Question - 0-85 Powerleveling

[an_image]

Happy Saturday All,
Our server's power-levelers on the 0-85 range have gone MIA. I'd usually tip a krono or two to get 5 toons up to 85 in 2-3 hrs...but since they're MIA it's going to fall back on me. Any of the pro-'s familiar with how it's done care to share the strategy?

I've been pwlvl'd enough to know it's done with a sk and bard...the bard usually starts at 1 with the new toons but I'd appreciate it if someone could do the walkthrough. Running out of 110-115ish to work on...need a new batch raised to 85...

Thanks in advance!

 

[Voidless]

I’ve seen some good variation in this as well, don’t forget the SoD zones, one is a hot zone - blood fields - not great mob density. Field of scale works well, with dragons and ikkies all lined up.

Combined with golden pick and hit all, it’s very nice once your little ones hit 10 and can proc. 10-75 in about 25-30 mins, which pulls everything in the main part of the zone.

Slows down after that, saw a guy in VOA the other day training the whole lower valley - using a Necro to sphere and SK tank, should be 2-6% per kill into the mid 80s.

was that you down there a few nights ago? lmfao that guy might've been me, saw a group come by while I was pulling stuff

 

[knave23]

For those of you using the golden pick, is there a trick to getting it quickly? I think I spent about an hour doing it the first time, but I was also trying to learn it. I'm thinking maybe I could use a high-level bard to plow it with bardspeed? Are there other tricks I'm not considering?

If there is one, I'm not aware of it. I just do it with a high level ranger in group cause archery (range = laziness) and SoW. I want to say I tried it with a bard once thinking similar to you, but selo's wouldn't stick on the other toons because they were too low. I could be misremembering though.

 

[naamloseeen]

I have a mage and druid. Mage can COH the little guy since they are kinda slow.

Druid is useful because the quest guy is right by the druid port location in Blightfire.

Even then it still takes some running around to get.

It's not totally necessary though. Just run hitall macro even without the pick and eventually your guys will do a point of damage.

 

[Turaj Steelfist]

So I decided to make a new toon and this time used my pally to do the PLing after lvl 25. I just equip a trophy and shield and pull the entire zone, (my pally is 120 with some ToL raid gear) I use Parlay for Honor on ever mob that I pull. That is sufficient aggro so the PLee doesn't take aggro. I avoid mobs that have any type of AoE. so far this has worked up thru 60. I think i will try TBS from 50-75 to see how that works, there are a ton of mobs there, but it might now work well with the islands. I don't have an SK to make life easy for PLing so I have to work with what I have. The hitall mac is nice.

 

[Joakhan]

was that you down there a few nights ago? lmfao that guy might've been me, saw a group come by while I was pulling stuff

Hehe nope, I haven’t been in there since before Christmas.

For the Golden pick, remember to stop at part 3, delete after the request (he hands you the pick), trade the pick away (on FV), and grab another. Fast to give them to all 5 toons, and if you pop your bank agent, you can get 12 picks in 5 minutes for spares.

 

[2ndGoat]

I have a mage and druid. Mage can COH the little guy since they are kinda slow.

Druid is useful because the quest guy is right by the druid port location in Blightfire.

Even then it still takes some running around to get.

It's not totally necessary though. Just run hitall macro even without the pick and eventually your guys will do a point of damage.

My big thing is speed of swarm kills. With bard, I just stand in the pile singing Chords of Dissonance and it taps all mobs for a couple points of damage within a few seconds. Where I would be interested in The Golden Pick is for high level mobs that would resist the bard song, but would obviously be hit by the pick's irresistible DD.
I'll do some testing on it and see if the time to get the quest is offset by kills on higher level mobs. In other words, I'm curious about whether the 30-45 minutes to get the pick make the grind to 90 at least 30-45 minutes faster. Hmm... looks like I've got an experiment to play with

 

[Voidless]

By the way, I've written a guide on how I do it on FV

https://www.redguides.com/community/threads/1-90-pling-on-fv-post-wurmslayer-nerf.84510/#post-542358

