Just One More Thing...

At the top of the post you can see a picture of my Berserker, not getting the new quest that came with this week's EverQuest II update, Coffers and Coffins You can tell he's in the right place. All those other people are standing on top of the questgiver. I have to assume they are getting it. 

The inconsiderate pile-up isn't the reason for my Berserker's failure to acquire the quest. Even if they all got the hell off the NPC it wouldn't help. As far as my characters are concerned, there is no NPC there.

The update, which I trailed a while ago, when we didn't know all that much about what was in it even though that was what the press release was supposedly to be telling us, looks very substantial. It has not one but two new raid instances and a new quest line culminating in a dungeon that can be handled solo or as either flavor of group. 

If, that is, you've completed the Signature Adventure Questline from Visions of Vetrovia. I have not done that. Yet.

I was hoping I might at least be able to talk to the questgiver and maybe get one of those "Come back when you know what the heck you're doing" messages. Then I would have been able to take a picture of her and use it as a framing device for this blog. Devs never think about bloggers and their needs when they come up with this stuff, do they?

Nevertheless, as you can see I've managed to come up with half a dozen paragraphs anyway. I am, after all, a professional. Or I would be if anyone paid me.

Adding "Finish Adv. Sig. Line" to my To-Do list and moving on, there's quite a lot more in the update. It really is meaty. The part I was most looking forward to was the start of Overseer Season Four. I can crack on with that right away, can't I?

Yes. Technically, I can. I have. I mean, I've started. I'd forgotten how Overseer Seasons work, though. It's a long, slow wind-up before the pitch, basically.

Here's how it went for me a couple of hours ago. I had my Berserker check the Overseer window. He's the one with the most agents although all my characters have pretty full rosters. There was a raft of Completed missions waiting to be cashed in from last time I was on so I clicked on all of those first.

Each completed Season Three mission gave me a large chunk of Overseer Level 30, which is where XP stopped last time around. It didn't take many hand-ins to fill the whole bar, at which point there was a nice Ding! and a pop-up to inform me I'd unlocked the Achievement "Season 4 Overseer".

So far, so easy. I carried on with the remaining completed Season Three missions. Immediately I noticed a change. Instead of great chunks of xp, I was now getting tiny slivers. Also, all the remaining Season Three missions had vanished.

On the plus side, the Achievement came with two Season Four missions. I scribed them both. They were, naturally, the shortest, lowest-quality possible: blue missions lasting one hour with a one hour cooldown.

This is completely normal. It's how Overseer has always worked. It's just that, what with there being a year between Seasons, I never remember it works that way. It always comes as a surprise. Not one of the good kind, either.

It's fine, though. I know the routine. I just have to do those two missions as often as possible until I get some more Season Four missions as drops and then keep doing those as well until eventually I have enough to do my maximum ten a day.

If I keep at it, soon I'll have ten good missions, the Purple and Green ones, and if I keep doing those every day I'll get lots of good stuff. It's a fair system but it requires patience. The early days (Or weeks, if the rng gods are unkind.) can be disheartening, which is why I imagine quite a lot of people still think Overseer isn't worth the trouble. They never stuck with it long enough to see it blossom.

While I was looking up where the NPC I couldn't see was, so I could go and take a picture not of her, I noticed there's yet another holiday event running. It's Norrath. Of course it's a holiday. I wonder any work gets done there at all.

The holiday in question is Beast'r. If you can guess which real-world holiday it mirrors, give yourself an Easter cookie. Damn! Gave it away!

I already have a whole clutch of Beast'r eggs that I never use as vanity or house pets so I wasn't hyped to go egg-hunting again. I would have, though, for completion's sake. I'm not much of a completist but I will fill in gaps if it's quick and easy and Beast'r is certainly that.

When I checked the press release, though, I found there are no new eggs this year. There are some new house pets on the vendors but that's it. 

What I did notice was that Beast'r comes with three Overseer missions of its own. I thought that might
get me a little extra Overseer xp for Season Four (It doesn't, by the way.) so I took a quick look at the wiki and mapped over to Everfrost, where the first of the missions begins.

Except I'd skim-read it wrong. It actually starts in Darklight Woods. I didn't find that out after I'd been to Everfrost, which turned out to be serendipitous. I was scanning the map for likely questgivers and I spotted one in a position I didn't remember so I flew over to see if that was the Beast'r guy.

It wasn't. It was the questgiver for one of the new tradeskill quests that arrived with Coffers and Coffins. A long time ago, most likely when Domino was in charge, questlines were added for several crafting ranks, rewarding all the Advanced recipe books for that decile. It started with the introduction of Frostfang Sea and New Halas as a starting zone, I think, and became a semi-regular thing with most expansions thereafter.

For some reason, presumably available dev time, a few sets of levels never got the memo. I never imagined anyone would find the time or the inclination to fill in those gaps but then I wasn't expecting Niami Denmother to get the Crafting Lead gig. 

The current update adds questlines for the forties and fifties. All the details, as you'd expect, are at EQ2 Traders Corner. I was planning to do both of them, for fun mostly. I hadn't even thought about who I'd get to do them. It's not like I actually need the recipes for those levels any more. 

Decision made! My Berserker, who is also a Weaponsmith, can do the Level 40 quest because that's what he just got. It does also come with a three-headed dog called Eustace, so he's keen. Just got to pick someone for the Level fifty one now.

As well as all of that, the update also includes several new collections and an excellent change to a useful but somewhat annoying questline from several expansions ago, described by Niami Denmother as "very off-putting for many". I was one who'd been put off. I've done it twice and that was enough. Now all I have to do is take my remaining max-level crafters, both of them, straight to Obulos Frontier and cut to the chase...

... providing they can a) speak Goblish and b) prove they've completed the Visions of Vetrovia Signature Tradeskill Questline. 

I think this is where we came in.