Everquest Character Journal

Goodbye Links

2006-10-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

I've grown tired of maintaining my link list here. I'm leaving it up as it is and future link updates will show on my new blog.

Goodbye Blogger

2006-05-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

Blogger has been great free software but I've outgrown it. Site is now migrated over to Wordpress under my username Mrrx.

New Site Link

Although, at the moment I think I will continue to maintain links on this site because there's more freedom to order them than under Wordpress. Or maybe I can buy a subscription if it works good enough.

Goblins & Sales

2006-05-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

Tlaloc : Ding 42 provisioner, 20% XP. Made lots of green tea.

It's actually harder to describe the crafting process now. If you "made a stack of green tea", did you work with 50 leaves (1 stack) to turn it into 50 teas (2 1/2 stacks) ? Or did he make 2 1/2 stacks ? Whichever it is, that's what he did.

Tezcatlipocca : 75% XP. Logged in to find that I sold nearly all the tempers and resins I had made, which was a real happy thing to see. It's possible that the tradeskill revamp is going live this weekend, so I want those things GONE. I also sold every last Feerrott item I gathered which was expected. Restocked my vault, and everything is now for sale including junk like elephant meat at 1c. After banking I find myself the owner of 23 plat, which makes me smile. I wonder if I'll ever bank enough to convince myself to sell it; my guess is no but you can hope.

Talk about arbitrage. Last night I noticed tuber strands for sale for less than the 20s I get for them nightly. Several price points, including a big stack for 2s. I gobbled up the 2s ones and left the rest; now I wish I had gone ahead and grabbed them all. They sold last night too, which is a handsome profit.

Helped a friend take down a quest mob in Varsoon, then headed off to Lavastorm to start the HQ there. First step is to take down 20 goblins for an irregular auto-update. The goblins were fun to solo and an add was not instant death.

Made it through the first tunnel from zone-in, and stood in a big open area with a mix of solo and heroic groups. There's even a small harvesting possibility here which I took advantage of; hopefully I can get my next two levels and retry some of these outstanding quests. And start on the carpet.

But between all that time for crafting, banking, and dealing with two issues in guild, it got late and I logged off.

Tradeskill Grind - Day 2

2006-05-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 50% alchy xp. Ground out a ton of tempers which took me halfway to level, then decided I was tired of grinding and more interested in leveling and/or gathering.

Put a lot of items up for sale instead of working them via tradeskill, made a fortunate purchase of tuber strands which I expect to sell for a handsome profit, mailed Huehueteotl a plat (21 plat banked), and then decided to talk to that lady labeled "Kerran Mentor".

She gives you a series of simple quests that take you around Nettleville and ultimately send you into the Peat Bog, where I had already finished the rest of the quests. So picked up another 4 or so quests, then headed off to Thundering Steppes.

Found one more weald wolf - 2 to go before the page is finished. It's simply amazing how hard these things are to find, that getting one is such a major event that it gets an entry in the blog. I hope the devs can change that someday. Logged out in front of the TS docks.

Tradeskill Grind

2006-05-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 42, then 43 alchemist. 5% XP. Made many a refine destined for the vendor in order to reach 42; then got a new recipe book with potions that heal and give power. Made two each of those for personal use, and donated my unused lower potions to the guild bank.

Grinded, forever, until I reached 43. White recipes with full vitality seemed to be giving .4% XP. Maybe it was more like .3%. They sure want you to take a while to hit 50, no doubt about that. And you know you have an imperfect game mechanic when a player reads a book while he's playing your game. Once I hit 43 I found myself with a little bit of vitality left so it was time to switch characters.

Still have perhaps one more mushroom-type harvest to run through, along with a ton of metal and teak. But this was a marathon session already and I wanted a change of scenery.

Huehueteotl : Ding 20, and carpenter. Had Huey wander Antonica until his various harvesting skills were all up to 90. This should ensure he can harvest in Thundering Steppes. Then had him swim from the Caltorsis ruins all the way around Antonica, picking up fish nodes along the way. Ultimately his fishing hit 90, and with all the junk I had picked up I was ready to tradeskill.

So what do I start with given that he will be making boxes? Wood, of course. Made a stack of 20 pieces of lumber ready for boxmaking. But after that, I took the easy way out and started making steaks with all those fish parts. Crabs got me to level 20, talked to Devona Ironforge after some confusion about which NPC I needed, and made that final recipe to ding 20.

Is that impressive? It sure took a long time - Ding 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and finally 20. That's a lot of fish steaks folks. Great practice for.......uhhhh....... box making. Yeah. But given that I'm uninterested in boxes lower than briarwood it made sense; just reach the right level and go from there. Time for more gathering and fighting.

And by this time - a full day planted in front of the PC - I was sick and tired of EQ2 so I logged off. But I definitely wanted to get at least one of my three characters out of the tradeskill grind, and I succeeded.

Milestones !

2006-05-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 41 alchemist. Tez managed to finish up both of the quests I was worried about with Vash, and lacking any more easy quests to work I decided it was time for a trip back to town.

Stopped along the way and finished some more quests, and passed the magic 700 quests completed marker. Awesome ! Have 705 quests and am in position # 166 on the server. Got one more weald wolf, so squeaked that book forward, and finished another book after finding Roaming Dead who would insta-repop after breaking the encounter; for the curious that is at the Graveyard in the Thundering Steppes.

Banked and sorted the loot, then bought and sold a whole bunch of stuff for a several gold profit. Headed into the tradeskill pit and got started; didn't take many Turnip Washes until I had the level, then decided to log and check out my alts.

21 plat in the bank, although I may have to pass one of those over to Huehueteotl. Still I have a respectable stash for a level 46 character.

Tlaloc : 70% provisioner XP. Tlaloc had a bunch of misc foodstuffs in his bank which I decided to make food & drink out of. If his boxes are finally full, well, time to actually sell foods. Of all the things, my Provisioner has never really filled up his bags so I've never sold any food. And this is supposed to be my way to make money - NOT !

Made some grilled shark fin before it got late and I logged off.

Quests and Harvesting - Entry Four

2006-05-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 65% XP.

Same thing, different day. Gathered and worked quests.

Now, I ran into a potential quest problem. The Path of War quest ends when you talk to Gretchen Spiritstorm in the camps, and she next asks you to talk to Vashadzar to continue the quest line (Hand of War, Eye of Fear). The only problem was, I had a quest outstanding with him and was unable to finish it, because his dialog only comes up talking about Gretchen's quest. That's a bummer.

Even after you finish that quest, Vash will only talk to me about the supposed final quest in the line, Broken Fist of War, and not Feeling the Fauna. Maybe it will work once I finish this quest; I can only hope.

I have more than enough stuff gathered, except perhaps foodstuffs. Still I'll wander the area and gather as much as I can before calling home because I want to go forward with quests.

More or less, I'm trying to get Tez up to 48 to be able to tackle some other, stuck quests; and get tradeskill levels before the tradeskill update.

Thoughts on Station Exchange

2006-05-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 47% XP. Finished off the Vision of Fear quest, which involved nothing further other than running around Feerrott some more. Also gathered a ton of stuff; no rares tonight. Since there is little in-game to post about, I came up with another subject.

This week saw the announcement of Zam.com and the purchase of several gaming sites tied back to real money transfers. This got me thinking again about the Station Exchange.

Some of EQ2's population treats us (Bazaar denizens) like lepers, outright criminals, and worse. They talk about the horrible impact that RMT has on the game experience. To all this talk, I just have to laugh usually.

I've been on the Exchange for a long time, and simply haven't seen any impact that RMT has on my game. None whatsoever. People are as nice and as mean on the Bazaar, as they are on other servers. Guilds and friendships work the same. Never have I been denied content because of gold farmers. Never (really) bought or sold items, or ran into people who do. But this week I was slightly impacted by the whole phenomenon.

We had a guildy who joined and disappeared very quickly. He started out as a lowbie, passed me speedily, and left the guild sometime around level 60. He did this in a matter of days; perhaps ten. And vanished.

The best explanation for this guy is that he leveled up, sold himself with a name change, and left the game. He did explain that he only had a very short time until he was going to Iraq; so he probably sold his character, and the help I gave him in doing things, was kind of silly and wasted.

My old guild was The Firm, and people have started reappearing with this guild name. One person is a former leader, nice enough guy, and I ran into him in the Feerrott this week. Well, his character. I got no response to repeated tells, and all he did was wander around and gather. What do you know - I ran into my first character sold to a gold farmer. Probably the whole guild was sold off too.

It was very strange, to see a name that you think is your friend, and he either is ignoring you or......... isn't himself anymore. Probably only speaks Chinese or something, so he couldn't reply even if he wanted to. I gathered around with him, in silence, and it was pretty polite with no node-stealing or griefing going on.

So there's the extent of the Exchange impact on me. If that tiny impact bothered you, brother, you would be way too sensitive.

Next post on Monday; I'm traveling Thursday and Friday.

Vision of Fear, continued

2006-05-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 41% XP. Tonight saw much progress on quests. Finished up two more of the quests from the camp; got my final language item and can now speak Thulian; repaired my broken conscript shield; and got a surprise.

Visited one of the lizard camps, along the river, and realized it was guarded by a group of three lizards, double-downs at about level 40. After whacking them and checking the tents, I finally found that irritating book I needed for Vision of Fear. This set off spending the rest of the night progressing this quest.

Approached the Pyramid of Fear, and found a player had cleared the front of it allowing me to walk up and talk to the NPC needed at the top - The Eye of Thule. Was to take down four Modinite fugitives. I heard a lot of nonsense about how tough they were to find; shoot, without spoilers I would still have had them in a day or so of wandering. As it happened, I had them finished in an hour. It would have been nice to know, beforehand, that it was four of them needed.

Returned to the Pyramid, and found myself able to get up by running quickly to its base, dealing with a small group of guards, and then walked right up once again. Got sent to take down Rallosian skeletons which was in progress when I logged for the night. 694 quests complete.

I have a ton of harvests that should take me quite a ways up if I just grind levels in alchemy; but I will probably continue to harvest in the hopes of having enough to bring me to T6. When I tried to buy the items on the broker, I found none available cheap. And did I score on the rares tonight - four luminous items, and four or five big rares like severed cedar, two ebon clusters, and some other things. Great session all around.

Top Three Hoped-for Changes

2006-05-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

# 1 - Get rid of No-Trade Loot.
We have an attuneable attribute; any piece of gear will only stay in the economy as long as it is unused, thus solving gear inflation. So why is it exactly, that some items that drop are no-trade? If it's to keep items in the hands only of those who raid, that's a bad tack to take. Let them be attuneable and sellable by the raiders.

The problem with no-trade is, the best items have it, deliberately. And that makes the non-raiders have no chance at acquiring them. Even if they were sold at ungodly prices, all the non-raider would have to do is save enough money to buy them. Required levels keep the alt-twinking to acceptable levels already. Even if the prices were so high that it's not realistically possible to purchase things, the carrot is important to keeping your steady "Achiever" type soloist person in the game.

An example. While playing Everquest 1 I wanted to get that Darkwater Pearl Ring - +1 regeneration. Other players sold it for a hair over 1200 plat. Near the end of my career I managed to buy one. But by saving my money and dreaming of the amazing help that +1 regeneration would give me, I was more interested in continuing to play the game. If it had been no-drop, I never could have gotten the stupid thing, no such carrot would have existed, and I'd have been less likely to keep playing.

# 2 - Track more statistics.
I love kill totals. Absolutely love them. Nothing I do is wasted if I'm also racking up points on the North Qeynos poster. I'd love it if more creatures would count, not just the new worlds like in Desert of Flames, but in the old world too. I'm certain that I would, for example, be a slayer of centaurs yet the stat is not tracked.

Centaurs, Giants, Treants, and Lizardmen are obvious good choices. Really, anything with a Lore & Legend book about it.

# 3 - Broker Sale Prices.
The brokers are undergoing a revamp; one thing not mentioned for the revamp is the ability to set a price and have it stick. If I sell my tuber strands at 15 silver, and they sell out, the next stack of tuber strands I put up for sale starts at "free". They should start at 15 silver.

Everquest 1 had a file that tracked this info, and loaded the price if you put one of the items up for sale. EQ2 doesn't.

I should not have to keep some off-line system showing how much I am selling every item for, in order to know if I actually got my asking price. Personally, I forget each time. So track it for me please.

Slow night

2006-05-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 22% XP - barely moved.

Mostly did gathering in the Feerrott, readying myself for the climb to level 50 alchemist. Finished off a couple more quests, bringing my total to 690. Once you are high enough level, these were easy - walk around the Feerrott, catalog or gather items, and return to the camp.

But fixing my cable connection (it appears to be fixed) has me still worn out, and I logged early.

Tradeskills Between Disconnects

2006-05-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 40 alchemist. 90% XP.

Survived internet connection troubles and constant disconnects. But because of all that, restricted myself to tradeskills. If I'm making random refines for vendor sale, the fact that I get disconnected in the middle of one is no big deal; versus, for example, refining a Rare item, or fighting something.

Started out by having Tez continue gathering in Zek, and he managed to pick up maybe 500 different items. This was more than enough - after hitting 39, the refine recipes stayed blue so the XP was still around .4% each.

Did a refine for each item possible at level 40, using Feerrott gathers, to pick up the maximum discovery XP I could get. This took me all the way to 90% XP which is awesome. But the constant connection issue wore me out and I logged Tez at this point.

Huehueteotl : Ding 19, 10% XP. Huey ventured out bravely into Antonica to start gathering. He's ignoring mushrooms and shrubs, and gathering everything else including fish. While he can't use the fish or the items from traps, I do want him to have his skills up above 90 and none of them reached that point during the night.

Went ahead and did the Tie That Binds quest, so he's now ready to completely set up shop in Nettleville. Call in, do vendoring and banking, tradeskill, and then back out. But I think I'll have him head back after his inventory fills up - he's going to need a lot of wood and tubers to do serious tradeskilling, and they cost too much at this tier on the broker.

Thanks to blogger Satia, I now know that even apothecary recipes for resins cost a single fuel. I could have sworn it was two at some point, but it isn't anymore. Huey will be making resins and refining wood, then making boxes when the appropriate place is reached.

Inspiration !

2006-05-04T11:16:00.000-07:00

Finally ! I have the solution to the six character limit !

Well, as far as I'm concerned.

Everquest2 has a six character limit. The exact reasons why are not stated; it might be because of server storage issues, or it might be an attempt to capture more revenue from their customers. Or it might be something altogether different.

Six is clearly too few character slots. There are 24 classes in this game people ! By limiting the number of slots, they limit your ability to play the game. Even the extra four provided by station access (for an extremely large fee by the way) are awfully pitiful and tiny. And the whole idea of limiting the number of characters created goes against the grain of the way video games have been designed for years.

The game also has a reward system for customer loyalty; if you are a customer long enough you get various rewards including titles, bags, and potions.

Proposal :
Make one of the possible rewards an additional character slot.

Benefits :
The cheapskates who won't pay for additional slots, have a way to acquire them. That is, if they stay customers long enough.

Station access is still a viable solution for customers who don't mind paying. Want those 10 characters in your first month of play ? Just subscribe to SA.

Is SOE limiting slots for a technical reason ? They still are limited, versus the wide-open systems in other MMO's. No new player creating 15 alts and then unsubscribing, or clogging databases up with placeholder characters.

Any downsides here ? I can't see any. Leave a comment if you have one.

Tradeskills and Harvesting - Day 3

2006-05-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

Huehueteotl : Ding 10, and become a craftsman. Bought all the T1 junk alchemy stuff and grinded up the levels. Now he's ready to start working with wood.

But wood, for a craftsmen, is a bit more complex than other tradeskills. Every recipe (at level 10 anyway) requires a resin it seems, which will require either roots or wood, and with which he can make lumber and related products. Buying either of these raws is not a cheap process, so it's time to have him go out and gather around Antonica.

There's also the question of who will make the resins - my alchemist, or Huey ? I'm guessing it will be smarter actually to have Huey do it; although you save a fuel if I have Tez do it, Tez gets no XP for doing so. But Tez doesn't have to buy recipe books and it might be nice to have him do something positive with his alchemy for a change. Ahhh, I don't know. Need to gather first in any event.

Tezcatlipocca : Set a goal of gathering 500 T4 resources to work on his next level. Headed out to Zek after buying a dozen or so cheap items on the broker. Gathered two complete stacks, and maybe another 50 items in addition; rares gathered were a ruthenium cluster and a glimmering flower. Only ran into two orcs high enough level to aggro which made things easy.

One interesting result of the gathering (I skipped the bushes) was getting few herbs and large amounts of wood and metals. If I make resins and tempers, it might be smart to attempt to sell them on the broker; I have the empty space in my boxes which I should fill up anyway. Will definitely sell the roots though.

Despite mad gathering of traps, did not get that glimmering tooth I will definitely need for my alts.

Tradeskills, Day 2

2006-05-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

More tradeskills tonight. Huehueteotl dings 7 and spends no more than 2cp per raw. Once he ran out of vitality I logged him off.

Tezcatlipocca buys every T4 raw on the market priced at 10cp or less and gets 85% of the way to 39. Making it through that level will probably require more harvesting in Zek & EL, as I doubt I'll be able to just buy the necessary ingredients. There are simply too many of them required.

At level 38 and with vitality, I was getting approximately .4% XP per combine. So this translates into 250 raws required to level; except that some combines give less because all I'm concentrating on is finishing the combine, and damn the quality. We're really talking around 350 raws to level.

Now if level 39 results in green recipes for the refines, that will probably double to 700 raws for a level. Yikes. At least, after I get him to 40 he can just use the stuff being gathered in Feerrott, along with buying any of the cheap stuff.

The "real" alchemy recipes that are higher con are all essences, and require roots and metals to accomplish. I don't want to bother; that can wait for the tradeskill revamp. In the meantime I just need to continue grinding the levels and making some small amount of money.

What's up at E3 ?

2006-05-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

Check out this link.

EQ2's new adventure pack - Fallen Dynasty - will be an asian themed area for levels 55 to 70. New quests and zones always get my interest, although I would buy the other adventure packs before this one. Tezcatlipocca is only 46.

EQ2's next expansion - Echoes of Faydwer - will introduce the first new playable race for the game, the Fae. New content for, apparently, all levels which will be a nice change, along with 350 new quests (!) and 20 new zones.

A Fae ? You can be a..... fairy? Well being the more masculine type myself I'm imagining I'll never play one but I guess you never know. My first thought is Fae being magic-users primarily, and scouts secondarily. Might be interesting to have a Fairy Swashbuckler, for instance.

Kudos on the spread-out zone concept being implemented. There's a reason I waited almost a year to buy Desert of Flames, and don't own Kingdom of Sky : there's no reason for a lower level person to buy either one. You *could* get achievements but they don't seem that useful, and in any event only my main Tezcatlipocca reaching 60 would motivate me to buy it.

On the other hand, the opportunity to go back to Faydwer, no matter what level I am at, is pretty enticing. Along with the prospect of more quests to do and you've got my interest pegged.

This notice is the first I had heard of Gods and Heroes, and the idea sounds promising. A fantasy world, with different fantasy (Roman style, not Tolkienesque), and yet still familiar to many people unlike other attempts. Control a group of NPC's and play solo in a more challenging way in a MMO.

Would it be possible, to actually see me play a game other than EQ2? OK, stop laughing, yes it is possible even for the ultimate immovable object such as myself.

Short & Sweet

2006-05-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 95% XP. Almost level 38 in Alchemist. Spent the night grinding out refines.

I can buy the various alchemy harvests on the broker for 2cp each, refine them, and then sell for around 3-4 sp profit each. I also get XP on each combine. So I'm hoping to hit 40 soon and have the ability to use the stuff I'm gathering now, which is T5 and not T4.

Like it really matters. The T5 stuff is also available for 2cp.

Price Increase

2006-05-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

My God. Now look what they've done. A station access pass, the only way to get extra character slots, will be costing an extra $3 per month.

There are just tons of people, all over the forums, and people that I know, who pay for this thing for the sole purpose of extra character slots. I knew that couldn't be a good thing, and held out and never subscribed, despite my passion to experience the entire game.

There's only one word to describe these people - suckers.

An extra $7 per month; a roughly 50% price increase; and the only reason they pay this is for extra characters. Sony's accountants rub their hands in glee at the prospect. An extra folder in a databse somewhere, and BAM you increase subscription fees substantially. So why not ? If people will pay $7, why not try for $10?

There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. There will be phony threats to quit, people will quit, but my prediction is this will be a revenue increase for Sony. I'm bitterly disappointed, but with a secret shame - I knew this would happen and I've been vindicated. Too bad nobody listened to me and boycotted station access too.

No doubt about it now - I'll never have more than six characters. It's unfair and ridiculous; sets a bad precedent; and is a terrible thing to have happen to the best MMO out there.

Dude, where's my Society ?

2006-05-01T08:04:00.000-07:00

Are you a gamer that travels ? Buy a laptop or you will go insane on vacations and business trips.

Returning home, I logged in Huehueteotl my Ogre Wizard, and finished off the Betrayal quest. Since the last time I did it [posts here and here and here] they have fixed and updated all the cons of each mob you have to fight -

Sarn and Towyn are level 17 one-down. Soloed them both.

Crugybar and Nantglas are 17 and ^. Needed help with them; Nantglas was duoable as the only gnolls near him are two spearfishers, while Crugybar is deep in the mine and required a group to reach and take down.

The all-time baddie is still Dancoed, a ^^^ who wanders the forest outside Blackburrow. A four-mage group knocked him flat, thanks to pets and good aggro control.

