I. Introduction
II. Social and non social mobs
III. The mez party
IV. PBAE party
V. Recruting a PBAE party
VI. A good camp and leech groups
VII. Terminology
VIII. Credits

I. Introduction

I am writing this strategy article not for glory, but to serve as reference background reading for geeks like me with too much time on their hands and a passion for DAOC. I have played a mana eld (Vicelok/Hib/Lance/Snakegod) to 50, and recently have started playing Merlin/Midgard and organizing PBAE parties there with my now 43rd SB (Housefrau/Eternal Glory). Recently Midgard was granted PBAE for their spiritmasters, and a whole new group of people are in need of education on the fundamentals of PBAE parties. I at one time wrote a strat article and posted it on IGN/Vault for the realm of Hibernia and on some of the other class specific boards there. Gaming friends on Merlin have encouraged me to once again revisit PBAE parties, and so here you have it. This is a work in progress, and not a definitive end statement. Valuable input will be incorporated and credited.

II. Social and non social mobs

A. Non social mobs

Early in your adventuring career you frequently kill single mobs. You pull the mob and that's all you get- 1. If you have a group of people and you can pull a mob from a crowd of them and only get one, you have a non-social mob. People dogpile the mob and kill it, then you do it all over again. Optimizing xp means you minimize your downtime and pull harder and harder cons so that your split of xp is still good. Generally you follow a rule like this

1 person = blues
2 people = yellow-orange
3 people = orange-red
4 people = red
5+ people = purple

The game code reduces a creatures defense by the number of attackers, so large numbers of players can hit purple con monsters in a group, and they would never be able to hit them alone. This sort of killing is perhaps the most simple kind of party you can run, and is the least efficient party for gaining xp/hour. It also can become mind-numbingly boring. I have seen things like bards park their characters with end song running, turn off the monitor, and go to bed for the night while the party continues to pull. I used to kid a friend that he could set up a drinking bird to periodically tap the heal key on the main tank, and just leave the game entirely.

But the basic rule remains that if all you pull is one, you must increase the con of the mob pulled as the party size increases. About all you can hope for bonus-wise on non socials is a camp bonus, which usually means working several camps in rotation.

B. Social Mobs

There are 3 main varieties of social mobs

1. BAF mobs- these Bring A Friend, or BAF. The number pulled, N, can be related to group size, G, by

N = G/2

So a group with G=2 or two people will have one mob come on a pull, G=3 will sometimes have 2 come, and G=2 normally has 2 come, and G=8 can have up to 4 come. For this reason many times you will see people stay in duos and refuse to group others, as they don't want to deal with BAF's. BAF is a trait that it can share in addition to CFH (explained below), so you can get more than this equation says. It appears as if friends must be within range to come, so if you pull a straggler way off on its lonesome, you will get one. Mobs BAF regardless of how much damage you do on the pull.

2. CFH, or Call For Help. Mobs with this property when hurt will call for help. Often if you are close you can see the message 'x calls for help' in the text scroll of the combat window. This is a probability that happens as a function of how much you hurt it. So for instance I had a mana eld working a Curmudgeon camp, and if I pulled with nearsight (a range debuff spell which does no combat damage) I would only get one on the pull, but if I pulled with a nuke, then I would get 2. CFH can be really bad news if the party is camped to close to a large group of these. For instance I was in a PBAE party in Malmohus working a Drakul camp, and the only agg free pull spot was close to the camp within call range. We had 8 and would get 3-4 per pull. Well on one pull we killed 4, which called and another 4 came, and we killed those, and another 4 came and wiped the party. Because CFH has a range, if you drag the creatures far away from the camp, their calls for help go unheard.

3. Linked- linked mobs all come, always, regardless of damage or group size. You can tell mobs which are linked sometimes by watching them move. Sometimes a linked mob is not apparent, such as there are some monsters which remain stationary or there are some boss type mobs that when killed spawn underlings.

All social mobs have a group xp bonus that depends upon the number pulled. You also get small chests for 2 pulled, and large chests for 3 pulled of additional gold. This group bonus can be very significant, and for this reason those at high levels often search out socials in order to level faster. You can receive a group bonus in addition to a camp bonus, so rotating social camps can be very good indeed. If you deliberately agg multiple non social mobs, you will NOT receive a group bonus, nor will you receive chests of extra gold.

Because of group bonus, a party can take on socials of lower con than parties taking on non-social mobs, and still come out ahead because they get more gold.

III. The Mez Party

The classic way parties deal with social mobs is via the mez party. Usually they pull a BAF type mob, and 'mez the adds', using the mezerize spell to freeze those extras that come on a pull so people can deal with the mobs one at a time. This works very well for social high con mobs, since multiple tanks have an easier time attacking the same target, particularly since attackers can attack from the rear where the monster can not block, parry or evade. Mez is not the only spell that you can use to do this, other crowd control (CC) spells work such as root, snare, and stun. Root works as well as mez if you root the mob at a distance and it has no ranged attacks. Rooted attackers within combat range will still fight. Snare works ok if you use it on the pull and run a long ways back to the party. If the party is good they can kill the adds before the snared one arrives, and this speed difference lets you take them on one at a time. Like root, snare will not prevent monsters in range from attacking. You must use mez or stun to disable target in range. Stun is typically so short duration as to not be used as anything more than a brief reprieve from damage.

