As planned, I spent today in EQ getting the Silverwing ring and belt items again, but I gave up on the cloak after a while as it was starting to get boring. It was also around that time that I realized I’d forgotten about the mana regen cap — apparently the default cap for regen from items is only 15, and so far I have from my items a total of…39. So any further regen isn’t really going to do me any good anyway until I get a lot more of the cap-raising AAs.

I also spent some time working on my epic 1.5 weapon, by doing the preparatory step of collecting a bunch of pages and turning them in. I probably won’t be able to do anything else on it anytime soon since it involves some fairly tough fights.

And although I managed to avoid HoH for almost all of level 69, I returned there just to burn off my daily double-xp period, and hit level 70. I still don’t have any other new spells, but I can now wear all the elegant defiant silk items I’d been saving up, giving me boosts of over 600 health and mana. Not too shabby.

I’m only getting 4% per clearing of the HoH basements now, but I’m only one level away from finally being able to buy spells again, so perhaps I just need to grit my teeth and put up with it for just a little longer. Even the highest level monsters I can charm con light blue to me now, without that level 68 charm spell.

I soldiered on and finished off the Silverwing quests in EQ tonight, netting me this charm, which is a significant upgrade from my old one. The only annoying part was a long stretch in Trakanon’s Teeth where the piece I needed just did not want to drop.

Ironically, getting that charm made my stats worse overall, since I had to combine all of the previous Silverwing items to make it. In particular, I was getting 12 points of mana regen from the other Silverwing items before, and afterwards I only got 5 from the charm. But, now I can go back and remake all those items again, and get a total of 17 points of regen, and I’ve already regained the earring from HoH.

That’ll probably be my goal for tomorrow, and with luck I should also hit 70 and be able to wear all the Elegant Defiant Silk armour I’ve saved up.

On a whim, I took another stab at the Silverwing quests tonight instead of doing HoH for the zillionth time, and actually managed to find some of the pieces fairly quickly. After running around Droga, Noble’s Causeway, The Deep, and Velketor’s for a while, I had three more pieces: the belt, cloak, and mask. The belt and cloak were even decent upgrades, which is going to make giving them up to make the charm even more difficult…

I also ran across an old friend from the very early EQ days, when I had a small, regular group I played with a lot. Looks like the mercs are bringing back even more people.

The EQ devs had a bit of fun today by changing the names of all of the classes in-game. Necros became ‘n3cr0’s, clerics became Rezbots, rangers became Corpses, and my enchanter became, well, a Smartypants.

I just barely made it to level 69 tonight, though it took pretty much all evening, so it’s going to take more than a single day for further levels… I seem to get 5% of a level per basement clearing now (though I was forced to leave before collecting much data), in which case it’ll take 20 clearings to get to level 70, which would take nearly seven hours at three clearings per hour (spawn time is about 20 minutes).