Extra Heroic or Two EQII Festivals For The Price Of One

It can be hard to keep up with EverQuest II in more ways than you might think. As I reminded myself just last night, it has possibly the hardest per-expansion reset of any MMORPG. Returning from a break or even going back to an old character can be brutal.

The game also has more events than fit comfortably on the in-game calendar, with two or occasionally even more sometimes overlapping. If it hadn't been for a short news item on MassivelyOP, I might well have missed two of them just this week.

One wouldn't have been too much of a loss. The Heroes' Festival is a short, very enjoyable celebration that rolls around this time every year. It's the annual birthday celebration for the game itself, which turns nineteen this month. The centerpiece is the Mischeva's Clothworks event, during which a "strange woman and her band of play-actors" appear in various zones to put on a kind of mummery involving giant, patchwork puppets in the shape of infamous boss mobs like the dragon Trakanon or Roehn Theer aka "The Godslayer".

The event was one of EQII's early attempts at Public Quests, glorious all-pile-on affairs where anyone of any level can join in, always provided they can get there alive and manage not to stand in any AEs. The big attraction of this one for anyone under max level is safety; all the fights happen close to a portal, making access relatively straightforward but more importantly, crucially indeed, the Clothwork bosses don't fight back.

The downside is it can take forever to chip away at their vast mountain of hit points, especially if not enough people turn up. Even after all these years, though,  many of the performances are well-attended. I haven't done one yet this year but as I was playing last night - and again this morning, in what would have been the dead hours of the middle of the night for the vast majority of players on my US server - I heard the usual call-outs for more people to go help bring them down.

There are plenty of other things to do in the Festival besides bash a patchwork dragon but I've done all of them quite a few times already and I don't feel much motivated to go round again. It's a short event, lasting just over a week. It finishes this year on the seventeenth, so there's still time to do everything if you're interested. There's one new quest, which once again is more of a collection. I'll get that done but it'll probably me my lot for this year.

I might possibly take Mitsu, who's only in the sixties, to some of the clothwork events. The armor and weapons you can buy with the event currency used to be very good for levelling characters but these days there are better options and anyway, who even levels any more? Doesn't everyone just pop a max level potion?

Well, it's funny you should mention it but clearly someone at Darkpaw knows something I don't. (Quiet at the back!) As well as the Heroes' Festival, this week also sees another event I didn't realise was a thing in EQII: Extra Life Bonus Week. 

I know all about Extra Life, the annual event that raises money for local children's hospitals across the United States. I just didn't realise we got in-game bonuses because of it.

And what bonuses! In celebration of Darkpaw's stellar success in fund-raising this year (They smashed the target they set themselves and currently stand second on the Team Leaderboard (Yes, there's a leaderboard...) to the folks from Magic: The Gathering.) EQII players are getting

• 250% bonus experience
• 40% increased rare drop chance
• Double currency rewards
• Double loot drops in current expansions
• 20% chance to drop an additional rare (on top of normal drops)

Those are some very generous percentages. So generous, in fact, I couldn't resist them, especially that super-juicy 250% to regular XP. The bonus event only lasts until 7am PST on November 14, but that ought to give me time to get my last few remaining major characters to the 125 cap in both Adventure and Tradeskill (Yes, it does appear the 250% bonus applies to crafting, which is highly significant. I haven't actually tested it but I did mouseover the Tradeskill XP bar and the bonus showed up so it looks legit.)

So much for the issue of knowing what's happening before it's already happened.  This is where we come to the part about how tough it can be to keep up in the game itself. 

Looking to get some value out of those bonuses, my first thought was to check all my characters to see who wasn't at the cap yet. I have about half a dozen characters I try to keep up to date and I've generally been pretty good about it, especially since level increases started happening only with every other expansion. It's been almost two years since the cap moved to 125 so I don't really have much of an excuse for falling behind.

And yet I have. When I checked I found I only had four of my Skyfire team of eight at the Adventure cap. That's not as bad as it sounds. I only really consider six of the eight active team members so I only have two of those to finish off and they're both at the previous cap of 120, so it shouldn't take long, right?

Yeah, you'd think. With a 250% XP bonus, full vitality, an 80% Veteran Bonus and an XP potion running, that gives me a massive 530% boost, always assuming they all stack. Which would be great if I could do the quests!