Note that the game design seems to be such that if you mez/stun a target that is attacking a caster, that caster will be disrupted until the delay on the attack sequence of the attacker expires. This is very annoying in RvR for elds who stun an attacker and are still being disrupted by slow swinging armsmen. The game also give mobs infinitely long arms, where if you say root it and run off to a range of 500, the mobs parting shot will land even though you are too far away for it to begin an attack sequence.

Mez works well because it lets the party deal with high con socials, which is very good experience. Because tanks dogpile, they can hit, and quickly dispatch targets. Peelers agg the target first to put the agg on someone who can take the damage, and everyone else benefits from the peeler's tanking.

The main problems with mez parties are (1) people who break mez, (2) people who pull agg off the puller, (3) mez which fizzes due to high con of the target, or is dramatically reduced in duration. The typical training one receives for mez parties are that everyone /assists the peeler. You can do this two ways: select the person you wish to assist by either clicking on them or their name in the mini party window and typing /assist, or you can just make this macro

/macro assist /assist <playername>

When you assist, whatever target they have becomes yours. Assist is slow when many mobs are about, and good players can manually select the peelers target faster by clicking on it. In crowded situations like dungeons where intervening targets obscure the one you want and there are too many to select the one you want via next enemy, assist is great. You use /assist to avoid breaking mez.

The other main problem is people who pull agg off of the peeler. Usually this is the over anxious nuker in the back rank who will not wait for the peeler to land a taunt, or an healer who heals a tank before he has landed a taunt. You can reduce your agg as a nuker or a healer by asking tanks to put the protect skill on you. Also distance between you and the monster reduces agg, so smart nukers stand back as far as they can and wait for the tank to get agg before nuking.

When someone other than the peeler gets agg in a mez party, you are usually taught to stand still and /yell. When you /yell, the tank sees you need help and is given a direction which he can head on his compass (shift-C). He then goes to you and aggs the mob off you.

The other main problem is mez duration and fizz. High con mobs have improved resistance verses spells, and this translates into greater chances of the spell fizzing or if it lands, of lasting so short of a duration as to be impractical. What then happens is the mob goes after whoever tried to mez it, and the peeler has to get agg on that mob too. For this reason most mezzers move well out front on the pull to have as much time as possible to cast mez multiple times, and sometimes the mezzer will just pull with root or mez so only the adds come and it is clear to the party if mez failed. This is dangerous because most mezzers are not great tanks, and if you have trouble getting agg off the mezzer, it can be bad. Good parties have good communication between the puller and mezzer, so say the puller says things like 'I am pulling the one on the left, you mez the one on the right' so it is clear which mob will be mezzed and which one will be agged.

IV. The PBAE Party

There is no faster way to gain experience in the game than the PBAE party. PBAE parties are designed to take down socials as rapidly as possible. In the mez party, you kill one mob, then the next, then say the third, and you are done for the pull. In PBAE everything goes down at the same time, and so the time to dispatch a pull is reduced by a factor equal to the number pulled. If you only pull one, well it's the same. But for 3 or 4, you will notice a much faster kill rate.

The basic recipe for PBAE is

1 taunter per mob pulled
1 PBAE nuker
1 pulsing bladeturn character
1 healer
1 downtime person

So a full group of 8 should have 4 taunters. There are many variants upon this basic mix, but this mix is here for illustrative purposes.

The basic idea is this. Someone pulls. Nearsight is good for pulling, but many tanks have spell like abilities useful for pulling. Each taunter uses a style with the taunt effect on a separate mob. You do not mez or root. The taunters then draw the mobs together into a pile at the PBAE point. Any non-taunter who gets agg runs at the PBAE point. For midgard, the healer then uses AE stun. Then all PBAE nukers start nuking until the pile is dead. Anyone else may use AE nukes once the tanks have the mobs.

The form this takes depends upon the realm. So far I have just done Hibernia and Midgard, and here are the assignments

Hibernia
Taunter= shade, warden, hero, champ, blademaster, ranger
PBAE nuker = full mana spec enchanter or eldritch
Pulsing bladeturn = warden
Healer = druid
Downtime person = bard

Midgard
Taunter = warrior, berserker, thane, skald, shadowblade, hunter
PBAE nuker = full suppression spiritmaster
Pulsing bladeturn = suppression runie
Healer = healer, high mending shaman
Downtime person = healer

Here are the roles of the different components. Read the sections for the other guys since you need to know what they are doing-

A. Taunters- you must have the taunt style, which is all you use. You have the most complex and demanding task in the group, and once you do this for a while, all other parties will seem boring. Do yourself a favor and make a PBAE bar, IE

/stick
/face
/assist pbaename
taunt
a few styles to dish out dmg if pbae goes down
sprint

Some weapons are better than others for this purpose, for instance in Midgard axe and hammer have medium bonuses to hit, but sword has zero bonus to hit. Hitting matters a lot, since even if you execute your role of getting your designated mob, you must actually reliably hit it. This in general tracks your level, weapon skill, which is a function of strength, skill points in a weapon, and adders. A 2/3 or higher weapon spec should do the trick.

Short delay weapons are much better than long delay weapons. If you miss, you want to be able to taunt again soon. Short delay weapons can offset poor hit rates.

