I spent most of today’s time in EQ2 starting a new character, a sarnak shadowknight. But wait, don’t I already have a shadowknight? Yes, but I also started taking this guy through the Freeport betrayal quests. I’m about a third of the way through gaining faction with Qeynos, and when I’m done, I’ll have a sarnak paladin instead, which will certainly be an unusual combination.

I had previously been at the character limit (a measly 7 by default), so this was also made possible by converting my payment plan over to a Station Pass. Since I’m still subscribed to EQ1 as well, it was only slightly more expensive than maintaining the two separate subscriptions, and gives me an extra 5 character slots. This will also let me cover all of the crafting professions, if I’m ever crazy enough to try raising all of them.

My time in EQ2 over the weekend was primarily spent on tradeskilling, getting my mystic up to level 36 alchemy, and my illusionist up to level 37 jewelcrafting. I also got the illusionist caught up on the gathering skills and Mara gathering quests, netting me a bit more cash.

I’m not really finding alchemy all that useful so far, though. None of the potions I’ve made so far are ones I’d really consider all that useful for regular or emergency use. Maybe it gets better later on…

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.

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.