EverQuest II : Rage Of Cthurath - Very First Impressions

After I finished yesterday's post, I felt sure the next thing I'd write would be a follow-up in which I recounted my difficulties - or lack thereof - in setting up my account to play Ashes of Creation (Early Access.) on Steam. With luck, I thought, I might even manage enough time in the game itself to put together some kind of First Impressions piece.

That plan lasted exactly as long as it took me to publish the post and then try to log into EverQuest II for a bit of house-building, only to find those servers also down, not for maintenance this time but for an update. I thought it was a bit odd. EQII almost always patches on Tuesdays. There was a link to the patch notes, so I clicked through to see what was going on. 

Which was when I realized there was something I'd forgotten. Something quite important.

Yesterday, December 10th, was the scheduled release date for this year's EQII expansion, Rage of Cthurath.  

That tells you a great deal about how some things have changed. Time was, when the imminent release of a new expansion for an MMORPG I was playing would have been enough to drive almost everything else from my mind. I would have been looking forward to it for weeks. 

On the day it was going to go live, I'd have been sitting at my desk, staring at the screen, waiting for the servers to open. I'd have been checking the forums, listening to people chatter excitedly about what was coming.

If the servers were due to come up when I'd be asleep, I might well have set my alarm clock to wake me up early so I could get online as soon as possible. I might even have taken a day or two off work so as to not to miss all the excitement.

That was then. Now, even though I've already paid for it, I couldn't even remember the day the expansion was slated to arrive. And it wasn't a momentary lapse of memory. The exact date just hadn't made that much of an impact. If you'd asked me, last week, when the new EQII expansion was coming, I'd have said "Sometime in December. I think it might be the 11th?"

Well, it wasn't the 11th. It was the 10th. And, at least once I'd been reminded, I did feel interested enough to want to take a look right away. The servers came up mid-evening my time. I was able to get in a couple of hours which, as anyone who's seen me moaning about it here lately will know, is quite a long session for me, these days. 

Today, I've already put in another three hours or so. If I didn't have this nagging voice in my head telling me I really ought to get on with writing a post about it, I'd be playing now. As soon as I finish, I'll be happt to get back to playing again.

Which certainly suggests I must be having a good time. And I am. I'm enjoying that oddly comforting, reassuring sense of commitment that comes with finding yourself wrapped up in a new expansion for a game you know well. You're aware there's plenty ahead of you. You're not going to run out of things to do for quite a while. 

You also have a pretty good idea what it is that you're going to be doing. Basically the same as you did the last time and the time before that. Only with different scenery.

That pretty much sums up an EQII expansion, twenty years after they began: same content, different scenery. (Really very lovely scenery, too. The screenshots never do it justice.) 

There's a very annoying cliche marketing departments, particularly those attached to publishing houses, love to use. There are variations but it always follows the form of "If you liked X, you'll love Y". The theory seems to be that what people want next is whatever they had last, only more so. It's as if the sheer repetitiveness of the experience intensifies it rather than watering it down.

And you know what? It's mostly true. It certainly works for books, anyway. As a bookseller, one of the first and most important questions you have to learn how to answer is "Have you got anything similar?". Readers read books a lot faster than writers can write them. A series that took the author a few years to write might take a new fan a few months to finish. Or even a few weeks. 

When they find there aren't any more and there won't be for at least another year, always assuming the author is still interested enough to keep the series going (Hi, George! Hi, Patrick!), they start casting around for something that's as close to what they just read as possible. Anything to keep the jag going. 

Gamers are much the same and MMORPG expansions ignore it at their peril. The "different" ones are rarely the successful ones. 

EQII expansions are even more attuned to the expectations of the audience than most, I suspect. I won't say they're formulaic or predictable but only because that sounds unnecessarily pejorative. They do all follow a pattern, all the same.

I wouldn't describe them as crowd-pleasing or fan service, either. Not really. Somehow, a section of the playerbase always seems to find itself baffled or upset about something. Many EQII expansions end up being surprisingly controversial, usually for relatively minor changes to systems or mechanics.

I think what EQII expansions have become in recent years could best be described as "a known quantity".  They aren't by any means all the same in detail. They all add new features and make changes to gameplay, some of which can be disruptive. It's also not unusual for the whole tone and feel of the game to shift perceptibly for the duration of a particular expansion cycle.

And yet, no matter how radical the new elements might be, the underlying structure is always almost identical. Compare the lists of content, year on year, and about all you need to change are the zone names.

There are always two or three open world zones across which you travel as the storyline unfolds. Each zone has a number of instances that have to be unlocked at specific points in the Signature questline. The questline always has you on foot at the stat, with flying being enabled at the end of each stage but only for the zone you just finished.

Everything always begins in a village or a camp on the edge of the first zone, to which you arrive by ship or portal from the Old World. Even though you clearly know nothing at all about the place you've just reached, everyone there immediately starts treating you like an old friend or a trusted servant, someone who can be relied on to take any job, no matter how  tedious or dangerous, and get it done with minimal guidance or instruction. No footling errand is too trivial; no affair of state too grand. Despite no-one knowing whop the hell you are, everyone just assumes you're trustworthy, capable and willing.

And, of course, you are. Before you leave the village for the first time, though, be sure to strip down to your underwear right there in the middle of the town square and swap every item you have for whatever you find in that box on the floor. Better yet, have a chat with the fellow standing next to it first. Let him tell you how to dress yourself. Better listen carefully, too. Miss even one step and you're going to find everything a lot harder going than you expected.

From then on, it's a long and convoluted tale of gods and monsters as you save the universe or the world or some specific subset thereof yet again, either by hitting things and setting them on fire, picking them up and making things out of them or quite possibly both. 

Along the way, you'll change everything you're wearing at least twice more, collect a whole bunch of random, useless items off the floor and hand them off to some obsessive, who will happily trade them for something different that you probably don't want either. You'll get a new pet and a new bodyguard and a new ride and you'll spend time and money you can scarcely afford on all of them to make sure they can keep up with you because you might think you're doing all this alone but in EQII "solo" means there really has to be at least four of you working together at all times.

That's what I was expecting and so far that seems to be what I've got. And I'm very happy with it, so far.

There is one big change from my perspective, something that really has freshened the whole thing up for me: I'm finally playing as a Necromancer. 

It's been my plan for several expansions but until now the disparity between my regularly-played Berserker and all my other sometimes-played characters has always left an insurmountable gap in preparedness, so even if I've started with someone else, I've always ended up back with him in the end.

This time, I spent much of this year setting up for it. Not the gear, which all gets replaced in the opening seconds, but the skills. In the past it's been little things like not having the obscure languages or taking three times as long to gather anything that's made playing anyone but the 'Zerker feel like a chore. My Necro is still lacking in a few specialist areas but mostly she's on par and for the first time I can enjoy playing her without the niggling details dragging the experience down.

So far, she feels much more powerful than the Berserker. Her Time-to-Kill is much better and she has far more versatility. Of course, to be sure the difference really is in the innate superior soloing ability of her  class, rather than Rage of Cthulath itself being a significantly easier expansion than the last few, I'd have to play it to the end of the Signature questline and then do it all again with the Berserker. I probably will, in time.

