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.
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