West Karana

The plan was to help everyone get to level 60 so we can start doing some of the two group raids in Kunark, Velious and Luclin — things like Velketor the Sorcerer, Trakanon, Venril Sathir and such. What better way, than through the hot zones? The hot zone for our level was (was) Riwwi in Gates of Discord. Not the best place in the world, but we made plans to go.

Then SOE came out with a new list of hot zones, and Riwwi wasn’t anywhere on it. Plane of Storms was the level 60 hot zone. Perfect! We’ll go to Plane of Storms!

Except that not all of us were level 55 or over, so that couldn’t happen. We went to the level 55 hot zone instead, Old Sebilis.

Old Sebilis had always been on the list of Nostalgic places to visit, but there are so MANY places to go and things to see that we’d just not gotten around to it. Now we finally had a firm reason — we would go there and level.

Back when Kunark was new, I don’t remember OS being all blue and light blue at level 55. I remember going there and grinding AAs there, when 60 was the level cap. But it was all blues and light blues last night, and even with Lesson of the Devoted on (double xp for half an hour) and it being a hot zone, I barely got a level out of it (level 56 now).

Since we had too many people for one group but not quite enough for two groups, we formed a raid and headed down to Trak’s Lair to farm some spells, kill some juggernauts, and see if Trak was up.

Experience dropped to 1% per kill.

That’s still 10x better than group xp per kill in Karnor’s Castle in EQ2’s Rise of Kunark expansion (which was 0.1% per kill). How the devs thought making an open dungeon with (a) no xp, (b) no loot, (c) difficult to kill mobs and (d) only a couple of quests would be the best way to introduce people to the expansion, I’ll never understand. We soon realized that SOE had decided to discourage grouping until the level cap. So Karnor’s was like a giant middle finger stuck in the middle of the Kylong Plains. Ah, bashing Rise of Kunark just never gets old, does it?

If you take a really close look at that screenie, it shows the first thing on my track list as “a fallen monk”, and there’s Sisca laying there dead. I thought that was a funny coincidence, in a macabre way.

Anyway, we (re)learned a few rules about Old Seblis. 1) Myconid adepts really suck. 2) So do Myconid priests. 3) No, they really, really suck. 4) People who flop past you to ninja the one named who was up that would have given one of the enchanters, at least, a cool looking robe which is absolutely valueless to anyone not in a progression guild, also suck.

We finally made it to Trakanon’s Lair. Trak wasn’t at home, and neither was Tolepumj, the enchanter frog who, until very recently, had been on track. Now he was mysteriously disappeared, yet all the golems that guard him were still up. How could that POSSIBLY have happened?

Sigh.

Okay, I NEED to tell this story about Crimson Eternity, my old guild back on Erollisi Marr.

Westleey was the guid’s lead rogue, raid leader, and guild leader. I liked him a lot, but he could rub some people the wrong way. But he was a good raid leader and took the guild much further than any of us ever thought we would go. Nonetheless…

One day, we’d headed down to kill Trakanon. Back then, Trakanon and Venril Sathir were on a scheduled guild rotation, to cut down on the race for the two most hotly contested mobs in Kunark. Trakanon dropped fangs for the Veeshan’s Peak key as well as all the Kunark class breastplates. Venril Sathir dropped all the Kunark class legs. So it was important that when CE came up on the rotation, that we drop the mobs as soon as we could, so that the next guild in line could schedule their kills.

It was more a contractual obligation thing by then.

Everyone who was online at the time, about four groups or so, headed down into the bowels of Old Sebilis. Monks split and pulled all the juggernauts from the lair. All that were left were Tolapumj and Trakanon.

Tolapumj, being an enchanter, can sometimes charm people. When an NPC charms you, YOU become an NPC. And, you can be killed by players, like any other NPC. When Westleey got charmed, he told the raid that he better not see ANYONE attack him.

As one, the raid turned to him.

Looked at him for a second.

And pasted him all over the cavern.

—

Anyway, once we cleared Trak’s lair of jugg’s, we split for the night.

Me, Tsukiko and Soaridor headed to the Plane of Justice to get Sejal flagged for the Plane of Storms (and the Plane of Valor) by completing one of the trials. We couldn’t think of any trial we’d want more to do than the Trial of Execution, and so that’s the one we did.

Way back when, until you finished one of the trails, you couldn’t progress to Storms or Valor no matter WHAT level you were. They later let anyone level 55 or over in, and suddenly the Plane of Justice turned into a ghost town. We had no trouble with the trial, finished it first time, and Sejal was the only death. Which wasn’t a disaster, because I had somehow morphed into a level 75 cleric on the way to PoJ.

Afterward, Sejal, Tsukiko and I went to the Plane of Sky and farmed island keys until we got to the fourth island, Pegasus Island. We could have cleared the island, but the weird spawn time for the Keeper of Souls (two hours after the first island mob and all the things it splits into were killed), plus the knowledge that the Keeper death touches and we had virtually no DPS, certainly not enough to kill it before it DT’d the three of us, prevented us from moving on up to the fifth island — to another mob that ALSO death touches.

