West Karana

And I have the title to prove it.

I didn’t reroll as an Ice wizard :) I was just spending my mornings as I often do, killing Bastilla in Firecat Alley to try and get one of her rare pet drops — it KILLS me that I haven’t gotten a rare pet yet — and she dropped, along with a rare staff, some rare robes, Chillcloak. For all that it looks like Luke Skywalker’s second best clothes, it’s a pretty unique look. Half cape slung casually over one shoulder. Matching hat and shoes to complete the outfit.

If you look behind Tara, you won’t see the crowds of Wizard City or the blinding glare of Krokotopia. Tara is standing in the central square of Marleybone, its eternal night lit dimly by the glow of shop windows and the flickering magics of the minigame portals. She finished Krokotopia. Well, that’s not *exactly* true. But she did earn the right to go to Marleybone; she didn’t get there by tagging along on someone else’s ticket.

The Arena Master.

I started off Saturday night, after getting back from helping my son move to college, having just barely achieved access to the Krokosphinx, the second quest hub in Krokotopia. The main storyline for that section is the rebuilding of the Order of the Fang, an ancient society that once protected the Krokonomicon from misuse by those undeserving of power. That vile tome was stolen and the Order killed or scattered. Those wizards who venture into the Krokosphinx are there to gather them together once more, both the living and the spirits of the dead. And if the situation of the servile Mander people may be improved, so much the better.

I met up with someone who was just a quest or two ahead of me. He helped me catch up, and we worked together through the Grand Arena and the Vault of Ice.

In the Grand Arena, the Arena Master sets you ever greater challenges to prove your worth to (if I remember right) earn one of the three badges that identifies the bearer as a member of the Order of the Fang. That, and a trip through the Vault of Ice, earns you the right to defeat the minotaur champion at the front of the Sphinx. There’s always people willing to help with that boss, who has 2000 points of health and three friends, because he has some interesting rare drops.

The Order of the Fang sends their love.

That fight ended the night. This morning, I soloed the Emperor’s Retreat instance (which I did again later to help someone with the scarab collection quest), and that earned me my second badge and membership in the newly invigorated Order of the Fang. I left them to continue the good fight and headed into the Temple of Storms.

Somewhere along there I picked up a friend, Oran Ogrestrider (or something like that, call him Oran O.) He was level 10, and I’d probably met him while farming Bastilla at some point. There was definitely no reason for him to be in Krokotopia — 15 is really the minimum level for the second world. But, what the heck.

Unlike most kids who zap in to high level zones, he would stay to fight. Even low level people can be somewhat effective, and while I wouldn’t want level 10 people popping in in Marleybone or Moo Shu, Krokotopia is still easy enough that it doesn’t matter so much. Farming boss mobs so much gives me fairly decent gear (though no rare pets…).

I’d been hanging out with ANOTHER Oran (call him Oran T.), helping him with some boss kills, and zapping over to Oran O. to help him with boss battles in the Krokosphinx, a place he couldn’t even get to without help. I enlisted them both to help me in the final instance of the Temple of Storms. I could use the help, and the final ten bosses or so might drop good loot for folks.

There’s plenty of other things to do in the Temple of Storms, but I was getting impatient to get to Marleybone, just the same way I’d been eager to leave its sands behind when I played in beta. The secret is, you only have to finish the storyline quests to move to the next world. There’s a lot of quests left waiting for me in the Temple, but…

I didn’t get the kill shot. It sure wasn’t my Guardian Sprite who, like usual, was making her own healing her number one priority. Oran T had some sort of lightning elemental pet, probably that got the kill shot. But — DUST! The Buffy fan in me screams with glee.

This is me and Oran T. dusting the ultimate boss of Krokotopia. Oran O. was helping, but left mysteriously during the Trial of Strength. Oran T. asked me why I kept Oran O. in my friends list when he was kinda annoying. That was a good question. I’d been thinking about removing him from my friends list so he couldn’t tag along all day, but didn’t.

I told Oran T., finally, that if we were playing a kid’s game, we kinda had to expect kids were going to act like kids.

So I don’t think I’ll be removing him. But I do hope he learns to call first before porting.

Some Marleybone pics (you’ll be seeing a lot more of these as my friends and I work through this alternate version of London):

Marcel Meow… hey, I don’t name ‘em.

By Jove, Holmes, you can’t be serious!

If I type “EverQuest Blog” into Google, I get pages and pages of plat seller spam, sites like Ten Ton Hammer and Warcry reblogging SOE press releases and stuff. But one thing I don’t find are actual blogs about people who are playing EverQuest.

I don’t even find THIS blog on such a list. It’s bizarre and backwards to me that I can’t find anyone — including ME — blogging about actually playing the game. I know it’s old, but I see bunches of people in game all the time, so I know there must be SOME people blogging about it.

Sure, EQ discussion has traditionally been on the community message boards and on the SOE forums and, of course, on guild message boards (which are usually closed to the general public). So there’s undoubtedly a lot of talk about EQ that just doesn’t appear on Google. Message boards are notorious for not being friendly to Google.

Anyway. There’s always the chance that you’re an EverQuest blogger or read other EQ blogs if you’re reading this one. So… what’s the URL? Because I’d REALLY would like to read about the adventures of other people in the game that really did more than any other to shape the MMOs that followed it.

