Gotta Keep 'Em All: GW2, EQ2, WoW

Y'know one thing that always annoyed me when I was playing WoW?  The Stable. That place you stash your spare pets. It just never seemed right.

Pet taming was the class-defining feature for Hunters, the class I spent most time with during my three-month visit to Azeroth. Also my favorite. Blizzard had clearly looked at everything that was wrong with the Everquest Ranger and thought "Surely we can do a bit better than that". So they did.
               
Then after a while they decided, what with Hunters famously being adventurers of very little brain and even less patience, they might have gone a tad too far with the whole full-feature pet-taming mini-game, so that had to go. By the time I arrived, fashionably late by about five years, Pet Taming was down to the bare bones but those bones still looked tasty to me. I set out to make the most of what was left, only to run slap-bang into the Stable door.

You want me to swap you for the Jungle Cat? He's not scared of heights.

I'm loyal to my pets in MMOs. I like to give them a name, watch them develop a personality and then create a shared history of adventure with them. On the other hand, I want to collect as many as I can because collecting is fun and pets are fun so collecting pets is funfun.

At first the Stable didn't sound so bad. Tame a pet, train him up then park him in a nice, safe Stable where I can convince myself he'll be well looked-after while I swan around having adventures with my New Best Friend? Sounds just dandy. Until I found out the size of the Stable, that was.

Twenty pets? Plus, if I work up the Call Pets skill, another five? So, twenty-five? When there are in excess of 300 possible pets? (I'm getting all this information from Petopia, by the way, which was my go-to for Pet info back when I was playing. I haven't played WoW in three years so about all I can remember is Not Enough Pets!!!).

Like I'm taking advice from a Necromancer on responsible pet ownership

Twenty-five wasn't just not enough pets. It was insultingly, tauntingly, derisorily not enough pets. It took all the fun out of pet collecting. Well, some of the fun. Not possible to take ALL the fun, there's just too much fun there. But still...

I read recently at That Was An Accident, one of my very favorite blogs and one I rarely get a chance to link to because it's the only WoW blog I read and, well, I don't play WoW (I think I mentioned that earlier...) that the Stable is going to double in size. Confirmed here. So, fifty pets.

Still not enough. Tempting though. I have been getting a weird, almost subliminal urge, not strong enough to call a desire or even a whim, more a background hum, to take another look at WoW. Purely as a tourist. Just for an evening. People keep going on about it and three years may be just long enough to ripen nostalgia even in someone who didn't think they'd had that much of an emotional engagement with the damn game in the first place. (Me, in other words.)

A Reindeer is for life, not just for Frostfell

Anyway, annoying though the Stable is, it's one hell of a lot better than EQ2's infuriating Beastlord bait&switch. In EQ2 you can have all kinds of pets, just so long as you stick to one of each kind at a time. For example, my Beastlord picked up the red-nosed Reindeer at Frostfell. Deer are members of the Bovine Family in Norrath's anarchic biosystem along with cows, sheep and camels. If I ever tame a sheep, bang goes Rudolph. Not that I call him Rudolph. That would be a daft name for a deer. And not that I want to tame a sheep...

EQ2's strict one in, one out policy on Pet Families pretty much put paid to any interest I had in collecting pets there at all. I just got one decent exemplar of each kind and that was that. What a waste.

They understand every word you say, you know

And what a joy, what a relief then to come at last to Tyria. In Guild Wars 2 you really can collect them all. There just aren't as many. Where WoW has 300 and EQ2 170, GW2 can muster only around 50 pets so far, but once you get those 50 they are yours to keep. They're not on loan. When you get a new cat you don't have to give the old one back. You don't have to park your polar bear in a Stable, worry whether she's getting enough seal-meat, if she's missing you, pawing at the straw and whimpering herself to sleep...

 Ahem...

So, pets. Yes, I want to collect them. Lots of them. And once I've got them I want to keep them. I will feed them and walk them and take care of them. All of them. I promise. Trust me. Now, please let me keep them.

Beastlords Now And Then: EQ2 & Everquest

Way back at the start of November I commented on the unthinkable arrival of Beastlords in EQ2. Now that my own Beastlord, a few of whose adventures are chronicled in character here, here, here, and here, is a whisker away from level 90, how's it been?

