Basic Character Creation
We’ve already been introduced to Percii, the Gnome Magician in an earlier post, but I didn’t go into the character creation process. The reason being… there isn’t much to it!
Upon character race, class, and religion selection (I ended up going Agnostic) you can choose one of 8 faces per gender, and allocate your starting statistics.
Why is this important? Unlike other RPG’s, once your character has their stats set at creation time the only way to augment them is with spells and equipment. You never get more points to invest. Depending on who you ask, that means that starting stats are incredibly important, or barely worth a thought.
I went with my standard for any Caster class: pump as many points into Intelligence as possible, and any leftover goes into Stamina. You are given 30 points total, and can put up to 25 in one stat.
Here is what I ended up with:
Quick Aside: Character Stats
Your EverQuest character is primarily defined by several primary statistics, all of which would be familiar to any tabletop RPG fan:
Strength
Effects: Attack Power (ATK), Carry Capacity, martial skill learning speed
Importance: Low for Percii, as weight reducing bags can be bought or summoned!
Stamina
Effects: Hitpoints (HP), Endurance (ENDR), and amount of breath for swimming
Importance: Medium to Low for Percii. Getting hit is going to be bad in any case due to armor restrictions. A little more HP won’t hurt!
Agility
Effects: Dodge and Defense Skills, ‘Avoidance’ Armor Class, Movement Speed (Below 75!)
Importance: Anything below 75 makes you run slower, which in a game with limited fast travel is a huge handicap. Percii’s innate Agility was fine.
Dexterity
Effects: Bard songs, some martial skill learning speed, critical hit chances, ‘Procs’ (special weapon effects)
Importance: Low for a mage, not worth investing in.
Intelligence
Effects: Trade and Spell Skill learning speed, and most importantly: mana caps
Importance: High! More mana = less downtime
Wisdom
Effects: As Intelligence, but for Priest classes.
Importance: Low for Percii - Intelligence is our casting stat
Charisma
Effects: Merchant prices, Enchanter and Bard spell effectiveness
Importance: Low. Very few if any spells in the Mage’s repertoire requires Charisma, and merchant prices aren’t wildly impacted.
A First Step into Norrath
Once you select your brand new character and enter the world, you are greeted with…
You Have Entered Ak'Anon
What's this? No tutorial… no opening cutscene… No fanfare?
That's right.
It’s just you next to a waterfall and a really intimidating looking guy named ‘Priest of Discord’ (Don’t worry, he’s pretty chill overall). Oh, and another player's corpse just sitting there rotting away.
Here’s the thing. This is how it was in 1999 and we loved it. Or at least, we say we did.
EverQuest from the initial moment is open ended. There isn’t much in regards to an overarching story that you follow along with outside of small incidental or discovered pieces. You aren’t here to do anything other than follow your heart and sense of adventure. The only instruction we will have is that we can go to our characters ‘Guild’.
So what does that mean for Percii? Let’s take a look at what we have in our starting inventory and see if we can find any clues as to what to do next.
Quick Aside: Interface
The original EQ interface was this beautiful piece of art that really felt at home with any other 1st person RPG of the era such as Might and Magic or Wizardry.
Unfortunately the limitations of Project1999 don’t allow for this interface to be used anymore. Instead they have a close approximation to what is known as the ‘Velious UI’, which came about near the same time as the expansion bearing that name. While not as interesting looking, it maintains about the same level of functionality and limitations as the original classic UI. I’ve adapted it to be 4:3 ratio for the viewport as widescreen views weren’t well supported back then and everything looks a little off.
Initial Inventory
Let's take a look at what we entered the world with:
By bringing up the Persona screen we can see the details about our character.
Our equipment slots are at the top of the screen, our stats, resistances and weight allowance down the right side, and our pockets for carrying goods in the bottom center.
Right now we have
No Equipped Items, and what appears to be
Food,
Drink,
3 Individual Papers, a
Book, and a
Dagger.
Almost all characters start this same way - although non casting characters would only start with one piece of paper. We can hover or long-click on any item in order to see what it is!
Skin of Milk
This is a
NO DROP item, which means it cannot be placed on the ground, or traded to another player. Milk, as you can see, can be enjoyed by all classes and races. No lactose intolerance in Norrath!
Bread Cakes
A ‘Hearty Meal’ means that it will fill up Percii’s stomach for longer than a ‘snack’ or ‘light meal’. Between this and the milk we should be good for a while. You will notice this and the Milk both have a Weight and Size. Weight contributes to your overall burden (we can carry up to 60) and Size determines what kind of bag it can go into.
