When I was playing EQ way back in the day (1999-2008) I remember always hearing about FV and thinking I'd never make a character there because I didn't want to get nailed down and never be able to transfer if the population started bottoming out. Now, almost 20 years later, I can absolutely understand how it's finally come into its own. We're older, have stable jobs with decent income, but limited playing time, so FV is the perfect place to make all those alts of classes you wanted to try out but just didn't have the time to level up and equip the hard way. Just make your toon, then invest a little of your disposable income and buy them all the wonderful toys you used to scroll through Allakhazam drooling over, and get that experience of wandering into a zone from an older expansion that always gave you grief and just decimating everything in it. Hell, even top tier Raid gear is tradeable, so it's perfect for people who want the abilities but lack the time to put in with a Raiding guild to go grind it out (while also competing with the other members for the drops). I imagine 90% of the player base of FV are us old-timers looking for a taste of the glory days without the time sink; the other 10% are the people doing the farming to feed the 90% and rich dilettantes who are just dabbling before moving on to something else.
You're absolutely right, that's why I liked Mischief the random/bonus loot plus tradeable made a surplus of items so you could get some BiS gear for really cheap and it was great to finally be able to get some of the items I never got. Like when I played my warrior in a raiding guild on live when Planes of Power was out in 2002/03 I was like 5th on the list to get a Blade of War from Rallos Zek and I never got one, and there was maybe 1 or 2 warriors that ever got a Dark Blade of the Warlord when it was relevant, I was able to get both those items on Mischief this time around and more and it was really cool.
I literally play the same thing. Erudite Paladin. I may have been the only one on multiple TLPs now playing this combination. Or at least one of very, very few. Not hard to guess which character is mine if you’ve played a bunch of TLP’s in the last 6 years. Always the same erudite paladin with the same name.
Agreed that Bards are popular boxes for their utility and ease of play, however, I think it's worth mentioning that Bards are also a super strong DPS class in SoD still, which may cause more people to play them
I cant speak for how they are after Velious, but Wizards got a bad rap because people think they're just DPS, when they're really a hybrid of the casters. So the the specialized casters out shine them on the surface, and their main utility is a blindspot of min/max'ing and parsing data pre-PoK, and in the eyes of the community eliminated after. They get pigeon-holed into pure DPS because the other specialized casters will always beat their combat utility, but they have the second best caster CC with their roots and stuns. Before there were guides for everything, their scouting abilities were an actual thing as parties were exploring and discovering things for the first time. And their last problem is no one ever sees how much experience and time your Wizard saved your group by evac'ing and being able to freely move around the world. They trivialize this value by biasing everything towards raid performance. And they ignore the number of nights they spent unable to find a group or when they do an open camp. It's impossible to measure the value of being able to move your group to any zone on the map in an instant to find the best exp and loot, and then send everyone back home at the end of the night. I'm not excusing Daybreak for failing to give them a niche that allows them to shine for the last 20 years, but Wizards are the most overlooked and underrated caster of classic EQ. Almost makes we wanna roll a new Wizard on Quarm right now
I would imagine FV has a higher percentage of players using MQ2, so the rogue, SK and MAG numbers for that server absolutely make sense. It's not about the tradeable loot, it's about how much power they can get out of the class while paying basically no attention to it. I'm surprised the bard isn't higher there too.
I solo box on tlp's, live, and emu's my favorite class is BST for my play style. It can be very active and I can solo efficiently. With that being said, they need to start releasing BZK and BST with the start of each TLP. Those who want to play their favorite class have to reroll or prepare to PL. The purest nostalgia wore off for me after the first TLP. Just think those two classes are over or near 20 years old. They belong in at launch and helps reduce burnout to catch up later.
I completely agree with this, it was cool to unlock new classes and races as time went on when the game was live but now those things should be part of original however they need to make it work. I hated that in World of Warcraft with Death Knights, like I don't want to have to start at level 58 wanted to play them from level 1.
Comment at 11:35: Rogue poisons become relevant during Seeds of Destruction. Their slow (Myrmidon’s Sloth) eventually will overwrite Forlorn Deeds, but not Turgur’s Insects. This makes soloing the class a lot easier.
BST come into power in SOD. DRU are insane on TLP during the early levels for power and ports both. They recently changed the banish line of nukes they have to work on constructs and elementals both, and opened up more options for their charm with insect types. Back when they consolidated DOT damage and changed the numbers on every druid dot in the game and altered stacking mechanics for them, the click dot items in game from kunark and PoP get the Upgraded version of the dot, making them insanely good soloing. My druid on Agnarr can kill in PoF with no mana using just clickies and not be slow because my highest dot is on the Orb of Clinging death and free to cast. Druids never really fall off in power anymore due to the changes above to charm and their insanely good Damage Shield AA that can be cast on lower lvl players. A 110 druid can put a ds on a lvl 75 group that will kill every mob in a lvl 75 task mission. They also get multiple lines of quint nukes starting at lvl 91 to open up quint kiting for them. The real reason you will always see more classes like Mage end game is because of the lazy factor they offer. Raid damage dru can hold their own post 110 as well and have been top of charts for periods.
Thanks for doing this research. Pretty interesting stats. Not surprised about the numbers - you can tell how closely linked the classes are to their perceived power. Monks a great example. They're stupidly overpowered for a long time. Then they're nerfed into uselessness. I wish DBG would go through all eras and rebalance everything. But that'll never happen.
Monks are lest liked for a few resins. They are classed as tanks not DPS witch pushes players away. They seem to drop off the map in most expansions because they get almost nothing in skills and times. They remain the after about 60 on live.
druids - your fairly right druids were one of 2 characters that could get groups to where they wanted to go, until more portals were added and more characters got port type abilities. i remember keeping my druid on standby when ever i was running a character in plains of knowledge, - when i would see people asking for help to get somewhere i knew i could go i would offer assistance, many weekends i would just use my druid as a strolling porter for groups going here and there, some people gave excellent gifts, others were astounded i had a small fee, usually potions i was short on. a few times i had single characters come back hours later and gift we with a special item they found dropped and none of their group could use. loved those people. when the porting finally ended was when expansions were coiming out left and right and updates would gift other characters with ports that people like me couldn't afford( litterally ) some new areas had no port spells for druids. but characters who bought the expansions would get items or gear to port them there. so if you didnt buy the new stuff you never had a way to get there other than on foot. if that was possible. sometimes it was not. because the new areas were to high leveled for any of my characters to get to. thats when druids became less needed. same with any other character with travel spells.
i find - my paladin ( dwarf) is good in small groups (up to 4 or 5 ) but when bigger groups are formed he cant do whats needed, he needs help. thats what i found in my time running my pally. was fun in small groups , but when the group got to 6 or 8 or more it was just too much to hold aggro and keep myself alive. i needed help with heals and buffs and crowd control when the groups got big.
You’re not supposed to self heal as a group paladin. If that’s happening, the group makeup is borked. Where pallies suffer as tanks is the ability to generate area-effect agro. The only practical way to get the attention of a bunch of mobs is via group heals, but they are slow to cast and costly in mana. But in a good group you should have a CC handling adds and a healer on your tank. Pallies are insanely good at getting snap agro and keeping it. Unless you have a careless wizzy nuking recklessly, you should always have agro as a pally.
