Going Backwards To Go Forwards

The colorful screenshot you see above was not taken in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Scars of Destruction, for the very good reason that I haven't been playing it. It's from the previous expansions, Ballads of Zimara, which is where I spent a couple of hours earlier today.

That was because to do anything at all in the new zones you have to be Level 130. Level 128, which is as far as my highest-level character had reached when SoD launched a couple of days ago, or even level 129, as that character is today, just won't cut it. 

None of the locals will speak to you if you can't produce your Max Level I.D. Card. Nor will the bunch of neo-colonialists who've sailed across the Sea of Erud to stick their oars into the locals' business uninvited (The locals are pretty salty about it, too, I can tell you!)

Other than what I read in the press release, namely that Overlord Lucan has his eye on some prize and we all have to get to it before he does, I know nothing about what we're all doing here in the charmingly-named Sodden Archipelago. And if you're thinking that doesn't sound like a very scenic location you're not wrong.

It may well be that some of the zones in this expansion are as bright and charming as those in its visually delightful predecessor. I certainly hope so. So far all I've seen is the dock and immediate hinterland of the starting zone and you can judge how impressed I was by the fact that I didn't take a single screenshot.

Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I took one but only to show how far across the map I'd been able to explore without getting myself killed. 

There I am, on the far side of a bridge that's barred by locked gates you can just climb around. It's the entrance to some kind of orc fortress, I think. Orcs always make barricades you can just walk around or they do in Norrath, anyway.

Probably because this is an expansion with no level cap increase, I found I had no trouble at all with the regular mobs, wildlife, orcs or kappa (Something like that...) who are kind of like Teenage Ninja Turtles that grew up. I was able to explore quite comfortably but unfortunately there wasn't much to see. The place is damn ugly.

I was somewhat worried it would be, when the setting for the expansion was announced. The original EverQuest zones on which the expansion is predicated weren't very visually appealing and neither, so far, have been most of their EQII spin-offs. As far as I can figure it, the expansion opens in the remains of Odus and moves to the extreme west of Velious, which most likely means a lot of sand and rock followed by a lot of snow and ice.

Still, I'd have persevered with my exploring and adventuring if it had been profitable in any way other than satisfying my curiosity. Unfortunately, regular mobs no longer drop anything worth having and killing them gives infinitesimal amounts of xp. The only realistic way to progress is by way of quests and since, as I said, at my current level no was going to give me any, it seemed pointless carrying on. Clearly I needed to go away, get a couple more levels and come back when someone would talk to me.

I could have carried on with the crafting questline. My Berserker is also a Weaponsmith and he qualifies, having dinged 130 months ago. Unfortunately, I lost enthusiasm for that approach when I hit the point where you have to grind faction to get the next quest. I don't have an existential problem with the concept of faction-work but I find it a bit off-putting to have to start on it about twenty minutes into the  first session of a new expansion, even if the grind is flagged as "ironic" by the designer.

Of course, I wouldn't be having this problem if I'd just knuckled down and done my levels when I was supposed to, months ago. I was surprised to find, when I checked my quest journal, to find I have actually finished the Ballads of Zimara Adventure Signature Questline. I remember now that that was one of the reasons I stopped.

In the latest unnecessary and ill-advised change to the way things work, someone decided to make leveling "meaningful" again. For several years it had been reduced to a couple of sessions at most, meaning you generally hit the new cap before you got to the second zone in the expansion. I found that odd at first but I soon got used to it and I can say for certain I prefer it hugely to how it is now, when you get to the end of the story and still have several levels to go.

There are still quests to do, of course. There'd pretty much have to be, seeing as questing is just about the only way you can get meaningful xp these days. The problem is they're all either scattered among random NPCs in multiple zones or started by items that drop from mobs.

It sounds worse than it is. At this stage, every last detail of where and how has been codified on the wiki so it's just a case of following instructions. I wouldn't have wanted to be one of the poor sods who had to go out there and discover the information needed to write the guides I've been using, though. Some of the locations I visited today were really obscure and the mobs must have been a lot tougher back then, too.

Luckily for me, I don't have to think about it, just copy and paste and follow a glowing trail. Plus I can fly in all the zones and I'm already wearing gear better than the quests give as rewards because holiday and mid-expansion updates all raised the item level beyond the BoZ baseline. Sometimes it pays to take your time.

It's been a lot of fun actually, to the point that I can't quite work out why I stopped before. The zones are really lovely to look at, the questing is relaxing and if xp doesn't exactly zip along it does at least jog. I started the day about half way through Level 128 and finished just over ten per cent into 129.

I did go take a look at the new Panda quests, which I'd missed this year, just in case that might help. They're permanently available and I will almost certainly have to do them for the Augments, even though the panda gear will already have been made redundant by the free stuff in the Tishan's box next to the guy in Sodden Arcihpelago. When I checked the panda stuff, though, I found you have to be Level 130 to wear any of it, so I didn't pursue it any further.

Based on how long it took me today, I'd guess I'm going to need another two or three sessions to hit the cap on my Berserker. There's a slight danger that will take the edge off my interest and I won't want to move into the new content but if I was really worried about that I suppose I could use the free Level 130 boost that came with the expansion and get stuck in right away.

I did consider it but it seems like a waste to use it on the Berserker, when he's so close. I am most likely going to save it for my Necromancer, who's Level 125. I've been saying for years I want to swap to her as my "main" but it never happens because the Berserker has so many other hidden benefits from having done All The Things that I immediately start to miss his privileges whenever I play anyone else in current content.

Even if I don't play her as a main, though, I will definitely be using the boost to skip her past the five levels BoZ added. I am categorically not grinding any more characters all the way through that. It's put paid to any possibility of keeping half a dozen characters at the cap, as I had been in the habit of doing.

