Character Development

EQ2 offers you numerous ways to develop your character. There's much more to the game than just gaining levels. We've already touched on some of them, such as Collections and Questing. Let's go over them in a little more detail.

Experience
The most obvious way to develop your character is to earn levels in his class. You gain levels by filling your experience bar with experience points. There are several ways to earn experience points in EQ2:
 * By killing a non-trivial creature
 * By exploring a new location for the first time
 * By completing a quest

Tradeskill Experience
In the previous section, we described adventure experience. There is also tradeskill experience. Your character has a second experience bar for tradeskill experience, which earns levels in his tradeskill. You can see this second experience bar in your Persona Window (press [P] to open it).

You earn tradeskill experience by crafting items. See the Taking Up a Tradeskill section below for details.

Achievement Experience
Starting at level 10, you'll earn a third type of experience: achievement experience. At this point, you'll have three experience bars. You can see your Achievement Experience bar in your Skills Window (press [L] to open it). This experience bar goes toward earning Achievement Points. See the Achievements section below for details.

Vitality
When your character is well-rested, he earns twice as many experience points from every victory in combat. (There is also tradeskill vitality, which affects experience from crafting items.)

Each time you get double experience from vitality, you consume a bit of it. If you play for long periods of time, you may run out of vitality. How do you regain vitality that you've "burned"? Simple - it regenerates about 1% every hour, whether you're logged on or not. It takes about 1 week of real time to accumulate 100% vitality (if you started with none).

There's a little yellow arrow on your experience bar, which shows you the point on the bar at which your vitality will run out. If you have lots of vitality, then the arrow is probably at the end of the XP bar. Point your mouse at this arrow to see a tooltip about your vitality.

Debt
When you die, you incur experience debt. This debt shows up on your screen as a small amount of red on your XP bar. While you have debt, your combat victories will only give you half as much experience as usual. Debt will evaporate over a period of hours if you were to wait, but you can repay it immediately by killing a handful of monsters.

Achievements

 * Main Article: Achievement Abilities

Achievements are the principle way of customizing your character. You'll begin earning Achievement Points at level 10, and you'll spend these points to receive Achievement Abilities (often abbreviated as AAs).

You earn Achievement Points by accumulating Achievement Experience. Achievement Experience is a separate pool from your regular Combat Experience, and has its own XP bar.


 * Spending points
 * Respeccing

Traits and Traditions

 * Main Article: Traditions

Taking Up a Tradeskill

 * Main Articles: Tradeskilling and Tradeskill Timeline


 * Overview of mechanics
 * Recipes and work orders
 * Getting started

Buy a House

 * Main Article: Category:Housing

Buy a Mount

 * Main Article: Mounts

Learn The Languages

 * Main Articles: Category:Languages

Master Your Enemies

 * Main Article: Lore and Legend Timeline

Earn Status

 * Main Articles: Category:Factions, Status points

Choose a Deity

 * Main Article: Category:Gods

Change Your Alignment (and maybe your class)

 * ''Main Article: Betrayal Timeline