How To Upgrade Ascension Spells (The Easy Way) : EQII

Earlier this week I spent some considerable time trying to work out how to upgrade Ascension spells in EverQuest II. If you just want to know how to do it, scroll down to the end of the post! If you want to see how I got there, read on...

Ascension was introduced in the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. At that time it seemed like a peculiarly perverse system even by EQII's abstruse and obscure standards.

I won't re-hash the bizarre details of how it worked back then. I barely understood it at the time and most of what I once knew I've forgotten. Thankfully, the whole structure has been revised and revamped, possibly more than once, so we can all move on and pretend it never happened.

For historical accuracy, I'd normally at least try to lay out the basic timeline in a post like this but the available information is more fractured and confusing than the original system. I did spend a while reading forum posts and various guides but it made my head hurt so I had to stop.

Ascension was never a popular addition to the game, at least as far as I can make out. It was confusing, expensive, grindy and turned everyone into battle-mages. At least, those are some of the reasons people gave when they claimed to be quitting the game over it.

In retrospect it seems that the main drive behind adding it was to reduce system load, something it attempted to do in several ways.

 Ascension spells do huge damage but have very long cast times. There are also just four Ascension classes, of which you can only use one at a time.

The means of changing from one Ascension class to another is highly restrictive. You have to visit an Ascension trainer to request a change of class, meaning no hot-swapping from one line to another during raids. It's also to your great advantage to use one of your Ascension abilities to convert all your other non-Ascension abilities to do damage of the type your chosen Ascension class uses.

If you have a whole bunch of people concentrating on Ascension abilities, the server has to deal with four classes using four types of damage on a slowish cadence rather than twenty-six classes using seven types of damage in a hyperactive frenzy. You can see how that might lead to fewer calculations.

You can also see how it would lead to fewer options and to the player feeling railroaded. If the system had been slick, straightforward and intuitive that might not have mattered but it was complicated, awkward and gnomic, so it very much did.

Even as a solo player, for whom Ascension spells were really an optional extra, I found it a little annoying at times. And all I was dealing with was the basic leveling process. Until this week I'd never even considered upgrading the spells.

The reason I finally got around to it was mainly that I'd gone quite a long way down the upgrade path on almost everything else. My Berserker has all his gear at 170 Resolve, with some of it at 175 or even 180. Most of his combat arts are Expert, some are Master. He's made and fitted BoL Adornments in almost every slot and he's completed some of the sets. He has max level mercenaries and mounts, decently geared. Even his Familiar is pretty darn nice.

All of this can be improved still further, even within the paramaters of a soloist, but he's at the stage where those improvements are noticeably incremental. I was going over his stats to see if I'd missed anything obvious and it turned out I had: almost all of his Ascension spells were still the basic apprentice versions.

That led to some long and not very fruitful research sessions. I read a lot of contradictory and confusing advice. I studied explanations and discussions of how Ascension spells might be upgraded until I felt even more at sea than when I started. Eventually I worked out that although various crafters can make various subsets of the spells, Sages can now make all of them. That seemed like somewhere to start.

I went through my bank vaults and dug out all the various Illegible Pages and so on, all of which can still be used but some of which belong to different versions of the system. I gave those to my max level Sage to see what he could do with them. Not much, as it turned out.

 I checked to see if he had the recipes to use them. He didn't.

I read some more and discovered he should be able to buy the necessary recipe books from a vendor in the Myrist Library, once he had sufficient faction, for which he'd need to do the Chaos Descending signature tradeskill questline.

I thought he'd done that but he hadn't even started it. I set to and finished it over three sessions. Then I went looking for the vendor to buy the books. I couldn't find him.

Back to the internet. After several unecessary trips to various vendors around the world, because every discussion I read just said "the vendor sells them", but never gave the vendor's name or location, it finally occurred to me that maybe it meant the crafting trainer in Myrist itself.

It did. All the books were there, on sale for chump change. I bought the lot and scribed them. Now my Sage should, in theory, be able to make all levels of all ascension spells. He can't in practice, of course, because some of the levels require those special pages, which are dropped as loot from bosses and given as rewards from missions.

What he can do with just normal mats is make both Journeyman and Expert Ascension spells. So I had him make journeyman for all the ones the Berserker uses regularly. He had a couple of the pages to make Adepts so he made those too, and for those he then made the Experts.