Felzik Dursin no longer wears a scary ^^ tag; he shows as an NPC and at the appropriate time, turns into a level 16 one-down.

Armed with my new Hunter of Gnolls title, I sought out a class confirming NPC and got a surprise. I had the opportunity to switch from wizard to warlock, but I also got all my spells reset and it was as if I had never made a choice before for traits or my master II spell. So that choice, to get Orc Master's Smite ? It was made again, and I cheated myself out of the big nuke for the betrayal quest. Curse the forums and their sometimes bad information !

Then figured it was time to start tradeskills. Huey will be a carpenter - that's the one who makes boxes right ? I will base him in Nettleville Hovel, so I went to the wholesaler to join it. And she won't let me in.

Damnation! What on earth is wrong ? I figured I had joined one in Freeport, even though I thought I had joined none of them. But what happened to the button that tracks societies ?

An hour later, I had my answer. Yes, I had to leave a Freeport society. The button to check on societies was removed several updates ago for unknown reasons. Stealth changes blow.

While they removed the item on the menu, they did not remove the functionality. /show_window MainHUD.Societies will open it - take care as the caps need to be exact or the window looks bugged. Once I got the window open, and displaying correctly, I left the Freeport one and joined the Nettleville one.

Ding 5 artisan. It's awesome how cheaply people sell T1 resources. Refined some junk and sold it; might be able to use T3 boxes so that's where Huey is heading. And logged off for the night.

It's good to be back.

Finishing HQ's

2006-04-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 46; 15% XP. One day in between travels; and got a lot done.

Did a lot of harvesting in the Feerrott first. Expected this night to simply end with quests and harvesting when I get guildys who ask if I can help take out Varsoon.

After we did so, the others didn't want to log off so I asked them to help finish of Foomby. Turns out, this was harder than I had thought. After you kill the 15 lamias, you have to be very close to the nightblood to have any chance of reaching him. Tried once, and we couldn't reach him in time to get him; we killed lamias on the far north beach and the run was too far.

For the second try, I found the spot where the nightblood would spawn, and we took out the lamias in that general area. Some of them were ^^^'s, but we still took them out without dying. A last group of single-downs and we had 15, then the big bad guy spawned. The fight was a tad difficult, but we had a helper in a 50ish wizard who showed up halfway through the fight and nuked the hell out of the bastard.

Afterwards, the group broke up, I run off and talk to the halfling and Foomby, and I have my Bag of Sewn Evil Eye. Went back into the Feerrott for a little more harvesting. And I see a call go out, group forming for Emperor Fyst. It's late, and I shouldn't do it....... but I get into the group.

This time, things went flawlessly. We had a 53 brigand help us through the whole thing, who had done the raid six times in the last week, so he knew *exactly* what to do.

Finished off the Greenhood quest first, then killed Fyst for the double update. Greenhood just required finding an NPC, then finding several women trapped in the castle and giving them a port stone to get out. Then you talk to Stryjin the NPC one more time and he asks you to kill Fyst.

The new look for the orcs helped substantially with lag and other problems, but I still crashed once before we finished. You had to run along the tower walls quite a bit, taking down nameds, then chase Fyst back to an arena where he sends his big baddies to kill you. After you defeat them, the big bad orc himself comes after you. One group was plenty, at least with all of us in it.

When the PC crashed again while I was on the Thundering Steppes docks, I took it as a hint and logged off. I should be able to get my Lore Seeker title now, which will be cool.

Next post - May 1st or thereabouts.

Drunkeness For the Win !

2006-04-14T08:11:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : With a fortunate complete day to game, I made a ton of progress.

Started things off with the new Brell Day event. Brell, the god of drinking alcohol in Everquest 2 ? There was no way I was going to miss this, as a favorite item missed from Everquest 1 was the drunk effect. And I wasn't disappointed.

You walk into a tavern where people are selling alcoholic drinks. And they actually work ! You get in-game drunk. But there was a dwarf offering a quest so of course I went after this one first. It wasn't too hard, just a fair amount of running around. Harvest "pure water" in four different zones, tip a cow and steal some hops, and get a barley farmer drunk and convince him to give you his barley. Select which stein is Brell's stein, which I got a tip on from another player. And you're rewarded with a keg of booze.

Now I can have a flaming party in my inn room, is that cool or what ? Invite the cutest woodelf in the guild over and get her wasted............. The effect cancels when zoning, why I don't understand, but just having the effect is really cool.

So when I was done boozing it up it was time to prepare for the Feerrott, requiring a trip to the bank and doing some selling. With about 10 quests in my journal requiring that zone, and progress stalled on many others due to level issues, it was clear that T5 is the place for me for the time being. After I hit 46 or 47 I may try and clear some of them, especially that annoying place called Nektropos Castle.

Sold some junk to the vendor, and bought and resold a few items. 19 plat hoarded now. Turned in status items and completed two collections quests. The provisioner vendor in Nettleville, and probably others, is selling alcoholic drinks now which I bought 20 of. And then I went into the tradeskill pit and started making stuff.

Ding 37 alchemist - gained three levels, two complete ones and the first one consisting of 10% XP. Made a few potions, but mostly I took the mushroom harvests, refined them and dumped them on the vendor. Also burned up all my wood and metals making resins and tempers - they don't sell for much on the broker so might as well use them for XP. Did buy some sage on the broker, which kind of surprised me as that's the one I'm using for my potions, and with a total overabundance refined it and vendored it too.

And when that was finally finished off, headed to the Feerrott. Definitely still my favorite zone; the music is cool, the strange jungle sounds, excellent atmosphere. Got several more quests and completed a few too, ending the night with 60% XP or thereabouts.

Killed many snakes and cataloged almost everything except the, by all reports, incredibly rare brush snake. I think that's its name. None were up despite spending a couple of hours in the zone. Took out thirty domesticated creatures to war with the lizards. Stared at a campfire and got a quest to kill 200 lizardmen. Wow - that's a tall order. Got started on it anyway. Also got the Huuuuuuptic quest requiring 50 dead huptics. And to save my life I couldn't find a precious metal node to finish off the gathering quest.

Duoed most of the night and while we killed lizards successfully, we couldn't find the journal necessary for the Vision of Fear quest. You're supposed to search lizardman camps as per the game info; and Ogaming lists several locations to find it at. Still, it just wasn't in any of the places we checked, by the time my duo partner had to log.

Ended the night on the beach after 30/50 huptics were dead and logged. 675 quests complete.

Foomby - Feh

2006-04-13T07:54:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 22% XP. Logged in at Chomper's lake to find two groups standing around there and got a quick invite into one. There were two people who needed to kill him, and four who had just done it a few minutes before. The four helped us three to take him down, after we cleared the pond several times, and Chomper was down.

Next we went to Foomby, who asked us to speak to a halfling inside the granary. Next step was to kill 15 lamias, timed, and my groupmates decided to log at this point. I died, then ran and ran to get to the north beach, the spot with single lamias. I fought hard and quickly, noting the seconds ticking off on the clock.

In the most nail-biting finish possible, killed lamia number 15 with one single second left on the clock. Down to one-third health and power. Yeah ! I did it !

Not quite.

Next step, also timed, is to kill some big bad boss who is a 40^^^ and of course I couldn't find someone to help me on such short notice. Or even at all; tried for some time to get help, harvesting when possible, and had to give up eventually. The quest reset back to the lamia killing. Well, maybe next time. Worked some more quests and finished Blood of the Bear book, and progressed fairy and treant killing for the L&L quest.

Headed to Thundering Steppes, progressed a book a little farther, then to Antonica intending to update Reaching Blade. Actually, that's not a good idea until I have a group to kill the Lamia. Better not do that. In any event, logged off at this point.

Last chance for adventure tonight - I'll be away for two weeks with unlikely PC access.

Brokering and Dreadwake

2006-04-12T08:49:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 15% XP or so. Started off by hitting the broker and purchasing Ire of the Grey, Adept 1. Wanted a master, but there were none for sale. Have to check again - this spell gets used ALL THE TIME. If there's anything to buy a master for, it's this spell. Also did some purchasing of underpriced items and sold them to the vendor, now that I'm starting to build up a database of vendor sellback prices. Do you know, I netted 40g doing this?

There was one guy who couldn't sell his adepts so he priced them all at 25s. I bought them madly and made most of my profit there. He sent me a tell immediately which kind of freaked me out - the new broker system has instant communication which allows this.

"Hey are you going to resell those?".

"Nope, I'm going to vendor them."

"Oh." You could almost hear him hitting himself in the head.

"Yeah. They sell for 66s and change."

"Nobody was buying them so I just wanted to get rid of them."

I shared the secret of buy low and sell high with him and he seemed cool about it. Have to try and group with him because somehow, I feel bad about doing it.

Afterward I headed off to the Enchanted Lands. Progressed a book quest through about seven pages - The Blood of the Bear - which was super easy as all the mobs were pinked out. Got some new quests, and re-started the Jumjum Thief quest. You see, I had progressed this one to the point of "Confront the JumJum Thief", and then left the zone. This bugs the quest - you'll never find him again. As he is a 33^^^ I couldn't solo him either at the time, so I'm restarting it. If I can't solo him I should be able to duo him. It was pretty easy otherwise anyway.

Got a call from guildys to start a raid, and though I'm not much of a raider I formed up. We tried to get Cragshell the crab but he despawned before the raid was well established. Ran around and got killed once doing this. Then they decided to take the formed raid and hit another target - Dreadwake in Everfrost. So with a little trepidation I ventured into Everfrost for the first time.

The art in this zone is awesome. Falling snow, snowdrifts, icy waters that seem to go on forever, and snow-covered hills. That said, what is up with having you enter the zone on an island, and then.......... swim to other spots ? The water is supposed to be freezing. What am I wearing, Underwear of 92 Degree Warmth covered with Magically Enhanced Scotchguard?

Swam over to a small island with, I believe, Kerath McMannus on it, and talking to him starts a quest and spawns the big shark, Dreadwake. The quest is beyond simple - kill the shark. Right after he spawns. We did it, not much problem - the only difficulty was getting everyone formed up. The uber loot was a lousy wooden chest with a 38ish Assassin spell and some other doodad. At least this was quest # 667 for me. Two deaths later I was really sick of raiding.

Returned to the Enchanted Lands and went after the Darkflight Fairies again. Hooked up with a guardian who I tried to tell, get the quest, but he wasn't interested. Well, that was fine. We killed maybe 50 or 60 before the quest updated. I have no idea where I got that 200 count from - perhaps from the Hierophant's Crook quest.

Ran and talked to Foomby again, and he asked me to kill the big fish, Chomper, in that little pond by the Darkflight Fairies. Couldn't get him to spawn, and that was probably a good thing as he is a 37 ^^^. Maybe I can get some help and do that tonight. Sleep overtook me and I logged out.

Blackguard Blogs ?

2006-04-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

Well now I'm completely surprised. Turns out that Nerfbat, the blog by the "grouchy gnome" about game design, is actually written by SOE's own Blackguard, the Everquest Community Manager. Blackguard does a very good job pushing info out of the corporate maze that I assume SOE is, on down to us players.

I had him linked up once, then he went AFK forever and quit talking about Everquest 2. Now I discover this. Welcome to my journal links once again.

I would have counseled him to stay anonymous, not surprising I hope from a guy who goes by Mr. X; but I have an advantage. Even if you knew what I did for a living, you still don't know me. He's totally exposed now. But I think he has his answer about "who would care if they knew who I am ?" - I sure care. I'll read those posts with a new eye.

Gnolls and Lutes

2006-04-11T08:07:00.000-07:00

Tlaloc : 60% XP. Yes, I actually took Tlaloc for a while to adventure. What a concept. Headed to Thundering Steppes and whacked any unfortunate creature like the bugs and hawks that got in his way, and was fortunate enough to get an Adept Stance which he immediately scribed. Fun!

Monk is such a change from Mystic. Furiously slap every ability button and hope the mob goes down, which it usually does. I can only imagine how well he'd do after upgrading his abilities.

But, I was indecisive tonight, and switched.

Huehueteotl : Ding 16 - 15% XP. Got up to 200 of the 500 gnolls necessary and gained a level. After looking around a little bit, had him walk back and forth between Fippy's Hill, and the Keep of the Ardent Needle. Whacked anything he saw when power was available, and took down every solo gnoll as soon as they showed up.

Gnolls seem particularly vulnerable to my root. Or maybe it was my imagination - I don't know. But they didn't break the root often, and many a time I would root a gnoll and nuke him to death. That works as far as I'm concerned.

The gnolls on Fippy's Hill were just great. They usually spawned as double-downs, or sometimes a group of four triple-downs - perfect for what I'm trying to accomplish, namely gaining XP on gnolls. Too bad there was competition, but that's the breaks in a multiplayer game. Picked up a bunch of junk and sold it, as well as a few interesting items which got mailed to Tez.

But, still indecisive. Hopefully I can get him to 17 tonight.

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 45, 10% XP. Tez got one weald wolf, then left for Zek and finished up with the Lute series of quests. Now these were quite a bit of fun.

Deathfist Cryptology - find a bunch of stones; make a set of orders involving meeting a cryptologist at the stones; plant the orders in the Deathfist camp; and kill the cryptologists who meet you at the stones. Cool storyline and fun to do, though I could have done without the gigantic walk from Three Toes lake to the big spire - twice no less.

Several quests involved sneaking around Deathfist Citadel, and gaining entry to three tents scattered around it. Each of the tents was progressively harder to get into due to position and wandering mobs. I stood next to each and had to gauge, can I kill the mobs ? Can I just sneak in? Run in and let em hit me ? And had to time my entry so none of the baddies would catch me while I was in the tent. This was great fun, and usually ended up with me standing near the tent, clearing the mobs one by one until I could get in. Some I couldn't clear - up arrow mobs conning blue or even white. So I just had to dodge.

One quest even required swimming through the moat and picking up a bunch of sunken chests, thus I had to clear the moat horror kelp things first. And finally found out what those bottles and crates are for, and did that quest as well.

Ultimately, the quest climax is hijacking the Greenmist, a slaver ship captained by a renegade Iksar. It's not that hard - it is a solo designed quest after all. Still, came extremely close to death twice during the whole thing, without dying, which of course made it tons of fun. After downing the baddies, you sail back to Zek and finish up the quest series.

Next went over to Enchanted Lands, where I had just a few quests left - but one involved killing Darkflight Fairies. Ogaming claims you have to kill 200. Not even a random one, just pseudo-random, because you don't get a kill total. That got boring real fast, especially after counting gnolls earlier in the evening, so I logged off.

Tez has a new nuke, Ire of the Grey, which considering how often it gets used, I think I will upgrade to Master if I can find one for sale. I wanted to fill up his bags before he went back to town, but maybe it's smarter to just get this thing to make life easier. He also has a weird 30-second "badger pet" that casts a bunch of spells when you summon it. Definitely a group thing.

And one other odd note - y'know the number of the beast ? That number, from the Bible? That's how many quests Tez has completed. Better finish one more tonight ASAP because that stupid number just freaks me out.

Nektropos Revisited

2006-04-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 55% XP. Started out the session by returning, real quick, to Nek Castle - Solo trip. Walked into the chapel and there was Billy. A 32 ^^^ but I knocked him down without a problem.

The problem, however was the next mob - the Inquisitor of Ulkoruuk. 30^^^ but a healer; I could not kill him fast enough and had to run from the castle, despite madly clicking my little power potions. This also meant I had to abandon the plan to solo my way to Alexa, for at least a couple levels, since the Inquisitor is her placeholder. Bastard.

Got my Rallosian Ghosts for the final Nektulos Far Seas req, and was chasing crabs and badgers when I get the call from Bruelle again - Nektropos Castle. I hustled over and we had a very good group. Fury, myself, three wizards, and Berserker. All 38+. Things went very well.

Did not finish the missing mask unfortunately, but that's just the way it goes. We fought our way all the way down to Everling and knocked him flat, to update Hadden's Earring quest. Kept them around long enough to help me progress the mask; killed the Librarian, and got the Fairy L&L book along with an update; met Billy in the Courtyard for another; and talked to the froglok assassin for a third. Next step is to trek back to the Library, but I couldn't keep the rest of them in the castle any longer, which was OK really. Instead we headed off to Varsoon to work Hadden's.

Another fine dungeon crawl. Looked in a bunch of places for nameds, but only found Hrath V'Tol for our quest. And, of course, Varsoon who dropped some masters which I unfortunately didn't get. I also got a look at the workshop, and progressed that quest killing living clays. We tried to spawn the Creator in here (needed for Ghoulbane), but the mobs repopped before we could so we gave up quickly. And headed out to the Thundering Steppes, killed a pirate captain, and all finished Hadden's earring.

Afterwards I went wandering again, killing crabs and looking for badgers. The flesh scavenger crabs aren't that big a problem - they spawn all along the dead river from the beach. But young timber badgers are hands down, the rarest creatures in the zone. You just can't pop these little buggers quickly. The most reliable place was the little wooded area near the tower north of Varsoon; I believe this was the Ruins of Karana. Never would two or more pop though, which made things difficult.

One other place to find the badgers is near the two gnoll pits, so I walked over to take a look. And there, right next to the Tesch Mal gnolls, I finally found what I needed - a linked spawn of two young timber badgers. Time to use the run off and repop method - kill one, run away, walk back and you'll have two mobs again. One of them magically "repops".

I killed that poor little badger 24 times in about 20 minutes before I finally progressed the book and logged off. Now that it progressed, what do you think was the next step? Of course - weald wolves. Somewhere a game designer is laughing at me.

Betrayal and Heritages

2006-04-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

Huehueteotl : Ding 14, with 60% XP. Just repetitively killed orcs and undead in the Commonlands until I hit the magic level; then started betrayal. I had another player help me get there though.

He was the absolute worst person to group with. Not only did he have no clue how to play the game, his concept of communication was nil. He never said a word, other than a single "kk" which I didn't get at all either. Eventually I just gave up, followed him around, and abandoned him if he got himself in stupid trouble. The XP was slightly quicker with him. Immediately upon dinging 14 I started the betrayal.

Betrayal went well. The newer aggro rules meant the serpent sewer was a three-step process to traverse. First you get ready to pass the filthy moccasins; I even killed two of them. Second you run down a sewer tunnel and lose the pursuit; stand and re-heal. Third, enter the betrayal room/area, and run like hell past the aggro mobs to see Kenjenedreau. Had a harder time dealing with the graveyard actually; the skels always kill me there.

Even ran through Nektulos forest without getting aggro, which was a shock. Grabbed some nice person and talked them into escorting me through, and he did a good job. Started the betrayal, and decided this time to kill my 500 gnolls first because the nameds are relatively tough, and will be easier at level 17.

Went to Fippy's Hill which had a large number of easy gnolls, along with the wussies at the gate, and got about 75 before I logged off.

Tezcatlipocca : Helped out guildys doing the Reaching Blade heritage quest; then decided to do it myself. Psyched myself up for the scary journey into Freeport.

What a letdown. It was beyond easy. For Reaching Blade, you need to exit the sewer, and enter the inn just south of it. There was once a permanently camped epicx4 guard in front of it; now, none of them even wander anywhere near the inn. Just walk in and find the NPC.

It was even easier for the Stein of Moggok; all the guards in that area were gray. Walk down the path, wave at the guards who state "Death to the enemies of the Overlord!", enter through the front door (don't forget to tip the two grey guards nearby, who hold the door open for you quaking with fear), and have a little conversation with Rumdum.

Also visited G'Zule again to finish off another easy lowbie quest; this was a real test of guts. The guards were all aggro and deadly, but I just sneak forward one step at a time until I'm close enough to hail him. The worst part was the aggro guard right behind G'Zule. I wasn't close enough to aggro; but I was close enough that she turned her head and looked straight at me. Finished the dialog and snuck out.

And my adventure in Freeport was finished. I felt bad about dragging a Freeport guildy with me; didn't need him despite all reports to the contrary.

Hooked up with some people inside the Crypt of Betrayal for the hired assassins. Oh man - I had not expected them to be so tough. There were four of us the first time, and though we had no DPS I figured we could burn them down slowly. I was wrong and we all died. Try #2 saw us switch our 30 guardian with a 50 ranger, and this is when we noticed that the assassins heal themselves. How unexpected - and deadly. Wipe #2.

Trying to figure out what to do next, a 51 assassin showed up and almost had them dead solo. We ran as fast as possible and got over to her, and got in two swings or so and they were dead. Got the update - that is, everyone except our ranger who ran the wrong way.

We hung around and took down the two assassins again; but our ranger didn't update. He was mentored too low. Didn't listen to me when I hollered at him to unmentor. Got him to do it, then waited for the repop and killed them once more, and then we were finished.

Headed over to Nektropos Castle next. It was late and I was tired, but in experienced hands. Bruelle guided our little group through and we made progress on Missing Mask, and did the library access. Some other quests kept dinging but I had no time to sightsee, had to run back and forth.

Just to get to the mask quest, you have to be able to open locked doors into the Sister's bedrooms. We trekked down and ultimately got it. What I couldn't get started, was the Lockets quest. You go into the chapel, spawn Alexa, and hail, which should start the quest. Except that it didn't. It didn't make much sense - nobody in the group had it completed, but Bruelle was working on it. I hope I can get it later; plan to enter the castle solo and try it again.

The big thing to progress the early steps of the mask, is to get Billy, the doll. He might be up in the gameroom, the chapel, or the courtyard. So you want to keep all these areas clear of monsters that are placeholders. We also cleared the stables of swine, to pop the Swinelord, who is needed late in the quest. While doing all of this, got the spirit updates for both Ghost, and Golem, lore and legend at last. Just parts left to acquire. Ultimately, I got to the point of needing Billy in the Chapel, but then it was way too late and I logged off.

