Some Random Observations On Games I've Been Playing

This is not going to be neat, structured essay like the one on AI. It has nothing to do with artificial intelligence, even though that was what I was planning on writing about next time, when I finished that one. I still have a couple more posts on the topic in mind but I think I'll let the AI flames die down a little before I stoke them up again.

This is also not going to be a post about the various problems I'm still having with my PC. Progress has been made on that front but I think I'll leave it until I reach something that looks like a conclusion there. I know it's not the most interesting topic to read about. Or write about for that matter.

And on that theme, the other thing I won't be writing about today is blogging. Once again, I have some ideas on the hobby that might get an airing at some point but now, I think, is not the time. Blaugust leaves a long shadow. 

Having crossed my first three possibles off the list, I was scratching around for something to write about today and as it so often is, my go-to for inspiration was my screenshot folder. I take a lot of screenshots, many for the sheer pleasure of looking at them, others with a post in mind. It's a good place to start when I'm low on ideas. 

I'm very untidy when it comes to storing my screenshots but I have a folder now specifically for lock screen images, which is where all the best ones go. I used to pick a screenshot folder from an individual game and point the slideshow function at that but this summer it finally occurred to me I could collate and curate them so I'd only get to see the good ones.

I particularly wanted to avoid having images on my desktop that were more UI than scenery or characters. I try to avoid shots with the UI in general but some games make it so fiddly to hide I just accept the clutter and edit it out if I want to use it in a post. Of course, sometimes I need the UI to be in shot because that's what I'm posting about.

Oh look. Here I am, talking about blogging after all. So much for promises.

But since I've gotten myself onto the subject of UIs, why don't I start there? I was browsing through the shots from the last week or so and I saw this:

Just look at it! And it's by no means the worst example from that game. It's Black Desert Online, in case you didn't immediately recognize it. I logged in for the first time in several years last week because I was wondering if it might make a suitable replacement for New World when that game sunsets next year and BDO is right there on GeForce Now, already set up and waiting.

It might work as a substitute, all though they aren't all that similar, but first I'd have to do something about the UI. Not counting the ones on the left, which are my character's vital stats, there are twenty-eight icons along the top of the screen and eleven along the bottom. There are also eight under the character's vitals and another five randomly floating in the middle of the screen.

By contrast, New World has sixteen and that's only if you count everything.Nearly all of them are for combat. 

That said, even then, it still looks pretty ugly.

 I'm sure many of the on-screen icons in both games could be switched off, if I dug into the controls. Or maybe they couldn't. It's odd that I haven't already tried, if so. 

The thing is, both of these games can be played quite comfortably with no UI at all and I've played them both that way, for long stretches too, when I've been doing nothing but traveling, gathering and fighting. Which, let's face it, is much of the time in almost every MMORPG..

I'm really in no position to complain about screen clutter anyway. I mean, I play EverQuest II! I'm pretty sure it has to be the all-time champion of clutter. 

Here's a typical screenshot, taken in the last couple of weeks:

 In that image I count one hundred and forty-five buttons you can press and another thirty-eight that just provide passive information. The scary part is that I know pretty much what every one of them does without even having to mouse-over them.

That, I think, is why I found the BDO screen so intimidating when I logged in the other evening. I'm fine having a hundred buttons I recognize immediately but ten that mean absolutely nothing is enough to make me think I ought to log out and play something else instead. 

I do like Black Desert, though, and I'm sure it'll all come back to me after a session or two. The sensible thing would be to roll a new character and start over but I already have four and they've all been through the same low-level content. Even though it was a while ago, I can still remember a lot of it. I don't think I want to give it a fifth go.

It's quite disturbing to remember how amazing Black Desert's graphics were thought to be, back when the game came out a decade ago. They look kinda funky now. That attempt at visual realism seems a tad old-fashioned, even though it looks a lot more convincing in New World. 

Speaking of Amazon's doomed MMORPG,  things have been going nicely for me in Aeternum. Or at least they have since I looked up how to get started on the Nighthaven storyline. 

Silly me! I thought just going there would be enough but no. If you turn up without an introduction, absolutely no-one will talk to you at all.

I had to go all the way back to Compass Keys and speak to someone there, then get on a boat to get back to where I'd just come from before I could get the plot moving. 

After that it was fine. The fights weren't too bad provided I didn't let myself get mobbed. The scenery was stunning.

And I do like fighting werewolves. It's funny how some mobs just feel good to fight and others less so. I've never been mad keen on fighting skeletons in any game and there are a lot of skeletons in Aeternum. Ditto zombies, which I find I can have more than enough of very quickly, too.

Other opponents I can do without include boars, bears and bats but I'm fine with any amount of wolves, big cats, bandits, or pirates. The occasional crocodile isn't unwelcome, either.. Were-creatures, though, I'm particularly partial to beating up and there are, as you'd expect, plenty of those in Nighthaven.

There's probably also a story although I'd be lying if I said I could remember what it was. I have the same problem with most high fantasy games these days. It all just blurs into one. 

I think I reached saturation point with this sort of thing about five years ago. That's one reason why I seem to get so much more out of the more contemporary-themed storylines in the gacha games I've been playing.

 

Take, for example, the side-quest I did in Neverness To Everness yesterday. It was one of the bond quests that pop up in the open world, when you run into someone you know on the streets of Hethereau. In this case, it was Fadia, who Flora happened to bump into in a bar. 

It was one of those bars that's mostly open to the street. Flora was just passing by and she spotted Fadia inside, It would have been rude to keep on walking. 

Flora wasn't day-drinking, I'd like to make that clear. Well, she wasn't until she met Fadia. But then the two of them started putting away the shots until Fadia was drunk enough to make a pass. Flora very gently indicated that she wasn't interested and called Fadia a taxi, which she pretty much had to pour her into.

Last seen, Fadia was hanging out of the window of the cab, making a final play for some physical contact next time they met.

The weird thing is, this is exactly the sort of writing I dislike in fantasy games, where I always find it completely inappropriate and unconvincing, but it comes across very differently in a modern setting, where it just seems to fit in with life in a big city. I still tend to rebuff any advances but I don't begrudge their having been made in the same way, especially when they make me laugh like this one did.

I also did a longish side-quest in which a talking bag of french fries had me polling the local neighborhood to find out how good it tasted. Or something like that. That ended up being a lovely, bittersweet tale about belonging and friendship. The sunset at the end was just sublime. 

And that's what I've been up to in my games of late. 

Oh, I also played through the first episode of Dispatch on Luna. But that can have a post of its own sometime, when I've played a bit more. As a spoiler for that, though, so far I've found it a bit on the annoying side.

Free Stuff! EverQuest II Edition

 It's all there in the header: free stuff! Come grab it.

