I Wasn't In That Much Of A Hurry Anyway - Time-Gating In EQII's Rage of Cthurath Tradeskill Timeline

Rage of Cthurath is shaping up very nicely. Then again, almost all EverQuest II expansions do. I think I usually come here in December, singing their praises in the first few days and weeks, before wandering off to play with some shiny new toy in the New Year.

The whole way I play MMORPGs has completely changed over the last five years or so, though. Before, even including most of my time in Guild Wars 2 (Which was hardly overburdened with the expansions while I was there, let's be honest.), a new expansion for my current game generally meant I'd be doing little or nothing else until I'd at least finished the storyline and quite possibly for several months after.

Now, I don't even seem to be able to stick at it until the end of the main story quest. I do finish in the end but sometimes it takes two or three goes, separated by weeks or even months, usually when I'm off playing other games. Last year, if I'm remembering correctly, it was Spring by the time I wrapped things up on the first character. 

Or maybe I'm imagining that. It's a bit fuzzy when you take multiple characters through the same content. Perhaps I did finish the Signature Timeline on my Berserker before I moved on to something else. I'm pretty sure I would at least have finished the Tradeskill line, if only because those always take a fraction of the time the Adventure ones need. 

[Hi! I'm the Inventory Full Fact Checker. I'd just like to jump in here and say that, actually, that's not quite correct. More to the point, it's totally wrong. As this post confirms, the Berserker (Whose name is Conkers so why not call him that?) didn't get around to completing the Tradeskill Signature Questline for last year's expansion, Scars of Destruction, until nearly the end of January. January 24th to be precise. And let's face it, precision is what I'm here for...)

Okay. Fine! Thank you for your service. Now bugger off. 

But that post is very helpful in making the point I was about to make, namely that this year, in keeping with the loophole-closing I was talking about only on Friday, someone at Darkpaw obviously cottoned on to the way people like to race through the crafting timeline just so they can get flying in all the new zones, before going back and doing the Adventure timeline on the same character. Being able to fly for that makes it so much faster and easier. It totally makes sense to do it that way round.

Only two problems with that plan this year. For one, I forgot to do it that way around. I was so eager to see how my necromancer would handle promotion to Expansion Lead, I never even gave a thought to the Tradeskill quests. I just slammed her into the first zone and started killing stuff to see how it went. 

And since it went really well, I kept on doing it. Right up until she dinged Level 131 yesterday, at which point I thought to myself, you know what? It would be really handy if my Sage, Barnabus, was high enough level to make Mordita's new spells for her as she was ready for them.

With that in mind, I swapped over yesterday and had him start on the Tradeskill line. It was exactly as expected. Some chatting, some sneaking, a lot of gathering and loads of crafting. All very entertaining and enjoyable. I was having a great time.

XP was rattling in, too. I thought about using an xp potion to speed things up even more but it hardly seemed worth it. It looked as though it might take about as long to do the whole tradeskill line as it had taken to do just the first zone as an Adventurer. I hadn't made my mind up whether to keep swapping between the two or to blitz through the crafting quests and get that finished first, when this happened: Problem #2.

That's the final part of Quest Four (Of Eight.) Halfway through the full questline. On paper, anyway. 

It took me about ninety minutes to get there. Maybe a couple of hours. I wasn't timing it. At that rate I'd have had it finished this evening. 

I will not have it finished this evening. I might not have it finished this week.

The final part of the fourth quest is very heavily time-gated. You have to "prove your worth" to the goat-folk of Yon Gorroth before you can get any further and boy, are they hard to impress. In the old days, you'd probably just have had to grind out some crafted item they wanted until your fingers bled, taking the same repeatable quests over and over again. Not any more.

Well, yes, still that, sort of... You still have to make them stuff they're too lazy/snotty to make for themselves, just so they can do you the favor of treating you like a hired hand rather than a potential criminal but now they're being a lot more controlling about it. And exploitative, too.

First, they want to charge you a fortune just for giving you the opportunity to work for them. Five hundred platinum pieces and a rare before they'll even consider giving you the work. Then they tell you it's going to take a full week, real time, before they're going to hand you the merit badge that lets everyone else know you're fit to be trusted with even more menial labor.

At this point you could just sit the week out, if you had the patience. The timer will tick down with no help from you. Feel free to log out and go play someone - or something - else for  few days. 

Is it just me or is that a bit of a risky mechanic for a genre that generally likes to keep people logging in every day? 

There is something you can do about it, assuming you'd quite like to play your character before this time next week. You can take a repeatable quest from the same guy and do that for an eight-hour reduction in waiting time. 

It's not obvious. If I hadn't had the walkthorugh on the wiki open, I would never have known. You have to Hail the goat to get him tell you there even is a repeatable quest. Who hails NPCs these days? Is it 2005 all over again? It's like they don't want you to know. 

Once you find out it's there, though, the quest only takes a few minutes. That's not so bad, is it? You could probably get the whole thing done in a couple of hours and be on your way to the next level and the end of the questline in no time. 

Yeah... nope. You can only take the repeatable quest once every three hours.  

Even if you were insane enough to stay up all day and all night, grabbing each opportunity as it came, it would take you a couple of days. Any normal person is only going to manage three or four of those time-cutting quests a day, if that. Maybe you'd get it finished in three or four days, assuming you played every day or at least remembered to log in every time the damn quest was up. 

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread complaining about it on the forums, hyperbolically entitled  The Tradeskill Timeline Sucks In This Expansion Like Never Before. Having played through every one of those Timelines I would  categorically deny that. There have been plenty of worse ones. 

Then again, I am a Crafter and an Adventurer. This doesn't critically affect my enjoyment. My immediate response was to make my mind up to carry on with the Adventure timeline and just do the repeatables as and when I think of it. I don't really care if it takes all week.

