Gimme The Loot

When I dinged fifty with my hunter I thought I'd go farm the Icecrown rare circuit for a while. It seemed like the quickest, easiest path to upgrades. And it was, except pretty soon it became obvious his slow flying speed wasn't going to cut it, even before they halved the spawn time.

The Shaman had had the same problem a few days before but she was fortunate enough to have more than enough gold on her from her leveling journey. All she'd had to do was portal back to Orgrimmar and train fast flying. The hunter, despite having been around a decade longer, only had about three thousand gold to his name. Since I hate to leave my characters completely broke I needed to get him at least another couple of thousand.

I spent a while looking at guides on how to make money. Most of them were horribly out of date and those that weren't made it look like a full-time job. I'm already quite deeply invested in making money through the markets in EverQuest. (Had my biggest haul yet this morning, over eight hundred thousand platinum). I definitely don't need to be doing any more of that. 

All I wanted was a fast way to make a couple of thou. Several guides suggested some outdoor spots. That sounded okay. I tried a couple but it took a long time getting there and money came in slower than just doing quests so there didn't seem to be much point carrying on with that. 

I thought about doing dungeons but then I saw one of the guides offering old raids as a quick and dirty way to make minor bank while waiting for your auction millions to start rolling in. It seemed like a plan. Only, how do raids work in WoW? I wouldn't know, obviously. 

I read that up and it was about as confusing as everything else in the game. I was kind of thinking I'd just fly to one of the blue spirals on the map and go in but it seemed that wasn't the way it was done. There was something about LFR and visiting NPCs...

I watched a video on YouTube (which I didn't bookmark and now can't find). It was helpful. All the guy did was go to his Garrison and talk to an NPC. I could do that. I have a Garrison. 

 

At the end the guy apologized that he couldn't be sure if the NPC he'd shown would be where he'd shown him if your Garrison wasn't maxed-out like his was. Or if he'd be there at all. I thought about googling to try and check that but then I thought it would be easier just to go to my Garrison, which is level two, and see for myself.

The NPC was just where I'd seen him in the video. I spoke to him and he gave me a long list of options, none of which meant anything to me. I could see I'd have to start a raid myself to get him to port me but from what I'd read and heard I thought I could begin with a raid of just one: me. 

I wasn't one hundred per cent sure whether other people could warp in and join me once I'd started. I've played games that work that way and it's always weird, when you think you're in a solo instance and suddenly someone pops up and joins in. 

It wouldn't really matter if that happened. We'd all get loot and loot was all I was there for. And its not like anyone ever speaks. Anyway, only way to find out how it worked was to try it, so I did. I picked the first name on the list, started the raid, zoned in and...

Found myself in an arena. It reminded me (a lot) of the one in Deathfist Citadel in EverQuest II. Like really a lot. There was the same layout, the same long speech by the arrogant warlord, the same wait for opponents to come in and brag at you before you killed them.

It went on for what seemed like a long time. There was a lot of talking. Two arena champions down and no loot later and I was starting to think it was going to be a waste of my time, when the whole place came under attack from some massive army and the scene shifted to a city under siege. 

Okay, I get it. The arena part's just scene-setting. Makes sense in a narrative-driven raid structure. I imagine there's some plot leading up to this, or used to be. I'm not interested in any of that. I just want to slaughter mobs for money. 

So I did, only they didn't have any. My experience of soloing old raids or dungeons for cash in other games includes mowing down the trash and pocketing a ton of loose change plus vendor loot. Not in WoW, it seems. Maybe one mob in twenty drops anything and that's just a couple of gold.

On the other hand, everything's a one-shot, more or less. Clearing them out doesn't take up much time and there's always that thing in dungeons and instances where doors only open when everything's dead so probably better to clear than skip. 

I opened the map because I had no clue where to go and there were all the bosses, handily marked. Getting to them wasn't as simple as it looked due to some misleading geography and architecture but it didn't take too long. Killing the bosses went even faster. Not quite one-shot. Maybe three or four.

Took me a bit but I got into the swing of it. Kill the bosses, pocket the loot, leave my own raid to get kicked back to my Garrison, run round the corner, sell all the loot to some vendor, run back and pick the next raid off the list. Rinse, repeat.

I worked through the whole list. One or two of them were awkward. The one where the top floor collapsed and threw me several floors into the basement was annoying. Another I couldn't even find the boss. 

Mostly, though it all went smoothly enough. Each run made me a hundred gold, sometimes twice that. Took me about an hour to make the couple of grand I needed. Then I flew over to the place where they keep the portal to Stormwind, took it, paid for my training and off to Icecrown.

Compared to how this kind of thing works in other mmorpgs I've played I thought it was odd. Certainly far more complicated than I would have thought necessary. I fancy doing the Pandaria raids, which reportedly pay better, but it seems I'd have to go to Pandaria and find an NPC there to set me up.  

