Master Alchemist

Monday night I decided to camp deepwater ink in Kedge Keep.  It was a lazy camp, I spent time doing other things -- making an omelet for dinner, making salads for lunch the next day.  Kedge is almost completely gray to me now, most of the mermaids are green or gray but the named ones are still light blue (and a few of the unnamed ones).  In the end even with turning experience to 100% AA, I only earned one AA in my time hunting there.  Despite this, one of the named mermaids proved very difficult to kill... she kept healing herself and the fight went on for more than 15 minutes, before she finally stopped healing.

I came away with 88 deepwater inks in 2-3 hours of casual play.  I didn't think that would be enough to get me from 297 to 300 in alchemy, but it turned out that I got lucky.  I hit 300!  This is the first time I've ever been a master at any of the EQ tradeskills, so I'm pretty proud of the fact.

Tuesday I went to the caves in Blackfeather Roost and did the same sort of thing, with an eye to getting tailoring drops.  The light blue bears and spiders were much better experience for me here -- I earned multiple AA's, maybe 20 or more.  I also got a lot of silk and pelt drops, and went to town on tailoring.  I got to 200 pretty quickly, making me a journeyman tailor, but after that I went through about 70 combines without a single skill increase, so that was pretty disappointing.

Tradeskilling

Between tradeskilling and marketing I've managed to get Jalia up a few levels.  She's 64 now.

Lately though, I've been doing little besides hunts for dyes and high quality skins needed to make the colored backpacks that I sell, and bouts of making potions and halas 10-lb meat pies to sell.  Ornate Defiant armor drops quite a bit off the bears and wolves that I hunt in Mesa, so that provides extra stuff to sell.  And that's been almost everything I've done -- just occasionally I've traveled to Blackfeather Roost or Undershore or wherever to gain some actual experience.

This past weekend I finally got around to doing the tradeskill quest that nets you the evolving tradeskill trophy.  I did this for alchemy first, of course.  I was worried about doing this after having waited so long, and true to form the Journeyman's Alchemy Test required me to make several things that included dropped ingredients -- things that I couldn't just buy.  But after a little research I realized that all I needed to finish all of the challenges was some hearty goblin blood... several at least.

After a little research I traveled to Kunark and headed to the Frontier Mountains.  The two places I wanted were the Mines of Nurga and the Temple of Droga, but the temple was closer to where I zoned in so I picked that.  Soon I found myself in a warren with goblins that were all green or light blue to me (some were even dark blue), and which dropped not only hearty goblin blood for alchemy, but green goblin skin which is used to make black dye.

For a brief, shining moment, I thought I'd found the perfect hunting ground.  I could earn experience, I could gather ingredients for alchemy that would allow me to increase my skills, and I could solve my black dye problem.  Black dye is one of the hardest to come by, and I need it not only for black but also for the light gray that I use to make purple backpacks.  You get it from charcoal, which is an extremely rare drop, or from blue slumber fungus, which is an extremely rare ground spawn in Lesser Faydark (if I'm lucky I can find two on any given trip).  There are other things that make black too -- all of them difficult to come by, it seems.  But here I could amass a large collection of green goblin skin while doing other things!

Well... it didn't quite work out like I'd hoped.  I set myself to 100% AA experience and I probably earned 20 to 25 AA points in an afternoon of hunting in Droga.  That worked out well.  But for all the time I spent there, I came up with only 20 hearty goblin blood and 7 green goblin skin.  So... not exactly a solution to my problems.  I read later that for skilling up in higher-level alchemy, everyone agrees that Deepwater Ink or Nodding Blue Lilly are the only ways to go.  I'd already learned to farm Deepwater Ink in Kedge Keep, and it looked like I'd be heading back there for many more trips.

But on the bright side, I finished my quest and got my Journeyman's Alchemist Trophy!  I picked up the baking and tailor trophy quests to work on later.

Tuesday I set out to do the baking quest.  This was also a journeyman's quest that required a lot of dropped items.  I had to hunt treants in Blightfire Moors -- and I learned that only the treants in the swamp area dropped what I wanted, and I'd never been to that place before.  I had to travel to the they Abysmal Sea to fish for saltwater crab (it's not an easy place to get to either), and I had to travel to Cobalt Scar once again to buy ingredients from the otterfolk vendors there (also not an easy place to get to).

But by the time I was done I had my baking trophy.  This one was even more difficult than the alchemy one, but it's done now.  Tailoring will be next.

Late last night I discovered a couple of vendors in the bazaar selling massive quantities of Deepwater Ink and Nodding Blue Lilly.  Now, I've been amassing a tiny fortune through marketing for weeks -- not really spending money on anything.  I had nearly 150,000 plat, which is not a lot to some people, but was quite a lot to me.  But the prospect of not having to hunt interminably for alchemy ingredients was too great to pass up.  I spent a bit over 50,0000 plat on hundreds and hundreds of Nodding Blue Lily and Deepwater Ink, and tonight I spent several hours working my way through well over a thousand alchemy combines.  Ultimately my skill jumped about 50 points, from 243 to 294, but things were going so well in the middle of that that I really thought I'd hit 300 and become a master... then, over the course of the last 350 combines, I only managed 4-5 increases.  This was very disappointing, although overall being 6 points away from master status is pretty cool.  One good round of Deepwater Ink gathering in Kedge Keep should get me to master now.  Or maybe I'll just buy some more Nodding Blue Lily when someone has some to sell.

July 4th DXP Weekend

On the 4th of July I spent the entire morning in Kedge Keep.

I had visited Kedge Keep for the first time (other than entering it once years ago and not going past the entrance) a couple of days before, enough to learn that I could farm for deepwater ink and it was a viable route for me to skill up in alchemy.  At that time I'd farmed more than 20 deepwater ink and earned one alchemy skill point increase for my troubles.  My plan this time was to get at least 40 deepwater inks, but I spend the full morning there and came back with 160 deepwater inks total.  This was good enough to get me to 240 in alchemy, or about 8 points increase.  Pretty sad when you think about it, tradeskilling in EQ is everything I remembered it to be.

I gained a level and 2 AA points doing this.  Even though everything was light blue or green to me, double experience week was on so I was slowly gaining experience from farming.  But I wanted to take advantage of the DXP to level a new character up, so I spent part of the day working on my newbie dark elf necromancer, who I got to level 12.

Friday night I had to spend part of the time farming for high quality bear and wolf skins, but I also started a baby shadowknight (drakkin).  I spent part of Saturday morning levelling her up, but then I spent much of the weekend visiting my parents and sister's families in Longview.  Sunday night when I got home I was able to play my new shadow knight a bit more, and got up to level 32 and even hunted a bit in the Highpass Keep basement.

I worked on tailoring last Friday too, getting up to almost 200 now.  My other accomplishment was farming enough of the materials to make a nice backlog of dyes for the colored backpacks I sell... but now I'm low on hq bear and wolf pelts yet again.

I would have liked to get more accomplished for DXP weekend, but I didn't get to play as much as I would have liked.

What Was and Never Will Be

Everquest kind of makes me sad.  It's a perfect example of a game suffering from mudflation.  Here you have a game where nobody plays at the low levels -- all they do is PL to get to level 65, 75 and up.  Valuable high-end gear sells for 1 million, 2 million plat, an unthinkable fortune in the old days.  Finding a group in the low to mid levels is nearly impossible, and all of the low and mid level zones are empty.

What really makes me sad are all of the zones that they revamped that are completely unused.  When I did the bard mail quests this weekend I saw a lot of them.  Steamfont Mountains has been revamped.  Misty Thicket, Innothule Swamp, Toxxulia Forest, Nektulos Forest, Eastern Commonlands, Freeport, North Ro, all of these zones have been revamped.  Nobody's ever in them.  In the old days these zones were always busy -- the game had 13 newbie starting zones at launch, 16 by the time three years had passed, and they were always busy.  It didn't matter which zone you started in, you'd find other players to group with.  No game will ever be like that again -- no game would ever take the time to create so many starting zones.  Even Everquest knows better; they've created Crescent Reach as a one-size-fits-all starting zone.  Every character, evil, good, whatever, can start there.  In fact, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that everyone will start there and all the other newbie zones will be left unused -- freebie accounts aren't allowed to start anywhere else, but the advantages of Crescent Reach are so many that you really wouldn't want to start anywhere else anyway.

It's sad because the revamped zones are very pretty.  They're comparable to modern MMOs -- not top-of-the-line, surely, but very comparable.  It makes me sad that nobody really uses them, not in the way they were designed to be used in any case.  There are still newbie zones and cities that haven't been revamped -- Feerot, Greater Faydark, Butcherblock Mountains, Everfrost, Qeynos Hills -- but EQ has zero reason to bother fixing those zones at this point.

It bugs me too that the boats are gone.  Mind you, being forced to ride the boats was one of the major problems with the game back in the day, but completely removing them sucks.  I really wanted to take a boat ride again, but all of the docks in the game exist for pretty much no reason now.