If I'm realistic, though, there was never any practical purpose to doing it, anyway. I only bothered because it was so easy. If it takes any effort, I don't have either the time or the interest to play through an expansion more than once. 

Or apparently even that often, if last time is anything to go by. I'll have to see how far I get with this one. I suspect it may take a while...

All The Colors Of The City

After I finished writing Monday's April Fool's post I thought I probably ought to log into EverQuest II to claim my free baby dragon and check out the Bristlebane Day content. I'm pretty much done with Nightingale for now, at least until they add some new content, and none of the other upcoming games I'm interested in are running tests right now, so it seemed like a good time to get back to what I was doing a couple of months ago - playing EQII.

Before I logged in I checked to see if anything new had been added to the holiday this year, which was when I found out there isn't just one holiday running, there are two. Well, three, if you count the Year of Darkpaw. Four, if there happens to be a City Festival on. (One of those runs for the first week of every month.) Or five, if there's a full moon, when the Moonlight Enchantments appear.

That's why it's not that unusual for holidays, anniversaries and live events to overlap in Norrath. There are just so many of them it's pretty much inevitable. Around this time of year we get Bristlebane Day, the April Fool analog, but also Beast'r, whose real-world counterpart is, I'm sure, readily apparent from the awkward pun.

I had a little trouble chasing down the exact details of what might have changed this year but as usual EQ2 Traders came to my rescue. From there I learned there is indeed something new this time. Quite a bit, in fact. As well as the expected new holiday crafting recipes and vendor items there's also a new quest.

A while ago I remember mentioning that in EQII these days, a new holiday "quest" generally just means a new collection with some framing dialog. Not so this time. This is a bona fide story quest that takes place in a brand-new dungeon. Okay, the dungeon itself is made up of re-purposed rooms from previous content and there are only three of them, but that's absolutely no criticism. It's an exemplary demonstration of how to re-use assets effectively to create enjoyable, new content.

I can say that now because I've finished it. The dungeon itself didn't take long - maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Getting a character ready to try it at all, though - that took me about four hours.

The very surprising thing about the new dungeon is that it requires a minimum level of 128 to enter. It's current expansion content in other words, which does seem odd for a holiday event. Usually these things scale.

I'd forgotten until I tried to enter the dungeon from a big book in the Commonlands that you have to click on. I didn't actually have a character that level. My nearest, the one I was playing, was my Berserker. At around three-quarters of the way into 127 he was close but not close enough.

I could have left it at that. It's only a holiday event after all and now it's been added it'll probably be in the rotation forever. I could have left it for next year. As I said, though, this happens to be a good moment for me to come back to EQII, something I've been wanting to do for a while, so I decided it was about time I knuckled down and got on with the Signature Quest from last December's Ballads of Zimara expansion.

Really, I ought to have finished it ages ago but I'd hit a patch with a lot of dungeon play and I hadn't been able to find the necessar couple of dog-free hours to beat down several bosses in a row. Last night, though, it was raining hard and Beryl was keeping her head down in case anyone suggested going outside. It seemed like an opportunity so I took it.

The dungeon I needed to finish turned out to be two dungeons linked together, both of them set in the final zone of the expansion, the Djinn stronghold, Vaashkaani. I was under the mistaken impression Vaashkaani was an open-world, city zone but while it might still be some kind of city, it's actually made up of several combat instances. 

The first took me about an hour to finish; the second double that, so a little over three hours in total, which is quite a run for me these days. Luckily, I had the invaluable EQ2i walkthroughs up for both. Without those I would probably have been there twice as long.

The fights, of which there were many, weren't all that hard. My Berserker is prety decently equipped for this kind of  entry-level endgame solo stuff, although there's still quite a lot more I could  - and should -do to toughen him up further. 

Having played EQII for so long now, it's interesting how these things change over time. A few years ago, most of the complaints from casuals like me revolved around time-to-kill on both regular mobs and bosses. It could take hours to grind through a solo instance, with each fight taking minutes and the bosses maybe a quarter of an hour.If you got a "kill ten" quest, and there were some, you could be there all morning.

Then there was a phase when just about everything seemed to drain your power or mana, making every fight take even longer. I remember going afk, leaving my Berserker on auto-attack and going to the kitchen to make myself a coffee because I had literally no buttons to press.

That was not a popular mechanic and I'm happy to say it's largely disappeared. What seems to have replaced it in BoZ is a cute little trick with Heroic Opportunities. 

As any who played EQII when it launched back in 2004 might remember, HOs were once a big part of the game. They are combination attacks that you can do solo or in a group. When the combo is complete they kick off powerful effects that either buff you or damage or debuff the mob.

I didn't much like them then because I was playing in groups much more than I do now and people were constantly yelling at each other, either demanding they complete the HO or complaining they had completed it when they shouldn't have. People were very fussy about the timing for some reason. It got on my nerves and I was glad when it largely fell into disuse.

Some people obviously remembered it more fondly than I did because there have been many requests for the system to be revamped and made useful again. A while ago that made its way to the top of the dev team's to-do list and now HOs are back in fashion.

In the instances I've just finshed there are several occasions when HOs are the only thing that will remove a boss's shield so you can actually hit them. Or you have to complete an HO to blow up some device that, if left unattended, will instantly kill you. There's no real logic to it but it's a lot better than seeing your mana disappear into a black hole. 

It's also a mechanic that requires a certain amount of attention and finesse, which is why I died a few times getting to grips with it. Once I had the method down, though, I thought it was fine. I certainly prefer it to having to chug mana potions, which cost a fortune for the good ones and which I never remembered to pack anyway, let alone the attritional auto-attack grindfest that comes when you run out of them.

