Nothing to Report

In keeping with the theme that this blog is first and formost a place for me to practice my writing, I am posting an entry even though there is precious little to say from the EQ front.

First of all, Bianca and I just took a 5 day vacation in Colonial Williamsburg, VA so I could indulge one of my other hobbies, woodworking. That means we missed 4 raiding nights and left the guild in the tender mercies of my backup raid leader Puus. Last night, unpacked, refreshed and ready to play, we were confronted with a snow/sleet/freezing raid deal that killed Comcast over a large chunk of our county until 10pm or so.

When we finally did get Internet back, we discovered that patch SoE put in that morning was particularly dodgy and the server was far too unstable to attempt raids. So, in the end, we didn't miss anything. Oh well, we will try again tonight.

I did manage to amass a new pile of pelts and run my tailoring (finally) to 300! Yay me. The new cultural recipe progression was a real help to making this doable in such a short time (about 2 weeks). Farming the bazaar for one particular dropped item is far easier than farming mobs in any zone. Of course, that came at a cost. Something on the order of 750K plat to run tailoring from 225 to 300. It was painful, and if I were in less of a hurry, I could have cut that in half by only buying from the cheaper vendors as they got stock. But, I had almost 2.5 M plat in the bank, so it was not a big deal. Fortunately, I also had a steady supply of cash loot from grouping to offset about half the expenses so far.

Next, I need to finish Fletching. While it may seem embarassing that a ranger would not be max skill in fletching, that fact that I am not speaks volumes about SoE's opinion of archery. It's just not important to them. They think it's unbalancing, so the archery DPS lags melee DPS by an absurd amount. The best bows are dropped and the best arrows, while fletched, are old and you only need one any way.

Then the last tradeskill for me will be Baking, also in the 225 range. That one I haven't plotted a course for yet. It's going to have almost no real utility for me, so I am just doing it to finish off tradeskills. I am also working on Spell research on Drayal and when that is done, Tinking has been stuck at 223 on Murdvarna...

I said I would TRY

I said I would TRY to post more regularly. This is as close as it's going to get for this week. I have been busy on another writing project that is now complete and I can get back to this. Of course, we are about to take a short vacation and leave the poor, wretched guild rudderless and adrift. As if...

So, where are we? Well, the guild has now mastered all of Ashengate except for Lethar 2.0. That dude will require some more HPs, especially on the casters before we have a legitimate shot at taking him down. We ran the script a few times to get a feel for it and got him to the low 70s.

Our plan now is the farm Ashengate and work on Frostcrypt. We took a look at the flagging raids this week and should have that down next week at the latest. Then we will farm both zones for a bit. Some of our newer players especially need gear, but most people still have some old stuff floating around, we need to catch them up. My goal is at least 18K HPs on everyone by the end of winter. Then we can give Solteris the boot and try our luck there.

Already, we can sweep through Ashengate East and West all in one night and still have a little time left over now. That's a good loot/time ratio. By the end of the month, we should be able to add North (minus Lethar 2.0) to that night for an almost CoA like loot farm.

On a personal note, I have finished smithing and am almost finished tailoring. Also completed the Exalted and Sublime symbol quests (both suck serious ass). So I am about set to replace some parts of my cultural setup. That will be nice. If we can get Serpents Essence to drop a little more, I could upgrade that part too. As it is, I am raid buffing over 23K depending on the lineup.

Back By Popular Demand

Several people have approached me recently and told me that they had found this blog and had enjoyed it. That's both surprising and gratifying. I consider my writing skills, at best, a work in progress and the rather limited appeal of the subject matter was sure to keep any potential audience to a minimum.

I started the blog in 2003 not for any sort of exposure, but as a way to save some information about the game that I wanted to keep handy, and as a way to practice my expository writing skills. I didn't tell anyone outside of a few close friends that I had the blog and expected no one else to read it. I used this format because anything that's in an off-line format is dead to me half the day and Google Docs hadn't been invented yet.

So, I kept it for about 2 years and added to it as I had time (usually at work when other distractions (like the game itself) are at a minimum). So you can find hit and miss updates about Bianca and I's experiences in Everquest land from roughly 2003 to 2005. Since I didn't (at the time) have an audience, there wasn't any effort to maintain a coherency between posts and capture everything of relevance that might have happened between updates.

As with most things of this sort, it became a bother to keep it up and since it was just for me anyway, I let it go. Even though I hadn't posted anything new to it, I maintained publishing the last version because it was a handy place for the EQ-centric links that are built into the template. Well, now thanks to Google some people have found the blog and wondered why I didn't update it anymore.

And that lead Bianca to read it. She gets a little obsessive when she find blogs that she likes and she starts at the very beginning and reads them to the end. If they are any good, she adds them to her reader and follows them thereafter. Now she is 2/3s of the way through this and bugging me to resume writing it. Why, I can't really imagine. If I start from today, what I write won't be news since we will have just done the things I talk about.

OK, so rationality doesn't have to play a part in it and back to work we go. I doubt you can schedule your life around the coming updates as I have no way of knowing if I will be able to find any consistent time to update this, but I will resume trying to update it.

Thanks for reading, now go get cable TV or something...