How To Upgrade Ascension Spells (The Easy Way) : EQII

Earlier this week I spent some considerable time trying to work out how to upgrade Ascension spells in EverQuest II. If you just want to know how to do it, scroll down to the end of the post! If you want to see how I got there, read on...

Ascension was introduced in the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. At that time it seemed like a peculiarly perverse system even by EQII's abstruse and obscure standards.

I won't re-hash the bizarre details of how it worked back then. I barely understood it at the time and most of what I once knew I've forgotten. Thankfully, the whole structure has been revised and revamped, possibly more than once, so we can all move on and pretend it never happened.

For historical accuracy, I'd normally at least try to lay out the basic timeline in a post like this but the available information is more fractured and confusing than the original system. I did spend a while reading forum posts and various guides but it made my head hurt so I had to stop.

Ascension was never a popular addition to the game, at least as far as I can make out. It was confusing, expensive, grindy and turned everyone into battle-mages. At least, those are some of the reasons people gave when they claimed to be quitting the game over it.

In retrospect it seems that the main drive behind adding it was to reduce system load, something it attempted to do in several ways.

 Ascension spells do huge damage but have very long cast times. There are also just four Ascension classes, of which you can only use one at a time.

The means of changing from one Ascension class to another is highly restrictive. You have to visit an Ascension trainer to request a change of class, meaning no hot-swapping from one line to another during raids. It's also to your great advantage to use one of your Ascension abilities to convert all your other non-Ascension abilities to do damage of the type your chosen Ascension class uses.

If you have a whole bunch of people concentrating on Ascension abilities, the server has to deal with four classes using four types of damage on a slowish cadence rather than twenty-six classes using seven types of damage in a hyperactive frenzy. You can see how that might lead to fewer calculations.

You can also see how it would lead to fewer options and to the player feeling railroaded. If the system had been slick, straightforward and intuitive that might not have mattered but it was complicated, awkward and gnomic, so it very much did.

Even as a solo player, for whom Ascension spells were really an optional extra, I found it a little annoying at times. And all I was dealing with was the basic leveling process. Until this week I'd never even considered upgrading the spells.

The reason I finally got around to it was mainly that I'd gone quite a long way down the upgrade path on almost everything else. My Berserker has all his gear at 170 Resolve, with some of it at 175 or even 180. Most of his combat arts are Expert, some are Master. He's made and fitted BoL Adornments in almost every slot and he's completed some of the sets. He has max level mercenaries and mounts, decently geared. Even his Familiar is pretty darn nice.

All of this can be improved still further, even within the paramaters of a soloist, but he's at the stage where those improvements are noticeably incremental. I was going over his stats to see if I'd missed anything obvious and it turned out I had: almost all of his Ascension spells were still the basic apprentice versions.

That led to some long and not very fruitful research sessions. I read a lot of contradictory and confusing advice. I studied explanations and discussions of how Ascension spells might be upgraded until I felt even more at sea than when I started. Eventually I worked out that although various crafters can make various subsets of the spells, Sages can now make all of them. That seemed like somewhere to start.

I went through my bank vaults and dug out all the various Illegible Pages and so on, all of which can still be used but some of which belong to different versions of the system. I gave those to my max level Sage to see what he could do with them. Not much, as it turned out.

 I checked to see if he had the recipes to use them. He didn't.

I read some more and discovered he should be able to buy the necessary recipe books from a vendor in the Myrist Library, once he had sufficient faction, for which he'd need to do the Chaos Descending signature tradeskill questline.

I thought he'd done that but he hadn't even started it. I set to and finished it over three sessions. Then I went looking for the vendor to buy the books. I couldn't find him.

Back to the internet. After several unecessary trips to various vendors around the world, because every discussion I read just said "the vendor sells them", but never gave the vendor's name or location, it finally occurred to me that maybe it meant the crafting trainer in Myrist itself.

It did. All the books were there, on sale for chump change. I bought the lot and scribed them. Now my Sage should, in theory, be able to make all levels of all ascension spells. He can't in practice, of course, because some of the levels require those special pages, which are dropped as loot from bosses and given as rewards from missions.

What he can do with just normal mats is make both Journeyman and Expert Ascension spells. So I had him make journeyman for all the ones the Berserker uses regularly. He had a couple of the pages to make Adepts so he made those too, and for those he then made the Experts.

I had to make the whole sequence for those because you can't just jump to the highest quality. A character has to have scribed each preceding level before they can scribe the next.

It's still more complicated and fiddly than regular spell upgrading but compared to how it used to be it is pretty straightforward.

To save anyone else having to work out the basics the way I did, here's my pared down, no frills bullet point guide:

• Sages can make all Ascension spells.
• All the required recipe books are for sale on the crafting trainer in Myrist, The Great Library.
• The vendor is called Elmelar Stilltree and she's in the Crafter's Gallery.
• The books you want are Sage's Primer 01 to Sage's Primer 10.
• To buy them (or even see them on the vendor) the character needs to have completed only the first three quests in The Scrivener's Tale, the tradeskill signature questline.
• That's the part called Escargot Overclocking, for which you get the fantastic 88-slot Crystal Shard Backpack as a reward. You'll probably want to do the quest just for that, anyway.
• You do not need to carry on with the rest of the very long questline, although it's easy and entertaining enough to enjoy for itself. It also has a useful final reward, a vendor selling all kinds of fuel, who you can summon, anywhere, on an hourly cooldown.
• Once your Sage has bought and scribed the books, they will be able to make all Journeyman and Expert level Ascension spells using only regular materials, including one regular rare, Planar Energy.
• The Sage can also make Grandmaster Ascension spells using regular mats, a regular rare and a Celestial Foundation or Spellshard, a kind of ultra-rare regular mat.
• All of these mats, even the ultra-rare, can be gathered from normal gathering nodes. They are all also tradeable and can be bought on the Broker, assuming anyone's selling them.
• For all other grades (Adept, Master, Ancient and Celestial) you'll need the appropriate Illegible Scroll. These are dropped by bosses or found in mission reward crates. They are also tradeable and can be bought from other players.
• Once crafted, the character who wants to use the spells must scribe them in sequence. 
• You can use offline research to upgrade all levels of Ascension, allowing you to skip over any level for which you don't have the mats.

I think that's about it. It may not be crystal clear but it's a lot clearer than anything I found!

If anyone spots any errors or omissions, let me know in the comments and I'll correct as necessary.

Ascension spells are very powerful and can be lot of fun to use once you get the hang of them. Worth the trouble they take, I'd say.

Who'll Be Your Mercenary? : EverQuest II

I was playing EverQuest II yesterday, just pottering around in a Sundayish fashion, sorting bags and trying to keep everyone's upgrade plates spinning, when I happened to look at the Guild Bank. Since I've been the only active member for well over five years, it's really just an extension of my own bank now.

