*Looking for group quests for Normal Dungeon Dailies will now award players with a Rare Equipment Cache which contains a random rare item for your character!
*Fixed an issue with sell back, this feature has been re-enabled.
*Iron Pine Peak: Failure to defend the Wardstones during “The Snow Pack” zone event will now properly cause the zone to fall under Akylios’ might.
*Fixed an incompatibility with AMD Athlon XP processors.
Ding, 300 Crafter – Bring on the Crafting Rifts #Rift
At level 38 my cleric is now a 300 artificer. Thanks to doing dailies in Meridian I also had 3 artificer plaques that I was able to use to purchase a few epic recipes. I mentioned in a previous post that I think crafting is far too easy and thus it makes it a little useless for profit, and I hold by that fact. The gear is amazing, and is still better for my character then my quested gear. I know that will change as I hit 50 and want specific gear in order to queue for T2 heroic dungeons, but in the mean time crafted gear > all. Especially if you take the time to imbue it with the special stat shards you get. Anyhow. I hit 300 crafter, and then promptly picked up my first weekly crafting rift quest. It requires a few items that are difficult for me to get, including some semi rare mined items. I’ll either need guild mates to help me acquire these items, or I’ll have to wait until I can harvest them myself. I’m excited about being able to spawn (and complete) my first crafting Rift, although I am a little disappointed they can only be spawned once a week (per person). I really wish players had more methods of being able to earn the tokens required for recipes, after all you can run dungeons for plaques all day long if you want, but you can only do your crafting quests as a daily.
Speaking of dailies, at level 38 I made my way to Stillmoor (pictured above) in order to turn in my Master crafting daily. It was a dangerous walk since I was surrounded by level 45-48 mobs but I made it in one piece, and got to witness more of the beautiful zones that I’ve come to appreciate. While I was turning in my crafting daily my little hub came under attack by an invasion, and even though I was far too small to actually participate I threw a few dps attacks out here and there and walked away with an enormous amount of planarite (for me at least, the average from a regular rift is 40 or so, for this tiny invasion I managed 65). It was fun to participate and I got a lot of experience even if I was well under level. Perhaps I’ll have my guild mates drag me around to random high level Rifts so I can experience some of those (although I dare say I will get my fill of them once I hit level 50).
I’ve been questing in Moonshade, which is a lot of fun. I appreciate that there are more options for my 30’s and I’ve been spending all of my time in this one zone. I’m incredibly eager to hit 40 (probably today, if I work at it in any case) and then begin the final climb to 50. I’m already planning which alts I want to level up next and I imagine when all is said and done I’ll have one of each class. As well as crafters, of course.
I hope everyone is doing fantastic on this glorious Wednesday, no matter where you find yourself. Happy gaming!
Seeing Red #EQ2 #EverQuestII
Today game update 60 was implemented, and with it a lot of pretty neat things. I do, however, have one major concern. Pictured above is what I see when I mouse over a piece of gear, and those two icons you see under the “attuned heirloom lore-equip” text are the new graphic they’ve added for adornments. Adornments are slots that you can use to add extra stats to your gear and they come in a few types including white, yellow, and red. White is a basic adornment, they’re player crafted and pretty simple and cost effective. Yellow adornments are vendor sold, they’re of a ‘legendary’ quality. Red adornments are fabled and typically come from raids although there other ways of obtaining them. My problem is the fact that when you looked at a piece of gear you could instantly tell what type of adornment your gear took based on the fact that there were words that told you [yellow adornment slot] and the like. Now they’ve switched to this weird graphic that is incredibly unfriendly to colour-blind players. I can see colours just fine and even I have issues telling that those two slots are white (it looks like grey) and yellow (looks more like tan).
Note the actual adornment itself (pictured above) – it says “slot type: white adornment slot” – that is perfect. It doesn’t matter what colour any of the text is, players can read right there that it’s for a white slot. I’m REALLY hoping SOE re-thinks their decision to use a colour based graphic in their armor pieces. It does nothing but create a hassle for those who may not be able to see it as well as they’d like.
I understand that it’s not an easy task to make sure that your game is accessible to every person out there when everyone is different, but I really do take a lot of pride in companies that go out of their way to make sure there are options for those who need them. For example, Rift uses sounds to trigger some events – but they also use text that scrolls across your screen. Great for those who may not be able to hear. When it comes to any sort of design decision it’s really important that you think above and beyond what the ‘average’ player may want – and look into those minorities. They’ll appreciate it, trust me.
Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.
