So lost coming back

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by Thalador, Aug 29, 2020.

  1. Thalador Active Member

    Howdy folks. I am a vet from launch day and was hard core until about 5 years ago. Since then I have dabbled on TLE but went back to my main on live the other day, 110 warlock, and was so confused. I came back for a bit during Kunark Ascending and worked a bit on Ascension classes but not much else. Logged in the other day and wow am I confused. I did the access quests for BOL and am now working on the sig quests, but I need help and a direction to go in. I looked at a 120 mage who was wandering around and she had hundreds of millions of health. HOLY WHAT? I am sitting at 65mil and feel like I am so far out of touch. What do I need to do to get back to being useful and having fun? I am using Zhugrus Blightstrike as my merc and he seems to be doing a good job, but should I be using him or something else as a warlock.

    Any advice would be appreciated. I also read that adept spells don't drop anymore and on the broker spells are going for millions of plat. I am sitting at about 200k so feel like I am in deep trouble.

    Last thing I noticed is all the gear I am getting can't be reforged and has bunches of other colored adorn slots. My head is spinning!

    Thanks for anything you can all give me to get back into the swing of things
  2. Tanto Done, finished, gone.

    Ok... orange adornments don't work in BoL. For some reason they're on the free-loot crate at the entrance, but don't worry, you get much better gear from the signature line. It's red runes in BoL, they can drop in solo zones, and most of them can be crafted. Just hang on to any you get, and take any opportunity you can to be given some. Maybe if you join a guild, someone will take pity on you and help you with some runes. I know my bank is full of recipe books now and I've given loads to returning guildies.

    You will struggle with the solo instances. You might not die a lot, but neither will your foes. This improves. Either ask for help (a geared toon can blow through a solo in 3 minutes or so), or just be patient and consider it an opportunity to learn your class again.

    Once you've done the signature line, do your solo weekly, and do big baddies every week. It's just a quest to kill 3 heroic overland named mobs, but being weak isn't a problem. There's always at least one strong character doing it and everyone else just gets the update. And tbh, nobody minds that. Once you have 375 of the coins you get for doing missions, you can buy your new 120 spell from the status merchant.

    Check out your presitge AA's. Maybe look up some of the stronger guilds on your server and look at their guys same class as you. Pay attention to all their AA's, but the class prestige tree has a big boost to HP.

    Are you doing the Overseers? If not, claim the starter pack (or grab it from the status merchant in Seru) and get started. You'll need it. Do it religiously.

    Adept spells do drop. But don't worry too much. The Overseer will (eventually) give you more rares than you could ever use, and you can enlist a friendly sage to make your experts for you. Otherwise if you're in a hurry, just go harvest all the mats you need. You can look up the ingredients on EQ2U.

    Your merc is fine, but in BoL you have the mercenary battalion buff from BoL mercs. Now, this only comes into effect when your merc is level 5+, plus you need to unlock it to be summoned anywhere, which costs a few DBC. The mercs who are good, and accessible, are Oor of Umbra (fury, Fabled), Zel'Kriaz (inquisitor? Celestial) and Rosa Dod (dirge, Fabled). You will get these from the Overseer, and from running instances. When you get one, maybe just the healers for a start, train them. The more you unlock and train, the greater the buff, but the cumulative effect isn't much, so just stick to one you like is my advice.

    Final piece of advice, is level a tradeskill and do the signature tradeskill line, and level up adorning, tinkering and transmuting on one character at least. You get so much stuff from the Overseer which needs these skills, and being unable to salvage and transmute unwanted gear is a huge missed opportunity in BoL. Also you can still make money from making runes for people, and I think you'll still be able to by the end of the xpac. So yeah, level those ones up.
    Thalador, Breanna and Dude like this.
  3. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    Level up your mount and open up all the locked barding slots, and equip a bunch of Bardings of Health. It's the fastest way to boost your HP. For any armor you unlock through heroics/raids, you can go to the Unlocked Armor merchant in Sanctus Seru, and you can purchase that same quality and slot in various configurations. The "Deathless" sets, combined with the red runes Life, Passion, and Excitement, give you the most mitigation and such.

    The reason to do this is running hard raids where you keep dying because you are squishy. I have a set of Potency bardings I use most of the time, and I switch in the Health bardings and maybe even Deathless armor that I carry in my bags to help survivability.

    Gear
    Do the BoL signature questline. Then go molo Wracklands: Diaku Corral [Solo] (it will give you the equivalent of heroic gear). This gets you to a point where you can run BoL Heroic zones and even start raiding (though you will be squishy as heck the first several raids until you get raid gear).

