SoF -- So where are you kiting?

[zanayael]

The new levels mean that we're going to be getting less bang for the buck XPwise from pre-SoF mobs (i.e. Icefall, The Nest, etc.) per kill. So where is everyone kiting now to keep that AAXP coming.

[Aayen]

Looping Plains is the new icefall good (yellow and white to 78) and bad (everyone goes there and lag). I have not tried Hills of Shade yet.

Aayen Adare
The Seventh Hammer

[Pharren]

bloodmoon missions

[winchester20]

Loping Plains was my favorite place during Beta.

[Viko]

The new levels mean that we're going to be getting less bang for the buck XPwise from pre-SoF mobs (i.e. Icefall, The Nest, etc.) per kill. So where is everyone kiting now to keep that AAXP coming.

And since new mobs have way more hps and barely more exp, we are getting less bang for buck from SoF mobs and less from press SoF mobs, so all in all, it sucks :)

[Quezquotyl]

Arreles Bonescrounger in the Bertoxxolous' Chosen camp offers a repeatable task to kill three rampaging boneguards. The trigger for said task is "Something". At level 80 with 90 percent into AA and 10 percent into regular experience each successful task is worth just shy of 20 percent AA experience.

The rampaging boneguards can be found directly in front of the zone line from the Loping Planes. Kite along the path and you should be golden.

[Siluuael]

I have been trying out kiting in Hills of Shade, mainly because lag is bad in the Loping Plains.

The feral frighteners and rampaging boneguards are red/yellow at 75 (reds giving about 16% AA at 90/10). The kills take me about 2.2 mins due to all of the mob hp and a focus I'm missing, so having a quest I can repeat to supplement the xp would be great!

Loping Plains note: I did find some easy faction quests in LP for Fang Breakers - The Lost Husband / The Daring Recue series, the latter being repeatable and requiring you to kite / kill 4 wereorcs. Not sure yet how long it will take doing that quest to get ally, as I've spent some time working on the Lost Elves and other quests in Loping Plains and also done some Fortress Mechanotus quests too.

Oh - before you find out for yourself, Wirelm (Phantom of the Lost Arts or something) in Loping Plains is a raid mob, not a quest mob. I hailed him (thinking he was for the Festival quest) and got hit for 5650 and a few 4000s. Ouch.

[Isoeses]

I
Loping Plains note: I did find some easy faction quests in LP for Fang Breakers - The Lost Husband / The Daring Recue series, the latter being repeatable and requiring you to kite / kill 4 wereorcs. Not sure yet how long it will take doing that quest to get ally, as I've spent some time working on the Lost Elves and other quests in Loping Plains and also done some Fortress Mechanotus quests too.



NPC names?

[Winmancer]

Oh - before you find out for yourself, Wirelm (Phantom of the Lost Arts or something) in Loping Plains is a raid mob, not a quest mob. I hailed him (thinking he was for the Festival quest) and got hit for 5650 and a few 4000s. Ouch.

Hey Sil, this the one that got you the other day? Sounds like I need to get to Hills of Shade. Exp and lag sounds better than LP.

[Siluuael]

The Alla writeups are accurate and have locs in the comments. Here you go!

The Lost Husband: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=4329

The Daring Rescue: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=4330

The most I got when snare pulling the Ambushers was 4, so you don't need to split at all if you don't want to. Kite the orcs around the lake, just watch for the occasional bear walking by. I never had any problems with them. Just keep the mobs snared and maintain some space in case of lag.

I did the hailing of the FD'd npc un-invis and didn't get any agro, though I was running fast just in case. I also killed the named (Orrel the Blood Mystic) in the middle of the circle of wereorcs before starting the quest (snareable, doesn't summon). According to Alla he dropped Talisman of the Puma (76 shammy spell) for someone else. I got nothing.

He is part of the Taking Back the Night quest: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=4349

... which I just realized now. So you can do this one at the same time as The Daring Rescue for even more faction.

