I’ve been leveling really slow. I mean, REALLY slow. It’s for a few reasons, the main one being that I haven’t actually played Rift a great amount in any one sitting. It’s a few hours here and there in between playing a lot of EverQuest. As such, I just hit level 25 last night, and myself and Ogur (pictured above) just hit Stonefield when I reached 24. Someone asked me how I managed to stay in Freemarch for so long, and it was quite simple. I did a LOT of rift fights when the game first released. Now they’ve slowed down a considerable amount, I haven’t seen the map crowded like I once did and I find the large invasions have become a bit rare. Whether this is due to my server specifically (I play on Deepwood) or because everyone is crowding the higher level zones thus leaving mine barren, I’ve no idea.
I wanted to make sure I finished all of the quests in Freemarch before I moved on, and I think I managed to complete all of them but two. Those I deleted because I was tired of the same zone, I’ve been there since release, after all. Stonefield is pretty and the quests I’ve done so far are enjoyable. One had me battling gigantic trolls, which really made me feel incredibly small and powerless – which was great. In the same chain I then had to turn myself into a troll and read some glyphs scattered throughout the area – towering above everyone else was a fantastic feeling (until an invasion landed on my head, combat morphs you out of the transformation). Crafting supplies seem a bit sparse compared to Freemarch, but it could be that everyone else has been collecting (except plants, those I found in abundance). I’m finding a new difficulty with playing a priest in Rift fights. When everyone first started the game this wasn’t an issue, because there were no level 50’s running around completing level 20 rifts. I was healing a LOT, and there for contributing a lot. As time goes on I see more and more players above the level of the rift participating in the events – which is fine except that my personal contribution goes WAY down because no one is taking any damage for me to heal.
My only solution has been to switch to my DPS spec (Justicar / Druid / Shaman) and wail away at the mobs. Then when the invasions are over I switch back to my heal spec so that I can keep my tank alive as we plow through our quests. I’m not really surprised at healers having a harder time, the same happens in EQ2 public quests as well, healers are second rate citizens (especially lately, there have been major issues with heals not counting towards contribution) and making a contribution to what is going on always seems hard. My tank friends on the other hand is always way up there in contribution. I would really love to see some sort of magical ‘easy answer’ to this problem but I doubt very highly that one will come.
In the mean time I just try to participate in every single rift and invasion that I see. I’m toying with changing my spec’s around a lot. I find myself not using warden (thinking of switching to druid for the pet but I’m unsure) and on that same note, I’m not fond of the shaman build either. Perhaps that’s a goal for today, to play around with my builds some what and see what appeals to me on a greater level. I love playing justicar for DPS, and I love sentinel for healing but I would enjoy branching out a bit. Then there’s also my 10 scout and 10 mage to level up eventually. For now they’re acting as crafters, I have Stargrace (25 cleric) who is my Artificer / mining / forager – then Kameeko (10 scout) is my Outfitter / butcher / armorer, and Velours (10 mage) is my apothecary / runecrafter / misc (I haven’t decided yet). It’s one more thing that makes me truly appreciate EverQuest where I can focus on ONE character, and work on aa to unlock every craft that I’d like to work on. I wouldn’t have the alts if I could do it all on one.
P.S. WRU player housing. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
Stonefield was when the game really started to get fun for me. I had very few urges to explore in Freemarch, it just really didn’t feel like a world to me until I got into Stonefield.
I love that screenshot, by the way, it’s really cool how the details standout.
I had to make very similar choices. Here’s the solution I came up with — make sure you’ve shelled out for a second role (in my case, I splurged and grabbed a third, but I really only switched between two), make a “pure” healing build which you can switch to for rift raid healing or group quests or instances. I personally went with purifier/sentinel/warden.
Consider switching your melee role to a caster dps role that would allow you to do mucho damage but still have a couple decent direct heal abilities. If you are going to be duo’ing a lot like I did (leveled the entire way to 50 with my husband – cleric and warrior combo) I found this to be a really good build: inquisitor/cabalist/warden. Inquis and cabal will give you the damage you need for questing and rifts where you don’t need to heal…but the heals you get from the warden tree will also help you solo, as well as keep your tank up during duo’ing. You will also be able to dish out good damage while doing so.
I had started with a melee build myself (shaman/Druid/justicar) which I kept as my third role, but found I didn’t need it much. It was great for taking on multiple mobs at the same time and staying alive through almost anything, but the build was best for soloing, and as I said, I was mostly always in a duo. In a group, I found the build did not shine so well…I wasn’t killing individual things fast enough for my taste (no where near as fast as my caster build can pull off) especially since i had my own tank, so i should be contributing more with damage. And while the build gave me lots of instant heals for myself, I found i was not so great a healer of others. Ask yourself how often you’ll be playing solo versus being with someone else. Like I said, I kept the melee build around in case I needed to go off to do stuff by myself, but that hardly happened and the role was mostly neglected. Plus, I found my caster role i mentioned above was pretty good for soloing too, so it was the one I predominantly stuck with when I wasn’t main healing.