    Mercs
    Any merc works. I usually run a healer merc when I am soloing.

    Work on getting the various BoL mercs (the Overseer Feature will help), and level those mercs to level 20. You don't need to equip all those mercs, but they contribute to this new Batallion Buff. It shows up in your Maintained Spells, looks like one of the merc coins you consume before you can hire some types of merc. Every 5 levels added to BoL mercs increases your Battalion Buff.

    I personally find that Rosa Dod gives the best Battalion Buff: when running in a group or raid, I summon Rosa Dod to activate the buff, then dismiss her. The rest of the time I have the Golden Inquisitor as my healer merc. No merc will be able to hold aggro or contribute meaningful DPS after about level 100, so usually a healer or buffer is your best bet.

    Amassing Plat and Upgrading Spells
    Harvest your hiney off in BoL. the rare mushrooms, fish, and pomes can be taken to a Scholar (since you're a warlock, you want a Sage) and then crafted into Expert spells. The rare hides go to make good mount tack. Sell any rares and common harvests you don't need.

    Pick up shinies, especially in Aurelian Coast and Wracklands and sell the ones you don't use on the broker. I throw them all in a salescrate, then check prices, and I usually pull out shinies that don't sell for much and put those into the Guild Hall collectible depot. Some of the regular overland shinies sell for pretty good money. Heroic shinies even more so.

    Harvesting and selling shinies can get you a surprising amount of plat.

    Some Master spells drop even in solos, I got most of mine on the broker, which you will do after amassing plat.

    Reforging
    Have you done the quest for the reforgers that unlocks reforging? You should have gotten an in-game mail telling you to go talk to a reforger. Can you reforge lower-level gear, say level 100?

    Before you start reforging, look yourself up at Dragon's Armory. Hovering over a stat will tell you what a given stat does. I like to use Dragon's Armory, because if you click on a stat, it highlights all the gear you are wearing that has that stat, and shows how much. This is useful in figuring out which pieces to reforge for what.

    To start, you probably have a ton of Reuse Speed, but zero Recovery Speed. You only need about 100 in each (in reality, I have found that I can't reforge out of all the excess Reuse). Most DPS I know reforge any piece that has Ability Mod, moving all the ABMod to DPS instead. You will still have TONS of ABMod.

    Infusing
    Have you infused your armor? As you do daily/weekly missions, you will get Empyral Infusers. You need those! Infusion works on three layers: Deity (which takes plat or Empyral Deity Infusers); Physical (which uses Infusers for STA, POT, CB, and ABMod); and Bonus (which uses special bonus infusers you get from the Singing Steel, Blood Ember, or Cobalt Crates). ideally, you want to infuse every single bit of gear you're wearing as far as it can be infused. You probably will be surprised at just how much you can boost your stats doing this.

    Ideally, you will get the recipe book "Reconstructed Empyral Infusers" (it can drop in both Solos and Heroics) and you're a level 120 crafter of any type. These recipes allow you to craft Empyral Deity Infusers, which can replace plat infusing. Also, they will allow you to craft Infusers for STA, POT, CB, and ABMod.

    You will need to look at your tradeskill AAs, and make sure you have a setup for Salvaging.

    If your transmuting is not maxed out, go to the crafting headquarters in your city and find Londiar Inygad. He has a little daily set of missions for transmuting, adorning, and tinkering. It takes maybe 10 minutes to do all three.

    All three skills are very useful! Tinkering allows you to make things like a repair bot and Overclocked Manastones, which you will really want. The Overseer and instances drop adornment recipes, and you NEED all your red adornment slots filled, the adorns are HEIRLOOM, so it's a PITA to have someone else craft them for you.

    So, as you adventure, junk loot you won't use gets recycled to boost the equipment you are using. SALVAGE any Legendary gear to make Infuser Fragments. TRANSMUTE any Fabled gear, TRANSMUTE any of the Transmutation Stones you get as you adventure (they look like blue coke cans) -- this gives you the raw materials you need for adorns.

    So, if you have the "Reconstructed Empyral Infusers" recipes, you can craft Empyral Infusers for yourself. You can also get another crafter to make the regular STA, POT, CB, and ABMod infusers. But Empyral Deity Infusers you pretty much have to make for yourself.

    Overseers
    Meanwhile, you should be using the Overseer Feature daily. Every morning, send out as many Overseers as you can.

