Ding, 13 – Camping the Nybright Sisters #EQ
stargrace 
Even though the free accounts have been turned off for now there are still a lot of people on Fippy Darkpaw, which is something I’m really happy to see. Yesterday I got to explore a little more, and made more coin for crafting. The enchanter is now sitting at level 9 (she seems to level incredibly slow) and the cleric managed to snag level 13. The enchanter doesn’t have any type of charm yet and that always makes things annoying.
I started out in North Ro, which is off of the East Freeport gate. After getting annoyed with multiple trains to the EC tunnels I moved down to South Ro along with Ninga (who is also level 12). We found a nice little area to set up camp and spent a good hour there before things started going drastically wrong. For some reason Sand Giants would just show up out of no where and bee line for our camp. We would haul ass out of there for a zone line before any combat could be initiated and wondered what was going on. Zone back in, make our way back to our little nook, and look over the top of the hill only to see another sand giant way off in the distance running straight for our camp again.
Getting tired of that fast we decided our best bet would be to head to Faydwer – so we teleported ourselves to Ocean of Tears (the boats still don’t work, it’s truly a 1999 experience) and from there Butcherblock. We bound ourselves in Felwithe so we wouldn’t have such a long walk back and then walked to Lesser Faydark. This is by no means an easy zone – there are brownie scouts (as we found out) just waiting to take a bite out of unsuspecting players. Not to mention we ran into the evil dark unicorn. Eventually on one run to Mistmoore to zone before we could die, we came across the Nybright camp that hosts four sisters. All of them rogues who apparently still have the ability to do frontal backstabs even though players don’t get to do that until aa are put into game.
A few cleric soothes later we had broken camp, with just barely enough time to take down three encounters before the camp would respawn mid-pull and we were back-stabbed to death.Ah, good times. I probably would have reached level 13 a lot quicker, but each death means -5% experience, and it seemed that when ever I was within 2% of the next level (or actually dinged) I would revert back down 5% and lose it all.
I also learned that my level 11 symbol spell doesn’t take any reagent (woohoo) so not EVERYTHING is back the way it was. I do really wish they’d do away with the servers being 4x slower then live servers. That sort of deterrent doesn’t stop the hard core (ie: Nagafen, Vox, Phinny, and Innoruuk have all been taken down, unsure if CT was taken down last night or not) and it discourages those who can’t invest quite so much time in leveling up. That’s not to say I want things *easier* but 4x slower and even slower then the game was upon original release is something that I think the casuals would be really pleased with changing.
DoV went live on the 22nd (amid many bugs) and Rift goes live today. Me? I’m still playing EQ, and living vicariously through everyone else. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself! I’ll see you in (old) Norrath.