Loping Plains hasn’t seen THIS much action since the Freethinkers threw that Christmas party and the Pumpkin-Headed Horseman barfed seeds and pulp all over Mayong Mistmoore. Everyone was talking about that for months.

So anyway, Ettie and I head over to Loping Plains to see what’s up. Some goblin over in Freeport was talking up stuff about some “really cool” thing over there, “a lot of fun”. So I asked the gobber if, like, I was going to die or something. “No, no, no, you no die,” said the gobber. “Be fun, you. You just go graveyard there, fun time!”

“Well, fun is good. Nothing is going to come out and attack me, right?” I asked. The gobber looked kinda sly. “No, no no, it just fun. Candy maybe! Fat hobbit like candy, yes?”

Pffft. Of COURSE I like candy. But I wasn’t going to say so to the gobber. “Maybe,” I told the gobber. “Gotta go.”

I sent a tell to Ettie. “Candy.”

“OMW,” she replied. And we were off.

We headed off to the Loping Plains, ran to Somborn and its cemetery, where we were attacked by — SOMETHING — that did 5000 points of damage to Ettie’s wolf, and then everything went dark.

FRIGGIN *(&#*(&# GOBBERS! WHY did I pick HALLOWEEN to start trusting them?

Some merchant had found us — get this — CLEAR on the other side of town, and DRAGGED us to his shop on the OTHER side of town. Sure, someone dragging the bodies of two unconscious halflings may not be the most uncommon site in the Plains, but don’t you think SOMEONE would have said something?

He tried to sell us some knick-knacks, but we weren’t buying it. We hoofed back to the cemetery, ready for battle, where a smug looking Proctor informed us that what had attacked us had fled into this abandoned looking home. Obviously, he would go in himself and discover the source of the evil, but he’d stubbed his toe on the way over and it looked like rain and his arthritis was acting up, so maybe we could go in alone?

Norrath, dear readers, is a world of people who call in sick when the cat looks at them funny. So anyway, we were still hot to find out what tried to kill us, so in we went.

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In either this latest game update, GU49, or the previous one, SOE added new recipes for tailors so that cloth-wearing classes, the ones whose clothing choices have previously been limited pretty much to all-covering burkas, can have a little more flexibility with their look.

Last night I stood in front of a loom and looked at some of these new options.

Some of the new outfits are ungodly ugly, at least on halflings. But a couple really stuck out. I must point out, though, that the claim in the GU48 patch notes that all outfits would be complete doesn’t seem to be the case. If you could previously only make four pieces of a particular suit, you should now be able to make all of them. This wasn’t the case with the tier 1 Tranquil sets, below. Both were missing boots and bracers, and neither the hat nor the shoulder pieces had a graphic.

Pristine Tranquil Sackcloth armor

Pristine Tranquil Threadbare armor

Both are fairly unique looks. The Sackcloth reminds me of the tier 7 cloth armor out of Castle Mistmoore, while the Threadbare looks almost like a gi.

A note about the screenshots. They were both taken at max quality in Gorowyn, with the multicore fix working. I was getting about 15 fps at max settings — in Gorowyn, long second only to Neriak as a difficult place for my computer. Unfortunately, running at max settings for very long crases EQ2 for me after it runs out of memory. But it’s a huge improvement over what I had before, and for me, is the best improvement that came with the latest patch.

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.