Registration Letter
This looks interesting. Many items have a right-click ability to engage with them. By doing so on this note we get the following:
Welcome new student of the Eldritch Collective. Take this Registration Letter to master Wuggan Zuesphere at the Library Mechanimagica. He will be your new instructor. Study Hard, and you shall obtain your goals!
Again, no fanfare, but this is our first quest. If we can locate
Wuggan Zuesphere in Ak’Anon and deliver them this note we will be able to officially ‘Join’ the guild of Magicians. It will also lead us to where we can train our
Skills and purchase additional
Spells. Speaking of… what are these other papers in our pockets?
Spell: Minor Shielding
All magic users begin with two spells. Minor Shielding is shared among all of the Caster classes and is a basic buff that increases your max HP and your AC for a limited time (about half an hour). Percii cannot cast the spell from just this piece of paper. We will get to that in a moment. This spell also belongs to a specific school:
Abjuration. The more you cast this spell the more your Abjuration skill will increase. Higher level in a spell skill reduces the occurrence of ‘fizzles’, or failed castings. These can be devastating - depending on how deep into the cast time you get before you fizzle, you will still expend a percentage of mana AND lose the spell. Not fun in the middle of a fight.
Many spells increase in power as your character levels up. At this point casting this would give us about 6 HP and 3 or so AC, and caps at power at around level 5.
Spell: Burst of Flame
Our second spell is going to be our primary damage output for the next few levels. As part of the Evocation line, Burst of Flame is a direct damage single target spell. At level 1 we can expect it to do about 3 damage to an enemy, depending on if they have resistance to fire or not. Thankfully this isn’t much of a worry at our level.
Tome of Order and Discord
Our first
LORE ITEM and… the first item we are going to use that big ‘
DESTROY’ button on in our inventory. We are able to give this book to the Priest of Discord standing where we initially loaded into the game. He will then flag our character as a PvP participant. This is universally a bad choice on any non-pvp dedicated server. By doing so our name will turn red, we will be able to be freely attacked by other PvP players, and worst of all… no beneficial spells can be cast on us by non-PvP players. It severely limits who you can group with.
Percii will not be going down that path!
This is a good point to explain the
LORE ITEM tag. A single character cannot have more than one Lore Item in their possession. Many Lore Items are required for, or the reward from, a quest. There is a spell ‘Identify’ that can give you information about a Lore Item. Later,
LORE ITEM was added to several items that the developers didn’t want players to be able to abuse by ensuring they could only have one of them.
Dagger
And last but not least, a simple dagger. Weapons are typically not going to be a primary focus for us as a caster, but at lower levels it is important to have something to fall back to in order to damage enemies when our Mana runs out. Weapons can be slotted into your
PRIMARY slot for most characters, but can also be used in your
SECONDARY slot if you have the Dual Wielding skill (which only Monks have at level 1). All weapons also have a
SKILL type (Piercing, 1 or 2 Handed Slashing, 1 or 2 Handed Blunt) which determine your likelihood to hit with that weapon. Using a weapon increases the skill over time. All weapons have an
Attack Delay and a
Damage stat. For us this isn’t important since if we are falling back on our weapon for damage we are likely already dead. However, Melee classes will look for specific weapons that have a favorable speed/damage ratio.
Now that we’ve gone through what our pockets contain, let’s get equipped. We can put the dagger in our
PRIMARY slot, Destroy the Tome of Order and Discord, and then get ready to use our spells.
Putting our Spells to Work
Spellcasters in EverQuest follow the same general pattern:
- Find, Research, or Purchase a Spell.
- Copy the Spell into your Spellbook.
- Memorize the Spell to one of your 8 spell slots.
The Spellbook starts completely blank and can be pulled up from your inventory or by the /book chat command.
A Beautiful, but empty spell book.
Each page has a slot you can put a new spell into. You cannot have a duplicate of an already known spell, and it is possible to move them around once they have been scribed. This can be useful to help you keep things organized as you get higher level spells that make earlier ones redundant or useless.
By right-clicking my two spells, and left-clicking on a blank spot I can put them into my book. Higher level spells take longer to scribe. Each of these took about 5 seconds.
Now we’re playing with Power!
Now that we have them copied, I can then put them into slots of my spell bar. I usually put my most efficient damage spells in slots 1 to 4, and then buffs or utility spells in slots 5 - 8. Memorizing a spell of your current takes about 20 seconds, but that time decreases as you level up. Hows that for Immersion!
