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EQII Gold Hints of play with AAs
xpowderx
Member UncommonPosts: 2,078
I am making this for the Gold or Plat subscribers. I am a gold member so I will give you some helpful hints that will increase you playability for your character.
We have many new players, alot of them are Gold Subscribers.
Starting out, your starting area level 1-20.
First let me say it does not matter so much on your starting area. What does matter is getting to level 10. That is when your most important skillsets come available. You AA's or Advanced Achievements. When leveling I recommend stopping at level 10. Bronze and silver players do not get this option as the AA percentage is already set for them 30% for Bronze and 50% for Silver.
I want to enjoy the game, make the most of it. So when I reached level 10 I switched my AAs to 100%. Now the question is why I would do that. Well the system EQ has for AAs can be tricky. I noticed many high level players who have AAs but not enough as they would like. There is a remedy. AAs are very esily attainable at lower levels (10-40).
So what I do at level 10 is switch to 100% AAs at level 10. Then I go to the different newbie starting areas and quest up all the areas til all the quests con yellow or orange. In this process you can get 7-10 AAs before even leveling up to level 11. You also get a nice chunk of items for whatever purpose you desire.
Once all the noobie zones con this on the quests I then turn my leveling xp on to 50% through ther AA slider bar. Then I level on average around 4 levels before I switch back to full AA.. This lets your character have a huge advantage later.
At this point you get the idea! I then just repeat and rinse the process. When I go into a instance I always switch to full AA. As they usually give very good AA experience!
You can if played carefully have between 120-150 AAs by the time you reach level 40. That means from 40+ and on you can just set yourt AA slider to 50% and will be close to if not on par with level to full AA cap at 90.
Take your time leveling, there is no hurry. By the time you reach level 40 your character will be a power to be reckoned with!
EQ II has a large learning curve as well as large world. Be sure to check everything out!. The AA idea is to help you progress. As well as give you knowledge of the quests and starting areas for future alts :-D.
The advantages of doing what I recommended at high levels is this.
1. you are close to if not at your cap for AAs
2. your character is a extreme valued asset for raiding.
3. It completely helps your survivability at high levels since mobs become much more difficult.
4. you wont get dragged down at high levels and waste alot of time trying to gain AAs to be formidable.
5.You will get lots of group invites! especially if you are a Tank or Healer!
I hope this helps some of you who are new to EQII and are gold subscribers! May yours Aventures be incredible!
Comments
Thank you good information. I have been considering returning and debating between extended and the live servers.
Most veterans would say if you're returning, go back to EQ2 Live, EQ2X actually offers you [b]less[/b] for your money, which unfortuntely is true. I've joined EQ2X for only one reason, I can level and play whenever I feel like it, I don't have to worry about my dedication or monthly fees. But yeah, as for what you get for your money and if you have a decent level character already I'd say go back to Live. Oh and they don't let veterans have their veteran item rewards on EQ2X either >_>
btw, to op, nice post, good advice for new players.
The way SOE rolled out their F2P server actually sucks pretty bad to me. You are severely limited in what you can do race/class wise, dont have access to certain tier spells, cant hit level cap, etc, etc.
At least with the way Turbine did DDO and LoTRO you could grind out turbine points in game to not spend money. With the way SOE did it, you are kind of screwed if you dont.
I would go gold of course and I had problems with the population sparseness in the Live servers before which is precisely why I am considering extended.
I donno what server you must have been playing on cus Antonia Bayle was always pretty populated, even in lowbie areas, though I admit atm EQ2X has more lowbie players actually questing rather just high levels running from A to B. However, I'm sure given time that'll change as people get to high levels and not many people wish to play or have interest in EQ2 by that point.
My Qeynos toons were on Najena and my Freeport ones on Unrest.
I would say go with the extended servers, 2 of the live servers do have heavy populations at peak hours, but they are all High level/capped out players. Grouping is extremely hard to accomplish, and the economy on the broker is skewed to players who have money coming in from higher level toons.
The population on the Extened server has a lot more lower-mid level players to group with, and is arguably higher than the live servers.
Even with a thiner population I still prefer Live over extended. You just don't get enough from extended until you upgrade to the subscription tiers anyway and why would you want to pay a subscription to play a free to play game that has a cash shop tainted economy? Getting into a good friendly guild can go a long way to making up for a thin population in the old leveling zones. Look up "Order of the Rose" on Everfrost. Those are good folks, very friendly and helpful.
As for locking down your AAs early and often, It is definitly the way to go if you want to arrive at the max level with most or all of your AAs ready to go. It also gives you the opportunity to really explore the world and the lore which runs very deep in this game. The only problem is that you will level very very slowly. There is a lot of world out there to explore and you can spend a lot of time working though just the low level stuff. You have to be cool with that for it to work. But don't feel like you are stuck doing having to do that. If you feel the game dragging then level up a bit, perhaps to the next zone and get into something new. You can also talk to the Chronomage in any capital city to self mentor down and go back to areas that you skipped later. It is a bit more efficient to be level locked and get full exp for an area rather than self mentoring and taking an exp hit but self-mentoring is better than getting bored with the game and dropping out because things were moving too slowly. My point is that you should take the game at the pace that is right for you right now. Enjoy it. Don't try to over do the AAs if you find things moving too slow.