Usually you want good tanks as taunters, since you want to minimize the power drain to the healer to minimize your downtime. This does not necessarily mean the guy needs to be wearing the heaviest armor- I have seen assassin types evade in combination with pulsing bladeturn take no damage. High shield spec and parry can help a lot here as well. Taunter level matters a great deal- I have seen a high level ranger do better as a taunter than a lower level hero.

The main way PBAE parties die is when the taunters lose agg. This can happen a number of ways. In my personal experience, the playing skill of the taunter tends to matter more than his raw character ability. It is much better for you to have someone be a reliable mana drain on the healer and reliably pick up the mob nobody else does than to have some clueless chain wearing warrior who is afk during pulls and double teams mobs when he is there. The first way this happens is when the taunter's fail to select different mobs and one is not targeted. This can be the result of player error, or more mobs coming than there are taunters.

To reduce the odds taunters go for wrong mob, you need very good communication between all your taunters. The normal way you do this is to make taunter assignments. I find it is really good to have the least experienced taunter in the party pull. Because he selected the mob and agged it, and he stays on the same mob the entire time, his job is as easy as it gets. However many newbies do not make good pullers.

Most people think a good puller is a tank type class with a spell like pulling ability such as a champion or thane. While this is true, there is far more to pulling than that. A good puller has his mini party window open and is paying attention to the mana bars of the party. He is cognizant of the fact that taunters need to recover endurance between pulls and allows for that. He knows that the best way to pull is from the perimeter of the pop zone (so as to avoid adds due to a pop), and he knows where the party is and goes to the PBAE point every time after a pull. A good puller for PBAE will pull from clusters of mobs so they BAF. Some spell using pullers can recognize a caster in a mixed group and use his abilites to disrupt the caster and force it to close on the pull. You know you have a good puller in the party when you have a steady rhythm of pulling with no complaints and unwanted CFH's or aggs from pop. Your puller need not be a tank. For instance you can have a runemaster run out and pull with nearsight, and have your newbie, mez trained taunter /assist the puller to select the target pulled. If you are going to have someone other than a taunter pull, they should pull with either a debuff or nearsight so that any attack, no matter what damage is done, will peel the mob off the person who is pulling.

Whoever is designated to taunt the mob pulled is said to be 'on 1'. This monster is agged first and at range. The at range part matters a great deal. In the best of worlds you want a taunter pulling with a big flashy spell with a huge animation on the mob pulled- what this does is give a visual clue to everyone else that that particular mob has been taken and they should take something else.

The next step is to put someone 'on 2', IE designate a taunter for the 2nd mob of the pull. If possible here you want another person with long range spell animations and taunt (eg champ, thane, skald) , since he can agg it with shouts at range and give people even more time to pick up later assignments. If you lack such a person and you have a newbie, this is a good place to assign him as a taunter. Tell him to as soon as he can, go out to meet any of the mobs not pulled and taunt it. By having him move out to meet the mob, it is clear to the party exactly which one he is on and makes the assignments of the other tanks easier.

The person 'on 3' and 'on 4/slop' are progressively the more and most experienced taunters in the group. The reason here is those who are last in the chain have the least time to react, and it is here where having experienced taunters really pays off. In a standard party of 8, you will have 3-4 mobs coming, and the '4/slop' guy will take the 4th if it comes, or pick up any mob anyone else missed.

To better assist the 'slop' taunter in his job of salvaging a bad pull, what I find works best is to designate one point the PBAE point, and tell all the other taunters to stand there. Then several paces back designate another point for anyone who isn't PBAE nuking or taunting. The slop guy stands back with the healers and watches and waits- the space between the PBAE point and the healers gives him time to pick up the missed ones. The PBAE nukers can line up wherever they want. From experience having them behind the tanks prevents adds from aging them on the pull, and lets them see when the tanks have the mobs ready for nuking, so they can either sit at the PBAE point or further back.

Now going out to meet your mob is usually a good idea. There are some limits to this. You want to not go within agg range or CFH range of the camp doing this. You want to be within sight of the healer, and within range of the PBT person. To some extent taunting the mob well off the PBAE point ( say more than 350 range from the PBAE point) is a good idea since if you miss, a lightly agged mob is not dragged into the blast radius. When you go out to meet your mob, it buys people time to see what is not picked up and react accordingly. Also having a bit more space lets you try a second taunt if the first missed. Pulling this off is not trivial though. If you stand in its path, stick it, and taunt when its in front of you, usually the taunt goes off. But if you are slow you sometimes get a 'target not in view' message as it passes you and the taunt misses. You can guarantee target will be in view if you /face it and stand in its path, but if you miss it, you will not automatically follow it. What seems to work very well for me is to go out and meet it, stick it, wait until its back is towards you, THEN taunt it. Since from the rear position the mob can not parry, evade, or block, this has a higher likelihood of landing. If the mob is running at the pbae zone, you want that taunt to land before its in the blast radius, else you will be in a struggle to regain agg from the PBAE nuker.

Now once taunt lands, that mob will /face and /stick you, and your job becomes to drag that mob to the PBAE point. Sometimes this changes on the fly, depending on where the PBAE nuker is, and you have to be aware of where they are. Fortunately the spell animation for PBAE is such that it is pretty easy to figure out where the center is.

'Agg and Drag' is the catchphrase for the taunter. How you drag is up to you. But here are a few tips. First off, if the nuker is nuking you do not want to drag it until you land at least one taunt. If you miss 3x in a row, and you are out of the blast radius, well you still have agg and its not chewing on the PBAE nuker.

