I occasionally get asked what quests Maltheas is working on, so in the absence of any desire to talk about the iPhone 4, I thought I’d share his current quest journal!
In the early days of EQ2, collections counted towards your quest limit! Thankfully those dark days for questers are no longer with us, but we are still often up against the generous limit of 90 active quests. Maltheas has 5 free slots at the moment, after a serious effort to clear up some tome quests, which will quickly vanish the next time he decides to load up.
Maltheas' Quest Journal
The lowest level one there, “A Key to the Past” has been a thorn in my side for about four years. It is a quest set in a peculiar little instance called the Tomb of Valor in Stormhold. A chamber is filled with wandering undead, and sarcophagi which begin to open. You need to quickly close them again, or else more undead appear. While being attacked you can’t shut sarcophagi, so it starts going downhill from there. Malth is at the point where he is in very little danger down there, but he still can’t deal with the undead fast enough to keep all the sarcophagi shut and get Lord Chesgard to spawn. I haven’t given that a go for a couple of levels, so should probably have another try sometime soon. I’d probably do better if I did not feel bound to chronomancer down to a level where the undead are green, to give them a fighting chance!
Most of the greener ones are in heroic dungeons, such as Runnyeye. Heroic dungeons are soloable, but you do have to accept that it’s going to be a bit of a slog, and you usually need to be a few levels higher than if you were grouping. Maltheas can currently get about halfway through Runnyeye before it starts getting totally impossible, and it’s the quests that need to go further that remain. Deathfist Citadel is similarly unpleasant, and only the sewers beneath it are survivable at the moment. The green Nektulos quests are actually in the D’Morte Burial Chambers, from the old Bloodline Chronicles adventure pack.
For every quest there is a time, and their time has not yet come. Extreme Questers enjoy pushing their limits, but at some point you have to accept that certain things are impossible at your current level!
N'Kzak the Unnatural - A battle for another day.
I’m probably going to let Maltheas level in the next few days, once I’ve cleared up the rest of the quests in his journal that I think might be doable. Levelling to 42 is tempting, as you get a big power boost from being able to use mastercrafted gear, but I’ll try to see what 41 can manage first. Maybe that will be the magic number that brings Lord Chesgard to his well-deserved end.
Do you have a quest, in whatever MMO you play, that has been sitting in your quest journal for years?
Pretty much every quest in LotRO…
I was checking over my EQ2 quests last night. I think that EQ2 allows for the build up of more quests then any other game. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
On one hand, you have a backlog you can return to any time whatever you’re doing isn’t “doing it” for you at the moment. On the other hand, the reason you have the backlog is because maybe those quests were too difficult ot just plain annoying back when they were “level appropriate”…or maybe you got somewhere where the quests offered were beyond your level at the time, and you just haven’t gotten to that level yet.
This might be bad design, but I like it. Being able to collect stuff to do on a rainy day is comforting, because you’re not necessarily left looking for something to do.
Oh my goodness, that’s a lot of quests.
Is that what extreme questing does to people? Because my obsessive-compulsiveness can’t handle that.
Oh, filling up your quest journal is easy! It’s emptying it out again that is the tricky bit!
Like Scopique, I love having a nice full quest journal, filled with mighty deeds that need accomplishing. Or perhaps just a bit of an old book that, for whatever reason, I mysteriously feel sure I can find the missing pages for on some blightrats.