I had to make the whole sequence for those because you can't just jump to the highest quality. A character has to have scribed each preceding level before they can scribe the next.

It's still more complicated and fiddly than regular spell upgrading but compared to how it used to be it is pretty straightforward.

To save anyone else having to work out the basics the way I did, here's my pared down, no frills bullet point guide:

• Sages can make all Ascension spells.
• All the required recipe books are for sale on the crafting trainer in Myrist, The Great Library.
• The vendor is called Elmelar Stilltree and she's in the Crafter's Gallery.
• The books you want are Sage's Primer 01 to Sage's Primer 10.
• To buy them (or even see them on the vendor) the character needs to have completed only the first three quests in The Scrivener's Tale, the tradeskill signature questline.
• That's the part called Escargot Overclocking, for which you get the fantastic 88-slot Crystal Shard Backpack as a reward. You'll probably want to do the quest just for that, anyway.
• You do not need to carry on with the rest of the very long questline, although it's easy and entertaining enough to enjoy for itself. It also has a useful final reward, a vendor selling all kinds of fuel, who you can summon, anywhere, on an hourly cooldown.
• Once your Sage has bought and scribed the books, they will be able to make all Journeyman and Expert level Ascension spells using only regular materials, including one regular rare, Planar Energy.
• The Sage can also make Grandmaster Ascension spells using regular mats, a regular rare and a Celestial Foundation or Spellshard, a kind of ultra-rare regular mat.
• All of these mats, even the ultra-rare, can be gathered from normal gathering nodes. They are all also tradeable and can be bought on the Broker, assuming anyone's selling them.
• For all other grades (Adept, Master, Ancient and Celestial) you'll need the appropriate Illegible Scroll. These are dropped by bosses or found in mission reward crates. They are also tradeable and can be bought from other players.
• Once crafted, the character who wants to use the spells must scribe them in sequence. 
• You can use offline research to upgrade all levels of Ascension, allowing you to skip over any level for which you don't have the mats.

I think that's about it. It may not be crystal clear but it's a lot clearer than anything I found!

If anyone spots any errors or omissions, let me know in the comments and I'll correct as necessary.

Ascension spells are very powerful and can be lot of fun to use once you get the hang of them. Worth the trouble they take, I'd say.

Good Things Come: EQ2

I finally got it done. Yesterday, I finished the Signature questline from last year's Chaos Descending expansion. Only took me about nine months.

As the ever-reliable EQ2Fandom wiki attests, there was plenty to do. There always is in an EverQuest II expansion. You can also rely on the rewards being excellent and the pacing well-judged.

There's a feeling that Daybreak know their market for the EverQuest games these days. From my perspective as a solo player, and with EQII not being my only MMORPG, it seems a very convincing argument.

Every year I eagerly await the next expansion. I pre-order at the first opportunity and start playing as soon as it arrives. If I go at it hard it tends to last me a month to six weeks before I've done the bulk of what interests me. If I take it in sips it can last me most of the year.

The approach and style of each expansion varies somewhat. Every pack sees a new wrinkle. There's enough variety to keep things fresh. In essence, though, it's a gear reset every year, a level-cap raise every other. There's usually a new system or mechanic and some tweaks to how the old ones work.

And there's always a story. In fact, there are two. Unlike just about any other MMORPG I can think of, except possibly for FFXIV (although even there I don't believe crafters get a separate storyline) EQII follows a genuine dual path for Adventuring and Crafting.

It's completely viable to have characters who only craft and still have a well-developed, structured throughline from creation to cap that includes everything an Adventurer could expect. There are signature questlines at all levels, side-quests, storylines, upgradeable gear and tools, important NPCs to meet, titles to earn, achievements, you name it. There are even craft raids.

What's more, if you really wanted, you could be a max-level crafter with the best gear and recipes and all the perks and still never have swung a sword or cast a spell in battle. Having adventure levels does make it easier on occasion, particularly if you plan on gathering your own materials, but you even get abilities and tools to help with that if you want to be a total pacifist.

Just by the nature of things, in recent expansions the crafting questlines have tended to be faster to finish. Yes, some of the combines take a while and sneaking about in dangerous dungeons can slow things down, but compared to the frequent, lengthy boss battles and instance-clears required of an Adventurer, the tradeskill timeline seems to fly by.

