EverQuest 2′s game update 49 is pretty much the most exciting single update since Kunark. As the last (I believe) update before the launch of “The Shadow Odyssey” expansion, they seem to be rolling out a lot of their new tech to prepare for what we’ll be seeing live in November.

During “Raising the Banner” (GU49): A team of dedicated excavators and researchers have begun to uncover a remarkable find in the dunes of Sinking Sands. They have numerous tasks for any recruits willing to help defend the site, excavate relics, maintain their assisting clockworks and provide crafted supplies for the team. They cannot fathom how important this project is and how it is fated to reshape the world of Norrath for years to come!

We’ve known for awhile that the next expansion features a struggle between the Goddess of Undeath (formerly Prime Healer), Anashti Sul, and the current Prime Healer and UFO alien, Rodcet Nife. This is like one of those Hal Jordan vs Kyle Rayner face-offs, and very likely ties into the return of the Void. Could their struggle be behind the alien incursions?

Construction of the Guild Halls has been completed. Guilds of qualifying levels can now purchase halls in a variety of locations. Smaller halls can be found in North Qeynos, South Freeport, Kelethin, Neriak, and Gorowyn. Medium halls are found in South Qeynos and North Freeport, and large halls are found off the shores of Antonica and Commonlands. Click on the corresponding doors, or mariner bells on the docks, to access these new structures.

I don’t know how popular guild halls will be. The larger guilds can get huge benefits, but for most smaller guilds, it will just be an additional burden, above and beyond the actual leveling of the guild. It sounds like there will be entrances in all cities. It would be nice if any guild entrance would bring you to your guild’s guild hall, regardless of which city you or it is in.
With the work completed on the coastal fortresses in Antonica and Commonlands the involved parties have retired to their cities and the guards have been recalled to the barracks.

The experience requirements for levels have been significantly lowered primarily affecting the 20 thru 70 level range. Along with the experience changes, the drop rate for Adept I spells has been increased slightly.

This is a good thing.

The Invasion of the Vale quest is now a more appropriate level for its difficulty. The Shattered Vale in Antonica now has an escape point inside it.

The first raid I ever went on. I was level 15, and still on the Antonia Bayle server, about a week after launch. It was pretty hard. At the time, I was really psyched that you could start raiding at such a low level.

Mentoring other players now grants greater achievement reward for the mentor.

While nice, I would like to see increased benefit to the ment-ee. 5% bonus experience just doesn’t make all that much difference.

Player made house items can now be scaled using shift+mousewheel.

OMG OMG OMG. This is HUGE. Or small, depending on which way you’re scrolling.

No, seriously, this is very cool.

Spells which do not expire have been made uninterruptable. There are some exceptions which include spells which summon pets or have limited uses.

Unless I’m reading this wrong, this means you will be able to BUFF. WHILE. RUNNING. This is something people have been asking for since the game launched. FINALLY buffers won’t get left behind.

Shadows should no longer disappear unexpectedly.

This always kind of bugged me; I’d be trying to take a nice high res screenshot, and the shadows would be gone. I’d have to restart.

The game automatically detects if you have more than one CPU. EQII now runs better with more than one CPU. There is an option to control whether the game uses multicore mode in the Options Window under Display -> Performance. If you’re running multiple clients on the same computer you may want to disable multicore mode. Setting the multicore option has no effect on machines with one CPU.

YES. OMG. My laptop isn’t the best in the world, but it is multi-core. I can’t wait to see how well it runs with this. Note to self: patch test tonight :)

Rare cure potions have been removed and standard cure potions have been upgraded to cure the appropriate levels of effects. This in turn should help reduce some of the demand for dusts.

Raiders are thanking you. Note to self: Put all rare dusts on the market TONIGHT.

Artisans have designed some new recipes for threadbare and sackcloth vests, and will continue to work on more vest-type cloth armor appearances for the future.

Thank you. Also, there are a BUNCH of special one-off appearances, mostly on trash armor, that would be very very nice to see on tailored gear. Outfitters should be able to make the best appearance armor AS WELL AS damn good master crafted armor.

A few of the fae in Kelethin react to a good aligned arasai now.

The special insults reserved for evil-aligned Halflings in Freeport make me smile. I’m happy to see more flavor text like this put in the game.

Tunare’s touch has reached the door step of the Teir’dal. The druid ring in Darklight Wood has sprouted a Blessed Shrubbery. Druids and adventurers alike should seek out the ring to extend their travel possibilities.

This is cool. I’m not sure how USEFUL it is outside of PvP servers or as a shortcut to the Shard of Hate, but it’s good.