That seems fair enough, if you look at this as a virtual world like some (ex-)developers would like you to, but this is hardly that, is it? This is a purely gamelike mechanic that's been specifically added so as to appease the portion of the playerbase that was in the habit of farming dead content for cosmetics before the sequence of recent changes to how levels worked. If it was a virtual world, the raids would scale to level the way the open zones do, wouldn't they?

The whole process felt so weirdly codified and segmented it made me wonder if it wouldn't be easier just to put the whole thing into the UI. With a max level character on your account you could just pull up a list of all the raids prior to the current endgame, pick one and have the loot from all the bosses delivered straight to your bags.

The feature could use the same rng you'd get if you killed the bosses and each raid instance could be on a cooldown equivalent to the average time it takes to clear. The end result could be that players would get the exact same loot in the exact same time but they could run the process in the background while they did something more interesting.

There's a lot gameplay in a lot of mmorpgs that doesn't hold up to close examination but the more I play Retail WoW the more it seems like a whole set of disconnected ideas. When Chris Kaleiki says that "Modern WoW, insofar as it has a vision, is muddled and unclear, even to the developers" (to quote Kaylriene's precis rather than the man himself) he's not kidding.

I'll probably do some more of these "raids". It is a quick and painless way to make as much gold as I'm likely to need and it's fun to see the zones and the cut-scenes. Once. 

The main reason won't be making a habit of it is that I find the way all the the mobs except the bosses drop nothing demoralizing. Also, once again, weird. One of things I noticed as far back as Exile's Reach is that in Azeroth, damn near all the mobs drop loot damn near every time. Why would that stop when you hit raid level?

I'll say this for the palimpsest of conflicting and confusing systems in modern-day WoW - it definitely makes you think. Whether that's the intent is another matter.

She's Crafty

After I hit max level on my EverQuest magician I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my Overseer quests any more but I did know I wanted to carry on doing them. Setting and collecting ten missions each day has settled into a ritual. I wouldn't say I look forward to it but I definitely get some level of mild satisfaction from the simple process.

It did occur to me to start leveling another character, naturally. You need to be at least level 85 to access the Overseer system but thanks to multiple rounds of free Heroic handouts over the years I have quite a few characters sitting around at precisely that level.

The question I found myself asking was why bother? What would I do with another max level character if I had one? It's not like I'm doing much with the one I've got even though I've made the effort to get her passably well-geared and Magician is probably the best solo option there is. Would I get anything out of a maxed Necromancer or Druid or Beastlord that I can't get from the Mage or would, as I suspect, playing any of those feel more limiting?

There certainly wouldn't be much point having another maxed character on the same account, either. That really would limit the synergy. A druid or enchanter or shaman on another account could provide extremely useful buffs or teleport my Magician to places it takes her a long time to travel to on her own. I can definitely see the utility there. Having two max levels on the same account would double the workload for no gameplay benefit at all.

If I was going to level up a character on a second account, though, wouldn't I be better off dual-boxing, with the Magician, who would be godlike to a level 85, power leveling? Except I've tried two-boxing in EverQuest a few times and I find it quite irritating. It's definitely not something I can imagine doing for pleasure.

 

So, maybe Overseer leveling another character on another account might make sense. Then again, if I was really interested, I could have been doing it the whole year already, couldn't I? It would only have taken another fifteen minutes a day. I'd have been pretty much finished by now. It's not like it didn't cross my mind.

And anyway, it doesn't address the core issue of what to do about the Overseer quests on the primary account. The one I do (sort of, sometimes) play.

I thought maybe it was time to take a closer look what else you can get from Overseer quest rewards other than experience. The options are

• Character experience - self-explanatory
  
• Mercenary AA experience - self-explanatory
  
• Tetradachms - a currency useable at a specific Overseer vendor
  
• Collection Item Fragments - combine four to get a Collection Item Dispenser
  
• Ornament Dispensers - choose from a large variety of cosmetic "ornaments"
• Tradeskill Items - specific items from specific expansions
  

The currency sounded interesting. I checked the vendor to see what I could get. There were some definite possibilities, a range of stat-enhancing augments and plenty of cosmetic adornments, all of which appeared to be non-Prestige. Generally both of those categories require a paying account to equip so I could certainly get some value there.

I've only recently begun to investigate collections in EverQuest. They work much the same as in EverQuest II, where they've been a staple since launch. Completing them gives some excellent, practical rewards and some of the individual collection items sell for big money in the Bazaar. 

The problem is randomness. As is well-documented, I like randomness and I'm not at all averse to spinning the wheel and seeing what I get but the fact is I've barely begun collecting in EQ. Almost anything I get is going to fall into an open slot in a collection I'll most likely never finish. If I was going to start on the system in earnest I'd be far better off running Heroic Adventures and visiting older zones to work on specific collections.

