Attention To Detail : EQ2

When Daybreak Games decided to offer everyone yet another free Level 100 character in EQ2, Wilhelm voiced what were no doubt the thoughts of many. He wondered just how effective such offers are. The answer would seem to be... quite effective.

Wilhelm also kinda, sorta answered his own question by making a new Level 100 Shadow Knight and actually playing him. I made a free Level 100 on the couple of accounts that turned out to have a character slot left. I even paid for an extra slot on my currently subbed account. The rest that were full I left. For now. No doubt there'll be another offer along in a while.

These offers do work - at least to a degree. There were plenty of people on fresh hundreds, asking questions in general chat, commenting that they hadn't played for a while/ages/in forever. It was the chance of a free high level character that drew them in.

I hadn't been playing EQ2 much recently. Not by intention. I got distracted, first by Wizard 101, then Pirate 101 and the KingsIsle pair pushed EQ2 onto the back burner. The free 100 dragged me back, not so much because it was a chance to skip the levels but because I was curious to see how good the offer was.

Very good. Very good indeed. The gear provided is, for once, more than powerful enough to make the experience of playing in the latest content a pleasure rather than a pain for the uninitiated and inexperienced. And, indeed, for those of us who have been around the park before.

I took my new Wizard out for a stroll around Plane of Magic the other night and as a brand new Level 100 in the gifted gear she seemed about as effective as my Berserker had been at 105 or so. It will certainly make the first few dozen quests a heck of a lot less hard work than they were back in the Autumn, when the expansion was new.

That said, a lot seems to have changed, both incrementally as the expansion beds in and suddenly with GU106. All of it for the better, at least  to my way of thinking. As well as the quality of life improvements they announced, I wonder if they've tinkered with the xp curve?

My Inquisitor has been hanging around for weeks, tapping her fingers and twiddling her thumbs, waiting for me to get on with finishing her last four levels. I took her out the other day to get the final faction she needed to complete the first section of the Signature Line, which in turn opened the first Solo Dungeon in Plane of Innovation.

I remember doing that as soon as it became available with my Berserker. It wasn't particularly hard, but Telwyn, who has been doing the same thing on her Inquisitor, reported a lot more difficulty than I'd had. Still, I wasn't expecting much trouble when I took my own Inq into the instance for the first time. At Level 106 she was higher than the Berserker had been and better equipped, not least because she was wearing some of his spare armor.

She died on the first pull. It wasn't even a fight. I think the mob hit her twice. Clearly something was wrong. I tried once more to make sure it wasn't some glitch . It wasn't. So I went and did some research.

A lot of research as it turned out. I read all kinds of advice on all kinds of forums and websites. I tried a few things but nothing helped much. Without going into too many details, the "solo" dungeons in this expansion work by means of a buff, which is intended to let a single player plus an NPC Mercenary handle the same mobs as a full group.

If the buff is working, you should have over 100k Potency and over 20 million hit points. My Inq had the potency but her HPs were stuck at around 3-4 million and nothing I could do would shift them beyond that. Even grinding a few more repeatable faction quests to hit 107 didn't help.

Eventually I found out what the problem was, from the twelfth post in this thread on the official forums. I hadn't maxed Enhanced Vigor in the Prestige AA line. Actually I hadn't set any Prestige AAs, but that's the one that matters. A lot. With that done my HPs went to just over 20m and instead of me dying it was the mobs who fell over.

Telwyn, to whom I commented about my discovery, confirms that it did the same for his Inquisitor. Just in case anyone else is struggling, or if anyone has made a new Level 100 and wonders why someone seems to have built a wall between Level 105 and 106, this is the reason.

MAX YOUR ENHANCED VIGOR IN PRESTIGE AAs!

Ahem. Anyway, with that done the rest of the instance was a breeze. So was the second part.

Another design feature of the expansion is that almost all xp comes from quests, meaning you don't really see the fruits of your labor until you exit the instance, go find whoever sent you there (usually Druzil Ro) and tell her you've done the business.

Based on my previous run as a Berserker I knew I'd get a fair chunk of xp. I know he hit 110 before he'd done all the instanced dungeons in the Sig.line. He did not, however, hit 110 after he finished the first of them.

