A Small Everquest 2 Update

Posted by Stropp on July 28, 2009 Since I've been playing more Everquest 2 than anything else lately, I figured it would be appropriate to post an update of where I'm at. I'm not fighting the altaholism anymore (stopped attending the meetings) which is great since I joined a guild, The Halasian Empire, which pretty much has a mandatory alt policy (mandatory crafting too ;-).) So I rolled (several) characters on Lucan D'Lere. These are:

• Bargears (pronounced BargeArse) - A Troll Shadowknight on adventure level 25 and tradeskill level 29 as a Carpenter. He's currently the character that I've been spending most of my time on, nearly six days played so far which might seem odd considering the relatively low level. I've been taking the leveling very slowly, as an experiment locking the adventure level and accumulating as many AA points as possible. So far he's gained 38 AA points since level 10 simply by doing as many quests from the available regions as possible.
• Stropp - A Froglok level 16 Templar, and level 22 Sage. I'll be spending more time on Stropp's tradeskilling than his adventuring, at least for the foreseeable future simply because he'll be responsible for spell upgrades.
• Motli - A Ratonga Necromancer sitting pretty on 13, and is also a level 25 Armorer. Also a character developed more for the tradeskills. Bargears is going to need that Master Crafted armor, and Motli will supply that need. When I do any adventuring, he'll get his spell upgrades from Stropp the Sage. Balance, eh?
• Stroppcat - A Kerran Illusionist, currently level 7 and a level 17 Scholar.  Also chosen for the crafting, he'll be going down the Alchemist path. Alchemists supply the combat ability upgrades for the fighter archetype (Sages => Magic/Healing, Jewelers => Rogue) and will also be a support for Bargears. Having said that, I was pretty impressed the other day when I was doing the first crafting tutorial quest. It required gathering a bunch of raw materials and I decided to go through Oakmyst Forest since it has the best selection of nodes in the newbie areas. I managed to get close to one of the young (agro) bears and got some unwanted attention. This beastie was also pretty tough, registering as an orange mob. Fortunately I had my Personae out and cleaned him up. Pretty good for a clothie, another mage class would probably have been torn to shreds.

Even though I don't necessarily intend to adventure with all these characters right at the moment -- Bargears is proving an awful lot of fun and I want to take him as far as possible -- I made sure that I picked an adventuring class that I'm interested in trying out. Stroppcat particularly interests me, especially with that orange takedown, and might be a good subject for an extreme AA experiment I'm considering. (More on that later.) There are a few other alts sitting in stasis, I did some experimenting with other classes just to see what they were like in the one to ten range. They might go on, or they might not, I haven't decided yet. However, it's a dead cert that sometime I'll create a new alt. I'll let you know when I do. So that's the round-up. I'll keep working on Bargears, he's currently got a nearly full quest log with quests for The Thundering Steppes, Nektulos Forest, and The Butcherblock Mountains. Not to mention a bunch for various dungeons like Fallen Gate and Blackburrow. He'll remain level locked until most of those are cleared (except for Fallen Gate, he'll need 2 or 3 more levels to solo that dungeon) and that should add up to 10 more AA.