I'll get to what the free stuff is, exactly, in a bit. 

I have a bit of a problem with EverQuest II just at the moment. I'd like to slot it into my gaming rota (Hah! Like I have one!) which currently consists of Neverness To Everness, New World, Wuthering Waves (When I get a free couple of hours that aren't going to be interrupted by dogs. Or one specific dog, I should say. It's not like random dogs run in off the street and hassle me to come play with them. Although that would be cool if they did...) and Black Desert Online. Well, I've played BDO once.

What all of the above have in common is that they're on GeForce Now. For the time being, I can only play games on GFN or more accurately I am only willing to play games using that platform. The reason is simple: if I play any game locally, as soon as I stop playing, my PC suffers a fatal error and crashes. 

It works perfectly the rest of the time. It works perfectly while I'm playing games locally,in fact. I can play anything just fine. It's only when I log out that there's a problem. And since when I carried on playing under those conditions earlier in the summer, it ended up corrupting my Windows install to the point I had to change the whole drive it was on, I don't think it would be a great idea to do it again.

I've been working with ChatGPT to see if I can isolate the cause and fix it. (It's not RAM or the PSU or any hardware fault as far as I can tell. Might be the Bios or the drivers.) but honestly, I'm not sure I even want to figure out what it is. I might be happy enough to carry on only playing games on GFN and just use the PC for non-gaming stuff, for which it seems to have no issues at all. 

If I hadn't logged in to EQII to get the freebies, I wouldn't even have been thinking about it. But I did because... Free Stuff!. While I was there, I took some screenshots so let's take a look at what you can get.

If you're a non-paying customer it's not a lot but it's all useful stuff and definitely worth having. It's all in the EverQuest II 2026 Splendid Celebration Crate. All your characters get one each.

Inside you'll find:

Five Portable Circles of Growth, (Handy teleport consumables that give you instant access anywhere to the Druid Portal Network.) 

Five Portable Translocation Devices (Ditto for the Wizard Spires.) 

A Shissar Armor Crate (Appearance armor.) 

A Mercenary Unlock Scroll (Free payment for a merc.)

A Sorrowful Spud (Really ugly cosmetic pet - looks like a rancid potato.) 

And something called a Splendid Tender, which is an illusion item you can use to make yourself look like.... well, like this guy to the left.

As I say, nothing to get excited about but certainly all well worth having. Except maybe the spud.

If you're an All Access subscriber, though, you do a hell of a lot better than that.

For a start, you get a free Level 135 Boost. 135 is the current cap and since this is an off-year, it'll still be the cap throughout the next expansion, so use this and you'll be good on levels for more than a year. As I can attest, having been through it - or, I should say, having started doing it and then stopped - leveling more than one character through the extra five levels that came with Rage of Cthurath is hard going.

Leveling my first character was fine. All the content was new. The storyline was interesting enough. I enjoyed it. But it took a while. 

I found it a lot less enjoyable, trying to get through it a second time without the benefit of novelty. In previous expansions I haven't bothered with the free boosts because leveling at the high end used to be trivial. As I've said several times in previous posts, Daybreak changed that a couple or three years back and now leveling multiple characters in current content is back to how it used to be - slow, grindy and tedious.

So a skip for those five levels is very welcome. Shame you only get one. I haven't yet decided who to use mine on. Emotion says it should be my ousted main, Conkers, the Berserker. Logic also favors him to a degree because in every respect other than level, he's my most-rounded, complete character, the one who knows all the languages, has all the best faction and owns every perk there is to own.

Even with all his privileges, he's not the second-easiest to play after the Necromancer who replaced him, though. Once I got Mordita fully kitted out, I realised, belatedly, that I'd been playing on a kind of self-imposed hard mode for years by doing everything as a Berserker. I'd be better off using the boost on my Warlock or Wizard or even my Bruiser, all of whom would be in a better position to kick on in the next expansion than the 'Zerker. 

Luckily, I don't have to make my mind up yet. These boosts don't expire.

As a subscriber, you also get a better class of crate. Inside your EverQuest II 2026 Splendid Subscriber Crate you'll find  

A Magnificent Nethernaught (Really impressive-looking flying mount as seen in the screenshot above.) 

A whole bunch of currencies and/or crafting mats, five kinds in total. (I have no clue what to do with any of them but I'm sure they're all very important.)

A flag to say you're eligible for Raid Progression Rank 20 and Untold Heroic Progress IV (No Idea what the implications of that might be. Don't even know what "Untold Heroics" are.)

Vox's Lair Deed of Ownership (A prestige house that's exactly what it says it is.) 

An EverQuest II Splendid Subscriber Gear Bag.

A little more detail on that last one might be helpful. I examined it and was shocked to see a list of items so long it wouldn't fit on the screen. I was worried about opening it in case it completely filled my bags but as luck would have it, the last time I was on I spent a couple of hours clearing Mordita's inventory, so she had a couple of hundred free slots. 

I opened it and what popped out was a complete set of cloth armor, accessories and weapons suitable for a Necromancer, all Level 135 and 130 Resolve. It only gives you the right gear for your class, or at least your archetype (Cloth, Chain, Leather or Plate.) so be sure and open it on the character you want to use it. 

It's baseline starting gear for your boosted Level 135 character. It's an upgrade from the quest rewards from the last expansion and most of the drops you'd get  in solo instances from Rage of Cthurath but Mordita already had some pieces that were as good or better from other content that's been added since.

Still, she's wearing plenty of pieces that aren't quite as good, so when I get time I'll go through and swap them out as necessary. Or I might give it all to whoever gets the boost.

It's a bit of a moot point anyway because a) I already have some 130 resolve gear in the bank to hand out to alts and b) I bet there'll be yet another set just as good on the Pandas, when that event comes round in a week or two. 

EQII is a real gear treadmill. I don't think I've played another MMORPG where gear feels so ephemeral. Even as a casual solo player it's rare for any item to last more than three months, if you play anything like regularly. There are gear resets at the annual expansion in December, at the two Game Updates in March and August and then there's the pandas and all the special events throughout the year and the new Overseer season...

Don't get too attached to anything you're wearing. that's what I'm saying.

All of this free stuff, as I probably should have said at the start, is in the Cash Shop at a cost of zero DBC. I started off looking in Claim but I should have know better. Just open the shop and click on the "New" tab.

While I was in there, I happened to notice a new familiar. It was pretty cheap at 899DBC and the name, Rowen, intrigued me so I took a look.

It's quite possibly the cutest familiar I've seen. It's a kitten with two sets of eyes, horns and blue fur. A demon kitten. But so cute! I haven't bought one yet but I will. 

As I'm always saying, I'm happy to find anything in that store I can spend my hoard of funny money on. It's not free stuff but it's the next best thing.