I remember "newbie runs" where the goal was to take a level 1 gnome from Ak'Anon to Erudin, crossing two continents through some very scary and dangerous zones and enduring two boat rides to succeed.  With dozens or hundreds of people participating, it was a ton of fun.  You could never get enough people to participate in that today, and even if you did, you simply can't make the run without the boats.

One thing I love about EQ is the depth of the world.  At the bottom of the Crystal Caverns is a Coldain dwarf town, with merchants and a bank and quests givers.  In the Goru'ka Mesa valley is a village of satyrs (Mitholen, I think they're called) with merchants and quest givers.  In one of the old goblin dungeons there was a goblin banker who evil types could bank with.  In the far North of Velious are otter folk with merchants and the like.  Everywhere you go, you find not just enemies to fight, but the communities they live in.  The game didn't just have 16 starting cities, it had dozens of more towns and villages and cities that you could visit, buy or sell at, possibly bank at or get quests at.  The world is vast and detailed.

Anyway, I don't have a point here, just sad at the state of the game today.  Things change, you can never go back to what once was (and in a lot of ways, you wouldn't want to), but there are definitely some things that I miss, that I'm afraid I'll never see in a game again.

Courier of Favor, and Hero's Forge

I did the "Courier of Favor" quest Friday Night, using an online walkthrough to explain how to do it quickly.  Even so it took me a good 2 1/2 to 3 hours to do.  Mind you, I took the long way in many cases, but still... it's a long quest.

If you were doing it the hard way (as in, no prior knowledge) then you'd be wandering the world looking for bards who want mail delivered, and making many back-and-forth trips to different cities.  The walkthrough explains where to go to gather all the mail destined for Kelethin, then all the mail for Freeport, then the mail for Qeynos, then the mail for Highpass.  You have to visit Freeport and Highpass twice, and you have to do a pair of sub-quests near the end of everything, but the end result is a very nice multi-slot bag with 100% weight reduction.

When I say I took the long way, I mean I ran all the way from Ak Anon to Kaladim and then back to Greater Faydark, instead of teleporting through the Plane of Knowledge several times.  I was bound in the Bazaar so every time I ported back I had to zone into the Bazaar and then zone out to the Plane of Knowledge, which slowed things down.  And I ran from Misty Thicket to Highpass, forgot to grab the mail for Qeynos so I had to go back later, and I also spent some time visiting the basement in Highpass Keep and reminiscing about the old days when it was a favorite place for players to hang out.

I also got confused about one instruction in the walk-through, which after the first contact Ton Twostring in East Freeport, it says "take the mage to North Ro".  I didn't know what this meant, but there's a mage in North Ro who can send you places... but you don't "take the mage" to North Ro, you don't have any other reason to be in North Ro, and the mage in North Ro did not send me to my next destination but instead sent me to Nedaria's Landingi, a zone above Surefall Glade and Jaggedpine Forest that I didn't know existed (it wasn't there back when I played).  This zone connects to some other continent via boats I think, except that boat service no longer exists in the game.  That makes me kind of sad, even though the boat rides were one of the biggest and stupidest time-sinks in EQ in the old days.

But basically, the instructions to "take the mage to North Ro" were both confusing and completely useless.  Not to mention, virtually nowhere else in the walk-through does it explain how to get from one place to another, so I don't know why that comment was even there.

I did the quest again Sunday on my alt enchanter Prisstina, who is by now level 36.  I did it much faster this time, in less than 2 hours I think.  I had a much better idea of what I was doing and I didn't get sidetracked.

Saturday I set out to vastly increase my tailoring skills.  I worked on Wu's fighting armor (with the help of viscous mana from my new enchanter) and got almost to 158 where the shirt becomes trivial.  Then I immediately started in on coarse silk templates, which trivial at 175.  When I ran out of coarse silk I started in on natural silk templates, which trivial above 200 but I ran out of natural silk at 175 tailoring skill.  I probably should have found more coarse silk to reach 175 before using my natural silk, but I was impatient.  Anyway, I can see that I need to gather a whole bunch more natural silk, which will be my new goal the next time I decide to work on it.

I also spent money on the market.  I finally bought the Hero's Forge update for my character, and ran around  looking for Sylvan armor pieces to update my look.  I had to substitute a few non-sylvan chain pieces so the work is still in progress, but I bought the bunny hat which was one of my main goals.  Ever since I first played EQ, back when a barbarian shaman who put on a leather cap would display a polar bear's head hat, I've wanted to some way display a bear's head hat with a more substantial armored helmet.  I even occasionally wore a leather cap just for that look.  Finally, EQ has made it possible to make any helmet at all look like a bear's hat (or bunny hat, or several variations). I approve!  This was the main reason I spent money on the Hero's Forge armor appearance upgrade.  I'd seen the bunny hat, and I wanted it.  I'm not skilled enough to make it myself so I spent waaaay too much money on the market for one, but I'm happy with the look.

I also bought a 36-slot 100% weight reduction bag from the marketplace since it was available.  It's WAAAY too much money, but for tradeskills I need as many slots as I can get.

Finally Made An Alt

Last night I made an alt.

Actually I made two alts, but I only really did anything with one.  That was Prisstina, a gnome enchanter.  I had a gnome enchanter previously in Everquest, purely because gnomes can learn the tinkering tradeskill and enchanters can enchant metal (and cast clarity, which I loved back in the day).  My gnome enchanter in the old days was named Ashti, and was at one point the 4th highest tinkerer on the Test Server.

My second alt was a dark elf necromancer.  I don't have any ulterior or trade-skill related motive for making her, but necromancers have always been some of the most fearsome soloers in the game and I had a dark elf necro back in the day as well that I enjoyed quite a bit.

I've been trying to avoid making any alts up until now.  My history with MMO's is one filled with many alts and very few high-level main characters.  In Everquest, I started with a wood elf ranger, switched to Jalia my barbarian shaman, switched to a druid named Ashleigh, then moved to Test and started a cleric named Aquaisha.  There were a lot of other alts along the way, but even after I settled on a new version of Jalia I had other alts -- Dill the rogue, a warrior, a monk named Shan Pu.  Party because of this, I never got Jalia or any other character to whatever the current max level was.  By the time Jalia hit 50, the max level was 60... then it was 65.  Jalia got to 53 or 54.  I followed this pattern in other games.  I was amazed when I played Disney's Toontown to get a character to the max level, because I'd never done that in any MMO up to that point.  In City of Heroes I got one character to 50 but I had a lot of alts, and it wasn't until I returned to the game several years later that I learned to concentrate on characters long enough to get them all the way to 50.  Even then, I had dozens and dozens of alts, and no character that maxed out the new alternate incarnate skill trees.  But I did have fifty level 50 characters in the end.

So with EQ I wanted to play just one character for a while, and I've done that.  But there's an advantage to having an alt or two.  More bank space, for one thing, and the ability to pursue tradeskills that I haven't yet tried.  But mostly it's fun to try different things.  Enchanters are fun for several reasons, such as all of the illusion spells they have.

I got my new chanter to level 10 in the tutorial last night, and I think I've learned how you can leave the tutorial and go back, though I haven't tried it.  But you can apparently log into the tutorial from the login screen at any point if you're level 10 or below, and can  teleport back there if you're still bound there until level 15.

My chanter is almost done with the tutorial already, but I want to kill the big boss still.  So I logged out before I hit level 11.

Having an alt also allows me to twink.  I bought an extremely nice any-level robe on the market for 5,000 plat (it was selling from others for as much as 45,000 plat, it's clearly a good twink robe).  I also bought a halfway decent dagger for 1,000 plat -- most of the daggers usable at any level were also very high priced.  I also bought another 16-slot bag, justifying a third of the five incredibly expensive expansion stone things that I bought the other day.  That was another 5,000 plat out the door.  I had come home to almost 38,000 plat, nearly completely recovered from all of my lavish spending on Sunday, and I spent a good chunk of it right away.  But overnight I sold 2 stacks of 20 gate potions, and those bring in 3,500 plat.  Despite the cost in making them, I believe I make at least 500 plat per stack of 20, but I haven't tracked my costs closely to see how accurate that is.  I managed to make two new stacks before leaving for work, so I may makes some more sales today.

Blackfeather Roost

Saturday I finally got around to leveling a bit in EQ again.  I made my way to Blackfeater Roost, which I'd heard was a dangerous place at level 55 (I was 56).  It seemed less dangerous when I first got there.  I killed a snake without problems, but then I took on a cougar, and another came by, and then another.  They killed my pet, they hit my mercenary very hard, and I was chain-healing and draining my mana very quickly.  I was almost convinced that we would pull it out when a fourth cougar joined in, and I had to run for the zone line.

After summoning my mercenary and pet and buffing up again, I went back and was more careful about pulling, and I made it to level 57 and earned an AA.  I decided I would come back the next day.