For now, though, I can say that from the first pull, every regular mob has been dying in two casts or three casts. And it only takes that long because they're all DoTs and I keep stacking them when I probably don't need to. 

The pet can solo them with no help from me and almost as fast. I have the new mercenary but he hasn't had to heal anyone on a regular mob yet. It makes exploring very enjoyable, even without being able to fly. Anything that gets in the way is dead before it even gets to us. 

Even more satisfying is the way the Necro has been able to handle the open-world solo bosses in the opening zone. As usual, they're all about seven levels above the starting level for the zone and flagged as tough for solo mobs. 

A few expansions back these kinds of mobs were always easy but then something changed and they became almost impossible. In one expansion, my Berserker still couldn't kill the named solo mobs in the first zone even after he'd finished the whole Signature quest. Things improved with the last expansion, in which they were kind of in-between those extremes. He still couldn't do them when he was working their zones but he could a little later, when he came back for another try. 

This time the Necro killed three of named mobs in the second session before she'd barely got going on the questline. It wasn't a total walkover. They all took some concentration. Her Mercenary died in one fight but it was near the end and the outcome was never in doubt.

I never felt she was in any great danger, even when she had to do all her own healing. Given that last night I watched someone in plate armor having a much harder time with one of the same targets, it seems fair to put it down to the superior DPS and survivability of the Necromancer rather than a major nerf to the mobs.

My overall first impressions, then, are very positive. The first zone is gorgeous. Any worries about the dark nature of the storyline delivering an ugly hellscape can at least be put off until I get to the next one. Gameplay is exactly as expected, which suits me perfectly. The story is also highly familiar and very much what I signed up for. And the class swap is shaping up just as I hoped it might.

All in all, a very good start. We'll see how it goes on. 

EQII Rage of Cthurath - Welcome To Our Nightmare

Today's post should have been a couple of Next Fest demo reviews. I've already played two of them. I was out of the house a lot longer than I expected today, though, and now I don't think I have time.

Which is handy because I also wanted to say something about the new EverQuest II expansion, pre-orders for which went up either yesterday or today. I saw the PR push when I logged in this morning and it's impressive. 

I think I mentioned this a while back but Daybreak have really upped their game, when it comes to marketing. Here's the "landing page" on the official website. Slick, isn't it? And modern. You could easily be fooled into thinking it was for a game less than twenty years old.

It's also surprisingly informative. Not only does it tell you everything you need to know if you're thinking of buying the expansion, it has a good amount of detail about what to expect when you start playing.

The "New Lands To Discover" section contains individual entries for five different zones: Yon Gorroth, Oggothl Sprawl, The Unknown, Gerion, Hold of D'Lere and Zon Zobboz. 

Pardon me a moment while I put my teeth back in. 

I find it hard to believe we're getting five non-instanced overland zones so I imagine at least two of those will be "dungeons", even if they are open to the lowering, purple skies of The Void. There are two screenshots for each zone and they make the hellscape look nowhere near as grim and repulsive as I feared. That was my biggest worry going into the expansion - that it would mean a year of dour, ugly heavy metal album cover art, all clashing colors and nowhere to rest your eyes. 

In fact, the art team seem to have done a magnificent job (As usual.) of making everything look better than it has any right to be. Some of it looks almost pretty. This, for example:

There is an awful lot of purple and red but it could have been a lot worse. There's a video, too, and that looks... actually, it looks really good. 

You know how these promo videos for aging MMOs can sometimes seem a little embarrassing? Not this one. Even the animations don't look too archaic. 

Granted, they seem to have chosen some of the least cluttered, most open areas to showcase, giving the whole thing a feel of open space and minimalism that most likely won't be how it feels in the game itself. But that's the Marketing Department's job, isn't it? To make things look, if not better than they really are, then at least as good as they can be.

As well as all the visuals, there's a lot of text. I read all of it and found it quite intriguing. At one point I couldn't help wondering if there wasn't some satirical point being made although I couldn't quite pin down what it might be. Having the main villain of the piece be called The Consumer surely has to mean something, doesn't it?

There's also a nice list of features included in the expansion, several of which seem pretty significant and/or useful. Last time around we got a keyring for Petamorph wands, something I thought was exciting enough to write a whole post about. In Rage of Cthurath we're getting another Keyring, this one for Illusions and I'm even more excited about that.

I use the Petamorph keyring all the time but only on one or two characters because it collates the specific items that change the appearance of combat pets and only a small number of classes can use  those. Everyone can use illusion items, though. All my characters have some in their bags and more in their bank vaults.

Having them on a Keyring is going to free up a significant amount of bag space but better yet it will also mean I use the damn things. I like illusions and EQII has some very good ones but I can never be bothered to ferret around in my bags looking for the items and then clicking them just to make a cosmetic change. If they're all on a handy keyring I can access with one click of the UI, then I'm far more likely to enjoy them in the way they were intended.

A much more significant innovation for most people, albeit not for me, is likely to be the new option to be in two guilds at once. That could be a potentially game-changing move for some. I would have loved it, back in the days when I was active in multiple guilds and had to choose which characters would sign up to which of them.

I remember what a big deal it was when Guild Wars 2 launched with the option to join up to five guilds at once. I did make good use of that over the time I was there. For a while I was in four active guilds, doing different activities with all of them. 

It's surprising how few games have followed suit. DBG is calling this feature "Guild Coalitions" and as yet there are no details on exactly how it's going to work but even that they're playing around with the concept is a huge step in a good direction for the game.

The third new feature, also very much unexplained in any real detail at this stage, is something called "Untold Heroic Dungeons". It looks as if it will be EQII's version of WoW's Mythic/Mythic + system (Not that I understand how that works, either.) although there are other ways it could go. It's highly unlikely (By which I mean all but impossible.) that it'll be of any practical concern to me but I await further news of how it works with interest.

And that won't be long coming. Along with pre-orders comes beta access, full details of which, including rewards for participating and hitting certain benchmarks as you test things like the Signature Questline or the dungeons and Public Quests, are included in the forum post.

Tempting though the rewards, which include familiars, mounts and illusions, may be, I will not be setting foot in the beta, even though I certainly will be placing my pre-order very soon. The phrase "too much of a good thing" comes to mind although in what sense a buggy, unfinished version of something you're going to be seeing for real in less than eight weeks counts as a "good thing" is a question always worth asking.

As well as all of the above, the expansion obviously includes all the usual content - major questlines for both adventurers and crafters, new spells and abilities, more levels and so on. In some expansions that's about all you get and honestly it's probably all you really need. This time, though, it looks like there'll be one or two rather tasty extras. 

The release date is "December 2025". There's a caveat of "before December 31" in the small print but experience suggests the final date will be considerably closer to the start of the month than that. As for the price, the Standard Edition, which is the one I always buy, is £25. Okay, actually £25.12 for some weird currency conversion reason. The dollar price is $34.99. There are the usual Expensive, Very Expensive and Insanely Expensive editions (Not the official titles, unfortunately.). If you're interested in what you'd get, you can see all of the details here. 