12:54 Later on, shaman heals actually dominate the game. They get an AE rain heal that generates massive healing for raids. They outheal everyone, including clerics. Their dps on raids by just rolling dots is actually superb, too. Shaman are just a very powerful class in pretty much every era of EQ history. As for wizards, they are capable of excellent dps even in a pickup raid environment. I joined a pickup Aerin`Dar raid early in PoP on Oakwynd on a level 61 wizard and managed to top the parse over multiple level 65 chars, including monks. One of the monks came close to me, but I still edged him out. I just rolled rains and concussions the whole fight while riding high on the aggro meter. The main tank never died so I never got summoned.
That's really cool with Shamans. I like Wizards but my fights are usually very long with a smaller box army killing raid bosses so they are OOM no matter how I do it, in PoP I had all of the AA and near BIS gear on Mischief and they usually lead dps till they run oom, but it's also maybe skewest because all of my other classes were near BIS to so it's a lot to keep up with. If you do sustained dps to keep mana up, the damage coming out falls below just about every other class I play with.
Monk on live here. If I had to guess, over time Monk utility for pulling went down as more and more classes gained abilities to be able to effectively single pull with little tricks, heck even Rogues with smokescreen traps can mez a little pack and single pull. That combined with the DPS value in a group Monks bring. A extremely well played Monk can create raid burn damage equivalent to a berserkers on live for most expansions, however in more recent times, berserkers provide more melee utility to other group members and have higher sustain with a 1 minute reuse dicho line. To top it off, Rogues and Zerkers have assinate and decap utility for soloing humaniod blues, where monks have no such utility making them less desired. Additionally caster dps on raids for the last few years has def outshined melee dps in raids on average. However with the newest expansion LS, this has changed slightly as Monks are now currently the flavor of the month due to a redesign on melee weapon ratios which have propelled monks as high tier dps benefiting the most from these changes even though all melee are "eating well" so to speak. It actually would be interesting to see what the monk population looks like now on live, or at least FV where twinks and alts are leveled quickly, if it weren't so time consuming to generate the data.
So while I don't have a lot of experience as I havnt played any other class other then a Wizard if I had to guess it seems like Wizard is one of the hardest classes to solo with. You are super squishy and its not until much later where you can use aoe snare, aoe attacks, and jboots that you can even begin to quad kite. Until then your mostly just killing one MAYBE 2 mobs and then having to sit and meditate mana. If your not in a group its insanely slow to lvl with and I'd say a lot of people just give up with it during the lvling process. I have no idea if other classes are as hard to solo with but from vids it seems like a lot of them have an easier time solo killing things/less down time. Killing one mob then medding for 3+ min is super slow lol
This isn't really true. I played Wizard as main up through PoP and I was quadding with her in the early 20s. It wasn't efficient but neither was sitting around waiting for a group or waiting for my friends to decide to log in (I've always played MUCH more than my friends). There's a long stretch ideal for kiting in the eastern part of Eastern Wastes (near the bridge) and I spent hundreds of hours there, over six or seven characters (wizards and druids). Lots of downtime but that was true for everyone in EQ at that time. Wizards are just overshadowed by more efficient (read: melee) DPS later on. Once Manaburn was nerfed (that was the peak of the Wizard's popularity), it was all downhill from there.
I started every account i owned (other than the 1st one) with druid!! I love me a druid. fits my play style the best. my 2nd character on every account is always the beastlord. love me a pet! can't wait to see how they stack up.
I always make the mistake of including a druid everytime I play, i Think it's because it was one of the main characters I used 20 some years ago but they are wildly underpowered in a lot of things at the start of a TLP for a long time and the reason I had a druid back in the day was versatility but now that I can play a group or more at a time I don't really need the versatility, ie, a healer and a dpser, I just get the best healer and the best DPSer and go to town.
hell yeah powerful healers , but they never level up with the group. i had to 2 box my clerics during the week to keep up to the leveling of the group i was with. we played on weekends as a 10 strong group for mobs we couldnt kill in our little groups. sometimes were heard about big groups doing raids for dragons or special places where there was a certain way you had to kill them to get things to pop. we were never that good. or maybe we just werent big enough. and none of our group was guilded up then , so we were doing things that guilds found easy , but we had troubles with because we didnot have the gear from powerful mobs waiting around tobe handed out.
mages - interesting - i had fun playing my mages, they could be a mainstay in the groups. they were kinda fun to play solo too. never had a overpowered mage, because i had other characters that could do similar things better. but i can see if mage was my fist how it would overpower other characters. especially when used as the backbone of groups.
enchanters - interesting - when i played mine yeah it had some crowd controls, but it wasnt a soloing character. my enchanter needed fighters , to keep the hits to a minimum ! if i got hit too hard or too often i couldn't concentrate - and spells would fizzle. gimme a good frontline of fighters and tanks and healers to keep them alive and i could control anything up to my level usually. but solo - enchanter was just a maker of items.
Enchanters start off slow but get crazy good as soloers pretty quick. I mostly 3 box a tank/healer/DPS class and if the 3rd is an enchanter it usually just goes around basically soloing stuff while the healer occasionally drops buffs and heals, and the tank just sits there soaking up exp. Starts around mid 20’s after I leave Unrest, usually to Mistmore. Reverse charm killing is so crazy fast and effective. Sometimes I just load up the chanter and solo for a few hours for fun and a challenge.
i can agree with you they start off slow, and as you say around lvl 20 they become the head of the group or can solo. (if you choose a good contingency of spells!@@stabgod
have you ever compared each character to themselves ?? like a lvl 20 compared to a lvl 80???? i'd love to see how each ( class ) expands or changes as they get bigger. i will assume from this graph alone that the shaman is the only class that shines throught its rise in powers. the bard , cleric, druid, enchanter, monk, they all have need of help to get thenm back to their heydays. the magician took a hit early but rose back to power so 7 out of 16 classes i can clearly see either steady powerups, or rises and fails in keeping power levels . the rest (9) eiher stayed even or varied slightly . by looking at this info and making a tornado like looking graph i theorize that only the shaman will have the cone effect. thin point at bottom and wide area at top. thats not to say they gained new things, but rather to say their given beginnings rose in an even tempo - probably because they are one of the most versatile, yet difficult classes to play well. anyone can do a decent job with them. but the people who get into it , live it ,will find cleaver ways to use this and that ability to do something a different class can do in a straightforward simple way. bad example - getting through a locked door. rouge (thief) picks the locks berserker warrior - probably use brute force to break it. magician wizard or any spellcaster with fire would burn thru it. like i said bad example but shows more ways than one to do similer effects. i believe the shaman is that type , followed by magician, then any other class that stayed fairly even across your graph. those that rose or fell or did both on your graph will be the characters that have wildly fat or skinny areas in my proposed tornado looking graphing. i see magician, shaman, SK lead in players, cleric, druid, enchanter, necro, ranger, rogue,warrior, will be those classes that play wise will generally be needed for groups either for dmg or spells or for niche things that no one else can do. only the paladin and the wizard seem to bee the characters that have never truely expanded outside of their original roles. meaning - they have changed the leat from lvl 20 to lvl 80 every other class looks like it tried doing things the others do. thats why the rise and fall of the characters. saying this it would be interesting to chart the growth of each character by the way the skill numbers rise. do the shaman and magician show a steady rise in all the different skills? or do they show sudden rises in certain skills???? how did they stay so popular???
I've never compared classes to each other in that fashion i usually rush to max level. It would be neat to somehow chart best in slot maximum damage per second on certain raid bosses with each class but that would be a big task to track. What ideas do you have to track power from level 20 to 80? On a live server or on a TLP from Classic ->
I don't think that's correct (that they all need help). The "problem" is, in this day and age of multiboxing, no one is really getting 100% from any class. So it becomes a game of which class requires the least bit of attention to provide the most benefit. Also, all classes will explode in ability from 20 to 80 because there are entire major spell lines that don't start until later (Splurt for necros, for example. Aegolism line for Clerics, Tagar's Insects for Shaman, etc). Charting that would be a task I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy since the parameters are so varied. Solo vs group vs raid, played "straight" or boxed, indoor or outdoor zone, type of mob (undead, humanoid, etc).