Other noteworthy things - Sway of Honor dinged guild level 20 tonight too - way to go guys ! Our status machine Opuja finished off the Teachings of Yoru heritage to ding it for us. I hit the 650 quest mark and am in position #190 on the server.

Edited after 1st posting

EQ2Players

2006-04-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

Not much to report - very little playing time. The flu sucks.

One major annoyance, is the EQ2Players site has not been updated since 4/2. Still shows Tez at 43 for example, when he is actually at 44. Very annoying.

Huehueteotl dinged 11, and got ready to make a boatload of silver from Paulina - when she surprised him. No, the ghostly orcs do not count any more for the Wailing Caves quest. Oh well. Still camped him there with the intent of undead hunting.

Treasure Hunter

2006-04-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 34 Alchemist, with 40% XP. With two full stacks of red oak, a mushroom harvest, it seemed like the right time to do some tradeskilling. I bought a lot of it, but anything I buy for 5c or less I don't worry about too much. Ground for awhile when I decided to try and make some actual potions.

Found one in my level 34 recipe book which does power regen, and made three of them. The quality level wasn't pristine, but that is controlled by the bottles, and the bottles I can make are not pristine. The glass is the jeweler part of a potion, and my skill is pretty low at jewelry. And who really cares ? A few charges low or not, these are for me to use myself on that next heroic grey fight, not to sell to someone browsing the broker.

Picked up another ten sabertooth trackers - it's not that hard if you accept standing around for 10 minutes at a time, then making a route around the pits and by the gnoll gate. Got 3 or 4 each time doing that. Third round, again, was sabertooth trackers, and I got them and finished off the book. Except that later I find myself in the Mage Tower and buy three more books for........ yup, the Thundering Steppes. Great planning eh ?

Am now wearing the title Treasure Hunter. After you complete 5 heritage quests, go see Sage Indis Surion in the Mage Tower (or the equivalent in Freeport) and he will award you the title and a house item. Lore Seeker, the next title, should be after 10 completions. I currently have 7.

Made my way to Nektulos where I completed the Captain's Deed quest (First captain had it ! Hooray!), another Far Seas Req, and the Nektulos part of the next Far Seas req. Just to empty out my Nektulos group, I decided to finish Maid in the Mist.

I needn't have put this off for so long. This quest is significantly easier than the Zek access quest. The only ^^^ you need to fight is the "disquised entity" - he is a fisherman wandering the beach. Level 30 ^^^ with no helpers - that's a far cry from Bloodstain's group. Once you board the ship, every so often goblins or fairies will pop and you have to kill them until you get another tough baddie, a ^^ with two skeleton double-downs to help him. He even throws you into the air during the fight, interrupting spells and disorienting you. Still, I was in no danger and took him down for the quest completion.

Dealt with selling, refilled my half-empty quest book with a few quests including books, writs, and a newb one I somehow missed, then logged off in front of the chemistry table. 16 plat in the bank; delicious.

Al`Quylar Down! Bloodstain Down!

2006-04-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 20% XP. Did more quest cleanup this session - finished off the last Crypt of Betrayal quest; did some gathering and such for Far Seas Reqs; and then seeing an opportunity, namely two guildys in Antonica, got a group together for Al Quylar to finish the Strange Black Rock.

We were a pally, warden (both 32) and me at 44. The fight didn't go as planned but we all survived and took him down. He almost killed the warden right at the beginning of the fight; he beelined to her instead of staying focused on me while I hit him with debuffs.

After this, I went back to Thundering Steppes and finished off the Zek access quest. That's kind of funny isn't it ? I'm level 44 and have outleveled the zone, but I finally can get "access". The fight was fun and very tough at the end - Captain Bloodstain, Gawar the Bad, and two helpers. Bloodstain got slightly less DPS than I did so he went down. Took out the two helpers fairly quickly next. Gawar had a very hard time hurting me, so we swung weapons back and forth for awhile, with me very very slowly scratching him to death, until some of my mana regenned. Gave him the old Heroic Opportunity Blast a few times and he went down, and I get the quest update.

Next attempted to kill more Steelhoof Prophets - 5 updates to go on this quest, and these are very rare updates. After taking on two heroics and just barely surviving both fights, and not finding any non-heroic prophets, I gave up. Maybe I'll try this again at 46. Went after Sabertooth Trackers and discovered they are not only by the gnoll fort but they also patrol the area of those two pits, right on the edges - probably killing scouts will help pop them.

I was really happy to get all five needed, then I examined the book for what comes next.

What came next ? Well, of course, another ten trackers. Three pages to go. Ugh - I was afraid of that. Logged off hoping to do it tomorrow.

One good thing about tonights escapades - I actually had a use, three times, for a potion. The one potion I've been carrying around for perhaps 20 levels. Time to go back to Nettleville and see what I can make at the highest level for fights like these (grey heroics).

Acting on a tip from a forum denizen, I switched my language to English (EU); which was previously set at English (US); and logged into the game. Bingo, six more character slots. Just to verify you can do it I created a Troll Fury and looked around the Isle for a bit. At last - I have much more of a playground to check out additional characters. Already have a plan to make six evils of various classes.

Five Metal Chests

2006-04-03T08:30:00.000-07:00

Tlaloc : Finished off the last of his steaks. Needs more stuff to cook, or maybe he can {gasp} adventure.

Huehueteotl : Ding 10. My Ogre went through all the content on the Newbie Isle, getting himself a +4 INT two-handed staff in the process; then headed out to Freeport. Stood and killed undead in the graveyard for awhile; and finished off the quest series from that NPC there. Got a ranged-slot item with +4 INT on it as well. After hitting 10, he headed out to the Commonlands and tried taking down ghostly orcs; looks like that should wait until he has another level.

Huey selected, each time a trait came up, extra INT which looks to be helping him a bit. Getting an Adept drop on his nuke also helped immensely. The whole gameplay amuses me to no end - big tough green guy, rooting and nuking. Tried to slug it out against a triple-down green when he ran out of mana, and he was clearly going to get killed. But that's OK - he stood up to it well and should have a fair amount of ability to get away from trouble.

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 44, 15% XP. Hooked up with guildy Opuja and camped the Sentry inside of Zek. This guy took a bit to get - we had the wrong idea for the mob who was placeholder. When we saw the real placeholder and took him down, we got Sentry Goorlux fairly quickly after that. Next step - Fyst raid. Urgh.

After that, we decided to finish off the Chamber of Immortality access quest. This is a true access quest still - you can't get in until you have finished this to kill Varsoon. And it took awhile because you have to camp three nasty named skeletons to finish it off. But each one dropped a metal chest. Nice stuff.

Walked right in and took down the first one; the third one went down after one cycle of killing placeholders. The second one took over half an hour to get, he just refused to show up, plus we weren't sure on the placeholder mechanic at first. But ultimately we finished and headed off to take out Varsoon.

It was pretty tough, just a shadowknight and me the mystic. But we survived and took him down. With a DPS player too, it would have been cake. Opuja used that AA pet for some extra DPS, and I immediately used my emergency ward to conserve mana, as well as the Manastone to suck additional mana into the fray. Still ended up with no mana and pretty bruised up, but we took him down. Too bad we got troubador-class master spells out of it, but that's life.

Gated back to Nettleville and logged, very late but a very profitable trip. Still need Scholar Al Quylar to finish of the Strange Black Rock heritage.

Nice Sig / Stat Generator

2006-03-31T10:53:00.000-08:00

Phatboy apparently runs and created a nice signature generator for EQ2. What it does, is run a script against the EQ2Players website and generate an image for you with your characters vital stats - ranking wise, that is.

He means it as a signature generator but of course my first thought is, maybe I can put this on the blog.

For example - Tezcatlipocca

Want to use it yourself? Check the url of the sig for Tez -

http://phatboyg.com/eq2sig/invertnoframe289897117.jpg

That number is the characters number on EQ2Players. Figure out what yours is, replace it in that URL, and it'll describe your character instead.

Nice stuff. Thanks Phatboy.

Stinking Sands

2006-03-31T08:01:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 75% XP. Logged in to find no Crypt Tempests available, so in an attempt to get them to spawn I killed every beetle in the hallway by that gnome Bramblehair. And guess what - it worked this time. Finished off the Cryptkeeper's book, as well as two agonized essence quests. Also found a quest starter for Bloodsabers - I was always wondering where people got that quest - when a guildy asked me to help them get that last 4% to level.

So we ran off to the Sinking Sands. I'm not sure if I was simply tired (I doubt it), but that was a boring time. This was an XP grind group for sure, in a zone that was way too high for me, and I watched them fight reds and oranges while all my spells got resisted. I kept the tank nice and warded, but he really didn't need me anyway as he also had a templar. We weren't trying to do *anything* other than find things to kill, and I'd much rather have a goal or quests to complete. Got a lot of discovery XP and a bunch of mob-killing before I gated out and logged.

Logged in early today and checked the broker. Bought some spell upgrades and am looking for a couple things. Would love a Master I Anger of the Ancients (Encounter damage spell) but prices were very high, especially for a spell I will outgrow sooner than later. Also want Howl of the Ancients, but there were none for sale other than a ridiculous Adept III. And I saw Glimmering Teeth for sale.

Some yahoo had listed his Glimmering Tooth at 2 plat early in the day. When I rechecked, two other people had followed his lead, along with a fourth who was selling at 75g and change. It was really high, but I bought it and I'm glad I did. Sheesh, that probably was nothing more than 3 stacks of tuber strands at the price I'm getting for them. Crafted my Shroud of the Manastone and discovered the last step - Kill Varsoon and take his manastone.

Got over to Thundering Steppes and the servers went down - so I camped near the hermit for the first step of the Varsoon access quest. I'm now quester # 200 on The Bazaar.

Alts and the Bank Shuffle

2006-03-30T08:05:00.000-08:00

And just as I noted the previous post - I did it. Created all four new characters and spent most of the night switching their stuff around. The plan is, take the new Huehueteotl and get him over to Qeynos first. Probably should do it fairly soon, but I'm not sure.

Got Huey leveled up to 5 on the Isle of Refuge; it's fun playing the lowbie wizard game. This consisted of find a mob, auto attack and debuff, and then button mash all your nukes. I was enjoying myself until I realized I had lots more work to do so I logged him just after dinging 5 and getting his HO button.

My Ogre wizard has a mohawk and looks... unusual in his robe. My paladin/shadowknight looks fierce and whitish with his bald head. The new Camaxtli is a baby-faced swashbuckler; but sheesh I really like the look of Chalchitlicue my beautiful Barb lady conjuror. A nice blue robe and a carefully manufactured face with blue eyes make her look HAWT.

Tlaloc : Ding 41 provisioner. Mmmm, creamed ice coffee and snapper peppersteak sandwiches. He's left with two stacks of meat to cook then perhaps some actual adventuring.

It might be a good idea; to keep all my alts spread out that is. Tlaloc is #2 at level 22. If I get a betrayed Ogre finished he'll be at 17 or higher. Or maybe, that idea failed before, and I should just be streaky about it. Well, I'll just have to deal with it later. Not quitting Tez anytime soon.

Tezcatlipocca : Got on long enough to help a guildy finish Axe From The Past. Needed to finish up our access quest, and while we got The Banished and Windfeather, Incaeulubius was not up and we didn't really want to make him pop. No sweat for me; only needed Windfeather.

Windfeather definitely got himself nerfed. I was one-shotted once, or maybe twice, by this rotten bird when he was an epic. I remember it clearly because it just seemed so.......... unfair. But what I got last night was a 28^^^ that realistically, I probably could have gotten alone. We then got a group of four and killed the Octogorgon; boy was that overkill. During the fighting in the Cove I hit 2500 undead and am now an accomplished undead slayer.

Gated back to Qeynos and dealt with selling. I am now the proud owner of 13 plat. This is just what's banked, not what the characters actually have. Would be great to increase the pace substantially and sell it, but priority comes on having fun.

Was also amazed at the prices for some things. Sold some electrum and turquoise which were sitting in alts' banks - for 10s each. That's for a T2 jewel people. And I thought I was being ridiculous; the other seller was selling for 25s. Similarly, my 100+ tuber strands are selling for an astounding 25s each. The other guy, was selling them for 50. And what's really strange about this is I was still placing books, and puttering inside my apartment, when I sold out of the metals and sold maybe 20 of the tuber strands.

And just before logging, ventured back into Crypt of Betrayal. And they were there ! My lovely, impossible-to-find Crypt Tempests. Killed four of them - two to go. And with the servers coming down, I'm hopeful that I can log on and take two more to finally progress, or even finish, that irritating book.

Alt Indecision

2006-03-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

Sat at the character select screen for awhile, trying to decide what to make two alts. I've got Tezcatlipocca; Tlaloc; and Camaxtli, my swashbuckler. My Test characters are Hatereaper the Troll Shadowknight, and Bonebank the Human Necro. So what should my other alts be?

They would include a conjuror I'm thinking, except that I can't decide what race to make my conjuror. No elves; I just would not enjoy any elf. Already have two humans, troll, barbarian, and kerran. I'm deleting a froglok because, well, frogs are seeming kind of stupid. Hate the look of the erudites, which is a shame. Dwarves don't work for conjurors.

So we're left with gnome, ogre, halfling, and ratonga. A halfling might be interesting, except the stats really blow; better for a swashbuckler. A gnome would work, but that doesn't excite me much. I'd like to have an ogre, but worry that it would seem stupid later like the Iksar did. But I really, really want an Ogre somewhere. I'm undecided on the ratonga; good stats and an intelligent choice, but do I want to be a rat?.

Wizard is tough too. Most of the analysis carries over to that choice, except that an Ogre Wizard sounds really cool - the difference between manipulating others to fight for you, versus killing them yourself. And if I can't make myself play any other wizard race, I should just be a human.

Maybe - what I really need is this.
A new Halfling Swashbuckler named Camaxtli.
A new Barbarian Conjuror named Chalchitlicue. Female.
A new Ogre Wizard named Huehueteotl.
A new Ogre Paladin.

This would require another name for the Pally - Huitzilopochtli would be good, that's a warrior god; but damn that's hard for people to type. Also Teoyamqui - god of dead warriors. Ometochtli perhaps for fun - drunken rabbit warrior god ! ( I mispell these because it works better mispelled, in case anyone notices).

And the good part of this is, if the Ogre Wizard starts to seem stupid, I can delete him and just go human. Or something else. I'm confident the other three choices will be fun.

Sheesh this would be so much easier if they'd quit limiting the number of our slots.

Greenhoods

2006-03-29T08:32:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Maybe 25% XP. Spent quite some time trying to finish the last mercenary quest in Nektulos; this requires you to kill the Nerius pirate captain. He's a ^^ so he's no pushover, and though I took him down probably 12 times he just refused to drop the deed I was looking for. Rotten jerk. So after getting bored on this, I made my way back to Zek.

At last, I finished another tombstone quest. Just the two higher-level ones, Sullon and Derris, left to go. Also started the Rescue of the Greenhoods heritage quest; one step was a timed request to kill 15 different orcs. There's no way I could have done it without Ogaming's walkthrough pinpointing the locations of the mobs. Took them down that way, with the most difficult being a trio of ^ green mobs near the Vallon lumbermill.

Just barely was able to kill one of the trio, then I ran like a scared kitten. Medded up and after returning, there were only two of them. That's odd - I would have thought that the one would do the magic repop, but he doesn't. So took down the other two, and repeated for the kill. Sullon centurions were easy - four double down guards on the road in the Mystic Forest, plus one at the gate; and the Vallon raiders were in the fort next to the human fort, triple down greens and pinks.

Next step is killing a 38 ^^^ so I'm gonna need a group. Spent the rest of the night helping a guildy through Training is a Shield up to Emporer Fyst. Also received Pinecrusher, a very nice one-handed crushing weapon, as a reward after finishing the Deathfist Access quest. Harvested like a madman, hoping to either fill my bags or get the Glimmering tooth, but neither one happened. And with the broker down, there was no real need to head back to my inn room, so I logged out.

Life and Light

2006-03-28T08:31:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 43, 10% XP. Spent some time in Ruins of Varsoon finishing a book quest and trying to catch a group for both the Life and Death tomes; I got the former. Hooked up with a guy who was running a four-character hydra, and he was good at it. But no matter how hard I tried, couldn't quite make it to Death.

So went back out, and with some help from a passing warlock took out two of three parts of the Cove of Decay access quest; Incaleubius the skeleton, and Banished the centaur. Windfeather I passed on, but I'll have to check that thing again; I got different reports about whether he was an epic, or not. Also got my last three spears from marauders, and headed over to Nektulos.

Got a new Far Seas Req in Nek and took care of part of it, and also finish Stalker Pulsarian's quest to take out skeletons. One part required me to take down Gul Thex Elites, and that was kind of fun. Even grey/pink, he was a tough mob to kill, although neither could he hurt me so I was never in any danger. His rogue arts were just hard to deal with. Also got the troll his giant head, finished off both Shadowmen quests (language and L&L), and killed the ungrateful troll in the Commonlands. Then I went back to work on Return of the Light.

The High Priest spawned easy - or was simply up. You are supposed to stand near the decaying remains and clear them, and I did this twice. I then checked a tower marked as having him in there, and there he was, standing there cowering. A few minutes later and I was ready for Bloodskull Valley.

But getting to the Valley was easier said than done. It's on the ultra-extreme south of the Commonlands, accessed by traveling down a canyon from south of some Bloodskulls on the eastern part of the map. Confused ? Yeah, I was too. The way to find it is to go to the Hidden Canyon griffin, follow the wall to the west, and you come upon a bunch of undead in front of a canyon. It took over half an hour but eventually I found the place.

There was a group trying to take out the General, and they were full, so I stood around and waited for promised help after they tried. Kept whacking undead and orcs to pad my kill totals. And quickly, they exited unsuccessfully and someone had to leave the group. Perfect! I was in.

Bloodskull Valley is an INSANE instance. You go in and are mobbed by perhaps 25 ^^ orcs with one or two ^^^'s to make it more dangerous. Luckily we had a good tank, an Ogre Guardian, and between my wards and the inquisitor's heals we kept everyone alive long enough to knock down all of them.

Then you get another wave. Yikes.

Then you get a third wave. By this time, I'm fully comprehending why people complain about this heritage quest; you just couldn't do this at a level appropriate time unless you were a raid force. And you'd have to be GOOOD at it too to handle that many mobs at once; nobody is good at it, however, in their 20's. General Drull, our target, was part of the third wave and after he fell, we ran out and completed the quest.

I was hanging around to help out two other people who wanted to complete the quest, but after 45 minutes I figured I was waiting too long so I logged off. Completed a few more quests for Mooshga - I wasn't done with her, just needed to see Mugwump in Nektulos first - and one or two I picked up in the Commonlands. Next session - get rid of the stone beetles and I'll be temporarily finished with the Commonlands.

Also decided to re-create Huehueteotl and Eheccatl. An Iksar conjuror? What was I thinking ? And any froglok doesn't excite me anymore. Not sure what I'll create in their places.

600 Quests

2006-03-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Maybe 90% XP. Close to 43; if you do enough low-level quests, apparently you can get levels out of them. Tez started this big quest sweep with a mere 5% XP and hasn't killed an XP'able monster for several days.

The big news is passing the milestone of 600 quests. This also puts him in the top 250 on the server. Finished up all the Crossroads quests except for the broken V'Tal Narin.

One required Tez to sneak into Freeport and visit the Temple of War. After dodging through the outer Freeport zone and the Sewers, he emerged into Freeport and got close to Missionary G'Zule. And what do I see ? Standing right next to him is a ^^^ guard who clearly could stomp me flat. What am I going to do ? I eventually decided to inch closer, and closer, and closer to the Missionary and see if my hail would hit him. And it did, with the guard out of aggro range. Not only did I finish off the quest I needed, I received two more from G'Zule. Thanks pal!

Also did the Fallen Gate access quest, since I emerged from the Sewers right next to the guy. Piece of cake, all of it, especially at level 42; but there was one irritant to the quest. You talk to the NPC who teleports you into a special instanced zone. After you're done with the zone, what do you do ? Well, the quest is for Freeporters generally, and you're supposed to talk to your friend once again, but he teleports you right next to a city gate with a nice ^^^ level 45 guard standing there, who two-shotted me before the loading screen even finished up.

So tip for Qeynosians : Teleport OUT OF the Thexian Meeting to avoid a death.

Did a bunch of sabotage quests - these in particular give very good XP. These are divided into tiers; Tier 1 all require you to run around the Commonlands and do various acts of mischief consisting of clicking on something. Tez finished all of these. Tier 2, require you to sneak into the city and do various acts of mayhem on a timer. This will require more study and dedication to finish off.

Got started with the Return of the Light quest; someone was camping the lion needed, and I was wandering the area doing gathering. He sent me a tell and said, C'mere it just popped, meaning the Lightbringer Wisp; and finally I have the quest starter. Killed the lion with my helper, and then checked on the two Orc Captains.

Captain Ogof, I went to his location, and he was up. Bam, one Captain down.

Spent hours trying to get Captain Gaer. His placeholder, Sergeant Reag, popped ten times before giving up the Captain. He was on a 15 or 20 minute timer, and I spent a lot of time knocking out the orcs in the area. The orcs have pretty good body loot, all things considered; got several antique treasures and odd things like that, 2 stacks of steel relics (status items), more orc parts than a whole guild would need, and coins from most of them. And eventually, instead of pop number eleven, I get the guy I'm after.