Persona Non Grata - The Latest EQ2 Producer's Letter

(Written on Friday, hence the present tense.)

I didn't really have anything in mind to write about today. I was thinking of skipping but then I thought maybe I could say something about the EverQuest II Producer's Letter. Or I could if I'd read it. I'll just go do that now...

Hmm. It's not very interesting, is it? Even by Jenn Chan's wonderfully low-key standards. After some of the hyperactive attention-seekers we've had shilling for the game over the years, I do genuinely appreciate her calm, reasonable approach but combined with not really having much of note to announce it can get a little "so what?" at times.

The first half is all "Here's what we've done so far. Aren't we good to you?" which is fair enough. No harm reminding people what the Romans have done for them. Then there's the usual trumpeting of special offers and things we can buy, with the crass commercialism of all that offset by the Good Works for Charity report. Again, expected and justified but really not very interesting.

There are a couple of mildly intriguing items. This Persona thing for a start. I can't remember when they first mentioned it but I feel like it was a while ago. I didn't pay much attention and I couldn't honestly say I knew exactly what it was but I think I do now. It's EQII's attempt to turn itself into FFXIV I think. 

"... this new feature will allow you to level and play alternate class 'personas' on the same character. This enables leveling from level 1 to max on each class while still playing the same character, having access to the same equipment, and credit for completing the same quests and achievements. "

The "all jobs on one character" thing was one of the aspects of Final Fantasy XIV I enjoyed the least. It was a strong factor in our decision to go back to Guild Wars 2, when there was a real possibility Mrs Bhagpuss and I might have moved to FFXIV full time because GW2 was overrun with bots to the point of unplayability (Something no-one seems to remember any more.).

It also put me off playing FFXIV much even as a side game later. I actively dislike being able to play all the classes on the same character. I like making alts.

The ability to play multiple characters, have them do different things, dress them in different gear and have different experiences with all of them is one of the things that kept me playing MMORPGs for so many years. The way that, over the last decade, many MMORPGs have moved towards an account-based rather than a character-based structure, with the more extreme examples making it illogical and counter-productive to do anything on more than one character, has been a significant influence on my declining interest in the genre as a whole. 

Rolling multiple characters used to keep me in a game a lot longer. Years longer in some cases. These days, while you can still do it, most of the practical reasons have been removed and it just doesn't feel fun any more. In fact, it feels like a waste of time and the last thing any MMORPG needs to do is remind you of how much time you're wasting, playing it. 

I suspect it may even have something to do with my growing preference for open world gacha RPGs, In those, you're actively encouraged to play lots of characters.And rewarded for it.

To me, then, adding Personas to EQII seems like a retrograde step. It's another sop to the Toon Brigade, those players who see all their characters as nothing more than interchangeable functionaries. From their perspective, being able to do everything on the same character must look like a huge benefit. 

Also, I suspect, it may have something to do with the ever-declining population of EQII. It's going to be a lot easier to get a group going if everyone can swap Personas to fill the missing roles. Then again, Rift used to work that way and it never did Trion much good...

The letter mentions the summer update, which has a name now: Revelations of Malice. It doesn't really say anything about it, though. In fact, I'm a bit unclear on whether the technical and quality of life improvements listed are part of that update or separate from it. Or maybe they are the update?

UI scaling is one of the proposed improvements although it's only going to be in testing, presumably on the Beta server, not on Live. I wonder how many people play EQII in 4K? Seems like it'd be a niche group at best. I guess when I get my gaming laptop (I was pricing them this morning.) I could hook it up to the big TV we have now and play EQII in the lounge in 4K. Not sure why I'd want to but I might try it, just out of curiosity.

More useful and attractive to me are the proposed upgrades to the number of mount slots and house item caps and especially the option to train mounts that you don't currently have equipped. I have a lot of mount xp potions stashed I'd like to get some use out of and that should help.

And that's about all there is. Not much, is it? Hardly worth sending out a letter.

Oh, there's a whole paragraph about the expansion. Ought to mention that, I guess. Only problem is it doesn't actually tell us anything. 

Here. have a read. See if you can make anything out of it. I can't.

"Cthurath, reeling from his recent defeat within Gerion, has been suppressed back into the Void. While the majority of Norrath remain unaware of the cataclysmic threat posed by the Consumer, the Overlord’s absence in Freeport has not escaped the notice of the power hungry. Encrypted messages continue flowing, and the feeling of dread seems to suffocate you as you think too hard not only on what you’ve deciphered, but other clues and gut feelings. Something big is about to happen, and you have thus far been unable to home in on what that could be. Words are power, mysticism and darkness go hand in hand, a found missive and a very vague map of islands... what could it all mean? A fair warning Adventurer: pursuing this course can only serve to open a yawning gulf of madness and machinations which will not easily be traversed. Heed the warnings, Norrathians. Beware the Descent into the darkness."

The only thing in that lot that caught my eye was the "very vague map of islands". I hope that means the expansion's set in an archipelago. I like island-hopping adventures. But then there's the ominous "Beware the Descent into the darkness" part, too. I do hope we're not going underground again. I had more than enough of that in Terrors of Thalumbra. 

Oh well. I guess we'll find out soon enough.  

Gnomes, Pandas And Flying Sharks - It Can Only Be Summer At Daybreak

I've been out and about doing stuff today so this is a bit of a cobbled together at the last minute post. It's also one of those "Here are some things I'm going to do that I haven't actually done yet" affair, by which I mean I've taken a few press releases and made a post out of them.

Which, yes I know, is cheap. So sue me. You think I get paid for this?

In all cases it's Daybreak I'm talking about. We're just about to hit the big summer festival season in EverQuest II and Niami Denmother has a couple of articles up at EQ2 Traders about it. The first is about Tinkerfest, which she describes as the "annual gnomish (including honorary gnomes) celebration".  Ratongas like to tinker, too, but gnomes don't like to talk about that much. Don't like the competition.

I used to take this one quite seriously. Well, as seriously as you can take anything involving gnomes. I played a few of them (And Ratongas, too.) and at least one of my gnomes had a suitably gnomish residence (See how I resisted saying gnome-home there?) full of the kind of widgets and cogs that make any self-respecting gnome happy.

And, let's face it, all gnomes are self-respecting. A bit too much so for some people. Have you ever met a gnome with an inferiority complex? Or a gnome suffering from imposter syndrome? No, they're all hyper-confident megalomaniacs with delusions of grandeur. It's compensation for their obvious deficiencies in other departments, I imagine, although I'm no expert in gnomish psychology. Thankfully.

But they sure can tinker. If you want something bolted onto something else, these are your guys. Tinkerfest is one of Norrath's  bigger festivals so after a couple of decades it's acquired a lot of cruft. EQ2 Traders has a neat overview and I'm going to steal it, just to fill the post out a bit:

Is this your first time celebrating this event? Or is your memory fuzzy enough that you need a refresher?

