Heh. If we're helping out the newbies, just have to comment on this:
Debalic wrote:
Later on, when tradeskilling for later quests, you can buy the skills from a guildleader - buying the first point from 0 takes you to skill equal to your current level.
Everything else is good advice. Just this one point is technically wrong. When you put your first training point into a skill, you automatically start with a skill equal to the level that you first gain access to the skill.
So if you get Dual Wield at level 13, then putting one point into training will give you a 13 skill. If you get research at level 16, you'll start at skill 16 in the skill.
However, if you wait until level 50 to put that first training point in, you will still start at 13 and 16 respectively. It's the level the skill first becomes available, not the level you buy it.
All tradeskills are available at level 1. The first point you put into them will give you a skill of 1, no matter what level your character is when you buy it.
As to the general issue of tradeskilling. It's really about what you enjoy doing. It will pretty much always cost you money to build up a tradeskill. There are ways to reduce your cost, but the game itself is designed so that it always costs you something. Even the "free" components that you hunted for could have been sold to a merchant instead of used up making something yourself. The game developers spend a great deal of work to make sure that you can't build up a tradeskill *and* save yourself money at the same time. You have to pick one. You either save money (sell items to vendors or in the bazaar, and buy the stuff you need) *or* you gain skill with a trade (use the items to make something, but get something that you could have purchased for less then the cost of the ingreedients). That's a pretty firm rule in EQ. Tradeskills always cost you in one way or another.
That's not to say that you couldn't bring along a few loaves of bread and make sandwitches with any meats you find as you hunt if you want. Heck. Lots of people simply don't loot and/or destroy stuff that's "cheap" since it may not be worth the bag space. If you'd destroy it anyway, but can get a skillup chance using it, then that's all good. However, you're still making a choice to get the skill up at the expense of time/money. You really can't cut corners in EQ (and when you can, the SOE guys make an effort to find and remove them).
As to the Rivervale guards thing. While they don't technically "roam", they can be quite annoying. The problem is that the guards are KOS to a very large number of mobs in Misty. And the mobs are relatively dense (close together, not dumb!). What I've seen happen *alot* is that a mob will wander within agro range of one of the Wall guards. He'll go running over to kill that mob. But when he's done, he's now far enough out away from the wall that's there are a couple more mobs now in agro range, so he'll run after those. I've seen them go on killing sprees where they'll run around like madmen killing everything within a pretty big radius of the Wall. I've seen them run up and kill mobs I was trying to kill as far as the top of that first hill.
Waaaaaaay back in the day, I used to farm this area for Bixie honey (for the stein quest I think, or maybe it was for the SSoL). In either case, it was a very noticable pain in the butt. So much so that I found hunting in Kithicor was better even if I had to wait for the sun to come up first. I never liked MT for hunting. There just really were never enough of the right kind of mobs one might want to hunt to make it really good exp, even solo. I always found the commonlands to be by far the best "group" newbie area, and Halaas by far the best for soloing a character. But that's just me...