@@Remianen ..... I WAS STATING MY EXPERIENCES FROM RUNNING SINGLE CHARACTERS. yes boxing 2 or more is easier to do things.......... but more specificlly , it was my thoughts , my reactions to how each type played. when i could find groups , that was best. but when i could not i resorted to boxing 2 or 3 of my own characters. (back then) i had one computer, i tabbed between characters/games. it was the only way i could play by myself. after a while i had 2 computers so a friend and i could both play , or i ran 2 computers with 2 characters each. that was about the limit i could handle. right now 2023 - i am limited to a laptop. soon i'll get my tower (desktop) functioning again. then in a year or so maybe i can pick up a 3rd computer and try getting to 6 character groups. but playing more than 2 characters on one machine is clunky at best. and the FOLLOW i have to use sucks. LOL sorry for any misunderstandings, just my take on what I have experienced. jeffrey rayborn
that was the biggest ??? change i had. when i finally guilded up and saw the resorces a guild could aquire. i dont play enough to be guilded now. and i dont know if i ever will again. because it puts such a restriction on where and when and how you play. i find running in smaller groups much more satisfying. probably because in smaller groups we all gained in our efforts. i remember the guild stuff i did , and i almost never got gear or bonuses. i was just one of the peon characters they expected to fall during the raiding. an it ws disrespecful! i find that many guilds run that way. especially really big strong guilds. the smaller guilds seem friendlier, and more helpful. but they never seem to last.
Storytime! When I was raiding in Luclin (when it first launched), all beastlord spells were available to be bought on vendors. Sadly, they also dropped off raid mobs. We were looking for KEI/C3, Garrison's, group Focus, and group Aegolism....and getting Spirit of Khati Sha and Sha's Advantage. Remember, during those days, a mob could only drop up to 8 items (usually 6) and 2 of them were guaranteed to be spells. I hated Beastlords from that moment til now. I have one at 90 and I created a Wood Elf who's currently at 20 but I'd be more likely to heroic the Wood Elf than play her up. I'm still bitter from all those Greig and Thought Horror Overfiend and Shei Vinitras and The Va'Dyn and Itraer Vius kills that resulted in BEASTLORD spells. That were available on VENDORS!🤬🤬
I'm not against it but when I did server population tracking for whole server Agnarr had a max of 141. This could mean people have adapted to server needs or are boxing certain things, I could grab the data and then compare it to Oakwynd when it gets to PoP though to see how/if the ratio changes.
i think the MONK is like the bard. it takes a certain mindset to play them well. and new stuff reshuffles their usefulness. mine was fun till about level 20 when other characters were stronger. but then i have seen higher ranked monks totally control the groups their in , again i think it has more to do with the players character than the character of the monk. i;ve seen both good and bad monks.
They should just change it so you run a whole group of your own characters on one account with you playing 1 and 5 acting as mercs and you can switch between as needed and make it so you can train the characters to behave as you would. except the time locks ,
hm hm hm ... loved my necro in the beginning stealing life force feels so good. then those spells begin to wain later and it becomes difficult and you need help. i dont know about if they got buffed later i was out of touch with everquest for a time and the few times i tried coming back i just couldn't get into the rythem of the game. there is no ??? it is very difficult to play now as anything, because the grouping has been moved for low levles to the cream of the crop players. if your not big enough you cant find a group usually. and i dont have the time or funding to box a whole big group to get the better gear for one or 2 classes. i am just now returning to EQ, only have one active account and started a druid last night to level out of gloomingdeep. gonna try leveling out a beastlord tonight. if my work (real life) comes into fruition i might be able to afford to build a 6 or 8 character boxing set up. most i have ever done was 3 . and with just 2 commputers thats frustrating. as it is - i'm gonna get this account to plains of knowledge before i expand. and see if i can keep this EQ attempt alive. wonder if this laptop can handle 2 or 3 accounts on this little screen???? we'll figure something out.
Start with a 2box. Pick SK/shammy or cleric/chanter. This SK duo is straight forward throughout the game and into PoP. If you can, join a guild on your shammy at max level and soak in the gear. The game is completely different when geared out from a raiding guild. The cleric duo is harder in the beginning but gets powerful around 20’s, and beyond. It will be a chanter charm fest from there moving forward. Again, at max level join a raiding guild on your cleric and soak up the raid loot. Cleric raiding is both challenging as your guild figures stuff out, then ez mode after a few clears. A well geared cleric with the right clickies is godlike and you will never solo again. Then when Kunark comes out, your guild will go out of its way to get you your epic. This game was so hard and cumbersome with only one character playing at a time. Two boxing made it way more enjoyable. Raiding on a semi effective guild is the best way to gear up and get access to the cool stuff. I always raid on a cleric as they are always needed and incredibly easy to master. Clerics usual get gear first and DKP ends up feeding my fun to play alts.
@@stabgod ......i understand your duo choices - typical. but my choices were fueled by wanting to play certain characters. i love druids and beastlords, so those were my first two characters. then i wanted heals so made a cleric.. my experiences while running my cleric alone looking for groups back oh around 2000 or 2005 was that with access to POK the cleric took off with all the new spells, but trying to maintain equlibrium with a group of player-characters was difficult. reason being - the healer classes don't level up as fast when all they do is heal and buff in groups. the dps chacters level so fast and leave the healers in their dust looking for more capable healers equal to their levels. cant remember how many weekend sessions i would get dropped by one group and get picked up by a different group only to be dropped again when our lvls grew too far apart. just a fact of the system. if you do dps, you get more exp. just casting heals - means all the exp you get is from spells, not dps. and the rate you gain exp is less than the rate dps ers can get because their dps climbs faster than heals or spells do. maybe in the futur they will learn how to keep dps and healing experiences equal.
Back in 2006, I made my own dual CPU (Pentium 3 1-GHz) on an ASUS motherboard with 4GB of ECC RAM and a mid-level SoundBlaster + video card. This setup allowed me to 3-box on a single system, alt-tabbing between the accounts, all the way into the Secrets of Faydwer era, with all the bells and whistles turned on. None of them were bots; I was literally starting an action on one, switching to another to begin an action on it, switching to the third to do something, and rotating like that. Granted, none were melee (Enchanter, Cleric, Shaman), so they didn't need constant repositioning, but it still took effort and attention to detail. But the thing is, I was doing that with technology that was old even then, mitigated only by a comparatively large amount of RAM (for the day) and the additional CPU that I used to run the other 2 EQ instances through the EQ.ini file. That was 16 years ago. With even a moderately adequate laptop for today, you should easily be able to 3-box (with mercenaries) and still be OK. Might have to tweak the settings a bit, but the hardest part would be training yourself to alt-tab the right number of times to end up on the right character. The /follow command can sometimes be buggy as hell, but it was good enough for me to run my alts up to the Queen Sendaii raid in The Hive by using the levitation trick from the zone wall without dropping down into a mob's lap or leaving someone behind.
its like saying that wizards drop off due to ports...literally nothing about them changes. Also, porting from camp to camp, evac etc....ports are more than just PoK stones.
