EQDiva

My play time is so screwed up I really only do LDoNs with my Wife. Bard w/ Shaman Box and her necro. All 65th 100+aas. Can this trio do DoNs? Thanks!

In my experience.. No With the nerfing they did to the DoN missions you need a tank at least.

I was afraid of that. Bleh. Thanks!

You could do the easier DoN missions in Lavaspinner with no problem (e.g., Grounding the Drakes). They don't give as good as experience or crystals as Creator or Nest runs, but they are still viable with your group.

not so sure about that one. creator can be done fairly easily three boxxed with a *good* bard puller. i am not sure what level the furious sentry would come out at level 65, but he should be able to be mezzed with lullaby of morell. if i want to pull the creator mission quick, i'll go in before everyone else, kill off the defunct sentries. clear out a few pathing drakes. then use ss helm to tag the furious, train everything out the front hall, and mezz the furious in place. fade the aggro, remezzing as needed and refading as needed. eventually, you'll have the furious nice and alone for the killing. everything can be easily kited in this mission, so tanking is really no worry, and the spawn time is 30 minutes, so the only reason you should face a respawn is because of a wipe. with an optimal spawn, this mission can easily be done in less than 15 minutes, solo. but the randomization kills it sometimes. once you get a system down for it, it shouldn't take you longer than an hour per mission. one thing to worry about is the hit radius is much larger for mobs than what you're used to in ldon missions.

Thanks :) Since it's not a clear cut, "You're gonna die" I'll have to give it a shot. Of course we need to upgrade still. We are mostly pre-PoP gear :/ Being able to kite at all will help.

OK. Dude says that an alternate method is as follows: 1. Fairly easily with a good bard puller - Well, if the other two are necro and shaman, then they will end up taking aggro every mob. This means kite only no matter how good a puller he is. Since his is botting the shaman also, keeping him alive while running melody and keeping all three toons out of add-aggro range and ahead of kited mobs in that small entry area, while watching for roamer adds..... 2. Kill off the Defunct sentries - Not as easily done as said since the drakes path by in the hallway and on the wall where you need to stand to pacify-pull them. There are usually one or two cats in your way also. Oh did I forget to mention that all these see thru invis. 3. Clear out a few pathing drakes - well, there are seven in the main area and one or two from behind by where the boss spawns and sometimes one right smack in the middle of your kiting area at the entry point. Expect to have to deal with the stone sentries (2-3) with fades or kites also. They see invis also. AND, meleeing the drakes wont be at all possible for your grp makeup. 4. Train everything to the front hall and you will have the furious nice and alone - this task takes a skillful player with lots of confidence in his abilities, and very knowledgeable of mobs, pathing, and the zone makeup. NOT for the beginner. Summary: Dont try this, it will be frustrating as your wife will be going broke trying to summon your corpses with coffins or you doing guild lobby summons dozens of times before you succeed on this mission, or even the furious pull, since it is new to you. Repop now means you may not be able to just loot your corpse like we used to, unless its by the zone in. Having no rezzer means the both of you will be running across broodlands naked many times. Just get a normal balanced group of six ppl and go for it. The other three ppl will probably have completed the mission dozens of times before and will help you guys through it. This is doubly so since your botting the shaman and he will have to be on the spot for slows and such, which is not a simple task for a bard who is doing the pulling also....

Umm. Whilst I agree that soloing creator at 65 for someone new to the mission is a verrrry bad idea, I do think that you're being a bit over the top in criticising all the points made. Certainly the defunct sentries are simple to kill ... who cares if there are mobs that see invis or path near? What are you doing trying to pull them anyway? Run into the garden area with DA, fade, chant kite them down (they dont summon), DA and run out to ZI, fade again. That bit ANYONE should be able to manage, whatever their abilities/experience and whatever their level of gear. Secondly, why would a shammy or necro hold agro over a bard? If the bard tries to hold agro with chants and worn perc mod, there should be no problems if shammy / necro take it easy. It wont be agro thats the issue though : at 65 and the likely gear level of the bard, he will get toasted without a cleric healer if he tries to tank ... so kite. And why not kill the roamer first! You also make the training to ZI sound hard. Its not hard, but you need a fairly large manapool to cope with the required fades. The problem here is that at 65 you're probably not going to land mez reliably on the named, thus its not really going to work. I agree that it shouldnt be attempted yet ... but dont go away thinking its really, really tough. Because its not. It just needs a couple more levels and basic knowledge of the zone layout.