Next week is Labor Day, so we’re off. The week after — PLANE. OF. FUGGIN. STORMS. Or maybe Blackfeather Roost.

As expected, SOE has made a whole new set of hot zones for nearly all levels. There are some old favorites, and a couple of new ones in the list. Hot zones give a substantial bonus to combat experience, and usually have some unique drops as well to encourage people to come to the zone.

20 — Lake of Ill Omen — great zone full of solo and group content
25 — Feerrott — The area outside the Temple of Cazic-Thule is particularly good
30 — Frontier Mountains — even without the hot zone experience, the Mountain Giant Fort is great xp. With it, even better.
35 — Tower of Frozen Shadow — an old favorite.
40 — Lower Guk — a great place for a group that doesn’t mind pulls of five to ten frogs at a time.
45 — Wakening Lands — the thick trees make this less than ideal, but the armor camps have easy pulls and decent loot.
50 — Old Sebilis — one of EQ’s most popular and largest dungeons.
55 — Blackfeather Roost — Not my favorite zone, and having to do quests to go to each island makes this hard to navigate.
60 — Plane of Storms — spent DAYS here working on Bastion of Thunder keys, a fun zone with many different things to see and monsters to kill.
65 — Sunderock Springs — wonderful quest zone.
70 — Riftseeker’s Sanctum — great place to bring a group, find a good spot and just pull to the pleasing sound of dings.

On the way to the EQ2 expansion panel, stopped by the room to upload some pics.

Attended the Living Legacy feedback panel, more notes later, but it sounds like it or something like it will be coming in the future, perhaps as soon as the tenth anniversary celebration next spring. A new progression server is a possibility (for EQ).

Talked with a guy from Matrox for awhile, angered some VG players, and ate lunch at Quarks.More later!

Oh yes, Kirk-bear and Picard-bear are now mine.

I’ll be seeing these live hopefully later today, but here’s my first reactions to the expansions.

EQ2: The Shadow Odyssey

So, we’re getting Lost Dungeons of Norrath, EQ2 style. I don’t know if this means the return of the Wayfarers, but I kind of hope it doesn’t, as the Wayfarer’s led into the ugly Gates of Discord and Omens of War expansions, which kinda broke the whole fantasy feel of EQ with their SciFi aliens from across the 8th dimension, a mistake finally corrected with Dragons of Norrath.

Anyway, expect a single gorup focus, the reurn of Innothule Swamp and its signature dungeon, Guk.

Also returning is the dungeon of Befallen, which is a little odd, since we all kinda thought Stormhold was Befallen, given the NPCs like Gynok Moltar who spawn there, the heritage quests like the Bone Bladed Claymore that go through there, etc. and now, here’s Befallen.

It won’t really feel like Befallen unless you can fall into a deep hole, die, lose all your stuff and have to start over.

Ah, Befallen memories.

Remember how much people hated that whole aliens from across the 8th dimension thing in GoD and OoW? Well, they’re BACK.

They are adding Guild wars-style hirelings in case you need someone for your group. This can work out one of two ways. Either the hirelings are awesome, removing the need to find a real human for their spot and removing the need for clerics outside of raids entirely; or they are weaker than players and useless. Guild Wars does it th first way. I expect EQ will be going with the second/ Shrouded characters are far weaker than the equivalent player; I expect the same for hirelings.

But, if you could have a full group of competent hirelings to help you, then perhaps new players would be able to level up to their fifties, where grouping begins, without having to two box or get powerleveled.

Anyway, time to get ready for a fun day :)

Long,LONG day. Son wakes up with an ear infection. Go to work. Do some work. Find doctor. Take son to doctor’s.Wait forever. Doc says, hey, ear infection. I /sigh. Go to pharmacy. Wait there forever. Go home, give son meds. He goes to sleep. It’s 1PM. I opt to do some laundry before we leave. Give the cat a huge bowl of water that scares her,it’s so huge she may drown. Go to airport. Remember in the security line that I brought a full sized tube of toothpaste. Expect to be arrested immediately, but they let it through. TSA, my teeth thank you. Thunderstorms in Hartford delay the flight an hour and a half. We barely make the connection in Cincinnati. Try to sleep on plane, but it is SRO. Get to Vegas Slots everywhere. Shuttle to Hotel. Registration guy wants to talk about EQ and WAR for fifteen minutes, which is weird. He’s in the WAR closed beta Lucky.

Get to room. Hook up my Eee to the internet and get to reading all the EQ and EQ2 announcements. Start downloading all the videos and pictures and stuff. Go to Massively and see that all possible things I might have written about have been written. No idea what I will do tomorrow.

Went downstairs to take picture of Quarks to prove I have been there. Forgot there are places people still smoke indoors. Looked at all the casino games and realized I had no idea how to play any of them. I’d just be handing the casino money.

This is why I hate Las Vegas. Smoking, gambling and drinking.