I might be a little more irritated if I only played a Crafter but I can guarantee that almost every player who does also has a whole stable of them, so it's not like they haven't got something else to do while they wait. Plus there's all that gathering to do if you want to have enough Rares to make anything worthwhile.

I really don't see what the rush is, anyway. The expansion is with us for a year. Does everyone really want to be done with it by Christmas? There are people in the thread speculating that someone might have "taken time off from work just do the TS signature quest" and now they're screwed, to which I'd say if they did then the problem probably lies more with that person's life choices than any flaws in quest design.

The upshot for me is that I'll get back to adventuring for now and shelve the plan to make spell upgrades as I go. So far there's no sign Mordita needs them and anyway. The way spell upgrades work in EQII now means even the Expert versions of the new tier that Barnabus could make for her probably won't be better than the researched versions she has of older ones. It's a very unintuitive process in some ways. Experts used to be the gold standard for casual soloing but now you mainly need them as a stage in a much longer upgrade path.

As for progress in the Adventure questline, Mordita can now fly in the opening zone and she's just arrived at the first solo instance in the second. I need a clear couple of hours when I can count on not being interrupted for that one, which isn't guaranteed to happen... ever.

If it's time gating your worried about, you should try living with a dog... 

(Oh, and in case you're wondering what the weird pictures of a fiery, disembodied hand are all about, that's the device you craft that allows high level crafters who don't have an equivalently elevated Adventure level to wander about the map in complete safety. It's slow but it gets the job done. Eventually. 

It's also a great way to take close-ups of mobs, something I hadn't realized until today. I may make more use of it for that.)

Levels And Legacies

Redbeard has a post up today about leveling in World of Warcraft Retail and how fast it is these days, so fast he wonders whether there's really any point in having it at all. I have some thoughts on that but I'll leave them over there, in the comment thread. I thought about writing a whole post but I don't play WoW regularly and I don't know enough about it. I've never even reached the level cap there so anything I say is going to be suspect.

When it comes to EverQuest II, though, I have plenty of experience, albeit mostly from the perspective of a solo player these days, so I feel quite safe giving my thoughts. And what that experience tells me is that getting your levels is the absolute least of it. Even if you have no intention of engaging in end-game content, hitting max level is just the beginning.

Of course, the significance of the number next to your character's name in an MMORPG has always been mutable. Even back at the dawn of the genre, levels were only ever a means to an end.

Back in those olden-if-not-so-golden times, when leveling in MMORPGs was such a chore people sometimes bought their characters on EBay or paid someone else to level up for them, it was widely believed it took sixty levels or whatever the cap was to just to learn how to play your class. 

If you hadn't put in the hours, no-one wanted you in a group. Even if you did have the player-skills, your character most likely didn't. Or they didn't have the equipment. They probably didn't have the flags or the languages or the faction needed because all of that takes time - a lot more time than it takes to get the levels.

In many MMORPGs and especially in EQII, not as much has changed as you'd think. It's true that, over the twenty years the game has been around, almost every aspect of the game has been streamlined, pared down and made more user-friendly but the process only goes so far.

Streamlining something may make it faster but the irony of comparatives is that making something faster still doesn't make it fast. It isn't until you settle down to compare the accrued advantages of a character that's been played for thousands of hours with one that's been played for only a few hundred that you begin to appreciate the vast gulf that lies between them, even if their level counts make an exact match.

And it isn't until you go to do something about equaling them up that you realize just what a huge task it's likely to be. I'll just give one example.

What I've mostly being doing these past few weeks in EQII has been getting my Necromancer's harvesting speed down to 1.5 seconds. I wanted to do it because harvesting is virtually impossible to avoid in the game, even if you never craft or go out looking for crafting mats. Countless quests require it so it's not a skill easily or wisely ignored.

You might just about get away with leaving it alone as a pure Adventurer but I want my Necromancer (Her name's Mordita.) to be an all-rounder. I want her to adventure, craft and harvest. My Berserker (Conkers) does, so if she's going to replace him, she needs to as well. And crafters have to harvest a lot.

If she's going to do at-cap tradeskill content, she'll need to max all the harvesting skills (Mining, Trapping, Foresting, Fishing and Gathering itself.) The cap is currently 700 (Probably. Hard information is so hard to come by for the game these days. It's a worrying sign of the end times, I think.) 

I could raise these skills just by going out and hitting nodes but I've been working my way through the lengthy gathering questline instead. Most of it still involves going out and hitting nodes but it comes with some useful rewards so why not?  

It's taken me quite a few hours and most of Mordita's skills are still less than half-way to the cap so there's plenty more to go, which was why after I got to the end of the second quest chain, I decided I needed to do something about her harvesting speed. 

The base speed to complete one harvesting action is five seconds. Each node has a potential three pulls although not all pulls are successful. With a skill well below the recommended level for the type of node, which is where she's been and will be for a good while yet, you can easily end up standing next to the same rock, picking away at it for a dozen turns or more.

With the help of crafted items you can bring that down some but it still felt glacially slow compared to what I'd been used to with Conkers for as long as I can remember. As with everything in EQII, the exact mechanics and details are obscure but in general, base gathering speed bottoms out at one and a half seconds, which is then affected by your Casting speed. Conkers casting speed is 103% so his effective gathering speed is about 0.75 seconds, which feels pretty zippy.

To get there, he needed the Gathering Goblin AA, which requires you to be at least a Level 90 crafter and some other AAs but that just for the actual goblin, who follows you around harvesting. To turn him into a buff that reduces your base harvesting time to 1.5 you have to do a quest.

It's been a few years since I last did it but I vaguely remembered it involved speaking to another goblin in Obulus Frontier, a zone that arrived with the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. Imagining it would take a few minutes, maybe half an hour at most, I trotted over to the zone to pick up the quest and of course the goblin wouldn't talk to me.

