Monthly update June 16, 2017Follow

In the last months, I have been working on Epics for many of my chars. I have now completed 9 Epics with 2 classes to go. My Berserker only has the final fight to go, but I am not optimistic that I can solo the 5 mob waves in less than a minute for each wave. Time will tell.

If and when I complete that, I will have completed the Epics for every class at least once (some classes I have done multiple times over the years) with the exception of the Druid Epic. I have a 55 Druid, but I am not enamored with that class. Previously, I had only leveled a Druid to 15 before deleting.

Some Epics were ridiculously easy (Rogue, Shaman), some I will never do twice (Enchanter, Magician). I wonder where the Devs' minds were when creating these quests. It would be interesting to read a "behind the scenes" write up of the development of Epic quests and the logic that went into the quests for the various classes.

Other than that, I have been alt jumping doing some of the hard core zones or farming equipment for my lowbie alts. In the last week, I have cut back quite a bit as I have a tendency to go all out to complete quests and burning myself out. That results in extended absences, so I will try lightening up and do more varieties of things to keep my interest up.

I just finished rogue 1.0 today I still have nightmares about the mage 1.0 piece in Sol A.

I've always felt that (on progression servers) the "PoP noob armor" quests should be available from day one. If for no other reason than to provide a stat lift for those who are unable to group and get decent gear that way.

I'd happily settle for the Luclin era newbie armour that would at least use up all the quest junk that is dropping on progression servers. I really enjoyed getting my first set on class appropriate armour from the relevant guildmaster. These were the ones where they gave you a box and told you to combine a variety of unsavoury body parts in it to create armour.

They went in in the Summer of 2002 and PoP came out in October.

I just find it annoying on a prog server that you are deluged in the peculiar quest junk - which didn't exist prior to the quests - and yet cannot do the quests

Devspeak goes something like this on the newbie armor situation:

"Tuned for PoP era, so set to PoP era".

-what doesn't get clearly said is that it was unevenly implemented over multiple expansions for different race/class combos (this is prior to them adding new combos like the Inny frogloks). I believe very little of it was implemented prior to PoP era (though I could be wrong on that).


I agree it is annoying to get buried in the drops, all of which should be merchant sellable and tradable (varies by zone/quest) before you can use them. It would be nice to be able to vendor dive for the bits while the population is strong in the zones. Difficulty of the quests varies considerably too.

Pretty sure they made the weapons scale by era back when Fippy/Vulak had them earlier than PoP. Personally I am fine with them being active any time prior to PoP, with Velious probably being a fair compromise of not making early-era tradeskills and drops obsolete.


Now if dev time could be spent... I'd love to see the newbie armor retuned to be appropriate for original era and improvable at various points along the way (i.e., velious goes live you hand it in with some velium to your home city GM for the upgrade, Luclin you combine it with the twilight sea quest armor for an actual desirable in era set, PoP you do some low-tier plane hand-ins and it gets you just below the planar quest armor and so on).

Or at least the basic route of making the armor scale up with expacs... what defiant should have been (instead of so over the top... TSS armor was good for low levels and should not have been made obsolete by that level range of defiant).