I’m still having a lot of fun with EQ, enough now that I feel confident in saying I’ll stick with this progression server (and the game) as my main game for quite some time to come. I’m really eager for Kunark to come out if for no other reason then to give players a little breathing room. Honestly, I thought the population may suffer a bit when the free accounts closed down but I think the opposite has happened. I see just as many people around now. Take last night for example, over 100 people in South Ro. Over 50 people in North Ro. There were 15+ in the catacombs, and I think the least amount I’ve seen in any single zone I’ve walked around has been 10. The most being too large for /who to work properly since it caps.
Yesterday started out as a frustrating day. Finding a quiet camp to settle down at is difficult when you don’t remember anything about the classic game (even more so for me, I never played classic, I started playing after PoP came out). Ninga and I hung around in the Karana’s a few times but each time a group of bandits would over power us and we’d be running for the zone line – or to be more specific my enchanter and him would run for the zone line because the cleric was already dead. She did so many times she almost fell back to level 13, again. Ouch.
After a very long day of unsuccessful hunting, we made the trek back to Riverval and bound ourselves in Freeport instead of hanging out on Antonica. We decided to settle in at a little goblin camp in Dagnor’s Cauldron. Most of the mobs con red to us but there is a nice little camp around the side of the zone that has four blue / white con orcs, and that’s where we sat. The cleric got a few pieces of gear upgrades, and the enchanter managed to ding level 13. That means ONE more level and she’ll have breeze. I am pretty excited. As you can see by the magelo profile above, Velours is almost level 15 and I’ve joined a guild. I browsed the EQplayer forums in the guild recruitment section to find out what guilds were active on Fippy (there are a lot of them) and this one seemed to best fit me. So far they are a great bunch of people not hung up on being uber and rushing through all of the content.
The remainder of the evening was spent battling trains in North Ro. The enchanter now has charm (it lasts for a little over 4 minutes) which helps in a difficult situation. I spent many months perfecting my charm ability on live servers but it’s been a little while and I’m certainly rusty – especially while boxing the cleric. I had a great time until people would wander by with their massive trains of orcs and sand giants and I’d be forced once more to flee.
I’ll be really happy when I can hit 15-20 and move on to some place that may be a little safer for experience. Yes, it’s slow. But I have so much pride in my characters and the work that I’ve put into them, it’s quite fascinating.
Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself! I’ll see you in (old) Norrath.
The problem with the karana bandits is there’s a lot of patrols so you’ll be happily grinding at a camp then on the next pull two patrollers show up and join in. I spent untold hours in EQ figuring out the patrol routes and solo pulling them instead of the camps. Their headbands gave a lot of exp and plat in Qeynos IIRC but a lot of deaths too.
I was hoping that you might be thinking about Blackburrow when the time comes, but then you said you were looking for somewhere safer. One of the interesting features of EQ is that the more populated a zone is with players, the more dangerous it gets, until the mobs gets completely hunted to extinction.
Awesome! I haven’t thought about Magelo in a long time. haha. I used to haunt my magelo profile all the time wondering about which slot would be my next upgrade. :)