I asked myself from the start just what there was left to do once you reached the endgame and killed everything.
Well, it turns out there is an answer for that.
The main grind is, of course, to farm the best-in-slot gear from the Plane of Sky quests. These quests all require random drops from random trash mobs and named all throughout the eight islands of the Plane of Sky. These islands aren’t easy to clear in a group, as the group version of the Plane of Sky features charm and mez resistant mobs, so largely it’s you and the highest level zone currently in the game, hoping for the rare drop you need for a specific quest to get a level zero item that you can now farm motes for to upgrade into usefulness.
I dunno about all that. I have decent gear just from Hate and Fear farming, and I know the forthcoming Kunark expansion will bring all new gear. Though, this being EverQuest, the original EverQuest in spirit, a new expansion doesn’t immediately invalidate all the gear you had; I was still using EQ original recipe gear right into the Planes of Power.
No, what I’ve been working on is my epic quests. The Warrior epic requires stuff from almost every raid currently in the game and a couple from Kunark. Same for the Paladin epic, which requires a lot of faction work, as well as working on the Paladin 0.5 epic, the Fiery Avenger, which culminates in the Plane of Sky. And of course there’s the Cleric epic, the water sprinkler with the free rez — unneeded when there is no death penalty or corpse runs. Game Jawn is going to have to adjust that somewhat to make it worth doing.
Faction work is also needed in order to unlock all the races for play. So this is what led to me taking my lowest level combo (WAR/DRU/BRD) through the Warrens last night, maximizing the evil Heretic faction by killing kobolds so that I could enter the evil city of Paineel and kill them in order to maximize the Erudin Paladin faction, Deepwater Knights, for the Fiery Avenger quest — this also helps unlock the Erudin race.
Last week I had to kill Sir Lucan D’Lere and his skeletal twin for the Paladin Soulfire quest, tanking my reputation with the Freeport Militia, making me kill-on-sight in East and West Freeport. Raising faction in Erudin opens up a faction quest for the Freeport Militia, so once I had Erudin faction high enough (they start out very apprehensive about me, since my starting race is Kerran and they are all 100% allergic to cats) I could repeat the quest to raise Freeport Militia to max ally status. If I ever meet Sir Lucan again, he’s going to give me a hug and thank me for letting him see the error of his ways, and he’s a new man now, and his lieutenant even baked me some cookies.
They love me so much. By the time Kunark rolls around, the whole known planet is going to be singing my praises.
Races I have unlocked:
- Gnome — first unlock, needed for tinkering for the Warrior epic, though I have seen people selling the item I will need. Still, might as well make it myself. Tinkering is fun.
- Halfling — easy since they revamped the faction quest. Just took a couple of hours slaughtering goblins in Runnyeye. Completed my Blackened Alloy armor set, though still probably not going to spend $50 so that I can make my armor look like it. I do like that you can look at my character and know what I’m wearing — cleric, warrior, paladin and some rubicite. I always liked that about OG EverQuest.
- Freeport Human — Raised the Freeport Paladin faction as part of the Soulfire quest, the quest to raise the Militia faction also included the other factions I needed.
- Iksar — Decided to unlock this to let me set my home base to the New Sebilis Expedition. I’d noticed from watching Kasul play that this is where everyone hangs out in EverQuest Legends, and if people are going to be selling stuff there, I need to be there.
- Kerran — my free unlock
So this is the endgame — factioning, unlocking races and classes, getting that BiS gear ready, and prepping for Kunark. Back in the day, we didn’t know anything about Kunark (well, we knew some). But now we know that the Temple of Veeshan awaits us, the first multiboss raid, the raid where we had to bind in GFay and leave a corpse so that we could get out of ToV because when it first opened, it was a one way trip. Once you entered, the only way out was by completing the raid, killing the last dragon, and stepping out into the Plane of Sky.
I can’t tell you how amazing that was after a whole weekend of raiding to go through the portal, gather for screenshots in Sky, and then all jump down together to East Freeport. It’s going to be weird doing it solo. But who knows — this may be the first thing in EQL that will require a group.
And that will be exciting.