As for Ornament dispensers, it's true I could really do with a new look. With a relatively limited choice in both armor and weapons due to not being able to equip Prestige items, access to adornments a non-paying player can use is quite an attractive option.

I was mulling over all of these until I looked at the tradeskill items you can get for doing Overseer  harvesting, crafting and research quests. For most of the last year my primary source of income in EverQuest has been twofold - selling cash drops like gems to NPC vendors and selling tradeskill materials to players. 

When I was selling my mats via barter the two income streams ran about neck and neck
but when I took the trouble to set up a bazaar vendor on a second account and leave him in offline sales mode 24/7 my Bazaar earnings quickly dwarfed anything I could make by clearing old content for drops. The only problem was keeping my trader supplied with stock and it looks like this could be the solution.

I looked at the Overseer tradeskill rewards with the Barter and Bazaar windows open at the same time so I could check the going rates for the stuff I'd be getting. I knew exactly what that would be because there's no random factor. Each quest gives you listed quantities of listed items for each expansion. The higher quality and/or longer the quest the more items you get.

Checking the current offers and wants there were several possibilities but in the end it looked like I'd get the most bang for my buck out of either 2018's The Burning Lands or, surprisingly, 2012's Rain of Fear. The former gives out relatively small amounts of indigenous mephit blood and meat, both of which sell in the Bazaar for five to seven thousand platinum pieces each. The latter gives considerably larger quantities of befouled silk, which turns over at around a thousand per.

Both also hand out lots of other period-specific items, almost all of which sell for a few hundred or so a time. Doing all the appropriate available quests looks as though it could net upwards of a hundred thousand plat a day. Always assuming people are buying, that is, but I've found it to be widely true that anything someone is asking for on barter will sell fast at a much higher price on a Bazaar trader. And most of this stuff is very much in demand on barter.

After the first day's questing I logged in both accounts and handed the mats from one to the other. Since I'm not currently adventuring with the magician I guess I could cut out the middlegnome and just have her do her own trading but somehow it feels tidier to use a dedicated trader and aggregate the income from across the various accounts.

And yes, of course, as I priced up the loot and calculated just how much money I might be making it did occur to me that I have access to half a dozen accounts with level 85 characters, thanks to all those promotions in the past. What's to stop me logging them all in to do Overseer quests and thereby massively multiplying my income?

Nothing, apparently. Out of curiosity I logged in three more accounts, ran through the Overseer tutorial, which takes less than a minute, and set them all to doing crafting, harvesting and research quests. They were all able to do it although one account was only allowed to take three quests whereas the others could all take five. I suspect it may have something to do with when the accounts were originally made or possibly whether I ever paid the nominal five-dollar fee to go Silver back when that was a thing you could do.

Whatever the reason it doesn't much matter because I don't propose to make a habit of logging five or six accounts in twice a day to farm Overseer quests for mats. Or not for long, anyway. Maybe just until I've earned enough to buy the Magician all the spells she's missing from the last ten levels. They get expensive when you pass level one hundred or so.

And I guess, if I'm logged on anyway and there aren't enough of the right kind of quests to fill the daily allowance, which sometimes there aren't, I might fill out the empty slots with the ones that give experience. I mean, since I'm there anyway...

Yeah, well, we'll see. For now, though, let the money roll in!

Big Blue Diamonds : EverQuest

There's no question that EverQuest is currently my main MMORPG. How weird is that?

I seem to have hit a sweet spot. The last time this happened was probably when I discovered Jewel of Atiki, a strangely-named but delightful zone from the 2007's The Buried Sea. That was four years ago, when I was doing my Lesson and my Hot Zone daily for xp, then keeping myself busy farming plat to pay for armor upgrades in the Bazaar.

That seems to be what works for me because I'm doing it again and loving it. Just as it did back in my days in the Jewel, it helps enormously that I'm hunting in the light, sunny, open zones of 2011's Veil of Alaris. It seems like a delightful expansion, not least when compared to the oppressive, claustrophobic gloom of the inexplicably-preferred House of Thule, through which all re-starters and Heroic characters are funnelled. So glad to be out of that miserable hole at last.

As I posted a few days ago, the mage dinged 106 and I re-subbed her account. As I also explained, I was waiting for that specific level because that's when you can equip Conflagrant armor. In my particular case, Arch Convoker's Conflagrant, the variant intended specifically for the Magician class.

I was dreading hunting sharks when Franklin Teek gave me the task but it turns out there are loads of them right next to the docks, including this huge named.

It's not cheap but it is affordable. By watching the prices in the Bazaar carefully I've managed to upgrade ten slots. That leaves eleven to go, not counting ammo and power source.

