(N)EverQuest Scrolls

I haven’t played EQ in a couple of years (yes, since World of Warcraft was released), and I wanted to try it once again, being still quite attached to some of my characters. A lot of things have changed,and a lot of old resources have either vanished, or remained static, and thus become less relevant. I am making these notes on the low end game in case they may help others in a similar situation.

To start off, I bought an Everquest Titanium CD key from a third party (one hour delivery, very good service), then chose the digital download of The Serpent’s Spine from the Station store; these both come with 30 days play time, so I didn’t need to reactivate my account at all, just use the play time in the box. I chose to start a new Drakkan character, and follow the standard lowbie path through the tutorial (the Mines of Gloomingdeep), and the new newbie zones in Crescent Reach. So there I was, in the Mines of Gloomingdeep, after choosing a necromancer, facing Arias to follow through the tutorial quests, as so many times before. If someone following this hasn’t played Everquest at all before, or never played in Gloomingdeep, it is worth playing through – you get a reminder to the controls of EQ, some basic armor and weapon (easily beat by most things crafted or from the Bazaar), and a decent item to fit into your charm slot.

Since I last played EQ, the tutorial zone has been considerably expanded, and even Arias has been converted into the new task/quest interface. Arias implies that the ‘basic training’ tasks are optional – but they really aren’t; this sequence of tasks will give you your kobold skull charm, which is very desirable. Several of the other NPCs will offer you training tasks, but these don’t seem to be connected to experience, taks or any special rewards – although Poxtan with the swimming task will give you a kobold leather mask and you can use a second copy of his sword. In earlier versions of the tutorial, these were all part of a long chained task series.

There may be special named mobs in various rooms – Rufus, in the rats and bats room, for example. These may (or may not) have special drops. There are also various rare drops of special stat armour (like Gloomiron Bracers).

Tip: you can smash open the container (barrels, vermin nests, cocoons) – but the /open command is a lot easier and quicker.

For the tasks, start with the vermin task, then graduate to spiders and coccoon silk. Incidentally, it’s the coccoon silk task that gets you the stitched burlap shirt; all the rest of the stitched burlap set come as rewards for the spider silk hand in.

Remember to collect all the gloomingdeep silk for armor, and one each of a chunk of bronze and a chunk of iron (for Absor to give you weapon upgrades).

Once you choose to leave the tutorial, you will be given directions to the initial task givers in Crescent Reach; you should also hand in your guild note to your guildmaster (this is easy to forget, especially if you put it in your bank, like I did). I would suggest leaving the tutorial, at least temporarily, around level 5, so that you can benefit from the rewards from the 1-5 and 5-10 tasks in both the tutorial and Crescent Reach.

The tasks in Crescent Reach involves a lot of running around looking for people – I suggest using Allakhazam to help track them down, the quests by zone list is very useful for this. At the moment, I am working through all the quests I can find; so far I have started none of them that require killing, although the experience I have received has amounted to next to nothing.