The Spirit Realm

Hi there. I'm a 70 pally with around 680AA. There are many AA's I still want @70, like speed of knight 5+, Knight's Advantage 5+, Combat Stab 12+ (did max agility finally, see for details).

I have the guk armor in bank, a full set sans breastplate and legs. Is it worth leveling to 71, then continuing the AA hunt, or should I stay at 70 and get what I want before going to 71.

yes IMO

The closer you get to max level, the better your chance to get a group to get more xp/loot/AAs. Get to 80 ASAP, then worry about AAs. The power increase at all levels in level dwarves any AAs you will ever get. If you fall too far behind, you will find it very, very hard to get a group.

i see you have elaborate definat so it will be a big upgrade for you to level to 71. i have a 73 pally on FV and it allowed me to solo faster in general and tank better in groups. you will not see much of a difference in exp gained from 70 to 71 in regards to where you are hunting. personally i found the hole dow in the bottom at castle very nice aa exp the mobs were light blue but died fast and dont hit hard. ward of tunare helps as well if you dont have it yet.

I did like you, stayed at 70 until I had broken 800AA. I found that leveling to 75 the loss of XP in my favorite hunting grounds (WOS murks) was not that terrible. (Now on the other hand, dinging to 76 absolutely killed it.)

I'd certainly ding 71 if you have a bunch of gear waiting for you. Also you can get Slay 7 and a few more ranks of nice DPS aa.

I agree with zorb hitting 76 killed a lot of my usual solo hunt spots . I work nights and play early am while everyone else is usually at work so solo a lot. Only places i still have for decent xp at 76 now are DSH ae pulling with ds pots and Sunderock while i farm the steamvent ruby is decent xp/aa now that its a hotzone. I could do rss as well but unfortuneately despite redownloading the zone files for it repeatedly its the only zone in eq in which i cant play without going ld evert 15 minutes. But the guk armor is a great upgrade from the elaborate set and is well worth leveling for to 71 or so. And while defensives are great for grouping and solo i got to 18/18 and now am working hard on offensive aa's in the hopes that i will be able to up kill rates some to make LP undead a bit easier to drop can solo there but currently taking 80% plus mana a kill and occasionally an AA or 2.

Yep definitley worth it - 71 enabled me to grab Guk Bb and other upgrades plus of course spell upgrades and the additional benefits of another level. These all really helped.

It's always worth checking on the spell upgrades by level too - that can influence you in the levels vs aa debate (eg Burst Heals, Benediction DD)

However I wouldn't necessarily advocate running straight for 80 - I too paused a bit as I didnt want to find myself at 80 but unable to kill xp mobs fast enough to farm AA. I'm now at 77 and 600 aas and working ona few more before going for 80.

Mind you if I was a hardcore raider I'd have probably gone for levels first as the benefits of the levels may have outweighed the AA.

Well, thanks for the input everyone. I've decided to go for 71, and then continue AA'ing there. Having the Guk armor in the bank seems to have been the deciding factor.

I'm 100% against Levels > AA argument. Mobs gain power faster with levels than you do. However, I have become a little mixed of opinion lately and made an exception. I think leveling to 73 to get burst is lifechanging. Basically a very hard to interrupt very very fast heal. It simply doesn't exist in a lower form before level 73, thus for soloing (and otherwise) I think that leveling to 73 to grind out your dps AA would still let you hunt in WOS, Arcstone, and the Nest. (You could probably solo ilsalin too although I'm not a fan of the RVR there yet until I get bigger.)

Seriously, you can level all the way to 75 and WOS/Arcstone will still be viable AA choices. That opens up a lot of ranks of DPS AA (and the last three SU ranks.) If you do go to 73 to get the burst, you'll still be able to get rank 8 of SU.

Why would you need 71 to get slay 7-9? The aa came out in PoR.

Do the AA first before moving up if mostly solo. Mobs are way way easier at level 70. Hole by the way is the easily the best xp area for AA I found. It sort of expires after ding 71. Just stick around get what you needed should not take too long anyhow. Level > AA only if you are a raider or got a fixed group of friends that you group with.

