Good Things Come: EQ2

I finally got it done. Yesterday, I finished the Signature questline from last year's Chaos Descending expansion. Only took me about nine months.

As the ever-reliable EQ2Fandom wiki attests, there was plenty to do. There always is in an EverQuest II expansion. You can also rely on the rewards being excellent and the pacing well-judged.

There's a feeling that Daybreak know their market for the EverQuest games these days. From my perspective as a solo player, and with EQII not being my only MMORPG, it seems a very convincing argument.

Every year I eagerly await the next expansion. I pre-order at the first opportunity and start playing as soon as it arrives. If I go at it hard it tends to last me a month to six weeks before I've done the bulk of what interests me. If I take it in sips it can last me most of the year.

The approach and style of each expansion varies somewhat. Every pack sees a new wrinkle. There's enough variety to keep things fresh. In essence, though, it's a gear reset every year, a level-cap raise every other. There's usually a new system or mechanic and some tweaks to how the old ones work.

And there's always a story. In fact, there are two. Unlike just about any other MMORPG I can think of, except possibly for FFXIV (although even there I don't believe crafters get a separate storyline) EQII follows a genuine dual path for Adventuring and Crafting.

It's completely viable to have characters who only craft and still have a well-developed, structured throughline from creation to cap that includes everything an Adventurer could expect. There are signature questlines at all levels, side-quests, storylines, upgradeable gear and tools, important NPCs to meet, titles to earn, achievements, you name it. There are even craft raids.

What's more, if you really wanted, you could be a max-level crafter with the best gear and recipes and all the perks and still never have swung a sword or cast a spell in battle. Having adventure levels does make it easier on occasion, particularly if you plan on gathering your own materials, but you even get abilities and tools to help with that if you want to be a total pacifist.

Just by the nature of things, in recent expansions the crafting questlines have tended to be faster to finish. Yes, some of the combines take a while and sneaking about in dangerous dungeons can slow things down, but compared to the frequent, lengthy boss battles and instance-clears required of an Adventurer, the tradeskill timeline seems to fly by.

There's a huge difference between hitting the new level cap and completing the questline for both disciplines. Capping out tends to be much faster, with crafting being the quicker of the two. There was a time when getting enough xp from the main questlines to reach cap was considered a problem but those days are long behind us.

Instead, in years where the number next to my name goes up, I tend to be less than half-way through the story by the time that number stops. It happened this year, which has something to do with why I've been meandering through the questline ever since. Something clicks in when I top out on levels, telling me I'm done when really I'm nowhere even near.

Solo content in EQII is so well-tuned these days that I rarely feel the bumps. What with the Panda quests and the day one free handouts, anyone paying attention should be able to start each new expansion at a comfortable jog-trot. The advice even for raiders is usually to start with the solo timeline because there's likely to be an upgrade in it somewhere, even for them.

It's not always something that just bumps your stats, either. Some of the most useful rewards I've received from finishing the signature quests of expansions are utility items or abilities. The Altar of Malice expansion from 2014, for example, gives you the ability to reclaim adornments from your gear. The skill is infinitely re-usable with no cooldown, making a task that was once impossible, then awkward and time consuming, as simple as a couple of mouse-clicks.

I was very glad of that yesterday when I took possession of an impressively glowy two-hander, the Abyss Reaver, Avenger of Tides. This mighty weapon, a significant upgrade to my trusty Blessed Aethersteel Greatsword, comes with no fewer than six adornment slots.

In moments I was able to remove five from my sword using the Adornment Replacement skill and slot them into the Reaver. There are a number of other ways to do this if you haven't completed the expansion but none nearly so quick or convenient.

Finishing the expansion signature lines is highly rewarding for practical reasons, then, but I would also contend that, at least for anyone already steeped in the lore of the game, it's worth doing for the stories, too. Storylines in both EverQuest games tend to stretch out over years - even decades, becoming knotted and tangled one with another. I rarely have much of a clue what's going on or why.

That, though, seems to me to be the strength of the game's storytelling rather than its weakness. Playing EQ for so many years, every new twist and turn of the plot has the sense of a real-life event. Great powers move and we feel the ripples.

Everything happens on a geo-political scale. Even a powerful, connected character, the position a max-level inevitably finds themselves occupying simply by dint of having been there for so long, is still a tool in the hands of the real major players - gods and demigods, queens and potentates, liches and archmages and elemental powers.

Old friends and enemies turn up when you least - and most - expect them. There's a perpetual sense of a living, breathing world behind and around as names you vaguely remember crop up and characters you thought you'd see the last of reappear to make trouble for you once again.

Chaos Descending concluded for me yesterday afternoon with a somewhat less than epic battle with Najena. Najena has been around since the very beginning. Starting as a "young, brilliant magician" under the protectorship of King Cristanos Thex of Neriak, Najena was given a research facility in the Lavastorm mountains, where she performed "her own personal agendas and experiments".

The lair was given her name, becoming the Dungeon known only as Najena. I spent many, many hours hunting there. Najena herself survived the Shattering of Norrath that followed the destruction of the moon, Luclin. Her lair was still there, blocked by boulders, when I reached Lavastorm again in EQII.

I last saw her in the Kunark Ascending expansion, where she was one of the four mentors or trainers for the first iteration of the Ascension system. She represented the element of fire and was my Berserker's trainer when I chose Elementalist as my first Ascended class.

I think that might be why she called him "pet" when they met in battle yesterday. She always called him that when she was training him. Or maybe she comes from Sheffield. Whatever the reason, it felt personal when we met once again.

That kind of immersion or connection can only be built with time spent. I would be the first to admit that EQII's storytelling is nothing special, even by video-gaming's historically low standards, but that doesn't matter. I know these people and that counts for so much more.

So, those are some of the game's great strengths, and only some. As I repeat ad nauseam, I believe that, for a player such as myself, the game has never been in a better place.

Which isn't to say that I think it's perfect. Or even safe. I'm far from convinced that I am the audience Daybreak wants or needs to please. I pay my annual subscription and I buy my expansion once a year and that's it. I always buy the basic version, too, because it gives me everything I need.

If I was more of a veteran, though, a Heroic Group player or a Raider, I don't think I'd be nearly as happy. Where my progression ends is where theirs begins. To perform even adequately at those rarified levels these days requires major investment either of time or, more likely, money.

