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With the recent posts on Alla about "What I've leared from EQ" and "What I'm not allowed to do" and the "EQ Memories" thread, I wanted to do something to get in on the action too.

So, here's a place to post your little known EQ facts, game lore, tricks, tips, easter eggs and observations about the game.

Did you know .. ?

There's a bank in Runnyeye. For the newer players, did you even know there's a zone called Runnyeye? No, it's not just north of Runnynose.

There’s a place in Timorous Deep called the Firepot room that lets you port to all the starting cities available from the Kunark days. I have heard about it but never been there.

How to get in / out of Inner Acrylia in Acrylia Caverns? In AC if you work your way to the castle courtyard and go into the room with the big pool of blood and a statue of Khati Sha, when facing the pool of blood you turn to your right. Go through that door and click on the smaller statue of Khati Sha in that room. Now you’re in Inner Acrylia. To leave you have to go through the Cauldron room. There are two cauldrons in Inner AC, you want to find the one larger one that is upstairs. At the far end of that room you need to click on the wall hanging at the opposite end of the room from the entrance. This zones you out to Grimling Forest right at the AC entrance.

You can change keyboard commands by remapping them to other keys in your Options window. The default of CTRL+S for Sit right next to CTRL+D for Disband is just silly.
I have mapped: Sit = S key, Interrupt casting = D key, Duck = SHIFT+D, Disband = CTRL+D, Open Spell Book = B, Bandolier = SHIFT+B. That's most of the non-standard key mappings I have besides setting alternate key combos for some things.

There are features available that do not have key combos mapped by default but are really handy. Toggle last 2 targets, cycle nearest NPC / PC targets, open/close all containers in inventory and more.
I have mapped: Since TAB is default for toggle between yourself and your last target I made SHIFT+TAB toggle last 2 targets. Since F8 is default for target nearest NPC I made SHIFT+F8 cycle through the nearest NPCs, and since F7 is default for target nearest PC I made SHIFT+F7 cycle through the nearest PCs.

You can run faster if you Jump. Unless you're levitating and can't jump then you should cover more ground with a running jump than by just running. Try racing someone with a similar connection speed and see if you don't outpace them if you keep jumping.

There used to be 2 other languages in game. Giantish and Kobold were replaced with Combine and Elder Teir’Dal.

I'll add more later. I'm sure there's pages and pages of stuff we could think of relating to this game that's not covered in the manuals and guides and tutorials.

Edited, Dec 19th 2007 10:45am by mfbrownbear

Did you know .. ?

Ogres love wolves. The ogres on Ogguk faction won’t attack you in wolf form unless you’ve really screwed up your faction.

Brownies in LFay have merchants you can use when in wolf form also, unless you’ve killed brownies around there and lowered your faction too far.

Gnomish pirates in Iceclad do NOT like wolves.

PoJ is another bad place to be in wolf form. I know the rats will agro and I think the guards too.

PoV the frogs will agro you in wolf form.

Anyone else want to chime in with known good / bad places to use wolf form?

Okay, so now I know:

There is no known way to raise Kaladim Citizens faction.

A nifty trick to cut down on the time it takes to repair some shady Freeport factions.

I had heard about the wall exploit but that was way before my time. I never liked hunting guards anyway. I like to be able to stroll into any town and order an ale without looking over my shoulder for the "welcoming committee".

Moving on, Did you know .. ?

In any chat window you can SHIFT+ArrowUp to cycle back through your most recently typed chat from that window. Useful for repeating instuctions or spamming language lessons.

Only rogues get notified when Hide does not work. Any non-rogue with the ability to Hide will appear to be hidden to themself, but can still be visible to players and NPC if hide failed. You have to /con a creature that is not normally indifferent to check if Hide worked, making sure Sneak is off since this will make them indifferent if you are behind their line of sight.
I've met many people that did not know that their Hide skill of 50 wouldn't work every time they used it. You will always have parentheses around your name ( ) when you use your Hide ability, whether it succeeds or not. A universal rule of thumb for EQ is to /con everything.

Also, only Rogues can Sneak while hiding. Any other class that tries to move while using their Hide skill will have their Hide drop. Halflings get innate Sneak and Hide abilities, and can use them both at once, but not if they try to move, then they will just be sneaking.

There are /Target and /Loot commands.
You can target without using the mouse or F7 / F8 keys. The command is /Target <name> or just /Tar and when trying to target a creature whose name has spaces you use an _ underscore _ in place of the space. Like /tar a_moss_snake and then you can loot with the command /loot even if the body is in a wall or in the floor. Also handy for targeting and dragging corpses through walls or in lava or like that.

