Outside Context

Ever­quest 2 the good and lvls 15 — 20

I have held off writ­ing a review of this game because as with all MMO’s you need to invest a lot of time in the game before you can judge it. I state here and now that I can­not judge the whole game at all. The later levels and full class bal­ances are as yet a mys­tery to me (and every­one else) as is the RAID lvl con­tent and Über Mob encoun­ters. We know they are there but I can­not step safely out­side Ant­on­ica without com­ing face to face with creatures 10 lvls higher than me and so can­not get to them. How­ever, I can state that I have been play­ing only this game since I got it and that I haven’t yet bought Half Life 2. If that isn’t recom­mend­a­tion enough, read on.

What I have for you is an ana­lysis of the changes and upgrades from EQ1 then some fur­ther tales of my adven­tures in Antonica

I recently com­pleted the clas­sic game Mor­row­ind. I had a full set of every type of armor, I was head of two guilds and I had ALL the spe­cial quest weapons (other than Bluebrand). I left my avatar in that game, hav­ing saved the world, sit­ting peace­fully with his loot arrayed around him in his room like an armory sculp­ture. Mor­row­ind was quite simply the greatest RPG I had ever played.

Until now. What did Mor­row­ind have miss­ing? Other people. Ever­quest 2 is two things. It is an answer to all the prob­lems, requests, and issues with Ever­quest 1 and secondly, it is Mor­row­ind with real people.

EQ2 is EQ1 fixed.

What did we hate about EQ1? I seem to remem­ber being very addicted to it and unable to think of much else dur­ing my days at work, this had the con­sequence of mak­ing me blind at the time to its myriad faults. I had fun in EQ1 because it was hard and I like group­ing. But what prob­lems were there? Thousands!

How­ever, fear not. I can tell you now that every /bug or /gm has been writ­ten down in a little book. Every exas­per­ated forum post, bad über loot encounter and night­mare 14 hour Hate Raid corpse recov­ery has been noted and pondered in a book.

This book is called “What will we do bet­ter next time?”. Well heres the top of that list and what they did in EQ2 to remove it:

1.Twinking. Twink­ing and eco­nomy over­load killed much of what made EQ1 great. It hurt see­ing a lvl 1 war­rior run­ning around in full Cobalt über armor and it hurt see­ing them flood­ing the mar­kets with sup­posedly hard to get swords and ruin­ing the prices.

In EQ2 twink­ing is a thing of the past. SOE have simply and effect­ively done away with it using four pro­cesses. Firstly, all items have a fixed level range before you can use them. You can­not give a lvl 7 (the low­est lvl that sees the main city) über loot and expect him to be able to even use it. Secondly, selling items is much more inter­laced than before. In order to sell any­thing using the games built in sys­tems you need to be in your room. thats right, stuck in you room. This of course leads to many afk sellers, who sell their loot whilst they sleep or goto work (like me). Long gone is the zone auc­tion chan­nel being drowned by a hun­dred people shout­ing out prices. The idea of price check­ing any­thing is very dif­fi­cult com­pared to EQ1 and there are no (at the moment) middle men who simply buy low and sell high through a day mak­ing a killing in the pro­cess. I know this happened, because I was very very good at it in EQ1. The third reason the eco­nomy is well is para­dox­ic­ally that mobs no longer drop money. In fact the only way to really get money is to quest for it. Nor do they drop quest loot you can sell eas­ily. This is because quest items are auto­matic. Should you need to kill 10 gnolls for a quest, on the tenth the quest will auto­mat­ic­ally com­plete without you hav­ing to loot any­thing. Rolling for quest loot is gone. Most mobs (so far) drop pages and spell books for crafters. Finally, the very best items in the game are attun­able. This means that you can sell them, but to wear them they need to be attuned and once they are attuned they become no-drop/no-trade. That item is removed from the sales chain. dropped Hand-me-downs no more. Twinkers no more.

2.Crafting. in EQ1 dropped loot was by far super­ior to player crafted.

I say dropped hand-me-downs above, because player craf­ted gear is bet­ter than the vast major­ity of early dropped items and quest items bet­ter than that. The whole sys­tem has been set up to bene­fit both play­ers who have put in the time to craft and questers who have put in the time to quest. Crafters make the same armor you can buy in shops but with bet­ter AC and, if it pristine, stats.

