So You Think You Can Alt - Confessions of an Altaholic

EverQuest Project 1999 includes fourteen playable classes and thirteen playable races, so there's something for everyone. Can you play them all? Of course! Should you? There's absolutely no reason not to. Should you play them all right now? Well, that's another question entirely. There are in-game expenses to every class: buying gear, spells, reagents to cast those spells, tradeskill components, and even some quests. In theory, each character could be self-sufficient, supporting its own needs. But once you add a lot of alts to the mix, you'll find yourself giving that nice piece of loot you just won to an alt that can use it instead of selling it for your current character's much-needed supplies. Another expense is time. You may have a lot of time to play EverQuest, or you may only be able to squeeze in a couple of hours a day, a few days a week. Even if you can play during every waking hour, splitting your time between a lot of characters means they'll all progress slowly.

Still want to play lots of alts? Yeah, me too. Let's go on.

Plan Ahead

If you know from the beginning that you're going to make a lot of characters and bounce around, you might want to take a moment to plan more carefully about which characters will be of which race and worship which deity. For example, for your new cleric you may be thinking about making a high elf. Great choice! They have the highest wisdom, a good newbie zone for getting started, and since they worship Tunare, they have a great mid-level quest for a necklace that can root their enemies. But wait... clerics already can cast root. Dark elves have pretty good starting wisdom themselves (and a great newbie zone for clerics, with a number of static locations with undead mobs to nuke), but the equivalent necklace quest for Innoruuk is a necklace that casts Clinging Darkness, a snare/dot that isn't part of the cleric's spell line and very handy. Dwarves also have good starting wisdom, and their equivalent quest (checks notes) summons ale. Great for roleplaying! (Less awesome for outrunning a mob.) Any time you make a new character you might want to think of these types of things, but for the altaholic it is even more important. You'll be investing time across a number of characters, and you may regret sinking a bunch of time into a character only to realize you might have enjoyed that class more on a different race.

Likewise, if your goal was like mine: to play at least one of every class and race, you might realize too late that you "used up" a few races on certain classes, only to find out that if you want to make something of a different race, you may need to double up on a particular class. And while there's nothing wrong with having both a wood elf druid and a halfling druid, one is almost certainly going to sit around doing nothing for a very long time.

To Sell Loot Or To Gear Up The Alt

I mentioned at the top that one of the biggest problems you're going to run into with several alts is the cost associated with gearing them up. Folks that play just one or two characters are more likely to just sell items they win but can't equip, and use the money on other things they need. Instead, you're going to say "Hey! I can use that on my shaman!" And that's fine... just remember that doing so will slow down your progress elsewhere. Will that item be lifechanging for your alt? If so, then by all means, put it on the alt! For minor upgrades, though, you may be better served by selling the item instead. This is even more true of items that have a great clickie effect or proc, but that you can't use until a much higher level than what your alt is right now. As cool as it is to have a Lute of the Howler on your level ten bard, you may be better off selling it for a lot of money you can use right now, rather than letting it sit in the bank until you're level forty.

(The exception to that rule is when you get an item so great that it motivates you to focus all of your energy into getting that alt to the level at which they can use that item. Maybe that lute means you're a full-time bard now. At least they level up fast!)

One additional thing to note is that once you're at raiding levels, you may find yourself wanting to roll or bid on items that would gear up your alts. Your guild may have specific rules about this, such as a minimum level requirement for the character getting the item, or simply that you aren't allowed to bid or roll for alts at all. Be aware of these rules, but even more so, be aware that some folks are likely to get salty if they feel they're losing a lot of gear to characters too low to contribute on raids. Find out up front whether it is both allowed and generally accepted (etiquette-wise) among your raiding entity to gear up alts.

Respect Your Muscle Memory

When you have a lot of different characters, you'll notice that many of them have similar spells. Lots of classes can nuke or heal or root or snare. Do yourself a favor and get in the habit of keeping the hotkeys consistent, so that all your characters that root (for example) use the same hotkey spot. That way, when you switch characters and need to root a mob, your finger instinctively goes to the same key whether you're on your wizard, cleric, druid, shaman, necro, etc. As a touch-typist, I find that 2, 3, 4, and 5 are the easiest for me to get to quickly, so snare is always in #2, root is always #3, the biggest nuke (or backstab or kick) is always #4, and their best heal is always #5. When you've been playing one character for hours but then switch to another, you are going to mash the same key you would have on the first character, so it might as well be the same type of spell.

Take Copious Notes

It's going to start with post-it notes, and then it will go on to whole notepads, and then spreadsheets, until like me you've built a pretty complex database with scripts to import data from the files you can output from the game. However you choose to do it, though, having a way to know what each character is working on, what their skills are right now, and which one is holding which important item is an absolute must.

One handy way to at least keep track of all of your characters' inventories and spell lists is to create a hotkey using the outputfile command. This command creates tab-delimited text files with your character's complete inventory (including what is in the bank!) in your EverQuest folder. You can then open them in a text editor or spreadsheet to see what they have.

On each character, create a hotkey with the following two lines:

  /outputfile inventory charactername_inventory.tab
  /outputfile spellbook charactername_spellbook.tab

Obviously change "charactername" to the name of each character. For warriors, monks, and rogues (who don't have spells anyway), skip the second line. (Note: you can use .txt instead of .tab, but I prefer .tab because most spreadsheet programs will recognize that the file is tab-delimited and split the display into columns automatically.)

At any time, you can look in those files to see what gear or spells your character currently has. This is really helpful when you're working on baking on character #7 and don't remember which character has the pie tin, for example.

Maybe Focus A Little, At Least For A While

It's a lot easier to succeed on your lower-level alts if you have a higher-level character getting good loot to hand down to them, and those lower-level alts will go up in levels faster with good stuff and lots of money. As much as you might want to level up sixteen characters at once, you'll find in the long run that if you focus on just one or two of them most of the time, the rest will level up faster later. Consider having a character that solos well and a character that does well in groups as your primary focus for a while. When you can't find a group, play the solo character. When you're bored with soloing, try again to find a group on the grouping character. Level either of them (or both) to as close to level sixty as you can get. And sure, from time to time, play the babies. But the higher you get on the characters you've focused on, the better gear and more money you can shower upon the lower toons.

It may take you a little while to really decide upon which characters to focus, and that's fine. Play many of them into their teens in solo, duo, and group settings and see which ones you enjoy most in those situations. But by the time you're level twenty or so on one or two of them, I strongly recommend you concentrate your efforts on those characters until you're in the fifties. At that point, a lot of really good camps will become avaialble to you, which will help you keep the rest of your brood funded and geared.

Conclusion

I've been an altaholic since 1999, and most of this knowledge was gained the hard way. If I can save you from a misstep or two, that's great! Is anything I said super important? Not really. Blaze your own trail if you like! Play an alt that doesn't make sense from a min-max or long-term quest-planning standpoint! Get that necklace that summons ale! EverQuest is a game, after all -- it's supposed to be fun. But if my tips are helpful to at least one or two of you, I'm happy about that.

Sincerely,

Kobayashii Maruu <Castle>

aka

Hikide Kikka, Wiltan Ryouki, Tuminy Altz, Dialectica Logicae, Tipsey McStaggers, Medikku Saishi, Gheee Buddersnaps, Yusha Kishi, Shikaze Uddosupporitto, Dorama Otokonoko, Majutsushin Sokanshi, Lavander Gooms, Dakunaito Kyuketsuki, Kikaze Uddosupporitto, Bruton Gaster, Fhqwhgadss Tothelimit, Mrslovett Smeatpies, and Waytuminy Altz.