Well, the Legacy of Ykesha expansion went live last night. There are a few new zones but the majority of the expansion seems to be user interface and content oriented. There's new recipes for at least the majority of the tradeskills. Suprisingly this even includes some new old-world style poison recipes for the first time in a couple of years. There's more bank space for people like me who collect up tons of tradeskill components and quest crap. We get a new Charm slot which seems to be pretty novel. Most importantly to tons of people is the ability to change the color of what you are wearing on the fly. Additionally there are a number of new quests. All in all it is more or less a year's worth of normal content all added at once it seems like. That's why it was only like $18 rather than $30 I suppose.

I like that I can now color my armor to match. However, it is kind of cheesy that it is the character that is getting colored rather than the armor. Trade the armor to someone else, and it takes on its original characteristics. Put a different piece of armor on yourself and that piece of armor is now the dyed color. This is exactly the same way poisoning works for rogues so it isn't too suprising but it does kind of remove the player another step from reality.

The new dye uses brewing and pottery as the tradeskills for creating the dye reagent. This was just the kick I needed to hurry up and get my brewing skill up to a decent level before Verant makes it more difficult to do so. Consequentially I spent an hour or two last night getting it over one hundred before I got sick of working on it. I can only click buttons mindlessly for so long. On the plus side it was pretty cheap to do and wasn't nearly as bad as some tradeskills are. I didn't have to worry about pottery since I'm already at 150 or 160 in that from making poison vials. Once I got to Gunthak and figured out how to make the vials I made myself five of them. I would have made more but I'm currently seriously lacking in cash. On the plus side I didn't fail a single time so didn't waste any money.

I actually only used one of the ones I made because Greg had given me five earlier in the evening. Since my head and hand slot items are invisible I only needed a total of six. Earlier I had noticed on the test server that you couldn't set the dyes to be darker than something like R24 G24 B24. If you set them to anything lower they reverted to that. My Ravenscale breastplate was R30 G30 B30 so I figured I'd see how dark I could get in blue or green. Interestingly enough I was able to set the color to R0 G30 B0, and it worked just fine. Dark green didn't look quite right though so I played around until I came up with R0 G30 B30 which is a dark blue-green. It looked quite impressive on my dark elf so I dyed everything that color. It preserves the dark, rogue-ness of my look while still being quite stylish. The lack of visible gloves really makes the dark sleeves look interesting compared to the original state of my bracers (uncolored chain.) I had been worried for awhile that I was starting to look pretty crappy with my dark gold pants, grey boots, and default chain bracers. Luckily this expansion came along so I don't have to worry about it any more.

The second feature I really like is the increased bank space. As a rogue without a ton of money I end up saving all the poison components I find until I have enough to make up some poison. This means that I need a ton of bank space just to hold the components. I think right now I'm using like twenty slots just for that. I also do a lot of random questing. That means at any time I probably have twenty or more no-drop items in the bank that are parts of quests I'm working on. Then there's my pile of stat armor for working on tradeskills. That takes up another ten or more bank slots. I could go on but I think that it should be obvious that I'm somewhat pressed for space. My bank was so crowded I had twenty or so slots on another character filled with my rogue's overflow. The extra bank space is nice. Now I don't have to continually shuttle items between characters to get enough space to do anything. Of course I still need to get my overflow food and gear off of my other characters and give it back to the rogue.

I haven't gone hunting for a charm slot item so I can't really comment on those yet. I did see a cool one linked to me though. It was something like 'gets more powerful the less people are in the zone' or something. It didn't say what its power was though but the idea was quite intriguing. Hopefully all the charms will be interesting things like this. Hopefully whatever they affect will be tangible enough to be worthwhile too.