I loved Morrowind, but when I think of the amount of time I spent casting a lock spell on a chest, just so I could unlock it and gain experience in that skill...over and over...and all the other things...it just is a bit embarrassing. I could never mention it outside of this forum!
Yeah, certain skills in EQ were painful to bring up to decent useful levels. I actually did fishing on my cleric main just to do it. I think I wanted the ability to catch certain fish in various places for cooking and possibly brewing too. Yes, I was crazy enough to do crafting in EverQuest. I like it actually. I should remember this well and now I am drawing a blank but I loved the crafting area on the ships. It was an awesome place to go hang out and craft for hours on end.
I always though of the time waster stuff as just being relaxing activities, very low key screwing around just to relax and have fun doing whatever. There was always some carrot at the end of a very long stick too and it was satisfying to finally get it. I camped certain mobs in relative solitude for many hours at a time to get something good from them. Remember the pain of placeholder mobs? You'd wait for the mob to pop again after killing it only to get the placeholder again, not the named that maybe would drop whatever it was you were after and maybe they wouldn't so you'd have to keep trying longer still, perhaps a great deal longer. I must be nuts but to me there was something fun about all that. It was a definite love/hate thing. We all complained about it and yet we all did it for various stuff.
I remember camping Vaniki for his slowing weapon for my little SK alt. It was an awesome weapon for him to have solo, whack the mob until slow lands and then swap via the bandolier to your good weapon and hack the slowed mob to death. Good times! The elusive rat Vaniki finally popped after a very long time but then I ran into an unexpected problem. As a cleric, I relied heavily on reverse damage shields to kill stuff but I had no snare. Speaking of which I cleared the almost the who damned Plane of Growth so I could forsake my religion and kill Tunare for her slowing weapon that a cleric could use but I grew impatient and didn't finish the clear, taking my chances. It did not go well. The rest of the zone came running when she called and they all swarmed and killed me. Then the zone fully repopped because too much time had elapsed. I never did go back and try that again. Anyway, so I finally get Vaniki but he turns and runs away at low health and gimpy cleric hammer dps just isn't enough to kill him without a snare and my dps constantly breaks any roots I cast on him so I just can't kill the bugger. Fortunately, a friend of mine ran all the way out there to help me and as a monk her dps was so good the lack of snare was not a problem. Actually, think she may even have had an AA snare but she would not have needed it to kill him before he got far anyway. The SK was already parked at a good spot to run in and loot the no drop prize from the dead Vaniki so I logged me out, logged him in and bingo! Little guy gets wicked uber weapon. So sweet!
Man I loved EverQuest. I still love it. Pretty soon I am going to go level another alt there. I have a bunch of fully twinked out to the max alts with really nice classic twink stuff, toys, full sets of defiant and fabled armor to take them all the way to around level 75 or so. It's really fun after time away to go play one. Last time I leveled my baby Mage up to 75 I think it was solo and he was kicking butt and taking names, him and rock man his earth pet. Tons of fun!
I am so dumb sometimes but I am going to leave this little off topic nostalgia trip up anyway for anyone who ever played EQ or might wonder what it was like. I thought you were talking about skilling up lock picking in EverQuest which also would be a time consuming affair of many clicks. I forgot what the heck thread I was in. Sorry!
Anyway, EQ is open world old school fun. It's a little like Morrowind when you solo actually just an order of magnitude more time consuming is all.
