So, yeah.

Still shocked and awed by the coolness of the Shadow Odyssey crafting quests. No killing. NO FRIGGIN KILLING. I had a quest to rebuild a cannon for some quick ballistic travel between a couple of areas, and after gathering ore, it asked me for a wire from a sweeper bot. “Okay,” thought I, “finally some killing!”

So I stealthed all up, got in position, targeted the sweeper bot, and the quest text said I yanked a wire from it and the quest updated. Didn’t have to kill it.

This is the first expansion where you really, truly, honest-to-God don’t have to kill stuff if you’re a crafter. Spent more time in front of the loom than behind a shield? NO PROBLEM. TSO’s got ya covered. These quests aren’t gonna ask you to do something you don’t want to do.

Lessee…. let’s count up the number of other popular MMOs that decouple adventuring and crafting levels. Um. Vanguard? LotRO? (I think they aren’t coupled in LotRO but don’t remember for sure). One of the things that really bugged me about WoW crafting was having to level my alt in adventuring in order to train up some other tradeskills.

Anyway, even though I had to drive all over New England to bring my son back from college for Thanksgiving (well, I didn’t mind), nothing was going to stop me from finishing the Moors of Ykesha crafting quest line in order to get enough faction to do crafting missions with my guild, who were totally wonderful about holding off on trying one until I’d finished the quests. They are so totally awesome.

Dinged 141 AAs from discovery xp and level 64 tailoring from tradeskill xp (yeah, all the quests give tradeskill xp as a reward. How cool is that?). I had to make things from several different crafting disciplines. All the recipes were 70, and yellow to me, but I didn’t have any trouble with them. Bard Power Song gives me the freedom to use the really expensive crafting arts with wild abandon, so even doing things WAY outside my comfort zone, like wood working, was no problem.

Should be fun. We’re planning to try a dungeon after our Nostalgia group in EQ tonight.

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The Shadow Odyssey is like a really big book… but you only have summaries for each chapter, and you’ll be having a test on it the next morning. At 7AM.

At least, that’s how it feels to me. Way, way too much to digest at once. New dungeons all over the place, or re-imagined old ones. The whole plot that runs through the Moors of Ykesha. All new crafting! All new AAs!

One thing you have to give Rise of Kunark; the expansion masterfully gave you a few levels to get used to things before dumping the expansion on you. You get all of The Shadow Odyssey from the moment you step off the Ethernaut airship.

EverQuest did that once, with the Scars of Velious, its second expansion. A group of gnome explorers broke through the ice surrounding the lost continent of Velious with their magical ship and opened up new lands to the rest of the world. After that, the gnomes were more or less forgotten for the rest of the expansion, aside from some adventures with a lost ship of the little ones in the Western Wastes… similar to the lost Ethernaut ship of gnomes crashed somewhere in the Moors of Ykesha. Rise of Kunark was EQ2′s Ruins of Kunark — obviously. The Shadow Odyssey is EQ2′s Scars of Velious.

The expansion’s heavy emphasis on crafting set it apart from other expansions since the Fallen Dynasty adventure pack. Crafters are taken aside soon after landing in Ykesha, and told how they can help the explorers learn the hidden lore and alliances of the vast swamp by gearing them up with special recipes for which they will supply most of the ingredients. For those crafters still too low level to go traipsing about the zone on their own, a secondary quest leads them through the balloon rides which take players safely through the zone.

I haven’t done much of the quest yet, so I don’t know the eventual rewards; I imagine they lead into the various crafting missions.

Though some of us (ahem) may have jumped right into TSO, the expansion actually begins with a quest from the monarchs of Freeport and Qeynos. We now know why they were both so eager to get the guild halls constructed a couple of game updates ago; it was so they could move into them!

Overlord Lucan D’Lere’s lair is an elaborately decorated edifice to himself, complete with all the comforts and amenities you’d want if you were an immortal, self-important, ruthless dictator. I especially liked the cool aquariums. I think they’ve been peaking at Stargrace’s apartment :)

Lucan ordered me to investigate the new lands, which leads right to some easy quests in TSO, great for AAs. And you want AA experience. All you can get. Because some of the new AAs are very sweet. I couldn’t spend my way down to the super fast run speed, but I got 5% more run speed and a decent chance to double harvest, which will be nice for when I do the epic harvesting quest.