Next step was to kill the High Priest of Val'Marr, but I didn't have another long camp in me.

Gathered a bunch of beetles and moths in the Wailing Caves; the ?'s are all linked as far as I can tell. One will spawn somewhere in the cavern, and another will spawn a minute or two later. Killed a bunch of skeletal orcs during downtime generated by this gathering, and never did finish any of the collections. Did put a bunch of duplicates on the Qeynos broker for insane prices. Have to come back here and gather more, and take out undead.

My titles are progressing. I am at over 1000 kills each for orcs and gnolls, and 2300 for undead. Believe I killed 500 orcs trying to spawn Captain Gaer. Wish I could find a spot with several linked pre-teen triple-down undead; there is none in Commonlands I believe, but will have to check out the ocean there again.

Made my way back to Thundering Steppes in search of Sabertooth Trackers, and got two of them. It's possible that the trackers spawn after you kill the guards in each tower, and if that's correct that will make the camp a bit easier. Still, the tower guards do not regenerate in five minutes so it's definitely a camp. Wish I could find more ?'s in this zone - I believe this is the place for ants, as my trip to Stormhold proved that place to be spider-gathering heaven. Plain red ants aren't even for sale on the broker.

Went over to Coldwind Cove, got another Marauder spear (3 to go), and even got my first Prophet prayer shawl (5 to go, ugh!), before calling it a day.

Empty Commonlands

2006-03-24T08:14:00.000-08:00

Tlaloc : Ding 40 provisioner. Made fish steaks, refined my shallots, and began making a stack of carp sandwiches. Tlaloc is getting close to outleveling Tez which would be kind of funny.

One irritant I tripped across was with cream. Cream is the same cost as aerated mineral water, and apparently counts as a "liquid". The game kept trying to select this first, instead of the mineral water. That's annoying. Not exactly a problem, but definitely an annoyance.

Tezcatlipocca : Maybe 55% XP. Completed several quests in the commonlands. Got Madam Vi her water, and delivered it to thirsty nomads; did two kill quests involving orc skeletons; finished JP Feterman's tour of Commonlands; got crab meat and then fixed Mooshga's pot; and maybe one or two others.

While Antonica and Qeynos are pretty busy on the Bazaar server, Commonlands and Freeport seem like ghost towns. I saw a grand total of three people last night. I guess it's not just the Test server. And this makes me even gladder I did what I did, and created my evils on Test. In any event, I ran across the empty Commonlands and got things done.

Did not see the Lightbringer Wisp tonight either. Maybe I'm just going to have to camp him; God bless it, but that would be irritating. To camp it you need to hang out by the druid ring, which is surrounded by lions, elephants, and wild dogs. Not a thing I'd have any interest in killing. And I'm not harvesting anything except tuber strands.

I also had fun with my disease spell which hits everything in an encounter for 200 damage. Anything about level 12 and double or triple down, would get one-shotted with this spell. I amused myself by wasting orcs and skeletons with this on several occasions.

The group of orcs begins to cower, seeing me in their midst. They stand mutely and without moving while I target them, and begin to cast. The spell hits, and all four fall to the ground dead, one with a dying curse. And I pick up corpse loot and coins, and add four more notches to my Orc Hunter title.

Brandus ! You Betrayer !

2006-03-23T07:50:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Started out by visiting Elowys Laceleaf in the Thundering Steppes, and giving her the moth she asked for. And the most irritating thing - the next thing she asks for - is a spotted yellow butterfly. Sheesh, I have all these extra moths and you want *another* butterfly. Not just any butterfly mind you - this is the rarest one.

Back to Oakmyst. Start gathering, and within 15 minutes, I am lucky enough to gather one. Another visit to Elowys and Desperately Seeking Moths is finally finished. Next one is Ants - but I decided to pass on this for the moment. I can probably get ants in Stormhold I'm thinking, or maybe just buy them from the broker.

Instead I returned to the Commonlands and loaded up on quests. Got started on the Crossroads quests, and finished up two of them. All the guards were pinked out so it was no problem to walk around inside there. One quest requires me to sneak into Freeport, so that will be difficult if not impossible. G'zule is right outside the Temple of War in North Freeport; and the path to reach him from the Thieve's Way defintely has a guard pathing through it. Have to scout it out with a Freeport character.

Some NPC's refused to talk to me. Not sure if it's because I'm a Qeynosian, or if it's because I'm too high level. But the bug squashing for instance, which can be picked up right outside the main gate, was not available. And then there's Brandus.

I finished off his first quest, involving the Ratonga, and came back and got a second one. This was to collect some debts from Andre Blackhammer in the Crossroads. I walk up and say hi, and he attacks so I kill him. I return to Brandus, who laughs at me and tells me to go back to Qeynos and smell some flowers and pet a deer. You little punk! I enjoyed his quest series when playing Hatereaper, and he teases me by giving me just two of them. Just burns me up, even though I have to give the writers credit. That was a well-written and scripted quest.

The Commonlands is a neat zone, but it was a little dull running back and forth over such a big zone for easy quests. Ended up logging off early.

EQ - one - Players

2006-03-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

Well I just discovered that Everquest the original now has player profiles. They're not bad; they show equipment, level and stats, and apparently would show more if I was an active player and subscribed to the game, such as rankings.

I re-linked my characters from the original game on the sidebar. They're all still there, including my Bazaar mule, who was level one during the EQ server merges and was supposedly going to be deleted. None of my characters has the advanced items enabled; here's a profile of someone who does, and what they show.

And none of the things they are tracking really interests me. It's just raw personal stats; no kill tracking, no number of deaths, certainly no quests completed. I really am a creature of goals and statistics when I play these games. I'd love to see how Hammer ranks against other players.

Dare I do it, or not ? Dare I play Everquest Live again?

But now, my previous choices come home to roost. My station account with EQ is different than my account with EQ2. I don't know why I did that, but I did. According to the SOE knowledgebase, there's no freebie possible, nor ability to merge accounts. If I could, I'd merge the two accounts in a heartbeat. Then Station Access would let me get at all my characters for $22 a month. That's a deal compared to the alternatives - if I wanted to simply resubscribe it'd cost me $16 + 18 = $34 per month. Two accounts, one for EQ2 and one for EQ1.

Transferring characters for a fee costs a fortune. To really move everyone would require spending perhaps $175 plus the paltry $20 for the software key. Yeah, right.

I could pay for a new EQ key and build characters up from the beginning. Get the station access pass, buy EQ for my EQ2 account, and transfer platinum and stuff from the old account, to the new account. So that's a cost of $20 + 15, with a new station access subscription at $22 instead of the $16 I currently pay. That's much more reasonable. Except that by doing so, I lose my characters.

Well - maybe I'll check it out. Maybe not.

A Freeport Newb

2006-03-22T08:34:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 50% XP. After checking again for a sabertooth tracker (and finding one ! 2 of 10 now) had Tez head off for the Commonlands boat dock. Picked up the 999 year old port quest, and Brandus Levine's quest, then zoned into the Ruins in Freeport.

I haven't been here since the update where they reworked all the 1-20 classes. It's quite a bit different. And despite spending a fair amount of time running around the zone, I didn't get too many ?'s. Frustration was building when I walked up to the newbie quest giver and got a surprise.

You see, I'm from Qeynos. The general rule is that Freeport NPC's won't talk to Qeynosians. But this guy did, and I got the beginning of a long quest line meant for the new players. The funniest part, was each NPC's insistence that I was actually a Qeynosian, my heated denials, and the awarding of the quest afterward.

The Freeport quests are well done and interesting. Great job Sony Devs. I finished them up over the course of the evening, and also answered a critical question : where is a good place to find moths ? The answer, which surprised me, is the Sunken City.

Ruins - Not many of them anymore. Too many statues and wooden palisades.
Graveyard - Few and far between.
Sprawl - A few, but the zone lags really bad.

After trying all of these, I kept finding them in the dry part of the Sunken City. There are limited spots that they spawn in, and little lag. Just run around on the dry parts and grab every piece you can get your grubby little hands on. Got the striped brown moth I needed, finally, after months of the quest languishing in my journal. Much better than paying 12g for the odd one that appears on the broker. Loaded up on them and have maybe 10 various ones.

One other surprise were the ghosts wandering there. That knowledge will come in handy once I manage to start the Ghost lore & legend quest.

Afterwards, headed out to the Commonlands and found the treasure for the 999 year old port quest. I like this quest - Hatereaper did it and the experience was pretty much the same. Then began working on Brandus Levine's quest. Needed to kill 10 more assassins when I noticed the time and logged off.

Quester #330 on the Bazaar server now. Time to return to Thundering Steppes and progress the desperate moth quest.

Killing Pink Heroics

2006-03-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 40% or so XP. Had Tez start out by clearing out the T4 herbs from his backpack. This resulted in an awesome three tradeskill levels; Ding 33 alchemist with 90% XP. Too bad he didn't have enough to get to 34 but I just got bored with the whole thing anyway. Picked up every discovery experience available, and burned up my metal by making tempers as well. Sold all the junk back to the vendor for 7s and change each, and bought another rosewood box with the proceeds.

Also checked on Palladium torques. I could have one crafted, but our jeweler is taking a little vacation from EQ2, and the difference in buying a torque, and selling my palladium, was pretty minimal so I said the heck with it and just bought one and turned it in. Al Quylar was really nice about it (NOT!) and sent me off to kill the Life and Death books again.

Adventuring started out with Varsoon naturally, and completed a few more quests and progressed almost everything in there. Didn't get either book; need an apprentice to finish that halfling's quest; and also working book quests inside the zone. After I got stuck, and finished up with the Zek access part in Varsoon, I decided to try and solo the old Zek access quest.

It was pretty crazy. You find yourself on a boat that looks a whole lot like the boat from the old tutorial; the Far Journey I believe was its name. The water is awesome, the waves realistic, and the seasickness quite palpable. The boats are simply an incredibly well done zone artistically. A whole bunch of orcs keep spawning on the main deck of the ship, and your job is to kill them all. As they were all grey-pinked out for me, it was pretty easy. Even got to rest between waves and wait for mana to regenerate.

Me - "Here now lad - don't mind me. I'm just resting before I kill you"
Orc - "Right then, I'll just cower while I wait."

Then Captain Bloodstain spawned, along with my old buddy Gawar the Bad. A level 30 heroic, pinked out, and yet he was able to hit me and hurt me. It looked for a bit like I would survive it, but in the end he was too tough for me and I went down. Have to try it again in another 2 levels or so.

After this I went back to Varsoon, and nearly finished up every quest when I got a request to help kill Varsoon himself. Sounded like fun, so I went ahead and helped. Three waves of spider/alien beings spawn and you need to kill them. They were cake, and grey. Next came a named creature, looked something like a lamia from the enchanted lands, and she went down. Last was Varsoon. All were fairly easy and the two nameds dropped master chests. Nice. Unfortunately I didn't get anything but oh well.

So made my way back to Thundering Steppes, looking for sabertooth trackers and not finding any. Finished up the other book quest - the drowned footsoldiers were not that hard to find, all you really had to do was run the dead river a few times and keep your eyes open for them. Went back to the Centaur camp again and killed more centaurs when I saw a shout about killing the Octogorgon.

It was a piece of cake. A group of five of us took the thing out; well, that is, we had a group of five, but one of the pallys ran ahead and half-killed the thing before the rest of us even got there. Then we took down the epic skeleton for the Stilletto quest. Ding, I have my polished granite tomahawk ! One more heritage down. I followed the group for awhile, back to Varsoon, and progressed the quest up to creating the manastone.

What you actually do, apparently, is craft the shroud of the manastone. This is a level 9 recipe that requires a glimmering tooth - the same things I've been selling on the broker as I harvest them. Even better, there were none for sale when I tried to buy it. Bah. Maybe I can harvest it myself. So I'm stuck there.

Next I headed down to Stormhold and finished off my quests there. The bone blood soldiers were a HUGE pain in the @$$. They only spawn two at a time, on a ten minute timer, deep in the zone. I needed 15. Spent the down time looking for easy skeletons to kill and updated the Sir Valinayle quest by doing so. Then I had to kill Lord Gydak.

This guy was fun. He's a big troll on the lowest level of Stormhold, in the tunnels. I was nervous about taking him on, but he was level 28 with maybe 8 helpers - including 2 bone blood soldiers which made me happy. After a long and tiring fight, burning every drop of mana and using my wards, Gydak went down. Fun stuff ! I even got a legendary bow, Stormfire, for my trouble.

Now I have a single quest left to do in Stormhold - which I haven't started at all - and that is the Scions of Darkness quest. Talked to a guy who did it and he said its frustrating getting the scions to spawn, so I figured I'd wait on the quest until later. It's not like I'll forget about this one.

With a much cleaner journal I logged off. Next, I just *have* to go harvest these stupid moths or I'm going to go insane.

Was I Wrong ??

2006-03-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

One thing I've complained ceaselessly about since go-live day has been the restriction on the number of characters. On go-live day, you could only have four characters in the game. Period. No alts. And this in a game that offers 24 character choices. And which is the "2" version of a game with effectively unlimited character creation. This lead to Quitting The Game Take 1.

They eventually upped the amount a little bit - to six characters. Wow, big whoop guys. Still, they were going in the right direction. With this plus the ability to play on Test, you could have 12 characters total which is half of the game. So I went ahead and restarted, and used up every one of those character slots.

Remember, this is back in the bad old days of not really having your class until level 20. I forced my way through a lot of content to get several up to their real class, and kept at it with every one of them. This, plus the general difficulty of the game, lead to boredom and Quitting The Game Take 2.

Now I'm playing again and almost exclusively playing my main, Tezcatlipocca. He's a questaholic and must do all quests. He's in a good and helpful guild. And I have to say I'm having more fun concentrating on him and seeing the new zones and completing quests which I've never seen before. Which prompts the question title of this post.

Was I wrong? Was Sony trying to do me a favor by limiting my character slots ? It's not quite clear to me at this point because I've yet to put any serious time into an alt - and Tlaloc the Provisioner doesn't count. At present I have five live characters and three on Test. The question is more one of, which do I delete or sell, rather than what should I create next. The new newbie quests are pretty neat; and I may get to a level again where I don't want to go up. But maybe not.

I really think the sinister explanation is the only realistic one. Sony decided that certain people would have more subscriptions, more "enhanced" subscriptions aka station access subscribers, and people would buy more game copies, if they were limited on the number of character slots available. Cold-hearted analysis makes you think that if you have one guy buying multiple accounts for every cancellation, the company earns more money. If station access passes get sold well (and by all appearances, they do sell well), for every cancellation the restriction brings, the company earns more money. As much as I love this game and don't engage in Sony-bashing much, I'm confident this is the reason. And yet, now my experiences are pushing me away from alts.

I can say one thing for sure though - Play a main character guys. Alt-a-holics should stop and concentrate on one character (I'm looking at you Geldon), and go forward with him, to really enjoy the game.

Green Quests Galore

2006-03-20T07:55:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 41, then 42. Started out by helping a guildy in Cazic-Thule. This is a cool zone; all maya pyramids filled with lizards. Straight out of EQ1 I guess, though I never managed to adventure in that zone. We fought for awhile in the courtyards outside the temples - everything is a ^^^ nasty so looks like you never go in there alone. This was ding to 41; only needed a little XP anyway.

Afterward I noted how insanely many green quests I have and got back to work. Finished off the Shiny Brass Halberd; the Captain was pinked-out and easy to duo. Also progressed a book quest up to another really hard part - sabertooth trackers, apparently only spawn by the alternate Thundering Steppes entrance and while I got one, I need another 9, and god help me if I need three sets of 10. I did it by picking a group of gnolls, killing the diviner, and running into the farmers fields. The instant the encounter broke, the diviner repopped, and I ran back and killed it again. 30 kills later I get trackers. It was kind of fun in a busy way.

Finished Selwynn's errands, finally, and moved a bunch of Zek quests along. The Zek quests are part of a long and involved series for the most part, and are really nicely done to keep you busy. Wish I had managed to do them when they were more appropriate. All the way through Quint's quests,and Birchbarks, now ready to start on Lutes.

Also entered Ruins of Varsoon solo and got the Cove of Decay access quest, part 1 of 3, and made my way back to Coldwind Centaur Camp. Yes, the same place where I camped for a week killing centaurs. Everything there is grey except for level 31 ^^^ heroics, right by the tents. Guess where I needed to go to update the quest. Yep, inside the tents. I sucked up the death and finished part 2 of 3, but to start the 3rd one you apparently need to stand inside the tent for a short period of time, and that isn't possible with 3 heroics wailing on you no matter how tough your wards are.

So I left, worked other quests, and dinged 42. After walking calmly back into the tent, instead of being killed quickly, I got the quest. Need to kill some tough heroics plus an epic so I'll have to wait until I get help to go further with this one.

Re-entered Varsoon. Tried to get the Tome of Death unsuccessfully, but did manage to get another couple of book quests in there, along with the Tome of Life. Logged out in front of Scholar Al Quylar; need to get the Palladium Torque made.

Tlaloc : Ding 39. The final stretch, and Tlaloc used up all foodstuffs gathered by Tez, and was 1% shy of 39. Bought some pig meat and made enough pork jerky to ding just before the recipe turned grey.

But Tlaloc's freedom didn't last long. Over the weekend Tez gathered more and bequeathed him a bunch of additional food, and refueled with vitality Tlaloc should try it again. Made some Wild Apple Juice and logged off.

Link Update

2006-03-17T09:09:00.000-08:00

I'm enjoying keeping my links up to date, and gathering the bloggers who write about the game. Life in Qeynos is a pure character blog like mine. I'm still catching up on it but it looks excellent. And I reorganized my categories a bit.

Provisssszzzzzzzzzz

2006-03-16T00:44:00.000-08:00

Tlaloc : Ding 37, then 38, provisioner. Much crafting of coffee, blasted samoflanges, and pork sandwiches; which lead to the next tier of crafting including honey fizzlepop, griffin steaks, and green tea.

The honey fizzlepop was an error; should have made honey liqueur. In any event, one stack of griffin meat, and rolled oats to be made into rolled oat malted milk, remain until Tlaloc has exhausted his raws.

I've been absolutely determined that I needed to finish off this crafting first, before any more adventuring happens. Tlaloc's bank was pretty full of raws, plus he needs the ability to work with T5 harvests (Feerrott etc) soon since Tez is adventuring in that area. And without total determination this just wasn't going to happen.

You see, I keep getting BORED. Staring at that crafting table, waiting until the next item gets finished, whacking the create button again, and repeating the process. The whole fun is harvesting the items, planning the thing(s) to be made, looking up what to make, and using the products. The actual crafting has literally got me falling asleep in my chair. This is two nights in a row that I'm asleep before midnight, which is unheard of. At least there's hope - the "no intermediate combine" change which is coming should make this no longer an issue.

Anytime I have real issues falling asleep I should just break out Tlaloc, buy some junk on the broker, and craft. I'll be asleep in 20 minutes.

Tonight, at least, I'll be finished with crafting and can go do something more fun. Except.......... Tez needs to get crafting too........... can I stand the boredom ?

Quint and Tombstones

2006-03-15T13:54:00.000-08:00

First thing I did after reading this thread – was to create a new character in Qeynos and verify the screenshot. Yes, he does actually say he wants shark fin soup. Yes, I’m completely convinced the reason he says that is this thread and developer humor. Nice touch guys.

Tezcatlipocca : Worked a few more quests. Quint Cerlius the gnome's quests. Needed to kill orcs near the druid rings, according to the quest; was a bit harder than it sounded. It turned out they needed to be Deathfist orcs. That wasn’t the main problem though, the main problem was the groups of fairies kill-stealing the orcs.

I ended up running around the area and tagging any Deathfist that popped as quickly as possible; then leaving the non-deathfist orcs for the fairies to kill. Was a bit difficult since I couldn’t med up to full mana each time, and once I just bashed the creature to death in a very close fight. Still, I lost 4 of the guys I wanted to the rotten fairies so I killed them too a few times for the Fairy Wing quest.

Next quest in this series was to find a bunch of notes pinned to trees. EQ2Maps to the rescue; completed this with no problem. One note was pinned to a stump used in another quest, and was difficult to get. Patience and carefully positioning the mouse pointer prevailed and I got the update and finished off the quest.

Also got invited into a group and finished off Trial #6 for Grozmag. Next step : Emporer Fyst. That will be challenging for sure.

I got another tombstone as well, which gives me four of one type. Next time I’m just going to offer a 1 gold bounty on anyone helping me get the lowest-level tombstones because they are so hard to get. These four quests are irritating me to no end, with the requirement to finish it basically being serendipity. The tome quests are not exactly much better either – no drop “!” harvests. At least they are out of sight on my quest journal, which really is where the tombstones should have been placed too.

One thing I’m going to have to do is Call back home quickly and reset my wholesaler task. You see, I got the current one before I understood what the various harvests actually were, and I’m asked to gather shallots which are one of the rare food items for this tier. Um, no, I’m not giving you guys the shallots when I can provision with them or sell them for 20x more than your reward.

Tlaloc : Ding 36 provisioner. Continued making lots of pinked-out recipes, got to Grilled Octopus which was green, and dinged thereby greying that out. Time to work on Blasted Samoflanges, which first require Tequila and Gin to be made, both just barely XP-giving recipes.

This was a long provisioning session, the first in quite a while, and once I found myself dozing off (3 gins completed) I logged for the night.

Karath Smoothmane; and Dead At Keyboard

2006-03-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 55% XP. Started out by beginning two book quests in the Thundering Steppes. These are, amazingly enough, the last book quests available now in the library in South Qeynos. I had thought, a year ago, that there were more available for higher levels but I guess I was wrong or they've been removed.