I can't say I've taken to it the way I took to the original. In Old Norrath choosing a beastlord meant a long slow haul until signature abilities kicked in. You didn't even get a warder until Level 9. Magicians and Necromancers came petted up from the get-go and low level Beastlords glared at them with the ill-concealed envy they'd get back in spades from Shamans later on. When the Warder finally did show up it was so small you wondered if the spirits had sent you a vanity pet by mistake.

But just when you'd be thinking of jacking it all in and re-rolling as a Magician you'd get Spirit of the Wolf, which should be enough to cheer anyone up and from there you could pretty much see Spiritual Light coming over the hill. After that it just kept getting better. So much so for me at least that my original Beastlord became and remains one of my favorite characters.

A huge part of that affection and satisfaction came from the bond between the Beastlord and her Warder. An Everquest Beastlord only ever gets the one. He grows alongside you, literally, getting larger and larger as he matures. You have no choice in species. A Barbarian gets a Wolf, an Ogre a Bear and so on. You can't rename your Warder, but unlike the Magician's elemental or the Necromancer's skeleton a Beastlord's warder doesn't get a spilled Scrabble hand for a name. He's your warder and everyone knows it.

And this is where I'm having a bit of a problem with the EQ2 iteration. On the face of it, being able to tame seventeen different "Families" of animal sounds, well, seventeen times better. Add to that a huge variety of appearances, currently 113 with more to come in next week's update and that has to be over a hundred times better! Right?

Well, not really. Right from the start I found it difficult to bond with all those different warders, even leaving aside the practical issue of remembering all their abilities. My Beastlord has just over half the Families but all of them were acquired before Level 30. As for the 113 flavors, once I found out that adding a new creature to a Family pushed out the one you were currently using I completely lost interest. Haven't tamed a creature since.

Then, each Family levels up. They begin at Journeyman and presumably go to Master. My highest is Expert. They level by fighting alongside you, a nice nod to the original, but they progress at a pretty sedate pace. To keep the whole menagerie ticking along at the same level would be quite a project. There are several Beastlord AA trees to contend with as well. I imagine it makes for quite compelling gameplay if you immerse yourself in it, but it hasn't grabbed me yet.

It's surprising me as I write to realize how little attention I've paid to any of this stuff while leveling up. After a bit of dithering I settled on a Bear as my warder around Level 40 and I have used him almost exclusively ever since. I seldom even remember I have the option to summon something different. Sticking with the Bear has largely solved my bonding issues but at the cost of not really playing the class anything like I imagine it was intended to be played. I'm going to have to experiment a bit more. I should at least get around to learning the Tame Exotic Warder skill, although I'll almost certainly end up with a Dire Bear.

The supposedly more action-oriented gameplay of the Beastlord I do like. Not like I loved the Monk/Shaman hybrid gameplay of the original but it's fun and very straightforward for anyone that ever played Rift, or even Dark Age of Camelot. Hit a bunch of hotkeys, fill a meter, hit some specials. The only odd thing about it is the giant blue paw that flashes up on the screen but my brain no longer registers that so it's not annoying. It is pointless, though.

My conclusion after nearly ninety levels of lording is that I still don't really have a handle on this class. I like it but I don't love it. It's certainly the only EQ2 scout class I've ever enjoyed. Doesn't play anything like a scout. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what it's about, which I suppose can only be a good thing. Onwards to 92.

Double Eggsperience! : EQ2, Vanguard, EQ

It's double xp all Easter weekend in EQ2. Also in Vanguard. Probably in EQ as well although I haven't checked. Pirates of the Burning Sea for all I know! Consequently I plan to spend more time playing than posting for once. I have so much going on in all three games.

GU63 lands in EQ2 next week, bringing two (count them! TWO! ) new levels, Prestige Points (AAs with Attitude I believe), a new overland zone, Withered Lands, a new city/dungeon, Skyshrine, and the opportunity to re-gear level 90 characters to the current top-end raid spec just by doing solo quests.

