I soldiered on and finished off the Silverwing quests in EQ tonight, netting me this charm, which is a significant upgrade from my old one. The only annoying part was a long stretch in Trakanon’s Teeth where the piece I needed just did not want to drop.

Ironically, getting that charm made my stats worse overall, since I had to combine all of the previous Silverwing items to make it. In particular, I was getting 12 points of mana regen from the other Silverwing items before, and afterwards I only got 5 from the charm. But, now I can go back and remake all those items again, and get a total of 17 points of regen, and I’ve already regained the earring from HoH.

That’ll probably be my goal for tomorrow, and with luck I should also hit 70 and be able to wear all the Elegant Defiant Silk armour I’ve saved up.

On a whim, I took another stab at the Silverwing quests tonight instead of doing HoH for the zillionth time, and actually managed to find some of the pieces fairly quickly. After running around Droga, Noble’s Causeway, The Deep, and Velketor’s for a while, I had three more pieces: the belt, cloak, and mask. The belt and cloak were even decent upgrades, which is going to make giving them up to make the charm even more difficult…

I also ran across an old friend from the very early EQ days, when I had a small, regular group I played with a lot. Looks like the mercs are bringing back even more people.

The EQ devs had a bit of fun today by changing the names of all of the classes in-game. Necros became ‘n3cr0’s, clerics became Rezbots, rangers became Corpses, and my enchanter became, well, a Smartypants.

I just barely made it to level 69 tonight, though it took pretty much all evening, so it’s going to take more than a single day for further levels… I seem to get 5% of a level per basement clearing now (though I was forced to leave before collecting much data), in which case it’ll take 20 clearings to get to level 70, which would take nearly seven hours at three clearings per hour (spawn time is about 20 minutes).

Argh, I wrote up a big, long post about EQ tonight, but it got eaten when I hit the Publish button. I’m not retyping it all, so in brief:

– finished anniversary quests, got shiny collapsible roboboar
– found elaborate defiant silk pantaloons for much cheaper than usual in bazaar, important for spell haste to ensure charms land before stun wears off
– 20 AAs banked now, back to leveling, sick of HoH but it’s the only safe, reliable spot I know of for now

I only have one more EQ anniversary event to go now, after a couple more delivery quests and following the party machine, and I couldn’t do it today only because it was on some shared timer with other ones, so I can’t even start it until tomorrow. I figured I’d work on the Silverwing quests a bit more instead, but after spending a while in Droga trying to get a piece to drop, I’m starting to wonder if it’s even worth it and if I might be better off waiting for a higher-level item instead if it’s going to take so much time. There are certainly charms with better total stat bonuses, but that 5 points of mana regen is so tempting…

By this point I had 30 banked AAs, so I spent a few, primarily on Natural Durability (giving me over 600 more hp), the shield block ability, and finally getting critical hits for my spells. It’s only a 2% chance of a crit for now, but I managed to fire one off before too long. Direct damage isn’t really an enchanter’s forte, but it only cost 2 points. I’m down to 12 banked AAs now, but there isn’t really anything urgent to spend them on, so I should get back to leveling soon.

Today was spent on more of the anniversary quests in EQ, of course, this time involving various tradeskills, a bunch of fishing, spreading disease, and making it rain in various zones. I even had to go to a few of the new areas I haven’t been in before, but I’ll have to go back later for a closer look. The fishing quest in particular gave me a pretty good chunk of plat and a couple AAs as a reward, so I might have to repeat that one…

A lot of the quests wind up taking me to or through a lot of the same zones, which makes it tempting to combine them and work on some simultaneously, but that’ll probably make things a bit too complicated to keep track of. And I’m almost done anyway.

And I also got my monk to 48, mainly just so he could start wearing some of the Intricate Defiant Leather armour, so it doesn’t eat up bank space. I had a bit of trouble finding a good zone at first, but settled on the Goru’kar Mesa, where he and his merc could plow through light blues pretty much nonstop.

I knocked off another three of the anniversary quests in EQ tonight, including another series of kill-equal-level-monsters, one where I had to plant seeds in various zones, and another where I had to set fires in more zones. They’re certainly taking me around to places I haven’t been in quite a while.

At this rate it looks like I should be able to complete all of the quests, so that roboboar will soon be mine…

I figured I’d better get around to doing those anniversary quests in EQ, and fortunately there’s a handy guide available, so I started doing them roughly in order (aside from the party machine one, which will take a while since it moves from zone to zone and I have to catch it in all of them).

I managed to get four of them done tonight, two of which were fairly simple and only involved talking to people and using items on them, but the other two involved fights against a series of equal-level enemies in areas where I couldn’t effectively charm, so I wound up having to tediously root-n-nuke my way through them. And it looks like the next one is going to be more of the same… At least having the cleric henchman makes them even possible.

I had 18 AAs banked by the end of the night, but then I blew 15 of them at once in order to get the AA for the pet /hold command. Unfortunately it’s not really what I thought it would be, so that might have been a waste. Oh well…

I headed back to Noble’s Causeway in EQ tonight, but with a particular goal in mind this time: working on the Silverwing quests. I’d picked up a glowing shard in HoH, and the other part of the quest comes from here.

I found an area where there were monsters known to drop the band I needed, but charming them was a bit tougher this time around, since in this expansion they reduced the DPS on charmed monsters (normally they’d hit for over 400, but only hit for 241 when charmed), and they were fairly magic resistant, so charm broke a lot more often. I died once soon after arriving when I got an unlucky charm break just as some spawns were repopping and mezzes were fading.

It was a good spot though, since I could kill the packmaster when it spawned as well, and it can drop the runes needed for the 66-68 spells. I only got one rune, which I turned in to get a, uh, Rune spell, but it’s better than nothing. I might have to come back here and see if I can at least get the 68 charm spell. And I finally got the Silverwing Band I needed, and completed the quest to get a really nice ring that was a substantial upgrade. There are a bunch of other lower-level quests I can do in the same line and can combine them all to get a nice charm, as well, so I’ll have to try that sometime (though that means I’d have to redo this quest to get this ring back).

I spent the rest of the evening back in HoH to burn off my xp bonus period, and I now have over 200 total AAs, with 12 banked right now.

(And speaking of spells, I’m starting to buy some higher-level ones when I see them in the bazaar for cheaper than they’d cost at vendors. It’s just the 66-70 ones that remain elusive since very few people would have spares of them with the way the rune turn-ins work.)