Gender Isn't A Construct - It's An Illusion : EQ2

In Autumn an old man's fancy turns to... the new EverQuest 2 expansion. Although, as I look at the historical record, the release schedule hasn't always been quite as consistent as I remembered. I would have said that EQ2 expansions arrived when the leaves were coming off the trees but there were a couple of years there, when SOE did a hop-step and punted expansions to the Spring.

Normality reasserted itself after a while and the last half dozen have all released sometime in November. This year the date to mark on your calendar is November 13th and for once I am actually off work for that whole week, meaning I'll be able to enjoy the inevitable launch-day crises and first-week bugs to the full before the inevitable nerfs and fixes render the whole thing enjoyably playable just in time for my return to work.

As Wilhelm confirmed, Chaos Descending will come in the usual three flavors - Standard, Collector's and Premium. I have never bought anything other than the Standard edition of any expansion for any MMORPG. Generally the base model represents very good value and EQ2's latest, coming in at under £25 with the Member's 10% discount, is a bargain.

Usually I just glance at the other two, shake my head in puzzlement over why anyone would think they were worth the inflated prices, and move on. Last year the inducements to players to open their wallets wider for Planes of Prophecy seemed particularly lackluster. That mistake seems to have been rectified for 2018.

For the first time in years I did momentarily consider one of the enhanced packages and even when I pressed the button to pay for the Standard pack I did so in the reassuring knowledge that these days you can always upgrade your account to Collector or Premium at a later stage.

Jann Magi Illusion (Male). Fiery Book not included.

The various goodies this time around include a really interesting Mercenary (GW2 Tengu fans, eat your hearts out!) and a house that is by all accounts quite spectacular, but the potential value really lies in the various boosts and buffs, which include Ascension Level boosts for all characters on the account, a max Tradeskill boost for a single character and a slew of Familiar Training potions, mercenary and mount gear.

All this stuff is of very significant practical use. It makes your characters more powerful. It is the very definition of Pay to Win. Except no-one ever really calls expansions P2W, even when the bonuses accrue from optional extras.

I'm particularly sensitized to this kind of advantage right now because I spent most of yesterday working on upgrading my Berserker. I recently gave some off-the-cuff advice to Wilhelm, who has been playing and writing about EQ2 of late. I suggested that, if he ever got to the point of taking a run at current max level content with anything like serious intent, he probably would need to take a look at the guides at EQ2 Library and take some kind of action on what he found there.

Closing in on 25m HP!

It occurred to me that perhaps I should be taking my own advice rather than doling it out to other people so I went and read the latest guides on Class Optimization. When I say  "latest", I mean the ones from last April. I did read them a few months back but I wasn't really paying attention. This time I not only tried to follow what was being said - I actually logged in to put it into practice.

I had thought my Berserker was doing quite well for a casual solo character and looking at the benchmarks for where he should be on various stats he was indeed not looking too shabby. His key stats, Potency and Crit Bonus were already above par for Solo, as were his Resists.

The real weakness was his Hit Points. A while back I'd almost doubled his Health, putting him somewhere above the 10m HP mark. More recently, with the aid of the drops I got from Fabled Guk and the rewards from this year's Days of Summer, I'd pushed that to around 18m.

That's still a long way short of the recommended 30m (unbuffed) the EQ2 Library guide gives. Yesterday, following their advice, I reset my Prestige AAs. That bumped me to around 20m HP. Then I went to Freeport and crafted all the Planar Health Augments I could afford and socketed them into augment slots. Finally I went through every piece of gear I was wearing and Infused it at least once.

The upshot was 23m HPs. Still short but a lot better. I can also see a number of clear upgrade paths I need to follow to improve further. This is the sort of thing that I find very enjoyable in an MMORPG to which I have become committed - and really annoying in one I'm just playing on the side. Since I thoroughly enjoyed myself yesterday, I guess EQ2 is back to being something I take seriously rather than something I dabble with now and then.

This morning - between writing paragraphs two and three of this post - I pre-ordered Chaos Descending. I was going to do it anyway but I confess that the reason I did it now was to get the Jann Magi illusion that you can use right away if you stump up the cash in advance.

Last year we got the Clockwork Calamity illusion, which I have been using ever since. I have illusions toggled off so I can't see it but I have been enjoying the benefit of its excellent buffs.

In EQ2 these days, everything gives you buffs or stat increases. Your mounts do it. Your familiars do it. Every one of your twenty gear slots, of course, does it. Your food and drink do it. Some of your house items do it. Your long-forgotten Deity pet does it. If you're a min-maxer, which thank god I am not, you pretty much need a spreadsheet just to keep track of where your buffs are coming from.

Someone thought it was worth highlighting.

Even if you aren't particularly keen on these kinds of details you can't afford to ignore them entirely. Familiars and Mercenaries need to be leveled up and mounts will, too, when Chaos Descends. You can't afford to forget your illusions.

As I suspected, the new pre-order illusion is an upgrade to the old one, although it's not an exact one-for-one swap. It handily raises all the key stats but there are a few differences. The Clockwork Calamity, very appropriately, buffs Tinkering, whereas the Jann Magi buffs Adorning instead. Whether I'll ever remember to swap them in and out for key moments like that I very much doubt.

The Jann Magi also has a couple of unusual advantages. It allows you to jump farther, which is something I haven't seen for a long time, if ever. It also has some form of falling damage reduction. I have a suspicion it simply uses the code from Arisai/Fey pseudo-flight.

