Slow Starter

My gaming was really sporadic this weekend.  I expect that this is kind of how things will be from now on.  I simply have too many other things that I want to do to be spending every waking moment online any longer.
 
That’s good though.  I think I’m happier than I have been in years as a result.  It is nice to be spending most of my time in the real world these days.  I’m not so sure how excited my guildmates are about it though.  There have been a few comments tossed around on the boards and in chat that make me think not everyone is thrilled at how far into the backseat I have thrown EQ2.
 
Oh well.  They will get over it or they won’t, but this is how things are.
 
I did manage to reach a goal this weekend that I have had since I first returned to EQ2 3 years ago.  When I came back, my wizard was the first toon that I created.  This weekend, at long last, he finally reached level 80 which makes him my forth level 80 toon.  Once he finally dinged, I spent some time crafting adept 3’s for him and had enough rares to make all but 2 of his 71 – 80 spells.  I’m not too concerned about those 2 though because those are 2 spells that I have literally never cast even a single time.  I then made what shard armor I could for him, but my shard stash is pretty sparse these days.  I had enough to make him 5 pieces of T1 gear, so he’s definitely in far better shape than he was.
 
Later on, we put a group together and hit a couple of Kunark instances.  It’s too bad that it wasn’t pre-TSO because I am not exaggerating when I say that the full suit of Kunark caster gear dropped between those 2 instances.
 
Afterwards, we reformed with mains and hit one of the Guk’s.  I’m not sure which one it was.  I want to say Outer Corridors.  It is the one with all of the ring events.  Only 2 of us had ever been in the zone before and we had people telling us to expect lots of wipes while we figured it all out, but I actually thought the zone was really easy.  I think we had 1 wipe and that was only because of an unfortunate pathing coupled with an unfortunate out of encounter AE.  Other than that, it was close to flawless and all of the named mobs went down on the first pull.  The drops were nice… although smart loot was again on vacation.  Thanks to the new heirloom feature though, several alts got some really nice upgrades.
 
The raid last night… well, I don’t know much about what happened.  I was there, but I wasn’t there if that makes any sense.  NaNo kicked off yesterday and I spent most of the day slacking on it… which meant I spent the raid splitting my attention between the raid and working on NaNo.  What I do know is that we were in Tome of the Mad Crusader and that Snake Lady gave us a few problems although we did eventually drop her.  I also know that my NaNo got off to a slower start this year than it did last year.  I think I hit roughly 5000 words on my first day last year.  This year, I hit about half that.  No biggie though.  That still puts me ahead of schedule.  To reach 50,000 words by November 30, I need to average 1667 words per day and I hit about 2300 yesterday.  I’m kind of fumbling in the dark on this particular story though, so I can only hope at this point that I don’t sputter out before I reach my goal.