I hit level 77 in EQ fairly quickly today, and the new spells are pretty decent, with upgrades to tash, haste, and a new charm. I also bought upgrades to the Clinging Root and Mez Mastery AAs, putting me back down at 14 AA points.

The exp is still pretty good at the fire goblin camp, so I’m going to have to decide whether to keep exping there, or start exploring a bit more, with the new charm opening up more possibilities. Either way, I think I’ll first max out my AAs again before hitting level 78, while the xp is still good.

I started leveling again in EQ tonight, but it’s going more slowly than expected, and after a couple hours I only gained about 26%, putting me 59% of the way to 77. I guess it’s going to take me a few more days…

I got bored of the exping though, so I figured I should actually spend some of that money I’ve been saving up and worked on jewelcrafting for a bit afterwards. I quickly got up to 282 with vendor gem combinations, but after that you need dropped gems. Fortunately, since the server had been up for quite a while, the ones I needed were readily available on random vendors, with a bit of searching.

It’s getting expensive, though. After spending about 40k plat (knocking me down to 70k left in the bank), I’m up to 288 skill now. Those last 12 points are going to be annoying, since at this point all of the gems and bars are quite expensive, the salvage skill doesn’t kick in quite as often as I’d like, and you can easily chew through 5-10k plat without a single skill gain. I think I’ll leave it at here for now…

I discovered tonight that the flurry ability I bought yesterday doesn’t actually work for charmed pets like I assumed it would. Oh well, that’s a bunch of ranks I don’t need to buy into any further…

Instead I picked up another rank of Shield Block and the other banishment ability, that acts in a cone effect. The single-target one is the preferred one for charming, but the cone one should be useful in emergencies when there are multiple enemies after me in a bad charm break. With my AA options cut a bit short by the above discovery, I think at this point I’m going to bank the usual 30 AAs and get back to leveling, as the more useful AAs I still want won’t be available until the next few levels.

I also finally hit 100,000 plat in the bank tonight. Soon I’ll have to choose between whether I want to keep saving it for spells and other items later on, or splurge it all on the fastest mount type.

I spent a little while longer than I intended working on more AAs in EQ. With the dual-wielding trick, I’m earning them more quickly than ever before at the fire goblin camp, so I may as well milk them while I can, and I’ve bought some more like innate charm resistance (will supposedly be important in the Seeds of Destruction areas) and the flurry ability for my pet. I can usually earn enough AAs to buy a rank of something each day, so although the camp is a bit repetitive, it doesn’t really feel like any days are entirely wasted. It’s pretty good cash too, with the deepwater gem and plat drops.

Though I’ve just been grinding AAs in EQ lately, I made two big discoveries recently.

First, the anniversary quests aren’t gone yet, even though the event has ended. This means I can keep doing at least the fishing one, for a pretty good amount of cash and a couple AAs for an hour or so’s work. I’m not sure if this is intentional or if it’s just because the servers haven’t been rebooted yet, so I’ll have to do it whenever possible in case it vanishes soon.

And I also remembered that I can give charmed pets weapons to make them dual-wield. This resulted in a huge increase in DPS when I tried it out on the fire goblins in Buried Sea, and now I can make 4-5 AAs per Lesson period instead of 3. It’s also riskier when charm breaks, of course, so I also have to be a lot more careful.

And speaking of AAs, I’ve bought up all of the ranks of Jewelcraft Mastery and Salvage, and one rank of the research mastery AA as well. I think I’ll finish off that one (15 more AAs to get the next two ranks), just so the important tradeskill AAs are completely over and done with, and then get back to leveling.

I did more exploring around the Buried Sea area today, as there’s a bit more to it than I thought. There was a camp of fire goblins on Suncrest Isle that was pretty good xp, where I’ll probably spend my double-xp periods from now on, and I found some chests along the beach on another island, in which I found:

It also turned out that I could enter the city of Katta Castrum by jumping into the big whirlpool at the center of the zone. It’s an enormous city, divided into outer areas under siege by elementals and Shissar and the inner area where the old Combine empire lives, but it’s largely empty.

I picked up a handful of tasks and did a few of them that I could do right within the city itself, but none of them were all that important. Katta Castrum has its own separate currency, but to pick up any of those it looks like I have to do the harder, group quests. I doubt there’s anything I really want to earn here though, since it would probably be quickly obsoleted once I reach the Seeds of Destruction areas.