Over the past few years DBG have re-designed the endgame to rely on a wider range of upgraded spells. The spectrum runs from Apprentice to Ancient, encompasing seven tiers. Time was, all you needed was your Masters. Now you need Ancient if you can get it, Grandmaster if not.

The upgrade path used to be clear. You got your Apprentice spells free at level, Adepts would drop comonly enough to be traded cheaply on the Broker, Masters less commonly and more expensively but still they were there. In between, crafters would make and sell Journeyman and Expert spells. Everyone got what they needed, eventually, in game, for Platinum.

Not any more. Over the years the game has moved to what many would call a full pay-to-win model. All spells can be "researched" by anyone. It's not a skill or a craft. It's offline training.

You get free research on every character over a certain level but you have to remember to use it - it's not automated. At low levels it's extremely fast and very good. Later on, less so. My Berserker is currently researching a Level 109 ability to take it from Journeyman to Adept. It will take him 24 real-life days. You can't skip a stage, either. To upgrade you must already have the previous tier in your book.

Taking an Ascension spell from Master to Grandmaster at that level takes more than fifty days.  Or you can buy an "Instant Upgrade" via a button in the UI. Every day you cut will cost you 49DBC, meaning a fifty day upgrade could be yours today for something like $25.

While that was just an option for whales no-one seemed to care very much. Then Daybreak turned off the drops. Masters, always rare, became virtually unknown, even in raids. Adepts, the bread and butter of leveling and regular play, went from dropping commonly to become even rare than Masters used to be.

What with that, and the addition of the mistrusted Ascension system, which many players feel devalues their class choice and turns everyone into a Wizard, and which also has to be researched in the same way, there's a feeling that the pips are being squeezed dry. How true that is is hard to assess, particularly from my ironically-priveliged position in the cheap seats at the back.

I worry, though, that in the necessary drive to keep the game profitable by serving a very specific and fixed customer base, the dial may have been pushed a little too far in the direction of bringing the money in. Fan service gets a bad name for some very good reasons but in this case I hope this year's expansion is at least a little more directed towards the hardcore and their needs than the last few have been.

Turning the Adept and Master taps back on would help a lot. People didn't seem to mind paying to get to the top tiers so much. It's having to pay all the way that's hacked them off. Then again, crafters who make Experts must be laughing all the way to the bank. Hmm.. Come to think of it, I have a Scholar who can do that...

As always, you can't please all of the people all of the time. When it comes down to it you have to make a choice. As a dirty casual I've had a very good run these last few years. If next expansion sees the wheel turn a litle towards the Heroes and Raiders, I won't be complaining.

Well, not much...

I Belong To The Beak Generation: EQII

When I publicly announced yesterday that I was "almost exclusively" playing Riders of Icarus, I pretty much set the seal on an entire day of playing something completely different. I did try to log into RoI but the servers still weren't up after the update so I was forced to consider my options. They were many.

I rejected Guild Wars 2, which has now been relegated to the odd daily every few days. There's something in the offing that will bring me back for a while, about which I plan to post soon, but until then GW2 is largely out of contention.

Next I looked at Star Wars: The Old Republic, still very much in play. I had been planning to resubscribe when we got back from holiday but after I played a couple of sessions and looked at what subbing would get me I couldn't really see the point. Then Riders of Icarus cropped up out of nowhere and I thought I might use the hypothecated TOR sub money to buy Elluns, once I can figure out how to do it. For now the money's staying in my pocket.

I still very much plan on leveling to the cap in TOR and I did get as far as logging in yesterday but I stalled on Character Select as something else occured to me. My thoughts drifted to Holly Longdale's advice in her recent Producer's Letters.

Hello! What have we here?

I have six Level 110 characters in EverQuest II but not one of them has completed the solo Signature questline. Actually, now that I think about it, only two have even started it and the only one to have made any real progress is my Berserker.

As a Weaponsmith he's finished the Crafting Signature line. It opens a plethora of repeatable quests that give recipes but he's never bothered to do any of them. My Scholar has made some progress on the same questline but hasn't completed it.

On the Adventurer timeline the Berserker is very close to the end. He only stopped because I hit a very mildly annoying series of solo instances just before the grand finale.

I ran into two design issues I didn't much like. One is a recent fetish of the designers, the other a real throwback to old-school quest design I'd never imagined would make a comeback.

The first and by far the most annoying is the Massive Power Drain trick. In order to stop players simply overpowering bosses and ignoring all the mechanics, something even my relatively modestly geared Berserker can often readily do even at level now, many bosses get dots that drain all your power in a matter of seconds.

I have no idea why this shot looks so much sharper than the rest.

This means that, if you don't do something about it very promptly, you end up trying to kill a mob with trillions of hit points using only auto-attack. If that's even possible, it takes fifteen to twenty minutes in which all you can really do is watch. If your Mercenary also happens to have been on the wrong end of the power drain, your healing dries up and you will die long before boredom becomes an issue.

All the drains are curable and in theory your Merc should handle that. An average player-healer would have no problems. Mercs, however, tend to be slower on the draw when it comes to cures. Even with my merc's assists and attacks disabled, so that all they have to do is focus on their employer's health and safety, I always end up flat out of power sooner rather than later.

The first instance in the sequence of four features two Bosses that use this trick. When I first did the instance a few months ago I had a lot of trouble with both of them. There were deaths. All of them mine and the Mercs.

I did some research, visited the Broker, bought a whole lot of crafted Cures and Remedies, a stack of Clarity potins and some very expensive Overclocked Manastones. That allowed me to both shut off the drain as it happened and replenish some of the power I'd lost. In theory.

In practice I could rarely spot the mob's text emote or the tiny debuff icon in time to click the relevant hotkey and I often ended up out of power anyway. Still, it made enough difference that I won the fights eventually, which would have been fine and dandy if it wasn't for the other design issue.

Drop, damn you!

The quest asks you to find nineteen items to imbue an inert Rune that you have in your bags. The Rune then interacts with an object at the very end of the instance, whichyou can only reach by killing  all the Bosses. No problem until you see the wiki warning, in bold type and italics : "You may not receive all of the thermite briquettes needed for this quest on one run through the zone."

That's optimistic. In my experience you definitely won't. It means doing every instance twice. Back in January I balked at that and shelved the Signature Questline until I was in the mood to grind it out.

