Where did I leave those mits?

I was looking for something a little different to do this weekend when I got around to logging into game.  I decided to go on another “give up the damn ebon clusters, you damn selfish nodes” Rivervale run while I attempted to decide where to go hunt.

Well, I got to Rivervale and place was packed with nitpickers.  Provo nodes, critter dens, and other nodes were everywhere, but being ignored as people raced to grab up the single ore node in evidence.

I decided to go see how the harvesting was in Everfrost.  I have spent very little time in this zone as it pissed me off beyond belief the other 2 times I visited.

I actually think the zone is very entertaining and has a lot to offer, but geez.  The design leaves much to be desired.

I don’t mind that the jumping off point is an island in the middle of the water.  I don’t mind having to swim to a cave or a canyon to get to the meat of the zone.  I don’t even mind having to remember to invis to dodge all of the triple heroic sharks that are everywhere.

But come on.  Who’s freaking idea was it to put an epic raid mob in the water circling the entire entrance area and making him so that he’s almost always up?  I saw him get killed 3 times this weekend and he would pop almost immediately again each time.

Then, if you survive the swim over to the cave, what is waiting?  Undertow.

These mobs were not a bother for me as I was harvesting with my 71 dirge, but back when I tried to go hunting there when the zone was level appropriate for him, they were what caused me to leave and never come back.  I died so many freaking times to those two just trying to get to the main part of the zone and I never did actually make it.

Anyway, I spent a good 4 hours harvesting in Everfrost on Saturday.  No ebon clusters.  Big surprise.  I now have more than 3k loams, nearly that many fulginate clusters, and about 30 or so rare loams.  No ebon clusters.

As I continued to roam Everfrost, it seemed like I ran into a raid level epic mob at nearly every turn.  Maybe back in the day they weren’t up quite as often and are only now permanent fixtures since no one hunts there, but it seems like that zone would be death on a stick for anyone of appropriate level.

Even on the far side of the zone, that damn broodmother and her 75 mile aggro radius… sheesh.

While I was harvesting, I saw something strange on the ground and picked it up… and got a quest update.  Heh.  I had forgotten all about the Eyepatch HQ.  So, I went ahead and knocked that out while I was there.

I also found the solo instance over near the minotaurs.  I know again that this was old news, but it was new for me.  Yesterday, I grabbed up my brigand and wizard 2-box and knocked that instance out… after playing dodge the raid mob for a while anyway.

Over the weekend, I got an e-mail from gdub over at The Lost Souls.  He was looking to try something a little different in EQ2 and asked where I played.  He created a newbie on my server and I got to spend an enjoyable couple of days chatting with him in game.

Hopefully we can hook up and do some adventuring soon.  I was going to try to group up with him last night, but I got side-tracked tradeskilling.  Besides, after wounding myself yesterday afternoon, I wasn’t much for playing last night.

Despite the ever-elusive ebon clusters, I did make some progress over the weekend.  My wizard and brigand both dinged 42 and got most of the way to 43.  I leveled my tailor 4 levels so he is now 34.  I leveled my jeweler 2 levels so he is now 48.

I have now stockpiled enough t5 tradeskill supplies to get most of my crafters through t5 thanks to the ebon cluster hunt.  Since I still haven’t gotten any ebon clusters, I’m sure to get even more in the days to come.

I’ll probably just give it up though and see if I can survive to 52 in my feysteel armor.  The cobalt clusters are much cheaper than the ebon clusters.  I think cobalt is selling on Unrest for about 50 gold per right now.  The ebon is up to 4 plat.

All in all though, it was a fun weekend.  I got to see a zone I hadn’t paid much mind to in the past, I enjoying running through that solo instance, I made some progress, and I got to chat it up with gdub.

Hopefully the coming days will be the same kind of enjoyment.

A Dirty Old Hat

I spent some time this weekend moving some furniture around in my apartment… which turned out to not be the brightest idea I had.  The furniture is all big, bulky and heavy and the little spaces I have to maneuver them in are pretty tight.

I had plans to completely flip the bedrooms.  When my temporary roommate moved out, he decided to leave all of his brand new furniture behind and let me buy it from him.  He has a family member who works at a furniture company, so he gets everything tremendously discounted.  Essentially, it is about $20,000 worth of furniture and he got it for $1400 which is what he is selling it to me for.  The mattress for the bed sells in stores for $3000 by itself.