 

[Silverspaceman]

Zones:
1-20: Crescent Reach. I work my way up from the entrance and mushroom/puma/bear tunnels to the back skeleton caves.
20-30: Blightfire Moors. Pull all the sporalis, then the skeletons in the NW.
30-46: City of Mist. My druid is bound there, so a quick Teleport Bind gets everyone through the hellish run through Kunark zones in short order. I pull every mob in the zone except for what's behind lockpick doors.
46-57: Plane of Innovation. The pull is a bit of a chore because of mob pathing, but I'll pull the whole zone.
57-60ish: Crypt of Decay. Pull the all the rats.
60ish-70: PoFire. If the birds aren't up, I'll pull C1, then the field, then C2. That's usually enough.
70+ I've struggled to find a good spot, but if I'm not distracted, I can usually get a group to 70 in about 4 hours.

I mostly do this, but bounce from POF around mid 60s for Farm in DSH (it's faster than POF and I head that way anyway for Fortress Mech). Set up on the little hill overlooking farm (just North of the field).
Pull 1: farm and spiders/mechs just past farm
Pull 2: run to the West (?) end of the valley to where the mechs are and pull them + all the animals back to my group
Take a 2 minute break for respawns and repeat.

You will also make a (relative) ton of plat doing this. Spells, tinkering, and a few other misc. junk sell for 100~250pp each at the farm camp. You better have some big bags and you will fill up your loot.ini file with entries.

Around 70, farm slows down, so I head over to pick on the minotaurs at their fort for a bit until that slows down, then bounce over to Fortress Mech and make huge pulls in the field below the lifts, but the pathing is POI-bad. This used to get me to grouping-level (80) back in ROS/TBL. I would then head to the Grounds to wrap up the last few levels (to 85) during TOV/COV. Not sure where I'd get those last few levels now to group with 120s. Like Joakhan pointed out, the NEC AOE sphere (FD off kill-credit to the PLees) works better than SHD DS by that point, though DS PL is still tolerable up to 85 at least. Honed Wurmslayer on a gold account means you won't take any damage up to Fortress Mech, and even then, only from backstabbers, so you can sit and not worry about damage.

I skip the GP because it takes too much time just to quest it unless you're on FV. Just straight killing would get my newbies past the point of its usefulness. Always PL new groups with a BRD in the mix. If I were on FV, the GP + Hitall.mac work great at early levels. Eventually, AOE damage from BRD hits everything faster on those big pulls.

 

[ARHEverquest]

I’ve seen some good variation in this as well, don’t forget the SoD zones, one is a hot zone - blood fields - not great mob density. Field of scale works well, with dragons and ikkies all lined up.

Combined with golden pick and hit all, it’s very nice once your little ones hit 10 and can proc. 10-75 in about 25-30 mins, which pulls everything in the main part of the zone.

Slows down after that, saw a guy in VOA the other day training the whole lower valley - using a Necro to sphere and SK tank, should be 2-6% per kill into the mid 80s.

PLd my group in VOA with an sk/necro around Jan 14th….. could it be….me? I’m on fv lol

 

[Lusec]

I LOVE this thread! I'm a big fan of PLing and I will have to try some of these tricks I've learned from here.

My brother and I do BRD/DRU PL combo. If PLee doesn't have AEs we use the PL w/ a newbie bard trick.

I pull with high level bard and do druid/bard ds to kill. Druid ports around and bard speed to get to areas faster.

1-20 Skellies in Crescent reach
20-35 Great Divide Tizmaks (2 sets of giant pulls)
35- 45/48ish City of Mist
50-55 Velks
55-60 Crypt of Decay
60 - 70 Grounds with lvl 90 zerker
70+ Grounds, Beasts Domain, whatever

I'm on progression server so max is lvl 100 atm.