Photoshop stitched together four screenshots to make this, automatically. Pretty neat!

No, it’s true. We went to the Plane of Time tonight.

Once upon a ‘time’ (sorry), that meant you had completed all the raids in Planes of Power — lessee if I can remember them — Terris Thule & Saryrn, Grummus & Carprin & Bertoxxulous, the Manaetic Behemoth, any trial in the Plane of Justice (didn’t have to kill Seventh Hammer, though), Aerin’Dar & three Halls of Honor trials & Mithaniel Marr & Agnarr, Vallon Zek & Tallon Zek & Rallos Zek the Warlord, Solusek Ro, that alligator in Plane of Earth, and then the Elemental gods — Fennin Ro, Coirnav (entire raid — 14 minutes or you fail for three days), The Rathe Council (12 raid mobs — six mezzable, six not — need to die within 8 minutes of each other, IIRC), and Xegony (google ‘xegony boobie taunt’). After doing all that — and how many times for each raid before all of 72+ people were flagged? — you could zone in to the Plane of Time.

Now it’s about as hard as walking into a wall. Just hail this bozo and say “Got the time?” and *poof*, there you are. He’ll also send you if you say, “please make a year of determined effort instantly pointless”. Nah, kidding about that one. Maybe.

Honest truth is, I would so love to raid Plane of Time, one last time. In fact. I would run every one of the raids leading up to the Plane of Time again. Because they were SO. MUCH. FUN. If you were in a raiding guild, it was never better before and never got better after than it was in the Planes of Power. After PoP, *NO* MMO dared to ship their game without a full set of raids because how else could they EVER hope to compete with EVERQUEST?

That’s died down some lately. But how many games tried to copy the master? WoW for sure, but they flinched, made their max raid size 40, and then 25, and now 10. Devs give a nervous little laugh at the thought of MEGA RAIDS that required 72 people to accomplish — that needed raid leaders and sub leaders and team leaders and so on.

Anyway. So, Plane of Time. Big whoop :) Not like we could ever raid it.

The latest patch notes told of a mysterious wanderer last seen in the Dreadlands who seemed awfully concerned that the veil between the present and the past was being rent asunder by some dreadful force.

He sends people to check on reported disturbances in the Field of Bone, Warslick Woods, Commonlands, Qeynos Hills and the Rathe Mountains. So I’m thinking, Kaesora, Dalnir’s, Befallen, Blackburrow and … but that doesn’t work, there is no dungeon in the Rathe Mountains, unless they added one I don’t know about. Best check this out. I thought maybe I’d get an update just for zoning in, but no such luck.

Field of Bone was infested by dragons. These dragons were in a state of high dudgeon. They’d just be in a horrible fight over the Field of Bone against the Iksar emperor Ganak, and things were not going well. Next thing they know, they’re here, Jared’Dar’s bones are picked clean in the center of a mysteriously appeared crater, the entire area seems to have not seen war for centuries… it’s very confusing. One poor dragon was not only pulled through time, but universes as well — ripped right from World of Warcraft.

Mmm, yummy troll dinner snack!

Whaaa? Where’d that troll go? And why are my colors kinda dull? Mother?

With Warslick Woods being so near, I zoned over, had a quick look-see for Grachnist the Destroyer (nope, Mr. Shrunken Goblin Earring once again being a no-show), and then tracked a couple of bright red dragons in the area. I wondered how they were doing. Really. My only concern was for their health. As in, their percentage of health. As in, steadily declining toward zero.

This guy was doing fine, if somewhat bewildered. Cousin to Vishimitar, if I know my dragons. The color, anyway.

Now this guy grew tired, and more tired as I watched. In fact, I took out my bow, hit my Trueshot Discipline, and helped him become tired even more quickly as the bard kiting him did his thing. Bard had a gnome mask — those are RARE. Anyway, when he saw the adds that were following him die, and me plinking away, we grouped up, finished making the dragon very tired, and I got a quest update when it finally lay down for a good nap.

The bard grabbed the loot and logged. I felt happy to have helped out.

By that time we had a fairly full group of people online, so we headed off to Lavaspinner’s Lair once again to try out luck there. Three people needed drakes and two needed spiders; just because I wasn’t paying attention, we went to the drakes first. Seja and I finished our drake collection quests, Mantis made some progress, Coldheat hit 60, everyone else made between 2-3 AAs, it was all good.

There was a raid mob on track, and we kinda were heading toward it when sanity prevailed. We turned back and pulled another, easier named, killed that no trouble, then were ambushed by Crimsonwing once again. Crimsonwing took her death well, except near the end where she gated away and summoned people, one-by-one, to die far from the group and surrounded by adds.

I have to admit I’m not feeling the love for Crimsonwing that I probably should.

Since we aren’t getting enough people on to raid, we’re likely going to be leveling up again soon. If we’re just going to be doing group things, might as well get to level 65 so we can go to the Bastion of Thunder and just have a good time with the grouping. BoT is all sorts of fun. Good challenge, good xp, good loot, a LOT of different places to go. Looking forward to it.

