Tuesday, July 19, 2016

The Race to a Mount on Trakanon

While WoW Legion is clearly in my future, there is still some time to get there, and with my Daybreak All Access still active for a bit I thought I would look into that whole mount thing on the new Race to Trakanon server they put up last week.  All I had to do was get to level 10, right?

Not a bad mount compared to many in EQII

Just 10 levels, how hard could it be?

I have never been that big on mounts in EverQuest II for some reason.  I have 150+ mounts in WoW… I know this because I got the achievement for hitting 150 a few mounts back… but in EQII I might have… maybe six… maybe ten on the outside… different mounts spread across all of my characters.

It isn’t that there aren’t plenty of mounts in EQII, it is more a matter of them being pretty damn ugly.  There are a lot of really ugly mounts in the game.

Ice Wolf on Ice

There is something not right with that ice wolf

And when they aren’t just plain ugly, they are generally just horrible things I wouldn’t be caught dead riding.

The setup to a "frog in a blender" joke

Rage inducing mount…

There is just something about the aesthetics and design of mounts in EQII that rubs me the wrong way.  I actively collect mounts in almost every MMORPG.  I have a fair number in LOTRO and a bunch sitting around in Rift should I ever return, but in EQII I stick to the most plain, most horse-like looking horse I can find and generally go no further.

Speed - We Haz It!

Plain mounts for me and my friends

But this Race to Trakanon mount didn’t look too bad in the pictures and, better still, once you earned it you would get it for all of your characters.  That is another thing I am a bit mixed on with mounts.  I have grown used to having access to all my mounts account-wide in WoW (aside from certain exceptions) so earning/buying a mount for only a single character feels a bit off for me.

So off I went.

The first thing I had to do was delete a character, as I was out of character slots.  That wasn’t too hard, as I had rolled up a bunch of characters for the Stormhold server.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to play on the server, but if you made a character in the first couple of weeks you got a free bag, and bag space is always a thing on new characters, so I rolled up every potential character I might play just to get the bags.  I still had some level 2, never really played options, so deleting them wasn’t a big deal.

Slots freed, it was time to make a new character.

It has been a while since I created a new character in EQII and they now have a big, shiny server type selection option. highlighting the various flavors on offer.  My target was the event server.

Free players... keep left

Free players… keep left

From there, I had to figure out what would suit me best in my goal to just get to level 10.

I went with a human berserker.  Human, because why not… no size issues, no oddness in looks… and berserker because that is just my go-to class for EQII.  They wear plate armor and hit things hard until they die.  All very simple.

As it so happened, the human they handed me looked vaguely like Boris Johnson, or maybe his son, so I didn’t change any of the appearance options, I just chose the name “Boris” and ran with it.  I chose the Qeynos side of the world and off I went to the Isle of Refuge, where I played for about 20 minutes, then logged off.

This turned out to be a wise move, at least when viewed through the prism of my achieving the simple goal of getting to level 10.  I didn’t come back until the next day, after which I had accrued enough rest experience to last through to my goal.  That meant I would level up twice as fast as I would have had I just tried to plow through after character creation.

I did the run through the Isle of Refuge, though the current version of it seems a bit… off.  I see things or mobs and I wonder where some old quest or another has gone off to since the old days.  I might have missed a quest starter drop or two along the way, or my memory might simply be faulty.  It has been a long time since the Frostfang Sea replace the Isle of Refuge.

Running through that got me to level 7, at which point I spoke to the captain of the ship that brought me there and was teleported off to the Frostfang Sea to continue along my way.

I probably should have just opted for that earlier if efficiency was my goal.  I think the Frostfang Sea starter area is better organized and moves you along more quickly for the most part, though it does have more than its share running back and forth for each new quest.

I crossed over the water on the raft to the first quest hub on the mainland.

A little more ramshackle than the old raft

Roll stock footage of Frostfang Sea raft

I ran through the quests there and moved along to the second quest hub where, only a few quests in, I hit the magic moment a level 10 was mine.

Level 10 yet again

Level 10 yet again

That gave me the reward I was looking for.

Here is your mount!

Here is your mount!

The Sunbrite Clothwork Pegasus was mine.  I just had to figure out how to get it.

Usually items that show up like that as a reward drop into your inventory.  I looked there, but did not see it.  So I thought perhaps it might already appear in my mount options, but it wasn’t there either.  In thinking about it for a moment, I decided that, in order to be available to all characters, including those made down the road, the mount probably had to be accessible via the /claim option, and sure enough there it was.

Pegasus found, I was able to claim it for Boris who was able to join the other level 10+ characters in the zone riding around on their new mount.

Boris on the new mount

Boris on the new mount

For me, this might be one of the better looking “goofy” mounts that Daybreak has added to the game.  As I said above, there is a lot of ugly going there on in my opinion.  I rode it around for a bit, spreading its wings for a glide now and again.

New mount, wings spread

New mount, wings spread

I am not sure it will replace the plain horse for an every day mount, though I say that as somebody who, after playing the game off and on since launch, still doesn’t have a character high enough level to use a flying mount yet.  For ground travel it seems a bit much.  Maybe some day I will actually fly and have a use for a mount with wings.

Anyway, I have it around should that day come, and it wasn’t all that hard to obtain.  Others have been after it as well:

Of course, now there is the WoW 7.0 patch to focus on, plus the big space move that is coming up, so this could be my last moment in Norrath for a while.

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