And now I'm going to try and get another demo or two done. With luck there'll be something about that here tomorrow. I'm not promising though.

When You Stare Into The Void...

Oh, look! I'm going to post something about EverQuest II again! Anyone would think I was trying to make some kind of point...

Nah, it's actually much simpler than that. I'm not really playing anything else so if I'm going to post about gaming, EQII is pretty much all I've got. And I barely even have that, since about all I'm doing most days is setting and collecting my Overseer missions, about which I am more than willing to complain yet again.

Seriously! What is this thing? I've been at it for what has to be most of the year and I'm still waaaay off the cap, which I think is currently 70, although as always it's hard to be sure. If there's one thing the game needs more than an enhanced presence on social media, it's some up-to-date, accurate, informative guides on the many, many abstruse and obfuscated systems that have been added over the years and only sporadically maintained or documented.

I have just now, as I started to do a little due diligence for this post, managed to find this wiki page, which has never turned up on any of the numerous searches I've done, this year or before. It's very helpful. In fact, it includes a lot of highly pertinent detail that I wasn't aware anyone had made available anywhere, like the exact amount of Overseer XP you get from each, individual mission.

Not that that's particularly useful in any practical sense. It mostly confirms what I already believed, that you get more XP the higher the quality of the mission and that within each quality band, longer missions give more xp than shorter ones. I could have proved that for myself by taking note of the change in XP after I hand them in, of course, but that seemed like too much effort so I'm happy someone else has done it for me.

There's not an awful lot I can do with the information now I have it, of course. All I can do is set the ten best missions available to me every day and those are exactly the ones I always thought they would be. I can - and do - stagger my picks through the day to let the better ones come off cooldown but that just tends to push my schedule off-center and lead to fewer choices the next day, so I'm not convinced it's always worth the trouble.

I'm still plugging away, as much out of stubborness as anything. At the rate it's going I'm not convinced I'll be at the cap by the time the expansion arrives, although I'll be close. I'm currently very close to the end of Overseer level 63. There's an Achievement at 65, for which you get nothing but the badge. The next tier - Tier 8 - doesn't exist yet but when it does, presumably when the expansion comes, it'll start at 71. 

That's another six levels, not counting 70 itself because the deciles always go at hyper-speed. I dinged 60 around the start of September and it's going faster now I have nearly all the missions for the tier, so I guess another two months 'til the expansion arrives might just about see it finished. I bloody hope so, anyway!

Speaking of the expansion, we know what it's called now. Jenn Chan issued a Producer's Letter yesterday. As usual, it goes hard on reviewing the past few months but only very lightly on what's coming next.

The name of EQII's twenty-second expansion is Rage of Cthurath. I'll let you have a moment to think about that one. And to go get a drink of water if you've been foolish enough to try and say it out loud.

The theme and setting of the expansion looks like it's Lovecraftian horror, which clearly explains the throat-mangling title, although when I saw it for the first time my immediate thought was "Mmmm! Churros!". 

Here's the pitch:

"Our journey begins through entering a reality outside of our own, a boundless realm of entropy and madness, where mortal lives are often treated with excessive cruelty. This is the Void, an ineffable conglomeration of paradoxical existence eked out on the edge of nothingness." 

Doesn't that sound inviting? It carries on it that vein for a while but I won't quote the whole thing. It's all there if you follow the link.

I have to say it doesn't inspire much excitement in me. The reverse, if anything. It always seems to me that these extra-planar jaunts take the game away from its well-established foundation in high fantasy. That said, the Void is an extremely well-established part of EQ lore, going all the way back to the elder game's initial phase, where Shadowed Men were a much-feared presence across the Commonlands and beyond. 

EQII's previous flirtations with the Void include some things I've really enjoyed, too. The Shadow Odyssey featured a number of Void-related instances, at least one of which occupied many happy hours as I farmed the final boss for what was, at that time, a very decent chunk of change. 

One of the best dungeons in the whole game, The Obelisk of Lost Souls, in the game since launch, is closely related to the Void and Rivervale has been over-run with invaders from that mysterious plane of existence since EQII began (Better them than halflings!) so I guess it may be about time we went to see where the pesky creatures come from.

There's not a whole lot more information available in the Letter, other than the names of what sound like a couple of open-world zones, Yon Gorroth and the Unknown. Exactly how many zones, instances or other explorable areas might be included has yet to be revealed but we do know the game is going to be getting yet another difficulty tier with the addition of Untold Heroics.

Commenters in the thread following the Producer's Letter on the Forums wasted no time in comparing UHs to World of Warcraft's Mythic Dungeons, promptly deciding that meant they wanted nothing to do with them. Since I already have nothing to do with the existing Heroics I and II, it's all a bit of a non-issue for me, just so long as we'll be getting the regular Solo versions of whatever dungeons the expansion brings.

There will also be a new batch of Public Quests. I really like PQs although it is quite true, as one disgruntled commenter points out, that in three months no-one will be doing them. That does tend to be the way it goes but honestly you could say that about most content in EQII and a good deal of content in just about every MMORPG, at least the ones that rely on vertical progression to keep people motivated. If we ruled out every new addition to the game on the grounds no-one would be using it in three months, we'd have barely any new content at all.

Finally, as everyone already must have known, the level cap will go up by five to 135. Happens every second expansion. If nothing else, that will make revisiting some of the only slightly out-of-date content from recent expansions and GUs a lot more fun, for me at least, although the merciless Resolve escalator means there's not a lot of point, other than to see stuff I haven't seen yet.

Pre-orders open up in a week, on 14 October, which is also when the Beta for the expansion begins. Pre-ordering always gets you a beta invite, which I never use because it's enough effort going through the whole thing once or maybe two or three times when there's a cap increase and I have alts to level. I certainly don't want to be doing it when everything's buggy and I'm playing a character I'll never see again.

Anyway, that's what we know so far. Oh, and the Arch-Villain of the piece is called The Consumer, which I imagine is supposed to make me think of some towering, all-devouring monster with teeth the size of cavalry sabers, but which actually gives me a mental image of someone in a housecoat, sitting on a sofa with the TV blaring as they hunch over a laptop, ordering lampshades and throw-pillows from Amazon. 

About the only other thing I have to say about Rage of Cthurath at this stage is that I'm not entirely looking forward to staring at purple and orange fungus for the next year. Other than that, bring it on! 

Out Of The Fog They Came

EverQuest II is a very busy game for one that's been plodding along for more than twenty years, largely catering to the same, ever-diminishing group of players. I've mentioned the plethora of holiday events many times. Since all of them tend to get one or two additions every year, the dense crust of content surrounding each gets thicker all the time. But the holidays are just one of the numerous content streams that keep bubbling up, over and over again.

Panda Panda Panda, for example. That's back. It's not exactly a holiday, in that there's no specific event being celebrated. It's just some agarophobic pandas with a warehouse of extremely powerful items they keep trying to give away for information they could very easily google. Assuming Norrath has the internet, of course.