Shiny Bob (Chanter Pet) was always in my way. So I used a social:

/target a

/pause 4

/loot


and made a hotkey I put on my tenth hot button. Made my life easier.

Did you know .. ?

Gravity Flux used to be a lot of fun. This spell used to throw you up into the air a good ways. Players were using it to bypass certain dungeon areas since it would throw you up to the floor above you if the ceiling wasn't high enough. Rather than fix their zone coding to make the floors impassible or to limit the function of the spell within the zone, SOE decided to nerf the spell as a quicker way to fix it now and forever. Maybe they were doing other things with the spell too, but I only saw folks skipping a dungeon level.

They added a StopCasting function so you don’t have to duck to interrupt casting anymore. I believe you have to map it to a key before you can use it. This still does not work while mounted.

Everquest lore contained a reference to a deity of lust, or carnal desires. This was Tholuxe Paells. When the servers merged, the gods of lust and of disease (Bertoxxulous) were put together in a darkened room with some mood music. The result is the new combined server of STDs. Not really. I like the community on the server, I just find it too amusing that those two gods ended up together.

You can actually loot a baby in the game. Baby Joseph Sayer. Stuff him in your backpack, throw some swords and knives in there, dump in some heavy blocks of ore, maybe a jar of acid or some poison vials .. he’ll be fine I’m sure. Who says parenting is hard?

Vampyres on Velious are a variation of undead that have normal vision. They see through Invis to Undead but not normal Invis or Hide, they are affected by all undead only detrimental spells. The reason I believe is the lore states they were transformed into “vampyres” by exposure to Akheva blood, not the Norrathian way that “vampires” are created.

Unless you are an Innoruuk worshipping Shaman or Cleric there is no item with unlimited clicky snares available that I know of that you can use. The Regent Symbol of Innoruuk does not seem to be usable by Frogloks however.


Edited, Dec 19th 2007 7:41pm by mfbrownbear

Did you know .. ?

This site uses a karma based posting / rating system.

You have to be registered to post, but you don't have to be a premium member or anything. Premium gets you a lot of extra stuff on the site but for posting it only means you get to upload a picture for your posting avatar.

Registered users can post anywhere on this site, on any forum I think. There's a lot of forums on this site too. However, you don't start off with the ability to rate posts. Other registered members, that already have the ability to rate, will read what you post and if they are moved enough by what you had to say, good or bad, they can rate your post up or down.

All posts start off with a Score: Decent until someone rates it. A downrate makes it change to Default. An uprate changes it to Good. I think the order goes: Sub-default, Default, Decent, Good, Excellent. Normally the forums won't even show you the posts and threads rated as Sub-default, which is how the karma system is supposed to work, by filtering out the garbage.

When your posts have been rated up enough times you will get a Title under your posting name and your name and title will be in a bolder color, and you'll then be able to rate others. The first Title is Scholar. Above that there is Sage and Guru. I'm not sure if there are any others besides Administrator. You can get rated right back down to sub-scholar and lose the ability to rate again, but you will always be able to post unless an Admin takes some action against you, but in that case .. what did you do?

I haven't seen a lot of rating activity on much of the threads in this forum, except for the downrating. Members that post wrong information or the never-popular "EQ is dying" threads deserve to be sub-defaulted and they do get filtered out, but no one usually rates up stuff that was actually useful or informative or even just funny or friendly.

I've resolved to get in the Frostfell Spirit and start rating more myself. I'd like to see some more Scholars making noise in here. I am only rating posts that I actually think deserve some sort of recognition, not just every post. For example; in this thread about the Frostfell quests I rated up 2 of marvinprobot's posts, one from jeffgb and one from Jonwin. In this thread, I actually have rated up every post I could, but that's because there's only 2 and they both had exactly the kind of thing I was looking for in this thread.

So, start posting those tips and tricks and neat little bits of information about Everquest here and let's see how many Scholars and Sages we can make. Am I wrong or was marvinprobot a Scholar just yesterday?

Heh, I just rescued lil' Joseph last night....who then spent the next day or so (game time) in a backpack filled with fireworks, rusty weapons, and snake eggs as I went about my other business for the Gnoll Slayer quest. Perhaps I should have delivered him back home first, but im sure he'd had his tetanus shots, right?

Groogle, I love that you love it.

Oh yeah, another thing Premium gets you is smileys.

Saeel, thanks for reminding me the baby was for the gnoll slayer quest. Here, give him a to settle him down. That leads me to ..