• Gnomeland Security in the Steamfont Mountains is the main hub for this event, with portals from all "celebration" areas sending you back to the main hub in Gnomeland. (Celebrating gnomes, surrounded by harvestable cogs and purple shinies, can be found in all home cities as well as the docks of Thurgadin, the gnome area in Solusek's Eye, and Dropship Landing in the Moors)
• The shiny tinkerfest cogs, used for shopping and for crafting, are harvestable "!" items in all celebration areas. They can also be brought back by an upgraded pack pony (100 per 2-hour run).
• The second purple shiny collection (added in 2016) requires that you have completed (and handed in) the first purple shiny collection. Once you have done so, half of the collection can then be found in the Gnomeland Security area; the other half of the collection will be found in Qeynos and Freeport in the celebration areas.
• You will need to know the gnomish language (from a language trainer if you're not a gnome) in order to obtain some of the quests.
• Vendor Tarly in Gnomeland Security will sell all of the past Tinkerfest recipes and items for you while vendor Myron will sell the current year's recipes and items. You will need some shiny tinkerfest cogs before you can buy the books, so scrounge up a few before you go shopping.
• The quest tracker included in a section below will be a godsend if you are trying to run more than one alt through the event. Quest details for all quests can be found on the wiki's Tinkerfest article.
• During the event, there will be a markable sign in several of the Tinkerfest areas, for the Party Sign! Excellent! achievement for those who missed getting the Tinkerfest update for it last year.
• Protip: if you see an item sold on either Myron or Tarly that costs 2 Shiny Tinkerfest Cog, it usually means that it can also be crafted. (Or is a special achievement unlock.)

That quest breakdown, linked in Niami's piece, is huuuuuge. I'm reasonably confident I've done everything on there at least once, some things many times. and by this stage, I'm pretty much tinkered out so I have no plans on doing any of it again. 

I do generally try to do any new quests that get added, just for the sake of being able to say I've done them all, but by now there's really no need for any more activities in most of the festivals. There's literally more than enough to do already. Technically, there is one new Tinkerfest quest this year but it looks to be nothing more than a repeatable option added to an existing quest. If so, I'll pass, thanks.

Even if you're done with the event itself, though, it's still worth noting down the dates because the special Summer Jubilee dungeon, Triad of Elements, only opens during the big three. 

The three tent-pole attractions are:

Tinkerfest — June 6, 2024 to June 19, 2024

Scorched Sky Celebration — June 28, 2024 to July 11, 2024

Oceansfull Festival — August 8, 2024 to August 21, 2024 

Running Triad of Elements multiple times is the only way to get this year's Plume for your Plume slot. I don't think there are details on stats for those yet but if things follow the usual pattern, it will be better than any of the inferior Plumes crafters can make. 
 
As to how essential Plumes actually are, I'll leave that to someone who does the harder content. I got mine the first year they added them and I haven't bothered since. I'm not a fan of running the same dungeon over and over.

The Summer Jubilee currency, Platinum Medals, can also be earned while the other summer festivals are running, the regularly-scheduled minor festivals that sprawl across the summer months, things like the Moonlit Enchantments and the City Festivals. The full, official write-up for the Jubilee is on the EQII website and EQ2 Traders version is here.

And that's it for EQII for the moment. I am still playing most days, by the way, although by playing I mostly mean logging in to set and collect my Overseer rewards. We'll see if the summer splurge of festive activities draws me back in. I do like me a good festival.

On, then, to DCUO, which I am very much not playing. I'm not playing it to the extent that I haven't even installed it on the "new" PC. It wasn't on the SDD I transferred across so it's languishing on the old machine. 

I am contemplating setting the old one up to be permanently available. The issue is where to put it. Until then, though, if I wanted to play DCUO, I'd have to re-install it. And why would I want to do that?

That's why! Come on! Wouldn't you re-install for that shark? I want that thing!

Daybreak has a very solid record on supporting Pride Month. I haven't mentioned EQII's contribution to the cause yet because I'm incompetent and disorganized but it's moar pandas!

I actually have more multicolored rabbits and red pandas than I know what to do with, which won't stop me collecting these, too. I might hold back on getting them for every character this time, though. It's a lot of bag space. 

That shark, though... with the flag! Gotta have it!

Just to round out the Daybreak news, there's a limited time promo on subscriptions happening. Wilhelm wrote an excellent piece comparing MMORPG subs, in which I thought Daybreak's All Access came out clearly on top. It's going to be an even better deal for a while because they've added some extras. 

100 slot Broker boxes and a 25% boost to what is now arguably the game's primary currency, Status, are  not to be missed. And while they're limited-time offers, the limits are pretty generous - the end of August for quarterly subs and the end of November for six and twelve months. If you were vaguely thinking of subbing, that might swing it for you.

And that's all I have from the Daybreak News Desk for now. I'm off to download DCUO and get my flying shark!  

EverQuest II - Guides, Links And Not-So-Helpful Advice

Last week Cliff, who's returned to EverQuest II again, apparently inspired so to do, at least in part, by reading some of my recent posts here, left a comment asking, among other things, if I had any sites to recommend that might help with things like understanding the stats in the game or figuring out which AAs are important. Just regular stuff like that, which you might think the game itself would explain.

It doesn't, of course, or not in any particularly helpful way. There's only so much you can do with a tool-tip and EQII doesn't have one of those nifty in-game encyclopedias that tell you everything you need to know. Not that those are ever much help, judging by the ones I've seen in other games.

It's not that SOE or Daybreak or Darkpaw, or whoever was nominally in charge when any and all of the myriad systems and mechanics in the game were added, didn't bother to explain them. It's more that any explanations were couched in long-forgotten press releases, AMAs and forum posts or latterly in Discord discussions, which are even harder to find. The entire game is a palimpsest of ideas, good and bad, some of which have flourished, some of which have atrophied, but all of which have been very poorly cataloged and annotated.

As with most MMORPGs, the best resources for the kind of detailed information that really tells you what you want to know has always come from other people who play the game. Once upon a time, EQII was rich in such resources but not any more. Many have gone dark and the few that remain tend to stop at a certain point, when whoever was updating them lost interest or gave up playing.

After I gave a few less than helpful answers to Cliff's general and specific questions, I had a bit of a think about it and decided I might see if I could find out if any sites that might be useful were still around. I started googling but it was slow going. The returns were meager. Still, there were a few useful results. I thought I might be able to put something together.

And then I ran across this thread on Reddit, the contents of which I am now going to cut and paste into this post just in case the thread gets unstickied or disappears. Full credit for the following goes to Mandalore93, who did all the actual work.

