Hello everyone! So, my husband and I spend most of our time casually duoing in this game. We really enjoy going back and completing old content we were never able to do since we have never been part of a large group or a guild capable of raiding. We tend to have some success going back and duoing the heroics and raids from a few expacs back since the gear from the latest expac is always so much stronger than what was balanced for in older content. However, we've been running into a few walls where we can't really tell what we're doing wrong. For example, in Dreadscale's Maw, we can't seem to be able to nuke down the first boss, even though we've read people say he's one-shottable. I can't even half-health him on my own in the Veilwalker's set (Tishan's from BoL), attempting with my Ranger, Berserker, and Beastlord. My husband has tried with his Necro in the same tier equipment. This is just one example, but it pretty much sums up our issues. We seem to be doing wayyyyy less DPS than we should be for the gear we're in, and I'm not sure if it's an issue of our skills not being fully upgraded or our skill rotation itself being sub-optimal, or something else. Does anyone have any tips for what we should be looking out for, or are we just going about this all wrong? I can give more details of our setup if needed, and we do check our parses every once in a while through ACT. Thanks a ton
It may not help you at all because you may know it all already - certainly you know much of it - but I will mention some of the things I do with a new character getting to BoL. Things that are all for solo or duo play and require no help from others. Get the gear from the box on Grieg's Tower. It has adornments in it - whenever you upgrade switch the adornments to the new gear (other than useless orange ones). Do the old summer "panda quests" from the panda near the spire across from the erudite city. This gives many good things including every ascension ability raised to level 15. Also houses, a familiar, familiar level boosts, adornments that are useful even at 120, two spell or combat art boosts etc. Whether or not you visit the panda get at least one ascension ability and level it. Etherialist may be best. Spells tend to be slow casting and long refresh but they are great at the start of a fight - may do more damage than all your other abilities combined. Do the BoL signature line for gear increases and ability to fly in the BoL zones. Then do Diaku Corral in the Wracklands for 7 pieces of gear resolve 165-170. Once unlocked any alt can buy them in Seru. At 120 get the epic 2 abilities from a BoL status merchant. Do weeklies at least once every week for the new summer event currency - when you can get the 200 resolve cloak. Your abilities may (or may not) still be at apprentice level. Depending on server you may be able to raise them to adept or higher fairly cheaply. A sage can raise etherialist abilities to adept easily enough with basic books though the fuel (planar energy) is expensive. Get as many red adornments and runes as you can from crafting or the broker or other players. Get white ones too they add up if you can put 200-500 points of potency in every piece of gear. Train up mercenaries and the best mount you have. If you have one of the cash package mounts like Skygge you can upgrade it for any character at level 110 at a status merchant. Makes a big difference. So does adding potency into the barding slots. Do overseer missions. Raise overseer to level 20 over time. This gives gear up to resolve 180, extra barding slots for mounts and far, far more. Lecture /off. I hope at least one of these points was useful.
That was actually very helpful! I do have the Panda quests completed, so I do have his upgrades accessible already, but a lot of the other things you mentioned (especially the BoL things apart from the epic 2 abilities which I snagged on my only current level 120) are certainly things I should start working towards. I know I need to upgrade my spells still, but I might have to go the longer route and work on a crafter to do so since the last I checked they're all very expensive on the HoF broker. Since we mostly duo, we don't have a reliable method of income, so a lot of the things the broker offers for current content gear is out of our price range, but I know with some time and effort we can get there. That's fantastic about Diaku though, I didn't know that that gear could be bought for alts since I haven't had the opportunity to hop in and do it yet. As for adorns, I particularly appreciate the advice on that, since I know they're important but I was a bit overwhelmed for what I should be aiming for. Honestly, thank you so much for such in-depth help! I'll start working towards those things that I'm still missing.
You mention the cost of some things - and prices are outrageous on most servers by new or newly returned player standards. A few thoughts on this specifically. 1. Consider a guild if you aren't in one. Many more casual guilds don't care if you ever group with them - they are happy to have more people to help level the guild up (the guild benefits from status you get) and to talk to. You benefit from the guild buff and the guild bank or depots may have useful upgrades. 2. Overseer provides many books - most sell for very little but now and then you get one that will sell for real money. High level sage books especially though jeweler or alchemist may sell reasonably well for somewhat less. Sometimes good books for various classes. Also some of the other overseer rewards - check the broker and you will quickly learn which are junk and which can sell even if only for 10,000 platinum. 3. Some of the collectibles (shinies) can sell for a lot depending on server. At least two sets found in the Coast may sell nicely but this *really* varies by server. I've seen the harder to get pieces sell for 5,000 or less on one server while selling for way over 100,000 on another. Easy to get lower level shinies may also sell, as may harvestable items.
I have my own guild that I've had since I started playing back in '08 (I've just taken various multi-year breaks), so we have all of the amenities we need (level 130) and I do use the guild buff as well. I have several shinies down in the depths of our collection depot that I might be able to dig out and sell... I can sort through that and see if it'll be enough to cover the cost of our spell upgrades. As for overseer, sounds like I need to just make sure I'm doing those more consistently. I have yet to get anything particularly valuable from it, but that's fair that they're rare but there so it doesn't hurt for me to keep up with it.
Good overseer rewards aren't at all rare though the best ones are. If you do all the missions you can every day you will build up rewards, get new missions, get new agents and raise overseer level (which gives access to better rewards). There are a lot of missions - you can have "overseer toons" that do nothing but log on once or twice a day to do some. If you have /claim boxes of agents you can give every agent in every box to each new character. There is a weekly mission that gives two nice crates - get it and do it every week. It is from the Freeport or Qeynos black market area. If you find this boring or too much like work just skip it - nothing is mandatory - but it is enormously useful in generating coin and gear and training for mercs and mounts.
Overseer is AFK so I don't mind having it going, I just tend to forget to check up on it; that's on me, I just need to get better about that. Didn't know about the weeklies though; thanks for the tip!