 

[Wild Beagle]

Make sure to equip something like fire beetle eyes on your sk in your main and secondary slots and then you won't do any damage via riposte. There are also some SK buffs that will do other damage types besides DS make sure you don't have those up. Also, make sure your pet isn't up made that mistake a few times.

Most tanks have an aa skill that uses bash or kick damage on riposte as well... Battlefield Vengence for warriors.

 

[Silverspaceman]

Most tanks have an aa skill that uses bash or kick damage on riposte as well... Battlefield Vengence for warriors.

I run around ducked w/ HW on the whole time. Others don't like that, but you've gotta slow down for mobs to catch up and group up anyway, so I don't see a reason to change. It's unfortunate that mobs are leashed now. When I round everything up and head to my group, I keep my back to the mass of mobs.

 

[Wild Beagle]

I run around ducked w/ HW on the whole time. Others don't like that, but you've gotta slow down for mobs to catch up and group up anyway, so I don't see a reason to change. It's unfortunate that mobs are leashed now. When I round everything up and head to my group, I keep my back to the mass of mobs.

I tend to use a shield on one hand and a TS trophy on the other... then I pull a big enough mass it just doenst matter if I accidentally kill 1-2

 

[Granditos]

If you dont have to have it done in 3 hours and you are lazy (aka dont want to run around through a lot of zones) get a druid to park in a zone with mobs at lvl 95-100ish and bind in a camp preferably a clear one. You can then use the druid to tp to bind all the PLee's and the PLee group bard, cast the long term druid ds on the tank/rounder upper and use the druid/merc/whatever to keep that char up. Go round up 30-50 mobs Bard aoe song and/or melee attack on and cycle through mobs and away you go. First few pulls will be slow while the char levels up their melee attack/singing (unless you did this prior with the bard) From there once it gets going you can get the chars up to 90 in a matter of a few hours with no potions at all (bonus at end if you do have them). Using this method you can PL a bard and 5 characters with the bard. You can do it other ways if you want and they may be marginally faster. But if you do it this way you can level up most of a group to 90 and if you have a few more hours you can move the same chars through to around 110-115(bonus with a potion). The characters other than the bard are going to have no skills and no spells. The bard will have melee/singing stuff maxed even more so if you hand over stuff along the way. Then its a matter of gearing/spelling/aaing the characters to usable, figure a krono each 250k pp and gear and they are in say full snowbound/waxing and 110 or 115 with around 25-30k aa.
Clearly this option gets characters up to level fairly fast but it does leave them needing to do some fairly intensive spell buying and 3-4 hours of skill up on on most every usable skill. On the other hand you have a free to play character near free to play end game and within sight of subscribed end game in a very short time.

Please explain more how you do this? My new bard is resisted until they are only 15 or so levels below the mob. Meaning I have to constantly move zones to keep that 15 level delta…

 

[Wild Beagle]

So I will use two different examples to help demonstrate.

