Keep me posted, I've actually never played an ice shard character before myself. Not enough pets.
Had a bit of a glitch in the Styx leader quest, by that I mean my quest rewrite was a total failure.
Having the quest item for a fetch quest an equippable item is a bit more difficult to process than I thought.
At least the job I did on creating an equippable oar was pretty good, I'm using it on my Ranger right now even though I can't complete the quest with that character.
The problem I face is how the quest knows which version normal/epic/legendary of the item you own when turning it in. Also, I still don't know if the quest recognizes equipped items as "has item in inventory". It may not see it and that will cause confusion to players, they may have to unequip the item to turn it in.
Anyway, I created a solution I think will work this time (ha ha).
Each Quest boss has three different monster files. One of which spawns when you go to do battle with them. A weaker one, an average one and a strong one. One of them is selected randomly from the "proxy pool" that contains all three files paths to the three versions.
So I deleted the weak and average versions of Medusa, copied the strongest one twice and renamed them to look like the weak and average versions.
I added each one to their own "proxy pool" individually. Every Medusa spawning in game will be the strongest version now. But that's not important, what's important is that I added one of each of the three separate pool files to the Medusa proxy in each difficulty. Normal, Epic and Legendary each spawn only one Medusa version.
In the same quest file that controls the Alal reverting to flesh from stone, I added the quest trigger "Player kills monster X" and gave a token "Normal Difficulty", "Epic Difficulty" and "Legendary Difficulty" based on which version of Medusa was killed.
The Gorgons are the very first quest boss battle that you can't skip, that's why I used that battle to give the difficulty version token and not the Satyr Shaman or the Centaur or even Arachne...those can be skipped.
So then I rewrote the quest for the Styx leader and oar and I could say "Player picked up Normal_Difficulty_Charons_Oar_Version" with "Has Normal Difficulty Token too" to make sure you are in the right difficulty with the right oar.
I sure hope this version works, it has a lot less to go wrong in the quest file as I only had to copy-n-paste each trigger and change the "has token" and "has item" values and not create multiple leader NPCs and such.
EDIT:
ANother thing I thought of is that if you turn in Charon's oar to the quest giver, you can just reload and kill Charon and get another anyway. That defeats the idea of it being a fixed choice.
So I created a trap skill for Charon's treasure orb that summons an invisible monster that dies and drops the oar from his initial chest and the repeat chest. THEN I cloned the repeat chests, accessory files and proxy and removed the trap skill.
In the xpack boss chest swap quest, I checked if you had completed the oar quest. If you did, you don't get another oar. Otherwise you do....since you can only pick up one at a time, you can at least farm for affixes.
I Made Xanthippus healing staff quest item into an equippable staff. It has a built in item skill which is basically a healing scroll for the party with a big cooldown. It also comes with a hefty pet elemental and poison resistance bonus. Otherwise it's a crappy Helos level staff as far as the player is concerned.
Keep it and you have a party heal skill you don't have to buy, turn it in and get a vitality resistance buff. Again, if you turn it in, the quest file disables the staff chest proxy. So you can turn it in or keep it, not both.