There's a huge difference between hitting the new level cap and completing the questline for both disciplines. Capping out tends to be much faster, with crafting being the quicker of the two. There was a time when getting enough xp from the main questlines to reach cap was considered a problem but those days are long behind us.

Instead, in years where the number next to my name goes up, I tend to be less than half-way through the story by the time that number stops. It happened this year, which has something to do with why I've been meandering through the questline ever since. Something clicks in when I top out on levels, telling me I'm done when really I'm nowhere even near.

Solo content in EQII is so well-tuned these days that I rarely feel the bumps. What with the Panda quests and the day one free handouts, anyone paying attention should be able to start each new expansion at a comfortable jog-trot. The advice even for raiders is usually to start with the solo timeline because there's likely to be an upgrade in it somewhere, even for them.

It's not always something that just bumps your stats, either. Some of the most useful rewards I've received from finishing the signature quests of expansions are utility items or abilities. The Altar of Malice expansion from 2014, for example, gives you the ability to reclaim adornments from your gear. The skill is infinitely re-usable with no cooldown, making a task that was once impossible, then awkward and time consuming, as simple as a couple of mouse-clicks.

I was very glad of that yesterday when I took possession of an impressively glowy two-hander, the Abyss Reaver, Avenger of Tides. This mighty weapon, a significant upgrade to my trusty Blessed Aethersteel Greatsword, comes with no fewer than six adornment slots.

In moments I was able to remove five from my sword using the Adornment Replacement skill and slot them into the Reaver. There are a number of other ways to do this if you haven't completed the expansion but none nearly so quick or convenient.

Finishing the expansion signature lines is highly rewarding for practical reasons, then, but I would also contend that, at least for anyone already steeped in the lore of the game, it's worth doing for the stories, too. Storylines in both EverQuest games tend to stretch out over years - even decades, becoming knotted and tangled one with another. I rarely have much of a clue what's going on or why.

That, though, seems to me to be the strength of the game's storytelling rather than its weakness. Playing EQ for so many years, every new twist and turn of the plot has the sense of a real-life event. Great powers move and we feel the ripples.

Everything happens on a geo-political scale. Even a powerful, connected character, the position a max-level inevitably finds themselves occupying simply by dint of having been there for so long, is still a tool in the hands of the real major players - gods and demigods, queens and potentates, liches and archmages and elemental powers.

Old friends and enemies turn up when you least - and most - expect them. There's a perpetual sense of a living, breathing world behind and around as names you vaguely remember crop up and characters you thought you'd see the last of reappear to make trouble for you once again.

Chaos Descending concluded for me yesterday afternoon with a somewhat less than epic battle with Najena. Najena has been around since the very beginning. Starting as a "young, brilliant magician" under the protectorship of King Cristanos Thex of Neriak, Najena was given a research facility in the Lavastorm mountains, where she performed "her own personal agendas and experiments".

The lair was given her name, becoming the Dungeon known only as Najena. I spent many, many hours hunting there. Najena herself survived the Shattering of Norrath that followed the destruction of the moon, Luclin. Her lair was still there, blocked by boulders, when I reached Lavastorm again in EQII.

I last saw her in the Kunark Ascending expansion, where she was one of the four mentors or trainers for the first iteration of the Ascension system. She represented the element of fire and was my Berserker's trainer when I chose Elementalist as my first Ascended class.

I think that might be why she called him "pet" when they met in battle yesterday. She always called him that when she was training him. Or maybe she comes from Sheffield. Whatever the reason, it felt personal when we met once again.

That kind of immersion or connection can only be built with time spent. I would be the first to admit that EQII's storytelling is nothing special, even by video-gaming's historically low standards, but that doesn't matter. I know these people and that counts for so much more.

So, those are some of the game's great strengths, and only some. As I repeat ad nauseam, I believe that, for a player such as myself, the game has never been in a better place.

Which isn't to say that I think it's perfect. Or even safe. I'm far from convinced that I am the audience Daybreak wants or needs to please. I pay my annual subscription and I buy my expansion once a year and that's it. I always buy the basic version, too, because it gives me everything I need.

If I was more of a veteran, though, a Heroic Group player or a Raider, I don't think I'd be nearly as happy. Where my progression ends is where theirs begins. To perform even adequately at those rarified levels these days requires major investment either of time or, more likely, money.