I ran into another problem my second day there when I attacked an "injured" mountain snake.  I almost didn't notice the problem until it was too late... my mercenary was at 20% health before I realized it.  Again I began chain-casting heals and this time we barely were able to survive the encounter.  A bit of research turned up the fact that the injured snake was the "named" snake or special snake.  He dropped a very nice magic item, a mask that I instantly used to replace the one I was wearing.  When I saw that snake later I attacke him again.  After another very tough fight, I managed to loot a very nice augmentation device that I placed in my mask to make it more powerful.  Later when I saw a "hungry mountain bear" I knew it was also a named bear, and prepared for  very tough fight -- which I almost lost, my mercenary died and I was left at 3% health.  But I looted a nifty cape and managed to find a safe place to heal up, so it was all good.  I made level 58 and 59 and earned at least 2 more AA's.  Level 59 was a big goal since that allows me to wear a piece of higher level defiant armor that I'd had waiting in the bank, and use a cool 2 hand weapon I had waiting as well.

I became very frustrated later when I first bought 20 rather expensive bottles of solvent instead of the 1 I needed to remove an augmentation from my old helmet and place it in my new one.  That was a waste of plat.  At this point I had 40,000 plat, so it wasn't a huge problem, but then I compounded it with several other mis-steps.  First I bought a Tailored Legendary Unexpanded Backpack, and then also an Unexpanded Supreme Backpack.  These are 100% weight reduction 14 slot and 16 slot bags when expanded, but in order to expand them I had to buy a special item, and it turned out to cost over 2,000 plat -- and then I accidentally bought 5 instead of just the two I needed, so that was 13,000 plat out the door immediately.  I decided on reflection to consider this an investment in three more of the same kind of bags, because they're very useful.  The ones I bought had cost 2,000 and 3,000 plat which was a good deal considering they are normally being offered for 3,000 and 5,000 respectively, but it was an expensive investment all the same.

The frustrating part was that I needed to scribe a special tome to learn how to do the combine that expands them, and I couldn't figure out how to find it.  It was in the zone Sunset Hills, which was supposed to connect to the Guild Lounge, which connected to the Plane of Knowledge.  This seemed straightforward, but when I zoned into the Guild Lounge I couldn't find a zone connection to "Sunset Hills".  After a bit of exploration I found the only other zone connection, but this went to various housing areas, each named by whatever guild controlled it.  None of the options said "Sunset Hills" and nothing I could find online explained where Sunset Hills really was or how to get there.  Eventually I picked a destination at random, hoping that each guild's instance was somehow set in a version of Sunset Hills.  This in fact turned out to be the case, but it was kind of annoying that nothing explained that ahead of time.

I became more frustrated when I bought the tome I was supposed to scribe, and couldn't figure out how to scribe it.  I was familiar with scribing spells into my spell book, an assumed I needed some sort of book to scribe this scroll.  Ultimately I figured out to just place it in my inventory and right click on it, but again there was nothing I could find on the web that explained how to do this, it was just assumed that everyone knows what it means to "scribe a tome".

I was able to dye the Legendary backpack pink.  I was excited to do this since pink is not a color available for the hand made backpacks I've been crafting, but it turned out that pink and purple display as the same color.  Sigh.  The 16-slot Supreme backpack (for which I had to scribe another tome) can not be colored, but I'm happy for the extra space and 100% weight reduction anyway.

Before I went to bed I made more gate potions.  These are incredibly expensive, costing me over 2,000 plat to craft a stack of 20.  I failed twice too, which is a very expensive fail.  But they sell for extremely good money so they're worth making.  As far as I can tell there's only one or two serious alchemists selling on the market so the opportunity is there for me to make some money.  I was down to less than 15,000 plat by the time I was done, but by morning my potions had sold along with my backpacks and some halas meat pies and other stuff, and I was back to 25,000 plat again.

Bone Chip Ogre Guy

I made a trip two days ago to the Crystal Caverns in Velious.  This was kind of a trip into the unknown, although I'd been there once before.  Back then Velious was new and there were tons of people up there hunting everywhere.   This time, there was no one.  At all.

I wouldn't have wanted to do this at the appropriate level for the zone.  I was swarmed by orcs as I made my way down into the depths of the cavern.  I had trouble finding the area with the spiders, but once I did, I finally recognized something.  The only time I was ever here, I came with friends and guild mates who quickly guided me to that specific area to hunt spiders.  We spent several hours there, and I never really learned much about any other part of the caverns.

Anyway I hunted crystal spiders for a good long time and the arachnid creatures at the end of the hall as well, and I gathered nearly 100 pieces of crystalline silk.  That was my goal, but I also picked up a bunch of rare robes and weapons that were once considered very good, but are now mostly vendor trash.  I saved the best of them to try and sell for a few extra plat on the market, one blackened crystalline robe has actually sold so far.

Afterwards I made silk swatches and then crafted crystalline silk hats and shoulders until I was trivial on both, and then some pants I think until I ran out of silk.  The highest trivial items require 3 swatches of crystalline silk, so 1 attempt per 6 crystalline silks collected.  I need to go back and gather a lot more silk in order to skill up to about 136 in tailoring, and then I can move on to the Wu's fighting gear.  Tailoring is turning out to be still pretty difficult, compared to how fast I got to 200 in baking and alchemy.  But the skill increases paid off -- I almost never fail on my colored backpack attempts now.  I've sold a lot of colored backpacks!

I'm at 220 alchemy now, maxed out on the spirit of wolf level V potions.  I've sold some at the bazaar, and I sold a bunch of the skinspike potions as well.  I made some of the illusion potions but none of those have sold so far.  With baking I'm at 207, fully maxed out on smoked freshwater fish pies now and I've been making Halas 10 lb Meat Pies, which have resulted in a lot of pies but not a lot of skill increases just yet.  But I can make those for quite a while, just need someone to buy some of the ones I've already made.

I've been selling a lot of stuff on the market.  I was up to nearly 20,000 plat, then I spent a lot on alchemy and buying updated gear, and I was down below 10,000 again.  Now I'm back up to almost 29,000 plat.  Backpacks and alchemy potions and various defiant armor and weapon drops have been selling well for me.

Last night I saw someone advertising in the main channel that he was looking for a "usable 2 hand weapon for a berzerker, 6plat".  6 platinum is nothing, I earned over 100 plat before I left the tutorial, so I figured he was a poor newbie.  I was going to offer him a crude defiant greatsword that I had (level 10 required), but when I checked he was level 6 and still in the tutorial, so I didn't reply.  But he kept advertising that he wanted to buy a 2 hand weapon for 6 plat.  I checked again, and he was still level 6 but now was on the plane of knowledge, quite close to the bazaar, so I sent him a tell saying I could sell him the weapon that he could use at level 10.  He never replied.  I wondered if he was so new that he didn't know how to reply.  He kept advertising, and I was about to say something else when he suddenly appeared in front of me.

I hadn't even told him where I was at, so this surprised me.  I started to type "hang on a sec", but by then he'd already bought a 2 handed blunt gloomsteel staff from me for 5 plat.  This is a weapon I used for the first two weeks in  the game, so it's not really a bad weapon (for a shaman anyway), but it's a tutorial weapon.  I hadn't really thought there was much chance I could sell it.

I lowered the price on the greatsword and told him, but he just stood there looking stupid for 10 or 15 minutes, gloomsteel staff in hand.  It's actually a nice looking weapon, long brown staff with a skull on the end.  He was a newbie ogre with very little armor, only 1 or 2 pieces of the newbie tutorial armor.  I was wondering why he'd left the tutorial so early, that was a mistake I made my first time too though.

Eventually he ran off, never replying to me or my attempt to sell him the greatsword.  I shrugged and moved the price on it back up.  But later he started advertising in the global channel again.  He wanted to sell 20 bone chips.  This was a clue that he was a very old player who had just returned, because way back in 2002 necromancers used bone chips by the ton to summon their skeleton pets, and would buy them off newbies for good money.  But these days you can use an AA skill to eliminate the need for bone chips, something I only found out from people replying to this guy.  Nobody pays for bone chips.  I checked the market, and there were none for sale there either, so that confirmed what people were saying.

Despite this, the guy kept advertising a growing collection of bone chips (he was up to 57 last I saw) and also spiderling silk, which is not very useful in trade skills that I can remember (spider silk is what you really want).  I also checked on him again and he was back in the tutorial, something I hadn't realized was possible.  He was level 8 last I saw.  But essentially he spent the whole evening getting enough money to buy a weapon he could have found in the tutorial, and collecting stuff to sell for money that nobody actually wanted to buy.  All instead of just playing the tutorial and getting gear, weapons, and money  (not to mention levels) the easy way.

Buying Salvation -- The Coin Operated Faction Machine

Lashun Novashine is a paladin of the temple of Rodcet Nife in Qeynos.  To me, Rodcet Nife seems to be part Holy Right-Wing Bevolent God of Lawful Good and part Suicide Alien Space Ship Cult, becuse in their temple area is a tiny space ship thing that glows and makes sounds like a space ship.  I have no idea what it's really supposed to be, it's always been the spaceship of the spaceship cult to me.

