Question - Using VV & KA, progress from Group to Raids (1 Viewer)

[BigDorf]

Hi all

I'm looking to get your thoughts and input, on the use of VV with KA, to work with 9-12 characters in a raid group setting please. i.e. more than the typical group of 6.


Background
Have used VV and KA for a few months, Broadly speaking, things have been great. Started with a couple of characters, followed the guides and videos from redguides and slowly built up to replace the mercs with a 6 'player' team. The core covered - Tank, Heal, CC and DPS. I've dabbled a bit, with warrior, knight, bard, enchanter, rogue, mage. This was to give a choice and wasn't too sure on what worked best for me.

Adventuring
I've done a mix with the tank. Sometimes I'll drive and the group assists or I've made a camp, and let KA run the puller mode to farm a variety of mobs.

To date, the adventures have been open zone areas and dungeon crawls, that could be handled by the group.

That is until now. Some dungeon instance open to 3-12 player ( no merc allowed, auto suspended ), caused a problem. Yet, it also raised the opportunity. To go beyond group, and raid!


The KA Basic
With me driving a tank, I know I can start the group:
/bcg //mac kissassist assist ${Me.Name}

When they have finished getting ready, casters stopped their up down yoga, wiggling fingers etc, the dungeon crawl can commence.
/bcg //chase on

Now the group will assist me, and auto follow wherever I go! Yay! VV KA!
( yes, the characters have their KA profile ini files with settings for dps, heals, mez, etc. )


How to progress to Raids?

It's one thing to get a feel for how an all player group driven by people can do things, but I don't know the limitations or constraints of VV and KA, when it comes to working at raid level, i.e. beyond a single group.

I think the scenario is traditional. MT will focus on hitting a named, and MA will switch between named and trash adds that arrive.

Using EQ, I can form a raid and move the pawns, sorry, the players around between groups.
In group there is ability to set main assist (I've also seen KA assign it sometimes). The EQ raid tool, has a main assist feature as well.


This is where I start to need your advice, guidance and experience please.

Do I place the MA and MT in same or different groups?
Do I need to have a healer in each group, or with the mains? (i.e.. will they cross heal between groups, or only focus on members of their own group ?)

MT wack the named, and the MA will join in. Then the addition mobs come. Will CC react, if not in the with the MT/MA group?

If I drive the MA, and change target to one of the random mobs, will the raid switch with and focus on that add, letting MT continue on named?

Unless I'm told different, I think this will be two boxing the pair of tanks, me driving them both and with all hopes that the combination of VV and KA will manage the rest of the army.

Then I'm wondering if there is anything to consider tweaking in the character KA profiles? Things that work normally in group, but need extra help for raid groups? Buffs? Heals? Pets ?




Thanking for reading, and hopefully your input !


Regards and Best Wishes.

 

[BigDorf]

Thanks for the red cents, and I notice a fair number have read the question post I made.

Yet, no input from those playing with 7+ characters using VV and KA.

I'm sure we've had hardware discussions on these forums, and people have quoted running dozens of characters. Likewise, I'm sure I've seen people talking about raiding bits of old content as well on the forums.


I'm trying to learn from others experience, how they have gone about it. What things may need to be considered etc. Or indeed, is it possible to work.

 

[methodx]

XTarget healing for running healers out of groups works quite well.

Dannet commands give a little more finer control for broadcasting commands to characters in zone, it has a bit of an edge over EQBC I feel

KissAssist isn't really optimized for raiding, it's mantra being keep it simple stupid, any custom code to deal with events could be added as a .inc to the KA macro but I think MQ2React and MQ2Event are better options now for tackling certain raid mechanics.

I have run 12 chars in a group session so I haven't really progressed to hitting tricky raid targets yet. My take is that all the fundamentals are there but creating ways to deal with the various raid tactics and encounter mechanics can require a lot of setup and creative thinking but it is doable.

Perfect execution might be difficult to attain though and brute force may be the easier way, when the mechanics allow of course.

 

[BigDorf]

Thanks for that info Methodx.

It's not mechanics of a named raid boss fight I'm concerned with. I understand that having certain characters respond to events would be troublesome.

I'm trying to understand how to run "an extra large group", i.e. more than 6 characters and have them work together as if the group limit was 8, or 10 or 12.
Accepting, it is 6, and so the extra characters are in a second group, or, not in the core / first group with the tank.

I do understand how to configure and use kissassist for healer, dps, and cc to work as a group ( 6 or less, in a standard EQ invited group).

Not sure what you refer to by, "XTarget for healing" - but that is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

Details of what configuration, what plugins etc people use to get charcters working together when there is 7+ involved in the activity.

Details of where characters of roles ( healer, melee dps, caster dps, cc ) would be placed ( in core 1st primary group, or in secondary group ) etc.

Again - not worrying or concerned about 'boss mechanics' of a certain encounter, just wanting the characters to work together as if it was straight up "tank n spank", doing their roles of .. tank.. heal... cc.. dps, in which the healers look after all the characters, of 7+ involved. ( in a standard EQ raid, so all can zone into the same instance ).