hmmm?? really?? i liked my beast lord. of course i was solo until i got to plains of knowledge, when he got a hell of a progression when i could get all his missing spells! but that was when all characters started in different cities and never grouped till they hit plains of knowledge, with other types of characters. when lucilin came out and i looked for a character to play, i thought the beastlord was the only one that had a chance to do everything. all the other characters seemed onesided. my difficulty while early on was finding info!!! all thse sites that now tell you where to go did noy exhist!! not when i was playing. I had to map, explore and find areas to level up . and jumped on any knowledge that i stumbled into. when i hit plains of knowledge, and hooked up with my druid, (2 boxing) he was a huge help and grew exponentially as i understood each of the things he could do well. it was a had road to get his characters specialized weapons, and i felt let down because they werent what i was expecting, it didnt fit my game play at first. but once i figured out how his weapons excelled and how to (chuckles) train my pet (so to say) he became an asset to all my groups, nearly took over tanking on most of my groups. and where he had faults my ddruid came thru with different solutions, then i made a paladin and a cleric on different accounts and they progressed fairly similarily - rough at times until they hit plains of knowledge, where all their hidden talents came to fruition. i think thats the biggest part of everquest i miss the most, the difficult climb to get to plains of knowledge, its so easy now to have a full roster group in low levels. back when i played, the only groups were of similar origins, ( rangers and druids ) sk and mages, etc depending on what race, and what starting city you chose. it made you learn your character well and then when you hit plains of knowledge you found out all sorts of stuff that wasnt available but would help you now. today. that mine beginning - is too simplified. all my characters when small , died alot! when glooming deep came about , yeah its nice to be simplified, but it doesnt make you try to learn every aspect of your character to get ahead. chuckls- my thief - oh bother_ he was so weak and unuseable in the beginning - i remember every account after, i made sure to 2 box him, and power him up to plains of knowledge where they then performed fairly well.
bards - hm? wasnt impressed until it grew. at low levels bards are hard to play, but if you own a bard and you can be one of the highest in the group then your looked up to. but head to head equal levels i dont see anything special out of the bard until he gets his good songs and is good at using them , took me awjhile to get a set up of songs and gear that let me perform specialized tasks in group. and then it was always a hassle to reset the style when coming back from a big gaining of songs,equipment. and had to reshuffle how the play went . if a bard can steadily rise gaining stuff in small bits n pieces i think its easier to transition to how to use stuff, but i remember the first RAID my bard was in . he got like 8 new songs, new drum new gear , and when i fnally sorted him out and started playing well again it was almost a month after that big gain. and yes , right after the raid I couldn't get the timing right of the new songs. hindsight- given time to use each song individually it would have given me a way to judge how each was changing my use. but gaining like 10 lvls and 8 new songs was a total revamp of him. still a good group character, but can be a pain to run well.
sorry you went through the last 5 characters so ast i couldnt put together my thoughts. um ? rouge ( what i term thief ) one of the weakest classes to solo with. in groups ??? its useable if its played well. but not a needed thing. at least to my endeavors so far. if they get him up on DPS and make double weilding a stronger thing for the um ? rouge... i think more people would have fun with him. but he is such a small niche helper most groups dont even think to look for them. ..................... shadowknight ( SK) yeah they were a sencond rank tank in the beginning, then they got some good overhauls and became a good tanker if you supplied the right backup system. if we didnt have clerics paladins and other tanker classes they would be #1 they are still to my knowledge, one of the better ways to play solo. ..................... shaman - when looking at all the classes to begin with they seem underwhelming. but when you play them, wow they can do so much! i notice now in gloomingdeep - they can be run ok with either a healer or a dmg dealer helper. its diffucult but doable. given good gear and effective use of their talents they are fairly fun to play as a solo, but they shine when they have 2 or more people in front of them where the buffs and debuffs begin to shine. put a warrior and a beserker in front of a shaman and a another healer and that 4 some can do a heck of alot of damage in time. ----------------- warrior - sighs what to say here - every warrior i have needs healing help, same as beserker. great dmg deeler IF he can stay alive. not a good solo character for that reason . i suppose a warrior that also learns potions could possibly keep himself alive longer, but that specialization will slow down the progress of leveling and your group will leave you behind ( thing i always found no matter what i tried to do to help my warriors. warriors are a frontline that needs backup. if you dont have friends ... your out of luck.
I gave up on my ranger at lvl 15, it just wasnt getting better, maybe he does if you stick it out longer. but looking at his spell progression i was unlikely to reach those goals as easily as other characters.
wow beserkers- difficult to play solo. needs heals. if you have a group of friend thay play together great! its easy then. but if your doing a beserker on your own its alot of grinding what you can kill, until you get big enough and have strong enough gear to help pffset the hits the mobs give you all the time. after my 1st berserker , i dont think i ever ran one solo again.
ewwww. good and decent humans dont play Daybreak EQ. Want REAL EverQuest? Project Quarm. Progressive. No disgusting boxing nonsense, no mercenary garbage. no krono. 2000 REAL HUMAN players loving EverQuest the way it was meant to be. Its freshly released on Classic right now - waiting for you!!! Join us !!
And no Gloomingdale Deep starter area or defiant gear. TLPs are also super nerfed so the no lifer's and box army bums can burn through expansions in like 2 months. Quarm is true to era difficulty progressing at a comfortable 9 months between expansions so u can breathe easy and enjoy the game.
It's great fun, it's also not viable for anyone and everyone to join in. Server is operating at max capacity with 900 players online and you are waiting for hours at a time to even have a chance to group at a named loot camp. I've already got lvl 16 on Quarm but I can tell already that it's not really an option moving forward for me as a serious endeavor for several reasons. The first is just time. I don't have enough time to wait for several hours just to be able to start playing the game. Sitting around or perpetually rolling new alts is not my idea of experiencing Everquest. The second is that there will not be instanced raid mobs on there for around 4 years. This means that there will only be 1 or 2 guilds, one of them being project faceless and the other probably whatever guild secrets is in, will be the only two guilds experiencing the game at its peak, and everyone else will be playing platinum quest to get any of that gear as hand me downs from the adventurers who looted it.
@@elevatormusicirelia9043 lol no. are you high? there are 1800 online right now. lag free. no queues. there are about 5 main guilds right now and about 12 medium/smaller guilds. Dragons are dead. Manastones have been gotten. youre delusional. "waiting several hours to play the game" - you just unmasked yourself as a fail troll
No boxing huh? So if I want to actually progress in the game I'm reliant on others unless playing certain classes. People who are against boxing just lack fundamental understanding of how the game works, especially in original EQ.
I found this while looking for quarm content. I love project quarm. My first time since original playing 1 character since i can’t box. Loving actually grouping. I’m a warrior.
Nice data capture to show where the distribution is of actual logged in characters. Thank you for this information
When I was playing EQ way back in the day (1999-2008) I remember always hearing about FV and thinking I'd never make a character there because I didn't want to get nailed down and never be able to transfer if the population started bottoming out.
Now, almost 20 years later, I can absolutely understand how it's finally come into its own. We're older, have stable jobs with decent income, but limited playing time, so FV is the perfect place to make all those alts of classes you wanted to try out but just didn't have the time to level up and equip the hard way. Just make your toon, then invest a little of your disposable income and buy them all the wonderful toys you used to scroll through Allakhazam drooling over, and get that experience of wandering into a zone from an older expansion that always gave you grief and just decimating everything in it.
Hell, even top tier Raid gear is tradeable, so it's perfect for people who want the abilities but lack the time to put in with a Raiding guild to go grind it out (while also competing with the other members for the drops). I imagine 90% of the player base of FV are us old-timers looking for a taste of the glory days without the time sink; the other 10% are the people doing the farming to feed the 90% and rich dilettantes who are just dabbling before moving on to something else.