The bosses in Vaashkaani also all have the ability to stifle, stun or fear, which would be extremely annoying if there weren't free augments available that negate all of those effects. I had to remember to swap the necessary augs in and out of my belt, the only item that has a slot that will hold them, but that wasn't hard to do - until I found out the hard way you can't change augs in a damaged item.

Eventually I got through the whole instance - both of them - and I have to say it was good fun. The level of challenge was just about right for me. I had to concentrate just enough to feel engaged and I got my timing wrong a couple of times but nothing went on so long it made me dread failure and another try plus I always made progress on each attempt so I could see a way to succeed.

It helped a lot that Vaashkaani is absolutely gorgeous. The screenshots give an impression of how colorful and vibrant it is but you have to imagine all those colors shifting and shimmering as the crystals pulse, clouds drift across the skylights, waterfalls pour down and foliage ripples in the breeze. Once again, you can really see why Darkpaw would like to get new players straight into the current content. The 2004-era graphics of the older zones, much though I love them, really do the game a disservice.

Under current mechanics, you get no meaningful xp for clearing zones. It all comes from quests. When I handed in mine I jumped straight from three-quarters of the way through 127 to five per cent into 128. Mission accomplished!

I also got a lot of drops from all the nameds but I wasn't very lucky with RNG. Most of the gear I got was for other classes. My alts will love it  - if they ever get this far. 

My Berserker didn't much mind not getting stuff he could wear. Everything that dropped was all 155 Resolve, which is mostly what he has now. He got it all from previous holiday events so he's very mildly overgeared for the content he's doing although not for much longer. According to the beta forums for the forthcoming GU 125, bosses in the next update drop 160 and 165 Resolve gear, which will be a nice upgrade.

As soon as I dinged 128, it was straight off to try the new holiday instance. It turned out to be a jolly romp with an amusing story, some good jokes and a lot of fighting. I won't rehash it all here but the gist is that Bristlebane tells you the story of a famous thief and sends you to three episodes from his life, wherein you take various roles, all of which pretty much consist of a massive fight that starts the moment you zone in. It's all action!

The drops were much the same level as the ones I got in the instances, which makes sense since 155 Resolve seems to be about par for current solo endgame gear. I was able to upgrade a couple of 145s I was still uisng so that was nice.

According to EQ2 Traders, if you do the instance three times, you get a silly hat. It's fast and fun so even I ought to be able to manage that before it all goes away in ten days or so. 

If I want the five new Beast'r eggs, though, I'll have to hurry. That event ends in just a few hours.

What am I doing here then?!

A Bird's Eye View Of Ballads Of Zimara

Yesterday's post on gathering in the new EverQuest II expansion kind of got away from me. What I sat down to write was a quick screenshot post celebrating my early experience of what The EverQuest Show described as "one of the most aesthetically beautiful expansions in a decade".

That's actually a quote from a player in the Ballads of Zimora beta. Fading, the host of The EverQuest Show, calls it "absolutely stunning", adding "There are four new gorgeous zones, each more beautiful than the last". In a video review he goes on to say that BoZ is "much more accessible early on than say Renewal of Ro" and that he found it held his attention better and made him eager to go on playing in a way that, as an EverQuest player, he didn't always experience with EQII expansions.

The review covers both EverQuest's latest expansion, Laurion's Song, and Ballads of Zimora and at least in the case of the latter I found it reflected my own experience so far. I haven't bought the EQ expansion yet because I just don't have time to play both of them at once but I plan on getting it sometime in the New Year, most probably in the Spring.

Here's the video. It's an entertaining watch.

As I implied in my first post about the expansion, Ballads of Zimara is probably the most user-friendly I've seen for a good while. That's not to say recent EQII expansions haven't been easy to get into - they definitely have - but this one seems to have made accessibility a real focus.

I'd say BoZ marks the best re-insertion point for ex-players since Altar of Malice a decade ago. If you were thinking about coming back - or if you've never played and would like to see what you've been missing - this is probably the best opportunity you're going to get. 

I just wanted to front-load that thought before getting to the meat of the post - the pictures.

The irony of doing a post like this, at this point in my progress through the expansion's content, is that even though I have four max-level crafters now, I've hardly seen any of it. Even though the crafting timeline technically takes to you to three of the four overland zones, it barely introduces you to more than the areas around the portals and the safe city-hub.

Even when you get to fly, as a crafter you really don't need to go anywhere. Most of the quests play out either within a few steps of the questgiver or very close by. Even when you do need to go to a specific place elsewhere in the zone, as when you visit the Isle of Wisdom in Zimara's Breadth, you're taken directly there and given no reason to explore the area around.

This certainly isn't any kind of complaint. As I've said, the brevity and succinctness of the crafting timeline is an absolute positive for crafters. It does mean, however, that most of the screenshots I have are of the same locations and they're almost all taken from the sky.

Then again, as I've also said, Ballads of Zimara is a skybound expansion. It's set in a fractured skyscape of free-floating sky islands, where locals get about by cloud-taxi or their own wing-power. It's counter-intuitive but, while the spectacle is all there for those who can fly, the kind of detail Fading brings out in his video and post can only be appreciated on foot.

To that end, I maybe should have saved this gallery of of snapshots for when I've completed the Adventuring timeline. I'm sure that will take me into many more corners and show me plenty of sights I haven't seen. 

That'll be something to look forward to, when I've done it. I'll be sure to take plenty of pictures as I work my way through the Signature adventure questline, which I believe will take me all the way to the final, open zone of the expansion, the Djiinn stronghold Vaashkaani.

The crafting storyline doesn't mention it. It was only when I read the EverQuest Show review that I knew it even existed. Soon after, though, while I was out gathering on my final crafting run, I saw what had to be Vaashkaani, hanging in the sky high above me at the end of a shimmering, glittering column of light.

