The Spirit Realm

Another hint about positioning in RoI. On the area above arena, I usually run into one of the corners, let all mobs get to me and then move out so I got my back against the wall. In the spider building, I put my back against the wall between the two ramps leading to the top half. I found that works pretty well.

Lol awesome video man!

Thanks for putting that video together and getting it posted Shiftee. Awesome stuff!

When you are not super over geared, these bolstered mob can really deal some serious damage and make mob dps out spike up like crazy. However at this stage it really just adds more riposte damage for you.

Just a FYI, with that double exp rolling right now ROI is a great place to AA. 7% a kill without lesson running. Considering it takes at most 10 secs to kill a mob there - it's kinda nice right now!

Just adding my thanks for that video too Shiftee, cheers. Slowly building up, I finally followed your route starting at the Raid mob room, through to the arena stand, 2nd room in the arena then looping back out to your first kill spot. Parser picked up 52 mobs (unsure whether that was correct or whether gamparse merges some mobs cause it bloody well seemed like more) on the pull and surprisingly I actually survived it. Deflection, Anguish BP + AoTI, LoH when low, Armor disc and normal healing with twincast/burst heals from there. Had to pop a hot potion towards the end as healing wasn't keeping up but that worked. Without the Anguish BP I'd not have managed it though so that's one of the prerequisites I'd say. I'm certainly not a Shiftee, but dps over the pull parsed at 17k

Normy, looking at magelos. I'm slightly less geared than you so it is possible mate. I did kill levitate as that seems to allow you to be pushed around more, and shrunk so I could get (and remain) right into the corner.

Yea, it's not an issue of gear. A mediocre paladin cannot do this, and I am a mediocre paladin. Did it again just because I'm apparently into hurting myself. Wasted a set of raid buffs, another lesson burn, and about 5 minutes of my life. Pulled a couple from the raid room, the first 2 rooms, and the mobs outside in the bleacher area. Gathered them all up by running them in circles until I had a nice tight group, ran them to the same corner used in the video, hit deflection and 7th vet AA once they started hitting me, went to town. After deflection faded I hit epic, CoA BP, Armor of the Crusader. Used LoH when I got a little low. Used 2 burst spells with twin cast to try to keep me alive when my life started dipping anyway. Finally died after about 2 minutes with most of the mobs alive and beating me.

Checked my xp gain: Gave up a percent of normal xp, a set of raid buffs, my 7th vet AA, deflection, HoP, and every defensive trick I had for 45% of an AA. Yup, in all that time I killed roughly 7 of them. Didn't have logs running because I forgot to turn them on and I'm on a newly installed copy of EQ, so I have no way of checking how the f that is even possible, all I could do is scroll my melee window and look at the absolutely TON of misses coming from me and very little actual hits.

It's not an issue of gear, nor an issue of strat. It's the player. This is just plainly out of my range.

yea i kind of suck at this too i guess

I dont die often, but I have been pulling smaller trains, maybe 6 pulls to get the whole zone.

But the xp just doesnt sem to pile up like i get in frostcrypt.. some times i ding a couple aa on a pull , but at the end of my xp time i seem to get more out of frostcrypt or underfoot groupage with a solo or group task or 2 involved in it.

I heard sk's do lost note book mission and can get 40 aas a lesson... wonder if it works half of that for us, or do we just lack the dps for that?

If you have trouble, I'd start with smaller pulls and just slowly add to it. I personally started with spider in the raid mob room only, then add more rooms to it.

I might also add gear level also make huge difference here, particularly a good 1 hander.

i went for broke an made first pull substiantly larger and that made big difference on aa earned got 5 or 6 on the one pull that included using intensity deflection and bp clicky, didnt bother with LOH didnt need it. but that big pull to start made lot of difference vs the smaller pulls i was making and wasting intensity on.

suposidly the sks are gettin 20 aas a pull in lost notebook, so they must be some pretty big pulls t6 / tower hard raid geared sk's.... unfortnatly we still havent bested Brath.

You can flip the instance just like what the rangers do using extra boxes, without doing that there is no possible way to make that much aa in a burn. Although as SK you got a lot more options on where to kill, lost notebook likely is less efficient compare to other zones for them.

Few things.

It's not the strat, it's the player. This is beyond me. I tried again last night as a last ditch effort to make any part of my lesson burns this week worth a damn. The pattern isn't what's killing me. It's a combination of inadequacy and unreal epic bad luck. I hit deflection at about 40%, Intensity of the Resolute, HoT and blessing of life healed me back up to full before deflection dropped. Went armor, LoH, and CoA bp when it faded. Well over half the mobs were alive and killing me when it faded. Noticed I was getting pushed out of range a bit to hit, tried to move up slightly as I was hitting, started getting summoned instead. Popped epic, LoH was just fading, used burst spells to keep myself alive a little longer then died.