Anyway Lashun wanders around North Qeynos yelling at people to be good and cease fighting, and to follow his god.  If you hail him, he will stop to talk, and you can hand him some bone chips, and he will bless you and cast cure disease on you.  And, oh yes -- your faction goes up with the priests and paladins, and Antonius Bayle (leader of the city), and Qeynos Guards.  And it goes down with the Bloodsabers, but they're clearly evil bad people that I don't want to be on good terms with anyway.  I think.

Lashun does the same thing if you give him two gold, which makes him a coin-operated faction machine.  With enough money, you can buy salvation.  I gave him 1,000 gold coins last night, along with 30 bone chips, which was enough to bring me from apprehensive to amiable.  That's only 100 plat, which I can make in 3 ice giant kills, which I can do in a matter of a few minutes in Everfrost.  Which I did, multiple times last night, while hunting mammoths for mammoth meat.

I want to go back and visit Lashun again with more gold coins.  Another 1-2 thousand should bring me to ally status.

Faction is one of those things that gives Everquest its incredible depth.  Few MMOs are as deep and complex as EQ, although Eve Online probably is in its own way.  Anyway, I've clearly fixed my faction with Antonius Bayle, and now I want to fix it with the Coalition of Tradesfolk in Freeport.  That's my next goal, along with more baking, working on alchemy, and paying another visit to my friend Lashun.

I also went on a buying spree in the bazaar last night.  I had over 20,000 plat and I decided to upgrade my equipment as much as I could, starting with buying a regular (non-legendary) Lodizal Shell Shield, which I can equip at any level and turns out to also provide Enduring Breath.  I'm undecided if I should now sell the Fishbone Earring -- I keep seeing the same two for sale in the market for 2,000 plat and 7,500 plat, they don't seem to actually be selling.  These days there are a lot of enduring breath items, and you can even use AA (Alternative Advancement) points to buy enduring breath if you want.

But I haz my Shell Shield, as well as the Legendary one in the bank for when I reach level 68.  The regular shield cost me 3,000 plat, 6 times the amount I paid for the legendary one.  Go figure.

I also bought a "Corpsegrinder", a massive 2 hand hammer with impressive stats and a cool name.  I upgraded my 1 hand blunt and bought a 1 hand spear to train on as well, but both of those weapons are unusable until I reach a higher level, so they're in the bank.  I upgraded a lot of my other equipment, replacing the newbie lamp in my range slot with an item that provided armor class and stat bonuses, and I bought a lot of enhancement items to slot into my equipment to improve them even more.  In particular I slotted a nifty item into my new helmet that grants me Ultravision (improved night vision), which is again something I have a spell for, but it's annoying to have to memorize and cast the spell every time it gets dark.  I think this makes for a pretty cool helmet.  ^_^

I spent about half of the money I had all told, so now I'm back in making money mode.

Fishbone Earring, Finally!

I finally got my Fishbone Earring, and it was after I thought I didn't even need it -- but as it turns out, I did need it after all.

I began the evening at the bazaar, having sold more stuff during the day.  I did an online search for Enduring Breath items to see if I could come up with something to replace the elusive Fishbone Earring.  I came across the Legendary Lodizal Shell Shield, which I found selling on the market for as little as 500 plat.  This was a little confusing -- I remember the Lodizal Shell Shield, I had one on my old shaman and was very proud of it, it's one of those things that was not easy to get at my level back then, I had help from several others, and when I left the game I passed it on to my friend and fellow shaman Roncor.  I didn't remember it being called "legendary" or having an Enduring Breath property, but for 500 plat I simply could not resist buying the Legendary version.  This shield works as a back piece as well as a shield, and has very good armor class for a cape (at least, in the old days it was one of the best AC back items a shaman could own.)

I was excited that I could own it again -- or an improved version, and especially one that solved my apparent need to breath underwater.  I bought my Legendary Lodizal Shell Shield and placed it on my back, and thought my Enduring Breath issue was solved.  (Side note:  it's a bit of a conciet that I need an item at all as shamans can cast the spell Enduring Breath, but I prefer to be able to breath underwater without digging that spell out of my spell book and casting it every 30 minutes).   However, I still felt like Hadden owed me a Fishbone Earring.  I had seen them for sale on the market for 2,000 to as much as 7,500 plat, so I could always sell it after, but I'd killed him too many times and taken too many faction hits to just walk away empty-handed.

So... I went to Qeynos Hills and killed Haden.  And this time, I got the earring.

I immediately decided to work on fixing my faction.  I conned some Qeynos Guards, and saw that I was only apprehensive to them, so that didn't seem too bad.  I entered Blackburrow and slaughtered gnolls for more than an hour.  I also took time to fish while in there, although I didn't catch the more elusive of the two unusual fish you can find there.  By the time I was done, I was at "amiable" with the Qeynos Guards and Merchants, and probably with the Jaggedpine Treefolk as well, so that part of my faction fixing was a success, but that leaves me with Antonius Bayle and Coalition of Tradesfolk to fix.

However, while in Blackburrow I fell into the water, and I decided it was a good time to test my new shell shield.  And it didn't work.  The earring worked just fine, but the shield appeared to have no effect whatsoever.  Eventually I realized that it was a level 68 and up item.  I've been fooled by this a few times now, items that are level locked can be equipped but don't do anything, and the level requirements are kind of buried in among the list of other stats in the item so it's easy to overlook.  And I had looked, but I was still working from the idea that the Legendary Lodizal Shell Shield was basically an improved version of the Lodizal Shell Shield (which it really is) and I had been able to wear the Lodizal no problem at level 50 in the old days.

So it's just as well that I got the Fishbone Earring.  I'm also not entirely clear on whether the Lodi shield will be considered a great back item at level 68, but eh, it still has the Enduring Breath effect and that's useful.

I also headed to West Karana and killed a buch of bandits there, which again helped me with Qeynos Guards, and with Karana Merchants and High Pass Guards, but not the two factions I was seeking.  I learned later that those can only be fixed via quests, but I know how to do it now (Coalition of Tradesfolk turns out to be merchants in Freeport, on the other side of the continent).  While in West Karana I killed some animated scarecrows and got more pumpkin seeds, and I fished for a while and caught a few Thunderhead Salmon (or something like that).

I almost forgot that my main reason to head to Qeynos Hills in the first place had been to hunt mammoths in Everfrost for mammoth meat (after visiting Hadden).  I spent some time doing this, and killing the occasional ice giant for exp and money, and killing the large snow spiders which occasionally drop barbarian parts (meat -- any meat from playable races can be used to make illusion potions, so any way I can get such meat without killing for it is very good).

I didn't get very much mammoth meat, which I will need to start making Halas 10 lb Meat Pies, so I will be back in Everfrost hunting mammoths again.

All of this faction work, however, makes me want to do something I'd wanted to do more than ten years ago.  Back when Kunark came out, it seemed really cool that you could improve your faction and be non-KOS in the Iksar (lizardman) city of Cabalis.  I always wanted to do that.  I have literally no reason to do it today, but I think I want to anyway.

Smoked Freshwater Fish Pie

So I did nothing very exciting last night.  I solved my smoked freshwater fish recipe problem with the help of EQTraders, where I'm getting all my recipe information anyway.  The recipe required a smoker, which wasn't listed.  Once I crafted a smoker and tried it, the recipe worked, so I helped them update one of their recipes that was wrong.

I smoked all of my freshwater fish filets and then made Smoked Freshwater Fish Pie.  I had to pause at several points to make more of this or that ingredient, but I made some 26 attempts and then was out of fish.  I got some good skill increases doing this though, and wanted to do more, so I headed out to the Blightfire Moors for another round of fishing.  After I got back I spent a good length of time turning all of my dye ingredients into extracts and then into dyes, which is a very involved process that takes time and costs a lot of plat, but now I have a large collection of dyes should I want to make more colored backpacks, and I don't have all of those ingredients cluttering up my inventory.

I really need to buy the tradeskill crafter's backpack from the SoE store, but it's kind of expensive.  But I could really use it, my inventory is becoming very cluttered.

After this I went to town again making vegetables so I could make vegetable oil so I could make smoking sauce so I could make smoked freshwater fish so I could make smoked freshwater fish pie... and I had to pause to make more egg batter as well.  I need to go on an egg collecting expedition, I've burned through my collection of eggs that I had in my bank.  When I ran out again, it was time to stop for the night.  My baking is now at 198 and these pies are trivial at 202, so I just need to gear up with enough egg batter, smoking sauce and vegetables to do one more round of pies, and then I should be set to attempt the Halas 10 lb Meat Pie, which I tend to think of as "the big one" because that's what it was way back when I was first learning baking.  It's not the most difficult thing any more, but it's still a huge undertaking and is still sold on the market.