I find it particularly useful for storing Lore items, "Lore" being a tag EQII uses to mean a character can only own one. For some reason it also means you can't put two of them in the shared bank, which never made to me, but there you go. You can put as many of the same Lore item as you like into the Guild bank, though, which is why I have a whole Guild vault tab filled with Blood of Luclin Mercenary claim tokens.

I deleted a bunch of Grollas only yesterday.
I should dump the lot but it seems so... wasteful.

These tokens started to drop with the introduction of the first season Overseer missions although the mercenaries and their tokens may well have been in the game already. Most, maybe all expansions come with new Mercenaries. Some can be found and hired in game, while others only feature as perks in the higher-priced Collectors editions.

I'm somewhat vague on the details because I don't generally pay much attention to new mercs. In the past I've been more than happy with the handful I've picked up from events and holidays. I still use the clockworks from Tinkerfest on several characters.

For a long time my Berserker used the obese ogre Zhugrus Blightstrike, introduced in the 2016 update The Scourge of Zek. He was a perfectly acceptable healer but he really wasn't much of a looker. (You can take a close look at him down at the foot of the post but I wouldn't recommend it). Having his bulk looming in the background - or the foreground, due to the way mercs, pets and familiars all seem to love to huddle - made taking screenshots quite awkward.

Odd thing to make the subject of a sub, isn't it?

I was happy to replace him with the much more svelte, if somewhat intense Evania Val`Sara, the mercenary whose services become available when you have sufficient faction with the Cae`Dal in the Chaos Descending expansion. She was in turn replaced by Oqdan Blisterbringer, a fire elemental with a more pleasing appearance than Zhugrus but, unfortunately, equal bulk.

There is, luckily, an ability called Shrink Mercenary, available for a nominal fee (and 150,000 status) from your class trainer. For some inexplicable reason, even though I knew that perfectly well, my berserker had never bothered to buy it until today. Sometimes I think he's been hit in the head a few times too many.

Over the years, following their introduction in 2011's Age of Discovery, mercenaries have grown from a small band of simple hirelings to a vast, shadowy network of strange and sinister accomplices. The extremely long and dauntingly complex guide on the EQII wiki attests to the extent to which these NPCs, loved by many, reviled by some, have embedded themselves deeply into both the gameplay and the commercial model.

Various expansions have added the option to dress the mercenaries in increasingly powerful and specific armor and to raise their stats and abilities with offline training. All of these things I'd been doing, sometimes diligently, sometimes less so, right up to and including the pre-expansion events for Blood of Luclin, which dropped a lot of very good merc armor. In retrospect, that was probably something of a hint.

BoL mercenaries can't even be seen until you consume their token.

BoL added two new reasons to collect mercenaries. Firstly, they're used in the Overseer feature, as are Familiars. You have the option to send one of your mercenaries along with each team of Agents you assign to a mission. Depending on the quality of the merc (they use some of the same, color-coded qualitative ratings as gear - Treasured, Legendary, Fabled, Celestial) a mercenary increases the mission's risk of success by 2%, 3%, 5% or 10% respectively.

To send mercenaries on missions you must first have unlocked them to so they can be summoned from anywhere. This is a feature for which you have to pay 150 Daybreak Cash. It's a small amount (you get 500DBC a month as part of All Access membership) and I would always unlock any merc I planned on using, because who wants to have to go all the way back to wherever you hired them, every time you fancy swapping from one to another?

What I wouldn't have done is unlock all my mercenaries, even the ones I knew I'd never trust in a fight. They have different abilities and, as anyone knows who's tried a few of them, different temperaments. Some of them my berserker quite literally trusts with his life while others he wouldn't trust to feed the pets and water the plants in his Maj'Dul mansion.

Evania Val`Sara is my favorite healer. She's extremely reliable and not at all flaky, unlike some. Even if she does have that thousand yard stare.

With Overseer missions in mind, I unlock all my mercs. I haven't yet started making any special effort to acquire new ones and I certainly won't be buying any Mercenary crates from the cash shop but I am using the tokens that drop to grab all the BoL mercs.

Lord Seru's Fool.
Now he's mine.
More fool me.

And boy, do those tokens drop. Well, most of them. They're all Lore and they're all tradeable and the Broker is stuffed with them.

The commonest, Grolla Skullwielder, is worthless, both financially and practically. She's a Diaku Berserker, only Treasured quality. Mercenary dps has, sadly, failed miserably to keep up with recent developments. You can barely notice the damage they do on at-level mobs. If you want her, you can currently pick up her token on the brokerage for five copper.

Melban Pindleclasp, a Troubador, drops almost as frequently and is nearly as useless. His buffs are of some value but you can still snap up his token for a silver. He is, at least, Legendary. Not that you'd know it.

Rosa Dod is a Fabled Dirge. Her buffs are worth having as is her 5% bonus to Overseer missions. She's still changing hands for a hundred plat or so, which is pocket lint, not even pocket change, by current EQII economic standards. I have several of her tokens in the Guild Bank but I haven't yet found out where to go to hire her. I'll add that to the list of things I have to do.

Oor of Umbra, a mysterious black cloud of smoke with piercing blue eyes, was selling for good money for a while. It's a Fabled Fury, which makes it reasonably useful for healing, although personally I'd always rather have an inquisitor for the Verdict (a  spell, which instantly kills mobs on low health and has for me, on occasion, meant the difference between success and failure in a tough fight). Oor's value is still holding at over a thousand platinum. The drop rate is fairly generous but the spawn spot, inaccessible without Luclin flying, is probably keeping quite a few people from adding Oor to their collection on multiple characters. I only have it on two, so far.

The spooky and uncommunicative Oor. Would you trust it?

Zel`Kriaz is a Shissar Inquisitor of Celestial quality. At one point he was trading for millions but he's down to just under 40k plat now. I'm in the process of training him up. I tried him as a healer when I first acquired him and he got me killed on the first pull. I don't know if he's an idiot or if he just needs to be upgraded and equipped before he's useable. I'll find out in a few weeks. If he ends up having to stay in barracks, he's still worth 10% to Overeer missions, and I don't even have to pay him for that.

Vylkorin the Vile, yet another inquisitor is Celestial, top of the shop for BoL mercs. So far I have seen his token drop just once. It's still in the bank because I can't decide who's going to to use it so I don't even know what race or gender Vyl might be. If you want to buy the token it's going to cost you more than a million plat. It also looks completely different from all the others. I don't know if that means anything.

The final reason to build up a large collection of unlocked mercenaries is the Mercenary Battalion. This somewhat confusing and currently slightly buggy feature, also introduced with Blood of Luclin, allows your mercenaries to apply a collective buff, the strength of which depends on how far you've upgraded them through training.