3.Camping was rampant in EQ1 with some­times a wait­ing list to even get near a mob.

Camp­ing, still to some degrees exists in EQ2, but it is a micro frac­tion to what it was before. Once again SOE ave taken a multi level approach to this ancient prob­lem. firstly, if a zone gets over crowded the game simply spawns another copy of the zone. Any zone. This leads to there being double the amount of spawns for the rearer mobs. Secondly, the game has been designed that the best mobs spawn in dynamic instanced zones, that act like little worlds, where a group of adven­tur­ers can battle through and no-one else can barge in. This I sus­pect is how dragons will be faced. finally, SOE have turned the idea of grind­ing on its head…

4.Grinding. EQ1 was fam­ous for the Grind needed to go up the levels, this situ­ation get­ting worse as you went on.

Gone, and good ridence. Well, actu­ally you can still grind if you want to but don’t expect to get any good items, or xp or gear com­pared to questers. Truth­fully, quest­ing gives far super­ior xp and items to drops and grind­ing. Some quests may ask you to kill say 50 of a creature, but that is really all there is left in the game. Hunt­ing is still there and alive and well, but camp grind­ing is a major thing that SOE have tried to get away from. About 85% of my xp in my 20 levels has come from quests. After lvl 20 hunt­ing comes into it a bit more with all the mobs being double red (very very hard). But even these mobs have a reason, all the classes get a full set of armor quests for post 20.

5.Questing. In EQ1 quests were a joke. In fact apart from the epic, I never even star­ted one.

In EQ2 quest­ing is of major import­ance. This is drummed into you again and again only the dif­fi­culty of the quests expands. Almost all the quest givers in the game now have full speech for their answers. The sys­tem for talk­ing to people has been changed from the night­mare EQ1 style to a full and easy to use “click the option” sys­tem. Many of the quests are funny, some are sad and some are ser­i­ous. Just walk­ing around the town trig­gers guards and NPC’s to beckon you to help with some sort of errand or prob­lem. All with exactly char­ac­ter driven voices. Some quests require you to speak a dif­fer­ent lan­guage, yes lan­guage means some­thing in this game.

Quests break down into dif­fer­ent types. Access quests give you keys or rights to hid­den or instanced zones. Whereas col­lec­tion quests just ask you to pick up a cer­tain amount of any items. There are also guild quests, whole­saler quests and well as hall­mark quests which must be com­pleted or you can­not pro­gress bey­ond a cer­tain point. For example, becom­ing a war­rior or choos­ing you sub­class are both hall­mark quests. all of these are kept neatly sor­ted within your journal, which acts as a reminder to com­plete all you have star­ted. This is dir­ectly lif­ted from mor­row­ind. As is ask­ing people for NPC loc­a­tions. The quest usu­ally has some sort of clue to which zone you need to be in to find the quest NPC’s and on arrival to that zone simply right click­ing on a guard enables you to ask him where you may find Mr so and so. The guard (if he knows) will point and a line (sim­ilar to the Corpse recov­ery line) will lead you to the required per­son. This is a magical bene­fit. The best quests ask you to group as to do them solo is almost impossible because Kit­ing is a thing of the past too. This is not too much of a pain as since every­one is on the quests and most mobs post 20 are red you will want to group any­way. Solo­ing whilst in the game is not the focus.

6. Fight­ing. In EQ1 the human war­rior had two but­tons. Attack and kick. that was it. I could leave these going and go make a cup of tea.

This for me was the BIG prob­lem with EQ1. I had very little to do in any battle other than taunt, which I did every time I kicked. I didn’t even have to click any­thing extra. EQ2 has solved the team dynamic issues. The war­rior now is no longer a final class. It splits (pain­fully to some) into a Dam­age Per Second (DPS) Ber­serker and a Tank based Guard­ian. Moreover both have a massive mul­ti­tude of spe­cial moves, stances, attacks and self and team buffs. I have two full bars of but­tons to press in a battle. I am required to ser­i­ously think when in com­bat and it takes all my atten­tion to cast the right spe­cial at the right time and bene­fit my group. Even bet­ter than this, SOE have intro­duced a chain spe­cial sys­tem called Heroic Oppor­tun­it­ies (HO’s). These allow a group to press spe­cials in a defined order to pro­duce a bene­fi­cial spell or dam­age to the enemy. So far only the very simple HO’s have been worked out, but it is thought that in RAID encoun­ters mul­tiple groups can cast HO’s together lead­ing to a kind of Über effect. This sys­tem is fra­gile. A wrong click can break the HO and the chance for dam­age is lost for a few more seconds. This has simply and effect­ively made any group knuckle down. There is no room for time wasters and good play­ers stand out a coun­try mile. No longer is Über just in your equipment.

