Epic

A Little Bit of Everything

I decided to disrupt Princess (my cat) for most of the day yesterday, and spent it spring cleaning. Moved all of her ‘beds’ around and rearranged the apartment, it looks much better now. I still have a few rooms to go, but it’s a start. Once that was done I headed in game to find Ultann’s boxed inquisitor at level 80 – woohoo! Less then a month to level from 1-80 using the recruit a friend method, which means he can start working on his epic now. We decided to head to Crypt of Agony and see if the Cardiocutter would drop (which it didn’t) or even the fabled ranged item for Ultann (which also didn’t drop). What DID drop though was that caster ring (legendary) with some pretty nice spell crit on it. Of course it would drop, since I had been trying to get it for my illusionist for quite some time and we never saw it. Thankfully, it’s also a nice ring for a bard who makes use of both CA’s and spells.

That was the only thing of note to drop within the instance, and afterward we decided to head to Courts off of Pillars of Flame in order to get some more guild experience (not to mention a good handful of craft rares). We one grouped everything except the final Black Witch who happens to elude us because our dps is too slow to take down a x4 before she ports most of us all over the zone, leaving either no healer, or no tank, or no dps (which makes everything even more slow). She also places curse of insanity upon the group which means you can get one shot if you go below a certain amount of power. Seeing as we were one group trying to take down an encounter meant for 24, we use a lot of power.

It was still a lot of fun, we still gained a lot of aa and the guild is nearing level 30 where we’ll be able to purchase a guild hall.

After that we headed to Chardok in an attempt to obtain the inquisitor starter which has been noted as dropping either there, or in Chelsith (or outside Chelsith). We didn’t see it and ended up calling it early because red encounters were absolutely ripping my bard to shreds.

The evening went well over all. The bard dinged level 74 and is 30% or so into it. As you can see above, she gets a good chunk of experience each kill. I wish it worked for quest experience too but such is not the case. At level 75 she can start doing shard missions, though you do have to be 79 to pick up the daily doubles. I haven’t begin to work on obtaining her skills yet, but that will be next. I cringe at the number of silicate loams I’m going to have to get.

I hope everyone else had an amazing Saturday, don’t forget next Sunday is Mother’s day!

Quests and all the Rest

Admittedly a large portion of my time in various games has been spent questing. I enjoy quests, even the ones that tend to be a grind. What I don’t enjoy, is ONLY questing (example: Ruins of Kunark) in order to progress in a game. I like a mixture of things, be it quests, experience grind (just good ‘ol plain killing) crafting, and simply hanging out. It’s all of these things combined that draws me into any MMO. If I start to feel pressured to do one thing or another, chances are I’ll end up giving the game up. 

Yesterday was spent doing a combination of things in EverQuest, as well as peeking my head into some Spellborn, though I didn’t have much time to do anything before I had to go out for a few hours. First I spent some time hanging out in Stoneroot, and my little halfling druid managed to inch her way to level 71. Friends make this type of grind so much easier, I burned my lesson of the devoted and we were set. Drachnid fell every which way. It only took half an hour or so to get the level, and then the group broke up a little. Next? It was time to work on my epic. Now, I had given up on the epic the day before in frustration because the Bloodgill foragers that I needed decided to spawn inside of the walls of a building. Not fun. Today we hoped that would not happen – but if it did we would be prepared. You can order your pet to attack by text command rather then a target, and that’s what we did. It worked, thankfully. My little Bobo (name of my druids bear) headed into the wall very brave like and calling him back caused those foragers to head right for us. 

I thought that would be the most difficult portion of the day, but alas it was not. Once I’d moved past a few more steps it was time to play Hide and Seek with a bunch of Goblins in Frontier Mountains. This requires you to first make a disguise, hang out in the front of the Temple of Droga, wait for 7pm game time, and then use the disguise, mention starting a contest, and then the King sends all these Seekers out and a few Hiders. Your job? Kill the correct Hider, before the King says the game is over (30 minutes).

Well dang. I ran around with track going and managed (with the help of Ninga of course) to kill a good portion of Hiders, but it was not the specific one that I needed. 30 minutes passed by and I lost the game. Unhappy that I’d lost and the disguise at the beginning only has one charge so you have to start way at the beginning again – I decided to call it a night. It’s always better to step away during those frustrating times (I’m sure lots of people have stories like this) then risk getting upset in game. 

