It’s the Hard Rock Life, For Us
stargrace 
For the past few days I have been working on the fabled harvesters cloak while I eagerly await my copy of TSO. It got to the point yesterday that I was so close to finishing it, I decided after doing a few TSO quests (more about that later) that I would finish the new cloak first, and get back to the content later.
This quest was by far the most difficult crafting related quest that I have ever done. Of course it made the reward all the sweeter, but I think it will be quite some time before I decide to dust off an alt and finish the cloak for them. Thankfully it’s not essential.
It took me approximately three hours to finish my harvesting in Rivervale yesterday. The dens were exceptionally rare, and if it were not for that Gnomish Divining Rod and the ability to track them – as well as logging in right after the server had been taken down for an hour, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have even finished when I did.
Whoever designed this cloak had a FANTASTIC sense of humor, and you can tell they are a large part of the crafting community for one specific reason.
There is a player joke that has been around since the game released. Crafters far and wide complaining that they just about harvested a badger. From behind these little pudgy creatures look like ore nodes. This is especially apparent in the smaller zones like Antonica, and a few of the 1-9 zones. On the craft channels it was (is?) quite common especially on Antonia Bayle, to hear people moaning over the lack of ore nodes and the abundance of badger bottoms.
I quickly put my new cloak on, and transformed into the small rock pictured above. The illusion is great in itself, you roll along the ground and there are some faint sparkles that tumble off of youl. While doing the quest I managed to gather a LOT of rares. It figures that the one time I really want commons and not rares I end up getting 15+ rares in one harvesting session. The guild bank is happy at least.
I decided to zone home from Mara, after the long (long, LONG) day of harvesting when suddenly – it was ME with the badger bottom!
That’s right, randomly (not every zone) you will turn into a badger when you’re sporting this illusion. Not only a badger, but you will turn into a 35% bigger badger then normal. What a fantastic quest reward. It’s may not be considered ‘essential’ for players out there but if you’re a hard core crafter (such things DO exist!) then you WILL want to get this cloak. The only down side I saw to the quest item itself is that you can’t mount it on your wall like other fancy cloaks. That would be a great option. I’m not sure how often I’ll actually *wear* this cloak with the surplus of other cloaks I have. It boosts harvesting skills, rather then crafting skills.
Aside from working on the harvesting cloak for the past two days, like I mentioned earlier my copy of TSO finally arrived. Two copies in fact. So my main account and alt account are now sporting dire bear mounts. I’ll talk about that more later. One thing I wanted to get done right away is that the crafting instances require you to have worked up a little bit of faction with the new Far Seas Trading Division. This is different then the old Far Seas faction that we all have. There is a chain of 6 quests in the Moors that starts with a happy little crafter on the landing platform. The quests reward a LOT of coin and the aa was pretty nice as well. It gives you a tour of the Moors. You *may* want to look up this quest on EQ2traders first or on the EQ2Wikia once you’ve gotten it because it requires some supplies and if you carry them with you you’ll be much better off. Or at least take along a form of evac (or be a druid).
Eyenstein, Albrta, Shadowgeist, Kasul and I all headed off to work on this quest together. Once we completed it Kasul and I told the group we would be unable to do the crafting instances quite yet. It was only fair, Tipa had been waiting to do a Nostalgia run and my late polar bears had prevented any of us from going yet. So tonight after EQ1 Nostalgia, EQ2 Nostalgia will attempt their first group crafting instance.
Maybe by then the issue with the invisible wood working machines will be solved..
Even though there was no in game notice this morning, servers came down promptly at 10am EST for their daily hour of downtime. It was announced on the forums at least, which is a fairly safe place to check if you’re not seeing messages in game. Perhaps this will address the vendor bug that’s allowing people to sell things to a particular TSO merchant for large amounts of coin. The /motd in game says that those who are ‘taking advantage’ of this will find their coin removed by the end of it all, but that at this moment there is no ETA on when that may be (or how it will be done for that matter). 
I typically don’t have a great deal of patience in game. It’s a fault that I admit to every so often. This quest is quite relaxing, and I’m not so gung-ho about completing it as I am just collecting harvests from every tier. With the new guild hall hirelings I find it a rare sight to see any harvesters out there. The market is flooded with rares that no one uses and aside from the elusive T6 harvests (sinking sands and PoF which are difficult zones to harvest in to begin with) they sell for 10-30g and no more. Najena is not a server for lower level characters. I miss that about Antonia Bayle, which caters to a lot of lower level characters due to their role play community (which is a fantastic one might I add). Since I have both of my accounts active, and the ability to create new characters on the second account still I may make one on AB just to relax and kick back on. I do have a level 30 guild over there after all that Calreth has been keeping warm for me. 