The blogger at the Playing Age of Conan With a Wiimote blog quits Age of Conan…

I admit it, life before Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning was fairly bland and meaningless. My life before I became consumed by WHOOOOAAAAA was just a shadow — a shadow OF a shadow, really. Before Public Quests, how could I really do a quest? Before the Tome of Knowledge, how would I know what to do? Before Open Groups, how would I ever find a group? MMOs before WAR were mostly people just standing around, without direction, without anything to do.

WAR changed that, and changed it forever. Changed it to death. From now on, no other MMO developer will ever dare confuse players by not telling them exactly what to do and when. But really, when you already have WAR Everywhere, what do you even need other MMOs for?

It’s time for all those other game companies to really examine their lives, to just sit back and wonder why they are even in this crazy business when the one game to rule them all has already been written? They should all roll up those masters of high elven magics, those twisted sisters of arcane allegiance, the Archmage, and go WAAAAAAAAA on someone.

Simulated Warhammer screenshot.

Your basic Archmage is always doing the wrong thing. When its just trash mobs everywhere, the Archmage is making them light up like fireworks at Christmas. When the boss is up and the Bright Wizards are all lighting up the bad guy, doing their part, the Archmage is looking for people to heal.

“We’re BURNING here, Ossandra-the-Amazing!”

“Wait, Lego Lass has a nasty scratch, be right with you!”

*Crunch*Crunch* boss picks Lego Lass up in one meaty hand and bites off her head. Ossandra brightens up. “See?!”

The Bright Wizards laugh and nuke the boss dead while Ossandra gathers her magic for a huge blast — finally. “Um, where’d he go?”

Archmages are famous for fighting the wrong mob at the wrong time. They bring dobermans to cat shows. They drive in the carpool lane without anyone else in the car. They show up to birthday parties a day early and send the present a month later.

Playing an Archmage? Here’s a news flash. Nobody wants your cruddy heals. Just toss a few around to build up the power for the nukes you were hired for and try to ignore the Bright Wizards doubling over in laughter. Your guild leader has a clue in the guild bank just for wild cannons like yourself. Go get it.

Gandalf would have looked damned silly trying to get some quick heals off on Samwise so he could fight the Balrog.

Get over yourself. Archmage is the high elf word for ‘hopelessly confused’.

—

Wow, has this really been three weeks of Straight Talk Warhammer? Very nearly! Three weeks since all our lives were changed forever. This is also the last Straight Talk Warhammer — for now, anyway. I’ve enjoyed doing them very much, and they’ve made me want to pick up the game and give it a try. But there are other games out there that need a pin in their balloons, and satirizing every class in Warhammer just to do it is definitely taking a good joke past the point where it’s amusing. Starting next week, Stout Henry will be back with his twisted take on MMO combat with ‘Stout Henry Goes to War”.

For those few of you who stuck with STW this long, thanks :) Your laughter and comments made this worthwhile!

There’s just so much to say about Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning that people don’t even talk about. I’m don’t mean innovations like Public Quests or the Tome of Knowledge or Open Groups or stuff like that, but stuff that really makes you sit down and go, “damn, why hasn’t any other game ever done this?” It’s that “I coulda had a V-8″ forehead slap moment.

I’d have liked to have been in that meeting where some nebbiish dev looked up from his books and said, in a quavering voice that would change the direction of the game forever, “why don’t we have DWARFS in our game?”.

The sound of helicopters… the tragedy of bunnies… Every person’s mind was immediately gripped by the tale of the dwarf Alderich, who forged a magic ring deep within a volcano’s maw, a single ring that would rule the entire world.

“Nobody has EVER done THAT,” agreed everyone else. “Nobody’s gonna figure out that we stole the idea from an OPERA!” And thus, the race of dwarfs was born, and among them, that stalwart example of dwarf obstinacy, the Ironbreaker.

Simulated Warhammer screenshot.

Standing four foot high on tippy-toes and waving their stubby little arms above their heads, you’d be forgiven for thinking the best way to deal with an Ironbreaker is by treating them like your annoying kid brother, who wants the toy YOU have, that you keep tossing back and forth with your sister on the other side of the room.

“Mine! MINE! I WANT MINE!!!” screams the Ironbreaker, his face going all red and cute, but he just can’t get the toy, can he? Can he? Here it is! Whoops! Over to Sis! Awwww.

Ironbreakers are the whiny little brothers of Warhammer, forever running around, hoping people will hit them so they can run and tell Mother. “MOTHER!!!!” cries little I.B., “He HIT me! And then SHE hit me! And then all these OTHER people hit me! MAKE THEM STOP!!!” and Mother comes out, looking like she wants to hit the little urchin, too.

Wait. YOU’RE an Ironbreaker? Sorry, I didn’t see you right away, crouching there behind the rock. Oh? Well, standing behind. Oh? OKAY. Standing on TOP of the rock, waving your hands. Well, so you’re an Ironbreaker, are ya?

Well, your job is to stand places. Yup. That’s it. Stand over here, stand over there, and be all whiny so people will hit you. You want to be hit. You CRAVE being hit. You want people to give you a real BEATING. To walk over to where you are, standing still, and then HIT you.

Yeah. You like being hit. Every bruise is a badge for you. You live for the moment when Mother walks up and you can say, “SEE what they did!? And I didn’t cry, not once!”

You’re one whiny, sick, Oedipal bastard.

