Bomber SMs were hilariously effective in certain situations. There were some famous fraps vids around at the time showing SMs diving off the wall at Alb MG in Emain and just pbaoe'ing the crap out of dozens of people.
Our guild had a couple of leveling tactics to exploit pbaoe SMs. We'd make big groups of our lowbie toons and do Tuscaren Glacier or Iarnvidiur, or the redcap camps in Modernagrav (I think), just pull masses of purples all night and roast them.
Another favorite was the Svartalf villages in Malmohus. There was one with a cluster of crates, and we could get half the guild's lowbies on the crates where they couldn't be touched, surround them with bomber SMs, and then pull the whole camp. It was the only time in five years that we actually exploited the geometry, but we couldn't help ourselves .
Ahh, the good 'ole days of running the CF fins list and maintaining the group for 8+ hours so there was no downtime at all.
I will be curious how no PvE will work, since that was an integral part of DAoC. I'm still definitely interested though.
The bomber groups were insane. I remember doing those with a couple druids and a bard. Keep defense was a joke. Wait for them to pound the door down, then hit them at a bottleneck. Those times were epic.
Eh, something else that was more fun was our NS keep group - 5 NS's, 1 Bard, 1 Warden, 1 Druid. Hib Galahad was probably the best overall Hib group, severely organized and we had some Asian guilds that would take care of things at night ... though I remember getting calls for RR's at 3am.
Yeah, at the very end when it had been dumbed down beyond all recognition in order to try and keep a few of the hard core pvp guys subscribed.
At inception it literally took months to hit 50. I played three to five hours a night with an active guild and my first character took something like six months to cap.
I think it took me something like 20-30 days of play time to hit 50 in the first two years of the game. They really dumbed it down towards the end. In Midgard with Modernagrav we could level people from 1-50 in about 6-8 hours of play time at the end using spiritmasters and pac healers.
I was in Imperial March (Midgard) on Galahad, and getting you Hibs out of a keep with your shrooms was damn near impossible.
One night we determined to go after your relic, got a zerg up, dropped every keep in Alb, and once the whole server was convinced we were after Alb's relics we suicided the whole zerg on relic guards and reformed in Hib. Almost got the relic, too.
Good times .
As others above said, that most certainly was not the case when the game first came out. Leveling from 40-50 took a long as time and there was very very few areas where there were mobs to level up on in the mid to high 40's. I remember spending a ton of time killing Pooka's in groups because that was about the only thing worth killing at high levels.
I don't know how the game changed as expansions came out, but DAOC's level grind while easier than EQ's was still no walk in the park.
Since we're all being nostalgic and stuff... someone tell me: What's wrong with a Bonedancer with the name of "Bonure"? There's nothing wrong with that, right? RIGHT?
Stupid name nazis.