Weekend Update for May 2nd, 2016Follow

I haven't logged in at all in a few days as I am nursing a severe chest cold. Not good as I have lung damage from my army days. The last time I did log in, my account showed as F2P instead of All Access as it should have. I'm feeling much better today, so will go have a look see after leaving here.

All I've really done lately is to get Fabled Journeyman's Boots for my four or five chars created since last year.

I'm leveling an enchanter on live to get a grip on the current game and learn how to enchanter a bit before going heroic. For some reason I still have the 4/20 hot zones, not the 4/23 ones, hence my zone choices. Anyway, I made a lot of progress this weekend.

4X - 51: grinding in Dranik's Scar. Hated every second of being here. I was basically letting my tank merc PL me while tossing out an occasional dot or nuke, because when I first got here charm wouldn't stick for more than two ticks on anything even with tash up. The pathing sucks here, everything runs, and mobs would just sail in sprinting across half the zone to add. 1-2 hasty gates were made per level because I would pull a single back to a "safe" spot and 3 or 4 more would sprint over to me from god-knows-where. One time I saw my merc and several mobs fly straight up into the air. The merc came back for the next pull, but the mobs never did.

51-57: PoI. One of my old favorites, and I finally really got into charming, so the levels just flew by here, gaining around 2 levels an hour in this range. Much superior vendor trash to DS as well. Had to gate out to dodge the big doggy twice (holy cow his aggro radius is huge).

57: tried Veksar. Nothing good to charm, tank merc losing his shine. Barely got past zone-in before I got frustrated and left.

57-59: back to PoI. Slower, but still good experience.

59: went back to Veksar determined to finish my daily to kill slaves. A PLing ranger had pulled the whole zonein area up to the underwater passage, so I made it in deeper than before. Was sloooowly grinding my way through before I pulled an add, tank merc died, and I gated out.

59-60: popped lesson and grinded out in PoI in decent time.

Seriously debating going heroic at this point. I can only charm up to 53 right now, at 62 I can charm up to 57 which isn't high enough for BoT or Valor, and don't get a useful charm until 64 (which is good for mobs up to 64). Not really sure how to go from 60 to 64 without pulling my hair out. The two options left are trying the next hot zone, Barren Coast, which I have never been to but looks like it has some charmables for me, or using a burn wizzy merc and eating the downtime. Regardless, still a good weekend of EQ for me.

There didn't used to be a compass (or maps until LoY IIRC), so that was how you found things using your binder of printed out maps. Though you could just drop a rusty sword and it would always point north.

I'm stuck at 18 on my shaman on Ragefire Phinigel. Where can I hunt with a reasonable expectation of not running for my life every nine minutes?

Edited, May 3rd 2016 2:47am by Bijou

Try Unrest. Usually others to group with available and at least if you have to run to the zone it's close by.

It takes some effort to cast my mind back to the days when none of the modern stuff was about. Compicated by the fact that in those days I was usually in a duo.
Ones that come to mind are :-

• the Spiders in Upper Guk. 18 is high enough that they should be easy but still give exp
.
• Crocs in Oasis, maybe even Orcs.
• Mammoths and Orcs in Everfrost

I'm thinking of trying the Progression Server once I get subbed but I'm not sure if my innate masochism is up to it

As far as my non-progression weekend went I started a new Berserker and went up to 24. 11-19 in the Spider Room of U.Guk and 19-24 in Paludal. But with Skinspikes and a Merc.
I leveled my new druid from 34 to 40 in Dalnir and Crystal Caverns.
My Paladin got off his butt and went from 16 to 21.

I persuaded my daughter and son-in-law to try EQ

My shaman made some gate potion for the melee chars and levi potions for my cleric. I've told him to make himself useful before he takes any more money out the bank for his damned weed -boiling!

A good time was had by all

Haven't been playing a ton, but still managed to get into some trouble with my main. My regular group has been doing TDS progression, which has actually been quite fun (but slow since we can only get together maybe once or twice a week). In between, we do various HAs and whatnot. It's kinda funny because one of the other mains in the group is a warrior, so he normally tanks. But against stunable stuff, my paladin holds up a heck of a lot better. Until we run into non-stunable stuff, which occasionally results in *splat* for me (cause I'll do silly things like not notice the red message saying the mob isn't affected, then not think to use a tanking ability, and then not notice my health has dropped super low until too late). So it's a mix of the warrior fuming about how overpowered paladins are, to laughing at me (well, my corpse anyway). Good times all around though!

I did manage to almost get the last laugh on him though. We were doing one of the DH HAs, which I normally solo, self healing with my caster merc on burn for speed. So, of course, I tell everyone I'll just tank and self heal, and they should all go full damage. Which was ridiculously fast. We were killing mobs faster than I could go through one cycle of my stun spells. Right until I managed to fat finger my buttons, got confused, flailed around for a few seconds, and then died. If you've never played a paladin before, one of the things you have to realize is that the difference between being silly powerful and dead is a lot of carefully timed button clicks. You get off your pattern a bit and things go *bad* very quickly. The really funny ones are when I fat finger my targeting, and find myself trying to heal the mob, and stunning myself. Which is... bad. Of course, in this case, we've got a warrior in the group, so no problem. Except, no healer. Hahahaha! Sucker. Ah.. They survived anyway. Might have lost a caster or something. But that's what makes it all so fun.

Haven't done much alt work lately, although I should just buckle up and get my wiz maxed out at some point. Just don't have a ton of time.

Any OS can play, they have some installation guides on their wiki and forums. They use a different client than P99 and most other emu servers.

http://www.takproject.net/everquest-classic-alkabor.html

I'm playing on Windows 7, took a little bit of finagling but I can log in three characters without any errors now. It's a low population server, but it is a good bunch of people. I guess that is how the Al'Kabor server used to be, too.

Currently in Kunark, with Velious being tested on their dev server.

Same situation for me. I was pricing out used rigs trying to find one with the right specs (newer Macs sounded like they would be incompatible at the time --I had even considered that route of buying a new mac I didn't really need.

They should have just spun off EQmac as a separate thing that grandfathered any current accounts on it as "paid", developed (I believe Dev Hobart was on this trail) a clean way for PC people to login to it and made the server a "One time $20 buy in per account to play on. And no, we aren't updating or changing it at all" ruleset. I would have paid my $20 bucks to log in at least...

Even then, I didn't use sense heading, we ran for the edges of the zone and worked our way from there.

ROFL!