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 Uber 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 uber 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 uber 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) uber 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 Uber 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 Uber 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