Getting The Quest Completion Achievement in Stonefield #Rift
You’d think that after all of my adventures in Stonefield, I’d be eager to leave it behind. However; there was one achievement that still eluded me that I REALLY wanted to get – and it was the achievement for quests in Stonefield. 87 in total. Now, typically when you work on this achievement it happens naturally over the course of questing and you even end up with extra quests still to complete. Not the case in Stonefield. I had been sitting at 3 missing quests for quite some time now and I just could not for the life of me figure out what I was missing. Turns out I wasn’t the only one. In fact had I not done a search for this specific issue, I doubt I’d have completed at all.
Two of my missing quests were quite simple. One happened to be the quest over top of Deepstrike mines that I had forgotten about. I saw the quest on my way out of the instance the one time I had done it but it didn’t exactly click at the time. I went back and completed it, and then headed to another hub where I found my second missing quest, unlocked once I’d completed the first one.
The third and final missing quest remained a mystery for the better part of the day. Thanks to some amazing searching my better half stumbled into a video that showed us exactly where it was I needed to go. See that scaffolding pictured above? Yep. It’s on the very top of that and it’s not easy to get to. I spent the better part of an hour playing super mario with the scaffolding, making my way slowly to the top. Once you’re up there you’ll see a glowing pickaxe laying down that you can pick up.
For one portion of the scaffold climb, it was in my best interest to mount and jump into the corner on the outer edge of the scaffolding. A game of balance and many falls later (where I almost died, numerous times because taking ANY falling damage in Rift seems to be extreme).
Like I said, it wasn’t an easy climb at all. But well worth it!
Finally!
That completed the achievement for Stonefield for me, and I was happy to do so. My cleric is now level 35, half way to 36. I’ve been questing in Moonshade (I believe that’s the name of the zone, I could be mistaken, but it does start with moon at least) which is a very nice change to Scarlet Gorge and Stonefield. I’m really eager to hit the 40’s and to be able to join in more adventures with my guild mates. This weekend I helped them do Iron Tombs on their alts, but healing it at level 35 wasn’t exactly a challenge. I’m still glad everyone had fun.
Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
Lets Talk Cleric Builds #Rift
I spent most of yesterday cursing the zone Scarlet Gorge. I thought Stonefield was bad, but Scarlet Gorge is much worse for defiant characters. There’s so few quests in this zone over all that there’s no achievement for completing them (to start things off). The best way to get up north (which is all Guardian might I add) and hence to the dungeon located up there, is to go from the zone above and head South. I was lucky enough to get a guild run through Foul Cascade and completed two quests within the zone. I noticed that the defiant zones are all very dark and .. dark. I’m looking forward to trying a guardian counterpart once I hit 50 on the cleric.
I ended up purchasing the Templar PvP soul with the intention of trying it out and perhaps purchasing a fourth soul build some time down the road. I can only put 10 points into it until I hit Rank 2, except I don’t even know what is required to hit rank 2. I matched it with a purifier / justicar mix (most of my points into purifier for aoe heals) and justicer for some survivability. I heal in PvP Warfronts, it’s just what I’m most comfortable doing.I like being able to snare anyone who attacks me, and reflect their damage back at them for a limited time. I’m still not sure if it was worth it to pick up, but it’s neat to try it out.
I also changed my main solo / duo spec quite a bit. I dropped druid, and picked up shaman. I’m now using a justicar (barely, 11 points into this) / shaman (most of my points spent here), sentinel build (I wanted a few single target heals) which is working out VERY well for me. My dps is much higher then it was before and I still have good survivability. I’m very pleased with the changes and hopefully I won’t be regretting them any time soon, hehe.
My third spec is my dungeon spec. I have a sentinel / purifier / warden build with most of my points into sentinel / warden. I’ve had this spec since I created my character and it’s a comfortable (and easy) heal spec without a lot of complications. I have a few group heals at my disposal for when AoE’s hit, but other wise I’m concentrating on single target heals.
I would like to add a fourth soul to the mix, but at 21 plat it will be a little while coming. I have the coin right now (barely) but that would mean not having enough coin to purchase anything else I may need. My crafting is quickly approaching the 200 mark, which means only 100 more to go after that. I’ve been focused on completing quests, so I haven’t ventured into areas above my level yet (in fact most areas are below my level by quite a bit) but I’m not in a rush and I know I’ll get there eventually. Yesterday I finished the puzzle in Scarlet Gorge (pictured above) – it was a lot of fun, and I got a nice upgrade of some gloves (blues) woohoo.
Anyhow, enough rambling for today. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