I flew up to see if I could reach it but just like Maj`Dul, the city which floats above the Desert of Ro, you can't get there by physical means. It takes magic.

And of course I forgot to take a screenshot of the city itself, which makes for an amusingly bathetic ending to a post about celebrating the visuals in the game. It looked spectacular but you're just going to have to take my word for that.

Or else go see it for yourself. 

W.H.O.O.'s On First?

At time of writing, a little over a week after launch, I have four max-level crafters in EverQuest II: Weaponsmith, Alchemist, Sage and Carpenter. Once I had the rhythm down, the five new levels took me around an hour, at least half of which was taken up with gathering.

There are two gathering quests in the sequence, the first about twice the length of the second. My Weaponsmith, having also been my "main" for years, was at the previous cap for all gathering skills. He had gear that gives bonuses to gathering, along with all the gathering AAs.

Most importantly, he'd done all the significant gathering questlines including, crucially,  the one to convert the Gathering Goblin into a Mercenary. That's the one that also gives the maximum, permanent, passive speed boost to all gathering skills. 

The Weaponsmith's a gathering machine but all of his advantages were somewhat negated by his having to go through the questline first. All the time he made up on the gathering sections, he more than lost having to look up where to go and what to do. He also had to buy all the fuels, which he then put in the shared bank for everyone else to use when he'd finished. He was trailblazing for the rest of them and he paid the price in time.

The Alchemist went next. By dint of having been my main for one recent expansion, when I mistakenly thought a Bruiser might get through the combat sections faster than a Berserker, his skills were also pretty close to being maxed. He hadn't swapped his Goblin over but it turned out he had done all of the pre-requisites to get the quests. Following a walkthrough, it only took a few minutes to run through the questline, after which he was able to pick stuff up off the ground very nearly as efficiently as the Weaponsmith.

The Sage went third. He's never done much adventuring but there have been times when I thought he might so he was at the previous level cap in his martial class, Warlock. That turned out to be quite significant.

I'm going to back-track a little now. 

One of the most obvious changes to the game since the arrival of Naimi Denmother as crafting dev has been the care and attention shown to high-level crafters, who may not also be high-level adventurers. It's not just reinstating something that's lapsed a little since Domino left, it's also addressing an attitude that's sometimes seemed present among some of the Darkpaw design team, who haven't always appeared to look kindly on crafters getting a helping hand.

There have been intimations in the past that crafters who don't also keep up with their adventuring may have been having too easy a ride; that it might do them some good to have to scuttle a bit, dodge the odd deep-red con mob, maybe even die a few times, just to keep them honest. One thing Naimi Denmother has done since she arrived is to take the cap off that particular jar of worms by making it very clear in her commentary when dark forces have been working against her in her attempts to secure safe passage for nervous crafters as they attempt to pick their way through high-level adventure content.

Judging from what I've seen in Ballads of Zimora so far, Naimi has been winning a few battles of her own. Not only is the crafting Signature quest much shorter than the Adventure one, crafters get to visit three of the four new zones long before Adventurers do and what's more they get to fly in them all, too. For once, I could see where pure adventurers might feel they had cause to be snippy.

That, however, is by no means all she's done to help high-level crafters whio don't relish the adrenaline rush of being jumped from behind by mobs eighty levels higher than them. A goodly portion of the Signature crafting questline revolves around the manufacture of something called the W.H.O.O.

The W.H.O.O. is a ghostly, blue hand about the size of a large dog. It's a device you can summon to let you harvest in complete safety. In game mechanics, it's an Elemental that you "possess". You craft a spell that goes in your spell-book and when you use it you're given thirty seconds to click on and effectively become the W.H.O.O.

As a disembodied, blue hand you're neutral to absolutely everything, meaning nothing pays you the least attention. You can zip around, gathering ansd mining and even fishing in the most dangerous areas at no personal risk whatsoever. The effect lasts indefinitely, until you opt to return to your true form.

It sounds great and for low-level adventurers trying to gather in the new expansion zones (Those being the only place the W.H.O.O. can be summoned.) I'm sure it is. It does, however, come with some significant disadvantages, chief of which is that certain crafting buffs don't work, including that speedy goblin one. It's safer, sure, but if you're able to handle the mobs it's also slower. Seems like a fair trade-off.

Since all my high-level crafters on my main server, Skyfire, are also high-level adventurers, even though I had to make several versions of the W.H.O.O for the questline (There's a different one for each zone.) I didn't actually use any of them until a few minutes ago, when I logged in to summon one for a screenshot. I found it much easier and more efficient just to kill anything that had the nerve to interrupt me while I was out gathering.

That in itself led to some interesting discoveries. With all four characters, I began by following the Quartermaster's guide to gearing up for the expansion, so everyone was dressed in the same gear and using the same Familiar, Mount and Mercenary. The big difference between them should have been how well-upgraded their spells and abilities were but it turned out not to be quite that simple.

The Weaponsmith is a Berserker when he's adventuring and he's by far my most rigourously maintained character. He had no trouble with any mobs and his time-to-kill was a handful of seconds. The Alchemist is a Bruiser and his short stint as combat lead left him not too far behind the Berserker. He also had no trouble defending himself but his TTK was noticeably longer. Still only a few seconds but a few more seconds.

The Sage, as I said, is also a Warlock but he hasn't done a lot of adventuring. I've used the time-gated upgrade system to keep a few of his spells at Master or above but I didn't even touch his spellbook in the last expansion, so even though he's the one who makes the upgrades for casters, most of his spells were either the lowest grade (Apprentice) from the previous cap or higher grades fthe cap before that. 