I don't propose to explain it here. It took me long enough just to understand it. Here's the EQ2 Traders page, the simplest explanation I've seen so far.

All in all mercenaries are a very clever and entertaining way for Darkpaw to make some money. In common with most things added to the game in the last decade there's an element of pay to win but I'm absolutely fine with that. The company has to make money or the games won't exist. I find the way Daybreak, and now Darkpaw, balance what you can get for paying versus what you can get for playing significantly enhances my enjoyment. I quite like buying little treats for myself. And I always loved the mercenary feature. I thought it was one of the best things ever added to both EverQuest and EQII.

The more useful and versatile they make them, the more satisfying and interesting the mercenaries become. As Telwyn was saying in the post I linked earlier, talking in that case about familiars, "It’s a reminder of just how much depth the game has, and how little adaptations like this make all the difference to this daily activity".

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go look for Rosa Dod.

Flying Easy: EQII

More than six months after the expansion arrived I finally took a second character to the conclusion of the Blood of Luclin Signature adventure questline. Everyone I was planning on levelling hit cap in adventuring, crafting or both long, long ago but there never seemed to be any urgency (or point) in finishing up the quests.

Back in January, when my Berserker muscled his way through the Sig line, it felt like moderately heavy going at times. Nowhere near as slow as some previous expansions but certainly not a quick stroll around the park.

The first time around, I was focused on winning the right to fly on the moon. I don't think I really noticed just how subdued the ending was. The whole thing just kind of fizzles out. Other expansions have had really big, kick-ass finales, throwdowns between gods that I found very impressive. This one just ends with a downbeat debriefing in an office.

Being able to fly around Luclin turned out to be no big deal, either. It's convenient, sure, but once I worked out you can either wear a cloak with the Featherfall effect or slot a leaper or glider into your  mount slot to get about eighty per cent of the effectiveness of actual flight, it really stopped being any kind of issue.

I always had my Necromancer pegged as the next character who'd finish the adventure line. I'd been gearing her up in anticipation so by the time she picked the story back up she was already seriously overgeared. The questline naturally provides sequential upgrades so that by the time you finish you have decent starting gear in every slot but the worst item she was wearing was already better than the best the reward she got.

Which was absolutely perfect. It meant the whole thing was a cakewalk. Boss fights that took my Berserker ten minutes or more back in January lasted barely thirty seconds. In one case, when the Necro got teleported into a pitch black room with the boss at thirty per cent and she was running round in circles trying to find the door in the dark, her pet and her mercenary finished him off without her before she could find the way out. 

I've been playing my Berserker a lot recently, plowing through instances in the hope of upgrade drops, the way you're meant to do. As I wrote, his power levels make that a fun romp rather than the effortful grind it has been in previous expansions. I've been very happy with his time to kill and general, all-round capability.

Well, I was. Until I played my Necromancer in the same content, that is. She's still not as well-geared as he is but the difference is staggering. Those six-minute instance clearances I mentioned someone boasting about in general chat suddenly seem entirely plausible.

It's not just the time to kill, either. It's the way the pet tanks everything without apparently dropping a beat. With a healing mercenary backing her up the pet seems invincible on this solo content. It also gives me a much wider range of options in awkward situations. When mobs do that infuriating power drain, for example, my Necro can simply stand back out of range and let the pet deal with it.

I've been thinking of making the Necromancer my primary character for instance farming. I played a Necromancer for several years back on the Test server and I know how satisfying a class it can be. The Berserker is enormously good fun but it's very much a one trick class. Two, if you swap between offensive and defensive stance, which I haven't done for a long time.

If it's pure speed in killing I was after I'd probably gear up my Wizard. Even in basic gear she's already faster than either the Necro or the Berserker. I'm always a litle nervous of playing pure DPS casters, though. I have it fixed in my mind how fragile they are although I'm not sure that's been true for many years.

Then here's the Warlock and the Bruiser to think about. Warlock, as a class, for some reason I have never really taken to. I always think of my Warlock as a crafter even though he's max level in both disciplines. Bruiser was another one I played for a long time on Test. I liked it a lot but I was almost always in a duo there. I fear that played solo it would end up feeling very similar to the Berserker, only with frustratingly fewer AEs.

As for the Fury I was levelling up from scratch, she's stalled at eighty-nine. It was really very good fun into the seventies. It's still fine and if it was the only way to level I'd be more than happy to keep going but I'm sitting on several Level 100 and 110 boosters and I'm more than half inclined to use one of those and just be done with it.

Overall, things are progressing very handsomely. Soon we'll have the next round of holiday events and then we'll be into the Summer Ethereal season. This looks like being the first year I'll actually be ready to take full advantage of that, assuming Darkpaw roll some of the drops out to solo content as they did last time.

From there we'll run up against this year's Panda quests, if that tradition continues. Then, if precedent holds, we'll head into Gear Up, Level Up and the pre-expansion events, whatever they may be. Atlhough maybe there won't be quite the same focus on getting everyone caught up this time around, seeing there's no level cap increase this year.

Whichever way you look at it, it's a full dance card. I haven't been so invested in EverQuest II for years.

Instance Karma

I spent a good portion of yesterday going through all the armor and weapons and jewellery I've been stashing in the shared bank in EverQuest II, comparing it with what various characters were wearing and allocating pieces to those who could best use them. I also spent quite a while crafting transmutation stones and transmuting them to make some of the very sought-after red adornments for which I've been fortunate enough to obtain limited-use recipes.

Because the speed of leveling in the Blood of Luclin era has become so fast I've ended up with six max-level characters. EQII operates a two-year cycle for level cap increases and in previous expansions going back many years, I've tended to have just one capped adventure character at this stage, six months after new levels were added.

I've also increased my capped crafters from the usual two to four. That happened in the run-up to BoL, when the fifteenth anniversary celebrations created an exceptional opportunity to level tradeskills at a highly accelerated pace.

With the somewhat controversial addition of Shadowed crafting and Overseer missions, both of which have led to my acquisition of far more Adept and Expert spells and combat arts than I've been able to afford for many years, not to mention a more than ten-fold increase in my bank balance due to selling spell scrolls on the Broker, I find myself in a hugely better place than ever before when it comes to gearing up. In fifteen years I don't believe I've ever had a better-equipped main character, let alone such a capable and increasingly well-prepared back-up team.

The whole process has been and remains both enjoyable and satisfying. Thinking about it this morning, I realized just what a balancing act it must be for the developers because my enjoyment rests squarely on a paradox.

Solo outdoor weeklies no longer give gear I need but I can still use the currency to buy recipe books for adornments.

