General Gaming Goodness
stargrace 
Well, lets get the bad news over first – ALL soe games and services are going to be down today for FOUR hours, from 12pm EST until 4pm EST (and that’s as long as everything gets up and running again properly). This was just announced yesterday night, and I’m not quite sure what’s being updated yet maybe it’s got to do with Free Realms going live on Tuesday. In any case, if you’re trying to get into the game and wondering why you can’t, there you go.
Now onto the good stuff! I had mentioned yesterday that I was hoping my bard would make it to 62, a general goal. I started out the day by doing groceries and puttering around getting those real life quests done, and then decided to hop in game for a bit. Ultann and Wpus were both there, and eager to do stuff. I don’t remember everything we did, but I think it started with a run through poets Palace, though that may have been the night before. We did numerous dungeons and instances and even managed to find ourselves in a Labs raid which I haven’t done in FOREVER. It was great. None of us are raid geared and I went with my illusionist who doesn’t even have her epic, along with numerous other level 80 characters and all three of us (illusionist, shadowknight, conjuror) managed to be on the top portion of the parse for the zone. Considering we were with some mythical geared players, I felt pretty good. I realize the parse is not everything but it’s still nice to know that skill and not gear will count for a large portion of how well you do with your class.
We (the trio of course) wanted to do Shard of Fear, but in order to zone in (as we found out while standing at the doors) the bard had to be level 70 (and so did the fury, she was close though). The dirge was sitting happily at level 67, and it was still a few hours before bed so we decided to grind out those last levels and then run fear. We headed to Loping Plains and then to the Mistmoore Catacombs, killing our way to the top floor which is covered in vampires and then heading into Castle Mistmoore for the last remaining experience I needed in order to ding. Plenty of aa and 3 levels later, I was sitting at 70, and we headed to fear. I was hoping that the bloodthirsty choker would drop but alas luck was not on our side (I’m used to it not being on my side by now). It was still great fun and the bard managed to cling to level 71 when we called it for the evening.
I wasn’t quite tired yet, so I ran around grabbing various druid ring ports and getting discovery for all those zones I’d never been to before (Steamfont, Klak’Anon, Bonemire, Barren Sky, etc) pinged off a few more aa and managed to climb half way through level 71. The T8 mastercrafted (incarnadine) gear is VERY cheap, so I picked up a full set of that (50g each) for when I hit 72, and I’ll see about getting some skills made as well (even though they use loam and loam is VERY expensive). I had dreams of an automated character transfer being implemented finally for Eq2 (it’s been down since September of last year) but I think I’ll just have to keep dreaming on that matter. I was debating whether or not I wanted to betray this new dirge to a troubador, but since I already have a troubador I decided to just keep this one a dirge in the hopes that some day all my characters end up on the same server.
I hope everyone had an amazing weekend, and that Monday is not too rough on anyone! See you in Norrath!