Hope this helped!
My cleric hit 50 this past weekend, and I’ve never been in a healing role outside of a dungeon. I started as a Justicar/Shaman/Warden and kept that as my main leveling build (tanked every dungeon up through King’s Breach too — never healed always tanked) until it started to feel too slow, then switched to an “Inquisicar” which is Inquisitor XX / Justicar 11 / Sentinel 11. It does nice dps for solo and the passive heals from the Justicar Salvation skill keep you at full all the time. Now that I’m 50, I’ve spec’d it for more support heals so it looks like this. It works well enough that in both AP and CC at level 48, when the MH would be a moron and get killed by boss AE’s I was actually capable of keeping the tank up on my own, while doing respectable dps overall.
If you’re always duo’ing with Ogur and want to try this type of build out, going early on for 16 Justicar for Righteous Mandate and Doctrine of Righteousness will give a nice constant stream of heals to the tank from your dps spells. Even the non-justicar spells will give 33% heals to the tank, assuming you aren’t being hit. 16.5% normally with your Mien of Honor, plus that doubles to the tank via the Mandate if you are at full health. The mandate also puts the full amount of your Vex heals on the tank as well. And of course the Justicar abilities will heal for 75% to him via the mandate too, though tbh that’s really only Bolt of Radiance if you stay at range. Still… if you’re at full then casting Doctrine of Loyalty is *also* doubled on the tank — hits him normally, plus the full overheal on you travels through the Mandate as well.
And of course the Sentinel heals are there too for if you’re out of Convictions and can’t sneak in a Sanction, BoR, or Life’s Vengeance to build one back up. Ya know, the more I look at this the less I’m surprised that I was able to keep the tank up in CC and AP after the main healer went down — that’s actually a lot of heals in this build, in spite of being primarily a dps.
If you prefer melee, I think a shaman/justicar or druid/justicar build would be helpful in your duo also — just be sure to have 14 in justicar for the Mandate and run in the Mien of Honor at all times. Would probably make things go a bit faster for you, if you wanted to speed things up a bit.
So far as actual healing specs go, I did a “full warden” spec in Runic Descent and it worked well — no wipes, anyway. I’m in a 38/28 warden/sentinel spec now that’s supposed to be fairly awesome, but I’ve never actually used it yet. . .
And Stonefield sucks for mining. Nodes are few and far between for that. I’ve seen a ton of plant nodes for my foraging though. And of course, cloth drops off the mobs, and hides from the yak looking things.
FWIW, for crafting, you need at least 3 toons to be able to do them all. 6 crafts and 3 harvest = 9 slots = 3 toons. No getting around that. I’ve got a toon of each archetype, so I’ve spread mine across 4 toons. Means I’ve got 1 of each craft, and some duplication on the harvesting is all. My apothecary is 200 since I don’t have a forager up high enough to gain materials for that, but all my other skills are 280-300. I kinda wish I had all 3 harvests on my cleric and could just feed all the high level materials to the other toons, but…. armorsmith / butcher / miner, so foraging is lagging. But the 26 warrior I’m working up now can forage, so that slack will be picked up over the next few weeks, at least.
Seems that for the most part, crafted gear is better than anything you can find outside a dungeon at appropriate level, so I just craft all my stuff for myself as I level anymore. If I find an upgrade, great, but it doesn’t happen often. At least not before hitting AP/CC — I did get enough blue gear out of there for my cleric that I didn’t use the crafted carmintium stuff I’d made for when I hit 50.
Same boat, in all ways. Stonefield is kinda letting me down because of it’s desolate landscape, and the almost total lack of other players and lack of rifts on Faeblight. I haven’t been able to do ANY of the event activities because nothing is happening in this zone! I’ve seen a few similar level players on occasion, but not enough; tears frequently go un-opened because I just can’t deal with them alone.
And the healing thing; yeah. I’m looking at switching my main build to something more heavily weighted towards the damage side of things simply because healing where I am, and when I can, is too few and far between at this point.
I am sad. JUST as I started to like the healing role, this happens XD
May I suggest going Inquisitor/X/X for solo levelling. You can go Inq/Sentinel and do some group healing for minor Rifts while still rocking the damage meters with DoTs and AoE. No idea if Cabalist rocks by now, but at your low level pure Inquisitor with a little Sentinel works nicely.