There have been a bunch of posts on the official Sony forums recently about returning to Everquest.  I will attempt to keep an up to date F.A.Q. here to help those are thinking about coming back.

Q1: What’s the latest all-in-one pack I can buy to get caught up with all the expansions?

A: Seeds of Destruction.  You can purchase this ONLY online through the station store or on the server select screen.  There is a new expansion coming out in November, Underfoot.

Q2 – What level can you start using Mercs?

A: Level One.  You just need to own Seeds of Destruction.  Mercs are free until you hit level 10 at which point you pay a small fee every 15 minutes you have them active.

Q3 – Given my long absence and all the changes in the game since I quit… would you recommend I start over with a new char?  Or try and remember how to play my old ones?

A: You have three options (I believe):

1. Goto the new 51/50AA server.  You start at level 51 with 50 AAs.  I hear they have a solid population.
2. Goto the Stormm Server (I hear a lot of people say they have a good population of new players).
3. Start a new character on your original server or another normal server.

If you decide to start fresh on a normal server give Bristlebane a shot.  My guild, Meiyo, is more than willing to help you get started again.

Q4: What has changed since I have been gone?

A: Short answer…everything.

Long answer:

1. Experience is a lot easier to copy by.  Getting to level 70 won’t take you more than a month even if you are a casual player.
2. Everyone gets an experience boost on AAs till you have 1,000.  This will help you catch up faster
3. Your old gear probably is worthless.  SOE introduced defiant gear which is a common drop off of any mob and easily bought in the bazaar.  These items will help you get going again.

Q5: Where Should I Experience?

A: Anywhere you like, but if you are looking for guidance…I would suggest the zones found in this post.  SOE introduced hot zones to provide players with a place to go to gain bonus experience.  Because of the bonus experience you will also notice those zones make it easier to find groups.

SOE has updated the hotzones:

• Level 20: Everfrost Peaks

• Level 25: Permafrost Keep

• Level 30: Iceclad Ocean

• Level 35: Tower of Frozen Shadow

• Level 40: Great Divide

• Level 45: Eastern Wastes

• Level 50: Velketor’s Labyrinth

• Level 55: Kael Drakkel

• Level 60: Western Wastes

• Level 65: The Ascent

• Level 70: Icefall Glacier

• Level 75: Valdeholm

• Level 75: Frostcrypt

They are really running with the frozen summer theme, haha.

So by the looks of this forum post it appears SOE is serious about getting rid of spamming in their MMOs.  From the page:

*** SPAM filtering ***

• SPAM filtering has been added.
  • Messages flagged as spam will appear as “Soandso tells you, (SPAM)”.
  • Clicking the word (SPAM) in the chat window will display the filtered message.
  • Clicking someone’s name in the chat window will bring up a menu that allows you to report what they said as either spam or not spam (in case the message was mis-flagged as spam).
  • Mails are also filtered for SPAM.  An email flagged as SPAM will have its subject replaced by “SPAM”.

Buttons have been added to the mail window to report emails as spam or not spam (in case they are mis-flagged as spam).

This is extremely good news for Everquest players since the filtering is being developed for this game.  I would imagine similar systems could be setup for their other games.

The following guide explains how to farm T4 essences easily.  Thanks to Mapfiend for the map outline and to Allakazam for the links to the quest info.  I chose to farm essences from the instance Hiding in Plain Sight for a few different reasons:

1. I don’t have to compete with other for the camp site/named
2. Unlike uninstanced named in T4, this guy has some predictability to his spawning.  He either spawns after you kill 15 mobs or he doesn’t spawn at all.

Prerequisites:

• Quest: Times are a Chainin’
• Faction: Kindly with Toskirakk Slaves.

If you need to raise your faction I would recommend the following tasks.

• Find Your Allies
• Whom The Frogs Destroy
• Wraith of the Korascian
• Champions No More
• Disrupt the Siege
• Retinue The Frog-God

The first three tasks must be completed before you can do Champions no More and Disrupt the Siege.  Alla says that Champions/Disrupt the siege gives faction, but I was unable to confirm this.  I stuck to the first three…plus the camp is easier and more named pop there.

Get The Task:

• Talk to Trilyaris (located right when you zone into Toskirakk from the void) and say “meet him”.  She will give you the task, Hiding in Plain Sight.
• Say “ready” to zone into the instance.

Getting to the Camp Site

• Upon Zoning in make sure everyone in the goup is invised

Hiding

• Using the above map as a guide, make your way to the green dot near the center of the map.  This will be your camp spot for the whole process.

