Player returning from Wow. How are Illusionists now?

[Tangogulf]

Hi all; I'm returning from Wow.  I have come to a point where I would like to see some content.  The community in Wow was killing me and I was finding myself soloing all the time.  I dont want to solo (exclusively) anymore.  I have posted many "hi I'm a newbie posts" recently.  The reason is that there seem to be alot of changes EQ2 has seen. I'm trying to decide on a Class for my main and have some questions: <ol><li> When I left, the illusionist community was unhappy because they did little dps and they did not seem to be a necessary component in groups;  leaving them in the cold.  Has this changed in the past year?</li><li>Crowd control seems like a fun idea. I'm wondering is the illusionist a fun class to play.  For me I define fun as being both effective both in groups and as a soloist, when groups are not available.</li><li>Is there a printable list of the spells and AA's that someone can recommend? </li></ol> Thanks for any and all help.

[Foolsfolly]

Illusionists can do good dps, but only with a LOT of effort. You have to not only get all the right gear, but also pay constant attention in order to keep dps up. Crowd controll only serves to slow down any good group as they will deal much more damage without you making their targets immune to aoe. However it can be useful in helping a weaker group get by. The EoF AA's really only have 2 useful lines, the buffs and the damage spells. The other options are crowd controll and time, or something, and both should be obviously useless just by looking at them. For KoS agi and int seem to be the most popular lines as they increase dps, but the other lines also work well if you are more concerned with soloing ability or crowd controll. Oh, and welcome back =)

[Ardnahoy]

<cite>Tangogulf wrote:</cite><blockquote>Hi all; I'm returning from Wow.  I have come to a point where I would like to see some content.  The community in Wow was killing me and I was finding myself soloing all the time.  I dont want to solo (exclusively) anymore.  I have posted many "hi I'm a newbie posts" recently.  The reason is that there seem to be alot of changes EQ2 has seen. I'm trying to decide on a Class for my main and have some questions: <ol><li> When I left, the illusionist community was unhappy because they did little dps and they did not seem to be a necessary component in groups;  leaving them in the cold.  Has this changed in the past year?</li><li>Crowd control seems like a fun idea. I'm wondering is the illusionist a fun class to play.  For me I define fun as being both effective both in groups and as a soloist, when groups are not available.</li><li>Is there a printable list of the spells and AA's that someone can recommend? </li></ol> Thanks for any and all help. </blockquote><p> Illusionists are a very intriguing class and are very underplayed. If you want to be unique, illusionist is the way to go. Both illusionists and coercers are, in my opinion, the most fun class to play in this game. Every other class has one or two strategies that they repeat constantly, but enchanters have so many different skills that there are many different ways to approach an encounter, and many different ways to achieve success.</p><p>Illusionists are among the best soloers in the game when it comes to soloing high level named heroic creatures. If you don't want to, or cant find a group, you can always solo your way through most heroic content in the game. Many classes can solo the easy stuff, some classes can solo some of the hard stuff, but only illusionists can solo all of the hard stuff. There is something very satisfying about soloing your way through heroic content that requires groups.</p><p>In groups, Illusionists are awesome. Even if you are in a strong group that doesn't need crowd control, you bring a good deal of damage, power regen, and buffs. You will definately get group invites when you go /lfg, and you will hold your own on the parse list. Lately, the game has added zones where crowd control is a must. I am on a few people's friends list for those times when they want to enter such zones. Some times you will get more group invites than you can handle. No one will ever tell you that you can't join a group or raid because your class is not needed - mostly because hardly anyone plays an illusionist and we bring so much to the game.</p><p>The illusionist class is not for everyone. You will need patience, timing, and creativity. You will need to open up a ton of hot bars and have all your spells ready because you will find that they all have a purpose. Some poeple do not like the complexity, but for those that do, there no better class to play in the game.</p>

[Tangogulf]

Hey thanks for the responses.  As I say, its a very intriguing class.  It is interesting to me that there is one person saying CC is non essential and another saying it is very essential. Why the divergent opinions.  And does this divergence exist in game? Thanks again.

[Kahna]

Basically, yes it does. The importance of CC depends heavily on your group. If your group can handle the adds then CC is non-essential, and is probably slowing down the kill rate of your group. If you group can't handle them, due to group make-up, skill level, or the few zones where the mobs are tricky enough to need CC then it becomes essential. You have to be flexible enough to know when to mez and when not to.

[Ardnahoy]

<cite>Tangogulf wrote:</cite><blockquote>Hey thanks for the responses.  As I say, its a very intriguing class.  It is interesting to me that there is one person saying CC is non essential and another saying it is very essential. Why the divergent opinions.  And does this divergence exist in game? Thanks again. </blockquote><p>The difference exists because this game, unlike EQ1, carefully balances fights such that a reasonably balanced group of four can handle any multi-mob encounter with little difficulty. There is no true art to pulling mobs since you know beforehand what you will get before you pull, mobs are spaced out, and roamers are few. When you take out difficulty and the element of surprise, crowd control is trivialized.</p><p>That said, crowd control in this game has one added feature (or handicap depending on how you look at it). When a creature is mesmerized, it is immune to AoE attacks. This is great if you don't want mez broken, but it sucks for players that rely on AoE attacks. Every class in this game has AoE attacks, including us. We actually do a pretty decent amount of AoE damage.</p><p>In most cases, multiple mob encounters are balanced by having weaker monsters. You don't normally see a group of three ^^^ mobs in an encounter. Any tank in this game can survive these encounters with any preist healing. There is no danger in keeping the adds awake and if you were to mesmerize the adds, it would take longer to finish the encounter. Only if the group is very unbalanced, or has a severe handicap is CC necessary.</p><p>In EQ1, monsters were much harder and encounters were very unpredictable. There were many places you would not go unless you took an enchanter or other form of CC with you. There were raids that could not be started without enchanters. Sony wanted to eliminate such dependancy and in the process relegated CC as a utility instead of a necessity.</p><p>Only recently has Sony added very difficult high level zones to EQ2 that require not only CC, but a powerful tank, excellent healer, and effective damage dealers. These zones are few, but folks will not enter unless they have an enchanter.</p><p>So, to break it down, CC is essential when:</p><ul><li>You are in any dungeon where the mobs are yellow</li><li>You are soloing, playing in a duo, or in a trio</li><li>You are grouped in a zone where no one has been before</li><li>Your group is not balanced, or healer can't keep up, or tank sucks</li><li>You want to try to solo something very hard</li></ul><p> Likewise, CC is <u>not</u> essential when:</p><ul><li>You are raiding 95% of raid content</li><li>You are grouped in outdoor zones</li><li>You are grouped in a dungeon where trash mobs are blue</li><li>Your group is perfect</li><li>You and your group are level 70 and fabled/mastered out</li></ul><p>Hope that helps.</p>

