Just this morning Davyydeous gained his final tradeskill level and is now a level 70 Armourer.  This was, without question, a very arduous journey for me.  When I first started playing EverQuest II I had no interest whatsoever in the tradeskilling component of the game.  Looking at the levelling history of Davyydeous, it shows that it was almost a full year after character creation that I reached level 20 armourer.  I found the whole process to be a real pain; this was back when you needed to create a bunch of subcomponents in order to make your final product.  I’d spend the majority of my time crafting washes, oils, and goodness knows what else before I could actually craft a piece of armour.

It was probably in my 30′s or 40′s that the system was changed to remove the sub-combines.  I enjoyed the process more, but I still found it to be a major grind.  I’d craft all my newly scribed recipes (minus the mastercrafted ones because of the cost of the rares) each level, and that would usually net me somewhere in the area of twenty percent experience towards my next level.  I’d spend the rest of the level just grinding out materials that ultimately nobody wanted and were in turn sold to the vendor.  It got quite frustrating seeing my wife’s sage get about seventy percent towards her next level from the newly scribed recipes in addition to all her stuff selling quite well on the broker.

Regardless, I stuck with it, mainly for the need to equip one of my alts.  Because of that alt, I forced myself to reach armourer level 50.  Once at 50, the biggest pain came from having to harvest in the Sinking Sands.  Competing with all the other players (and farmers) for the ore nodes was never a fun experience.  Levels 50 through 60 were easily the most difficult for me as an armourer.  60 through to 70 however, were a different story entirely.  I was stuck at level 62 for a few months with no motivation to continue crafting.  By this point they had introduced the tradeskilling writs which helped a little, but it still took a huge amount of resources and time (grinding!) to make any levels.

Then SOE introduced tradeskill experience for doing the writs.  This was my saving grace.  I completed one out of curiousity to see what kind of experience I’d get.  I just about peed my pants when I got about ten percent just for completing the writ.  This was the motivation I needed.  I was level 64 on August 1.  Today is August 10 and I’m now level 70.  I was receiving roughly 14% per writ turn in, and for the first time, I found myself without any tradeskill vitality and a desire to continue.

This morning after logging in, I almost immediately received a tell from a player asking if I could craft a full set of Xegonite armour for him.  I did so which put me about 20% away from 70.  With no vitality left, I completed another writ, then banged out a few more pieces of armour and got my ding.

Needless to say, I’m a huge fan of tradeskill writ experience!  Hopefully it’s still around at its current levels when I need to level up to 80.

Davyydeous raided the Labs last night, which is normally a pretty fun time.  Given that our guild has had Labs on “farm status” for quite some time, the time usually goes by pretty fast and the mood is light and carefree.  To be honest, most of the time I don’t even pay attention when we run through this raid.  Last night, that changed.

It all started when we first zoned in.  I hit my macro to assist our main tank, but for some reason it wasn’t working.  The Labs raids are typically run to gear up our newer raiders or alts, and on this night, it turns out our main tank was playing his Ranger alt.  That meant the main tank for the raid last night was now one of our usual off tanks, a Shadowknight.  A quick scan of the raid window showed that I was the only other plate fighter in the raid, in fact, the only other fighter period, which  in turn meant that I would serve as the off tank.

This was the first time I had been asked to actually perform a roll on one of our raids aside from “swing your sword and help kill stuff“, and quite frankly, it was pretty nerve racking.  I’m just a casual raider, raiding with the guild maybe once or twice a month, so I’d prefer on the rare times I manage to raid that I not be remembered as a screw-up.

In the end, all things turned out well, but it was a different experience from what I was used to for sure.  I certainly got an appreciation for how tough it is to keep aggro away from  a hungry mob of scouts and mages all trying to claw their way to the top of the DPS parse.  On the Pardas Predd fight, I managed to grab the two abominations that spawn halfway through the fight easily enough, but as soon as the rest of the raid started nuking them through me all bets were off.  I kept spamming my taunts, blew Rescue, Insolent Gibe, and did just about everything I could to keep them off our more squishy raid members, all to no avail.  While we got through the fight just fine, I still felt like a complete failure.

At the end, after Vyemm and Alzid Prime lay dead I had a chat with our regular main tank who told me that anyone would have trouble keeping aggro the way our raid was DPS-ing.  We had just wanted to tear through the raid as quickly as possible.

I was also finally able to upgrade my shoulder armour when the relic plate shoulders dropped.  I’m embarrassed to say that up until last night I was wearing tier 6 fabled.  I got a nice stats boost out of the relic… and I like the red too.