I wasnt trying to criticise the idea but point out how it wont work for him. If you DA run then fade in the garden you might not get to a point where the mobs will path away from you and not all reaggro. There are caster mobs that will nuke you down and the cats wont always roam off correctly. Plus the flappers roam right in the pull spot, I mean by the wall in front of the defuncts. If you cant fade there due to them being there first, then you will have to run around in the garden some more aggroing even more goats and flappers along with the defuncts. By now you have a huge train and some mobs will be stopping to cast so its going to be hard to negotiate around the terrain obstacles in the garden and avoid getting hit in order to find a spot to fade where the see invis mobs wont just reaggro. Plus remember that some mobs cast root. After you manage that, you will still need to pacify pull the defuncts. If you dont you will aggro 2-3 goats and 1-2 flappers. Then you will need to chant these down all the while avoiding the roaming flappers that will enter the room. At this point if 30 mins has past, you can DA again and run out to the entry area if you havent taken too much nuke damage from the 1-3 caster goats or melee dmg from cats that usually add while trying to kite three defuncts in the full popped garden. Some of those root also. By now, any roamers in the front area that you cleared to begin with, will have repopped. Or if you just skipped them to begin with, they are still there to be dealt with prior to pulling the boss sentry. Now you will have to wait for DA to reset again as you tear azz to the back of the zone to pull the Furious. Problem here is again, cant fade if there is not a spot free from roamers. Hence the recommendation to remove some roamers ahead of time. This means that during the 30 mins you can take out the 1-2 in the entry hall and then begin to work on the roamers. Since you need to ensure all roamers are dead, you will likely need to kill 2-3 stone giants and a cat in addition to the roamers. If you dont then you cant be sure you got them all and on your run back to the Furious you may end up having DA drop with no place to fade. Now that your in the back area and within range of bellows to the mob, you will need to use the eye to target Furious. Its ez to buy the tinkered gizmo from bazaar if you dont have the helm. But the problem is now you will need DA again after using the bellows exploit to switch targets mid cast. This is because the sentries (4) at the junction all see invis and you faded out in the hallway. This means you need to use the exploit to get a bellows to land on the mob out of sight. Either that or spam and wait for a critical failure on a pacify. Once you accomplish this you need to DA again out to the front area if you didnt clear the 2-3 stone giants and the cats in the corners along with all the roaming flappers; AND they have not started repopping again. (Did you manage to do this with bard/shaman/necro kiting all in 30 mins?) If you dont you risk getting stunned and quadded by multiple mobs. Not to mention rooted by a caster mob. Anyway getting the last fade to work and keeping the Furious in the front hall is not simple either. Some of the stone giants are nukers/cleric mobs and like to cast dispell not to mention all the warping that will be going on as mobs get stuck behind walls and stuff. There are many many things that can go wrong here. Its far far simpler to just get another 3 ppl who dont mind someone 2-boxing the bard/shaman and just go through the mission normally.

DA is on a 3 minute recast timer, not 30 mins ... thats what makes it such a nice tool for SO many situations. Never leaves my bar. I can promise that you dont have any pathing issues running from ZI to garden and fading anywhere within to lose the mobs. There are also no mobs that wander into / out of the garden room from the sides. Why pacify the garden sentries? Kite the lot in a big circle in the middle of the room together with anything else that agros there. Very occasionally you will get a healer kirin / drake agro too .. which is irritating as you need to mez it whilst chant-kiting all your sentries ... but its more irritating than tough. With decent resists, nothing but an occasional lure will land ... ie. nothing that a hotpot wont fix. As far as pulling furious is concerned ... the easy way to do it is pre-target with eye then ... fire up selos, DA, whizz a complete circuit agroing and training everything, and fading them in a bunch in the far corner from Furious. then you're free to pul it out with only an add or two whilst they take ages to reset. Again, as I said, its not too difficult, but you do need some experience with the zone. Wholly agree with your conclusion tho for a bard new to it ... and more particularly, a bard at 65.