Over the past few years DBG have re-designed the endgame to rely on a wider range of upgraded spells. The spectrum runs from Apprentice to Ancient, encompasing seven tiers. Time was, all you needed was your Masters. Now you need Ancient if you can get it, Grandmaster if not.

The upgrade path used to be clear. You got your Apprentice spells free at level, Adepts would drop comonly enough to be traded cheaply on the Broker, Masters less commonly and more expensively but still they were there. In between, crafters would make and sell Journeyman and Expert spells. Everyone got what they needed, eventually, in game, for Platinum.

Not any more. Over the years the game has moved to what many would call a full pay-to-win model. All spells can be "researched" by anyone. It's not a skill or a craft. It's offline training.

You get free research on every character over a certain level but you have to remember to use it - it's not automated. At low levels it's extremely fast and very good. Later on, less so. My Berserker is currently researching a Level 109 ability to take it from Journeyman to Adept. It will take him 24 real-life days. You can't skip a stage, either. To upgrade you must already have the previous tier in your book.

Taking an Ascension spell from Master to Grandmaster at that level takes more than fifty days.  Or you can buy an "Instant Upgrade" via a button in the UI. Every day you cut will cost you 49DBC, meaning a fifty day upgrade could be yours today for something like $25.

While that was just an option for whales no-one seemed to care very much. Then Daybreak turned off the drops. Masters, always rare, became virtually unknown, even in raids. Adepts, the bread and butter of leveling and regular play, went from dropping commonly to become even rare than Masters used to be.

What with that, and the addition of the mistrusted Ascension system, which many players feel devalues their class choice and turns everyone into a Wizard, and which also has to be researched in the same way, there's a feeling that the pips are being squeezed dry. How true that is is hard to assess, particularly from my ironically-priveliged position in the cheap seats at the back.

I worry, though, that in the necessary drive to keep the game profitable by serving a very specific and fixed customer base, the dial may have been pushed a little too far in the direction of bringing the money in. Fan service gets a bad name for some very good reasons but in this case I hope this year's expansion is at least a little more directed towards the hardcore and their needs than the last few have been.

Turning the Adept and Master taps back on would help a lot. People didn't seem to mind paying to get to the top tiers so much. It's having to pay all the way that's hacked them off. Then again, crafters who make Experts must be laughing all the way to the bank. Hmm.. Come to think of it, I have a Scholar who can do that...

As always, you can't please all of the people all of the time. When it comes down to it you have to make a choice. As a dirty casual I've had a very good run these last few years. If next expansion sees the wheel turn a litle towards the Heroes and Raiders, I won't be complaining.

Well, not much...

In My Experience... : EQ2

I was happily sorting my bags in EverQuest 2 yesterday (three hours and the job barely started) when I happened to spot someone in chat talking about double XP. I hadn't heard anything about it but I moused over my xp bar and sure enough, there it was: Server Bonus 100%.

Well, I say moused over but it wasn't quite that simple. These days, EQ2 XP comes in (at least) five flavors: Adventure, Tradeskill, Alternative Advancement, Tithe and Ascension. When you're leveling up, the default is Adventure but at max level that swaps to Ascension, since the entire endgame is now balanced around those four classes. What happens when you max that out I don't know - and I'm a long way from finding out.

When I heard about the possible bonus XP, I was playing my max-level Berserker, so the bar in front of me showed Ascension, which is unaffected by bonuses. It didn't used to be, at least I don't think it did, but one of the unheralded changes that came in with the Chaos Descending expansion was a complete revamp of the way Ascension works.

Someone doesn't get out much.

All four Ascension classes received five more levels; that was advertised. The old "Ascension Vitality" mechanic, which limited the amount you could earn per day and involved a complicated and annoying process of visiting NPCs to top it up, was removed; that wasn't mentioned anywhere I saw. Also, all Ascension XP earned by killing mobs vanished, too.

The only way to level Ascension classes now is by completing quests or using specific items, mostly those granted by quests. Quest XP goes directly to Ascension. Sometimes you might get an item that gives a whole Ascension Level or even several. I haven't had one in the new expansion zones yet but as far as I know, they're still attached to the quests that used to give them in Planes of Prophecy and in panda Yun Zi's catch-up questline.