7.Dying. EQ1 = 8 hour corpse recov­er­ies to the Plains of the Gods. Nuff said.

Dying is always going to hap­pen in any game, but it is in a MMO, which has no reload facil­ity that it has sys­tems that have reached the levels I am going to describe. Firstly, death no longer takes xp away. It simply adds red xp debt to your xp left for the level, dam­age to your gear and slight dam­age to your stats. That debt is big­ger or smal­ler based a few things.

I.If you get your ghost (shard) back from where you fell it is vastly reduced and stats returned to nor­mal.
ii.if you get raised from the dead by a priest it is vastly reduced and stats returned to nor­mal after a minute or so.
iii.If you are in a group and a mem­ber dies you get a little of their debt.
iv.If you log out debt reduces faster nat­ur­ally.
v.In an instanced zone you can click the door to get your shard back.

This has led to the end of EQ1’s zerg rush. When you die you get restored at a pre­defined way­po­int in a nearby zone (no longer will you die on the way to Kun­ark and have a CR jour­ney across 18 zones!). You also keep all you gear on you. All with a 10 per­cent reduc­tion. When this hits 0 you can no longer put on the armor or wield the weapon until you fix it. Your stats will con­tinue to reduce if you get killed again until you reach an unplay­able state. This will put an end to the zerg rush­ing seen in high level EQ1 guild tac­tics. And that is good.

Also under this sec­tion comes the con­ning of mobs. The game now has a rather neat sys­tem in place which gives you far more inform­a­tion than pre­vi­ously. you can tell if it is an easy mob for its type or harder. you can see what lvl it is and whether it is designed to solo play or group play or even mul­tiple group raid play. nifty.

This sys­tem is deadly accur­ate. You can be in a excel­lent group killing red conned mon­sters all day, but take on a times 2 group red con and your dead as a door nail.

8.Kill steal­ing and ninja loot­ing. In EQ1 the per­son who scored the most dam­age on a mob won the xp and items, also the fast­est clicker got to loot.

Whilst here in EQ2, a mob is yours until you run away and click break. No more will a mage simply nuke your mob out from under you and no more will you have people passing through pulling them off you. Once you hit that mob its yours. Also there will be no more argu­ments over who hit it first as the encounter is locked on the first blow. A groups leader can set the loot order to auto loto, which make sure that no one can ninja steel any­thing any­more. The loto sys­tem is ran­dom and people can click to not take part in it if they dont want the item.

PART TWO: Onwards to lvl 20 and beyond.

My exper­i­ences from lvl 15 to lvl 20 have been great. For earlier epis­odes check the archives. Over the last few weeks I have been con­cen­trat­ing to fin­ish­ing all the little quests left in the city and hunt­ing some of the more dif­fi­cult named mobs. I have also been scour­ing the dun­geons of Black­bur­row, which his full of gnolls and The Vermin’s Snye, which is full of the undead.

Some of the quests I have been on have been bril­liant. As you will remem­ber in my last post I had spied a char­ac­ter with a power­ful two handed weapon, [golem] AND I WANTSSS IT! [/golem]

Track­ing the quest giver down {cough! Google cough!} I was told to go and kill a num­ber of sea creatures includ­ing the very large Cold Wind Octopi that inhabit the zone of Ant­on­ica, just out­side the city.

Here I am swim­ming in the river try­ing to find the octopus

And here one comes!

After killing a few of these super cool hor­rors (I like octopi and squid!) I turned in for the reward:

I imme­di­ately decided to test this baby out on a more dif­fi­cult quest. This one was what is called an Access Quest. This rewards me with being able to go into a instanced zone. The quest involved find­ing a note on a dead ratoga in the dun­geon and tak­ing on a invest­ig­a­tion to find­ing out what the note means. The quest led me all over the city until I found someone who could finally tell me where the note points too. It seams that the tav­erns in the city are all mem­bers of a gang rep­res­en­ted by a coin. The guards told me that these coins are rare but he remem­bers a now dead noble hav­ing one.