Anyway, not sure what there is to do here that doesn’t involve smoking, drinking or gambling. 4AM by my body clock so…. bedtime.

Yeah, it seems really hard to imagine, but we have not yet ventured into any of the alternate planes of reality as a guild. We fixed that last night as we had our way with the Plane of Hate.

This isn’t your dad’s Plane of Hate. Once a viciously deadly raid zone, PoH has been gentled, and is now a fairly average place to experience. We had the guild hall portal set to PoH so people could come and go as they pleased, a huge difference from the old days where just finding a wizard to port you up was difficult, as the zone in was often a death trap. Early zoning strategy was to hope the monsters would be more interested in killing the other groups so that yours could get to the safe point, and then you could start the long, mandatory corpse recovery before you ever pulled a single mob. It could easily be an hour between zoning up and being ready to pull. Sisca, our monk, used to have the job in those elder days of zoning to Hate, feigning death immediately, then dragging the corpses once everyone was done dying.

Sejal had busted butt to get to 46 so that he could join the Friday group in Hate, and it was a good thing. A LOT of enchanter loot dropped — a defiant dagger and various bits of Insidious armor made him last night’s big loot winner.

Once we had a group together, we cleared our way through to the Maestro area, and guess who we found there:

“Bad touch” Rogbog? No, that’s the Hand of the Maestro playing one-fingered piano. The Hand is needed for the warrior epic. Ceipheid couldn’t make it last night, but we decided to go ahead and kill it anyway. When we had enough for a second group, we made a quick raid and entered the Cathedral to take the mob down. The Hand joined as we were killing the mob in front of it, so I offtanked that while everyone else killed the Hand and Qutey and Callendra, druids both, tried to keep people alive as the cleric, Coldheat, kept getting disconnected every couple of minutes. The Hand and the add died at about the same time.

We split back into two groups. Group 1 stayed on the steps, while the group I was in returned to the bridge and pulled for a couple of hours. It was fun, but after awhile it got a little boring. I can’t wait until we get to level 60 so we can get back to doing some raids. In EQ, Raids = TOTAL FUN, and there’s bunches two groups can do.

Ended the night with four more AAs, for a total of 30 now, with 20 spent and 10 saved. Nine of those are reserved for Endless Quiver when I reach 59. 44% through level 55. I’ll probably try to get into a Nadox group sometime next week to start heading for 60. This weekend, though — Fan Faire, but my son is sick so I dunno how that will work out.

Next week: Riwwi, the level 60 hot zone. Level grinding, but in someplace new. I used to see groups camped at the zone in all the time. Next week, that will be us.

Remember those spam books that you could get in the 80s that would claim to have all the genealogy of your family name and trace your roots and print your family crest and stuff? And then it would turn out to have the phone book information of everyone in the country with your last name, along with some really generic information and a totally made up crest.

I’m not saying EQ’s 10th anniversary book will be anything like that. The description of the book just reminded me of it. Here’s what it includes:

• The original storylines for EverQuest and EverQuest II.
• Interviews with key contributors to the EverQuest legacy, including John Smedley, Russell Shanks, Brad McQuaid and many others.
• See the world of Norrath come to life! Concept art to final 3D art representations of famous EverQuest and EverQuest II locations, as well as descriptions and commentary from the development and community teams.
• Concept and promotional images of famous NPCs, with interview notes from the developers about why and how they were created.
• Wireframe model shots, rendered shots and previously unreleased artwork.

So, screen shots and copy/paste from old interviews.

I’d love to see a round-table discussion with the original EQ devs where they talk together about making the game, share stories, whose baby was born in crunch time, you know, the cool stuff. Or some of those old long flamewars that would follow Abashi whenever he posted on the EQ forums about ANYTHING, that led SOE to closing the EQ forums entirely because every new player that tried to ask any question at all would be mercilessly flamed.

EQ, to me, is so much more than its concept art. It was a game whose success depended almost entirely upon its community. To have a book that only talks to the devs misses an opportunity to make a truly memorable EQ memories book.

I’d like to read about the adventures of the first people to kill Nagafen and Vox. About the “duel wars” when the results of a duel would be broadcast through the world and people would make fake alts just so “Cokeclassic has defeated Pepsicola! Pepsicola has fled like a cowardly dog!”, though usually they were not that generic. Reports of the Battle of Bloody Kithicor from the troops. The list of steps you would need to do, in order, to gain access to the Plane of Time. The banning of Ewle and Ebonlore. The sad tale of the people who first woke the Sleeper. Or when the pranksters of Tarsis Shriners went to Kedge Keep and shouted EVAC! in the zone and half the groups in the raid that was killing Phinny suddenly poofed. Or the weekly “uberscore” list tracking raid guild kills that evolved into a community discussion thread. Or when soon to be ex-Guide Tweety (and soon after to be DAoC community manager) posted her infamous “Nutless Assmuncher” post.