I'm so used to doing expansions as they come out, with characters whose spells I've upgraded and who are wearing all the right gear, that I forgot just how unforgiving levelling content can be in the upper reaches of the range. I started last night with my Inquisitor. This is how it went:

• Forgot which expansion she needed and went to the most recent by mistake.
• Was able to take the quests but fortunately realised before I went any further I was in the wrong place.
  
• Looked up when the level cap had changed and went to the correct zone in the right expansion.
• Did a non-combat quest and made most of a level on the hand-in. Looking good!
• Tried to do a quest that asked me to kill stuff and literally could not see the mob's health bar move.
  
• Realised I was probably under-geared. Checked and found I was right.
• Thought I'd go get Panda Gear since I've done all the quests this year and it's an Account-Wide unlock.
• Went to the vendor. Of course, it's all Level 125!
  
• Remembered Tishan's Lockbox, the free gear option at the start of all recent expansions.
• Went back and swapped out all my gear for that. Huge increase in stats.
• Even remembered to swap out all my Merc's Accolades too.
• Went back to kill the mob I couldn't put a dent in the first time. Killed it!
• It took about three minutes, going flat out.
• Slowly ground my way through the required six alligators. Took me about twenty minutes to do them all. 
• I even died when I got an add! Who fricken dies, levelling up, these days?!
  
• Did the hand in. Got a follow-up quest to kill eight more.
• Took a break to calm down.

As I write this my Inquisitor is Level 123. I found a couple more non-combat quests (And died again trying to do one of them - mob density in the starting area is vicious.), levelled up again and my TTK began to improve. I will get her to 125 today (Edit: See picture below!) but what started out to be a goofy, fun romp has turned into serious MMO business.

I can very easily see how returning players get discouraged. Not only is there one hell of a lot to learn, but as a casual solo player, the gameplay itself is far more challenging when you're playing catch-up than it is when you're actually at level, doing new content. That seems counter-intuitive.

All of that only applies from Level 100 onward, though. That's when the entire game changes. I do have a couple of characters still in double figures. It would be a lot more fun to take them through some dungeons with that massive XP boost running so I'm going to do that for light relief.

I still will get my Inquisitor and my Wizard to the cap before the boost goes away. Last chance before the next expansion drops and we get another hard reset. And this one comes with a level increase, too. I don't want to have to do ten levels at normal XP to catch up.

As for Tradeskills, I only have one character in need of the last five levels. It's the Inquisitor again - she's also my Carpenter. 

Busy week ahead for her!

Yes, Of Course I'm A Hero. Didn't You See My Cloak?

With New World swallowing the lion's share of my gaming time these last few weeks (153 hours played according to Steam although I'm beginning to doubt the accuracy of that.) I've been uncomfortably aware of the way I've been neglecting old favorites like EverQuest II. I don't think I've logged in at all since I did some Nights of the Dead quests towards the back end of October.

This being EQII, almost as soon as one holiday comes to an end, it's time for the next. November is the game's anniversary (Seventeen this year.) which means the Heroes Festival. 

It's one Norrathian holiday I tend to skip these days. I've done my share of patchwork-bashing in my time, especially back when the weapons and armor you could get were more than decent for a casual player, but most of my characters outgrew those years ago. I do like to keep up to date with holiday quests, though, so when I heard there was a new one this year I thought I ought to drag myself away from Aeternum and catch myself up with the latest happenings in Norrath.

I started off in Freeport, looking for anyone new wearing a feather for a hat. I cantered around for a while but I couldn't see anything. I checked the obvious spots - down by the docks, the various squares and parks - before I remembered the Heroes Festival generally happens in the cheery surroundings of Execution Plaza. Nothing like an hourly hanging to get the party going with a swing.

I couldn't see much going on there that I hadn't seen before so rather than waste any more time I looked it up, first at EQ2 Traders and then on the Wiki. 

I'll save us all the long version in which I bumble around trying to figure out why the NPC won't talk to me (the first time and the second time) and the part where I resort to watching a YouTube video to find a quest item I  walk right past. I will mention something that still puzzles me, though.