That sent me back to the Wiki to see what the problem was and it turned out to be quite a big one. I'll try to sum it up as succinctly as I can.

To get Growf the goblin to give you the first in the series of quests that concludes with you setting the gathering goblin free and receiving the harvesting speed buff, you need to have finished the whole of the Kunark Ascending crafting signature questline. Growf's bit is just a kind of coda at the end but it's dependent on the full thing.

I wasn't best pleased but it didn't sound too bad. Three or four hours, maybe, assuming I didn't read any of the quest dialog, all of which I'd seen more than once already. So I set about it, only to find you can't just start in on the KA questline out of nowhere. There's a pre-req: the entire tradeskill signature questline from the previous expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra.

This was starting to look like a much bigger project than I'd anticipated. Two complete expansion signature questlines. That was going to take a while, even if they were only crafting ones, which go a lot faster than their adventure counterparts. We're talking several full sessions for sure.

Got to be done, though. Off I went to get started on the ToA sequence, only to find I couldn't get that one either. For most expansions you get a letter inviting you to speak to someone and off you go but it seems that around this time the plan was to make sure everyone saw every part of the content  so before you can get the Thalumbra questline, you have to complete yet another pre-req, The Captain's Lament from the 2013 expansion, Tears of Veeshan. I think it was part of the pre-expansion build-up but it was a long time ago...

To release my Gathering Goblin from indentured servitude and receive, in recompense for my magnanimity, a reduction in my base harvesting speed to 1.5 seconds, I was going to have to complete the full tradeskill signatures from two expansions, plus the warm-up from the one before. 

All told, that comes to more than fifty separate quests. Fifty quests, just to upgrade one small aspect of Mordita's capabilities to bring them in line with Conkers'. And it's not even anything crucial to gameplay, just a minor quality of life improvement.

I wasn't counting but I played most evenings the last couple of weeks, generally for an hour or two each session. Even with the huge boost of instant map travel via All Access Membership, the huge advantage of being a max-level Adventurer, thereby making every mob in every required zone non-aggro, a full walk-through on hand, complete with locs to cut and paste into the game and the lack of any inclination on my part to read for the third time even a single line of quest dialog, it still took me that long to get it all done. 

And I was lucky Mordita already knew how to speak Gobblish, the Goblin language, because Growf doesn't speak anything else. If she hadn't, I'd have had to go do the quest for that as well.

Luckily for me, I enjoyed the whole thing. It had just the right level of simplicity for me not to feel the grind while I had to pay just enough attention to the instructions to make it seem like I was doing something. My sweet spot, really.

Even so, it's a hell of a long time to spend on such a small thing, while preparing one character to take over from another. If it was the only time I needed to do something like it, that would be one thing but it's just an example of a seemingly endless number of minor adjustments and calibrations that have to be made before Mordita is going to feel expansion-ready. 

Getting the levels, which used to be the barrier, is now literally the least of it. You can buy those, quite legitimately. I just had to click a button. But if anyone thinks a Max Level Boost is going to do all the work for them - or even most of it - they can think again. At least in EQII, they can. I don't know about other games. I bet it's much the same everywhere, though.

And let's not forget that all of this was mainly done as a way of speeding up another set of quests. Now that Mordita has the fast harvesting speed, it's back to the harvesting questline itself so she can use it, and that's going to take quite a few more hours to finish. 

After that, I'm going to have to take a close look at her stats and see what else she's missing. She could do with learning a whole bunch of languages, for a start.

Six months to the next expansion. I hope it's going to be enough...

What A Tradeskill Booster In EverQuest II Gets You. And What It Doesn't.

Last time I posted about what I was up to in EverQuest II, I mentioned I was thinking of making a proper effort to prepare my Necromancer to be the character who takes the lead in new expansions from now on. Contrary to expectations, not least my own, I have actually done something to make that happen: I bought a tradeskill booster from the cash shop.

It's been an instructive experience so I thought I might share a few notes. I don't know if anyone reading this will find it useful - I know there used to be a handful of occasional EQII players amongst my readership but I'm not sure any of them still indulge - but maybe Google will send some seeker after truth my way, one day.

This One Goes To 120

The first thing to mention is that you can't, at time of writing, buy a booster that will take you to the crafting cap. I'm not sure why. You can get one for Adventure level so there wouldn't appear to be an existential objection and I'm damn sure there's no technical reason preventing it, so who knows what the reason is. If there even is one.

The boost takes you to 120, ten levels below the cap. It's then up to you to do the necessary quests or, if you prefer, grind writs until your fingers bleed, to finish the job. Fortunately, tradeskill levels come very quickly via questing these days. Even so, you should probably set aside a few hours to bring your new crafter up to speed.

It's Going To Cost You

Tradeskill boosters are not cheap. They cost 3500DBC which, if you had to buy it, would cost you $35. As an All Access member I get a 10% discount, making it $31.50 and I suppose you could knock another $5 off of that for the monthly 500DBC stipend. 

Even then, at the cheapest it would run you $26.50, which to my way of thinking is one hell of a lot of money to pay for a shortcut in a video game. On the other hand, at a conservative estimate, leveling from zero to one-twenty in a tradeskill would probably take twenty or thirty hours so set that against whatever you think of as your hourly rate and see how it stacks up. Not going to be twenty-six dollars, is it?

For me, such calculations weren't necessary because, as I've frequently complained, thanks to having been subbed forever and having taken advantage of a number of the extremely ill-advised Triple Value Sales both Sony and Daybreak used to run, until they realized they were giving away the farm, as of yesterday I had a sliver short of 35k DBC on my main account alone. I was glad to find something worth splurging on.

Don't Press That Button!

The process involved in activating the boost is very simple. Too simple in some ways and yet not simple enough in others. 