 Official EQ2 Links

• EverQuest 2 Official Site

  • EverQuest 2 Server Status

  • EverQuest 2 Support

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• EQ2 Travel Baubles - (Sigrdrifa's post, specifically.)

• EQ2 TLE Youtube content by Bear Necessities

I have checked all the links They all work, although at time of writing the EQII API is non-functional so the EQ2U site is of limited functionality. Darkpaw are supposedly working on fixing the API so it should be restored to it's usual self at some point. Cross your fingers! Also, when I tested it, EQ2 Trader's Corner had exceeded its permitted bandwidth and wasn't responding. Presumably that, too, is a temporary condition.

I also removed two links from the guild section because they threw up a malware warning when I clicked on them. You can find them in the Reddit thread if you want to take your chances.

And I added in links to the current forums where appropriate. Mandalore93's links go to the old forums but I've left those in because there's a ton of useful archive information there, at least for as long as Darkpaw keep the old pages up.

As you'll see if you click through all these links, many of them go either to the official Daybreak EQII website or to the excellent EQ2i wiki. In all honesty, these are probably the two most reliable sources these days. There used to be a lot more but time has withered most of them away.

For anyone coming back or just starting, I would strongly recommend Megaton's Varsoon TLE Guide, regardless of whether you plan on playing on the Varsoon server or not. Apart from the restored starting areas, which don't exist on the Live servers, I think most of the rest will be there or thereabouts correct for content on Live, up to wherever Varsoon has gotten to right now. I believe it should be going into the Chains of Eternity expansion next month, which will give it a level cap of 95, right before everything changes at 100, so the guide will stand as the definitive source for how to play what now feels like almost a separate game.

Cliff also asked a couple of very pertinent, specific questions that I ought to be able to answer. Unfortunately, I can't. Not with any confidence, anyway.

One was about stats and what they mean. If only I knew! It would make things so much easier. 

Stats have changed many times. I understood them once but that was a long time ago. The Megaton guide has an very illuminating overview on how they've altered over the years and, more importantly, on what's most important now. It's in the "Adventuring" section. My rule of thumb is that it's generally your Primary stat, Stamina, Potency, Crit Chance and Ability Mod you want to concentrate on but don't quote me on that. It does keep changing...

The one crucial stat Megaton's guide doesn't mention is Resolve. Varsoon hasn't gotten to the expansion that introduced it yet. Resolve, for players on Live servers, is probably the most important stat of all.

Resolve is explained in enormous detail here on the wiki. It doesn't become relevant until Level 100, after which it becomes absolutely central to Heroic and Raid players but less so for soloists. It does still gatekeep solo content but since every expansions gives you a full set of gear with the required Resolve for solo instances, you don't really need know much more than to be sure to pick that up and equip it before you start any new expansion. It'll usually be in a container with the name "Tishan" attached, next to an NPC in the very first area you arrive in.

What Resolve does do is make for a very handy way to decide if a new item is an upgrade or not. If anything you find has higher resolve than what you have, you'll want to swap it in, unless there's some triggered or passive effect you particularly want to keep on the old piece.

On the topic of free gear, solo players working their way up the levels probably also want to make sure they do the Panda quests. There's a ton of free stuff in there, much of it worth having although the Tishan's items tend to overwrite it. 

Cliff's other question was about AAs, which for anyone that doesn't know stands for Alternative Advancement. I wish I could give a good answer to this one. I can confirm that having the right AA build can make a huge difference. 

For example, a few years back, I read a comment on the forums that explained why my Berserker wasn't feeling nearly as robust as he should have. I applied the advice given there and he immediately became much more powerful. 

For what it's worth, I wrote about that in this post and the forum comment that helped me is here. The key AA in that case is Enhanced Vigor in the Prestige line. Max it to double your hit points.

The good thing about AAs in EQII is that you can have multiple builds saved and swap between them, although it is a bit of a faff to do. The best I can suggest if you're not sure what to take is to make a few builds and swap between them. 

And that, I think, is about as helpful as I can be. There are a myriad of quests that give all kinds of highly useful and desirable items and abilities but trying to list them would take forever. I'd suggest keeping Overseer up to date as you go along, if possible, although it can be a diabolical grind. The various time-reducers it gives for Mount, Mercenary, Familiar and Spell progress are invaluable. 

Always remember to keep your upgrades for all of those going and, if you have the time, do the Familiars Wild quest daily every day. At higher levels (Post-100, really.) a huge proportion of your effectiveness comes not from your own stats but from those of your Mount, Merc and Familiar.

But I'm not going to get into that in detail. I barely understand the how the synergies work myself and certainly not well enough to explain them. As I keep saying, systems and mechanics in the game are ferociously complicated now and as population and interest continue to drift down, accurate, up-to-date resources are increasingly hard to come by. 

I hope that helps a bit, anyway.

Recursion To The Max

Now there's no more leveling to do, it's time to start filling out the many gaps in Mordita's character sheet so she can become the do-it-all character Conkers was. I did a fair bit of prep on that last year but there's a long way yet to go.

And it's complicated, not to say confusing, deciding what's essential, what's merely desirable and what's mostly irrelevant. One problem with bringing a new character in at the current end game (Solo end game, that is. Let's not get carried away.) is that by definition they weren't there for all the previous end-games, so whatever the point of doing those might have been, you've missed it. Haven't been there, haven't got the T-shirt. 

Every expansion comes with a bunch of features that require you, at minimum, finish the Signature quest-line to get the full benefits. Often there are side quests and other content you'd be expected to do as well, if you want to make sure you've got all the goodies. There could be skills and abilities and items and spells... all kinds of things you probably don't want to be without, not least because, when the devs are designing later content for subsequent expansions and updates, they may very well assume most people have them.

A surprising number remain relevant for years, while others are swept aside and forgotten. For example, there's a crafting quest in 2016's Kunark Ascending that gives you a buff that makes gathering materials very significantly quicker. You really wouldn't want to miss out on that, especially if you were used to having it on a previous character. It's like gathering treacle without it.  

On the other hand, there's not much point back-tracking to get the widget that lets you see Shadow Nodes and gather from them, much less spend the many hours needed to raise the skill. To everyone's relief, the deeply unpopular Shadow Prospecting from 2019's Blood of Luclin expansion never made it off the moon.

But you could if you wanted to. All of this stuff - indeed very nearly everything there ever has been in the game - is still there, waiting for anyone that feels they missed out. Some of it is worth doing for the fun of it, even if the rewards don't mean much any more. If you're just trying to catch a new main character up to where you left off with the previous one, though, you'll probably want to be a bit choosy.

The question is, where to start? There's a lot of quality of life stuff that isn't essential but that's exactly what I miss most, when I suddenly run into something that reminds me I don't have it. Like languages, for example. It's always a pain when you try to speak to an NPC you know has a quest you want, only to find you can't communicate with each other.

