Nostalgia the Guild

Because people occasionally miss our Nostalgia nights, those who make all of them have outleveled those who do not. I, alas, not only not missed a night, but I sometimes do quests and group with guildies on other nights. The result: Some people were still at level 30 when I hit 40 and 41. I wasn’t sure how to get back in level range. Dying a million times to delevel isn’t something I ever want to do. What I want to do is just turn off xp, or have it all go to AAs, but you can’t do that at 41. ...

We didn’t come anywhere near our level cap Friday, as Mistmoore Castle turned out to be pretty tough. Saturday, a few of us were on, not doing much, so we decided to just DO something. And so we did probably about the most boring thing you could think of – we went to a zone, broke a camp, and stayed there and chatted and just had fun for the rest of the night. In the end, it was probably my most … nostalgic … moment since I returned to EverQuest. ...

Something I’ve seen time and again as we revisit the happy memories of long ago: The more things change, the more they remain the same. Sure, we’re older, wiser, more expert players; but put a couple groups of characters in regular gear in an old zone and all the old problems are going to crop right up. There’s one of our smaller pulls in Mistmoore, up above. The place is a slaughterhouse. Tantalized by easy pickings near the zone, we moved cautiously in, not knowing that the main healer for one of the groups was AFK and the 25 shaman was doing his level best to keep people alive. Stargrace, who had leveled a rogue at top speed from 1-35 in about two days to join the group, had to sit her out and play her cleric. After many wipes and people having to leave, we eventually were down to just one group… and we did our best… but there’s just no way of pulling just two or three without a feign death puller. Well, I guess I could have invis’d up and gotten lull targets for Ishbel, but we were pretty frustrated by all the deaths. ...

Able was I ere I saw Unrest? This zone has always been a killer and is a killer still. We came for xp and we got the most stressful adventuring night yet. These old world dungeons are nothing but punishment. But, a GOOD kind of punishment. Hakiko and I spent some time just sniping the occasional mob from inside the mansion as people showed. Aside from a lack of DPS, no problem! How hard could it be? Well, not really that hard… until we went upstairs to camp the Bar. The Bar was one of the first real Unrest camps back in the day – pro groups would camp the Tower on the floor above, and pull the Bar and surroundings there. Well, we camped the Bar and pulled Tower, so not that much difference. ...

My Tuesday night paladin, Sela, needed to work on the level 20 Crescent Reach quest armor, but she was already over the target level of 20 and shouldn’t be getting too much xp, so I had my cleric Brita farming the materials and patterns in Blightfire for her. This involved gathering up every gnoll in the area, turning on my 660 point damage shield, then looting the bodies. /hidecorpse looted hides corpses you have looked at, even if you have left items on them. Considering all the annoying non-stackable and no-drop stuff the gnolls carry, that command was a godsend. Bored with that, I wandered over to the Stonehive gardens because, well, I’d never been. I was as busy as a bee gathering up bixies and wasps (and remembering last Saturday’s Doctor Who, “The Unicorn and the Wasp”), when I saw Urtog, Nostalgia’s main tank, running past me naked and with some drones in tow. I did my best to pull them away, but he died – again, I guess – and then promptly went link dead. ...

Last Tuesday, the second progression gathered for our second time in Paludal Caverns. Back In The Day… I start out so many sentences about the EQ groups that way? And yet, you really can’t go to these old places without saying that a lot. Every camp we moved to carried with it a dozen memories. Here’s the place I ran into Jaasur who restarted on Stromm when it opened, same as I did, but didn’t stay with it. Over here was the bandit camp where I really learned how to play a cleric. Here’s the small rise where two groups would chain pull the bandits. Here’s that icky disease crud that made clerics (again) so incredibly popular in PC. In all the time we were there, we were the only group. ...

The goblin spawner got stopped up. That’s the only explanation why we were sitting in the King room in Sol A, mindin our own business, when suddenly seven, eight, ten goblins were dancing on our lower intestines. Between sudden goblin drop ships landing troops wherever we happened to be, having to keep apart from the other group, and the powerlevelers who used the place as their private reserve… well, by the end of the evening, corpses were piled high at the entrance, the goblins were very well fed, but most of us were pushing 30… and we had fun. ...

German EQ player Mohanos is looking for people with whom to start a European-time progression group on the Luclin server. Those people who want to see EQ from the beginning once again (or perhaps for the first time), but couldn’t make North American times… might want to check this out :)

The leader of the Tuesday group said we should finish our racial armor quests before next week; I figured I’d get them out of the way today. A variety of wolf furs, various yellowjacket drops, and some iron bricks from goblins. I started at around 6, finished at 11:30. OUCH. Okay, I thought that would go faster. I did take a couple of breaks. I peeked into the Bazaar to see if I could find any sort of shield that would work for me and wouldn’t be considered twinked. But all of them, even the cheapest, were well beyond what we’re allowed to use. Same for weapons. Even assuming I had that sort of cash… it would have just been too much. ...

The Friday progression group is pretty hot stuff, but leveling in EverQuest is so fast now that we quickly leveled past a lot of low level content that we really wanted to see. The only cure? More cowbell. Another progression group! Hakiko couldn’t make the Friday progression group, so he went ahead and made another for Tuesdays. I simply couldn’t resist. I rolled a pally, and with the help of a guildy and some others, finished the tutorial missions for the last of my armor, and then headed off to the dungeon, Befallen. ...