Count To One Hundred: EverQuest

Things I never thought I'd say in EverQuest:

Ding 100!

It is, of course, all down to the Overseer system introduced back in March. At that time my highest character was a level 93 Magician, a character I'd played the traditional way into the mid-sixties then bumped to 85 with one the many free Heroic upgrade promotions.

From there I leveled her slowly through a combination of Hot Zones, Franklin Teek's missions, Veteran lessons, xp potions and server bonuses. It was steady going for a while, if slow, but by level 93 my options were getting thin.

The hot zones and missions I could handle were giving less and less xp. The next ones up the chain were tough and needed me to learn new zones. In EQ, learning is often freighted with death. Dying, while it doesn't have the sting it once had, still applies a sharp brake to leveling.

What led to me beach at 93 wasn't so much the difficulty as the time. Almost nothing happens quickly in Norrath, other than your demise, should you foolishly try to hurry. People talk blithely about "grinding" xp. If only it were that simple.

First you have to get to the grinding place. These days EQ has ample options for fast travel but they all remind me of flying with a low-cost airline. First you have to travel to your point of departure, be that a Planes of Power "Book", a Combine Spire or the Guild Hall teleporter. Sometimes there's a wait for the device to cycle or a transaction to complete before you can travel.

When you arrive you're likely to be a long way from your final destination. You'll need to run or ride or levitate across hostile territory, avoiding hostile mobs and environmental hazards.

When you do eventually reach the general area you'll need to find the precise spot where you plan to set up camp. If it's a familiar zone it might be quick but if the area's even a little unfamiliar it won't be. You may need to check the pathing of wandering mobs. You might need to split a camp. Chances are you'll need to run or hide, more than once.

If you're doing one of Teek's Tasks, which you will be if you want to maximize your xp, you'll
usually need to move around. He tends to send you to kill mobs that don't cluster. Often he'll have chosen something you can only find deep inside a building or a cave. It will always be filled with hostile creatures you don't need to kill but must to get by.

You'll want to have your thirty minute Lesson running as you kill because it doubles your xp but you'll also want to have it up when your task completes. The big xp is in the reward and it doubles that, too. Or it used to. I vaguely recall they changed that. It often takes longer than half an hour to get the kills you need to finish the task so you have to judge the optimum time to start the clock.

If anything goes wrong.... scratch that... when something goes wrong, you'll have to handle it. If you can't you'll need to make it to a place of safety before it handles you. If you die you should get a rez from your Mercenary, assuming you brought a healer, but you'll lose some xp and a lot of time. If you don't get rezzed, for whatever reason, it's back to the Guild Lobby to get your body summoned and rezzed for a fee by the NPCs there. And then you either quit or start over.

All the time you're out there your buffs are wearing off. You'll have raid-level buffs and so will your merc and your pet, if you use one, because you live in the Guild Lobby, in the dogpile, assuming you have any sense. That's where you start and end every session, so you can keep those buffs refreshed. You have to come back to Plane of Knowledge anyway because Franklin Teek only assigns missions in person and that's where he is.

When I was leveling my Magician this way I'd allow an absolute minimum of an hour to do one thirty-minute Lesson on one of Teek's missions. If things went perfectly that was enough. If something went wrong it could be twice as long to get what I'd come for. I'd usually bail if it looked like that was going to happen, taking whatever xp I'd got and banking it before something else went sour.

If I had time and felt strong, I'd take two or even three tasks, hope to finish all of them before my buffs began to drop. Run the Lesson on the last and get the benefit on all the hand-ins. It rarely worked. I almost never managed three. They come in five level increments, all in different zones. The zones can be on different continents or in different dimensions. The travel time alone was crippling.

Franklin Teek channels Goldilocks. The mission ten levels below is cold. Easy, but it won't give much xp. Five levels below tastes just right. At level? Too hot to be worth the trouble, most times. You'll get burned. Anything above or below those, forget it.

Within that structure, some of the zones he picks will be much harder than others, for all kinds of reasons. Which expansion they're from, what class you're playing, line-of-sight issues, resistances, types of mob, runners, you name it.

The short of it is, soloing in EverQuest isn't hard, it just takes an inordinate amount of planning and concentration. And time. So much time.

Overseer doesn't. Overseer missions take maybe ten minutes to set up, tops. I could do it in five. You can stay in the Guild Lobby so your buffs never fade, not that you need them now. You're not going to be fighting anything. You don't have to move, let alone travel. There's literally no risk so the risk-reward ratio is infinite.

Once you've upgraded your agents to handle the higher quality quests, xp is better than Teek and the Lesson and you didn't have to go anywhere. Every twelve-hour quest gives somewhere between 0.8% and 1.3% of a level. The better-quality quests, more than that. Longer ones, better still.

Running the full ten would nets ten to fifteen per cent of the level, every time, if you pick the ones with the best xp. I always take the recruitment quests that give you more agents. Those don't give xp at all. I've also been taking grey, easy quests while I level up different jobs. Even so, I make 10%  for ten minutes, twice a day. When I've leveled them all and only take the best xp, I should hit 15% a day, maybe twenty.

I've been doing it every day since the feature was added. My target was level 100. I figured I might get there by October but I hadn't reckoned with the way xp ramps up on the better quality quests. At the start I couldn't do those but now I do one or two every day. As my agents improve I'll do more and xp will roll in even faster.

Which is good, because there are stil twenty more levels to go. That could take me another year. I'm not sure I'll have the discipline to keep going every single day but even if I slack off I know I'll get there, sooner or later. What was once a distant fantasy is now just a matter of time.

I guess at some point the Magician will want to try out her new power, somewhere, on something. First. I'll need to upgrade all her spells. And her pets. And her foci. And her gear. Not much point doing any of that yet, not if I'm still leveling. I guess I'll just stay where I am and carry on as I have been, for now.

Ding 100! though. Ding 100!