Make Sure You Harvest in Everquest 2

That should probably be rule numero uno in the Everquest 2 guide for noobs.

And there’s a pretty darn good reason for it too. That is, spending five plus hours harvesting in order to raise your harvesting skills is about as boring as watching chili seeds grow*.

That’s about the time it took me last night to bring all of my harvest skills to the point where I can harvest tier 4 resources. Unfortunately, when I started, my fishing and trapping skills were low at 22 and 63, while my mining, gathering and foresting were in the respectable 130s.

However, even my mining, gathering and lumberjacking skills needed some love. Ssirius the Sarnak Shadowknight has just reached 31 by doing quests in Nektulos Forest. While Nek is a treasure trove of quests and XP, it’s a dismal dreary place, especially when it’s raining. And it seems to rain all the time.

In search of nicer weather, I did some traveling to both the Enchanted Lands and Zek, both level 30 plus zones. At both locales I ran around loading up on quests — I’m almost out of space in the quest log now — and just looking around the early parts of the zone. However, when I tried to do some harvesting I was soundly rebuked.

So. I needed to improve my harvesting skills.

I’ve thrown together this little table to give you an idea of what the skills are for each tier. The Final Skill Gain column is where the tier x nodes stop giving me skillups. I’m not sure what these values are after Tier 3 at this stage. I also pulled some of this data from the EQ2i wiki which states that the Tier 7 minimum requirements vary.

The EL and Zek are both Tier 4 zones, so I needed to get my minimum skill to 140. Unfortunately, my fishing was still in Tier 1, and my Trapping at Tier 2. So back to the newbie zones I went.

Fishing was relatively easy, if time consuming. I basically swam around the coast of Mok Rent looking for fish. At one and a half laps, I hit 95. At that point I dried off and went looking for nests to practice trapping. These were like looking for hens teeth. After just over an hour, the server came down with still 10 points to get. This was around 11:30pm. When it came back up, there were more nests than before and I quickly finished off.

Now it was off to Butcherblock. This was easier, but I needed to be more careful. In the newbie zone everything was gray to me. I could walk around raptors and man eating plants unhindered. In BB, it was mostly green. In any case, I ran around gathering from nodes like a madman until all of my skills were 140+. I finished of at 3:30am.

So take my caution. It’s easier to harvest as you go along. If you craft you’ll need the resources to make gear. If you don’t craft, you’ll need the rares to make cash. I ended up harvesting about ten rares in my session last night. I’m not sure if I’ll sell them on the broker or use them to make some goodies. In both cases, having your harvest skill as high as possible will help you out later. Not to mention that some quests require certain high harvesting skills.

* Watching chili seed germinate is not all that interesting until they actually appear. I recently purchased some Dorset Naga seeds from the UK, and they are beginning to grow now. They are supposedly the hottest chili in the world with a SKU rating of approximately 1,000,000. In comparison the humble Habenero is around 100,000 - 200,000 SKU. Woo Hoo!

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Getting Nostalgic

After an absence of a couple of months, with most of that time spent in Hyboria and a touch in Azeroth, I reentered the world of Norrath this week.

When I was last there, my Sarnak Shadowknight, SSirius, was a little way into level 26 and hanging around the Butcherblock Mountains. I remembered that I was starting to get a little bored with the Butcherblocks the last time I was there after I logged in and found myself wandering around looking for some critter and not being able to find it. A change of scenery was in order…

One of the things I’ve found — in my experience — when playing MMO games, is that the social experience of the game enhances the game itself. Even though I’m generally a solo player, I enjoy the interaction and dare I say it, the camaraderie of being in a guild. For me, being in a guild also adds to the personal longevity of the game. So as I was contemplating getting back into EQ2, getting into a guild was high on my list of priorities.

I’ve been following the efforts of the Nostalgia project over on Tipa’s blog West Karana and Stargrace’s MmoQuests.com. The Nostagia guild originally started to gather together current and ex Everquest players so that they could revisit some of the great areas of the original Everquest. Nostalgia the Guild didn’t take very long to become quite successful. You can read about their adventures on both Tipa’s and Stargrace’s blog.