I'm not going to say any more about Panda Panda Panda today because although I read that the event had started, I haven't been to see what the reclusive bears want this time. I'll get a separate post out of that soon enough, I'm sure.

I'm also not going to talk about the new(ish) Fabled dungeon that only arrived in the game a short time ago, with the summer update. It does have a solo mode I could try out but until yesterday I hadn't bothered to find out didn't know where the zone-in was. I do now but it's going to have to wait until I'm both in the mood and have the time for a proper session.

No, today I'm going to reveal a very few facts about this year's expansion prequel event, Heralds of Oblivion. Every year we get one of these, whether we want it or not. Sometimes they can be really good. I can remember a couple that kept me occupied for weeks, putting several characters through them for the experience or the loot. 

 

Mostly though, and especially recently, they've been a bit thin. Usually a very quick quest to introduce us to the next, previously unheard-of, Norrathian secret society and a bunch of repeatable quests so we can ingratiate ourselves with them for no very obvious reason. There seem to be an unlimited number of these groups, most of them self-appointed guardians of something or other, roaming around the world like a bunch of Boy Scouts looking for old ladies to help across the street or planar incursions to repel.

This yeare's bunch are called The Flamebearers and they differ from the usual run of do-gooders by being associated with Lady Najena, who I could have sworn was a Medium-Sized Bad last time I met her. She's organizing this year's bunfight all the same so maybe it's one of those enemy-of-my-enemy things or perhaps she's had a bang on the head. I imagine we'll meet her at some point and she'll monologue all about it.

Angeliana on the forums claims "Heralds of Oblivion is shaping up to be the biggest prelude event to rock Norrath since 2018’s Against the Elements event that preceded Chaos Descending." If I could remember what that one was like I might be able to benchmark against it. I bet I posted something... ah! Here we are...

"I spent more than two hours helping Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science this morning. The introduction to the event was even more perfunctory than usual and the quest itself took less than ten minutes, half of which was finding the main questgiver... "

Hmm. That doesn't sound like it was much to write home about, does it? But wait...  "None of that mattered a jot when I got stuck into the gameplay. It's exactly what I want from an MMO."

Aha! That's more like it! And I remember something about it now. It was a big, open world affair, where you could fight waves of mobs and close rifts, just as if you were... playing Rift, I guess. I also noted "the rewards are fantastic", suggesting it wasn't just fun but profitable, too.  

It's too soon to say if this year's prequel matches up but the signs are promising. I ran through the first several quests last night and those were more substantial than usual. They took a while and involved some travel and some combat that was easy but not a complete walkover, thanks to mostly taking place in endgame zones, where I had a lot more trouble from random, wandering mobs than the ones I was there to kill. (There are also tradeskill quests for the non-combattants among us. I took those but haven't done them yet.)

 I can immediately see the similarity between 2025 and 2018 - it's another bunch of rifts that spawn waves of mobs you have to dispatch before firing up your doohickey and closing the portal. I did that the required number of times to progress the quests, along with a few other menial tasks, acquiring a bunch of event tokens along the way. Who takes those and what they give you for them I do not yet know.

I also don't know where the next questgivers are, the ones that hand out what I'm guessing are the repeatable quests. The event neatly sends you to whatever the highest-available open world zones for your character level might be, so in my case the NPCs will be somewhere in the two endgame open world zones, Sodden Archipelago and Western Wastes, but I couldn't find them and it was getting late so I decided to wait until someone posts their exact locations on the wiki or, better yet, adds the POIs to EQ2Maps.

I can say that the rifts I've had to close so far are not random. They appear in the same spots and have a fairly short cooldown, of the order of five or ten minutes I'd guess, meaning you can just pick one and stay there as long as you need. Or you can fly around like a dumb-ass like I did, looking for new ones, until you finally realize you just keep coming back to the same two.

At max level, I'd recommend the ones in Western Wastes for the simple reason that zone is much less cluttered with foliage, as the name suggests. A lot of it is flat ice floes, which makes spotting the rifts as you fly around much easier. Sodden Archipelago is a jungle and a bunch of ravines, so not ideal for aerial reconnaissance.

The storyline is interesting. Well, it is if you play EQII. Not, I imagine, for anyone else. The rifts are planar but don't appear to come from (Or, presumably, go to...) any planes we already know. The creatures coming out of them are vaguely elemental but of that odd order of elements that includes things like fog and mist. Dragon magic seems to be involved but there's no obvious draconic connection.

 

At one point a treant of some sort turns up and starts throwing threats and accusations about. Everyone denies having any intent to invade the plane of wood or wherever the hell the thing comes from but it pays no attention and keeps on ranting. 

I have to say I was intrigued. It made me wonder what the expansion might involve and where we might be headed, which is clearly the main point of an expansion prequel, so job done there, I'd say. I'll definitely follow the questline to the point when it becomes certain there's nothing more but repeatables for token or faction left. I might be at that point alread or I might not.

After that, I guess it depends how much fun closing the rifts is and how good the rewards are. I'll get back to you when I know more. 

All in all, though, a very solid start to this year's expansion cycle. 

#19 - Ratha - Born 4 July 2004 - 59 Days 21 Hours

Here she is. Ratha, the last of the significant characters we're going to meet on this long, slow, much-delayed journey through EverQuest's first quarter-century. As her close on sixty played days suggests, she got out quite a bit. Also, if this series didn't have an established format for the titles, I'd definitely have called this post Born On The Fourth Of July.

One thing this series has taught me, as if I didn't know it already, is that my memory is shot. Even that suggests it was ever any good to begin with, which it most certainly wasn't. I have always had a bad memory and waiting a couple of decades to write anything down sure isn't making it any better.

It'd be lovely if I could say for sure why I decided to roll up a new character on July the fourth, 2004, which would have been very close to the end of my second stint playing EQ as my main MMORPG. To recap a little, the first run lasted from November 1999 to whenever Dark Age of Camelot went live (9 October 2001) and the second from about six months after that until I got into the EverQuest II beta sometime around the end of August or the start of September 2004.

There was a third substantive phase that began when EQII puttered out about six months after launch, a fourth around the time of the Serpent's Spine expansion in September 2006, (That was the expansion that was intended to re-boot the franchise and nearly succeeded) and a fifth and final hurrah, at least as any kind of group player, when Seeds of Destruction arrived in October 2008, bringing with it the game-changing Mercenary feature. 

Since then, I've been back a good few times, occasionally for quite long runs lasting several months, but always as a solo player. After I created Ratha in June 2004, though, I never again felt the need to start over from scratch with a brand new character, or at least not one that stuck. I may well roll the final five names on this list into a single post because there won't be much to say about any of them.

Ratha, though, has a very substantial history. And if I could remember it, I'd tell you what it was. Here's what I do remember...

Her name, for a start. She's named after the central character in a novel called Ratha's Creature by Clare Bell, the first in a series of novels collectively known as "The Books of the Named". She's a sentient, prehistoric great cat, who learns how to use fire, so you can see why I went there. 

