Learning How To Play & Integrating Kissassist
This is the fifth guide in my EverQuest Boxing Series with MacroQuest2 and Isboxer. In order to fully understand what I am trying to teach you on this page you'll need to have read through my previous guides in this series. Before we start with any part of this guide I am going to assume that you have accomplished the following things.
- You have read my previous guide, Setting Up Your Interface and completed everything that you see on that page.
- You have read every part that's relevant to you of my Learning Kissassist Series.
- You should read my Isboxer Standing on Your Own Guide. It covers a lot of the same material here and is meant more for beginners to boxing as a whole.
Before continuing any further with the guide I want you to take your box team to a zone with Light Blue mobs. Someplace relatively easy with safe locations for you to go AFK to make food or take breaks because we're going to need to spend a lot of time alt tabbing and setting things up while having mobs nearby to test what we're doing. If you need some ideas for a leveling location head over to my Everquest Leveling Guides and find a spot there.
There are two ways for you to play during this part - the first of which is found on my Isboxer Learning to Stand on Your Own Guide. That way teaches you how to play with maximum control over every single thing your characters do. If you've setup your interface exactly like I have told you up until this point then you can play like that too.
But - there's another way to play and that's by integrating Kissassist into Boxing. That's primarily what this guide is going to teach you. Before I do though I gotta throw a buttload of my opinion at ya. I very strongly recommend that you take my Isboxer guide seriously and read that just as much as you read this one.
The Isboxer playstyle that I teach gives you maximum control over the situation and you'll often find yourself "taking control" over a situation and turning off Kissassist because it's not as good as an actual player. A good example of this is on a really tough named - sometimes you just can't sit there and wait 45 seconds for Kissassist to pop all of your burns.
Now, let's talk about how to setup Kissassist and get it working on all of your characters. Seriously, if you haven't read any of my Learning Kissassist Series you should do that before continuing with this guide. The very first thing we're going to do is create macros on all of our characters (except the tank) to Turn Kissassist on/off.
I talk more about the Kissassist Macros in my guide. Once you've created them you'll want to place them on your hotbars and then press the key to start Kissassist. It'll take a little bit if this is your first time, it has to generate INI files for all of your characters. Once it does, you'll have to go into your MacroQuest 2 Folder and into your Macros folder to find your Character's INI files.
Your installation destination is probably different than mine. If you're a rookie with computers just search your entire computer for "Kissassist" to figure out where you installed Macroquest2 at. Then remember that location for future use.
Go into your Macros folder and scroll down until your find your character's INI files. Now is the extremely annoying and tedious part. You're going to have to go through each of your INI files and add in all of the Buffs, Abilities, Cooldowns and everything else that you want your character to use.
I'd say you should expect this process to take you a couple of hours - and it'll be an ongoing type of process too. For the next few days as you get started you're going to be changing your INI a bunch of times. After that though it'll be a weekly thing usually, a minor tweak here or there until an expansion pack or something that adds a bunch of new abilities.
You'll want to start piecing together your INI Files now but you don't have to worry about actually finishing them until we get to the next part of the guide where I teach you exactly how to play with MQ2 and Isboxer. If you'd like some ideas for your Kissassist INI Files I'd recommend you check out the two links below:
If this is your very first time getting started with boxing and Macroquest 2 what I recommend you do is complete one character at a time and then test to see if it's all working properly. I also very very highly recommend you do not just pilfer someone's INI and use that to get started. We need to actually learn how to use these boxing programs otherwise you're just going to totally suck at the game.
Take a look at some of my INI files that are uploaded onto my website, you'll notice a reoccuring theme with most of them is that they're all pretty basic. I call them Plug and Play INIs which means that anyone can take my INI and slap it in and it'll basically fulfill that character's role efficiently with no 'extra stuff'.
I've uploaded all of these INI files to give you enough information on how to play the class but not so much information that you're completely confused by the INI file. If you're new to using Macroquest 2, Kissassist and boxing in general I recommend you stick to the INI files on my website as they're almost all geared for beginners/intermediary players.
I'm going to assume that by this point you've set up some of your characters and are ready to start playing a little bit. Since we're using Macroquest 2 and isboxer there are two distinct playstyles for us to learn, I am going to teach you both right here. First up, let's learn the Isboxer Playstyle that I also talk about in my Learning to Stand on Your Own Isboxer Guide.
Boxing Only Hotkeys
Character Specific Hotkeys
Much like in the Isboxer Guide I am going to depend on some visual aid to help me explain things. You should be familiar with Boxing Only Keybinds (which are for executing commands on your entire box team - not single characters) and Character Specific Keybinds (which are for individual characters).
To reiterate from above before you go any further with this guide I want you to go to a zone that's relatively easy for you to fight in, with a lot of Light Blue Mobs and safe locations for you to go AFK for long Alt Tab Breaks/Food breaks and whatever else. If you need some ideas for leveling locations use my EQ Leveling Guides.
1. Park your group somewhere they won't get slaughted for you to pull too.
2. Do NOT turn on MacroQuest 2 yet - instead pull mobs one by one to your group and use your Assist button to target them on your entire group followed by your DPS button to burn them down.