That reminded me of something Wilhelm said about Lord of the Rings Online:

"I remember back when LOTRO was working up towards launch that the idea of quest experience being so heavily weighted on your progression path as somewhat controversial. Of course, any minor change of formula can be said to have been controversial to some degree. Still, we went from EverQuest, which was “Quest experience? You have to have quests for that!” to WoW, where killing the mobs tended to be, on balance, worth as much as the quests themselves, to LOTRO, which pretty much required that you do the quests to level up."

For a long time after that EQ2 offered a meaningful choice between grinding mobs and questing but the current orthodoxy is squarely in favor of quests. In fact, in a year when the expansion cycle doesn't include a level cap increase, XP, however acquired, can begin to seem a tad irrelevant to most of the installed customer base, which does make you wonder just who Bonus XP events could be aimed at. Perhaps that's why no-one bothered to tell us about this one. 

It did get me thinking, though. The change in the way XP gets handed out at higher levels is a reflection of the degree to which the last ten levels, including the solo "casual" version, are now both separate and different from how everything works for the first hundred. It's much more than just the XP, too; from 100 onwards you might as well be playing a different game entirely.

For a hundred levels you really can just wander around, wearing whatever gear you happen to find, killing whichever mobs you chance to run into, doing quests for anyone with a feather over their head. Yes, there are optimum paths and yes, if you stick with the game long-term, you'll have to backtrack to fill out the significant parts you ignored, but if your goal is simply to entertain yourself and get to three figures then you don't need much of a plan - or a clue.

Kill named mobs for fun and profit and, if you have the Weekly, XP.

From 100 onwards, though, you need to pay increasingly close attention to any number of abstruse and often unfamiliar systems. Even that most basic of constants, Adventure XP, changes radically, and not just as outlined above.

In order to make sure players spent time on the newest content, thereby concentrating populations in a small number of zones, the amount of XP required for each level was increased by orders of magnitude. You can still do older content if you insist but it won't do you any good at all, even if you mentor down for it. You will still get XP but it will be infinitesimal compared to what you need.

Going from Level 99 to Level 100 takes 1.66m xp, up from 1.5m the level before. Getting from 100 to 101 requires 140m. You can see that grinding in Sebilis isn't going to make much of a dent in that.

Killing mobs in current content gives more XP than killing mobs in older contet but not by all that much. It won't begin to make a dent in what you're being asked to earn. If you want to level from 100 to 110 you have to do quests in the latest level-appropriate zones, which means no later than last year's expansion. A single quest there will give you a decent chunk of the level: with full vitality and a server bonus you might get half-way from one level to the next on a single hand-in.

The alternative to grinding levels used to be grinding AAs. It's not called Alternative Advancement for nothing. AAs, aren't what they were. They stop at 350 and by the time most people hit max level they'll already have capped out. AAs are still essential, especially if you spend them correctly, but once you've got them and set them you can forget them.

Gratuitous picture of a snail. In no way intended to symbolize leveling speed.

The attention that used to go to AAs has, for a couple of years now, been replaced by the focus on Ascension. Ascended skills are extremely powerful. Among other things, they deliver nukes and dots that visibly impact the health of Level 118 named mobs, which your class skills definitely won't.

I am only just beginning to get a clear idea of how important Ascension is. I can see now why committed veterans have been grumbling about everyone turnng into Wizards. On the plus side, it certainly must make the small EQ2 dev team's job a lot easier; balancing four Ascension classes has to be a lot more manageable than balancing the full twenty-six.

Once you have your levels and your AAs you have to think -among other things - about your spells and/or combat arts. I'm still trying to figure that out. My Berserker is mostly using the highest-but-one level versions he has access to because he's upgraded them all to Master quality via the time-gated system.

Vet bonus 60%? Hmm, I guess 110 crafter must count now.

As you level to 110 you still get the lowest level Apprentice version of each new spell or CA gifted to you automatically, but to upgrade a Master of the previous version you need to reach Expert in the next. At lower levels you'd just have bought the Adepts off the broker or crafted the Experts yourself. That's still possible from 101st onwards but it becomes ferociously expensive. The drop rate on Adept spells is many orders of magnitude lower than you've been trained to expect. If I see one Adept drop in a session I'm amazed. The chances of getting one you need is too small to contemplate.