Once you do land a taunt you can either run through it at the PBAE point, or strafe and backpeddle. The former gets the mob just where you want it soon, but exposes your back to it and disables parry, evade, block for you. The latter does not expose your back to it, but walking backwards to the PBAE point with a mob in tow takes some getting used to. On the strafe and backpeddle, you must stick it, then hold down strafe left or strafe right (see /keyboard for which keys are strafe for you). What this does is circle you about the mob with you facing it. Strafe and backpeddle is safest, but slower. It lets you also land a few more taunts before dragging it into the nuke zone. If your party is light on healing, you prob should play more defensively and strafe/backpeddle. But to some extent getting it to the PBAE point fast is good defense, as it will get killed faster and expose you to fewer rounds of blows from the mob. Regardless, you will have to make fine adjustments to the mobs position for optimal kill.

You see, PBAE is a funny spell in a number of ways. First of all agg for it works like this. The game counts up the number of attackers, and splits agg among those attackers. In normal circumstances it would be an agg nightmare- the caster is at range zero for maximum agg, and he is doing absurd damage with this nuke- how could you taunt it off him? Because PBAE splits agg among attackers (I think it divides up the damage by the number of attackers, probably everyone in the party in attack mode counts as an attacker, then it only applies the agg to the nuker at his reduced share level.) you can taunt for more 'agg damage' than he does and get agg.

The other main point about the PBAE spell is its damage drops off as a function of distance from the caster. It is maximum at the center of the nuker, and zero at range 350. This damage fall off matters a great deal, since the closer you park that mob on top of the caster, the more damage he will do, and the fewer nukes it will take, and the sooner the pull will be killed, and the less downtime you will experience due to recovering nuker mana.

So if that nuker is nuking you drag it to him even if he is off the designated PBAE point. You want the toon for the mob in the exact same location as the caster.

In a party of taunters who stink at dragging, you will find the mobs spread all over and frequently the PBAE nuker repositions to maximize nuking damage. If they are spread out so poorly that there is no overlap, then it takes at least twice as much mana for the nuker to drop the pull. When you get them all right on top of the PBAE nuker, they drop VERY fast.

Some things you need watch out for as a taunter-

1. The endangered puller- here the puller gets either nuked by the mob pulled and the healer heals him up, drawing agg of the mobs on him. In this case the mob can be pulled way off out of the PBAE point, and many times the mez training kicks in and that guy will just stand there dumb as a post while the mob chews on him, and you will need to run all the way over there, taunt it, and drag it back to the nuker. They should know to run at the PBAE nuker, but for some reason this seems to be a very difficult concept to master.

2. Agg on the PBAE nuker- the guaranteed way to get agg off the nuker is to select his name in the mini party window and /assist the PBAE nuker. That guy should be /yelling. By assisting him, he will automatically select the mob attacking him, and you will get that mob as your target. This takes time though, and if it is clear which one is attacking him, manually select it and taunt it.

3. Mobs pulled greater than number of taunters- DON'T PANIC. You can survive this. I use a technique that I call 'feathering'. The sequence is next enemy, /stick, /face, taunt, next enemy, /stick, /face, taunt, repeat until all mobs are dead. If all tanks do this, then all mobs in the blast zone are taunted in rotation. I have used this technique with 4 tanks to handle a 20 pull and lived- that's right, a 20-pull (servants, up in Raum, horrible linked number). This is a fantastic method for the slop guy, since if the number pulled is less than the number of taunters, your main job becomes finding which one was not taunted, and you can tell by the life bar of the mob in feathering whether it was that one or not.

4. Mr. Itchyfingers- you have a non PBAE nuker in the party with serious damage envy, and he is just itching to nuke and outnuke the PBAE'rs. Well it can't be done, but what can happen is Mr. Itchyfingers starts nuking before the tanks have agg and anything without agg runs at him. If he compounds the problem by being dumb as a post and just standing there, well you will have to run to him, taunt all the mobs on him, and drag them back to the PBAE point.

5. PBAE nuker down- when this happens, you need to switch to normal styles and try to double team some mob dead fast with another tank. This is a really bad situation since odds are you are low on end and the mobs are not mezzable. If its hopeless, just taunt your mob and die honorably while YELLING AT YOUR HEALER TO DISBAND AND RUN. If the healer gets away, they can res you and you can live for another pull quickly.

Guard, protect, and intercept are all tank abilities that should be used if you have them. Put intercept and guard on the PBAE nuker. Intecept works for one blow, but if it does work, that PBAE nuker is not going to be disrupted, and it gives you another bit of time to get agg on it. Guard works great on the PBAE nuker since he is going to be close to you and within guard range, and a blow blocked is a blow that doesn't disrupt. Put protect on the healer.

Tanks should loot before they sit. The game keeps you 'in combat' for 8-10s after the last creature died, and until you are 'out of combat' your endurance regenerates at the slow cycle time of the combat cycle time. So the most efficient of parties will loot then sit. If your party is really good and you packed them in well, all the loot bags will be withing reach at the PBAE point, so you can sit and then loot. You should /face the puller while you camp so you are watching when he runs off to pull, and you don't miss the pull. If you have trash, don't be rude and leave it on the ground (unless it is marker for PBAE), shift-d to destroy it while in your inventory. Do not sit there bickering about some drop and miss the pull coming in.