On the plus side, he did at least have the goblin-granted gathering speed buff,  proving he was at least paying attention during Kunark Ascending back in 2016.

In theory, he should have been the one to struggle but apparently no-one told him that. Far from having difficulty dispatching anything that looked at him funny, he was one-shotting some stuff and taking no more than two casts on the rest. If he attacked from range to clear a path, mobs died from the dot effects before they got to him. If he used an AE, everything just fell over. 

I shudder to think how easy he'd find it all if he'd bothered to upgrade his own spells. I'm going to have to have a word with him about that. Also, I might have to try and figure out what most of his spells do. I'm pretty sure he'd be even more bad-ass if I knew.

That just leaves the Carpenter. Her adventure class is Inquisitor, which makes her pretty much bomb-proof, especially with an Inquisitor mercenary as well, so I was surprised to find she was the one who had the most trouble. She didn't have the gathering buff or much in the way of gathering gear and she doesn't appear to have set foot in the KA expansion zones. I did take her over to see if she could get the quest but as soon as she got discovery XP for entering the area I knew it was hopeless. 

Not wanting to spend longer doing the pre-quests than it would take me to do the entire BoZ crafting timeline, I abandoned that idea and cracked on. Even with the slower gathering she still took the shortest time getting to the level cap. The 60% XP bonus from the three who went before more than made up the difference.

What slowed her down more than anything was her TTK. I know she's a cleric and you can't expect frontline DPS numbers but Inquisitors are basically battle-wizards in EQII and I've not had much problem with her ability to knock things down fast in the past. Once again, she's suffering from lack of attention over the past few expansions. I really need to pull my finger out and bring everyone's spell-books up to date.

And that is where I'm headed. Having maxed both the spell-makers, I'm covered for levels and the acquisition system for Advanced recipe books in BoZ is a straightforward, time-gated, NPC-driven process. According to Niami Denmother, it should take about ten days research to get each book, a wait you can halve by doing the relevant dailies. 

That should leave plenty of time to get the necessary Rare materials, even though it will be a lot. Some high-level Expert recipes have been using two rares for a while and even if it only takes one, there are dozens of spells and combat abilities to upgrade.

It very much looks like there's going to be a lot of gathering in my future. And in the Weaponsmith/Berserker's future because he's going to be the one doing most of it. That's what you get for being the best at something - you get to do all the work for everyone else.

Doesn't really seem fair, does it?

Craft Your Way To The Skies In Ballads Of Zimara

As an addendum to yesterday's post, I thought I ought to add a little more detail to my account of the Crafting Signature Questline in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Ballads of Zimara, now I've finished it. Yep, already.

I didn't put a stopwatch on it but I'd be surprised if the whole thing took ninety minutes and that would include a lot of faffing about on my part. I'm going to do it with my Berserker/Weaponsmith next and I'm guessing if I don't read the quest dialog for a second time I'll be done in less than an hour.

I understand that for some people reading that's going to make it sound as though Darkpaw have really skimped on the crafting content this expansion. You can do the entire questline in a couple of hours, tops? When it probably takes an adventure five times that? At least. Scandal!

That's an Adventurer talking, that is. Most crafters will probably be happy to have the whole thing over with as soon as possible. 

By and large, it's always been my impression that what most Crafters want to do is craft. In the olden days, that's all you could do if you wanted to level up a craft skill. You stood at the crafting station and made stuff. 

You got big experience for making new things for the first time and a lot less for making the same things again, so you made everything in your Recipe books once and then picked the easiest or cheapest thing and made it over and over until you dinged and got a new Recipe Book so you could start all over again. Obviously, you also made stuff to sell on the broker and stuff for your guildmates and friends but basically you just ground out crap no-one wanted and sold it back to the vendor at something close to cost, hoping to break even if you were lucky.

Over time, all of that changed. Crafters got Tradeskill Writs - repeatable orders from NPCs that gave better XP than making random stuff. They got quests and then whole questlines. There were NPC factions to work on and gear to upgrade. Crafters even got "raids".

During the reign of Domino, Queen of the Crafting Devs, Tradeskilling became a fully-fledged, genuinely complete, wholly discrete playstyle. She added enough questlines to cover the entire level range so you could make a character and go out into the world and adventure as a crafter. You could level all the way to the cap without ever having to kill anything, do writs or make stuff to sell or give to other players.

In retrospect it was all a bit strange but Domino was so good at what she did I think everyone just bought into her vision. And then she left. 

After that, various developers did their best to keep to the plan. Every expansion came with a new, detailed, lengthy Tradeskill Signature Questline. Or it did if the resources permitted it. At least once the quests weren't ready by launch and we didn't get the Signature line until well into the New Year. 

There was clearly an effort being made to keep Crafting in line with Adventuring but as a Crafter and an Adventurer I'd have to say it was always significantly easier to level to the new cap as a the former. On characters who did both, I got into the habit of doing the Crafting timeline first. 

There were some definite advantages in doing it that way, the biggest of which being flight. It's been a very long time since flying mounts have been able to take to the skies on Day One of a new expansion. How long it's taken has varied a little but the rule of thumb is for the final Sig Line quest in a zone to grant the ability to fly in that zone.

It can feel like a bit of a pyrrhic victory sometimes. You can fly in a zone you're about to leave. You'll be grounded again as soon as you take the next quest.

If you do the craft line first, though, you'll be able to fly in all the zones as soon as you begin adventuring. The Tradeskill Sig Line follows the same pattern, letting you fly as soon as you complete each zonal set of quests. Since that typically takes a fraction of the time it would take to complete the same zone as an Adventurer... well, as they say, you do the math.

For some reason, in last year's expansion, Renewal of Ro, this policy was reversed. Crafters didn't get to get to fly at the end of each zone. They didn't even get to fly at the end of the whole Sig line. They had to do all of that and then also complete fifteen research missions - and the missions were on two-hour timers.