I was invited into a group to do my first TSO dungeon, Miragul’s Phylactery, which appears to be a greatly expanded version of the older dungeon, Miragul’s Menagerie. I have to admit that I was totally confused by the whole thing. Apparently there are like ten quests for the dungeon of which I had… um… one. About midway through, everyone shared their quests and that brought a little more sense to the mad dashing about.

Just seemed so… disconnected. That’s not a criticism of the zone. It was just so fast paced, and that’s likely a good thing. Half the people had done the dungeon before and were more or less dragging the rest of us from place to place. Suddenly something surprising would happen. Then we’d race around trying to make something else happen. Suddenly something else would happen.

I can’t make it any clearer than that. We’d fight for awhile, run around, something would happen, we’d fight again.

LOTS of cloaks dropped. I have the bard cloak from RE2, so I wasn’t that interested in any of them, until the very last, which had decent enough resists that I had to vote NEED on it. I remembered how my poor resists hurt me in Thuga and the Shard of Hate. Boosting my resists is a necessary step toward returning to raiding.

Fighting some Valkyrie. I don’t know what they were for. They are fairly common in Everfrost, and even have their own mini-instance, but I don’t know if their presence here means they were for Miragul or trying to kill him. They were good-aligned creatures previously. Anyway, we’re killing them here.

Here we are killing some animated hands, like the ones in EverQuest’s Lower Guk and Karnor’s Castle. Similar to the Valkyrie, I have no idea why they are here. They appear, we kill them. I do like how they clatter about, John Carpenter’s “The Thing”-like, on little insect legs.

Don’t take my confusion over what was happening in this one dungeon as an indictment against TSO. All new things are confusing, and the dungeon did have a nice mix of killing and puzzle solving. There’s definitely a plot that runs through the place that was kinda hard to follow since so many quests asked you to do so many things in there. While I was looking at my quest list trying to see the things I should be looking for, everyone else was racing about trying to do the same. And then ice spikes would impale you from the ceiling.

Best way to approach The Shadow Odyssey? I’d definitely say the thing to do is to focus on just one thing at a time. Do the crafting lines, or the exploration quests, or all the different instances of a single dungeon and all those quests. Because TSO is not the kind of expansion you can get the sense of by trying to do everything at once.

While my experiences in Miragul’s Phylactery were kinda fun and I did get a nice cloak from it, I think I would be happier, right now, doing the crafting quests and exploring the place slowly as the quest brought me through it — and THEN taking on the dungeons.

I’m looking forward to transferring my cleric over from Befallen once my second copy of the expansion makes it to my apartment and doing some of the kill quests that lead you through the swamp in a different path.

Maybe after I’ve done both of THOSE things, will I be able to tell if this is better or worse than the previous expansion, Rise of Kunark. Way too early to tell. But by this point, I’d already had enough bad experiences with RoK to sour me on the whole deal — repetitive quest grinding and very, very little experience for just killing stuff, especially given the difficulty of the very first dungeon, Karnor’s Castle — so in that respect, TSO is already a win.

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What looks sillier than a very tiny fairly, with an even tinier fairy stuck to her shoulder, riding a huge, massive bear into a huge, massive bear convention with a group of gnomes in a steampunk city made out of mega-works and rusted iron?

Not much, actually. That’s pretty much as silly as it gets.

Or maybe the retailer support for EverQuest II’s latest expansion would be a little sillier. I went to Best Buy and two Gamestops last night hunting up the retail box. In between the hundreds of WotLK boxes, and many Hellgate: London boxes, the rows of Lord of the Rings Online boxes, the huge Warhammer Online displays (with collector editions!), were two copies of Rise of Kunark and one copy of Secrets of Faydwer, last year’s EverQuest expansion.