The final step is to select a target and cast the spell. Let’s try out Minor Shielding and see how it helps:
6 HP, 3 AC. Could help us take 1-2 more hits against a level 1 enemy!
The spellbook also has a button named ‘Meditate’. This is a skill for Casting classes that unlocks at level 4. We will discuss it in more detail, but it is a big differentiator of EverQuest from other MMO’s.
Skills
I’ve mentioned Skills in several parts of this update, but haven’t really reviewed what they are. Every Character has a specific set of skills at level 1 based on their class and race. As your character levels up they unlock more skills to use, and get 5 Points that they can allocate at their Guild Leader.
Percii's Starting Skills
Like any 1st level character, Percii isn’t good at much. In fact, she is ‘Awful’ at just about everything except Common, Gnomish, Dwarvish, and Tinkering (a gnome racial skill).
Using a skill actively is the most common way to raise it. Many of these skills are also capped each level using a simple (level * 5) + 5 formula, with a ceiling around 200-255 depending on the skill. At first level most of our skills will cap at 10.
Spell Skills
Percii's most important and most used skills. Most of our skill unlocks will happen in this category as well.
Abjuration, Alteration, Conjuration, Divination, Evocation
These dictate how often you fizzle at a spell when casting their respective school. Raises naturally through casting spells of the appropriate school.
Channeling
How likely you are to continue casting while being hit in combat. Raises when hit during casting.
Meditate*
Shown as a bug - we can’t use it till level 4.
Combat Skills
A grouping of skills that while important for melee and hybrid classes, will be generally ignored by us.
1H/2H Blunt, Hand to Hand, Piercing, Throwing
Likelihood to hit a target using a weapon of that type (or bare handed for Hand to Hand). Raises naturally by attacking with the appropriate weapon type equipped.
Defense
Directly raises your AC as it rises. Improved by being attacked by enemies.
Offense
Directly raises your ATK as it rises. Improved by attacking enemies.
Tradeskills
All Tradeskills allow a player to craft items for their own use or for sale.
Baking, Blacksmithing, Brewing, Fletching, Jewelry Making, Pottery, Tailoring, and Tinkering
You can learn any number of tradeskills. All of them are raised by attempting to make items with a difficulty at or above your current skill level.
Language Skills
There are a total of 24 languages you can speak in EverQuest. Nobody ever does.
Common Tongue, Dwarvish, Gnomish
How clear you are in Chat when speaking said language or what you can understand when speaking that language. Every character starts at 100 Common Tongue (fully fluent). You raise it by hearing someone speak the language. There are many other languages we don't know yet!
General Skills
These are skills every character regardless of race or class has access to. Some are useless, some are useful.
Alcohol Tolerance
How quickly you recover from drinking alcoholic beverages and how it affects your stats. Raised by drinking!
Begging
Non-hostile NPC’s can be begged from, and you may receive a small amount of money. A failure can enrage the NPC and cause them to attack you!
Bind Wound
Heal a character up to 50% HP using Bandages. Helpful for downtime reduction but raises slowly and can be expensive (unless you are a Magician!)
Fishing
Buying fish and tackle and taking some time out to relax. Every game must have a fishing minigame by law.
Sense Heading
There are no maps in classic EverQuest. Sense Heading allows you to determine which cardinal direction you are facing. Raised with use. You can’t get a false trigger on this thankfully - you either know the direction you are facing and are alerted, or you don’t and it clearly says so. Raised through usage. Fun Fact: dropped weapons will always orient their blade due north as an alternative!
Swimming
Determines the speed at which you can move in water and at high levels can allow you to stay underwater longer. Important situationally - there is a whole zone (Kedge Keep) that is underwater and a slow swim speed will make it unbearable!
More skills will unlock for us as Percii gains levels - most notably at level 4!
What now?
Fully equipped (with her meager possessions), spells at the ready, I think it is time to explore Ak’Anon and see if we can’t find the Guild Master Wuggan Zuesphere at the Library Mechanimagica and turn in our note. It’d also be a good idea to start looking into additional spells we can cast. Hopefully we can find them in the Library Mechanimagica alongside our Guild Master.
CURRENT STATUS:
Level: 1
Location: Ak’Anon
Goals: FInd Wuggan Zuesphere, Discover new spells, Get to Level 2!
I hope this deep dive into some of the minutiae is interesting or, at least, enlightening. There is a lot to unpack if you never played this on live. So much of the Dungeons and Dragons and early MUD roots of this game are apparent in almost every design and gameplay choice that has been made.
Next time I hope to get a video overview of me touring Ak’Anon and surrounding Zones and a breakdown of the quest structure and our first taste of combat!
