Why use Follow and Assist from any window in EQ?

I don't really understood the need for a dynamic Follow and Assist from any window in EQ.
If it is really worth the bother I'd appreciate it if someone could explain it to me.

I agree that it is a really neat trick, and makes for impressive demonstrations and video clips.

But for actual play, with any particular combination of active characters and purpose, I always have one particular character serving as the leader. This is the character that others should assist for targets, this is the character that others should follow when we are moving as a group.

I'm not talking about a hard-coded character name. The leader is not always the same character. Different characters may assume the leadership role for different purposes and configurations of characters. But for any particular setup the leadership does not bounce around, it stays with one character until I re-form for some different purpose. So to me it is acceptable to take a few seconds to explicitly designate a leader/main-assist during setup.

The approach I have taken is to use the first slot of the Extended Target Window to hold the leader/MA name.

Then the "follow" hotkey is:
: /xt 1
: /fo

The "assist" function is:
: /xt 1
: /pause 6,/assist

This has advantages over most methods I've seen described here:
- it is trivial to configure
- it does not depend on group/slot ordering
- it works for characters not grouped with the leader/MA

I've done a few other things that make it easier to set xt 1 for everyone, (detailed in another post "A Minimalist Approach...", but even if you manually set xt 1 individually during initial formation, it does not take long, and you do not have to do it very often. The setting even persists through camping and re-launching.

Comments?

[lax]

For the same reason you might want to do it in any other game. If you are in the middle of a fight and your "leader" dies or is otherwise incapacitated, you might be inclined to switch to another window.

I know that WoW isn't EQ1, but I haven't played EQ1 in many years so I don't know what types of quests they have these days ... but in WoW, we have to run around and collect things with individual toons. They often are not targetable and are only lootable by one character before despawning and then spawning in a new location. For me, the most efficient way of doing that is to lead with one toon at a time. Follow working from all windows means I run up and loot instead of run up, switch windows, loot, switch windows, run.

Certainly do what is easiest and most convenient for you. If I was using your "simplified" setup I probably wouldn't want to think about setting this up either. Thank you for sharing your method