A Heroic Effort

Hey! That 300% bonus xp thing in EverQuest? And the Heroic Level 115? How's all that working out for you, then?

Yeah, not so good, as it goes. 

So, I thought about it and I decided what I'd do first was take a lowish character and have some fun moloing them up a few levels. Moloing is soloing with a mercenary, in case you didn't know, and it's very quick and easy up to maybe 70 or so, even without a big bonus.

I took a look at the characters on my regular account and the likeliest prospect seemed to be Cassis, a mid-40s druid I sometimes get out to take screenshots for posts. It'd obviously be handy if she had more teleport spells to more places plus I like her, so it wouldn't seem like time wasted, probably.

I logged her in and... she wouldn't log in. I'd left her in North Ro and now the launcher was hanging halfway through Zone Loading. 

After a few minutes the game shut itself down. I tried again. Same thing.

Well, I've seen this before. Corrupted zone file, most likely. I opened the game folder and deleted everything with Nro at the start. Tried again. Same story. Did it a few times, finding more files to delete every time. Still nothing.

Might be Cassis that was corrupted? That's happened before, too. Very annoying because it needs a GM to fix it. Before I got to petitioning I thought I'd run a couple of checks myself.

I logged in someone else to see if they could get to North Ro. Of course, everyone was either in the Guild Lobby, Plane of Knowledge or the Bazaar, so I had to run them to the Freeport portal in PoK and then through the Commonlands into the tunnel. 

Halfway down the tunnel I hit the zoneline with the desert and guess what? Now I have two characters I can't log in!

Next step: google it. I found a few threads on similar issues. They're not that uncommon. Most of the suggestions I'd already tried but one possibility was an issue with ports to the server I was trying to access. Apparently some people had had zones become inaccessible for characters on one server but had no issues with the same zone on another.

I have a lot of characters on different servers so I thought I'd test it. Now I have characters I can't log in on two servers. 

Whatever the problem is, it seems to be specific to the North Ro zone. Best advice is to wait until the next patch, when the servers will all be taken offline, and see if that magically fixes things.

That was it for Cassis for now, anyway. I thought about shifting the plan to someone else but then I remembered the free 115 Heroic. Might as well grab that and maybe do something with it.

When I posted about the Anniversary, I hadn't seen the other Daybreak press release about the Heroic Characters in the store. That tells you all the things you get for your 4,500DBC and it's quite a lot:

 50,000 Platinum  

200 Bayle Marks  

Entrusted Midnight Steed's Saddle  

Two 40-Slot Bags  

Spells  

Thousands of auto-granted Alternate Advancement abilities (AAs)  

Full set of Equipment, including Weapons, Armor, Power Source, Charm, and Augments  

Food, Drink, and Ammo 

I'm not sure 50k in platinum will get you much in the Bazaar these days but two forty slot bags is a hell of a deal. I don't think any of my characters have any that big. A full set of all gear at 115 is very appealing, too, always assuming it's any good.

I had a good think about who I'd like to bump up to 115 from the existing roster and the answer was no-one. It has to be on the account I'm paying for and there's no-one on there that I want to play. That meant making a new character and with the same logic as before, it looked like that was going to be either a Druid or a Wizard. They're the ones that get the ports.

I've never had any luck with Wizards. Can't play them. Druids, though... I know druids. I should. I have several.  

At 115 a druid has a lot of travel options. Not only the ports to all the druid rings but at some point druids got their own version of the Wizard's Translocate line, which means they can point at someone else and teleport them to another zone without having to go themselves.

That could be handy. It'd be a lot quicker to log in two accounts and have my druid on one send my Magician on the other to wherever she wanted to go than it would for the Magician to make her own way there. So much of a session in EQ can be taken up with just getting from one place to another it's enough to put you off even starting, sometimes.

So, I made a wood elf druid and called her Floradelle. Then I selected the upgrade option to make her 115 and logged her in to Greater Faydark, as I'd selected on the drop-down and she appeared in Gloomingdeep, the tutorial zone.

Well, eventually. Some time since I was last there they added an introductory slide show. You can see it, too. I took screenshots. They're all in this post. 

What I did wrong, I don't know. Probably didn't press the mouse button hard enough or something. I logged out and went back to Character Select and did it again and this time it worked. Kinda.

Floradelle was 115 alright. She had all her spells. About a hundred and thirty pages of them. She had a mercenary standing next to her. She was in Plane of Knowledge, too, so that was all good. 

Problem was, she was still in her starting gear, wielding a wooden club that looked like she'd torn the leg off a table, back in the kobold mines. 

Where was all her high-level gear? In a bag, maybe? Nope. I opened inventory and apart from an eight-slot backpack with some basic food and a note for her guildmaster there was nothing. No 40-slot bags, either.

I tried Claim in case that was how it worked, It wasn't. I tabbed out and did some googling to see if maybe freeloaders don't get the full kit. They do. So I did what everyone always does when something's not working in EQ; I logged out and logged back in again. 

And that worked. Floradelle came back fully dressed in new armor and carrying two huge bags. In them, for some reason, were her weapons. I got her to put the table-leg away and swap it for something more appropriate but by then I'd had enough. 

The whole thing had taken me more than an hour and anyway I had no real idea what to do with a Level 115 Druid, other than use her as a taxi. All I wanted to do, still, was wreck around some low-level zones with a merc and have some fun.

Maybe I'll do it today.