—

Wondering what your Warhammer career says about your personality? You won’t find that hot info anywhere else than here at Straight Talk Warhammer, where we know you better than you know yourself.

Professor Grayrose added something new to the patch notes:

I forgot to add something!

You will find a new setting in your Options panel under “Show Names”.
The selections are now
Everyone
None
Players
Non Players
All Others

This will allow you to only see everyone that is not a player, such as creatures, shopkeeps and items.

Yay!

Very useful. I usually go with names OFF when I am in public spaces. You kind of need them ON to see the primary schools of the monsters you battle — and this is the best of both worlds.

Maracas aren’t as good at warding off intergalactic invaders as I thought they would be.

While out gathering the day’s meals, my duckling tribespeople were startled by a huge contraption which WALKED on white, clanking legs down from the sky and sucked up the food animals that were being kept in the pen behind the main hut. It then buzzed the village twice and stalked back up into space.

It was Ogrebears‘ starship. Later, when my little ducklings had ascended to space, I was given a mission to suck up some of the Ogrebears creatures into *my* starship. Their terrified yelps couldn’t save them from the power of my abduction ray.

That was SPORE. As a game. it’s okay. As a way to get millions of people creating their own content and sharing it with their friends, of unleashing their creativity and playing games in a way that engaged people’s brains instead of numbed them, it was amazing.

In three weeks, LittleBigPlanet will play the same trick by giving kids and adults all the tools to make pretty much any arcade game they can imagine, along with all the awards and prizes, and share them with their friends (and anyone else).

Warhammer Online decided to vastly de-emphasize the scripted encounters common to older games in favor of boosting the PvP game. The PvP game — the part of the game where your opponents are other players and not computer-controlled automatons — is considered by Mythic to be very much more compelling than the part of the game where you find a clump of Wuzzits and press a key repeatedly until they are all gone.

It’s not that WoW is the only game that encourages repetitive and meaningless killing — its predecessor, EverQuest, was widely mocked for focusing on exactly that — but that it took such great delight in it. The Deadmines is a fantastic little story, but it always plays the exact same way. The fight against the dread dragon Onyxia was so scripted that a video where a raid leader berates his raid for not following the script exactly enough was one of the most widely circulated WoW videos I ever saw while I played reveals just how ingrained this has become.

The game devs have long assumed the path to big success was in leading the player to the rides, then letting them have their very tightly managed fun.

EverQuest 2 shares a lot of things with WoW. But, you can decorate your home limited only by your imagination. You can dress your character however you like (depending on your class). Lord of the Rings lets you also choose from among several outfits of your own design and build your own house. Likewise Vanguard. Star Wars Galaxies lets you design almost anything you like to your own specifications. Chronicles of Spellborn will let you from the start design your own look. City of Heroes will let you write your own missions — complete with a villain of your own design.

Yet in Warcraft, every character looks the same. There are no houses, no outlet for creativity. Only in the battlegrounds (and the upcoming open PvP zone) are the players set loose to be free.

There is a new generation of MMORPGs coming. It won’t be marked by super real graphics or ever-more elaborately scripted raid encounters. The new games will hand over some of the keys to the playground to the players. And, absolutely 100% guaranteed, what the players will do with them will astonish.

I’ve talked about this before, and people have said it’s impossible, but it’s not. It’s already happening. The days when you could log on to your MMO and depend upon a scripted experience, the same as everyone has, are nearly over. Within five years, the quests I run will be the quests YOU wrote. And FINALLY, a dozen years too late, 3D MMOs will be up to parity with the text-based MUDs that inspired them.

And once we’re up to date with the state of the art of a dozen years ago, we can move forward into something truly new.

WoW is a dinosaur, bigger than anything that came before it. A hundred feet long, tall as a tree, thundering footsteps and a trumpeting call proudly proclaiming it master of the prehistoric.

But we all know what happened to the dinosaurs.

They just couldn’t adapt.

After being a one-wizard elimination team on the Niriki royalty, it turned out it was all for nothing. Professor Winthrop told me with an astonished tone that the missing Order of the Fang was on an *entirely different island*. Not in the Pyramid of the Sun *at all*, it turns out.

So, I had just gone through and spread terror throughout the Pyramid *for nothing*?

Just so.

All those hours, all those endless card battles, all of that — and I was on the wrong island the entire time?

Sadly, that is the case. And now, would you hurry along to the Krokosphinx and get on with the killing?

How do I know that the real evil won’t actually be on that mysterious looking Temple of Storm island nobody is talking about yet? Why can’t I just skip right there? HUH?

At least I got to see the cool Map Room, which certainly has nothing to do with the Map Room Indiana Jones discovers in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Bah, who am I kidding? Krokotopia has such a love affair going with Raiders that it almost hurts. From the music, to the quests, it’s all there. Just give me a whip and a fedora, please.

Thankfully, the Krokosphinx is the home of creatures that use Ice. My secondary school, Fire, was mostly useless in the heat of the Pyramid of the Sun. But nearly every critter in the Krokosphinx will be baking in the cleansing fire of my Sunbird. Especially if I can get to level 22, my next spell level, before I get too deep. I think this level is the meteor storm, that does fire damage to every enemy.

The Pyramid of the Sun quests left me off partway through Level 21, so I’m just about there.