One quest required gnolls in the pit, and the other undead wandering the fields, by the Antonica zone-in. Worked on gnolls first, and it was pretty simple to find and take them down; problem was they were ^^ so it required a lot of effort. Got bored with it when diviners came up - I hoped that the ones in Blackburrow would count instead (they don't).

The undead were a lot of fun. There are three sets of ruins with zombies standing around, and Tez cleared them and got the special mobs to spawn - usually a big group of double or triple downs, or sometimes a ^^^ heroic named. It didn't matter that many weren't needed for the quest, it was just fun to destroy the mobs so quickly and thoroughly, and these were all one down arrow mobs.

Eventually I needed to get drowned footsoldiers to spawn, and made the attempt. They spawn in the dead river and I had a lot of undead to clear; but only managed to get one to spawn, and ran across a second one while traveling. That will just have to be done catch-as-catch can, it was too boring and difficult. All in all, though, the book quests are both half done or more which is good news. Tried to get more crypt tempests in Crypt of Betrayal too but they weren't there.

So got bored with all of that and headed over to the Feerrott. Have I said that I love the Feerrott ? Yes, probably, but I'll say it again. Music and visuals, mobs that are hard to see, and good memories of EQ1 make it enjoyable.

Now in Feerrott as I write this is a guildy. He's been sitting there since Saturday, the same spot, which makes it four full days. Nobody seems to know who he is exactly, or what the deal is. Now most likely, he got called away from his computer and just left the game running and PC on. That seems pretty weird. I also like the explanation of "Dead At Keyboard", DAK, as oppposed to AFK, "Away From Keyboard". I mean, who does that ? Most people turn the thing off, or at least use it a fair amount necessitating exiting the game. Not this guy. Weird any way you slice it. Perhaps he's slumped back in his chair in his apartment and nobody has noticed an awful smell yet.

Enough gallows humor.

Got a whole bunch of additional quests and explored the entry area thoroughly. Finished off by my writs and probably should get more; but at level 40 I get different writs so we'll see which ones I can get. The XP was really good; killing mostly blues, but groups of 3 double-down blues were really nasty. Finished a couple more quests and noticed how full my journal was getting again, so I decided to move back to Zek.

In Zek I did trial #5 for Grozmag; was doable at level 40, got pretty banged up but survived it. Worked several other quests and found one more of those irritating tombstones before logging off.

Tlaloc also continued with grey recipes. He's got so much stuff to make; I probably ought to just get it out of the way. Maybe tonight.

Quests again

2006-03-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 40, 5% XP. This was another quest cleanup weekend for the most part. Got ten treants for Jonovan, and should be able to get another dozen versions from him. Progressed the series with the Dark Elves until I got to Master Szin. Got quite a ways with Green Hoods, and several other quests in Zek.

At one point I got sucked into a raid party to go after Deathfist Citadel and get Emporer Fyst. It was very dysfunctional but that was OK - I went for the experience. You can sneak in through the sewers, and you apparently need to kill every named creature inside to get the Emporer to spawn. We tried, but wiped as we tried to get into the Citadel - Sewers were a success, the courtyard was a success, but climbing the ladders and taking care of the guards on the ramparts was a quick death for us all.

Finished up with Kleron too. Good riddance. One step required me to kill dockhands, who are semi-rare pops that require you to keep the camps cleared on the beach of Nek. What a long and big hassle that was; at least I got a lot of guild status goodies from the body loot.

Dinged 40 in the last minutes of the weekend, and visited Desert of Flames for the first time. The big thing I found was, it is WAAAAYYYY too hard for me right now. I see guildys there all the time at level 43, but at 40 it clearly is still too hard by half. We got killed once wandering around Maj Dul, and after that the group broke up. I ran out to Thundering Steppes to get ready to work more book quests and logged off.

Heritage quests

2006-03-10T11:12:00.000-08:00

Heritage Quests - Next Steps :

Strange Black Rock - Speak Barbarian; get two books in ROV; Complete Where Will This Lead Me ? quest.

Axe From the Past - Octogorgon. Duoable.
Stilletto - Get the Hand.
Both quests - Need to complete Prison Break first in RoV.

Dragoon K'naae - Kill T'Sanne. Might be duoable.

Foomby's Stolen Goods - Kill Darkflight Fairies.

Ghoulbane - Kill Torig in Cauldron Hollow; part of an event requiring killing 34 epic X 4 mobs. Huge deal. Also kill Creator in RoV; 33^^ with chanter friends that cast a silence. Sounds like a group required for this one.

Lavastorm - Kill lots of goblins in Lavastorm.

Green Hoods - Kill Gruk Strongarm, 35^^^.

Shiny Brass Shield - Level to 40.

And Hadden's Earring, which means kill Everling, which means wait until after Ghoulbane gets to that point.

Scarecrow King - 27 Epic x2. Probably need one group. Not a heritage, but still a tough one to finish.

Difficulty in Zek

2006-03-10T08:46:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 55% XP. Completed a quest or two in Zek. There was a lot of running around for the Bogstrutter quest, and killing several hatchetmen etc. And after that, most of my quests are too difficult. All require either a group or more levels under my belt - killing heroic mobs, heroic groups, or passing by said heroic groups. Don't want to continue with Grozmag until I hit 40 either. So I cleaned up the waste grawlers (aka, bears) for another writ completion, and took a closer look at the tombstones.

I have three tombstone quests now. Each of these requires you to find five tombstones. Sounds pretty simple, right ? The catch is the tombstones are a *spawn*, and not a static object in the world. I managed to find one, and when you right-click it it will say "pick object up". After you pick it up it disappears. And I need to find five of these in the northwest forest area, and five in the southwest battlefield. Far from being an easy quest, this looks to be almost as hard as gaining levels to complete quests.

Add to this the seemingly innumberable book quests, which are completed via either static page locations or by picking up !'s, and which are futhermore no-trade, and I'm likely to need a lot more time in Zek. The whole thing seemed more like work than fun so I logged intending to get my Feerrott writs next session.

Trolling for links

2006-03-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

Did a thorough search for more EQ2 content and I've linked up several places.

EQ2I Wiki which I discovered trolling the forums. A good wiki is excellent; theirs looks like its getting better. Also a possibly outdated recipe database for provisioners; the author has quit EQ2 but generously left the database running for your pleasure. Another database being EQ2 Item DB which I think I'll download and try out - it claims to allow you to link any item whether you have it or not.

I'm not the only one doing a character EQ2 blog anymore - Both Krystalea and Geldon Yetich make notes about what their characters are doing combined with events in the real world.

The Journey is Finally Over

2006-03-09T08:43:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 39, 40% XP. After realizing that my previous attempt at doing the Journey is Half the Fun quest (aka Jboots) was stopped since I didn't know the Zek zone and got everyone killed; and that I now know the zone, as well as Enchanted Lands; I decided to finish off the quest.

There is an excellent guide to the quest which helped me immensely the first time I tried it. So I dug up this website again and studied the Zek route. The only part that looked difficult was the Deathfist Citadel part - especially as I hadn't been there before. But the thing that was problematic was the mines.

Almost at the end you need to take the elevator in Zek down, to the bottom of the mines, and back up again. No problem, unless aggro mobs are there trying to kill you. Three blue ^ Tallon Mechanics were standing right at the entrance to the mine and they bashed me to smithereens. So I had to hang around the area for a while, and got a duo partner; we promptly sent them to Orcish Hell. I immediately took off to try the route again, and succeeded. The mobs didn't respawn in the 20 minutes or so it took me to get back. The notes in the guide were excellent and that was really all I needed, along with knowledge of the zone.

Next stop - Enchanted Lands. I walked across the zone to scout the route again and it looked incredibly easy. Very little aggro, no bottlenecks, and with the evac trick it looked to be doable easily. Recruited a guildy ranger and finished it off, first time. Not the tiniest hitch. I probably could have done it even without the evac.

And next came the Feerrott. I thought, bah, this can't be a big deal. Plus I simply wanted to adventure in the Feerrott. My EQ1 character Hammerbreaker cut his teeth in that zone and so the idea is partly sentimental, plus I enjoy the jungle looking zones. So I decided to try it.

First handicap -I have never been to the zone. I studied the map, closely, and hoped that would be enough to get me through the zone. And on everyone's advice as well as that of the guide writer, I blew 5 gold on an invisibility totem. Didn't matter - got killed near the old druid ring. It turns out that most of the creatures in the Feerrott could see right through my invisibility. So much for wasting money on that.

I ended up dying a total of nine times, but ultimately finished with all my gear at 10%.

Two deaths were due to being lost. The worst idea I had, was to try and do the run without completely scouting the route first. Unfortunately, I died twice before I really got it and just walked the route. Second worst idea was buying that invisibilty totem but at least I can sell that.

Four deaths were due to the difficulty of approaching the Alliez Tae outpost. The guide doesn't really describe the difficulty well. The outpost is a circular area bordered by a roughly straight north/south river. There are extremely large groups of aggro spiders in the middle and to the south of that river. There is one group on the extreme northern portion along with a mountain that limits access.

But it turns out there is a very small corridor you can approach the outpost on which has a single aggro plant to deal with. Come off the bluff and cross the river. Move northward and get on the opposite side of the tree which you will see close to the river. You should see the plant and the outpost in the distance. Everything saw through my invisibility; and there was no way to just run in and run like hell out. Four deaths due to that craziness.

Also died once approaching the Alliez temple. Bad luck - got stunned or rooted and wailed on by many nasties. Also died twice because of the awful, horrible, nasty, vicious, cruel and inhumane respawn point.

If you die near the Alliez Tae outpost you are respawned near the temple of Cazic Thule. This is in the end of a box canyon that is reached by traveling along a river. What a cruel joke to play on the player ! I died once figuring out I was actually in a box canyon; and a second time trying to escape it. To survive you must hug the canyon walls, travel completely around the temple, and start down the river. You can't just go the direct route, and go south to the river, due to the "invisible wall" (aka boundary of the zone) and aggro mobs. Once on the river, you have to follow it to a couple of boulders and swim through it to emerge southwest of the outpost, dodging aggro mobs that may show up along the river. The cost of figuring out the aggro mobs was another death. I called back to Qeynos on one trip, and eventually made it out alive and figured out how its done. Ugh.

Summary on the Feerrott run is this : It's very doable at 38. Scout the entire route in game first, and read the guide. Follow the route and all the guide writers suggestions, but be more careful around the outpost and look for a safe corridor to approach it in. Everything after the Alliez Tae outpost is cake; follow canyon walls and you've got it made.

The Feerrott as a zone is awesome. It's colorful and wild looking. The music makes me think of headhunters in an African jungle; very appropriate. And I was pleased to see that Tez is of an appropriate level to fight there so I just may have him do that. There are a whole bunch of quests he can reach now that I know he can move around safely there.

After finishing the race, I talked to Chon and completed the quest. Ding 39, wiping out all my debt, along with a whole bunch of XP and guild status points. The quest is well worth doing, even though I can't wear the boots yet. For all the complaining that might come across in the post - it was A WHOLE LOT OF FUN to do this. My heart was pounding, I was on the edge of my seat, and I wanted to cheer at the end despite the late hour and sleeping family.

Traveled out to Zek intending to finish off my writ and logged off. I want to finish the one I have, get two new ones for the Feerrott, and go back.

Lost Legend of Lavastorm

2006-03-07T08:24:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 38, 15% XP. This was writ night. Started out the night duoing with a guildy berserker, and together we passed the gate and exited the Mystical Forest in Zek. Past another gate was an orcish mining operation, and there stood four gorge huntresses. Camped them for half an hour and killed em. Just four would spawn, blue to 37, in a group, and they were a *tough* but fun fight for the two of us. Definitely not the best writ around for the level though.

That honor belongs to "Muzzling " such-and-so, which requires you to kill waste growlers. These are bears which con white at 38, either double-down or down arrow, and come in either singles, duos, or trios. They are very doable, and if you run out of targets lots of orcs and deer around to take out too, along with harvests and what looks like a bunch of quest items (crystals) laying around on the ground. I had help - two guildys and I did this and it took almost no time for the killing, maybe 20 mins travel time.

I'm thinking I'm going to repeat this writ as many times as possible. Now that I know what's on the other side, I can just run past the gate and lose the sentries. From there, the bears will be soloable at least some of the time. Slow, but doable. With help, quick.

We also took out an orc in the lumberyard to update my Feerott access quest, then headed over to Lavastorm. Wow. That is an awesome looking zone. I suspect I haven't seen the half of it either. Red skies and everything done in a heavy red tint. The water looks like lava, but in fact acts just like water - I took a quick step in it and didn't get hurt. Started the Lost Legend of Lavastorm quest, but got no updates. We tried to get into this cave right off the docks to take out mobs for our tank, but couldn't do it; and after our ranger went linkdead the tank mentored me for a half hour killing trash mobs on the lava beach. Have to try and help him out next time.

What I really want to do, though, is take on the Scarecrow King in Antonica and finish off that quest. Should be fairly easy at this point to do, with a group or maybe even less.

Hunting Orcs

2006-03-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 60% XP. Tez started out in the Crypt of Betrayal and finished up three different books at long last. One book is stuck at requiring Crypt Tempests which were not up while he was there, so I figure he'll come back. Also finished up Maglus potion quests by entering the Bug Queens Crypt. That would have been really fun at a level-appropriate time, but oh well. Four really big lieutenant-type ^^ and ^^^ bugs, and killing them spawned a queen, a ^^^ toughie. Did not work on the two agonized essence quests; thought I was going to but my duo partner and I couldn't hook up at the right time.

So next moved on to Thundering Steppes and finally got the pirates for Spars & Sails; as well as finishing up the Scouting Report. Wave after wave of centaurs came and attacked the village, and I took out most of them along with some help from random people standing around in the area. Crawled the dead river and got the crabs needed for Selwynn's final quest; got some of the knights and giants needed too. Tried to work on Mighty Griffins (need 12) but none were up and a group trying to spawn Bloodtalon was hanging out there. Well, another day.

Finally moved on to Zek and explored a bit more. Now I'm starting to understand the zone. Did a lot of running around and got several quests finished. I entered the Tallon Hoarding Halls which I'll have to do again because that was fun. It was strange - the entrance disappeared the second time I wanted to go in. I think you need to kill the two guards and go STRAIGHT in or it poofs, although I don't get why it would be set up like that.

Managed to collect quite a few exploration quests; both Bogstrutter and Bootstrutter, and Irene Cellus. Along with gravestone hunting quests, which are pretty hard; I couldn't find a single gravestone and the EQMaps markings aren't accurate. Maybe the stones move around randomly. Most to all of the exploration is done, although I don't have a good handle on how I did most of it which is a shame; these quests are good learning opportunities.

The Mystical Forest is a bottleneck to exploring further in the zone, and finishing up my Zek writ. There are some high walls, like a fortress in a canyon, guarded by tough blue con orcs and with wandering treant groups who would pound me into the dust. Speaking of treants, killed a few more and still got no body loot, nor L&L update. I'm getting a bit worried about completing that quest. In any event, I clearly need to level up to about 40 before I can cross that gate; or go through with a group.

I think I should try and get more Zek writs if its possible, as I won't be able to get them once I can finally work the gorge huntresses. The Gorgers are well past the Mystical Forest.

Stupid writs. By the time you can do them solo, you outlevel them; and this means you can never get writs which are doable at your level. That is, when you are finally at the level to solo the things, the NPC will not talk to you and sends you to a higher-level NPC with writs for another, tougher zone to start the cycle over again. And if you've never explored the zone, you don't know which ones to take or not; rarely if ever have I gotten a writ that I could actually do right away. Hope to get back to Qeynos soon for that, plus my bags are getting pretty full.

Now within the top 700 questers. Keeping up with my guildy in total quests, but not passing him anytime soon it appears.

We had a guild meeting over the weekend, and after a lively discussion on how to promote, it got hammered out and should be posted on the website soon. Man, though, it took forever. We were talking for so many hours I thought we were on Cspan or something. I hope we can stay focused as a group that helps one another; I didn't hook up with anyone over the weekend at all. In the mayfly-world of guild politics that can be a long time.

I hate books

2006-03-03T10:59:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 10% xp. Tried to find the infected burrower again, and failed. I hope I don't have to kill all the stupid snakes in the hope of spawning it. To avoid that I continued fighting in the crypt of betrayal.

Right now, the book quests are sucking majorly. I'm sick of reading yet another page, with another hit list of "kill 8 zombies" and "kill 4 zombies". Nevertheless I stuck to task and kept progressing things. Selwynn's errands part 4 is halfway done, and I believe all my books are at the halfway point. The couple of quests I picked up in the crypt are moving along well too.

I hooked up with another player down there, and together we took out the ridiculous mobs I had to deal with, along with medics for his quest. With him as wizard, I played tank and he played DPS nuker. It worked well enough; no longer was I out of mana at the end of fights with multiple pink heroics. It worked so well, in fact, that we emptied our area of the dungeon and decided to call it quits at that point.

I next got together with guildys for an easy fight to finish Cauldron Hollow access; the guild leader wanted to get that done so I piggybacked. After running around Nektulos to finish that, and a few other things off, I logged out. I've reached the top 800 of questers on the server.

Mad XP in the Caves

2006-03-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 37, 5% or so XP. Started the night off making alchemist refines to grind and check for discoveries. After going thoroughly through one item's set of refines, I think everything has already been discovered. It's not like Shadowhaven where hardly anybody crafted or was there; someone else already had my idea. Well, no big deal.

Next I hit up the broker and finished Skeleton, Zombie, and Goblin L&L quests. Skeleton & Zombie parts were cheap, while the Goblin ones were a few silver each. Now I know to save those things and sell them. The rest of my L&L quests were either not auto-update finished, or the parts were too expensive. Any extra Shadowman parts I get are going straight to the broker - ka ching !

Decided to finish up the new Qeynos newbie quests, so headed over to the Caves and did them. I got a real laugh out of levelling up there. Looks a bit out of place among the other zones I'm levelling in lately doesn't it ?

Next headed over to Stormhold and progressed more quests. Accepted that I would die, found Valinayle's remains and got killed, but updated the quest. Selwynn's Errands part III is finished; too bad I won't wear the reward. I'm ready to head down to the fourth level of Stormhold for Quartermaster Berlon's next quest. I need to take out some undead as well, but I'm not worrying about that until more of the other ones are finished. To say nothing of killing Lord Chesguard. Ahh, maybe that will wait another ten levels thank you.

Went into Vermin's Snye and got my infected rat; just need to find the burrower. Also was able for the first time to wander around in the Crypt of Betrayal. I got the same sense I did of exploring the Vermin's Snye; an old crypt that seems really dangerous, which is I'm sure what's intended. Progressed most of my ancient book quests for the first time in six months or more. Also picked up a few new quests, and discovered that not everything is greyed out thus requiring me to stay on my toes. Agonized Essences, heroic ^^^ mobs in large groups, are ready to pound me into the ground if I try to go deeper inside the crypt.

Took down several restless corpses and logged out in front of their empty spots. I'll have to find my books and read them to move those quests along. Now in the top 850 of questers.

Fear the Named

2006-03-01T08:20:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Finished up K'naaes request for zombie destruction. Had to have pulled a hundred or more cackling cadavers but ultimately finished it. Also got him his drink of water. Next step is to take out Captain T'Sanne, but I'm putting that off until they fix the problem with nameds having double hit points. Got my three auto-updates for Zombie L&L, but not a single body drop. Well, you can buy that stuff. Lit all the torches and am ready for a duo partner or whatever to take down three named ghosts for Cauldron Hollow access; but that gets put off as well. Nameds, y'know. Also have two other quests centered around T'Sanne's citadel so I'll be waiting on the whole line.

Called back to Qeynos and readied work on tradeskills. I'm thinking I'll try and get discoveries on the T4 junk refines. Did a single one, however, and got no discoveries so that might have already been accomplished by some other server denizen.

Fruit Bats and Owl Feathers

2006-02-28T08:35:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 84% XP. Worked a few quests in Zek of the exploration type, as well as harvesting for the Far Seas company, then headed off to Nektulos.

First I took care of owlbears and bats. The Owlbear quest wasn't so hard - kill 20 owlbears. The fights were a bit tough, but the progress was easy to see, and was enjoyable. I even got hurt taking on the hardest group of the little punks, they took me down to 50% health. Not bad for four pinked-out creatures.

The bats were a huge and irritating timesink. No XP for these bad boys, combined with not finding a lot of them for quite some time, and also combined with a very rare quest update created quick frustration. Eventually I happened upon a group of them near the broken bridge, and took them all out to get the update. It still took a long time - I estimate I had to kill 10 bats for each update, and the quest required me to gather 5 bat fruits. After I finished, I got my tasty reward - 5 level 10 pies. Gee thanks.

Got another quest from Kleron and took down 18 bears for him, and spent the rest of the night hunting cackling cadavers for K'naae and Zombie L&L. I took out quite a few zombies, and got another 15 or so updates for K'naae. I got no updates for the zombie quest. I sure hope they count, because I would have expected to get some piece of zombie body loot or a spirit or whatever update.

Very little XP - pretty much all I hunted this night was pinked-out creatures. 401 quests; top 900 questers.

Tlaloc spent some time crafting food; making grey recipes for Fizzlepop drinks. They're easy to make, but that makes them boring. Hit combine, and 98% likelihood that the result will come out pristine. Managed to make a bunch before I got tired of it and logged.