Killing 15 Mobs

• You need to kill 15 mobs before Borskar will spawn.  It doesn’t matter how long/short this takes you – he won’t spawn until 15 mobs have died.
• Swarm pets do count (Wizard’s Call of Xuzl for example), but swarm pet procs from weapons do not count (SK swarm pet sword for example).
• I have found that the warboars have the lowest about of health and hit the lightest of anything in the zone.  They spawn all around your campsite and I have pointed out some of them on the map above.
• When pulling boars be aware of the Rallosian mobs around you – they will social agro if a boar gets to close to them.  They have signicantly more hp and hit a lot harder.
• Note: With an 85 SK with 4.2k AC/26k HP and nearly maxed out defensives I am able to tank 15 of these at a time.  Don’t be afraid to pull at least a few at a time.
• Personally, I used a log parser to help me keep track of how many boars I have killed so far.  When you pull a whole bunch at once, it is easy to lose count.

Checking For Borskar

• According to the Allakazam page he shouts “Lazy fools! None of you deserve to be in Rallos’ army. I doubt any of you are worthy of the heroes death you are soon to enjoy.” when he spawns, but I haven’t experienced this.
• Check along the his path I drew out in the above picture or have a tracker look for him.  I have found he does spawn within 20 seconds or so of the 15th kill.

Killing Borskar

• He has nothing to special about him,but can hit for up to 7k.  This can cause problems if your tank doesn’t have high AC or HP.
• My group makeup is Enchanter,Druid,Wizard,SK and 2 cleric mercs.  I was able to do all this boxed (SK/Wizard on one computer and Druid/Enchanter on the other).
• Set one merc to balanced and one merc to reactive so they don’t heal on the same cycle.
• Used edict of command with the enchanter to charm one of the guards for extra dps.
• Hit my deflection displine with the SK and pulled with harm touch (to ensure good agro).  While the disipline was active I tashed and slowed him with the enchanter.
• Sent the chanter’s charmed pet for dps.
• I then began constant spam heals with the druid.
• I then used twincast/other displines with the wizard and burned him down (while continuing spam heals with the druid).  He went down quickly.

Rinse and Repeat

• Once he is dead and you have looted have everyone drop the task.
• You can keep repeating this until you get all the loot you are after.

For those of us who played EQ1 we remember the days of camping a named mob for hours and usually days on end.  Some of us remember getting in line for a fabled drop – staying up all night for our turn.

Personally, my most memorable camp was the Cyclops to get Jboots in Everquest One.  I spent an entire weekend waiting for him to spawn.  It was during this weekend that I got to know Reltok, the leader of ‘Champions of Norrath and All’.  He ended up helping me kill the Cyclops and I ended up joining his guild.

I think the best part of this story was that Myclawz (Tynecastle at the time) randomly walked into South Ro and asked if anyone saw the Cyclops.  Some had just killed him and let him loot the ring for the quest.  It took him all of 10 minutes.

What is your best camping story?

The fellow EQjunkies and I will always have a soft spot for EQ before those horrible expansions were released (everything past Velious).  I have often wondered how things would be like if I could go back to the original EQ today and relive the experience.  The EQClassic project has given all of us that opportunity.  Their goal is different than the regular progression servers: they will never release an expansion beyond Velious, they will only use items available in the game when the expansions were released, they will only use the old graphics models, etc.

EQClassic is a 100% volunteer project, so remember that as you are waiting for the official release and things to be worked on.  That being said, EQClassic presents us with a truly unique opportunity.  If you are interested check out their website and here is the info about the alpha beta test from their website:

Send an e-mail to ScottyCEQC@gmail.com with your answers to the following questions;

1. Are you capable and willing to be on the IRC server?

2. Do you have any experience with being in an alpha, or some sort of environment where you are testing software? If yes, please explain (briefly) what you did there.

3. What time periods would you be available through (Please also say what time zone you are in, we have people from all over the world here)? In addition, how much time would you consider being able to spend testing? Be careful when answering this question; you and I both know that you won’t be spending 6 hours a day, every day on this… unless your name is Tongpow. You don’t need big chunks of time every single day to devote; what we’re looking for with this question is a realistic estimate, so don’t give unrealistic numbers that aren’t true.

4. What experience do you have playing the game during the classic era?

5. Why do you want a return to the classic EQ world?

6. What is wrong with this situation:

“You and tongpow make two new halfling characters, and decide to test out conjuration skill ups by casting the spell “Dance of the Fireflies”. The spell description says it is usable at level 1 for druids and level 15 for rangers so you level your ranger up to 15, while he stays at level 1. You both cast the spell and it fails, giving the message “You can’t do that yet”.”

7. Is there anything else you wish to add that you think may be important?

Lastly, a few things I wish to stress;

Remember, this is completely a volunteer project by everyone involved. Do not come expecting it to work like a company. All of us here are here because we enjoyed the game as it was, and that is what we want to be recreated. Everything being done here is accomplished in the free time that is being given to this project by all the awesome people involved. So please remember that we want a fun productive environment for all involved so we can reach our end goal.