Hey guys! I am thinking of returning to the game, and haven't played since SF. As is the norm for my EQ2 excursions, i'll be bringing a few others and rerolling. I have a few questions on new mechanics right now though! First off: How are mercs for tanking all the group dungeons? Chances are I wont even touch quests, going from one dungeon to the next. I may or may not have 1-2 people to play with during this. Can I run with both a healer and tank merc? Or should I roll a tank? I was thinking of going beastlord, though its not required. Second: If I do need a tank, what is the best one right now? Back when I quit, it was SK. I've read that monks and brawlers are pretty amazing these days though. I wouldn't mind rolling one of those up. And finally: How active are endgame 1 group dungeons? Are they still difficult enough to be a challenge, or did they go the WoW route of making them ridiculously easy? I will never be raiding, so this will be my final target. I love how challenging EQ2 dungeons were around the time of Shadow Odyssey. Can you do them with mercs? Thanks!
1) Mercs are fine as tanks until skyshrine, which is a 90+ zone. Skyshrine has a zonewide perma debuff of your critical chance stat ( -110% to -175% depending on the zone), and the statts of mercs aren't sufficient to overcome that debuff. Plus their HP isn't great at that level. Everything below that is fine though. 2) Brawlers are good tanks but they got nerfed a little a while back. To be honest, for group content any tank is ok. Beserkers are arguably the weakest at the moment because they have the lowest self buffed HP, but my zerker is fine for most zones. Guardians and brawlers, followed by SK, pally then zerk if you really pushed me for an answer. 3) Endgame is semi active. There's a new expansion out next week which will get a lot of people playing again. The trouble currently is there's only one contested dungeon (skyshrine) and 5 instances, and the hardcore frequent players have done it all and got bored, so you just have the more casual people playing it now as a general rule. There are easy and hard versions of the instances but the hard mode ones aren't easy to do with a random group of pickups. I've never managed to get in a group to do one. In fact there are two easy mode instances (Underdepths and Sleepers Tomb), that can be a challenge with pick up groups. So overall, yes I'd say it's challenging to all but raiders. And the raiders are semi challenged by the hard mode stuff if they can be bothered to do it.
