Talk:Newbie Guide

I am a newb myself. Things that I think would be helpful, would be info on how to find bags, the average tip for a port and the average tip for a bind.

While I don't have this information yet, I am certain it would help many more people than myself.

Disputed Facts

After the major changes I made yesterday, I noticed some of the stuff I wrote was changed, in particular some factual stuff. This is perfectly fine and I know some of these things are not completely obvious on P99 (e.g. who exactly is a better tank out of the non-tank classes). However, some of these things I am very confident editing back to how they were before. Here are the things I edited back and why. I don't want to have an edit war over these things, so I would prefer discussion here first.

1) Solo ranking. I am super-confident about this. It's widely acknowledged that charming, if done right, is more EXP per hour than quadding. Charming gives you two kills, one dark blue and one possibly higher, for almost no mana, and can be done in succession very quickly. In terms of charming, enchanters are kings due to their ability to charm any monster, charisma adding to charm effectiveness, crowd control, and mana regen. Necromancers come in second place since they can only charm undead but they also have great mana regen and crowd control plus feign death. Druids come in third because they can only charm animals and they don't have mana regen abilities. Quadders should come strictly after charmers in EXP per hour. In terms of shamans versus magicians, magicians should absolutely come before shamans. Shamans are terrible soloers early game, and even once they get canni+regen, they are not great. Root-dotting takes a lot of mana and can be slow, even with canni+regen. Their pets are not amazingly useful. Once they get their epic things speed up some; fungi and JBB can also help, though they are very expensive, and of course with Torpor they are champs, but this list is about EXPing, not end-game soloing. Magicians, on the other hand, can get amazing EXP by chaining fire pets, reclaiming energy when the monster is fleeing, and casting a low-level nuke to finish it for full EXP. This is much faster than anything a shaman does unless that shaman is geared to the gills.

2) Wizard grouping. Wizards are not very popular for groups here on P99, and any wizard who's spend a while grouping can tell you why. Their DPS is terrible. Even with an enchanter or a bard in a group, their DPS is easily outmatched by melee classes unless the group is very slow on pulls. I've shown this before mathematically. Finally, they do not have a great array of other abilities that make up for their bad DPS; they have some useful stuff, but not much, especially before Evacuate. As such, I would not list them on the list of recommended group classes. I'm especially confident saying all this because my main is a 58 wizard and I've spent a good deal of time in groups.

3) Hard mode. SKs and paladins definitely do not have life on hard mode. They are desired for groups despite their 40% EXP penalty because they are EXTREMELY effective tanks, and tanks are always in high demand. Anyone who's grouped with a warrior versus a halfway-competent SK or paladin can tell you this: they have zero problem holding aggro, and this is an enormous advantage over a warrior. Groups will often EXP faster with a knight tanking than a warrior just because of the warrior's extra aggro issues. An exception can be made for uber-geared warriors, but even they are not as good at holding aggro as knights, especially at later levels when having great DPS (for a warrior) isn't enough.

4) Recommending AGI. I've never seen people seriously recommend putting points into AGI except to get to 75 AGI to avoid the penalty. I'm not going to edit this back, but I'm really interested in where you're getting this idea from. Is the idea that at Velious end game, every other halfway-useful stat will be easily maxed? Because AGI is widely regarded as almost useless, with a minimal effect on damage mitigation/avoidance.

5) Recommending outdoor EXP for grouping. Yuck! Outdoor zones boast terrible ZEMs and terrible loot. There is simply no reason to go outdoors if you're in a standard EXP group. The one exception would be farming deathfist belts, if they really do sell for 10pp each.

6) Again, not going to personally edit this one back right now, but I think telling low level newbie Iksars to go to Freeport is one of the worst ideas. A case can be made for experienced players, but the last thing newbies need to deal with is getting from Cabilis to Freeport and trying to play with Iksar faction in the main world at level 5. It would be mind-bogglingly hard for a newbie to do this and I really don't understand how you think this would be worth it when there are plenty of good leveling zones in Kunark and a lot of grouping going on there.