The Potion Maker

Tradeskills, as I've outlined in another post depicting "Research," is a fun way for players to kill time, but also do something useful. Let's not talk about how much of video gaming is a time killer anyhow - no more than golf without the Vitamin D or grabbing a drink with friends without the expensive bar tab, but for this context, we'll look at how they add to the player's experience.

One thing that EverQuest did extremely well was making items "social objects." Given the ease at which players can transfer items, especially since many of those items provide such crucial quality of life enhancements, the act of crafting things like potions was incredibly lucrative. However, in the developer's infinite wisdom, they made it so that only Shamans can use this skill.

It makes sense from a lore perspective. Gnomes get Tinkering, but you don't see much else in the way of tradeskills for each race. Classes have specific crafting, such as Rogues and Poisonmaking, and many casters are able to do various types of research depending on the ingredients.

Even for research, players might need some help having a spell formed, or even pay to have it made so they can sell it, themselves. Social items are a great way to incentivize organized communities or at least economies within the world, but having social tradeskills is a must-have. It's in the name, afterall.

This piece shows a Troll Shaman making a Spirit of the Wolf potion. These allow whoever consumes them to run at an increased rate. Character movement was fairly slow, which made traversal dangerous and outrunning an enemy practically impossible without additional help from a spell or player. Spirit of Wolf - or SoW (pronounced "s-owe" by almost everyone's standards) was a buff that people literally begged for. It not only cut down the time from point A to point B, but it also allowed casters to "quad kite" - a technique where a character would run four enemies around until they stacked on each other, and then hit them with an Area of Effect spell for ultimate mana-to-exp efficiency.

Without SoW, characters would have to MQ (main quest) the Journeyman's Boots, or JBoots for short. Like any MMORPG, there was a shorthand for common practices and items.

In hindsight, I should have included the distillery that is required for the tradeskill (which someone online very passionately pointed out to me). However, a gathering of ingredients for preparatoin will have to do, for now.