Sir Valinayle in Stormhold now corrects himself after calling Stormhold Befallen.

Ha ha ha…

Removed the option to go to Prize of Prexus and The Maid for the Mist on the mariner bells unless someone in the group is on that part of the quest.

Thanks. That’s been incredibly annoying for years.

Tomb of Thuuga. The boss fight is hard to take screenshots of because of positioning.

Yes, yes, I know I don’t have time for raiding, nor the desire to have some group of strangers have control over how I spend my evenings. Hardcore raid guilds have always seemed at odds with modern life. You mean, you actually raid seven days a week? You seriously expect that every single night of their lives, people will want nothing better than to sit in front of the computer and

I love raiding, but there is no way that hardcore raiding is good for you in any sense at all. I quit that self-destructive lifestyle last Spring and will never go back. And, I consider any game that encourages or requires such dedication (see: EverQuest, World of Warcraft) as encouraging a really psychotic playstyle. WoW is even giving out a unique title for the first person to hit level 80 in the expansion. They even used to have a PvP ladder system that required you to do nothing but battlegrounds 24/7 — with little or no sleep — to reach the top. They did finally change that.

When I quit raiding, I quit EQ2. It was when we were starting the Nostalgia guild in EQ1 (a game I had quit under similar circumstances a year before), and getting that going required a lot of time anyway. I didn’t log back into EQ2 for about a month. My guild there kicked me out. But I felt great. I was getting plenty of sleep. I stopped worrying about how I was ever going to finish my mythical epic. I absolutely stopped caring about EQ2 at all. Not because the game isn’t fun, but because it was taking up too much of my life.

Stargrace eventually got me to pick up EQ2 again with her EQ2 Nostalgia branch, but even with that, I haven’t been playing EQ2 much. I have way more fun playing a variety of games casually than one game to the exclusion of all others.

So, given ALL THAT…

Yesterday was my EQ2 crafting day (or was going to be). I did some writs to hit level 60 tailoring, logged on to my jeweler and made a couple of rings for a guildy and a set of tier 4 jewelry for a random stranger, and was trying to decide between starting up tier 7 tailoring or to betray my necro to a conjurer when I was invited to a Tomb of Thuuga raid. This is the tier 1 Kunark raid where you kill a spider who spawns cocoons and more spiders, similar to the EQ1 Volkara raid in Dragons of Norrath.

There are some very nice scout boots that drop from there, so what the heck… it is an easy raid, and it had been awhile…

After two tries with different strategies, we took her down. That didn’t finish the night… we rolled to the Shard of Hate, where we easily killed the two easy bosses, Dreadlord D’Somni and Demetrius Crane (getting me a master spell, Countersong, along the way, YAY!), and then, amazingly and astonishingly, Master P’Tasa, the first time I have ever been part of a raid that killed him. (And it was a pickup raid! Imagine!)

He dropped the ring Signet of Betrayal, and I won the roll. Winning loot is the Scooby snack of raiding. It’s easy to be all blasé about raiding. Then you win something and it’s all like, “oh, what’s this on my finger? Just a bauble really. I’m sure nobody is interested in this old ***—> SIGNET. OF. BETRAYAAAAAAAAAAAL <—***”. And now you need more. You start looking up strategies for raids you haven’t seen yet, and whittle a carving of Trakanon into your desk with a pen-knife, leaving the blade stuck quivering in his little wooden heart. Yesssssss fear me, Trak. Your death is coming……

Huh? Oh, wait. That’s right. I gave up raiding.

Tonight, Nocturnal Wrath, the guild that hosted the pickup raid, plans to finish off the Shard of Hate, and they invited those of us who hitched a ride on last night’s raid to stick out a thumb for this one.

I’ve at least tried Master P’Tasa before, but the rest of the Shard of Hate I have never even seen. I wonder where I’ll be tonight. 7 PM Eastern time. Najena server.

Hmm.

I finally got a Sebilis group with my troub; and the experience was pretty decent. The tank wasn’t quite up to tanking it — he being 72 — so we died a few times and after awhile the group broke up.

I had already camped from my troub to my inquisitor to help heal, as one of our healers had had to leave, but the group broke up before I got there. Unperturbed, I continued on, thinking at least to get the discovery experience for the jungle and Sebilis itself.

I started off 8% into level 73. By the time I got to Sebilis, I was 20% in — just from discovery along the way. What the heck; I said lfg in the level channel… and immediately got a group for the Crypt of Agony as second healer.

I couldn’t *pay* people to take a 75 troub into CoA, and yet one casual “LFG!” in level channel and I’m on my way there… at 73. Sheesh!