As I remember, the effect of all of that was to make it faster to do the Adventure line to get flight for once. Since I was going to be doing both anyway it didn't make much difference to me but I imagine it must have annoyed the heck out of pure crafters.

This year, the finely-crafted boot is very firmly back on the other foot. And then some. As I mentioned yesterday, while Adventurers have had their XP rates trimmed back to levels not seen for many years, crafters are still getting half a level per turn-in. 

Added to that, the questline itself is much shorter than usual. As Naimi Denmother, who designed it, confirms in a forum post, it comprises just eight quests and as I can confirm, having done them, some of the eighte pretty much involve walking ten feet, making a combine that takes a few seconds, then walking back. 

So why isn't the Tradeskill forum full of threads complaining about crafters being stiffed on content in BoZ?  Because crafters mostly just want to craft is my guess. Even as Domino strived to bring the entire profession into equivalance with Adventuring, there was always a vocal demographic that just wanted to stand at the crafting station and grind out writs. Not everyone likes quests. Or going outdoors.

And of course, for both Adventurers and Crafters, getting to max level is just the start. Adventurers have to run dungeons for gear if they want to be truly endgame; Crafters have to get all of their recipes. In this expansion they do it through Research Missions, which unlock once the Signature questline is complete. Since those are time-gated, that should keep everyone busy for a while.

Having seen how it works and how long it takes - or should that be how short? - my own plans have changed. I'm going to take the Berserker through his Weaponsmith levels before I go back to adventuring with him. Not only will that allow him to fly in all the new zones, the mount he'll get is a huge upgrade on the free one he got only a few days ago. And it has both Adventuring and Tradeskill stats. 

And most importantly, it looks amazing!

After that, I'll most likely take my Warlock/Sage through the craft line so he can make spells for himself, my Necromancer and my Wizard. Neither of them crafts, so they'll have to do the Adventure line, which is going to put them at the back of the line.

Since they'll both have the advantage of flight, the Warlock/Sage and the Bruiser/Alchemist will go through the Adventure line second and third, although not necessarily in that order. There's a 20% bonus to XP for each max level Adventurer and Crafter, calculated separately, so it'll get faster each time. By the time the Necro gets to go, she should have at least a 60% bonus, which I hope will make up for not being able to fly.

The wild card in all of this is my Inquisitor/Carpenter. I'll probably slip her in before the Necro, just because of the crafting and the flight, even though it's always the Necro I really want to play. Or maybe I'll just succumb to the call of Necrotic fun and leave the Inquisitor as a max-level furniture maker for now.

All of which, I think, explains why the expansion not having enough content isn't likely to be a problem for me. It never has been before and I certainly don't think it will be now. I'm very happy to have a quick and easy route to flight for almost everyone. In fact, maybe I ought to think about getting those slacker casters into a crafting training program.

I could always use a Jeweller, for the scout skills. And a Provisioner. Everyone has to eat!

Through Splendor Sky By Cloud And Owl

EverQuest II's latest expansion, Ballads of Zimara, continues to be both a delight and a surprise. My progress has been slow, for which I can only blame my increasingly poor sense of time management. It seems the more free time I have, the less I get done and anything labelled "Inessential" goes right to the back of the line. I swear I found it easier to make time for playing games when I worked full-time, which is just ridiculous.

Because of all that, I'm still in the opening zone of the expansion, Splendor Sky Aerie. It's charming, open, airy and vast; a perfectly lovely place to explore. It's also precipitous and twisty, making the lack of flight a potential drawback.

Fortunately, there's a workaround to not being able to fly: my Featherfall cloak. Wearing one of those is almost exactly like having Levitation cast on you in EverQuest. All you need to do to get from one side of the zone to the other is climb up somewhere high and then drift slowly down. You can move freely in all directions at a good speed and it feels just like flying - just so long as you don't need to go upwards again.

The last several expansions have handily provided plenty of mountains and cliffs to launch yourself from and this one's no exception. I've been riding my Tishan's Fluffy Transport, the free big white cat mount, through the air in style, although not as much in style as when I've been riding the official Kingdom of Sky public transport system - clouds - or better yet, travelling about the Aerie the way the locals do, on the back of a giant owl.

Experience gain is, as promised, very slow. I just dinged 126 this morning after completing the first instance and doing the hand-in. I found that instance itself something of a surprise in that I didn't need to kill any of the bosses to complete the quest I was on. I just had to do regular stuff inside the instance, killing a set number of ordinary mobs, freeing some trapped apprentices and escorting the senior trainee back to the zoneline.

I can't remember the last time a Signature quest took me into a new instance and let me come out again without completing the zone and killing all the bosses. It felt really good, like someone was actually thinking about what a solo player might enjoy doing rather than just giving them the cut-down version of the Heroic instance and telling them to get on with it.

Since I wasn't being forced to, naturally I decided to try the first boss anyway, just to see how it went. I'd already been using the regular instance mobs to see how reliable my new Mercenary might be and he was doing fine but a boss would be a much better test.

I couldn't find a specific walkthrough for the boss so I just pinged him with an arrow and went toe-to-toe. If he had any tricks I missed them although I did notice Valek announce several times that he'd cured me, so I guess there must have been something going on. 

There was one moment when my Merc looked like he was getting behind on his healing duties but as  Berserker I have a bunch of self-heals. I popped a couple of those and we were back on top right away. 

For the first boss-fight of an expansion it all went very well. Add to that the open world solo Named I took on and beat (Close fight!) a couple of days ago and I'd say so far things are just about perfectly tuned to my particular tastes and my character's abilities. I'm pretty sure there will be people claiming it's all gotten far too easy but I rememember a few expansions back I literally couldn't kill even a solo overland named until well after the mid-year update so I'm definitely not complaining.

