Warrior help needed

[Hogie]

Hey Everyone!

Glad to be back playing EQ, but I am playing a warrior and am not 100% familiar with it. I know the basics of tanking in EQ (I was a tank in 2 other MMO's for 6+ years combined), but was wondering if anyone could shoot me a PM to help setup some key macros I will need in the near future.

Im sure people will ask "What do you need help with", and quite honestly I dont know lol. I just want to make sure I am playing my class to its fullest and make sure I understand my roll and how to do it best.

[azeth]

I think you're ideally going to be looking for 2x Obsidian Shards, Dex jewelry & AC gear on P99. Warrior aggro here is very proc dependent.

[Hogie]

Sorry, i should of mentioned i am level 46. I can farm two of them for sure, but is there anything a little better? Does Ringed Mace of the Yak still drop?

[azeth]

oh my bad, yea there are way better alternatives. disregard.

[greatdane]

You got to level 46 without getting remotely familiar with your class? Huh. Well, warrior tanking is pretty simple. You auto-attack your target, and if it starts hitting someone else, you taunt it to try and get its attention back. That's pretty much the essence of it.

Some notes:

- You'll want proccing weapons or you'll never hold aggro reliably. Look for anything with an effect that tends to piss mobs off: stun, snare, stat debuffs and such. Straight damage won't help very much, especially at this point in the game when damage procs aren't very high yet. Ykesha is good because it has a ministun in it, not because of the 75 damage.

- You can only taunt targets that are under your level. A change will go in at some point that allows warriors to taunt higher-level mobs when they're above 50 or something, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been implemented yet. Taunt doesn't do anything when the mob already hits you. A succesful taunt just puts you at the top of the threat list, and if you have aggro, you're already there.

- If you're about to break mez on a mob, it's a good idea to taunt it a couple of times first to reduce the chance of it running for the enchanter/bard who probably has aggro from mezzing it.

- There aren't really any tank macros, but as with any other class, you should have an /assist puller macro and a macro that indicates what target you're attacking. That one can be used for incoming messages as well if you're pulling, and a simple '/g %t' will do the job.

- There's a few myths about tanking. Agility will not improve your avoidance by any noticeable amount, and the only thing that matters is keeping it at or above 75. Fast weapons do not inherently generate more threat, it's all about the ratio of the weapon, although fast weapons might reduce ping-ponging a little since slower weapons will leave larger gaps in your threat generation where someone might take aggro in between your swings if you're both tied. Threat is also unrelated to the actual damage you deal, or even whether you hit at all. Whenever you swing your weapon, you generate an amount of threat based on your weapon's damage and your damage bonus. Hits and misses generate the same threat and extra damage from strength or crits does not increase it, although crippling blows have a stagger effect that does.

- If your gear is adequate and you aren't being slow about targeting/attacking the mob, it's not your fault when you lose aggro. People have forgot how to wait before engaging when the tank is a warrior, so yell at them when they try to slow on incoming or nuke twice in a row.

For tank weapons, you're probably looking at some of the Kunark ykesha weapons. There are some that have slightly better ratios than the SSoY, although that'll suffice if you really can't afford something proper. Forget about Ringed Mace of the Ykesha, it goes for like 80k or something. You can also try Silken Whip of Ensnaring, and Sarnak Warhammer procs at level 46 if you can afford it (it's like 4k or so). Do not attempt to tank with a weapon that doesn't proc. Lammy is not a tank weapon.

You can even use Throneblade of the Ykesha, slow weapons proc as much as fast ones and your off-hand weapon has half the proc chance so it doesn't add a whole lot. The advantage of a slow two-hander is that the proc chance per swing is very high in order to have the same procs-per-minute as a fast one, and this significantly increases your chance of getting a proc on your first swing, which helps a ton, as well as on riposte swings where speed is irrelevant. When you're still leveling, mobs die fast enough that it isn't so crucial to sustain high threat for a long time, so you won't need the better long-term threat gen of dual-wielding. The Throneblade has an ok ratio and an early proc is usually enough to secure aggro for the short amount of time that a level 40ish mob lives.

[Hogie]

Thanks Greatdane! Thats what I was looking for.