B. PBAE Nukers

Read the taunter section. Knowing what they should be doing and how to help them do it will save your life.

For your information, I have seen suppression runies in their low 40's with the 2nd highest PBAE nuke hagbui zerks and thanes (lvl 50 mobs) for 500-600 dmg on center. Your damage FAR exceeds anything taunters can hope to do with styles, and that is why you don't even bother with regular styles on the taunters.

You want to wait until the taunters have the mobs packed in tight before nuking, and you want to hold off if you see one taunter missing a lot. To some extent you are the tanks defense- if you kill the mobs off fast, then you protect them.

The main tricks you need to master are timing (when to start nuking) and centering. A good taunter will only bring a mob that is taunted to the PBAE point. However it will take you a while to find a reliable group of good taunter, and deaths will help you master the hard way timing. Do not nuke too early. This is pretty important. Many times you will find yourself in a jam where you must go with a low level taunter who can not reliably hit the mob. If you just give him time for one swing, that may miss and you will get agg. For lower level tanks you need to wait a few swings.

Centering is hard. There are two ways to do this. One is to rotate the camera into a top view looking down on you and the battlefield. You rotate just before you position to nuke, then rotate it back when you need to move or the battle is over. You can see where the mobs are, particulary during nuking, and you want to move to be as close to as many as possible. Sometimes things will get split due to things like Mr. Itchyfingers standing off and not dragging the mob he pulled off the taunters in, and in this case go to the nearest cluster and nuke it clean.

The other method is to pick the mob that looks centered, /stick it, then step forward one step to be inside it and nuke. When you step after sticking you break stick. By stepping forward you move on top of it. I find this latter method works when you are doing PBAE on singles. Overall your visibility of the battlefield is better, but for big groups, I prefer top view.

Camp behind the tanks. I like being slightly off to the side where it is clear if one is going for you on the pull. Face the puller while camping for mana so you can see the pull and see the tanks response to it. Really bad tanks will let the mob hit you off the pull.

If you get agg , /y . This is a shortcut for yell. Its default color is yellow and it gives a direction. Tell the tanks if you get agg you will yell. I have seen a few guys try to set up macros for different types of mobs that are on them, but really all the tank will see is the yell and direction. Yell with no argument gives a direction.

If you get agg and they are not getting it off, you can buy yourself time with quickcasting. You can either quickcast nuke and try to kill it outright, or quickcast root or stun and move off the PBAE point. I do not like the latter much, since the minute the nuking stops, the longer it takes to drop them and the power drain on the healer increases. A really good thing to do is to /yell then backpeddle off the pbae point a bit so that the mob that is pounding you is clearly visible to the tanks and they can easily select it and pick it up.

A really good situation to be in is a PBAE party with PBAE nukers. What you do then is stand on top of each other, and cover for each other. If a tank blows it and you are disrupted, he can nuke it off you then you can return the favor. The safety here is being within each others blast radius and close. If one guy is better than the other guy at centering, have the less skilled nuker stick you and step through you to line up his PBAE, and let you start the nuking. Whoever is highest level should nuke first, since you can take more shots before dying, and whoever is less experienced should nuke second, since then you will have the timing down. Two nukers mean you can really drop stuff fast.

C. Pulsing Bladeturn Character

Pulsing Bladeturn is critical to the PBAE party. Things just work so much better with it. The reason is without it healing drain on the healers is so high that your downtime goes up. Prevention of damage by PBT does not draw agg to the PBT character, and this helps immensely in the early stage of a pull when purple con mobs are thwacking your taunters and they have yet to land a solid taunt. Without PBT, your taunters will spend more time fetching mobs off the healers.

As you are aware the mana drain on PBT is enormous, and gets worse as your pulse interval increases. At zero mana your PBT turns off, and below half mana, your rate of mana recovery is halved. Since PBT consumes mana even when nobody is taking damage (each pulse it burns mana), being below half can mean the difference between gaining mana or losing mana. Serenity can help some with mana regeneration, and so can mystic crystal lore. If you need to rest for mana, you can switch from PBT to say run chant between pulls.

It is hard writing strat for this since who gets PBT is so very realm specific. In Hibernia , it is the Warden who almost always serves as a taunter as well. Your PBT matters a great deal. If you are not needed for tanking and the party is lite on mana you can supplment your PBT by casting group bladeturn. Since the cast speed of group bladeturn is pretty fast, you can effectively renew your bubble at a very fast rate by manually casting group bladeturn- the drawback is mana drain.

Wardens- Wardens will not have enough mana to keep up PBT and heal at the same time. However you can use your healing to save the day. One situation I was in was running the gorbo camp going for vindicators (trying to get that mana staff). The vindicator would move at hyperspeed and chew up the puller bad. If the regular druid healed, well it was bad news trying to taunt that vindi off. But if the warden healed the puller, he would draw agg, and could taunt and tank just fine. So you can use healing to assist the puller in a bad situation, just be sure everyone else knows what you are doing and switches taunting assignments accordingly. I have also seen wardens effectively taunt by healing whoever is endangered the most, say like another healer. If your weaponskill is low, this is frequently a more effective way of gaining agg. But normally you will just taunt and run PBT.