Turns out I was in that mood yesterday, because I finished my postponed second run through Doomfire and then went on to do the Eryslai instance twice in a row. Doomfire was, once again, very tough. I was rusty and I remembered that even when I'd completed it last time, after buying all the potions, it had been touch and go.

So I did a bit more research. I bought a couple of slightly different potions but I also learned something that came as a complete revelation to me, even though it has apparently been in the game since launch or thereabouts.

If you have the correct Cure potions in your bags all you need to do to use them is to click on the little debuff icon under your name in the group window. The game will then use the potion as though you'd clicked on a hot key for it. This means you don't have to worry about working out what type of debuff it is, then matching it against the relevant image of a flask that may be an entirely different color, which was what was making me too late every time to get the dot off me before the damage was already done.

Victory at last!

I knew you could get this functionality by using a custom UI but i had no idea it had always been a feature of the default. I tried it and it didn't work and I died but instead of abandoning it as a bad idea I did some more research and discovered I also needed to turn on "Click Through" on the window options. I always wondered what that was for...

Once I did, it worked like a dream. I moved my character window into center view, directly above my hot bars, so I could easily see the tiny icons as they appeared and didn't have to move my mouse more than an inch or two to click them. In that way I was able to remove the debuff before I lost much power and I managed to keep enough juice in my blue line to get the job done.

Doomfire was still a rough ride, even so, but once it was over I was feeling ready for more. Eryslai turned out to be a much easier proposition and a lot more entertaining.

The scenery was much more appealing, being part of the Plane of Air rather than Fire. The Bosses were all much more straighforward. None of them used massive power drains and although the wiki listed a number of mechanics for the fights, I found I was mostly able to tank and spank, which is just how I like it.

The absolute highlight was the first Boss, a small cockatrice who goes by the glorious name of Beaknik. Even better, his mechanics consist of demanding to be fed, which he does by emoting "Beaknik's hungry. Don't be such a drag!", and summoning his crew, The Beaknik Generation.

I found this almost infinitely amusing. It's completely out of context and inexcusably self-indulgent but it just played so perfectly to my own sense of humor and cultural preferences I instantly forgave the designer for their lack of self-control. I know if I was writing my seven hundred and sixty fourth quest I'd be coming up with stuff like this all the time just to keep my sanity.

The only downside of Eryslai, apart from a somewhat confusing layout, was my bad luck on the RNG for the required drops. With one Boss left to kill I was four short.

Using my tracking potions, an absolutely invaluable cash shop purchase, I cleared the entire zone of everything, regardless of whether it was flagged to drop the item or not. I still finished three short. I killed the Boss, who dropped one more. Then I portalled back to Myrist, The Great Library, reset the instance and went through it again.

Skipping all the avoidable trash and killing only Bosses and the mobs needed to activate the Rainbow Bridge gave me the missing ephemyral gusts in no time. The three run-throughs, one Doomfire and two Eryslai, took me all afternoon and into the early evening, although quite a lot of that was research. The instances themselves probably take about an hour on full drop mode and two-thirds of that just on bosses.

Asset reuse at its finest.

I have two more Planes to do and then it's the final instance. I'm confident of getting it done in a week or two, providing I don't run into any major roadblocks. Generally, though, the solo Signature questlines of recent expansions have been excellently tailored to be challenging but not frustrating - always provided you understand your available toolsets and how to use them effectively.

EverQuest II, like all mature MMORPGs, is not pick-up-and-play. Even a relatively junior example of the genre, like Riders of Icarus, positively requires players to do research both in and out of game.

The systems are far too complex to explain themselves by simple trial and error through normal gameplay. This is both the genre's greatest strength and its highest barrier to entry. After an initial burst of excitement and enthusiasm it must be so easy for players to become frustrated, confused and fed up. Tutorials can only do so much and can often be off-putting in themselves.

In essence, playing traditional MMORPGs is a hobby and hobbies always require dedication, study and practice. As pure games, MMORPGs struggle, which is why we have seen such a consistent move away from traditional mechanics towards ever more gamelike systems.

And yet, even those are complex and arcane, because RPGs always are. To get something that plays purely like a game you have to drop the suffix, leaving just the MMO, which is where Survival games and Battle Royales come in.

For anything that retains the RPG tag, you can streamline the storyline, simplify the combat and  squish the stats all you like but in the end you're still left with a whole lot of stuff that just has to be learned.

And that suits me just fine!

Brand New Bag : EQ2

Yesterday's post kind of got away from me. It's amazing just how often that happens. I sat down to write about how much I was enjoying EverQuest 2's new Chaos Descending expansion. Instead I ended up rehashing the whole "wither DBG?" debate from months back.

I was meaning to talk about the way the new progression mechanics actively encourage the kind of louche, relaxed gameplay I relish as an explorer archetype, while still retaining sufficient structure to keep me from wandering off and getting lost altogether. I was planning on pointing up how having four open world zones instead of the usual one or two has allowed the Mission system to expand into something more organic and natural than we're used to seeing.

I also had praise in mind for the astonishingly vibrant visuals, particularly the spectacular spell effects, which these days not only rival but often outdo Guild Wars 2's infamous fireworks, even when the only player-character on the screen is my own. I had things to say about the stunning landscapes, from the densely populated wasp hives of Doomfire to the ziggurat in Vegarison, possibly the largest single structure I've ever seen in an MMORPG.

I love the way you can pick out my Familiar's Santa hat and my inquisitor Merc's Gavel as it delivers her Verdict, but of my actual character or whatever he's fighting there's nothing to be seen.

To that end I'd already taken, prepared, cropped, named and saved a selection of screenshots, some of which I did end up using even though they weren't entirely appropriate. Yeah...nope. Knowing exactly what I want to write and doing all the prep for it is still apparently not enough to stop me freestyling on a Sunday morning.

At the risk of repeating myself (hard to avoid if you're trying to be emphatic) I'm loving this expansion. After I finished blogging yesterday I ripped quickly through my GW2 dailies, spent an hour or so on the frontlines defending the increasingly irrelevant Honor of the Yak in World vs World and then spent the rest of the day - some six or seven hours - playing EQ2.

For the first time since chaos descended a couple of weeks back, I decided to follow a detailed walkthrough on the wiki. Up until now I have been winging it, taking whatever quests appear, doing missions and generally concentrating on exploring the new zones and gearing up my Berserker to meet whatever challenges lie ahead of him.