My wife and I are in a similar situation. We have a 4-box crew we built in LDoN and tried it last weekend in DoN for the first time to see if we could really do it. I play bard (puller/tank/slows/debuffs) and wizard (1-2 nukes per fight plus Xuxl pet) and my wife plays a mage (DPoC Air pet, DS, Nukes, Debuffs) and cleric (hammer pet, reverse DS, heals). We're all 61 with between 50-70 AA using mostly pre-PoP gear. Most of my AAs are in the Defensive categories and some melee offensive with JF1, IM1 as the only really "bard" AAs I have (my magelo is way out of date, but gives an idea of where we were headed). We left EQ when GoD was introduced and only returned 3 weeks ago so we're still shaking off some of the rust :) We did a starter mission and completed it in 3 hours with 1 death (I fell through the fake floor and had to do a GH CR and run back hehe) and 1 evac (got a critical resist on SSoQ and got 3 spiders.... yay for Kazumi's). We had to kill 45 mobs total and gather 15 items. We got 23 crystals and just over 1 AA xp for all that killing. None of the casters went below 70% mana at any time, and I only went below 20% health once other than on the death. Now that we know what to expect and have our tactics for casters and adds sorted out I think we can do it in about 2 hours which is closer to a reasonable amount of playing time. For reference, this team does 52-55 mob count LDoN normals in about 60 minutes and 25-28 collections in about 45. We don't push very hard at all right now since I can't charm, and we're not too concerned with being the fastest around. All in all, we were quite happy with it. We didn't think we'd be able to handle it at all but with the partial slows from the bard and the combined DPS from the group it wasn't half as bad as we thought it would be. If you've been kiting through LDoN chances are you can kite through the lower end missions in DoN. They're really well spaced out and few wandering mobs. If you've been bard tanking/meleeing LDoN I'm pretty sure you can handle it with your 3-box crew. Good luck, and please let us know how it went.

What are your resist , i have 4 resist over 300 and the other at 250. I still get alot of nukes hit me.

None of my resists are over 200, but we have the mage air pet which makes a massive difference when facing casters. It stuns constantly which prevents a lot of casting. I still get hit occasionally with casting damage, but it's nothing a cleric HoT can't handle. For your setup you could probably mez tank them and get away with it.

Follow-up for reference... We added a few AAs (about 10 to each character) during the double XP weekend and upgraded some of the caster gear in the Bazaar specifically for extra mana regen. Now, we can do that same mission in just over 2 hours without any problems at all. That time even includes a 20 minute lunch break we took during the run so we could have done it in as little as 1.5 hours if we'd really pushed it. We're still not using tribute at all and we're still using primarily PoP/LDoN generation gear.

The enemies of don give a limit between the lowest level and the highest meaning if you got 3 level 68 and 2 65 enemies would be between 65-68 and the furious sentry always cons white or yellow exept when you are grouped with people who are higher level than you. Oh by the way,be carefull in the ldon were you kill drakes on a high mountain because they are all red to 70 with a full group of 70 or mostly red with a mix of yellow and white.You will be pulling 2 at a time and you can keep it down to two if you know the path,otherwise leave it to another group member who has done this don before. Follow-up for reference... We added a few AAs (about 10 to each character) during the double XP weekend and upgraded some of the caster gear in the Bazaar specifically for extra mana regen. Now, we can do that same mission in just over 2 hours without any problems at all. That time even includes a 20 minute lunch break we took during the run so we could have done it in as little as 1.5 hours if we'd really pushed it. We're still not using tribute at all and we're still using primarily PoP/LDoN generation gear. Lucky you,i got a few don pieces myself but nothing extrordinary althought my bp is awesom to me. If you are looking for advice i'd say save up and get a full suit of cultural don wich has awesom stats and forget about the newer piece wich is around same stats as don cultural maybe less ac and stats and costs way more.