Expansion excitement #EQ2

I dipped into the new expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, for Everquest 2 as a Saturday morning treat after a very busy work-week. The mail was waiting to take my Inquisitor on his journey to the Svarna Expanse starting zone.

Easy accessed from the fast travel map, or a Bell if you’re not a subscriber. That brought my character to the island that starts the expansion and the questing. Before I could begin with adventuring though there was the small matter of expansion freebies and gearing.

That gave my character a new pet, a new familiar and a new mount (pictured below). His inventory is a bit of a disaster at the moment, I need to seriously look into the depot housing feature that Bhagpuss wrote about recently – I’ve never gotten around to installing any.

But I was in the mood for questing rather than virtual life-admin so I just focused on the free armour upgrades from the nearby Tishan’s Lockbox and throwing away all the old character-bound gear. Gear replacement can be a very frequent thing in Everquest 2, getting too attached to any particular items is probably a bad idea given how easily they can be replaced.

The upgrades were pretty impressive, as expected, and his health trebled and them some. I’d read in the linked post that the new monsters could be a challenge – thankfully I’d done the upgrading before I went out to start fighting my way to the first area for quest objectives.

My healer is running with a mage mercenary at the moment. His health dipped on occasion but so long as I kept the buff up for his “I heal if you dare hit me” mechanic, I had no problems even with the slighter tougher elite mobs. That seems like a nice change from the rather rough start I’ve had in some other recent expansions, though I’m not expert enough on EQ2 gearing to offer more than gut-feelings.

My rather paltry free inventory slots quickly filled up with vendor trash, status items and some quest rewards. So an early order of business was finding a “status merchant” to sell to for maximum benefits. For once, going straight to the wiki wasn’t the best idea: the in-game map had the correct NPC marked in the first village you come to, so it was easy to find where to sell.

Oh, glowing tower!

I’m liking what I see so far. The quests are solid, and the visuals varied and interesting. There are enough strange or interesting sights on the horizon to keep my character wandering and me happy!