What's The Point? EQ2, GW2, WoW

I sat down at the PC this morning not sure what I was going to do. I have the week off work (yes, I do get a lot of vacation time, thank you very much) but I have no particular plans other than to enjoy myself.

The night before, I'd logged off  about two-thirds of the way towards the total number of Hero Points I need to complete Mirage, the Path of Fire elite specialization for the Mesmer. Contrary to my previously expressed doubts I'm finding PoF somewhat more sticky than expected. Partly this is because, after a full month's break, by far the longest she's ever taken from the game, Mrs Bhagpuss is playing again and we've been duoing on and off in the new maps.

I think it was Aywren who mentioned somewhere (I'd link it if I could find it) that the PoF open world content is a lot easier to handle in a duo or a group. I'm not at all convinced of that. It seems to be just as relentless with two - and "relentless" is definitely the word I most associate with this expansion.  I firmly believe PoF to be the most "hardcore" open world content ANet has released since the original Southsun - far more "hardcore" than anything I experienced in Heart of Thorns.

At one point in Desert Highlands, up around the plateau where the giants roam, we had the most intense fifteen-minute running battle I can ever remember outside of an instance in GW2. It all kicked off when Mrs Bhagpuss spotted a necklace near a nest of skelks and made a beeline to grab it.

Skelks were thick along the ramp up to their nests and much thicker still at the top. There were many veterans and the respawn rate was ferocious. Skelks have the annoying ability to stealth and teleport so it was impossible to tell which were respawns and which were just the ones already in play, flicking in and out of existence.

Tyrian Giants are proper big.

Added to that we had aggroed a Giant on the way up and he was hurling boulders at us. I'm sure there were other kinds of creatures mixed in as well but it was so hectic it was hard to tell. It also didn't stop or even slow down.

After a quarter of an hour of non-stop combat I called a retreat and we withdrew. At no point did it ever look as though we were going to get ahead of the game. We could still be there fighting skelks now.

This, I find, is entirely typical of the whole expansion. Bringing more people just seems to increase the number of mobs. Not that there aren't plenty to begin with. I soloed a Hero Point in Crystal Oasis last night, the one where you fight a Djinn of the Air. When I started it was just him and me. When I finished it was him (dead) me (2% health) a Veteran Hydra, a Veteran Sand Shark and a pack of hyenas. Probably some sand eels in there too - there usually are.

The big difference between fights like that in PoF and similar all-pile-ons in HoT is that you do feel you can win in the desert. I did win. It was flippin' hard going, there was a lot of dodging, I stealthed and reset a couple of times and once I kited the Djinn so far he leashed, but I always felt I could do it.

What people mostly didn't like about Heart of Thorns Hero Points was that some of them were intended not to be soloable. Putting a Champion instead of Veteran at a Hero Point will tend to give that impression.

That dam' HP's gotta be around here somewhere...

The PoF Hero Points are all soloable by intent but you still hear people asking for help with them in map chat because they're bloody hard. Whether you prefer the on-demand, manic chaos of PoF to the much more straightforward but by appointment only predictability of HoT seems to me to be largely a matter of taste. I'm fine with either.

The upshot of all that is that I very well might have sat down this morning ready to carry on where I left off. Only I didn't. First, I ummed and aahed over whether to re-sub to WoW. Had I read Stroeb's post on his belated Legion experience first, I almost certainly would have subbed up right away.

As it was, I didn't read that until after I'd finished adding a level to my Shadowknight on EQ2's Fallen Gate progression server. I ended up there because, while I was trying to make up my mind, I went to check if any new pre-expansion content had been patched into EQ2. It hadn't but I saw it was a double XP week for Prog servers.

So I logged in and did that. It's all so...random. I'm not in control of my own actions! Do I need an SK on a Progression Server? Do I need to to level him up? Does it make any frickin' difference if he's Level 30 or Level 31?

Mount skins? We don't need no stinkin' mount skins!

No, but it's fun and that's pretty much all you need to know about it. Syp was wondering why he grinds levels through the Dungeon Finder in WoW when he could be out there questing and seeing the world (again). I don't know. Don't look at me! I don't know why I do any thing in these games...other than it's what I feel like doing it when I do it.

My SK woke up in Butcherblock so that's where he leveled today. It's a really great leveling zone. I've done it many times, both end to end - every quest - and piecemeal as required. With full vitality, 100% server bonus and the 10% from boost from the Clockwork Calamity illusion (which is, surprisingly, usable on all servers) it still took me nearly two hours to do the whole of level 30.

It felt just about right. I'd hate to do it with no vitality and baseline xp though.

I hadn't seen a single other player in Butcherblock all morning. Out of curiosity I typed /who to see if I was alone in the zone. I was. Not unusual in a lower-level zone during the middle of the night by American clocks.

Both EQ games have a handy function few other MMOs offer: you can type /who and it will tell you the name of every character in the zone you happen to be in right now. Or you can type /who all and it will tell you the name of every character currently logged onto the server.

Claws off, birdie! That's my egg.

I guessed everyone must be wherever the level cap has gone. I've lost track of which expansions are active on Stormhold right now. I typed /who all, expecting the usual truncated list of 100 names, which is where the function caps, making it useless for guesstimating the current popularity of the game or your server.

Well, usually it's useless for that. Not so much when the result that's returned is four names. There were four people online on Stormhold.

I'd like to say it was at that point that I remembered the server is due to be closed and all remaining characters transferred to Ant. Bayle. I really should have twigged it when I logged in and the game gave me a free transfer token. I think I even mentioned it in a post a while back...

Embarrassing to admit but I only remembered it when I was halfway through writing this.

All of which makes the two hours I just spent even more completely pointless than I already thought. Except that I really enjoyed myself and I'd happily do it again. Maybe I'll go for Level 32 later today.

That's why, once again, I don't think Gevlon has it exactly right. Or, this time, Syp, whom he cites, either. Sometimes the sheer fun of doing something is all it takes to make something worth doing. When it comes to entertainment, maybe always.