#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+.

Woe Is Me!

Sometimes you don't know what you'll do 'til it's done, as Joni Mitchell almost said. Only yesterday I was whining on about how I always mean to play EverQuest II and never do and now guess what? I played EQII!

More specifically, I played some of the new expansion, instead of prepping for it, which is just about all I've done since Scars of Destruction dropped back before Christmas. It was all very spur-of-the-moment. I logged in mainly to collect my monthly 550DBC stipend and on a whim I ported into Port Woe, the intentionally unattractive starting area in Sodden Archipelago, the expansion's equally unattractive opening zone.

Place names in the real world often reflect either their physical situation or the attitude of the people who named them. That convention holds true here. Unlike those really annoying games, where everywhere seems to have been named by upsetting a Scrabble board, Port Woe is unironically miserable and its hinterland undeniably waterlogged. Things do improve somewhat as you move further inland but at no point, at least no point that I've reached yet, does any of it start to look attractive.

This, it has to be said, is a risky strategy for a game to adopt. I was skeptical when the EverQuest Show attempted to spin the approach as both worthwhile and successful, claiming "... the direction of creating more realistic unique landscapes like swamps, highlands, and rocky outcrops is a much more demanding task, to do it well. And the artists do."

Yes, well, maybe. A more detached observer, however, might conclude that as a twenty year-old game whose graphics have not aged as well as they might have done, leaning into the things the tools are good at, like the vibrant colors and lush foliage seen in several recent expansions, might be a safer option than trying to make stagnant water and bare rock look appealing.

It's not all about looks, though, is it? It's about story and gameplay and progression. Isn't that why we come here?

Up to a point. I do like to have nice things to look at while I'm playing, all the same. So it is indeed a compliment to the devs that I found time zipping past this morning even while I struggled badly to find anything worth taking a picture of for the blog post I knew I'd be writing later.

If I'm going to be strictly accurate, it wasn't really the story that jollied me along, either. I think there is one but I'd be hard put to tell you what it was. Granted, I did the introduction a couple of months ago and now I'm back to do the follow-up I've forgotten the finer details but I have a feeling that, even at the time, I was never clear on why I was in Port Woe or what the Big Crisis was supposed to be.

Let's see if I can precis the story so far without looking anything up. Hmm....

Some bunch I never heard of before, by the name of The Open Hand, got in touch with me to go someplace I'd also never heard of before, to intervene in some sort of burgeoning problem that was going to be bad because... I have no idea why. 

When I got there the locals didn't like me or trust me. A bunch of adventurers had apparently turned up and started running around, riling up the indigenous bad guys, firstly a bunch of Teenage Mutant Turtle lookalikes and more importantly the inevitable tribe of militaristic orcs that shows up wherever you go in Norrath, with whom the Port Woeians were barely holding their own through a policy of kow-towing and forelock-tugging and basically keeping their heads down. 

Naturally, I got the job of ingratiating myself with the locals, trying to convince them I and my new best friends, who I barely knew, weren't going to cause a huge heap of trouble then vanish, leaving them to deal with it on their own. As always, getting on their right side took the form of doing menial tasks for anyone too busy or lazy to do them for themselves which, again as always, turned out to be everyone.

Along the way I was able to throw in a few noble acts, like finding unsupervised children, who should surely not have been allowed to go wandering about in the alligator-infested swamps in the first place, and rescuing a bunch of fishermen, who'd managed to get themselves captured by orcs. Isn't that always the way?

All of this eventually got the locals to think of me "kindly", at which point a different bunch of villagers, noticing how gullible I was, suddenly thought of a whole new set of chores for me to do. One of those was to go to some haunted village where all the Kerrans who used to live here died in some unspecified purge or pogrom or natural disaster (Or maybe it was specified but I forgot, which seems more likely.) to steal a baker's dozen of their totems, something that apparently was going to put the willies up either the orcs or the turtles or both.

That village turned out to be the first instanced "dungeon" in the storyline, although I don't think we call them dungeons any more. Very few of them are underground, anyway. This one wasn't.

