Even though the official start of the 12 year anniversary events is tomorrow – today marks the beginning of two double experience events. The first one runs from the 14th-16th and the second one runs from 25th-27th. Think there’s no way to prepare for these events? You would be quite wrong. See in EverQuest there are things called “tasks” or “missions” in the later expansions, especially in the House of Thule expansion. These are instanced versions of dungeons with specific objectives that players have to accomplish for a reward of experience, coin, faction, and typically one of the new types of currency like dream motes in the case of HoT. You can do these tasks one of two ways. A group member will request the task and if you’re in group you will automatically be added to it and have the ability to hail the npc that will port you into the instance – or – you can get a “task add” also called a TA in public channels. This will add you to the current mission but NOT add you to the group. That means you can be doing your own thing in the bazaar or any other zone, and still get the rewards from being task added to a mission. If you happen to box or have a group of friends who are not interested in the progression flags or rewards from doing these tasks it’s very common to see players selling TA’s for anywhere from 10,000-100,000 plat depending on the task. Since these tasks are also used in HoT progression, people can sell access to further zones (ie: in order to unlock Tier 4 of HoT you need to do a number of tasks).
Preparing for double experience comes from the fact that you can actually save up the rewards from up to 10 tasks before claiming any one of them. All you have to do is close the reward window and ignore it until you’re ready to claim. That meant yesterday players were frantically doing tasks in order to save up the rewards for today, and me and my friends were no different. I did six tasks with the desire to claim them today once the bonus has been turned on, and before I actually remembered to start saving my tasks I managed to cling to level 87 on the necromancer. This opens up a few more powerful dots as well as another tank pet. It looks like I’ll be 90 before too long, then I can work on working those aa and leveling the bard on my 2nd account who has been sorely neglected in my climb to 90. There’s a chance that another friend of mine may be returning to Drinal which I’m pretty excited to hear about. The server is quite populated, about 500 people in public channels at any one time, and I’m never going to think it’s a bad thing when someone returns.
I’m excited for the remainder of the anniversary events to get off the ground. Two years ago there were some fantastic quests for potions and I heard from others there were some anniversary augments – as well as the fabled events of course. I believe there’s an increase in spawn rates for the next three days as well (named, that is) but we’ll just have to see. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself! I’ll see you in Norrath.