Last night I had to “de-friend” my first “friend”. I normally approve all friend requests — and why not? But when one of these random friends kept teleporting to me in the middle of a boss fight, I had to let him go. It didn’t matter so much in these instanced fights if people join the fight and immediately leave, because the fight won’t get any harder. But if that had been an open fight, a fight tuned for just one wizard could quickly turn impossible with the adds an extra wizard would bring, but who wouldn’t stay to fight them.

Some people say this is a cheesy way to PK someone, where people will intentionally try to make fights so hard that you’re forced to flee or die, but I don’t think it’s that malicious. These were likely just kids — it’s nearly always children — who were hoping I would be heading to Marleybone or Moo Shu and they could hitch a ride with me to those higher level zones. When this kid saw I was just fighting the final bosses of the Pyramid of the Sun, he lost interest.

But I just couldn’t have him, in the future, pulling this stuff in Marleybone or Moo Shu where that kind of behavior would get me killed, so I de-friended him. Today’s patch, that limits the size of the friends list, will likely have me de-friending a lot of the people I don’t know.

Wizard 101 released a huge patch this morning, but it doesn’t seem to have fixed that many things. The notes, such as they are, are below:

—

Big News!
1. All new pets dropped by bosses will no longer only be named Baby Abbey, they will now have a randomly generated name.

All boss-dropped pets were named “Baby Abbey”, the default name for everything. I wonder if Baby Abbey pets will become rare, now? I still haven’t found a dropped pet…

2. The floating book pedestal in Crimson Fields appears to have been fixed.

This has long been an issue with people trying to complete a certain Moo Shu quest. It’s been said to have been fixed in each of the last couple patches. So we’ll see if it finally is :)

3. Choose your friends wisely. The size of the Friends List is no longer unlimited. Each character can have a maximum of 100 friends, if you have 100 or more friends now, you cannot add new friends until you remove enough people from your list to bring the total under 100.

So much for indiscriminately adding friends :P

Spells
1. Steal spells now describe the “steal” action.
2. Accuracy for the Stun and Freeze spells has been increased to 70%
3. Quench spell Rank has been reduced to 2
4. Melt spell Rank has been reduced to 2
5. Dissipate spell Rank has been reduced to 2
6. Rebirth’s spell accuracy has been reduced

Krokotopia
1. Djeserit Dwellers will turn to dust when they are defeated in a duel.
This is a really cool effect — like when vampires get dusted in Buffy.
2. Oka looks much more like his portrait.
3. Players can no longer interact with the Frozen Forge multiple times.
4. Zan’ne may ask you to do the Tome of the Fang quest again.
5. Desert Golems give credit for both Elemental and Golem badges.
6. Completing the quest “A Fang in Hand” is no longer be required for “Master of the Oasis” Badge.
7. Shackled Slaves will no longer have the word ‘Shackled Slave’ over them.

Moo Shu
1. The Myth Wand available in Moo Shu is now available for all schools of Wizards to use.
2. Players can no longer use “Teleport To Friend” when another player is inside Fushiko’s dojo in Village of Sorrow, since it is now a single-player instance zone. You are meant to complete this on your own as a test of your ability.
3. The floating book pedestal in Crimson Fields appears to have been fixed.

Misc
1. Cyrus has been busy with his red corrective pen again, this time he’s been correcting grammar and spelling.
2. Many treasure cards have new cinematics when they are cast.
Oh, cool :) Treasure cards are always so much fun to use.
3. At the Wizard Creation screen, buttons have been added to rotate your character during character creation. You can still use the mouse to do this as well.
4. The names of all the mini games can now be said in Text Chat.

Was your life as devastated as ours when one, two, and then three days went by without a Straight Talk Warhammer? Did you feel feverish, slipping in and out of consciousness, and have long and repetitive arguments with yourself about whether or not Sokka from The Last Airbender was inspired by Xander Harris from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Friends, we know exactly how you feel. But from those pits of despair and dreams we have wrangled news of one of the most excitingly original careers ever conceived of by a game which has already proven time and time again that a war between orcs and humans was too good an idea not to copy, the Witch Hunter.

Simulated Warhammer screenshot.

The problem with being a Witch Hunter is, not enough Witches to go around. Like, you come to a village, and you see normal people going about their normal jobs. How can you tell which are witches?

Luckily, there’s an easy test. Have your minions line up the villagers and send them into Witch Hunter Central one at a time, and see if they match any of these tell-tale witch signs in our handy “Description-Prescription” table.

Simple truth is, a good witch hunter can’t be really effective against the minions of darkness if there’s any sign of taint in their so-called allies. I mean, how sure can you be that you yourself are not a witch?

Witch hunters always place themselves behind the allied lines, so they can keep a sharp eye both on their friends AND their enemies. Because witch hunters have no friends. They can’t afford them. They have seen too many friends willingly and with great intensity shrug off the illusion of Order to reveal the demon hiding beneath after it was shown to them that their homes, wives, children and fields were unholy.

It doesn’t matter who you are, really. The Witch Hunter has looked into your soul with his steely, unforgiving eyes, and what he sees disgusts him. Prepare to burn.