I missed Holyforge. This time. Unless that's going to double my DPS I don't see how this is going to save me. I've lost more experience trying this than I've gained.

I'll look at the logs when I get home for the fun of it. I'm just not hitting as hard/often as any other paladin in the game. I see the parses put on these boards, I'm not pushing 17k DPS. My best run to date is half that. I wish I could explain it, I can't other than I just don't get good rolls on the random number generator. I have my DPS AA's, I completed shield specialist mostly because I wanted to try this trick.


Anyway, I've not heard of SK's getting 20 AA a pull in any instance. There are alot of mobs in lost notebook (that was 69.1 wasn't it?), so if they were all gathered up at once and mass slaughtered solo I do believe it would be possible with the number of mobs, what I don't buy is being able to do that on a regular basis. /meh, who knows though. It wouldn't shock me, they are far better at keeping their awesome tricks hidden than we are.

I also hit twincast nuke during the Deflect stage so that I at least have the twincast in my short term buff window. It's pretty easy to get off a burst after deflect wears off.

I feel kinda bad for waiting to post but I didn't want anyone trying to get all stupid and nerf people for what 5% of that paladin population is capable of. The reason I pop LoH + anguish bp is because I usually round up 70 or so mobs. I don't have to cast heals during that period most of the time but I have still died from time to time from lag/or from push and mobs being in range to hit me but oor to hit them.

A train that size isn't possible in any other zone currently because undead HP scale up to 3-4x and so does their overall dps. We are basically screwed on solo lesson burns once HoT hits but there are still group options so not really a big deal outside of when you don't have time to group.

Ok, since my interest wanes and the only thing I generally have time to do online is see what kind of creative way I can get killed next is, I'm still making runs on this BS zone.

OBSERVATION: Lev is a death sentence here. You can use it for pulls, but if you have it when you head to a corner and start attacking, you may as well gate to save your buffs. Those are the runs where my parser shows my DPS to be about 7-9k, and the mobs DPS to be about 3.5k after deflection drops. Not healthy.

Ok, so in all my time of trying, I've survived ONE (1) train of any substantial amount, and for some odd reason it was really really easy. Every other train I've attempted I've died on, which is edging up near 20 so far. I THOUGHT I had it figured out with using the corners in the arena area, clicking off lev at the right moment (or not using it at all), but then for the last 2 runs I've come up with a whole new problem. I got PUSHED OUT of the corner. On two different runs. My back was solidly to the corner, I had no lev or any other major screwup going on. I noticed I had a problem when I used F8 to target and I couldn't hit my target because I couldn't see it. They were getting behind me!

So I've managed to go from having the mobs not come in close enough to me for riposte, to coming in, getting behind me, and pushing me out of the corner. Once that happens it's just a matter of time before I die, most of my riposte DPS is being lost because they can still get around my swings, yet are still able to hit me with no problem.

I have no solution to this. I'm just going to try different corners, the corner in question is to the right of the first door leading to the arena area. So has anyone run into this fun issue? Or did I find something else unique to my experience? Will shrink help fix this?

EDIT (9-16-10): The corners are definately not created equal out there. Bringing them in from one direction, I eventually get kicked out of the corner by mob push, going the other direction that doesn't appear to happen.

Think ill hang out in illisan for 86 ( once riou or who ever else beats me there gets board and leaves)

Then i gonna claim and turn in all of the undershore and other random tasks / turnins i banking

Think some of the group missions going to give about 6 to 9 % xp i hope

Might skip the frostcrypt thing all together and pray fro a Thule progression group to get a jump on what ever tasks we will need, i am sure someone will have a walk threw up by day 2

If its giving you trouble, if you can, borrow a shaman you can pop listlessness on yourself. It will reduce the mob dps on you far more than it will reduce the dps gains from riposte.

My only issue was ever when the mobs were spread out a bit and started chain summoning me back and forth, which sucked, and occasionally would cause a death. I had no problem doing 20 at a time 2 years ago in gear that was even older, so not sure what's going wrong.

As someone else said, try just building up pull size. Sure, if you pull the entire zone, kill it, then camp out to save lesson, and do that a few times you'll get 40-50 aa in a lesson, but no point shooting for the stars if you can't break orbit.

I've been playing around occasionally with swarming in Blackburrow (SoD version). Very few undead mobs, but high mob density, and all LB cons. While just messing around / learning the terrain / trying to find mobs (helps if you know the zone better than I do lol) I managed about 28% normal xp on a lessons burn (gotta love learning T7 UF raids, ugh). Can probably increase this substantially by going with a friend (AE'ing wizzy would be best) but might run out of mobs.

