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.