I'll quit with the story-so-far at this point because, as must be clear, I have no clue what it is. The last time I remember there being an actual narrative, as opposed to a string of chores with some flavor text, was probably the first time I zoned in back in December. I'm trusting that at some point an actual plot will develop, probably with guest appearances from a few Norrathian celebrities and a climax featuring a demi-god or two. That is the go-to format for EQII expansions, after all.

What I will say is that the instance was fun. I really enjoyed it. I went in blind, didn't look anything up, didn't even have the Wiki open. I thought I'd try winging it, see how it went, then back off and do the research when things fell apart. But they never did.

There were five bosses. All of them were tank&spank or at least I tanked and spanked them all. That alone would earn the instance at least a B+ in my book. I wish every boss in every game was T&S or more properly T&S-friendly. I don't mind them having clever mechanics for those that like that sort of thing, so long as I can ignore them. I just want to stand there and hit stuff until it falls over and this morning that's what I did.

Which is not to say the bosses didn't have resources. Two of them did serious knockbacks that sent me flying high into the air and at least two also summoned loads of adds. Happily for me, I had my Featherfall cloak on, so all I had to do was gently float back down to carry on the fight. As for adds - I was playing my Berserker ffs. He thrives on adds!

Even better, not one of the bosses had any of the more irritating passive abilities used by devs in recent times to make the fights more "challenging". The one I really, really hate is the huge mana drain every bloody boss used to be given that meant I often ended up spending ten or fifteen minutes auto-attacking the buggers to death. That was fun.

The other, newer trick is for bosses to become invulnerable to all damage except what comes from Heroic Opportunities. That one gained currency right after the big HO revamp, surprise surprise. It's far less irritating than the mana drain but it's still hokey and trite so I hope we've seen the back of it.

With none of that nonsense in play I was able to explore the dungeon (Sorry, Instance.) at my own pace. Not that there was a lot to look at. Some instances in EQII can be genuinely gorgeous, especially the ones with a lot of tiling and statuary, but this was a long-deserted mountain village, originally populated by relatively primitive cat-people, so there weren't a whole lot of photo opportunities. At least one of the bosses had a model I hadn't seen before. though, so that was nice.

As far as mobs went, there were a lot of undead Kerrans and a lot of rats. Really a lot of rats. At one point I was swarmed by what looked like a dozen or so and that was one encounter. I haven't seen a mob of mobs like that since the deer in Thundering Steps. It was novel.

It was also easy because it seems all that work I did prepping has paid off. In the past, the first instance in an EQII expansion has sometimes been a little rough. They have been tuned a little high at times and anyone going in unprepared tended to have a difficult time of it. Since they added the Tishan's Box at the start and put in a tutorial to make sure you make full use of it, that's improved a lot. 

I also had good food and drink, the new mercenary, mount and familiar and I'd had my Jeweller make me Expert level Combat Arts for most of my main attacks, so I was about as well-set as a casual was likely to be. And now I'm better set even than that because three of the five bosses dropped upgrades I could - and did - use.

The other two dropped items a Berserker can't wear but those will be passed on to someone who can. I have someone who can use everything, pretty much. I was happy to see all the boss chests were metal this time around. Last expansion there was a disheartening switch to Treasured quality drops, something I did not appreciate, even though the stats may have been the same. It's the look of the thing, don't you know?

I'm trying to do the Adventure and the Tradeskill questlines at the same time because there are some welcome synergies. The Crafting line is much shorter and faster and you get to fly in the expansion zones as a reward for finishing it. It relies on gaining faction with Port Woe, though, as does the Adventure line, and Adventurers gain that faction much faster.

With a bit of swapping I should be able to make each of them feel easier and therefore more fun. Easier is always more fun for me. I used to wonder about that but I'm pretty convinced now it's true. 

There is a sense of satisfaction from overcoming more challenging content, I'll not deny it, but after decades of playing games like this, I'm convinced a fleeting sense of satisfaction rarely compensates for the hours of frustration experienced achieving it. 