Some more Loping Plains quest info:

Lost Elves: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=4352

To complete the quest, you need to find all of the corpses of the lost elves, then fight a shade that spawns from each one when you get close to it to loot a quest drop. All of the shades are kiteable, and each drop 6 of the quest items you need. If you download the latest maps from mapfiend, you'll see that all four of the corpses are marked on the map. The first one is pretty much directly W of the zone in from Steamfont, near a circle of shadowmanes.

The only one that required anything tricky was the one inside the minotaur caves. I had to clear in to the corpse so I had room to kite.

[Siluuael]

Yeah Win, I was invited to a group in Hills of Shade when I realized the mobs we were pulling were not summoning and therefore kiteable. I stuck around and soloed for a while for xp and hoping for a Rk. 2 or zonewide random drop (got nothing).

There are some big, open kite paths in Hills of Shade which makes it pretty straight forward xping.

Random question: My dodge cap is now 280 (up from 205). Where are people going to train this skill? I tried kiting some of the gnoll sharpshooters (db to me) in the Steppes, but I wasn't getting skillups from their arrows. Thoughts?

[Isoeses]

The Alla writeups are accurate and have locs in the comments. Here you go!


Thanks for the info...wasn't sure if alla had writeups already or not.

[Winmancer]

Random question: My dodge cap is now 280 (up from 205). Where are people going to train this skill? I tried kiting some of the gnoll sharpshooters (db to me) in the Steppes, but I wasn't getting skillups from their arrows. Thoughts?

The gnolls should still be lb to us. They don't hit all that hard. We should be able to tank tank them pretty easily and get the skill-ups. Don't know why the arrow shots aren't working. That is how I got most of my skill-ups during the TSS lvls.

btw; nice write-up on the quests. Thanks

[Aegrusnecrox]

Gyrospire Beza. The mobs have a little more hp than icefall, and they give the same xp as icefall mobs all the way up to level 80.

There is a huge kitable area in the yard, repops are fast, and you can get rank 2 & rank 1 spells from there.

It's my personal favorite place.

-Egg

[Pharren]

the caves all the way north in crystallos have a HUGE open area for kiting down below, and everything seems to have a ridiculously small assist range. nothing i killed summoned, but the eyes see invis (have to watch for them on the way to the camp) and spawn some statue adds that dont seem to despawn, or dont despawn for a very long time.

[flishtaco]

I am not sure if its accurate but I had a few people tell me that there is some code built into SoF to prevent pathing bugs/eploits, that lags you if you hit zonewalls. I messed around trying to test it for about 2 hours in Loping Plains before I got an Ashengate group the other day.

Whne I was conciously avoiding all zonewalls and corners and it did appear to decrease my lag. I still had some though, and by far not enough time for an acurate test sample, I will try it some more when I play later tonight.

Larks

[scrat]

I am not sure if its accurate but I had a few people tell me that there is some code built into SoF to prevent pathing bugs/eploits, that lags you if you hit zonewalls.

Don't believe that. There arose a problem during beta with any environmental object slowing you down dramatically if "touched" - and it just hasn't been fixed entirely yet...but it has gotten a few hundred percent better. Running and brushing against a wall or tree was like hitting water with a swim skill of 2. It has gotten better, but it still lingers in some places worse than others; the code guru is working it.

[Viko]

Gyrospire Beza. The mobs have a little more hp than icefall, and they give the same xp as icefall mobs all the way up to level 80.

There is a huge kitable area in the yard, repops are fast, and you can get rank 2 & rank 1 spells from there.

It's my personal favorite place.

-Egg

WATCH OUT

I was in the Gyro Beza non instance and ran into a few mobs that summoned, now THAT was a nasty surprise.

You can also kite off to the left near the minotaurs, tho the minos have 140ish k hps, steamworks have 110-120k and gnomes around 100k

[Evillil]

Yeah, I tried out Beza too after Egg's advice. I ran into the same surprise summoning mob out of nowhere. I was just screwing around at the zone in, and after about the third repop, I found a summoner. The odd part is he didn't summon until he got down to ~60% so I had to scroll up after I FDed just to make sure I wasn't overtired and imagining the summon, haha. Nice spot though, especially if I can ever get some spells to drop, thanks Egg.