Everything I read said that to get the new quest, One Afterlife To Live, you have to have done the quest A Dream Adventure this year, even if you've done it before. It needs to be re-done every year, apparently, to get other quests in the festival. I had to do both that one and the one that precedes it, Shattered Remains and the one before that, Thuramore's Absence as well before the new quest popped.

  I remembered all the older quests very well so I've obviously done them on someone. It's possible it wasn't the character I was playing today. It seems unlikely because he's the one most likely to have done everything but it is true that the reward for one of the quests was a cloak he didn't have and as you can see from his wardrobe he's not one to miss out ona good cloak. He has a bit of a thing for them. 

The new quest itself was interesting. Not for the mechanics, which were the usual EQII holiday fare, pleasant and simple, but for the locations in which it takes place. The set-up refers back to the 2012 and 2013 expansions Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan, which take place in EQII's afterlife, the Ethernere. 

After a little reminiscence, Lothaire Stormgazer, the questgiver, sends you back to some of the places you supposedly ought to remember from when you acted the hero and saved a load of people, including him, from some fate if not worse than death then possibly death itself. I completed the solo signature quests for both those expansions but I forget how it went. Even so, I thought I'd at least recognize the scenery but two of the three instances were unfamiliar to me. 

I'm guessing they're probably raid zones I never visited. Any raid from more than three years ago, of course, is probably a walkover for any max-level character of today but although I've done my share of sightseeing in older content I can't claim to have seen everything and I don't remember either of these.

I think I would, had I been there before. The first instance was particularly striking. Very attractive decor, if you like giant, staring blood-red eyes. The second was less original, architecturally but it had a kind of mob I can't recall ever seeing before, the Lujin, a kind of gnoll that looks like it works out a lot.

Just seeing those zones and creatures made the whole thing worth my time. Just as well. It was a fair old investment. Longer than I expected. I think I was an hour and a half getting it all done, including the false starts and do-overs. 

There's a twist in the tale when you come to do the final hand-in, too. I'll refrain from using the screenshot that gives it away completely although there's a hefty clue in the one I have used, even after I redacted the quest text. As you can see there's another cloak although this time I didn't take it. I'm not all that keen on the filligree but the weird back-waistcoat upper part is the real deal-breaker.

Since I'd picked up quite a bit of the holiday currency, Tokens of Heroism, I thought I'd have alook at what the vendor had to offer. I was very impressed. New this year are a couple of flying carpet ground mounts and an unusual cloak and hood combo (Pictured left.)  and some nice house items, all of which you can see in the EQII Traders article linked above. There's plenty more good stuff to be had, too. I'd forgotten how many really great paintings and statues had been added to the vendor in previous years.

I have a strong feeling I already bought most of the paintings I wanted a few years back but I suspect I may have missed the statues when they were added. I might have to farm some tokens this weekend to buy a few.

After that I guess I'd better play catch-up with the panda quests. I need to get my EQII groove back in readiness for the expansion. It won't be long until we're off to Vetrovia. 

Since it's IntPoPiMo and I took a bunch of screenshots, I'll close with a mini-gallery, all taken during the new quest. They look rather good which seems to be a feature of zones from that era. Another reason to do the quest, I'd say.

Thank You For Your Patience: EQII

 

It's most likely not going to feature too highly on anyone's agenda right now, which is just as well because I'm a day late spotting it, but following the recent connectivity issues over at Darkpaw towers there's a bonus weekend going on for EverQuest II. According to Dreamweaver's announcement 

"This special bonus will run from November 20, 2020 at 12:01 AM PST and ends November 23, 2020 at 11:59 PM PST

Live Servers during this time will see

Double XP

Double Ethereal Currency

Limited Time Familiar Drops

Limited Time Mount Drops

Bonus Jadeite Medallion Drops"

For once, Kaladim also gets to join in

"Kaladim during this time frame will see

Double XP

Double Hunters Coins

Double Expansion 5 Loot Drops"

Dreamweaver explains more and answers a number of pertinent queries in the thread, although I notice he remains annoyingly silent on the one question that interests me, namely if and when we might be getting a double status event. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent bonus event for EverQuest, which tends to support my own experience that the interruption to service there was on a much smaller scale.

Puppets! Get yer puppets! Get 'em while they're hot!

