Speeding Away: EQII

It's just shy of of a month since Blood of Luclin released. I think I've seen enough now to confirm my initial impressions. For me, as a regular, committed-but-casual solo player, this is the best expansion for five years, since 2014's Altar of Malice.

There are several reasons behind my positive take, not least among them the strong nostalgic feelings the setting evokes for me, but perhaps the key factor is the surprise design decision taken by Daybreak to completely upend the normal levelling process.

In retrospect, you could say we've been working towards this for several years. The Days of Summer questlines, first introduced in 2017, the annual "Gear Up, Level Up" events, the introduction (with 2017's Planes of Magic) of the Tishan's Box of gear at the start of an expansion, the inclusion of a Level Boost item with even the basic expansion package; all point towards a desire to get everyone on the same page for the start of each new era.

All of that has worked well, putting most players on a reasonably equal footing on Day One, even if the usual tribal lines re-establish themselves only hours later. Even so, for all the work being done on facilitating easy entry into each new expansion, one important aspect of the game seemed to have been forgotten.

With two dozen classes and nearly as many races, EverQuest II, perhaps more than any MMORPG I've played, encourages the creation of a stable of characters. Playing "alts" may even be the norm rather than the exception. When DBG made the decision to eliminate the longstanding practice of levelling up to the new cap in old content whenever the maximum level changed, they also closed the door even for more casual, solo players to get a bunch of characters end game ready in timely fashion.

It's not that getting to the cap became unreasonably difficult. Just time consuming and repetitive, a problem which, ironically, the change to xp in older zones was supposed to address. Instead of running laps round Chelsith or Sebilis, for the last few years, about the only way for solo players to hit cap has been to take every character, Adventurer or Crafter, through the Signature questlines of the latest expansion.

I have a very soft spot for the storylines in EQII. They're nonsense but they're my kind of nonsense. Even so, once is generally enough. Twice, with a long gap, maybe. If, like me, you have ten characters, at least half a dozen of which you would quite like to keep up to date, the prospect of hearing the same dialog and seeing the same cut scenes over and over again is less than motivating.

The last two expansions really doubled down on the difficulty of alting. Planes of Prophecy had huge faction requirements while Chaos Descending, although nominally taking place in outdoor zones, managed to feel much more like repeating a series of instances.

Blood of Luclin stands all of that on its head. Other than Star Wars: the Old Republic's sixfold storyline xp phase, I can't think of another MMORPG that's put the hammer down on levelling the way BoL does.

It's not just that xp comes breathtakingly fast. It's also that you don't even have to follow the Signature line to get it. At least, not if you're levelling an Adventure class. Crafters, for now, do still have to follow the narrative, although they don't have to follow it even halfway before they'll hit 120, and it only takesa few hours to get there.

For adventurers there are plenty of side quests to be picked up around the new zones. There are NPCs scattered across the moonscape just waiting for a handy adventure to pass by and help them out. There are also lots of quests that begin from dropped items. You can't level by grinding mobs but you probably could level by grinding mobs then doing the quests that spawn from bits that fall off.

If that seems like too much trouble, there's even a short sequence of quest, starting on the platform where you arrive in the opening zone, which concludes in a repeatable quest to kill mobs about fifty feet away. And the mobs aren't even aggressive. How much easier could it get?

So far, I've levelled my Berserker, Inquisitor, Necromancer and Bruiser to the cap. I also have a max level Weaponsmith, Alchemist and Sage. That's in less than four weeks, during much of which I didn't have a lot of time to play.

I have never had that many characters at cap that quickly after an expansion. Even in the days when I played EQII every day all year round. It's weird but it's good weird.

When I saw the astonishing rate of gain as my Berserker dinged two levels on zoning into Luclin for the first time, my immediate concern was that if levelling to cap was going to take hours rather than days (or weeks) there'd soon be nothing for me to do. That concern has turned out to be completely unfounded.

Even as someone who relishes the levelling game, I love this change. It's amazingly liberating. The biggest benefit, by far, is that I'm now playing all my characters. Levelling them is fun. It doesn't just make me want to level all the ones I have, it makes me want to create more so I can keep on doing it. And since I have several leftover level boosters allowing me to start at 100 or 110 I definitely will.

Better than that, I've been discovering something I'd forgotten: in EQII different classes play very differently. I've been thinking of my Berserker as my "Main" for so long now, I'd been treating his abilities as a gold standard for solo play. When something seemed slow or difficult I'd work out how to improve his abilities to get over that hump.

Playing my Inquisitor and Necromancer through the same content has been a revelation. I'd expected the Inquisitor, as a healing class, to be a slog. It turned out to be faster than the Berserker. As for the Necromancer...

Combat on my Necro is like putting the game on fast-forward. Or setting the difficulty to "Easy". With the highest level tank pet, an upgraded Cleric mercenary in support and the Necro tooled up to the eyeballs with AEs, single target dots and ferocious "limited pets", large groups of mobs die two or three times faster than the Berserker can dervish them down.

When it comes to bosses, things get even better. No more ten or even fifteen minute fights. No running out of power and taking twenty minutes to auto-attack my way to "victory". Time-to-kill on the bosses my Necro's met so far is around two or three minutes.

There is some risk. Putting out that much damage does draw aggro and she's not wearing plate armor. Even so, the days of cloth casters not being able to take a hit are long past, in solo content at least, and if things really go south there's always her 100% guaranteed Feign Death to fall over on.

Far from closing down my options by making the additional ten levels the work of a single session, this radical change to xp gain has raised my eyes to the horizon. So much so, in fact, that it's made me re-assess my assumptions about levelling altogether.

No longer do I see it as an unalloyed good. Circumstances evidently alter cases. I have two months of posts from last autumn confirming old-school levelling still works its wonders. WoW Classic proved that. But Blood of Luclin proves that other approaches can work equally well, can be equally satisfying, equally compelling.

After years of attempts to reconcile access to current and end game content with a long tail of legacy gameplay centered on levelling, it looks as though developers are finally begining to find a format that works. If you relish the old ways, WoW's Classic and EQ/EQII's Progression servers have you covered. If you just want to get to the new stuff, EQII's level boosts and supercharged xp and WoW's upcoming Level Squish gets you where you need to be, fast.

I'm sure we'll see more iteration on these systems but at last we seem to be getting somewhere: player choice. I'd love to see EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online and Final Fantasy XIV, among many others, develop and expand on these ideas.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Wizard and a Warlock to level. I'm off work until Wednesday. That'll should give me plenty of time.