Tonight’s session in EQ was the one in which I actually started killing things. But first, I had to stop off and pick up one of the new mercenaries, which essentially gave me an AI-controlled duoing partner. You can select either a tank or a healer, and there are five tiers of each type, each higher one costing more than the others (there’s a one-time hiring fee and an ongoing every-15-minute continuation fee), though it’s not really exactly clear what the differences are. I picked a tier III dwarven healer and headed out to the Planes.

The most effective way to solo as an enchanter is through charm soloing, which is simply charming an enemy and sending it against other enemies to do your killing for you. Of course it’s not quite as easy as that — the charm can be resisted, it’s of random duration and could break at a bad time and leave you dealing with two enemies after you, some enemies will summon you directly to them and beat you up anyway, dealing with caster types can be a pain, it can drain a lot of mana very quickly, etc…

I was never really all that great at charm soloing before, but tonight it almost felt too easy, even though I’m severely out of practice. The healer merc gave me the HP buffs I normally wouldn’t have, it kept me and the charmed critter topped up so that I didn’t have to worry about HPs being worn down, and she kept me alive during the charm breaks that took a while to bring under control again. The healer even kept me alive through a really bad fight where a summoning giant somehow drained all my mana away and I was frantically looking for that restore-to-full veteran ability while charm broke at the same time, and even if I had died, the merc would have given me a rez.

I even made 5 AA points in only 4 hours, just practicing on light blues and a handful of dark blues in the Nightmare, Disease, and Storms planes. That’s crazy-fast compared to the rate I remember getting them before. I’ll mainly be spending them on the AA skills that raise the stat caps for now, since I’m severely capped on INT and that’ll get me more mana fairly easily. Beyond that, I’ll have to do a bit of research on just what the useful new AA skills are.