Even before this current bonus, the Heroes Festival had already been extended by a few days to compensate for the outages. I killed a couple of clothworks and found to my surprise there were apparently some associated collections I hadn't done. 

I could have sworn I finished them all last year or the year before but if I did it can't have been on my most-played character, the Berserker. Since the rewards for the easily-completable collects are all mounts (or, I should say, the two I finished before the event ended were, so I'm guessing the others are too), I'm a bit cross with myself for missing out. Just goes to show it's always worth double-checking even when you think you know.

It wasn't even that I was too late to do those collections, the items for which spawn, briefly, after each clothwork "dies". It was more that the puppets take a very, very long time to kill unless there's a good turn-out and by the time I wanted to join in almost everyone else had done their quota and moved on. Maybe next year.

It was Scholar Primarch Rais in the Archives with the Exploded Wand. (It was, in fact!).

 

I did take some advantage of the double xp to put a couple more levels on my Fury this morning, taking her from 89 to almost 92. Given that I had 450% in cumulative bonuses running you might have thought it would have been faster than that but I made the mistake of picking the agnostic version of the Library of Erudin, an excellent dungeon themed around the board game Clue (or Cluedo if you prefer). I spent far more time looking for clues to solve the murder mystery than I did killing things, which wasn't perhaps the most efficient use of the bonuses.

Some people are apparently still having problems logging in, which doesn't surprise me. As long as I've been playing online games a subset of players would have been having problems logging in to any one of them at any given time. The general issue, though, appears to be fixed. 

Until the next thing breaks, that is.

Underpromise, Overdeliver: EverQuest II

When I first read the official announcement  outlining the events Daybreak had scheduled for EverQuest II's fifteenth anniversary celebrations I was underwhelmed. Granted, anniversaries that end in five generally carry less significance than those that end with a zero - and fifteen is definitely neither ten nor twenty. Still, fifteen years of continual operation is a notable achievement for an MMORPG. It deserves recognition and respect.

For what was described as "our big 15th Anniversary event" we were promised something called "Dragon Attack": dragons were scheduled to attack the Ulteran Spires in four zones, Thundering Steppes, Everfrost, Loping Plains, and Nektulos Forest. Backing this up came a tradeskill event, in which we would be tasked with "constructing permanent, impressive statues commemorating the 15 years that have passed since the Age of Destiny".

Is he looking at me? He's not, is he?

The list of rewards from the crafting quest looked a tad thin and there was no mention of the pay-off for protecting the spires from dragons. The press release also tied the annual Heroes Festival, which falls at this time each year, into the anniversary celebrations as if it was part of them. That seemed a bit cheeky to me.

It didn't help that there was a 15th Aniversary Celebration Bundle in the store, stuffed to bursting with really tempting treats including a crafting table that works for any tradeskill, a 66-slot bag, a 100% fee-reducing, 100 slot broker crate, speed-enhancing boots, a mount and lots more. Very good value at $34.99 but perhaps a little galling when compared with what I thought were rather lackluster in-game rewards.

And then I logged in and discovered I was wrong on every count. The event is excellent and so are the rewards. I spent most of yesterday killing dragons and having a rare old time. As I sit here now I'm alternating between writing this post and killing more. Whether by good fortune or good design, EQII's fifteenth birthday party is turning out to be one of the most enjoyable I've attended for quite a while.

Note bunny and shovel from previous events. Cloak too, probably.

Dragon Attack and Heroes Festival mesh a little chaotically but work well together. Structurally very similar, they each consist of a series of public quests in which very large creatures with quadrillions of hit points appear at easy-to-access locations on a fairly predictable schedule.

All the mobs are raid-level so it relies on a good turnout if things are going to go smoothly. We certainly have that for now. Heroes Festival is a little more forgiving on numbers, although not by much.

It features "clothwork" puppets representing famous villains from the lore. They're notionally operated by a theater troupe of NPCS and are nothing more than giant pinatas. I'm not sure if they even fight back. Dragon Attack features guess what? Dragons. They do fight and there are even some tactics required, as outlined in the wiki.

You can't fool me. You're not a real dragon!

All of the dragons and most of the puppets appear right next to a wizard spire, meaning anyone can get to them with the minimal of travel time. There's a ten minute warning before they arrive and once they're in place there's a nominal timeframe in which they have to be killed, something like 90 minutes.