The most unusual thing the illusion does is entirely cosmetic: it changes your gender. More precisely, it switches from one gender to another each time you recast it. I might be reading more into this than was intended but I found it heartening. Of course, since I keep illusions off, it's something of a moot point. Still, in 2018, it's nice to have the option.

All of which leaves me - by far - as well set-up for a new expansion as I've ever been. With no level cap increase this time around I'm not expecting to have to replace all my gear right off the bat but it wouldn't be much of an EQ2 expansion if everything I'm wearing now wasn't obsolete in a few months.

I plan on muddling along with what I have and whatever the Signature questline gives me until EQ2 Library come out with their next set of benchmarks, probably in Spring 2019. Then I can take another look and start all over again.

Happy days!

Oh, Calamity! : EQ2

Yesterday marked the official pre-launch of EQ2's fourteenth expansion, Planes of Prophecy. The actual launch doesn't come until the end of November, the 28th to be precise, but if you can't wait you can pre-order now and get instant access to the beta.

I happened to be at home when the livestream began and I didn't seem to have anything better to do than watch it. I went to Twitch first, assuming that's where it would be, but apparently Twitch is so last year now. Facebook Live is the place to go.

That made it a first for me. I don't have a Facebook account but apparently that doesn't matter. And I have to say that it was a cleaner interface and a less fussy experience all round than Twitch.

I don't know if you can still view the presentation - I couldn't find it this morning but I didn't look very hard. I wouldn't bother trying to find it anyway, unless you want to gaze in wonder on the metal god that is Kyle "Kander" Vallee, who looks exactly as I imagine all the CCP devs must look like but probably none of them do...

Ship ahoy!

The forty-five minute promo was MC'd by the somewhat nervous Community Co-ordinator Roxxlyy, who looked, in the words of Ed Reardon, about twelve years old. As reported by the late EQ2Wire, she was an intern until very recently but SOE and DBG have a long history of battlefield promotions so that's not too surprising.

Roxxlyy, Kander, Gninja and someone I forget ran through various highlights of the expansion, including the Prestige home, the Planes of Innovation and Magic (the latter being the expansion's open-world zone), a raid dungeon and the new Crossbow weapon, usable by all classes, which levels up using xp. Plus another ten levels of course.

There wasn't a huge amount of hard information but there was more than enough to convince me - not that I needed any convincing. The full details of the three versions (Standard, Collectors and Premium) are laid out here. I have never bought anything but the basic model of any EQ or EQ2 expansion yet and this is no exception. I have, however, already pre-ordered the Standard one. With the 10% Members' discount it was less than £25, which I think is very good value indeed.

I make it 18.30 hours precisely by my chronometer. (Actually this is the /salute animation - very Roman!)

The only bonus you get with the Standard is the Clockwork Calamity illusion but it's a very nice perk indeed. In keeping with the strongly nostalgic - not to say retro - theme of the expansion, this is modeled on the classic EverQuest clockwork model, complete with key in the back.

Star animator Ttobey has hooked it up with fifteen emote animations plus the usual idling suite and you can ride and fly all mounts with the illusion displaying. Well, no, actually. They said you could but you can't. Not if, like me, you have wings. You just hang in the air, apparently unsupported, because while the various "wing" mounts go in your Mount slot they actually display from the Cloak slot - I think.

Anyway, a levitating clockwork looks pretty good, although they maybe should switch off the clanking "running" sounds. The animations are fantastic. So good I took the trouble to make a short video to show off a few of them.

The Clockwork isn't just about looks. It's also a buff and a substantial one. Every recent expansion has come with a buff like this attached but I always forget to use them. So much so that, when I checked this morning, I found the last two still unclaimed.

Given that I regularly complain about how slow the xp is in each expansion, especially when new levels are involved, it seems counter-intuitive (or possibly idiotic) that I don't take advantage of the buffs designed to alleviate that, not least the 10% direct buff to xp gain.

Have you really got nothing better to do than just hang about?

The problem has always been that the buffs come from an item that you place in your house and go visit and I just never get around to doing it. Also, they have always been one per account, meaning every character has to go to the same house to get the buff.

This time is different: the buff is an illusion cast on yourself from your spellbook and every character gets their own. No excuse not to use it this time. Plus, if I recall correctly from the presentation, the buff stacks with previous buffs from the house items. So I suppose I'll have to place those after all.

There's no NDA on the beta so no doubt lots more hard information will come out over the next few weeks. Also, I'm sure, a huge amount of complaints because if there's one thing EQ2 players know how to do it's complain.

I think EQ2 is now the best value MMORPG available. Were you to start now as a brand new player. for the extremely reasonable price of the Standard expansion you'd get all thirteen previous expansions. And the base game, of course, is free. That's a lot of content and it's top quality, too.

If you're a returning player who may have fallen out of range of the current end-game, note that you get a Level 100 boost with all versions of Planes of Prophecy. As for gear, which was a problem for some at the beginning of the last expansion, well, if Yun Zi's gear wasn't enough, there's a Quartermaster in Plane of Magic who will give (not sell) you a complete set of armor that's a slight upgrade from the Panda's set.

I don't plan to do anything in the beta even though there are some good rewards for doing so. It's only a month or so until the real thing. I can wait. I might pop in to take a screenshot or two, though, and the beta forums are open to all to read, so I'm not going to try and keep my launchday experience entirely pristine. I'm sure there'll be plenty to discover even so.

The inevitable doomsayers are already talking about this being the last expansion EQ2 will ever get and crowing about the imminent demise of the game itself. On what evidence I'm not sure, other than that no MMO can go on forever and EQ2 has been around for a while now.

If longevity was based on quality rather than fashion, though, EQ2 would be safe for the rest of the century. Long may it continue!