At the time I gave a few moments consideration to loading up my old Everquest install, getting it up to date and joining in the fun. Unfortunately, I was already playing WoW, EQ2, and waiting on Age of Conan — not to mention about to go away for a couple weeks holiday. It really is true — too many games, not enough time.

It didn’t take long before Stargrace hatched the idea to start up an offshoot of Nostalgia for Everquest 2. She got a number of the EQ Nostalgia members together and created Nostalgia on the Najena server.

So the other day, after transferring SSirius over to the Najena server, I contacted Stargrace in the game and joined up with Nostalgia.

Once I was joined up, it was time to get to work. I set up my chat client to set up a guild tab, something I always do when I’m in a guild, it makes tracking conversations much easier when the general chat spam doesn’t mess it all up.

I also decided that I’d had enough of the Butcherblock Mountains for the time being, so I headed over to Nektulos Forest. The beach area there has a few level 20+ quests, so I added those to my quest log and started working on them. After about an hour I dinged 27, and then decided to go exploring the forest. I found the camp at the Commonlands entrance, picked up all the quests there, did a couple and continued exploring.

By the end of the evening, I’d trudged most of the paths of the dreary rainy forest, completed the gryphon egg quest that opens up the gryphon flight paths, died by sticking my nose into an area I probably shouldn’t have, and opened up most of the map. At least opened the map areas I was able to get to. I also added a level of achievement experience and nearly half a level of adventure experience.

The next step is to go back and complete all the quests in my quest log for the forest. That should get me to level 30. At that point, I either go back to the Butcherblock Mountains, or head to one of the other 30+ areas; the Enchanted Lands or Zek, or maybe all of the above.

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Return to Timorous Deep

Thanks to Mordraeth, I discovered a cluster of easier quests near the entrance to Greater Faydark. There’s two camps, some Dwarves at the bulwark and some Dark Elves and Arasai back a bit toward the Greater Faydark zone. These quests quite comfortably sent me through 20 and 21.

Once I’d completed them, it was time to head back to the Butcherblock Docks and continue with the quests there. Now that I had a couple more levels it was significantly easier.

I did have one quest that presented a bit of a problem. A Dark Elf by the name of Ninion D’syl wanted me to get her some fletching supplies. She was in a bit of a mood about it too. The problem was that the Butcherblock require gathering skills of 90 and over. My best was the mining at 65. D’Syl wanted me to harvest some wood for arrow shafts and I wasn’t up to the task.

So it was back to Timorous Deep.

I spent a good afternoon working on the various gathering skills and managed to bring my mining, gathering, and foresting up to the low to mid 90’s. I didn’t bother much with the fishing, and brought trapping to the mid-sixties - I’ll probably have to head back at some point to raise that too - before I called it a day.

The next day, I hit the bank to deposit all my gatherings, at which point I discovered that there was another questline open. It probably popped at 20 and since I was 19 when I left, I missed it. If there’s one thing I reckon that EQ2 should copy from WoW and other games, it’s the grayed out quest marker. It’s definitely handy to know a quest will pop in the next couple of levels. Anyway, I did those quests and headed into Gorowyn.

Since I had all these raw materials in the bank I decided to look into the tradeskill quests. I’d already picked up the first quest which was to make a spiffy candelabra. I completed that and worked through all the tradeskill quests. That got me to level 9 so I headed over to the career advisor and picked up the Outfitter trade.

I figure for a Shadowknight there would be two useful paths I could take. Ultimately, provisioner for the food and drink, or Armorer for the nifty battle-threads.

I considered Alchemist for the fighter skill upgrades but for the most part these would be one offs. Once I’d created a skill upgrade for myself I’d have no need to create it again - I’m not really into crafting in most MMOs, the trades never seem deep enough for me. Alchemist would also have enabled me to create potions and poisons, quite possibly very useful.

