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When Luclin came out they included mid-level armor quests (as has been done several times)based out of the Twilight Sea. Very few people bothered with them because effort involved in getting the various dropped from named in Scarlet Desert and so on was tedious far beyond the percieved reward (it wasn't a real upgrade for most).

Level 40s quest chain deemed useless and bypassed by players could have been the end of the story (and was for years). But for some reason this particular chain of quests was messed with...

... all the named that used to randomly drop 1 of the needed pieces for the quest now drop all of their loot table when you kill them. So level 40 named sunflowers drop 5-8 different items (and this was before the world drops added 1-4 items to each corpse).

So now you kill one of these named and go "wow... that is a lot of loot!". Then you look up what it is all for and go "Oh drat and curses" (or whatever you would say). Ironically, I don't believe the quests were improved and I haven't heard of anyone doing them since the change. If someone knows a way they made all these drops useful I'd love to know.

Imagine if SOE took the massive loot table approach to more named mobs in the game --killing Emperor Crush would land you 4-8 pieces of good level 15 armor! A dragon would drop a hoard load. It wouldn't be that hard to balance tribute and vendor sale wise, but would surely add to the excitement of hunting named at your level.

Rundle, I don't know how I could have forgotten Highpass . I actually had it in mind when I started that list. I edited it in.

Hah! Yeah. I remember when Luclin came out, wandering around the Twilight Sea and checking out those quests for the first time. Very rapidly realized they were completely useless. I'm just glad that some other schmuck spent the time actually completing them to discover this rather then me (although I did have a collection of some of the rare drops for awhile).

The problem with those armor quests is that they were utterly eclipsed by the gear available from the previous two expansions. Which is a bit odd since they were previous expansions. You kinda expect new stuff to replace old, but not the other way around. At least for melee classes, the problem was that it was only a slight upgrade from Ry'gorr's, which you could camp for in your 30s, and was readily purchasable at the time Luclin came out. However, the Twilight Sea armor quests pretty much required that you be in your 50s to complete (the "rare" pieces of each quest almost all dropped from a named on one of the plateaus in the Scarlet Desert IIRC). And at the level range you'd need to be to pull and handle those camps, you could just as easily camp the locations where the Kunark class armor dropped, which was vastly superior (and could *also* be purchased).

It's almost like someone at SOE just looked at the old class armor quests and thought "let's make another new set of quests for gear that's only slightly better, but twice as hard!", while not realizing that in the two expansions in between, they'd already released gear that was better and easier at the same time. Moronic move IMO. I really think pretty much all players just kinda scratched their heads on that one. I remember I did...

What I forgot to mention in the previous post was that Class based experience penalties had been removed already from the game, and were pretty severe. What I didn't know for sure was whether or not the class based bonuses were still in place.

I don't have the info on what the penalties used to be, but I did find the answer to my question about the bonuses in an EQ Producer's Letter from January 14, 2001. The same letter that spelled out the resolution to the class penalty xp fix.



Unless something has changed that I haven't come across yet, it looks like halfling warriors and rogues get the best xp gain in the game.

/Salute the hairfooted Hamburglars!!!

Alas, the South Qeynos message board is no more. Unless of course, I'm at the wrong one. I just ran my Iksar Monk into SQ to the Lion's Mane Inn, down by the docks, and there are two message boards, neither do anything when clicked, or when the "U" key is pressed near them.

If I remember, the cat rooms were where gms would take people so they were not bothered by other players while problems were being solved.

There are tons of zones with them, I am sure they havent all been found.

A funny story that goes with that (depending on whats funny to you) A member of a guild im in,a long time ago was took to that room with another person to be told to stop corpse camping them (pvp server) He then killed the gm,then the person he was camping and was suspended for a few days. He said it was well worth it.

Did you know...

...that the windows' "paste" command works in EQ?

You need to remap the command to something , because iirc it doesn't have a default key mapped. I mapped it to ctrl+V (I think something else was default ctrl+V, so i changed whatever it was). It basically pastes the last item that was copied to your notepad.