There are five books in the series, published sporadically between 1983 and 2008. I used to review books for a semi-pro comics zine back in the eighties, which is how I got hold of the first and second books in the series. They were review copies. I still have them and they made a big impression on me at the time although not so much that I've re-read either of them since or hunted down the three remaining volumes. 

Looking at them online now, I'm not too surprised to see they're all out of print (Although you can get them all on Kindle.) but more so to find they're quite collectable. I'll have to see if I can complete my set and finish the story.

As usual with just about every name I've ever given a character in any game, no-one sent me any tells saying they recognized the name or commented on it in any way. There seems to be very little common ground between the kind of books I read and the tastes of people who play these kinds of games. Which, of course, makes those books ideal sources for naming characters.

So that's why she's called Ratha. As for why she's a Beastlord, not too long before, we'd been spending a great deal of time grouped with an Eastern European guy around college age, young for our crowd, whose name I forget although I have a feeling it will come back to me [Edit - it didn't.] so I'd had plenty of opportunities to study the Beastlord gameplay as it was then. And boy was it OP!

A lot of EQ players strongly disapproved of Beastlords when they were introduced. The pushback was a factor in why the class didn't carry over into EQII, only being added there years later.

They were widely seen as easy-mode upstarts, created by the devs as some kind of sop to the idea that EQ was too difficult - too difficult to play solo and too difficult to get groups, both of which problems Beastlords seemed designed to fix.

Beastlords could do lots of things other classes could do, making them almost as good all-rounders as Norrath's famous jacks-of-all-trades, Bards. The big difference was you needed a lot of skill to play a Bard but any fool could play a Beastlord. That was their reputation, anyway. And it was half-way true. Having spent a lot of time with a couple of the best bards on the server, I knew what an incredible class it was but also how much chance I had of playing one well - none. The Beastlord, though, looked manageable. 

It also looked far more nuanced and interesting than its bad reputation suggested. Played competently, let alone well, a Beastlord could tank, heal, buff, handle crowd control and provide decent dps both at range and in melee. There was always something for a Beastlord to do in almost any situation or any group make-up. Shamans hated them for it because they did everything people wanted a Shaman for - not as well but well enough for most groups - and a lot more besides.

As I'd seen, though, since we frequently played in groups with a top-class Shaman, the two classes were perfectly able to sync if the players were willing. But then, in those happy days most of the players I grouped with regularly were both skilled and socially competent. I know! Hard to believe, isn't it? Shame it didn't last.

I do remember that those were my reasons for making a Beastlord. I just don't recall now why I needed a new character at all. Just looking at the dates, it's unlikely verging on impossible that whatever it was Ratha was meant to do ever got done. Not unless it only took a couple of months and in those days very little in EQ took as little time as that.

What actually happened that summer before the beta is lost to time but afterwards, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally abandoned the listing wreck that was EQII six months post-launch and returned to the safe harbor of the original EQ, literally no-one we knew there was still playing. They'd all left for... who knows? We only ever saw one of them again.

For that and other reasons, we declined to pick up where we left off on our established characters and instead started playing new ones. I've already written about our times on Stromm, which I remember relatively clearly, but how Ratha fits in is much more cloudy. She might also have been on Stromm for a while but if so I've forgotten about it.

What I remember very clearly are the times I spent playing her in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss. We had a good go at Depths of Darkhollow, the September 2005 expansion that all happens underground and we did a lot of the Serpents Spine expansion together. Ratha was my main character for both of those. I think we got to about Level 50 in TSS, probably stopping before we got to the end of Goruka Mesa, a zone that goes to the mid-fifities.

When we came back for our final duo tour in Seeds of Destruction three years later, it was for a hugely enjoyable romp through dozens of zones that had previoulsy been far out of our range. Playing as a "duo" comprising a Necromancer with a powerful pet, a Beastlord with an even more powerful pet and two full-time, dedicated Mercenary healers made us not that far off being a full group. 

It certainly allowed us to explore most zones in every expansion from Gates of Discord through to the opening of Secrets of Feydwer, few of which either of us had seen before. If the game was a theme-park, then anything earlier, even the once-impenetrable Elemental Planes and the Plane of Time itself, was the equivalent of the kiddies' tea-cup ride.

We had a great time. We kept it up for months, working our way through expansion after expansion, starting all the way back in Planes of Power and working our way up, swapping to the next if it ever got too hard, picking up AAs by the thousand and adding real levels steadily too, thanks to EQ's deep vertical progression that means expansions several years old frequently still bring in at least a dribble of xp, providing you can kill mobs by the score.

All good things... as they say. By the starter zone of Secrets of Faydwer, the expansion immediately preceding SoD, our levels had almost caught up with the cap and we had to play properly. Duoing was still practical and fun but it was clear we weren't going to get much further and knuckling down to grind out a few per cent of a level each session, while taking care not to get killed, wasn't nearly as much fun as romping across whole zones leaving a trail of smoking corpses in our wake.

That was the last time we visited Norrath together. We moved on to duo in several more MMORPGs, eventually settling down for another decade in Guild Wars 2. Mrs. Bhagpuss is probably done with MMORPGs now, after two full decades playing them pretty heavily. I continue to pick away at the genre, albeit with considerably less enthusiasm these days.

As for EverQuest, as I said, I've been back plenty of times since that final run in Seeds of Destruction. As I recall, the first time I returned alone, I did pick Ratha back up in the expectation of adding a few levels. She did get a couple more but, while she's a competent soloist with a mercenary behind her, it seemed awfully slow compared to what I'd been used to doing with her. It didn't last.

She ended up, beached in the mid-80s (Like a lot of us...) I did think about using last year's free Level 100 boost on her but there's not really much point. I would never play her and if I was going to boost anyone it'd probably be my Necromancer... who we'll meet next time. 

Didn't I already have a Necro, though? I did! Well remembered! He's still around. Somewhere. Just not in the right place. So the new Necro it would have to be.

Nikolaiovitch is his name. I'll tell you all about him another day. 

Trust me, it won't take long.

Heralding The Heralds

Jenn Chan, Darkpaw's "Head of Studio" dropped another Producer's Letter for EverQuest II yesterday. I imagine she posted one for the elder game, too, but I can't even pretend to be playing EverQuest any more so maybe I'll just skip that one. I wouldn't really understand what any of it was about, anyway.

Before I get started on the content, I have something to say about the nomenclature. Is Head of Studio" a new title? It's snappy. I like it. Although it kind of makes a nonsense of the whole "Producer's Letter" thing, doesn't it? Aren't they called that because the person writing them is the game's "Producer"? Shouldn't it be called the "Head's Letter" now? 

Except that sounds ridiculous. Like something your twelve year-old brings home from school to tell you the dates of the next school play and that the science block needs a new roof and would you like to help run a stall at the school fair to raise funds for repairs? 

Whatever she's calling it, Jenn Chan writes a good letter. She's affable, friendly, informative and she has a great line in what I think we're going to have to accept, much though we may not want to, are now generally known as "Dad Jokes". I'm minded to say she's the best Producer (Head of Studio.) the game's ever had although I'm not claiming I can remember all of them. She's certainly the least pretentious and most agreeable.

