I spent tonight in EQ2 just clearing out some old quests to make room for more (I was down to one free slot), mostly repeatable ones in Thundering Steppes.

One particularly annoying one was a writ from Qeynos to hunt octopi around the docks, though. It turns out that they share spawn tables with the plain, non-aggressive fish in the area, and it took much longer than I expected as I had to swim around and clear out a lot of stupid little fish just to get another octopus to spawn.

Oh well, at least I have 11 free quest slots, now.

And in EQ2 news, we had an impromptu grouping on Saturday and got a bit further in Fallen Gate, though there are still some loose ends to clean up there. Then today, I worked on lower-level quests on my illusionist for a while, though it’s kind of boring since I did them all already with my mystic.

I also started working on Carpentry on my monk character, just for kicks. He’s up to level 23 in that so far, though he can’t really make anything too impressive-looking yet.

The primary event of note in EQ2 this weekend was when a group of us in the guild got together and did the Greater Lightstone heritage quest. The first few steps were easily done solo, but the last one definitely needed a group as we had to take on several waves of a large number of orcs. It was the first time my mystic really had to do any healing, and I was OOM by the end. (It’s also worth noting that mystics don’t “heal” like regular healers do, but instead they place a damage-absorbing ward on group members, and use the direct healing spells to clean up afterwards.)

Other than that, I just did a bit more tradeskilling, getting my ranger up to a level 23 or so fletcher, and my illusionist up to level 28 jewelcrafting.

Our regular Thursday group in EQ2 finally finished off the Timorous Deep quest lines, and apparently we’re being sent off to Butcherblock next. That got my mystic up to level 22, and I should be able to get farther in the prep stages of some of the heritage quests now.

But I think we’re going to investigate some dungeons first, and although we haven’t decided what to do with the weekly group yet, on Friday a few of us got together and did Wailing Caves with our alts. The dungeons are definitely a lot harder than the typical solo/duo quest lines we’ve been doing, since a lot of the monsters are rated ^^ or ^^^ and are linked into encounters that can’t be split. Since we didn’t have an enchanter, we just had to tank the extras on each pull, and some of the fights were pretty chaotic.

I’ve continued to be busy in EQ2, of course, even though I keep forgetting to update here. Last weekend I started a dark elf SK alt and got him up to level 16 and 20 armoursmithing. Melee in EQ2 is definitely more involved than in EQ1, mainly because of the huge number of attack cooldowns you wind up having, and from trying to use Heroic Opportunities effectively. I still don’t really have a good pattern down for the SK like I do for the mystic.

Speaking of the mystic, I got his alchemy up to level 30, and that’s about as far as I can get without gaining more class levels. He’s still stuck at level 19, but I took the opportunity to wander around to the Commonlands and Greater Faydark and do as many newbie quests as I could. There weren’t many I could do in the Commonlands since I can’t enter Freeport, but I’m still working through them in GFay. I’m up to 33 AA points now just from all of these extra quests and exploration.

My money problems are also temporarily solved after finding a quest chain on the island of Mara that only required gathering materials, for a reward of over 17 gold each time. You have to go to higher and higher level areas each time though, so I’m stuck on the fourth stage of it for now, but I earned enough to buy myself some 22-slot backpacks for the shared bank, at least.

I’ve been busy in EQ2 lately, unsurprisingly, starting out with getting a bit further with tradeskilling on my illusionist. Just like my old enchanter, he’s a jewelcrafting expert, and got up to tradeskill level 22.

At this point I need components from higher-level areas, and ironically enough, my enchanter could survive in those areas but didn’t have a high enough gathering skill to actually pick anything up. Since gathering is somewhat tedious, I worked on raising those skills with my primary mystic instead…but he was too low level to survive in those areas just yet.

Ah well, the weekly Thursday group came and we worked through a lot of the quests in the Mok Rent area, finishing off all of the ones involving the southern areas and now we have the bird-guy quests still left to do. That got me to level 18, and then I accidentally hit 19 today when I forgot to switch back to 100% AA exp.

I did some more quests around the Antonica area with my mystic today, gaining a handful of AA points, and with those and the ones earned on Thursday, I’ve been able to start adding pet abilities. Now he can interrupt casters, and hastes the rest of the group by 8%. Soon he’ll be able to randomly proc wards on the group, as well.

And I also went back to Thundering Steppes and managed to successfully gather a bunch of tradeskill components now that I was higher level. It was only enough to bump me up to level 26 alchemy though, as the recipes use more and more ingredients and it takes more combines per level. I also learned transmuting along the way, though I haven’t really done anything with it yet.