Things to watch out for, though. Very few solid corners, but you can use your mount in the zone Also, they hit much harder than RoI so start off conservative until you learn what you can handle. I believe I managed a pull clearing the entire top floor, but it was close at the start. Also....avoid the Wrext Mal around the lake like the plague. Those guys bash interrupt like crazy, and it will kill you. There is also 1 type of Wrext Mal which can stun you (spell stun) for a good 5-10 seconds, which is not fun. But, avoiding this area, it's not a bad spot at all for soloing when bored.

Yeah corners are different, some work better than the others, for example the one Shiftee used to do the spider area is great, because mobs will walk right up to you. Positioning and bunching up the mobs are key to effective cornering, because frankly most of corner really shit, I personally do not find levitation that big of a deal, having it make moving around in zone much easier.

Hills of Shade is my new solo spot at 90 can do a good 10+ aa a lesosn burn depending on how efficiently you kill i can do the entire shoreline and the village inside the repop timer and i dont even touch the GY next to it so plenty of mobs to kill.

RoI is still good at 86 as everything is light blue, at 87 spiders and some of the shiliskin turned green. The regular xp still isn't too bad, I pulled about 16 percent of the level in a lesson burn doing it easy. I went back the other day but the area was taken so ended up going to hills of shade to check out the blackwater mobs. I did 15 in lesson burn, not too shabby for a first run, probably can push it significantly higher once I make myself comfortable with the area.

The travel time to hills of shade is a lot longer than RoI that is not a plus, but again it is heaps closer than frostcrypt.

After some goofing around in the new expansion it's definitely a bad spot for solo due to mob hp. Tried rooting skeletons in Erudin Burning, using bow with the stun-nukes-root, managed to take one down, got a hefty amount of xp out of, but it took so long per-mob that a group is much better xp. Tried soloing frog ghost in Feerott, same result, takes so long to kill just one mob that it's not worth the effort solo, again with rot dogs and skeletons in House of Thule.

The best xp solo out of new expansion was doing frog ghost with the progression related solo task, got 16aa clearing, killing the Tae Ew that spawned, and then completing the task, but that took awhile solo, especially killing the Tae Ew. Not a bad option for Intensity of the Resolute, the undead ghost frogs die at a reliable enough speed under full burn, the intensity would even out kill speed against the live Tae Ew; think with just intensity it would take around 15 to 20 minutes to clear, get Tae Ew to spawn and kill it, if your lucky and get Tae Ew on first corpse it would probably be closer to 10 minutes.

I play around with the new expansion some and tried out the frostcrypt and hills of shade. I was getting rather weak xp in frostcrypt, my gear and weapon just do not dps faster enough.

I settled for lesson burn in Freerott doing undead frogs as what Shillingworth described. There are two quest you can do at same time you do the killings, An Expedition Gone Awry & A Cursed Cure. First one is simply open frog corpses and loot a book then kill the tae ew spawned, second involves looting some common parts off other mobs in the zone then kill 10 undead frogs, I usually do the looting part in some fragment of time I have.

Because my kill speed is pretty slow, so I normally try to do the first mission twice in the lesson burn, in the case you got good dps it is probably better just straight kill undead frogs. First mission is worth 2 aa on completion and second one is 4 aa on completion. I usually end up anywhere between 13 to 16 aa per lesson burn depend on how hard I try in dps area. I am using the group 2 hander from Convort, so with a better weapon and gear you likely can easily top out what I am getting. All in all not a bad lesson burn spot, similar xp to what I was getting in RoI but much worse cash loot which isn't a problem for most these days.

Sup

/GU A blighted gorilla in 7s, 492k @70230dps --- Shiftee 492k @70230dps

lol that is a real parse but I'm j/k friend wanted to see what would happen if he hit discs on his bard/shaman when I attacked a feerott undead mob. I haven't done much solo xp in HoT. I imagine FC is still pretty decent. Cleric friend and I went for giggles and they hit me with SR and I pulled 120 mob train in FC. Didn't hit lesson but I assume that rate of kills would be decent xp with lesson on.

Hrm, if you can handle the undead content at all from HoT, honestly FC should be a walk in the park. But you do need to maintain a decent killing rate to make it worthwhile. I'm still soloing in FC to level up to 90, been on a bit of a break from EQ so this is EXTREMELY casual play. I can usually pull about 10-12% of a level (at 88) there on a lesson burn as long as I mind my mana a bit.

I just didn't enjoy Hills of Shade much, but the xp was comparable and likely a little better there, but I would end up using too much of my mana during the fights, resulting in downtime during the burn. If you are better at stretching your mana (or if you have a real DPS weapon, which I don't), that can be a good solo spot too. I was clearing up and down the waterline there, never ran out of mobs.