These days, you can just buy a book from an NPC to learn most languages but there are still a few you need to do some work for. The question is, which is which? I probably ought to take Mordita to the vendor and buy everything she hasn't already got, then compare her language skills with Conkers, my Berserker and make some notes on what's missing. Then I'd have to look up how to fill in the gaps.

It's some work, changing Mains in mid-stream, for sure. Not everyone enjoys the admin. Luckily I do. Mostly.

In theory, QoL improvements ought to take second place to combat efficiency but as I've been saying all along, as a Necromancer I'm suddenly finding the solo content a lot easier than I was used to, back when I was playing a Berserker. If she's winning all her fights easily already, is the effort involved in upgrading all her spells going to be worth it?

And let's not pretend it wouldn't be an effort. I got my Sage, Barnabus, out yesterday to see how many Expert spells he’d have to make and how many rares it would take. I make it thirty-three spells. Every spell requires two rares these days, so sixty-six rares.

The rares for cloth caster spells are Flowfall Vines. There are enough on the Broker to make everything but they go for about 25m plat each so that would be 1.65b plat for the lot. Hyperinflation is rampant in Norrath these days. It's true Mord did have a windfall recently. She got a key Inquisitor Master as a boss drop and sold it for 1.7b. I wasn't planning to spend it all on crafting mats, though.

The preferable alternative is to gather the vines myself but they call them rares for a reason. Last session, I spent about three-quarters of an hour gathering and I got five, which was honestly a pretty impressive haul. Maybe I could average six an hour if I was really lucky, so eleven hours of gathering, but realistically I'd expect it to take more like double that long.

Which is fine. I like gathering. It's restful. I generally don't listen to the radio or podcasts any more when I play games but gathering mats is made for it. If it was June and the cricket was on...

If I was going to do it seriously, of course, I'd need to get Mordita's Rare Harvest Chance stat as high as possible. And her Bountiful Harvest stat as well. She already has the AAs for both but there's gear with boosts she and her mount could be wearing that they're not. 

Well, the mount has some, now. I had Barnabus make a saddle and hackamore with relevant stats since I already had him working. He, or any of my high-level crafters, could make other items, too. The Artisan pieces, at least. Any crafter of high enough level can do that, always assuming they've scribed the recipes. There are consumables too...

Except the problem with the whole plan is that a lot of Mordita's existing spells are already upgraded to a degree that means the Experts from the new spell books, which I just got Barney to buy because he didn't do much in the last expansion or three either, won't actually be upgrades for Mordita. Although I haven't been playing her as much as Conkers these last few years, I have been keeping up with her free, time-gated spell progression and as a result all her important spells from before the level cap went up (And a lot of the less-important ones, too.) are Master level or above. 

That means I'd be gearing Mordita up so she could get mats so Barney could make her upgrades she doesn't really need, which wouldn't upgrade the spells she already has anyway. And yet I do still need to do it at some point, if not right away.

She may not need those upgrades now, but if I keep on passively upgrading her old spells without replacing them, at some point they'll be maxed but still be too low to be really effective. Every expansion comes with power creep as a built-in feature, whether you want it or not. 

I could certainly leave it until the next expansion, later this year. That won't come with an increase in the cap so it should be fine. If I do, though, in two years, when the cap goes up, I'll almost certainly need to swap to at least the new spells that came with this expansion and if I make the Experts for those now, I'll have a year and a half to upgrade them with the passive system, meaning they'll be more powerful than the Expert-level spells in the expansion-after-next.

Yeah. Makes my head hurt, too. I think the percentage move is just to keep gathering every time I'm out doing anything, pass the vines to Barney and have him make the key Experts piecemeal as and when I have the mats. There are probably only a dozen or so spells that really need to be kept at peak effectiveness. That should be easy enough.

Of course, that's just for one character. I have a whole lot more clamoring for attention. At one point I had half a dozen at cap although that was when leveling took hours not weeks. And the above examples are just a few of the things that need to be done to get Mordita to where she could be. Where Conkers already was before I swapped over. 

There are all those adornment slots that could be improved for a start. She could make the Adornments herself if she did the dailies to skill up. And she ought to max her Tinkering, too. I think Transmuting is already done just from clearing the many unwanted drops from doing the Overland dailies and Weeklies and the instances in the last update. Come to think of it, she only did one of those because the rest were Level 135 Required. I guess I should run her through the rest at least once, just to see what's there...

And so it goes. On and on and ever on. But to what end? 

Don't look at me. After more than twenty years I think it's clear the only reason I'm doing any of this is so I can keep on doing more of it. I'm seeing recursion everywhere these days.

I kinda like it...

Progress Is An Illusion

This is barely even going to be a placeholder post so don't expect too much. Or much at all. It's only here because if it wasn't there'd be a gap where a post should be and there's been altogether too much of that sort of thing lately. 

What I'm about to talk about wouldn't normally merit a whole post of its own, either, but I'm going to see if I can eke it into one, somehow. It's a topic I'd most likely have given a couple of paragraphs to in a "What I'm Playing" post. Just a little oddity that struck me as curious enough to mention, since I'd happened upon it.

It came across it while I was playing EverQuest II on Sunday. After hitting the cap I decided, as I often do on such occasions, that it was probably about time I sorted my bags. It's not as if I keep them tidy at the best of times but in a leveling frenzy I tend to let anything and everything fall into inventory, to be sorted out later. After a while it turns into a problem that can't be ignored.

One nice feature that came with the Rage of Cthurath expansion was the Illusion Keyring. Even more useful than the Petamorph Keyring we got with the expansion before that, I guess, because everyone can use illusions but only pet classes use Petamorph wands. (Probably. Don't quote me on that. Cf the rest of this post.)

EQII is very generous with illusions. They come to you from all directions; holiday events, collections, crafting and quests are among the many possibilities sources. The problem is, apart from the spells that some classes get, illusions are all attached to items that take up inventory. I have a ton of the things stashed in banks and I keep plenty more - the ones I always think I might use - in various characters' bags.

But of course I never do use them because it would take me an hour to find any of the ones I wanted. Even the thought makes me not want to bother, so I don't.

The exact same thing used to happen with Petamorph wands. At best I'd keep one on hand and make do with that but unless I had a particularly annoying pet, I wouldn't even do that much. I'd just put up with whatever dumb-looking undead or elemental or beast my current best-in-class spell gave me, however hideous to look at or annoying to listen to it was.

Actually, that's not 100% true. There's another mechanic that was added who knows how long ago, whereby you can set any of the appearances attached to any of the pet spells to which you have access to be the look of the one you're actually using. I used to do that, long ago, but when I picked up with Mordita again last year, it'd been a while since I played a pet class and until I started typing this paragraph I'd completely forgotten it was a thing you could do. (Cf the rest of this post.)