So far I've yet to find my sweet spot for grinding out AA at 80 in this expansion. The mobs just seem to have far too many hps for less exp than I was getting per kill on even TSS mobs. I'm having to refresh snare probably every other mob or so, when I never used to have to refresh snare to kill exp mobs before. Granted I don't have the best focii or anything, but with the extra spell slot, that's an extra dot I wasn't using at 75, so that should make up for it I would think. Maybe it's just me, but yellow mobs with ~140k hps should give a higher % of an AA at level 80 than yellow mobs with ~70k hps did at level 75.

[Zissoutheundeadking]

Kited both Beza and Zeka only mobs i could find that summon are the clockwork gnomes that have (shocker) in their name. MAkes sence if you pulled one to kite, and at 60% you may get shocked!. other than those both those zones are open season for kiting the rest of the zone. confirmed RK1 and RK2 spell ocasionally drop in both. Looted the lvl 80 spell Venonscale Venom from Zeka trash mob from ent. Last thing is if you get trained by another grp or get too many adds i noticed sometimes its hard to drop aggro there with FD. dunno if anyone else had the problem/issue. Best way to drop it is run to where you zoned in at and click on the catapult there to zone to Fortress then zone back. Happy Kiting.

[Lady Todiefor]

LOL..with all the AA they put out..and the real *smurfy* xp we get with the new levels...now you know why the expansion is supposed to last a year..lol again

[Desh]

I tried out Gyrospire Zeta (beza had a group) and killed a handful a mobs, gnomes and one spider or something. 1% of 77 every kill, parsed mobs at 160k HP or more (some pet dmg not recorded). Nothing summoned, I picked up a mechanotablet and a rank 2 wizard lure. Be warned that everything here hits in the mid 2000s. I also encountered one mob that cast a spell slow on me, at least doubling cast times.

Without actually timing it, I'd guess that Atiiki is still as good for regular exp at 77. I can get more than 30% of the level on an LotD there. To match that I would have to kill at least 16 mobs per hour in Gyrospire. A kill takes about 2.5 minutes, but to kill that fast requires periodic med breaks, so the average kill time over an hour probably comes to 3.5 - 4 minutes. As your gear and AA improves, Gyrospire should pull ahead of Atiiki as you can get more mobs down (and faster) between med breaks with a bigger mana pool.

Doing the golems and quest in Hills of Shade is also a decent option, as the faction is useful.

[FCseven]

1.The warewolf camp in LP next to the zone in to bloodmoon (across the river).Its easy to keep the camp clear and kite the two orcs that are posted before the bridge,it gives about 1 AA per clear.Just be careful of the named Frenzy Shadowmane(?).

2.FM next to the lvl 78 spell merchant,Pick off the mobs that hang out around the outside of the castle.The nice thing is since there is a merchant there you can loot and sell some of the droppable crap.

3.Hills of Shade.The graveyard has a few skellys that can be single pulled and kited.Next to the graveyard there are some mobs that have a human appearance and are easily pulled and kited also.The nice thing about them is they drops spells.

4.Hills of Shade.There is the undead tunnel as you turn left from zi.Pick off undead from the tunnel and kite them in the outside area,easy shit.

5.LP.The graveyard has skellys that can be single pulled and kited around the zi to HoS.

6.Bloodmoon keep.Just pull the mobs out of the doorways and kite them around the courtyard.Beware of the sos orcs though.

[scrat]

Random question: My dodge cap is now 280 (up from 205). Where are people going to train this skill? I tried kiting some of the gnoll sharpshooters (db to me) in the Steppes, but I wasn't getting skillups from their arrows. Thoughts?

The gnoll archers / sharpshooters are bugged; their ranged attacks are broke. They don't hit you, period. Once fixed, they should be an optimal choice for maxing dodge again.

[DeadLikeMe]

While doing a quests to clean up the farm of beetles, crows, and scarecrows I got a lot of dodge skill ups since none of these can be snared or rooted. They were dark blue to me (not sure now since I hit 80) and I had no problems tanking them even without a pet. The namers for each of the mob types were a different story.