Runemasters can also assist the puller when he is in trouble. If you spam group PBT, then he will take little melee damage on the return trip, and you wont be in a situation of having the taunters try to peel the mob off of the healer. Also since nearsight is in the suppression line, you have a great range 2300 pull spell with very little agg. This is a fantastic spell for pulling since it lets you pull from the perimeter deep into the camp without entering the pop zone. Also if you have a mixed bag of casters and melee mobs, if you pull by nearsighting the caster and then run behind your tanks, that caster will not stand off and nuke the tanks from within the pop zone. If you have a weak healer in the party, your services on pulsing blade turn are needed far more than your nuking ability, and you should try to save your mana for keeping the tanks alive rather than dishing out a lot of damage. This is particularly true if there are 2 PBAE nukers in the party. If you are going to nuke WAIT until the PBAEr(s) have started nuking, and if you get agg, run toward the PBAE point. If you have dark magic, keep that dps buff on the tanks- to remind yourself of when it expires, cast it first on yourself, and then upon them so that you can see when its gone on you.

D. Healer

At least one healer is needed in your party. Remember instead of having just one tank getting thwacked as you would in a mez party, you have maybe 4 getting beat upon at the same time. Therefore as a minimum I would say you need the following

1 regrowth druid or 2 bards
1 healer or 2 shamans, one of which is pretty good with mending

So you need one primary healer or say 2 secondary healers. If you have 1 primary healer and a backup healer, you are 'healer strong'.

Healers should stand back to reduce agg on heals. Watch the puller. If he is close to dying, heal him and get ready to run to the PBAE point.

Normal solid healing practice applies. Keep that mini party window open to select who is hurt by clicking on their name. Faster healing is better than slow cast speed heals that come in too late. The worst person to lose is the PBAE nuker, since once they go down, everything goes downhill from there.

Group heal can really save a bad situation, but save it as a last resort, and get ready to run at the PBAE point when you do.

YOU DO NOT MEZ OR ROOT. I know. Its hard. Lots of mobs are coming right at you and its scary, but you don't mez or root. What happens when you mez or root is the taunters must go out to wherever it is, fetch it, then drag it back. Mez can be useful if say its early in the pull and there is a single creature that nobody is hitting that is chewing on the PBAE nuker who is /yelling. Then mez can stop a bad situation, but odds are if you are in that kind of situation, you are mashing your heals as fast as you can anyway.

Midgard's healer is special in 2 ways for a PBAE party. First it is a 'downtime' character too, with the power over time (PoT) buff. The other unique ability here is the AE stun. Done right AE stun makes PBAE much better. Done wrong and you mess stuff up. The best time to use this is after all of the taunters have brought their mobs to the pbae point and the nukers have begun nuking. This buys all the tanks and nukers time to build up agg and take less damge. The main way people screw this up is by stunning to early. When you stun too early, the mobs freeze in their locations and the tanks can not drag them to the PBAE point, and the PBAE nuker faces a horrible cluster to try to nuke. In general if you are low level for the party, you should not even try this as it will be resisted, and your mana is better off saved for healing.

Know when to bail. The first sign is the PBAE nuker going down. If it has been dragging on a long time an the taunters are out of end, they must then switch off to regular styles and try to win. It is better that they die and you live to res them than for the entire party to get wiped. Disbanding and running away along a map edge checking with F11 until they stop following you.

E. The Downtime Person

For Hibernia, it's the Bard. If you have one, run the mana song, as mana recovery will be the rate limiting step. If you have 2 you can run end song.

You can twist if you are good. Twisting is rapidly switching between mana and end song such that both are up at the same time. It takes practice, and your fingers cramp, but they love it when you do it.

For Midgard, it's the Healer. Its also a no brainer- all you get is PoT. Midgard has no end regeneration. Put whatever PoT buff you have on the mana consumers- the PBAE nukers and PBT runie.

F. Other characters

Well there is a lot of possibilities on how to fill the extra slots. Another PBAE nuker is always nice. Stronger healing or stacked PBT is good. If your taunters are inexperienced, having more of them reduces the chance things will get missed.

V. Recruting a PBAE party

Wherever I go, it always seems like you are pushing spaghetti uphill in trying to get a PBAE party formed. I have spent a lot of time doing this now and here are my practical suggestions on how to go about doing this.

First off save this link as a reference on paper nearby and bother to give people this as a reference. Who knows, maybe they will read it and be ready.

Next get good at the 10 minute lecture on how PBAE works. Assume anyone you have not grouped with is ignorant and explain. It never ceases to amaze me that after all this time so very many people can be completely ignorant of PBAE parties, and one could only hope these kind of lessons could be learned in the 20's rather than in the 40's. A good time to explain this is while you are headed out (autofollow someone else and start lecturing). Be sure you stress what their role is in the party and what you want them to do.

The other perfect time to explain is when everyone is dead after the party gets wiped out. I have found that people are in a 'more receptive learning state' when a screwup just killed the entire party. This method of explaing PBAE is effective, but it is very hard on your experience rate and people tend to give up a lot when someone uses this as their preferred learning method, but often is the only method capable of reaching some people. Usually in this golden period you should objectively state what the mistake was, and state what the correction is. A few repeats of this learning method will sometimes encourage them to seek out other learning methods.

