The Angry Raider

My brother bought EQ2 the day it came out, which I believe was November 8, 2004. He left City of Heroes (“bye bye nothinghead”) for EQ2, while I stayed in Paragon City and forged to 50. We had been playing CoH together but he had lost interest and time, as he worked nights.

A couple of weeks after EQ2’s launch, WoW came out, and with all of EQ2’s launch issues, he switched to WoW and I left City of Heroes for Azeroth as well. This worked out well for us as we could have our “mains” that we played together on the weekends, and our alts for when our hours didn’t jibe.

In September 2006, he grew tired of WoW and decided to switch back to EQ2. He convinced me to try out EQ2 so I bought it, as did Zoe, with the Kingdom of Sky expansion. I couldn’t really get into it, but I did get my troll shadowknight to 6 and camp him in Freeport before I quit and went back to WoW.

Fast forward to April 2008, and once again, we are tired of WoW. We decide to revisit EQ2 and we all bought Rise of Kunark. I rolled my Sarnak shadow knight, Grabthar, and off we went into Norrath. We always played together, the three of us. But Summer arrived and we let our EQ2 accounts lapse, so we returned to WoW again. Our characters sat in their inns and houses, waiting for our return, which mercifully happened around Christmastime.

Now my brother and I have 80s (my shadow knight and his reroll, a wizard). I have my epic and T1 + some T2, he has T1 and the Bloodthirsty Choker. We’re in a pretty active guild. I have about 150 AA and he has something like 140, which isn’t bad for fairly fresh 80s. We have barely scratched the surface of what the EQ2 endgame has to offer.

But now I have a feeling of, “Where do we go from here?” Recent events in-game have left me wondering if EQ2’s culture is inhospitable to our accustomed playstyle, or if it’s just the people in our guild. Tanking in instances has been an exciting experience, and I’ve grown much more accustomed to my combat arts and spells, and I’m learning the intricacies of the encounters in the game, but the other people in my group seem to make my job so much harder. This wasn’t the case in WoW. Only noobs would attack on pulls or go ahead of the tank or pull with a spellcast before the tank was ready.

My brother and I play together as much as we can; he still works nights, so I try to save the juicy stuff for his night off. But like me, his patience is wearing thin, so only time will tell as to whether we stick with it or make a change.

Shard runs in EQ2 are unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in an MMO. I’ve been running the shard instances on Grabthar the past few nights, and I’m up to 19 shards. The runs are pretty fun, and I get a nice chunk of XP and AA from each one, but I have to wonder: what are these like when done level-appropriate?

See, I’m doing what are called speed runs. You get the level 80 void shard quest (doable starting at level 75), mentor down to a 50-something in your group, zone into the instance, and unmentor. This means you can complete the quest by killing level 50ish mobs in your full level 75-80 glory. It sounds like cheating, but SOE says it’s kosher.

The interesting thing is, it almost seems mandatory. The TSO zones are very hard. Most groups won’t even take you unless you have void shard gear (known as Tier 1 and Tier 2). How do you get shard gear without doing shard runs, unless you speed run? I don’t know, but I’ll leave that discussion to the folks on EQ2Flames.

Once I ding 80 and put on my nice shiny new (but ugly) Legendary tier 1 armor, I’ll be ready to, well, run those same dungeons over and over for Tier 2. But at least I’ll get nice gear upgrades and AA from the names, since the mobs will no longer be gray. And on the plus side, I’ve learned how a lot of the encounters work, so I won’t be flying completely blind on day one.

Meanwhile, Grabthar is 78 with 15% to go, which means I’ll hit 79 tonight and hopefully 80 by this weekend. Last night I completed an interesting timeline in Kunzar Jungle that netted me a Legendary tank ring, so I am seeing some nice gear improvements. Tonight my plan is to get to level 79, finish my Jinisk faction, and then head to Jarsath Wastes!

It’s amazing how things drastically change from day to day, and seemingly minute to minute. In the world of online games, these changes are even more accelerated because there’s less risk, so we’re more agile in our decision-making.

Take today for example. My previous post talks about my wife’s dirge, and how I’m thinking about playing it, and so on. Well, today when I logged on Grabthar to get the wife’s dirge some AA, I saw a guild recruitment message that really intrigued me. I had been frustrated with my guild for quite some time because it felt like a dumping ground for new players and all their alts, and my requests for help and more complex answers fell on deaf ears. Thus, the guild recruitment announcement with promises of building up a raid guild came at the perfect time. I dropped out of my first real EQ2 guild and joined <Seven Deadly> on Unrest.

Now, bear in mind that I had all but abandoned Grabthar. He’s level 76, and it has taken me four months to get him from 72 to his current level. My singular goal has been to get him to 80 and use him as a farm bot. Granted, he has a lot of cool stuff: LoN loot card items, a five-room house, cool mounts, the Faydwer collection glasses, and so on. But in my old guild, I felt like Grabthar had nowhere to go. I never felt like I was going to be good enough to tank, and I had absolutely no guidance on what I should do as I approached 80.

With the new guild, all of that has changed. Almost immediately, my new guildies were explaining how Void Shards work, how to decide which spells to upgrade to Adept III, what the tier armors are and how they are upgraded, how to do the shard quests, and more. I joined the guild around 7:00 PM CST and by 10:30, I had gained almost an entire level, about 70k status, 2 AAs, and 6 void shards. And, I started laying the groundwork for my epic weapon, getting the Mysterious Black Tome collection done and starting the rep grind so I can get my epic timeline when I ding 80.

In all the time I spent in my previous guild, I only grouped with them once. Today, I did six instances with my new guildies!

Our guild is only level 24, but we’re rising up fast, and we’ll have our guild hall by this weekend. One of the neat things about the guild is that your rank increases as you gain status for the guild; this is to reward those people who are in the “startup” phase of the guild. You get a new rank at 5k status, 30k status, 100k status, and when you get your epic (or T2). Each rank gets better amenities, such as more access to the guild bank. This appeals to me because I really like to have something to work toward: a guild rank, a tier of gear, a special item, a mount.

I should have all ~40 shards for my tier 1 gear in about a week. When I logged in today, I thought I might have Legendary gear a year from now. I still plan to play the wife’s dirge–it’s so much fun–but I feel some closure with Grabthar. He’s not going to waste after all.

What a difference a day makes.