As far as the main Signature questline goes, I'm guessing I'm maybe halfway. I still haven't checked that timeline. I've opened all four of the overland zones and completed an instanced version of each of them. Next up is the Plane of Water, Awuidor, which doesn't have an open world version.

Boss fights in instances are generally too intense for snapshots. I think this might be one but then again it might be an overland boss. Hard to tell with nothing but honey for a backdrop.

I might take that on today. All the instanced solo dungeons required for the main storyline in EQ2 use the same template: there's something you want and either the last Named (aka Boss) in the dungeon has it or he's standing between you and where you can find it.

You can't just skip straight to him. Every dungeon has a specific set of steps to complete to open successive areas and no matter what other variations are in play it always involves killing every Named in the instance.

Instances are persistent for up to three days. Mobs don't respawn and your progress is saved. You don't have to do it al in one session but I find I always want to finish what I've started so I try not to open a storyline instance unless I have about two hours for uninterrupted play. On average it takes me about ninety minutes to clear one using a wiki; longer if I have to figure out mechanics for myself.

So far I haven't had to follow a walkthrough for any of the dungeons. They've been relatively straightforward. I did look up the mechanics on a boss or two as I got to them, mainly because I wanted to avoid that annoying situation where the mob has a massive power drain and I end up flat out of mana and taking half an hour to kill him using auto-attack.

A nervous moment...

The wiki entry I consulted yesterday was something entirely diferent. Somehow, I found myself doing the Signature tradeskill timeline, which as you'd expect involves a huge amount of crafting. Crafting takes some preparation. You can't just wade in there and set off all your AEs at once, my Berserker's go-to tactic. There's nothing more annoying than making your way to some far-flung outpost with your bags full of mats, only to find you can't do the combine because it needs candles or incense not coal and the nearest fuel vendor is several loading screens away.

If you've ever wondered why people sell fuel on the Broker for ten times what it costs to buy it from an NPC - that's the reason. One of the benefits of Membership in EQ2 is being able to use the Broker anywhere in the game by way of a drop-down menu. Your purchases are magically delivered straight into your bags. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and pay the inflated mark-up rather than trudge all the way back to town.

Well, I wanted to avoid doing that. Okay, I wanted to avoid doing it again...hence the wiki. The walkthrough  tells you exactly what mats you need for each step and more importantly what fuel and how much. And it's not like there's that really a plot to spoil. This year's crafting timeline is solid, entertaining and very rewarding but you can tell Domino's not writing the scenarios any more.

The reason I started doing the tradeskill line yesterday was because I'd picked it up a few days ago and still had one of the steps in my quest tracker. I thought I'd just get that out of the way before I went adventuring. Well, one thing led to another, the way they do, and five hours later...

Crafting Crew. Same as Adventuring Crew, except for the pony.

Crafting is very relaxing so it was a good fit for a lazy Sunday. Still, I might not have done it had it not been for the rewards. One step, early in the chain, gets you an 88-slot bag. Eighty-eight slots! That's literally twice the size of most of my bags. It's bigger than the 66-slot Naylie's Nebulous Newsbag that has players dropping everything to grab the quest whenever a Guide broadcasts.

152 slices of heaven!

In a serendipitous co-incidence, an earlier step in the sequence had me making boots for a snail (don't ask...) which required me to use a tailoring station. My berserker isn't a tailor but, just as these days all adventurers are Wizards, so all high-end crafting revolves around everyone being an Artisan.

He was in his Mara Prestige home, which is where I keep all the Personal Storage bins for the account, and although I only have a Forge and an Engraved Desk installed to service my max level Scholar and Weaponsmith, the berserker can summon temporary versions of any crafting station.

They last ten-minutes but it only took thirty seconds to make the snail shoes. I hate to waste a good summoning so I had him thumbing through the recipes to see if there was anything else he could stitch together, when I spotted the recipe for the 64-slot Rallic Pack.

It turned out the Berserker had all the mats on him except for a strand of Crystalline Spider Silk, which he grabbed from the broker for a couple of hundred plat. A few moments later, voila! Rallic Pack!

All of which meant that in half an hour I added more than sixty slots to my inventory and found myself all fired up to see what else the crafters had to offer. One thing leads to another and that's how I spent my day - gathering mats, handing out cheese sandwiches, polishing statues and eventually re-organizing my banks all over again, because if you gain storage space you have to fill it. You just have to.

Among the many rewards from the crafting line so far were a couple of pieces of Horse Armor. Armor for mounts is a feature of this expansion that, until I did the crafting timeline, I'd all but forgotten about. I spent a while pondering the options available from the Archivist's Tradeskill Tack but even after googling for help I didn't feel I had enough information to make an intelligent choice so I left it in my bag, unopened. And the next one, too.

I have no idea...

As a result of fiddling about with that, I did at least discover that you can now train your mounts in exactly the same way you train your Mercenaries. I set mine going, a couple of weeks late but at least it's started. Now I need to go through everyone on the account and set the timer running on whatever beast they ride.

I also took my Inquisitor to Myrist to check the free gear in the box by the Registration Desk, which led to a trip to Qeynos to see her class trainer, who sells (for one copper piece) the absolutely essential unlimited use Adornment Remover that was once a major reward for finsihing the Signature timeline in another expansion.

Swapping adornments and changing out gear for the Inquisitor took the best part of an hour but the end rseult was another max level character with nearly 40m hit points and 37k potency. Next comes the Necromancer and after her I need to decide who gets to use the Level 110 boost that came with the expansion.

Maybe my Warlock, who's a max-level crafter but only a level 100 adventurer. Or I might spend some of my DBG Cash on another character slot and give myself a max-level Shadowknight. SK's are a lot of fun.

From which descent into me chuntering on to myself, making plans and cackling, you can surmise that so is Chaos Descending. Fun, I mean. And so is EQ2. At the moment, every time I sit down at the desk it's the game I want to play. It feels like there's a huge amount to do and very little in the way of my doing it.

Can't ask for more than that.

In My Experience... : EQ2

I was happily sorting my bags in EverQuest 2 yesterday (three hours and the job barely started) when I happened to spot someone in chat talking about double XP. I hadn't heard anything about it but I moused over my xp bar and sure enough, there it was: Server Bonus 100%.