Each dragon has a one-hour respawn time and right now they're taking five or ten minutes to die. With people doing them in a fairly strict rotation that means the next is along in about the same time it takes to kill one, if not sooner.

Indeed, because the two events are on different schedules, there's frequently a dragon and a puppet up at the same time. It's possible to chain-kill with no more than a few five or ten minute intervals now and again. I did that for about four hours at a stretch yesterday and it was a lot of fun.

Everyone lines up along the crater rim for this one. People are weird.

There's a real carnival atmosphere at the moment, on this first weekend. Every dragon and puppet draws a crowd, even on my low-pop server, Skyfire. Yesterday afternoon and evening there were sometimes enough people to spawn second instances of the zones. I crashed twice because of the strain a hundred players, their pets and minions put on my graphics card.

General chat is busy with people asking which dragons or puppets are up and with people who are killing them reporting the progress. We even had someone roleplaying a TV reporter for a while. I've heard no complaints save one - someone was moaning that having these two events plus the expansion beta all at once meant there was too much to do!

My haul from Saturday,
not including the stuff I equipped.

As for the rewards, which I turned my nose up at when I read about them, I was completely wrong. They're great! Very generous and sufficiently desirable to bring people out of their usual instances to get them.

The Dragons drop very good gear for Mercenaries (every piece I've had has been a major upgrade), Illegible Spell Scrolls (needed for spell upgrades and something I virtually never see drop as a solo player), and Infusers for gear (which I'm saving to use on the inevitable upgrades from questlines in the upcoming expansion).

The most important drop for me, though, is Mount equipment. Levels and gear for mounts was a keynote feature of last year's expansion, Chaos Descending, but it was one that I spent most of the year ignoring. Until this weekend none of my mounts had a single piece. Now I have a saddle and some barding equipped and more than a dozen more mount items in my bags.

Last, and very much not least, there's an Achievement for killing all four dragons. I'm not much for Achievements in general but it's different when they come with one of the best "mounts" I've ever seen in the game.

It may seem odd that I'm sounding so enthusiastic about a mount when only a few weeks ago I was bemoaning their very existence but the name of the mount in question should go some way to explaining why that is: Reveal Inner Dragon.

Technically an actual mount, this is really an illusion. You place it in your Mount Appearance slot (you can put it in the main Mount slot if you want but it doesn't have very good stats) and you become a dragon. A really good-looking dragon at that.

Look at me! I'm a dragon!

I want one for all my Level 110s. The Berserker has one and the Warlock will before I finish this post. That leaves four more. I may well get it for the lower level characters on other servers too. While the dragons are Level 110 Epic X3 raid mobs, you get credit for just being there when the kill happens so any level can complete the achievement provided they don't mind dying now and again.

That's the adventurer side of Dragon Attack. To keep this post to a manageable length for once I'll cover the crafter's version separately. Suffice to say it's pretty good, too.

As for the returning Heroes Festival, which I so glibly dismissed on sight as "more of the same", I'd completely missed the part of the press release that mentions the five new collections added this year. Even if I'd seen it, I wouldn't have known that the rewards for those include three new mounts.

Not really! Don't kill me!

As for the new items added to the Heroes Festival vendors to be bought with the currency you get for doing the event, if it wasn't for the invaluable EQ2 Traders I wouldn't have known there were some wonderful old school paintings (the ones without the horrible new frames) and one of the best sets of appearance armor I've seen in the game for years. The PR team might have mentioned that...

Dragon Attack runs until December 6th and Heroes Festival to November 19 so there's plenty of time to get everything done. At the moment everything is buzzing and it's easy and fun but as people run their alts through the cycles and get all the rewards they want I imagine it will quieten down considerably.

I wouldn't leave it too long - all the targets are raid mobs and I can tell you from experience that even with the puppets that don't fight back it takes a handful of players an awfully long time to whittle one down. I imagine that's why the event allows an hour and a half for the kill.

All in all I give this anniversary celebration a hearty cheer. So much better than I thought it was going to be. Thanks and congratulations to the dev team once again. Maybe someone needs to pop round to the PR department and have a quiet word...



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