Her Producer's Letters are also very predictable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. She's established a form and a structure and she's clearly happy to just keep going with it indefinitely. At least half of every letter is a recap of the previous one, detailing what she said was going to happen and confirming that it did or, if it didn't, which is rarely the case, why.

At this point I do have to wonder what the substantive difference is between a Producer's Letter and a Roadmap, other than that a Roadmap looks much flashier. In terms of content, they seem very similar. I don't in the least mind getting both but there does seem to be a deal of overlap.

According to the July letter, everything that was promised did indeed come to pass. There's an overview and a month-by-month breakdown of events since April, all with hyperlinks to the relevant press release or explanatory article on the official website. It really is about as well-documented a piece of reportage as you could hope to see. I would guess either Jenn is an excellent administrator herself or else she has one in her employ.

Following the studio's uninterrupted support for Pride Month this year, it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise to see the second paragraph of the letter celebrating Darkpaw's latest donation - $5,000 to the San Diego LGBT Community Center - but in the light of certain less admirable decisions made by other gaming companies (*cough* Jagex *cough*) it's more than usually heartening. 

I did manage to remember to pick up red pandas for all my characters on my main account although I'm not sure now if I got them on any of the others. Too late to worry about it now! Speaking of things you can have for (a given value of) nothing on every character, there's an odd promotion going on right now that gives you a Fabled Mount: Zhufeng, Harbinger of Mirth for every Krono you buy. 

Why they're specifically promoting the purchase of the "in-game objects that can be redeemed for 30 days of membership time" and also traded for Platinum within the game I'm not sure. They do cost $3 more than a regular monthly sub though, so I guess that would explain it. Presumably no-one actually uses Krono to pay for their subscription, only as a way to get the vast amounts of in-game currency needed to buy anything much on the broker in the age of hyper-inflation caused by people trading Krono...

You get one of those mounts for every Krono you buy, too, and twenty-five of them if you buy a twenty-five pack of Krono, which I did not even know was a thing you could do until I read the press release. Why anyone would want to buy 25 Krono at once is beyond me but apparently you can if you want. As to what you'd then do with 25 ugly flying fire-dragons... invade Freeport, maybe?

After recapping everything that's happened since the last time she wrote and reminding us of the current cash shop campaign, Jenn Chann goes on to tell us what to expect over the summer, which pretty much means recapping the roadmap and re-iterating what we can see in the handy in-game Events Calendar. I doubt anyone playing the game needs to told that after Tinker Fest comes Scorched Sky and Oceansfull any more than they need to know that after Thanksgiving comes Christmas and then New Year.

After all of that, we eventually come to something we didn't already know. Or that I didn't know, at least. 

Firstly, there's going to be "a Content Creator program" established later this year. What exactly that means we'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out but I'm assuming it means streamers. Not that I'd bother applying even if old-school blogs counted. I'm technically a "Content Creator" for Stars Reach and all that's done is make me feel uncomfortable posting about the game at all so I'd rather remain independent.

Next, we get to the really interesting part - some information about the upcoming expansion. Well, actually about the pre-expansion event, which has a name of its own - Heralds of Oblivion. We don't know what the expansion itself is called but that at least sets the tone.

In my experience, pre-expansion events, or "Preludes" as Jen calls this one, for any MMORPG fall into one of two categories - low-key and trivial or hyperactive and essential. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. Either you're doing some busy work for a bunch of tedious NPCs who hand out rewards barely worth the bag space or the entire server is howling around in a huge gang, descending on every event like a swarm of locusts, desperate to hoover up the insane XP and/or huge upgrades.

As Jenn halfway acknowledges in the letter, we haven't had one of the good ones since 2018, when I described the rewards as "fantastic". Here's hoping this one at least matches it. It certainly seems to have some depth with "5 tradeskill quests, 5 adventure quests, 2 public quests, 2 collections". Pre-expansion PQs tend to be very popular and profitable in the first couple of weeks, until everyone has what they want, so I'm going to try and make sure I get in on the action early this year instead of leaving it to the end with all the other lazy bums.

As for what the expansion itself migh be about or where it might take us... no clue, really.  Jenn often ends with a pun that's supposed to offer a clue but this time there's just a picture of her standing in some kind of crater or hole and the tagline "No Bones about it, this is going to be good!", which I'm not even sure refers to the expansion.

It might just as easily refer to Game Update 129, also discussed in the letter and due to arrive in August. That one's called Fear of Eternity and includes Solo and Heroic versions of some of the dungeons or instances from the Chains of Eternity expansion from 2012.

I would have said I wouldn't be doing any of that, since I can't do very much of the instance that came with GU128 yet. That, however, should be fixed with the new one because it comes with a "Gear Catch-up Crate" designed to "get you straight into the GU action".

I'm probably going to do a separate post on this, for which I'll wait until I've been able to see the gear and the stats, but welcome though all this free stuff is, I can't help thinking the whole gear-ladder-catch-up thing in EQII is getting out of hand. It looks like we're going to get three complete new sets of upgrades to all our gear given to us for free in just four months - the GU Catch-Up crate in August, the Panda gear in September and then the Tishan's Box with the expansion in November. Is that overkill? Certainly starting to look like it.

The Herald's of Oblivion Catch-Up Crate is, however, only available to All Access members and the Tishan's only for those who buy the expansion, while anyone at all can get the panda gear just for the trouble of doing some very quick and easy quests, so there is an argument for all three, I guess. Best not to be inspecting the dental records of any gift horses too closely.

And that's about it. Another letter sent, received, read and discussed. Let's all meet back here in three months and we'll do it all over again.

Daybreak Backs Expansion For Unfinished Game

Anyone remember Palia? It was going to be the Next Big Thing for a while and then, like Nightingale and so many others, people got to play it and suddenly no-one was all that interested any more.

Like many of those under-cooked, released-to-soon titles, it's been plodding along, catering, I imagine, to a small cadre of die-hards, who find in it something they can't easily get elsewhere. Along with the regulars, in these half-forgotten games there's also usually a trickle of returnees, coming back to see if anything's changed.

Well, it has. Quite a lot. In fact, Palia just got its first expansion. It's called The Elderwood and here are the bones:

The Elderwood Expansion includes an entirely new Adventure Zone, our first since we launched, which contains a whole new map filled with new content for every skill in the game, new gameplay systems for players to experience, and another chapter in our main story.

At the highest level, this update brings the following changes to the game:

• A new map, the Elderwood, a lush overgrown forest seeping with magic.
• A new chapter of our Main Story.
• A new Villager joining the cast of Palia.
• The introduction of Infected Essence, a major focus of the gathering experience in Elderwood.
• The search for Artifacts and ability to craft Relics, a new equipment type that provides buffs to not only yourself, but your party.
• New Gatherables, including a new wood type and forage you can knock down.
• Changes to mining, making Palium a more abundant resource and introducing dedicated mining nodes for Gold and Silver.
• New Huntable Creatures (and plushies!)
• New Insects, including a frog-like critter called the Rockhopper.
• New Fish, including some ferocious sharks.
• New garden crops found within the Elderwood.
• A new set of Cooking Recipes that make use of everything in the Elderwood.
• Our largest single patch of decor, including multiple new furniture sets.
• The introduction of Courier Pets to the game.
• And last but definitely not least, decor limits have increased on the housing plot from 3,000 to 3,500!