Well, I say moused over but it wasn't quite that simple. These days, EQ2 XP comes in (at least) five flavors: Adventure, Tradeskill, Alternative Advancement, Tithe and Ascension. When you're leveling up, the default is Adventure but at max level that swaps to Ascension, since the entire endgame is now balanced around those four classes. What happens when you max that out I don't know - and I'm a long way from finding out.

When I heard about the possible bonus XP, I was playing my max-level Berserker, so the bar in front of me showed Ascension, which is unaffected by bonuses. It didn't used to be, at least I don't think it did, but one of the unheralded changes that came in with the Chaos Descending expansion was a complete revamp of the way Ascension works.

Someone doesn't get out much.

All four Ascension classes received five more levels; that was advertised. The old "Ascension Vitality" mechanic, which limited the amount you could earn per day and involved a complicated and annoying process of visiting NPCs to top it up, was removed; that wasn't mentioned anywhere I saw. Also, all Ascension XP earned by killing mobs vanished, too.

The only way to level Ascension classes now is by completing quests or using specific items, mostly those granted by quests. Quest XP goes directly to Ascension. Sometimes you might get an item that gives a whole Ascension Level or even several. I haven't had one in the new expansion zones yet but as far as I know, they're still attached to the quests that used to give them in Planes of Prophecy and in panda Yun Zi's catch-up questline.

That reminded me of something Wilhelm said about Lord of the Rings Online:

"I remember back when LOTRO was working up towards launch that the idea of quest experience being so heavily weighted on your progression path as somewhat controversial. Of course, any minor change of formula can be said to have been controversial to some degree. Still, we went from EverQuest, which was “Quest experience? You have to have quests for that!” to WoW, where killing the mobs tended to be, on balance, worth as much as the quests themselves, to LOTRO, which pretty much required that you do the quests to level up."

For a long time after that EQ2 offered a meaningful choice between grinding mobs and questing but the current orthodoxy is squarely in favor of quests. In fact, in a year when the expansion cycle doesn't include a level cap increase, XP, however acquired, can begin to seem a tad irrelevant to most of the installed customer base, which does make you wonder just who Bonus XP events could be aimed at. Perhaps that's why no-one bothered to tell us about this one. 

It did get me thinking, though. The change in the way XP gets handed out at higher levels is a reflection of the degree to which the last ten levels, including the solo "casual" version, are now both separate and different from how everything works for the first hundred. It's much more than just the XP, too; from 100 onwards you might as well be playing a different game entirely.

For a hundred levels you really can just wander around, wearing whatever gear you happen to find, killing whichever mobs you chance to run into, doing quests for anyone with a feather over their head. Yes, there are optimum paths and yes, if you stick with the game long-term, you'll have to backtrack to fill out the significant parts you ignored, but if your goal is simply to entertain yourself and get to three figures then you don't need much of a plan - or a clue.

Kill named mobs for fun and profit and, if you have the Weekly, XP.

From 100 onwards, though, you need to pay increasingly close attention to any number of abstruse and often unfamiliar systems. Even that most basic of constants, Adventure XP, changes radically, and not just as outlined above.

In order to make sure players spent time on the newest content, thereby concentrating populations in a small number of zones, the amount of XP required for each level was increased by orders of magnitude. You can still do older content if you insist but it won't do you any good at all, even if you mentor down for it. You will still get XP but it will be infinitesimal compared to what you need.

Going from Level 99 to Level 100 takes 1.66m xp, up from 1.5m the level before. Getting from 100 to 101 requires 140m. You can see that grinding in Sebilis isn't going to make much of a dent in that.

Killing mobs in current content gives more XP than killing mobs in older contet but not by all that much. It won't begin to make a dent in what you're being asked to earn. If you want to level from 100 to 110 you have to do quests in the latest level-appropriate zones, which means no later than last year's expansion. A single quest there will give you a decent chunk of the level: with full vitality and a server bonus you might get half-way from one level to the next on a single hand-in.

The alternative to grinding levels used to be grinding AAs. It's not called Alternative Advancement for nothing. AAs, aren't what they were. They stop at 350 and by the time most people hit max level they'll already have capped out. AAs are still essential, especially if you spend them correctly, but once you've got them and set them you can forget them.

Gratuitous picture of a snail. In no way intended to symbolize leveling speed.

The attention that used to go to AAs has, for a couple of years now, been replaced by the focus on Ascension. Ascended skills are extremely powerful. Among other things, they deliver nukes and dots that visibly impact the health of Level 118 named mobs, which your class skills definitely won't.

I am only just beginning to get a clear idea of how important Ascension is. I can see now why committed veterans have been grumbling about everyone turnng into Wizards. On the plus side, it certainly must make the small EQ2 dev team's job a lot easier; balancing four Ascension classes has to be a lot more manageable than balancing the full twenty-six.

Once you have your levels and your AAs you have to think -among other things - about your spells and/or combat arts. I'm still trying to figure that out. My Berserker is mostly using the highest-but-one level versions he has access to because he's upgraded them all to Master quality via the time-gated system.

Vet bonus 60%? Hmm, I guess 110 crafter must count now.

As you level to 110 you still get the lowest level Apprentice version of each new spell or CA gifted to you automatically, but to upgrade a Master of the previous version you need to reach Expert in the next. At lower levels you'd just have bought the Adepts off the broker or crafted the Experts yourself. That's still possible from 101st onwards but it becomes ferociously expensive. The drop rate on Adept spells is many orders of magnitude lower than you've been trained to expect. If I see one Adept drop in a session I'm amazed. The chances of getting one you need is too small to contemplate.

As for crafting Experts, I have a max-level sage who can do it for my casters but the number of rares required per spell and the cost of buying those rares makes it so off putting I haven't yet started. I'm also short a max-level Alchemist to make CAs for my Berserker. I used to rely on Mrs Bhagpuss for that.

All of which just gets you to Expert, at which point you can begin using the time-gated process to upgrade to Master, something that takes about six weeks. Per spell. Which itself is just the beginning. Next comes Grandmaster, Ancient and - I think but I'm not sure - Mythical. 

Even basic information on how all this works can be hard to find. Daybreak themselves recognized the potential for confusion a while back, when they added this very helpful guide to changes for returning players. I would absolutely advise anyone coming back to EQ2 after a lay-off to read through it carefully. It was written in May 2018 and it seems reasonably current but I fear some of the detail on Ascension may already be outdated.