It's the old banging your head against a wall thing, isn't it? Lovely when it stops but surely better never to started all that unnecessary head-banging in the first place.

And since I've clearly wandered off the point and clambered onto my soapbox, I'll leave it there. It's nice to be back on the old horse, anyway. Let's hope I don't fall off again before I get where I'm going.

It's All In The Preparation

There are often rumblings in this part of the blogosphere about how tough it can be, going back to an MMORPG you haven't played in a year or so. It's true, too. And I'm here to tell you, it's not a lot better going back to one you were playing as recently as a couple of months back.

Scars of Destruction launched for EverQuest II just over a week ago and I've played quite a few sessions since then but it wasn't until a couple of hours ago I finally got as far as starting the first quest in the Adventurer Signature Timeline. Even though I had a character just a level and a half below the access requirement when I logged in eight days ago, it's taken me this long to get to the point where I could finally start in on the new content.

As I've posted already, a lot of that time was taken up figuring out how to get that last level and a half but even when I got to Level 130, I still had quite a bit of prep to do. 

The first and most important thing was to clear some bag space. I do realise this isn't entirely something the developers can do much about, what with it having more to do with my personality, psychology and playstyle than any particular flaw in game design. The name of this blog is a bit of a giveaway there. Still, I've read enough other bloggers complaining about the problem of coming back to a game only to find all their bags full of stuff they don't know whether to keep, sell or junk to know it's not just me.

The temptation is always to clear just enough space to get by and pretend the rest isn't there. I tried that. It didn't work. And even doing that little housekeeping took me an hour or more.

It left me with half a bag empty, out of six in total. Not much but I figured it might be enough to take all the free gear I knew was going to have to deal with the moment I arrived in the new lands.

It wasn't enough. Not even close.

Free stuff. It always brings the crowds.

The upside is that Darkpaw have largely perfected the onboarding process for new and returning players, at least to the extent it's possible to speed the lengthy process to a satisfactory conclusion.

Once upon a time  you were left entirely on your own when a new expansion arrived to invalidate every piece of equipment you owned. Then they moved to leaving hand-outs lying around in boxes without telling anyone where they were or what was in them, expecting players to figure it out for themselves.

Now, you get a an actual quest as soon as you become eligible for an upgrade and there's a quest-giver waiting right next to the box to talk you  through the entire process. This year, you barely even need to look in the box! The guy gives you a crate that unpacks straight into your inventory, giving you a full set of armor for your class and every piece has the correct Adornments already installed!

I optimistically opened that crate hoping for the best and it filled every available slot in my half-a-bag and carried on into Overflow. When I put the armor on, all my old gear popped off, right into the vacant bag slots, leaving me back where I'd started. So much for trying to do it the lazy way.

I gave up any idea of adventuring and ported back to Freeport, where I spent the whole of  yesterday evening working on a proper clean-out. I went to two of my mansions to place every house item I could find, put a bunch of stuff up for sale on the broker, emptied all my mats, collection items and Lore and Legend parts into the hoppers outside my crafting hall and did a few other things as well.

All of that got me one empty bag. I could have worked with it - it was sixty-six slots - but I knew I could do better so this morning, when I came back from walking the dog, I settled down for a proper clearance session. I went through five of my six bags - several hundred items - sorting everything into three piles - Keep, Sell, Trash. Then I sub-sorted the Keep pile into Bank Vault, Shared Bank, Guild Bank and so on. I have a lot of storage options.

I hung those lights, you know. The round ones. Not the lanterns.

That told me what to do with it all but before I could make any actual room I had to go check all the places I was planning to put things to make sure there was room. Of course there wasn't. So I had to sort those as well.

All that took a few hours and even when it was done I still only had two empty bags plus a few slots in the third. Everything that's left is either something I want to keep close at hand or a quest item of some kind.