My Inquisitor did. She went from 107 to 110 in a single hand-in. I couldn't believe it. At first I thought it must be because of the double XP event but that had ended days before. I checked. What I did have was full vitality (110% bonus) and a 20% Veteran Bonus from the 'Zerker having hit max level.

That should not have turned a single quest into three full levels (I'd barely started 107) but it did. Something's up but I'm not complaining.

The way EQ2 works now, max level is only the start. As well as your AAs, which you probably have alreeady, you need your Ascension Levels. The xp that would have gone to Adventure Levels transfers directly to Ascension instead, although there's a convoluted gating process to make sure you keep at it most of the year until the next XPack arrives.

My Berserker has been slacking on Ascension so I thought I might try the new Solo version of Shard of Hate that came with GU106. He could do with the gear, which would be sure to be upgrades or else why would anyone bother? Even if he didn't get anything good, the xp would be useful.

It was a mixed experience. The Solo Shard of Hate is brilliantly designed. There are two dozen Named mobs, split into several groups, each with a method to spawn them. Every time you create a new instance you get a subset of the total. It differs each time, which strongly enhances replayability.

All of this is explained on this wiki page...which hadn't been written the first time I went in. I went in blind, floundered about, found a Named near the start and killed it after a very long fight which ended with me flat out of power. I autoattacked it to death!

Emboldened, I pushed further in until I ran up against a cleric mob that I simply could not kill. It was only a regular mob, not any kind of boss or sub-boss, but it easily outhealed what I had thought was my respectable solo DPS. Eventually I gave up and left.

On my second run I had the wiki to work from. I killed the Mimic-style chests and spawned the Trapped Bellhop. Then he killed me. It was a DPS issue again. That and he has fiddly mechanics that meant I wasn't even doing any DPS half the time.

I didn't give up. I was pulling regular mobs by the roomful and AEing them to death in short order and the xp was coming in so I carried on. I picked another Named to spawn - this time the Anarchic Obscenity. I killed a load of what looked like skeletal spiders and he spawned. And I killed him.

I ran out of Power again but for once I had the presence of mind to drink a potion to restore it. I never remember there are potions in EQ2. It took two full bars of Power and I was flat out at the end but the Obscenity was on 1% health and again I auto-attacked him to death. I clearly have a lot more work to do on improving my DPS. And my Power. And my Health pool. And my resistances.

Two nameds out of three down, though, and each dropped an upgrade, so that's a start. It was hard work, I died a few times, and reading the strats suggests most of the Nameds will take more effort than I'm likely to want to put in, but I have to say this is an excellent piece of solo content. I look forward to picking away at it until the inevitable day when power creep means I can waltz in on a whim and kick the backsides of the lot of them.

If the next EQ2 expansion really is the last, as the rumor has it, it's a shame. The quality is still top-notch. Oh well, enjoy it while it lasts...

Is Path of Fire A Better Expansion Than Heart Of Thorns? : GW2

No. It's not.

Oh, you want more than that? Okay, then. Here goes...

Looking back at the posts I wrote about Heart of Thorns when it was new, what comes across more than anything is how surprised and delighted I was by just how much I liked it. My first-day impression was overwhelmingly positive: "The whole game feels like someone took it into the yard, ran the hose over it, washed off the dust then buffed it up until it just shines."

A few days later I observed "By far the most frustrating thing about Heart of Thorns is having to choose between playing it and blogging about it." (Not a problem I've encountered with Path of Fire, by the way). I took a day off work to make a long weekend for the HoT launch and the only downside I could find was "I wish I'd taken a week. It's been very irksome, having to go to work every day only to spend most of the time daydreaming about playing." (Ditto)

My upbeat reaction to Heart of Thorns, which continued and indeed strengthened the further into the expansion I progressed, wasn't shared by everyone. Over the course of the next six months there were course corrections aplenty as ArenaNet attempted to right the wallowing ship until finally the Captain was cast adrift and the crew turned back for safer waters.

This time has been very different. The general response to the second expansion has been far more enthusiastic than the critical mauling the first received. The forums are, by forum standards, warm and fuzzy and I couldn't begin to count the number of in-game conversations I've seen comparing PoF favorably to HoT.

I regret to say that I'm not really feeling it. My loss, I'm sure.