Some of us love double XP!

Once you've gotten your head around the fact that your Adventuring class is no longer your prime concern and that your means of acquiring both XP and spell/CA upgrades have changed almost out of recognition , you can start looking at your gear. Unless you were a frenzied min-maxer you probably never bothered to pay attention to Infusing, let alone Reforging as you were leveling up. Well, you're going to have to start.

I still don't understand Reforging and I'm not sure how important it is in the scheme of things but I have come to terms with - and very much learned to value - Infusing. Infusing means boosting the stats on individual pieces of gear. It uses the Deity system (itself radically revamped recently and another entire system you need to learn) and runs either on Infusers you get as boss drops and quest rewards or on Platinum.

Pumping money into this slot machine is essential if you want to boost your character's effectiveness. I banged several thousand plat through it yesterday to add more than a million hit points to my Berserker's health pool, as well as pushing his Potency over 40k. You must repeat this process every time you change a piece of armor, too, because, unlike Augments, you can't take the upgrades out and re-use them.

Augmenting - that's another vital mechanic that just can't be ignored any more when you hit 100 although at least the way they work doesn't change - much. Keeping your gear as close to fully augmented as possible is another essential aspect of being max level. So is leveling up and gearing your Mercenary. So is keeping your Familiar maxed. And as of Chaos Descending we have levels and gear for our mounts, too. And I haven't even mentioned Fervor and Resolve...

On it goes. And on and on. If you play solo it's maybe not utterly impossible to ignore most of this and bumble along as if the old ways still applied but whether you can do that and still have fun, I'm not so sure. If you adapt and change then the newer content becomes as easy and genuinely "casual" as the lower but if you don't then it can feel like running face-first into a brick wall.

Don't worry about me. I'll just sit this one out.

As I said, if you want, you could familiarize yourself  with many of these processes and mechanisms as you level up. You probably should, since there's one hell of a lot to take in all at once if you leave it until you have no choice. Given that every expansion now comes with a Level Boost token, however, plenty of people are going to find themselves starting cold on a new character, even assuming they're current players who know the ropes.

How appealing a prospect this is will depend. It must be very tough on genuine new players and returning prodigals alike, but some people are going to love the complexity. There's a demographic that plays games mainly to learn the systems. They should be in clover.

For people who just want to log in and kill stuff, though, I'm not sure I could recommend starting at the top by buying the expansion and triggering the boost. It's attractive to be where the crowd is and you might well feel you're missing out down in the lonely lower levels, but if its the traditional MMORPG experience you're looking for, that's where you'll find it. EQ2's endgame, even the solo, supposedly casual endgame, is something else entirely.

All of which brings me back to the question: just who is a Double XP event that only applies to leveling modes really aimed at? And, perhaps even more puzzlingly, if you're going to have a Double XP event, why not tell people about it? I can't see any sign of an announcement either on the EQ2 Community News page or on the Launcher. Even google can't find a single mention. If that one person hadn't spoken up in chat I'd never have known.

It does potentially change my plans. I might concentrate on leveling a couple of my 100s to 110. Or I might wake up some lower levels, just to watch them knock off a dozen levels in a session. That's always fun.

How long this mysterious event is going to last I have no idea. I don't even know when it started. There's a patch today - there's a patch every Tuesday - so it might be gone when the servers come up. Or it might be with us through the coming holiday weekend. I suppose it might even be permanent...

Get it while it lasts, that's my advice. Unless your on your Level 110, in which case don't bother!

Some Things Never Change: EQ2

Chaos Descending, the new EverQuest 2 expansion, is turning out familiar yet different. An odd feeling; new and old at the same time.

For several years, all EQ2 expansions have followed the same pattern. A hub zone with services, an open zone, occasionally two. The main storyline progresses through solo quests and exploration.

At nodal points in the narrative there's access to instanced zones. They come in solo and group versions. You complete either to forward the story, then you farm whichever you prefer for gear upgrades, collections and similar forms of character progression.

On top come Raid instances, Duos and several other flavors of difficulty and reward, plus Public Quests, a separate and detailed Crafting questline and a new feature or two. This time it's gear for your mount.

My practice, going back to when I returned after a longish break to play catch-up through several expansions I'd missed, has been to open the Wiki from the start and follow the Signature Timeline to the end. EQ2 has a very well-maintained, authoritative and accurate wiki so playing with it open leads to a thoroughly smooth and streamlined journey through what feels like heavily curated content.

That has suited me very well. For the last few expansions I've been playing EQ2 mostly at the end of the evening, dropping in for an hour or two after I've finished in Guild Wars 2. I've been very happy to follow the guides, see the content, enjoy the story, gear up as I go.

This year, just by chance, EQ2 happened to drop its expansion in a week when I was at home with more time to play than usual. I also just happen to be on maintenance mode with GW2, popping in to do my dailies and then mostly popping out again. At the same time the EQ2 team also decided, for reasons unexplained, to give us the most open zones we've had since 2007's Rise of Kunark.

With plenty of time on my hands and sucked in as I was by the best introduction to an expansion in many years, somehow I found myself playing in the way I used to play a decade ago. After putting in something like ten hours I have yet to consult the Wiki on anything at all, let alone to follow the intended storyline in logical order.

Instead I've taken whatever quests I've happened across, which includes a significant number that open up from items dropped by mobs. Many - perhaps most - of those would seem to be side-quests or one-offs that have little or nothing to do with the main narrative.

For example, I spent nearly three hours ingratiating myself with an Iksar in the Great Library. His questline, which appears to have little to do with anything else, sent me to Detroxxulous, The Plaguelands. It counts as one of the four "new" zones athough it's actually a re-skinned version of a  zone from the last expansion. It's entirely new in content and feels very different, so I'm happy to give Daybreak a pass on including it in the count.

The Planes of Earth, Air and Fire are properly new. I've partially explored all of them after quests suggested I should. In each case I've rapidly wandered off-piste, sidelining my supposed purpose in favor of completing missions for the ubiquitous Dr. Arcana or just flying around, taking screenshots and battling Named monsters.

I haven't really played brand-new content in EQ2 this way since 2011's Destiny of Velious. I'm not sure there's any reason I couldn't have approached subsequent expansions in such a cavalier fashion. I just haven't, until now.