The reason I find all of the above so satisfying is the way each incremental improvement makes my characters more powerful and effective in combat. Being able to kill mobs more easily and clear instances faster means I'm much more willing to take the daily and weekly missions and engage in the kind of repetitious behavior I've previously avoided.

That willingness, eagerness even, only persists for as long as I feel I'm getting something out of the experience. In other words, the better the developers feed my sense of achievement by making me feel more powerful, the less there is for me to achieve to sustain that sensation.

I tend to talk a lot about playing for fun and it's true I do spend a great deal of time doing things that aren't in any obvious way productive or meaningful in terms of the kind of character progression that can be measured by a DPS meter, but I do also like to see my numbers go up. The interest I have in running the same instances over and over is unlikely to continue once I cease to receive rewards that further my character's progression.

At the moment I'm still in the sweet spot. My Berserker is doing very well but there are quite a few upgrade paths yet available for him. While I work on those, he gets plenty of drops that the other five can use. It's immediately apparent what a smart move the creation of the "Heirloom" tag was, all those years ago.

By far my best weapon to date.
It came from an Overseer mission.

EQII's extensive Heirloom system means most drops can be passed to other characters on the same account, something that instantly extends the potential life of any dungeon still capable of providing upgrades to any of the characters able to receive them. Also, as the only maxed transmuter and adorner on the team, the Berserker gets to make the all-important adornments for everyone (just as well, since his chosen professionof Weaponsmith is totally useless these days) and instances drop the transmutation stones for those, too.

Those instances are still profitable but they're also fun for me right now because they're easy and getting easier every run. Someone claimed in General Chat the other day to be able to complete any Blood of Luclin solo instance in around six minutes. I'm a long way off that but I can imagine twenty-minute runs being a realistic prospect sometime soon. When I was levelling up they took a couple of hours.

Already, though, that sweet spot is starting to sour. Most regular drops are no use for any of my team, now. Common drops from bosses in solo instances mainly come in at 155 Resolve with the better ones going to 160. I'm already transmuting all of those.

A major incentive to run instances remains. Any boss chest might contain a red adornment. The loot rights to group with someone to come into their instance and loot one of these non-tradeable gems run well into the millions and bidding for them in open auction is often fierce. Even with my hugely-improved finances, I'd go bankrupt buying just a couple of the better ones.

I can make several red adorns now but the mats it takes are themselves worth hundreds of thousands of platinum so I'd obviously rather get them as drops if I can. There are more that I don't have recipes for yet and all of them have a limit of two "charges" before the spell unscribes itself. With six characters to gear up that's either a lot of luck with drops or a lot of money spent.

The balancing act the developers have to perform with each expansion, and indeed with the major updates inbetween, is to allow players to feel their characters growing ever more powerful,  something that always translates into faster and easier fights, while somehow imbuing those increasingly trivialized battles some degree of meaning and value. It's why so many MMORPGs use a tier system for instances and dungeons, effectively allowing for several gear resets within the same expansion era.

Before instanced dungeons we used to talk about"keying" or "flagging". Difficulty was gated not by a gear rating but the possession of an item or character flag, usually obtained through lengthy questing and a great deal of combat although occasionally by pure, blind chance. The general idea was that if you could survive the content that gave you the flag you'd be just about ready for what came next.

Those shields were a nuisance once. Now they're a joke.

This still happens in EQII, albeit without the actual keys or flags. There's an informal  ranking system, whereby players talk about "Tier 1" or "Tier 2" dungeons. These used to be more of a judgment issue but nowadays certain instances come withhigher Resolve requirements than others so it's pretty much a formalized process, the kind of gear or DPS check seen in many games.

Or at least I think that's how it works. I have only the sketchiest understanding, enough to know that even at my current, fairly powerful, solo state I don't meet the entry qualifications for the lowest tier. I can at least see them from where I'm standing, though, which in itself is a new experience for me.

Once, EQII only had one kind of instance but over the years the variety boomed: "Solo", "Advanced Solo" "Duo", "Challenge Duo", "Heroic", "Event Heroic", "Challenge", "Raid"... I remember doing "Advanced Solo" instances some years back, mostly as a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss, but that must be getting on for a decade ago. I think I tried a Duo instance with my Mercenary once and didn't get past the first room.

I don't know how many of those kinds of instance exist in the current era. Most of them are probably artifacts of the past. Blood of Luclin instances seem to come in either Solo or Heroic flavors. It didn't used to matter because I never came close to reaching the gear ceiling for solo play. Now  I might, at least on the Berserker.

I suspect that the ceiling for solo progression will equal the ceiling for my own interest in self-improvement. I have no plans to try and find groups willing to babysit a tentative move into Heroic content. The question I'm asking myself is this: if it did turn out there was a viable, solo upgrade path available, extending beyond the one I'm on, would I want to follow it?

A shot from when I first did this instance while levelling. I had to clear everything for fear of adds. These days it's the more the merrier.

If, for example, there were Advanced Solo dungeons and Challenge Solo Dungeons, would I want to keep pushing onwards?  I'm absolutely positive that the less resistance the mobs are able to offer, the more I like it. Would I want to step from the top of one ladder onto the bottom rung of the next, only to find myself struggling once more to survive, fighting the same mobs only tougher?

I've rarely, if ever, been in a position where I need to ask myself questions like this, which go to the heart of the whole concept of "progression", and I don't have any ready answers. It's quite refreshing to be thinking about something that I'd usually dismiss as  having nothing to do with me.

It's a dangerous path. This is how those endless progression games work, isn't it? Where you fight your way up a never-ending tower or down a never-ending dungeon, with everything getting stronger and you always just behind the curve. I'd hate to find myself sucked into something like that just because it's fun.

In practice I'm sure that what will happen is that something will come along to distract me. A holiday event, another game, some whim that pops into my head. Character progression of this kind above all takes commitment. I have enough of that to take me only so far. I think.

I'm not sure, though. After all, I haven't been here before.

Busy Making Progress : EverQuest II

Something unprecedented has happened to me in EverQuest II. Less than six months after the launch of an expansion I have a character who is on the verge of being overpowered for that expansion's solo content.

I wouldn't normally reach that stage until at least the preamble for the next expansion, something that begins, these days, with the Yun Zi panda quests in late summer. By the way, I have only just this moment discovered, as I checked I'd remembered his name right, that Yun Zi is an actual giant panda at the San Diego Zoo.

The character who's on the cusp of being more powerful than the content intended for him expects him to be is my Berserker. The main way I can tell is because he can mostly now ignore the scripts of solo instance bosses. A lot of what they do he's able to shrug off and some of it they don't seem to manage to do at all.

He's a long way off being able to slice and dice them in seconds, the way he can most solo content in any previous expansion, but fights that took ten or even fifteen minutes when he was working through the signature quest line now don't last long enough for his ascended abilities to refresh after one use. That means he's carving through most bosses in two or three minutes.

