EQ2 - Multiple Classes

[Ellay]

Question for those EQ2 veterans out there, I love the ability to play the same class and stack it. It's easy on the mind.
Probably 3 years ago I made 3x Conjuror and had a ton of fun with it, not sure what level I got to but it was decent, reading through the other posts here and it seems to be overall effect in all aspects it's good not to stack the same class or type.
With that wondering how everyone manages, do you bind a similar dps ability for all characters on the same token? do you end up switching to different screens constantly? I guess overall I would like to know how much "effort" is put in to how much your getting out. A 2 hour group, does it leave you exhausted?

[Noxxy]

A 2 hour group, does it leave you exhausted?

If I 'only' played 2hrs per day I would be a totally different person - good for a laugh - still find it very funny - try min 5 to 12/13 per day everyday (as I'm guessing that most of us all do)

TBTH it's not much effort at all to actually play the class - but it is a lot of effort to actually 'play' the class - what I simply mean is that it is easy enough to arrange spells and when I hit say the 3 key, I know my tank taunts and everyone else detaunts - 4 is the rogues spinning the mob (turns it's back), the other go stabby-stabby which is only fired from behind, etc - stuff like that is easy to work out - but what makes it hard to actually 'play' the classes is the fact I have 6 per group (total 11 classes x 80 atm +6 more inc)

each class requires time to sit down and basically work out what it actually brings to the group and how best to spec it (AAs) to maximise its utility 'for the group' - this requires a fair amount of time 'tweeking' and researching / testing to see how things work together - this is what takes up a lot of time, the simple research and tweeking in learning how to 'play' a class - BUT - this is an aspect which makes boxing a 6 man far superior than a pug - we can tweak the team to work together as opposed to being a single char who's only interest is 'self interest' and being on top of the DPS meter, et al

as a simple example, just recently I leveled up a trouby - normally I play a dirge - but I just wanted to see what the other side was like - anyways, I have been sitting in SoH (epic x4 dungeon) pulling mobs, then I'd change the order of a few spells, pull another, rinse repeat - it was then that I noticed that a debuff I had actually debuffed mental as opposed to magic (which I had assumed) - I know that's a simple observation but when you have to keep in chk 6 classes at a time little things like that slip by - what it basically meant was I changed it's position on the firing line and whalla - scraped some more dps out of the team

one aspect of boxing EQ2 with multi-classes which can be viewed as a negative is spell timing (which you alluded to in your OP) - for instance, wizards now have long cast times (as opposed to when the game was released) whereas melee tends to be short times BUT they also have autoattacks (critical to never miss an autoattack in raid dungeons as it adds so much DPS) - the problem comes with finding a combination of spells for each of these classes that works together so that a simple keypress 1 - 2 - 3, and I know that I have performed 'complete' actions on both classes whilst maximising DPS

[Ellay]

Where do you find this information or do your research? I agree that is definitely the fun part of it all, and would like to research more.

[Frosty]

try min 5 to 12/13 per day everyday (as I'm guessing that most of us all do)

/sigh I would give anything to play for a solid 3 hours. There's way too much wife/kid aggro at my house.

Where do you find this information or do your research? I agree that is definitely the fun part of it all, and would like to research more.

Right now it only exists for single-boxers/players. I've been dumping a ton of info into our wiki from Noxxy, Khatovar and others.
But there is still a lot of work to do on it. (I'm a slacker, just ask my wife!).

I think with enough of us playing here, we'll be able to streamline what works and doesn't work for boxing.
I'm still a complete nuub at it, but I'm pretty sure there are going to be spells/talents that are great for a solo person that will be chaos if we use it.
The first thing that comes to mind is a run speed increase talent for your tank. Probably don't want to leave the rest of the group behind. :P

But as for macros and mixed groups, I have 4 "main" buttons right now.
Tank:
1 = Taunt + autoattack
2 = Extra Taunt..anything that will help pull mobs off of the others + autoattack
3 = Main DPS spells. Since EQ2 works differently than WoW, you can't do as many fancy things with castsequence. So I just stick the spells in the macro in order from highest recast time, to quickest recast time. (also throw in your heroic opportunity spell too somewhere).
4 = Debuffs - same setup as #3

Rest of the Group:
1 = assist tank
2 = Any spell/ability that can dump agro
3 = Main DPS + autoattack + heroic opportunity
$ = Debuffs

I also have a button to buff the tank for big pulls, and a button to heal the tank.
I'm lazy so far and haven't set up other keys to directly heal the others. :P
I just click them in the group window, hit assist and then the main heal button.

I'm REALLY hoping we'll get some more of the EQ2 boxing people in here to start our think tank on how to make things go smoother for boxing.
I have run into several people on Nektulos that are multi-boxing by the alt+tab method. 8|

[Noxxy]

Where do you find this information or do your research? I agree that is definitely the fun part of it all, and would like to research more.