I set myself up as a vendor at the bazaar after that, and I sold quite a few things before I went to bed.  I even sold some of my patty melts!  It's not a lot of money but it makes it seem like making them was worth the effort.  I hadn't sold anything else by morning, but I left my vendor up for the day while I'm at work so we'll see if anything else sells today.

Fish Rolls and Patty Melts

The thing about baking in Everquest is that there are hundreds of recipes for all kinds of interesting concotions, but a large number of them require "foraged" items, and until yesterday I didn't even remember what foraged meant.  I was thinking there were an awful lot of ground spawns out there that I hadn't noticed yet.  Then I realized / remembered that foraging is a special skill that only a few get -- rangers, druids, elves, iskar, something like that, but mostly only rangers get it at full strength.

Except -- I also discovered that these days, anyone can put 3 AA (alternative advancement that you get after level 50) points into forage, and are allowed to forage up to a capped 50 points.  I had been saving up my AA's so I immediately put 3 points into forage and started working my new skill.  I'm not sure what I can accomplish with forage at 50, I couldn't find any information on the web that explained that to me so I just went for it.  Hopefully I can scrounge up some or most of the things I'd like to try in baking, because these days you can't depend on a lot of low level and mid level rangers and druids selling you their foraged stuff, because most of the low and mid level zones are empty nearly all of the time.

In one evening I managed to get up to foraging 12 and foraged 3 pods of water.  Yay.

My goal for the evening was to work on fishing and baking, which I did.  I'd left my character in the marketplace overnight and all throughout the day, and I'd sold quite a few things.  I'm up over 18,000 plat now, which seems like a lot to me even though I know it isn't.  But it's plenty as far as allowing me to tradeskill and even work on alchemy, which tends to be expensive.  Costs for tradeskills and store-bought items have not changed with inflation, so everything that you need to buy from a vendor is much cheaper these days.

I fished off the East Freeport dock for nearly 2 hours.  This is "lazy" game playing, as in you're doing nothing and I was able to go cook dinner and occasionally come in to hit the fish button (I set up a hotkey that would fish twice and place anything caught in inventory, based on reccomendations I saw online).  Ultimately I got my fishing to up over 100, but all I caught in Freeport were fresh fish, sandals, and daggers, and fish scales.  Nothing exciting.  I caught a few Crescent Perch after I teleported back to Crescent Reach however, that was cool, but there's not much you can do with them as it turns out, just one recipe.

I had done a lot of research on recipes that I thought I could try to get my skills up close to 200, but after realizing that it would be a few days before I was able to fish and forage some of the ingredients, I wound up doing fish rolls to 143 instead.  You can buy fresh fish and batwings from vendors so this was very easy to do -- in fact, I wound up with far too much fresh fish, I bought a bunch in East Freeport before realizing that you can buy them in Crescent Reach, and then I wound up catching a ton of them while fishing.  So I had plenty of fish for fish rolls.

Next I decided that I could buy everything I needed to make patty melts, which trivial at 191.  This was a long jump from 143 but since I could buy the materials I could afford to fail a lot.  The only thing I needed was a non-stick frying pan, which, as it turned out, required a trip to the Jaggedpine Forrest for the mold to make it.  Once I got that made, I went to town and made patty melts for more than an hour.  I wound up at 190 baking skill, which I felt was good enough to stop and try something new.

I sold a lot of the patty melts back to the vendors (at a profit, it seemed).  I made so many and I'm not certain regular food like that sells through the bazaar, though I'm willing to try.  I made TONS of patty melts, I was getting only 1-2 skill increases per 40 attempts for a while there.

My next goal was complicated.  I wanted to make Smoked Fresh Fish Pie.  This turned out to require me to brew smoking sauce, which required me to first brew vegetable oil, which required me to first mix lettuce, carrots and turnips into "vegetables".  That was a very involved process, and then I discovered that I needed a tacklebox in order to produce filet of fresh fish, which meant a trip to the Plane of Knowledge.  After that I realized that my fresh fish could not be turned into filet of fresh fish (oddly enough), but several different other types of fish could.  This did not include Crescent Perch.  I fished in Blightfire Moors for a while and was able to catch enough fish to produce 26 filet of fresh fish.  Then it was on to the next step, which was turning snake eggs into egg batter.  I'd collected snake eggs all evening as I was able in preparation for this, so this step went smoothly.

The last step before making the pies was to turn my filet of fresh fish into smoked filet of fresh fish.  Supposedly this was simply combining the filet of fresh fish with smoking sauce in a mixing bowl, but this did not work.  I was given a message that indicated this was not a proper recipe, so I was stuck at that point and decided to log off for the night.

I killed Hadden in Qeynos Hills again.  Still no Fishhook Earring.  I've become concerned with the faction hits -- not that I plan to stop killing him, but I check on guards and such before I approach them now.  Jaggedpine Woods is near Qeynos and I travelled through the ranger glade there to get to the forest, and I was conning everything to make sure nobody hated me yet.  But after checking what faction hits I get from killing Hadden, none are Jaggedpine Tree Folk:  Antonius Bayle, Guards of Qeynos, Merchants of Qeynos, and Coalition of Tradesfolk.  Antonius Bayle is the leader of the city.  Some of these factions I can fix by killing gnolls and bandits, but I have to check to make sure whether it fixes all of them.  But the guards are the important one, they're the ones who will attack you on site if they don't like you.  Merchants just call you names when you try to trade.

Siren and Bixie

This weekend I finally decided that I would spend some money on Everquest, which I've been playing for more than two weeks now.  I bought a three month subscription, and I bough some extremely frivolous items from their online store.

Friday night and Saturday morning I did more tradeskill stuff.  I spent another couple of hours in Permafrost, and this time I scoured the whole keep (aside from the area where Lady Vox the dragon dwells) and located many of the permafrost crystal ground spawn locations.  I wound up with about 25 permafrost crystals, more than enough to keep me busy for a good while.  The next day I hunted animate scarecrows in West Karana for the Jack-O-Lantern fungus they drop, but they only dropped one so that was a bust.  I came up with some pumpkin flesh and seeds for baking though.

I've killed Hadden at least twice more, still no underwater breathing earring.  I'm taking quite a few faction hits from killing him, but I don't ever need to visit Qyenos anyway, and in any case I can slaughter knolls and bandits until the cows come home to fix faction later.

I visited Lesser Faydark again and picked up more Jack-O-Latern fungus and Sarcosypha Fungus.  I visited Meras Seru again, but only scrounged up one charcoal (and some iron oxide and russet oxide).  Later I was able to buy more iron oxide and charcoal from a vendor that someone had sold to, so I'm now really set for more dyes.  Not that I actually need more bags at this point, and I don't think they're very marketable, but I want to make more purple and dark blue bags.  Also, the dyes can be used on the higher-level bags that I'll make later on.

The frivolous items that I bought were two polymorph wands that turn me into a small flying fairy or a siren.  These are, in my opinion, two of the best-looking polymorph options available.  I also bought a "petamorph" wand that turns my pet into a bixie -- a small bee girl.  (Actually, it turns my pet into a LARGE bee girl, but I can shrink her down afterwards.)  I like this -- she looks better and doesn't bark and howl all the time.  I also bought a potion of "pet amnesia" that allowed me to rename my pet permanently.  I wanted something that worked for a bixie/fairy sort, so I thought about calling her Honey and then settled on Clover instead.

The biggest thing that buying a subscription offered me, though, was the chance to set myself up at the market as a seller.  So strangely enough, no sooner had I paid for a subscription than I got my character all set up and walked away from the computer.  Over the course of Saturday I sold quite a few things and made some money -- I'd been saving up drops for a while, mostly various flavors of the defiant armor and weapons that really are good equipment at whatever level they're intended.  And that's mostly what I was able to sell, too.

Sunday I spent more time foraging for trade skills.  I decided to work on baking, and to use up some of the various meats and baking materials I'd collected so far.  My skill was 70, and I had drake and wurm meat that can only be used in pickling, which was a 75 trivial, and that required me to travel all the way to Cobalt Scar in Velious to get the ingredients needed to do the pickling.  This was a tricky journey into the unknown. I used a shortcut through the Plane of Mischief, and found myself by the shores of a big lake in a zone that tops out at level 50, so it wasn't very dangerous to me.  The water is filled with creatures that attack on site -- cold water barracuda, sharks, possessed treasure chests, and sirens that looked very much like I currently looked.  And they all dropped valuables or meat that I could use in baking, so I spent a good amount of time swimming underwater (I got to use my enduring breath spell) and killing everything except the friendly otter folk, who sold me their spices and bought all the junk I dredged up.

I have to say, the siren polymorph looks good but has limited movement -- it's not designed to sit down or kneel, for example, so when I sit to meditate I can't see myself sitting.  But it's very much designed to swim underwater, and to look good doing that, so I enjoyed swimming underwater and looking like I actually belonged there.  ^_^

When I was finally done I gated back to Crescent Reach and spent a lot of time baking.  I made pickled wurm, pickled drake, siren pickles, candied spiders, lemon pie, and finally animal and barbarian-shaped cookies, which required a detour to Freeport to buy the cookie patterns.  Freeport was kind of sad -- it's been fully updated and looks much better than it used to (although it still looks like a muddy, crummily-built outpost city, which it's meant to be), but there was no one around.  Many, many of the zones in EQ (on Firiona Vie anyway, but likely on many servers) are empty, while the "hot zone" servers and high end servers see action (and Plane of Knowledge and the Bazaar are always busy).

