Ding 135!

Geez! It took long enough, didn't it? At around 11.30 am on Saturday 11 April my Necromancer, Mordita  finally dinged 135, the level cap in EverQuest II. It only took four months (To the day, near enough.) What is this? 2004?

Well, no, I guess not. In 2004 the level cap in EQII was 50, I think. Pretty sure. Wait, let me check... Yep, that's right. MMORPGs usually capped at fifty on launch back in those days. No idea why. What's so special about fifty? Okay, my favorite number is and has always been five so fifty is cool with me but I don't think they did it just to please me.

As of the release of the latest expansion, Rage of Cthurath, in December last year, the cap went from 130 to 135. Remember when expansions went up in tens? That's been a while...

Leveling has changed so much over the years. In all games but let's stick with EQII. At launch it was slow as hell but still a lot faster than we'd been used to in EverQuest so we weren't complaining. Much. It stayed like that for a long time or at least that's how I remember it. 

To get xp in those days, you could do quests or kill mobs or mix it up and do a bit of both. Your choice. Also, you could hand in Collections. They gave big xp and the collectables were tradable so people would hoard them up and then hand them in on the day the new expansion arrived. That way, you could rack up the new levels in minutes. 

Later, after chronomagic came in, you could mentor down and solo dungeons for a level or two a run. Or have a high-level friend drag you round on follow. Or pay someone to power-level you that way, if you didn't have any friends. And then came mercenaries so you could get an NPC to do it and pay them peanuts in plat. That pretty much put the power-leveling professionals out of business.

There were loads and loads of ways to tear through the levels at little effort and no risk. For a while it was all about the Dungeon Maker and I'm sure there were other exploits tricks I've forgotten. Pick one, slam down an xp potion, get your head down, knock the levels out in a few hours. It was hella fun for the first hour or two, then not so much, then dull enough to have you screaming. Still, we all did it, even if we complained about it all the time, too.

This is where I get to quote Joni Mitchell, isn't it? Well, you never do, do you? Who'd have thought I'd be gazing back wistfully at those Sunday afternoons going round and round and round Chelsith or Sebilis? Round and round and round until my teeth ached. Halcyon days...

Well, they put a stop to that around the time the cap hit 100. For our own good, I think they said it was. Oh, they didn't do anything as crass as ban it. They just started counting the xp needed to level in numbers orders of magnitude larger than anything you could get in old content. 

Suddenly, killing mobs  got you absolutely nowhere. Mobs still gave xp, sure, but it was like trying to fill a swimming pool with an eye-dropper. From then on about the only way to gain enough xp to make a difference was to do quests. 

And for a while that was slow but not so slow you'd really hate it. Constrictive and coercive, yes, but not ineffective. New normal, all fine. 

Then in one expansion, I can't remember exactly which, the new quests started filling the entire bar in two or three hand-ins. Instead of taking a couple of weeks to hit the cap it took a couple of days. Maybe a couple of hours. Seriously, it was that fast.

Leveling to the cap in a new expansion turned into something so trivial there didn't seem much point in having levels at all. Some people liked it, particularly the ones with big stables of alts. Others hated it. Either way, as always, we all got used to it.

And then they took it away again. A couple of expansions back it switched back, without warning, to little dribbles. Actually, I think the dribbles are bigger than they were before the surge but it's like when you were a student, isn't it? A room in a shared house seemed fine but once you get used to living in your own apartment, who wants to go back? 

Only it's not like anyone gave us a choice. These days, there's about one way to get xp in the current expansion and that's do the damn quests. Nothing else makes a dent in the bar. Hah! Dent? Doesn't move a pixel!

And it's not just any quests, either. Do the Signature line, the core story, the MSQ if you will. That's where all the xp is. But don't expect it to be enough. I finished the Sig and it left me about 70% of a level short. It's taken me about as long to cobble together enough xp to finish that last bar as it took me to do the previous four levels.

OMG was it bad! Repeatable quests. Don't you hate them? I hate them! I've always hated them. This is where I get to quote David Byrne. Yes, that line from Psycho Killer. Of course, that line. And well he may ask! Why? Eh? EH?!

I've been grudgingly chipping away at that last 70% for what feels like weeks now. Okay, sure, I could have done the whole thing in a day or two, but only if I could have stood it, which I couldn't. I couldn't even bring myself to do a couple of the damn repeatable quests each day.

I did manage a couple every few days though and the singularity the level cap was getting nearer. Slowly. Horribly slowly. 

And then today it finally occurred to me to check if I really had done all the non-repeatable quests. 

It took me about three-quarters of an hour. Just to check, that is. The quest structure is so convoluted now. Who knows what's anywhere any more? I went through my Active Quests, my Completed Quests, I compared them to the Timeline on the Wiki... In the end it was only by going through the Quest Achievements, something I almost never look at, that I worked out there was a ton of stuff I hadn't done. 

I'm really out of the loop on Achievements. They spent so many years being completely useless for anything other than being able to say you'd done them that I stopped paying attention to them altogether. Which meant I'd missed it when they turned into something useful, not to say necessary. 

They all come with rewards now. Mostly Status but Status is the new Platinum. Hyper-inflation made NPCs stop asking for money. Now all they care about is how famous you are. Status buys you everything.

Anyway, that's probably a post of its own. The important thing is, I was going through the Quest Achievements to see what I might have missed and it cued me into a whole bunch of side-quests I didn't have and among those there turned out to be several where the xp wasn't the pitiful 1.2% of the repeatables but a big, chunky ten per cent!

I spent a happy hour or so finding and finishing those and suddenly there I was, just a couple of per cent from capping. Just right for one last heave...

A couple of repeatables and over the line! Ding 135! There's an Achievement for that, too.

And now I don't have to think about it again until December 2027. There won't be level cap increase this year. It's fallow.

Of course, I do have all those alts. But they can wait until I'm in the mood. Which might be never, now I've found the Necro Hack for EZMode. I really only need them to keep their crafting up to date and thank god tradeskill levels are still relatively easy to get. (Shhh! for gawd's sake...)

Of course, hitting the cap just means the real work begins. Every piece of gear needs replacing and every spell upgrading. Plus all those Achievements and Collections that I'm starting to realize are core content these days, not optional extras like they used to be. 

Only now I can take it all at my own pace and enjoy the experience. 

Free! Free at last. Free!

For now...