Levels And Legacies

Redbeard has a post up today about leveling in World of Warcraft Retail and how fast it is these days, so fast he wonders whether there's really any point in having it at all. I have some thoughts on that but I'll leave them over there, in the comment thread. I thought about writing a whole post but I don't play WoW regularly and I don't know enough about it. I've never even reached the level cap there so anything I say is going to be suspect.

When it comes to EverQuest II, though, I have plenty of experience, albeit mostly from the perspective of a solo player these days, so I feel quite safe giving my thoughts. And what that experience tells me is that getting your levels is the absolute least of it. Even if you have no intention of engaging in end-game content, hitting max level is just the beginning.

Of course, the significance of the number next to your character's name in an MMORPG has always been mutable. Even back at the dawn of the genre, levels were only ever a means to an end.

Back in those olden-if-not-so-golden times, when leveling in MMORPGs was such a chore people sometimes bought their characters on EBay or paid someone else to level up for them, it was widely believed it took sixty levels or whatever the cap was to just to learn how to play your class. 

If you hadn't put in the hours, no-one wanted you in a group. Even if you did have the player-skills, your character most likely didn't. Or they didn't have the equipment. They probably didn't have the flags or the languages or the faction needed because all of that takes time - a lot more time than it takes to get the levels.

In many MMORPGs and especially in EQII, not as much has changed as you'd think. It's true that, over the twenty years the game has been around, almost every aspect of the game has been streamlined, pared down and made more user-friendly but the process only goes so far.

Streamlining something may make it faster but the irony of comparatives is that making something faster still doesn't make it fast. It isn't until you settle down to compare the accrued advantages of a character that's been played for thousands of hours with one that's been played for only a few hundred that you begin to appreciate the vast gulf that lies between them, even if their level counts make an exact match.

And it isn't until you go to do something about equaling them up that you realize just what a huge task it's likely to be. I'll just give one example.

What I've mostly being doing these past few weeks in EQII has been getting my Necromancer's harvesting speed down to 1.5 seconds. I wanted to do it because harvesting is virtually impossible to avoid in the game, even if you never craft or go out looking for crafting mats. Countless quests require it so it's not a skill easily or wisely ignored.

You might just about get away with leaving it alone as a pure Adventurer but I want my Necromancer (Her name's Mordita.) to be an all-rounder. I want her to adventure, craft and harvest. My Berserker (Conkers) does, so if she's going to replace him, she needs to as well. And crafters have to harvest a lot.

If she's going to do at-cap tradeskill content, she'll need to max all the harvesting skills (Mining, Trapping, Foresting, Fishing and Gathering itself.) The cap is currently 700 (Probably. Hard information is so hard to come by for the game these days. It's a worrying sign of the end times, I think.) 

I could raise these skills just by going out and hitting nodes but I've been working my way through the lengthy gathering questline instead. Most of it still involves going out and hitting nodes but it comes with some useful rewards so why not?  

It's taken me quite a few hours and most of Mordita's skills are still less than half-way to the cap so there's plenty more to go, which was why after I got to the end of the second quest chain, I decided I needed to do something about her harvesting speed. 

The base speed to complete one harvesting action is five seconds. Each node has a potential three pulls although not all pulls are successful. With a skill well below the recommended level for the type of node, which is where she's been and will be for a good while yet, you can easily end up standing next to the same rock, picking away at it for a dozen turns or more.

With the help of crafted items you can bring that down some but it still felt glacially slow compared to what I'd been used to with Conkers for as long as I can remember. As with everything in EQII, the exact mechanics and details are obscure but in general, base gathering speed bottoms out at one and a half seconds, which is then affected by your Casting speed. Conkers casting speed is 103% so his effective gathering speed is about 0.75 seconds, which feels pretty zippy.

To get there, he needed the Gathering Goblin AA, which requires you to be at least a Level 90 crafter and some other AAs but that just for the actual goblin, who follows you around harvesting. To turn him into a buff that reduces your base harvesting time to 1.5 you have to do a quest.

