Saddest Sight Ever Seen

Saddest Sight Ever Seen

EverQuestNextLandmark64 2014-02-10 06-07-39-53 If this image is not enough to ball up your fists in rage and scream out “why god why!” then you are not yet to the cobalt pick grind in Everquest Next Landmark.  The moment you see red in a cobalt vein you know that your hopes and dreams have been dashed on the rocks in front of you.  As I entered the cobalt era I was certain that the problem would be elemental cobalt as it had been in every other tier.  I have never been so wrong in my life.  Up until this point the gem component of your items has been the “easy” thing to get, since gems tend to be surface spawns that you can zip around the map looking for.  This all changes with Sapphire… and name you will come to hate.

It turns out that Sapphire can only spawn at the tail end of a cobalt vein.  In my experience however this is a one in twenty type occurrence as almost every single cobalt vein contains the crystallized cough syrup known as Rubicite.  Don’t get me wrong, I get happy shivers at the fact that I will eventually get to mine up Rubicite… and maybe just maybe make it into an amazing set of armor.  I loved Temple of Cazic Thule, and I was a bit too late to soak up the Rubicite armor from there when I started in Velious but it was a thing of mythic proportions that I lusted after.  The problem is… since we need 80 sapphire to make our cobalt pick I am beginning to curse the sight of it.

At this point I have found exactly two Cobalt veins that had sapphire at the end, which has netted me 28 sapphire in total.  On the other hand I have 25,000 cobalt ore and 170 elemental cobalt to show for my best impression of dig dug.  From what I hear it only gets worse when you start needing Ruby, which can only be found at the tail end of ground spawn Rubicite veins.  Most of the ground spawn rubicite is sitting beside cobalt generally meaning they are all part of the same mega vein.  My friend Rae managed to power through the sapphire level in about three hours, but based on my experience yesterday this seems like she managed to get lucky.  Since each of the tier 3 zones tends to have a little bit of a mix, I might just need to abandon my beloved Pingo for a bit and search elsewhere.

The Root Problem

EverQuestNextLandmark64 2014-02-10 06-24-23-91 Notice something weird in this picture?  Yup that is right, it is in fact silver spawning in Pingo a Tier Three zone.  The problem right now is that Tier 3 has become a dumping ground for everything that is high end.  This means to find your rarer spawns you are having to sift through a ton of Iron, Silver, Tungsten, Gold, Marble and all of the associated tier 2 and 3 gems.  At some point I am sure they will add tier 4 and 5 zones, but until they we have to scrounge to find the higher tier resources in one massive melting pot of a zone.  I realize this is all extremely temporary, as they have mentioned already on the forums that tier 4 and 5 are coming, so I am not so much complaining and just venting my frustration… and warning those who have not reached this point yet that they might want to slow down and smell the roses a bit.

There are still a lot of things I want to build, so while I am out soaking up all the cobalt I find in hope of sapphires… I am also trying to gather up as much gold as I can since there are still a few nifty things I can build with it.  I have heard that the Viridium Grappling Hook is much better than the bronze one, so I am anxiously looking forward to having enough elemental gold to craft it.  Similarly I have a bunch of crafting machines that I can work on upgrading.  I plan on making my Cobalt pick at one of the communal crafting hubs rather than trying to craft the Amaranthine forge for my own claim.  Though to be honest… since the forge takes no sapphire I might end up with more than enough resources to craft it first.

The Silver Lining

EverQuestNextLandmark64 2014-02-10 06-05-53-24 The silver lining is of course that I now have more stone than I know what to do with.  This has allowed me to take breaks from all the farming to work on my temple.  At this point calling it a temple is maybe a bit of a misnomer since depending on the angle you look at it, it may or may not look like a castle.  The biggest thing on my wishlist right now is the ability to completely remove a tree.  I have several that keep respawning in awkward places…  like the stairwell between the second and third floor for example.  At this point I have added a third and fourth floor and have started working on a tower on the upper ramparts.  Trying to figure exactly where I want to go from here.  I am considering making the undercroft stone rather than its current dirt, but in any case I have more than enough resources to do whatever at this point.

House Husband

I was at a loss for what to write about as my factoid for today, so going to one I have held in reserve for awhile.  I have never been terribly big on traditional gender roles in my marriage.  I tend to believe that a marriage is a shared voyage and whatever it takes to get through together is what needs to happen.  As a result I tend to be the “Mr Mom” of our household.  My wife is a teacher, and for those of you who have teachers in your life… they are grossly underpaid for their work.  My wife happens to be one of those rockstar teachers that refuses to accept anything but the absolute best for her kids.  As a result she quite literally works 70-80 hours a week between classroom, lesson plans, grading, and the plethora of councils that she sits on as a member and the extra duties she has willingly taken on.  Most nights I am home by 4:30pm and she doesn’t get home until after 7.

The truth is I have much more disposable time than she does, as evidenced by the fact of my gaming.  So as a result during the school year especially I take on the lions share of household chores.  This means I cook, clean, take care of the animals, do laundry, do almost all the grocery shopping and anything else that happens to need to get done during the week.  The only chore that I do not do, is the dishes… but I could and I have in a pinch.  My mother was a Home Economics teacher… and as a result she was tired of seeing boys come through her classroom that were completely incapable of taking care of themselves.  Her mission in life was to make sure that I could do whatever I needed to do to be self sufficient.  While I suck at using a sewing machine, I can even do that in a pinch…  though I am far more comfortable with needle and thread.

The original plan was simple.  I have lots of disposable time so I would pick up the slack during the school year, and then over the summer I get a break… and do nothing.  This however has not quite worked out as well as we had planned it.  The problem is part of being a rockstar teacher is going around the country to various conferences over the summer.  My wife has even gone so far as to work with a group of other teachers and found her own summer conference.  So several weeks out of the summer I do get to do absolutely nothing, but the majority of it these days is business as usual.  I really don’t mind too much, but there are days where I do get sick of keeping the household running.  So all you folks who juggle family and house and still try and find some time for yourselves…  I know those feels.

4 thoughts on “Saddest Sight Ever Seen”

  1. I have found Sapphire exactly once so far…

    I just want the damned Line tool, then I’ll ease off on pushing for the next tier of tools.

    Sometimes I think “This is all getting wiped in a couple of weeks when alpha shuts down” and think maybe I should just set Lankmark aside until then.

    Like you, not complaining since I know this will all change as they balance things and add more tiers, but right now it is quite frustrating.

  2. Hehe, I’m having similar problems much further down the tool levels. Got to the end of an Iron vein (finally) only to discover something (silver?) that I couldn’t mine. Right now I just wish there were something maybe a tooltip that identifies the resource, so I can skip the mining attempt if it’s pointless. The other thing concerns me is the chatter about hiding the veins completely underground—I guess in an effort to make it more “realistic.” The problem is the folks pushing that don’t understand geology. IRL, we mine where we do because someone analysed the surrounding geological features and “species” of rock to determine that there is something there worth mining. We don’t just blindly start digging in hopes of finding ore.

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