There are so, so many stories in EQ, and very few of them were told by the devs. A book collecting the stories of the PLAYERS would be an instant classic and sell millions. A hardback book of concept art and tired interviews… I dunno. Heck, I bought the instantly outdated EQ Atlas when it came out, I have it around somewhere. I’ll probably buy this as well. But it could be so much more and with this book, we’ll never get the book that tells the story of the REAL EverQuest as it was loved by millions. Well, a million.

The number one rule of Nostalgia the Guild is that we level together and nobody gets left behind (unless they stop showing up). Last night we had the twin goals of getting everyone up to our current cap of level 55, and to explore the sunken city of Veksar, deep beneath the waves of the Lake of Ill Omen. SOE introduced the original Veksar as a free content update in June of 2003, and are poised to do it once again in EverQuest II.

If you travel to the Lake of Ill Omen in the Fans of NASCAR zone in EQ2’s Kunark, you can see that the recent live update did more than enrage the void storms… that tremor was some power forcing the long-buried city back to the surface. Who knows what’s entombed in those ancient ruins?

Maybe we’ll find “Bad touch” Rogbog still molesting Iksar Golems. I mean, it’s possible, right?

The night started out slow, but people tend to trickle in and we have tricks like the campfire to help people get to the right place. Once we had a full group — me, Ceipheid playing his ‘zerker Rogbog, Warmunger showing off his shiny new epics, chanter Mantis, and Stargrace two boxing her cleric, Ishbel, and her beastlord, Nala — we headed in. No issues, no wipes, we made it without getting too lost to the shops/iksar behemoth area, placed the campfire in a safe place (as opposed to “under where the behemoth pops”, as SOMEONE suggested), fired up the Lesson of the Devoted and settled in for the night.

Callendra, Sisca and Binxs showed up awhile later, so I split off to be their tank, and we moved back to the pool room.

While we were in the other room, i was watching the first group on the web cast. It was pretty wild :)

The aim was to get everyone to level 55. All but Binxs and Rogbog made it. And that’s tenacity for ya. Veksar is not a hot zone and in fact the experience is pretty crappy, in general. It always was. Even back in 2003 when I was leveling my cleric there, we seemed to spend days there without making much progress.

But heck, we’re not in a race, and a lot of people had never been to Veksar before, so it was worth a look on the way up. Rogbog, who was like level 6 or something when he got there, ended the night well into his forties, so that was good. I made 6 AA, and that didn’t suck, either. I’m saving the first nine AA for Endless Quiver, but after that — back to Combat Fury and Weapon Affinity.

Next week is the Plane of Hate. That DOES have a decent experience mod, so we should be able to get most everyone to 55 and also a fair bunch of AAs along with it.

Afterward, I went and did the GU48 void storm quest, and now have seven notes to my name. Just fourteen or so more, and I’ll have the cool black armor :)

Play EverQuest? Want to get in on the ground floor for the next expansion, Seeds of Destruction? Now’s your chance to sign up to get into the beta. EQ SoD beta starts August 19 and ends October 7. EQ lead dev Clint Worley says they’ll be letting people in in stages, so sign up early to get in early.

The clock on the cable box in the living room is twenty minutes slow; I *know* I shouldn’t rely upon it. I was trying to be clever and use my Asus Eee from the living room to SSH into my Linux box and copy the latest episode of The Middleman to my Vista laptop so that my PS3 could find it and play it. I have this crazy idea that I can use the Eee to control every piece of electronics in the house. I’d managed all that, when I noticed the Eee had a different time from the cable box — the correct time — and that I was late for the Tuesday Nostalgia group.

I ran to my room, jumped online, but nobody else from the group was there. I checked the boards and it looked like a lot of people weren’t going to make it; Hakiko may have been there and left already, I don’t know and nobody on had seen him. So I went to the Bazaar and thought about buying some gear to fill up all the empty slots in Sela’s armor, but after about an hour, decided to work on Tipa’s levels and AAs instead.

Since we raised the level cap from 52 immediately after killing the dragons last week, most everyone has been madly leveling … the three levels to the new cap of 55. Some people have wished for the cap to be 60 instead, but I want Nostalgia the Guild to be the kind of place you can come once a week and not fall behind. With AAs, there’s always something to do for those who want to play more.

I made level 53 the same night we removed the cap in the Crypt of Nadox, the level 55 hot zone. I made 54 in Akheva Ruins while we tried to do with one mid fifties group what raid guilds used to do with four level 60 groups — take on Va’Dyn, the giant rock monster who is one of Luclin’s first raid targets. We eventually managed to get him solo, but we could not take his damage. Still, made a level from the attempt because AR is, too, a hot zone.

Last night it was back to Nadox where I got 40% of the way through level 55 and my 20th AA, which I spent on Weapon Affinity. There are SO MANY AAs after so many expansions that it’s tough to figure out which to get. I have Run Speed 3, Innate Regeneration 3, Foraging (by mistake), Combat Fury 2 and Weapon Affinity 1. The last couple will increase my dps a lot.