It's been a few years since I last did it but I vaguely remembered it involved speaking to another goblin in Obulus Frontier, a zone that arrived with the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. Imagining it would take a few minutes, maybe half an hour at most, I trotted over to the zone to pick up the quest and of course the goblin wouldn't talk to me.

That sent me back to the Wiki to see what the problem was and it turned out to be quite a big one. I'll try to sum it up as succinctly as I can.

To get Growf the goblin to give you the first in the series of quests that concludes with you setting the gathering goblin free and receiving the harvesting speed buff, you need to have finished the whole of the Kunark Ascending crafting signature questline. Growf's bit is just a kind of coda at the end but it's dependent on the full thing.

I wasn't best pleased but it didn't sound too bad. Three or four hours, maybe, assuming I didn't read any of the quest dialog, all of which I'd seen more than once already. So I set about it, only to find you can't just start in on the KA questline out of nowhere. There's a pre-req: the entire tradeskill signature questline from the previous expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra.

This was starting to look like a much bigger project than I'd anticipated. Two complete expansion signature questlines. That was going to take a while, even if they were only crafting ones, which go a lot faster than their adventure counterparts. We're talking several full sessions for sure.

Got to be done, though. Off I went to get started on the ToA sequence, only to find I couldn't get that one either. For most expansions you get a letter inviting you to speak to someone and off you go but it seems that around this time the plan was to make sure everyone saw every part of the content  so before you can get the Thalumbra questline, you have to complete yet another pre-req, The Captain's Lament from the 2013 expansion, Tears of Veeshan. I think it was part of the pre-expansion build-up but it was a long time ago...

To release my Gathering Goblin from indentured servitude and receive, in recompense for my magnanimity, a reduction in my base harvesting speed to 1.5 seconds, I was going to have to complete the full tradeskill signatures from two expansions, plus the warm-up from the one before. 

All told, that comes to more than fifty separate quests. Fifty quests, just to upgrade one small aspect of Mordita's capabilities to bring them in line with Conkers'. And it's not even anything crucial to gameplay, just a minor quality of life improvement.

I wasn't counting but I played most evenings the last couple of weeks, generally for an hour or two each session. Even with the huge boost of instant map travel via All Access Membership, the huge advantage of being a max-level Adventurer, thereby making every mob in every required zone non-aggro, a full walk-through on hand, complete with locs to cut and paste into the game and the lack of any inclination on my part to read for the third time even a single line of quest dialog, it still took me that long to get it all done. 

And I was lucky Mordita already knew how to speak Gobblish, the Goblin language, because Growf doesn't speak anything else. If she hadn't, I'd have had to go do the quest for that as well.

Luckily for me, I enjoyed the whole thing. It had just the right level of simplicity for me not to feel the grind while I had to pay just enough attention to the instructions to make it seem like I was doing something. My sweet spot, really.

Even so, it's a hell of a long time to spend on such a small thing, while preparing one character to take over from another. If it was the only time I needed to do something like it, that would be one thing but it's just an example of a seemingly endless number of minor adjustments and calibrations that have to be made before Mordita is going to feel expansion-ready. 

Getting the levels, which used to be the barrier, is now literally the least of it. You can buy those, quite legitimately. I just had to click a button. But if anyone thinks a Max Level Boost is going to do all the work for them - or even most of it - they can think again. At least in EQII, they can. I don't know about other games. I bet it's much the same everywhere, though.

And let's not forget that all of this was mainly done as a way of speeding up another set of quests. Now that Mordita has the fast harvesting speed, it's back to the harvesting questline itself so she can use it, and that's going to take quite a few more hours to finish. 

After that, I'm going to have to take a close look at her stats and see what else she's missing. She could do with learning a whole bunch of languages, for a start.

Six months to the next expansion. I hope it's going to be enough...