    In addition to the 10 overseer missions you 're limited on, you can go and purchase Season 1 "Charged" Overseer missions, I get a stack of 10 of the ones I want). I recommend getting a selection of the Legendary Charged missions from Administrator Agent Stanley Parnem (in Qeynos, he's in the shipyard on the Qeynos Docks, you have to look up, he's standing on some scaffolding; there's one in Freeport also, but I don't know where). The Season 1 Legendary missions tend to drop more adornment recipes, so I prioritize those.

    You will get Overseer Agents from /claim, from mission crates, and from Overseer Missions as they are completed.

    The Overseer quests reward a number of things. You can purchase a Daily Crate mission from a person in the Black Market sales area of your city: you want to do this, because the Singing Steel Crate you get from it contains things like barding slot unlocks, potions to level up spells, mercenaries, mounts, and familiars). A lot of Overseer missions will give you rare harvests (useful, because you NEED Expert spells crafted!). They also will give you tons of Essence of Chaos and Lesser/Superior/Greater Planar Energy, which are used to make those Empyral Deity Infusers.

    Panda Quest Adorns
    Take any wizard spire to Sundered Frontier and do Yun Zi's series of quests. Once you have finished these, you can buy some nice stuff from his sidekick, Pas Yu, for zero copper each (what a deal!) You will want the "Daring" white and cyan adorns. You may also want some of the Ascension boosts he sells, if you want to level up your alternate Ascensions (I figure it's easy and free, so why not?)

    Red Adorns
    As I mentioned earlier, you want to have ALL your red adorn slots filled. Recipes for red adorns drop in both Solos and Heroics. You either need to craft these adorns yourself, or else use a bunch of plat to have another crafter commission craft them for you. Either way, you want to get the materials for adorns by transmuting junk gear as much as possible, they're pricey on the broker. Sometimes an actual rune will drop in a zone, too.

    As a Warlock, you REALLY want the Empyral Aniquilacion set of runes (Firmament of Fire, Foundation of Ruin and Ascension of Destruction). The Destruction rune can't be crafted, you have to get it as a drop. People do advertise in channels that they will SLR for one, the price has been around 5 million plat on Maj'Dul, but it varies.

    The second rune set you want is Empyral Zou Kunnen (Ascension of Magic, Firmament of Power, Foundation of Thought). These can all be crafted.

    You will also want the "VIII" runes (Empyral Rune of Championship [VIII], Empyral Rune of Glory [VIII], Empyral Rune of Juxtaposition [VIII], and Empyral Rune of Witness [VIII])

    There are a couple of runes you will have to purchase in Sanctus Seru (Empyral Rune: Force Projection and Empyral Rune: Timed Attacks).

    The remaining red runes are a matter of personal taste and availability. You can look at all the red runes via EQ2U's Item Search.

    White Adorns
    You also need to have all your white adorn slots filled.You start with the four "Daring" runes from the Panda.

    If you run the little harvesting quests for the Researchers in Recuso Tor, Fordel Midst, and Sanctus Seru, you can gain coin to purchase things from their nearby assistants, which includes Voidpiercer adorn recipe books. You'll probably start with Voidpiercer adorns, but upgrade to white Empyral Adorns when you can.

    WHICH white adorns do you want? This varies a lot by person. I have Extra Attacks on most of the places they will fit. I either use Raw Power (Potency) or Increased Critical adorns in most of the other spots, a couple of Magical Skill, and Health runes in the remaining spots. Oddly, there are places that Voidpiercer Health runes will go that Empyral Health runes won't! You can look more closely at which adorns I have if you like via EQ2U.

    Green Adorns
    You need three green adorns. Do the best you can do, is all I can tell you here. Some greens drop from BoL overland names and in BoL solo/heroic instances. Look closely at how each green adorn says it has to be leveled: you want the ones that level doing BoL missions.

    That's probably enough info dump to keep you busy for a while.
    Cravaro, Mercychalice, Nazy and 2 others like this.
  4. Miroh Well-Known Member


    Welcome back! I know when I came back for Kunark Ascending, I was so lost. I had missed the entry of resolve and potency and didn't understand why a solo fight was taking me 10+ minutes lol.

    Mercs are limited to their usefulness. Almost everyone runs around with a healer merc and more so an Inquisitor for verdict. The newer mercs do offer a better passive buff when you level them up but you use what ya got ya know?

    Familiars, Mounts and expansion buff spells (Think this one is your loyal companion or whatever its name is) will help greatly with the stats. If you're on Skyfire, shoot me a tell ingame if Im around. I'll be back on the road sometime next week so I won't be back in game for 4-6 weeks.