If you have the new Age of Discovery expansion you can now hire mercenaries to help you out if you have to solo or to fill in a needed spot in a group. Lore and I have been using them since the launch and I have to say they are game changing for a small guild like us. Now when we only have 2 or 3 players on we can still field a full group and do some of the harder instance content that has been denied to us. On the solo side they made getting Sisca, Acsis and Casis from 85 to 90 much easier than it had been getting them from 80 to 85.
I know that on first glance the price for hiring and their upkeep cost seems prohibitive – 5P to hire and 50G an hour upkeep at level 80+ though it does scale with level – but it’s really not. In the month+ that they’ve been out I’ve pretty much had one up on all of my characters and I’ve still banked well over 200p just from selling loot to the merchant – not even trying to broker spells and such anymore. You’re much more likely to get a chest drop with a Merc since you’re technically in a group so you tend to get a lot more high value loot to sell.
So if you’re interested here’s a list of the various classes and where to find them:
Gorowyn: Berserker, Defiler (no cure on abilities)
Kelethin: Ranger, Warden
Halas: Conjurer, Mystic
Classes no merc available: Beastlord, Bruiser, Fury, Coercer, Illusionist
In Qeynos they’re in Fish’s in Qeynos Harbor, easy enough to sneak in the backdoor if you’re evil. The only one that might prove a problem to hire is the Pally since he’s standing outside.
In Freeport they’re at the tavern in – I believe it’s East FP – it’s right on the water and there is a bell that drops you on the back porch. Again, easy enough to get into if you’re good and want to try one of those classes.
In Gorowyn they’re right up the first ramp from the lower level and of course the Sarnak don’t care about alignment as much.
In Halas they’re in one of the wooden roofed buildings – not the stone ones – that look like great halls and, much like Gorowyn, the guards will ignore you.
In Kelethin they’re in Josalyns Pub and, again, the guards here ignore you.
In Neriak they’re just past the first gate at the entrance from Darklight Woods. These are the two that will be toughest to get if you’re not evil since that gate is guarded by 2 level 85 epic x 2 raid mobs. It can be done if you have an evil friend that’s either a Conjurer with call of hero or has the call of veteran vet reward token. They just need to summon you to the area over by the forge and you should be able to hail them. Be careful though there is another x2 guard inside the tower that they’re standing outside of. If you need help getting to one of these try to hook up with Lore or myself and we’ll get someone over there to summon you.
The good news is that if you replace the merc with a different one for whatever reason they’ll be available in either Qeynos or Freeport depending on your alignment should you want to hire them back. This means you only have to do the whole sneak around thing once. If you do it at low enough level they’re even relatively cheap at 5s per hire at level 20. You could take a new character around and hire them all so that they’ll all be available as you level if you wanted. At higher levels this could be costly at 5p per hire but, as I said, you tend to make up the cash pretty quick (I know this probably won’t work for Reyder since he tends to squeeze every copper so hard that the guards have a warrant out for him for assault on Antonia’s likeness).
So, over at , Kendrick posted on with a fishing comparison. A lively discussion ensued, but since it is pretty apparent that we have fundamentally opposing views on this, and since neither of us will convert the other, rather than continuing to spam his comment section I’m taking it to my own blog.
First, let me lay some groundwork. Kendrick is the guild leader of a large raiding guild – a casual raiding guild, but still a raiding guild. I’m the guild leader of a tiny friends-and-family casual guild. While I led a few raids in EQ, I’ve yet to be on one in EQ2 in 5 years of playing, and I’m unlikely ever to be on one. While I would enjoy doing the 12-man city raids, I have no interest in doing what it would take to turn my tiny guild into one large enough to do the 24-man raids, and I’m also not going to jump ship to a larger guild just to raid. Besides – week nights the only night I stay up past 10:30 is the night I have a team game of Civ 4 with friends, and Saturday nights Sisca and I play D&D with those same friends. I like my sleep too much to become a raider! (For the record, I’m over 40 and I’ve been playing MMOs since EQ launched in ‘99)
As noted elsewhere on this blog, Sisca and I only recently reached 80, with his monk and druid, and my guardian. Next highest in the guild is a 72 necromancer, followed by my 67 conjurer, and then a 62 berserker and a 60 wizard (who has been playing for about a month ). Even ignoring time zones and varying work/D&D schedules, with those levels and classes we’re barely capable of grouping up for instances in, say, Tenebrous Tangle – we can’t yet do Kunark instances let alone TSO ones as a guild.
I know a lot of this has been posted elsewhere by now but due to traveling and having to upgrade my main computer to Windows 7 when I got home – the beta build is expiring so I have to upgrade to the RC – I never managed to get this stuff posted. Still, I want to get it out there and I hope I can help clear up some of the confusion that I’ve seen here and there over the last couple of days.
The first session we attended on Saturday was the premier of EverCracked, the Jace Hall documentary about the creation of EQ. I can strongly recommend that you grab a copy of this when it comes available it as hilarious as well as an interesting look at the people behind the game.
We only managed to take in a couple of sessions today but, between them and the announcements from the keynote tonight there’s going to be a lot of new stuff coming for SoE games. I’m just going to go through my note book and give you the stuff that I remembered to write down along with some impressions. Read the rest of this entry »
I attended two EQ2 sessions at Fan Faire so far today. The first was on quest mechanics, the second on more-general game mechanics. What was interesting in the first was watching the process of rewriting a quest — in this case, that really annoying open-the-gate quest in Thundering Steppes is being rewritten! No longer must you know Halasian, nor come only during the day, to earn the right to come and go as you please. Further, the story line makes more sense, AND does not require you to lower your faction with the centaurs! Instead you’ll collect guard tower reports, find a box of coins (look under the sofa!) and kill a highwayman causing problems, all to make the road safer. For how the quests themselves are built, I’m afraid you had to be there, or talk to someone better at conveying it then me. suffice it to say that while flexible, the tool IS still by its nature limiting in what can be done. There was one point of interest though — there is a desire within the dev team to add other ways of advancing/completing quests that is not so dependent upon kill-10-rat mechanics. This will require rework of the tool, as well as some gameplay mechanics, but they seem to be keen to do something there.
