I kid. I don’t know how to make any money in EverQuest, and I never did (but read on, I do have a strategy). You have me down here, and then you have people who know what they’re doing up there, and all I can do is just look up in wonder.
Opening day for Rizlona and Aradune is coming up, though, and I need to have a plan for what I am going to do from the start, day 0, hour 0, minute 0, seconds 1 and counting.
There’s going to be a wave of people working through content. By this time, years and years into the progression server paradigm, those people who habitually restart in these servers know what to do. And those people will form the ones doing the bleeding edge of content.
Kasul and I will not be on the bleeding edge. But we don’t really want to be left behind, either. We talked it over, and we’d like to see some of the Planes of Power raids — we both agree that PoP was EverQuest’s peak. This means we’ll have to join a guild at some point, and so we’ll have to be ready and available when those guilds begin to happen.
Me, personally, I’d like to start raiding by Kunark. Dunno if that’s going to happen. Kunark will open twelve weeks into the server life. They’ve just announced that the two new servers will not be locked at Planes of Power when they reach that point. That’s kind of sad, for me: that means we have to get to PoP pretty much when it opens, or the players will have moved to Gates of Discord already. I hated Gates of Discord.
Not as much as I hated Prophecy of Ro, but hate is a continuum.
The new servers will have “Agents of Change”, who will spawn instanced versions of classic raids for you to fight. They will also have “Pick Zones” — if a zone is overcrowded, they will spawn new copies of the zone. In classic EQ, if a zone was too crowded, you simply could not enter.
Making Mad Stacks of Plat
My current preflight Shadow Knight on Mangler is still missing anything in several armor slots. Some slots have cloth armor, and I have one piece of quest armor on her. She is wielding rusty weapons, and she is level seven over the course of a few days (and this is with the increased XP gain!)
I’d like my Aradune SK to have a little more gear by that time. Kasul was looking into this, the careful planner he is. He said that the best way to make money, day zero, is through the “Going Postal” quests.
This is not something I’m going to be able to do as a Dark Elf. I will not be welcome in most cities. So I will make a half elf bard, starting in Qeynos.
I will then run/swim/translocate to Erudin, where I will bind, and then start ferrying mail from Erudin to Qeynos, killing myself against the bards there (like a motherless gnoll), respawning in Erudin, rinse and repeat.
After a little more than half an hour of doing this last night, at six gold per run, the bard was level 2 and I had 54 gold. It cost 37 gold to buy a complete set of cloth armor in Erudin. I returned to Qeynos, bought the AE damage spell Chords of Dissonance, and went crazy in the newbie grounds. Not long after, I had two plat — enough to get a full collection of backpacks.
My goal really was to get some chain or better armor, or perhaps to craft some, but farming the materials can’t really be done at low level. Still, this will do for a start, perhaps make the early levels go by a little more quickly. (Alternately: just play the bard…)
Kasul spent some time sharpening rusty weapons to build skill in blacksmithing last night. So we’ve decided that he gets all the armor and tailoring materials. That leaves the baking materials for me, and I’m perfectly happy with that. I love baking in real life 馃檪
I’m a little nervous and a little excited. The last time I started from scratch on a new server was waaaaaay back in 2008, when we did the Nostalgia the Guild project. That’s when I first met Kasul. And now we live together 馃檪
What a journey.
I always used to do the postal runs because they’re steady money at very low levels. I used to go all the way to Highpass if I was in the mood although that can’t have been a good use of my time. There is an evil circuit, if I remember correctly, with bards in Nektulos Forest, Freeport, Innothule and The Feerrot. It’s a longer run than the one on the other side of the continent, though, and more dangerous.
I wonder how diligent they’ve been about removing all of the enhanced value drops from low level mobs? Plague rat tails used to sell for over a plat. I think last time I played on a Prog/TLE server they removed all of the stuff like that, which was quite ironic, given it had all been added specifically to solve the exact problem of low level characters not being able to make money.
On a quieter server, one without hordes of players in the starting zones slaughtering everything the nano-second it spawns, I think hunting mobs even with the original value of loot would always be faster than Going Postal – orc pawns and decaying skeletons drop a lot of cloth armor and rusty weapons, and it all sells for over a gold a piece even with poor charisma, just as one example. The bard runs has the huge advantage of being completely immune to player infestation, though.
Yeah, as I mentioned, the money was much better just killing newbie stuff in North Qeynos and selling the proceeds. But I just want to get the very basic stuff done asap — lots of bags, and some sort of armor — as fast as I can. With shared banks, doing the good-side quest and giving the rewards to the evil-side character is a thing, I think 馃檪