New player, looking for advice/groups

[bcbrown]

Hi Baros,

It was fun grouping with you the other night on my bard. Here's my advice for you: get good gear, find the right zones/mobs to fight, get good at the tactics for your class, and get good at finding groups.

For gear, in addition to getting hand-me-downs from more established players, try to find camps where the mobs drop a lot of money or stuff that sells well to vendors. Find interesting quests with good rewards. Look up gear on the paladin equipment reference page and see where it drops: https://wiki.project1999.com/Category:Paladin_Equipment.

Generally speaking, the order of importance for gear will be: Good weapon; decent haste; good AC; good HP. Stats are almost irrelevant for now; a +3str or +3wis item isn't going to move the needle in terms of survivability. Since you've got a mithril 2-handed sword now and one good +hp ring, getting some better AC items is probably the best bang for the buck. But if you can get a Golden or Platinum Fire Wedding Ring the extra HP will help a bunch in terms of surivability.

In terms of good zones for grouping, the established grouping zones are Unrest till 25-30, Mistmoore from 25-40, City of Mist till close to 50. Eastern Karana is another decent place to look; there's often one or two people soloing the spiders there and you can see if they want to group up. Nearby is also the Gorge of King Xorbb with minotaurs and High Hold Pass with gnolls. In South Karana at the far south end of the zone is the Aviaks, commonly referred to as KFC where you can often find some people. Just putting on your LFG tag isn't sufficient usually, you gotta be proactive about reaching out to ask if someone wants to group.

It also helps a lot to join a leveling guild. Castle is a fine raiding guild but I don't know how helpful it'll be in finding leveling groups. Friendly Druids and Nova seem like the two most active leveling guilds, and both have helpful people to answer questions and help with finding groups.

In terms of good cash camps, the Nybright Sisters in Lesser Faydark are too low-level to get xp, but they drop bronze weapons that sell well to vendors. Gargoyle Island in Ocean of Tears drop 9pp gargoyle eyes, but you'll probably want to wait until level 25-26 to go there with your gear.

In terms of tactics, always keep Center and Holy Armor up on yourself. If you're the tank in a group, spam Flash of Light to keep aggro on yourself, or ask a caster to keep the mob rooted so you can use root aggro. In a tough fight against an undead mob, casting Ward Undead between swings can make the difference. Lull can be helpful in splitting multiple mobs: it reduces aggro radius, so lull one mob and then pull the other, and the lulled mob shouldn't join in. Root can be super helpful in giving you a bit of a breather, but it doesn't last very long and often breaks early. One effective tactic on a tough fight is to root it, back up, and bind wounds to regain a little health. Bandages aren't super cheap (1pp/stack) but they can help a lot with recovery.