As for regular mobs, he's now able to round them up in packs and AE them down in seconds.

The upshot of all this is that instead of thinking of solo instances as difficult prospects needing a good block of time, they're becoming light, knockabout fun, suitable for a wind-down at the end of the evening.

The difference between this expansion and all the previous ones going back many years is undoubtedly the Overseer system. I've been doing all available missions religiously every day since it was introduced.

Most of the rewards aren't particularly thrilling but all of them are useful. I have never been so well supplied with potions for a start.

There are plenty of good drops from the Overseer Missions, too. That's how I've been able to upgrade his gear from the Signature questline as well as improving many of his combat arts. I've even been able to make and fit several of the desirable Adornments.

A few weeks ago I would have been content to get all of his gear to 160 resolve but the arrival of both Season Two Overseer missions and the Diaku Corral instance means the solo benchmark is now 165 or 170 and I've even seen one 175 drop, although it wasn't one my Berserker could use.

With the addition of elements like the free mount we recently received, a significant upgrade to the one I was still using from the Planes of Prophecy Signature, and some reasonably diligent use of the infusion mechanic, my Berserker now has almost two hundred million hit points and a hundred and ten thousand Potency in open world content, rising to well over half a billion and nearly two hundred thousand respectively in instances.

What all this means is that the prospect of running instances repeatedly to get drops I might want is
now an attractive one rather than something I'd prefer to avoid if at all possible. The faster the mobs die, the more fun it becomes.

The irony is that the gear that drops from bosses and instance mission rewards generally aren't anything I can use any more. Still, there are other drops, not least Adornmnents, that are still worth having and there are lots of collects to find and complete.

This is probably the first EQII expansion I've played approximately as the developers intended since... well, quite possibly ever. Even ten years ago, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I played the heck out of Sentinels of Fate for months, I still never got all that far with the instances.

It is true that what I'm describing is pretty much a solo game in which a lot of other people also run around doing stuff. I have the feeling, though, based on what I've read and what I've heard people say in game, that it would probably be feasible to move from where I am to the bottom rung of group content without falling flat on my face.

If I wanted to. Which I don't. At the moment I'd rather get as close as possible to "finishing" my Berserker and then move on to my Necro. Then, if I'm still feeling it, either my Inquisitor or my Wizard. Not to mention I still have a Shadowknight I was meant to be levelling.

By which time we should be about ready to start ramping up for this year's expansion and all this effort will count for nothing as we turn the corner and see the next flight of stairs leading up...

But isn't that always the way of it?

Call Of The West

The new Diaku Corral instance in EverQuest II is unsusual in that I've already completed it not once but twice. In common with all too many modern MMORPGs, EQII expects players at the level cap to spend a good deal of their time running the same instances over and over in order to gear up so they can then run a slightly different version of the same instance at a higher difficulty level so they can gear up so...

You get the picture. It's not a playstyle that's ever appealed to me. I don't mind doing instances multiple times so long as there's a healthy gap between runs - a few weeks, say, or better yet months - but grinding through the same mechanics and scripts day after day seems to be taking a love of repetition a little too far.

It's not a matter of principle. It's laziness. If you're doing instances because the bosses drop items that are better than what you're wearing it's almost bound to be a bit of a slog. I will do it, but I won't do it a lot.

Diaku Corral isn't all that different to any other Blood of Luclin instance in terms of difficulty. The ogres hit hard but they prefer to stand well back and pepper you with arrows from a distance. I've died a couple of times because there are a lot of obstacles that break line of sight, which seems to confuse my mercenary. Sometimes she stops healing altogether and sometimes she runs out of range as she tries to find a path.

All the named mobs have quirky mechanics. Some of them took me a while to figure out but most of them are reasonably intuitive. There's a walkthrough up on the wiki now, which explains everything very clearly even though it's written by someone whose first language plainly isn't English. By the time I got to read it I'd already finished the whole instance but it did answer a couple of lingering questions.

For once, most of the boss scripts aren't particularly annoying. The sound effects on the bucking bronco are nerve-jarringly loud and the winds that try to blow you into the shark tank are a pain but as these things go the whole instance is quite painless. The scenery is nice, if a bit orange and the wild west theme amuses me.

Even so, I probably wouldn't have gone straight back for another run had it not been for two things. Firstly, the loot is really good. The regular drops are 165 resolve, which was going to be my baseline for calling my max level characters fully dressed, but the uncommon drops are 170 resolve. I wasn't expecting to see anything that good in solo content this side of the next round of panda quests in late summer.

The bosses also seem very happy to give up their good stuff. I had more Exquisite chests than Ornate. In two runs I've had five 170 items drop, all of which someone can use.

Even so, the main reason I went back wasn't for the loot. It was that the questline carries on. That surprised me. I was imagining the quest existed only to act as an introduction, letting you know where the new instance was but there's more.

I probably should have guessed from the name of the first quest, "A Fistful of Diaku". Naturally, there had to be "For a Few Diaku More".

The second run was, inevitably, much smoother than the first. The whole thing took little more than an hour. My berserker is starting to feel powerful enough in solo content not to need the crutch of defensive stance. I swapped him to offensive, which sped things up considerably. It's also why he died when the healing dried up but you can't have it both ways.

As well as the stat gear, all of which is wild-west themed and looks fantastic, there's also themed appearance gear and themed house items. There's even a gnomophone that plays the theme tune,  "High Noon on the Moon". When Darkpaw throw a themed party they hang out all the banners.

When you down the final boss a cannon appears that shoots a barrel all the way back to Aurelian Coast. It's your fast trip home. I haven't seen one of those since the Moors of Ykesha.  I thought at first it was out of keeping with the cowboy motif but then I realised the whole plot revolves around a gnomish inventor working for the Diaku ogres and those cannons are classic gnome tech.

The cannon is canon, if you will. You won't? Oh, please yourselves.

As my berserker stood on the docks, picking splinters of barrel stave out of his armor, he noticed an ogre standing nearby with her shingle out. Who should it be but Grol Skullwielder, one of the BoL mercenaries whose hiring tokens drop from Overseer chests.

Grol is so highly thought of as a sword for hire her token currently sells on the broker for forty silver pieces. Or doesn't, more like. She suffers from being both common as dirt and largely useless. I already have enough of her tokens to give one to every character on Skyfire and still have a few left to play tiddleywinks.

Also, Grol being a berserker herself doesn't exactly make her the best duo partner for my berserker. She'll come in handy for Overseer duties though and she joins the Mercenary Battalion, yet another feature introduced with the Blood of Luclin expansion that I don't entirely understand. I hired her and noticed immediately that she charges for her services, unlike all my pre-BoL mercs, who all apparently decided to work pro bono as soon as we landed on the moon.