You're absolutely right, that's why I liked Mischief the random/bonus loot plus tradeable made a surplus of items so you could get some BiS gear for really cheap and it was great to finally be able to get some of the items I never got. Like when I played my warrior in a raiding guild on live when Planes of Power was out in 2002/03 I was like 5th on the list to get a Blade of War from Rallos Zek and I never got one, and there was maybe 1 or 2 warriors that ever got a Dark Blade of the Warlord when it was relevant, I was able to get both those items on Mischief this time around and more and it was really cool.
I almost always have Erudite Paladin as my main...I'm usually the only one on the entire server when I'm online 🤣
I'm there with you, except my Paladins are always High Elf or Half Elf (if I already have a HIE on the server).
You? So this is where you went...
I literally play the same thing. Erudite Paladin. I may have been the only one on multiple TLPs now playing this combination. Or at least one of very, very few. Not hard to guess which character is mine if you’ve played a bunch of TLP’s in the last 6 years. Always the same erudite paladin with the same name.
Really cool that you do this man, much appreciated
Agreed that Bards are popular boxes for their utility and ease of play, however, I think it's worth mentioning that Bards are also a super strong DPS class in SoD still, which may cause more people to play them
Bard players can get carpal tunnel syndrome
@@lifetrees1 /melody is a great thing. Saves lives and wrists.
I cant speak for how they are after Velious, but Wizards got a bad rap because people think they're just DPS, when they're really a hybrid of the casters. So the the specialized casters out shine them on the surface, and their main utility is a blindspot of min/max'ing and parsing data pre-PoK, and in the eyes of the community eliminated after.
They get pigeon-holed into pure DPS because the other specialized casters will always beat their combat utility, but they have the second best caster CC with their roots and stuns. Before there were guides for everything, their scouting abilities were an actual thing as parties were exploring and discovering things for the first time.
And their last problem is no one ever sees how much experience and time your Wizard saved your group by evac'ing and being able to freely move around the world. They trivialize this value by biasing everything towards raid performance. And they ignore the number of nights they spent unable to find a group or when they do an open camp. It's impossible to measure the value of being able to move your group to any zone on the map in an instant to find the best exp and loot, and then send everyone back home at the end of the night.
I'm not excusing Daybreak for failing to give them a niche that allows them to shine for the last 20 years, but Wizards are the most overlooked and underrated caster of classic EQ. Almost makes we wanna roll a new Wizard on Quarm right now
I would imagine FV has a higher percentage of players using MQ2, so the rogue, SK and MAG numbers for that server absolutely make sense. It's not about the tradeable loot, it's about how much power they can get out of the class while paying basically no attention to it. I'm surprised the bard isn't higher there too.
I solo box on tlp's, live, and emu's my favorite class is BST for my play style. It can be very active and I can solo efficiently. With that being said, they need to start releasing BZK and BST with the start of each TLP. Those who want to play their favorite class have to reroll or prepare to PL. The purest nostalgia wore off for me after the first TLP. Just think those two classes are over or near 20 years old. They belong in at launch and helps reduce burnout to catch up later.
I completely agree with this, it was cool to unlock new classes and races as time went on when the game was live but now those things should be part of original however they need to make it work. I hated that in World of Warcraft with Death Knights, like I don't want to have to start at level 58 wanted to play them from level 1.
Comment at 11:35: Rogue poisons become relevant during Seeds of Destruction. Their slow (Myrmidon’s Sloth) eventually will overwrite Forlorn Deeds, but not Turgur’s Insects. This makes soloing the class a lot easier.
awesome i didn't know any of that.
BST come into power in SOD. DRU are insane on TLP during the early levels for power and ports both. They recently changed the banish line of nukes they have to work on constructs and elementals both, and opened up more options for their charm with insect types. Back when they consolidated DOT damage and changed the numbers on every druid dot in the game and altered stacking mechanics for them, the click dot items in game from kunark and PoP get the Upgraded version of the dot, making them insanely good soloing. My druid on Agnarr can kill in PoF with no mana using just clickies and not be slow because my highest dot is on the Orb of Clinging death and free to cast.
Druids never really fall off in power anymore due to the changes above to charm and their insanely good Damage Shield AA that can be cast on lower lvl players. A 110 druid can put a ds on a lvl 75 group that will kill every mob in a lvl 75 task mission. They also get multiple lines of quint nukes starting at lvl 91 to open up quint kiting for them.
The real reason you will always see more classes like Mage end game is because of the lazy factor they offer. Raid damage dru can hold their own post 110 as well and have been top of charts for periods.
Thanks for doing this research. Pretty interesting stats. Not surprised about the numbers - you can tell how closely linked the classes are to their perceived power. Monks a great example. They're stupidly overpowered for a long time. Then they're nerfed into uselessness. I wish DBG would go through all eras and rebalance everything. But that'll never happen.
Monks are lest liked for a few resins. They are classed as tanks not DPS witch pushes players away. They seem to drop off the map in most expansions because they get almost nothing in skills and times. They remain the after about 60 on live.
Right now on Mischief/Thornblade. Necros, Mages, and Monks are topping the parses. They are the primary damage in raids.
druids - your fairly right druids were one of 2 characters that could get groups to where they wanted to go, until more portals were added and more characters got port type abilities.
i remember keeping my druid on standby when ever i was running a character in plains of knowledge, - when i would see people asking for help to get somewhere i knew i could go i would offer assistance, many weekends i would just use my druid as a strolling porter for groups going here and there, some people gave excellent gifts, others were astounded i had a small fee, usually potions i was short on.
a few times i had single characters come back hours later and gift we with a special item they found dropped and none of their group could use.
loved those people.
when the porting finally ended was when expansions were coiming out left and right and updates would gift other characters with ports that people like me couldn't afford( litterally ) some new areas had no port spells for druids.
but characters who bought the expansions would get items or gear to port them there.
so if you didnt buy the new stuff you never had a way to get there other than on foot.
if that was possible.
sometimes it was not. because the new areas were to high leveled for any of my characters to get to.
thats when druids became less needed.
same with any other character with travel spells.
i find - my paladin ( dwarf) is good in small groups (up to 4 or 5 ) but when bigger groups are formed he cant do whats needed, he needs help.
thats what i found in my time running my pally. was fun in small groups , but when the group got to 6 or 8 or more it was just too much to hold aggro and keep myself alive. i needed help with heals and buffs and crowd control when the groups got big.
You’re not supposed to self heal as a group paladin. If that’s happening, the group makeup is borked. Where pallies suffer as tanks is the ability to generate area-effect agro. The only practical way to get the attention of a bunch of mobs is via group heals, but they are slow to cast and costly in mana. But in a good group you should have a CC handling adds and a healer on your tank. Pallies are insanely good at getting snap agro and keeping it. Unless you have a careless wizzy nuking recklessly, you should always have agro as a pally.
12:54 Later on, shaman heals actually dominate the game. They get an AE rain heal that generates massive healing for raids. They outheal everyone, including clerics. Their dps on raids by just rolling dots is actually superb, too. Shaman are just a very powerful class in pretty much every era of EQ history.
As for wizards, they are capable of excellent dps even in a pickup raid environment. I joined a pickup Aerin`Dar raid early in PoP on Oakwynd on a level 61 wizard and managed to top the parse over multiple level 65 chars, including monks. One of the monks came close to me, but I still edged him out. I just rolled rains and concussions the whole fight while riding high on the aggro meter. The main tank never died so I never got summoned.
