EverQuest II is a very busy game for one that's been plodding along for more than twenty years, largely catering to the same, ever-diminishing group of players. I've mentioned the plethora of holiday events many times. Since all of them tend to get one or two additions every year, the dense crust of content surrounding each gets thicker all the time. But the holidays are just one of the numerous content streams that keep bubbling up, over and over again.
Panda Panda Panda, for example. That's back. It's not exactly a holiday, in that there's no specific event being celebrated. It's just some agarophobic pandas with a warehouse of extremely powerful items they keep trying to give away for information they could very easily google. Assuming Norrath has the internet, of course.
I'm not going to say any more about Panda Panda Panda today because although I read that the event had started, I haven't been to see what the reclusive bears want this time. I'll get a separate post out of that soon enough, I'm sure.
I'm also not going to talk about the new(ish) Fabled dungeon that only arrived in the game a short time ago, with the summer update. It does have a solo mode I could try out but until yesterday I hadn't bothered to find out didn't know where the zone-in was. I do now but it's going to have to wait until I'm both in the mood and have the time for a proper session.
No, today I'm going to reveal a very few facts about this year's expansion prequel event, Heralds of Oblivion. Every year we get one of these, whether we want it or not. Sometimes they can be really good. I can remember a couple that kept me occupied for weeks, putting several characters through them for the experience or the loot.
Mostly though, and especially recently, they've been a bit thin. Usually a very quick quest to introduce us to the next, previously unheard-of, Norrathian secret society and a bunch of repeatable quests so we can ingratiate ourselves with them for no very obvious reason. There seem to be an unlimited number of these groups, most of them self-appointed guardians of something or other, roaming around the world like a bunch of Boy Scouts looking for old ladies to help across the street or planar incursions to repel.
This yeare's bunch are called The Flamebearers and they differ from the usual run of do-gooders by being associated with Lady Najena, who I could have sworn was a Medium-Sized Bad last time I met her. She's organizing this year's bunfight all the same so maybe it's one of those enemy-of-my-enemy things or perhaps she's had a bang on the head. I imagine we'll meet her at some point and she'll monologue all about it.
Angeliana on the forums claims "Heralds of Oblivion is shaping up to be the biggest prelude event to rock Norrath since 2018’s Against the Elements event that preceded Chaos Descending." If I could remember what that one was like I might be able to benchmark against it. I bet I posted something... ah! Here we are...
"I spent more than two hours helping Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science this morning. The introduction to the event was even more perfunctory than usual and the quest itself took less than ten minutes, half of which was finding the main questgiver... "
Hmm. That doesn't sound like it was much to write home about, does it? But wait... "None of that mattered a jot when I got stuck into the gameplay. It's exactly what I want from an MMO."
Aha! That's more like it! And I remember something about it now. It was a big, open world affair, where you could fight waves of mobs and close rifts, just as if you were... playing Rift, I guess. I also noted "the rewards are fantastic", suggesting it wasn't just fun but profitable, too.
I can immediately see the similarity between 2025 and 2018 - it's another bunch of rifts that spawn waves of mobs you have to dispatch before firing up your doohickey and closing the portal. I did that the required number of times to progress the quests, along with a few other menial tasks, acquiring a bunch of event tokens along the way. Who takes those and what they give you for them I do not yet know.
I also don't know where the next questgivers are, the ones that hand out what I'm guessing are the repeatable quests. The event neatly sends you to whatever the highest-available open world zones for your character level might be, so in my case the NPCs will be somewhere in the two endgame open world zones, Sodden Archipelago and Western Wastes, but I couldn't find them and it was getting late so I decided to wait until someone posts their exact locations on the wiki or, better yet, adds the POIs to EQ2Maps.
I can say that the rifts I've had to close so far are not random. They appear in the same spots and have a fairly short cooldown, of the order of five or ten minutes I'd guess, meaning you can just pick one and stay there as long as you need. Or you can fly around like a dumb-ass like I did, looking for new ones, until you finally realize you just keep coming back to the same two.
At max level, I'd recommend the ones in Western Wastes for the simple reason that zone is much less cluttered with foliage, as the name suggests. A lot of it is flat ice floes, which makes spotting the rifts as you fly around much easier. Sodden Archipelago is a jungle and a bunch of ravines, so not ideal for aerial reconnaissance.
The storyline is interesting. Well, it is if you play EQII. Not, I imagine, for anyone else. The rifts are planar but don't appear to come from (Or, presumably, go to...) any planes we already know. The creatures coming out of them are vaguely elemental but of that odd order of elements that includes things like fog and mist. Dragon magic seems to be involved but there's no obvious draconic connection.
At one point a treant of some sort turns up and starts throwing threats and accusations about. Everyone denies having any intent to invade the plane of wood or wherever the hell the thing comes from but it pays no attention and keeps on ranting.
I have to say I was intrigued. It made me wonder what the expansion might involve and where we might be headed, which is clearly the main point of an expansion prequel, so job done there, I'd say. I'll definitely follow the questline to the point when it becomes certain there's nothing more but repeatables for token or faction left. I might be at that point alread or I might not.
After that, I guess it depends how much fun closing the rifts is and how good the rewards are. I'll get back to you when I know more.
All in all, though, a very solid start to this year's expansion cycle.
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