I've been thinking about making a ranger/rogue/shaman team. For the lols. Anyone play a rogue alongside another melee? How annoying would it be to keep the rogue in stabbin' range? Could I, like, /follow the ranger on the rogue, and automatically maintain "RNG -- MOB -- ROG" positioning? Any other tips for boxing two melee? I don't expect to play this trio much at the high end. I'd just lolz around fun old zones.
I did a stint with Monk/Rogue/Shaman in mid Luclin. I started by having the rogue Auto-follow the monk for perfect positioning on mobs but found it was too annoying to have to un-autofollow after every EXP mob when the monk went to pull another mob. It's easier to just bounce back and forth repositioning. I found the shaman pet helped if i positioned it perfectly to counter push. 2-melee is much higher APM due to the constant repositioning, which is why, i ultimately swapped the rogue for a wizard.
I personally don’t find 2 melees to be noticeably more of a chore than any other setup in a typical exp setting. against high HP mobs it’s kinda nice to balance your tank’s push over a long fight. The times it really sucks are if there’s unstable aggro and you’re trying to chase something all over camp, or a raid sort of situation where you’re hopping all over trying to dps and stuff is just dying the moment you’re set up on it (think trash pulls at a Kael raid)
Melee centric trios just mean that everything goes in the corner, or lots of moving around. I once tanked on a shaman with bard and rogue meleeing, it works but it can be annoying dealing with push. Ranger and Rogue going together should have similar push so that should be a minor issue.
The shamans ruins being able to have a trio of all the same race. You could have an elf ranger, half elf rogue, and barbarian shaman to imply they are all related, though! Who says half elves have to be half human?
Well technically the official EQ lore specifies that the other half is human. But depending on the current norrathian one-drop laws, it might be possible to get some barbarian in there. Bring shrink potions!
i really like shaman as a tank, ive done like shaman tank rogue stabbies and cleric healing but thats not all chain
I did pal/shm/rog for awhile, just in easy exp grind situations. It was a lot of fun. Positioning was slightly annoying but the 3 classes worked well together. Mind you this was late state Luclin. I'm not sure how these things work in PoP because I haven't been around. If pal/shm/rog was fun, I can imagine that rng/shm/rog would be. No rez in that trio. But yah, it's possible to work with it, the positioning isn't that bad. Ranger or Pally holds tight aggro, you set up in a corner, while DPS is happening you just canni like mad on the shaman, though again, different with canni 5. Anyways. Slouch - If you want to borrow my shaman and or rogue to play around just PM me on the Tem boards and I can hook you up. They're nothing special, level 60. So I haven't touched them in awhile. Ahih well, you can check it out and let me know.
I do war/brd/clr all the time. I park the Warrior, and drag the mobs over his head with the Bard. With 2 weapons, auto attack always picks up agro right away, and bard can rejoin melee after 3 or 4 rounds from the warrior. I've done brd/rog/dru, same story, but the bard tries to keep the agro instead of passing it off to the warrior. In principle, I think you'll find the most success if you park the rogue somewhere, and pull with the ranger, and position the mob with the ranger, before engaging with the Rogue. And here's my backstab macro, for even less button mashing! I think 100% haste (no overhaste) is 5 seconds, so /pause 50 would be racing the clock. /pause 55 seems to do the trick with out ever missing one. Adjust the number up if you aren't fully hasted (10 seconds with 0% haste iirc). Code: [ Only registered users can see the bbcode. Click Here To Register... ]
Ooh, good idea on the "/tell main macro over" line! I've used stabstabstab hotkeys but that's a nice addition.
I leveled my rogue to 65 via SK/SHM/ROG, mostly in BoT. It's not bad at all, but it's not charm pet speed for sure. I don't love the prospect of a ranger doing this well before some gear/AA's, but you're Temerity so you'll likely not have that issue. My mostly - VT alt ranger tanks pofire F1 fine with a shaman healer, so you can make it work, you just have to get there. ROG is positioned perpendicular to a wall to wall pin mobs, SK pulls a mob into position, neither melee has to move after that. SK pet and shaman pet are nice additional dps in this situation and are also positioned to wall pin the mob. Shaman has a macro to assist SK, slow target, sent pet, target SK. Rogue dps macro assists the SK, /attack on, /doability backstab, /pause 52, /doability backstab. Backstab is linked to GINA triggers which shows me when it is off cooldown so the button can be hit again. The ROG spamming your other melee with tells seems silly when there are much better workarounds. Constantly moving two melee sucks. This setup means I only ever have to move 1 PC unless something screws up.
I play a rog/war/shm. I just toggle back and forth hitting backstab/evade and taunt/kick. No 3rd party software needed. When I grp with other people I make sure to surround the mob to avoid pushing it around.
I've got a bard/SK/wiz trio and melee positioning is the least of my worries. Healing, now that's a worry.
Since it's tied to your haste %, it's only reliable if your GINA triggers a) know how much haste you have active or b) is statically set to assume 100% haste all the time. I haven't used GINA, does it do the transparent overlay stuff? So you see like a cooldown timer? Cause the hotkey in the built-in UI already "pops" when the button can be mashed again. The point of the macro is to not have to mash the button so often. I've been playing here with out GINA for a long time, partially because I'm on Linux, and I enjoy playing the game more than I enjoy tinkering and customizing the experience of playing the game. I recently spent about 30 seconds cobbling together a linux commandline to text-to-speech the "Charm break" lines in my enchanter's log file. That's been indispensable learning how to charm. But then I watch Soulfire's videos of his gameplay, and that's clearly *too* much text to speech. So I'm still not sold on GINA.
In my experience, the most valuable alerts are on charm breaks, invis fading, and group/raid invites. Not as ubiquitously useful but great when you need it - mez timers, DA timers. Lastly, when I’m trioing hard content, I enjoy having debuff timers.
My Gina folder has easily over 1000 triggers. But there are very few text to speech ones. As thucy notes, charm break, invis fading, invites are ones I have sound for. I also have sound for Tells so I can catch tells on characters I’m not looking at. Beyond that it’s just a bunch of timers or purely text triggers.
Speaking of Gina, where's a good place to get that downloaded from? Windows refuses to load the one I have found.
With help from @Majo, I made a Mac thing that goes 'bonk bonk' when charm breaks, then called it a day. The charm break trigger is great. I tried a few other alerts but they just felt kinda spammy so I nuked 'em.
If you're 65, raiding at all, and have some form of a self sufficient trio, you can assume 100% haste. If that's not the case, you'll need to adjust the timing. Yes, I have mine set up with a transparent overlay that counts down when the hotkey will refresh. The point is that I can backstab on the rogue and then do something else (like play the SK, etc) rather than watching hotkeys refresh. It doesn't serve much of a purpose if that's the main toon you are on.
I did that too until everyone in the guild found out and decided to send me a tell at the same time. Some say the triggers are still going off.
You can set certain triggers to interrupt others you can also tell certain triggers to not fire again while a previous one is active! Also with Regex knowledge you can improve that trigger to avoid merchant and pet spam.
Any chance, would you share the script, or command line? I'm using Linux to avoid MS surveillance. But I'm no geek or programmer. I'm Linux noob. I'm learning charming and sound alert at charm break would really really help. Now I'm usually finding out that charm broke, when pet starts hammering me.
Code: [ Only registered users can see the bbcode. Click Here To Register... ] Hopefully you can see the pattern, should be straight forward to copy/paste. Watch for those double quote escapes!