It's not that Path of Fire is in any way a poor expansion. It's not. It's perfectly fine. Fair value for money. Spectacular to look at. Entertaining. All of that. No, the problem is that, as I suspected almost from the outset, it doesn't have a hook.

What's clear from my posts about Heart of Thorns is that for all its supposed problems GW2's first expansion dug its claws into me from the start and never let go. I found the change in emphasis exhilarating.

Back then, when the furor was at its hottest, I wrote "I do believe these design decisions, which must be difficult to make at the best of times, have been taken with the best interests of the players in mind. Often players really don't have the clearest view of what's good for the long-term health of the game." That seems bitterly ironic in hindsight.

Path of Fire represents a major retrenchment from the position taken by Heart of Thorns. It's easier and more accommodating. It's populist and crowd-pleasing. Mounts are the exemplar: far more so than gliders, they represent a marketable move towards the mainstream, as the enormously successful introduction of mount skins to the gem store at the first opportunity amply demonstrates.

You could interpret all of this as a welcome move towards a less paternalistic, more egalitarian approach. You might say it's just giving the people what they want. You might recognize it as a business belatedly acknowledging commercial reality. Or you might see it as a climb-down of massive proportions, a battered and bruised team throwing in the towel in the face of unrelentingly hostile criticism.

It's all of that and plenty more but what it undoubtedly is, more than anything, is a decision predicated on necessity. Heart of Thorns under-performed commercially as we know, unequivocally, from the subsequent NCSoft quarterly reports. Making the game more challenging resulted in less money coming in. The hope is that making it easier will reverse that trend.

The problem for me is that I never found Heart of Thorns to be in the least part "difficult" to begin with. I found it to be pitched almost perfectly to match my limited skills. I described HoT as "solo heaven... a classic interpretation of the MMORPG solo experience" but I also loved the signature GW2 open raid play, which reached its apogee in the mesmerizing Dragon's Stand meta event.

Filling out the then-new Masteries, opening the Elite specs on all eight classes and completing the lengthy and enjoyable collections for the associated Ascended weapons kept me busy and engaged for months and I was still eagerly running Dragon's Stand on new characters well into the following year.

Indeed, once Heart of Thorns dropped, I didn't spend much time anywhere else in Tyria (other than World vs World) for a good, long while. That has very much not been the case with Path of Fire.

It took a few sessions to finish the story, which was, at best, alright. A bit thin. Unengaging. Having seen it through, I have no desire to do it over on any other character. Certainly not now and quite possibly not ever.

Acquiring the four advertised mounts turned out to be exceptionally simple. Completing the masteries for them has been quick and easy too, which is probably just as well because there don't seem to be many worth making the effort to acquire. Thin, once again, is how I'd describe that offer.

If it wasn't for the hidden mount, the Griffin, the whole mount thing would have been a bit of a bust for me. The Griffin quest remains the highlight of my expansion experience so far. Shame it only lasted a handful of sessions. I wish it had been longer. Or per character not per account.

Path of Fire does include a new, Elite specification for every Class, along with a Collection for a new Ascended weapon to go with it. Exactly the same set-up as Heart of Thorns, in other words, about which I was so enthusiastic last time.

The difference is that back then I barely had any Ascended weapons. The opportunity to "quest" for genuine upgrades was exciting. Chances for meaningful, vertical progression in GW2 don't come along every day - or every year.

This time around, I already have Ascended weapons for every character I play regularly and multiples for most.  What's more, the new Elite specs for the classes I play most regularly don't appeal. I will not be changing from Tempest to Weaver or from Druid to Soulbeast so the new Ascended weapons would languish in the bank, unused.

I'll probably get them in the end, just for the skins and to have something new to do, but therein lies the real problem. Path of Fire is fun enough but little or nothing in it seems necessary. I have the mounts but I don't use them if I can avoid it  because they're awkward and clunky. I'd rather run. Or glide. I'm not excited by the new Elites. The new armor collections are, it goes without saying, hideous and unwearable.

Exploring the maps is enjoyable, or rather it was, for a while, but once the visual novelty wore off I confess I began to find them a bit...samey. As I've said, I'm not much of a one for map completion, but I'll probably get it done eventually. It's hardly what I'd call a hook, though.