Anyway I got my baking skill up from 70 to 106, so I did some good.  ^_^

Then I set myself up to try and sell more junk!  ^_^

Success!

After a lot of work last night, I finally made some colored handmade backpacks.  I was really happy by the end of the evening.

I started by spending more than an hour searching for more evergreen leaf ground spawn.  Eventually I took the advice found on the ZAM web page and turned off grass/ground shading effects, which made the things easier to see.  I wound up with about 25 leaves so I was satisfied at that point.  Then I spent some time slaughtering bears and wolves to get more HQ skins -- I got 7 more HQ wolf skins, and a few more bear (I already had a lot of bear).  This gave me 18 HQ bear and 19 HQ wolf, enough for a good run at making the backpacks.  And I made some cash from the rare drops from the named wolf and bear and named snake too.

The process of getting to the backpack making stage was more involved than I expected.  I needed to turn my drops (charcoal, permafrost crystals, evergreen leaves, jack-o-lantern fungus, etc) into extracts.  This was basic alchemy but required resin which was expensive -- 104 plat for a stack of 20, and to get light blue or gray I needed 3 resin per extract.  Then I needed to turn my extracts into dyes, which meant combining them in a medium jar, which meant I needed to make a medium container on a pottery wheel and then fire it in a kiln, which meant I needed to do the four newbie pottery quests to skill up to 54 in pottery first.  And each medium jar combine sacrifices the jar itself so I needed 1 jar per dye.

I still haven't finished turning all of my extracts into dyes, but once I had a stack of more than 10 red dye and more than 10 green, plus some orange, light yellow (for white bags), and light blue and light gray (for purple bags) I was ready to rock.

And this is the result.  Sadly, two of my for attempts at purple bags failed.  I need more charcoal and permafrost crystals.  I haven't even attempted yellow or blue or dark blue bags, or black, or brown (I'm curious what the brown looks like, normal bags are already brown.)  I also need a lot more HQ wolf and bear skins, as I want to make quite a few more colored backpacks!

Dyes

For the last two days I've been working on gathering supplies for the dyes required to make colored hand-made tailored backpacks.  I kind of think of it as "I'm not really playing the game, I'm less addicted!" but that's only partly true -- crafting gets boring more quickly, and I probably log off sooner, but then again, I'm still logging in for a couple of hours a night at least.  I'm not actually getting any writing done, or reading more, or watching a movie or cleaning up my apartment.

I saw a bit online that suggested that another color was possible -- pink -- and that you could color the higher-quality excellent backpacks that appear to be the top-of-the-line backpacks these days (and wich require an "excellent" animal hide that probably drops off very high level mobs, so I'm not too concerned about making these just yet).  It sounds like for these you have to make the backpack first and then dye it afterwards (not sure if that means you can fail and lose your new backpack).  Anyway, something to look forward to later.

In the meantime, I've been hunting and gathering.  Monday night I went back to Marus Seru and spent a lot of time killing the rock guys; I wound up with 4 charcoal for my trouble, but they also dropped 5 iron oxide and 4 russett oxide which are used for other colors.  I really want more charcoal  though, these are used not only for the color black but for light gray that I need to make purple.

Next I went to Greater Faydark and Butcherblock Mountains to look for evergreen leaves.  It was kind of cool to visit these old zones again, but I was so focused on my hunt that I didn't explore that much.  GFay was the first zone I ever experienced in an MMO -- I remember how frightening and exhilarating it was to explore the whole zone at about level 3 or 4.  I also remember hunting this zone for evergreen leaves when they were first introduced, when dying was used to make colorful armor (which is completely useless armor these days, so nobody goes to the trouble of doing that).  I had a regular route and knew where the spawn locations were, but I don't remember any of that now.  I'm not even sure if the spawn points I found online are still good, since GFay has been given a revamp at some point -- a revamp that improved the wandering spawns, but did nothing for the blocky, ugly old zone design.

Anyway I tried to check one spawn point and ran around a good deal, and discovered nothing, so I headed to Lesser Faydark to hunt for the mushroom spawns around the fairy ring.  These were easy to find.  I picked everything up that I saw, camped out there, and when I came back later I grabbed everything that had respawned.  There are three different groundspawns here, and I'm not sure what the third one is used for, but the other two are for yellow and red dyes.

My next trip was to Permafrost, but I stopped in Qeynos to kill Hadden again.  Four kills so far and no fishbone earring.  I don't like taking that many faction hits, but oh well, I'm still going to get that earring.

Permafrost was confusing without a map (the EQ map function only works for me about half the time), but as long as I wasn't deep enough to disturb the dragon, everything was very green to me, so I stumbled around blindly and slaughtered goblins left and right.  I even found a few magic items that used to be considered good.  (I got a lot of Simple and Rough Defiant Armor drops as well -- that stuff drops everywhere, I've stared selling it to vendors now since I have so much in my bank already).  After a good hour and a half of killing I managed to scrounge up 8 permafrost crystals and tons of vendor trash.  I killed the three ice giants on my way in and back out again too.

Lastly I gated back to Crescent Reach and then made the run to Goru'kar Mesa where there are also evergreen leaf ground spawns in a protected fairy grove.  This still involved a lot of running around, they're hard to see and mostly you have to pick up acorns first to get the leaves to spawn, but I netted about 14 by the time I was done.  I also logged out here so I could look again when I logged back in.

Ultimately, I think I have everything I need to make just about any color I want now.  I just need to make the dyes and then try my luck with colored backpacks.

Dragonslayer

Saturday night I made it to 50.  Sunday I managed to get to 52, and also make about 4,000 plat, by doing something I did ages ago:  killing ice giants outside of Permafrost Keep, and killing any Wooly Mammoths that wandered by for their tusks.

I had a lot of fun doing this, it's one of those nostalgic things.  But today I went wandering for zones that could offer me experience.  I wound up in Skyfire Mountains on Kunark, where I killed dragons of various sorts (wurms, wyverns, chromodracs, I don't know what all) for a few hours until I hit 54.

I am already higher level than my old shaman ever was, and thus I'm hunting in zones that I've never visited before.

Then I went to work on tradeskills.  I did the alchemy newbie quests to get up to 54 in that, and then decided to work on tailoring.  I still want to make the colored hand tailored backpacks, but I decided to work my skill up close to 100 first.  So I went to Marus Seru in Luclin, a weird moon desert zone that I'd never been to, and killed greyhoppers (which were easy to kill, everything was well below my level) until I had 20+ greyhopper hides.  Then I made greyhopper boots (or shoes, slippers, I forget) which got me to 94 and trivial very quickly, I had a lot of greyhopper hides left.

The next step will be making the dyes for the bags.  I discovered that two of the things I'll need are permafrost crystals (from Permafrost Keep, where I was earlier) and charcoal (from Marus Seru, where I just was, it drops from the rock guys that I ignored the whole time I was there).  Anyway that's a start.  I want to make some purple bags first, and dark blue I guess, and white and red.  ^_^

I did manage to buy another 7 HQ bear skins off a vendor in the Bazaar, so I'm all set with 14 of those and 12 of the HQ wolf skins, so I can make at least 12 attempts on these bags when I'm ready.

Almost 50!

I found out today that Firiona Vie (the server) has a 50% experience bonus, so that's one of the reasons I've found it so easy to level.

Wednesday and Thursday I took it easy, but by Thursday night I was level 39, still hanging out in Goru'kar Mesa killing bears and wolves.  Friday I came home and really went to town.  By the time I was done I was 43 and had killed Fantoma (the named wolf).  I'd also killed a few of the faun-like Minohten guards that were in the area.  I'd had one attack me (and I killed it) before, and I'd also read that they were good experience, but after only a few kills (they were apprehensive to me now) I read that they give out quests if you don't ruin your faction with them.  And then I discovered the Tuffein, who are evil versions of the Minohten, so I killed them to raise my faction with the good fauns and nymphs.  I'm not entirely sure which faction the first one I ran into actually was.

Anyway I hit level 43 without ever heading back to the city. so at that point I gated back, sold off, and bought all my new spells.  Then I headed back again.

By Saturday morning I managed to get up to level 46 and then 47, and finally 48 and nearly at 49.  I probably would have shot through to 50 if I hadn't paused to do a lot of other stuff first.  I had been saving all of my animal hides and pelts and decided it was time to work on crafting again and learn tailoring.  The newbie tailor quests in Crescent Reach take you to about 54-56 in any given tradekskill.  I did the newbie quests for tailoring, and then decided to work on tattered tailored backpacks, which required patterns from the Plane of Knowledge, and tacky silk.