Paying the money puts a token in your inventory, which you then have to Examine to activate. I was expecting a context menu with a "Use" option, which is how other, similar items work in the game, but of course there's no real consistency in these sorts of things in EQII. What with it being two decades old and any and all systems having passed through countless developers' hands over the last twenty years, it's anyone's guess how anything's going to work, most of the time.

Once I'd figured it out, a menu appeared, asking me which specific tradeskill I wanted to raise to 120. My Necromancer had never done any crafting at all so I had a free choice because she was a mere Level 2 Artisan, the generic non-class with which you start before you specialise twice more, at Levels 10 and 20. 

If you use the boost on a character who's already made that decision, the boost will jump that class to 120. It doesn't offer you a change of career. If, however, you haven't yet settled on a crafting profession, now is the time. Be sure you know what you want!

This is is where I feel the simplicity goes too far. I wasn't sure whether I wanted Mordita to be a Tailor or a Provisioner. I was leaning towards the latter as I clicked on Tailor, thinking it would merely highlight the option while I thought about it. That was not what happened.

The moment I clicked, a stream of pop-ups appeared, telling me I'd earned a whole bunch of Achievements as my Necromancer morphed instantly into a high-level Tailor. I would have thought a confirmation box with a cautionary "Are you sure you want to use this token to become a Tailor?" would have been best practice at this point but there you go.

Boosts With Benefits

Perhaps the best thing about the booster - and a very good reason why someone might even choose to buy it for a character already at the crafting cap - is that it also boosts several other important skills. I didn't know this so it was a lovely surprise.

Once again, it's not entirely consistent. The booster raises the three Secondary tradeskills, the ones that don't count as classes and which all characters can, if they choose, level independently. Those three skills are Experimentation, Adorning and Tinkering, at least two of which are extremely handy to have, even if you have no interest in crafting. I can't comment on the third, Experimentation, which is a skill I've never used or really understood, but no doubt it's great if you know what to do with it.

As well as those three, it also raises Transmuting, currently classified as one of the Harvesting skills, of which more later. Transmuting is particularly important in that it allows you to convert a large proportion of surplus or unwanted gear into the raw materials used to make Adornments. This means you suddenly have a way of getting rid of all that Attuned and No Drop stuff cluttering up your bags without having to destroy it or sell it to vendors for a pittance. 

You can then either sell the mats on the broker or use them to make Adornments, which you might as well because, thanks to the booster, you now have the necessary skill. You can use them yourself, pass them to your alts or sell them. At the very least it's a great way of clearing some bag space.

Tinkering, used to be notoriously awkward to level but a long time ago someone, most likely Domino, added a daily quest that helps you to raise your skill by a few points a day. There are also dailies for Transmuting and Adorning and the same NPC gives them all, so you can, if you have the patience and the personality for it, level all three simultaneously. 

Leveling them from zero to cap that way would, I estimate, take you about three months, assuming you never missed a day and the RNG gods were kind to you. Once again, you may or may not consider that a valid use of your valuable time.

I have never gone all the way with those dailies but I do routinely use them to fill in gaps and bring my Berserker/Weaponsmith back to the cap in Adorning and Transmuting as each expansion arrives. Even then, I haven't managed to get Tinkering more than half-way on anyone so my Necromancer is now by far my highest-level Tinkerer.

She is not, however, a max-level Tinkerer because for some incomprehensible reason the booster sets Transmuting and Experimentation to their current level caps but leaves the other two skills fifty points short. Consequently, I'm now doing the Tinkering and Adorning dailies again to catch up. Still, it's one heck of a bonus that I wasn't expecting. 

Shortcuts Only Take You So Far

You may be a high-level crafter now but don't expect to be able to craft anything! Not until you go shopping, anyway. The booster doesn't give you any of the 120 levels of recipes you're missing. Not even the basic ones you can buy from the vendors in the crafting hall. 

That did surprise me. I would have thought it should at least give you the regular books, which are freely available and only cost a few silver. It would save a lot of clicking. 

As for the Advanced books and the many, many special recipes, I guess it's back to questing or buying from the broker. Or, in my case, digging through literally scores of bags and boxes in bank vaults and personal inventories for the numerous recipe books I've stashed away over the years.

More problematic is the issue of Harvesting. The tradeskill boost does absolutely nothing for your five harvesting skills apart from Transmuting: Trapping, Mining, Gathering, Fishing and Foresting. 

Not only does this mean you'll have a really hard time getting your own mats, especially in high-level zones, but it also road-blocks you in certain crafting quests, some of which quite reasonably assume that anyone whose doing them will have harvesting skills equivalent to their tradeskill level. I've already had to drop one questline because of that.

In the old days I'd have been completely screwed because harvesting was directly tied to level. These days, you can at least attempt to harvest anything at any skill level although your success rate is likely to be pretty poor at the top end. You do still require an appropriately high level in the relevant harvesting skill if you want to get any rare mats, though, and I personally cannot cope with seeing the message telling me I've harvested a rare and then not actually getting one!

What this means in practice is that I'm probably going to have to do the entire harvesting timeline and put up with the obnoxious Qho again for weeks on end! I've done this timeline at least three times before and it's honestly not that bad. Domino wrote most of the quests and they're amusing and fun... the first time.

The many rewards they give are excellent, which is a great incentive. Indeed I'd say they're pretty much essential for anyone who wants to be an all-rounder. One of the key reasons I've always backed off from dropping my Berserker as lead character in expansions is that his maxed gathering and crafting skills make any number of Adventure quests significantly easier, or at least faster. If Mordita is going to take over from him, she'll need to do the work.

And that's what she's going to do. Or I am. The boost is just the beginning. I've got at least six months to manage the rest. It should give me plenty of time...

Craft Your Way To The Skies In Ballads Of Zimara

As an addendum to yesterday's post, I thought I ought to add a little more detail to my account of the Crafting Signature Questline in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Ballads of Zimara, now I've finished it. Yep, already.