The group I was in couldn’t keep mobs off me, even if I did nothing but auto-attack (I’ve a variety of nukes and dots I can add, including uber nuke Icewind that I quested for last weekend). I kept casting jolt, but finally decided nothing would work but to stay out of the fight entirely for the first few seconds. That helped some. Chain casting Jolt worked somewhat but was harsh on my mana.

The night was marred by the constant stream of high level monks who would go from camp to camp in Nadox looking for nameds to steal, bringing trains with them wherever they went, leaving death behind them. Sure, they could have feigned their trains off, but there was always the possibility that some level appropriate groups might get the nameds in their areas before they did. And there were plenty of level appropriate groups around. The fifties are the time you start coming upon the majority of the players. Most of the group was probably alts, but their twinkage was usually not high; I was the only one wielding epics, anyway.

So when I say training skills, I’m talking about the monks’ skills at training. I can’t tar them all with the same brush — we had two monks in the group who seemed very capable — but it certainly seems that if you want to be a real jerk, and you really care nothing about anyone besides yourself, a monk is the way to go. Once all the lowbies in the area are dead or dealing with your train, you can steal their named mobs.

Years ago, being trained would have really bugged me, because I cared about leveling and loot. Now that I realize neither of those things matter, I just take these things as they come. Being able to affect someone else’s game play, for good or ill, is just part of EQ. I got trained, and I died, but I got dragged to a friendly cleric, got a rez, full buffs, and an invitation to join their group. Being trained was bad, but I got to meet new, friendly, good people as well. In an entirely instanced game, neither would have happened. World of Warcraft, et al, by taking away the bad parts of open dungeons, took away the good parts as well.

Come Hell or high water, we were going to start leveling again after last night’s dragon raids. Everyone has been getting antsy about perpetually staying at level 52 solely to farm the dragons. Last night, we killed them both, and have killed each of them three times. Nostalgia the Guild has gone back in time nine years to when mega guilds used to roam the world, throwing themselves against the greatest monsters of the age. But now, we’re moving on to EverQuest’s first expansion. Next week: Veksar, the city hidden beneath the smoothly lapping waves of the Lake of Ill Omen. Nostalgians, remember that for the next two weeks, we’re meeting on Thursday instead of Friday. And that the new level cap is 55.

First up, Lord Nagafen. We had a fantastic turnout, but, unfortunately, were gnome-less :(. Soaridor had transferred his monk, Sisca, over (along with a lot of very nice arrows — THANKS!), so we had a puller once again. First pull was a disaster in slow motion. First came the two giants in the room. And then Magus Rokyl decided to join in. And then Warlord Skarlon and HIS friend join in (!!). And then, NAGGY. Okay, I was very nearly almost laughing. We got the first two giants dead and Rokyl most of the way there before the last of us died.

We rez up (I remembered this time to move the campfire to the ready room), and kill Skarlon and his friend. Sisca manages to split Rokyl, so we kill him, then rush in for the Naggy kill. It took a little longer to position him than normal, but we took the old lizard down — live! on the web!

Ceipheid was broadcasting our raid out on the web (I would have announced it here if I’d known in advance), and it was bizarre watching the raid live on my computer, and then watching the raid a few seconds delayed from the MT’s perspective on the other computer. Plus commentary from the random visitors who wandered in. One of them mentioned he could solo Naggy, I guess he must have been 52 or lower but he claimed to have 15K hit points. Well, okay. But we’re not raiding to be uber. We’re raiding to have fun. And to get a second Red Dragon Scale.

We didn’t get one. Naggy is being stingy. Someone asked if that meant we were coming back. Nope. It just means we’re heading to the bazaar. 7500 plat later, and Ceipheid got his GREEN scale, which means he doesn’t need to do the quest to turn a red scale green, which is a huge bonus.

Brown Chitin Protector — Guild Bank
Razing Sword of Skarlon — Ceipheid
Cloak of Flames — Binxs
Gauntlets of Fiery Might x2 — Guild Bank
Gold Plated Koshigatana — Guild Bank
Torn, burnt book — rot.

With Naggy dead, his love Vox would be pining away. She needed to be killed just to set her soul at rest. It would just be cruel to leave her alive, really.

The hardest part of the Vox fight was clearing the giants from her room, there was an extra one or two in with the pack that I guess we normally kill separately. Two ice giant priests and their complete heals made the whole thing tedious, but not particularly dangerous. After a few minutes we had them dead, and Sisca pulled Vox to our normal kill spot in the flag room (to the displeasure of the peanut gallery on the webcast, who wanted to see people get flung into pits by tentacle terrors as we took her down. Nope. There’s a REASON we don’t fight her in her lair.)

Without any mages and nobody to drain her mana, Vox took a much longer time to die, but we stepped up our dps just at the right time and she had no chance to either complete heal or gate away.

Both of them will be back next week after their forced vacation courtesy of Nostalgia, but we won’t be. It’s been absolutely wonderful to be able to raid them these past few weeks.