[Mortticia Addams]

Playing around in Gyrospire Beza atm most don't summon but found a steamwork shockreaver does. They don't start summoning till about 40%(at least the 2 I tried) and then they summon quickly(10 sec between?). PI\icked up Feralisis Rk 2 there(sucky shaman spell). EDIT:Just discovered steamwork shocktroppers summon too.

[Knutplate]

Playing around in Gyrospire Beza atm most don't summon but found a steamwork shockreaver does. They don't start summoning till about 40%(at least the 2 I tried) and then they summon quickly(10 sec between?). PI\icked up Feralisis Rk 2 there(sucky shaman spell). EDIT:Just discovered steamwork shocktroppers summon too.

Thats the one of the most unorthodox summoning qualifiers ive ever heard of.

If this is correct, and they really do have a 10 sec summonging patterns (which is an eternity btw) then I would believe they could be soloable when necessary.

Even with a ton of hps. If worse comes to worse just make sure that you have a full stack of dots loaded around 42% and then hit HS or two. Should be plenty enough dmg to carry you through it.

10 secs would also give you 2 rounds of lifetaps between summons.

4 second summoners are where things begin to get hairy.

[Mortticia Addams]

Actually feels shorter then 10 but seems quick anyways. As for 2 rounds of lifetaps yea and running out of it's range when being hit for 2500 a hit. Not saying it's not solable just was surprise to suddenly be summon at 40. Most summoners start way earlier. Be prepared is all I am saying.

[Meph]

It's probably a bug. In beta i killed a named in Fortherss Mechenotus solo by speed kitting. It started to summon at 4% hp. I bugged it to the devs and Absor replyed summon % was set incorectly (4% instaed of 96%).

Wouldn't suprise me if same was with this mob.

As for kitting, i'm kitting where the quests take me to personally. Helping in Crystallos atm nfc where next, maybe Hills of Shade doing tasks there.

[Evillil]

Been playing around in Beza a bit lately, and all the robot type mobs with "shock" in their name summon. Minotaurs and gnomes with shock in their name, however, don't summon. I usually just hang out around the zone in and kite everything on the platform until they repop as summoners, and then just work the sides. There's plenty of mobs around, most of them are single pullable, but if not, they're easy splits.

Some of the gnomes have a nasty little spell that hits for ~5kDD with a dot that's ~800/tick. The gnome necros cast coruscating darkness (rank2 in fact) which can make them a pain, but I'll just root rot them. The big things to worry about though are the minotaur juggernauts. They cast an 8100DD about every 30 seconds or so that I still have yet to resist. I've only got resists in the 450 range, but I've never even had it land for less than the full 8100 at all. Just make sure you've got a full mana bar when you pull one of these because you'll spend half of your time tapping the hps back.

[Mortticia Addams]

The Juggernauts usually hit me for just over 5K that is with a 602 MR and rest are 500s. Yea a pain I just tap it back or use a pot instead. As for the gnome casters just had a kedgefish rk 2 land on me. SOB has the spell before I do(just got allied last weak and have rk1 not sure if spending orum on rk2 spell 5 levels below me worth it). Otherwise I am resisting most of their other spells.

[Viko]

Used to like beza until they nerfed the drop rate on TS stuff there. The juggernauts suck with the big Axe they toss... Berserkers do a charge but only if you are close... also Juggs seem to have a max range on Axe that is triggered every 30 seconds or so.. Gnome Medics can stun you so watch coming too close when they are about to stun.

I went back to ATiki... its all darkblue still at 78 and with 60k hps its better exp

[Aegrusnecrox]

ya atiiki is best till 79, then go to loping plains.

-Egg

[Doogrin]

Some good advice, thanks guys!

[scrat]

After 400+aa earned in this expansion, I've come to the conclusion that aa xp doesnt vary enough from zone to zone to stand out. It doesn't seem to matter how fast I can shred vicous worgs in Loping Plains or how many gyro zeka mobs I can kite at once...I can't bust 4aa per hour non lesson.