 

[lilwizzie]

First thing is to get multiple groups working together, then you can work on optimizing group makeup.

Look in your ini file, under the heals section, there are settings for doing extended target heals. This will work if you are in or out of a raid. Simplest configuration is to configure a slot to watch for heals, then assign your main tank to that slot.

For dps, just start KA with the main assist specified.

Once you have healing working, and dps assisting, you can fine tune and report back what isn't working.

 

[saar]

Kiss is mainly a group based macro, in the past there was raid versions but they are old and out of date. Now you can get it to work somewhat but it needs something on the xtarget list to trigger assisting. Now using it in raid is ok but it's burns are linear so very predictive and indicative of boxing. Also snaproll and multiple melee assisting at same time. Now all that aside healing aspect is ok but extremely slow for xtarget/outside group healing.

 

[methodx]

Thanks for that info Methodx.

It's not mechanics of a named raid boss fight I'm concerned with. I understand that having certain characters respond to events would be troublesome.

I'm trying to understand how to run "an extra large group", i.e. more than 6 characters and have them work together as if the group limit was 8, or 10 or 12.
Accepting, it is 6, and so the extra characters are in a second group, or, not in the core / first group with the tank.

I do understand how to configure and use kissassist for healer, dps, and cc to work as a group ( 6 or less, in a standard EQ invited group).

Not sure what you refer to by, "XTarget for healing" - but that is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

Details of what configuration, what plugins etc people use to get charcters working together when there is 7+ involved in the activity.

Details of where characters of roles ( healer, melee dps, caster dps, cc ) would be placed ( in core 1st primary group, or in secondary group ) etc.

Again - not worrying or concerned about 'boss mechanics' of a certain encounter, just wanting the characters to work together as if it was straight up "tank n spank", doing their roles of .. tank.. heal... cc.. dps, in which the healers look after all the characters, of 7+ involved. ( in a standard EQ raid, so all can zone into the same instance ).

It is actually straightforward enough.

The characters in your second group, you start their kissassist macro in the normal way but assisting the tank or whoever in group 1. So when the puller brings a mob, group 1 tank grabs it and group 1 and the characters in group 2 assist him.

The healers in group 2 running kissassist will normally only heal their own group, but by adding the players in group 1 to your extended target list manually and setting up xtarget healing in KissAssist to heal these extended target list slots the healers will cover these characters in the other group too which might be helpful if the offtanks are in group 1 or if the healers are all in group 1 and no healers in group 2.

Buffing characters in other groups is simply achieved by turning on DanNet in kissassist and any other characters nearby also running kissassist will be buffed.

Offtanking is as little trickier, one way would be to have a hotkey on your driving/controlling character and send /dgtell or /bct commands to the offtank to pause kissassist on that character, assist you to get your target, /nav target and /attack on. The offtank will run to target and hopefully grab agro but it will just be autoattacking, mq2melee or mq2react could be used to fire a few abilities to help peel the mob off healers or whoever if they don't have agro. That's just an idea, I haven't played around with offtanking too much.

 

[BigDorf]

Thanks for these replies.

Further thanks for detailed information @methodx


I haven't used DanNet before, noticed it's mention some times on forums, but not see binary in with the VV software. Then, having now been prompted to read forums specifically for it, see that it's a plugin, works peer to peer and not have its own server process to launch. I see there are a number of discussion around EQBC and DanNet.

For me, I've been with EQBC as that is what the learning material from redguides directs towards. Not saying that is a bad thing, just the material talks of launching EQBCS, connecting to it. Then have a series of talks about the commands [ bccmd, bcg, bcga, bca, bcaa ] to relay from one character to others. I see there is similar with DanNet and given those a quick test today. The EQBC -> DanNet cheat sheet list, on plugin is really good help.

The extended targets window has given some amusement. I thought it was a helper window to show mobs that have aggro on you. No aggro, empty box. I didn't know until started right clicking the red box with yellow exclamation that in standard EQ they can be set to other things! Right click, and a lot of options appear.

I think that potentially highlights there is a lot of assumed knowledge. The game interface has changed over the years, with new features old players returning are oblivious to. Similar with alternative ways of setting up VV and associated components to use things. Yet that is where the forums come in, and people take time to write good information to spread what they know.

Before I go back to the raid instance, I'll try and test these features to become familiar with them.

 

[methodx]

Yes the extended target is one of those things I don't think I use to it's full potential. VV adds some commands with /xtarget that help to manage it but I haven't played around too much with them.

I watch people playing EQ on Twitch.tv sometimes which I think is a good way to see how other people work the interface.

I see enchanters putting their charm pets on extended target so when charm breaks they can quickly target and recharm. Clerics in raids keep out of group tanks and offtanks as well as trigger happy players like rangers on extended target so they can monitor their health and fire off a quick heal.

If you're playing with the same groups regularly you can save your extended target list once it's setup to quickly reload it as it can take time setting it up initially.