This is very handy for raid leaders and other "info hounds" that do a lot of alt-tabbing between EQ and Alla's and other sites. I lead raids for my guild and raid alliance, and when you need to use 4-5, and sometimes 8 or more social hotkeys for one encounter, your socials get used up quickly.

So now I keep my guild's raiding forum open in the background, and when I am getting ready to go over strat info for the raid I alt-tab out of EQ, ctrl+C to 'copy' the section I need, alt-tab back to EQ, hit 'enter' activate the chat window, then ctrl+V to paste it in. I just alt-tab repeatedly back and forth, copying and pasting all the info until we are done with strats. (I write most of the strats on our forum anyway).

I try to keep all of the pasted lines in the same chat window, that way I can shift+UP to repeat any lines, if necessary.

I also use the paste command to point people in the right direction to useful websites that they can get info on whatever question they have asked me.

...and just a little addition to some info above: the Ranger/Druid "harmony" lines of spells can be resisted, thereby causing aggro. If the target is "unaffected", it is either too high of a level for the spell or it is immune to the "harmony" line, and it will NOT aggro.

But, if the "harmony" spell is "resisted" by the mob there is a high chance that it will aggro you and pull his nearby friends into the fight with him.

I can attest, though, that the chance of the "harmony" line of spells actually being "resisted" is very very low. I would take a guess between 1 in 300 and 1 in 400. I have had it happen to me on a gnoll in the Steppes, and I recall it happening in a creator mission or two (I ran hundreds of these for pickups and guildees). The chance is low, but it still happens. At least to rangers and druids, lol.

The "Cat Room" is basically a safe spot where players can wind up if some catastrophic glich occurs or where the GMs can put someone to 'hold' them. I've only been there once and it was with a non-caster character so I don't know if they can be Gated/Ported out of or if it requires GM intervention. In my case, I needed a GM.

How I wound up there was trying to zone into the Warrens once when I didn't have the zone file installed. The game crashed and when I installed the files and logged back in, I was in the Warrens' Cat Room. This was well before "Go Home" or Vet rewards so I just had to wait it out until I was rescued by management.

I heard a second-hand account before of someone who glitched into the Cat Room in some zone (I think Befallen) and noticed he could see mobs walking 'over' him on the next level. He could also cast on them. When the GM showed up, he was chewed out for exploiting by casting DoTs on the mobs while he was safe in the Cat Room

I'm not sure if every zone has a Cat Room or not.

I once lost my electronic way in the Great Divide and was sent to a safe room. I could see coordinates in bold black type on the corners of the walls.

Iirc...

...Iksar also get an underwater swimming bonus - hold breath longer and maybe start w/ a high skill in it. ((edit, Iksar also are vulnerable to fire but get a resist bonus to cold - or soemthing like that))

Halflings start with a somewhat high Hide skill - and maybe get a racial Sneak ability, too. Bah, the memory gears are so rusty. I believe if you needed a low lvl alt or "mule" to run errands for you in dangerous places, you made a Halfling Rogue - cuz w/ racials he could sneak fairly effectively at lvl 1. Iirc my old raiding guild planted lvl one Halfling rogues deep in certain dungeons - they could sneak past the living and undead - to occasionally see if certain mobs (mostly bosses) were up.

Also, lvl one Halfling rogues could sneak around in any zone looking for "ground spawns," which used to sell for crazy money. Hah, I now remember making a lvl one rogue to do just this. You just had to be very careful before destealthing to pick something up. I'm talking lvl 50+ zones.

Wood Elves and Dark Elves, iirc, get a racial Hide but not sneak. Wood Elves get a racial forage skill, I think.

High Elves and Erudites start w/ high Int, Wis - and for HE cha. They make good casters for this reason. Don't think they get anything else.

Ogres have stun immunity - or did. The attack had to come from their front to be immune, iirc.

