What are some of the worse time sinks in EQ?

I know some factions take an obscene amount of time to raise.

Tradeskills? Achievements?

301 to 350 TSkills
Hunters
1.0s
PoP Flagging

Alaran tear, tradeskills post 345, AA grind on a new toon, expansion progression depending on the expansion and the toons power, gear farming for tanks, specialized aug farming for casters and priests, anything requiring a ground spawn, combat in water zones, caverns, logging into EQ, and forum questing.

OMM missions, Hunters, tradeskillz 300+, and sadly the worst one of all starting a new char. I would have been a Zerker 12 times over if it wasn’t for that.

BiC aug when it was current

Housing! At least it is for me, heh.

Finding stuff in Inventory. They keep giving us bigger bags, which amount to more hoarding, then we get even bigger bags and more hoarding.
Yes, we have search but you have to remember what the item is named to find it.

Doing like 400 LDoN's in era for the charm aug.

Finishing Master of Alaris achievement, especially the Sepulcher of Order quest lines.

You say PoP flagging, that can be done in less that 6 hours.

That factioning in OOW for the armor with the good clickies. Even with double faction bonus's it will take forever.

Farming type 18 augs

Hoping it drops this time (/crossed fingers) then getting well basically junk. Hey at least I can resell that in FV bazaar.

You have not experienced the joys of farming type 19's.

The frustration on a free trade sever with more notrade loot every xpac.

I'd love to see an hour estimate of each of these timesinks when the content is current. I have to imagine the

True Tears of Alaris
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=104752

would be champion, but I don't know how many hours it took to get whe ncontent was current. Today I think you can get it done in about 100-150 hours if you're able to quickly cycle the quests for the tablets.

I'm hearing estimates of about 300 hours to level the evolving items to level 5 via farming Stratos, not sure how long it's taking to do the 600 or so runs of Tempest Temple instances. If you combined that with the ~50 average runs of FF it takes to get the aug + doing hunter / collections / travelers + the farming for 18/19 augs it could get up to 600-1000 hours with the type 18s probably being the most tedious part.

I feel like quests like Hero's Journey or BiC may not count because they are long lists of different things to do vs doing the same thing over and over.



In terms of 2019 time and beyond, I think Old Man McKenzie has an advantage since it's a monster mission and you can't just overwhelm the zone. Sure it's not hard once you figure it out, but you can't pull entire zones in it.

Can put things into two buckets:
1) Things that were incredible time sinks in era.
2) Things that are incredible time sinks today.

(1)(2) Tears of Alaris. When first launched, fragments didn’t drop from random Alaran mobs. This made the time sink infinitely more ridiculous. Nowadays you can plow through Alaran mobs to secure fragments, which is my preferred approach. I just did this for my new tank and it took roughly 15,000 City of Bronze Alarans to get enough fragments + XP to max out my tear.

(1)(2) Artisan’s Prize. Ugh. The amount of effort that goes into taking trade skills to 300 isn’t bad at all nowadays. The AP quest itself is painful (Eron’s Jewelry in particular, rest is pretty easy). Of course, taking trade skills to 350 is one of the biggest nightmares in all of EQ.

(1) Coldain Ring / Coldain Shawl / Coldain Shawl Aug. Pretty meaningful timesink in era, but relatively quick now that you can steamroll everything.

(1)(2) Slayer Achievement. Some of these were just outright painful and repetitive.

(1) Dragons of Norrath Progression. I hate the repetitive nature of doing quests over and over again for faction. The primary reason why I always start a new character as a Heroic is that it comes with level 4 of DoN progression (wish it had level 5).

(1)(2) Certain Collectible Sets. An Ounce of Fetid Flesh (Crypt of Sul). Only drop in two heroic adventures from particular mobs. The drop rates are freaking rare too (I get maybe 0 - 2 drops per HA). Getting JUST this collectible set took me probably 5 hours with a full group of 110s chaining the mission. Ugh.

(2) Conquerer (Raid) Achievements for old expansions. When any mid-level character can steamroll raid mobs that are on up to a 1-week respawn cycle, it is ridiculously challenging to get these achievements. You basically need to set up camp for up to a week per raid mob or check in on a recurring basis and hope to get lucky. I know on some servers people have these timed and perma-camp them so they become literally unavailable to the public.

(1)(2) Certain Hunter Achievements for old expansions. Has anyone else done Hunter of Accursed Temple of Cazic Thule or Scarlet Desert? One named in particular in CT took me longer than 24 hours to get. Even with full zone clears this one took nearly an entire weekend of effort. Absurdity.

(1) Breakdown in Communications quest. I’ve never done it, and I’ve done almost everything in EQ... The write-ups look daunting to say the least.

(1)(2) Veteran Reward AAs. Been progressing towards maxing this for nearly a decade straight and not even done yet! (Just kidding)

(1) Spirit Wracked Cord. I remember doing this in Kunark era circa 2000. Maxing Chardok faction was a great feeling — could run around the zone and find the NPCs wielding staves or shields to cherry pick the good loot.

BoC quest! Crazy long quest that involves both group and raid drops so not only does it take forever, it pits guild members against one another!! Classic EQ at it's best!

ForumQuest.

Alaran Tear was the first thing I thought of when reading the thread title, and it's no surprise multiple other people posted it too. In addition to adding the clickable fragments to Alaran drop tables that you mentioned, another thing people may not know about the original VoA era form of the tear is that after VoA, Dzarn severely nerfed the total amount of evolving item xp needed in order to finish it. The original version of the tear required 7,250,885 total item xp to reach the max level. He nerfed it down to requiring "only" 2,500,140 total item xp. To put that in context, the maximum item xp you can possibly gain from a single kill is 131 points, and that's if somehow you're killing red con mobs completely solo with no mercenary. For the un-nerfed tear, that's a bare minimum of 55,350 total Alaran kills with no possibility of fragments dropping to click, if you're leveling it purely by killing. But chain killing red cons completely solo isn't really very realistic. More likely the best you could do would be farming blue-yellow cons in a full group in Pillars of Alra. If your average kill was an even con level 95 Alaran in a full group, that's 41 item xp per kill, or in other words realistically about 176,851 total Alaran kills to fully evolve it, if leveling purely on kills. Anyone that actually finished the original version was awarded The True Tears of Alaris which is almost the same as the regular tear but with +1 to every stat. I'm not really sure on specifics, but I think less than 20 people serverwide managed this crazy feat before the nerf.

The item lore on The True Tears of Alaris...
This ancient artifact is a testament to its owner's dedication to the ritualistic dismantling of the Alaran race. Some would call it psychotic, others say dedicated...

Would be interesting to see how many people have finished the OEQ Hunter Achievements. I know it's waaaay easier in a big guild that has semi-permanent hunter raids.

Quilmane.