Dragon Bone Bracelet — Guild Bank
McVaxius’ Horn of War x2 — Ceipheid’s bard, Maromi
White Dragon Scales — Maromi

Afterward, we kicked Urtog, Gozad and Malfi from the Fellowship and added Callendra, Sisca and Warmunger in their places. Sorry guys :( We needed the spots, and those three are there every week. I wish Fellowships were larger. Nine seems to few; there’s no middle ground between campfires and guild banners. I’d just prefer to set up a guild banner someplace. Make it six people in the guild that need to be there instead of thirteen, and that would work out fine.

Lackey was tearing up the Crypt of Nadox with his cleric, and invited anyone to come join. I thinks I will, I said, rushed over there, turned on my Lesson and ended up 72% of the way through level 53 when the group split up. It felt good to be able to level. This morning, I returned to Nadox to do the Icewind quest. Lots of people claim this can take days, but it only took about an hour of killing before I got the drop, went back to Gunthak and am now the proud caster of a sooper dooper ice nuke.

I also got a pair of Steel Wrapped Leggings and three pairs of Gloves of the Fallen Spirit, coming soon to a guild bank near you.

Game Update 47 went live yesterday, though not without problems for me. I was a little apprehensive about the patch because it had consistently crashed my computer when I was trying to check it out on Test, but I patched (eventually) and logged in fine. Stargrace was after me to get on voice chat, and even after all her detailed, patient instructions, it just didn’t work. It would say “You are not in a channel” whenever I pressed the push to talk button, even though I had selected a channel. Midway through the evening, it suddenly began working. No, I don’t know why.

The chat quality was on par with Ventrilo, so that ws good. Unfortunately, voice chat only works when you are logged in to that game. Ventrilo, not being tied to any one game, let’s me chat with people from any game or no game at all. Since my Befallen characters are not on Najena, I couldn’t chat in the Nostalgia guild channel unless I logged over there. Which I did, logging in Brightknife while Dorah did her stuff on Befallen. And not Najena, because after four tries to transfer her over to Najena and getting a “Service Violation” each time, I gave up. Each failed transfer attempt looks to my bank like a hacking attempt and after awhile they shut down my card — that’s what happened last time I tried to transfer my Befallen characters to Najena. I got into chat with a tech support rep and he just cut and pasted useless stuff that didn’t help.

Some guides were playing around, trying to get people to get drunk and leap to their deaths. One of the participants claimed they were having fun, and a guide responded that this was just as much fun for them. I can believe that! In fact I imagine it was even MORE fun for them :) Honestly, if it was all that much fun, you’d see people getting drunk and leaping off cliffs just for the fun of it even without guides around, no? The guides could have been more creative, though, with their willing audience. “Okay, you there, you’re Mommy Cat, and you over there are Daddy Cat, and you in the middle there are the full moon on a warm summer night. Okay, GO!”

I kid :)

What else? Oh yeah, the new reputation crafting clothing. Naturally, I bought it immediately, but it just barely fit. Is this any way for a halfling to dress? I mean, we tend to simple, rustic dresses and broad-rimmed hats to keep the sun off.

I complained to the merchant there, and she said it was no fault of hers (naturally), but the dresses were tailored for gnomes and only barely fit on any other race. For barbarian women, there’s only enough fabric for a couple of tassels and a G-string. I dunno about that. But look how nicely it matches my tradeskill epic cloak!

I was checking through the guild hall supplies to see if there was any insufficiently guarded bits of stone or ore I could safeguard in my bank vault — for the glory of the Overlord, of course! — when who should happen by but Lord Blayze, who was pretty pleased with the work thus far, but went all Darth Vader at Death Star 2 on the engineer when he requested more materials to replace the extensive supplies of rare ores which had just recently gone missing (oops… what did I do! heh…) On time and under budget, that’s the Freeport way!

Swam out to have a look at it, and nice job thus far, folks! That has me wondering which city Nostalgia will have its guild hall in. Evil, spiteful, hateful Qeynos, or refreshingly honest Freeport? If SOE ever gets their act together and allows me to transfer my characters, we may yet find out.

I didn’t do anything with the new void storm quests. Still burned out from the 21 times I did the previous one to get all my armor, weapons and house items, and I hear you now have to do it separately for every person in your group, for no reason at all that I can think of.

I’ve had my level 75 cleric on Luclin for about… four months now. The level cap on EverQuest is 80. There have been three expansions since I last played her, The Serpent’s Spine, The Buried Sea and Secrets of Faydwer (I played TSS just long enough to get to level 75). A new expansion, Seeds of Destruction is about to come out.

And I don’t care. I haven’t even joined one group her level. Because I know what my job will be — sitting on my ass watching other people have fun while I press the heal button occasionally. Doesn’t matter what level or what expansion, my job was the same. Same as when I was a rogue. Druid was a little different; when the druid was my main, I could solo well, or be bad at stuff in a group. They’ve since made druids better in groups and given clerics the ability to solo somewhat, but really, my complete frustration at the mindless repetition of playing EverQuest, combined with the difficulty of finding a group, drove me to quit. I only came back for the Nostalgia group, but once again, I find I have zero interest in leveling, except insofar as I get to see areas of the game one last time. SoD may well raise the level cap to 100 and promise pie, but there is absolutely nothing that will get me to willingly join the grind again.