3. When your Tank needs heals, use your Healing button to heal him/her. If anyone in your group takes damage use your Group Heal to heal them for the damage they've sustained.
4. You're going to be using your Character Specific Hotkeys on your tank/driver to pull the enemies and build aggro on them. Then you'll be using your Boxing Hotkeys to Heal, DPS and everything else. Rinse and repeat this entire process for about 30 minutes until you've gotten a firm grasp of how to use all of the most basic functions of boxing.
5. Confused by any part of this? Use Learning to Stand on Your Own Isboxer Guide for more information & a relatively similar explanation of what to do/how to play.
Once you've gotten a firm grip on how to play using primarily Isboxer it's time to start introducing MacroQuest 2 into our playing. If you haven't already now is the time that we're going to need to finish our Kissassist INI files and start experimenting with that. Use your Kissassist Macros to launch Kissassist on your team. Assuming that you've set up your INI files your characters should start buffing and setting up after you start the macro.
We're going to want to follow basically the same 5 steps that are shown above. You're going to want to pull mobs to your group & use your character specific keybinds to DPS them down until your characters using Kissassist assist you (95% health is the default value for this) and start DPSing.
This is how you box with Macroquest2 and Isboxer in tandum. I'd recommend that while you play you also use your Isboxer keys to DPS and heal - I like to call this "playing over your boxes". You'll notice when you play over your boxes and you're mashing that DPS key as well as your heal key - you'll do about two maybe even three times more DPS than you were doing with Kissassist playing for you.
Now you'll hopefully start to understand my EQBC/Kissassist vrs Isboxer argument a little bit better. This is the reason that I felt the need to teach you both Isboxer as well as Macroquest 2 with this guide. I feel that Isboxer does a much better job of giving you more control over your characters and thus unlocking your true potential as a boxer.
Macroquest 2 on the other hand cuts out a ton of the really annoying and outdated aspects of Everquest. It improves the entire user experience and makes the entire game more enjoyable - not just boxing. This is the reason that I recommend to players they use both Macroquest 2 as well as Isboxer.
Anyway, now that you've learned how to play (a little bit) as a boxer, it's time for you to sit back and spend some time practicing. You need to get comfortable with your box team and spend a few days playing. Do things that push your capabilities like pulling a bunch of easy mobs and trying to kill them all before they kill you.
Travel to a harder zone for your level and test your luck hunting some nameds or killing some enemies there. Before moving on to the next portion of the guide - wipe a few times! I'm not saying purposefully wipe, but do enough boxing and playing that you put yourself into challenging situations that result in your death. During this time you can keep updating your Kissassist INI files and making your characters more powerful and better that way ... but I very strongly recommend you do not add more Isboxer Key Maps and Boxing Hotkeys until you're ready.
In this situation it will be very easy to overwhelm yourself and bite off more than you can chew since I am giving you basically all the information you need at once with these guides. Some people are going to setup their entire interface, making it as complex as mine and when they get into a 'heat of the moment' situation they're going to panic and forget where everything is. You're no exception to this whether you think you are or not.
What I am teaching in these guides isn't a very easy thing to do - boxing takes a whole lot of learning, practicing and perfecting to make yourself adept at it. I used to be a hell of a lot better than I am right now at boxing and at Everquest in general.
I've fallen out of practice a lot in the last few years because I have had to spend so much time writing guides for content from many expansions ago. It hasn't given me the opportunity to do current content and push myself and strive to be better than I am right now. Just last week I was boxing with my 12 box on Lockjaw and I was fighting a Plane of Tactics mini raid named. He summoned adds that I couldn't get off my Cleric and he wen't down. My other Cleric (using Kissassist at the time) decided to stop healing and rez him... which is an extremely long cast on the TLPs during that era (no epic clicky either).
I basically just panic'd and didn't know if I should stop the macro and take over healing/stop the rez but then what about the adds? I gotta get control of them too before they destroy my other healers!! My mind raced and I pretty much just froze in the situation. The reason is because my interface isn't setup well enough for that type of situation and because I was depending on macros to play every character except my tank.
The end outcome is I won (barely) but it's a good example of what I am talking about. Kissassist made the wrong choice to stop and rez because getting that Cleric back up didn't help one bit. Now, if I had been in full control of my characters the other cleric probably wouldn't have even died in the first place because I would have just spammed group heal the entire time instead of regular heals. He might have OOM a TON faster but he'd have kept my tank alive and himself the entire fight without issue.
I could have left the macros running on my Druid which still would have given me single target heals throughout the fight if absolutely needed. Additionally I should have set the Enchanter to not DPS at all during the encounter and focus entirely on Mezzing the adds - as they were mezzable. That would have been the appropriate way to handle that encounter.
This is what boxing is all about; attempting an encounter, wiping or just barely beating it and then developing a strategy to do it better. Then you keep refining this strategy over and over and take some of what you learned from previous encounters and use that knowledge to keep tackling more and more difficult content.
Continue to Setting Up Your Interface (Advanced)
Don't have MQ2 yet or want to learn more? Check out the RedGuides Compile of MQ2!