Butcherblock lag & Reverse Damage

Surprise! You're lagged!
Something needs to be upgraded on Butcherblock, the constant server end lag is getting almost unbearable. I can understand high populations area having lag, but when you are in a raid instance for example Palace of the Overlord and another raid enters a separate instance causing the whole server to stop for over 5 seconds while they enter the zone, it's just annoying.

Another lag area that needs to be fixed are mobs that actually create lag, until the other day I have rarely seen this happen, but with less than 50 people in The Thundering Steeps including our raid, fighting The Avatar of Storms was almost impossible. During the fight he summons several mobs that are "Storms" at the same time, I have seen 20 of them at a time spawn during the encounter. In the previous tier they were trivial annoyances that are killed as part of the encounter, they usually die in less than 10 seconds after they spawn. But on Sunday it was a diffrent story, as the waves of the storms would spawn, the server would just lag out, causing several people to go link dead or lag out the zone to the point where the mobs have free reign on the players while they were still waiting for the clients to catch up. When a mob causes a a packet loss during an encounter there has something to be done on SOE's end. Please ftlog upgrade your servers!

Reverse Damage!
Was originally inspired by our fury Vegaxe's addiction to DPS. He found during Trakanon that he could do 7k+ dps on the mob using his AA ability and gear that has reverse damage procs on it. The gear specifically is what I am going to discus here, some of it can only be obtained on raids, but there are options you can use outside of raid.

In a raid setting you need to proc the gear, a way of taking lots of damage little damage, fast, to accomplish this you need a fight that has lots of AoEs (Such as Trakonon) or you need something like Mortal Coil.



I put on a player in my group who is going to take a bit of damage and since I am usually in the mage group, I put it on our "20k Warlock", Mordrulle, our Wizard, you look at him funny and dies Argenteyes or Gerrod an illusionist who fires off spells like a machine gun. These guys are pretty much the best when it comes to blowing shit up, they make healing a challenge.

Sometimes I am placed in the off-tank group during Gynock Moltar in Tomb of the Mad Crusader, which I place it on Onra our almost un-kill-able Shadow knight (Deathknight for you WoW folks out there, which btw have been in EQ2 since launch).

While the actual share pain proc will very rarely save players from being one shot killed, it does help ease the healing of a player who spikes or takes lots of damage over time. Now that you are sharing their pain, you need a way to protect yourself, while taking this damage. I use Soul Shattering band which will stone skin the incoming damage, as long as it procs, which it does constantly. You can also use gear with "Dispersion" or "Templar's Dispersion" these are generally on the market you can do a search for those in the ability field of the broker, most of the Dispersion pieces are mage wearable only, while the "Templar's Dispersion" pieces are for Pali's, SK's, Templars and Inquisitors.


So now that you've got your source of damage, and protection from that damage, now it's time to redirect that damage, the easiest way to do this is with a couple consumable items. One is a food called Magma Fish Reduction it will do 50+ damage every time you are hit, for 30 minutes. Another consumable item is Thorns potions, they can be expensive and only last for 2.5 minutes, but they can do a simmilar amount of damage to Magma Fish Reductions if you keep them on auto consume during that big fight.

Next you'll need some gear, Items with Mutagenic Burst are a good to start with, as the damage increases for each piece you equip. Divine Light items such as the Signet and Buckle of Light and Darkness are decent as well, but the ring being level 69 will get resisted more on mobs higher level.

Make sure to bring your spell critical damage up and base spell damage up because the damage on items and procs from the consumable items can critical! Items that increase spell damage are like the Bloodthirsty Choker. There are others out there, check the Void Shard brokers up in Moors of Yakesha as some classes may have shoulders that have spell bonuses of up to 8%

With only using one Mutagenic Burst Item and the two consumable items described above, my DPS from the procs has been over 1.3k dps on some fights!