Anyway, I was attempting to move all of the old furniture from my bedroom into the spare bedroom and move all of his furniture (or my new furniture I guess) into my room.  I ended up getting my bed taken apart and moved out and the new bed moved in and put together.  I also got the end tables moved.

By the time I completed that, I started feeling a massive tearing pain in my stomach and had to stop.  I tried stretching out a bit and then sat on the couch, but the pain kept getting worse and worse.  I ended up lying on my side in a borderline fetal position for the better part of an hour waiting for the pain to pass which it eventually did.

The diagnosis is that I gave myself several small tears along the abdominal wall.  I swear… I could hurt myself combing my hair.

While I was shuffling things around, I found a box that I hadn’t opened since moving here a year and a half ago.  I opened it up and smiled.  Within the box, I found a really nasty old black felt hat.  It is definately an 80’s era hair metal hat.  Definately dated and definately ugly.

Years ago, when the band I was in was cutting our first CD, we started kicking around album names and cover designs.  It was one of many things that we couldn’t all seem to agree on.  One guy jokingly said we should name the album “Dirty Old Hat” in honor of the nappy baseball cap I generally wore pretty much all the time.

The idea was discarded, but it got me to thinking.  I went home and grabbed this 80’s felt hat.  When I was growing up, I went through a period of time where I was having a lot of problems at home.  One of my friend’s mothers took me in to give me and my parents some distance from each other.  She was a wonderful woman.  Around the time that we were intially forming the band, she passed away from cancer.  As my buddy and I were going through all of her things, he told me to take and keep anything that I wanted because he knew she would want me to have it.  She had a statue that was a hobo clown sitting on a box blowing a trumpet that I always loved.  That was the only thing I kept.

I took that hobo clown and set it in the middle of the street.  I took that nasty felt hat and turned it upside down in front of him and scattered change all around.  I got a piece of paper and wrote, “Tips Please” and set it up in front of the hat and snapped a picture.

Everyone loved it and it became the album cover for our first CD entitled “2 cents worth.”

That hobo clown still occupies and place of honor in my apartment, but I had long since forgotten about that hat.  It made me smile to see it again.

/wedgie

Last night, after another brief stint of harvesting, I went hunting for the Bristlebane Day quests.  I don’t know if there is more than one, but I only found one.

Some halfer was standing around outside of Qeynos in Antonica freaking out because the gods kept abducting him, stealing his items and memories, and then dumping him at random places in the world.  He had heard that there was a tin hat he could wear to keep it from happening again and wanted me to go get it for him.

So, I ran to Qeynos Harbor and sought out a blacksmith and asked him for the hat.  He giggled and said that it was all a practical joke he had been playing on the poor halfer.  He would be willing to give me the hat if I would go get him a trick deck of cards from a gnome.

I found the gnome upstairs in the bar in Qeynos Harbor.  She wanted to show me a magic trick.  After being “amazed” by her trick, I told her I wanted her trick deck.  She said she would be willing to give it to me if I could bring her some cute pink glasses some lady in South Qeynos had.

Off in South Qeynos, I found the lady in question walking around on a balcony upstairs in one of the buildings.  She was pissed because she had been jilted by some dude on Erollisi Day.  She was willing to give me the glasses, but only if I tracked down the object of her bitterness and reclaimed a high dollar bottle of booze that she had give him.

He was in the bar in South Qeynos.  He wanted to brag of his exploits to me.  When I told him that I wasn’t interested, he began cringing and begging me not to kill him.  I informed him that I wasn’t there to kill him and just wanted the hooch back.  He agreed to give it to me, but only if I went out to Antonica and killed a Ratonga who was after him.

I ran out to Antonica and got quickly ambushed near the griffon tower by the ratonga.  Right around the time I was attacked, I suddenly realized that it had been so long since I had taken my dirge into combat that I didn’t remember what everything did.

Right around the time my health was nearing 50% and I was debating evacing out, I started to recall the methods I used for fighting with my dirge.  Sheesh.  I couldn’t believe that I had already forgotten.

The rat died and I ran back to the coward in the South Qeynos bar.  He gave me the booze and I ran back to the jilted lady.  She gave me the glasses and it was back to the gnome.  She gave me the cards and I went back to the blacksmith.  He laughed at me for being willing to part with the card deck for a worthless hat, but made the switch.  I ran back to the halfling in Antonica and gave him the hat.