Quest items are the real problem. My Berserker has a lot of them in his bags - likely more than a hundred - and hardly any of them mean anything to me. Or, presumably, to him. His Quest Journal is all but full and that's after I purged it of all repeatables and anything I hadn't actually started. I'm always very loathe to delete a quest where I've already made some progress, just in case it turns out to be needed for something later on.

It'd be easy to wipe the lot and start fresh but only this week I wrote a whole post about how useful it turned out to be to have a bunch of quests in my book from four expansions ago, so I don't see scorched earth as the best policy here. Experience tells me I tend to regret getting rid of stuff a lot more than I ever regret keeping it. That's a general principle of life, not only gaming.

Still, I know I ought to go through all those quest items, one by one, to find out what they're all for and whether I really need them. Developers in too many games I've played have not always been as diligent as they could have been about making quest items auto-delete themselves when they're no longer needed. That has gotten better but some of these go back many years, to when practice was often lax in that regard.

It wouldn't be difficult to check. The huge majority of quest items say exactly what quest they're whern you mouseover them. All I'd have to do would be cross-reference the information on the item with the quests in my Journal and the steps on the Wiki... Does that sound like a good time to anyone? 

I don't know. Maybe? I'd have to be in the mood...

Do you know who I am?

I'm not doing it now, anyway. I may only have a third of my Berserker's potential onboard storage capacity available but those are two big bags. Over a hundred and fifty slots ought to be enough, provided I clear as I go from now on.

Having leveled up and cleaned up I was finally ready to start adventuring after lunch. Well, after I sorted my new Mercenary out, that is. That's part of the process that could still do with some work. 

It's great that you get a new Merc as part of the Welcome to The Expansion quest (Not the actual quest name.) It's even better that he comes fully leveled up. It's weird you still have to dress him yourself, out of the box on the floor. How primitive!

Plus there's no specific Mercenary gear in there other than a whole bunch of Accolades. For the armor slots, Mercs can wear the same, free gear as player characters, only no-one tells you that. I nearly didn't think of it and I've done it a few times, now.

All of that and a few other things took me until mid-afternoon, at which point I was finally - finally! - ready to do some actual questing. And what did the devs have me doing, now I was all kitted out in my spiffy new gear with a new mount, merc and familiar and a bunch of special buffs? Swimming around the bay, grabbing leftover fishing floats, that's what. I could have done that in my skivvies!

There was some fighting, to be strictly fair to whoever came up with the quest. I fought some fish. Quite small fish. But feisty!

My characters routinely hob-nob with demi-gods and get called in as special consultants by the likes of Firiona Vie and the Duality but here I am, treading water, stabbing pike with a dagger so I can string up some fairy lights in the hope of getting a bunch of downtrodden orc vassals  to give me the time of day. (That's vassals of orcs, by the way, not vassals who happen to be of orcish descent.) I guess it's a living.

Anyway, I'm up and running at last. We'll see where it takes me.

Going Backwards To Go Forwards

The colorful screenshot you see above was not taken in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Scars of Destruction, for the very good reason that I haven't been playing it. It's from the previous expansions, Ballads of Zimara, which is where I spent a couple of hours earlier today.

That was because to do anything at all in the new zones you have to be Level 130. Level 128, which is as far as my highest-level character had reached when SoD launched a couple of days ago, or even level 129, as that character is today, just won't cut it. 

None of the locals will speak to you if you can't produce your Max Level I.D. Card. Nor will the bunch of neo-colonialists who've sailed across the Sea of Erud to stick their oars into the locals' business uninvited (The locals are pretty salty about it, too, I can tell you!)

Other than what I read in the press release, namely that Overlord Lucan has his eye on some prize and we all have to get to it before he does, I know nothing about what we're all doing here in the charmingly-named Sodden Archipelago. And if you're thinking that doesn't sound like a very scenic location you're not wrong.

It may well be that some of the zones in this expansion are as bright and charming as those in its visually delightful predecessor. I certainly hope so. So far all I've seen is the dock and immediate hinterland of the starting zone and you can judge how impressed I was by the fact that I didn't take a single screenshot.

Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I took one but only to show how far across the map I'd been able to explore without getting myself killed. 

There I am, on the far side of a bridge that's barred by locked gates you can just climb around. It's the entrance to some kind of orc fortress, I think. Orcs always make barricades you can just walk around or they do in Norrath, anyway.

Probably because this is an expansion with no level cap increase, I found I had no trouble at all with the regular mobs, wildlife, orcs or kappa (Something like that...) who are kind of like Teenage Ninja Turtles that grew up. I was able to explore quite comfortably but unfortunately there wasn't much to see. The place is damn ugly.

I was somewhat worried it would be, when the setting for the expansion was announced. The original EverQuest zones on which the expansion is predicated weren't very visually appealing and neither, so far, have been most of their EQII spin-offs. As far as I can figure it, the expansion opens in the remains of Odus and moves to the extreme west of Velious, which most likely means a lot of sand and rock followed by a lot of snow and ice.

Still, I'd have persevered with my exploring and adventuring if it had been profitable in any way other than satisfying my curiosity. Unfortunately, regular mobs no longer drop anything worth having and killing them gives infinitesimal amounts of xp. The only realistic way to progress is by way of quests and since, as I said, at my current level no was going to give me any, it seemed pointless carrying on. Clearly I needed to go away, get a couple more levels and come back when someone would talk to me.

I could have carried on with the crafting questline. My Berserker is also a Weaponsmith and he qualifies, having dinged 130 months ago. Unfortunately, I lost enthusiasm for that approach when I hit the point where you have to grind faction to get the next quest. I don't have an existential problem with the concept of faction-work but I find it a bit off-putting to have to start on it about twenty minutes into the  first session of a new expansion, even if the grind is flagged as "ironic" by the designer.

Of course, I wouldn't be having this problem if I'd just knuckled down and done my levels when I was supposed to, months ago. I was surprised to find, when I checked my quest journal, to find I have actually finished the Ballads of Zimara Adventure Signature Questline. I remember now that that was one of the reasons I stopped.

In the latest unnecessary and ill-advised change to the way things work, someone decided to make leveling "meaningful" again. For several years it had been reduced to a couple of sessions at most, meaning you generally hit the new cap before you got to the second zone in the expansion. I found that odd at first but I soon got used to it and I can say for certain I prefer it hugely to how it is now, when you get to the end of the story and still have several levels to go.

There are still quests to do, of course. There'd pretty much have to be, seeing as questing is just about the only way you can get meaningful xp these days. The problem is they're all either scattered among random NPCs in multiple zones or started by items that drop from mobs.

It sounds worse than it is. At this stage, every last detail of where and how has been codified on the wiki so it's just a case of following instructions. I wouldn't have wanted to be one of the poor sods who had to go out there and discover the information needed to write the guides I've been using, though. Some of the locations I visited today were really obscure and the mobs must have been a lot tougher back then, too.

Luckily for me, I don't have to think about it, just copy and paste and follow a glowing trail. Plus I can fly in all the zones and I'm already wearing gear better than the quests give as rewards because holiday and mid-expansion updates all raised the item level beyond the BoZ baseline. Sometimes it pays to take your time.

It's been a lot of fun actually, to the point that I can't quite work out why I stopped before. The zones are really lovely to look at, the questing is relaxing and if xp doesn't exactly zip along it does at least jog. I started the day about half way through Level 128 and finished just over ten per cent into 129.

I did go take a look at the new Panda quests, which I'd missed this year, just in case that might help. They're permanently available and I will almost certainly have to do them for the Augments, even though the panda gear will already have been made redundant by the free stuff in the Tishan's box next to the guy in Sodden Arcihpelago. When I checked the panda stuff, though, I found you have to be Level 130 to wear any of it, so I didn't pursue it any further.

Based on how long it took me today, I'd guess I'm going to need another two or three sessions to hit the cap on my Berserker. There's a slight danger that will take the edge off my interest and I won't want to move into the new content but if I was really worried about that I suppose I could use the free Level 130 boost that came with the expansion and get stuck in right away.