—

There’s only one blog that will wade through the scourges of fire and fever to bring the Straight Talk about Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and that’s this one. You won’t find this on any Tome of Knowledge… is not given as a reward in a Public Quest… but dammit, it should be. Tune in tomorrow for another exciting edition of Straight Talk Warhammer, where we discuss that bane of pressed clothing, the Ironbreaker.

Another Friday, another entirely new zone, and we still are ages from seeing more than a fraction of the game.

Last week, we started doing the faction quests that open up the main mission arc of the Dragons of Norrath expansion. The first brought us to Stillmoon Temple, deep inside the Broodlands. Last night, though, we stayed a little closer to home, and headed into Lavaspinner’s Lair.

A Lavaspinner is a particular kind of spider formed of cooling lava and sent forth by their queen, Volkara, one of DoN’s earlier raid targets, to entrap unwary explorers in their burning webs to use as food for her young.

Our job was to kill those spiders and grab some of their webs — eight for each person who needs. And while we were there, maybe some blood from the higher-level Delve drakes guarding the nests in the northern part of the lair.

So, basically, an entire night spent getting uncommon drops from hundreds of mobs, because they are collection quests, the ABSOLUTE WORST kind of quests ever written in any MMO. The kind of quests that you don’t want to do in a group because it will take forever, but this being EverQuest, not the kind of thing you can do alone. Not at level 60, at any rate, and not Lavaspinner’s Lair.

Things went fairly well before we kind of all slipped into a pit, so that wasn’t good. Most of us died. On the way back, we were jumped by a bunch of mobs and a couple people died, cleric camped and those of us still alive evaced. Coldheat logged back in and rezzed the two with him, but then they got a respawn while the rest of us were fighting back. It was after eleven, we were all still kind of disturbed by the presidential debates — no matter what side you were on, it was pretty disturbing — so we called it, ported out or summoned depending on our live/dead state, and logged.

Final tally: 3 AA for me; bought Ambidexterity and have a point left over. Spending those points earned me some new AA titles, so I switched from my epic title to Huntress, just for fun. Huntress Tipa Tanglewood.

Since most of the screenshots I took last night were craptacular (why isn’t that word in the dictionary!? It should be!), I logged on my rogue, also by some wild coincidence destiny cannot explain, named Tipa Tanglewood, on Erollisi Marr, and headed into Lavaspinner’s to take somewhat better screenshots (the one up above is an example. See how good things can look when stuff isn’t trying to kill you?).

While there, I got to chatting with Egat, and then someone piped up in general chat that they needed to kill Emoush, which, I believe, is the second Dragons of Norrath raid. I was *right there*, so I asked if they could use a lowly 70 rogue — they could, I was in, and off we went.

Emoush is a huge rock dervish at the far end of a goblin temple in the Broodlands. This temple pops up in a lot of different quests and missions; it’s beautiful, sure, but it’s way too large for goblins. It’s very hard to believe they made this themselves. More likely it’s something they robbed from the dragons. Still, they’re there now and are about as friendly to strangers as these kinds of places normally are, so in we went, spreading death in dark puddles staining the stainless marble floors.

This used to take four groups back in the day. Seriously.

Emoush has a posse. Three goblin shaman who won’t allow him to come to harm. They’re pretty protective of each other as well, but they have a code of battle they follow. They can instantly restore one another to full health, but they will only do so if their buddy has been dead for more than thirty seconds or so. So all three have to die more or less at the same time, or they will just revive each other. We knocked them all down to about 10% one at a time, then did some absurdly awesome dps to vanish their hit points.

Emoush awoke, enraged, and with an urge to kill. I was going through my book of disciplines, firing one off and going on to the next. I may be only 70 and my gear may date back to Uqua, but I can still deliver a righteous stabbing when I want.

If he’s not killed in two minutes, he manages to revive all his shaman protectors who instantly resume protecting Emoush from all harm. We got Emoush — a (former) RAID mob — down to 20%, re-killed the shaman, and sent Emoush back to hell to keep them company — no problem.

One of the people in the group needed Gimblax, the first raid in Dragons of Norrath. Even before I quit, this was easily done by a single group. In fact, we rogues of Crimson Eternity would get the mission, sneak up to him, and then take turns tanking with Nimble on (immunity from melee for about 20 seconds) while the others stabbed, evading off to the next rogue when Nimble wore off. It was an easy way to farm radiant crystals and faction tokens.

So I snuck this time back into position, waiting for the SK tank to finish feigning to the mob. When he got there, we slayed. And that was the second (former) raid done.

I was enjoying my first Tipa group since like 2005 so much, I stuck around for another Stillmoon Temple mission. I did this a LOT back in the day; a rogue can make some of the yuckier bits go by much faster by using their ability to soundlessly sneak all over the temple.

We did it in record time and that was several dozen more crystals to my name. Crystals, used for buying DoN gear, used to be worth a lot of money, and that cash I did have in EQ came largely from running missions and selling the crystals. I doubt they have much, if any, value now, but those were good times.

When I turned in the faction token for that mission after, I went from warmly to ally with the Norrathian Keepers; this opens up every one of the DoN missions to me.

Not that there’s much point in them these days, but it’s another milestone.

It’s fun days like this that make me miss EverQuest. The sort of casual fun, exploration and (dare I add) competence that has been mostly drained from modern MMOs which abhor risk or danger while also ramping up the pace. So you do less, but look busier.

