Thursday, May 30, 2013

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!


Wednesday, May 29, 2013

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.

Monday, May 27, 2013

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.


Saturday, May 25, 2013

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.



Wednesday, May 22, 2013

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.



About this Blog


I've played various MMO's since I first played Everquest in 1999, just after the game launched.  I'll probably always play MMO's, though my goal is to not become as addicted to any given MMO as I was with City of Heroes.  After City of Heros closed in November, I avoided all MMO's for nearly six months (Second Life is not really an MMO).  I had considered eventually trying out Guild Wars 2, but when the time came I tried out several free MMO's instead.

That time came about two weeks ago.  After a week-long The Hobbit/Lord of the RIngs marathon session, I was in a real high fantasy mood and really missing my old EQ shaman Jalia McMarrin.  I was ready to dabble in an MMO again.  I did some research on free-to-play MMOs, and I tried several, including Vindictus, Allods Online, Scarlet Blade, and Neverwinter (open beta at the moment).  I also downloaded Everquest, the original game that got me hooked on MMOs.

I have a blog about my time in City of Heroes, perticularly the last three months of the game, and I have a small Second Life blog, but I wanted a blog to cover all the other games I play.  That's what this is for.  One of my earliest MMO characters eventually became my main EQ character, a barbarian shaman named Jalia McMarrin.  I've used the name Jalia since in other games -- in Dark Age of Camelot, in Toontown Online (Jalia Jamb), in City of Heroes (my first level 50 was Jalia, and one of my best level 50 scrappers was Jalia).  I have a Jalia in Neverwinter and in Scarlet Blade and in Vindictus, and now I have a new Jalia McMarrin in Everquest.  But the original was Jalia McMarrin, my shaman.  In Everquest, Shamans are a priest class that heal and buff and generally use blunt instruments like hammers -- thus the name of the blog.