I almost quit EQ when I heard TSS would raise the cap to 75, but I enjoyed the people I raided with enough that I (with their help, of course), grinded out the levels. When I heard about SoF raising it to 80, that was when I quit EQ.

I played WoW enough in beta that I had no interest in playing it after release, but I eventually did, and started and finished the game in six months and quit before anything was known about the expansion. I was actually glad that there was a game out there (WoW) which was fun all the way through, and that you could actually *finish*. Naturally, they had to add a lot of grind to it but I was already gone by then. There was nothing they could really add to WoW to make it worth grinding for anyway.

I don’t have any interest in grinding levels in Vanguard, EverQuest 2, Lord of the Rings Online or any of the other WoW-likes out there. Zero, zilch, none. I log into EQ2 once every few weeks to say hi to my stuff. My alts sit before the RoK quest grind level and I see no reason whatsoever to do that twice (my troub and inq did it simultaneously so they only count at once). If Shadow of Odyssey raises the level cap, I’ll probably quit EQ2.

Just counting my main characters, I figure I have heard the ding 2270 times (counting AAs in the EQa). And that’s really low, since I have bunches of alts in every game I didn’t count. Also that doesn’t count DAoC, FFXI, LotRO or the others. Call it 3000 times counting everything.

That’s enough to become immune to ding. This old rat is no longer pushing the lever that sometimes but always longer than before, drops a sunflower seed into my salivating mouth.

I look at upcoming WoW-likes and wonder why they have to be that way. If the focus of Warhammer Online is city sieges and mass battles, then why level? Why not just get in on the city sieging from Day 1? If WoW’s raids are so great, why have all that cruft before you get to them? If EQ2’s lore is so terrific, why do we have to fight at all? Guild Wars lets you start a character at max level if you just want to do arena combat. That sounds like an EXCELLENT idea. Why doesn’t every game do that?

I’ve spent a few hours trying to figure out what could bring me to strap myself to the grinding wheel once more and I can’t think of anything. Not even friends or family.

I do know why I play MMOs, I’ve always known it. I play MMOs to tell stories, with myself as the main character. That Wizard 101 comic is part of the story I tell myself when I play (and there’s a lot more to that which will unfortunately have to wait until I unlock Marleybone). I had a story for leveling Dina and Dera through the RoK quest grind. I had a story for Etha as I went through EQ for the first time.

But the less WoW-likes let you tell your own stories and the more they force you to do whatever little evil treadmill schemes they’ve decided upon, the less I am interested. I play Wizard 101 a lot because, though it has levels, they don’t matter so much. A level 1 wizard could teleport right into Mooshu, the level 35+ world, and still contribute to the fight, because fighting isn’t based on your level, it’s based on your deck of cards, and being higher level just gives you more options. When i DO port into those fights, though being way lower level, I DO contribute.

It’s astonishing.

This is why I have started trolling the free-to-plays. Because WoW-likes don’t interest me any more. Not even the ones I play right now. I’m glad Cameron and others aren’t tired of them, but geez. These games are like punishments to me now. Punishments I pay for.

PvP? If, in Warhammer, I could make it so that every member of the opposing faction died, without hope of resurrection, if I could destroy all they had ever made, if I could make it so that not one brick of their homes rested upon another brick and all memory of their civilization was stamped out forever, I’d probably play. But instead they just reset things after awhile. Zzzzz. If I really wanted to PvP, I’d play a game that didn’t require you to level to do it. Like Call of Duty or Halo or TF2 something. WoW-likes and PvP will always be shaky partners, since levels and gear ensure few fights are purely about skill.

After some false starts, the intrepid Tuesday group, full (for the first time in a long time) with the addition of Maromi’s bard, we made it up easily to the third floor of the Tower of Frozen Shadow, the servant’s quarters. Well, I shouldn’t say it was easy. Fada and Hakiko kept getting disconnected. But we did eventually make it with all hands, cleared to the butler room and settled in for a nice camp. Alas, things did not end well. The butler room repopped (two zombies) at the same time Bjoern was bringing back a skeleton and an armored shadow. But that skeleton brought friends, and by the time he got back to us, it was a barbecue. And THEN one of the butlers spawned the Enraged Shadow Beast that holds the key to floor 4, the home of the witch Cara Omica (who also holds the key to floor 5, the Wedding). Anyway, it was an unlucky pull and we wiped. But we wiped knowing the keyholder was up for the next floor.

We summoned our corpses and returned to fight our way back. As we cleared the second floor, we couldn’t help noticing that our healer, Hakiko, was still stuck at the mirror. Crashed again. So we decided to head up and try and kill the Enraged Shadow Beast for the key, anyway. We managed it with only one death — mine — and I got my corpse summoned and rezzed and returned to loot the key with only thirty seconds to spare.