Almost 4 1/2 years after launch and I’ve got my first max level character. In fact this is my first max level character in 10 years of playing MMO’s.
Even scarier is that the next day:
Acsis only took me almost 3 years to cap.
Shortly after that Lore also managed to ding 80, I’m not sure what her played time is but I did manage to snag a screen shot of her ding
I also managed to get Sisca to 80 in Alchemy over the weekend so now I just need to get Acsis 10 more levels of Tailoring and I’ll go from 10 years of no characters at any level cap to 2 characters with both tradeskills and adventuring levels capped.
We also started doing the daily quest for Void Shards and managed to get the first 2 pieces and by the end of the week we’ll have the third. I think our next goal is to get Lore’s mage caught up and I wouldn’t mind getting my ranger leveled so we have a scout class to give us some versatility. I’d also like to spend some time mentoring guildies to see if we can put together a group and maybe start in on some of the TSO instances. I also want to get the crafting epic done with Sisca and Acsis is about halfway through the harvesting cloak so he’d like to finish that off as well.
So still plenty left to do and I haven’t even started in on my other 12 alts
Friday night Lore had to babysit a server upgrade so she wasn’t really going to be able to devote her full attention to gaming but she did want to get some play time in. We decided this would be a perfect opportunity to check out the new tradeskill instances from TSO. She could craft and if something needed her attention it wouldn’t be a big deal for her to stop for a few minutes.
Since she hadn’t really gotten any of her other tradeskillers through the introductory quest line in the Moors she brought along Serrenial, her 80 Provisioner. This matched up well with Sisca, 67 Alchemist (Sage line), and Acsis, 52 Tailor (Outfitter line), giving us coverage of all 3 of the base skill lines. So off we went to isle of Mara.
Apparently the Gnomes in Steamfont were having an issue and could use the help of some skilled crafters so Acsis fired up a portal and we headed off to see what we could do to help. When we arrived at Gnomeland Security we spent several minutes running around looking for someone to direct us before we realized that there was a new doorway that led to an underground research workshop. Zoning in there we saw this giant dragonbot on a rampage tearing up the place. Talking to the foreman revealed that they had built the dragonbot to help defeat the bot that had gone haywire and driven them out of Ak’Anon all those years ago but, again, something had gone wrong and he was malfunctioning. Not to worry though, they had a cunning plan! They would just build a bigger and more powerful bot to beat up the bot that they had built to beat up the first bot. Gnomish logic. Oh well they were willing pay good money, they were providing all the raws and I had a druid to get me the hell out if it all went horribly pear shaped.
Tuesday saw the release of the fifth EQ2 expansion – yes kids there are other MMO’s out there that don’t have War in the title anywhere and they’re still going strong. From all accounts the launch went pretty smooth, to be honest this has become expected from the EQ2 dev team so hats off to them for raising the bar.
The Halloween event has started in EQ2 and Sisca, Lore, and Acis decided to kill things that go bump in the night. We first met up with goblin illusionists who made us look creepy; the fun part was, our look changed every time we zoned. His goblin friend suggested we pay a visit to Loping Plains, as a friend needed a meal, so off we went!
Here Acis and Lore as Vampire Twins — this one amused me greatly, since normally it is Sisca and Acsis who are mirror-twins.
The look changed again as we arrive in LP:
We grabbed the Nightmare rides to Sonborn cemetary
and headed in to meet this friend. We were accosted as we arrived — something bit my neck, and everything went black! I woke in the merchant shop, and went out to see if I could find out what was going on. I found a man in mourning and a priest dithering about trying to cleanse the man’s home — we agreed to go in and find the ritual book (the previous volunteer, with book, never returned) and perform the ceremony.
Sadly, I left my camera behind, so we’ll have to do without pictures from here-on unless Sisca remembered his.
The haunted house was actually pretty entertaining: get jumped by vampires, find a key; retrieve items for the ritual; get jumped by vampires and find another key. Repeat until all ghosts are seen (mom, 2 kids, baby), vampire-filled coffins are torched, and so on. When we were finally ready to perform the ceremony, the ghosts were successfully sent home, but we were accosted by the vampire sire. After chasing him from room to room we found ourselves in the basement. As he died, he mocked us, saying that he was not the source of the evil, and perhaps we should look in the mirror! Doing so, we were accosted by someone who looked remarkably like Sisca! Once he was properly put to rest, we explored again — the ghostly family had departed, but they left behind a toy chest containing a mask, which Sisca claimed (and taking the mask was itself a quest btw). We then went out to reassure the priest that the house was cleansed.
We actually ended up cleansing the house twice more, so that each of us could acquire a mask; we also discovered that starting with the 2nd time through, L&L books were scattered throughout the house, allowing us to pick up some of our missing ones. Each time we zoned in we acquired the cleansing quest anew, so we were able to get both quest rewards, as well as quest exp each time (though the AA was only for the first time). Still, there were enough named on the first round to get a fair bit of AA, and Sisca and Loredena both leveled during the runs through. /edit to add: The funniest part to me was that Sisca was the doppleganger all 3 times!
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!
). Even ignoring time zones and varying work/D&D schedules, with those levels and classes we’re barely capable of grouping up for instances in, say, Tenebrous Tangle – we can’t yet do Kunark instances let alone TSO ones as a guild. 
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