That's really cool with Shamans. I like Wizards but my fights are usually very long with a smaller box army killing raid bosses so they are OOM no matter how I do it, in PoP I had all of the AA and near BIS gear on Mischief and they usually lead dps till they run oom, but it's also maybe skewest because all of my other classes were near BIS to so it's a lot to keep up with. If you do sustained dps to keep mana up, the damage coming out falls below just about every other class I play with.
Monk on live here. If I had to guess, over time Monk utility for pulling went down as more and more classes gained abilities to be able to effectively single pull with little tricks, heck even Rogues with smokescreen traps can mez a little pack and single pull. That combined with the DPS value in a group Monks bring. A extremely well played Monk can create raid burn damage equivalent to a berserkers on live for most expansions, however in more recent times, berserkers provide more melee utility to other group members and have higher sustain with a 1 minute reuse dicho line. To top it off, Rogues and Zerkers have assinate and decap utility for soloing humaniod blues, where monks have no such utility making them less desired.
Additionally caster dps on raids for the last few years has def outshined melee dps in raids on average. However with the newest expansion LS, this has changed slightly as Monks are now currently the flavor of the month due to a redesign on melee weapon ratios which have propelled monks as high tier dps benefiting the most from these changes even though all melee are "eating well" so to speak. It actually would be interesting to see what the monk population looks like now on live, or at least FV where twinks and alts are leveled quickly, if it weren't so time consuming to generate the data.
Good suggestion, individual class tracking through expansion.
Also, the cleric number is high due to boxing
Yeah I think that becomes apparent when Mercs come out the numbers drop.
So while I don't have a lot of experience as I havnt played any other class other then a Wizard if I had to guess it seems like Wizard is one of the hardest classes to solo with. You are super squishy and its not until much later where you can use aoe snare, aoe attacks, and jboots that you can even begin to quad kite. Until then your mostly just killing one MAYBE 2 mobs and then having to sit and meditate mana. If your not in a group its insanely slow to lvl with and I'd say a lot of people just give up with it during the lvling process. I have no idea if other classes are as hard to solo with but from vids it seems like a lot of them have an easier time solo killing things/less down time. Killing one mob then medding for 3+ min is super slow lol
This isn't really true. I played Wizard as main up through PoP and I was quadding with her in the early 20s. It wasn't efficient but neither was sitting around waiting for a group or waiting for my friends to decide to log in (I've always played MUCH more than my friends). There's a long stretch ideal for kiting in the eastern part of Eastern Wastes (near the bridge) and I spent hundreds of hours there, over six or seven characters (wizards and druids). Lots of downtime but that was true for everyone in EQ at that time. Wizards are just overshadowed by more efficient (read: melee) DPS later on. Once Manaburn was nerfed (that was the peak of the Wizard's popularity), it was all downhill from there.
I started every account i owned (other than the 1st one) with druid!! I love me a druid. fits my play style the best.
my 2nd character on every account is always the beastlord. love me a pet!
can't wait to see how they stack up.
I always make the mistake of including a druid everytime I play, i Think it's because it was one of the main characters I used 20 some years ago but they are wildly underpowered in a lot of things at the start of a TLP for a long time and the reason I had a druid back in the day was versatility but now that I can play a group or more at a time I don't really need the versatility, ie, a healer and a dpser, I just get the best healer and the best DPSer and go to town.
After playing FV with tradable loot, I would not go back to a regular server.
Enchanters in PoP are still Kings !!
It is with GoD where they start falling in dps but you need even more CC.
hell yeah powerful healers , but they never level up with the group.
i had to 2 box my clerics during the week to keep up to the leveling of the group i was with.
we played on weekends as a 10 strong group for mobs we couldnt kill in our little groups.
sometimes were heard about big groups doing raids for dragons or special places where there was a certain way you had to kill them to get things to pop.
we were never that good. or maybe we just werent big enough.
and none of our group was guilded up then , so we were doing things that guilds found easy , but we had troubles with because we didnot have the gear from powerful mobs waiting around tobe handed out.
mages - interesting - i had fun playing my mages, they could be a mainstay in the groups. they were kinda fun to play solo too.
never had a overpowered mage, because i had other characters that could do similar things better.
but i can see if mage was my fist how it would overpower other characters.
especially when used as the backbone of groups.
Awesome info 👍
enchanters - interesting - when i played mine yeah it had some crowd controls, but it wasnt a soloing character. my enchanter needed fighters , to keep the hits to a minimum !
if i got hit too hard or too often i couldn't concentrate - and spells would fizzle.
gimme a good frontline of fighters and tanks and healers to keep them alive and i could control anything up to my level usually.
but solo - enchanter was just a maker of items.
Enchanters start off slow but get crazy good as soloers pretty quick. I mostly 3 box a tank/healer/DPS class and if the 3rd is an enchanter it usually just goes around basically soloing stuff while the healer occasionally drops buffs and heals, and the tank just sits there soaking up exp. Starts around mid 20’s after I leave Unrest, usually to Mistmore. Reverse charm killing is so crazy fast and effective. Sometimes I just load up the chanter and solo for a few hours for fun and a challenge.
i can agree with you they start off slow, and as you say around lvl 20 they become the head of the group or can solo.
(if you choose a good contingency of spells!@@stabgod
Bards huh? I mained a Bard through the classic - velious era until I got banned. Then I rocked the Monk through to Gates of Discord.
have you ever compared each character to themselves ?? like a lvl 20 compared to a lvl 80????
i'd love to see how each ( class ) expands or changes as they get bigger.
i will assume from this graph alone that the shaman is the only class that shines throught its rise in powers.
the bard , cleric, druid, enchanter, monk, they all have need of help to get thenm back to their heydays.
the magician took a hit early but rose back to power
so 7 out of 16 classes i can clearly see either steady powerups, or rises and fails in keeping power levels .
the rest (9) eiher stayed even or varied slightly .
by looking at this info and making a tornado like looking graph i theorize that only the shaman will have the cone effect. thin point at bottom and wide area at top.
thats not to say they gained new things, but rather to say their given beginnings rose in an even tempo - probably because they are one of the most versatile, yet difficult classes to play well.
anyone can do a decent job with them.
but the people who get into it , live it ,will find cleaver ways to use this and that ability to do something a different class can do in a straightforward simple way.
bad example - getting through a locked door.
rouge (thief) picks the locks
berserker warrior - probably use brute force to break it.
magician wizard or any spellcaster with fire would burn thru it.
like i said bad example but shows more ways than one to do similer effects.
i believe the shaman is that type , followed by magician, then any other class that stayed fairly even across your graph.
those that rose or fell or did both on your graph
will be the characters that have wildly fat or skinny areas in my proposed tornado looking graphing.
i see magician, shaman, SK lead in players,
cleric, druid, enchanter, necro, ranger, rogue,warrior, will be those classes that play wise will generally be needed for groups either for dmg or spells or for niche things that no one else can do.
only the paladin and the wizard seem to bee the characters that have never truely expanded outside of their original roles.
meaning - they have changed the leat from lvl 20 to lvl 80
every other class looks like it tried doing things the others do.
thats why the rise and fall of the characters.
saying this it would be interesting to chart the growth of each character by the way the skill numbers rise.
do the shaman and magician show a steady rise in all the different skills?
or do they show sudden rises in certain skills????
how did they stay so popular???
