Archive Page 2

06
Jul

where do we go

By angryraider 0 Comments
Categories: Everquest

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.

06
Jul

i love it when a plan comes together

By angryraider 0 Comments
Categories: Everquest

This past weekend was very productive in EQ2. On Friday night we raided Protector’s Realm and I got some great Fabled forearms. There were some pretty good drops in there for tanks, and the other SK got a new shield and some new boots. I didn’t roll on the boots as I wanted to keep my T2 bonus, so I was happy for him. I’m not sure why he took the shield as what he had was better, but mox nix.

After the raid we worked on my epic updates. We pounded through Karnor’s Castle, Chelsith, and Shard of Fear. We finished up SoF at 2:30 AM so we called it at that point, and I only needed Maiden’s Chamber and VoES to finish it all up. That happened on Saturday.

After much standing around waiting, I killed the last NPC and was given Sedition. I was pretty exhausted after running all those dungeons, so I just added an adornment and logged.

On Sunday I ran through Crucible to try for my shield, but alas, it did not drop. I was pretty burned out on dungeon runs so I passed on the WoE raid. It started right after Crucible and I didn’t have six contiguous hours to spend at that point. But I did log in later, and to my shock was asked to zone in to WoE to receive a Fabled belt (the name of which escapes me).

After that, I went name-farming in Moors with my brother and killed about six or seven. Most of them dropped Ornate chests so I picked up a lot of attuneable Legendary items, including a ring I gave to my ranger.

It was a very productive weekend, that’s for sure. But it was not without its frustrations. I’ll save that for my next post.

22
Jun

i do not want what i have not got

By angryraider 0 Comments
Categories: Raiding

Euripides at Critical QQ rants for a while about Tier 8 being made accessible to non-raiders in the next World of Warcraft patch. While I wouldn’t agree with his characterization of the whole thing as “elitism,” I see where he’s coming from. I wouldn’t characterize T8 as “free,” as Blizzard isn’t just dropping it in everyone’s bags. You still have to get the Emblems of Conquest, whether it’s through heroics or raiding.

My position on the whole thing is a lot less black-and-white. I don’t really care how people get Tier 8 in WoW. I do know that Blizzard has to keep their game alive, and they learned some very hard lessons from raid content back in “vanilla WoW” and Burning Crusade. And with the exodus of users from WoW to competing MMOs or console games, Blizzard has to make sure that the masses are appeased. They asked themselves, “Do we cater to the 1% of our userbase that will whine on our forums or do we cater to the 99% that will whine on our forums?”

That was a difficult decision, I’m sure.

You might be asking yourself, Why does someone want raid gear if they don’t raid? That’s a good question, but I think I know why: In WoW, gear is the only way to “complete” your character. It’s what defines you in endgame. If you’ve been level 80 for months and you’re still in blues and heroic epics, well, you suck. That’s the prevailing wisdom in Azeroth/Outlands/Northrend.

A similar statement is made in EverQuest II: why do you want your Mythical if you’re not a raider? On my server, at least, the answer is a bit different: you don’t get to raid if you don’t have your Mythical. Vicious circle, I know. Still, the argument is the same: if you’re level 80, and you want to feel completeness, you want your void shard armor. And if you’re rich, you buy the loot rights to whatever else it is that you want or need for that completeness. With that level of gear, you can do the difficult content if you want to. Makes sense.

In both cases, WoW and EQ2, the gear appeals to our basic desires to complete sets of things. That’s human nature. And for some of us, that desire for completion doesn’t justify the sacrifices necessary to be considered worthy of it all.

It remains to be seen whether SOE will make getting your Mythical via heroic content a possibility. Perhaps I’ll be one of the “QQing elitists” then.

17
Jun

grouping: the best and worst MMO feature

By angryraider 0 Comments
Categories: General

I’m a goal-oriented person. I like to set goals, work toward them, achieve the goals, and then do something else. When it comes to MMOs, this personality trait can be both enormously exciting and devastatingly frustrating.

Sometimes my goals are individually achievable. For example, if my goal is to get 140 AA, I can do that on my own. I don’t have to depend on anyone else.

Other goals require one or two other people. Grabthar’s tier 1 gear, for example, only required two other people: one person to mentor down to, and another to help clear the zone (he also made the gear).

And still other goals require five additional people, or 11 additional people, or 23 additional people. Those are the frustrating goals. Those goals have too many dependencies, too many avenues of failure caused by other people. My goal for Sedition, my fabled epic weapon, falls into this category.

As a rule, I like grouping with other people. Playing EQ2 long enough finally indoctrinated me into the groupthink (with apologies to Orwell). I like tanking, I like being a lynchpin, and I like the feeling of success.