I didn't put a stopwatch on it but I'd be surprised if the whole thing took ninety minutes and that would include a lot of faffing about on my part. I'm going to do it with my Berserker/Weaponsmith next and I'm guessing if I don't read the quest dialog for a second time I'll be done in less than an hour.

I understand that for some people reading that's going to make it sound as though Darkpaw have really skimped on the crafting content this expansion. You can do the entire questline in a couple of hours, tops? When it probably takes an adventure five times that? At least. Scandal!

That's an Adventurer talking, that is. Most crafters will probably be happy to have the whole thing over with as soon as possible. 

By and large, it's always been my impression that what most Crafters want to do is craft. In the olden days, that's all you could do if you wanted to level up a craft skill. You stood at the crafting station and made stuff. 

You got big experience for making new things for the first time and a lot less for making the same things again, so you made everything in your Recipe books once and then picked the easiest or cheapest thing and made it over and over until you dinged and got a new Recipe Book so you could start all over again. Obviously, you also made stuff to sell on the broker and stuff for your guildmates and friends but basically you just ground out crap no-one wanted and sold it back to the vendor at something close to cost, hoping to break even if you were lucky.

Over time, all of that changed. Crafters got Tradeskill Writs - repeatable orders from NPCs that gave better XP than making random stuff. They got quests and then whole questlines. There were NPC factions to work on and gear to upgrade. Crafters even got "raids".

During the reign of Domino, Queen of the Crafting Devs, Tradeskilling became a fully-fledged, genuinely complete, wholly discrete playstyle. She added enough questlines to cover the entire level range so you could make a character and go out into the world and adventure as a crafter. You could level all the way to the cap without ever having to kill anything, do writs or make stuff to sell or give to other players.

In retrospect it was all a bit strange but Domino was so good at what she did I think everyone just bought into her vision. And then she left. 

After that, various developers did their best to keep to the plan. Every expansion came with a new, detailed, lengthy Tradeskill Signature Questline. Or it did if the resources permitted it. At least once the quests weren't ready by launch and we didn't get the Signature line until well into the New Year. 

There was clearly an effort being made to keep Crafting in line with Adventuring but as a Crafter and an Adventurer I'd have to say it was always significantly easier to level to the new cap as a the former. On characters who did both, I got into the habit of doing the Crafting timeline first. 

There were some definite advantages in doing it that way, the biggest of which being flight. It's been a very long time since flying mounts have been able to take to the skies on Day One of a new expansion. How long it's taken has varied a little but the rule of thumb is for the final Sig Line quest in a zone to grant the ability to fly in that zone.

It can feel like a bit of a pyrrhic victory sometimes. You can fly in a zone you're about to leave. You'll be grounded again as soon as you take the next quest.

If you do the craft line first, though, you'll be able to fly in all the zones as soon as you begin adventuring. The Tradeskill Sig Line follows the same pattern, letting you fly as soon as you complete each zonal set of quests. Since that typically takes a fraction of the time it would take to complete the same zone as an Adventurer... well, as they say, you do the math.

For some reason, in last year's expansion, Renewal of Ro, this policy was reversed. Crafters didn't get to get to fly at the end of each zone. They didn't even get to fly at the end of the whole Sig line. They had to do all of that and then also complete fifteen research missions - and the missions were on two-hour timers.

As I remember, the effect of all of that was to make it faster to do the Adventure line to get flight for once. Since I was going to be doing both anyway it didn't make much difference to me but I imagine it must have annoyed the heck out of pure crafters.

This year, the finely-crafted boot is very firmly back on the other foot. And then some. As I mentioned yesterday, while Adventurers have had their XP rates trimmed back to levels not seen for many years, crafters are still getting half a level per turn-in. 

Added to that, the questline itself is much shorter than usual. As Naimi Denmother, who designed it, confirms in a forum post, it comprises just eight quests and as I can confirm, having done them, some of the eighte pretty much involve walking ten feet, making a combine that takes a few seconds, then walking back. 

So why isn't the Tradeskill forum full of threads complaining about crafters being stiffed on content in BoZ?  Because crafters mostly just want to craft is my guess. Even as Domino strived to bring the entire profession into equivalance with Adventuring, there was always a vocal demographic that just wanted to stand at the crafting station and grind out writs. Not everyone likes quests. Or going outdoors.

And of course, for both Adventurers and Crafters, getting to max level is just the start. Adventurers have to run dungeons for gear if they want to be truly endgame; Crafters have to get all of their recipes. In this expansion they do it through Research Missions, which unlock once the Signature questline is complete. Since those are time-gated, that should keep everyone busy for a while.

Having seen how it works and how long it takes - or should that be how short? - my own plans have changed. I'm going to take the Berserker through his Weaponsmith levels before I go back to adventuring with him. Not only will that allow him to fly in all the new zones, the mount he'll get is a huge upgrade on the free one he got only a few days ago. And it has both Adventuring and Tradeskill stats. 

And most importantly, it looks amazing!

After that, I'll most likely take my Warlock/Sage through the craft line so he can make spells for himself, my Necromancer and my Wizard. Neither of them crafts, so they'll have to do the Adventure line, which is going to put them at the back of the line.

Since they'll both have the advantage of flight, the Warlock/Sage and the Bruiser/Alchemist will go through the Adventure line second and third, although not necessarily in that order. There's a 20% bonus to XP for each max level Adventurer and Crafter, calculated separately, so it'll get faster each time. By the time the Necro gets to go, she should have at least a 60% bonus, which I hope will make up for not being able to fly.

The wild card in all of this is my Inquisitor/Carpenter. I'll probably slip her in before the Necro, just because of the crafting and the flight, even though it's always the Necro I really want to play. Or maybe I'll just succumb to the call of Necrotic fun and leave the Inquisitor as a max-level furniture maker for now.