I've never compared classes to each other in that fashion i usually rush to max level. It would be neat to somehow chart best in slot maximum damage per second on certain raid bosses with each class but that would be a big task to track. What ideas do you have to track power from level 20 to 80? On a live server or on a TLP from Classic ->
I don't think that's correct (that they all need help). The "problem" is, in this day and age of multiboxing, no one is really getting 100% from any class. So it becomes a game of which class requires the least bit of attention to provide the most benefit. Also, all classes will explode in ability from 20 to 80 because there are entire major spell lines that don't start until later (Splurt for necros, for example. Aegolism line for Clerics, Tagar's Insects for Shaman, etc). Charting that would be a task I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy since the parameters are so varied. Solo vs group vs raid, played "straight" or boxed, indoor or outdoor zone, type of mob (undead, humanoid, etc).
@@Remianen ..... I WAS STATING MY EXPERIENCES FROM RUNNING SINGLE CHARACTERS. yes boxing 2 or more is easier to do things.......... but more specificlly , it was my thoughts , my reactions to how each type played.
when i could find groups , that was best. but when i could not i resorted to boxing 2 or 3 of my own characters.
(back then) i had one computer, i tabbed between characters/games.
it was the only way i could play by myself.
after a while i had 2 computers so a friend and i could both play , or i ran 2 computers with 2 characters each. that was about the limit i could handle.
right now 2023 - i am limited to a laptop.
soon i'll get my tower (desktop) functioning again. then in a year or so maybe i can pick up a 3rd computer and try getting to 6 character groups.
but playing more than 2 characters on one machine is clunky at best.
and the FOLLOW i have to use sucks.
LOL
sorry for any misunderstandings,
just my take on what I have experienced.
jeffrey rayborn
that was the biggest ??? change i had. when i finally guilded up and saw the resorces a guild could aquire.
i dont play enough to be guilded now.
and i dont know if i ever will again. because it puts such a restriction on where and when and how you play.
i find running in smaller groups much more satisfying.
probably because in smaller groups we all gained in our efforts.
i remember the guild stuff i did , and i almost never got gear or bonuses.
i was just one of the peon characters they expected to fall during the raiding.
an it ws disrespecful! i find that many guilds run that way.
especially really big strong guilds.
the smaller guilds seem friendlier, and more helpful.
but they never seem to last.
Storytime! When I was raiding in Luclin (when it first launched), all beastlord spells were available to be bought on vendors. Sadly, they also dropped off raid mobs. We were looking for KEI/C3, Garrison's, group Focus, and group Aegolism....and getting Spirit of Khati Sha and Sha's Advantage. Remember, during those days, a mob could only drop up to 8 items (usually 6) and 2 of them were guaranteed to be spells. I hated Beastlords from that moment til now. I have one at 90 and I created a Wood Elf who's currently at 20 but I'd be more likely to heroic the Wood Elf than play her up. I'm still bitter from all those Greig and Thought Horror Overfiend and Shei Vinitras and The Va'Dyn and Itraer Vius kills that resulted in BEASTLORD spells. That were available on VENDORS!🤬🤬
Yeah that's nasty lol dropping you vendor spells.
i love data!
Check agnarr for your planes of power stats.
I'm not against it but when I did server population tracking for whole server Agnarr had a max of 141. This could mean people have adapted to server needs or are boxing certain things, I could grab the data and then compare it to Oakwynd when it gets to PoP though to see how/if the ratio changes.
i think the MONK is like the bard. it takes a certain mindset to play them well.
and new stuff reshuffles their usefulness.
mine was fun till about level 20 when other characters were stronger.
but then i have seen higher ranked monks totally control the groups their in , again i think it has more to do with the players character than the character of the monk.
i;ve seen both good and bad monks.
They should just change it so you run a whole group of your own characters on one account with you playing 1 and 5 acting as mercs and you can switch between as needed and make it so you can train the characters to behave as you would. except the time locks ,
hm hm hm ... loved my necro in the beginning stealing life force feels so good.
then those spells begin to wain later and it becomes difficult and you need help. i dont know about if they got buffed later i was out of touch with everquest for a time and the few times i tried coming back i just couldn't get into the rythem of the game.
there is no ??? it is very difficult to play now as anything, because the grouping has been moved for low levles to the cream of the crop players.
if your not big enough you cant find a group usually.
and i dont have the time or funding to box a whole big group to get the better gear for one or 2 classes.
i am just now returning to EQ, only have one active account and started a druid last night to level out of gloomingdeep.
gonna try leveling out a beastlord tonight.
if my work (real life) comes into fruition i might be able to afford to build a 6 or 8 character boxing set up.
most i have ever done was 3 .
and with just 2 commputers thats frustrating.
as it is - i'm gonna get this account to plains of knowledge before i expand. and see if i can keep this EQ attempt alive.
wonder if this laptop can handle 2 or 3 accounts on this little screen????
we'll figure something out.
Start with a 2box. Pick SK/shammy or cleric/chanter.
This SK duo is straight forward throughout the game and into PoP. If you can, join a guild on your shammy at max level and soak in the gear. The game is completely different when geared out from a raiding guild.
The cleric duo is harder in the beginning but gets powerful around 20’s, and beyond. It will be a chanter charm fest from there moving forward. Again, at max level join a raiding guild on your cleric and soak up the raid loot. Cleric raiding is both challenging as your guild figures stuff out, then ez mode after a few clears. A well geared cleric with the right clickies is godlike and you will never solo again. Then when Kunark comes out, your guild will go out of its way to get you your epic.
This game was so hard and cumbersome with only one character playing at a time. Two boxing made it way more enjoyable. Raiding on a semi effective guild is the best way to gear up and get access to the cool stuff. I always raid on a cleric as they are always needed and incredibly easy to master. Clerics usual get gear first and DKP ends up feeding my fun to play alts.
@@stabgod ......i understand your duo choices - typical.
but my choices were fueled by wanting to play certain characters.
i love druids and beastlords, so those were my first two characters. then i wanted heals so made a cleric..
my experiences while running my cleric alone looking for groups back oh around 2000 or 2005 was that with access to POK the cleric took off with all the new spells, but trying to maintain equlibrium with a group of player-characters was difficult.
reason being - the healer classes don't level up as fast when all they do is heal and buff in groups.
the dps chacters level so fast and leave the healers in their dust looking for more capable healers equal to their levels.
cant remember how many weekend sessions i would get dropped by one group and get picked up by a different group only to be dropped again when our lvls grew too far apart.
just a fact of the system. if you do dps, you get more exp.
just casting heals - means all the exp you get is from spells, not dps.
and the rate you gain exp is less than the rate dps ers can get because their dps climbs faster than heals or spells do.
maybe in the futur they will learn how to keep dps and healing experiences equal.
Back in 2006, I made my own dual CPU (Pentium 3 1-GHz) on an ASUS motherboard with 4GB of ECC RAM and a mid-level SoundBlaster + video card.
This setup allowed me to 3-box on a single system, alt-tabbing between the accounts, all the way into the Secrets of Faydwer era, with all the bells and whistles turned on. None of them were bots; I was literally starting an action on one, switching to another to begin an action on it, switching to the third to do something, and rotating like that. Granted, none were melee (Enchanter, Cleric, Shaman), so they didn't need constant repositioning, but it still took effort and attention to detail.
But the thing is, I was doing that with technology that was old even then, mitigated only by a comparatively large amount of RAM (for the day) and the additional CPU that I used to run the other 2 EQ instances through the EQ.ini file.