When I flew back for the hand-in I was expecting to be given the third quest in what would inevitably become a trilogy to match the inspirational source material. I wasn't disappointed.

Well, I was, a bit, but only with the name they'd come up with, "The Good, The Bad and The Broken". I have to admit I couldn't come up with anything better given the quest itself but I'd have rejigged the plot a little and called it "The Good, The Bad and the Buggy". All it would take is jar of metal-eating beetles and what self-respecting gnome doesn't have a few of those lying around?

Part three means another trip to the Corral but that's fine. I like it there. I might not even need a quest to persuade me to go back next time.

For a little variation I'd run a few more characters through the instance. It would be a significantly different ecperience with each new class. Unfortunatley, entry is restricted to characters who've completed the adventure signature quest line and I've been a little lax on that. Okay, a lot lax.

Maybe it'll give me the spur I need to take a couple more of the team through the final stages . Spur! Geddit? That's a good one.

Okay, no it's not. I'll just be riding off into the sunset then. Yippee kay yay... oh, wait, wrong movie...

Let's Go Jumpin'

By the time you read this Bristlebane Day will most likely be over so don't go thinking you're getting a rabbit like mine. Not until next year, anyway.

I wasn't planning on getting one either but after my last post on the holiday I thought I should at least visit the vendor and pick up this year's new crafting book, so I could not make anything from it, just like I haven't made anything from any of the others I've bought every year. It's a tradition.

While I was there I took a look at all the things you can buy with Fool's Gold. A few odds and ends caught my eye but the one that really jumped out (boom-tish!) was the rabbit mount. It was three hundred FG, which seemed like a lot Then I checked how much was in my wallet and I already had a hundred or so. Maybe it was doable.

Holiday currencies in EverQuest II are generally easy to get. The various quests tend to offer them as one of the rewards but most holidays (probably all of them although I'm not about to go check) also have some form of repeatable content that gives currency every time.

For Frostfell, my preferred currency grind is the Icy Keep, a dungeon you can easily run solo or, better still, mentor down and do the Heroic version for better rewards. During Tinkerfest the cogs just lie around all over the place waiting to be picked up. Several festivals have associated races, which are always good for coins. Bristlebane brings out patchcraft mobs to kill so that's where I set my focus.

Are they even the same species?

To kill patchcrafts in 2020 you need a max level character or at least someone at the upper end of the level range. Three of the four zones where they spawn are in the current expansion: The Blinding, Aurelian Coast and Wracklands. The fourth, Obulus Frontier, is a little lower, the level cap for the Kunark Ascending expansion being 100. Still not a spot for tiddlers, though.

I'd already been killing the patchcraft zelniaks as I ran into them on my rounds because I once got a nice165 resolve cloak off one and I was hoping there might be more upgrades. (I can now say they also drop a belt and that both belt and cloak come in different versions with stats to suit casters, tanks or melee dps and quite possibly other roles, too). I knew where they spawned so I started keeping an eye out for them.

I doubled my coins to around two hundred in a couple of sessions. Each kill is actually three because the first zelniak spawns another zelniak when it dies and the second spawns a goblin. It's the goblin that drops the coins and he always drops three of them. That would mean one hundred goblins and three hundred kills in total for a rabbit, if you were starting from scratch.

Except that one of the perks of being an All Access member is double currency. I don't generally think much about it but on occasions like this it really comes into its own. I was getting six coins every time. Fifty spawns for a mount seems pretty reasonable.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a frickin' rabbit!

After four months of playing regularly my Berserker has become fairly powerful in solo content. I'm gradually working towards a goal of having all his gear at 165 resolve, at which point I will use the infusers I've been stockpiling to make him more powerful still. I've been exceptionally lucky in getting limited use recipes for adornments and I've started to make them and slot them. It's a work in progress. I anticipate it taking me most of the year, at which point the next expansion will drop and I'll have to start all over again.

Right now, though, I can mow through two-up-arrow zelniaks in seconds. It made harvesting them for coins very straightforward and quite enjoyable - other than having to wait for them to spawn, that is. I popped a tracking scroll so I could find them and cruised around at low level, swooping down on any I could find.

It took me maybe half an hour to get the final hundred coins I needed. Off to Freeport via that other invaluable membership perk, instant travel, and I had me a bunny. A very big bunny.

It looked fantastic but I was curious to see how practical it might be. Rabbits don't fly, not even in Norrath, so you can't slot a rabbit into the mount appearance slot and use a flying mount for stats. It's a Leaper, the second grade of mount (it goes Ground, Leaper, Glider, Flying), meaning it can jump long distances, but crucially, as I discovered when I tested it, it also negates falling damage and is steerable in the air.

In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a rabbit needs to wiggle its ears 43 times every second.

That makes it a very effective ride in The Blinding, where you can jump off the platform at the zone in and pretty much glide to anywhere else in the zone. If I'd thought about it I'd have bought the mount for one of my characters that doesn't have flying in Blood of Luclin zones yet. But I didn't. C'est la vie.

The other problem is that equipping the bunny makes for an enormous drop in stats. I was astonished just how enormous. My Berserker has a maxed-out mount, Level 20 with all the regular gear slots filled and some of the additional barding slots too. Changing to a Level 1 mount with no gear dropped his key stats by almost twenty per cent.

I'm leveling the bunny up a bit because I have no other mounts I want to level and even at eighty per cent effectiveness he can still do what he needs to do quickly enough.. Mostly, though, I think it's a mount to pull out for special occasions and screenshots.

I feel quite pleased with myself for taking the trouble to get it, all the same. I may play a lot of EQII at the moment but I don't play it the way I used to, when it was my main MMORPG. In those days I made the most of holidays and special events. I'd forgotten how satisfying that can be, especially when you get the thing you've been eyeing up.

Let's hope I remember when the next big event rolls around. There's the very short Beast'r event this weekend and then a holiday drought until mid-June. And who knows what we'll all be doing by then?

An Opportunity To Go To The Moon (And Other Stories)

A little catch up on a few odds and ends that don't merit full posts of their own. Not that I couldn't spin them up into something longer. I can always do that. I just probably shouldn't.

Divinity: Original Sin

Seemingly determined, as always, to be the last aboard any passing bandwagon, this Friday I bought Divinity: Original Sin. It's been in my short but select Steam wishlist for a while but somehow I have only just now started receiving nudges by email when things go on sale.

I'm not sure why that's happening. I wasn't aware I'd changed any settings. It's quite useful. It also goes some way towards explaining the mystery of how people end up with such massive backlogs. Left to my own devices I'd probably think of checking my wishlist maybe three or four times a year. Except for those times, I wouldn't have a clue if anything had gone on sale.