I did consider it but it seems like a waste to use it on the Berserker, when he's so close. I am most likely going to save it for my Necromancer, who's Level 125. I've been saying for years I want to swap to her as my "main" but it never happens because the Berserker has so many other hidden benefits from having done All The Things that I immediately start to miss his privileges whenever I play anyone else in current content.

Even if I don't play her as a main, though, I will definitely be using the boost to skip her past the five levels BoZ added. I am categorically not grinding any more characters all the way through that. It's put paid to any possibility of keeping half a dozen characters at the cap, as I had been in the habit of doing.

If I'm realistic, though, there was never any practical purpose to doing it, anyway. I only bothered because it was so easy. If it takes any effort, I don't have either the time or the interest to play through an expansion more than once. 

Or apparently even that often, if last time is anything to go by. I'll have to see how far I get with this one. I suspect it may take a while...

Scars Of Destruction - A Key Feature

When the details of the latest EverQuest II expansion, Scars of Destruction, were revealed, I was weirdly excited by one minor feature - the Petamorph Keyring. For anyone who doesn't play the game that phrase is going to require a little explaining.

EQII is and has always been a game that makes enormous play of illusions. Whatever you choose to make your character look like at creation doesn't even represent a baseline for what you'll be looking at for most of your time in the game. You can look like just about anything.

There are many, many ways to change your appearance including but not limited to your gender, species or even your kingdom. You can start out as a human and end up as a rock. This happens all the time, whether you like it or not, because quest after quest has you turn into something other than what you were when you spoke to the questgiver.

There are spells and abilities that allow you to change your form and also an enormous number of objects you can use to impersonate anything from a tiny rat to a full-size dragon. You can change size and shape until you shrink yourself so small you can barely be seen - I was at the bank last night next to someone who'd managed to make themselves both look like a mushroom and be the actual size of one.

You're looking at the highest quality, highest level Necro pet and that's what someone thought the default should be. Is it any wonder illusions are so popular?

Since this can understandably get to be a bit much after a while, you can toggle the whole thing off in Options, something I tend to do after the novelty wears off. From then on you will look like yourself no matter what illusion you're under, even though every NPC will treat you as though you're still in costume.

Something very similar also applies to Familiars, Mounts and Combat Pets. There's both an Appearance and an Equipped slot for Familiars and Mounts, allowing you to combine the best stats withthe best looks.

Combat pets, by which I mostly mean the undead summoned by Necromancers, elementals by Conjurors and warders by Beastlords, can all be switched between the different appearances provided both by the different levels of ability and the various qualities of spells. At least Necros and Mages can do it that way. I forget exactly what it is that Beastlords can do but it's something along the same lines.

That's about all I can think of without looking it up. I'm aware it's by no means all the ways the game allows or compels you to change your form - or the forms of the entourage that swirls around you, like a family of ducklings following their mother. And that's just the bodies. I haven't even mentioned what you - and they - could be wearing...

There, now! Isn't that better?

Many of those illusions are accessed either through the UI or from your spellbook, where they take up no space and get in no-one's way. Some, however, far too many in my opinion, come in the form of items you need to click to activate. These all take up bag space.

This actually isn't too much of an issue for most of my characters, who tend to have far greater issues with hoarding to worry about a few illusions. Before the expansion dropped, for example, I spent an hour clearing some space in my Berserker's bags in readiness. It was a horrific task.

EQII is insanely generous with storage space and I've made quite an effort to take advantage of every opportunity to expand my storage capacity. In just the packs he carries around with him, my Berserker has 502 slots. When I went to check on Tuesday evening fewer than a dozen of those were free. 

Even when I'd cleared out everything that didn't require a lot of thinking about, he'd only managed to empty 88, the equivalent of a single bag. The other seven (You get six regular slots plus two for specific kinds of items, not counting your quiver.) were all still stuffed with junk that "might come in useful one day".

