{"id":151,"date":"2006-12-02T10:48:57","date_gmt":"2006-12-02T09:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/?p=151"},"modified":"2006-12-02T10:48:57","modified_gmt":"2006-12-02T09:48:57","slug":"starting-over-in-the-serpents-spine-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"Starting over in the Serpent&#039;s Spine era"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s Spine from the Station store; these both come with 30 days play time, so I didn&#8217;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&#8217;t played Everquest at all before, or never played in Gloomingdeep, it is worth playing through &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8216;basic training&#8217; tasks are optional &#8211; but they really aren&#8217;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&#8217;t seem to be connected to experience, taks or any special rewards &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<p>There may be special named mobs in various rooms &#8211; 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).<\/p>\n<p>Tip: you can smash open the container (barrels, vermin nests, cocoons) &#8211; but the \/open command is a lot easier and quicker.<\/p>\n<p>For the tasks, start with the vermin task, then graduate to spiders and coccoon silk.  Incidentally, it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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).<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The tasks in Crescent Reach involves a lot of running around looking for people &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;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. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hints-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/eqblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}