It's not quite a month since Path of Fire launched and I missed the first few days, yet I already have the feeling I'm close to being done with it. Not with GW2, which I'm playing every day just like always, just with the expansion itself. I'm spending most of my time either in WvW or pootling about in Core Tyria ot the Heart of Maguuma. I even did map completion in Bloodstone Fen the other day.

I've gone back to doing The Maw and Jormag several times a week for no reason other than I like doing them. It'll be Teq next and Auric Basin. I miss the camaraderie of those huge events. Bounties, are no substitute for real World Bosses or map metas, that's for sure.

And of course there's the Halloween event, Shadow of the Mad King, which is in full flow right now. There must be scores, maybe hundreds of instances of the Labyrinth running 24/7. I've been there more than anywhere this week, not because I need anything from the event but because it's good-natured, communal fun.

Maybe there's some of that, somewhere, in the Crystal Desert. I'm not seeing much of it but that could just be me. Thing is, I've spent so little time in any of the Path of Fire zones lately that I can't even estimate how popular they remain. Megaserver technology will ensure there are at least a few fullish ones for the foreseeable future, I'm sure, but unless and until some future update adds a compelling reason to travel I may not be there to notice.

All of which isn't to denigrate Path of Fire as an expansion. It is, as I said, perfectly fine, as far as it goes. It's safe, unambitious and a little bit obvious but those aren't necessarily bad things. Not at first.

In the good old days, when EverQuest knocked out a full expansion every six months, if you didn't particularly like one it didn't much matter. There'd be another along soon enough. Even nowadays EQ and EQ2 players only have to wait a year (not to mention the increasing feeling that we're fortunate to be getting expansions at all, given the age of the games).

For GW2 it matters a bit more than that. Expansions are a Really Big Deal both in absolute terms for the immediate effect on the bottom line and as an increasingly rare opportunity to expand the audience via reviews, press coverage and word of mouth. I'll be very surprised (and absolutely delighted) if we see GW2's third expansion before 2019 so, with a minimum two-year wait between them, expansions need to have staying power.

I'm not convinced Path of Fire does.

Kunark Ascending: First Quarterly Report

I mentioned a while ago that I was just about done with EQ2's most recent expansion, Kunark Ascending, at least as far as completing solo content with my Bereserker goes. Turns out I was somewhat premature in making that assessment.

Power to add, they call it...

KA added several major new features. There were the Epic 2.0 weapon quests, the Wardrobe Tab, gear for Mercenaries and the four Ascension Classes.

Before launch I was probably most excited by the prospect of having a place to throw all the hats, cloaks and fancy robes that had piled up in my bank vaults over the last decade or so. The Wardrobe feature, sad to say, turned out to be more awkward and limited than I'd imagined.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It works. It's an improvement. From my perspective, though, the problems are threefold: it isn't infinite, it isn't free and each item added is destroyed.

You get a reasonably generous allotment of slots, half a dozen for the basic package, rising to a dozen for the Collector's and eighteen for the Premium edition. These can be expanded by way of the cash shop up to an as-yet unknown amount that's not less than sixty. Nevertheless anything short of everything means making choices and making choices was exactly what I was avoiding by dumping all the armor in the bank in  the first place.

So, apart from a couple of hats, I haven't really added anything much to my wardrobe as yet. It means going through literally hundreds of items and making a decision on every one and I keep putting it off for another day - a day that will probably never come.

Missing some Accolades, aren't we?

I've made a lot more progress on leveling and gearing my Mercenaries. My regular Merc is Zhugrus
Blightstaff, the Orc Inquisitor from last year's Zek revamp. He's a powerful and popular choice. I see copies of him running after people all over the place.

The mercenary gear system is on the simple and straightforward side as EQ2 systems go. Quick, too. There are five ranks, each of which allows your Merc to wear additional gear with stats that make him or her more powerful. The gear comes from quests, drops in PQs and instances and can be crafted.

Like most of EQ2's background upgrading processes, and there are many, it's a mixture of  Fire and Forget and hands-on micro-management.  You have to remember to activate each stage and you don't get any reminders but once you've opened the window and clicked the button you can leave your Merc to get on with it until next time.

