Now that’s a Skeleton – and Views on the Dark Elf Starter City
stargrace 
My little level 9 necromancer, standing beside a giant skeleton for one of her quests. Now, I have a level 10 blood mage and a few other characters. I have started in a lot of new zones, and the dark elf one by far just.. sucks.
I’m level 9 and the only quests I have left are mainly diplomacy (she’s only sitting at a skill of 27 right now), and the adventuring ones she has are a lot bigger then her. I’ve tried to group up for them but no one seems interested. I’m looking forward to being slightly higher level so I can at least join my friends who are off adventuring all over. Anyhow.
The majority of the dark elf quests also do not have locations that show up on your map. They’ll say ‘in a canyon close to here’, and then you get to wander around and find out it’s not actually close to there at all. Or they’ll say ‘go find so and so, he’s east of this outpost’. It’s late though and you log off, the next morning you go back to the quest, you’re no where near the original outpost and the quest has no way to show you where that is, thus you are not even sure where the second outpost that you need to head to is.
I’d also say there’s a lack of quests. For my blood mage she ended up finding two npc’s who had no less then 10 level 8-10 quests on them, she got her levels easily and painlessly. The necromancer is struggling along, the quests are difficult, and there are not very many. Not in comparison to the other classes I’ve played at least. I was going to scrap the necro all together and remake a different race just to get out of their starter city, but decided I’d stick it out until 10 and see if it got any easier.
My blood mage was also a hell of a lot easier to level solo then the necro, while I applaud Vanguard’s idea to make the healer classes more ‘fun’ and unique, there’s no reason why a healer should be able to heal better then anyone else in the game – and dps – and tank. Which is exactly what a lot of healers are doing. It’s a wonderful way to keep people interested, but why bother being anything else, when you can be a healer and just simply do it all.
Ok, enough of that rant. On a completely different note — I finally understand crafting. That’s right, you heard it here first! After struggling with it since release, I sat down and spent a few hours working on it yesterday. I did refining and finishing work orders, started with the easy ones and worked up slightly to moderate. I didn’t bother with anything harder then that for the time being. The experience started going very slowly, but I still had fun. I made more coin then I ever had adventuring, and bought myself some new gear upgrades and 10-slot bags with it. Also got the necromancer to level 6 artificer. It was fun. So I’m finally at least comfortable in the game. Here’s hoping they’re going to be fixing bugs. There’s plenty of lore and story lines if you look for them, especially with diplomacy. It’s easy to get into a role play mode and create an elaborate background for yourself simply following those. For example the dark elves are testing the blood of their race to see if they’re worthy and all this stuff. There’s been an outlaw I’ve been helping because his wife was not found worthy or what have you, but now she’s dead and he’d like to come back to the city, so the guards said he could — if — he defeated some bird thing that’s way up on a cliff (where I would have to fight level 10 ^^^ just to get to him). So yeah, there are certainly a lot of stories around. I still hate the starter zone though.