And it needs to be a thing because some of the pets you get are blimmin' annoying!. Some of them are so big you can barely see what they're fighting, for a start. I hate that. 

Again, you get a spell to do something about it - Shrink Pet or some such - but I've been forgetting  to use that one, too. There was a time when I'd cast it automatically every time I summoned a pet but that was a long time ago. Use your skills, folks, or you will lose them!

More annoying than being too big is being too noisy. Or too flappy. Or both. Pets of all kinds in EQII, cosmetic or combat, come with a full set of animations and behaviors, which is great for authenticity and ambience, sure, but also fricken' annoying, when you have to listen to them grunt or whinny or bark for the ten thousandth time or when they're flying around your head, making a noise like a broken umbrella in a thunderstorm and getting in your line of sight every two seconds.

Mordita's best tank pet is hideously ugly and it's asthmatic. It groans and wheezes all the time. You wouldn't want it anywhere near you if you had the choice, which you don't. All pets of every stripe in EQII love to cling to you as closely as they can, shuffling around to be near to you every time you move. I had a cat like that once and I had to give it away to someone who appreciated the attention.

Having Petamorph wands on a Keyring means I have all the ones I own, ready to hand and easy to find. Granted, I still have to mouse over them to see what they are but at least they're all in the same place. Before the Keyring, I tried doing something similar by keeping them all in one backpack but I begrudged the space and anyway they always ended up in the wrong place no matter how I tried to keep them together.

So, anyway, to get back to the point, back in the  last expansion, the arrival of the Petamorph Keyring meant I suddenly got interested in Petamorph Wands in a way I never had been before. I went through everyone's inventory, sent them all to Mordita and I even did some holiday quests just to get new ones. Mord hooked them onto her keyring and now she uses them all the time, swapping from one sort of pet to another as the mood takes her.

The addition of the Illusion Keyring means I'm just beginning to do the same thing with all the illusion items I've picked up over the years. And there are a lot, not least because it seems every quest that includes a bit where you have to pretend to be something other than yourself leaves the item in your inventory to keep forever. 

I went through Mord's bags and added all the ones I could find in there, then I went through the shared bank looking for the good ones I'd left for everyone on the team to grab, which of course none of them ever did...

And about now, I'm betting you're thinking this is a post about appearance items, aren't you? Yes, well, it probably would have been, if I'd thought of that at the start, but I didn't. This is just some scene-setting aside that got out of hand.

The only reason I mentioned it was to put a bit of context on why I was going through Mordita's stuff so carefully in the first place. I was clearing her bags, as I said, and one reason I tend to avoid doing it for far too long is that it means examining every single item and making an assessment of its worth and usefulness. It's fun for about an hour and then it's progressively less fun and unfortunately an hour barely clears a couple of bags these days. Bags in EQII are big.

After a while, I was done with the illusion items and I'd moved on to checking for gear upgrades. I'd picked up a few things before I dinged that you had to be 135 to use, so there were some good ones. Most of the decision were very straightforward: check the Resolve. If it's higher, swap it in.

As I was going through them all, though, I came across a couple of items that seemed slightly unusual. They had an extra line of description for a start. It read

 "An upgraded version of this item can be purchased from the Norrathian Armory Merchant Sirius". 

And it had a passive effect. Sick Star II, that adds 32.5 Fervor.

I couldn't recall seeing anything like that before so I googled it. And guess what? There's a whole feature that got added to the game back in July 2024 that I've never even heard of!

It's called the Norrathian Armory and there was a press release about it at the time. It explains the whole thing. The tl:dr is that it's a cash shop deal that lets you share specific items across the account. You buy a token from the cash shop and then your alts can use it to buy any of the items you've found as a drop.

Bloody stupid idea if you ask me. It's Heirloom items you have to pay real money for, as far as I can see. Granted, the items are better than Heirloom items would be but even so...

My point, though, isn't to moan on about Darkpaw trying to screw a few extra dollars out of the hardcore. This isn't the official forums. That's the name of the game when the name of your game is EverQuest II, anyway; when most of your money comes from the same few thousand people. 

No, my point is how very complicated older MMORPGs become and how very easy it is for even regular players to miss whole features and mechanics. You just have look away for a minute and there you are, out of touch.

It's lack of knowledge of these kinds of systems that puts new and returning players at such a huge disadvantage. Hard to know what you don't know. And even when you do know it, hard to know if it's worth knowing.

Here's another one I found while going through my loot. Several pieces of armor in my bags that were upgrades for me came with the note

 "This item may be converted to an alternate version using Matter Mallea". 

Really? Converted to what alternate version? And what is Matter Mallea? None of it meant anything to me but apparently it's a feature that came with the Rage of Cthurath expansion. As per the wiki, it exists "primarily to allow players to convert excess blue stat Critical Bonus into much-needed additional orange stat Critical Bonus Overcap". 

Riight...

As for the Matter Mallea itself, it's "crafted by players, from uncommon recipes that drop from the Cthurath-era Invaders of The Unknown Public Quests scattered across lvl 110+ Norrath zones (and The Unknown) ". I guess if I'd done any PQs in this expansion, I'd probably have known that.

The idea seems to be that committed players will have hit the cap on Crit Bonus and will be willing to pay in cash to convert the wasted points to Crit Bonus Overcap. That raises a whole load of awkward questions for me, like for example, how many non-hardcore players even know there is a cap on Crit Bonus, let alone what the cap is? And more importantly, why even have a cap if you're then going to create another stat that raises it? Why not just raise the cap?

Those last couple of questions have been answered by the devs already, I'm pretty sure. I vaguely remember reading about the logic of it a few years ago. But who can keep up with all this stuff? Clearly not me.

It's no wonder returning players tend to bounce. And it's no wonder the most popular server is Anashti Sul, the Origins server. The quasi-Classic ruleset there is so much easier to understand. Everything makes more sense. And there's a lot less catching-up to do.

The other side of that coin, of course, is that on Anashti Sul, a casual player most likely has to work harder and take more care just to do regular content. As I've been saying, on Live, at least as a Necromancer, nothing puts up much of a challenge even when you aren't especially well-geared, even as a soloist. Those complicated systems and mechanics designed to min-max your combat efficiency don't really mean all that much when you're winning all the fights easily already.

The main effect unfamiliar mechanics have on me is to make me curious. I don't like people writing mysterious messages on my boots. I want to know what they mean. Over the years I've invested quite a lot of time, learning how to use systems that I probably could have quite safely ignored. It's fun learning but a lot less fun using what I've learned.

