I’ve been busy in EQ2 lately, unsurprisingly, starting out with getting a bit further with tradeskilling on my illusionist. Just like my old enchanter, he’s a jewelcrafting expert, and got up to tradeskill level 22.

At this point I need components from higher-level areas, and ironically enough, my enchanter could survive in those areas but didn’t have a high enough gathering skill to actually pick anything up. Since gathering is somewhat tedious, I worked on raising those skills with my primary mystic instead…but he was too low level to survive in those areas just yet.

Ah well, the weekly Thursday group came and we worked through a lot of the quests in the Mok Rent area, finishing off all of the ones involving the southern areas and now we have the bird-guy quests still left to do. That got me to level 18, and then I accidentally hit 19 today when I forgot to switch back to 100% AA exp.

I did some more quests around the Antonica area with my mystic today, gaining a handful of AA points, and with those and the ones earned on Thursday, I’ve been able to start adding pet abilities. Now he can interrupt casters, and hastes the rest of the group by 8%. Soon he’ll be able to randomly proc wards on the group, as well.

And I also went back to Thundering Steppes and managed to successfully gather a bunch of tradeskill components now that I was higher level. It was only enough to bump me up to level 26 alchemy though, as the recipes use more and more ingredients and it takes more combines per level. I also learned transmuting along the way, though I haven’t really done anything with it yet.