Example one Start with the initial zone in Brells expansion (lvl 80ish) Every char can use a guild hall portal to port to the zone with no running at all (other similar zones would include Argath, and Feerott in VOA and HOT expansions respectively). For these zones you dont even need the druid (for porting) but a druid/mage with a long lasting DS and a merc healer /heal ability themselves is useful. Park the PLee's in a spot with no roamers ideally with a perma invis or IVU if nearby mobs are undead with the exception of 1 who will damage the mobs to get credit.
So initially the song does nothing but get the mobs on the extended target window. Then you cycle down through them with auto attack on and get a hit or so on each. Early on it will take awhile to hit (offense needs to be over 100 and the weapon skill over 100 to start hitting even semi regularly (fast weapons like swiftblades daggers or lamenations work well here) You don't care about damage at all really just the delay to up the skill and get lots of chances at 1 point hits. Dont forget to use /autoskill on kick/bash etc as well.
Each mob that dies to the tank DS will give between 6% of a level to a max of 26% of a level depending on the level of your char and the mob killed. Mobs that are say level 80-90 will give about 6% a level til lvl 20 then jump to 25% of a level until you get to about 20-25 levels below the mob level. A big pull of 50 mobs can easily give you 12 levels from 20-65 or so at that point levels slow down again. You start dropping % per kill down to 1% per kill around 10 levels below mob level. At about the 20 level below mob level spells, ae, procs etc all start hitting. At that point you could not even bother with attacking the mobs other than 1-2 aes (other than to continue skill ups).
Example two - combine a couple tasks into 1 pick a zone like City of Bronze (Erillion) and pull the librarians for a chance at stone of alaris tablets. Give one each to anyone getting pled and let the PL level their tear as well as them. Most of the time the tear with just one tablet to start it ends up between 12 and 13 by the time the char hits 90. In this zone if you have a headshot char you can really speed the dps up if you wanted to but with a well geared 120 you are quite literally pulling 3 full pulls per repop cycle of around 40 mobs each and killing well over 500 per hour just with DS and the little dmg (in the thousands at most total) done by the PLees. You do have to pull and kill named here... away from the plees the ae will kill them. You do have to kill the last one of every pull because they will start to run and go get friends. And its scalable a poorly geared 115 can do this on a smaller scale though the mobs might con green to him at that level and his pulls might be limited to 10-15 to start. That's not a bad thing
SK with non damage ae agro and warrior with AE taunt/wade into battle and expanse line will hold all the mobs on them while burying their nose into a corner. However mobs do summon if damaged so if you have a DS up while going around and collecting mobs here its likely your pull will be limited by how many you can proximity agro without taking damage running past.

So takeaway Use melee dmg to get the 1-2 points of damage early on ... sucks but it will work for a full group of 6 with just one melee class doing any damage at all.
Once you get to the level the bard song (lvl 4) does damage you don't even have to do that much just sing away. I started singing immediately and by the time i got to where it was hitting I had the skill in singing to maintain it indefinitely.

 

[Wild Beagle]

I might add the last character I leveled to 110 had zero kills before going to COB and no additional kills prior to heading to FM He is currently sitting at 2356 mobs from Alaris and 4967 kills in FM He spent 3.75 hours in COB and 8 hours in FM with a total time played of 14 hours (some of which was traveling around time. This char was the designated 'hitter' in the group for COB and he used a lamentation and a jade mace both of which cost approximately 2k on bazaar.

 

[519helvis]

hailing from test i start at 25 but i use an SK and mage and make sure i have some form of magic aoe in the group, i then use terror on mobs to pull then make sure I'm running aoe agro spells when they refresh. pulling as much trash as I can find in each level range. killing named and anything that aoes than of course mage/sk ds after the magic aoe is cast from the pl toon group

my path to 85 is as follows

25-35 blightfire moors rats/bushes
35-46 goru-kar mesa wildlife to 41 than giants to 46
46-60 PoI - one full zone pull will get you to 60 easy
60-65 ruins of lxanvorm mull all the mickey mice you can find
65-71 pofire c2 and the field surrounding it ... be sure to kill any possible raid mobs up first
71-85 fort mech starting in the open area before the elevators mass pulling to about 81 then move up the elevators (it does slow down a bit post 80 but i find its faster to tough it out)

i do this with a 120 sk/mag

on test, i can get it all done in about 4 hours but i like to camp toons so i wont burn the lesson when pulling as it helps. (remember double exp on test makes 4 hrs doable on live i imagine its different) oh and patience is a virtue as once you pull 150+ mobs it will lag out the zone so be sure to take time on the pulls or you will lose mobs

 

[Shadow]

After doing this the last couple of days, experimenting with good places, etc...I am close to a completed group. I also have multiple toon sets I can use for the last part which made it easy mode. I wanted very little travelling around and this accomplished it.

1-25: /testbuff
25-40: Blightfire Moors undead area.
40-85: The Grounds. Pre-clear names, or avoid them. I felt it was better to pre-clear.
86-105: Lceanium grouped with my 115s. I ran a 3/3 combo. 3 x 115s, with 3 x 85s, and just decimated the zone. 2 groups.
106-110: Same as above, but Korsha Labs.