Now, tacky silk drops by the bucketful in the tutorial, but I sold it all (you don't really have a lot of room to carry stuff around in there anyway).  I'd continued to sell any I came across, thinking all of the "low quality" types of silk (crude silk, sullied silk, tacky silk, etc) were useless.  So now I had to go find some.  There wasn't a lot on vendors -- I still think much of the in-game activity these days is people PLing friends and alts, so they probably don't bother to loot junk like silk and sell it.  I decided I should hunt crag spiders in East Karana, partly because I remember doing that while tailoring over 10 years ago.

So I ran from Crescent Reach to the Blightfire Moors and then to High Pass Hold, which has been upgraded and looks much much better than it used to.  As soon as I zoned into East Karana, I was back in a zone that hadn't been upgraded since 1999.  It's ancient, blocky, and ugly.  This is the Everquest I remember, and boy, I didn't remember how bad it looked compared to -- well, any game, but even the new EQ zones.

I was higher level than just about everything in the zone.  I killed a bunch of spiders and some hill giants and griffons and bandits.  Eventually I had a nice cache of various silks including about 20 tacky silks, and I headed to North Karana, then West Karana, then Queynos Hills.  It was a long run but it was very nastagic for me.  What was weird was that I was inevitably the only person in any of these zones -- and even the named mobs dropped magic items that are pure trash by today's standards.

In Qeynos Hills though is a barbarian fisherman that drops an earring that allows breathing underwater.  I had his earring in the old days, and I was really proud of that, on most servers he was camped 24/7 because no other item in the game at that time granted permanent underwater breathing (and unlike some games, EQ has entire dungeons underwater.  Well, Kedge Keep at least, and some other locations I think).

So I found the guy and killed him.  No earring.  I came back much later (he's on a bout a 5 hour 20 minute spawn timer) and killed him again.  Still nothing.  But he's going to give me that fish hook earring eventually!

I wandered through Blackburrow -- also really old, blocky and ugly -- and up to Halas, where I made tattered backpacks.  I got to to trivial in those and filled my bank with extra backpacks.  Then I teleported back to Crescent Reach and set to work on Cured Silk Capes, which required patterns from the Plane of Knowledge again and required me to train up in brewing so that I could make Heady Kiolas.  Luckily though, I now had tons of spider silk to work with (seriously, over 200 pieces.  I am soooo glad they do stacks of 100 now!).

Once I was tivial on cured silk, it was time to put my high quality bear skins to work.  I got more patterns and made Hand-Tailored Backpacks, which are 10-slot so these are much better than the kind you buy.  This was my real goal all along!  I had 10 HQ bear skins to work with, and when I ran out I headed out to hunt some more.  I spent the rest of the evening hunting until I had about 10-12 more HQ bear skins.   I killed Fantoma twice more, I killed Ursula twice (she's very hard to kill even when I'm higher level).  I killed some dromrek giants and more of the Tuffein guys, and I wound up nearly level 49 at that point, and got my tailoring to 88 which is where the Handmade Backpacks become trivial.  My new goal is the colored handmade backpacks, which are trivial at 100 and are bigger and better than the regular kind (and look cooler).  I'll need more HQ bear skins for that though.

Really hard to believe I could solo my way to 50 in a week, but I've nearly done it.

Fail

I made a lot of mistakes tonight.  First off, I discovered that one of the coolest items I'd recently purchased -- a ring -- was level 65 and above only.  It let me wear the thing, but none of the stats had any effect until level 65.  Another item was level 40 and above, I left that one on since it will be useful soon enough, but I placed the other ring in my bank.  I'll have to find a replacement for now, but there was hardly anything interesting for sale when I checked.

Next I traveled back to Crescent's Reach via a gate spell, after doing research that suggested I wanted to hunt in Stone Hive or Goru'kar Mesa, two zones that connected to Blightfire Moor.  The reason that these were good destinations was something I found out that explained a lot of things for me -- these zones, and the ones I have been hunting in, are "Hot Zones" where experience is greatly increased.  I still suspect that the game has been tweaked since the old days, and I probably get more experience in High Pass or Everfrost Peaks than I would have in 2003, but in any case I get a ton more experience in these Hot Zones, which explains my insanely quick leveling.  It also explains why I keep running into massive slaughter parties that are clearly designed to PL someone's new alt or new guild member.

In any case, Stone Hive was geared for levels 35+ and Goru'kar Mesa for 40+, but I'd read that in Stone Hive it was fairly difficult to avoid fighting multiple foes at once, so I decided to head out to the Mesa.

My first mistake was not re-summoning my pet and my mercenary, who I'd gotten rid of the night before when I thought I was going to be able to set myself up as a trader/merchant.  I was attacked by a mushroom guy on my way to the zone, and then he spawned a bunch of smaller mushroom guys (something the other Sporiali I'd fought had never done), and then a wandering treant decided to attack me as well.  All of these guys were green to me, but I was alone and there were too many of them.  I wasn't able to recall my mercenary away from the city, and I didn't have my pet summoning spell memorized (which takes so long I probably would not have been able to cast it anyway).  I wound up running away and gating back to Crescent Reach again, where I was able to summon my mercenary.

I made my way back through the Blightfire Moors and found the entrance to the Mesa.  Here I was careful and looked around before deciding the wolves and bears were good targets.  The wolves were even deep blue cons to me, while the bears were white or yellow con (my level or higher).

But now I discovered my second mistake:  in my attempt to set myself up as a merchant I'd cleared my inventory, placing all the bags with junk I might be able to sell on me while placing extra bags of useful stuff into the bank for later.  I'd meant to swap them back several times, but ultimately forgot to.  Now I was out in a faraway zone hunting, and I had little space for storing the drops I got.

Meh.  I decided to live with it for the moment.

I stumbled across a fawn-like guard who immediately attacked me.  He was red con, and at first I tried to run away, but my mercenary was doing very well against him (the mercenary never runs), so I came back and was able to kill the guard.  I was worried another guard would show up at any moment, but things went well.  A bit later I found a named bear, a giant one called Ursula, wandering nearby, and I kept my distance. I looked her up online and she was level 45, well able to trash me.  I had to be careful not to kill any bears near her, or wander too close (the bears were all aggressive and attacked when I got near, and so would Ursula).

I made it to level 37.  I hadn't planned to play much tonight, but a level 51 froglok shaman happened by and buffed me, my pet, and my mercenary to the gills.  He spent some time cannibalizing to get enough mana to cast all of the buffs, so I didn't want to waste his effort.  I killed another bear, and then a wolf, and then a named wolf spawned on top of me and attacked.

This was Fantoma, who I suspected was at least level 42 or 43 (turned out he/she is 45 just like Ursula).  I really didn't think I had a hope to kill it, but I was uber-buffed.  I set in poisoning the creature and slowing it, and tried twice to disease it.  I wound up healing my mercenary until I ran out of mana.  By that point the wolf was at about 30% health, but was killing my mercenary too fast for me to do anything about it.  I decided to run.

On a whim I ran to the guard and quest guy near the zone entrance instead of straight to the zone border.  I wanted to see if they would protect me, though I knew if they didn't I was dead.  Well, they didn't, so I died.  So much for not wasting all those great buffs.  :/

That was the end of my evening, although I did remember to find the bank and swap out my packs so I'd be better prepared for my next outing.

Everquest -- Getting Up to Speed

Tuesday night I logged in to the bazaar.  I did some shopping and found much better prices on things I could use than the day before -- as usual, I spent too much money the first day because I was impatient.  I bought what I could afford, and decided that more money was in order to complete my equipment makeover.

One thing I discovered was that I had to actually go to the merchants to buy from them.  I had been doing this, of course, but there was also a "buy" button in the search window, but the few times I  tried to use it I was told that "you have to purchase the current expansion to use this item".  The first time I encountered this, I thought it was saying that about the specific earring I tried to purchase, and so I missed out on a good deal.  Oh well, it's not like running to the merchant is all that hard, even if the new bazaar is a confusing maze, you can click on their name and the game leads you right to them.  I've been using that feature a lot, all of the Planes of Knowledge is a maze too.

I kind of miss the old layout of the bazaar and the whole Luclin starting location.

I went back to the Blightfire Moors to hunt.  I decided at first to try and complete a quest I'd take at random the day before, which involved finding the gnoll foreman in the nearby gnoll mines.  They were all light green or gray con to me, barely any exp involved at all, and the money was only so-so, but I spent a good hour or more killing gnolls trying to make the foreman spawn.  Later I realized there was a second mine, but by that point a group was monopolizing the whole area, pulling every gnoll in the area into the mines to kill them en masse.  I assume they were higher levels working on faction or something, I don't know, but I wasn't able to complete my quest.

