroud of Armor. Hexation really isn't that helpful for heroic and soloing content, though toss 5 points into Bane of Warding at least. For the new Sentinel's Fate endlines, everything but the Sacrificial Restoration upgrade is good--the upgrade for Sacrificial Restoration simply doesn't do a lot in the grand scheme of things. The crit bonus for Shroud of Armor, Carrion Warding and ward-cure bonus from the SF lines are all really great (the cure-ward is amazing). In Shadows I spent the least amount of my points overall, picking up anything healing related down to the healing stance. There's a few ways you can go to squeeze out a little bit of extra DPS, but it's not going to be much to make or break you. The defiler upgrade with the SF class line was the best I did find of the DPS stuff if you have extra points and want to try it out. 2. For gear, go with potency and/or reuse gear first and foremost over anything else. Reuse has been split down into ability reuse and spell reuse--both stack and affect all of our spells so either/or is fine for us. Crit bonus is good, but keep in mind that the bonus from crit bonus is halved for wards. Nearly all gear in the expansion has some amount of crit bonus, so it's not something you'll really be hard up for to begin with. The same can be said for Spell Casting Speed--it's plentiful in the new expansion. Wisdom I wouldn't worry so much about, since it only affects your damage, power pool and spell mitigations. If you're getting priest gear, wisdom is going to be there but I wouldn't waste too much thought comparing wisdom on different pieces. I wouldn't worry much about accumulating ability modifier gear--if it's on a piece great, but strive to get as high of potency and reuse speed as you can manage even if it means giving up some ability modifier. 3. I really can't give any decent feedback on questlines--maybe someone else can help out there. I did finally go back and finish off my Claymore questline. It was very easily soloed at 90 (even all of Deathtoll). 4. Deities are still pathetic for us. Anashti Sul is the latest new one. She has decent DPS abilities, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend her for defiler. Personally I went back to Solusek Ro for Incinerate but Cazic Thule is still viable with that minute-long root/fear miracle you can get. For straight healing the best you'll be able to go with will be Karana. Just look at all of the abilities and go with whatever looks most interesting to you.