Zhugrus finished his training some time ago but of course he's not my only Mercenary. My Berserker keeps four of them on standby and every other character I play has at least one more. I'm currently training up Rafik the pirate rat simply because I really like him and I'm also trying to remember (but mostly forgetting) to train the Mercs most used by my Warlock, Inquisitor and Necromancer.

It's a lot to keep track of although not as much as when I was leveling up three of the Tradeskill Apprentices that were added in Game Update 63 almost exactly five years ago. I'm still training up at least one even now!

Three bags full Lady Najena.

For the time being I've shelved any plans towards finishing the Crafter's Epic 2.0. I never had any intention of attempting the Adventuring ones but the tradeskill quest is definitely within my power to complete. It just takes more organizing than I can be doing with at the moment.

That leaves the Ascended Classes. I almost forgot about those. When I finished the expansion's signature questline it was several weeks before I got around to choosing which of the four to begin. Even after reading up on how it all worked I was still somewhat at sea. In the end I picked one pretty much at random and got going.

Weeks later my Berserker is still only about two-thirds of the way to Level 3. The recent Double Ascension Scrolls week struck me as deeply ironic, personally, although I know it was welcomed by people who play more than an hour or two a day.

What the scrolls effectively do is reset some of your limited capacity to acquire Ascended XP, rather like refreshing vitality or Rested XP. Since I generally run with near-full capacity anyway that makes them about as much use to me as a theremin to a badger. Or possibly less. I don't even bother to visit Najena to pick up my regular ones any more.

All the same, I am working on it. Like AAs in EverQuest or Masteries in GW2, Ascended Classes are an excellent way for characters that have capped out to carry on earning xp. I vastly prefer to see my xp going to something even if it's not anything I'm ever going to use. Much better than to see it simply dissipate.

Don't talk to me about dwarves.The rest of the crew I found face-down on the floor but come dawn next day this rat was still propping up the bar. Ratonga power!

It's looking unlikely that I'll have even one Ascended Class maxed before the next expansion arrives and there are four of them. That makes me happy. I like filling bars.

It's just as well, really, because EQ2 is all about the bars. I'm not talking about Brewday, either, which is back right now, bringing with it a fine new quest that I knocked off in half an hour before I began this post.

I've pointed this out before but every returning Holiday hammers it home - the EQ2 dev team is exemplary when it comes to making the most out of not very much at all. We get a new quest for every holiday, every year. They may be simple but they are always fun and often funny, too. If DBG can do it with a handful of people, why GW2 can't manage it with hundreds...well, there really is no excuse, is there?

Don't look left. That's not for you.

Be that as it may it's progress bars I'm talking about. There's yet another one with the new Deity system. Well, it's more of a circle than a bar but it's the same principle. Fill it up. Spend it. Start again. And like all the others you have to pay attention. If you let the meter hit the top of the dial you're spilling god-juice into the ether until you do something to tap it off.

There are consumable Miracles, similar to the old system (which, I think, is also still in-game) if you want them, but the real attraction here is a permanent boost to your choice of three key stats, Potency, Stamina and Crit Bonus. Everyone, without exception, can always use more of all three so this is another simple, accessible, desirable path to upgrading your character.

That's more stats on one item than some MMOs
give you on a whole character!

EQ2 has a lot of those. It makes it a desperately satisfying game to play, whether casually or obsessively. In addition to all of the above I am also still working on improving my Berserker's gear.

By the time he finished the main KA questline he felt very powerful in all appropriate content but since then he's been able to swap out several items for superior PQ drops. He's also used the Infusion system, lottery though it is, to enhance some even further and he finally got around to crafting Adornments for every available slot.

As it stands he's able to solo much of the Heroic content from 2014's Altar of Malice expansion. I even felt confident enough of his survivablilty to accept a group invite in an AoM contested dungeon the other night, something I haven't done for a long time.

Overall, my strongly positive impression of Kunark Ascending continues to strengthen even further. It's fun, there's a ton of stuff to do and it feels very accessible for a casual player. My server, Skyfire, is still bustling with activity nearly four months after the expansion dropped. PQs are very well attended, there are multiple instances of the new zones and most importantly the tone and tenor of general chat is more cheerful and upbeat than I've heard it for years.

No word yet about either the next expansion or another major interim Game Update. On the evidence before me, though, I expect good things.

There! If that doesn't jinx it I don't know what will!