I haven't been keeping a count of the exact cost but I must have spent somewhere around a quarter of a million platinum so far. I raided my Beastlord's piggy bank for 50k and bought a bag of platinum worth 13k with some loyalty tokens but mostly I've been farming grey mobs in much older zones.

Money flows in quite comfortably from the xp-level content I'm doing but when it comes to cash drops, EQ has a quirk I think is probably unusual in the genre. I can't speak for current content, which I haven't seen, but in pretty much every expansion from... well, thinking about it, from the original, base game, the standard moneymakers remain the same: gems.

Diamonds sell to a vendor for 190 platinum. Blue diamonds sell for 238pp. Various other gems sell for somewhere around the same amount. The main change between expansions seems to be not so much what gems drop as how often, although even that isn't consistent.

Hunting underwater in this zone is amazingly pleasant, not least because of the spectacular way the water amplifies every spell effect.

When I'm out doing my daily double xp Lesson in the level 95 Hot Zone, Sarith, City of Tides, the sharks Franklin Teek insists on sending me to kill drop diamonds and blue diamonds. So did the boogymen and samhain in Fear Itself. So did the reavers in Meldrath's Majestic Mansion.

Gems are great but high-value stackable mob drops can bring in as much or more. Clockworks in all of the Meldrath-related zones from Secrets of Faydwer (also 2007 - two expansions a year back then) explode into showers of cogs and springs when you smash them and those parts sell to vendors for a lot.

I guess those count as body parts if you're a clockwork, which makes sense because mob body parts have been a vendor staple since the game started. In other MMORPGs it's often barely worth giving bag space to fur and fangs but in EQ those crazy NPCs pay top dollar for the most repulsive and objectively worthless organs. I've always wondered what they do with them, although since no NPC vendor ever leaves his spot it's a bit of a moot point what they could do.

The final consideration when deciding where to farm is what players are currently buying on Barter. Incredibly conveniently, these days you can open the Barter window wherever you are in the game and sell directly out of your bags. No more running around the mazelike corridors looking for that one guy who buys writing ink.

The streets of the city are good, safe hunting. I'd do the quests but for that I need to learn the language. All in good time.

It's nearly all tradeskill materials they want, of course, but not necessarily the obvious ones. Many older mats retain decent value but many more are utterly worthless. Also, when selling things that are new to you, you have to be careful to check what the NPCs are paying before you put your silks and ores in the hand of a reaching player. Some buyers are less than scrupulous about offering a fraction of the coin you could get from cashing out at the nearest vendor.

Gems notwithstanding, it's fair to say the more recent the expansion, the more valuable the drops. If you're focused on making the most money per minute, though, it's makes sense to go somewhere you can cut the mobs down like corn. The individual drops may be worth a little less - although unless you go back almost to the beginning of the game it will only be a little - but being able to pull and clear whole rooms in seconds more than makes up the difference.

I've been experimenting, trying to find the most profitable, fastest, least annoying, most enjoyable farm. All of those. Asking a lot, I know.

I've tried half a dozen zones in Planes of Power. A lot of older guides to making money suggest the Plane of Fire and it is indeed very good for gems, plus there are trade mats there still that sell for hundreds of plat a time. Unfortunately, it's a hideous, ugly, depressing zone. I don't really want to spend more than half an hour there.

The aptly-named Beast's Domain is the next zone along. A lovely, blue-green forest with loads of kiting space.

Few of the PoP zones have aged well. My favorite to farm is Ruins of Lxanvom, better known as the Crypt of Decay. It's also stunningly ugly but as an underground dungeon with corridors and tunnels that seems more acceptable. Also it's relatively small and very simple to navigate.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's fairly popular for exactly the reasons I go there, so its not unusual to zone in to find everything already dead. Luckily the respawn rate is fairly fast and once people have cleared it they tend not to hang around for a second run. I know I don't.

All of the aforementioned Meldrath zones are good but I've done a lot of those over the years and I could do without the clanking. A nice alternative I've been trying is Bloodmoon Keep, a dungeon from the same expansion, refreshingly clockwork-free. All wereorcs, spiders and undead, that one.

I tend to farm until I run out of bag space or until I get tired, both of which clock in at around about an hour. My average for a run is somewhere close to 10,000 platinum but I'm fairly sure I can improve on that.

I probably need to, if only because I've bought up all the cheaper Conflagrant pieces now. The rest are going to run 40-50k a pop, which means I need to make about twice what I've already spent. I was very fortunate to get the chest and legs for about half the going rate, though, so who knows what bargains may turn up if I keep my eyes open?

From long experience I do know that I'll just about have had enough of farming after a couple of weeks. It's one of those activities that starts out as really good fun and ends up being a chore. For now, though, I'm still getting that thrill every time I see my balance go back up after a spending spree.

With a bit of luck I should be able to fill out all the remaining slots by the time my month's sub runs out. After that I imagine I'll be ready for a break, anyway.