But having a healthy amount of AAs is very important. Definititly don't ignore them and power up to max level with few or none. That will hurt you alot. I would say, at the bare minimum have at least as many AAs as you have levels. That is still way to little in my book but I think you could get away with it. A better plan for someone who who doesn't want to worry about AA too much would be to simply shoot for having twice as many AAs as levels past 10. That would put you at 160 by lvl 90 and that isn't too bad.
But if you want to explore the whole world anyway, you might as well get your AAs doing it. Do your collections, Kill all the named mobs that have a * next to their name. and do all your heritage quests. This will get you lots of extra AA exp.
Need a list of the heritage quests? http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Heritage_Quests_Timeline
Need a list of all the zones? http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Zones_By_Level (note that you cant start characters in the outpost or colony and there has never been a way to get back to them after leaving.)
For everyone of those zones there are EQ2i has timeline pages that will give you all the quests to hunt down. Also, the splitpaw and bloodline chronicles are special instances/questing timelines for about lvl 30. These were two of the old adventure packs. Very good story lines. Worth doing if you haven't seen them before.
The zones by level page is also a great way to see at a glance what zones run in parallel. There are always 2 or 3 overland zones going, not to mention all the shared dungeons with their related quests and a healthy number of private instances. The most intense range is from 10-20, which has at least the 6 full up overland zones, as well as counting the districts of the two human cities really push that up to 8. But don't order your Ginsu Steak Knives yet. Because each city also had 3 layers of sewer systems to explore, either of which could easily keep you busy until level 30.
It is pretty easy to miss all the city stuff now though because they removed the two generic starting zones (Queen's Colony and Outpost of the Overlord) that were originally associated with the two cities and would dump new adventurers into those areas. Why? Well, these areas were not as coherant and well directed as the newer starting zones. If you seek to explore these areas on your own you will see what I mean. But that doesn't mean they aren't interesting as hell. They have a ton of early lore associated with them. So if you want to check them out. I would suggest searching around the various racial neighborhood districts and start picking up the quests there that start at about lvl 5 or 6. But remember, these are the old, undirected areas so you will find hidden quests givers, quest objects, and quest books all over the place. If that is what you are into. Just don't get burnt out on it.
Last bit. If you are really anal about doing the max number of quests then start your character as evil and be sure to do all the Freeport, Freeport sewers, Neriak and about the first third of commonlands before betraying to good to do the Qeynos quests. Alternatively, if you don't want to betray and don't mind playing evil then go that way as you can get to more quests as evil. (last time I checked) Most of Kelethin is not hostile to evil, just stay away from the Royal platform. You wont be able to get most of the quests that are in the city but you can do pretty much all the quests down below in GFay including the start area. Darklight wood and Neriak are not nearly so accommodating to good characters.
All die, so die well.
I forgot to mention I only have dessert of flames so won't I have to buy all the other expansions to play on live?
You only ever have to buy the latest expansion or the previous to get completely caught up. Right now you can get Sentinal's Fate for about $40 or you can get the shadow odessey for like $19.99, both will include everything previous. In fact, you should be able to log into your account and from those pages you can purchase either online.
All die, so die well.
Okay marvelous thanks
may not need to buy anythign to play up to level 80
as part of the Living Legacy promotion, 2 years ago, all older accounts were given access to all content Kunark and earlier
you only need latest expnasion, Sentinels Fate, to level beyond 80
I recommend you log into your SOE acct and review what content you have or have been given in free promotions
https://account.station.sony.com/authenticated/cam/updateAccountInfo!input.action?theme=eq2
or goto
http://everquest2.com/
and choose ACCOUNT
(its undergoing server maintenance as I post tho)
EQ2 fan sites
My 2 cents worth:
(take 2 - I really hate when my post gets lost ....)
Well I not goign to say all i spent 30 min typing out again.. but in a nut shell
1> EQ2X i find is a good alteritive to EQ2live is yo uwant to try it out for a while and dont have the money for live.
2> AA are really needed at high levels. And in EQ2X it would defetly help out in giving your more power from the restrictions taht are imposed on you. I have play EQ2X some found it lots more laggy and waiting for content to be downloaded all the time makes it nearly to slow for me to play for long periods of time. I not dug into the store yet but can you buy off the equimpment and spell restrictions?
But all in all AA make the charaters in EQ2, even more then the equipment. I have older charaters that where already in the 50s before they earned the first AA and it was a pain to go back and pick up the lower AA. (back when AA where first introduced to the game) It much easyer to pick them up as you go as to make them up.