The Magician's Tower

Warning: Unnecessary preamble...

After leaving EQ in ~2004 I came back about 8 months ago and have been connecting up here and there and having a good time slowly relearning the game. I left around the time of GoD - for reasons completely unrelated to the expansion release though - and was in a "casual" raiding guild at the time. We were elemental flagged but hadn't made it to time yet. Now, of course, I'm mostly going it solo or boxing a druid on my wife's account and grouping up whenever I can get more than 30 minutes in a row to play.

I've just recently made it up to level 75 and while it would be easy to keep going and level up to 80, buy some HoT gear and zoom up to current content I'd rather not skip everything I've missed in the 6 years away. Time constraints prevent me from joining 'progression guilds' or even dreaming of raiding again, so I'm content with mostly solo/molo/2-boxing with the occasional group when I can. That doesn't mean I don't want uber-gear and leet supa-powahs! OK, I exaggerate, but I do like to work towards a goal that isn't merely watching the AA count increase. So I've gone and done DoN progression up to the first required raid (Emoush), I've done a bit of factioning in TBS, until I realized no matter what your faction you can't buy the raid drops with loyalty crown-purchased phosphenes (phosphites?) and gave up and researched the spells. I had my epic 1.0 but recently finished the 1.5.

Having hit level 75, I'm now currently at a loss as to how best to improve my gear beyond the elegant defiant that I am, for the most part, wearing. In particular, there are two things I'd like to improve - my pet focus, and my spell foci (e.g. fire nuke mod, casting haste, etc.) I've purchased the energized wire coil from Fenden Helter for the Spire Servant focus, but I'm looking for advice on anything better that I can obtain that is wearable at my level. Level 80 would get me EMIV through the loyalty vendor, but I'd like to stick around 75 for a bit to see some content I missed.

Likewise, the focus effects on the elegant defiant are ok, but I'd like to improve those as well. Unfortunately the SoF tier 1? gear has worse focus effects. I haven't looked closely at the fenden helter sold equipment, but I couldn't find a fire nuke focus in his list of items either. Any advice on where to look for this? (N.B. With the zone revamps, I'm going to try for glowing othni gear).

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

Unfortunately, you aren't going to get much better than Spire Servant at 75, unless you do void progression to at least VoidC+ ... or raid.

There's the SoD cauldron EM1 focus (Skull of the Spire Servant, yes it's mis-named) which you can occasionally find in bazaar or someone giving them away. That works decent if you tend to gear up and take care of your pets. There might be a TSS focus (servitor of scale) from zeka earring? Probably required 80 though (see below).

At 80 a whole range of options opens up, EM4 from Loyalty, EM4 from UF (see danille's link), EM5 from HoT/bazaar. Then there was the anniversary things, EM4 (or 5?) from last year's and EM8 from this year's, those are gone for a year though, but something to keep in mind if you're staying 75 for a while.

If you have no qualms about not earning your gear, you could try to mooch a dzadd for a Discord Tower win (unlocks EM7 aug in void). I dislike this kind of crap, but some folks are fine with it. [edit] EM7 wont' focus TSS pets anyways, NM.

As far as gear goes... yes, Othni is probably your best bet at 75.

Thanks for the advice - it does appear that many more pet foci open up at level 80+, so I'll have to consider that when I'm deciding when to bite the bullet and level up.

I was thinking about doing some of the SoD progression (assuming I can find some groups to do so), at the very least for upgrading the mercs so that could provide a pet focus increase. That said, I'm not sure what gear accepts Type 3 augments. All of the "[qualifier] Dyadic Quartzite" augments that have the pet foci are type 3 and Zam isn't too helpful for searching for gear with particular augmentation slots.

Pretty much all the non-visible slots from SoF expansion and higher have a regular version (type7) and an uncommon version (type7 & type3). Viable gear at 75 would be:

SoF T1 ~250hme (65required/75recommended) -- DSH/Loping Planes etc
SoF T2 ~300hme (75/80) -- Beza/BMK/HoS/etc
SoD T1 ~275hme (70/75) -- OGH/OGV/Temple of Bertox
SoD T2 ~400hme (75/80) -- Kithicor/Old Commons

These are all attuneable, you can find them in the bazaar. On my server the resellers tend to snatch up type3 gear and put insane prices on it, so be wary. Also, check out raspers for more info:

http://home.comcast.net/~mathadon/Guides/index.html

None of the revamped (legacy) gear has type3 slots that I know of.

All UF and HoT gear is req 80 at the lowest tiers. Might be a few exceptions, but none I can think of offhand. SoF and SoD T3+ gear is req 80, and has been rendered obsolete by entry level HoT/UF gear.