Good Morning Friends! I spent quite a bit of time running around Edengrove yesterday and it is freaking gorgeous. So much of the island feels corrupted and sinister, and this is a whole other kind of dangerous. Think about the various Green Magic the Gathering cards about rampant growth and nature taking over in dangerous ways… and you have Edengrove. It is the bastion of the Angry Earth faction and there are so many different varieties of plants in this area. At first I got excited because I thought all of these were Ironwood trees… but alas they are just zone specific versions of Young and Mature trees.
I know I already talked about this before, but weapon experience is greatly increased after level 60. Proof of this is the in leveling to 60 I managed to finish off a single weapon and that was Sword. In the time since leveling to sixty last week I have finished off Great Axe, War Hammer, and as of last night Hatchet. I have switched over and am now working on Spear which is pretty enjoyable. I am not certain if or when I will ever level some of the ranged or magic weapons. Probably at some point I will start working on Life Staff since I had already gotten it to level 7 previously. Right now I have been able to just level weapons while doing content that is relevant to me, but for things like ranged I would probably need to drop down a bit until I picked up some abilities.
Earlier this week I talked a bit about the trading post and how everything was cheap… that may not be the case anymore and more the case of things just not being available for awhile. Yesterday with Patch 1.0.4 a really awful bug went into the game. Basically if you are offline, you will not get gold from anything that sold. There are some complete horror stories of folks posting high end chests, selling them, and then being short like 24k in gold. Right now this means I am dragging around with me anything that might be something I want to sell on the market. So my bags keep getting more full and I am hoping that they apply an emergency patch soon. This also means that folks are selling way more stuff in open chat than previously, which makes me realize that this game really needs a /Trade channel.
Last night I did my first zone invasion and it was super fun. It was more than a little hopeless especially given that we did not have a full group of 50 players available. People had been waiting all day long for Outpost Rush to open back up, and it did so roughly an hour before the zone invasion it opened up. That meant there were not a ton of folks available and I think we ran the invasion with 48 instead of 50. I am super interested in doing some more of this. I more or less blended into the crowd and given that I was placed in an area with a very clear objective I think I did okay. I was sword and hammer and spent most of my time as hammer for the stun and if things went really south I would swap to sword and taunt things. I probably need to get a carnelian in my hammer so I can properly tank with it.
For those curious, this is what a rewards box looks like from an invasion. We absolutely lost and died somewhere during the sixth wave. On wave five the doors were broken down and in wave six we had to mostly deal with everything on the inside. For about thirty minutes total it was well worth doing because there are few other things that reward 630 gold coins. The box of loot was blue quality and seemed to be capable of rolling higher based on snapshot. I ended up with I think some 505 boots that were not that useful to me, but it did bump my snapshot up a bit. The other rewards are pretty great as well with 350 Azoth mostly going wasted on me because I was already close to capped. At the end of the match it ranked players and I was 24th out of 48 which is firmly middle of the pack. Not bad enough to get kicked but also not good enough to really get noticed by anyone. I feel like that was reasonable performance for my first invasion.
I closed out my evening running faction missions in Reekwater because we were extremely close to flipping that zone. I am guessing with everyone doing Outpost Rush, no one was really paying much attention to the zones either. There was a swarm of purple players all running back and forth between the territory and objectives. I only really had time for five rounds of quests but I at least contributed a little bit to the total. Running faction quests doesn’t really FEEL like PVP since most of the time you don’t actually encounter much opposition. This feels more like clerical busywork associated with filing a declaration of war and I figure it is something that I can do to help out the faction as a whole if I am not doing anything terribly pressing. If they push to flip Everfall when I happen to be available, I am going to participate. The interesting thing about Everfall turning, is that it has introduced me more to Brightwood and I think in all honesty I would rather buy my third house there given that I am spending so much more time in the unheld territories of the North.