The evidence is right there in my thousands of storage slots - all those arcane materials and devices I used to think I needed but never quite got around to using. I threw a few of them out on Sunday but then I decided better safe than sorry so I woke up someone I hadn't seen for a while and told her to store them for me. In the end, that always seems like the easier option and EQII gives you so much storage space.

Speaking of which, Mordita has over two hundred free slots in her inventory now. Should be good for a couple of weeks before she needs another clear-out. There's no knowing what she might find then...

Ding 135!

Geez! It took long enough, didn't it? At around 11.30 am on Saturday 11 April my Necromancer, Mordita  finally dinged 135, the level cap in EverQuest II. It only took four months (To the day, near enough.) What is this? 2004?

Well, no, I guess not. In 2004 the level cap in EQII was 50, I think. Pretty sure. Wait, let me check... Yep, that's right. MMORPGs usually capped at fifty on launch back in those days. No idea why. What's so special about fifty? Okay, my favorite number is and has always been five so fifty is cool with me but I don't think they did it just to please me.

As of the release of the latest expansion, Rage of Cthurath, in December last year, the cap went from 130 to 135. Remember when expansions went up in tens? That's been a while...

Leveling has changed so much over the years. In all games but let's stick with EQII. At launch it was slow as hell but still a lot faster than we'd been used to in EverQuest so we weren't complaining. Much. It stayed like that for a long time or at least that's how I remember it. 

To get xp in those days, you could do quests or kill mobs or mix it up and do a bit of both. Your choice. Also, you could hand in Collections. They gave big xp and the collectables were tradable so people would hoard them up and then hand them in on the day the new expansion arrived. That way, you could rack up the new levels in minutes. 

Later, after chronomagic came in, you could mentor down and solo dungeons for a level or two a run. Or have a high-level friend drag you round on follow. Or pay someone to power-level you that way, if you didn't have any friends. And then came mercenaries so you could get an NPC to do it and pay them peanuts in plat. That pretty much put the power-leveling professionals out of business.

There were loads and loads of ways to tear through the levels at little effort and no risk. For a while it was all about the Dungeon Maker and I'm sure there were other exploits tricks I've forgotten. Pick one, slam down an xp potion, get your head down, knock the levels out in a few hours. It was hella fun for the first hour or two, then not so much, then dull enough to have you screaming. Still, we all did it, even if we complained about it all the time, too.

This is where I get to quote Joni Mitchell, isn't it? Well, you never do, do you? Who'd have thought I'd be gazing back wistfully at those Sunday afternoons going round and round and round Chelsith or Sebilis? Round and round and round until my teeth ached. Halcyon days...

Well, they put a stop to that around the time the cap hit 100. For our own good, I think they said it was. Oh, they didn't do anything as crass as ban it. They just started counting the xp needed to level in numbers orders of magnitude larger than anything you could get in old content. 

Suddenly, killing mobs  got you absolutely nowhere. Mobs still gave xp, sure, but it was like trying to fill a swimming pool with an eye-dropper. From then on about the only way to gain enough xp to make a difference was to do quests. 

And for a while that was slow but not so slow you'd really hate it. Constrictive and coercive, yes, but not ineffective. New normal, all fine. 

Then in one expansion, I can't remember exactly which, the new quests started filling the entire bar in two or three hand-ins. Instead of taking a couple of weeks to hit the cap it took a couple of days. Maybe a couple of hours. Seriously, it was that fast.

Leveling to the cap in a new expansion turned into something so trivial there didn't seem much point in having levels at all. Some people liked it, particularly the ones with big stables of alts. Others hated it. Either way, as always, we all got used to it.

And then they took it away again. A couple of expansions back it switched back, without warning, to little dribbles. Actually, I think the dribbles are bigger than they were before the surge but it's like when you were a student, isn't it? A room in a shared house seemed fine but once you get used to living in your own apartment, who wants to go back? 

Only it's not like anyone gave us a choice. These days, there's about one way to get xp in the current expansion and that's do the damn quests. Nothing else makes a dent in the bar. Hah! Dent? Doesn't move a pixel!

And it's not just any quests, either. Do the Signature line, the core story, the MSQ if you will. That's where all the xp is. But don't expect it to be enough. I finished the Sig and it left me about 70% of a level short. It's taken me about as long to cobble together enough xp to finish that last bar as it took me to do the previous four levels.

OMG was it bad! Repeatable quests. Don't you hate them? I hate them! I've always hated them. This is where I get to quote David Byrne. Yes, that line from Psycho Killer. Of course, that line. And well he may ask! Why? Eh? EH?!

I've been grudgingly chipping away at that last 70% for what feels like weeks now. Okay, sure, I could have done the whole thing in a day or two, but only if I could have stood it, which I couldn't. I couldn't even bring myself to do a couple of the damn repeatable quests each day.

I did manage a couple every few days though and the singularity the level cap was getting nearer. Slowly. Horribly slowly. 

And then today it finally occurred to me to check if I really had done all the non-repeatable quests. 

It took me about three-quarters of an hour. Just to check, that is. The quest structure is so convoluted now. Who knows what's anywhere any more? I went through my Active Quests, my Completed Quests, I compared them to the Timeline on the Wiki... In the end it was only by going through the Quest Achievements, something I almost never look at, that I worked out there was a ton of stuff I hadn't done. 

I'm really out of the loop on Achievements. They spent so many years being completely useless for anything other than being able to say you'd done them that I stopped paying attention to them altogether. Which meant I'd missed it when they turned into something useful, not to say necessary. 

They all come with rewards now. Mostly Status but Status is the new Platinum. Hyper-inflation made NPCs stop asking for money. Now all they care about is how famous you are. Status buys you everything.

Anyway, that's probably a post of its own. The important thing is, I was going through the Quest Achievements to see what I might have missed and it cued me into a whole bunch of side-quests I didn't have and among those there turned out to be several where the xp wasn't the pitiful 1.2% of the repeatables but a big, chunky ten per cent!

I spent a happy hour or so finding and finishing those and suddenly there I was, just a couple of per cent from capping. Just right for one last heave...

A couple of repeatables and over the line! Ding 135! There's an Achievement for that, too.

And now I don't have to think about it again until December 2027. There won't be level cap increase this year. It's fallow.

Of course, I do have all those alts. But they can wait until I'm in the mood. Which might be never, now I've found the Necro Hack for EZMode. I really only need them to keep their crafting up to date and thank god tradeskill levels are still relatively easy to get. (Shhh! for gawd's sake...)

Of course, hitting the cap just means the real work begins. Every piece of gear needs replacing and every spell upgrading. Plus all those Achievements and Collections that I'm starting to realize are core content these days, not optional extras like they used to be. 

Only now I can take it all at my own pace and enjoy the experience. 

Free! Free at last. Free!

For now...