I'm not yet sure whether Chaos Descending is objectively larger in scope than recent expansion or whether it feels that way because of how I'm playing. Whichever it is, I like it. After several lengthy sessions I have yet to reach the point where the narrative moves into instanced, solo dungeons and I'm quite happy to leave that point some way off in the future.

EQ2's solo dungeons are very good, on the whole. They tend to be graphically gorgeous, thematically intriguing and mechanically sound. I usually find the difficulty level just on the right side of challenging; I can't always complete them first time through and I sometimes have to adjust tactics or gear to succeed. In the end, though, I have never run into one I couldn't finish.

That said, I prefer open zone play. For the bosses and sub-bosses, the solo dungeons incorporate variants of the kind of scripted behavior that has dominated group and raid play for a decade and more. It tends to involve a lot of gimmicks and/or dance moves and I can live without that quite happily.

I'm a tank&spank player at heart, or a kiter. I'll root-rot or nuke and run. If you can sum it up in a phrase, I'll do it. Just don't make me learn dance moves or break codes. It makes me glad I've not rushed down the storyline when I see Kaozz saying:

"The bosses take forever to kill on solo mode and there are mechanics you have to pay attention to or you'll end up dead, swarmed or out of mana, not terrible but the slow pace of killing a boss is really excruciating"

The solo Fabled dungeons are like that. I haven'tf inished some of those, although mostly because I couldn't be bothered, not because I found them unmanageable.

Storyline is a greater incentive than loot so I'm confident I'll be able to step up when I need to but I'll get there soon enough, no need to hurry. For now I'm enjoying the much looser, slower pace, exploring the beautiful new zones (well, Eryslai, the Kingdom of Wind is beautiful - the others are more like imposing or terrifying...), picking up bits and pieces of the story as I go.

Clothes, Friends, Photos: OWW, OLN

You know how it is. One day you're bemoaning the lack of non-combat MMOs then next thing two come along at once.

It would have been easy to miss them both. There's a lot going on this week. I'm struggling to stay on top of it all, EverQuest 2's Chaos Descending expansion and the big Rune and Sigil revamp in Guild Wars 2, which I still haven't had time to explore in any depth. I've already had to pass on Lord of the Rings Online's Legendary server. At least I don't have to worry about Fallout 76...

I'm even keeping a watchful eye on EverQuest for the pre-expansion "Fall Fun Bonuses". The first couple of weeks was double rare spawns and double faction bonuses. Pass. That round ended yesterday, though. As I write the next set hasn't been announced. If it's double xp then I'll have to make time somehow. Magician needs new shoes. Spells. Levels. All of that.

And then StikiPixels had to choose yesterday to commit. Art curation MMO Occupy White Walls has been hanging around outside Steam Early Access for weeks and now it's going in. I was more than willing to make time but as the screenshhot up top suggests, so was everyone else. So far I haven't managed to log in.

I only have myself to blame for getting caught in the stampede when the doors opened. I had a Steam Beta key for this one a weeks ago (alpha tester's privelige) but I couldn't work out how to redeem it.

Not that I tried all that hard. I already had my hands full of testing with the Unnamed Alpha. If that one was Live and had true persistence I'd be playing the skin off it right now. Anyway, I figured the open release for OWW would be just around the corner so I stood down from Early Acess to Early Access and here we are.

OWW is a very interesting MMO. I'm not sure whether it's an MMORPG. You certainly could use it as a venue or a vehicle for roleplaying. I'm sure many will. RP is entirely optional, though.

I'm not even sure it's a game. It didn't have many gamelike elements in alpha, not that I noticed. More a kind of mash-up of Landmark, Second Life and that one time my Director of Studies took us all round the Fitzwilliam Museum to explain how paintings work.

I think it has huge potential. As I said, only yesterday I was moaning about the lack of non-combat MMOs that don't revolve around farming and/or survival. Well, here's one. It has the look of something that could break out of its niche to find a larger audience, too. An audience composed at least in part of people who wouldn't self-identify as "gamers".

As a particularly brilliant comment on Steam put it, "If all those Lo-Fi Hip-Hop 24/7 Radios would be a game, this would be it". Yeah... no. Really.

If anyone's jonesing for Landmark I'd definitely recommend OWW as more than a palliative. I'd also draw the game to the attention of anyone who used to enjoy decorating in Rift or WildStar and is now, understandably or unavoidably, casting around for somewhere more stable.

Even if you don't feel you have the decorating chops, I'd still say give OWW a look. All you need is a passing interest in art and especially art history. It's accessible, involving, educational and slightly crazed.

I'd give it a few days, though. According to the forums "We're currently testing out a new patch to see if our fix works. But we are working hard on fixing it!" I've been trying to log in the whole time I've been writing this post and so far the only picture I've seen is the one on the loading screen. Which could be better, given it's an art game and all. That is theshop window, kinda. Or the lobby, at least. Just sayin'...

With some free time on my hands - time I would have spent on OWW - and with Steam already running, I thought I might as well take a quick glance at Otherland Next. That's how we're meant to call it now, the Tad Williams-inspired MMO that's spent much of its time on life support. Try to keep a straight face.

OLN, as I'm sure no-one is calling it, got a major patch - they're labelling it an expansion - this week and along with the new name comes a new game mode. It's described, enticingly, on the character creation screen as something suitable for people who like the social aspect of MMOs but who don't like the gameplay.

And on the face of it, that's not a bad idea. There's a sizeable demographic out there, people who use popular MMOs as a kind of glorified chatroom and if ever an I.P. was made for doing just that it has to be Otherland. That's literally why the characters in the original novel were online before things went horribly wrong and they found themselves "adventuring".

The problem Otherland has is this: if you want to socialize you need people to socialize with. Good luck finding them in OLN. I made a new character, took the Social option, spawned into Lambda Mall and spent fifteen minutes running around without seeing another player.

Which was probably just as well. The new mode skips the tutorial, and the tutorial is where you get your gear. I made a female character and when I logged her in she appeared in the middle of a shopping mall in her underwear. We've all had that dream, right?

I did check her inventory to see if she'd stashed a vest in there for emergencies. No luck. I decided I'd roleplay the whole thing as a tendency towarss exhuberant exhibitionism so she ran around taking selfies in front of suggestive signage for a while. You have to make your own entertainment when you're barred from questing and adventuring, especially when you're running around in your skimpies and there's not even anyone watching.