My Berserker on Freeport, the one I made on a F2P Silver account just to futz around with back when EQ2X launched, ended up being the most completed, rounded EQ2 character I've ever had in seven years of playing. He's currently 90/90/316 (that's Level 90 Berserker, Level 90 Weaponsmith, 316/320 AAs if you left your scorecard in your locker). I'm hoping to get those last 4 AAs this weekend before SOE gives them to me on Tuesday.

Wear that thing and you're on your own, buddy!

The whole AA curve is being revamped, the result being that we all get a bump-up in AAs. That already happened to Adventure levels when they smoothed the curve there a year or three back. I don't recall it happening to tradeskills but it may have done. The AA adjustment is because of an unusual decision to set a bar of 280 AAs required before level 90 characters can start acquiring xp to get to 92.

My Beastlord needs five more levels to get to 90. Mrs Bhagpuss has two characters in the mid-80s that have been slacking while she designed and decorated about a thousand houses and another guildie is at 87th so the plan is to try and get everyone to 90 while the bonus xp lasts. I suspect we will be very sick of the sight of Chelsith come Monday. I have a bunch of crafting levels to do on all my otter-trainers, too.

In Vanguard I have a whole clutch of characters working their way up, all of them far too much fun to play to make it an obvious choice which should get focus. I really should concentrate on improving my Raki Disciple's Diplomacy but I can't fit any more scraps of paper in my Diplomatic Bag and I can never find the informants that want what I know.

So it's not chocolate! I'm eating it anyway.

Everquest I don't even want to think about. From my Druid, born on the day the Luclin server launched, which must be over a decade ago, still in the mid-60s and managing about a level a year on a good year, to my Beastlord beached at 84th to my latest addition, a level 20 Necromancer on Fippy Darkpaw, I have far more characters than I know what to do with. I daren't log in in case I create another. That's what usually happens.

Anyway, if I'm quiet this weekend, that's why. No bank-sorting, dungeon-making or decorating, just Kill! Craft! Diplome! It's the meaning of Easter, like they taught us at school. I think. It was a long time ago. I'm sure it went something like that.

Furglebin's Journal 1 : EQ2

So anyway I wake ups this morning in some tiny little village with a huge tiger lookin' at mes. Not a good starts to the day for anyone, really but specially not for a ratonga, what with cats and rats not getting on all that well at the best of times. Even when the cat is not a flippin' ginormous tiger and the rat is a much bigger ratonga than wot I ams (I have always been small for my age) you do nots want to wake up with one starin' at you.

I'm just looking for something to hide under when I get this idea in my head that this tiger is not just any ol' tiger. Apparently he is my Warder, which is some spirit that has decided to follow me about and turn me into a Beastlord. I don't know how I know thats. It's all a bit fuzzy if I am honest (which I'm nots, since, well, ratonga!). I don't seem to remember where I was before I woke up nor what I dids to get a Warder. I call him Tiger, by the way, cos it suits him and it is easy to remembers.

Get to the points, Furglebin. Focus!

A well-fed warder is a happy warder. Paws crossed.

Okay, start again. I am going to write down my thoughts about learning to be a Beastlord so that if one day I wake ups somewhere I never saw before and can't remember how I got there or hardly even who I am, I can just read my Journal and then I will know.

I am in this village like I said and all sorts is going ons. Guards in armor are yelling and there are these little earth elementals all over the place. Next thing I know I have been drafted in to sort it all outs. Well, why me? That is a good question! I mean, they are guards in armor with swords but they are getting a tiny ratonga in ordinary clothes to do all the stuff what you would think a guard is paid to do. Maybe it is cos I got this massive tiger looking at thems over my shoulder...

It's all about the cloak

I'm a bit scared if I am am honest (I already explained the problem with me saying that ...) but it turns out that I am much tougher than I look! And Tiger is just as tough as he looks like he is, which is very tough indeeds. Everything the guards ask us to do we do really, really easily and it is brilliant fun! If this is being a Beastlord then I think I am going to enjoy it a lot.

The guards send me on to talk to some more people. Every second person I meet seems to have work they want doing and no-one seems to want to do any of it himselfs. The more jobs I do for people, the more they recommend me to other people and before long I am Johnny Fix-It for this place, wot I now know is called Darklight Woods (although if it is a wood then I cannot see where all the trees are. Looks more like Darklight Common to mes).

