There's Been A Change Of Plan: EverQuest

All the shots in this post come from the aptly-named Beast's Domain, a Tier 3 zone from the Veil of Alaris expansion. Zam describes it as "a lush, wild land where the beasts rule".

I never really planned to go there. It just happens to be right next to the Level 95 Hot Zone, Sarith, City of Tides.

Sarith is the final Hot Zone. After this there are no more. I don't know why. Maybe Hot Zones always ran a few expansions behind the cap. I haven't been near enough to the top of the ladder to notice since 2004 and we didn't have Hot Zones back then. I can't say I've been paying attention to what happens when you get this close.

I'm paying attention now, though. My magician dinged 107 a couple of days ago and she's already 20% in. The next gear change comes at 110 but her focus effects already reach to the cap, five levels above that. She's not at endgame yet but she can see it from where she's standing.

With that in mind and planning ahead, I thought I ought to start investigating where she might go when Franklin Teek runs out of tasks to give her. Some of the mobs in Sarin already turned green when she dinged, although most are still a comfortable light blue. Another level, though, and it will definitely be time to move on.

With EverQuest as my focus game, things are changing. I'm finding it quite strange. I've been putting in a lot of work, upgrading gear, spells and AAs and it's paying off. XP per kill still crawls but time to kill has never been shorter. Quite possibly literally.

Instead of the familiar, sedate pace I've been used to, the mage is burning mobs down in seconds. She's started pulling aggro from her pet even on single targets, something that hasn't happened in forever. I'm having to hold back a little, which takes some getting used to.

With the buffs from the pile and the ever-increasing mana regeneration provided by high-level gear it's all but impossible to run out of mana. When I'm burning hard for maximum flow during my daily half-hour, double xp Lesson, I can chain-nuke and never go under half mana. I can kill mobs faster than I can find them - and there are plenty of mobs in Sarith.

With all that in mind, I went exploring in Beast's Domain. Hot Zones have always been unreliable when it comes to levelling efficiency. They have a bonus, it's true, but all EQ zones used to have separate Zone Experience Modifiers and some of them were already better than the Hot Zones for the level.

Something was done about that a few years ago, or I seem to remember it was. I think I might even have posted about it. This kind of thing is notoriously difficult to research, though, and I don't feel like spending the time right now.

Luckily, these days it's easy to test the proposition with a practical experiment. The default UI now renders xp to three decimal places. No more squinting at an analog "xp bar" and trying to guess how many pixels moved.

Another thing I don't know and can't be bothered to research just at the moment is when EQ expansions started using a "Tier" system for zones. It's long been common practice to refer to "T1" or "T2" zones but I always used to associate it with raiding. Now that I'm looking stuff up I realize it also applies to open zones.

I finally began to pay attention to tiers when I subbed my Magician's account at the end of last month. Subscribers can equip "Prestige" items. F2P players can't. I'd been wondering why she could use some of the drops from named mobs and not others.

As Zam explains, "Prestige Items in EverQuest are items obtained from higher-end content in the Seeds of Destruction™ expansion and later". "Higher-end content" is a little vague but a little digging suggests it means T3 zones and above.

Since I don't plan on keeping up the sub for more than a month and since almost all the drops are No Trade, being able to get Prestige items isn't of much practical use, even if anything the mage can kill was likely to drop anything she'd want, which is exceptionally unlikely. What's of more interest to me is a) how much harder the higher tier zones in the same expansion might be and b) whether the xp there is enough to to make any extra risk and effort worth taking. On the basis of my initial experiments the answers to those questions would seem to be "not much" and "just about", respectively.

Mobs in Beast's Landing take a little longer to kill but they give a little more xp. It probably balances out but BL is a really nice zone to hunt in and the drops are worth more. Also, it's visually very impressive - for an EverQuest zone. It's almost pretty in places and it's fun to explore. I like it there.

I even bumbled into the next zone on, the bizarrely named Evantil, the Vile Oak. I walked up an inclined tree-trunk, thinking it led to a raised area in Beast's Domain and half way up I hit a zone line.

