West Karana

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 :)

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.