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.

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…

This is the first handheld gaming system I have owned, and I’m pretty impressed with it. I was looking for something small and light to add to my travel bag for gaming entertainment instead of lugging my laptop around. I decided to go with the DSi because of the interactivity via the touch-screen and there were already a lot of games out that appealed to me. I waited a few extra weeks for the DSi launch simply because of the improvements Nintendo have made to the processor speed, screen size, memory size, touch-screen, and sound. Not really sure the 2 built in cameras will get used much.

A Gaming system is nothing without good software to support it, and thankfully because this just an update to the existing DS rather than an all new handheld launch – there is already a good selection and some gems for a new owner like me.

Currently occupying my spare time when away from home is Hotel Dusk. This is sort of like a graphic novel mystery adventure game; I won’t try and explain it in detail, just give a link to its Wiki entry if you’re interested to learn more.

This Saturday I hope to have a quick look around the pre-owned and bargain bin area of my local video game store, I’m hoping they might have a Zelda or Mario Bros title.

Mentioning EQ2 leads me smoothly into saying I’m back in the game.
Yep – I expected my break away from EQ2 to be longer than just 3 months, and I kinda had visions of not stepping back into Norrath until closer to the next expansion which I guess will be around November 2009 time. During my 3 month hiatus I continued reading various EQ2 related forums, sites, blogs, and listening to podcasts. This helped me realise I still loved the game; I had just lost focus and direction with it. I guess this is what you call a burnout. What did it feel like? Well it was like hitting a brick wall; I would log-in and pretty much just spend my time staring at the screen wondering what the hell to do – even though I knew there is still a huge amount of content there was zero motivation.

Lucky for me I know the nature of my brick wall – it’s the adventure level cap, and once hit with my 2 main adventure characters I lost all motivation to continue questing for achievement points or better armour. What didn’t help was being left with Auberon and Randle – 2 characters that were really only ever created purely for crafting. In hindsight I should have just created a new character but instead I played them because of the amount of time already invested with them in crafting. A bit stupid really to have kept levelling in hope I would grow to like the character classes as they got higher, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to play any of the remaining classes anyway! – so kept grinding on.

Last week I reopened my main account and created an Erudite Conjuror. I had fun with the class and like the way the pet changes its look depending on the level of your summon spell, and of course the pet types change as you level through the tiers too.

The Erudite race was nice for a test of the class, but I really wanted another Ratonga. Having invested 20 levels into Conjuror and feeling pretty happy with the play style of the class I deleted him and created a Ratonga Necromancer named Hendon. Hendon has already betrayed Freeport and is currently doing faction quests for Qeynos to get citizenship with the city, and because there is no Necromancer class allowed this will swap to conjuror.

Hendon is currently at level 17 and is only using or wearing quested items; there is little point in spending money until the speed of his levelling slows enough that it will not be a waste. When he gets to Qeynos he will probably spend most of the time 2 boxing mentored with a high level Mystic – so I will only really need to worry about spell upgrades and I plan to craft Adept 3’s for pets, I’m sure that quested equipment will be sufficient until he gets out of the base game and into expansions.

This was my first attempt and as such I really didn’t want to try anything too complex, this was really more of a test to see if the software and hardware I had would work together in giving a result I was happy with.

I remembered a child’s alphabet toy block on the floor near to the beginning of Fallout 3. Nothing easier than a cube I thought, although on closer examination I noticed it wasn’t a perfect cube – it had some uneven modelled edges. This I guess was either to make it look worn; perhaps it was a remnant from the old world before the area was nuked, or maybe it was modelled that way so that when the block was interacted with by the player it would roll around the floor better using the games physics engine.

I launched the Fallout 3 game through the 3D Ripper DX software and was please to see the game running with the yellow capture ready bar in the top left corner of the screen. Pressing F12 captured the frame and associated textures and located them to folders within the Rippers default folder.

Using 3DS Max 5 I imported the frame and removed all the unwanted bits except for the toy block.

This I saved by exporting it as a .3ds file. Next still using Max I looked through the textures and located the one associated with the toy block. This was then opened and saved out as a .jpg file.

I opened the texture in Paint Shop Pro and sharpened the image a little.

Next I started up the Pepakura Designer program, opened the .3DS file of the toy block and applied the texture to it. With such a simple model I unfold it using auto settings and after rotating the unfolded box to better fit the page it was saved as a .pdo file.

The .pdo file was then opened in the Pepakura viewer for craft ROBO. This is a version of the viewer that adds registration marks to the A4 sheets of paper when you print out your paper model pieces. It also translates the different lines in Pepakura (edge, fold, and flap) and sends cutting data to the Graphtec Craft Robo CC200-20 when you have set-up a page for the machine to cut the pieces out. I also set it to perforate the fold lines for speed.

All that was left was to fold and glue it into shape.

The whole process from start to finish took about 30 minutes, aided greatly by the cutting machine.

Software used:
Fallout 3
3D Ripper DX
3DS Max 5
Paint Shop Pro 7
Pepakura Designer 3
Pepakura Viewer for CraftRobo

Other items:
Colour Printer
Craft Robo Cutting Machine
120gsm A4 Matt White paper
PVA glue