Tonight’s EQ2 session was spent mostly working on tradeskilling, first collecting a bunch of materials around Zek and the Enchanted Lands to fulfill a gathering quest, and then working on jewelcrafting until I ran out of materials, managing to go from level 32 to 35. Levels 36 and 38 are where the good rings I can make will be, but they won’t be wearable until my characters hit class level 30 anyway.
Tonight in EQ2 we finally got back to the Butcherblock quest lines that we’d been directed to weeks ago. We finished off the ones near the docks and sarnak camp and then headed to the camp near the GFay entrance, where we found a bunch more quests. We called it a night there, though.
Along the way I won an advanced armourcrafting page and with it I was able to make nice boot and shield upgrades for my SK, at least. And before the group got going, I did a bunch of gathering and hit level 33 alchemy on my mystic, though it’s fairly slow going now that combines give less xp and take more materials.
Ugh, I’ve been forgetting to update again, so in brief:
EQ2: Last Thursday our regular group popped into Befallen briefly but didn’t find much there, so we headed to Stormhold, explored it pretty thoroughly, and completed a handful of quests there, though some are still unfinished. On Friday I worked on the Heroes Festival quests, including a fairly easy collection, setting off some fireworks, and a long quest chain that took me through a few instance zones I hadn’t seen before, including Unrest and Karnor’s Castle, giving me the title of Dream Hero. Since this is probably a one-time-only thing for the 5th anniversary, I did it on almost all of my alts as well.
I also started working on the armour quests on my mystic, and grouped up with a couple other guild members to finish them off on the weekend. Since then I’ve been working on quests on my illusionist, holding him at level 25 and letting it go to AAs instead. I’ve mostly finished off Antonica but still have to do GFay. And I discovered I can sneak around the Zek zone and gather some materials for the next tier of crafting without getting into fights, but haven’t done anything with them yet.
WoW: There was a seasonal harvest bounty event in WoW as usual, and I finished off a couple more achievements, but didn’t get most of them. Not much else has happened there, really.
Serious Sam HD: This was finally released on Steam and I played through the first chapter of it. It’s a bit on the old side now, even with the updated graphics, but it’s still fun to get mobbed by a bunch of screaming, exploding, headless guys.
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.
I finished Torchlight tonight, or at least the ‘main’ part of it. The dwarven ruins weren’t actually the last environment — there was one more after that — so it took a bit longer than expected. And, of course, it culminated in a boss fight, which took an awfully long time and I died once and almost ran out of health potions.
Overall it was a pretty decent Diablo clone, though it lacked a bit of variety and puzzles in the middle section. There’s still more to go, as beating the boss unlocked a ‘vault’ with some additional harder levels, but I’ll work through those at a slower pace.
Whoops, I’ve been falling behind a bit, so in brief:
EQ2: Over the last few days I mainly worked on crafting, but didn’t spend as much time in it as I had before. Tonight we had our weekly group and went through Wailing Caves again (not everyone else had seen it), and started on Fallen Gate. We didn’t make it to all the areas in there though, so we’ll have to come back. It finally made my healing actually necessary, though, and I’m halfway through level 24 now.
WoW: Yesterday, I finally achieved two goals at the same time: hitting Exalted with Kirin Tor, and collecting 100 cooking awards in Dalaran and getting the chef’s hat. Those were all I had really been logging in and doing the dailies for, as I think I’ve got pretty much all the other possible awards for the cooking and fishing dailies.
Torchlight: I made it through a couple other environments and I think I’m at the last one now, though nothing terribly exciting or interesting has happened. I did finally get a kickass wand and found a couple suitable uniques though, so I’m much better equipped than before.
This weekend I also finally got around to starting Torchlight, and it can pretty much be summed up as…Diablo. That’s about it, really. It’s kind of like a blend of the original Diablo and Diablo 2, with a lot of the mechanics of the latter, but the underground dungeon focus of the former.
I’m playing an Alchemist, and currently I’m developing my golem summoning skills, though I’m not sure what to do for my own attacks yet. Unlike D2, you don’t have to buy prerequisite skills, so I’m even more hesitant than usual to spend skill points too early…
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.