The pay is pretty good and people keep giving me armor and weapons as well. Lots of the jobs are about killing stuff, mostly animals and undeads and elementals, so not like real people (although after a bit there is some trouble with some Thexians but apparently they are always making troubles so it is just as well to kill them before they starts). I can keep anything they drop too, and they drop all sorts of nice things.

Are you in there, Tiger?

Fighting so much makes me get tougher very fast and I learn lots of new moves and tricks. The best trick I learn is how to tame animals and make them into Warders. Takes a bit of getting the hang ofs, this one. First I have to concentrate to see wot animals are tameable. Then I have to bash them until they know who is boss. Then when they know I tames them and when they are tame I can have them as warders.

Except what I think is that I only have one warder and it is Tiger. I think that he just makes himself look like the animals I tame and then he can do different things, but it is always him really. So far he can look like a bat, a bear and a crocodile, which is the scariest one.

I love being a Beastlord. It's only my first day and I have learneds so much but I think there must be a lot more to find out. Tired of writing now but I will write again when I learn something new.

Never Coming Back: Beastlords in EQ2

I know the Very Thing to go here. And no, they're never coming back.

According to Smokejumper's somewhat garbled interview, helpfully summarized by Feldon at EQ2Wire, both the expansion that brings back Beastlords and the Game Update that ruins revamps Freeport will go to closed Beta (from Friends and Family Beta presumably) on Tuesday November 8th. I'm as excited about one as I'm nervous about the other.

I have an affinity for pet classes that long pre-dates MMOs. The first time I ran into the idea was back in the very early '80s in a tabletop RPG called Dragonquest, a quirky ruleset that offered an unusual choice of career paths. I didn't much fancy Military Scientist, Astrologer or Courtesan but I liked the sound of Beast Master. It reminded me of Daniel P Mannix with attitude (if Mannix didn't already have more than enough attitude to be going on with).

Oh sorry! Was he yours?

I loved the catching and taming part but almost immediately I ran into a fundamental design flaw. Should have spotted it earlier, really, given that it was quite literally part of the Beast Master's job description: "A Beast Master will, in almost all cases, become very fond of animals". All too true as I found out when I was repeatedly required to bury the dead after ordering my furry friends to fight monsters much bigger and tougher than they were.


Several dead pets into our group's campaign it became apparent that a Beast Master who was a) rapidly running out of beasts that took months to train and b) increasingly reluctant to allow any of the few he had left to take any risks whatsoever in case "something bad" happened to them, was going to be of limited use outside of a petting zoo. I re-rolled as something less emo and that was about the last I thought of pet classes until I stepped into Norrath some fifteen years later.

We don't do "cute"

For a good while "pet class" in Everquest meant someone who raised the dead or animated rocks. This had two big advantages over the Beast Master, namely that skeletons and earth elementals cannot strictly be called "cuddly" and that if they "die" you just raise or animate a new one. Nothing to bury, nothing to mourn.


Shamans did have a pet that looked like a wolf, but it turned out to be a spirit. It looked cuddly but your hand would just go right through. You couldn't rest a pint on his back like I used to do with the landlord's labrador in a pub where I used to drink. We were close, but we weren't quite there. We'd dealt with the downside but something was still missing. Then came the beastlord.

I arrived late on Luclin, Norrath's doomed moon. We were off playing something else at the time, Dark Age of Camelot probably, so I missed the birth of the Beastlord. When we returned, though, I made a Vah Shir Beastlord immediately. A tiger-girl with a tiger pet? Come on!

I took to the class right away. It had all the things I'd always wanted in a pet class: a really powerful pet that would fight beside me, not a weak creature I'd need to protect nor a living wall I'd hide behind. My warder and I stood hip to shoulder as we fought, falling back or surging forward to support and sustain each other as Shissars hissed or Akhevans made that weird chittering noise they make before they fell to our claws.

What have I told you about claws in town?

