User:Cald/Cald's Newbie Guide

Cald’s Guide to your first trip to 50 in EQL: Or how I learned to stop worrying about equipment and love the ding.

Welcome to EQ Legends. This isn’t your parent’s EQ, or the one you learned 20-25 years ago. It is a new experience, and one that does not play by the same rules you have seen in other MMOs. This doc is intended to help those taking their first trip to 50 in EQLegends, with the assumption that you’ve put in 5-10 hours of gameplay and are thinking “Fun, what’s next?”

By the time you read this, you have probably spent a little time in Befallen, or Blackburrow, or Crushbone, or any of the other revamped dungeons. You are probably wearing a couple pieces of upgraded equipment that make you think “that can’t be right, this gear is *really good*, the devs have lost their minds”.

Congratulations! You have now surpassed Classic EQ content itemization by the time you are level 25. The gear you are using now can carry you to 50, and some of it could carry you to 50 more than once.

If you read the above sentence and understood it, excellent. If not, a quick explanation - Gear in "Classic" EQ had very few stats. Low level items might have 1 attribute at a low single digit number, and some AC. If you were lucky, it might have 2 attributes at low level. Equipment from one of the Classic EQ planes might have 3 stats, and one of them might be double digits. Perhaps. Low level gear from a revamped EQL dungeon probably has 3 stats, and upgraded to +2 or +3 is in middle or high single digits.

The question becomes: What next? Where do I go to keep that dopamine high of upgrading weapons and chasing dings and AA and making the numbers go up all at the same time?

The answer is: You’ve gotten the first part of EQL out of the way: the on-ramp. You’re equipped in a few pieces of gear that far outclasses “Classic” EQ by at least one expansion, outside of planar raids. You now have the core gameplay loop available to you - level up your classes, accumulate Alternate Advancement (AA) , and spend AA to increase your character power.

Why AA? For time invested, nothing in game will make as much of a difference in your in-game performance as AA. The exception to this might be a haste item if you do not have one, *maybe*, or a focus item, but those are best acquired as a side effect of gameplay, not as something to spend hours camping for…unless that’s how you would prefer to play the game.

AA points are going to give you more spell slots, increase your critical hit multipliers, increase your armor class, increase your evasion, and more. The gameplay effects of these improvements far outweigh most statistical swings you will get from any gear you can acquire in the “Classic” old world of EQ. The best way to acquire those AA points is to level up, and the best return on your time invested is at low level – you simply get more levels per hour at low level than you do at high level. Basically you have any number of options, and you are not stuck doing any single one of them. You could certainly do several at the same time.

So, what's next:

1. Buy your spells if you haven’t yet. Nothing more embarrassing than not having your level 22 spells at level 45, because you zoomed past all of them.
2. Clear your bags.
3. Accept that you are so far removed from the “standard EQ power curve” that a couple more stat points are not really going to matter much, and go have fun.

If you are interested in questing, almost every class has quests available to them. Find the class trainers in your starting cities and see where they send you. Class trainers aside, there are quests everywhere.

If you are interested in the open world, there are multiple continents worth of zones to explore. The experience gain in the open world will be slower than dungeons, but it will allow a more relaxed pace of encounters.

If you are interested in tradeskills, you have options.

If you are interested in getting to 50 immediately, the prevailing opinion seems to be: Go to Upper Guk, then to Lower Guk (LGuk), and finally leave at 50 having acquired a deep hatred of all things froglok. I would not recommend this, because by the time you are done with EQL you will have eradicated continents worth of frogloks. Why start now?

At any point on the drive to 50, please feel welcome to jump back and try a different class combo. While your primary is locked until you get an unlock token (or complete the quests in Sky) your secondary two classes are not. Maybe you head to a low level dungeon you haven’t explored yet level up that new combo. And if/when that gets boring, you go back to town, switch again and try something new someplace else. New classes also open up utility: druid and wizard for ritual magic (fast travel) options to save you time getting around the world. (other examples?)