I’m not poorly equipped as a cleric by any means. I have some T7 stuff, some raid gear, +143 healing from (soon to be nerfed) Kunark jewelry. I have some improved T8 heals.

Most of the mobs there cast a “Curse of the Crypt” on individuals and often, the entire group at once. This comes in as an elemental debuff, and I can cure those from the entire group with one spell, which I ended casting quite often. Aside from that, the trash was meh. The experience was okay, but I was making more from discovery and nameds.

And oh… the nameds… imagine Old Sebilis in EverQuest 1. Crypt was possibly the most prized camp in all OS, except maybe — MAYBE — the Sporali King who dropped the fungi tunic. Crypt could have six or seven nameds pop… or just placeholders… you never knew what you’d get but it was a hard camp to clear and a hard camp to keep.

In today’s Kunark, EVERY named is up, EVERY time. So all that good stuff that could take days to get in old OS — drops pretty much every time now.

Loot loot loot loot loot and xp xp xp xp… this is what I was looking for all along. WHY do people have to wait until they are 75 to get to the FUN PARTS?

Okay, I know a lot of people have a lot of fun soloing quests, but me — I love to group, do a good dungeon crawl, be challenged a bit, be rewarded a bit… and tonight was the first time I experienced Kunark the way I liked best.

And it was on an ALT.

Anyway, we eventually came to the boss of the place, the Emperor. Back in EQ1, he dropped rare spells that sold for mucho plat. Here, he seems to drop the Nathsar Longsword… well, I wanted some pictures but knew I would not be able to try for good screenies and also keep the tank alive, so I set Fraps to take a screenshot automatically every three seconds (btw, I love Fraps; I paid for the full license), and so I have a lot of pictures of me dead, because I didn’t know some things about the encounter.

Our next pull, I have pictures of that, too… with the tank dead and the rest of the people trying to stay alive and killing the emperor.

And finally, last pull, I twig to the fact that I need to stay at max range so the buffs don’t get dispelled from the tank — they radiate from the caster (me), so if I lose them, everyone loses them. and hey, suddenly he’s easy. That’s why in the picture, I’m nowhere near the fight — just barely in cure/heal range.

Fun fun. Left CoA nearly 80% through 73.

Now to try to get a group there with Dina again :) Maybe get that longsword… Six second delay means megacrits. And it includes a taunt, which would be wonderful when 2 boxing. Yeah, I’d like that thing.

If you’ve been following my guild drama, a few of the people who left the guild in the past couple of days came back. I have no idea what happened, what made them change their mind… but it looks like the guild might still be alive.

I guess that’s a good thing!

I didn’t want to talk about Winterwing before she finished the Butcherblock quest line, but while I was messing up an alliance between the Timorous Deep and Butcherblock aviaks, I looked up and caught the end of a partial eclipse of the sun as the un-blowed-up moon Drinal passed before it. Whichever artist did the sky — well done. I was blown away.

Also, note that Winterwing has a gi now :) That’s the Lonetusk Gi from a named in the Ruins. The stats are awful but… it looks like a gi, and now she doesn’t have to do the woefully out-of-date armor quests in order to look like a monk again. Well, bruiser.

I should rather have chosen a toilet for a picture for this post. Last night, several more people left the guild, including its former raid leader and main tank, some healers, a couple other random people… and those who are left are getting a little worried. Maybe more than a little. Especially a friend I grouped with last night to do some Fens quests. He’s got a physical handicap which he feels will hurt him should he apply to a new guild. It’s nothing he can help, and Lord knows we all need some compassion for people with his condition.

You see, he’s a paladin.

Yes, he is. And we love him anyway. But can he find a home elsewhere?

I may have to get in touch with Sally Struthers here. For just one raid a week, you can support a needy paladin and help him have a normal life.

The Escapist recently had an article called “Riding the Failure Cascade“, and though they were talking about EvE orgs, they noted that this sort of catastrophe piled upon cataclysm happens everywhere. First one thing goes wrong. Then another. Then an important person leaves. Then some follow. Then its rats + sinking ship = taking my chances with the sharks.

That’s where we are now. We’ve lost too many people to raid anything past Kingdom of Sky, the website is gone, our DKP history is gone. and the new guild leader is recruiting people in their 60s in the hopes they will grow and more importantly, STAY, one they’ve reached the cap.

I don’t like leaving places. and it would be silly to think about going anywhere before I hit 80 with both Dina and Dera, to increase my options. Heck, maybe the guild leader can pull it off… but it looks for sure like we’re caught in a Failure Cascade, and that only ends one place. The toilet.