When you find yourself in an unfamiliar zone in EverQuest it's best not to wander about. I hugged the trunk on the other side and conned the mobs. They were all aggressive but they were also all light-blue so I chanced it and sent the pet to poke the nearest.

They were tougher but quite manageable. I spent about half an hour there, gradually clearing the area around the zone line and venturing further in. Respawns were fast and there were plenty of roamers. I didn't get far. Eventually, inevitably, I got more adds than I felt equipped to handle, so I took the discretionary path and gated out.

It was good xp while it lasted and the loot sold nicely. I plan on going back but first I want to explore the whole of Beast's Domain. That could take a while. BD is huge. I mean really, really huge. It feels as though you could put several of the Karanas in there and still have space left over. 

That's the current plan, anyway. It's nice to have a plan but you always have to be ready to throw it out, particularly if it goes far better than you expected.

The whole reason I subbed was so I could grind AAs instead of xp, since I was making almost all my xp on Overseer quests anyway. And that's been going beautifully. I spent all my saved AAs and since then I've ground out over a hundred more. I've been saving them until I found out whether or not I'd get any of the free, auto-granted AAs when I dinged 107.

Well... I did. I got thousands of them. I'm not sure exactly how many it was but my Magician currently has 17,385. A week ago, before she subbed, she had about five thousand.

Those auto-granted AAs, automatically assigned to the abilities the developers consider key, make an immense difference. I went out right after I received them to see if I could tell the difference and it was as if the mage had been supercharged. I guess she had. No wonder everyone says the higher game is all about how many AAs you have.

So, change of plan. From now until my sub runs out I'm going to focus on leveling. I can get one more level for sure. Maybe two if I really go at it. If I get auto-grants for those it's going to make one heck of an impact.

And I'm going to see how much further up the expansion ladder I can climb. I had no idea when I was there, but checking it today for this post I realized Evantil, the Vile Oak is a zone from 2012's Rain of Fear. A Tier 2 zone, no less.

That's the most recent expansion I've ever hunted in (albeit not visited) and it was eminently doable. Maybe I'll try Call of the Forsaken's Dead Hills next. People keep suggesting that one in chat.

I can only die, right?

Big Blue Diamonds : EverQuest

There's no question that EverQuest is currently my main MMORPG. How weird is that?

I seem to have hit a sweet spot. The last time this happened was probably when I discovered Jewel of Atiki, a strangely-named but delightful zone from the 2007's The Buried Sea. That was four years ago, when I was doing my Lesson and my Hot Zone daily for xp, then keeping myself busy farming plat to pay for armor upgrades in the Bazaar.

That seems to be what works for me because I'm doing it again and loving it. Just as it did back in my days in the Jewel, it helps enormously that I'm hunting in the light, sunny, open zones of 2011's Veil of Alaris. It seems like a delightful expansion, not least when compared to the oppressive, claustrophobic gloom of the inexplicably-preferred House of Thule, through which all re-starters and Heroic characters are funnelled. So glad to be out of that miserable hole at last.

As I posted a few days ago, the mage dinged 106 and I re-subbed her account. As I also explained, I was waiting for that specific level because that's when you can equip Conflagrant armor. In my particular case, Arch Convoker's Conflagrant, the variant intended specifically for the Magician class.

I was dreading hunting sharks when Franklin Teek gave me the task but it turns out there are loads of them right next to the docks, including this huge named.

It's not cheap but it is affordable. By watching the prices in the Bazaar carefully I've managed to upgrade ten slots. That leaves eleven to go, not counting ammo and power source.

I haven't been keeping a count of the exact cost but I must have spent somewhere around a quarter of a million platinum so far. I raided my Beastlord's piggy bank for 50k and bought a bag of platinum worth 13k with some loyalty tokens but mostly I've been farming grey mobs in much older zones.

Money flows in quite comfortably from the xp-level content I'm doing but when it comes to cash drops, EQ has a quirk I think is probably unusual in the genre. I can't speak for current content, which I haven't seen, but in pretty much every expansion from... well, thinking about it, from the original, base game, the standard moneymakers remain the same: gems.

Diamonds sell to a vendor for 190 platinum. Blue diamonds sell for 238pp. Various other gems sell for somewhere around the same amount. The main change between expansions seems to be not so much what gems drop as how often, although even that isn't consistent.