I still wouldn't have bought D:OS just for that. I don't do everything Steam tells me. Valve is not the boss of me. But I had quite a bit of my IntPiPoMo winings left after buying Californium so I thought I might as well spend it. The game ended up costing me about £8.00 in real money, which seems like a fair price for something I was mildly curious to try.

A squirrel wearing a bone mask and riding an undead... something... started following me and won't go away. Also a cat. The squirrel is by orders of magnitude the most interesting NPC I've met so far and we can't communicate. The cat looks like she has something to tell me too. I've never regretted a choice at character select more.

So far I've played for... hang on, Steam knows exactly how long... oooh! Look at that. Four hours! I would have guesstimated two, two and a half. I must have been enjoying myself more than I thought if time slipped by unnoticed.

As I commented at GamingSF, where Telwyn was talking about the upcoming Baldur's Gate 3, under development by Larian, creators of the Divinity series, "D:OS so far ... seems okay. As usual, I can’t as yet entirely see what all the fuss is about. I read people gushing about RPGs and then when I get to play them I’m underwhelmed – I think it has something to do with ovehyped expectations but a lot more to do with what seems to me to be the overall lower standard of writing and voice acting that’s deemed acceptable in gaming."

That's probably a bit harsh. I'm not even off the starter island yet. And I am enjoying it. It just hasn't really grabbed me yet. Mostly I find myself wishing I'd taken the Pet Pal talent at character creation and wondering whether it's too late to stop and start over. Also the camera controls are some of the worst I've ever battled with, which does absolutely nothing for immersion. And it's a pig of a game to take screenshots.

Other than that, not much to say. I'm a little loathe to write too much about it here because I'm fairly sure everything there is to say about the game has already been said. Still, when has that ever stopped any blogger?

Neverwinter

With Divinity: Original Sin, I just realized I'm now playing two Dungeons and Dragons games concurrently (...or not, as someone points out in the comments, because D:OS is not an official D&D product - it just feels like one to me). That's a bit weird. Of the two I'm enjoying Neverwinter more, which is a surprise even to me.

Something has definitely changed but I can't put my finger on what it might be. As I play, I keep thinking "Is it the game or is it me?". The whole experience feels very different from how i remember it on previous runs.

It feels more like an MMORPG for one thing. There are people everwhere. It's really busy. And not just in the sprawling maze of the hub city (which is, of course, caled Neverwinter, not Everdeep as I said in an earlier post. I knew I'd gotten that wrong and I was waiting for someone to correct me but no-one did so I'm doing it myself).

When I'm out and about adventuring I can barely get to the questgivers for adventurers on unlikely mounts. Not quite as unlikely as the ones in Azeroth, Norrath or Tyria but still quite outlandish enough to let me know I'm playing a bona fide multiplayer fantasy rpg with a cash shop.

I'd somehow always thought of Neverwinter as closer to the original Guild Wars - a central hub with instanced adventure areas - than a traditional quasi-open world MMORPG but many of the zones I've been adventuring in are open to all and the gate system for travel is no more artificial than EverQuest II's world bells.

The open air zones are attractive if a little hazy. So far I've been too focused on following the sparkly trail to the next quest marker to explore but at least they look like places you might want to explore if you found yourself with time on your hands.

The biggest change from previous runs is definitely the gameplay. The whole thing feels more streamlined, cleaner, smarter. I can see there's a lot of work waiting to be done in gearing up for anyone who takes the whole thing seriously and that's quite re-assuring to know. For now, though, everything seems to trot along quite nicely without much behind-the-scenes preparation from me and I'd like to keep it that way as long as possible.

I did the introduction to crafting. It made me think of Black Desert, which in turn made me think I wanted to stay as far away from it as possible. Not because either of them are bad systems - just that they involve a level of micro-management I don't find particularly entertaining. I'd rather gather my own mats and craft my own stuff, if I'm brutally honest. I don't much relish roleplaying the branch manager of a regional garden center franchise, which is what these things sometimes feel like.

I think that so long as I stay well clear of the workshop I should be fine. My Warlock dinged twenty-three last night doing some proto-espionage work for The Harpers. It felt a lot more like the kind of thing I've been looking for. I look forward to quite a few more leveling sessions having jolly, swashbuckling  adventures, at least until my Warlock's  black crows all come home to roost. When you look at her backstory, it's no surprise the Moral Majority used to call D&D out as a gateway drug to Satanism.

EverQuest II

Yesterday I finally got around to finishing the Signature adventure questline from Blood of Luclin on my Berserker. It sounds late, given the expansion launched well before Christmas, but it's actually quite speedy for me. It took me more like six months to get to the same point in 2018's Chaos Descending.

The main reason it took as long as it did was that I was anticipating the final instance being hard work. When I finished the penultimate stage I made the mistake of going to the Wiki and reading the walkthrough for what came next.

There's a perennial problem with walkthroughs on the excellent EQII wiki: they almost always make things sound more complicated and fiddly than they really are. It's hard to avoid. Try writing a detailed, step-by-step guide to a series of scripted encounters without leaving anything out or being vague.

I've tried it and it's difficult to be concise, clear and comprehensive. In an effort to cover everything it's almost impossible not to make things sound more obtuse and convoluted than they are in practice. The EQII wiki does a brilliant job but the sheer level of detail can feel intimidating. That's why I used to love Borgio's video walkthroughs - he made everything seem really easy. Unfortunately he had a falling out with the game a couple of years back and that was the end of that.

The other reason I hadn't finished up the questline was that the same walkthrough showed me the rewards and they weren't anything I wanted. My Berserker could already fly in BoL zones thanks to having done the crafting Signature line and the weapon is a choice of one-handers, whereas he's used a two-hander almost exclusively for years.

Even so, it needed to be done sometime and I had the afternoon free so I set to it. And guess what? It was easy. The instance took around an hour. All the bits that looked annoying in the walkthrough were a lot more simple in person.

There were a couple of mana drains but I managed them effectively with the help of some of the Clarity potions I got from Overseer missions. My almost maxed-out Inquisitor mercenary did a great job curing detrimentals. My DPS was plenty good enough. The trash fights took seconds, the boss fights two or three minutes. None of those attritional fifteen minute slugfests from a couple of years back.

After an hour it was off to see The Duality for a debriefing session that made it very obvious our visit to the moon is going to be a two-parter. We haven't heard a peep out of Darkpaw about this year's expansion, except a very vague nod towards there being one, but I'd lay heavy odds on a trip to the dark side of the moon.

Over the coming months I imagine I'll slowly finish the Adventure sig line on the other five max levels and the tradeskill line on the three that craft. Plus I want a Provisioner, so there's that to do as well. Should keep me logging in for most of the year, on and off.

