Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

Despite my exposure to EQ1 not being enough that I really found out how to go about Armour quests I knew of them. In fact Miglok was given his first AQ fairly early on, I had never encountered these things before so the idea of farming animals, adding their elements to a box, then hitting ‘combine’ was a novel one but I never got around to exploring it. Frankly, the drops were scarce and this was in the days before I really bothered to research anything in-game.

Times change so Hinjani is looking for a nice set of plate armour now that he’s reached his twenties, so a quick look on EQ2Wikia (Nowhere near as user-friendly as wowwiki is but it’ll do) sent me straight to what I needed. As an Inquisitor, thus someone with questionable morals (though Hinjani has great morals, he’s just acting the rogue to keep in with the Freeport lot) my quest will take me to Dyric Pire who will give me Custom Fitted Armor - Part 1.

This is my reward, when I work through all six stages of the quest I will be left with Armor of Dark Arbitration, a tier 3 armour set.

So cut forward an evening of questing and I started out from Butcherblock for my first foray into Freeport since I returned to EQ2. Now I’ll be honest, I wasn’t all that excited as memories of just how much I hated the Freeport/Commonlands/Nektulous combination when EQ2 launched are still fresh in my memory. Freeport was always laggy as was Qeynos back then (however at least Qeynos was the ‘good’ city so a pleasant place to be,) Commonlands were barren and dull and Nektulous was quite frankly depressing. However I’m ‘neutral’ and an Inquisitor so this was my only way to get my first full armour set, so I jumped the boat at Butcherblock Dock and headed for Nek forest.

I was frankly surprised on my trip. This partly addresses my one big issue with EQ2 at launch, Norath never felt like a world so much as a linear series of areas connected by loading screens. Qeynos to Antonica to Thundering Steppes. Freeport to Commonlands to Nek Forest. There was no sense of geography or scale. All this seems to have changed even in my short trip, I could see on the world map where the continents I was travelling around were and I got a real sense of distance.

I got lost in Nek very briefly, I was surprised that it didn’t seem as heavily populated near the roads as I remember, Commonlands was a beautiful sight now that I’m running high res textures with full light bloom (The feeling that it’s actually somewhat similar to the Nevada desert really came through with these settings) and then came Freeport. Good frame rates kept me running along smoothly and the high textures I just mentioned made everything a joy to behold. In short it reminded me of the Freeport of EQ1 which didn’t seem like so much of an ‘evil’ city as just simply a city. It was a pleasure and I picked up the first part of ‘Custom Fitted Armor’ (silly American spelling) which I was surprised to notice was rated as an easy quest for me. It took my level 23 Inquisitor to the Commonlands, a zone geared towards teen-level characters so I set off with glee knowing I’d have no trouble.

I was right in fact, I began by hunting down (rather surprisingly) a non-player character at one of Freeport’s outposts and then set about ’sending him a message’. The guards around us couldn’t care less, quite frankly.

With that done I set off to the Forgotten Valley which appeared to once be a small town before the cataclysm. Here forgotten Guardians were my target, skeletons who roamed their old patrol routes and who were significantly lower than my own level. I actually used the techniques I recently learnt on WoW with Rayda to grab a bunch of targets at once and Area of Effect spell them, all the while using my incredible Cleric abilities to keep myself healthy. I had eighteen of the blighters down quite quickly which led to my first armour piece, the gloves from above.

Now for the gauntlets.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under EverQuest 2, Gaming, Hinjani Lifegiver, Human Cleric. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.