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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.

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Since the last EQ2 update I’ve been pulled by competing desires.   Guild Halls our coming next update (probably today!), so we want to get the guild to 30 – as of Sunday, we’re 70% through 29!  Considering our size (4 active members) I’m really happy with how far we’ve come!    At first I was running all of my avatars through the harvesting quests – the first time with each, you receive AA, and you get guild status.  Also, 10 gives a scroll for one’s house, 20 a statue, and 30 a title.  I think Loredena, Serrenial, and Fellbrood made it to the title – Serr can harvest tier 8, so she actually did all harvesting quests, while I actually pushed Fellbrood’s armorcrafting to 40 just to open up another harvesting tier.   I like the evil side statue (a dragon) better then good’s ( a knight) but don’t really have the energy to grind out that many more harvest runs with my other evils.  Taking my lower level avatars harvesting in higher-level tiers was pretty good guild status (at 30 Lemi got 16K for tier 7, which is better then Serr gets doing a level 80 writ!) but rather slow and death-prone.  I did do all the levels of the crafting journeyman series with each as I went though, as well as Duggin’s Hungry Halfling quests where available.

This last update also added a murder mystery – the Seeress of the Temple of Life (Rodcet Nife’s prophet) was killed.   Everyone ran some of the (rather boring) bone chip quests to get the orb to 100%, and then we spent time solving the mystery on both sides.   I really enjoyed the first time through on either end, though it most definitely is time consuming!  But, the evil and good sides are of course close parallels, so not quite as entertaining the second time, and the third and fourth was rather boring.   The quest rewards are exceedingly good, so I’m glad I ran it with my main avatars, but it was a bit tedious towards the last.   One thing about the rewards is quite nifty – two of them grow with you!   They are at the x5 level, and they can be mounted to display in your room.   Mounting and then unmounting them (making them usable again) will set them at the closest x5 level.  Thus, should you acquire them at 25, you can level them to 35 and so on to 75.  This makes them exceedingly good rewards all told.