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.
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