It was fine by me of course, I have a few books I’ve been neglecting and I ended up spending the rest of my evening playing scrabble on yahoo which was something I haven’t done in years. Today my mood has calmed some and I’m not quite so cranky at having to start all over. Not that I’ll be doing it again any time soon, teehee. 

I’ve been trying to plan out my schedule game-wise for the next three weeks. Not for my personal game play, but because I have a few Beckett Articles (few = 5) due in early April (not to mention my birthday is coming up, dang I feel old!) and I have a review for MMORPG that needs to be completed. I love the way I have a few weeks of quiet and then everything comes all at once. Typically it begins with me emailing my editor about a separate issue and then the casual ‘Oh by the way, we need it a week earlier and we need five pieces not two’ comes into the conversation. I am quite used to it now, and it’s actually something I adore about this line of work. Gets the blood going!

In any case, I hope everyone is having an amazing weekend and enjoying some of that nice weather if you’ve been so blessed. Hopefully I’ll get some more game time in this weekend, I’ve got a few projects on the go that need some work first.

Safe travels!

Deadly Dragons

There is nothing quite so majestic as a dragon, nor as terrifying or exciting. Nothing that I have found in my travels, in any case. Yesterday as myself and the human monk traveled through the frozen lands of the Western Wastes we happened across such creatures. Many of them in fact. It does not matter how many of the great creatures you either slay nor admire, each time they will give you reason to pause in your tracks. The monk acted as though he had a personal vendetta with each and every one of the creatures, tearing at them with his hardened claw-like weapons. Myself, I watched from a distance. While I did not have anything personal against these great creatures nor was it my place to interrupt

Yesterday was spent working on the druid 1.5 pre-quest for the most part. It was actually not too bad, involved a lot of foraging which I sort of assumed. The drops were not quite as rare as forum posters made them out to be (at least for me) and on our way through the Western Wastes (since servers had been taken down for 6 hours just prior) we came across 6-7 fabled dragons all lined up in a row. Of course they all dropped nearly the same thing, a fabled talisman, but it was still nice to be able to partake in some of the fabled activities without having to elbow other players out of the way. 

After completion of the 1.5 pre-quest I decided to begin working on the actual quest itself. I didn’t get very far though because when I approached the Lake of Ill Omen where I was to spawn three Goblin Foragers – they spawned directly inside of a wall. They didn’t path, and I had no way of reaching them. Instead of bothering support with my epic woe’s I decided to call it for a bit. Frustrated? Sure, slightly.

Afterwards with some guild mates we decided to work on the PoR missions that reward spells and auras. I felt pretty much useless as my druid has 10 levels of spells lacking (that I can not find in the bazaar at all, not to mention with fabled season well under way spectral and ethereal parchments are more difficult to obtain) so I sat around and tried to do what I could and not die, which is always a bonus. Afterwards we headed off to another mission in North Ro, where I ended up looting some piece I shouldn’t have because the same person needs to turn in all four pieces. This was not mentioned in the mission any place and I couldn’t have really foreseen it, my night ended on a some what sour note in any case. 

On the plus side, today is Friday! I hope everyone has an amazing day and finds themselves in awesome stories with mighty battles. Most of all, I hope you all write about it, because I certainly love reading it. 

See you in Norrath – or where ever I end up this weekend!

Fabled Loot, Leveling, and Epics

I haven’t actively gone after any fabled in game. The really good amazing stuff is either camped – or it’s held hostage by encounters that there’s no way I could kill, even with friends. Later last night it was suggested I begin working on the druid 1.5 pre-quest (difficult to work on 1.0’s when the named you need are fabled up) and so I was heading to Plane of Growth for some foraging when a fabled encounter walked into view. I had no idea who they were – but as coincidence would have it, they did drop a nice clicky for me! My first fabled drop and it’s not so bad. 

As I mentioned, yes. I decided to begin working on the druid 1.5. Ideally I’ll do the 1.0 as well but with fabled up for the next month it makes it a little difficult, and I’d rather own my 1.5 anyhow. My first task was to head to Jaggedpine forest, a zone I have not been to in many moons. It looked almost exactly as I remember it way back when. After speaking to my npc there I headed to Plane of Growth (no fabled Tunare up) to forage a nut, which took most of my evening. Thankfully Tipa’s tweets on belly button line kept me entertained and slightly disgusted, either way. 