EQ2 Maniac

2006-02-27T08:19:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 36 - that's right, 36 - with 60% XP. Two fortunate coincidences over the weekend (Family away, and Bonus XP) turned me into an Everquest playing fool. I decided to earn as much XP as I could manage and I pretty much achieved that goal.

Spent some time in Stormhold to start out, as that's where Tez had camped, and found a group helping a guy do his AQ3 quest. I finished up a couple of quests and another step in AQ3, and *almost* got done with the key to the Tomb of Valor. We just couldn't get to the end; Sir Valinayle's remains were right there at the end of the hallway but the mobs were too tough. So we just went in anyway as a groupmate had his key.

The Tomb of Valor was pretty interesting. There are a bunch of sacrophagi that you have to close and open in order to get the event going. We just managed to survive the starting process, when we spawned Lord Chesguard and his minions. There was just no way - with no rest whatsoever, and us all at 10% power and damaged, we zoned out immediately. But the important thing - Ghoulbane - I grabbed without incident, and am ready to take on the three tough undead as the next step.

Spent some time getting Lore & Legend books next. Considering that they're all possible for him to get, I felt this detour made sense rather than being stupidly single-minded. Got some updates, but the farthest along is skeletons; hopefully I can just buy the final piece. Still not a single update for treants.

Next came exploration in the Enchanted Lands. That place is really neat looking - green hills, deer, hobbits and fairies. Of course, it's more or less set up for the evils to come in there and wreak havoc. I got a whole bunch of quests and even managed to nearly fill up my quest journal. New goal for the week - finish existing quests. Last thing I want to do is have no room in the book. Maybe I should leave 6-8 slots open as a reserve.

Beware the Muck Fin in Enchanted Lands; unlike the other fish I've encountered this one still knows how to fly. As in, I aggro a group of them while walking through the river - run out of the river in hopes of breaking the encounter. And it doesn't break. Not only that, but the fish chase me until I'm dead. They get me later, and again chase me, but I just barely make it to the docks and zone out to survive. Sheesh that's ridiculous. First, the encounter should break. Second, the fish *never* stopped chasing me. And yet I forgot to bug it.

Finished off many quests in Enchanted Lands, and also visited Rivervale. Looks tough - just took a peek and left. But it's even more beautiful and hobbit-like there. Got a group in Runnyeye, and the XP flowed really well until the tank insisted on going in way too deep and taking on really nasty mobs. We wiped. It didn't help that our wizard was badly played. My two guildys and I quietly left the group and snuck out.

Also went in for hours with a guild group working another heritage quest - Training is a shield. I made it to the fifth trial, which is a solo step, and with three yellow-con baddies I failed the trial. I figure I'll wait until I get more levels or spell upgrades and try again. We stood outside the door to Grozmag's trial for probably 3 hours, getting different people through the trials but never making it to the sixth trial. Zek is a neat place, blasted and ugly, filled with Orcs that a goodie like Tez can't argue with taking out. My orc count went way up in those mines.

Ultimately I had to run out, and continued working quests in both Enchanted Lands and Zek. I finished Part 1 of the Cauldron Hollow quest and a couple others in both Nektulos and Thundering Steppes. The devs, bless them, fixed the Woe of the Travelers quest which I promptly finished pulling two big groups of 3-down giants. I got Harold Winemaster his wine bottle. Failed to find any weald wolves which is expected, but surprisingly could not find the pirates needed for Spars and Sails. I thought I could probably take them solo by now. Final action of the weekend was in Zek, employing a novel tactic.

One set of quests is with a troll cooking food near the pier, and he wants you to get several crates in the water. The difficulty is the kelp horrors - root type monsters - that are all over the place. After overpulling them I ran out of the water and that didn't break the encounter. But the three guards on the dock were more than happy to take them down. Seeing this, I made a big train and pulled them all out of the water and let the guards fight them; then took a leisurely underwater stroll and picked up all the boxes. That was cool!

398 quests completed; I'm gaining ground on being the top quester in the guild. Sway of Honor is a great guild - I've not met such good & helpful people before, makes me volunteer to help people every time. I'm not yet in the top 1000 serverwide for questers though.

What next ? Well without bonus XP it's time to finish off quests. I'm thinking to head back to Nektulos and knock out a bunch of those quests (Zombie L&L, Dragoon K'naee, Kleron, Cauldron Hollow, maybe others) and see where that leads. Or have Tlaloc finish more cooking. Thanks much Sony for the bonus XP. I haven't had that much fun for quite a while.

Heritage Quests

2006-02-24T13:17:00.000-08:00

My research on Heritage quests has been interesting. I have completed the Dwarven Work Boots quest; but not any of the others.

Here is a post about the most efficient way to finish off the early heritage quests. Quite good and detailed. But there's some other info to impart in addition.

Three of these heritage quests require you to kill Lord Everliving. Getting to him is, by all reports, an exercise in frustration and usually as enjoyable as having teeth pulled without anesthesia. SOE attempted to make things easier but didn't succeed. Why is it so frustrating ?

There's a quest called the Everliving Lockets which you have to complete to get access to the area where Everliving is. But completing it, does not actually give you permanent access, only access for the time that you completed it and stay in the castle. Or something like that. Because the Locket quest is so long and involved, you want to give yourself plenty of time to do it and for God's sake be ready to kill Everliving on every quest possible.

I'm ready for Everliving on Hadden's Earring. I have a long way to go on Ghoulbane. And you also need him for the Missing Mask, but you can't even start that one until you enter the castle. So I need to set it up; be ready for Ghoulbane and give myself enough time to finish all the steps necessary.

Now to warn my guildys. I hope I'm not too late - one guy was in Nek Castle last night.

Easy = Pink/Gray ? Not !

2006-02-24T09:20:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Worked on cleaning up heroic and access quests. Begged a nearby wizard for help and finally, finally finished off Gawar the Bad to progress the Zek access quest. Not that I need the access; but I want to do the quest. Also did all the stuff necessary to start the Scarecrow King epic fight in Antonica, which requires a lot of time as you have to wait through a full day/night cycle. Progressed the Skeleton L&L by wasting pink skeletons while waiting.

I do need the access to the Keep of Immortality and I finally got it tonight. After a solo trip to the Crypt of Betrayal I hooked up with 3 other people; we needed both my mob and some Hired Assassins who are part of another heritage quest. While standing around trying to figure out how to deal with the assassins what walks by other than the Archaic Fury. I pulled it and we killed it, and I got my key.

I manged to get a few of the ire minions that I needed for other quests that are very old; and I *thought* I had at last completed the Qeynos Catacombs quest. I cataloged the ire minion, but I guess my groupmates killed the agonized essence just before I could catalog it. Bah. That blows. I wasn't going to ask for more help either, that wouldn't be fair - we already took most of an hour between the two quests.

After leaving I checked out the new NPC in the Peat Bog, and got around 10 newbie quests in this zone. All were incredibly easy at 34. Quest count ++ for the win! They were very engaging and interesting for their level, and I bet the new players enjoy them quite a bit.

Went to the South Qeynos library to start two more quests, including Shadowman lore & legend, and went back towards the Snye to find infected creatures. The Vermin's Plague quest requires you to find three infected creatures in there, and naturally, I couldn't find two of the three. The Infected Burrower is supposed to be easy; the Infected Vermin should pop in the Rat Queen's area, but despite taking down a bunch of the ^^^ rats it didn't pop. Logged out figuring to try it again tonight.

Also logged Tlaloc on for awhile, but all he did was work grey recipes. More food is always a good thing. Tlaloc is mostly waiting until Tez can harvest him some T4 foodstuffs. Other alts are being ignored; the more I play Tez the less I want to play a Templar, ever, so Chalchitlicue might find herself deleted in favor of something else.

And now I see we will be getting bonus XP this weekend. Nice ! Would be great to get Tez more levels and get him closer to dealing with some of these *&#$^)@ tough to finish heroic quests. The soloist's method of dealing with tough quests, of course, is to just pink out everything in the zone, and for most of my stuck quests I'm totally happy to just do this and get on with things.

376 quests completed but still not in the top 1000.

Naive Blogger

2006-02-23T14:37:00.000-08:00

So here I am trying to link up anyone who runs an Everquest 2 blog, or site; and I do a search with Blogger's search feature and discover that template links are not recognized by the thing. So I thought I'd make a quick post about each of the sites I've got linked currently on my sidebar.

Aggro Me is an engaging and well-written newsite describing what's going on in the world of Everquest 2 and related areas; I read him every day. Friday humor posts spice things up a bit.

The EQ2 forums run by Sony are an indispensible information source. And the best place to check what the patch-of-the day was is here.

Allakhazam was the premier EQ 1 website and they run one as well for EQ 2 ; The Crystal Keep has excellent info on Provisioner recipes; and other places to check out about game info include EQ2 Alchemy, EQ2 Center, EQ2 Maps - which you absolutely must install by the way - and the Character of the Day which is fun to check out.

Fellow EQ2 bloggers include Steph at EQ Adventures; Quylein at Quylein the mage's site; Anskiere and others at The Three Wizards, and Toldain at Toldain Talks, who oddly enough given his blogname never replies to my comments :p .

Rounding out the linkage is EQ2 Test, a forum just for the Test server community; O gaming where you can get almost all your walkthroughs and quest info; WTF Comics which is an EQ1 webcomic; and a couple of perhaps controversial links.

As a reminder not to get too sucked in to virtual worlds I link up EQ Daily Grind, which more or less bashes the hell out of us MMOG players. The main point though, to not let your virtual life become predominant, is important and one I don't want anyone to forget including me. And I am a Station Exchange player and lukewarm supporter. I got in because I liked the idea of ending my game career someday and selling stuff. I've yet to sell a single thing, and given the falling price of plat I probably never will. Shrug. Nothing sees more heated commentary than the Station Exchange, the majority of it bad, but here's the kicker - you can read this blog and decide for yourself just how bad the effect is on my gaming.

I've also got a few dead sites on the sidebar but doubt they really care about being linked up. So there you go Google - index this.

More Quests

2006-02-23T08:07:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : 19% XP. Did nothing but work quests.

Kleron's latest quest, after getting done with the annoying spiders, now requires me to gather an amazing 30 owlbear feathers. Now am I right, and this will require killing another 300 owlbears ? What a hassle. I killed one or two solo and got no updates, so I think it's actually talking about the body loot. Maybe I can buy them on the broker.

Progressed Hadden's Earring at last. I ran around from one underwater zone to another when I get a tough step - kill Lord Everling. Well, that can wait. Went further with Dragoon K'naae aka Shiny Brass Halberd quest too, which took longer than I thought. Apparently he can be killed; he was gone when I went looking for him, but repopped after maybe half an hour. The next step he gave me was to kill "constructs near Nek Castle". The Patchwork men seem to work, but that's dangerous. It turns out the low-level cackling cadavers also update the quest. Too bad they're pinked out. I took down ten of them, 50 to go.

Finished off several more quests in Nek, then gave another try at soloing the Zek passage quest. Man, there was no way. Gawar the bad was a 25 ^^ undercon with two friends. I gotta talk someone into doing that. Also tried to finish up more Stormhold quests but wasn't successful; had a nail-biter fight with four defiled cavaliers that I lived through with a single sliver of health. Was however, finally successful at getting into the Library and getting the Skeleton L&L quest. I think I need to get the Zombie L&L - isn't that in Fallen Gate ? - and at least have those both active ASAP.

Now that EQPlayers is working - I find myself with 366 quests, and in position 1139 in quests on the Bazaar server. Ouch. That's a comment mostly on population, but shoot, I've aggressively worked every quest I could get without being nuts about it - ie, shutting off XP and mentoring just to get quest drops, and the like. And there are over a thousand people with a count higher than me ? Bummer.

Enjoyment

2006-02-22T14:35:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 34. Got into a Nektulos group and took out the sixty owlbears needed for the Shiny Brass Halberd; also finished up several more quests. Those four annoying owlbear quests are finally done or progressed.

It was a lot of fun; we were a group of four, Warden, Templar, Shadowknight, and me the Mystic. I get a kick out playing Mr. Ward. Just keep a ward up on the tank at all times, and/or a group ward to protect everyone if the tank needs time to gain aggro. For emergency situations I have the instant ward too. XP was flowing well, and even after groupmates had finished their owlbears they stuck around to get the XP, and help me finish.

Some combination of the following is making EQ2 an awful lot of fun right now :

A good guild you can group with

Server merge increasing the population

People at my level and not 20 levels above

Group XP increase several months back

Treants lore & legend is undone; and some Far Seas reqs, one which I can't access until I take down more ancient rumbleroots which are tough to kill. Two more quests from Kleron to finish. One involves spiders, which apparently are only in one very specific place in the southeast and which I killed quickly without finishing the requirement. That might even be a day camp. Ugh. I'll be spending a lot more time in Nektulos.

EQ2Players.com also got updated today. For whatever reason I have kept my server discoveries which is awesome. I'll have to try and get more of the tradeskill ones on T4 next time I'm in Nettleville.

Post Server Merge

2006-02-21T13:59:00.000-08:00

I survived the server merge. Things went fine, pretty much. I re-enabled offline selling in Tez's apartment - nothing was apparently missing from it either. Tlaloc got to keep his name, and Eheccatl was renamed.

EQ2Players.com is all messed up. None of the rankings are showing correctly. When I click on Tez's profile, it tells me how many quests he's completed, but not his server rank or worldwide rank. His paperdoll is gone. All server firsts are gone too, which may be correct, but the forums were pretty inconclusive on how that would work. I'll have to check out Magelo 2 when they get that working.

I'm waiting for someone to post about how these new "abilities" or whatever they are called under Kingdom of Sky.

Found Varsoon !

2006-02-21T09:42:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca : Made level 30 alchemist at last, thanks to bonus experience. Just refined T3 items; and sold. Apparently I could do the same thing to hit level 31 but rather than that it's time to get acquainted with T4.

Also got to level 33 with 60% xp. Part of a group going through Cove of Decay and Ruins of Varsoon. I had it all wrong about Varsoon. One area in the southeast has a well you can jump into to go into Varsoon; you don't have to use the "secret" entrance. Had a ball in there, took on a new quest or two, and got one of the books needed for the Strange Black Rock heritage inside.

For some reason Cove of Decay was bugged; I needed to get started on Stiletto's Orders but the chest was not clickable. Have to do it again I suppose. Since there were only four of us, we couldn't get the Octogorgon either. Otherwise I finished off all soloable quests in Thundering Steppes, and will try and get groups to finish off the rest.

Logged off after completing several soloable quests in Nektulos. Have a few more to do from Kleron, which have to be done in succession. I think I'm on number 3 of 5; they're very easy thank goodness.

One oddity - using the Nektulos griffon towers can be hazardous to your health. After flying into N'marr station, I got immediately attacked and killed by rumbleroots. Supposedly this is just something odd and bugged. I guess I'll see after the servers reset and Kingdom of Sky has been officially launched.

Tez as a main

2006-02-16T12:09:00.000-08:00

Been playing Tezcatlipocca this week, and he's achieved level 32 at last. Safe for him to journey to Enchanted Lands or Zek. And yet, there's other unfinished business that's keeping me from going forward.

First there are several quests to complete within Thundering Steppes. The frustration-inducing Far Seas quest requiring Amazon Abbots; these beasties spawn after wiping out most of the single centaurs in the camp near Coldwind Beach. You have about a 50% chance for them to update the quest. I need another four of them. There are a few easy quests like kill gnolls as well, and I finally finished off the giant lore quest last night.

Add to that several easy quests I managed to pick up (kill X in the Caves zone, easy at level 32), along with gobs of Nektulos quests, and you have a reason to keep going without advancing.

Secondly, he can't use any harvests from T4 until he hits level 30 as an alchemist. I got him 80% through level 28 doing the monotonous "mushroom refine" process. I bet I can get another 120% XP doing that by buying junk on the market, harvesting in TS and Nek, and using what he already has. Then maybe, just maybe, I'll enjoy Alchemist at T4.

And thirdly, I actually am close to finishing the Polished Granite Tomahawk quest. The hardest part of course, is you have to kill Octogorgon, who cannot be attacked until you can get access to Cove of Decay. There are a boatload of access quests I still need to finish, and the easiest one in Crypt of Betrayal is still probably beyond me solo. Would be really cool to knock out several of these things. Plus the Varsoon access quest.

So Tez, at least, is going along fabulously well. Enjoying my new guild - the people are fun and are about my level, for once. Game life is good.

Catching up

2006-02-10T09:13:00.000-08:00

Tezcatlipocca is now level 31, and exactly 50% towards 32. He's in a bit of a slow place. Thundering steppes, filled with green creatures and featuring very few blue ones, is the safe place for him to adventure. He's completed most of the soloable quests; having joined a guild last night I plan to ask for help completing the grouped ones, such as Tarby Boulderboom and the freaking Zek passage quest. After 32 it's off to more interesting things in Zek and Enchanted Lands so I just have to force my way through it.

Tlaloc is much happier given the new announced policy on the server name transfers. Whoever has the most played time during the previous 60 days will get to keep the original name. I'm confident that he'll beat out Mr. 8th-level on the Bazaar server.

Tlaloc has rocketed up to level 35 as a provisioner thanks to Tez's gathering activities and donations of food. He burned up all of his vitality right at level 35 and has been inactive adventuring, remaining at level 21. I put most of the pinked-out recipe raws for sale on the market, planning to use them to make stuff if they don't sell and my interest remains high. Forty more Octopus Pasta and he can feel free to go adventuring again, or make pinked-out food.

Test server characters are also active. Hatereaper dinged 25 last night and is higher than that as a provisioner. Mostly though I want him to level up and expect to make his fortune via loot rather than going Tez's route of gather-and-sell. Things don't sell well on the Test server. Slowblade is planned as a box-maker; he is an Ogre Assassin who played through the new newbie area and enjoyed it.

Coming back to... Server merges ! Argh !

2006-01-31T10:38:00.000-08:00

Having played Civilization IV for two months, I decided I needed a little bit of variety and resubscribed to EQ2. Obviously something's good about this game; I keep coming back to it don't I ?

I had a lot of fun coming up with unusual, creative, and themed names. Each of my characters has an Aztec-themed name. Now I'm going to lose two of them when Shadowhaven and Bazaar merge.

I'm irritated and sad. I just hope I can use this /rename to pick good new names.

Tlaloc, a 21/28 monk/prov will lose his name to a 8/4 fighter, who likely is a non-played character.

Ehecatl, a 12/11 wiz/sage will lose out to a 53rd level guild leader. I will rename him Eheccatl which is acceptable.

Really, I wish it would go by the total number of levels, where my Tlaloc would win, but my Ehecatl would lose out. I can't think of a good spelling variant for Tlaloc either.

Tlalocc - Too obvious. Tllaloc - That sucks. Talaloc - Changes it too much. Tlalloc - That sucks too. Ttlaloc - Bleh. Tlalocx - Ewwww. Talloak - So much for the theme.

There's no good choices there. Maybe my guy will win out anyway. Here's hoping.

Subscription cancelled

2005-11-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

And I come full circle. It happened again - I just suddenly woke up one day, and said "Why am I playing EQ2 ?", same as I had done with World of Warcraft. I've logged on a few times in the past weeks, but just to deal with selling, or to wander around and destroy mobs for XP.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - the 6 character limit causes problems. I might actually have stayed interested if the restriction was removed. The apparent "Let's soak our customers" explanation has never, to my knowledge, been countered by Sony, and I simply can't imagine them doing it any other way. If they want me back, that's what they should change.

I didn't sell anything on the exchange either. What if I change my mind and want to come back? Not that I could net more than $50 anyway, so I don't feel it's worth it.

Have fun and play safe.

Hiatus Extended

2005-10-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

For no particularly good reason - I'm not interested in Everquest right now. I might be done, and I might not. I'm spending free time playing Master of Orion instead. My subscription is up for renewal on November 11th I believe so when that time comes I'll have a decision to make.

Maybe it's time to start a generalized gaming blog.

Hiatus

2005-10-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

I took a few days off from Everquest. Not sure why. Real life is a bit tiring perhaps.

Plus I'm reading my latest entries, and it's just not interesting. More entries later. Sorry about a lack of daily updates (which has been a longstanding goal) but if they're crap updates, then who cares ?

Tlaloc right now is trying to reach level 20. Tune in later to find out how it went.

Stitched in time

2005-10-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

Tlaloc : About 50% XP. Just went after kills inside Antonica and found a fun place to fight.

Directly past Sayer's Outfitters is a hilltop with a bunch of vv gnolls on it surrounding a tent. It's pretty easy to solo through them all and then you get a tribal elder and helpers to spawn. After him, a ^^^ heroic spawns. Even though they are large groups I had fun taking down so many, and it's always fun to imagine upping your gnoll destruction count.

Tezcatlipocca : Tez is in danger of being relegated to broker status. Or at least, losing his position as a main. I have had no desire to advance him for quite some time, and am not planning on doing so anytime soon. And then, this weekend, I filled up two of his bags and parked him inside his apartment to sell.

It worked well - couldn't do any computering anyway, and he sold a bunch of stuff. But this should give any soloer pause about making a shaman alchemist.

Huehueteotl : Ding 20, and tailor. 75% XP towards 20 and conjuror. Huey managed to sell all ten tanned backpacks, so I went ahead and had him make 20 more. The 20 pushed him over the top, finally, making him a tailor.

With one half of the goal finished, I next moved him deep into Antonica, in the eastern farmlands area, and took out bears and wolves until sleep claimed me and I had to log out.

Goal for this week - Finish up with Huey. Also get Tlaloc up to 20 adventurer.