Whether the difficulty ramps up later in the Sig line or in subsequent zones I'll wait to see but normal practice has generally been for things to get easier, not harder, as you'd expect when you acquire better gear from the quests and drops, so I'm optimistic.

One thing that has always made a big difference, of course, is upgrading your spells or combat arts, which is why as a solo player I take some care always to have crafters on my account who can make them for all my adventurers. 

If I'd had some kind of ten-year plan all those years ago, when I rolled a Berserker on a whim to try out the new Free to Play server, Freeport, I'd have made him an Alchemist so he could make his own upgrades. Obviously, at the time I had no inkling he'd become my main character and stay that way for more than a decade, so I made him a Weaponsmith because it seemed like a craft a Berserker might do. Bloody roleplayers, eh?

I've long since rectified that error of judgment by giving my Bruiser the Alchemy job. He's also a max-level Adventurer, or he will be when he does this Sig line, but I thought he might as well get on with the Tradeskill Signature in the meanwhile, so he could make new spells for the Berserker going through ahead of him.

I started on that a few hours ago, which was how I learned two things. 

1. The Bruiser never did the follow-up quest to swap his Gathering Goblin for a gathering speed increase so he gathers at a painfully slow rate compared to the Berserker.
2. All that stuff about reduced XP and slower levelling in Ballads of Zimara? Does not apply to crafters!

I did one quest in the TS Sig line. It took me about five minutes, most of which was zoning. I handed it in and it gave me about half a level. 

Then I did the next part, most of which was doing a handful of combines at a workbench right next to the questgiver, using materials he'd just given me. I handed that in and dinged 126. 

The whole level probably took me ten minutes. Fifteen at the outside. Half of that was reading the lengthy quest dialog. If it carries on like this, I'll have a 130 Alchemist long before I have a 127 Berserker.

All of which works for me. I have half a dozen adventurers and four or five crafters I'd like to get to max level. I'm very happy to have it go faster. 

There's already a structural problem with alts in EQII in that the first hundred levels offer multiple paths to avoid repeating content but after 100 everyone pretty much has to do the same thing. I almost always enjoy the Adventure Sig line in each expansion but rarely so much I want to do it half a dozen times. When the XP  rate was jacked up, it wasn't too bad but I'm already starting to dread having to go through it all at this pace again and again. At least it's nice to think I won't have the same problem with the crafters.

That said, looking at the walkthrough and bearing in mind what I read on the Beta forums, I think both questlines are probably quite a bit shorter than they have been the last few times. That might sound like a negative in that it might mean there's less content but if, as I hope, it really means there's less padding, I'd say it's actually a positive move.

Once again, we'll know when we get there. So far, I'm having a great time. If it carries on this way, I'll be a very satisfied customer.

Before I get any further through the storyline, though, I really need to go back and do that Gathering Goblin quest I missed. I have two hundred and forty assorted mats to gather for the next stage of the TS questline and I'm jiggered if I'm doing it all at half speed!

You're Never Too Old To Have Someone Else Dress You

To my considerable surprise, last night I was able to spend a good hour and a half with EverQuest II's twentieth expansion, Ballads of Zimara. It was a delightful experience. 

I'm assuming the servers came up on time because they were running smoothly when I logged in twenty minutes after the deadline. I saw one admin message in chat about something that hadn't been working having been fixed but other than that I didn't see or hear about any problems at all.

Expansions offer a key opportunity for MMORPG developers to lure dormant players back to the game, so it's imperative that the initial experience is clean, clear and welcoming. Granted, by the time a returnee gets to see the expansion content, they'll already not only have made the decision to come back but have backed it with their wallet. Still, it only takes a bad first session to undo all of that goodwill and send them, muttering and grumbling, back to former-player limbo again.

In the past, some EQII expansions have been, shall we say, less user-friendly in the opening stages than they might have been, even for current players. There have been issues with the over-tuned difficulty of opening zones and quests, confusion over access requirements, lengthy pre-req quests to grind through and a general lack of helpful information on where to go and how to get started.

In this 20th expansion, Darkpaw seem finally to have taken much of that to heart. I would say that my experience last night was probably the best-directed, least confusing introduction to an expansion I can remember for many years.

The expansion takes place in the Overrealm, the skybound setting of EQII's second expansion, Kingdom of Sky, perhaps not he most obviously accessible location for anyone who hasn't played for a while. In the past, just getting to the zone where the action begins has been a problem but this time it couldn't have been much more straightforward.

As soon as I logged in I got a pop-up telling me I had mail. I checked my Mail window and found two letters, one from the Sky Watcher Sodality, updating me on the situation following the pre-expansion events in Norrath and directing me to an NPC named Orren in Barren Sky, the other from a Hooluk called Baoko, asking me to meet him at the Ulteran Spires on Whisperwind Isle.

Short of actually doing the travelling for me, that couldn't have been more straightforward. As an All Access Member (And it's probably a reasonable assumption for Darkpaw to make that almost all purchasers of a new expansion will also be Members.) all I had to do was open my map and click on it. 

When the zone loaded I found myself standing next to both the named NPCs from my letters. After a couple of short conversations in which the pair of them set both the Adventuring and Tradeskill Signature questlines running, they directed me to the standard form of public transportation in the Overrealm - a white, fluffy cloud. Naturally, flying mounts don't work in the new content. They never do. We're all used to that by now.

Clicking on the cloud opened a map in which my next destination was very clearly marked. I flew there and landed beside a large owl with a book hanging over his head, indicating my quest hand-in. This turned out to be Quartermaster Arkymedus, who proceeded to run me through the initiation process for the new expansion in extreme detail.