My Future And My Past Are Presently Disarranged

As Wilhelm explained yesterday, the Overseer system introduced to EverQuest II with the Blood of Luclin expansion is coming to EverQuest as part of the elder game's twenty-first anniversary celebrations. Holly "Windstalker" Longdale's Producer's Letter describes the new feature as "a passion project".

Really? I mean, I'm quite a fan of the Overseer mechanic but a passion project? When it comes to the EverQuest franchise that's a phrase I associate with the kind of half-baked, hand-waving, hit-it-and-hope mentality of the Smed/Smokejumper years. It's the sort of thinking that brought us EQEmote and, god save us, EQNext.

The Overseer system isn't anything like those "passion projects" at all. For one thing it works. Sure, it had a few teething problems but so do most new systems when they're first introduced. It's working beautifully now.

Unlike most of the innovations of SOE's later, dark years it's also useful. Arguably too useful. I've seen Overseer Missions compared, not always unfavorably, to World of Warcraft's Garrisons, a system that had its detractors but which seemed to be fairly well-used and accepted by the majority of players during its window of activity.

Never having used Garrisons myself, my only knowledge of them comes from what I've read in blog posts. I was under the impression it was a great way to make money but I'm uncertain whether it was a direct source of gear and upgrades, let alone a primary source.

The Overseer system is very much that. Almost all of my best gear has come from the ten hour Missions. So have all of my upscale crafting books, from which I've been able to make Expert spells and combat arts, top quality adornments and a good deal of money.

This is where I start to look slightly askance at the new feature. As a casual, solo player it has a very definite, positive impact on my characters' upgrade paths but it also takes them out of the normal progression loop almost entirely. I have, quite literally, not adventured with any of my max level characters for weeks, even though I play EQII for several hours every day.

Indeed, as I mentioned recently, EQII has now drifted so far from being an adventure-driven experience for me I've had to go looking for another MMORPG to scratch that itch. My typical gaming day during the working week now runs something like this:

1. Get up
2. Log into EQII on my Berserker
3. Collect any completed Missions
4. Set new missions
5. Pick up and complete the Zone Gathering Mission in The Blinding
6. Use my Shadow Staff to gather Shadow Materials
7. Log in my Necromancer, repeat Steps 3 and 4 until I have no Missions left
8. Log out, have breakfast, go to work.
9. Get home, log into EQII, repeat Step 3, 5 and 6.
10. Log out
11. Log into Guild Wars 2
12. Complete Dailies on two accounts
13. Log out
14. Log into Neverwinter and actually play a damn game for an hour or two!

The recent update to the Overseer system means we can now choose whichever Missions we want from all those we've collected. They are now also color-coded by quality. That means, inevitably, doing all the available purple ten hour missions every time they're off cooldown, then all the three hour yellow ones, followed by as many one and two hour blues as it takes to hit the daily cap of ten.

As my stable of Missionaries... er, sorry, Agents... grows and the range and mix of traits widens and deepens, the choice of who to send where becomes a little more complicated. There's also the issue of varying cooldowns to consider. I wouldn't call it difficult, not by any means, but it is time-consuming and, while I enjoy it, I would be very wary of doubling up on a whole new set of Missions and match-making in a second EQ game.

Fortunately, Darkpaw seem to be helping me out there with their determination to set 85 as the entrance level for new and returning players. When the Overseer system comes to EverQuest it will require a Level 85 character to initiate and use it. If you don't have one they'll give you one for free.

Sounds good, doesn't it? A free Heroic character. I'll take one. Why not?

Only, remind me again, what's the level cap in EQ these days? Oh yes, that's right - a hundred and fifteen! Having a Level 85 in EQ is about like having a Level 40 in WoW Classic. You might, charitably, think of it as half-way.

Probably not quite that far, to be realistic. With a Mercenary, the first sixty or seventy levels in EverQuest can be something of a romp these days. It starts to slow down somewhere around the mid-70s and by the time you hit that level 85 benchmark the brakes are most definitely on. Maybe that's why they picked it. Can't have people joyriding over the hard miles or those all-important dues won't have been paid when you hit the finishing tape.

Yes, well, maybe. Or perhaps, as I'm beginning to suspect, it would take more resources to produce a complete set of new, free Level 100 or 105 gear and associated kit for all classes than Darkpaw has to spare. It might not be a lack of will so much as a lack of ability that keeps the Heroic needle pegged at 85.

Which brings us back to the Overseer system and why it might be a a "passion project" for the team. I wonder if that passion might be for a much simpler, faster process to bring new content into the game.

It has to be faster to write and code an Overseer Mission than a quest line, doesn't it? Maybe orders of magnitude quicker. Once the kinks and wrinkles have been hammered out of the underlying systems, which seems to have happened now, adding new Missions and agents and rewards has to be on a par with the Collection system, or so it would appear from the outside.

Collects are the one thing SOE/DBG/DP have always been able to add to every new holiday, each year, all year round. When there seem to be no resources for a new quest there's always time for a new Collection. And people like them, too.

And another thing, while I have my tin foil helmet fetchingly tipped at a rakish angle. Doesn't the Overseer system look absolutely perfect for a mobile app? Wouldn't it be great if I could do Steps 2, 3 and 4 (above) on the commute into work, in my lunch hour, on the way home?

The future is Mobile, as we all know. You do all have mobile phones, right? (Or cell phones, if anyone still calls them that).

SOE made a Mobile App for EQ once. It was so long ago mobile gaming wasn't even a thing. It was useful, too. I could log into it at work and talk to Mrs Bhagpuss in game at home. Then Smed lost interest in it because he seems to have the attention span of a sugared-up five year old. It broke and they never fixed it.

I trust Darkpaw not to do that. Over the last few years they've convinced me they can manage the game better than late SOE ever could. If only they could manage the expectations of their entrenched, entitled customerbase they'd be flying.

Unfortunately, I would expect any announcement of a mobile app to go down about as well with the faithful as Blizzard's hyping of Diablo: Immortal at Blizzcon 2018, at least with the EQII faithful. Strangely, the demographic that plays the older version of Norrath seems more amenable to modernity than their supposedly younger siblings. The EQ crowd might just wear it, so long as they can see something in it for them. They're more pragmatic.

All of which makes the introduction of the Overseer system to EverQuest something I'll be watching with interest. Holly Longdale hints at big plans for the future now she has her hands firmly on the controls of both iterations of Norrath and this could be a straw to tell us which way the wind might blow.

So I'll make my free Heroic 85 and play around with the new toy for a while. I very, very much doubt it will bring me back to EverQuest for any meaningful amount of time, not least because I seriously do not want to add another three or four steps of not actually playing another game to that daily routine.

Y'know, a mobile app really would help with that.