All of which, I think, explains why the expansion not having enough content isn't likely to be a problem for me. It never has been before and I certainly don't think it will be now. I'm very happy to have a quick and easy route to flight for almost everyone. In fact, maybe I ought to think about getting those slacker casters into a crafting training program.

I could always use a Jeweller, for the scout skills. And a Provisioner. Everyone has to eat!

If You Want Something Done...

Tempting though it is to make every day at Inventory Full an AI or a music day - and believe me, I could - it's probably about time I got back to what both Bard and ChatGPT know me for, namely writing about video games. 

One day I'm going to sit back and ask myself how it came to this. It certainly would surprise my adolescent, twenty- and thirty-something selves to find me here, spending two or three hours every day spouting off about computer games but I guess I've been playing, talking and writing about the things for long enough now I'd look a bit precious pretending I'm better suited to doing anything else.

It's all about the games, then. And the game I'm mostly playing right now is EverQuest II. Again. How did that happen? Admittedly, getting into the beta for EQII back in 2004 was one of the more exciting things that had happened to me up to then but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been expecting still to playing the same damn game twenty years later.

Eliot at Massively OP wrote an opinion piece earlier this week about how, as gamers - and particularly as mmorpg gamers - we're all getting older and yet we don't talk about it. I dropped a comment to say I disagreed. Not that we're getting older. I'm not that disassociated from reality... yet. I just don't agree that it's something we don't talk about. 

On the contrary, it seems like we talk about it a lot around here. It's hardly surprising. Most of us have been playing mmorpgs for a decade or two and computer games for longer than that. Age is going to come up in conversation whether we want it to or not, if not about us then about the games we're playing. Which is aging more badly - the games or the players - is another question.

Eithr way, we still keep on playing them, some of us probably more than we should. It's like experience has taught us nothing. I'd like to be able to say I've gained enough wisdom over the years not to see a morning spent organizing storage in a video game as time well spent but I'd have too much trouble keeping a straight face to pull it off convincingly.  

That, of course, is what I spent several hours doing yesterday: moving little icons from one slot to another so I could hoard even more imaginary bric-a-brac I'll never use, in a game I've been playing, on and off, for more than a third of my life. And I enjoyed myself doing it, dammit!

EQII probably has the most storage of any mmoprg ever created but even that brings its own problems. It's just like what happens where I work - as soon as someone tidies up a corner somewhere and creates some space, next day someone else has come along and dumped something in it. Clutter expands to fill the space available, which I'm sure is somebody or other's Law.

Darkpaw haven't been making things any easier lately. After that peculiar debacle earlier this year, where they changed something about how boss drops are handled and everyone threatened to quit so they rolled it back (I wasn't paying attention at the time so I can't give details.) the devs said fine but we have to do something. Probably as a result, a whole lot of items that used to be treadeable now seem to be Heirloom and some stackables now have this weird timer attached to them, meaning the game identifies them as unique, so they don't stack until the timer runs down to zero.

According to today's patch notes, at least some of the problems are unintentional: "Corrected a bug that prevented Di'Zok Minion's Runes from being stackable". Those aren't the ones with the timers, though, so I don't know what's going on.

Anyway, as I said, if there's one thing I'm not short of in EQII it's storage. The only drawback to hoarding stuff there is remembering where I put it. Yesterday I was reduced to taking notes. I may have to go so far as to craft an in-game book where I can record the details of who's looking after what, which is one of the more amazing things you can do in the game.

That Artificing score tells you I haven't
actually been making much lately.

All of this is on Skyfire. On Isle of Refuge, where I'm spending most of my time at the moment, I have no such problems. When you only have one character, it's easy to remember where you put your stuff. If there's a problem with stuff there it's getting some.

Seriously, it's somewhere on the far side of ironic now. Let me give you an example.

When I renamed Lana "Mitsu" and transferred her to IoR, I decided she'd focus on crafting over adventuring. I've been steadily working on both her main tradeskill, Jewellerycraft, ever since and also diligently completing each of the three dailies for Transmuting, Tinkering and Adorning, all of which has turned this once-minor character into one of my most rounded crafters ever.

As a tip for anyone wanting to level a crafter in EQII but who's not in a tearing rush to get it done, just doing those three quests as often as they become available will not just give you decent skills in the three minor disciplines but also get you several levels of your main crafting profession every day, too. 

All three give a hefty chunk of tradeskill xp on hand in, enough to ding a couple of times, always assuming, that is, that you have full tradeskill vitality as often as possible (Don't forget the weekly Veteran refresh.) and keep an xp potion running. Given that all three together take less than five minutes to do and the questgiver provides all of the mats, it's the slacker's way to level crafting. 

Until you hit Level 100, that is. As with adventuring, that's when everything changes. From getting most of a level for every hand-in, you'll suddenly find yourself getting so little xp for all three dailies you'll struggle to see your xp bar move at all. I'm not going to go over the whole thing again but the short of it is that from 100 onwards the only viable way to level either your combat or your crafting class is to do the appropriate Signature questlines from the Planes of Prophecy and later expansions.

Okay, there are other ways but I'm not here to talk about those. They're all slower and more tedious, anyway. You'd be ill-advised to try and avoid doing the Sigs, which will net you multiple levels at each stage. I'm currently waiting for full vitality to return before doing the first, which I'm hoping will jump me from 100 to 110 in a session.

How much?!

While I was focused on crafting, I was planning on ignoring adventuring for the time being. Mitsu drifted from the twenties to the fifties just on exploration and killing mobs while doing Qho Augren's harvesting quests and I was content to leave her there for now. Playing a high level crafter who isn't also a high level adventurer is a new experience for me and I was finding it quite exciting, all the sneaking and hiding and having to pay attention so as to avoid the many, aggressive, deep red-con mobs as I tried to harvest mats in zones supposedly far too dangerous for me to be in at all.