Hunting underwater in this zone is amazingly pleasant, not least because of the spectacular way the water amplifies every spell effect.

When I'm out doing my daily double xp Lesson in the level 95 Hot Zone, Sarith, City of Tides, the sharks Franklin Teek insists on sending me to kill drop diamonds and blue diamonds. So did the boogymen and samhain in Fear Itself. So did the reavers in Meldrath's Majestic Mansion.

Gems are great but high-value stackable mob drops can bring in as much or more. Clockworks in all of the Meldrath-related zones from Secrets of Faydwer (also 2007 - two expansions a year back then) explode into showers of cogs and springs when you smash them and those parts sell to vendors for a lot.

I guess those count as body parts if you're a clockwork, which makes sense because mob body parts have been a vendor staple since the game started. In other MMORPGs it's often barely worth giving bag space to fur and fangs but in EQ those crazy NPCs pay top dollar for the most repulsive and objectively worthless organs. I've always wondered what they do with them, although since no NPC vendor ever leaves his spot it's a bit of a moot point what they could do.

The final consideration when deciding where to farm is what players are currently buying on Barter. Incredibly conveniently, these days you can open the Barter window wherever you are in the game and sell directly out of your bags. No more running around the mazelike corridors looking for that one guy who buys writing ink.

The streets of the city are good, safe hunting. I'd do the quests but for that I need to learn the language. All in good time.

It's nearly all tradeskill materials they want, of course, but not necessarily the obvious ones. Many older mats retain decent value but many more are utterly worthless. Also, when selling things that are new to you, you have to be careful to check what the NPCs are paying before you put your silks and ores in the hand of a reaching player. Some buyers are less than scrupulous about offering a fraction of the coin you could get from cashing out at the nearest vendor.

Gems notwithstanding, it's fair to say the more recent the expansion, the more valuable the drops. If you're focused on making the most money per minute, though, it's makes sense to go somewhere you can cut the mobs down like corn. The individual drops may be worth a little less - although unless you go back almost to the beginning of the game it will only be a little - but being able to pull and clear whole rooms in seconds more than makes up the difference.

I've been experimenting, trying to find the most profitable, fastest, least annoying, most enjoyable farm. All of those. Asking a lot, I know.

I've tried half a dozen zones in Planes of Power. A lot of older guides to making money suggest the Plane of Fire and it is indeed very good for gems, plus there are trade mats there still that sell for hundreds of plat a time. Unfortunately, it's a hideous, ugly, depressing zone. I don't really want to spend more than half an hour there.

The aptly-named Beast's Domain is the next zone along. A lovely, blue-green forest with loads of kiting space.

Few of the PoP zones have aged well. My favorite to farm is Ruins of Lxanvom, better known as the Crypt of Decay. It's also stunningly ugly but as an underground dungeon with corridors and tunnels that seems more acceptable. Also it's relatively small and very simple to navigate.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's fairly popular for exactly the reasons I go there, so its not unusual to zone in to find everything already dead. Luckily the respawn rate is fairly fast and once people have cleared it they tend not to hang around for a second run. I know I don't.

All of the aforementioned Meldrath zones are good but I've done a lot of those over the years and I could do without the clanking. A nice alternative I've been trying is Bloodmoon Keep, a dungeon from the same expansion, refreshingly clockwork-free. All wereorcs, spiders and undead, that one.

I tend to farm until I run out of bag space or until I get tired, both of which clock in at around about an hour. My average for a run is somewhere close to 10,000 platinum but I'm fairly sure I can improve on that.

I probably need to, if only because I've bought up all the cheaper Conflagrant pieces now. The rest are going to run 40-50k a pop, which means I need to make about twice what I've already spent. I was very fortunate to get the chest and legs for about half the going rate, though, so who knows what bargains may turn up if I keep my eyes open?

From long experience I do know that I'll just about have had enough of farming after a couple of weeks. It's one of those activities that starts out as really good fun and ends up being a chore. For now, though, I'm still getting that thrill every time I see my balance go back up after a spending spree.

