Everquest lore has always had gods to worship. In the Everquest 1 days you were able to pick you deity of choice from character creation. When Everquest 2 was first released the gods were absent. The story behind this lies in the departure of the gods over 500 years earlier. With the Echoes of Faydwer expansion pack some of the gods have returned. With each expansion pack a couple more gods have also returned. There are currently 14 gods in the game 5 evil, 5 neutral and 4 good. You can choose to serve or follow a god that you are aligned with.
The benefits of worshiping a god are nice. You get powerful spells and abilities called Blessings and Miracles. These are limited in use because they tend to be very powerful. The Miracles last for 10 minutes and the Blessings are only usable for 20-30 seconds but are usually a difference maker in a raid or when in a sticky situation. I guess that’s why they are called miracles. Now you are allowed to use each miracle and blessing once every hour and you only get two uses. You’ll need to find an Altar to worship in order to obtain the abilities again at a cost of Favor. Favor is basically faction and works as currency to use the blessings and miracles. You will also get a Pet that behaves very much like a wizard’s familiar in that its only purpose is to enhance one of your main attributes such as Strength, Agility, Stamina, Intelligence and Wisdom. You also will receive a Cloak once you have fully devoted you allegiance to your god. These have some nice stats as well. Each god will provide a different set of blessings and miracles that will not always benefit your class so it is important to find the right god to get any real use from them.
You will need to be level 25 before you can seek out your deity of choice. Once you are ready you can head over to the Butcherblock Mountain Docks where you can talk with a Deity Historian which will lead you to the Prophet for your deity. These NPC’s also serve as merchants to buy the base Altars and books for crafting advanced Altars such as the Deity Altar Crafting, Advanced Deity Altar Crafting and Decorative Deity Shrines that Carpenters can craft. Altars are used to house your blessings and miracles. This is where you will go to get you abilities and to donate or sacrifice treasured items to the altar to increase favor which you can use to get your abilities. The better the altar the cheaper your abilities will cost. The best altar that can be crafter is the Imbued ones while the best altar in the game is the Ordained one that is dropped from Mayong Mistmoore which is NO-TRADE. Better altars means the abilities will cost less.
Once you have made a decision to follow a particular god you will need to locate the Prophet. The Prophet will start you on a series of devotion quests. There are five in total and they are available at different levels of your character development. By completing each devotion quest you will be granted rewards such as an Altars, Pet, Cloak, miracles and blessing along with some favor. There are five miracles and five blessings for each god. These are unlocked upon completion of each of the devotion quests. The 1st, 2nd and 4th quests are usually Soloable while the 3rd and 5th ones tend to require some assistance since they are heroic.
There is one more benefit you will receive that is very rare. Every so often one of the Avatar’s will descend to Norrath if enough favor has been collected by worshipers of that god. The Avatar will remain on Norrath for 1-3 days or until they are killed. Only one god’s Avatar can remain on Norrath at a time. If the Avatar representing your god is up, you can approach them and receive a small 5-hour buff. Another important note about gods is even though you have completed your entire devotion quests does not mean you are stuck with the god. You can just visit another prophet and begin your devotion to your new god. The other important note to this is you keep your cloak and altars. Now the altars are not usable but the cloak still is. For more information of gods check out the next EQ-IQ show.
More information on The Gods…..
Which Deity For Me?”, Part I: The Benevolent Gods
Deity 101: A Quick Overview of the Deity System of Everquest II
Deity 102: How the Norrathian Gods Came to Be
EQ-IQ God List (84.7 KiB, 603 hits)