If you need more, the full - very full - patch notes are here. 

I've been looking for an opportunity to mention Palia for a while now, ever since I bookmarked this post at MassivelyOP. I've had it on the shortlist for a Grab Bag for a month (To the day, in fact.) but so far it hasn't made the cut. Today's the day.

The pull-out quote from Bree's interview with Palia's developer, Singularity 6, which she used as the title of the piece, is "Daybreak made Elderwood possible". Gee, it's just like the good old Sony Online Entertainment days, isn't it? Remember when SOE was the place old MMORPGs were put out to pasture? And then, just as they thought they were safe, "sent to the farm" when the Sony Home Office finally noticed what was going on...

Actually, did they ever buy any third-party games other than Vanguard? I know they published a few but that's not exactly the same thing.... 

Scenery looks great.
My character looks plastic.

But this is all getting a long way from the point, which is that, thanks to Daybreak stepping in, Palia isn't just plodding along any more. It's growing. A new expansion and new platforms, too. The game has been available on the Switch for a while but as of this week you can also play it on PS5 and XBox X|S. 

IGN re-reviewed it very favorably a couple of days ago, calling it "endlessly relaxing and incredibly hard to put down" so it seems to be getting fresh attention, something it certainly needs. The game currently doesn't even have enough critic reviews for a MetaCritic rating and that only takes four. 

After two years, Palia has just two professional reviews listed at the aggregator (Presumably soon tobe three if that  new one at IGN counts.) Both are for the Switch version. The PC game hasn't received a single review from a recognized critic or publication in a year and a half but then the game is still in Beta so maybe everyone's waiting for the official launch.

Which makes me wonder. Can games in Beta or Early Access get expansions? Is that possible? Isn't anything added in beta just more core content? Do any of these labels even mean even anything any more?

Don't know and frankly don't much care. Whatever it calls itself, Palia is doing okay. Better than expected, certainly. As I write, there are just under twelve thousand people playing it on Steam. The game hit its Steam peak concurrency with the launch of Elderwood two days ago - 17,508, which is five thousand more players than it got on its original opening day.

I was one of that first influx of excited players back in late 2023. Well, I was more curious than excited, I guess. I was looking forward to playing, anyway, but although I gave it a few sessions, I never really got on with the cozy sim part of the game and there wasn't a lot else going on. I could overlook the  unfinished feeling, naturally, the game being in beta and all, but it felt dull and that's much harder to forgive at any stage of development.. 

Ididn't uninstall though and I have been back once or twice, just to see if it felt any better. When I did, not much seemed to have changed, so I wasn't expecting a lot when I patched up and logged in today. I was pleasantly surprised.

I don't remember fast travel from last time I played. Sadly, still no actual horses.

I'm not going to do any kind of "Second First Impressions" on either the expansion or the game. I haven't seen enough for that. I did go to the new zone to take a look around and I even picked up a few quests there but I only played for a little under an hour and a half. And of that, at least half was spent handing in old quests, claiming the huge amount of freebies waiting in the mail and fiddling around with my house.

I do have a handful of observations to make, even so. Firstly, as you may be able to tell from the screenshots, the new zone looks radically different from the old ones. Much more dramatic, weird, colorful and fantastic. It's also very dark by comparison, although darkness is a relative term in Palia, where you can always see pretty well, even in the dead of night. 

Elderwood felt more dynamic, too. There seemed to be a lot of mobs moving around and doing things other than running away. A whole load of large salamander-like creatures kept spitting huge gobs of green goo over me for a start. Palia doesn't have any actual combat per se (As far as I know...) so it's not like I was at any risk while I was exploring but it did feel different, having monsters behaving aggressively, even if there didn't seem to be a lot of bite in their attacks.

A talking chair gives me a quest. (Actually it was a tiny piksii hiding in the upholstery.)

The whole vibe of the game felt somehow different in a way I couldn't quite pin down. I know I was only there for a short while but not once did I feel the kind of ennui that, in the past, has swept over me within minutes of logging in. 

There seemed to be a lot more to do, for one thing. I didn't have to go looking for quests or speak to everyone in town to find someone who wanted something. I picked up several quests just from examining objects in the world and I found a couple of chests that needed some climbing and scrambling to reach. 

Because I've barely touched the game since the first month, I have no idea how much of the change in atmosphere is down to the new expansion and how much come from incremental changealready in place but whatever the provenance, the game certainly feels different. It feels more alive but also more like a game. 

I don't imagine it's going to be enough to encourage me to keep logging in but that has more to do with my current disinclination to play games in general than any shortcomings in Palia itself. Based on my brief dip into the game today, though, I would say that if anyone's been thinking of giving Palia another try, this might be a very good time.

Storytime Is Over

This morning I finished the Signature Adventure Questline for EverQuest II's twenty-first expansion, Scars of Destruction. For a given value of "finished", anyway.

While SOD is a typical EQII expansion in most ways, in others I found it a little strange, both in the overall storyline and some of the structure. Almost all of the game's expansions for years have fallen into roughly the same shape but there are always variations and this one is no exception. 

The story was perhaps the oddest part. There's usually a fairly clear existential threat to Norrath and some new land has been discovered. We always have to go stop one and explore the other.

This time the new territory plain enough but the threat never really became clear and not just to me, either. The whole storyline, which I've been saying I didn't entirely understand since the expansion was announced, ends wholly inconclusively, with some of the NPCs handing out the quests apparently as confused about what's been going on as I was.

The Adventure Timeline was also structurally peculiar in that it had at least three endings. There's the expected set-piece battle when you finally catch up with the Overlord and learn exactly what he's been up to. Thankfully, you don't have to fight him. That wouldn't have gone well and even if it had I'd have been uncomfortable with it. My ratonga would probably rather fight with Lucan than against him.

Once that's over and you think you're done, there's another emergency to deal with: a Behemoth has broken through from the Void and you, of course, are the only one available to send it back. I really thought I was done then but no, there's a coda to the coda.  

There's an Aerykn who needs help and you'll want to give it to him, if you want to be able to fly in Western Wastes. Even if, like me, you did the short crafting timeline  and you've been able to fly pretty much since you got there, you'll still want to carry on because this is the final quest that gets your I Finished the Scars Of Destruction Storyline badge and along with it a new self-buff that gives you truly massive stat boosts.

Despite rarely knowing what was going on, I mostly enjoyed the story, even if objectively it wasn't very good. It's very clearly only the beginning, though. I assume it will carry on in the next expansion, something that's not unusual in the game. Maybe it gets better. We can hope...

Luckily for me, if the story wasn't up to the usual standard, pretty much everything else was above par. I found the combat almost exactly to my liking for once and because I did the crafting questline first, I was able to fly for almost the whole of the time I was adventuring instead of not getting the ability to take to the skies until it was all over.

