Just after Thanksgiving I decided that my next EQ2 goal was to get Sisca and Acsis to 75. This would open up almost all of the game to me and put 80 well within reach. Last weekend Sisca, Acsis and Lore all managed to hit the target as well as ding their 100th AA. So, Sunday evening I was casting about for something new to focus on and for some strange reason I decided that I just had to start in on the quest for the Cloak of the Harvesters.
I knew that this was a long quest that involved harvesting in every tier but I actually enjoy harvesting and, being 75, only tier 8 would have me harvesting in zones with agro mobs. How hard can it be, right?
It started off simply enough, go to any tier 1 zone and bring me back 10 or so of multiple items from the various nodes. This took me longer than I thought it would mainly because shrubs were almost non-existent – right, who’d a thunk it since it wasn’t that long ago that you could zone into T1 or T2 and find nothing but shrubs up. Next up was T2, I had Acsis port us over to Antonica and we were able to complete everything but the fishing without even getting out of site of the spires.
Next up T3 and this is where it started to get complicated. He wanted you to harvest equal quantities of the same items from both Thundering Steppes and Nek Forest. TS was no big deal, I know several good harvesting spots for all of the various nodes there but Nek has never been one of my favorite zones so I haven’t spent a ton of time there. Still I managed to find an area that I could run back and forth through and get most of the harvests, except for dens. T4 was a repeat of T3 except he wanted stuff from Zek and Enchanted Lands. Again, easy enough and, being 75, I went deeper in to both zones to leave the easier to get to harvest for the lower levels.
For T5 it was off to Rivervale and Feerot. Much like Nek Forest, Feerot has never been one of my favorite zones so I decided to put that off. I know Rivervale, I’ve harvested in Rivervale even when it was still green, this should be a snap. Two hours later I was finished with everything except DENS. In that entire time I had seen maybe 10 dens tops and you didn’t just need 20 or so of the pelts but also 20 or so of EACH type of meat from the dens. Frustrated, I gave it up for the night and started thinking about finding something else to focus on.
Last night saw the culmination of about 3 nights of work with the Legendary - Golden Efreeti Boots <Link/Image coming soon>. The quest was titled “Saving Soles” but with all the running around in Lavastorm I have to wonder whose “soles” were being saved ’cause it darn sure wasn’t mine.
Oh, and Note to SoE: Lavastorm could use an Everfrost style revamp. The first trip through there was entertaining, the fifth trip to the docks and back was fingernails on a chalk board irritating. Luckily for us we had out leveled the zone or it would have taken hours just to complete a single step of the quest, and that’s without killing whatever needed to be killed for that step.
Anyway, Sisca, Acsis and Lore are proud owners of GEB’s and now we’ll move on to finishing off the Crown of King Tranix quest line. Either that or we’ll take a break from slaughtering greys in Lavastorm to make the push to 70. Though I have to guess that since they put phase 2 of the D.I.R.T.Y. quests in we might spend the rest of the week distracted by that.
By the way I’m trying a new system for posting using Google Docs so we’ll see how this works out.
With the advent of guildhalls starting at guildlevel 30, The Revellers made a strong push to level the guild. Sisca and I are two of the only four active members right now, and we have the highest-level adventurers (and I have one of the two level 80 crafters). Everyone helped though — we ran alts and mains both through some of the lower-level heritage quests, everyone did the harvesting quest series for the guild construction, and we all did both adventuring and harvesting writs.
For the final push, Sisca, Acsis and Loredena (all 63/64 at the time) collected all 4 of the ‘kill Sentries in Tenebrous Tangle’ writs and headed topside. We could get there, kill 20 sentries, and head back to Qeynos for a fresh batch of writs in less then 10 minutes per cycle. Three or four rounds later, we dinged 30!
After a fair amount of discussion, it was decided to purchase our guild hall in N Qeynos. We considered Gorowyn as being accessible to good and evil alike, but since we are primarily Qeynos based, and I liked the ‘look’ of the Qeynos halls better, that’s where we settled. Sisca, as original guildleader, did the honors. We failed to get a ‘now purchasing’ screen shot though, sorry!