Unfortunately, all the ol'time good stuff has slowly disappeared off the net as a lot of the main info sites were actually fan driven - most of who don't play the game anymore leading to their sites either dropping off the net or being woefully out of date

About the only current info sites I can recommend would be the SOEand Flamesforums - in particular, check out the class specific forums plus the wikia. Personally, I think flames and the wikia have more info than soe atm.

Each of the forums suffers in that there are a lot of really dumb questions and comments (mostly smack talk) filling each of the threads requiring a fair amount of speed reading to weed out the cr@pola - basically, the simple approach I follow is when I find something interesting, make a note then I try it out myself and see if it works - a real pity is EQ2 doesn't have an elitistjerks forum

As an addition to the information above get ACT - I would also recommend getting the single/double attack addon. With ACT you can basically analyse what SD/CAs are doing the most damage and see the results of your tweeking

I know that's not really a nice simple answer in relation to a gold-mine of information but, unfortunately, that's all we really have to play with

[Fat Tire]

I have run into several people on Nektulos that are multi-boxing by the alt+tab method. 8|

that is the way I boxed EQ

[Frosty]

I have run into several people on Nektulos that are multi-boxing by the alt+tab method. 8|

that is the way I boxed EQ

Well you stop it and get with the "now" man!!!!

I started boxing that way too. :whistling:

[Noxxy]

Think we all started that way - either that or 'iron man boxing' (mashing multiple keys on multiple keyboards)

It's amazing how many spells you can attach to a spacebar

[Herc130]

I started out ironman....still am pretty much, it's just my "keyboards" got alot more fancy. If I stay with EQ2, each account will get an Xkeys pro. and I will set-up each character where the top two rows of 18 keys are genera (not sure what to put here yet)l, the left 10 keys will assis tank (heals, nukes, attacks), the outboad 10 keys will assist my melee (some kinda scout...probably trabadour...heals nukes attacks) and the 20 middle keys will be heals to each toon other then the 2 melee, pet control, different follow commands and whatever with the bottem two rows devoted to herorics....all in a picture icon for each key that I can understand at a glance. That's for individual control for each character. Will also tie my non-melee's in with my 4 port vetra and hook up another Xkey's pro to that for normal grind operation. I may even put an Xkeys pro on my tank and scout as well. Multiplicity is a great tool, but it's nice not to have to mouse click, especially if I gotta drag the mouse over to another screen.

Effort for this...well, I dunno about EQ2, but I expect it to get easier for me compared to my 10 boxing in EQ1. With my set-up I pretty much watch tv while I button mash the xkeys. Adding in the vetra really cut down my effort as well, although I still demand individual control ...hence all the Xkeys I have lol. I would expect for 80%, maybe 90% of my play in EQ2, I won't need all the Xkeys for each character if I set-up the single X-keys running through the vetra right, but it's nice to be able to have have 1 character do X, while another does Y and another does Z..etc... that was not already maco'd ino the X-keys off the verta, because you cannot account for every combination

[Khatovar]

I never switch screens, personally. Since my husband plays the tanks in my groups, I only ever have to worry about DPS and heals. If my main screen dies, usually due to stupidity, I just play through. Most healing classes have an in-combat rez. You will also have death prevention tools at hand. You'll avoid a lot of switching due to that alone. CC is big business. My CC buttons are all set up as Mezzer > Stun & Mez, bard > stop attack & charm, everyone else > stop attack, pet backoff. This gives 2 chances to avoid a wipe from a loose mob.

I use some very primitave macros for the moment, breaking things up into spell effects. Debuff, DD, AOE, heals/wards, triggered buffs and such. Having the ability now to create hotkeys for all 10 banks of buttons will make things much cleaner. I am so very bad at making use of multiple modifiers and I just can't seem to "see" things when my buttons are all crammed together, so this will allow me to break things up better, both macro-wise and space-wise. Now if they would just fix the "abillity queue off" thing {I've /bugged it twice now} we could make something more in line with /castsequence. Ability queueing will take some getting used to for anyone coming over from WoW.

Like Noxxy says, information is hard to come by, which is rather odd because multi-boxing in some form or another is very, very common in EQ2. We are not a rare sight at all. Well, maybe we are in that we box full or near full groups, but a LOT of people 2box the alt-tab way. But we don't have the number crunchers and theory-crafters that WoW has. All you'll really see is people spitting out the info they get from ACT, and as Noxxy pointed out, that's all about parsing the big DPS numbers and not about utility and group synergy. Figuring out that stuff is the hard part...learning to play better.

I'm putting off a lot of my own digging until I hit 80 since we're not in dungeons right now. After WoW, I just want to romp around in the world and not worry too much about details. And there's a lot of details to go into with so many AAs to play with and dissect. Running a full group on regular quests doesn't give me enough info to look at for my own inept theory-crafting. :whistling: