One thing about double experience weekends, is that they do show up ... less often than we would like perhaps, but they do arrive. And for those returning after a long hiatus and those just starting ... I thought I would repeat some of my old advice ... First of all, plan ahead ... Simple enough ... by this I mean that you should think bout what you want to accomplish ... level up just one character? level up several? Concentrate on getting more AAs? By planning, you first have to establish an answer to those questions ... then you need to think about what zone is appropriate for each character ... who will you group with? Guildies? Friends? Just you and your box sets (my usual choice)? Other questions that you should think about are how many hours will you try to stay on line to get the most experience. Will you work until you drop? Just do a couple hours here and there? More than usual for a weekend? Less? For my part I wanted to try to even up the characters in my 2 accounts so that more of them are at level 85 (At present I have one level 90, and 6 level 85s in the other account). So, my secondary account is in better shape level wise than my primary where the majority of the characters were in the 70s ... from just 70 to 75 with three 65s ... With both accounts having a substantial number of veterans the long term goal has been to pair them up at 85 and work teams through lesson each day to maximize experience and over time get a solid set of level 85 or better teams ... and this last weekend was the time I hoped to accomplish this goal ... bringing 8 toons in my primary account to level 80 at least ... and finishing a couple toons in the secondary account to level 85 ... That *WAS* the plan ... and to that point I was planing to work zones I was familiar with, that usually have no one else in them and to do lesson to get the maximum amount of experience and only take time off when health flagged. So, I actually started to work early with the onset of Frostfell where I had been long planing to camp the Guradian's pouch for the characters that I had that did not have the pouch but could use it. While camping the Guardian I also worked on a couple of the lower level 70s and in the process of getting 4 pouches (I need one more) I leveled one enchanter from 73 to 76, warrior from 72 to 75, bard from 73-75, SK from 73 to 80, and a rogue from 72 to 75. I earned on merc point on my main and qualified several characters for bane strike. With the double the spawn rate on rare named, and the Guardian seemed to qualify, I managed to get three drops in one 4-5 hour stint. With the SK at 80 I also ran him out to get his HoT T1 jewelry and as complete a set of Abstruse as I could find ... and I also answered a call for help to complete the J5 merc series and qualified one more of my level 85 characters with the J5 Mercenary. When the morning of dawned ... I noted where each and every character was on both level and AA count ... for most toons I run 90 / 10 to experience as fast as possible, but to allow me to buy some of the critical AAs along the way ... level 85 toons are at 100% AA as I am trying to flesh them out before proceeding. Anyway ... I managed to, with insomnia helping, to catch lesson on most occurrences of its 20 hour cycle throughout the weekend ... meaning that I managed, I hope, to get the maximum experience with minimal effort ... On a side note, if you don't pre-prepare, at the end of a long double experience weekend you will likely have several hours you will have to devote to updating the spell book(s) and combat abilities of the characters you level. If you buy all the spells you expect to need BEFORE the weekend (planning remember) you will be able to simply scribe them as you level up ... in my case, I have quite a few level 70 dropped spells on each of my toons so this was already done for me ... but ... This Monday I spend most of the day reviewing the characters, updating spell books with the other spells not ready to hand and cleaning out inventories of build up junk ... oh, and updating the inventories of my merchant mules... In the event, I failed to reach my goals in the sense that I only managed to get one more character to level 80 ... and initial impressions of my gains was not good ... BUT ... When I totaled the gains across the board it is not too shabby ... I earned 346.96 AAs and 22.99 levels across 18 characters ... and if I did not get that many to 80 ... I have several at 78 and with a little concentration on those I am sure in a week or so I could have them at 80 as well ... I hope this helps ...
