Last week we took the advice from some of the engaged commenters here on the site, and conveyed ourselves northeast to Nektropos Castle. It was, pretty much from stem to stern, completely awesome.

Nek Castle is a crazy old rambling shack in the far corner of the Nektulos Forest. There are quests associated with it outside of the castle, but I noticed when researching the place that there were an awful lot handed out inside too. This one element of the instance, quests on the fly, made it well worth the effort of working through the instance’s crazy-fast repop rate. My experiences in EQ2 so far regarding quests have been mixed. Some of the quests themselves have been highly entertaining, but with no ability to share there’s always a lot of confusion about what we’re actually doing.

With all of us essentially given quests at the same time, it made it incredibly easy to coordinate what task we were doing at any given time. Several of the quests were ‘access quests’ that unlocked different areas of the castle. While I normally find this kind of thing a bit obnoxious (oh keys, how I hate thee), when the quest to unlock the wing of the castle are given out … inside the castle … it is a lot easier to swallow.

We only got about three or four things done in the course of our play session, because we spent some time figuring out where things were and such. Found some good resources during our run that will help more this week. Very much looking forward to the chance to get back into things.

Another element that has me looking forward to this week is my updated gear and spells. When I dinged 30 I went shopping to update my stuff, as you do, but I realized last play session that I mebbe kinda did things a little backwards. I grabbed some good plate gear, but I only realized in the middle of fighting last time that I hadn’t really spent a lot of time actually looking at the gear. Looking over my armor, I seem to have gotten a lot of +strength +stamina gear, and not so much +int and +wis gear. :P

So, this week I’ve been haunting the broker for deals on different level 30ish armor and updated spells. Just got a few new heals in the last few levels, and I really needed higher than Apprentice I. I splurged and got Adept level for my big heal, because the different between Apprentice IV and Adept I was huuuge. Gear-wise, I had to be very frugal, but I did find stuff that’s got me set on at least some +int and +wis on every item. Most excellent. The only thing I didn’t have time to research, and I wonder about, is whether I should consider going to leather or cloth armor. Do non-plate armor sets have higher bonuses to those all-important attributes, or does plate armor at each level have similar bonuses that I’ll be interested in? I’m pretty much only a healer, and I don’t need to worry about soloing; I don’t even really care about mitigation that much. More thought is required.

I’ve also been doing a lot of tradeskilling. Spurred by my renewed interest in the game, I’ve been bumping my level up again on that side of the equation. I wasn’t *too* far behind, so I’m a level 28 carpenter now. It’s been really awesome making furniture for myself and my allies, but err … now that I’m getting higher in level I kind of wish I’d focused on a different pursuit. My hope was that sales of carpenter crafts would sell fairly well, but unlike in Galaxies it seems like folks are fairly happy with simple apartments. This means that turnover is low, and carpenter stuff goes fairly cheaply on the broker. Our team has a set of pimped out apartments, but ehh … would have been nicer to be a Chef, I think.

As it seems folks are always willing to assist with advice, I have another question for the EQ2 vets in the audience: If you’ve played evil side, what do you think of the Inquisitor as a healing class? How does it stack up to more ‘pure’ healers in the game? Any suggestions for making me more effective in my party role?