With a bit of luck I should be able to fill out all the remaining slots by the time my month's sub runs out. After that I imagine I'll be ready for a break, anyway.

Change My Gamma : EverQuest

A lot of unexpected things have happened this year. Finding myself playing EverQuest again is one of them.

I really thought I was done with the old game. It wasn't that I'd never play it again but that I'd never play it seriously, again.

By "seriously" I don't, of course, mean grouping up for dungeons or anything silly like that. When was the last time I grouped for xp in EQ, I wonder? Over a decade, ago for sure. Maybe a decade and a half.

No, what I mean is focusing on a character, levelling up, finding better gear, going to new zones, upgrading spells, researching which focus items I should be using, learning new mechanics and systems. The kind of regular soloing I've been doing, on and off, now and then, for years. I really thought I was done with all that.

I've written enough about the Overseer feature Darkpaw added back in March. I won't go over it again, save to say that without it I definitely wouldn't be playing EverQuest, either "seriously" or frivolously. I don't think I'd logged in for the best part of a year before curiosity about how EQ's version compared to EverQuest II's tempted me to take a look.

Can we get a spot on this guy?

Overseeing turned out to be both entertaining and practical. It's great to see my highest character positively zipping through the levels, if a level every couple of weeks can be called zippy. I still wasn't doing anything you could really call "playing", though. Just standing around the Guild Lobby, setting quests from the UI and collecting the rewards.

Around level 97 I went shopping for spells. By late June I had a level 100 character and I'd never used any of them. It occured to me that I was going to end up buying a lot of spells I'd never use if I carried on that way.

I started browsing the Bazaar, thinking about getting some better gear but gear costs a lot more to buy than spells. You really don't want to buy it and never use it. I thought maybe I'd see how I got on with what I had, first.

By early July I was out hunting. It was going well. I spent quite a lot of money making bags so I could carry all that fat vendor loot. It was starting to feel like old times, only maybe better.

Cogs for cash.

Not having to rely on mob xp to level makes a huge difference to how much fun going hunting feels. Soloing into three figures, at least the way I do it, remains painfully slow. I can make a reliable eight or ten per cent of a level in a matter of minutes just doing Overseer quests whereas I can kill or quest for hours and barely move the needle. The standard EQ UI now displays xp to three decimal places. It has to or you'd think it was broken.

With Overseer questing making light of the heavy lifting when it comes to xp, soloing is fun again. When I take the mage out to hunt my main aim is to make money and I always loved making bank in Norrath.

Unlike EQII, which has had Weimar republic levels of inflation for years, EverQuest still seems to retain a rational relationship between in-game income and expenditure. There are plenty of upgrades for my level on sale in the Bazaar, priced in the thousands or low tens of thousands. In EQII you'd need to add several zeroes to that.

"Tens of thousands" still sounds like a lot for one piece of armor, fifteen levels below the cap, but I can net ten thousand plat in an hour just by killing mobs and selling the drops to vendors. I know several very lucrative spots no-one else seems to be using these days. With the mobs now conning green, shading to grey, I can pull  whole rooms and AE everything down at negligible risk. Every pull brings in hundreds of platinum in gems and vendor loot.

Did you remember to bring the torch?

Add to that the numerous tradeskill materials that sell to players though the Barter system and money just rolls in. And modern EverQuest has what I'd consider to be almost ironically state-of-the-art mechanics for looting and selling.

Clear a room and all the drops on all the kills appear in a window with multiple options to take or leave. Tradeskill items self-sort into separate bags. Open the Barter window anywhere in game and you can check who's buying what you have, then sell it to them and get paid instantly, emptying your bags and filling your wallet right there at your hunting spot.

If you pick a place to hunt where most things you're going to sell to vendors stack, you can pretty much kill indefinitely without ever running out of space. It makes the whole thing feel quite zen. If mass slaughter can ever be considered meditative, that is.

As I play more I gain confidence. Today I moved on from hunting in zones I'd almost completely outlevelled to ones that are still a tad low but which give marginally decent xp. The hot zone for level 90, Fear Itself, which I wrote about a little last week, is just about right for stress-free soloing at my current level of 103.