Excellent post Feistmaster! I definitely agree with your points here. I also learned over last double exp weekend it's better to stick with the zones you know (lol) but it's no big deal as I've never been a level rusher anyways. I enjoy the journey more than the actualization of hitting level 100 As for spells, I would suggest cleaning out your inventory and making sure that any items you keep are at the bottom slots of your inventory (new items will appear in top-most and left-most bags, with empty inventory slots taking priority over bags). Once you're all cleaned up you can go to the merchant, make sure you have "Show only items you can use" checked, which will filter out any spells you have already Memorized, and then filter the spells by Lvl (top right corner of merchant window). This will allow you to purchase all your spells evenly so you when it comes time to level up, you can just go to the top of your inventory and memorize spells without looking for the ones of your level. Happy Holidays and good luck everyone for next double xp!
things to work on before leveling fast: get bigger bags and clean out inventory- can allways sell after the double exp is over. plan on gear upgrades - pre -plan quest that give gear upgrades and exp pre- buy upgrades in the bazzar pre-spells in the bazzar Identify 3 places to get exp each range of levels and what quests in that camp can you get free exp - some camps will be taken http://almarsguides.com/eq/leveling/
My main carries 3 40 slot trade skill bags and 7 - 32 slot regular bags and has at least 4 of them empty at the start ... even so, I had to sell twice as I was getting so many drops that were too valuable to let rot ... at the end of the weekend I had made nearly 200K from drops ... though I spent more than that on filling out spell books and armor upgrades ... And planning on gear upgrades, if you have time enough before hand, you can farm for your characters ... which is what I had done to this point ... Though I have not been able to take my teams into HoT zones yet without having my, er, head handed to me ... So, for the moment I buy the abstruse I need ... The HoT jewelry, I had anticipated and bought Dream Motes in sufficient quantity to allow me to get all the toons jewelry ... and in fact it is likely that before I get more chars to 80 I will be leveling my main as I am down to only two open lines of AA skills that are not maxed out for level 90 (another 20-100 AAs ... not sure how many more sub-levels are in the two open lines). Anyway, thanks for the additional thoughts ... Like I said, there will be another double experience weekend ... and if you have not done one, or it has been a long time ... hopefully this will help you make the most of the opportunity ...
Thanks for this post, very useful. For me getting ready usually involves buying a half dozen copies of the ltest expansion and working out where to head to. Was looking at coming back and only came to the forums to see if there was a double XP event going on or coming up. Any ideas when the last one was an when the next one might be ? Always surprised that SoE don't send out blanket emails when they do double XP events. I'd love to receive them and hear about them in advance. edit : Darnit looks like I just missed a double XP weekend. Strange time to have one when folks are so busy preparing for Christmas. Hopefully I'll catch the next one.
IIRC they tend to cluster in the front part of the year because that is when most of the holiday weekends are ... look for three day weekends with a Monday holiday as the likely candidates ... in the past, usually would start Friday at 10 AM PST and run to Monday at the same time (Though I have vague memories of them running it till Monday Midnight - though that may be simply senility setting in ...) .
Also, stock up on Red Bull and get to know your Domino's delivery guy. He can enter the house and personally give you the pizza.....
Personally, I don't like double xp weekends. Yes, they're fun and help me getting to aa goals. But, on my server (Firiona Vie), it tends to bring the worst out. I was in the Grounds and there was trains galore (well, more than usual). It was just really ridiculous. Which is why I tend to stay away from double xp weekends.
As long as you are not run over by Mages Beam kiting zones.. you should be fine..... but since the amount of people doing zone wide pulls has increased exponitanally ... its a good chance Crushbone will be the only place to go to not be trained.
The problem with zone pulls is that in many of the smaller zones the one group essentially locks up the zone for their own personal use ... no one else can use the zone due to the lag introduced by the mass pull ...that is one reason why you should scout for a usable zone that maybe has an instance type that you can use (Quest zone) so that you will be the only group in there ... the only bad thing is that for many of these instance zones, there is no re-population so you have to go in, use up the content, the leave and get another instance ... and with many of these quest instances there are lock out timers associated with them ... SO, back to the planning idea ... I had been worried that a group of level 100s that was coming down to a level 75 zone I was planning to use would have been there that weekend. Luckily they did not