My beastlord ended up being the Everquest character I played most over the years. She's my highest level still, beached at 84th. I could understand, though, why Beastlords were lost when Luclin exploded. In many ways they were too powerful, too versatile. Just too damn good. Once you've played a beastlord it's hard to settle for less. The balancing issues that beastlords brought had ripped through Everquest for years and since EQ2 seemed to have "avoiding anything that gave us trouble in EQ1" as its core design brief it must have been an opportunity too tempting to resist. Although Blizzard seemed willing to take the risk when they added the Hunter class to WoW. Wonder how that worked out for them...

For many years Beastlord became the class that dare not say its name. They all died on Luclin. Every last one. They're never coming back. Except they are. Next Tuesday in beta and, with luck and a following wind, by the end of the month for the rest of us. There'll probably be five thousand new beastlords in Freeport on the first day and I'll be one of them. And I'll be keeping a diary.

Can't Judge a Book

Sometimes even Bo gets it wrong. Every novel has an author. There's the name on the spine. Movies have credits that seem to last longer than the film. Even journalists get a byline. Most of us pay at least some attention to who wrote, directed or performed what we read and watch. It helps us decide how to spend our time and money in the future.

I've done a lot of questing this week. Last weekend was double everything in EQ2 and I popped in to visit and ended up staying. I bought the Destiny of Velious expansion pack and asked the Othmirs to let me ride their giant turtle to the land of ice and snow.

We're going to need a bigger tureen!

 
I'm playing on EQ2X's Freeport server and my highest character there is a level 80 berserker. There is pretty much nothing you can do in Velious until your level hits 85, so after I'd looked around the docks and chatted to some more Othmirs I was stumped for a moment.

Then I remembered my Berserker was also a level 82 weaponsmith. And I recalled reading that there's a whole line of crafting quests in Velious that leads to you getting your very own flying griffin mount. And it's much, much faster to raise your crafting level in EQ2 than your adventure level. With double xp and full vitality it took me no time to make 85 and begin making myself useful to the Far Seas Supply Division and sundry indigenous othmir, coldain and snowfang gnolls.

Oh Ruffin, if only the other gnolls were as clever as you!

The quests came thick and fast and were a joy both to do and to read. The prose was crisp and clean, the dialog sharp and witty, the plots were amusing and engaging, the tasks were interesting and absorbing. Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent most of Sunday and Monday doing the entire flying mount quest-line, and the pack pony quest-line.  The whole experience was exemplary. Everything that's good about questing was here and there was little or nothing of the old nonsense that's given MMO questing such bad press of late.

With my young griffin trailing along behind, still growing to the size needed to carry the weight of a ratonga in full plate armor, I returned somewhat reluctantly to Paineel and the previous expansion to resume the long, slow journey to level 85 in adventuring. And trust me, on a silver account with the xp/aaxp pegged at 50/50 it really is a plod.

By last night I was halfway through 84th, my griffin was ready to fly and I really wanted a break from the perpetual yellow palette  of Odus. It occurred to me that I'd not yet done the newish beastlord prequel questline, so I took the spires back to The Commonlands and picked up the starter quest.

Does the marketing department know about this?

What a contrast. Everything I'd enjoyed about the griffin and pony quests, all vanished. Instead I plowed through speech after speech of overblown, overwritten, pompous twaddle. Terrible leaden prose, complete absence of any form of wit, elan, spark or interest. An incomprehensible "plot" utterly devoid of amusement or entertainment. Utter rubbish, in fact. The only saving grace of this horrible farrago of amateurish drivel was that it was soon over.

Don't know. Don't care.

Now I understand that people have different tastes. Some people probably like this sort of thing. I also understand that you can't have your best people on every part of every project all the time. I've read enough Gerry Conway fill-ins, after all. No, the problem with quests in MMOs is you have no way of knowing before you begin whether the new line was written by the person who wrote that great quest you did last week, the one that had you laughing so hard you snorted coffee all over your keyboard, or by the twerp who wrote that numbingly tedious, po-faced saga you ended up tabbing through the month before.

Credits. Let's have credits. I want to know who to follow and who to avoid. Whose work to look forward to and whose to dread. Mrs Bhagpuss had a great idea. Let's have an in-game review system for quests, like the new Housing Leaderboard. I'd give five stars to those Velious craft quests and half a star to the beastlord one. And really it doesn't deserve half.