Arcane Gamer

Most of my EQ2 game time over the weekend was spent questing in the low level areas thanks to Zelka a new Warden character on my secondary account. Grissom my level 80 Wizard mentored down to zelka at level 2 in the Oakmyst Forest and I nuked everything in sight, even yellow and orange targets went down with ease.

The thing about mentoring is you don’t lose any of your spells; they just get adjusted to a more appropriate power level. This means you have a lot of fire-power, especially as the level they adjust to feels like they are all Master grade. I’m not sure as to what grade your equipment gets lowered to, but I would imagine its at least Master-Crafted.

As soon as Zelka hit level 9, I locked her Adventure and Quest XP from the menu accessed by right-clicking on the XP bar on screen.

Oakmyst didn’t have any new quests that I could find, so moved on to The Forest Ruins followed by The Peat Bog. Both these areas had a new quest line in them, and both areas had a lot more mobs in them compared to the old days.

Next I checked out The Caves but again found no quests that I hadn’t already done.

At this point I decided to make the journey to Timorous Deep – a starting area added with the Rise of Kunark expansion pack. To get there I took a boat ride form the Antonica Docks to the Butcherblock Mountains, and from here it was just a run along the western beach and up a slope to grab a ride on a colourful Griffin. There were loads of quests here as you would expect from a starting area, and I decided as we got into the higher end quests to unlock Zelka’s XP gaining ability.

Questing in Timorous Deep also kicked of my Sunday session which ended in completing a couple of quests in the Butcherblock Mountains before logging out and taking a break. Zelka is currently at level 22 and I think we’ll head across Antonica towards Stormhold next.

Later in the afternoon I logged in Grissom with Negnar my Mystic to run through the Lavastorm quest line; now that this is done they can both do the void shard daily solo quest whenever I feel like it. Negnar dinged 77 whilst we were doing this.

I realized that I had forgotten to take any pictures over the weekend so quickly took the one below of Grissom (Wizard on left) and Negnar (Mystic on right) before logging off.

So – what did Grissom get out of this weekend?

44 quests completed
2 Achievement points
5 Plat and 27g through broker sales of unwanted collectibles and combat art / spell books.
And a lot of fun along the way…

Yes- I sold all treasured items instead of transmuting them. I am definitely dropping the skill and going for tinkering as my secondary tradeskill. I’m a Ratonga at heart, and we are just too greedy to transmute things of value.

Although I have been a little quiet about EQ2 – over the last couple of weeks I have been putting as much time into the game as possible.

First I would like to say a belated Grats! to our guild “The Allied Qeynosians” on the Befallen server for reaching the current guild level cap of 80 Woot!

This is a pretty big achievement for a small and casual type guild, and we certainly wouldn’t be sitting at level 80 if it were not for the tireless dedication and effort from Maria (Senior Officer) who has amassed around 8 million guild status. Although most guild members and their alts have added to our guild status – Kobee (2^nd guild leader) and Buaf (Officer) deserve a mention as they have both been award their crossing over the 1 million medals by Ulion (guild leader) on the guilds website.

So what have I been doing?

The guild has been coming together for void shard runs at the weekends with Ulion tanking. I will need 44 shards to buy a full set of armor for Grissom from the Tier one vendors, or 38 if I get someone to craft the items for me. I have already bought the Wizards hat and gloves from the vendors, but Maria has kindly offered to make me the other items. I didn’t think I was going to bother with shard armor, but it has been great to have this common goal that brings us together, and also great that we all get rewarded with the shards rather than having to roll a D100 to see who wins.

Hendon – my new Ratonga has betrayed Freeport and is now living as a Conjuror in Graystone Yard. He has reached level 23 but has been put on hold because I have decided earlier this week that there is a ton of stuff I would like to do with my 2 main characters Grissom and Tudor before focusing too much on him.

What I would really like to do is take Grissom back through all the low level tiers to increase his completed quest count via the quests he missed first time through, and I believe there will be a lot of newly added quests since his original low level days. This will be possible by mentoring him down to another alt on my secondary account which I use a lot in dual boxing.

The other things inspiring me to do this are:

To farm treasured items for his Transmuting secondary skill I was just about to give-up on.
He has a huge amount of uncompleted collection quests that need items you can’t buy on the broker (No Trade).
He has no fishing skills, might be a good idea to max this as there could be quests or changes in future expansions I guess.
There are Lore and Legend books I would like to get.
The chance to earn some Achievement XP along the way.

I already have an unused alt created on my secondary account sometime ago, a Warden named Zelka. I think it’s time for her to come out and play.

To help out on this I am using zone and instance level information from the EQ2i site, and will be disabling Zelka’s XP gain at certain points to try and make sure we don’t out level content too quickly.

I should have time to start this tonight, and will let you know how things go…