This is where Darkpaw really upped their game. In recent expansions there has always been free gear to bump new, returning or just badly-equipped players up to a minimum acceptable level so they don't die on the first pull in the new zones. The gear is always in a container, called something like "Tishan's Box", on the ground next to the first questgiver but there hasn't always been anything to point the player to it and it's been very easy to miss.

In the past, even when you have found Tishan's Box, it hasn't always been clear what to do with it. It contains a huge number of items - full sets of armor for all classes, adornments, buffs, mounts, you name it, it's in there. This cornucopia of free stuff is great but it's also extremely confusing, even for a regular. Sometimes I've ended up with the wrong stuff or missed things I should have taken and other times I've needed to swap adornmnents in and out to get the right fit.

It's been a pain at times. It was exciting the first time it happened but after a few years of doing it it's become something I just want to get out of the way fast so I can get on with the story. Heaven only knows how offputting it must be for people who haven't played for a few years.

In the new expansion, everything is much more streamlined - and it comes with a manual! Well, a tutorial, anyway. Quartermaster Arkymedus literally talks you through the entire process. He starts off by handing you the full set of armor and weapons for your class so you don't even have to look in Tishan's Box for them, although eveything is in there if you want to rummage around for yourself.

He tells you to put it all on but I didn't take him at his word. I was wearing a mix of the latest Panda gear and some better pieces I'd gotten from the last update and a recent event. I was expecting some of those would be better than the Tishan's gear but although it was very close on a few of them, the new "Shattered" gear was always at least a little better.

The new expansion also uses different Adornments, which the Tishan's gear has and the old gear doesn't, so my advice to anyone coming back to the game with this expansion is to take Arkymedus at his word. Open the pack he gives you and put it all on. It's going to be better than anything you're wearing unless you're in Heroic Dungeon gear or better from the last expansion cycle.

The tutorial doesn't stop at gear, though. Arkymedus goes on to explain the importance of Mounts and Familiars as well as where to find them in your spellbooks and how to equip them. For anyone who hasn't played for a while, this is crucial information. A huge amount of a player's effectiveness now derives from the stats of their companions as well as their own. If you don't have an up-to-date Mount, Familiar and Mercenary at minimum you're going to struggle.

Arkymedus doesn't just tell you about Mounts and Familiars, he gives you new ones. I was suspicious about whether they'd be better than mine because mine were pretty new and I'd levelled them up, but it when I looked it turned out so had Arkymedus. The ones he gave me were fully levelled and a significant upgrade.

The Quartermaster also had a new Mercenary for me, standing right next to him or rather hovering, since he's a gremlin of some kind. I ought to know the exact species but I'm afraid the name escapes me. He's got wings, anyway, and he's an Inquisitor, by far my preferred class for a Healer Merc. 

Again, I was skeptical whether Valek, as a Treasured quality mercenary, would be better than my fully-levelled Celestial merc from a few expansions back, so I checked. 

I'm still not entirely sure. I don't think I'm going to know until we get into some tight situations together.

Valek is fully levelled but he doesn't come with any gear. I spent quite a while swapping my old merc's gear onto him and checking the differences in the stats but in the end I still couldn't be sure. Valek has a lot fewer hit points but a lot more mana. Which of those is going to be preferable is circumstancial.

I did remember that you can put regular gear on mercs instead of their own, specific armor so I gave Valek my Panda cast-offs, which seemed to do more for his stats than the aging Merc gear from three or four expansions ago Zel was wearing. That probably has something to do with Zel's less-than-stellar performance recently, now I come to think of it. 

I suspect that my old, Celestial merc in new gear from the latest expansion might be better than Valek but that's an experiment to come. For now, if a returning player just takes the merc they're offered, I think they'll do fine - and save themselves all the fiddle-faddling I went in for!

Finally, Arkymedus explains how the Mercenary and Familiar buffs work. Those are very significant but also incredibly easy to miss. He doesn't just tell you they're in your spell book, either. He even tells you which tab they're on. 

All in all it's a very thorough run-through to get a new or returning player fully prepared for the content they're about to attempt. I'd add something about Mercenary gear to the tutorial but other than that I don't think they missed much. 

It's certainly a huge improvement on the "You're all grown-ups. Just work it out for yourselves" approach we've had up to now. I do have to wonder if it's the work - or at least the influence - of Naimi Denmother, the newish tradeskill dev. I know it's primarily adventuring gear but the whole approach does seem to have her thorough, thoughtful, not to say maternal stamp. 

What with all of my fact-checking and stat-swapping, it took me about forty-five minutes to get past that mini-tutorial. I think it'll be more like five or ten minutes on subsequent characters. It's a small price to pay for the effectiveness of the lesson because once I  got to the killing grounds I really felt the benefit.

In most recent expansions, even though I've not had too much trouble with the opening stages, there has been a significant and noticeable ramp up in difficulty even on the entry-level mobs, compared to the one or two shot kills I'd been used to at the end of the previous expansion. I was expecting much the same this time so I was wary when I pulled my first mob, especially since it was a supposedly more powerful one-up arrow and higher level than me. 

It died in a couple of hits. They all did. It was glorious. I ran around doing my quests just like I was still in the previous expansion, which in my opinion is exactly how it should be. Plenty of time for things to get more challenging when we get to the instances; random wildlife at the start of the opening zone does not need to hit like a boss mob from the last expansion, which at times has been the case.

Whether the very reasonable difficulty is a design choice or whether it's what comes of finally getting clear instructions on what to wear and what buffs to use, I'm not exactly sure. I guess I could test it on another character and I might just do that another time.

For now, though, I'm enjoying being able to explore the new content with the freedom and confidence that being properly prepred brings. Long may it continue.