Unfortunately, that kind of laissez-faire attitude just won't wash on Isle of Refuge and I'll tell you why.

If Mitsu is going to be a proper crafter she's going to need personal storage depots for her home. On Skyfire, when I decided to set those up, all I had to do was go to the Broker and buy them. They weren't even all that expensive.

On IoR, the server where you can trade almost anything, that's not an option. For a start, they're not easy to come by at all. On the Broker there are just two pages of Depots on offer. And even if you can find the ones you want, there's the cost. Apart from a couple of not-so-useful ones like ammo and fuel, prices start at seven figures. Five million plat seems to be the going rate for the good ones.

On Skyfire, with its regular ruleset, there are six pages of Depots and prices begin around 20k. Even the biggest, the Personal Harvest Depot (Large), will only run you 500k, a tenth what you'd have to pay on IoR.

Buying what I needed was out of the question but all the depots are made with the Tinkering skill so, since Mitsu's Tinkering is coming along, I thought maybe I could make my own. All the recipes for Depots are in a single Blueprint and you can make them with a Tinkering skil of 445. Mitsu's skill is 378. She could easily raise it in an hour or less of grinding or just do the dailies for another couple of weeks and let it tick up to where it needs to be.

First, though, she'd need the recipes. Maybe she could buy them. 

1Kpp if you collect.

I checked the IoR broker, expecting the Blueprint to be out of my price range. It wasn't but only because it wasn't on sale at all. There were only a couple of pages of Blueprints of any kind. Granted, the few there were didn;t seem all that expensive, which was a surprise, but it didn't mean much since they also weren't any use to me.

On Skyfire, by contrast, there are seventeen pages of Blueprints for sale on the Broker right now. Prices
start at less than one platinum piece. The Personal Depot Blueprint can be had there for 1200 Plat. Even Mitsu could easily afford to pay that much. Pity she's on a different server.

This is the joy of low-pop. If you want something you pretty much have to go get it yourself. Even if you're willing and able to craft it, you have to go get the mats and the recipes. You can't rely on someone else doing the hard work for you.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can lead to adventures you weren't expecting.

I had no idea where the Blueprint for the Personal Depots might come from, so I looked it up. It's a drop, fairly common, from a lot of different mobs. Getting hold of one is a straightforward farming job. The only problem is the mobs that drop it are all around Level 85-90. Before Mitsu can even begin trying for one, she'll need to get another twenty-five or thirty Adventure levels. 

And that's not hard, either. Levelling in EQII is easy enough. But it does mean I'll have to change my plans. If you play on a low-pop server, you end up doing a lot of that. 

There are shortcuts I could take. I could have her use one of my many Level Boosts. I have at least seven of them stashed away, ranging from Level 100 to 120. I'm very tempted to use the 100 on her. It would make farming the blueprint easy and also take a lot of the danger out of running around looking for mats in higher-level zones.

Then again, didn't I just say that was fun? And wouldn't it be more satisfying to get good xp from all those mobs I'll have to kill to get the blueprint to drop?

Such are the choices you have to make if you play on a low-pop server. Personally, I find it all adds a layer of complexity that makes the whole soloing-in-mmorpgs experience richer and more satisfying. It's obviously not for everyone, though.

As with many things we find ourselves doing in mmorpgs, it's fun until it's not. If wisdom comes from experience it shows itself in knowing when to stop. 

I haven't stopped yet.

Let's Tink Again (Like We Did Last Summer)

Not to rehash my own joke but it's Jubilee weekend here in the UK and by complete coincidence (I'm guessing...) it's also the week EverQuest II kicks off its very own Summer Jubilee. There's a pun in there somewhere involving EQII and Elizabeth II, Q(ueen) but I'm not going to be the one to try and dig it out.

Summer Jubilee incorporates three events and the first of them is Tinkerfest (The other two being Oceansfull and Scorched Sky). Relocated from midsummer, it's been polished till it gleams.

Judging by what I've seen so far it's better than ever, impressive when you consider it was already one of the top holidays in EQII's extensive calendar. It's also long been one of my personal favorites. I read the official announcement with interest and enthusiasm. 

Credit for some of that has to go to new Community Manager, Accendo. When he first arrived I wondered if he might be a little brusque, especially after the exceptionally affable Dreamweaver. For all I know, he might be a regular demon in ding-dongs with players, always a risk (Just ask RadarX), but in prose he has a strong, confident style and a sense of humor that amuses me more often than not. I'll take it.

For regular Live servers, there's a lot to dig into, all of it handily detailed in the press release:

• New adventure quest!
  • Blood, Sweat, and Gears offered by Tickni Kerplooie at Gnomeland Security in Steamfont Mountains for players level 120+.
• New tradeskill (tinkering) quest!
  • Gearing the Competition offered by Navier Stokes at Gnomeland Security in Steamfont Mountains.
• New dungeon with solo and heroic versions!
  • Innovation: Tinkerer's Trial [Heroic] and [Solo]
• 11 New Merchant Items sold by Myron in Gnomeland Security, including a new mount!
• New Tradeskill recipe book, "Tinkerfest Blueprints 14.0” sold by Myron in Gnomeland Security in Steamfont Mountains. The recipes require Shiny Tinkerfest Cog obtained as quest rewards or harvested, and other low level harvestables as components.

Special Ruleset servers get whatever subset matches their current timeframe and whatever rewards don't break their local zeitgeist, as per usual. 

I'd like to say all the regular events, quests, collections and achievements are back as well but I'm not absolutely sure if that's true. There's a slight element of ambiguity in "Lots of stuff is returning for this year's event too including achievements, recipe books, collections, quests, and more." "Lots" isn't a synonym for "All" but I imagine I'm reading more into the choice of words than Accendo intended. 

