Where to hunt for gear upgrades? 6 boxed 80ish group.

[jdpatt]

Hi,

I returned to the game in January from a LONG absence (like fall of 2004), with my various alts ranging from L70/700AA to L53/0AA. I've been progressing through TSS, and have mostly farmed whatever upgrades I can get there. I had intended to to TBS next, then SoF, but now I'm leaning toward just jumping straight into SoF to "catch up" before the next expansion is launched.

I'm not in a guild, for all practical purposes (created a guild with friends just for access to guild lobby).

My group is mostly L80, and the gear is pretty much Fabled or SoF droppable (for the non-visible) or TSS Tier 2 (for the visible, unless the old pre-DON raid gear was better). I don't have any glaring shortcomings in my gear (it's all 200ish hp or more), but it's far from uber...the weapons on the warrior and rogue are probably the slots most needing upgrades, in my opinion, then AC/HP, of course.

So where should I start? I don't mind upgrading via the bazaar if I can get a good deal, but don't have 20 million plat to upgrade the toons via SoF droppable armor (my trader hovers somewhere between 500k and 1000k plat, depending on what I've impulse purchased.. I'd prefer to camp upgrades while earning experience and AA...so I'm calling on you wise, seasoned 6-boxers:

Where do I go next?!?

Thanks in advance for any and all input, take care.

Dave

[Veril]

Skipping TBS sounds OK, with one exception: The Jonas Dagmire Augment. With your 6box you should be able to easily camp all of the pieces, and the Hand Augment is very very good. Lots of the missions are explore, lots are kill XX creatures where everyone gets credit.
You'll need to do about 3 pirate missions to get enough doubloons to buy the boxes to do the combines.

For the next month Lower Guk will be an awesome place, the living legacy has had this zone upgraded for a month. The droppables in there seem very good. With your team hunt there.

Another alternative - this week a new NPC goes active in dragonscale (at the port in spot) who gives out dailies (everey 18 hours) somecombat and non combat missions. These will be a very good way to get faction and "faycitium" a currency that will let you buy stuff from the guy.

[Daldaen]

I would suggest Lower Guk, in the several hours i spent there today with a friend who boxed a paladin, shaman, necro all 80(CoA/Demi gear on paladin and Groupable/CoAish on others I believe), and my two characters druid 80, cleric 68 (I'm in CoA quality gear as well, cleric is in trash) we got.. almost a full set a plate armor (350hp/manaish and AC is a bit better than Warped Steel) from trash mobs, in total i recall... 4 boots, 2 arms, 2 wrists, 1 helm, 1 BP, and a silk robe and silk hat. This is from I would guess about 100-150 undead frogloks. Looking at your setup you could definitely handle new LGuk if your warrior is of equivalent gear of your other toons with magelos. To save you from much aggravation of trying to navigate 6 toons through LGuk, I would suggest you shared camo, or normal fixed invis your magician and fixed IVU him as well so he has IVU/invis. Then run him into safe hall(I appoligize if this is gibberish to you, I'm just assuming you know what i mean by safe hall) and CoH your other 5 toons down, then proceed to pull to there or you could IVU your whole crew and move to a safer location, because people have a tendancy to train through safe hall. I would suggest the hall leading to frenzy (contains 1 roamer) or the hall leading to ghoul lord, (1 roamer again) or the room just below reanimated hand where there is water above you (1 roamer again). Aside from the trash mob drops (called Enameled Black xyz) each namer has had their original items buffed alot. Frenzied now has a 39% haste belt with 5% overhaste, Assassin has two good items for your rogue, darkened mask of deception and darkened serrated bone dirk etc. I suggest you check out alla for any items with darkened and fit the profile of new guk loot (300-360 hp/mana lots of mod2s) and then find out where they drop (will drop from same mobs that dropped the originals ie ghoul lord dropped SSoY, now he drops darkened sword of ykesha). And move your group around as needed (continually track on druid to see if any namers are up that arent taken that you could grab.

[Pugger]

You kinda have to do a step by step progression of your chars. And personally I would ditch one of the classes and level up that bard. I run 6 and theres nothing better on a 6 boxed team then a tactical striker. I run War / Shaman / Zerker / Bard / Cleric / (Necro or Cleric or Druid or Enchanter)

Augs are important but augs and super long aug quests are secondary, they are on the list, just further down it.

First thing you need to do is see if your group is capable of farming tier 2 SoF gear. If you can then you can skip having to farm other 300 - 350 gear. You can hit up GuK if you can find a camp in there and want some fast upgrades but I wouldnt choose GuK over SoF visible armor because GuK cant be upgraded.