Use a chat group to recruit. What I do is this. I first of all check my friends list for people of level who have done PBAE and add them first to chat. You want to ask them if they have time to actually do it. Understand that because this is a specialized party, it is going to take some time to get everyone around and you don't want someone who will ding and run just after you get there. By adding them to chat one at a time, they will know the progress of your recruiting efforts (by doing /cg who) and will not spend a lot of time spamming you with questions. Chat group recruiting also lets everyone in remote locations coordinate when and where they are meeting, and everyone else knows that say the healer is on a horse to Huginefell from Uppland. Furthermore retaining a chat group for all tutorials and chat during experience time frees up group chat for important message such as INC, or the number that came on the pull, and lets vets tune out chat if they wish and still do the basic party.

Go out and start them out on something easy. Call it a warm up. Do a few pulls of something easy before doing social purples. If someone screws up once, /send them what they should do to avoid that the next time. If they continue to do the same screwup, start pointing it out in group talk.

Those who are good, learn fast, and DON'T have any other of the numerous problems such as

- squabbling over loot
- going AFK for long periods of time
- going AFK when others are not AFK
- not paying attention to pulls
- going linkdead 2 times in 10 minutes
- blowing assignments after repeated instruction
- making the entire party wait while they run some errand
- are there to leech or powerlevel their alt
- over level 40 and don't know how to use /loc
- taking way to long to invite people to the group or chat group
- people who for some reason don't know how to stick the leader when the party moves

then add them to your friends list, and look for them first on future PBAE parties. In general you want people who are friendly, considerate, pay attention, and want to get good at PBAE in your party. The reason why you want people lacking the above problems is that it takes so long to recruit a PBAE party and get to your camp that the last thing you want to do is waste time squabbling, waiting on AFK's, going back to drag people who won't stick to camp, or having to manually tell someone over /send over and over detailed directions on how to get where you are. I suggest a rule of dealing with loot division during long downtimes (IE waiting on rez sick).

Aside: A brief tutorial on /loc. Add this macro to your bar

/macro loc /loc

When you press it you get the following

Loc = x, y, z, dir=d

The only numbers of real navigational value are the first two numbers, x and y. Mentally move the decimal place left 3 places to get the coordinates to the nearest thousand. So think of something like

Vanern swamp 32456 18233, 1034, dir = 123

As

Vanern 32, 18k

When you move hold down your /loc macro. This will scroll back coordinates. If someone gives you a /loc, you move to make your coordinates match theirs.

The first coordinate, x, is the east-west coordinate. The second coordintate, y, is the north-south coord. The origin (0,0) is in the NW corner of the map. This means to move east, make x bigger, and to move south, make y bigger.

VI. A good camp and leech groups

A good PBAE camp has plenty of socials, and a good pop rate. You want a nice spot which is flat and free of wandering agg, usually uphill from the camp if possible for a good view. Flat matters because /stick doesn't work properly on steep inclines. You want some place nobody else is not routinely working, for a good camp bonus. You want to be far away from known camps which have regular waiting lists. You want some distance from the party's spot and the camp to avoid CFH and agg. And you don't want anyone else to know about it :)

I will not list specific camps. There are a million places to do this, and it is very good for you to be in the mindset that you can take this anywhere. For instance you can go out on the frontier and do it, or say in the epic zone, or darkness falls, or say a nice bog/swamp somewhere off the beaten path. Finding that camp nobody else is doing helps a lot, and for this reason you should try to have a few stealthers on your friends list and encourage them to scout out new spots for your regular friends group. Almost always stealthers are so very used to having crap solo xp as their only option that they will be more than willing to do some homework in exchange for a slot, and go the extra mile in terms of smart taunting that they make excellent mob 4/ slop taunters.

Leech groups are horrible. The leech group idea is to set up a second group which will experience with the main group, and has a reserve of replacements waiting to fill the main group. In practice that leech group wants to max their xp, and they will fill up with things of low replacement value to the main PBAE group. XP and loot squabbles are common. You are far better off making a group of 8 and heading off somewhere alone. The only time you should consider a leech group is for RvR or big things like Legion or Prince raids in DF- but be ready for serious headaches. Sometimes /anon helps too.

To drive this point home, here is my experience with leech groups. I was playing Hib/Lance and lvl 42 in the swamp soloing for a living (at that time nobody wanted mana elds since their single target nukes were slow and inefficient, and their PBAE nuke broke mez), when a higher level mana eld (Lochib) invited me to come see a PBAE group. I did and was impressed at seeing my first PBAE party. They put me in the leech group and showed me the ropes, and I learned how to do it as a mana eld. At this time the leech group was filled with characters who could directly swap out for people who had to leave in the PBAE group. I was there to replace Lochib. People in the leech group got some token experience while they waited on slots to open. Well to this point nobody had been doing this fins spot, and the group worked so well we kept it up nonstop for about 3 days. Word got out and people started taking their characters up to the fins and logging, checking for slots and waiting on the list. The leech group became a regular feature, and began to fill up with people who did not know the fundamentals of PBAE parties. People in the leech group started complaining about how they needed to get a more even share of the experience and drops, and so they started loading it up with multiple non PBAE nukers, since the group who does the most experience is the group that does the most damage, and to equal PBAE nukers a leech group of normal nukers have 2-3 nukers for each PBAE nuker. So say the main group has 2 PBAE nukers, to get an equal share of xp, the leech group would need say 6 non-PBAE nukers, all of which are worthless in replacement value on the main group, and giving you only say 2 free slots left for people of replacement value. At this point the replacement value of the leech group had been completely destroyed, as there were no tanks, wardens, or healers to replace those components in the main PBAE party. Also they would frequently nuke mobs off the taunters, and ruin the entire point of PBAE by dispersing the mobs. Also around this time high level characters started making rules about how they should move up on the list faster than lower levels. So with a mixed bag of leech group types, the safest way to pull became by using mez. And PBAE nukers who showed up were frowned upon for breaking mez or getting too much of an xp share. So the fins group was transformed from an efficient PBAE party into a high level mez group entitlement with waiting list and perpetual squabbles, and the only way I could run a PBAE party was to recruit it directly and go to another camp. Furthermore thereafter if I brought a PBAE group to the fins when nobody else was there, I got no end of grief about people who wanted to leech and didn't understand why we were hogging the spot, and I was in endless tell hell about people wanting in on the list.

