EverQuest II boasts a LOT of different factions. Each expansion comes with its own drop down menu that you can use to sort by, and figure out who likes you (and of course who does not like you). Some of them there’s nothing you can do about, as there’s no way to work the faction up from the negative standing, but then there are the factions that you almost feel obligated to work up for whatever reason (a lot of this relates back to my ‘do you enjoy dailies’ post).
This is the faction standing for my tailor. It differs from my jeweler, and my carpenter, because they’re each working on faction differently. My tailor needs faction with the Kerra Isle Outfitters in order to purchase special recipes. The jeweler needs faction with the Researchers of Quel’ule, and my carpenter needs faction with the Hue Mein Craftsmen.
When the daily quests only reward 2,500 craft faction, and you need to climb to 40,000 it can be pretty slow (and boring). Especially when you have multiple crafters to log in every day to make sure they all get their faction taken care of.
One very neat thing SOE has done is allowed almost all of the faction items to be heirloom (minus the recipes, which is why I’m working each character individually) which means you can put them in your shared bank, and you don’t have to work faction on every character you own (unless you’re like me, and you need those recipe books). I love this idea. I love that I don’t have to grind a whole lot of faction across every character if I don’t want to.
I’m getting there. Slowly. At 30,000 faction my tailor can purchase one of the books available, it’s casual wear, which I think is just appearance gear but I’m not certain about that. At 40,000 she can purchase battle secrets gear. I’m hoping that’s PvP gear but I’m not certain. I know I could probably find everything I want to know at EQ2traders, but I would rather wait and find out on my own, leave a little surprise after all this faction work I’ve been doing.
How important are factions to you in your game of choice? Do you spend hours working on them for achievements or other rewards or could you care less about who hates you? I want to hear below!
While I do love to grind some faction, there are times that I just can not do it anymore. I think EQ1 killed off the chance of ever being a “faction master” when I got a boot mold out of Anguish, only to find I was pretty much at the 0 point…and soloing kills still only netted like 5 faction per kill, so it was slow. Slower than slow. And the only useful thing to use the faction for was to turn in raid armor molds, as far as I ever knew.
But I will say that I was hardcore enough that I was non KOS with every faction in Cabilis…which, at the time, was a big feat for a Dark Elf like Vaeluur (my SK). I can not remember how many 10 slot backpacks full of bone chips that took…Something on the order of 15ish…with 1k chips in each bag, that’s a lot of grinding on gray mobs just to get the chips.
I guess the lesson should be something like: Play a class with good AoEs.
Now as far as EQ2, I burnt out on crafting. I don’t think Carpenter was the best choice for a first class. If I ever have to make a bear skin rug again, I will probably lose it. But I will say that going back last week, it’s not quite as bad as I remembered it. I noticed some new stuff to make too, so that helps. I even managed to get a few levels last week, so maybe I will be playing the faction game in EQ2 soon. As far as adventuring, I have always had more than enough faction to max things out. I think that’s because I am a quest-a-holic too, but that’s getting into a different topic.