Things you might want to make it a point to pickup:

• A Haste item (The Flowing Black Silk Sash ((FBSS)) is the most well known, but there are others).
• Focus Items
• Bags

If you don’t end up getting the FBSS on your first trip to 50, don’t sweat it. Multiple raid encounters available at 46+ drop haste items that do not require long hours in Lower Guk. If you are in LGuk for experience, and an FBSS drops, fantastic. If not, that’s ok.

The one exception to this is bags. You will never have enough inventory space, but it does not hurt to get a good head start. The Bag of the Sewn Evil Eye drops from the Evil Eye in LGuk. It is doable late 20s, more comfortable with a group on the first trip to 50, and the bags themselves are weight reducing 8 slot bags. Spend some time, get some bags, get some xp. You can find a map of Upper Guk (off of Feerott) here, and a map of Lower Guk here.

Motes: By now you should have accumulated several motes, and you will continue to accumulate them as you play the game. Motes tend to drop of the same quality as the difficulty you are at, so d0 is going to see motes to take items to +1, whereas D3 or D4 will see Lesser Potential and Potential.

If you have plenty of motes, fantastic. If you’ve spent some motes, that’s ok. My recommendation would be to hold those motes for planar and dragon drops, because the value return for each mote spent is higher on rarer equipment. Upgrading your FBSS might give you a 1 point of haste from 0 to +1. Upgrading a Runed Bolster Belt (a dragon dropped belt haste item) will give you that 1 point of haste and additional stats.

Mote farming is its own topic. There’s a guide (here) that discusses item and mote systems in EQL.

Raids:

Before we get further, the way raiding works in EQL is as follows: You can receive loot from one instance of each raid at each difficulty each week (at the time that this is written) Those rewards will follow EQL itemization rules – so doing a raid at D4 will reward +4 gear with a chance at D5.

Your first available raid encounter opens at 40. Master Yael’s raid encounter is available from a voidling in Paineel, and will be your first experience with solo vs multiplayer raid instances. To be clear: if you get a drop in solo D0 in Yael, you do not get a drop from multiplayer d0 Yael; the lockout for the item drops is assigned to the difficulty, not the encounter size. Yael has a couple of decent drops that may fit into your itemization. If nothing else, trying Yael at D0 should give you a good idea of where you stand as a benchmark for future progress.

Level 46 opens up the rest of the raiding options. These will all function like Yael – some “trash”, a miniboss or 3 (if Fear or Hate), and then the raid boss. Start at D0, and pay attention to the mechanics in the fight.

In “Classic Era” EQL, this is going to be:

• Phinegal Atropos (voidling in Kedge Keep)
• Lord Nagafen (voidling in Nagafens Lair/SolB)
• Lady Vox (voidling in Permafrost)
• Cazic Thule (voidling in Feerott)
• Innorouk (voidling in Oasis of Marr)

Much like Kedge, SolB, and Permafrost, both the Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate have open world maps with raid targets removed, allowing you to solo or group as desired for planar armor. Fair warning – while Hate tends to respect line of sight for agro, Fear has a much larger agro range, and the mobs are very social.

At 46, you also get access to Sky. I recommend holding off on Sky on the first trip to 50 until you are wearing several pieces of PoHate and PoFear gear.

Then you hit 50. On 3 classes at the same time. Congratulations! You now have a class unlock token for a free primary class unlock. If you like the classes you hit 50 with, you might consider looking at the high level class quests for that class – Wizard has a quest to unlock Ice Comet, for example.

Putting it together: The devs have often said “play it the way you want to play it”. I can only reiterate this. If you are tired of the dungeon grind, go explore the world. If you are tired of exploring, try doing some trade skills. Player power – levels – are easy to come by. AA also easy to come by, leveling a single class to 50 seems to give you 70 or so. If you find yourself 2 percent away from killing Naggy or Vox solo, go level a new class for a couple hours, invest the AA wisely, and try again.

You can see the loop. You accumulate power making it easier to accumulate power, increasing the speed at which you accumulate power. And in between you’re dodging Blackburrow trains (or derailing them), talking smack in world chat, and having fun with friends doing content you haven’t touched in 20 years, if ever. It’s a big world. Go have fun.