West Karana

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.

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.