After being away on vacation for a bit, I’ve now had family visiting me for the past week and a half, so my playtime has really taken a hit.  The times I’ve logged in I’ve spent either harvesting or tradeskilling.  Davyydeous is currently a level 62 armorer (oh the boredom!) and I’ve decided to make that final push to get him to 70; just in time to push to 80 once the expansion comes out.  This picture shows me grinding away on a tradeskill writ, along with my UI layout.  I always find it interesting seeing pictures of other players’ interfaces, and just how different they all are.

From the beginning I’ve always just used the built-in UI as it suited me just fine.  Just for fun the other week, I decided to give a custom UI a try.  The one in particular was Profit UI Reborn, for no other reason than I saw its name come up the most.  I gave it about a week before I reverted back to the default UI.  It just seemed way too fancy-pantsy for me and I didn’t like the look of it. 

So, for a quick tour of how I have my UI set up, I have four hotbars on the bottom that I keep open all the time.  The one in the center of the screen above the other four is brought up just when I’m tradeskilling.  When raiding, I have the center bar full of all my useful macros and such.  On the bottom right, I always like to have an inventory bag open so I can immediately see anything I pick up while walking through Norrath.  My main chat window is over on the left, with all the combat text going into a separate Combat tab.  My guild window is just above the main chat window, but is visible only on mouse-over, or when new chat text appears.  Group members appear along the top, just to the right of my character name, while I keep my active quest window in the top right.

Pretty simple and clean, and it does the job for me.  That said, I’m not sure how or why this post turned into a tour of my UI, because that’s not what I set out to talk about at all.  Oh well, I’ll consider it a freebie!

Davyydeous had been sitting on the Knights in the Round quest for a while with just one statuette left to investigate.  The statuette in question was Lady Myth, which is in Mistmoore Catacombs at the base of the long climbable wall to the upper part of the Catacombs.  For whatever reason, I never found myself an opportunity to group up with someone to help me get the statuette.  It’s guarded by two obdurate sentinels, one 66^^^, the other 65^^^, which meant that Davyydeous was unable to investigate it without help.  That’s not to say I didn’t try though.

Getting to the wall is no problem itself, it’s just a matter of hopping on to specific walls along the way to de-aggro any angry mobs on your tail.  Once on the wall in question, hovering above the statue, I began to feel pretty helpless though.  If I dropped off the wall, the two sentinels would start wailing on me.  While I could take a pretty hefty beating, I couldn’t investigate the statuette because I kept getting interrupted, so I’d hop back on to the wall.  I’d run a few ideas through my head as to what I could do to investigate this thing, but from what I could tell, my options were limited.  So, I’d try jumping off the wall, aggroing the sentinels, jump back on the wall to deaggro, then jump back down to investigate while the sentinels reset themselves.  That never worked though because the sentinels would be reset and beating on me again before I could finish investigating.

Then I had a brainstorm.  I logged my wife’s level 70 Wizard in and brought her to the wall.  Actually, it took two attempts to get her to the wall as I discovered that Wizards are decidedly more squishy than my plate-wearer.  Anyway, once we were both on the wall I prepared to unleash my foolproof plan.  I was going to use my wife’s character as a decoy.  I figured she owed me for all the times I’ve tanked for her.  Controlling the Wizard, I hopped off the wall and proceeded to aggro the two sentinels.  I immediately switched over to my keyboard and took Davyydeous off the wall and began investigating the statuette.  Knowing that the Wizard was about to die, I figured I’d buy myself some time by hurling her off the ledge of the cliff into the water below.  The plan was perfect.  The sentinels would follow the squishy down to the water below to finish her off while I completed the statuette investigation.  That was the theory anyway.  After hurling the Wizzy off the ledge she hit a rock that was sticking out on the way down and died before ever reaching the water below.  The sentinels reset almost immediately and then proceeded to pound on me.  The idea sounded good at the time.

I returned later in the evening and parked Davyydeous on the wall again.  After a few minutes a group came strolling by and aggroed the sentinels.  I promptly hopped off the wall and got to work on the statue.  Fortunately for me, the group was having trouble jumping on to the wall so the sentinels stayed with them the whole time.  Actually, their entire group, minus a healer, ended up wiping.  I watched for a bit as the healer kept trying to jump off the wall and rez the group but the sentinels wouldn’t let him get the rez spell off.  Feeling nice, I hopped off the wall, grabbed the sentinels, and hurled myself off the cliff, allowing the healer to rez the group.  I died of course.  The idea sounded good at the time.

With that, I headed off to the Commonlands and turned in the Knights in the Round quest.  There seems to be a lot of people working on the rest of the Swords of Destiny quests, so I’m hoping to piggy back on to one soon.  I haven’t been able to play a whole bunch lately though so we’ll have to see.

I’ve been away from Everquest II for a little bit while off on vacation, and while I had planned on blogging while away, well, we all know how those intentions turn out.  Quite honestly, it was refreshing to get away from the game for a bit, but last night my wife and I sat down at the command center and logged in to see what we could do.

We weren’t going to be on for very long so we were looking for something quick to do.  We still had Hadden’s Earring to complete with Ordeth and Saryan, so we headed out for the Ruins of Varsoon to kill Hrath Tvol.  We were both level 39, approaching 40, so the majority of the zone was grey to us aside from a few mobs deeper in.  It was no problem reaching Hrath, and no problem killing him either, in fact, the whole thing went a little quicker than anticipated.  Looking to do some killing before finishing up Hadden’s, we decided to head into the Chamber of Immortality to get Varsoon.

It had been a long time since I last killed Varsoon so I couldn’t remember how tough (or easy) the encounter would be for us.  The beginning void beasts almost had us, but Saryan kept throwing out the heals, and we managed to chip away at them until they were no more.  After that, it was pretty much cake.  The rest of the ring event went very smoothly, and then it was time for Varsoon himself. 

Ordeth and Saryan continuously used their roots to keep Varsoon at a distance while throwing nukes at him.  There were a few times where he broke root and commenced a beat down on Ordeth, but Saryan kept him alive long enough to re-root and back off.  Soon enough, Varsoon lay dead at our feet and we looted our second Exquisite Chest of the instance.

With that done we headed out to Thundering Steppes to finish up Hadden’s.  After turning in that quest, Ordeth dinged level 40 (Saryan had dinged during the Varsoon fights).  So in the quick time we were on (maybe an hour or so), we both levelled up, each got two achievement points, and looted two Exquisite Chests.  Not bad.