What I don’t like is trying to bring those five people together, trying to make sure they are as committed to my goal as I am, and trying to make sure all five people will meet the expectations of everyone else in the group.

Perhaps I am too demanding of other people. In my day job, I work in a leadership capacity. I have deliverables. The people who work with me have to get their work done in a timely manner in order for us to ship software on time. Otherwise, we fail.

My last few grouping engagements in EQ2 have been very unsatisfying. In one case, the guy leading the group took a two hour afk to go eat dinner, right in the middle of the dungeon that he organized. This has happened more times than my razor-thin patience can deal with. So I don’t want to group with that guy anymore, which in itself is very unfortunate because he’s an otherwise awesome guy. I’m not the guy’s dad; I can’t make him schedule runs for after dinner or whatever. I’m at his mercy if he’s in my group.

The obvious solution is to find other people to group with, either within the guild, in another guild, or a pickup group. That starts the whole process over again. If I log in and I’m not making progress toward a goal, I don’t want to play. That’s just how I am.

That means I have to find another goal to work toward. In EverQuest II, that means playing my ranger, who dinged 56 last night. While I’m playing Ipswich, I’ll occasionally give a thought to Grabthar’s equipping Sedition.

Someday.

15
Jun

survival of the fad-dest

By angryraider 1 Comment
Categories: General

There has been quite a bit of discussion in the MMO blogosphere about hardcore vs. casual, difficult vs. easy, and what the next generation MMOs will have to do in order to compete. Quite a bit of this discussion was fueled by Blizzard’s further nerfing of Ulduar and the change in patch 3.2 to support faster travel on mounts.

I don’t play WoW anymore, but all of this got me thinking about EverQuest II a bit. Game Update 52 comes out tomorrow and adds some controversial additions. First, spell ranks are changed. Gone are the days of App4 and Ad3 and M1. Now there are Journeyman (formerly Apprentice 1-4), Adept (formerly Adept 1), Expert (formerly Adept III), and Master. Second, research assistants are being added to the game. They will take one spell and upgrade it to its next rank. So your Expert rank of Nefarious Sacrament can be upgraded to Master without you having to buy the spell on the broker. Supposedly it takes about a month for the research assistant to upgrade a level 80 Ad3 to its M1 equivalent.

These changes were added to make EverQuest II a bit easier for all the new folks who are coming from WoW, WAR, AoC, and so on. The old system of spell ranks and new names for upgraded spells was very confusing for new players. And getting a Master was either an exercise in frustration (farming for it) or a very expensive proposition. SOE solved the problems by redesigning the spell system and making the spell upgrade process a bit less daunting.

Longtime EQ2 “hardcores” cried foul, understandably. They don’t want the game ‘dumbed down,’ and they worked hard for their spell upgrades. Further, they feel that people don’t even need their masters if they don’t raid. And so on and so forth.

In my opinion, whatever gets more people to try the game—and stick with it—is more important to me than placating the people who want things to stay the same. I do understand where they are coming from: change is difficult to deal with, the time we spend on these games is enormous and it feels like something is lost, and EQ2 specifically has a great community that the players don’t want tarnished by kids coming from WoW.

But in order to ensure the survival of EQ2, Sony has to adapt. They have to adapt to the rules that WoW has implicitly enforced on MMOs. Thankfully, if EQ2 is no longer to your liking, there are other hardcore MMOs like Vanguard or EVE. And if EQ2 is still too hard for the new players, they’ll stick with Runes of Magic or the old standby, World of Warcraft.

My only hope is that SOE remains agile enough to backpedal on a change that ends up bad, like the fighter hate changes they rolled back a few months ago. I am willing to try new things, support the changes that SOE is putting in, and help new players get into the (IMHO) best MMO on the market.

As one of my guildies recently said, “It’s really a good thing that EQ2 is good enough and popular enough for people to get upset about it.”

11
Jun

just another ding post

By angryraider 0 Comments
Categories: General

Something amazing happened last night. I witnessed an instant transformation, a transition from young and weak to mature and powerful; it was as if suddenly I was imbued with power and tradition, and I was seemingly unstoppable.

Grabthar dinged 80.

This is my first level 80 character in EverQuest II. It’s been quite a journey. Even though I’ve been playing EQ2 for less time overall than World of Warcraft, I feel more emotionally invested in my EQ2 characters. It’s so much easier to get attached to them. It’s as if they live their own lives when I’m logged off.

This is, of course, mostly to SOE’s credit. The game itself completely supports as little or as much immersion as you want. If you just want to hunt monsters and upgrade your gear, have at it. If you want to have a home, and stuff to put in it, you can do that without killing anything. And everything in between.