As for crafting Experts, I have a max-level sage who can do it for my casters but the number of rares required per spell and the cost of buying those rares makes it so off putting I haven't yet started. I'm also short a max-level Alchemist to make CAs for my Berserker. I used to rely on Mrs Bhagpuss for that.

All of which just gets you to Expert, at which point you can begin using the time-gated process to upgrade to Master, something that takes about six weeks. Per spell. Which itself is just the beginning. Next comes Grandmaster, Ancient and - I think but I'm not sure - Mythical. 

Even basic information on how all this works can be hard to find. Daybreak themselves recognized the potential for confusion a while back, when they added this very helpful guide to changes for returning players. I would absolutely advise anyone coming back to EQ2 after a lay-off to read through it carefully. It was written in May 2018 and it seems reasonably current but I fear some of the detail on Ascension may already be outdated.

Some of us love double XP!

Once you've gotten your head around the fact that your Adventuring class is no longer your prime concern and that your means of acquiring both XP and spell/CA upgrades have changed almost out of recognition , you can start looking at your gear. Unless you were a frenzied min-maxer you probably never bothered to pay attention to Infusing, let alone Reforging as you were leveling up. Well, you're going to have to start.

I still don't understand Reforging and I'm not sure how important it is in the scheme of things but I have come to terms with - and very much learned to value - Infusing. Infusing means boosting the stats on individual pieces of gear. It uses the Deity system (itself radically revamped recently and another entire system you need to learn) and runs either on Infusers you get as boss drops and quest rewards or on Platinum.

Pumping money into this slot machine is essential if you want to boost your character's effectiveness. I banged several thousand plat through it yesterday to add more than a million hit points to my Berserker's health pool, as well as pushing his Potency over 40k. You must repeat this process every time you change a piece of armor, too, because, unlike Augments, you can't take the upgrades out and re-use them.

Augmenting - that's another vital mechanic that just can't be ignored any more when you hit 100 although at least the way they work doesn't change - much. Keeping your gear as close to fully augmented as possible is another essential aspect of being max level. So is leveling up and gearing your Mercenary. So is keeping your Familiar maxed. And as of Chaos Descending we have levels and gear for our mounts, too. And I haven't even mentioned Fervor and Resolve...

On it goes. And on and on. If you play solo it's maybe not utterly impossible to ignore most of this and bumble along as if the old ways still applied but whether you can do that and still have fun, I'm not so sure. If you adapt and change then the newer content becomes as easy and genuinely "casual" as the lower but if you don't then it can feel like running face-first into a brick wall.

Don't worry about me. I'll just sit this one out.

As I said, if you want, you could familiarize yourself  with many of these processes and mechanisms as you level up. You probably should, since there's one hell of a lot to take in all at once if you leave it until you have no choice. Given that every expansion now comes with a Level Boost token, however, plenty of people are going to find themselves starting cold on a new character, even assuming they're current players who know the ropes.

How appealing a prospect this is will depend. It must be very tough on genuine new players and returning prodigals alike, but some people are going to love the complexity. There's a demographic that plays games mainly to learn the systems. They should be in clover.

For people who just want to log in and kill stuff, though, I'm not sure I could recommend starting at the top by buying the expansion and triggering the boost. It's attractive to be where the crowd is and you might well feel you're missing out down in the lonely lower levels, but if its the traditional MMORPG experience you're looking for, that's where you'll find it. EQ2's endgame, even the solo, supposedly casual endgame, is something else entirely.

All of which brings me back to the question: just who is a Double XP event that only applies to leveling modes really aimed at? And, perhaps even more puzzlingly, if you're going to have a Double XP event, why not tell people about it? I can't see any sign of an announcement either on the EQ2 Community News page or on the Launcher. Even google can't find a single mention. If that one person hadn't spoken up in chat I'd never have known.

It does potentially change my plans. I might concentrate on leveling a couple of my 100s to 110. Or I might wake up some lower levels, just to watch them knock off a dozen levels in a session. That's always fun.

How long this mysterious event is going to last I have no idea. I don't even know when it started. There's a patch today - there's a patch every Tuesday - so it might be gone when the servers come up. Or it might be with us through the coming holiday weekend. I suppose it might even be permanent...

Get it while it lasts, that's my advice. Unless your on your Level 110, in which case don't bother!