Just to clear things up about your first comment. I do have a understanding on how to tank and the basics, I was looking for more of the information you posted on the second half of the post. Would you say it is better to use a item with much lower damage but has a proc, over something with much higher damage and no proc?

Is Yak cheaper than Sarnak right now? Would i be ok getting 2 of them for now until i can afford Sarnak?

[hedbonker]

On mezzed mobs, it's always advisable to have a group mate root the mob before you engage it (if you have a root class in the group).

[Dantes]

Yaks are better than the sarnak warhammer for aggro. Lower DPS, however.

[Estu]

Agility will not improve your avoidance by any noticeable amount

Do you have any evidence for this?

[greatdane]

Would you say it is better to use a item with much lower damage but has a proc, over something with much higher damage and no proc?

Don't even try to tank with weapons that don't proc. Well, you could get away with a non-proccing off-hand weapon since they proc so little anyway, but it isn't advisable. You simply don't generate enough threat through your base DPS to hold aggro from rogues, monks, slowers etc., you'd have to out-damage them to hold aggro and that's not gonna happen unless you're much higher level or they have truly terrible gear. Tanking is 90% your proc weapons, you just can't do it properly without some. If you're talking about, like, Gnoll Hide Lariat vs. Wurmslayer then sure, the latter will do better. It has to be an enormous difference in ratio for that to be the case, though. I'd use SSoY over Jade Mace on a warrior. You will not out-damage DPS classes, so your only hope is to land a couple of procs as quickly as possible.

Is Yak cheaper than Sarnak right now? Would i be ok getting 2 of them for now until i can afford Sarnak?

SSoY should be dirt cheap by now. Last time I saw one for sale, it was like 800 and there's probably no real demand for them anymore. The ratio is a bit poor, but they should be good enough for aggro. Ykeshan War Club is a little better and I don't think they're terribly expensive either, but I dunno.

As a side note, you will struggle with aggro. A lot. Warrior is a broken class that wasn't given the tools to do their job until several expansions later, and as long as you gear correctly and haven't got cerebral palsy, you can be pretty confident that any problems you have aren't really related to your ability to play. The class is so primitive that there's not much of an element of skill involved, and when you lose aggro, it's mostly because the mechanics are terrible and/or because the other people in the group weren't careful.

Do you have any evidence for this?

A decade of experience and time spent as a dedicated member of thesteelwarrior's community. We parsed that shit to death, seriously. Agility doesn't do any more good for you than the 1 AC per 3 agi or so that it gives you, and that's not enough to warrant gearing for it or putting points in the stat. Most of the time, it isn't even worth it for the shaman to buff your agi unless he can't spend his mana on anything else. People think it gives all kinds of dodge bonuses because some prima guide somewhere said it helped you avoid attacks, but it said so because AC helps you avoid attacks and agility gives AC. It's pretty much a useless stat as long as it doesn't get below 75. If it gave any kind of meaningful avoidance, halflings and wood elves would be the best warriors, not ogres. I can't say if this server's mechanics are the same, they often aren't and there's countless little quirks where the original codebase builders had to make guesses. On Live during this period, agility gave nothing but its ~3 agi = 1 AC, and that's pretty pitiful.

[Estu]

A decade of experience and time spent as a dedicated member of thesteelwarrior's community. We parsed that shit to death, seriously. Agility doesn't do any more good for you than the 1 AC per 3 agi or so that it gives you, and that's not enough to warrant gearing for it or putting points in the stat. Most of the time, it isn't even worth it for the shaman to buff your agi unless he can't spend his mana on anything else. People think it gives all kinds of dodge bonuses because some prima guide somewhere said it helped you avoid attacks, but it said so because AC helps you avoid attacks and agility gives AC. It's pretty much a useless stat as long as it doesn't get below 75. If it gave any kind of meaningful avoidance, halflings and wood elves would be the best warriors, not ogres. I can't say if this server's mechanics are the same, they often aren't and there's countless little quirks where the original codebase builders had to make guesses. On Live during this period, agility gave nothing but its 3 or 4 agi = 1 AC.

Well, thanks for the insight. I'll have to rethink my paladin's gear, then.