SoS and other quests
stargrace As if it were not enough that I’ve been doing the claymore series with Silverstep, I decided to actually start it with Stargrace as well. Ugh. 
Now, don’t get me wrong. The experiance is very nice, and I don’t actually mind SoS that much.. yet. However, this series of quests has you running literally *all* over SoS, and in most cases by the time a group has made it to the lower levels of the zone, they’re no longer interested in actually working on the quest any more, since it takes quite a bit of time to delve that deep. Unless you are a monk, and can FD your way down there. Even invis will only take you so far, as random guards and mobs will see through. I spent some time farming food supplies for Stargrace to cook with, she’s been slacking for quite some time now, and Silverstep spent some time just wandering around EFP a little, I wasn’t really in the mood to play. I did join an PoA (Palace of the Awakened) group for a short while; but as always there are good pick up groups, and bad. This one was certainly one of the worse ones I’ve been in, perhaps one of the reasons I tend to avoid them (though I’ve no choice right now, being new to this server). First sign that it was a bad group, a random invite to it. Now granted, I *did* have my LFG up, but I recieved no tells on what we’d be doing, where we were going, or if I was interested in that specific group. Typically I’d just turn them down right away for that. I perfer to get a tell first. Just picky that way I suppose. Second sign. There’s just me and the shadowknight in the zone to start, and a necromancer in the group. Both are mid 60’s while I’m level 70. We then invite another mid 60’s inquisitor and another shadowknight. 20 minutes pass, and it is still just myself and the shadowknight in the zone. The shadowknight is busy dueling other groups that are also gathered at the front entrance. Still no one has spoken a word in group. Needless to say, after that I didn’t stick around, and left to do my own thing for a bit.
Ricotta is still working on betrayal, and I hate it, I perfer the old method. Why? Because unless you’re very twinked out and can ping off the sabatoge quests fast, you’re going to be at it a while. The simpliest quest I’ve found is rock smashing. You walk approx. 20 feet away from the quest giver, to the Freeport city walls, and find 5 rocks to click / smash. Back to the quest giver and you recieve +1,000 faction for Qeynos. Issues? #1. The rocks take a little bit to respawn. #2. +1,000 is not very much faction when you’re looking to get from -50,000 faction to +40,000 faction. It takes approx. 5 minutes per quest. Now, granted there are other quests with greater faction rewards, one of which is +5,000 and I did manage to complete one. But in the time it took me to finish that one quest, I could have completed at least 5 of the easy rock smashing ones. It requires you to sneak into the crafting instance in West Freeport (level 30+ heroic guards at the gates, you’ve got to use the sewers to get to WFP, level 72 epic x 4 at the other gates, level 50+ heroics that patrol the streets), once you’re there, you have to sneak around collecting 24 recipie cards. There are 2 see invis mobs in the zone that you can avoid, and shift the camera angle so that you can click the cards. Then you have to sneak back out of west freeport, back through the sewers, out to commonlands to complete the turn in. Yeah. Like I said, not the most fun of quests. I’m eager to finish her up though and perhaps get closer to level 20. Also, you get no exp rewards at all while working these sabatoge quests. And they get permanently removed from your journal upon completion so they don’t count towards your total quest count. Sighs.