So after having fun in Albion and seeing what's changed there, we decided to check out Hibernia, our home away from home. Because we had characters on Percival, we picked that server. I was a little "grumbly" that for some reason even though I deleted "Velea" I couldn't recreate with a character named "Velea" right away, but I guess the name doesn't clear right away.

What has been the best part of starting over is that the first 20 levels go FAST! (And no, I don't mean because we used the /level command.) We started again just looking for quests in and around Tir na Nog. Not only did these quests provide us armor and weapons, by the time we were "done" both our characters were around level 14. And we'd only spent about 12 hours playing over the couple of days. (Again, keep in mind that some of this time was spent just relearning our way around the world and exploring some, so other's might be able to move faster.)

So having pretty well exhausted our possibilities in Classic Hibernia, we descided to move on to the Catacombs. Minor mistake, unfortunately. The Veil Rift is great if you want stories and enjoy questing for storyline because there are TONS of quests, but for us the experience we got wasn't worth the time spent. Many of the quests required killing grey mobs, spawns that had to be camped, and completing the quests became more of a chore than it would have been if we'd just going to do kill tasks in SI if we were after coin and experience. None of these quests have items as rewards either, so we were finding that we were quickly outgrowing the armor and weapons we had, so needed to do something different. With a few gold pieces in hand, we headed to make some purchases and then to SI to run tasks.

Kill tasks have changed since we last played too. When we played last we you'd have to find the right guard for your character and your level. Now it seems that all guards will give you tasks, and you can pick one guard to do tasks without having to change guard when you level. Kill tasks give you a huge bonus to your experience when you finish one. The guards give you a task to kill something that cons anywhere from green to yellow to you and tell you what general direction to find the mob in. You might not always be able to FIND a mob that cons between green and yellow (sometimes all you can find easily is a grey con, and rarely an orange con), but they do exist. It isn't the experience from the kill which really counts, though, it is completing the task without dying. Thanks to kill tasks, we finished leveling to 19 before our long weekend was out.

At this point we decided to see if there was anyone in the first battlegrounds. Midguard was in control of the center keep, and not all that well guarded by NPC's. We'd hoped that by attacking some of the NPC's and killing them, a notice that the center keep in this first battlegrounds was under attack and we'd get some defenders, but apparently that doesn't happen. If we were really committed, and wanted to spend a lot of time, we might have even been able to take the center keep with just the two of us, but as there were no rewards (no experience and no RP's) for fighting NPC's, we left the battlegrounds for bigger and better challenges.

Unfortunately kill tasks stop at level 20, but we finished up and got our "ding 20" before the weekend was done. Personally I'm pretty happen that in one long weekend we were able to get 2 characters each up to level 20. Things slow down signifigantly now, unfortunately. Kill tasks no longer exist. There are no quests for level 20 exactly, though they kick in at 21 again. Those quests haven't given much experience in the past, however. We'll see if that's changed. There are certian mobs that drop items which you can turn in for extra experience to some NPC's, but last time we tried these "collection quests", the drops were so rare that they didn't make much difference. And, of course, the next issue will be finding level appropriate equipment for our characters. Neither of us wants to craft this time around, and we don't know anyone on Percival to buy crafted gear from, so it might get interesting. I'll let you know.