There was a buncha info saying that Humans had an experience bonus. It turns out they probably never did. Humans and Barbs can't see in the dark, and early on we didn't know how to adjust gamma (a lot of us didn't) to fix that. W/out a spell or glowing item, we were blind. Corpse runs from HaulAss, er, Halas, down that dark tunnel to Blackburrow were challenging.

Negatives for trolls and ogres, and sometimes barbs, is getting stuck in dungeons. Literally. I remember an ogre in our party died and lost his "shrink" in Solusek (the lower lvl one). There was a shaman in another grp there, but he wouldn't come over and shrink him. We offered to come to him, nope - he was being a jerk. He wouldn't shrink our ogre.

So, we overpulled - and it was RUN! Run to zone! Our Ogre tried but got stuck in the window room - literally got stuck in a doorway. We were on the other side, healing him, while four gobs hacked at him. Then, the party w/ the uncooperative shaman overpulled - and tried to run for zone - and came upon our Ogre!

There were like 12 angry goblins - then more, cuz they started spawning - and the other group was SCREAMING at our ogre to get out of the way. We told them back they should have shrunk him- and we ran for zone, sans ogre - and the rest of them died. We zoned back in and rezzed our ogre - they had a loooong walk back (they didn't have the nerve to ask us to rez their cleric). And then we decided to fight down to the zone line to Naggy's lair, where the tunnels were wider and our ogre wouldn't get stuck.

This was back when potions either didn't exist yet or were quite rare.

Troll SKs were notorious for having a bad exp penalty, the worst - Troll penalty plus sk hybrid penalty. Also, before PoK, there was a considerable penalty for being evil. Evil humans and gnomes weren't KoS everywhere, but a lot of DE, ogres and trolls were (evil race + evil god was BIG kos). You had to do a lot of rep fixing to be able to enter FP, and even then you couldn't bank there til you worked even HARDER to up rep w/ N FP - (muffins for Pando or soemthing - there were some quests you could do a zillion times - or you could just hunt orcs).

As the game progressed, other factors became important - like religion and certain items you could go for. Evil Clerics and Trolls who worship inoruuk could quest for (and probably still can) a clickable item that casts a necro "darkness" spell. What's so cool about that? It's just a level one DoT. But wait! There's more! It's a level one DoT that SNARES. This means a cleric can fear kite!

You pull a mob to a safe spot in zone, click the snare-dot on him, then fear. As the mob slowly trundles away in panic, you smite and nuke away! This way you don't have to worry about root breaking when you root bomb. For shamans, dot-kiting or root rotting becomes much safer if the target is also snared. So if you wanna be a soloing cleric or shaman, consider this option - it makes things much easier (it's a something symbol of Inorruuk, sorry, can't remember exact name - maybe devotion symbol or symbol of devotion).

There is a really good clicky that Tunare worshipers can get, too - which is iirc a free root. Very handy for certain soloing situations, like when you're out of mana and your target is almost dead - root it mana free, sit, get mana for that last spell, kill it.

Edit, it's cleric/druid only, and race restricted: https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=5684 Warden symbol of Tunare.

Regent Symbol of Innoruuk. https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=1254



Edited, Dec 21st 2007 4:20pm by IponemaGirl

Edited, Dec 21st 2007 4:25pm by IponemaGirl

Edited, Dec 21st 2007 4:27pm by IponemaGirl

Did you know...

...if you get stuck in lava in a zone such as Solusek A, you can /quit out. When you log back in, you'll be at the zoneline. This only works for environment-damage areas though such as lava or acid; it won't fetch you out of water.

Yeah, that Abandoned Orc Shovel has a pretty low delay for a 2hand weapon, and any class can use it.

I once found a better weapon to train skill for my Enchanter:

Untouchable Tome of Lunacy

Not a fair comparison at all since the shovel is a free ground spawn and the tome drops off a scripted raid encounter. I wish I could say I earned it, but I found it for like 1k plat in the Bazaar. With a 21/20 ratio my Enchanter got that skill up quick.