# EverQuest/Strategies/powerlevelling

taken from: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=1&mid=1118173098101489300#1118173098101489300
There are numerous disadvantages to power leveling. How serious they are, and whether or not they are correctable depends on your previous experience with EQ. An outline of some of the potential consequences follows.
Ok, so, you’ve decided to help a lower level friend coast through a few levels? How can you make this happen? There are more than a few methods to discuss.
For the sake of convenience, we’re going to give the players in this scenario names. Mike is the lowly character hoping to rise rapidly through the ranks, and Anna is the godly high level character who is willing to spend a little time helping him get there.
The colloquial term “twink” is used to refer to a character with armor and weapons far exceeding the items normally available at the character’s current level. Older players often twink their new alts in the bazaar, spending thousands of plat to get the very best gear their new character will be allowed to use. Such a character is said to be “twinked” or “twinked out”. In and of itself, this is not power leveling, but it serves to make earlier levels almost trivial even with the character going out and soloing. For the earliest levels, it’s often important to select gear with no recommended or required level. The Smoldering Brand is a classic example of a “twink” weapon. It’s a 9/22 one hand blunt weapon, usable by all classes and races, with a proc effect “burn” that can cause an additional 12-13 damage when it goes off, and it does so right from level one. It’s not that useful past the teens, but for the very early levels, it can make kills very quick.
Buff loading is exactly what it sounds like – having a buff class cast pretty much every beneficial spell that will stick on Mike, raising his statistics to godly levels and making early content relatively trivial. Again, this is not usually considered power leveling as such, as that term usually reflects a situation where a higher level player stays with the character to assist on a constant basis.
Agro locking is a situation where Anna attempts to hold the mob’s attention while Mike kills the mob in relative safety, usually from behind. In this scenario, taunt skills and debuffing spells/songs are used to hold agro without actually doing damage to the mob. Some of the higher agro spells that can be used for this purpose are snares, slows, statistic debuffs, fears, and intentionally broken charms. For healing classes, heals also provide a very high level of agro, so merely keeping yourself at high health after you’ve initially acquired agro may be enough to hold it.
Nursing is a situation where a cleric, shaman, or druid merely tags along with Mike, keeping him constantly healed and out of danger while taking on harder content. It’s not the fastest power leveling method, but it’s better than soloing for the xp rate.
Nuking or tanking for power leveling is fairly straight forward. XP for a mob goes to the player or group that has done the most damage to that mob when it dies. This means that if Mike does 51% of the damage to a mob and Anna does 49%, Mike will get all of the xp, as long as you are not grouped. There are a couple of caveats to this, however – the first being that all of the damage done to a mob is counted when figuring out xp assignment. This means if Mike does 60 damage to a target with 100 hp total, and Anna finishes it off with a 300 pt nuke, he’s not going to get the xp, because Anna did more damage than him, even though the mob was technically dead 260 hp ago. Also, certain effects, like damage shields, are not counted in crediting who has done the most damage to a mob, so if Mike does 40 damage to a mob and the damage shield he’s wearing did 25 damage, Anna can still only do 39 points of damage to the mob without stealing the kill. Note that this method can also be a good way to hold agro – in this scenario, Anna would nuke or tank the mob down to 51% and the mob would be agroed on her while Mike finished it off.
In a pincushion scenario, Anna takes advantage of the fact that damage done to a mob by a damage shield is counted as neutral damage. As long as Anna does no damage to the mob directly, and Mike does at least 1 point of damage to the mob, when the mob finishes grinding itself to death on the damage shield, Mike will get all the xp. This can be hugely effective if Mike or someone in his group has an AE damage spell. Anna could potentially go and agro 20 mobs with an AE debuff, then retreat to a corner and cast her damage shield. Once Anna has firm agro, Mike pulses his smallest AE damage spell on all the mobs to avoid drawing too much agro away from Anna, makes sure that there are no resists from the mobs in question, and waits for the mobs to grind themselves to death on Anna’s damage shield. In lower levels, a single pull can generate multiple levels of xp this way. Two important notes on this method – mobs that have taken damage only from the damage shield will simply vaporize without giving loot or xp, so it’s important to make sure that each mob has been successfully hit at least once. If you are using melee to hit rather than an AE spell, it can be effective to have the person hit each mob while you are building the mass of mobs, right after you’ve established agro with each. The other thing you should be aware of is the corner I mentioned earlier. Spell interruptions are largely based on movement and knockback, so positioning yourself in a corner, facing outward to your target mobs, can greatly increase your chances of pulling off a heal or damage shield spell while masses of mobs are beating on you.
One of the quirks of charm spells is that when a mob is charmed, all current damage to the mob from other mobs, for xp purposes, is wiped. This means if Anna charms a mob and throws it against a bunch of other mobs until it has been beat down to 2%, then breaks charm, Mike can take care of the last 2% and get the xp for the mob. This is a bit slow at lower levels, and rarely worth the time invested, but at higher levels it can be a good way to quickly rack up kills.
A similar quirk is that when a character zones out, all damage done is wiped for xp purposes. This means that Anna could knock a mob down to 2%, then zone out or evac to effectively wipe the damage she’s done so that Mike can finish the mob off. Any effect that causes Anna to reload the zone is valid for this method, so while a gate spell won’t work (doesn’t reload), an evac (or levant or whathaveyou) will.
Classes that get feign death make especially good power levelers for high levels. Yet another quirk of the game is that if you are feigned, the mob doesn’t count you anymore for xp crediting purposes. This can be a little tricky, and only seems to work reliably if the person being power leveled holds off on damaging or agroing the mob until after you have feigned. Probably has something to do with having them on the hate list when you feign. (Avoid using dots, or at least dots that will last past the time that you need to feign – screws up xp crediting) Anna just nukes or tanks the mob down to low health, feigns, and calls Mike over to do cleanup.
Some well known quests provide a decent amount of xp for lower levels. Turning in bone chips in nearly any starting town, crushbone belts in Kaladim, and lightstones in North Karana are all examples of droppable items a higher level characters can collect and hand to the lowbie to generate faction and xp. Alternately, there are several higher level quests that require no drop items but still give decent xp. An example of this would be the sarnak berserker whips in the overthere. A high level character can easily wipe out a bunch of berserkers and allow the lower level character to loot all the whips.