I am 2-boxing a warrior & an enchanter with a friend playing a druid. We have 1 cleric merc, 1 melee merc and 1 casting merc. My warrior is 75 and enchanter is 73. My friend's druid is 73. All 3 of our accounts are gold and we are auto-granting AAs. We are all in elegant defiant gear. All 3 toons got the AC25 augment from Dragonscale. My warrior has all DoN augments & weapons. My enchanter and friend's druid only have augments found along the way. We have been hunting lately between Dragonscale Hills and Direwind Cliffs (hot zones). Do we just keep doing hot zones? At what level or expansion do we need to do faction work or quest lines to upgrade our gear from elegant defiant? What about weapons and jewelry? I guess I am looking for a checklist of gear so I know when we move to the next piece (expansion). We do not mind grinding to get a needed piece of gear, we just need to know what that gear (expansion) is. Thank you for any assistance.
Hi, You can do some important level-appropriate quests such as DoN progression and MPG group trials. There is such a huge gap between level 75 gear (250 hp per slot) and level 80 gear (800 hp per slot) that you're best off waiting for those levels and re-gearing after 80. This set of armor is tradeable; otherwise it's found in the reward chest of the first group progression mission of the House of Thule expansion. http://everquest.allakhazam.com/search.html?q=terror infused linked Named mobs throughout the HoT expansion commonly drop pieces to craft Abstruse gear, so that's another route. (Bear in mind, it's a little bit expensive to craft.) http://everquest.allakhazam.com/search.html?q=abstruse At 80+ you can ask guildmates for - or purchase inexpensively in the bazaar if you're lucky - a few thousand Dream Mote and buy the non-visible gear (rings, etc.) from the faction vendor. http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=35714 Because there were so many expansions released over a period of several years, levels 70-80 have by far the richest hunting grounds in EQ, with great XP to be had in at least 2 dozen zones. You can find awesome level appropriate content all throughout the following expansions: Omens of War (2004, level cap 70), Dragons of Norrath (2005, level cap 70), Depths of Darkhollow (2005, level cap 75), Prophecy of Ro (2006, level cap 75), The Serpent's Spine (2006, level cap 75), The Buried Sea (2007, level cap 75), and Secrets of Faydwer (2007, level cap 80).
Since you have Gold accounts, at 75 you can try to do the quest line to upgrade your mercenaries from J1 to J5. The content is more appropriate for level 85, so if you'd like to do this I would strongly suggest dropping a merc or two and asking a high level friend to carry your group through the content. It would take about 90 minutes. https://articles.eqresource.com/mercoverview.php At 75, you can begin to do Heroic Adventures until your face goes numb. This will provide enough currency to buy more augs than you can ever use. You can also do progression to unlock vendors for The Broken Mirror expansion at 75+. http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=8049
A fairly good option at 75 is to start SoD (Oceangreen Hills). You get Paragon gear as rewards, it is about 900hp/slot, and quite a lot of quests are rather easy.
I did the TBM quest at 75 to unlock the Aug vendor. I bought the vendor gear which isnt much but the Augments you buy is what made the gear really strong. I used it until 105 (with upgraded augs of course) and didnt run into any issues at all. I think you can buy Remnants of Tranquility from the bazaar for pretty cheap. You only need a couple hundred at level 75 to get a full set of equipment+augs. If you want to upgrade the gear every 5 levels you'll need to run those TBM missions pretty frequently. The higher level you are the more you get per run. Heres a video that walks you through it all.