1st - Using SHD/MAG/SHM for the PL to 85 part. As stated above, typical methods and a modified hitall.mac with golden picks.

2nd - At 95, I actually tried to use Grind with my new group and it was abysmal. Not TS freebie Abysmal, but worse. With Lesson, 0.6% per kill is abysmal. Grouping with the 3 x 115s netted 2.5% per kill and was insanely fast.

I could speed it up even more with a BRD in my PLee group, but all in all, this was pretty efficient.

 

[knave23]

After doing this the last couple of days, experimenting with good places, etc...I am close to a completed group. I also have multiple toon sets I can use for the last part which made it easy mode. I wanted very little travelling around and this accomplished it.

1-25: /testbuff
25-40: Blightfire Moors undead area.
40-85: The Grounds. Pre-clear names, or avoid them. I felt it was better to pre-clear.
86-105: Lceanium grouped with my 115s. I ran a 3/3 combo. 3 x 115s, with 3 x 85s, and just decimated the zone. 2 groups.
106-110: Same as above, but Korsha Labs.

1st - Using SHD/MAG/SHM for the PL to 85 part. As stated above, typical methods and a modified hitall.mac with golden picks.

2nd - At 95, I actually tried to use Grind with my new group and it was abysmal. Not TS freebie Abysmal, but worse. With Lesson, 0.6% per kill is abysmal. Grouping with the 3 x 115s netted 2.5% per kill and was insanely fast.

I could speed it up even more with a BRD in my PLee group, but all in all, this was pretty efficient.

I've been doing korsha lab lately from 90-109ish and agree with this. It slows down a ton at 108 so I'm going to find somewhere else to get to ~111 before doing ToV missions.

 

[Gohast]

After doing this the last couple of days, experimenting with good places, etc...I am close to a completed group. I also have multiple toon sets I can use for the last part which made it easy mode. I wanted very little travelling around and this accomplished it.

1-25: /testbuff
25-40: Blightfire Moors undead area.
40-85: The Grounds. Pre-clear names, or avoid them. I felt it was better to pre-clear.
86-105: Lceanium grouped with my 115s. I ran a 3/3 combo. 3 x 115s, with 3 x 85s, and just decimated the zone. 2 groups.
106-110: Same as above, but Korsha Labs.

1st - Using SHD/MAG/SHM for the PL to 85 part. As stated above, typical methods and a modified hitall.mac with golden picks.

2nd - At 95, I actually tried to use Grind with my new group and it was abysmal. Not TS freebie Abysmal, but worse. With Lesson, 0.6% per kill is abysmal. Grouping with the 3 x 115s netted 2.5% per kill and was insanely fast.

I could speed it up even more with a BRD in my PLee group, but all in all, this was pretty efficient.

How did you prevent your hitall toons from dying? Even without pulling any named my PLEE is dying every pull from seemingly random melee swings.

 

[dewey2461]

How did you prevent your hitall toons from dying? Even without pulling any named my PLEE is dying every pull from seemingly random melee swings.

You need to position the clump of mobs so they are ALL facing the tank and none of them can riposte the PLee.

I tend to have tank move in a triangle pattern. Come in to camp, move out a bit, then come back in.

 

[Szazor]

There is no such thing as seemingly random swings... If you are always on their back they wont hit you - but you may get hit by Rampage or a Caster AE. But with practice - you never get hit.

 

[hackzimus]

I've done two methods of PL'ing to 85 recently. Each time using a SK/MAG/Bard/Cleric to PL my toons

Method one: Have a bard in the PLee grp with chords of dissonance. Gather train with SK, weapons put away with no damage shields. Clump the train hit AE threat. Do Chords on bard then load up DS with wurmslayer, sit and profit.