Rather than have a leech group tell each person in the group that they are responsible of giving you 30min notice of when they will leave and they will  make an effort if you need them to of finding a suitable replacement. You can get a replacement out to a PBAE group in about 30min. If you run successful PBAE groups for several weeks, after a while people will be asking you if you have room. Also it is a good idea for the initial recruitment of finding people with say a 2hr time block to play, so as to avoid the replacement issue entirely. Or if you are working a fixed camp, have those who wish to be replacements log their characters at the camp and play an alt, and you can message them to log onto that character when needed.

VII. Terminology

PBAE- point blank area of effect, a 350 radius direct damage spell that does significant damage to all monsters in a radius about the caster. Damage is list at the caster (or higher depending upon spec, stats, and realm abilities) and falls off to zero at 350.

MOB- mobile, an old mudding term for monster, derived from the name of the section in areas called '#MOBILES' where you spelled out the details your monsters for that area. Here in DAOC its just short for monster.

PULL- making a monster aggressive on you by attacking it at range via spell, shout or weapon. You 'pull' the mob from its present location to where you and your party are.

DOGPILE- everyone attacks the same creature, much as a pack of dogs would.

XP- experience

CON- consider. The 'con' of a creature is its relative level verses you. Gray is easy, purple is hard. Yellow is your level.

CAMP BONUS- an experience bonus proportional to the infrequency at which the monster was last killed. If you are the first to take it on in a long time, you can receive a sizeable camp bonus, but if you farm an area for a long time, you will diminish the bonus to nothing.

MEZ- mesmerize- a long duration spell which prevents monsters from doing anything until they are attacked or the spell expires. Has diminishing returns on recast, where the 2nd cast of mez on the same mob will last half duration. Mez on players in RvR obeys the 'sleep code', where a creature is immune for 1 minute to this effect after the first effect expires.

ROOT- a spell which reduces targets movement to 1% normal until the creature is attacked. Sleep code applies to root for RvR. Note damage shield will break root.

SNARE- a spell or style effect which reduces target movement by 35-40% (depends upon spell). Snare nukes (direct damage spells with a snare component) do not break snare, but melee or other nukes will. There are shouts which can snare as well. Sleep code applies to snare for RvR. Note damage shield will break snare.

STUN- a spell or style effect which immobilizes a target for a brief (<11sec) duration. Unlike mez, stun can not be broken by attacking the target in any manner. Sleep code applies to stun.

TANK- a person with high defensive rating, either achieved by high evade, parry, block, or armor or combination of the above.

PEELER- the person, usually a tank, who you want to have the monster attack. Peelers 'peel' the mob off the puller with something like taunt, and they are the one which breaks mez on the next target to be attacked.

FIZZ- a spell which is resisted, usually do to high con or high resistance of the target. Resisted spells do not affect the target- the caster's spell 'fizzes'.

AGG- aggression. Damage done to a mob, and healing done near a mob has agg value proportional to the amount. Each person in the party has an agg rating for any mob, and this rating is reduced by distance and protect. The taunt style multiplies the agg rating of an attacker. Whoever has the highest agg rating wins the attention of the mob. Some spells like confusion cause the target to randomly agg.

NUKE- a spell which damages, usually at a high level.

TAUNTER- a character, usually a tank, who uses a taunt style to get agg in a PBAE party.

SPEC- the ratio of your adjusted skill rating to your level in a skill.

PBT- pulsing bladeturn, a chant which prevents damage on a hit, and renews each pulse.

PBAE point- a designated spot where the taunters drag their mobs in a PBAE party. This may be something as simple as a gravestone, a dropped item, or a stationary player such as the PBAE nuker.

POP ZONE- monsters populate in an area called the pop zone. If you work a camp long enough, you pretty much can figure out where the limits of this are for a given creature type. Sometimes it is clearly fixed at a specific point, but normally there is some random fuzz to where they pop.

DEBUFF- a spell or shout which reduces an attribute such as str, dex, con, qui.

STRAFE- moving laterally without changing your facing.

BACKPEDDLE - moving backwards while maintaining facing.

TOON- the cartoon like animation representing a player or monster

MANA- alternate name for power

PoT - power over time buff, a bard song or a healer concentration buff which increases the speed at which mana recovers per cycle. The power cycle is something like 3s sitting, 6s standing, and 14s in combat, and you get back say 2 power each cycle + the amount from this buff.-

Map Edge- the furthest limit of a zone you can move in DAOC. Usually a safe place to run as no mobs pop there, and only occasionally a few wander there.

AFK - away from keyboard

ALT- an alternate character, another character on the same server.

VIII. Credits

Lochib- for introducing to me the concept