Here Comes Summer! : EQ2

Just a heads-up for anyone who may be currently subbed to EQ2 but not playing: don't miss the new Days of Summer event.

It arrived without much of a fanfare and I could easily have missed it if it hadn't been for the ever-alert Feldon at EQ2Wire. The official Daybreak announcement is here.

This isn't an event that you do for the fun of of it, although, like all EQ2 quests and events someone has taken the trouble to give it both context and content. I enjoyed doing the first one but enjoyment is the bonus.

What this is all about is catch-up. Even with max-level boosts and the like, the end game of EQ2 is stratospheric.

I play fairly regularly. I've completed the storyline of the current expansion and done a bit of grunt work to improve some of my gear beyond what that provides. As a solo player I'm happy with where I am but compared to anyone doing Heroic Dungeons regularly I'm a wet-behind-the-ears newbie and let's not even talk about raid-equipped...

And that's just on a single character. None of my several max level alts is even in anything like that good shape.

Yun Zi is here to fix all that. Or at least give you hope. Hope that you might be able to take the forthcoming expansion at a canter rather than a crawl.

The diffident panda has unlimited stocks of the kind of gear you'd get from doing Heroics or better.

They are free. The only "cost" is being flagged for a specific number of weeks of his quests.

He has sought-after adornments in the colors you can't easily get solo. He has armor and weapons better than I've been able to get from Public Quests (which themselves give better gear than the solo rewards from the last expansion).

He has boosts to Divine Potency (which I am guessing I should know what it is...) and to raise an Ascension Class to Level 5 from scratch (I'm still just short of Level 4 on the only one I've tried to level - I lost focus on that months back).

All this and more has clearly been added to his inventory in order to allow both returning players and casuals like me to bootstrap themselves to something like viability for the current expectations of Heroic content and to give us a fighting chance at what's coming later in the year.

Even if you don't need to upgrade your gear or you're not interested in being hardcore this is still an event you won't want to miss. Yun Zi has mounts, prestige houses and a large stock of decorating items. There's something here for all playstyles.

What's more, and what's unusual, if not unheard of in EQ2, doing the quests on one character opens up the rewards for every character on that account. This makes the whole event very attractive not only to laggards like me but to committed, regular players as well.

People have been complaining that the current direction of development has been hard on alts: this is a response to those complaints.

The event looks to have been constructed in such a way as to avoid grind of any kind. Not only is it once per account but the first week's quest, which I did last night, took me less than a quarter of an hour (following the wiki). If you remember the Bootstrutter quests from the original release, it's like that; all you need to do is visit some locations then come back and tell the panda what you saw.

I'd go so far as to suggest that even of you aren't currently subbed, this event might be worth resubbing for if you have any intention of playing EQ2 again in the next expansion cycle. For the price of a couple of months' All Access this is a bargain.

The event runs from Tuesday, August 1st, 12:01AM PT to Monday, October 2nd at 11:59PM PT and each new week should presumably begin with the regular Tuesday patch.

I'm going make sure I don't miss any of them. I just hope they're all as quick and easy as the first!