Did you know .. ?

You can use 'Spirit Shrouds' available from certain NPC in PoK if you have Depths of Darkhollow expansion to "shroud" to a monster form. The monster forms are from a set list of creature types you get to choose from. There is an Elemental line of shrouds, an Animal line, Nature Spirit and others. They are also set class types, you do not keep your own class or any of your spells or abilities when you shroud. Think of it like Astral Projection. Your spirit leaves your body and enters the empty shell of a shroud creature.

While your spirit is in that body you have that creatures abilities. You do NOT have your own gear, in fact you can't wear any gear but what you come with, which is usually nothing. You don't have access to your AAs. You get to choose any level for your shroud to be up to your own that is an increment of 5. If you are 43 you can be a level 40 shroud or 35 or 30 or like that.

Shroud abilities are all activated with hotkeys you have to make or set up depending on the class type. Warrior shrouds will be able to kick and taunt but if you are a spell caster that shrouds to a warrior you will have to find and map those abilities to a Hotbank. All spells and disciplines for shrouds are also only available through hotkeys you will have to create and put on hotbanks from the Monster Ability window that will appear when you shroud.

Your own body, with all your gear, your buffs and your AA, everything is held in suspended animation while your spirit is in the shroud. Any xp you make while shrouded is saved up and given to you when you remove the shroud. The suspension is not just like the buff timers stopping as in Guild Hall and now Guild Lobby. It's a more thorough freeze and it includes your PET and all their buffs and gear as well.

People would hang out in PoK in shroud form to save their buffs while they LFG if they didn't want to stay secluded in the Guild Hall, until they stopped buff timers in Guild Lobby too. Pet classes discovered that if they shroud while they have a pet, and log while shrouded, the pet will not poof away. In fact, the pet still had all its buffs and gear, even the TEMPORARY stuff, when they removed the shroud and returned to their own body. One important note is that any temp stuff in your own bags will still disappear if you log for long enough even while shrouded, only the pets gear stays.

So, if you are a WAR PAL RNG SHD BRD or ROG do the Gnoll Slayer quest and you can get a clicky wolf pet and keep him for as long as you can keep him alive if you shroud before you log each time.

Edited, Dec 17th 2007 8:08pm by mfbrownbear

You also used to be able to bind yourself there. Which meant that casters could use it to effectively port anywhere back before there was a PoK. Gate. Run into correct pot. Poof! You're near wherever you wanted to go. For some time after they flagged the area no-bind, some players continued to keep their bind locations there. Of course, there was always the risk of the dragon wandering by and camping you into a death-loop, but for some, this was worth the risk.

I would assume that no one uses it anymore because with the PoK books, it's just not needed.


You can learn one point higher in a language then the person teaching it to you, but you had to zone before you could teach with your new level. This is actually how many people learned languages back in the day (before zillions of people had 100 in tons of languages). You'd have two characters in a group. One would spend one point on half the languages, the other would one point on the other half. Then you'd make hotkeys spamming some random stuff and hang out right next to a zoneline. You'd each spam the other in each language until each had reached level 2, then zone, switch the language list (cause now character1 had 2 skill in the languages character2 originally trained in, and vice-versa) and repeat the process. 99 zones later, you'd both be 100 in all the languages...


You used to be able to swim into boats while they were moving. It was *very* hard to do, but basically, if you swam in front of the boat you'd be "scooped up" and end up inside the hold. It was usually easier to just swim to wherever the dock was, but sometimes you'd be heading there, see the boat, see it start to move and if you were somewhere in front of it, you could still catch it. Given the time delay between boat arrivals, it was worth at least attempting.




I've heard this a zillion times. Either it's a myth, or it's something that only occurs with *some* pacify/harmony spells, but not all. I can say with absolute first hand experience that I've used the paladin "pacify" spell probably 10s of thousands of times over the course of my EQ career, and I have *never* seen it fail, nor ever experienced the so-called "critical failure" where you'll actually get agro using the spell. Not once. If I don't get a "this target unaffected" message, it always works. Back in the day (before pretty much every mob in any zone I'm hunting in became too high level to be affected), I used to paci-pull for groups for hours at a time, day after day, week after week, though pretty much every expansion content.

I've just never seen this happen. I've *heard* about it happening. But always third hand ("I knew a guy who said it happened to him"). I'll certainly admit that maybe some of the spells have this chance. But not the paladin line (and I'm pretty sure not the chanter or cleric versions either). Maybe the druid/ranger lines have this chance? Dunno. It's just that if this was a feature/risk of pacify spells in general, then the chance of it happening must be so absurdly low as to not really be worth mentioning.

