EQ2s Sentinel’s Fate expansion launched on our anniversary. Naturally, being complete geeks we played on launch night! (Of course, it WAS a Wednesday, and we did our anniversary dinner on the following Saturday instead). Loredena (my guardian) and Sisca and Acsis (his monk and fury, respectively) are our usual trio, and they had been 80 for several months. I had started leveling up my original launch-day character (Daena, a conjurer), now moved to a second account, to 2-box but she was still only 76 on the 17th. Luckily it turned out that there were three different starting quest lines on Spire Island — one, from Felice Adae, was for 80 crafters, which all of us were, a gnome gave out a questline at 75, and then the city reps gave theirs out at 78. By the time we had done the gnome and crafting lines, as well as many of the quests stemming from that, Daena had turned 78. On Thursday night she dinged 80, and on Sunday night Sisca’s ranger Casis (slated to replace Sisca in the foursome) also turned 80. Of course, in the meantime our trio has hit 82
In ten years of playing MMOs, until TSO we had never had max-level characters. Clearly, while we won’t be the fastest levelers around, we’re going to max out again within a few months, which will leave a very long time at max this time around. Still, we have plenty of AAs to acquire and a ton of content left to explore (not to mention a stable of alts) so I’m not overly concerned.
First impressions: I loved that there is an extensive series of crafting quests. The first two to complete the initial lines (before the 4 daily crafting quests) made 2.5 levels each, which is awesome! The zones are huge, and a bit laggy due to the number of people, but that’s already improving. They are also really stunning — much brighter colors then EQ2 tended to use early on, and some fantastic artwork. The quests tend to involve an awful lot of running back and forth, which gets tedious, but also ensures you learn your way around. The coin is good, and the quest rewards were definite upgrades for Daena and Casis, whose gear was lagging, but not really for the others, who are in a mix of tier 1 shard armor (TSO) and Kunark quested. I love doing collections (ooh, shiny!) and there are a lot of them in this expansion — but there are also a ton of spawn points for the shinies it seems, so so far no difficulty in doing them. As a crafter, I appreciate that I can do my harvesting without much difficulty as well. I’m also looking forward to spending some time in the Hole once we’ve gotten a bit further along in our questing, and I like that so far everything has been manageable by our small group rather than requiring an optimized one (we never did do the missions in TSO for instance, getting all of our shards from the solo quest).

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