The crafting questline was every bit as incoherent as the adventure but mercifully much, much shorter. Once again, I enjoyed it well enough. The days of Domino's epic quests are long gone and great though those were I'm not complaining about being able to rip through the crafting timeline in a few sessions so I can fly when I do everything else.

Drops and quest rewards throughout were excellent. I was constantly upgrading as I went along. It felt very satisfying. I have a ton of gear stashed away now, for other characters to use, but since I largely tapped out of the previous expansion, all of them need to get another five levels before they can wear any of it. But that's a problem for another day.

The only new feature this time around was the Petamorph Ring, which I was very glad to have. Or I will be, when I play my Necromancer. Other than that I didn't notice any of those annoying changes to systems or mechanics that sometimes mean learning how to play your character again, almost from scratch.

These days, we get a level cap increase only every other expansion and the ones where the number next your character's name stays the same tend not to rock the boat too much. I have to say I'm glad of the rest. Things don't stay the same for long enough in my opinion.

I believe this sort of slow-rolling change is common to most long-running MMORPGs but it seems more extreme in EQII than most. Every expansion adds at least one new feature, often several, and only slightly less often than that there come wholesale changes to the way basic aspects of the game function. Occasionally these are welcome but usually they're received with all the enthusiasm that might greet the dumping of a bucket of piranhas into a kiddies' paddling pool.

What makes this tendency to change the rules particularly confusing and challenging for returning players (I'd add "and new" but I find it hard to believe EQII sees genuinely new players any more.) is that, unlike World of Warcraft, these things are rarely removed after the current expansion cyle ends. Instead, they build up, one upon another, forming a palimpsest, until eventually they decay and atrophy through neglect.

When EQII was more popular and populous than it is now, it was at least possible to check various external sources to see which systems were currently in favor, optional or obsolete but these days it's all but impossible to find up-to-date guides on anything other than quests. How long even quest details will continue to stay relevant is another, worrying, issue. I already can't find up-to-date walkthroughs for some of the solo instances.

Getting even a small thing wrong can result in serious problems, even for a regular player. I had a nasty reminder yesterday of just how important it is to retain at least a basic understanding of what's required of you in the modern EQII. 

I'd been trundling, very comfortably and pleasurably, through the solo timeline, encountering no significant difficulties with any of it. Even the bosses in the solo dungeons were easy enough to be entertaining rather than annoying.

I'd finished the final fight in which --- Spoiler! --- Overlord Lucan d'Lere gets away with his dastardly plot. All that was left was the fight with the Behemoth. As I was flying to the instance, I was expecting the same level of difficulty as in every solo dungeon so far. I got something very different.

When I zoned in and pulled the first trash mob, it took as long to kill as a boss. Every mob was like that until I got to the first actual boss, which was ten times harder. It took me maybe fifteen minutes to kill, a flashback to the unpleasant era a few years back, when mana drain meant attritional boss fights that could last anything up to half an hour.

This mob wasn't draining my mana. It didn't need to. I was managing that quite well on my own. It just seemed to have a vast health pool and it could heal itself. The nightmare combo.

Eventually I killed it and then I had to fight another, almost identical. That took just as long. 

After that there was a third, same again, only this one also summoned endless adds. By the time I finally died - and I lasted a lot longer than I expected to - I literally couldn't see the boss for the swarm of summoned monsters packed around me like ice on a sardine. 

That fight lasted far, far too long and eventually I lost. I decided to stop for a while. I had a feeling something was wrong but I wasn't sure. Maybe it was just a bastard hard final instance some sadistic dev though would be a "fun" way to end the questline, which had, it must be said, been something of a doddle up to then. 

When I left the instance, I noticed there was a solo overland boss right nearby. These used to be extremely easy but a few expansions ago they got tuned up to be a heck of a challenge for someone in basic solo gear. Not impossible, though, so I thought it might be a good way to test whether the extreme difficulty I'd been having was down to the instance itself or, as I half suspected, some issue with my character or build. A bug, even.

Before I got to that solo boss, though, I ran across a regular, overland mob I needed for another quest. I thought I'd just knock that off as I was passing. I'd killed plenty of them before. They only took a few seconds to kill. 

This one took a few minutes. It was easily as tough as the mobs in the dungeon had been. Proof there was something wrong. 

I abandoned any idea of tackling the solo boss and tried re-logging, something that often fixes unexplained glitches in every game. It made no difference. I flew back to the lower-level part of the zone, where I knew the mobs were easier, and tried one of those. It was not easier. Not at all.

I had some ideas on what to do next but there was a server reboot due in a matter of minutes so I thought I'd leave things until after, in case it was some server issue that would fix itself with the update. I didn't log in again until this morning, when the first thing I did was pull one of the weaker mobs to test if things had returned to normal.

They had not. Clearly the problem was with my character, not the server. 

And I have had this happen before or something like it. In the past it's been the wrong adornments or the wrong buffs. On one embarrassing occasion it turned out I didn't have a weapon in my hand. I wasn't aware of having changed anything but I play so sporadically these days I might have moved something around and forgotten about it.

I was going to go through all my gear, check the stats, maybe take it all off and put it on again, which has fixed glitches in the past, but before I started doing any of that I noticed the green, fuzzy, glowing ball of light that often gets in the way when I'm taking a screenshot was nowhere to be seen. 

That glowy thing is my familiar. I forget what kind of creature it is but it looks like a Willowisp that's somehow managed to get candyfloss stuck all over itself. I didn't think not having a familiar up could make that much difference but boy, was I wrong. I resummoned it and pulled another of the mobs I'd just taken about two minutes to kill. This time it went down in two seconds.

And that was that. I went back to the instance and blitzed through the remaining four bosses in less time than it had taken me to kill one the day before. It would have been even faster if I'd been able to time my interrupts to stop them healing themselves but that's a skill issue, not a fault of the game.

That is just one small example of how a single misstep in equipping or building a character in EQII can lead to disaster these days. Anyone coming back after more than a few months away is going to need to do a lot of research or risk having a very hard time of it. 

I play relatively regularly and I really have only the most perfunctory conception of what an acceptable build is these days. There are lots of systems I hardly know exist let alone know how to use.

The cave in Western Wastes where all the daily and weekly questgivers hang out is stuffed with vendors willing to sell or trade me much better gear than I'm wearing but they want all kinds of tokens and currencies and account flags I don't even recognize, much less have. When I say I've "finished" the main questline for Scars of Destruction, what I mean is I've come to the end of the story. I've only just arrived at the start of the gear upgrade ladder for this expansion cycle.

I don't plan on doing any of it just now, not even the many remaining non-storyline quests. I might even save those so I can do them after the level cap goes up with this year's expansion. It seems a shame to waste the xp. 

And of course I don't really need to upgrade my gear. I've finished the story. I'm not likely to do anything much more challenging than some holiday events until the first of the year's two major updates. On that basis and on my terms, I've "finished" the expansion.

I'd give it a B+.