My own personal recommendation would be to get to 76 for Benediction. You also get full effect of all that gear...and I was able to pull 3AA per lessons in Arcstone at that level with that gear. Not exactly spectacular, but it was the easiest grind I've ever done.

I've still been using Arcstone for a bit of grinding at 76 and 77.

At 76 and 77, you might consider Direwind. Its a bit harder than Arcstone, but everything is harder than Arcstone really. There is the location of undead that if you are careful on the pulls, the most you should have to deal with is 2 at a time. They are still decent xp to me at 80, but they are all light blue to me, at those levels they are probably still dark blue and worth quite a bit.

If you just stick to the bone golems, you can single pull the entire time, just watch the pathing and snag them when they aren't too close to the static spawns. But you might run out of mobs before they respawn only taking those.

I don't chain nuke with benediction either, would burn through my mana too fast - basically just cast a couple of times per mob hoping to get the trigger on the mob.

It's useful quite often due to the occasional crit nuke and the dps increase from the trigger procs but I'm dubious as to whether it's worth going for the levels to grab this spell if you're on an AA grind - may well be better to stay lower level and get more xp per mob.

Same thing I do as well, Gorblimey...most of the time mob dies before refresh on second or third cast, and I usually don't cast if mob is around 30% (will cast on another target though). Nice thing about Arcstone at 76 was that I very rarely had to use mana on heals...combo of gear & AA made it unnecessary. I should also mention that I would be pulling/fighting the entire 30 minutes of lessons, only breaks moving from one pull point to the next.

Well, I did ding to 71, and I'm working on SU7 now. I've ugpraded some augs, and buying the last 2 guk pieces I needed bankrupted me.

I'm hoping to stay 71 long enough to make some money to buy some of that sweet 75 gear I see available.

You wont make much cash in arcstone (i can't even sell the arcblades and end up giving them away) but some good aa xp.

But you could always alternate with runs through CoD where you'll pick up trib items and loads of diamonds - CoD was always a nice earner for me. I got a fair bit of xp there too but somewhere around 76/77 most of the mobs became green cons - I do pop back once in a while if I need a quick cash or tribute boost.

As Carmaris pointed out, past the mid 70's then you'll hardly need to heal whilst hacking your way through the undead mobs in Arcstone.

I've noticed that Guk gear prices have crept back up now - they were high at first but came down to reasonable prices (cheapest piece I bought was 40k I think) as more of it hit the baz. But what's left now on Saryrn seems to be 100-120k

I got my gaunts, bracers and helm for 40k, legs for 50k, bp for 55k, arms for 75k,

Any of the BB gear a must buy?

Blackburrow trinket is a nice charm (took 3 - 4 hours of slaying in BB after it returned to normal to max it); also have the two earrings, gnoll brewer's cloak, and worn iron muzzle.

while you'll have less xp coming your way, it will be a small loss. perhaps 5 - 20 percent less a kill depending.

if you can get your xp now with your current gear and you arent having problems, you might consider staying at your level.

Well, I do about 3.5AA per hour without lessons right now in CoD or Arcstone. I do closer to 4 on murks in WoS. I can get almost 3 per hour in PoStorms. I read about people getting 6/hour, which thus raises the question...

Is the 75 gear worth levelling for? LOL.

No, I'm really not going down that path. I will stay 71 for a few weeks at least, I want to max all those 2-hander AA's, speed of the knight, etc. Also, need to max Combat Stability, Planar Power...you can see what I'm missing in my Magelo.

But if there are any specific gear upgrades I should be saving/camping for, do let me know.

(I'd love desperately to stay on topic, as this is the gear forum)

The most important peice of equipment is your weapon, and yours isn't too terrible, but I imagine being on FV you may be able to pick up better at some point.

Your gear is ok, you just need to get some augs. Get in a group in RSS if you possibly can and get those Flameshield Stones. Having HP augs is killing you.