And T1 is done

2005-10-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

Chalchitlicue : Ding 10 both artisan, and adventurer. Selected Cleric and Outfitter as planned. She was very quickly done with the priest subclass quest, then went and killed dryads in Oakmyst for her level while gathering a bunch of components.

She ended up overgathering. That's OK though, the stuff went into the shared bank for eventual sale or whatever. Had her make a bunch of tin bars which got converted into Tin Swords, and Tin Sconces, to bring her to level 10.

With that, I expect all my characters to never set foot in T1 zones again. Perhaps Ehecatl, for making scrolls at that level, but I tend to doubt it. Onwards to Antonica and the challenges of getting into Teen Tradeskills.

Huehueteotl : Imagine my surprise. The two tanned backpacks I put up for sale sold immediately. Now I know what he'll be doing to get up to 19. Took a look at his inventory and it should be up to snuff; he has tons of hides and I think enough iron to make several packs. Made a few of the required WORTS before logging off.

Broke

2005-10-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

Chalchitlicue : Ding 8 TS, and 9 priest. Had her tradeskill for awhile, making tempers, tin bars, and pelts. And then she ran out of money. Now, I could have had her sell some of the things she's made but I didn't want to do that, so it was back out to adventuring.

Camped the dryads and spiders until she hit 9, then got going on her subclass quest. Man, the priest one is annoying. You have to travel to North Qeynos, and from there it's a long walk to each zone where you actually need to do things. I guess I didn't really notice it the first time. I think she completed everything except the final fight - had logged her off inside North Qeynos after healing the soldiers in Antonica.

Short

2005-10-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Chalchitlicue : Ding 8 for adventurer, 7 in tradeskills. Short session tonight. Fought deer in Oakmyst; it's amusing to stand in front of that big doe-eyed face and then whack it with your mace. Also fought glowmyst beetles and spiders, which were both pretty tough. Took out corrupted dryads when possible, as they were much easier to deal with than any others.

And eventually inventory filled up. Ran off and decided to see how empty I could get my inventory from a visit to the wholesaler. Made a whole bunch of food, not all of it delectable, which means it won't go to my food storage.

At level 3 and with full vitality, one white recipe (baked frog legs) gave me 50% XP. Heck, why even have levels like that? At 7 it's a more normal 2% or so, destined to go down towards 1% in the teens. She's probably one-third of the way there in terms of combines needed to get to 10.

Newbs No More

2005-10-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

Camaxtli : Ding 11. Workshopped his way up to level 10 and outfitter status also.

Made some items that were just junk for levels, but mostly had him try out the various weapon recipes. Got some yellow ones and quick XP from them. Even made one which he started using, for a while anyway. Then moved on to fighting again.

I'm surprised, still : it's fun being a rogue. I stealth myself then sneak up behind the monster; give it a stealthed attack. Next, I Cheap Shot it which is some kind of a stun, circle quickly behind it and then mash it with a backstab. If necessary I finish up with my high-damage melee attack, and complete any HO's that come along as well. He's also happy to have two razor-sharp shivs equipped now that he passed level 10.

The subclass quest was fun too. You have to sneak through a warehouse full of guards and grab an item sitting in a chest. The most important trick being, you have to sneak and also WALK past all the guards. Shift-R toggles run or walk by the way. I got killed once, retreated two more times, and on the fourth try I got the note and then got my subclass.

Headed out to Antonica, killed a bunch of mites and rats, finished up the Tie that Binds quest, and logged out after dinging.

Chalchitlicue : My future templar dinged 7. Finished citizenship and started collecting tradeskill items inside of Oakmyst. My last newb is off the Isle at last.

I had toyed with the idea of leaving her on the isle and working my other characters, but it was just frustrating me to not get her started.

Huehueteotl : About 60% TS XP, closing in on level 19. Refined the last of his T2 pelts in an amazingly long and boring process; I read a book while doing it. Then he created an additional 10 tanned leather backpacks which I passed out to alts.

Between Hue making packs, and purchasing teak boxes, every alt has 8-slot or better bags, and an 8-slot or better container in their bank. Teak boxes are much more reasonable now that the highest level box possible is sandalwood or cedar. But this also means that Hue is done making backpacks.

Now the question for him is....... what's next ? Perhaps he could make more of those tailored robes, yellow recipes. Perhaps; but they don't sell very well, and I'm not too surprised given the other people's prices for them. I'm cheaper than anybody, feel like I'm asking too much, and then I find out that the robe doesn't sell that quick anyway. Or I could just make a bunch for the XP.

Failed on the goal-level for last week. This week :

Huehueteotl to level 20 and tailor.
Chalchitlicue to level 10/10.

That should be doable.

Broad Tradeskills

2005-09-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ehecatl : Ding 10 scholar. Had him run to a bank and try on his new gear. It worked well; cleared out a couple other things from the clogged shared bank as well. He still needs most of his jewelry and bangles and such. Then I figured I'd get him going on the path to a sage.

Courtesy of his full load of 8-slot bags, he'd managed to pick up a whole bunch of weird stuff. So I had him make all of it into various things, some just for vendor sale, and some for the food bank like frog legs and turtle steaks. Got some practice on making spell scrolls, and he barely upgraded most of his skills to App II. Made an App III Lightning Shock, his main nuke.

Not sure why he wasn't able to make any App IV's. I tried the gamut of recipes, from very green to white, and got the same result for all of them. He didn't get many skillups either. But at least the beginning levels are finished; the more levels he gets the more likely he can craft *something* at the highest level.

Started to make a second batch of components for spells when I logged off. Spell scrolls follow this pattern :

Inks; long chain of precursors

Paper, a single combine

Quills, 2-step combine using Fletching

Worked my way through most of the ink and then logged.

It's interesting - my latest sessions are showing that you can have a lot of fun by simply crafting. Given enough character slots, you can craft anything in the game for yourself (9). And I know pretty well what I need to enjoy the game, and thus have been crafting in that order - tailor for bags, provisioner for food, sage for spells. And it's very enjoyable.

So once again, I have to ask - what are they smoking, by limiting our character slots? The number of characters possible should be very high; something like allowing you to try each class available in the game. Instead, they make the strangely lame decision to allow only 6. It's only 6, in my opinion, because we players quit in droves; if we hadn't it would only be 4.

I understand that originally they wanted interdependency, which would require you not to allow too many crafters on an account. They gave up on that idea with the cross-class books. So why are the number of slots limited again?

Packing It

2005-09-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

Ehecatl : Ding 10. Ran through the steps to become a sorceror, the interim sub-class prior to wizard, and completed the Tie That Binds quest for the level. Will try out his new equipment next chance.

Huehueteotl : Ding 18 TS. Completed the 10 tanned leather bags to get the level. My geomancy and binding skills are increasing a lot.

Got my level 18 recipes, and they include only "Inventor's" items which I don't want to make. Thankfully, I also shuffled a lot of items around among all the Aztecs and it turns out I can definitely use another 10 bags. The only things still in the shared bank are dependent upon which alts can get them; so this is why I got Ehecatl up to 10. But that also makes me want to get his tradeskill going; so much for goals like 20 tailor. But anyway, Huey can still make more backpacks, even if that won't take me to 20. I'm probably just going to have to make some things for vendor sale.

Yarning through Tradeskills

2005-09-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

Ehecatl : Ding 8. Rooting the bears in Oakmyst and nuking them into oblivion. The bear cubs are yellow v to a level 8 and root seems to work OK on them. Of course, he did get killed once, but it's not really a big deal when you can run from the dock and get your corpse that quick. And, when you're not worried about repairing your equipment.

Huehueteotl : Ding 17 TS, with 60% XP.

First items - made up several blue-recipe cloth armor items, with the idea of giving them to Ehecatl. There are a lot of subcombines necessary, creating yarn and thread to make cloth, and making padding etc. The process was uneventful other than running out of tuber strands, and getting some more from Tez.

Then he actually made the items. Burlap armor reports it is useful to a level 6 when you examine the recipe, before making anything. So I figured, OK, I'll give this to Ehecatl; not useful for Huey given how quickly it will go grey, like in half a level. And yet the finished product requires level 10 to use. I think this relates to the difference between crude, and pristine, for the finished products. Pristine must be useful at a higher level only, and this means he has to pick up some levels before the items can be used.

So he found himself at level 17, without any other items for the two mages to wear. Decided to make another batch of ten tanned leather backpacks and pass them out. Got started on the iron buckles before I logged him out.

Sewing Like Mad

2005-09-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Huehueteotl : Ding 16 outfitter, with 95% XP. Learned a lot about being a tailor in this session.

First thing though, was to finish up his class selection quest. It was a piece of cake, once you knew what to do. I wandered the area between Sir Jaeger's camp and Blackburrow, and gnolls would just pop randomly and attack. Killed them until I had the required totems - no trip to Blackburrow required, despite what the quest giver tells you.

Then I go back to South Qeynos and meet an earth elemental I need to kill. It's HUGE, and Epic x4. But what you do is, go through the teleporters and kill three other elementals and this "weakens" the main one, making it killable. I would have figured this one out I think no problem, but the gnolls ? I would have gone crazy not knowing. So with maybe 50% XP I turned my attention to tailoring.

Noted that I had a "Threadbare pattern" in my recipe book at level 5, and so assumed that other patterns would be in my level 15 book. Armed with this knowledge, I had Huey make lots of tanned leather. Just a metric ton. Tanned leather is the first refine of the harvested material, the sullied pelts from the traps.

I whacked buttons until I was so bored I fell asleep, earning XP at 1% per combine, but making sure they ended up pristine because many recipes that use them, need them to be pristine. The main tools of the tailor trade are roots and pelts. Roots surprised me. But all my yarn, thread, and stuff like that is made from roots. Grabbed all the tuber strands I could find, because so many things need these items.

And eventually, I made level 15. Bought the recipe book. And no burlap pattern is in there. What ! And then, finally, I turn to the web and find out that patterns are, of all things, considered fletching. Uhhh - sure. This is just a weird interdependency thing they built in that makes no sense. It was also available at level 10.

Proceed to buy the required secondary skill books, and finally get a single burlap pattern made. Make some nice pantaloons that replace the junk he had managed to pick up as a drop. And then have him get to the reason I made a tailor - making bags. Made lots and lots of bags. Most of my alts including the littlest ones are pretty well set for beginner bags now.

For each backpack, you need a cord, buckle, and a hide plate. The hide plate and cord are tailoring and made easily from tanned leather, with the hide plate being the main ingredient. The iron buckles require metalworking skills. So ultimately I made a bunch of each component, decided I didn't want to overmake them, and then just used up the components I had to finish at 95% XP.

Didn't want to try to figure out what to make next, so he logged out just shy of 17. Good progress on the level 20 goal though.

Need to make a forearm and sholder item for Huey; and probably a full set of items for Ehecatl. That should get me a fair distance towards 20, plus being useful.

Ehecatl : My new mage made it to 7. Did his citizenship quest and got off the island. The game is much more fun when you have bags and can actually pick things up. Holding onto a bunch of tradeskill junk to level him up a bit too. Ehecatl is a future sage.

Also created Chalchitlicue, a future human templar. Had to delete Tuoni to do so. Not that that was a hard decision, Camaxtli looks like more fun as a future swashbuckler. Backstab backstab backstab! And that fills out his character list. Now to flesh out the complete set of tradeskills, or as complete as I can get, my list is like this.

Huehueteotl - Conjuror and Tailor.
Tlaloc - Monk and Provisioner.
Tezcatlipocca - Mystic and Alchemist.
Camaxtli - Swashbuckler and Weaponsmith.
Chalchitlicue - Templar and Armorer.
Ehecatl - Wizard and Sage.

This means I'm missing carpenter, fletcher, and jeweler. Can create those on my second account if needed. I'm thinking only the jeweler will be necessary.

Goals for this week -

Huey hits 20 for tradeskill and adventurer.
Tez gets to 32 as adventurer.

Need Tez to be able to gather in Enchanted Lands and Zek without getting killed easily; hopefully only a few levels will be required for that. Once he can do that, then T4 tradeskills open up. If not, well, he'll just have to keep going higher in adventure levels but we'll see how it goes. I'm worried these next alchemy levels are going to be difficult.

Transparency ? Well, no.

2005-09-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Was browsing Everquest 2 links and came across this post by Toldain talking about rule transparency in Everquest.

When I first started playing Everquest this was the most irritating thing to me. Here I am, wandering around in the fantasy world, and I literally don't know what the rules are. You play for awhile, and figure out the basics, but at no point do you really and completely discover what the rules of the game are.

It bothered me and made me redouble my efforts to play and really understand what's going on. And then it hit me - why, by not telling me the rules they are increasing my play time in the game!

Now I am thankful for the things that are just impossible to discover. It's about time there's a faction tab available on your persona window. But it's simply fun to discover some things yourself.

This seems to hold true across the board. So many posters in the official forums parse the results of their combats, create detailed walkthroughs and play through areas just to create documentation. The negative view of this is Sony is asking us to document their game for them. The positivist view is they are increasing our enjoyment by allowing us to create the important documentation, keep us immersed, and paying. Because writing about this stuff is fun too.

Summoner Return

2005-09-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

Huehueteotl : Ding 19, 25% XP. Had two main goals with Huey tonight, to finish off the Bootstrutter quest, and get to 19 and started on my class selection quest. Managed both. Wandered Antonica harvesting when I came across something, and whacking the various and sundry nasties I saw.

New change - A summoner has to put one point of damage onto a mob in order to get XP for it. Silly change. Were they trying to stop me from doing this ?

Select mob near harvest item
Send pet to kill it
harvest items until the creature is dead
Loot then select new target

I still had him send out pet, pet attacks mob, and in addition I gave it a single nuke. Then I harvested while the pet killed it. I don't get what the issue might have been anyway; any mob which can be pet-soloed like this is too weak to give lots of XP. I'm still in danger when harvesting from wanderers, so what could be the problem?

Made my way to Qeynos to start the Conjuror quest. I have to get a totem from a Sabertooth Diviner, Sabertooth Chanter, and Sabertooth Oracle. I'm hearing that it is **very** difficult to get around in Blackburrow where it would be obvious to look for these mobs. I'll have to try and get into a group if I go that route.

It might also simply be that they pop if you wander the area in front of Blackburrow, which would make things much easier to deal with. That's the report from Ogaming anyway. Here's hoping.

I dumped a lot of stuff out of his packs and had the dreaded thing happen - I ran out of space in the shared boxes. Huey set out for Blackburrow with a bunch of stuff still in his packs. Next session I need to deal with that, through some combination of buying another box (one box is crude elm), moving stuff out to sell, out for Tlaloc to cook, or out for alts to use.

I'd really like one of those new Cedar boxes craftable under Desert of Flames. They're selling for 20ish gold. Uh, not at that price thanks. Even teak is way too expensive right now on my server. Tez logged in solely to deal with selling and then went out.

Drowning in harvests

2005-09-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 50% XP or so. Tez killed the fairies he needed and ran around a bit for the investigator again. Ultimately, he got a reward which was a 20-slot box, which set him over his weight limit. Now, I couldn't remember if you can put a no-trade item in your shared bank. Nope, you can't I find out, after calling back to Nettleville.

Set up selling once again after a many day absence. Fricking poisons. They remain unsold. I cut their prices again and will vendor dump them the second my vault is full. Essences, however, are almost all sold. Will definitely be making more of those things.

As I worked through my bank vault I got overwhelmed. There is simply too much stuff at too many different levels and most of it is necessary. Like, for example, I need those T2 pelts for Huehueteotl to skill up on and make bags or whatever. So I'm thinking its time to work on alts again as bonus XP has disappeared and been replaced with crafter bonus XP.

Tlaloc : Ding 16, 10% XP. Ran around harvesting and whacking the random creature, and finished up 10 completed quests or thereabouts. Logged off trying to find the dwarf near the covered bridge - where is that little bugger ?

The plan now is :

Level Tlaloc up to 22 or so.

Get Huehueteotl up to tailor level as a TS'er (currently 14)

Pick a tradeskill for Camaxtli. I think Tuoni is going to get deleted.

We'll see how it goes.

Where's the Bees?

2005-09-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 45% XP. Tez spent the night solo except for a brief group to help a guy finish off a quest. As he walked past a bunch of spiders, it turns out this guy needed them to finish a Freeport scribe's quest. Had to mentor down to assist, and unfortunately we got wiped on the first pull.

Word to the wise (or ignorant!) - when you mentor down, you lose **all** your buffs, not just the high-level ones. Re-apply before the pull, not after.

After he finished things off I set off in search of the wax-covered book. There's a quest for Noxious Beeswax which I'm trying to have Tez get, and he was unable to find the book. Looked in the exact place marked by EQ2Maps, and it's not there. Also got a hint from somewhere that the mushroom is near the Commonlands bridge, and behind it is the quest starter. The point given on EQ2Maps, is a mushroom. I looked all around this thing, but maybe I missed it. Have to try one more time.

Found a location on the southern part of the map, near the bridge, with two solo treants so I whacked them a couple of times for one Treant L&L update. Then managed to find several of them - Blacktimber Treants - south of Nektropos castle on the other side of the mountains. Probably need to spend some time here and work that quest.

Also started the Shiny Brass Halberd Heritage quest which requires no less than 60 owlbear meats. Man ! Getting a group to do that sounds like a good idea, or at least a duo. I really don't want to wait like five levels until I can take down the stupid trios of these things.

Worked various quests while doing all this wandering; down to two Far Seas reqs after finding the Valley of the Bears. Made progress on several others, and continued gumshoeing for the Investigator. This guy really blows - "Go take a look over here" he asks you. Then you look, and have to return to him. Take another look over **there** next. And return. Now look at that other spot **over thataway**. I'm really sick of him but this is Tez's job - be the quester. So he's gonna finish it.

Logged off in front of the Investigator. Need to kill more Sullian fairies next session.

Cauldron Hollow

2005-09-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 30, 22% XP. Tez got into a group early and spent the night fighting with them. A bunch of Freeporters and myself, we hooked up while I was killing Dragoon Warriors solo.

Nobody was sure where to go to kill things. Treants were suggested; I suggested owlbears (need em for quests, and can't kill them alone); that undead keep near the beach as well. Ultimately we walked through owlbear territory to Cauldron Hollow, completing one owlbear quest for me and leaving another frustratingly at 9/10 kills.

Cauldron Hollow was interesting, although it got boring towards the end. Lots of ^^ and ^^^ mobs, greens and blues, and we mowed em down like blades of grass. One named, who was green of all things, and didn't seem to drop anything interesting. I got very little loot but managed to ding just like all the rest of the group. The one thing I did get (armorer book), I got because I soloed a spider while I was waiting for everyone to get to the Hollow.

So we broke up after a couple of hours, and I decided to go ahead and try and get that last stinking owlbear. Warded myself, pulled with debuffs, and commenced whacking. But the outcome of killing a single one, and getting away alive, looked very much in doubt halfway through so I ran. Damnation! Tried to talk a ranger into a group and he was having none of it. Well, maybe tomorrow.

Explored a little bit more, and found the area with Asilian fairies. Killed three of the four diviners which I needed when I noticed the late hour and logged off.

Nek Castle

2005-09-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 40% XP. Tez checked in on his selling which is infitesimal now. You see, I've not been harvesting or tradeskilling due to Bonus XP Week, and that translates into not a lot of stuff selling. That fourth platinum piece is looking farther and farther away - Tez has 3, and Tlaloc has one.

Afterwards, traveled to Thundering Steppes and said hello again to Amy Bhorgese. And that led me back to Nektulos to clean up more quests. I thought I was done with Granville's Restaurant, but instead I need to find another fayberry before I can do the turnin. This is harder than it sounds inside of Nek Forest.

Did manage to finish three of the Nek Far Seas reqs, and got .......... the same rewards you could get at Thundering Steppes. Including a shield which Tez can't use, must be a tower, and the bracers that he's already wearing. Bah.

Stood for quite some time by Black Water lake pulling those root things. Now they look a lot like treants, and I had been calling them that. But clearly they aren't considered treants by the game. My lore & legend quest does not update when I kill them. So for lack of a better term I will call them roots. Eventually got my needed wood samples from them, and made my way back to Bone Lake for fairy guard epees and another chat with the Investigator. Also finished up with the Wandering Augur, for a nice upgraded ring.

Next I took on the Nek Castle access quest - "Calling in the Forest". Now I had thought I was going to need a beefy group to take out a ^^^ dragoon lieutenant. Imagine my surprise as I'm harvesting merrily away and I find a two-mob group with a lieutenant, both of them vv and blue. Whacked them for the update. Next had to travel right to the castle and touch monuments.

Getting there was a bit tricky. I think they re-tiered the patchwork men because I see only one or two solo ones, and many groups with this Patchwork Fleshripper guy. He's vicious - ^^^ white con, and in one hit I lose 580 hp. While I was fighting one of the solo guys the Fleshripper sneaks up behind me and kills me. Grr. Nice. After corpse recovery, I decide to just give up on my patchwork man samples and continue to the castle. Sneak past the big ^^^ gargoyle in the pass successfully.

And ready for monuments. The first one was the hardest. This thing was completely surrounded by aggro and dangerous mobs and groups - ^^ white and yellows, and ^ groups of whites. Almost got killed the first time. Second time I managed to time the wanderers so that I only had one white ^^ zombie beating on me, I touched the monument and worked through the dialog, and ran like a scared little girl. Next I made my way to the rest and touched them - they weren't guarded.

Now I needed to get to the front door. I was a bit worried about getting there but it turned out to be no problem. Whacked the three patchwork men in front of the castle, one at a time, and cleared the way; also got all my skin samples. Glad I didn't risk the road to Nek further! And with that you can just walk straight up to the front door and finish the quest.