It will take a while to upgrade that many to SoF gear but just pick a piece of gear and camp it for a while. You will get most of your upgrades for that visible slot within a cpl of days and you will probably end up with plenty of extra tier 2 SoF drops. Repeat that process for each visible slot. The tier 2 drops sell for a lot. Sell all your extra's and use that money to buy the rare pieces (warped steel blows). Warped steel feet seems ultra rare bleh. If you have extra money save it, youll need it later. You might wanna farm more tier 2 just to bank up a nice chunk of pp for the next step.

Farm Cores. Ive found ship to be the best place to do this. Drop rate in zeka seems to suck as they can drop cores or loot but mobs in ship, most of them just drop cores. Factory core droppers are rude, the same with MMM names so ship seems to be the easiest route. If you get lucky keep your eyes open for porous loam or the marrow that sells for like 150k. Most likely you will have to change over a lot of cores as only a few of the cores have easier names for you to target. Ive seen a few core droppers 2 boxxed. Each core you have to change will cost you 60k which is why you want to farm the tier 2 stuff for a bit longer to build up your bank power. But the core upgrades your gear to 440ish I think.

At some point, and definately before you go for tier 4 stuff, I would take the group to tss Ashengate and farm augs. Dont need all of them but just hitting up the lava bridge galvanized name for a few days will net you a lot of augs. Theres lots of augs in there to be had but if it takes days to farm one or two augs then lower them on the list and just go for the easier ones and any ac augs you can find for your tank. Doing the tbs hand aug for that many chars will take you some time.....id think probably a few weeks. I can do the whole thing for a char in about 8 hours now but the tank I use is sick. (He just pulls the island) At any point during the process it feels like your just not powerfull enough, stop for a bit and farm augs and do the new faction quests for faycitum. Use the faycitum to buy non visible slot upgrades.

Once youve auged up a bit, get the MMM access and Crystallos access quest done for all your char's. I would even do the access quests first if I could as gear in there rots constantly. During my farm sessions everything that isnt an essance is now rot as Ive geared up alts and friends alts in the stuff already. Just sitting at the zone in for a while can usually snag you some upgrades. Even better, stand near a group and without messing with em, help them with some dps and youll be first to get anything they dont need.

Invis your chars past the eyes to the end of one of the T4 sides. Id suggest earth or ice. These seem to be the easiest for a farm team. Pull the ph forever and forever. You will have your chars geared up in non visible before you ever get near all the essances you need for upgrading your tier 3 armor to 4. But they will come. I usually get about one name every 7 spawns and one mini name (essance dropper) every 10 or so from one ph. I kill about 30 ph's in a sitting so I get a few essances and lots of upgrades then I go into a coma for a while before repeating the process.

All of this takes a lot of time and no small amount of patience. The way Ive found easiest to cope with is just make a master list for all your chars of stuff they need. Such as farm tier 2 gear, farm augs, farm sof faction, farm tier 3, farm augs, farm tier 4. Then make a list for each char with exactly what drops they need for tier 2, how many sub 90/90 augs they need upgraded, where their faction stands for spells / discs, where they stand on the hand tbs aug and sof face aug. Examine your lists and pick one thing to do a night. With that many chars needing upgraded you will see lots of quick upgrades at first. Then it will be harder and harder and you will usually have to sell the rot to get what you still need. But the list does eventually start getting smaller. Im down to needing the face aug on one char and about 7 more cores and 12 essances for my boxxed group to be full raid / T4 gear.

It takes time so be patient but you will see results. It took me about 2 weeks to take my 80 cleric that had about your clerics mana of 10.5k up to 15k mana. I was mostly focusing on her though and the rest of my team are already raid geared or in tier 4 but thats kind of an estimate of time versus reward per char. Your time will be a bit higher as you are gearing up 6 or 7 chars though and you have to do it in steps as you can handle harder things.

Good luck, happy hunting, dont go insane.

[Pugger]

PS....

Once you get your group decked out in tier 2 / 3, farm you some orum. Lots and lots and lots and lots....of orum.

You only need a little at first and the rest I would farm once your list was getting much smaller. Buy powersources for 10 orum for your chars. Once you are lower on the list go back and farm orum for purity upgrades. Its like 800 or 900 orum to put a purity 20 aug in each of those visible slots. Its a complete waste of orum since the augs cannot be removed without destoying them but if your running six then every 3 or 4 missions you can upgrade one piece. This is definately a last on the list kinda of thing other then the few orum you need for the powersources. But I would definately get the initial ps's quick as once you have everyone in tier 2 gear its like adding 8 low augs to each char.