Also, you could right now lose the P1 ring and get dwerium for a large ac/hp upgrade. Dwerium + Any cut Taaf + Round Peridot/Opal = 35ac/400hp +25 all saves and a handful of stats.

gear is only as important as the content / era youre fighting. if youre trying to tank higher end SoF zones, or want to in the short term, then you'd need to gear for it. however if you want to aa yourself up before you make the push to 80, you can do that with what youre wearing. i would avoid the lure of leveling to unlock gear, if you enjoy the xp bonus. there will always be better gear in every slot, its more an excersize in self control to keep yourself at the level to maximize that xp bonus you wont really parallel further along. if i were to start over, and i wanted to grind my aa's out early, i'd probably only linger at 71 for the most important ones, and then push for 80 and get the rest while grouping. this of course depends on class. the most likely candidate of my characters for this would be my wizard. there's really only one aa line they need above all else, crits, both frequency and potency. after i'd finished that, even though i'd be far from the max, i'd probably willingly level up, being that my goal would be to get the minimum aa's trained to be useful, useful being the key word, not maxed out.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess he's a paladin.

you must've been bored zorbee.

thats more or less my guidelines for my alts. in the paladins case focus on the tanking then move on. some people might wanna linger longer. me personally i'd wanna be in a rush to play with my friends asap. slay undead for instance. its not gonna do you much good if youre grouping. if youre the kinda guy whose gonna solo thoughout your career then it becomes higher priority. try not to go higher than 75 though, for anyone trying to take advantage of cheaper aa's. that's about the cutoff as far as ive seen. you still get benefits but way less. and the spells dont really help. but the tactic to stay on early to aa for paladins is weird. reason being stuns. when youre soloing something you need to be at least the level of your mobs. and then at least the level that'll give you the stuns for those mobs.

If I had a plat for every time that some random melee in the group asks who has the most hp and the group decides on that basis alone who should tank then I'd have at least 357pp.

On the plus side you can almost feel the incredulity creeping in when I'm offtanking the add and taking nothing like the beating he/she is!

Lately actually I've been getting asked "What's your ac?" Not even "what's your ac/hp?" like before. There certainly has been an education for pickup groupers.

Get to 73 and get your burst of sunlight spell then begin to grind in direwind at the boneyard. The mobs spend a majority of time casting spells and so their dps output isn't that high. Moving up in levels will nerf the xp in say WoS/Arcstone but during the TSS expansion at 75 that camp in direwind was a premier spot to solo for most paladins on my server. You have no idea how helpful the burst line of spells are, it will literally change the way you play your paladin. I recommend also getting the healing boon aa and stocking up on heal potions. If you can swing it try to pick up the clicky hot bp from arcstone it also comes in handy. The guk gear is on par with anguish/demi gear I don't think you should have any trouble soloing in dire.

cheers,
shiftie

HP is still a valid concern, but these days I'd say its more so for raiders than casual groupers. This to me is because of the AE's and spell DoTs that a raider will have to live through vs the minimal spell effects a grouper will come across. /shrug, there is always an ongoing debate of ac and hp. Strike a balance you like, I don't suggest you go all one way or the other, but thats just what works for me.

from my experience hp comes with ac anyways. granted, if ya not raiding high end atm, ya wont get the top hp, because ya might take a high ac item with 350ish hp over a low ac item from sof with 500+hp. but i really never had the feeling i had not enough hp for the content i raid. (at 22kish unbuffed now, raided up to solteris). i always feel though that need more ac

now dot and spell shield are a different matter. i am very happy to have those almost maxxed, it really helps against those nasty ae crap.

c.

HP matters to some extent in group SoF as well with the ae's proc and effects some of the named have especially since with group gear its so much harder to get max spell/dot shielding. there are a number of 6-8k dd effects and a number of 4-8k short term dots procced by group named in tier 2 plus SoF.

Easier to max spell/dot than to max Shielding :/