Will start making future tier zones and armor to be level required instead of flags or old armor combines.

Are you saying that I could theoretically have the noobie cloth wrist item, and then skip right to the T8 wrist item?

Vald looks cool based on pics from Allakhazam alone. Riftseeker's looks cool too, but I think all the surface details would really mess with your head after a while.

You are doing well imo with having half your group be heals, that is a very good setup to have.

I believe this was actually your idea lol. I had a thread a while back about group balance.

Thanks for the advice guys. Here are my findings after experimenting (mainly for others who are soon to break into T5)

- all the chars with UC's pretty much never die. War can't be killed unless you're like me and just happen to have 2 bosses spawn directly on top of each other!

- Clearing corals takes about 2 - 2.5 hours. Really only using 1 dps for this (the monk). The dps has UC and the best strikes he can possibly have at this point, so each of his rounds does about 1 million damage.

- Characters without UC get killed by rampage all the time. I think the cutoff is about 150k hp. Any less than that, and expect to rez that character constantly.

I may technically be ready for T5, but I've decided to try and get the cleric his UC as well so I don't have to worry about him dying ever. I'm sure I'm going to want him to have his UC before T6 anyway.

Going to slowly work rogue up to have as good of dps as the monk. Hoping that will reduce coral clear time to about an hour.

Thanks for the good insight Anuli.

Hey guys,

Would you start working on T5 with this group, or continue preparing?

The Good Characters:

War with 4.5, UC, and over 300k hp buffed
Pally with 4.0, UC, and full T4
Monk with 4.0s, UC, NS 7's, and full T4

The Bad Characters:

Cleric with 4.0, lvl 11 oracle, full T4
Rogue with 4.0s, lvl 11 sorc, NS 4's, half T3 half T4
Paladin with 4.0, lvl 11 oracle, full T2

I'm pretty sure the 'good' characters are good enough to handle most of the zone by themselves, what do you think?

If anything, I'm thinking maybe try to get rogue his lvl 41 sorc and NS 7's, and get one of the secondary healers oracle 41. DEFINITELY not ready to start another UC, but I think secondary paladin would be next UC. Sound about right?

As is, it felt like a natural progression from PoD to HoH.  I didn't feel underpowered, and without augs I wasn't killing things ultra fast, Shadow fight took awhile.

Good feedback, Woogie (that's my cat's nickname dude, hope you weren't trying to sound intimidating lol).

Did Shadow feel like he was coming really close to killing your tank? Something seems a little off if you can kill Shadow the first night you spend in HoH. But if your tank and heals were basically as geared as they possibly could be coming from T2, I guess that makes sense. Its not like you can kill MCP already (or can you???)

I was so thrilled to not get rooted every fight last night that I stayed up at least 3 hours later than normal farming HoH.

If anyone is working on their UC right now that doesn't need Oracle V2s, pst in game. I no longer need Brawler and Guardian V2s, but need 11 Oracles.

Until I get time to test things further to make them work as intended, I've edited the resist for Roots, Stuns, Flux to be about -300 check for ToFS, T3/T4, and T7 which should make these spells a non issue now.

Thanks a ton Hunter.

Any feed back on T3/T4 zone for Avatars? Killing faster, err umm same rate as before the spell changes? Made their HP lower so hoping to increase how fast can kill them.

Hey Hunter,

It is taking me at least twice as long to clear heavens because even though I can down an avatar in less than 5 seconds, it is almost guaranteed that they will root me for 40 seconds with nearly 1200 resist.

I'm totally cool with every other change you've made, but can you pleeeeease go back to only earth and underworld being able to root?

Just a guess, but I have a feeling you weren't intending for people to have to sit there for 30 seconds in root after the mob is already dead.

I'll be very interested to hear an anecdote from a T2 player just arriving at HoH for the first time. My guess is that they are going to find the Avatars extremely overpowered, even if you reduce their HP to just 10% of what they originally were. I have UC'd full T4 and half T5 characters dying to unlucky debuff casts. I can't even imagine what its like as a T2 player there.

"it gets youon everyones ignore list for asking stupid questions"

I'm sure anybody who behaves like that is going to get what's coming to them, or perhaps they already got it through past trauma.

Again, my opinion, but hope it helps some of ya.

FLAME ON!

Oh, and more this week on T5 and further progression!

I actually agree with this whole post. The one thing I'll point out is that individual party differences have a pretty big effect on how much gear each character needs. For example, if I had 5 melee dps, then they wouldn't all need UCs and NS 5+ to do T5. If, however, I have 1 main melee dps, that toon better be beast mode with UC and the best strikes he can get at his level.

Personally I think 21+ main charm on war and pally in HoH is pretty crucial, because there are some pulls that sporadically bring 2 Avatars, and I'm pretty sure you'd get crushed by 2 avatars without 21+ tank/heals. DPS can do whatever they want in HoH, however, just don't be surprised if your first Heavens clears take 45 minutes.

My final opinion is that the jump from TACVI to T1 is one of the easiest transitions in the game. Therefore, I wouldn't consider having all TACVI gear crucial, but rather a nicety. I think its always nice to have a piece or two from the previous tier that you need, so that when you get sick of one zone (it happens), you can go take a break in another zone for a while.

Pfft. Using MQ2 and the options in it Hunter allows on EZ you can make the cleric cast group heal non stop, just as fast as it can refresh, by typing /twist <spell gem number> from the cleric. However, I find that to be far less effective and alot more wasteful in terms of mana than just using EQBCS to add a dedicated hotbutton macro to the cleric and making it cast from the controlling character. I do this by tying all my special attacks (pet attack, epic clicks, monk quick refresh abilities, etc) to ONE macro on themain box. Just make the macro in the same hotkey number across all your boxes, then its a simple /bcaa //keypress # on the macro for the main character. Works like a charm.

That's some good stuff, should be sticky. Thanks.

There is really no autopilot when using a cleric to heal your group, unless you use a program like Isboxer. The cleric has an AOE heal spell that needs to be cast to keep the groups health up. The amount of time you need to switch and heal depends on your other characters gear/survivability.

Cool, I better start practicing then. Can't wait to see how much progress I've made a month down the road, especially with my monk. He's about halfway to UC.

Thanks for the replies guys. I'll definitely work on charms and gearing up a cleric. And forget that mage, he's getting to be pretty useless. I'd rather have another auto attack beast like a 2nd monk or a zerker as one person suggested.

Fortunately, the account I was considering creating a new character on already has a cleric in the casters guild with 2.0, so I wouldn't be starting from absolute scratch. In fact, 2.0-4.0 is the FUN part imo.

When boxing a cleric, how much of a distraction is it? Are you able to still spend a lot of time tabbed over to the dps or is the cleric window in focus most of the time?