The only great variable is personal survival statistics when things go sloppy, and the quality/quantity of spell loots.

The best group xp I have encountered has been doing mech. guardian instances; nearly as good as solo xp.

[Desh]

Lately I've been doing worgs in LP when I want pure exp soloing, on an LotD I get 6 AA or so. Seems better to me than HoS, though with no loot or even faction to be had.

[Dereeoobs]

There is a npc that gives a quest for kill 20 worgs beside the boat dock for fangbreakers faction.

[scrat]

There is a npc that gives a quest for kill 20 worgs beside the boat dock for fangbreakers faction.

Aye, you get 8% aa xp with this kill 20 task. You can kill the bloodmoon mobs also (20) and get 8% aa xp per task.

Or, you get 8% aa xp with the bigger, dumber, faster task killing 3 boneguards in HoS.

Just a fine example on how much effort was put into this expansion on quest rewards i.e. make all slay quests = 8% aa regardless of how easy or difficult.

[Kuursed]

I believe that I am getting closer to 30% AA exp for the kill 20 worg quest. This is with the 25% bonus Christmas exp tho, so I assume it's actually 24% AA.

[jarlax]

I typiclly Kite crystallos for about 20 % a kill can kill 2 mobs before i need to med " with 16k mana " Drop lvl 79 and 80 rank II spells and if you can kite the three linked wyverns some nice 500 hp mana loots. Mostly just after spells though. Have got a ton so far but still missing lich and searing shadow HATE
- Jarlax

[Jebasiz]

Lately I've been doing worgs in LP when I want pure exp soloing, on an LotD I get 6 AA or so. Seems better to me than HoS, though with no loot or even faction to be had.

I'd find a place with faction. There's a kill 20 worgs quest..I think. There's WAY to much faction work to be done to "just exp' imo.

[Aegrusnecrox]

yeah, every kill you make should have some form of faction attached to it.

-Egg

[Imriel]

That's why atm been doing gator's in LP. Not the part where they spawn but the stretch right across from the spell vendor. Nice easy stretch with no adds. I pull 5 per bar so with right efficiency.

Also they drop clay which is for fangbreakers faction quest as well (loot 10 , turn in 10). So it's a nice alternative when not grouping as worgs / orcs are rather heavily camped on Xegony.

[Hohlraum]

Playing around in Gyrospire Beza atm most don't summon but found a steamwork shockreaver does. They don't start summoning till about 40%(at least the 2 I tried) and then they summon quickly(10 sec between?). PI\icked up Feralisis Rk 2 there(sucky shaman spell). EDIT:Just discovered steamwork shocktroppers summon too.

minotaurs and any of the clockworks with 'shock' in their name summon in beza.

i started doing FM south (other side of the big hill) from the 'gearing up' mission giver. its about 15% aa per kill doing 90%aa/10%xp @ lvl80. Almost all dark blue but hand full of white and yellows thrown in.

lots of mechanotablets drop off these. All of them sell for 160pp each and tribute for 222. However, some tribute for 611 which is a decent ratio.

Disuniting Mechanotablet
Exactitudinal Mechanotablet
Meliorated Circumlocuting Mechanotablet
Meliorated Circumventating Mechanotablet
Rampageous Lambasting Mechanotablet
Sanguinary Mechanotablet

they don't stack which sucks. i'm guessing the increase tribute means they are used in some more impressive recipes.

for those of us without a decent affliction haste and efficiency focus the VI versions of these can definitely increase the AA output over a given time

[Todwelt]

Disuniting Mechanotablet
Exactitudinal Mechanotablet
Meliorated Circumlocuting Mechanotablet
Meliorated Circumventating Mechanotablet
Rampageous Lambasting Mechanotablet
Sanguinary Mechanotablet

they don't stack which sucks. i'm guessing the increase tribute means they are used in some more impressive recipes.

Mechano tablets are used in a subcombine that ultimately give different focus effect to Last Blood/Bazu Augs.