Shattered Kingdoms

If you get a full-enchanted weapon to begin with you will level very quickly in my experience. The problem is once you reach higher levels and for non melee classes.

As for buffs, I completely agree that everyone and their mother shouldn't be able to use almost all spells in the game. Those logs with people buffed by 12-20 spells is just insane and ruins the uniqueness of the professions.

On a side note I think the whole tiny/small/medium/large/giant damage modifiers for races are too big. No wonder noone wants to play a melee dwarf or sprite.

As for enchants I also agree that they are too needed at the moment if you wish to survive battle. Take something like MP, its ridicolous (how it spelled?) that some people have 50 mp on their suits making them almost impossible to kill. I'd like to see a system where enchants are a lot more rare, if you think about it, its MAGICAL armor, it should be rare! Perhaps it should be stripped from sorcerors and priests?!

Maybe just make every weekend give the xp boost instead of during random rp events. I was looking at the past schedule of events and the time between each one can be long, or very short. Why not just do every weekend as an xp boost reguardless if there is an rp scheduled?

Generally they are spaced by six weeks. I know that I'm not solving this entire issue, but I'm actually working on having Bonanza events every week or two instead of every six weeks. I've already stated the next event is running on the evening of October 24 and the day of October 25. After that I've scheduled another half dozen events before the end of the year. Its not every day, but it seems like a better idea than every six weeks.

Leveling is not hard at all and it doesn't take very long either, if you know what you're doing.

Fighters, if you get an enchanted (good) tanso weapon and a suit of STORE BOUGHT ARMOR can hit Mentor+ in 20~ hours. I see countless lowbie mercs/barbs with like katanas and utter crap for armor. It is not that hard to get 2 obsidian and go BUY a suit of tanso armor from a shop.

After mentor/master it gets a bit harder for fighters.

Casters have the benefit of not needing EQ at all to level, but they take longer to get to Mentor~, though they can for the most part get from level 1 to level 50 completely solo.

I made this suggestion a long time ago (through an intermediary) with a very eloquent and in-depth argument behind it. Once again, D's basic response was apparently "I don't want leveling to go quickly, [I want to drive players away via boredom]."

It has nothing to do with ease and everything to do with entertainment.

Exactly, Dulrik doesn't seem to understand this fact. People play SK to be entertained not to use 60+ hours grinding NPCs or 3+ hours being in jail.

People already whine their asses off about "OMG I GOT KILLED FOR NO REASON!" or, "OMG THEY JUST KILLED ME FOR MY LEWT, WITH NO RP!", imagine how much worse this would be without the thought of jail time in the back of people's mind. Execution doesn't mean anything when you have a priest to immediately rez you, and confiscation can be, and is easily avoided 90% of the time.

And if it takes you 60+ hours to get to a point where you can start to enjoy other parts of the game (Mentor~) you seriously need to talk to someone and get some tips on leveling. Any class that can wear heavy armor and use a sword or any class with the spear skill can get to Master in roughly 25 hours. Priests and shamans are a pain in the [REDACTED], and the casters aren't too bad.

If you consider that once you spend 40(?) hours getting your character to Master-ish..you can then play that character for another two, three, four, even five hundred+ hours. It's not really that much.

I got my current character to GM in about 100 hours, only about 40 of that was spent "grinding".


P.S. Also, if you suck at leveling, do yourself a favor and max your charisma. Pretty much every class/race/cabal/trib combo gets SOME benefit from charisma.

I think the point being made is that not everyone knows all the primo gear or the hax lvling routes (cause you really do have to know which spots to hit and when or you're lvling is all sorts of fubar'd) or how to get lotsa coin quickly or a lot of the other tricks that people 'in the know' find common knowledge and don't even have to think about. This is true for noobs and newbies alike... ESPECIALLY newbies, I'd say.

In my opinion you need to be master/champion before you start enjoying your char but that may differ from player to player. I think PKs are entirely fine as is because that is part of the fun of the game, you can avoid getting PKed if you want to or don't [REDACTED] off the wrong people. So having to spend time in jail because you PK (which is part of the fun) or being outlawed in an entire country is beyond my understanding. It is like saying:"No more fun for you".

As for leveling, you might not think that 60 hours in front of the screen grinding NPCs is much but I do. Considering I can play 4-6 hours a week it takes a pretty long time before I reach a level where I can enjoy my char. There are alternatives to SK where you don't have to spend so much time in boredom.

As for maxing CHA that might be a solution for some classes but my shaman will be short of those stat points elsewhere so that really isn't a solution for me as well.