The other useful skills, Carpenter or Fletcher would be much the same. Picking Carpenter would allow me to create furniture and the like for my house, but eh.

Provisioner would be useful. Everquest 2 makes good use of any cooking that a player does. Since food and drink are consumed a lot in this game, it would come in quite handy.

Ultimately, I figured that Outfitter/Armorer will be the most useful. The Shadowknight is a plate wearer, and since I solo a lot being able to make my own high level armor may be very useful. It’s my understanding - not confirmed - that crafter gear is actually quite good in EQ2 even at the lower and middle levels.

The Outfitter has one other thing up his sleeve. He can create bags. Very useful for someone like me who hoards a lot of gear. It will be the tailor who makes the most capacious bags, but at least up to twenty, I’ll be able to make a few with more than four slots.

After a couple of hours sweating over a hot forge, I took Ssirius back to the Butcherblocks. But before I headed back I went searching for that elusive quest giver that I had trouble finding. This time success! He was right in the back and I had to jump down from one platform to get to him.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t giving out quests as such, but writs that required hunting a bunch of critters. I decided not to worry about it, declined, and made my way to the gryphon heading for the Butcherblock Mountains.

Once there I handed in a couple of quests, and started a couple more. I began harvesting fallen lumber to collect the arrow shafts for D’Syl, my reason for going back to Timorous Deep in the first place, and collected a few of them.

At log off Ssirius is three quarters of the way to 23. I still have quite a few blue and white quests at this point. I expect that he’ll be 25 by the time I finish these.

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Butcherblock Here I Come

My foray back into Everquest 2 continued over the last weekend.

Ssirius the dragon-like Sarnak Shadowknight finally completed the majority of the quests in Timorous Deep with the exception of one or two that I couldn’t find my way to. The Sarnak home city is Gorowyn and is located in a vast cavern inside a active volcano. Property values must be cheap there. Available quests in EQ2 are represent by a hollow orange circle on the mini-map. Try as I might I couldn’t find the way to the last one.

I also didn’t do the tradeskill quest chain. I’ve mined my way up to a skill level of 60 though I haven’t really touched the other harvesting skills. I figure if I end up working on tradeskills it will probably be one of the metalworking ones, either for armor or weapons.

The bulk of the Timorous Deep quests were about the ongoing struggle the Sarnak were having with the Haoaerans, one of the Aviak races. Seems the Haoaerans were horning in on the Sarnak lands, digging up Sarnak relics, and overall being bad neighbors. These quests effectively took me from level one and petered out around halfway through level 19. It was here that the last questgiver directed me to head to the Butcherblock mountains where I was to check out a possible alliance between the Haoaerans and the Aviaks there.

So like a dutiful Shadowknight I caught the first griffon to the Butcherblocks.

Apart from going back to Gorowyn, since I keep all my stuff there, the next time I’ll see the Kunark content is when I get to the 50’s or 60’s.

The problem now is that the Butcherblock quests are a little tough for level 19. Once I hit twenty some of the fights got a bit easier, but there are still a few ^ mobs that I have to kill as well as a few orange quests. I don’t really expect to progress quickly here, at least for a couple more levels.

That’s one of the differences between EQ2 and WoW. Properly geared in WoW, I normally don’t have much trouble with mobs 2 or 3 levels above me. Once they get above that my hit miss ratio heads more towards the miss. With EQ2 even two levels drops my hit rate drastically. That could be gear, but I’m wearing all the quest reward gear, and have picked up some nice drops as well, so I’m not sure it’s that.

One thing I know, is that it has been a while since I’ve everquested so I’m not necessarily up on all the knowhow, or all the changes. One thing though, EQ2 has a lot of depth, and a huge amount of content.

The downside of EQ2 is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of current content. The forums have some good info, but I haven’t really been able to find any good guides to Shadowknight AA, or just to Shadowknights in general. A lot of what I’ve found by googling is related to earlier content, or even to the original Everquest.

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