1-20 - Crescent Reach
20-35/40 - Blightfire
40-46 - Maiden's Eye/Akheava/Gorukar
46-55 - PoI/Dranik Scar/ Bloodifelds
55-70 - CoD/PoV/Icefall/Steppes/PoFire
70-75 - fort mech
75-85 - Grounds

This was a lot of moving around as some of these spots had players in them already. I could pull this off over a 4-6 hour period.

Method 2 and my favorite: Got the golden pick on one character, used hit all and went straight for the grounds. Before big pulls i'd go around and kill the nameds and just pull trash.

I pulled into the Tunnel and would alternate which sides I pulled from.

Brought the train into a nook inside the tunnel and cornered the tank while the pick holder used hit all and smacked them from the side of the swarm. He may have eaten a riposte once or twice during the whole process but with cleric buffs and bard AE regen going he never died.

I don't have the exact time frame but lets just say during a 4 hour DnD game I would do a pull during our breaks and these guys went 1-87 during that time period.

Make sure you got a 111+ mage, that new DS at 111 was a crazy upgrade compared to the ros version. I want to say my total damage shield was closing in on 6.5-7.2k before using abilities.

I'm thinking if grounds is a bit rough on you for riposte still, I'd try HoT lower floors with creatures that tend to be smaller and you can set up right behind the train reliably.

I do feel I could get a group of characters to 85 within 2-3 hours here. a single character under 2 hours but I havent truely tested it yet.

 

[Gohast]

There is no such thing as seemingly random swings... If you are always on their back they wont hit you - but you may get hit by Rampage or a Caster AE. But with practice - you never get hit.

Welp I found out why they were "randomly" hitting me. Turns out if you leave TAUNT on they don't like it!

 

[hackzimus]

Welp I found out why they were "randomly" hitting me. Turns out if you leave TAUNT on they don't like it!

Yup that'd do it lol

 

[ToeJamSamy]

Why does anyone even care if using Sk anymore on the old methods?(lower zones, not golden pick) I mean we did the same thing when cap was 100 and below, shouldn't be any class at 110+ that can't handle as well as a 100sk. Then it's about debuffs, Ds, aggro(debuff and buffs for bards can be aggro, bards have a lotta tools for that now if they wanted) so a bard with instruments or a shield and instrument, or cleric, mage, Dru, etc should be gtg. So many classes have kicks etc now in AA idk if all can even be turned off tbh (forget if some are unrelated to autoskill, which you certainly want to turn off) but why bring the given class AND the sk if don't even need the SK?(remember to turn off autoskill on sk too if equipping any weapon or shield due to bash)

Would think pulling would be even faster too with a bard with Melody and bardspeed, but Dru has the big long term ds as well as the short-term one(short-term is kinda overkill unless using the golden pick in higher zones, but there are a couple short-term spells too c.85-100 that would do the job) if I was going to use the aa short-term I'd probably pull with NOT the SK, after casting it on the SK (and invising them) to start, then maybe just run around DAd or similar (can Pop it if they start to hurt) and then switch to self-healing spam while babies start cycling hits. Once they're done hitting can keep on Dru, or pass to SK, if pass to SK can then add the 5-6k DS, cast the AA one again, and even go start another pull, keeping aeaggro on SK.

I never used to pull less than 30+ mobs when I did DS PLing so the big AA Dru DS wouldn't cover it anyway, but smaller pulls I guess. I mean time spent pulling only 10 after the first 1-2 might as well just kill with the babies. Also haven't tried just finding out how good a group of 3-4+mercs with top buffs can just pl themselves. Pulling, changing zones, ensuring good aggro, no ripostes, and cycling hits on mobs too high for that group to kill eats time as it is. The DS part is fast of course. How much of PLing is really just our perception of speed due to that?

I am going to try to remember the Golden pick next time I decide to PL something and then the SK makes sense, but I've gotten lazy since HCs showed up lol. But, I don't run more than 1 crew, period. Not more than 1 at a time, just, at all. So I only PL for additions/replacements for my crew. Suppose I do have the tools/classes to do it for fun AND profit though lol.