[Tangogulf]

Ardna; It does indeed help.  And I thankyou for your well thought out response. What you say concerns me somewhat.  Not only about enchanters but the game itself.  I was dissatisfied with Wow for a variety of reasons.  The two that stand out most in my mind is the community and the easy nature of the Pve encounters there.  From what Im seeing, the EQ2 community wins hands down, however, what you say here causes me some concern about the difficulty of the encounters. I'm looking for a challenge.  My roots are in EQ1 and I remember some of those fights.  As long as it would take to level, some of the battles were epic, wonderfully exhilarating and at times just as frustrating.  What you say about EQ2, makes it sound like easy mode;  I sure hope I'm not misreading things here.  When I think of an enchanter (aka illusionist), I visualize these epic battles.  Lets face it, that is where a CC character is needed. Frankly, I dont want to wait until Level 70 to see it.  Heck, even with my best effort, I may never see it.

[Miele]

If you trio, you'll have a blast and play the class at its full potential imo, in a full group of 6 fights are quite easy honestly, although an enchanter can save the day on horribly huge pulls (even with the ugly targeting system). I trio 90% of the time, if I'm not with my 2 buddies, I duo with one of them. My main is a SK and I usually am the tank, but with our alts we kinda switch roles and I picked Illusionist instead of a pure damage dealer. We're still quite low level, but the difference for us is huge when we're on our alts, as the mez, power regen, mana flow AA, stuns etc. allow us to tackle very hard encounters. For honesty EQ2 (in most of its content) is easier than EQ1 on many levels, but not so easy that you can play with one hand. If you go in zones before outlevelling them (white/yellow/orange mobs) it can be really challenging even in a full group, but given the levelling speed (especially in the first 30 levels), unless you turn off combat exp, you're going to start a dungeon with yellow mobs and finish it when they're green. We did 15 to 22 in the last 4 hours of dungeon crawling while completing a few quests, it slows down considerable past 30, but not so much. It's good and bad at the same time, I'm still torn on this fast exp feature, sure makes creating an alt more appealing, because you get faster into the levels where you can do much more things. At the higher levels the rate of advancement depends a lot on your playing mates, if you have a fixed group ready to go every evening, you'll blaze through them if you want to. In our trio, we play often with exp off to do as much of our level content as we can.

[Ardnahoy]

<cite>Tangogulf wrote:</cite><blockquote>Ardna; It does indeed help.  And I thankyou for your well thought out response. What you say concerns me somewhat.  Not only about enchanters but the game itself.  I was dissatisfied with Wow for a variety of reasons.  The two that stand out most in my mind is the community and the easy nature of the Pve encounters there.  From what Im seeing, the EQ2 community wins hands down, however, what you say here causes me some concern about the difficulty of the encounters. I'm looking for a challenge.  My roots are in EQ1 and I remember some of those fights.  As long as it would take to level, some of the battles were epic, wonderfully exhilarating and at times just as frustrating.  What you say about EQ2, makes it sound like easy mode;  I sure hope I'm not misreading things here.  When I think of an enchanter (aka illusionist), I visualize these epic battles.  Lets face it, that is where a CC character is needed. Frankly, I dont want to wait until Level 70 to see it.  Heck, even with my best effort, I may never see it. </blockquote><p> In  terms of difficulty, EQ1 is the hardest, EQ2 is easier, and WoW is by far the easiest.</p><p>Don't let this discourage you. EQ2 enchanters are incredibly diverse and fun to play. If you want a challenge, try soloing an even-con ^^^ named heroic. EQ2 is much less brutal than EQ1, and a bit more predictable, but it is just as challenging. You still have to be on your toes, and click the right buttons at the right time.</p><p>Sony has done many thing to EQ2 to make it more appealing to the masses a'la WoW, but the game was not made easier. Levelling and other penalties have been made less severe, but the mobs still require the same amount of skill to overcome. EQ1 wasn't particularly harder, it was just more unpredictable, and the penalty for failure was harsher.</p>

[Tangogulf]

Thanks for the encouragement. You make it sound like it really can be worthwhile.  So I appreciate it.  I really do like the concept behind the illusionist, so I think I will make him my main. Hopefully groups will be interested in having an illusionist as I level. Speaking of targeting, any tips you can offer other then the Tab key?

[Manyak]

<p>yeah, use the WASD, QE keys to move around, tab to change targets, and Z to /assist (its in the options, ull find it). this way when you are targeting a different mob you can just hit Z twice and ur targeting the tanks mob again.</p><p>thats about all the targeting i use other than mouse clicks</p>