Before heading off with a guild mate to work on my druid epic, we hung around Stoneroot and managed to ding the little druid level 70. It surprised me because when I started playing her again she was level 63 – only a few days to get to 70 without even trying. Of course it shouldn’t surprise me after the speed in which the necromancer leveled (from scratch) but it still makes me giggle. 

By the time I managed to forage the one item I needed, it was getting late and I was getting tired, so I called it a night and headed to bed. Today I’ll pick up on it again as I’m sure there are plenty more things that need to be foraged, and it’s easy to get it done while I do other things. Inching the druid up a few more levels will be nice, though not on the top of my list of priorities. I still haven’t completed the new deity quests that are in place and for some reason servers came down last night at 2am and should not be back up until 8am – I have no idea why. The MoTD claimed it was for a hot fix, though I’m not quite sure what hot fix takes 6 hours to implement. Guess we’ll see!

The new LoN items today are great! For EQ2 it’s a parrot for your shoulder, in EQ it’s a special frost particle effect. Be sure to check out the LoN free loot items for EQ’s 10th anniversary. Even if you don’t play the game there’s no beating free items. 

I should have some role play posts to add here soon, it’s been a little while and I’ve missed it. We’ll see how that goes! In the mean time, happy adventuring no matter where you find yourself.

Veeshan’s Peak, and Epics

Yesterday I wrote a little about how odd it was to experience things in EQ2 first before finding them in EQ, and I had yet another strong encounter with this. It was only a few months ago that I did a dungeon guide on Veeshan’s Peak (EQ2 version) for Beckett, explaining the named encounters that you’d run into and a little bit about what it would take to defeat them – or at least what each encounter did (without giving too much away). I’d never been to Veeshan’s Peak in EQ – though I had killed plenty of Mistmoors friends so apparently I was amiable with the Ring of Scale. At least on my enchanter. The necromancer didn’t fair as well and after one kill (the dragon pictured to the left) she was agro to the entire zone. Hard penalties for killing dragons! Ultann, Ninga and I decided to head to VP and see if we couldn’t get a few clicky pretties that drop. I’m not sure about all the other servers but Drinal is pretty heavily camped, all of the PoP gods, and a good number of the Luclin named (Grieg’s End, the named in Umbral, etc) Trak is also pretty camped, as well as Seru and others. We did manage to find Maestro up, but no Innoruuk. Anyhow, it sort of helps that you take such huge faction hits for slaying dragons, as the entire zone was up with all of the named. We decided to only kill a few of the mighty creatures before calling it a day because it was annoying to camp fire around the zone in order to avoid as many faction hits as we could. Nocbot and Kameeko (the two amiable) stood far away and out of combat, while Ninga, Minxes, and Ultann pounded on the dragons. 

We killed Hoshkar, Silverwing, and Druushk. The lute on the right was from Silverwing, and I giggled when I saw it. We didn’t have a bard in the group, but it of course made me think of the EQ2 halfling bard, the famous Tipa. It would have been a nice twink item for Ninga’s bard had we been able to drag him into the zone easily. The necromancer also managed to get herself a clicky staff, we all giggled at the graphic though, it’s just a straight wooden stick. Very drab compared to what we were all expecting.

Afterwards Ninga headed to bed (sleep is important) and Ultann and I decided to work on the enchanter 1.5 pre-quest. It would be easier just to finish doing the 1.0 I think. You need to head to Veksar and gather shards (that only drop VERY rarely from the mobs in the theater) and spawn the dragon. I remember doing this once before but the zone is now very grey to me and it was really slow. The respawns were also slow, and we spend most of the time seeing how large of a train we could gather and fight all at once. After a few hours there not a single shard dropped and I decided this morning it’s probably just easier to finish off my enchanter 1.0 then it is to do the pre-quest for the 1.5. Hopefully I can get all of that completed before too long, we’ll see how it goes. 

I also did a little crafting yesterday, working on my spell research. It’s expensive. It’s long. I did get three skill ups with over 100 combines. I suppose that’s a good thing? I still love crafting in EQ but wow when you miss out on an expansion or two you really get left behind. 

Today I believe we’re going to explore Seeds of Destruction a little bit. Not everyone had the expansion until yesterday, but now we’re all sporting it as well as the two boxed accounts. One thing we certainly want to do is to do the progression quests in order to upgrade the mercenary that we can purchase. I haven’t set foot in any of SoD yet aside from those mercenary, and it should be a lot of fun. That, combined with working on my enchanters epic of course. I’ve been working on that for so many years now it would be fantastic to finally finish. 

Happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Nomadic Gamer