I re-subbed to the Daybreak All Access pass for the EverQuest II 15th anniversary events, as I did back in March for the EverQuest 20th anniversary. This started off with chasing some dragons, as I mentioned last week.
Dragon in the Loping Plains
There are four dragons and they are not hard to find. They spawn in a rotation by the travel spires in four zones. You can follow them through their cycle going from Thundering Steppes to Everfrost to Nektulos Forest to Loping Plains. I think that is the order. I just go where the crowd goes. There are some interesting drops and an achievement and special mount form if you slay all four dragons.
Spires Defended
Achievement reward
I did that with the character I consider my main, Sigwerd, a level 100 berserker on the Skyfire server. Then I got out my level 100 paladin on the same server and did it again.
Dragon in Nektulos Forest
And then I did it yet again with a level 100 berserker, Reynaldo on the Hands of Fate server, who is still knocking around in the Revelry & Honor guild. It was a bit tougher with him as I have never bothered to get him a mercenary, and not having your own pet healer means taking care. Still, I managed it with him.
I have another level 100 character sitting around, a Shadowknight who was one of my level 100 boosted characters… Sigward is the only one who leveled up to 100, and I seem to recall boosting him to 85 back in the day… but I wasn’t sure how much commitment I really had to him.
And I was wondering how to use some of the nice drops I got from the dragon event. Bhagpuss has a post that shows the dragon form mount. They were all flagged for level 110 players and my highest group there is all level 100. I wanted to get somebody to level 110.
The easiest way to do that would be another boost. And since you get a level 110 boost with the base Blood of Luclin expansion pre-order at basically the same price as a boost out of the cash shop, I figured I might as well grab the expansion.
So there was now a level 110 boost in my /claim items. However, in buying the expansion I also unlocked all of the previous expansions. I do not remember the last time I bought an expansion, but now I had everything live on the server. So I decided to see if I could just level up to 110 via content rather than using the boost right away.
Of course, as I always say when I come back to EverQuest II, the game is pretty bad at telling you where to go or what to do in order to get started at whatever level you left off at. I had been doing something in the Vesspyr Isles previously with Sigwerd, but I recalled it being very slow. He was barely 5% into level 100 and I knew he had done a series of quests there already. I was not keen to go back, so I looked around at what else was available.
There was Myrist, The Great Library on my map, but that said it was for level 110 players. Next to it, however, was the Plane of Magic. That said level 100, which seemed good enough for me, so I gave that a shot. I took the spires there and was in.
When you wander into the Plane of Magic you have to pick a faction to work with. Each espouses a specific philosophy, but I chose House Vahla pretty much at random. They had a nice gold trimmed platform.
Turning in a quest on their platform
The first couple of quests boosted me up to level 101 pretty quickly. It was one of those deals where you have to earn enough status with the faction in order to unlock further quests, so I repeated the first two a few times. Soon I was level 102. Clearly these were decent quests. I had read somewhere that Daybreak chose to emphasize questing for leveling up. While I had the membership boost, the vitality boost (blue bar in EQII land), and a pre-expansion experience boost going, slaying mobs didn’t move the experience bar at all, no matter how hard I hit things.
Hitting things repeatedly
The damage I do seems to throw out crazy random numbers. And EQII does not suffer from a lack of combat skills, so I just mash a bunch of buttons and things die.
Getting around wasn’t too bad either. EQII has embraced flying and my berserker had a mount from a special event from way back, so I just glided over the terrain, dropping on my targets when I needed to.
Swooping by a waterfall
But it is the quests that boosted me along. It wasn’t a long time before I had made it to level 105.
Half way to 110
After that the quest experience started to slow down some. But I am going to try and carry on a bit and see if I cannot get to 110 on my own before the Blood of Luclin expansion hits. It might be something to actually be lined up at the right level for an expansion when it drops. Of course, we’ll see if I can actually figure out where to go when it does drop. Daybreak still isn’t very good at that.
Addendum: I carried on after I wrote this and made it to level 107. I had to use the Orb of Concentrated Memories, an item usable once every seven days that restores you exp vitality.
The guild log shows me leveling up
Now I’ll have to see if I can make those last three levels before the bonus exp runs out.
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