New to the server and seeking advice

[Namegen_Isterrible]

Originally Posted by mgellan [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Thats nuts, I soloed my Shammy basically from 1 - 50 (obviously combined with grouping and soloing elsewhere, but my play times were not condusive to being able to play in a group all that often) as follows:

1-9 EF trash, BB teeth
9-19 Kiting mammoth calves with SOW, DOTs
20-34 Kiting mammoths ditto
34-42 Cynthia in RM
42-50 Spectres in Feerott / Guards in Ogguk

This is with very basic (cheap) equipment. At the top end of each level range yes you can melee to add DPS but prior to that a young shaman gets his ass kicked trying to melee. All SOW, root, DOT with disease / poison (and later pet) and run away when root breaks. Rinse and repeat.

Regards,
Mg

There's a difference, imo, between being able to solo to 50 and being powerful. I didn't say a shaman couldn't solo 1-50, I just said that they become powerful eventually and that they aren't especially strong without decent+ gear.

A cleric can easily solo to 50, especially with kunark out, entirely naked. But the experience would not probably be described as nuts.

A shaman can easily solo to 50 with very basic gear, but I wouldn't describe one as "especially powerful" or anything like that unless you were at least twinking with jaundiced bone gear and other high AC and HP gear, a poison wind censer, and a JBB at 45.

Shamans, without potent gear, lack the difference-maker spells that a necro or an ench or a bard has. Slow is great, yes, but only if you have enough AC to not get totally obliterated by melee in the first place. Canni is great, yes, but only when you have enough hp regen to have a chance to use it. Etc.

Compared to a necro, whose lich and lifetaps are superior to a leveling-shaman's canni and regen, whose FD and HS and snare and root and mez are all vastly superior to a shaman's CC/survivability tools, whose pet is actually halfway decent, whose dots are superior and more numerous... yeah.

Or compared to a bard, who can kill half of overthere in a single pull at level 30 in 1 hour using only a drum and a horn bought from a merchant for like 2pp.

Or compared to an ench, who can spend as much on gear as the sham does but become a 200+ charisma charming beast with that money.