And I’m not being sarcastic when I ask, when is someone going to make an EverQuest killer? Dark Age of Camelot came closest, but ever since, the genre has focused more on graphics and fluff than deep gameplay. EQ is not a pretty game, never really was — but it is so deep. Impenetrably so, really. People new to EQ have real trouble with it.

And that’s why I wonder, where are the EQ killers — the games that have EQ’s scope, depth and challenge — but are somewhat less exclusive? Maybe one implies the other, but I’m still looking. EQ2 is a good game, but it’s not EQ. Vanguard is — well, it was supposed to be the EQ killer, but it missed the mark. WoW’s wild success has made the very thought of a challenging MMO anathema to developers; after all, who wants to go after a market of 100,000 when you could go after 10,000,000? I sure couldn’t make that argument.

But as a player, I very much wish someone would.

Due to being sick, I don’t have a Straight Talk Warhammer today. Look for all the facts you never knew about the Witch Hunter, Monday.

Have a good weekend :)

Dragon Mouth Cave

The Pyramid of the Sun doesn’t look that large, but somehow it contains miles and miles of corridors, archaeological digs, and monsters who spend their entire existences slowly pacing back and forth, hoping for an unwary wizard to accidentally step off the sidewalks.

Always kind of cool to have an MMO that emphasizes such traditionally-ignored skills like staying on the sidewalk and looking both ways before you cross the street. It’s almost sad to note that the Marleybone rooftops don’t work the same way.

Hand this dog a deck and make him do his OWN fighting.

Given the problems the dog-folk of Marleybone are having at home, it’s odd they are spending so much time dealing with problems abroad, specifically in Krokotopia. They have soldiers stationed everywhere, and these are the least effective soldiers known in all the Spiral. They lose their weapons. They lose their ammo. They lose their food. They lose their water. They find themselves entirely unable to deal with Rank 2 trash, much less the bosses. The only ones who can haul their butts from the flames, are novice wizards such as yours truly.

Last night, I cleared the Chamber of Flames and the Royal Halls portion of the Pyramid; I also helped a few random people with boss fights. I’m always happy to help with these — the more bosses I kill, the better the chance of getting a rare pet or staff. I haven’t gotten any pets yet, but I do have a nice staff waiting for me at level 20.

The Dig Site in the Royal Halls.

I posted a couple of suggestions to the forums, asking for a way to respec our secondary magic school, because this seems like a choice you should be able to do over if you find it doesn’t work for you. I also asked if there could be a way to save specific decks. Mobs in the Pyramid are typically fire based, but a significant number go with Ice, Myth and Balance. Each one requires I rebuild my deck.

Since my secondary school is Fire, I pretty much have to build my deck solely around Life when facing these. Versus Ice, it’s the opposite — emphasize Fire, their opposite element. The others require a more balanced deck, one with plenty of Life heals but also not forgetting Fire dps.

I got a great reply from someone who pointed out you could have multiple decks — one built one way, one another — and just equip the one with the spells I needed. One person even has a deck built around Treasure cards. I imagine that one is tuned for boss fights where you really need to bring out the big guns.

I dunno, do I really look like a Storm wizard?

In between all this, I was working on my Level 17 spell quest. My new spell summons a Sprite Guardian minion, a companion that joins the group and casts heals. During one fight, I died, and I figured the fight was over and I would be sent, in defeat, back to Wizard City. But she cast a major heal and followed it up with a Heal Over Time the next round. I won the battle and ended the fight pretty much at full health.

I love my little Sprite Guardian.

Another evening should see me done with the Pyramid of the Sun and moving on to the Krokosphinx. That’s the shortest of the three quest hubs in Krokotopia. I’ll probably be level 20 by the time I get there; I’m level 19 now. I don’t have many problems staying alive, but I might look into the RMT gear after I ding and see if there’s anything really nice.

You love you some Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, but the game isn’t addicting enough. There should be some way of making your time away from the game an interminable hell. If only… if only there was a career that could give you such a high that when you came down, all you could think about would be your next fix — and the next after that.

Meet the best friend you will ever have in the game, the one whose number is #1 speed dial on your cell phone, the one who always has what you need — the Runepriest.

Simulated Warhammer screenshot.

There’s nothing subtle about the Runepriest. You’ll see him in the dark shadows of every battlefield, surrounded by his Witch Elf honeys, dispensing the runes. You know you want that health rune, dontcha? Yeah you do. You feel uber with that health rune. And that strength rune, man, that fuggin’ turns you into a Public Quest pretty much. Dude just got in some Runes from the Empire, them are Elf runes, and they’ll totally mess you up.

But watch out for those protection runes. Yeah, they totally give you a high so high you can see the next chapter without even looking up. But you have to keep paying the Runepriest, or he’ll take your protection away, and then you better be watching out for your wheels and your women, ‘cuz without the Runepriest protection, they is up for grabs.

What? You want to be a Runepriest? Well, let me cut you in on a little secret: It’s all about the connections. Because the other Runepriests don’t want your dwarf wannabe ass taking a slice of the rune pie. And no way you can make it out there alone. What you have to do is make some friends with the local law. You can give them some gold, and they’ll stay bought until it’s gone, but lay some runes on them and you have friends you can count on.

