I finished off a small handful of other quests involving Crescent Reach and nearby areas today in EQ, but I figured it was time to take a bit of a break and explore some other games I’ve recently bought. But then later on it was right back into EQ, of course…

I did some more charm soloing in Sunderock Springs, and hit level 73 after a couple of hours, breaking 10k mana in the process. With the new spells, I had upgrades for my nuke (with a new max crit of 4230 so far), single-target clarity, a DoT, spell damage mitigation (too situational, usually not worth the peridot it costs to cast), and a point-blank AE mez.

Those were nice, but the real benefits came when I finally spent those AAs I’d been saving up. I put a rank in Clinging Root and it’s already noticeable how much less often roots get broken by nukes, I bought a rank to raise the mana regen cap from items, and I got Perfected Invisibility just for kicks. But the big one was Beguiler’s Directed Banishment, which will make it much safer to deal with charm breaks from now on. It casts quickly, and knocks the enemy back a ways and keeps them rooted long enough for me to reapply tash and charm. Ideally, I shouldn’t get hit at all during the recharm if I notice the break in time.

My mercenary also got a nice upgrade with a new healing spell that seems to be much more efficient. Before I hit 73, she would gradually fall down towards being out of mana, but now she stays nearly full in the same situations.

Now that I’ve gotten used to higher-level charm soloing, I’m tempted to pause the leveling a bit and grind out some more AAs. There’s still plenty of stuff to buy additional ranks in…