The next step was a quick run down to The Down Below and then fight­ing my way through to the nobles. All of these were low level for me and I man­aged to do it alone.

I then had access into the instanced zone to find out who or what is behind the gang. Hid­den behind a staute of a man was a switch. This is what I found:

It Fippy Dark­paw! (who was in EQ1 – or at least his great great grand­father was). This NPC had the most bril­liant voice act­ing, which was very funny. I clicked some­thing like “Oh! your a gnoll who talks!” and he came back with “OH NO! A talk­ing gnoll! Call out the guard! Sigh.…you com­plete dolt!”. It turned out he had bet on me find­ing my way down here and now he had a little job for me. He has been sup­ply­ing grog to the tav­erns around Qeynos from down here in the dun­geons. He wanted me to col­lect the sig­na­tures on the mani­fest and bring itback to him. To hell with that, I thought. I col­lec­ted the sig­na­tures ok, but went back to the zone and killed every­one (Fippy runs away and I didn’t get him). I then turned the mani­fest into the guard for a reward (and a feel­ing of hav­ing done the right thing). A nice quest. Look­ing it up on the web showed I could have got a reward from fippy instead if I had com­pleted the quest his way.

Now that my AC was creep­ing up (always good for a war­rior) I joined a group tak­ing on harder game. We went around and killed yel­low and above cons. such as:

The Fan­glord! This mob had been the stand­ard wan­der­ing upper level mob you all­ways get in zones. I had tangled with him before and died so this was sweet revenge.

Valen. This guy stands atop a tumble down tower deep within the zone. He is needed for a quest and is non agro, but we decided to take him any­way!

The Cour­ier. This mob pops when you have a cer­tain quest. I will have to kill her again when I get the quest up to this stage myself. She was hard.

And even Queen Bright Fang (although in this image I wasn’t fight­ing her, this is the only one I have since I was far to busy tank­ing the bitch to be able to snap shots!). She lives deep within Black­bur­row and feeds upon the gnolls that have dis­turbed her nest. As you can see she is a won­der­full look­ing mob and show­cases this games great anim­a­tion!

After all this slay­ing I was now lvl 18 and ready to take my sub quest for lvl 20 and abil­ity to become a guard­ian. This quest was quite easy all told. I was sent out to kill a num­ber of gnolls (easy) and then tele­por­ted to an instanced zone full of the smelly dogs. Tak­ing my time I pulled them in groups and man­aged to kill my way through to the chief­tain. The story behind the quest was bril­liant. I was being asked to help stop a planned inva­sion of the city by the gnolls partnered with the Bloodsabers. The final two mobs were the nego­ti­at­ors in this pack. One was a bard, the other was a wiz, but they both went down.

Finally, I had made my mark in the game. I quickly built up the exp needed to ding 20 and went shop­ping! here am I in my heavy +20 only armor, nice! This is mostly Van­guard 20+ only armor.
I took the sur­name of the real Yagyu.

Armed up I was able to join in with higher groups. Zon­ing away from Ant­on­ica I joined a group as a third tank who were hunt­ing in Thun­der­ing Steps, a high level zone com­paired to me.

Our leader was a Paladin who had a horse upon get­ting to 20. Nice. He looked the busi­ness rid­ing around moun­ted up. Here you can see him in front of a Tripple Red mob (one of the guards) I guess I wont be able to solo this one!

Everything here is massively red to me but our team was very solid and we quickly racked up the kills:

Cen­taurs! These raise up thier legs to attack and you need a very high AC to be able to tank them even with two heal­ers!

Plus the named! Named mobs are all­ways dif­fi­cult. This one caught agro on our second healer as we moved through the zone, killing him in one hit. We finally took it down but I burned all my power to do so.

The group leader decided to go for lar­ger (sic) game. here we are killing Giants!

They are BIG! Giants are all­ways cool to kill. The graph­ics in this game are bril­liant.

But they do go down! Giants also drop nice loot.

I am hav­ing a really good time in this game. After a few battles, The Main Tank gave me some drops he no longer needed and in com­ing reports I will be telling of how I man­aged to get enough exper­i­ence to put them on and also the start of my own war­rior armor quests.

until then,

basho