Next week we’ll likely just stick to floor 3 and get some more levels (I got two, now level 38) before we ascend to the invisible mobs and pit traps of the fourth floor.

Sorry, no pictures :( Bad me.

It was a pretty slow weekend, considering. I meant to do a first look at Pi Story to complement the one I did for Florensia, but I didn’t get to it. Nor did I play Florensia any. I did play some EverQuest; Saturday I did all sorts of running around with my ranger, soloed Hate and Sky with my cleric, and Sunday morning met up with a guildie to do The Hole more or less legit, in that I actually played Tipa the entire time :) But I’ve talked about that in a previous post.

Since last week’s patch, some of the tougher fights in Wizard 101 have been eased up. I did a lot more of the Krok fights, cleared out the Djesserit tombs and working on the Anjit ones. The Emperor’s Retreat is still a little tough; I’m going to have to find some friends to help on that one. I have been exploring Marleybone, the next world, by looking up friends who are there and teleporting to them. I’ll have a post about Wizard 101 tonight, I didn’t have time this morning. With any luck, I’ll be able to piggyback to the fourth world, Mooshoo, soon.

I logged on to Dina in EQ2 for awhile; couldn’t find a group, but I chatted with a guy who wanted me to move to Butcherblock and return to raiding. Even if all my nights were free — which they aren’t — I will NEVER sign up for a six or seven day a week raiding commitment, unless I am being paid for my time. There are no rewards for raiding that are worth giving up half my life to obtain. None. Not even one. The fact that WoW, EQ, EQ2 and their clones encourage and require this to raid is proof enough as to how out of step these games are with the time most people have to spend on something like that.

How to bring the casual player into raiding? Guaranteed reward. Every time I complete a raid, I get a master spell or another piece to my set gear. I get it, it goes right into my inventory, same for everyone else. Having to raid something dozens of times for a chance to get something you need is the way things used to be.

Honestly, the only rewards worth working for are the ones that will remain even after I hit the UNSUBSCRIBE button. Friendships, or real-world loot.

I logged into my EQ2.Najena assassin, Brightknife, and headed over to Timorous Deep to work on some more gray quests that nonetheless would improve my armor while looking for a group, but lost interest quickly and logged off.

I see Cryptic has finally officially announced they are working on Star Trek Online, which probably comes close to being just as much a surprise as the fact that Bioware is working on a Knights of the Old Republic MMO. Which is to say, no surprise at all. Cryptic has not yet proven to me that they can make an MMO worth playing. City of Heroes/Villains comes close, but its grindy, repetitive gameplay is only worth doing if you are doing it with friends. Since nearly ANY MMO is worth playing if it’s with friends, this isn’t any sort of recommendation.

Looking at the screenshots, it looks like they didn’t use any of Perpetual’s code not because Perpetual didn’t want them to have it, but because they refused to buy it. The screenshots look entirely different from that of Perpetual’s game. There’s just one thing I want out of a STO game. And that is, my character, sitting in the captain’s seat, ordering the bridge crew around and talking with aliens on the viewscreen as we jockey for the best firing position. A tactical game that requires teamwork. And I’ll stand at the science station or whatever I have to do to earn those captain’s stripes.

If it’s friggin’ WoW-in-space like Perpetual’s seemed to be — forget it. No more WoW-likes, PLEASE. We have WoW already. Even though there were battles and stuff in Star Trek, that was NOT the point of the show. Most of the time the point was to AVOID killing. If Cryptic says I have to kill a thousand Gorn soldiers to LEVEL, they will have TRAMPLED the whole meaning of Star Trek. To seek out new life and new civilizations — and BRUTALLY MURDER THEM? NO. Star Trek Online had better be a game where you AVOID killing for the best score.

Somehow I have the feeling that the people at Cryptic, as able as they are, will not be able to make a Star Trek game that isn’t loaded with senseless killing. Maybe it will be a mirror universe Star Trek game, that universe where people delighted in senseless killing, and a universe far better suited to a WoW-like.

Ya know what? Star Trek Online shouldn’t be like an MMO at all. It should be more like — some sort of social web thing, where you could work on science projects or try to heal alien creatures, or experiment, or play on the holo-deck, or attend command school, or try to tune engines up to a better efficiency, or figure out a new way to use the deflector dish, or explore the ruins of ancient civilizations, or attend a peace conference as part of an ambassador’s retinue, or… see what I’m getting at? Having to assassinate just ten more Romulan Centurions to ding before you get your next Phaser upgrade goes against EVERYTHING ST STANDS FOR. You should be able to experience the breadth and depth of the Star Trek/Starfleet universe, which CAN INCLUDE space battles and dangerous away missions, but those would be a small part of everything you can do. And not necessary to level. Why even have levels?

Anyway, I’ve ranted about STO plenty in its last incarnation. Perpetual was going to cheapen it. Cryptic might not. I hope they don’t. But I don’t think they are daring enough to make a game that isn’t a grindy murderfest. It’s what’s easiest.