Joining the Community

''This page is still in progress. Sassinak 03:20, 6 June 2008 (UTC) ''

Grouping
A discussion about grouping is coming soon. Sassinak 22:13, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Targeting
You can target your group friends directly using the F-keys, F2 through F6. (F1 targets yourself.) Or you can click their name in the Group Window to target them.

Assisting Your Friends
Assisting is the term that we use when you allow someone else to choose your target for you.
 * In EQ2, you can continuously target one of your friends, and you'll automatically use their target for your attacks. When they change targets, your attacks will follow.
 * Conversely, when you target one of your enemies, your beneficial spells will automatically land on the player that is being attacked. When your enemy changes targets, your beneficial spells will follow.

This is called implied targeting, and it's a valuable tool when you want to work together with your group friends. It's quite common for a group to select a single person to be the "main assist", who selects the target for everyone's attacks. You'll get accustomed to using the Implied Target for most of your activities when you're in a group.

Threat

 * Main Article: Threat

Threat is the method that EQ2 uses to determine which player or pet gets targetted by each enemy. Almost every action in combat, besides running around, builds up threat in your enemies. Attacking, healing, casting buffs or debuffs - all increase threat.

Each enemy has its own threat meter that is tracked separately, so enemies can attack different targets depending on the status of their own threat meters. The player with the highest threat will probably be targeted by that enemy, and will be attacked until someone else passes the threat of that target, or the target or enemy is dead.

Some spells and combat arts are specifically designed to raise or lower threat levels. When in a group or with a pet, you can use these abilities to try to influence the monster's choice of target. When you're fighting by yourself, these abilities have no effect. Certain types of monsters also have these abilities, and will occasionally force you to change targets to protect their friends from death.

Threat control is the basic method a group uses to control monsters or crowds of monsters, and is a large advantage of being in a group versus being alone. Managing threat in a group is a good way towards victory, because if monsters attack people who have strong mitigation, avoidance and defensive abilities, all aspects of the fight become simpler.

Browsing Your Friends' Journals
When you're grouped with others, your Quest Journal has an additional tab, called "Group". In the Group tab, you can view all of your groupmates' in-progress quests. A separate category shows you which quests are in common between the members of the group. You can use this feature when deciding how best to help each other with quests.

Sharing Quests
Quests that have no prerequisites can usually be shared with others. When you share a quest with another person, you're saving that person the trouble of traveling to the NPC who offers the quest. The recipient has to begin the quest from the first step, regardless of how far you've progressed on the quest (and regardless of whether you've completed it or not).

To share a quest, just find the quest in your Quest Journal (in the Quests tab or the Completed tab), highlight it and and click the "Share" button. It'll automatically be offered to every member of your group that doesn't have the quest already.

The Broker System

 * Main Article: Broker

The Broker system is what you'll use to buy and sell items with other players. There are no auctions in EQ2. Items are bought immediately at the selling price; money and items change hands immediately. The Broker NPCs, found in all major cities and a few towns, act as the interface to the Broker system. When you click on a Broker NPC, the Broker window opens and you can start browsing the market or list your own items.

Browsing the market is usually done using the Advanced Search tool: you can search for items by class, level range, item type, equipment slot, and certain effects. You can inspect each item on the market, and you can even see how an item would look on your character by Ctrl-clicking its icon. When you click "Buy", the item goes into your bags immediately.

When selling items, you can either place bags in the Broker Window and place your items for sale in them, or you can put the items in Sales Displays in your character's house. Either way, they'll be listed on the Broker for other players to buy, as soon as you choose a price for each item. A "Lookup" button lets you check what other players have priced the item at. When you check back on the Broker later, you can view the sales log to see what sold, and collect any money that you earned.

The Commission System

 * Main Article: Commission System

The Commission System allows one player to offer their tradeskill expertise to another player, and optionally to be paid for it. The buyer provides the materials, and the crafter selects the recipe and performs the crafting job as usual. The buyer gets to watch the crafter's progress in a simplified version of the Item Creation screen. When the job is complete, the buyer receives the resulting items automatically.

The Commission System addresses the issue of trust between crafters and their buyers, and also allows crafters to perform jobs that utilize NO-TRADE materials for other players. Thanks to this feature, it's not necessary to learn a specific tradeskill when a quest demands it; you only need to find a crafter who's willing to help you. It's not even necessary to arrange for materials to be gathered by the crafter that's helping you. Thanks to this feature, crafters can get paid for offering their skill rather than just for selling products that they create.

Joining a Guild
(more info about guilds coming soon)

Finding a Guild
The Guild Window doubles as a Recruitment Window when you don't yet belong to a guild. Bring up the Guild Window by pressing U, or by selecting it from the EQII Menu. In this window, EQ2 suggests a list of guilds that might be a good match for you - and makes it easy for you to contact that guild immediately.
 * Only guilds with online recruiters are shown in the list, and up to a maximum of 40 guilds will be shown.
 * The list of guilds is sorted based on how many members are online (or recently online), based on how many members of the guild are close to your level.

Belonging to a Guild

 * Guild chat
 * Guild bank
 * Guild website

Guild Levels

 * Benefits of earning guild levels
 * How to earn guild XP