That was 16 years ago. With even a moderately adequate laptop for today, you should easily be able to 3-box (with mercenaries) and still be OK. Might have to tweak the settings a bit, but the hardest part would be training yourself to alt-tab the right number of times to end up on the right character. The /follow command can sometimes be buggy as hell, but it was good enough for me to run my alts up to the Queen Sendaii raid in The Hive by using the levitation trick from the zone wall without dropping down into a mob's lap or leaving someone behind.
its like saying that wizards drop off due to ports...literally nothing about them changes. Also, porting from camp to camp, evac etc....ports are more than just PoK stones.
hmmm?? really?? i liked my beast lord. of course i was solo until i got to plains of knowledge, when he got a hell of a progression when i could get all his missing spells!
but that was when all characters started in different cities and never grouped till they hit plains of knowledge, with other types of characters.
when lucilin came out and i looked for a character to play, i thought the beastlord was the only one that had a chance to do everything. all the other characters seemed onesided. my difficulty while early on was finding info!!! all thse sites that now tell you where to go did noy exhist!! not when i was playing.
I had to map, explore and find areas to level up . and jumped on any knowledge that i stumbled into.
when i hit plains of knowledge, and hooked up with my druid, (2 boxing) he was a huge help and grew exponentially as i understood each of the things he could do well. it was a had road to get his characters specialized weapons, and i felt let down because they werent what i was expecting, it didnt fit my game play at first.
but once i figured out how his weapons excelled and how to (chuckles) train my pet (so to say) he became an asset to all my groups, nearly took over tanking on most of my groups.
and where he had faults my ddruid came thru with different solutions, then i made a paladin and a cleric on different accounts and they progressed fairly similarily - rough at times until they hit plains of knowledge, where all their hidden talents came to fruition.
i think thats the biggest part of everquest i miss the most, the difficult climb to get to plains of knowledge, its so easy now to have a full roster group in low levels. back when i played, the only groups were of similar origins, ( rangers and druids ) sk and mages, etc depending on what race, and what starting city you chose.
it made you learn your character well and then when you hit plains of knowledge you found out all sorts of stuff that wasnt available but would help you now.
today. that mine beginning - is too simplified.
all my characters when small , died alot! when glooming deep came about , yeah its nice to be simplified, but it doesnt make you try to learn every aspect of your character to get ahead.
chuckls- my thief - oh bother_ he was so weak and unuseable in the beginning - i remember every account after, i made sure to 2 box him, and power him up to plains of knowledge where they then performed fairly well.
For Mischief now, Wizards are passing melees DPS on bosses. And Necros have absolutely blown us away now. Rogues are starting to pass monks too.
Wizards are meant to be mained. Good info!
bards - hm? wasnt impressed until it grew. at low levels bards are hard to play, but if you own a bard and you can be one of the highest in the group then your looked up to.
but head to head equal levels i dont see anything special out of the bard until he gets his good songs and is good at using them ,
took me awjhile to get a set up of songs and gear that let me perform specialized tasks in group. and then it was always a hassle to reset the style when coming back from a big gaining of songs,equipment. and had to reshuffle how the play went .
if a bard can steadily rise gaining stuff in small bits n pieces i think its easier to transition to how to use stuff,
but i remember the first RAID my bard was in . he got like 8 new songs, new drum new gear , and when i fnally sorted him out and started playing well again it was almost a month after that big gain.
and yes , right after the raid I couldn't get the timing right of the new songs. hindsight- given time to use each song individually it would have given me a way to judge how each was changing my use. but gaining like 10 lvls and 8 new songs was a total revamp of him.
still a good group character, but can be a pain to run well.
sorry you went through the last 5 characters so ast i couldnt put together my thoughts.
um ? rouge ( what i term thief ) one of the weakest classes to solo with. in groups ??? its useable if its played well.
but not a needed thing.
at least to my endeavors so far.
if they get him up on DPS and make double weilding a stronger thing for the um ? rouge... i think more people would have fun with him.
but he is such a small niche helper most groups dont even think to look for them.
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shadowknight ( SK) yeah they were a sencond rank tank in the beginning, then they got some good overhauls and became a good tanker if you supplied the right backup system.
if we didnt have clerics paladins and other tanker classes they would be #1
they are still to my knowledge, one of the better ways to play solo.
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shaman - when looking at all the classes to begin with they seem underwhelming. but when you play them, wow they can do so much!
i notice now in gloomingdeep - they can be run ok with either a healer or a dmg dealer helper.
its diffucult but doable. given good gear and effective use of their talents they are fairly fun to play as a solo, but they shine when they have 2 or more people in front of them where the buffs and debuffs begin to shine.
put a warrior and a beserker in front of a shaman and a another healer and that 4 some can do a heck of alot of damage in time.
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warrior - sighs what to say here - every warrior i have needs healing help, same as beserker. great dmg deeler IF he can stay alive.
not a good solo character for that reason . i suppose a warrior that also learns potions could possibly keep himself alive longer, but that specialization will slow down the progress of leveling and your group will leave you behind ( thing i always found no matter what i tried to do to help my warriors.
warriors are a frontline that needs backup.
if you dont have friends ... your out of luck.
I gave up on my ranger at lvl 15, it just wasnt getting better, maybe he does if you stick it out longer. but looking at his spell progression i was unlikely to reach those goals as easily as other characters.
sad that they made one of, if not the most difficult Class to play "Bard" from original EQ one of the easiest to play.
wow beserkers- difficult to play solo.
needs heals.
if you have a group of friend thay play together great! its easy then.
but if your doing a beserker on your own its alot of grinding what you can kill, until you get big enough and have strong enough gear to help pffset the hits the mobs give you all the time. after my 1st berserker , i dont think i ever ran one solo again.
Vie is pronounced Vee
@@treljaengo that sounds so much less fun ;(
@@vanman2099 c’est la vie
ewwww. good and decent humans dont play Daybreak EQ. Want REAL EverQuest? Project Quarm. Progressive. No disgusting boxing nonsense, no mercenary garbage. no krono. 2000 REAL HUMAN players loving EverQuest the way it was meant to be. Its freshly released on Classic right now - waiting for you!!! Join us !!
And no Gloomingdale Deep starter area or defiant gear. TLPs are also super nerfed so the no lifer's and box army bums can burn through expansions in like 2 months. Quarm is true to era difficulty progressing at a comfortable 9 months between expansions so u can breathe easy and enjoy the game.
It's great fun, it's also not viable for anyone and everyone to join in. Server is operating at max capacity with 900 players online and you are waiting for hours at a time to even have a chance to group at a named loot camp. I've already got lvl 16 on Quarm but I can tell already that it's not really an option moving forward for me as a serious endeavor for several reasons. The first is just time. I don't have enough time to wait for several hours just to be able to start playing the game. Sitting around or perpetually rolling new alts is not my idea of experiencing Everquest. The second is that there will not be instanced raid mobs on there for around 4 years. This means that there will only be 1 or 2 guilds, one of them being project faceless and the other probably whatever guild secrets is in, will be the only two guilds experiencing the game at its peak, and everyone else will be playing platinum quest to get any of that gear as hand me downs from the adventurers who looted it.
@@elevatormusicirelia9043 lol no. are you high? there are 1800 online right now. lag free. no queues. there are about 5 main guilds right now and about 12 medium/smaller guilds. Dragons are dead. Manastones have been gotten. youre delusional. "waiting several hours to play the game" - you just unmasked yourself as a fail troll
No boxing huh? So if I want to actually progress in the game I'm reliant on others unless playing certain classes. People who are against boxing just lack fundamental understanding of how the game works, especially in original EQ.
I found this while looking for quarm content. I love project quarm. My first time since original playing 1 character since i can’t box. Loving actually grouping. I’m a warrior.