He promptly turned into an avatar of Bristlebane and started laughing at me for falling for his prank.  He informed me that all of the beings I had encountered along the way were actually him in disguise and he then proceeded to congratulate himself on a great prank.

In the end, I got a deck of cards to place in my house that, when placed, look like a deck of cards slightly fanned out.  If you right click them, you can enter into a LoN session.  Yay.  Yet another attempt to get me to actually care about LoN.  As if the constant system spam weren’t enough.

I placed the “hat” on the floor.  It looks like a brass kettle turned upside down.  You can right click that and there is an option to “turn on protection.”  When you select that, a light show starts jumping off of the thing like a mini fireworks display.

The quest was kind of fun.  It was definately easy.  It involved a bit of running around, but only through 3 zones and everything was relatively close together.

I am curious if there are other quests for Bristlebane Day or if this was the only one.  I have to admit that the holiday events in game are some of my favorite things to do.  I did the haunted house for Halloween with each of the toons on my main account (I hadn’t opened the second account yet).  I did parts of Frostfell with various toons.  All of the toons on my main account got all of the Frostfell daily gifts.  One toon got the wreath and Frostfell tree and they all did the Frostfell Carole instance.

For Erollisi Day, I was able to collect enough candies to buy a couple of the stuffed bears and a few other items and I got the cloak and keg for Brell Day on a couple of toons… although I never got around to doing the quest for the Avatar of Brell on anyone.  I meant to, but just ran out of time.

I have always thought that these holiday events are a nice touch to MMO’s.  They help to lend an air to the idea that these are persistant worlds that actually do change and see the passage of time.  Plus, they offer a nice break from the standard day of hunting.  For me, they definately bring out a different level of enjoyment to an already enjoyable experience.

Give me coffee and no one gets hurt

Man, I’m tired. 

I don’t know what the deal is, but I have just been exhausted all week.  Maybe it is some leftover from the cold that totally kicked my ass last week.  I don’t know.  All I do know is that I have literally struggled to keep my eyes open every waking moment this week.

For the past few months, my alarm has gone off around 6.  I jump right out of bed and get in the shower.  I’m dressed and ready to walk out the door by 6:45.  I would sit down at the computer and do a little writing and then finally head out around 7:15 or 7:30 arriving at work 15 minutes later.  That gave me a little bit of time to sit in the office alone when it was nice and quiet and get caught up on some work.

This week, damn.  The alarm goes off and gets a sound beating atop the snooze button.  I finally ooze out of bed around 7, belly-flop into the shower and just stand under the water until 7:30 and the engage in the mad dash through morning traffic to get here by 8.  I then spend the rest of the day alternating between doing my job and sucking down caffeine in a worthless attempt to quit nodding off.

Oh well.  The weekend is nearly here.

Not that ANY of this gave me any additional luck in harvesting some more ebon clusters last night.  Nope.  Not a one.  I’m still sitting on the 2 I have in the bank and hoping for 7 more before I need them, but time is running out.

In other randomness, one of my co-workers is currently being visited by his parents… and his mother can freaking COOK.  She sends him to work every day with leftovers and I send him home every night with requests to be adopted.

Screw you, Hindsight!

When I was initially grinding up my carpenter, I really go into making a wide variety of furniture that is now littering my Qeynos Hall.  One particular item that I really thought was cool was the Ebon Wall Sconce.  I liked the look of those so much that I ended up cranking out about 12 of them before all was said and done.

And now, I’m kicking myself in the ass.

For the last few days, I have been a harvesting madman trying to dig up some ebon clusters.  My brigand is just about to hit level 42 and it is time for some new armor and weapons… and I have only managed to scrounge up 2 ebon clusters for him.

I’ve spent so much time harvesting in Rivervale lately that the game now says, “Welcome back to Rivervale, Rao” when I zone in.

The good news is that I need all of the other supplies that I’m picking up, but the ebon sconces on my wall are mocking me now.

After another 2 hours in Rivervale last night, I checked the broker to find out what it would cost me to buy the clusters I need.  7 plat each for the cheap ones.  Yeeee-ouch.

So, more Rivervale for me tonight I guess.  The good news is that I should be well stocked for t5 supplies for a while after all of this is said and done.  I’ve also gotten plenty of rares to make my t5 cloth armor for the wizard, so I’m in good shape there.  Now I just need to grind about 7 levels on my tailor so he can make the stuff.

Heh.  I’m always behind somewhere.  Just my lazy nature shining through.