We’ve designated one room as a library, and other as the crafting area. Kennet, Reyder’s monk alterego, is busily experimenting with housing items before decorating the room he called dibs on. He has some unique ideas, so I’ll be sure to post screenshots once he progresses a bit more!
Spore is one of those games I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. It has a ‘god game’ aspect with initially creating your creature and having it evolve. Eventually it will hit the city builder stage (a gamestyle I enjoy) and then the Civ-game, which is also a gamestyle I enjoy. Finally your creations venture off into space, in what I assume will be Gal Civ-like 4X game.
What makes it unique is that, while a single-player game, it will populate your world with the creatures of others, lending it a multiplayer aspect. The creature creator itself was released earlier this summer, and I spent some time playing with it. I don’t know how practical in-game any of my critters will prove, nor do I know how any of the ones I downloaded to my creator will be. It’s nifty though how easily you can take someone else’s creature into your game. The intent is to have creature-casts as well as buddy (and ignore) lists. It launches in one week, and I’m excited to see how it plays out!
If I’m going to start posting more about my adventures in the various games I guess I should give a quick rundown of my various characters.
Everquest 1:
Bjoern - Level 30ish Dwarven Berserker created to play with the Tuesday night Nostagia group. No last name yet but I’m thinking of something like Ta’Rock.
Soaridor - Level 53 Drakin Mage created to check out the new race and, due to the increased speed of leveling, ended up joining the Friday night Nostalgia group. Currently replaced by Sisca but I may start alternating depending on the needs of the group.
Sisca Mainacier - Level 56 Human Monk, this was my original character in EQ, created back in October of 1999. I recently moved him over from The Tribunal when Nostalgia was working on Vox/Naggy. While I thought the tactic we came up with for Mage pulling Naggy was cool - basically the druid would cast her translocate spell on Soaridor and I’d run in and aggro the lair and get them to just outside then accept the TL to clear agro then gate back to the where I had bound just outside the throne room - I thought having a monk around would be more efficient. Besides, Sisca was still 51 since I’d held him there for the express purpose of pulling Vox. Got him to 56 so far but after the trip to Old Sebilis last week I’m thinking that depending on who’s available and where we go Soaridor’s DPS might be more beneficial at times so I may start platooning them.
I rolled my warrior, Loredena, on the Tribunal on 9/1/99. A coworker had convinced me to play EQ by telling me ‘it’s D&D online!’. Despite a confusing UI, corpse-runs, blind Barbarian in Halas and everything else that went with a new online game, I was immediately enthralled. While Lore was my much-loved main, played most days, I rolled up other avatars to play with friends. With Traveller (my coworker) and his friend Nine, I played a dwarven cleric named Serenya on Sunday afternoons, eventually joined by Sisca with his wizard.With Traveller, Nine’s sister Bobaloo, and their friend Hammey, I rolled a different dwarven cleric named Velma (on Fennin Ro) to play one night a week as part of the Scooby group (we had Daphyne, HE enchanter; Scrapy, dwarf warrior; Scooby, WE druid; Shaggey, barb shaman; and Phreadd, human paladin)
By the time we stopped playing six years later, Serenya was 65, Loredena was 55, and Velma was 52 – we had moved Scooby group to the Trib, and I switched to playing Serenya with them. While Lore wasn’t played as much, those two once-a-week groups were still going strong, right up until the end.
In the years since, I would occasionally log in just to look around, but I never tried to play. Until this spring.I have been reading the blogs of Tipa and Stargrace for awhile, and they began writing about EQ Nostalgia.From their posts and the ensuing wave of nostalgia a new guild was born, Nostalgia on the Luclin server, and Sisca and I decided we wanted to be a part of that.
Last night I spent some time making sure all of my various alt’s in WoW have emptied their mailboxes in preparation for canceling my account.
Around May I started to get bored, as did Lore I think, and we sort of put the group on hold for awhile. Both Lore and I have hunters that are at 67 and the temptation is there to make that last push to 70 but she said she just couldn’t muster the energy and she has a much higher tolerance for these things than I do - every time I consider it my head starts hurting.
So today it ends.
I may be back at some point but I have to say that nothing I’ve seen coming out of WotLK is making me think that will be what brings me back.
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