All these places seemed a little confused — they’d clearly never heard of EQ or EQ2. And these were game store employees? Stargrace said when she went looking that the people she met just assumed it was a different name for WoW’s expansion.

Finally, at the second Gamestop I tried, the girl I asked about it had no clue, but the guy standing next to her said he had some in the back. They hadn’t put them out yet, and only he knew about them. He popped into the back and brought out a copy just for me :)

I have a copy coming from Amazon sometime this month (with the pewter dire bear figurine, which I expect to be about the same size as the race car in Monopoly), but didn’t want to wait until then to get into the action.

After loading in the DVDs, I STILL had over an hour of patching to do, which only slowed down MORE when I ran Wizard 101 over the top of it. Plague Oni had to die again. And no, he didn’t drop any useful loot. And no, we got no experience from it. A big fat “0 XP” floated into the sky as we completed each subquest.

Then my UI didn’t work :/ By the time I got everything working and in shape, it was 11PM and after running around just a little — slowly because of the lag of fifty thousand people in game at the same time — it was bedtime.

But the game’s installed, both computers are patched so I can two box, I’ll probably be bringing Dera over from Befallen so I can get the Rise of Kunark band back together (no way I could have usefully soloed all those quests on Dina alone), and I spent some AAs on the new tree.

If I’m reading it right, bards can allot their new AAs to give a 30% boost in out-of-combat run speed over and beyond what they currently have. This would bring me to 86% run speed with JBoots on. Races with a inherent run speed boost could get to *91%* run speed, all the time.

YES. THIS is what bards have been asking for for four (4 4 4? hmm) years. To be the fastest things in the game. We had it in EQ. And now we have it in EQ2.

Tonight, we’re hoping to do a crafting mission finally :)

And that was my first half hour in TSO.

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I THOUGHT they were doing a tailoring update with new colors and patterns, but I can’t remember if that was expansion or pre-expansion.

My tests with the multicore support on my Core 2 Duo-powered laptop showed a significant improvement on Test.

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I put my necromancer, Adora, on the case. If this investigation was going to veer into life and death, who better than a necro to get to the (blackened, shrunken) heart of the matter?

Adora hunted for clues all over Norrath. Her investigations finally led her to a small apartment in Neriak, where she listened, hidden, as shadow creatures plotted with mortals about some foul deed. Then Adora was discovered.

While her pet went on a mad rampage and killed every living and unliving thing in the apartment, Adora picked up a curious amulet from the floor, and was immediately gripped in the power of a vision that seemed all too real.

Thousands — millions of void beasts and shadowmen gathered in what can only be the Void, all looking at a mysterious figure addressing them from atop a tall stone…

Though robed and shrouded, the woman on the stone wielded incredible power, and she held Adora’s soul in a grip so powerful she could not struggle nor scream… and then she was suddenly released.

Adora never suspected a necromancer could show fear. But there are some things in the universe more powerful, and more dread, than mere death. Adora realized that she had been left to live for one purpose only — to give up the creed of Brell Serillis and to help reveal to the world the coming of the Queen of Unlife, Anashti Sul.

Adora got a replica of Anashti’s staff as well as the amulet she found (now drained of its connection with The Void) and … a treant pet? Not sure how that fits into the lore, but whatever. The bubbling bowl of poison on the floor was a gift from a grateful Evdonia for helping her clear the good name of the Disciples of Disease.

Today is possibly GU49 and the continuation of the story. One of the very nice things about EQ2 is how each expansion is set up with months of storyline and lore quests — these have been going on since spring, and each one gets more elaborate.

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SOE has a great preview of their re-imagining of the dungeon of Najena on their web site.

I loved the original Najena — it was the first raid I ever did with the guild I’d just joined, United Norrath Coalition, and I must have been all of level 19, and Drelzna hated druids so much, she harm touched me to death every time she popped.

Good times. I don’t expect it to be the sort of casual fun Najena was in EQ1 (which, despite what people say, was pretty much the ultimate casual, social MMO), but it will be nice to see what it has become.

Ironforge, looks like…

But without the dancing naked night elves.

I don’t think Najena dances.

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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 :)

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