Today I finally set off to explore more in EQ, and I figured I’d pick up where I left off a long time ago, in the Gates of Discord areas. There’s supposed to be a giant ship you can take from the Nedaria’s Landing zone, but after waiting a while I guessed that the boats are broken yet again and used the Magus nearby to teleport to it instead.

On the ship I discovered some quests for unlocking some expansion-specific parts of tradeskills, and went through the necessary intro steps for blacksmithing and jewelcrafting, but left it at that since it gets pretty tedious. I did spend a little while working on raising jewelcrafting a bit further, as apparently the cap has been raised to 300 now (was 250 before), and managed to gain 8 points. That cost me about a thousand plat in materials though, and I decided to leave it at that. There were some progression quests as well, but I’ll have to leave those for now since they all pretty much require groups or raids.

Moving on, the zone of Natimbi was next, but it’s pretty plain and there was hardly anything my level, just a bunch of grey, green, and light-blue monsters. Boring.

After that was Qinimi, which was sort of a fairly small hub zone connecting to a few others. Again, not much here of real interest to me, just a bunch of light-blue monsters.

And then after that I stuck my nose into Barindu, which had a much more consistent mix of blues and light blues. There was an annoyingly long corridor at the entrance, but it eventually opened up on the garden area below, and I think I’ll try fighting a bit here the next time I’m on.

I only spent a little time in EQ tonight, but it was still enough to earn 4 more AAs, despite dying once when an unlucky break had three monsters beating on me. I’ve bought up three levels of the INT-cap-raising skill, getting me nearly 300 more mana, and should probably start looking at other skills to focus on as well.

But first, I should explore a bit. It’ll get boring rather quickly if I just sit in Plane of Storms and solo the same frogs over and over again, and I might be better off somewhere else anyway. Looking through the guides to each expansion tells me how to get to all of the new zones, and I’ll try and see as many of them as possible. I don’t know how much I’ll actually be able to do in a lot of those older zones, though. A lot of them have progression steps, and there might not be enough people around those old zones to make going through the progression practical. Especially when most of the loot is obsoleted by the newest couple of expansions anyway.

But I should at least drop in and say hi…

Tonight’s session in EQ was the one in which I actually started killing things. But first, I had to stop off and pick up one of the new mercenaries, which essentially gave me an AI-controlled duoing partner. You can select either a tank or a healer, and there are five tiers of each type, each higher one costing more than the others (there’s a one-time hiring fee and an ongoing every-15-minute continuation fee), though it’s not really exactly clear what the differences are. I picked a tier III dwarven healer and headed out to the Planes.

The most effective way to solo as an enchanter is through charm soloing, which is simply charming an enemy and sending it against other enemies to do your killing for you. Of course it’s not quite as easy as that — the charm can be resisted, it’s of random duration and could break at a bad time and leave you dealing with two enemies after you, some enemies will summon you directly to them and beat you up anyway, dealing with caster types can be a pain, it can drain a lot of mana very quickly, etc…

I was never really all that great at charm soloing before, but tonight it almost felt too easy, even though I’m severely out of practice. The healer merc gave me the HP buffs I normally wouldn’t have, it kept me and the charmed critter topped up so that I didn’t have to worry about HPs being worn down, and she kept me alive during the charm breaks that took a while to bring under control again. The healer even kept me alive through a really bad fight where a summoning giant somehow drained all my mana away and I was frantically looking for that restore-to-full veteran ability while charm broke at the same time, and even if I had died, the merc would have given me a rez.

I even made 5 AA points in only 4 hours, just practicing on light blues and a handful of dark blues in the Nightmare, Disease, and Storms planes. That’s crazy-fast compared to the rate I remember getting them before. I’ll mainly be spending them on the AA skills that raise the stat caps for now, since I’m severely capped on INT and that’ll get me more mana fairly easily. Beyond that, I’ll have to do a bit of research on just what the useful new AA skills are.

Today I finally got back into EverQuest in earnest. I started out by actually creating a whole new character, a gnome magician, and taking him through the new tutorial. Nothing really new was revealed that way, but it did get me used to the controls again. After switching back to my enchanter, I then spent a while fine-tuning the controls and UI, setting up windows, setting hot keys, creating spell lists, etc. The setup I’d used before is long gone, and I doubt it would have done me any good anyway.

I also grabbed a few map packs from map collection sites and installed them. They’re not nearly as pretty as WoW’s, but they’re still pretty much essential.

Somebody asked in /ooc how to get to some zone I hadn’t heard of, and my curiosity was piqued, so I followed their directions and headed there myself (via a stone-activated portal in the guild hall), and wound up in a rather spooky-looking part of the Depths of Darkhollows areas. It was all dark and underground like the fungal caverns of Luclin, but populated by mind-flayer-like creatures and weird, twisty paths. I might have to come back later for leveling, since the enemies were blue to me.

Back in PoK, I ran across an old guildie friend and we chatted for a bit, and then it was off to the bazaar to see what was available. I was afraid of what inflation might have done to the market, but managed to pick up five pieces of defiant silk armour that boosted my stats considerably, for not too much money. My HP went from 4352 to 5030, my mana from 5756 to 6263, and a bunch of other stat and regen increases as well. I’ll have to keep checking back for other good pieces, especially as I (hopefully) sell off some of my own stuff. Update: And I wound up selling my LoN booster deck for 55k plat, which should get me off to a pretty good start.

Next up, I’m going to have to get one of those fancy new mercs and get practicing on my charm soloing…

I caved.

I felt the MMORPG itch, but instead of turning back to WoW, I fell back into the arms of an old friend — EverQuest. I’d been meaning to give it one more shot for a long time now, so I caught up to the latest expansion tonight, logged in, and…I have no idea what I’m doing.

The problem is that it’s been almost five years since I last seriously played it. I have no idea what zones are new, what new features have been added, where the good leveling spots are now, how to get back into the old rhythm of play, who I should be looking for for good groups, what “obvious” things I should be configuring and setting up, where to get some good new equipment…

Fortunately I’ve found a few resources that should help: the EQSummoners’ Returning To EQ FAQ, Allakhazam’s expansion guides, and even the old enchanter forum is still around.

Looks like I’ve got a bit of reading and preparation to do… So far I’ve just taken my monk out of the zone he was in and back to the Plane of Knowledge, and just trying to remember what the available skills are and how to avoid aggro while traveling around was an adventure in itself, as well as getting lost in Blackburrow along the way.