I went back to the sporioli decayer (mushroom guys) camp and began killing Dragoneater again.  Eventually this place became a little crowded too, with several others hunting the area.  I buffed some of them because I felt like an interloper, I was pretty high level for the camp by now.  But in the end I managed to earn over 2,000 plat and even gained 3 levels to 36, which surprised me.  I went back to the bazaar and carefully shopped for items that were improvements over my newbie gear, and I think I did very well for myself.  I had a bunch of stuff I had intended to sell as well, but it turns out only subscriber accounts can sell.  I don't know if I'm ready to spend money on this game again, or not.  So that was the end of my evening, level 36 and much better equipped, with a good amount of money left.  I really feel I could hit 40-42 this evening if I move on to someplace where I get normal experience.

Back to Everquest Again

After a week-long Lord of the Rings marathon, I became nostalgic for my old fantasy MMO days.  In my quest to find some new MMO's to play, I decided to download the original MMO that I played from 1999 to 2003.  While Everquest technically wasn't the first MMO, beaten out by Ultima Online and Meridian 59, it was the first such game that presented a true 3-D environment, and set the stage for everything that came after, including, of course, WoW.  And even though I've been playing Neverwinter, one of the newest, shiniest MMOs around, I've also found EQ to be as much fun to play as it ever was.

The things that make EQ unusual (if not unique -- I haven't tried a lot of other MMOs, including EQ2) is the complexity of the game mechanics, and the size of the world.  You can play something like a dozen different races and classes.  You can swim underwater, and drown.  You are weighted down by what you carry.  You can get drunk.  You need food and water to survive, or you grow weak.  Trade skills include brewing, baking, pottery, tinkering, alchemy, jewelcrafting, spell research... basically there are a lot of things that can be found in other games, but I don't think any other game include all of them.  As for the size of the world, it's been around longer than most other MMO's and they keep adding expansions with new zones, planes, and continents.  It would be impossible to build a new MMO today that is anywhere near as large and complex as EQ; even WoW doesn't match that, at least.

Of course, the things that EQ does poorly are still there -- graphics for some zones are ancient, combat is incredibly uninspired, animations are rudimentary and jerky, etc.  Compared to Neverwinter it's an ugly, primitive game.  But I was able to adapt to it easily because I played it for so long, even if that was ten years ago.  I surprised myself by playing EQ most of this past weekend.

I began last week by starting a barb shaman on the Bristlebane server.  The name of my old shaman, Jalia, was taken, so I named her Jellia and entered the tutorial.  EQ's tutorial was new to me, and I'm used to tutorials that only exist to explain the basics to you, so as soon as I thought I had things figured out I left.  The dropped me into Crescent Reach, the only starting zone for free accounts, which disappointed me because I really wanted to explore my old starting zones Halas and Everfrost Peaks.  I was poor and ill-equipped (not really equipped at all)as well.  I logged off after that session, unsure if I wanted to continue.

I discovered online that it was possible to level up to at least 12 in the tutorial, and to get a lot of nice newbie armor and equipment, so the next time I logged on I created a new character -- another shaman, but this time a vah shar (cat person).  I wondered why I hadn't considered doing that before, I'd never played one.  This time I stuck to the tutorial and did all of the quests, and over the course of three days of casual play I got to level 12, finished nearly every quest, made over 100 plat, and then headed out to Crescent Reach.  I explored Crescent Reach a bit and did a little hunting there, then figured out how to make it to the Plane of Knowledge and then to Everfrost Peaks and Halas.

But somehow this didn't feel right.  The whole reason I'd wanted to play EQ again was that I missed my old shaman.  Playing a cat felt different.  I moved Jellia to Halas as well, even though I'd already decided that I made mistakes on her and wanted to start over.  It seemed appropriate that she log out in Halas.  And so, last Saturday, I found a new server that allowed me to use the name Jalia, and I recreated my old barbarian shaman on Firiona Vie, the roleplay server.

This time around I really knew what I wanted to do.  I spent all Saturday working my way through the tutorial, getting to level 12 quickly and finishing nearly every quest again.  I stuck around long enough to kill the one giant beast in the lower tunnels that I hadn't fought before, and to make sure I got the gloomsteel 2 hand staff that I wanted, wound up with over 100 plat again, and headed out to Crescent Reach.

I spent a large part of Sunday morning on crafting -- baking mostly, and some smithing to make a pot -- because that's one of the things I always enjoyed from my old days in EQ.  I even remembered my old account and password for the EQ Trader's web site/forums!  ^_^  But eventually I started hunting in the higher levels of Crescent Reach, and to my complete surprise, experience and levels remained remarkably easy to get.  I hunted crocodiles by the lake, then moved on to gnolls, then skeletal ogres, and finally the high-level ogre skeletons at the back of the zone.  By the end I managed to hit 22.  I went back to the Plane of Knowledge to buy spells, then came back and decided to try hunting in the Blightfire Moors, near Crescent Reach.

By this point I was working on the theory (untested) that experience was simply better in these new zones, so I didn't go back to any of the old zones I remember leveling in (such as Everfrost Peaks, or Commonlands).  In any case, Blightfire Moors were clearly designed to be the next step for the newbie who starts off in Crescent Reach, and it was fun exploring a zone I was unfamiliar with.  I stayed close to the zone wall and killed snakes, bog rats, and blightfire witchlamps (wisps by another name).  Surpisingly I got to level 27 doing this, and pretty much called it a night.

Combat is easier because of the mercenary you're allowed to hire, but that doesn't explain my quick experience gain.  I'm fairly certain they've tweaked that at some point since 2003, maybe more than once.  The max level in the game is now about 95, so I'm sure the early levels are much easier to level in but the higher levels may not be.  Crafting was the same -- I was able to buy nearly everything I needed off vendors to get me up to about 70 in baking.  In the old days a big part of crafting was simply tracking down the materials needed.  In the middle of my crafting I had to pause to learn smithing so I could make a pot for my baking, and it turned out that I could level to 50 in smithing for free through quests in Crescent Reach.  Probably could have done that for my baking also, and I think for other trade skills, I'll be sure to check that out when I work on other things -- including alchemy, something shamans can begin at level 25.

Monday night I thought I would easily make it from 27 to at least 29, but I was worried about money and equipment.  I was levelling so fast and there isn't a lot of money in killing snakes and rats.  The wisps I had killed yielded one lightstone and one greater lightstone, which at first had excited me -- in the old days a greater lightstone was worth very good money, about 4.5 plat by itself but if you ran to North Karana and turned it in for a quest you would get a concordance of research, worth almost 10 plat.  You could do this as many times as you liked, and get experience for the quest too.

But on reflection, 10 plat for a GLS didn't seem like such a huge find.  I had started with over 100 plat just out of the tutorial, and built that up to 250 plat before spending much of it on new spells.  I knew in a game this old that ten years of mudflation would have changed the economy significantly, and I was right, many things on the player market sell for thousands or tens of thousands of plat.

After a little research I found that Defiant armor that now dropped randomly off mid-level mobs was much better than anything I'd ever owned in the old days.  I had nearly a full set of Totemic on my old shaman, armor that you got through very tedious quests involving drops from rare mobs.  It was considered very good armor back in the day.  I was still wearing a lot of it at level 50+, and now it seemed like trash compared to the Defiant I could get randomly as drops -- trash that was very difficult to come by, at that.

I went back to the Blightfire Moors and wandered around until I found some of the guys I was looking for -- mushroom people that were known to drop the armor I wanted.  They were blue to me, except for a named one, "Dragoneater", who conned yellow.  I killed them for a while, levelled to 28, and then took down Dragoneater.  He popped up again and I killed him again.  He drops either a magic dagger or a magic mask, and quickly I had both.  You're not allowed to own more than one, so I was broadcasting to the zone that there were daggers on his corpse rotting away if anyone wanted, but nobody replied or showed up.  Eventually I went back to the nearby outpost and sold what I had, and suddenly discovered that the magic mask sold for 47+ plat and the dagger for 57+ plat.

That changed everything.  I switched to killing Dragoneater as often as I could, and running back to the camp to sell as often as needed.  The experience was still very good, so I hit 29, then 30, then 31, and then 32 -- the level that shamans get their first wolf pet.  I can't tell you how long it took me to do that in the old days, it seemed like forever.  By this point the experience was not so great, but Dragoneater was reliably dropping an average of 50 plat or more a kill, so I kept at it until I finally hit 33.  By that point I had 1600 plat and one piece of Rough Defiant Chain arms that I could wear, and a Rough Defiant Plate chest that I could not wear but could probably sell for a couple hundred plat at least.

I made my way to the Plane of Knowledge where I bought new spells. then to the Bazaar where I found that even 1600 plat wouldn't go very far.  I managed to buy some Rough Defiant legs and boots though, so already I feel better equipped.  At this point though, I need to either farm Dragoneater some more, or find a similar named mob in the mid 30's that I can make money off of... it's clear I'm still not as well-funded as I want to be.

But really, level 33 in 3 days with some money to spend -- I feel like I'm doing really well.  The game is certainly a lot easier than it was back in the day.  I'm also still half-tempted to quest for my totemic armor anyway, even if it's pointless.