Made my way back to the base of N'mars ascent. One of my Far Seas items is Gul Thex Mystics, and right at the base are maybe 6 of them. Took down a full spawn cycle and got one update. OK, this is going to take awhile. So I decided I had had enough for the night.

Next - finish off those mystics. And hopefully get my stupid fayberry.

Dings

2005-09-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 29 mystic. Finished up a few more quests, made my way back to Bone Lake, and got asked by that constable to deliver a message in Thundering Steppes.

Took out the piranhas for the meaning of life quest. The water combat just makes so much more sense now! While walking along the bottom of the lake, I found one, then got an add. And I simply ran out of the water to break the encounter. No flying fish chased me. Eventually, I got the three I needed. I also found the spot where the Sullian Fairy Queen resides, and took out four of her guards to progress that quest. Only two are up at any particular time, so what I'll do later is come back, take down the two that are there, and wait until they respawn. They come back fairly quickly, 15 mins or so.

Finished off my cataloging and got another book for my house. I think I should just sell these things. Like I'm ever going to move out of my inn room, so all these status point reductions are useless. I took out maybe 7 patchwork men as well, with no quest updates, before I got tired and logged off.

Tlaloc : Ding 15, plus around 20%. Did some running across Antonica working my way through the Bootstrutter quest. Polished off several quests along the way, and did turnins for several other quests to push me over the top. Tlaloc is just a blast and easy to play.

One problem - already, half or more of his equipment is pinkeded out. Now if I understand the changes correctly, nothing pinked out actually helps with mitigation. So time to either quest up some new stuff or (horrors!) buy new equipment off the broker. The good thing is his two-handed maul is still ok; his fistwraps are pink, with his other dual-wield-weapon still white.

Tuoni : Ding 7. Backstab is fun. Maybe I'm going the wrong way with this guy - I should probably make a rogue or something instead.

New combat is great

2005-09-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : 85% XP. The verdict on the combat changes for Tez is - fabulous ! I had quite a bit more fun with the actual fighting, than I ever have when playing EQ2. Well done dev team; I suspect Moorguard's influence, in keeping a useful dialogue between players and dev team, was very helpful (yes this is just me using my intuition, no inside info here).

First Tez went through and did a complete respec. Respec, by the way, is reselecting all of your racial traits. Made one bad decision - picking an upgraded Contagion when it is already obsolete due to Miasma. But I might be able to respec again in a week and get something better instead. Concentrated on wisdom; Tez remains stronger when buffed rather than wiser.

For nukes Tez ended up getting three, but they are all on the same timer. Grey Wind was slightly better than the other two (Smite AppIV, and Cold Wind AppI) so that is the one he's using for the time being. So far I'm down a nuke - which sounds bad.

For DOTS he gets three, Cold Fire, Contagion, and Miasma. But the latter two are on the same timer. So he ends up using Cold Fire and Miasma. Slight improvement here versus the prior setup, because he has a better DOT.

Debuffs - the only one he used to use was Delusion. Cry of the Ancients though, is also a very nice debuff which I decided to start using. So in a sense he gets another debuff.

Buffs - No concentration needed for bear form. One point for Auspice. Courage no longer stacks with others. So this left his buff loadout at Spirit of Bull; Spirit of Badger; Auspice; (the other one); and bear form, for four concentration slots. I had thought they were trying to make it so you had more buffs than concentration slots, but they didn't succeed for my level at least.

Heals & wards - I have to recheck my heals. The rumor is that the three I have are on the same timer; I didn't really notice. My wards are new and improved. Take just as long to cast as before; seem to last for a slightly shorter period; but now apply damage after mitigation. Something must have happened to the power requirement - seems to use less mana now. Spirit of Badger includes a minor ward that regenerates constantly.

The only ward I managed to use well was Eidolic Ward - the instant cast, 15-minute recast one. It worked very well. The others just weren't worth the time to cast as a soloist.

So with trepidation, I set out to find the wussiest creature that I could, and managed to get a V green con. ( New convention - V is a down arrow, and ^ is an up arrow mob)

I knocked it down with very little mana or health usage. Encouraged, I tried out a ^ green mob, and took it down with no problems. Next I tried out a yellow 0 arrow. Was able to take it down but got pretty banged up. Ultimately figured out that I could take out roughly yellow cons and lower, adjusted for arrows. Did not try a ^^ green or ^^^ green, which is something I should make the attempt to do.

Combat seems to go well, and can roughly work out two ways as a soloist. First is, hit with your two debuffs, nuke then dot for HO, then nuke then dot for HO. Adjust the mix of dots or nukes as needed, to keep DOTS up and not overwrite, or to keep HO's hitting as fast as possible. With the two debuffs, you could see a significant improvement in how fast they went down, with less power and health loss than when not using the debuffs. For really big wimps, like most greens, don't bother with the debuffs, which is the second way to fight.

The Eidolic Ward came in handy several times - when running from a fight, or when adds come up. I hadn't used it much before the revamp as I seemed to get a bunch of unmitigated damage at the end - no longer is that the case.

The tooltips pop with combat info about what damage your spells are doing, their quality, and good descriptions. Wow is that a big improvement. Now in the heat of battle you can at least glance over your spells first before using them, and actually get to the point where you memorize useful info rather than "this hurts the mob".

Enough about how to fight - what happened ? Tez went out and fought a little bit in the Steppes testing things out. It soon became clear that the quests he was stuck on, he will still be stuck on. Some of them are now helpfully labeled "Heroic", letting you know the designers kind of expect you to field a group to finish them. Others, like Giant L&L, just involve grinding which I wasn't able to do solo.

Headed out to Nektulos and progressed several quests, including the Calling in the Forest. Made it to several locations which the nomad asked me to walk past, and now I need to kill a Dragoon Lieutenant. I saw one near the beach - he's a ^^^ blue mob so I'm not taking him down without a group or a lot of levels. Also got the power source for the Strange Black Rock, and more quests from the wandering Augur about the meaning of life. Apparently now I have to kill piranhas rather than contemplate my navel.

Stood on the beach for a long time killing spiders and crabs, and ended up with two fanged fistwraps which I gave to Tlaloc. Did more things for the Dark Elves on the beach, and now have to catalog an immense tree snake and a dragoon sentry. Couldn't seem to find them when I needed them this time.

Making your way up Nmar's Ascent is fun at this level. There are a bunch of skeletons, green V and blue V, which I fought my way past. Now moving around at the top is another story. There are these strange Quetzal guardians, where some of them are hostile and others could care less about you. This is hard to deal with, actually, considering that they are a significant fight. The road after this is filled with treants and rumbleroots, which caught me and killed me twice. Didn't make it all the way to Nektropos because I got discouraged by the deaths and decided to come back another day.

Several of my quests require me to forage. This is pretty hard to do in Nektulos. I suppose I'll finish them at some point, but made minor progress only in this session despite its extended length - like 5 hours or so. Finished up the session by dealing with selling, and made my way back to the Nektulos dock before logging off.

I am amazed - I did not expect, at all, the combat upgrade to go so very very well. I heard a lot of negativity on the forums, and while we may be doing apples to oranges (50 bad! 28 good!) it makes me wonder about the pessimism some people have. The only thing I miss is parry. But really, if the combat works anyway, who cares?

Also created Tuoni, a Halfling Ranger (Well, scout, but you know). Got him up to level 6. I wish I had created a scout sooner - it's kind of fun to use that sneak ability, walk behind a mob, give 'em the backstab and BAM! They're dead. Now here's another alt I need to buy bags and boxes for.

Tlaloc : Just below level 15. Tlaloc came out of the upgrade very well too. No, I'll go one better than that : Tlaloc is A KILLING MACHINE now! All his combat arts fire very very quickly. He can smash a mob up in perhaps half the time that it took before. Had him travel across Antonica and got a good feel for the post-combat-upgrade world of brawlers. He's in good shape. While he might get hurt his DPS is very high and he has plenty of food and drink being a provisioner.

And so ? .............

2005-09-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Live Update 13. Been busy playing and not writing; this is a good thing. Ditched work yesterday just to play.

A better post later.

Anticipating LU #13

2005-09-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

The combat changes are going live. Along with tons of other tweaks and fixes, nearly all of them good. This one might be very interesting.

Combat changes include -

Priests no longer receive parry. Bummer. I'll miss that quite a bit.

Wards apply damage after mitigation. Maybe I'll actually use them now when soloing. Up til now, to use a ward required too much mana and too long of a cast when soloing.

Priests should, supposedly, be able to do more damage. Thank goodness, because Tez is a 98 lb weakling in the DPS department.

Spells don't require more mana when you upgrade them. IE - Smite APPI and APPIV both have the same power requirement.

Slows should be more useful.

Combined, it looks like Tez may actually use more of his spells than he did under the old system. It used to be smite, smite, HO. Contagion, cold fire, HO. Mix in a grey wind on any opponent vulnerable to cold like zombies. Now I can ward - the main thing my class does - and debuff.

Now, supposedly, a heroic opponent won't be soloable. A grey opponent shouldn't kill you. Nice to see better balance, even as I was never one who could fight anything tougher than yellow. The new con system sounds great too.

Things which I'm noting with interest -

Removal of patron system - Now, when you turn in those status items, do writs, or complete heritages, your guild gets some XP. This is big stuff for me as I've done none of these, and deliberately held off completing heritages because I want my guild to get the XP. And then Tez's guild goes and hits level 30 last night!

No more water creatures chasing you onto land. Man, that was annoying and strange.

Faction standings tab. This was always a mysterious thing, in both EQ1 and 2. You never really knew where you stood with the various groups and peoples, and now you will. The tab worked well when I saw it on Test.

Now you can be a hero. Encounter locking has been relaxed. If I see someone getting blasted, I can heal them in the middle of the fight. I can even help by whacking the mobs myself. Thank god - it was really annoying to watch someone run past you or die in front of you, and just shrug your shoulders and let them die. Can't help anyway, even under the new rules ? Well at least you can rez the poor soul now without grouping.

Dueling. No damage or debt, and you can actually bet on whether or not you will be successful in the duel. I like the idea. It's totally voluntary, and the biggest reason I never dueled before was a simple one - why ? Just for bragging rights ? Now you can bet which might make things a lot of fun.

Now this is something I'm looking forward too. Level 50 expansions? Please. This actually affects the lowbies and non-level-focused types like myself. I'll be checking things out in earnest tonight.

Making Essences

2005-09-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

Tezcatlipocca : About 50% alky XP. Went into the workshop to try and make some potions, and I notice that my potions require patterned glass and sealed poison vials. None of these things are for sale, nor are there any recipe books I can find. A quick google turns up the book, something called "Advanced Apothecary" recipe books, on sale for the low low price of 75g or thereabouts. Yikes.

Or you can just level up a jeweler and get the same recipes, which I just might decide to do.

Instead of this, Tez made many white recipes for fighter essences. He got a nice amount of XP for this, and costs were pretty low. I kept a monk art for Tlaloc, and put the rest up for sale on the broker. My costs are really low, and I was able to undercut other people by 50% and still make a big profit. If they don't sell, well, they don't. I can cut the price way down as I basically made the things only for XP anyway; cover your costs and you're good.

What a screwed up tradeskill, when you can't think about making money with it.

The tradeskilling was interesting at least. Instead of trying to stay awake, I was trying my hardest to keep the quality at APPIV. Some of them were really dicey, and one only completed because I managed to get a Flawless Chemistry event. I was hoping for some discoveries but I got none from any of these items. Someone else must have picked them up, either that or if you purchase them from vendors that counts.

Tlaloc : Ding 14, 70% XP. Closed out several more Antonica quests, and worked a bunch of them inside of Sayer's Outfitters. I think they must have upped the success rate on the Bow for a Beauty quest, because I had my earthcrawler legs before I knew it. Last go around, with Tez, it took literally forever to finish the quest.

It's fun fighting with Tlaloc. I mash quite a few combat arts and try to maximize my HO's as I go. This is as compared with Tez who finds it a bit hard to fight and mana-intensive. Well, we'll see how things go later.

Vitality Exhausted

2005-09-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Tlaloc : Tlaloc managed to ding 27 provisioner and get 70% XP. Made lots of gin, tequila, and blasted samoflanges. Got ready to make fayberry drinks and mountain coffee, when I noticed something strange - where was my vitality?

In all the months I've been playing I have never managed to deplete vitality. But Tlaloc did it. I guess he's the only one who ever managed to level at the correct, highest rate. And if there's one thing sure about this game, it's that you don't try for XP without vitality.

The good news being, of course, you get a second ticker for combat vitality. Hit 60% XP into level 13, and picked up a bunch of harvests. Completed the Antonica creature catalog quest and a few other simple ones. I got somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% XP for the catalog quest, which was absolutely awesome. Also got a bunch of them started by visiting various NPC's.

Tezcatlipocca : Ding 27 alchemist. Things are not going well for Tez the alchemist. Potions and poisons basically do not sell, at least at the T3 level. Oh, sure, I can leave things to sit around for a week and 20% of them will sell; but I want to burn through things a lot faster than that, plus not have "leftovers".

Decided to make some ink and try and sell it, and also make essences for Tlaloc. Not that he'll get any XP for T1 and T2 essences but still. Ink, at least, nets a decent amount of XP and might sell for good money. Heck, even if it sells cheaply, if it sells I'm happy. So that's the first part of the plan for level 30.

I also made a deal with another player to take her junk T3 mushroom harvests in exchange for making extracts. Between those, and harvesting myself, hopefully Tez can just refine & dump the mushroom stuff and squeak upward on XP. It will clearly take forever - I think he was getting 1/4% XP per combine, now that they've turned green. Maybe I just have to make potions and vendor sell them and leave it at that. White combines might make much better XP, and get me to my goal which is level 30.

Oh - Desert of Flames is probably going live today. Or tomorrow. I don't care. I'm nowhere near level 50 and probably won't get there until year end. If then. But I am thinking about getting Splitpaw; Tez might be ready for that.

Bartender ! Nutmeg Fizzlepop ?

2005-09-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Tlaloc : 40% XP into 25th level as provisioner. Made many grey items including nutmeg fizzlepops, ogre swill, and pond juice; elephant steaks and refines of tea leaves and coffee. Late last night managed to make things which actually gave XP for the 40% - refuge island iced teas, black tea, and others.

Managed to sell some of my slower-moving stuff last night, and was able to put the final set of potions on the broker. God bless it, potions including poisons just sell so slowly. On the other hand, I can't use the nuts and vegetables for provisioning so I put a bunch of them up at 3c each. They sold immediately. I had a second set which I put up for much more. I guess some people prioritize on the food item made, to get particular stat boosts, versus prioritizing by length of benefit as I am doing.

I got a provisioning Favor of Innovation event at last. I was working on elephant steaks, a pink(grey)-ed out recipe, and it hit. My reward was a sisal root. Now what exactly do I do with a sisal root anyway? I have no idea. I do know that you can sell them for lots of money on the broker, but I'd really like to figure out what I can do with the thing first. This will make 2 of them I'm holding onto.

This is becoming my crafting and selling blog. Have hardly killed anything in the last week or two.

Grillin Fish

2005-09-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

Tlaloc : Ding 25 provisioner. Tlaloc made yet more black tea, and bought yet more leaves on the broker to make still more tea. Time to sell some of that stuff and make sure it actually is sellable.

Also grilled up a lot of seafood. Went through three stacks each of mackerel, and crayfish, and got them cooked up which is the first expected level of cooking for them. I think the next recipe requires marjoram which will mean I can't make that many of them.

Just before writing this post, bought yet more T2 items to make and sell, for only a few coppers. It really works well, as I'm getting XP for the top combines, plus I expect to sell the stuff for a good profit even though I'm purchasing off the broker.

Also mapped out on paper an alt course to get me to 24 different professions between Test and Live. I'm feeling a real hankering to play an evil dwarf. Got as far as mapping out professions by server; did not work on what race the professions should be. So far I've stifled the urge to actually create another alt in this manner, telling myself to get on with leveling the existing guys with specific classes.

Hammerbreaker - Level 19. To become a guardian.
Huehueteotl - Level 18. Eventual conjuror.
Tlaloc - Level 13. Someday a monk.
Bonebank - Level 5 or something low like that. Necro someday.

So immediate plans include making more and more and more food with Tlaloc; and leveling alts up to 20 or so. I can't seem to talk myself into playing Tezcatlipocca, which is OK - it's a lot of fun to make food too.

Making Coffee

2005-09-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

Tlaloc : Ding 23. 30% XP. Tlaloc made an awful lot of food items over the past few sessions. Most of them were greyed out - white tea, black tea leaves, T1 coffee, and several food items. Ultimately, he moved on to things which actually netted him experience like Black Tea, Creamed Antonican Coffee, Vulrich Pies, Marjoram refining, and rye malts.

Having reached 23 as well, he can finally make use of those fished items which have been sitting for a while in the bank. The octopus tentacles make some very-long lasting food. He's got enough stuff to get him quite a ways still. I'll be provisioning for the foreseeable future probably.

Ya just never know what you're going to find on the broker. I've purchased tea leaves for 10c, plantains for 60c, and various other miscellaneous things. It works very well to search for cheap stuff and see what is available.

As expected - drinks sell very well. I finally put a few things up for sale and what do you know, the drinks sold out quickly while nobody has bought the foodstuffs. Well, I'll cut their prices and not worry about it. The things I put up were all normal quality and in ones and twos. Basically, I had to start selling or I would have a filled up storage area.

Also bought yet more boxes. Tez now carries two teak boxes with no problem, and has filled the shared slots with teak. Still a few briarwood boxes he needs to get rid of.

I like the Casual Collective. I can feel like a god of EQ by answering all the noobs questions, it's noisy without pressure, and so far everyone is pretty nice.

Everquest Economy, Part 3

2005-09-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

You are limited in the number of items which you can hold. This is a typical design in every game - make choices about what you want to hold onto, and what you want to keep.

Bad design here. You are putting constraints on the player's ability to create and store their wealth. Don't tell me to just sell the items - the whole point is the need to store wealth in the form of items to combat inflation. Plus how does one deal with items without vendor sell prices ? Or items valued highly by the player which he cannot sell to another player, or vendor ?

By contrast - in a game system with inflation under control, you can trust the value of your coin, and thus have less reason to desire storing items as any kind of inflationary hedge.

But it's not only design limiting the items. The game can only handle so many items in inn rooms, probably for a technical graphic reason. Similar issues are probably going to arise if you tried to make item count unlimited. But some kind of large item storage should be included.

The designer's motivation would be controlling inflation. When you're talking about inflation, usually what is really meant is increases in the price of plat as measured by items.

I'll say that again, because its a weird concept. The right way to look at a transaction is to see both sides. Not only is that palladium cluster valued at x plat, it also means x plat is valued in a palladium cluster. By allowing a large item count, you allow the economy to self-regulate its inflation rate. That rich player holding all the palladium clusters is regulating inflation by holding them, rather than 1000 plat.

And that is definitely enough back-seat designing from me. I hope these three posts help everyone see why inflation needs to be controlled in game to keep the whole thing fun.

Everquest Economy, Part 2

2005-09-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

From a player perspective - how should the economy work?

The EQ2 economy has faucets, sinks, and drains. Money enters from faucets, and leaves permanently from drains. Within the sink, much economic activity happens, and this is where all the fun is generated - player to player sales. Can I sell my palladium cluster for x plat? Can I manage to get a palladium cluster for y gold ? Another thing which happens, is players store the value of their cash for various reasons.

Now when you store your funds in the real world, almost certainly they end up back in the economy in the form of investment, unless you stick your money in a coffee can. Not in Everquest2. Go ahead, ask the banker what your interest rate is; or if you can have a loan. In the strictest sense, no money held is actually driving any part of the economy.

So given that, how do you determine when the cash in the system is too high or too low ? You need to know the amount of funds which the players are expecting to spend right now, versus that which is just being stored. If nothing is going to convince me to part with my 10 plat, why worry about it in the inflationary sense ?

(plat held by players) X (% held which is spendable) / (number of players). Something like this equation can be used as a measurement. Compare the results at specific times and you know how much inflation is driving your economy. The problem being, that second term there is not something knowable by the developers.

I'm coming full circle here, on commenting on Jeff's post - he's pretty much correct. The amount of money in the sink isn't that important. What's important is preventing runaway inflation, yet any count of cash in the system won't provide useful information in assessing inflation.

Can inflation be controlled, for a player, by dumping cash for investments ? It's possible. If you're concerned about inflation buy every highest-dollar-value item and store them. Stackable ones would be particularly good. The trick being, you can't buy anything from the vendors as they usually do not recognize inflation. But that leads to another thought.

Suppose the game designers had a way to measure inflation. If they did, they could create something like an investment merchant. His sole purpose is to sell items to players as hedges against inflation. Buy the Antonia Bayle Certificate of Deposit, and if inflation increases by 50%, then the value of that certificate when sold back to the investment merchant also increases by 50%. The purchase price of the items would probably need to vary from, say, 50 gold to 500 plat, given the 20-stack limitations. Players could park excess dollars here and be free from inflation. SOE staff adjust the vendors prices on some predetermined basis depending upon inflation.

Come to think of it, I'm giving out the method to determine (% that is spendable) of cash in the economy. Think of it as cash held by players being the important measure of cash and thus inflation. Any cash parked on the investment merchant's items is not counted. This would only work if the merchant's items could not be resold until a certain amount of time passed, or were sold with a penalty, which probably introduces too much difficulty in tracking given the existing game.

But the method might be valuable for some new game.