I made straight for Tinkerfest Central - Gnomeland Security in Steamfont - where I hoovered up every quest I could find. Some of them I recognised, some I didn't, but that happens at most festivals, whether there's anything new or not. I can't remember every quest I've ever done in EQII. There must be thousands! 

Most had blue feathers indicating repeatable content, something that's probably going to turn out to be important given the new Jubilee currency, the Copper Jubilation Medal. I had a good browse through the inventory of the Jubilee vendor I found, hanging around the East Freeport Docks later. Anyone taking this event seriously is going to need hundreds of medals to buy everything they want.

The rewards are very tempting, too. Lots of great housing and appearance items as always but also some very nice stat gear, at least for a solo player. The big ticket item is the 340 Resolve bracer trailed in the original announcement but there's also 300 Resolve gear for all armor classes. I imagine there'll be a full set of that by the time all three events have arrived. 

There's also a dog. That got me wondering if there had been dog pets in the game before. I'm sure there must have been. The dog model has been in the game from the start. I imagine they've always been there but I just never noticed, me being more of a cat person. 

Now we have a dog of our own I'm seeing dogs in all kinds of places I never saw them before, like on my lap while I'm trying to play EQII. It wouldn't matter so much if she didn't like to rest her chin on my mouse arm. 

Fortunately, EQII is relatively easy to play one-handed. I managed to grab all those quests and pick up a load of the Shiny Tinkerfest Cogs lying all over the place. The cogs are the Tinkerfest-specific currency, the event having vast amounts of buyables independent of the Jubilee. No doubt the same will apply to the other two festivals so it's just as well the quests reward both kinds. 

As soon as Beryl changed position, allowing me the use of both hands, I mapped to the other center of Gnomish activity, the Dropship Landing Zone in Moors of Ykesha to look for the the portal to the new, non-combat instance of Plane of Innovation. I wanted to do the tradeskill quest given to me by Navier Stokes back at Gnomeland Security. There's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in Tinkerfest, always was, but even without All Access travel perks it's easy enough via the handy temporary portals the gnomes install for the occasion.

I've been around Plane of Innovation many times but sightseeing always feels better when nothing's trying to rip your arms off. I had time to look at the architectural details for once. 

The quest itself was very good, assuming you like EQII quests, which, obviously, I do. I'd pretty much have to, still to be playing after all these years. It follows the classic gather, craft, install sequence, where you spend ages wandering around picking up materials before knocking them into something on a local crafting device, before following a glowing trail around the zone, sliding the doohickeys you've created into the correct slots.  

No-one could claim this kind of content is challenging but it sure is relaxing. As a very, very bad tinkerer, I appreciated the huge Tinkerfest crafting boosts, the absence of negative effects to counter and the easy skill-ups. I didn't notice whether the quest was repeatable but if it is I might grind it out a few times until the recipe goes grey, just for the tinkering points.

There's a narrative thread relating to the possible induction of the first ever Froglok to the Ak`Anon Tinkerer's Guild. I found it oddly intriguing. It started me wondering just which races are capable of tinkering these days. I have a suspicion it's all of them. I know it used to be a purely gnomish skill back in EverQuest but I can't recall whether Ratongas could always tinker in EQII or whether that was a later concession.

Of all the races, you'd think the most obvious candidate after Gnomes would be Dwarves. I don't believe I've ever played a Dwarf in EQII, or not for any meaningful amount of time, at least. Frogloks would come a long way down any list I ever made but then I try not to think about frogloks at all if I can help it.

I'll have to give it some more thought as I work my way through the rest of what Tinkerfest has to offer. Next up is the new adventure quest, Blood, Sweat and Gears, followed by the Solo dungeon, the Tinkerer's Trial.   

I hope that one's not too tough. I always think holiday instances should be lenient but if the drops are competitive with current content it'll probably have to be at least as challenging as a regular Visions of Vetrovia instance, probably more so than the ones in the basic storyline since they're already beginning to fall behind.

I don't have all that long to get everything done, either. Even though the Summer Jubilee runs all summer (Well, duh!) Tinkerfest is only with us for a couple of weeks. The gnomes shut up shop on June 15.

I'd better get on with it, then.

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.

Welcome To The Dark(paw) Side, Denmom!

I'm on a little bit of an EverQuest II break right now so much thanks to Gen. Alexander for leaving a comment drawing my attention to this extremely welcome announcement on the EQII forums. I might very well have missed it otherwise.

To save anyone clicking on the link and to add some substance to what's going to be a very brief news squib of a post, here's the full text of Kander's statement, which opens the thread:

Niami DenMother, for those who don't know her, has long been the unofficial record-keeper and archivist of all things tradeskill in EQII. She's also the lynch pin of the small, dedicated group of volunteers that tests all EQII's crafting content to destruction on the Test and Beta servers. 

Without her tireless efforts many of us wouldn't know our forge from our fishing pole and it's for certain sure there would be thousands more bugs in the recipes than the handful that occasionally slip through. She, along with two or three others, has all but kept the trade ship afloat since the departure of the much-missed Domino and short of Domino coming back there could not possibly be a more welcome piece of tradeskilling news than to hear Denmom will be wielding her wooden spoon from inside the tent from now on.

That the powers that be at Darkpaw have had the good sense to make this appointment speaks volumes to the current state of the company. It can only be a good harbinger for the future of the games.

It's also wonderful news in as much as Niami was very ill indeed a year or two back. That she's willing and able to take on this new responsibility suggests she's made a good recovery for which all EQII players should be very grateful indeed. With her husband Ngreth back at EverQuest as he has been for five years now, this puts crafting in the strong place it should be. 

I'll leave it there, not least because I've already spent several hours writing a post today. No doubt there will be more to say once Denmom gets her furry feet under the crafting table. Until then , welcome to EQII, Niami Denmother. I think you know where everything is!