Now, they *used* to be broken such that you could get agro from using them (which is why no one used them for a long time. That and variable duration such that they'd randomly wear off faster then you could make use of them). But since they fixed the spells (back during Velios I think?), I have never seen one fail. The spell either reports that it wont affect the target, or it casts. If it casts, it either fizzles or lands. If it lands, it always "works". It's quite possible also that at some point (before they fixed the spells), the spell would allow you to cast it even on an opponent it couldn't affect, resulting in agro. Currently, it wont even cast if that's the case.

I just really think that this is a holdover from a long time ago when these spells were actually broken that people have kept alive in a kind of "EQ legend" sort of way. If the rate of failure I've observed is normal, I'd suspect that those reporting failures and critical failures are far more likely to themselves have done something wrong (or had some random agro issue occur) that had nothing to do with the spell itself. Click the wrong gem when you think you hit paci, and you might think "OMG! I just got agro from using my pacify spell!!!".

Heh. Heck. I actually did that myself semi-recently. Almost didn't notice it though. I was pacifying a couple trash goblins in Veksar (cause it's less annoying then fighting them and I'm not going to waste an invis potion getting past two grey mobs). But I accidentally clicked my IVU instead (and just plain didn't pay attention). When they agroed on me, I looked back and realized I'd clicked the wrong gem. I can certainly see someone thinking that their pacify failed in a case like that...

Pacify type spells are sort of unique. You can cast them on players, but they're not buffs. They do have resist checks.

I can guarantee that the paladin pacify spells are also liable to the same resists as the others. It's actually the same spell as the chanter / cleric one, they just get it later. I have cast Pacify on a mob, not gotten a resist message, and still gotten agro from pulling a nearby mob. I have cast Pacify and gotten resisted many times, only occasionally getting agro.

I find it truly hard to believe you've never gotten a resist or agro using these spells, but I suppose it's statistically possible.

I used to see far more resists and far more agro from such during Hard LDoN adventures on my enchanter and paladin. Now the mobs in LDoNs are too high for your paladin to use anyway otherwise I'd recommend trying one to see.

Did you know that not being able to use the StopCasting function while on a mount is actually part of the game design? It's the trade off in exchange for the ability to be medditating while still in a casting position.

Did you know that you can map some windows to a hotkey even if they don't have an ALT-O -> Keys entry?

To map the Skills window (the button you normally press while viewing your inventory) to ALT-I place this line in your eqclient.ini under [KeyMaps]

KEYMAPPING_TOGGLE_SKILLS_WND_1=268435479


(Sorry, that's the best I can come up with right now, dead tired... I'll try to come up with some more tomorrow.)

[Edited to make better sense the first time you read it! :) ]

Edited, Dec 18th 2007 10:01am by Rundle

You can bind there again now. They re-allowed it after PoK made the restriction moot.It's not only true, I've even quoted the developer comments regarding Pacify, Charisma and critical resists on these forums and you've responded to those quotes.

Did you know that alchemy shops in towns sell Harvest and Spring crystals? Both are clicky items which summon one bread or water per click. If you're not a shaman, you might not have noticed them before. Back before foods had different durations and everyone stocked grub that lasts for hours, they made a nice stop-gap when you had just traveled for 45min to your adventure destination only to get the "You are low on drink" message.

Edited, Dec 18th 2007 9:41am by Jophiel

I had a critical failure on a pacify last week and again yesterday. Both were with the new 76 bard lull songs. When using the one-step and the two-step lower lvl pacify songs, I have never had a critical failure. So it depends on the spell/song I suppose.

I used to have them quite often during the year of the LDON with that expansion-appropriate pacify.

Plus this new one is resisted quite a lot more than the old one. I used both paicifys at the buried sea, named pirate camp, on Blacksail island and with the lower lvl one the dogs are almost always pacified on the first tick of the song. When using the lvl76 song, they often resist the first tick of pacify and then rarely, gain and pass agro with all mobs and charge to attack.

Also,
-Did you know that us ppl who were in Qeynos/Surefall as starting cities couldnt pay for a port to ecom-bazaar, so what we did was leave messages of buying/selling on the note board inside the tavern in South Qeynos. You clicked on the board and typed your message and read what others had to say.

- It seemed like in every city some guard likes muffins and some other guard likes bones chips?

Edited, Dec 18th 2007 11:05am by kirbyramz