As someone who is pretty new to Everquest II, bonus experience days are still novel concept to me. I’ve only seen two bonus experience weekends come around, and I missed the first one, so this is my first “official” one to take part in.

The guild was bustling, at least much more than it used to. Overall, my guild feels pretty dead most of the time. There generally is little to no chat except for a “grats” now and then. As somebody who doesn’t want to commit to the game much, playing ever now and then, maybe once a week, that’s fine for me. The guild basically is only a home base with a second teleport (on a 15 minute timer), and lots of harvesting materials to level my tradeskills. I guess it’s a mutually beneficial agreement, because using up harvesting materials to do rush orders gives the guild status points that in turn are used to pay for amenities such as the guild harvester NPCs. If anybody has a nice guild to suggest on Antonia Bayle for someone who barely knows anything about the game, but is willing to learn fast, friendly to have around, and overall pretty low maintenance, I’m all ears!

So, where was I? Oh, bonus XP weekend, right. It seems Everquest II is really big on bonus XP. Rested experience (or “vitality” in their terminology) gives you a bonus 200% to start with, much more than I’m used to in other games. Bonus weekend XP adds another 100% on top, so I was running around at effectively quadruple experience for a long time, until I ran out of vitality. With nothing much to do this weekend, I spent quite a bit of time, and got Tabascun, my half elf swashbuckler, quite a few levels and AA.

I started out in Lavastorm at level 47 with 78 AA…

Interesting architecture... and I hope this saddle is made of asbestos!

Overall, the zone wasn’t too much to my liking though, so I hit The Sunken Sands soon. It’s here where I hit the original level cap of the game.

I then found a static group of 4 people within the guild, and we went camping triple-up heroics, and did some of the small dungeons in The Sinking Sands. AA started to fly at this point. I ended the weekend at level 57 and 118 AA.

Lots of thing going on in this picture: First of all, level 57 and 116 AA, yay. Second, I have no idea how to spend AAs on the swashbuckler tree and just go with something. Third, yet the wrong palace sweeper again! Fourth, note the Gamblin' Goblin in the lower right corner who I spent a couple of gold on waiting for the correct spawn.

Overall, a nice experience. I really like the desert zones, though for some reason, the Pillar of Flame sometimes gives me horrible lag. I even enjoy the magic carpet mount. Yes, I do, Wilhelm! Though I guess it would be different if everybody flew around with them, and I’ll probably go back to a standard horse once I’m out of the zones that have the fitting flair.

Next plans: continue the Peacock Club Quest Line. It looks really fun, with a lot of things that can be frustrating in the beginning (collecting items randomly strewn across Maj’Dul), but it has this “vintage” feeling that has been mostly ironed out of the early levels of the game in exchange for streamlining. Notable, for example, the mob camping (palace sweepers, I’m looking at you! 16 rounds!). I really enjoy that for a change over the “kill 10 foozles at X” quests. I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish the quest line any time soon, because the last parts require groups or even raids. I might eventually be able to finish once I’m high enough level, though.

The reason I didn’t progress even further on the weekend was that something happened in guild on Sunday that ate up a bunch of time. But I’ll make a separate post about that later.