And then you can be all like, yeah, I have some protection runes, local stuff, good stuff, but I just made some really wild stuff, real rare, and to be honest, I don’t think you can handle it. And they’re all, yeah, I can handle it. I can take whatever you got. And you say, this is gonna cost you, I can’t be making these things every day, you can’t even afford it. Lemme just bag you up a dime bag of the regular runes. And they’re like, dude, I ranked #1 on five PQs last night, show me what you got. And you’re like well, okay, if you think you can handle them, but I better not see your saggy human ass banging on my door in the middle of the night unless you got some shinies in your backpack to pay. Cuz I got plenty of strung out junkies like your own self being my doormat ALREADY.

And they’re all, hey, dude, I’m not like that. Here’s the swag, now gimme the bag.

Yeah. We’re talking repeat business. We’re talking logging in, and seeing guild chat light up with people wanting your runes.

Damn, it feels good to be a Runepriest.

—

Strung out and hung over waiting for the next edition of Straight Talk Warhammer? Don’t be! Read about the secret details of every Warhammer career every weekday. This is the only place you can get the straight dope that Mythic won’t tell you. The only place that dares tell the truth about Warhammer: Age of Reckoning.

What takes two hours to do, results in a blade nobody will use, and no status at all?

That would be the signature quest that ends in Eitholi, Blade of the Fae. Here in the dressing room, since Etha — now known as Ettie — can’t wield it. Green glows are uber. Too bad the stats aren’t!

It wasn’t a total wash. Ettie got enough AA experience from all the subquests that she dinged 30 AAs, and, after finishing the Wisdom/Ritualist AA line, is heading down the Stamina line, which includes a very cute little buckler attack.

To be honest, I had no idea what the quest was when I started. YEARS ago, I’d picked up a quest from some fluttering ghostly angel thing on a cliff in Butcherblock, and just never worked on it. Well, back then, you had to understand the language of magic to advance the quest. A quest requiring someone to explore level 40+ zones to learn a language to do a level 20-ish quest? There was no way that was going to happen, so I just let it sit there in my quest journal.

Since I can’t level Dina any more, being at max level and max AAs, I’ve been spending a lot more time on Ettie, and it’s been a bit of a contest with myself to see how far I could get on this quest (”The Wind that Speaks Her Name”) before I got a group. Last night I got all the way to Greater Faydark, headed toward Crushbone, when I got a group invite for Deathfist Citadel.

I’ve done it before, I always have a couple of quests that need me to go there, so I’m happy to go. They didn’t have a healer and I didn’t think I’d have any trouble keeping a group alive there. Defilers are pretty good at their jobs, and their slows take the bite out of any fight.

So I was more than a little alarmed when the group started discussing if maybe one of them should switch to a healer, since they couldn’t find one.

I’m a defiler, I said. I can heal, you don’t need another healer.

The tank discussed switching to his warden.

I’m a defiler — shaman subclass, I’m a priest classs, you don’t need another healer!!!

But, said the tank, I need Fyst on this character, so I dunno.

HELLO??? Is this thing on? Can anyone read this message? Seriously, I asked that. I’m not even exaggerating here.

Someone piped up, and mentioned that he thought defilers were a cleric class, and the group had a healer.

I cannot COMPREHEND how people can play a game this long and not know the difference between defilers and inquisitors, or believe a defiler is a kind of necromancer. Maybe they should just change the class name to “Evil Shaman”.

Went through the entire dungeon, no deaths, dinged to level 43, it was fine, no problem. Yeah. Okay. NOW you know what defilers do. We keep you ALIVE.

Anyway. When I got out of DFC, I started in on the quest in earnest. Made my way to Crushbone Keep, found the sword that was stuck there, cleared a room of mobs so I could rez someone who was dead in the middle of it, did some of the badge collection quest from the zone, wandered off, and spent the next forty-five minutes looking for someone named The Witch of the Wood.

I finally backed off far enough to notice a climbable wall leading right to her.

I didn’t speak her language, so I went to Kelethin and learned the Fae language.

Nope, that wasn’t it. She spoke Fairy, not Fae. Because, I’d know the difference. So half an hour toward killing treants for Fairy language bits, and then she tells me a story about a Fairy who had gotten herself trapped in a sword, which had been stuck into a tree, and the tree had grown up around it, and I should go find the tree and the blade in it.

The tree had turned into a Treant who was menacing the cliffs above the Shores of Growth in the Nursery. He said, sword? Oh yeah, I have a sword, and it hurts like anything. If you could get some aviak eggs from Butcherblock, that’d be sweet. We can mix them up into some sort of magical Vaseline and it will slide right out.

Yeah. Whatever.

So another half an hour trying to figure out how to get up to that nest I could see stuck to the side of a cliff hundreds of feet above my head.

Turned out to be ANOTHER hidden climbable wall. Got the eggs, went back to the Treant, he decides he doesn’t want eggs after all, he just wants to kill me, so he attacks me. Occasionally he stuns me, but my faithful wolf, Cinnamon, takes over when that happens.

Finally kill him, I pull the sword from his splintered corpse, ding 30 AAs and add an exciting 0 guild status to my awesome total of 70.

Oh, well. At least it makes for a nice screen shot.