stargrace

Just another day

New gear!

*edit* Forgot to mention, I’ve got the page links along the top set up / working with brief bio’s and pictures of each gal.. wuwu!

That’s right, finally after a month or two of working on the Claymore series with Silverstep, I’m DONE with Sanctum! Not to mention the fact that the breast plate was actually an upgrade for my girlie. Well, sort of. The one she was wearing was cloth and had FT6 on it, which is handy for raids. However in every day group situations, I’d rather the stats / mitigation of the leather one vs. the cloth. I also finished the next claymore quest after this tunic, which rewarded me with a very nice ring, also an upgrade *cheers*.

Took Stargrace through the Den instance, managed to finish off Grizzfazzle’s quest for her, now she just needs three more levels in order to wear the weapon..*groans* I’m sure it’ll come eventually. I also started a new swashbuckler today, to take up the 6th (and final) character slot I have. Cordanim hasn’t been in game since I’ve moved servers, but hopfully I’ll get to see him around eventually. Making friends is awfully slow *grumbles* I’m still having a blast though! Ricotta’s betrayal is.. on hold.. for the time being, until I’m not quite so grumpy and I feel like working on it. Maybe I’ll just keep her in Haven, I haven’t decided really yet. That’s about all the rambling I’ve time for today, more tomorrow as always!

SoS and other quests

As if it were not enough that I’ve been doing the claymore series with Silverstep, I decided to actually start it with Stargrace as well. Ugh.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The experiance is very nice, and I don’t actually mind SoS that much.. yet. However, this series of quests has you running literally *all* over SoS, and in most cases by the time a group has made it to the lower levels of the zone, they’re no longer interested in actually working on the quest any more, since it takes quite a bit of time to delve that deep. Unless you are a monk, and can FD your way down there. Even invis will only take you so far, as random guards and mobs will see through. I spent some time farming food supplies for Stargrace to cook with, she’s been slacking for quite some time now, and Silverstep spent some time just wandering around EFP a little, I wasn’t really in the mood to play. I did join an PoA (Palace of the Awakened) group for a short while; but as always there are good pick up groups, and bad. This one was certainly one of the worse ones I’ve been in, perhaps one of the reasons I tend to avoid them (though I’ve no choice right now, being new to this server). First sign that it was a bad group, a random invite to it. Now granted, I *did* have my LFG up, but I recieved no tells on what we’d be doing, where we were going, or if I was interested in that specific group. Typically I’d just turn them down right away for that. I perfer to get a tell first. Just picky that way I suppose. Second sign. There’s just me and the shadowknight in the zone to start, and a necromancer in the group. Both are mid 60’s while I’m level 70. We then invite another mid 60’s inquisitor and another shadowknight. 20 minutes pass, and it is still just myself and the shadowknight in the zone. The shadowknight is busy dueling other groups that are also gathered at the front entrance. Still no one has spoken a word in group. Needless to say, after that I didn’t stick around, and left to do my own thing for a bit.

Ricotta is still working on betrayal, and I hate it, I perfer the old method. Why? Because unless you’re very twinked out and can ping off the sabatoge quests fast, you’re going to be at it a while. The simpliest quest I’ve found is rock smashing. You walk approx. 20 feet away from the quest giver, to the Freeport city walls, and find 5 rocks to click / smash. Back to the quest giver and you recieve +1,000 faction for Qeynos. Issues? #1. The rocks take a little bit to respawn. #2. +1,000 is not very much faction when you’re looking to get from -50,000 faction to +40,000 faction. It takes approx. 5 minutes per quest. Now, granted there are other quests with greater faction rewards, one of which is +5,000 and I did manage to complete one. But in the time it took me to finish that one quest, I could have completed at least 5 of the easy rock smashing ones. It requires you to sneak into the crafting instance in West Freeport (level 30+ heroic guards at the gates, you’ve got to use the sewers to get to WFP, level 72 epic x 4 at the other gates, level 50+ heroics that patrol the streets), once you’re there, you have to sneak around collecting 24 recipie cards. There are 2 see invis mobs in the zone that you can avoid, and shift the camera angle so that you can click the cards. Then you have to sneak back out of west freeport, back through the sewers, out to commonlands to complete the turn in. Yeah. Like I said, not the most fun of quests. I’m eager to finish her up though and perhaps get closer to level 20. Also, you get no exp rewards at all while working these sabatoge quests. And they get permanently removed from your journal upon completion so they don’t count towards your total quest count. Sighs.

The Exiled

That’s right, Ricotta is now an exile from Freeport. At the moment she’s sitting at 111 quests, and 23% into level 19. I decided to check out the new betrayal system for a few reasons. One of course is natural curiosity, I’ve betrayed my fair share of characters using the old method, and found it an interesting way to add some history behind each character. This new method so far, is quite entertaining. I had to run around Freeport doing various tasks for “squires” who would tell me of this Haven, a town located in some caves, where those of neutral alignment (hated by both towns) could escape to. The quests even sent me some mail as I made my adventures along, from “Citizens of a Free Freeport”, it was great. Haven itself is fairly sparce, however for those who are not attached to material house things, it is not that bad. There are sections for crafting, a black market, secret entrance ways to various zones, a bank, and even a market place to buy food and general supplies. Over all I was quite impressed and had fun running around. Of course, now the boring work starts, working my Qeynos faction. I’m actually going to remain a dirge, I’ve no inclination to switch to a troubador. So why bother betraying at all? First of all, I gathered all of the Freeport language primers. Since merchants of Freeport will not sell to those from Qeynos, and vice versa.

Ricotta - Betrayed

I wanted Ricotta to have the opportunity to learn all languages. She is a worldy ratonga after all, singing her songs in whatever language she pleases. So that was one deciding factor in the betrayal. Also, I wanted to be able to do some of the Freeport quests (hence the 111 at this point in time) as well as the Qeynos ones. This server also appears to be Qeynos heavy, with better sales on the Qeynos side. So those were the deciding factors for me. The small quests I’m required to do to work my faction back up to ally, are…. not fun. I’m only level 19, so things still squish me fairly easily. I’m not a twink, at all. I wear level 2 gear because it’s what I’ve found / can afford. I have no guild to help me out. Thus far the easiest quest I’ve found, is basically me running back and forth along a wall about 10 paces from the quest giver, and smashing 5 rocks. Rinse and repeat. This gives me +1,000 to Qeynos each run, and I’m sitting at -47,000 currently. I’m told I need to get to +40,000 before I can actually move back to Qeynos. This should be… interesting. Various quests give more faction then others, based of course on the difficulty of the quest. One that has me running into Freeport directly, gives +5,000 faction to Qeynos, so I’m going to attempt some of those ones today and see if I can’t finish this betrayal up. I was hoping I’d get to keep “the exiled” as my name, but I think it’s a temporary status seeing as I can not remove it whatso ever while I am betraying. All in all, a lot of fun!

Ricotta Is’Gouda

Level 17 Dirge / 20 Jeweler, and making my way through Norrath’s wonders. One of many alts, and hopfully one of many posts. I’ve been reading people’s blogs for quite some time now, and decided to make one of my own, we’ll just have to see how it goes. Ricotta is of course a ratonga, with quite a cute name if I do say so myself.