Beyond what SOE provides for us in the game, there’s the community that has built up around it. EverQuest II simply has one of the most dynamic and involved communities I’ve personally seen in an MMO. Sure, public chat has its fair share of discussions about politics, and other games. It’s when you group with others that the game really seems to take on an identity wholly different from World of Warcraft.

I’m not even sure how to explain it, and I don’t really know the source of it, as I’m still learning, even after four and a half years of owning the game. All I can say is that last night, I tanked Sebilis for the first time, at level 79, and the people in my group (three from the guild and two not) were so patient and helpful as I effectively learned how to tank in EQ2. Our templar was in Sebilis for the last update for his epic, and even he was patient. We were all in voice chat—another big difference from WoW, where I never even used its voice chat—and they offered tips, advice, and criticism as we moved through it.

I dinged 80 around midway through. It got pretty late, and things started to get sloppy here and there, so we called it with the intention to finish it tonight. I recalled to the guild hall and the guild master made me five pieces of T1 with my void shards as well as a belt, so already I have substantially better gear for tanking Sebilis tonight.

I can’t wait to see what happens next!

09
Jun

shard run rundowns

By angryraider 0 Comments
Categories: Everquest

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!

08
Jun

the road to sedition

By angryraider 0 Comments
Categories: General

Yesterday I did some mentored shard runs on Grabthar (I’m up to 12 now) and dinged 78 in the process. Seeing 80 right there on the horizon, I decided to work on the grind over the next few days, achieving 35% XP toward level 79. I have been doing this in Kunzar Jungle.

Why Kunzar Jungle? One reason: City of Jinisk rep for my epic weapon timeline. I have already farmed up the Teren’s Grasp rep, I completed the Dragoon K’Nae heritage quest, and I learned the Sathirian language via the Mysterious Black Tome. Now all I “need” for the prerequisites to my epic timeline is the 40,000 rep with Jinisk. I’m presently at about 12k, so I don’t have much farther to go.

Of course, this is just stuff I need to get out of the way. The actual timeline is much more intense, with several heroic dungeon runs, lots of names to kill, and various mobs to farm. I’m actually very excited about kicking off the quest when I ding 80. The timeline doesn’t look too difficult, and it’s nowhere near as groan-inducing as the ranger epic quest.

I’m generally a goal-oriented person. I set goals for myself and I work toward them. This is true both in real life and in MMOs. In MMOs, my goals are usually something special to me and my character, such as getting 700 agility for my no-raid hunter in World of Warcraft (pre 3.1). I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Grabthar, but I’ve finally realized (and accepted) that he’s my main, he’s fun to play, and I’ve already succeeded in so many ways with him that I should go the distance.

Thus begins my travel down the road to Sedition.

03
Jun

The party’s over

By angryraider 1 Comment
Categories: Everquest

Joining a guild is like dating someone new. In the beginning, you’re enamored with them, you’re happy, and it feels like the world is your oyster. Indeed, these are the salad days.

But after a few days, things start to go south, and you realize that all is not what it seems.

I joined a new guild last week and blogged about it here. I was pretty happy. We got the guild to 30, bought the guild hall, and started making plans for the future. But once my experience with the guild expanded to the rest of its members, most of them newer than me, I started to get a bad taste in my mouth. Little things like a 12-year-old boy insisting he’s my “leader” and turning the guild hall into the most inhospitable and ugly place I’ve ever seen. Or logging in only to be deluged with tells from guildies begging me to level them. Or perhaps worst of all, the guild leader organizing a raid but completely failing at running it.

So as it is, Grabthar returns to his old guild, where he belongs, and I finish the 2.5 level grind to 80.

I continue to waffle on my shadowknight’s long-term playability. Now that my wife is into her dirge, I don’t have the option to take over that character. I still have my beloved ranger, who is 53 and holding, but there’s something missing when I play him. I can’t put my finger on it. I think it’s the overall slowness of the class. It’s like, I sling a whole bunch of arrows and then I either stand there and autoattack, or run up to the mob and melee. I haven’t figured it out yet. From what I hear, the ranger gets more fun as you level, so perhaps the investment is worth it.

I also have a low-level illusionist that is pretty cool. I really like the animations of his spellcasts. I’ve also never played a caster in EQ2, so maybe I should devote some quality time to leveling him up.

Tonight I’m going to play Ipswich for a while and work on leveling Wyrmtail, the illusionist, to 20. I’m still planning on farming void shards on Grabthar, but I’ll put them in my bank to use on whichever character I enjoy more. And I need to run a few HQs to help the wife get enough status to buy her 5 room Qeynos home. So much to do, so little time!

29
May

What a night in Norrath

By angryraider 0 Comments
Categories: Everquest

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.

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