Of the remaining four hundred and some slots, only a dozen were taken up with illusions and just one by a Petamorph Wand, which the Berserker can't actually use, not having access to any combat pets. This feature does nothing for him. 

It's different for pet classes.

When I checked in with my Necromancer this morning, she had more than twenty-five slots taken up with Petamorph Wands. And I realise now that I still haven't explained what they are, although the name pretty much explains the function.

They're clickies that change the appearance of combat pets. Yes, combat pets already have an innate ability to change form, as discussed above, but these handy doodads let you turn them into totally different creatures altogether.

According to EQ2Wire, there are more than a hundred and fifty of these things. More are being added all the time. You can buy them in the cash shop, they get given away as holiday rewards, you get them from quests...

Until now, I've been wary of collecting them because of the space they take up but I'd like to have as many as I can get. They're fun but they're practical, too. Many of the default pets are annoying in one way or another and it's often useful to be able to change them into something that crawls or flies or just doesn't make a really annoying sound in the background all the frickin' time.

That was why I was excited to hear we'd be able to add them to a Keyring. A keyring is effectively a UI element in which you can store items that would otherwise take up bag space. Originally, if I'm remembering correctly, it was added to EverQuest to store the actual keys that were needed to access certain zones, particularly Planar instances, but over the years it's become the generic term for any UI-based storage solution, no matter what you put in it.

EverQuest has made great play of the "Keyring" conceit over the years but I have a feeling this might be the first so-named in EQII. Lots of things you'd think might have used a keyring, like Mounts and Familiars, already have their own UI tabs, so I guess it hasn't been deemed necessary until now.

Almost the first thing I did when I was able to log into the expansion was to get my Necro out and start playing with the new toy. There didn't seem to be any hints or explanations so i just started clicking things and that worked nicely.

All you have to do is right-click a Petamorph Wand and the context menu now offers the option to add it to the keyring. There's a warning that it's an irreversible action but since you can only add Attuned or No Trade wands to the ring that seems like an unnecessarily cautious step. I mean, what else are you going to do with them?

I started adding all of the Necro's wands, one after another, until without warning it stopped working. There weren't any error messages so at first I thought there was something different about the wands I was trying to add. A close look didn't suggest anything but after a while I figured out the reason.

The process had stalled because the Petamorph Keyring operates on the same principle as the Wardrobe, meaning it has a limited number of slots. I'd filled them all, which was why no more wands were going in.

The basic allowance is ten slots, which shows up as five rows. You can expand that a row at a time at the cost of 50DBC per. What the upper limit might be or if there is one I don't know but I would imagine you'll be able to add enough slots for all those hundred and fifty wands and more. 

I'm sure there will be people who'll complain about the cost and claim it's some kind of money grab. For subscribers, though, who get 500DBC as a stipend every month, and who also get a 10% discount on all cash shop purchases, it seems pretty harmless to me.

In fact, as I've said many times, I'm always glad of something to spend my Daybreak Cash on. I have almost 35k on my main account now and I rarely find much I want to buy. There are only so many Prestige Homes you can decorate, after all.

I bought another twenty slots immediately and started filling them up. Unfortunately, I attuned all my wands without looking at them and only after I'd done it did I discover I had a few duplicates. The keyring helpfully tells you when you try to add a wand it's already holding but by then I'd rendered them all untradeable so I just had to destroy them.

Never mind. Plenty more where those came from. And I'll be looking out for them now. I have Mages and Beastlords who can make good use of them and they all heve keyrings of their own. Yes, the keyring is character-based, not account based. I'm sure that will annoy some people as well but I personally prefer to keep my characters cleanly separated whenever possible so it suits me just fine.

And with that out of the way, I suppose I'd better go take a look at the actual content of the expansion. I got an in-game letter from the Far Seas Traders, asking me to go help with something in the new place so I'm going to start off with the Crafting Timeline.

I pretty much have to. I still don't have a max level Adventurer to start the main quest. Although I do have a level 130 boost...