I may take my adventuring character (male, clothed) to look at the new content. We'll see. For now, though, I think it's back to the Elemental Planes.

Non-combat content's all very well but after a while you really feel like pulling the wings off a few mephins.

The Best-Laid Schemes Of Rats And Gods: EQ2

I'm pleased to report that, from everything I've seen so far, Chaos Descending continues to meet the high standards it set in its opening stages. That may, of course, be because the opening stages are still all I have seen.

My plan was to spend much of today playing Everquest 2's new expansion. I thought I'd make sufficient progress on the Signature questline and see enough of the new zones and instances that I'd be able to post something approximating an authoritative "First Impressions" piece. This did not happen.

It's four in the afternoon and so far I've managed just over a couple of hours, almost all of which I spent running around Myrist, The Great Library. I sat down to play right after breakfast but at around eleven I made the cardinal error of logging out to do a couple of chores.

I won't rehash the tedious details of what happened next. Let's just say that what I expected to take me thirty minutes took more like three hours and leave it at that. On the plus side, at least we have a working kitchen sink again.

By then, I really needed my lunch. Then Mrs Bhagpuss got home and we went for a walk in the glorious late-Autumn sunshine. That took me to four o'clock, where we came in. I should be logging in right now, but it's the day after launch, so wouldn't you know it, there's an emergency patch. The servers are due up in an hour or so, which is why I'm here blogging about EQ2 instead of playing it.

A rat can look at a God, as they say.

The two hours I did manage this morning firmly consolidated the positive impression the expansion made on me last night. Myrist isn't just a great library, it's a big one, with a lot going on. And so far very little of it has involved killing anything.

In what must be more than three hours of questing so far I've killed half a dozen mobs in total. I can even remember what they all were - a gardening book, a couple of bookworms and three guards in the jails of the Plane of Justice.

Most of the quests have asked me to find things, fix things, meditate or chat. It's been extraordinarily civilized. I love it. It's so EQ2.

Honestly, I would love to see some imaginative developers make a full-on MMORPG with this sort of core gameplay. I'm positive it would be both possible and, if done well, sustainable. There must be plenty of people out there, looking for a solid, entertaining, largely non-combat MMO with a lot more story and structure than"grow your own cotton, craft your own socks, chat up the miller's daughter".

Oh, no! Not you again!

Speaking of story, so far the narrative throughline in this expansion is rather compelling. For once it manages to be both immediate and understandable. It's true that, yet again, it's all about the affairs of Gods, Demigods and Mortals but the writer has done a great job of working the player-character convincingly into the weave. 

And I can't deny it: my Berserker has been instrumental in changing the path of destiny. He does know gods personally and they do remember who he is - and should. I used to sniff at this sort of thing but the surprising truth is that I don't, not any more.

I've been playing EverQuest and EQ2 for so long now that I'm marinated in the lore like a pickled walnut. I take it seriously, for a given value of seriousness. I feel my characters have paid their dues. They deserve to have the gods take them seriously, too.

I think this must be how those Guild Wars vets feel when ANet drops anchor in the deep oceans of nostalgia as they so frequently do these days. When I find myself talking to Maelin Starpyre the name does more than ring a bell and when conversation turns to Zebuxoruk and his troubles in The Plane of Time I have a fair-to-middling idea of how that turned out. As for that Dark Elf in the cell I still can't unlock, oh yes, I know her alright...

The Scrivener. Someone missed a trick by not calling him Bartleby.

It makes a difference. It makes a big difference, frankly. It's not so much immersion as investment. I've put in so many hours over so many years that this history is my history. And in Chaos Descending it's history curated by custodians who care.

I suspect that most EQ2 vets these days care more about the numbers on thier character sheets than the characters in the story but the same certainly can't be said for the developers, at least not from what I've seen so far, this time around. There's been some sloppy writing in a few of of the more recent holiday and pre-event questlines but standards appear to have been fully raised for the expansion.

I've seen very few solecisms so far and no jarring contemporary slang. Even the usual inappropriate attempts at humor have, thankfully, failed to make their traditional, leaden appearance. If the prose is a tad on the starchy side, well I'll take that and gratefully, too.

Don't you hate people who turn straight to the end to see how it turns out?

Given that the action, such as it is, happens entirely in a library, I'm also happy to confirm the presence of some lengthy and fascinating in-game books. For many years, long before Player Studio and with a lot less administrative fuss, players have been able not only to craft books but to trade them and place them in houses. Much better than that, we've been able to write in them as well.

Someone at DBG has used that facility to author a number of works for the Great Library that are longer than we usually get. I spent a fair while this morning, reading several volumes that ran to more than twenty pages of closely typed text. They were good reads. I hope to find many more.

On the subject of crafting, it looks as though the Signature Tradeskill questline made it in for launch this time. Last year, when the crafters; Sig had to be delayed until a few months after launch, it seemd like a sign that the wheels, if they weren't yet coming off, might at least have a few loose nuts. This time I hadn't heard anything about it but I ran into it for myself while exploring the various Galleries and Wings.

Another feather in Chaos Descending's cap is my complete lack, so far, of any need to look things up. I haven't had even a momentary, fleeting thought to open the Wiki or google anything whatsoever. I haven't even updated EQ2Maps to open up Points of Interest because, for the first time in fourteen years, I'm adding my own POIs to my own map!

Working on my Junior Cartographer badge.

How I've never thought to do this in almost decade and a half is beyond me. Okay, we didn't have EQ2Maps right at the start but I must have been using the add-on for a decade at least and yet it has literally never occured to me to annotate it for myself. When I think of how much time that could have saved me I feel faint. Plus it's fun!

The whole thing is fun. That's my takeaway so far. I get the strong impression that each of the last four expansions has moved significantly further in the direction of "fun" than it's predecessor and we may just be about to reach the sweet spot.

Certainly I have yet to feel roadblocked or even speed-controlled by anything in Chaos Descending. I already have the account keys and quest unlocks for several of the instances and open zones, all of which have popped up merrily as I pottered through the bread and butter quests in Myrist. Maybe that will change when I get to the Elemental Planes proper. I hope not.

I think I'll just go see if the servers are back up. Pardon me if I don't come back right away...