The main problem I was having there was the gloom. It was so dark I literally couldn't see where I was going. If the mobs didn't have their names in lights above their heads I wouldn't have been able to see them either, which would have made wandering around in pitch darkness tantamount to suicide.

I should probably look at all these settings one day.

Fortunately I finally remembered what we used to do to fix visibility issues in very dark zones in EQ. Ramp the gamma as high as it would go.

It's been a very long time since I changed the gamma setting in any game. I imagine most modern MMORPGs don't even have one. EQ still does, even if it took me a while to find it, hidden behind an "Advanced" button in the Display tab in Options. Once I'd found and fiddled with it the difference was like night and day. Literally.

True, everything looks washed-out now. Granted, the whole "Fear Itself" thing is considerably less terrifying with all the lights on. But I can see where I'm going and what I'm about to bump into, which is a lot more important. It's not like I'm playing EverQuest for the graphics, after all...

I've already started researching where to go next. The final set of Hot Zones (the system finishes at level 95) will take me into 2011's Veil of Alaris expansion. That's going to be completely new to me. I should think I'd be ready to give it a try when I hit 105. Ten levels seems to be a fairly reliable margin although twelve is probably safer, when trying to learn a new zone solo.

When you start reading this stuff up and making plans it means you're invested in the game, at least for the moment. I really never expected that to happen again with EQ.

Of course, it may not last past the weekend. I kind of hope it does, though.

Nothing To Fear: EverQuest

Today I played EverQuest almost the whole day. I logged in around ten in the morning to collect and set my Overseer quests as usual and then I thought about the bonus xp and how it's only going to be around for a little while and how if I went somewhere easy, somewhere I knew, a Hot Zone ten levels below me, say, and I popped my Lesson, I could just do half an hour and maybe make another five per cent. What could go wrong?

Eight hours later I'd been to half a dozen zones I'd never seen before, died once, spent about a quarter of my money and made less than two per cent of level 101. I'd been on an adventure. God knows it's about time.

After a false start, about which the less said the better, I took the level 90 daily task from Franklin Teek. I already had the 80 and the 85 but they're all but worthless to me now.

Teek wanted me to kill five Samhains in Fear Itself. I had no idea what they were or where that was. I had a vague feeling it must be somewhere in the House of Thule expansion but that was about it. EQ's in-game map has a pathfinding function that will set a route between any two zones but what it comes up with isn't always the most sensible, let alone the safest, so off to Google DuckDuckGo I went to look it up.

As I suspected , Fear Itself is some way on from the only zone I really know in that expansion, Feerrott: The Dream. You can use the Oggok stone in Plane of Knowledge to get to The Dream, then you cross that zone to the gates of the House of Thule itself. Once inside, you head for the Upper Floors and, finally, into to Fear Itself.

By EQ standards it's straightforward. A simple, four-zone trip. Also bloody terrifying, especially the bit where you have to go down a series of long, dark corridors filled with scores of writhing snakes and spiders, not to mention demons from hell. I'd love to show you my screenshots of that part but I was too petrified to take any.

The journey took me an hour or so. I haven't played my Magician for months, not in any meaningful sense, so I thought I ought to warm up on some easy stuff along the way. Most of the mobs in The Dream conned green, which seemed perfect for getting back into the swing of things.

Just as well I didn't go for anything more ambitious. My pulling and positioning skills were horrifically rusty. The little snakes were simple enough but it wasn't long before I had more lizardmen than I know what to do with. Literally.

As I dithered and tried to remember which spell icon was which, my uber-buffed air elemental and healer mercenary handled everything beautifully. A couple more very bad pulls and I had myself sorted out enough to give them the dps support they didn't exactly seem to need.

Near the zone line into the House I happened on Patches, a named that might have been a dog, once. He conned light blue, which is supposed to be standard fodder for soloists these days. I thought he'd make a good test so I pulled him and down he went, along with an add or two because I still hadn't remembered you're supposed to pull mobs to a safe spot.

Emboldened by that I found the entry point and zoned into House of Thule, Lower Floors. And to my surprise I recognized it. My magician hadn't been there before but I had. I took my necromancer there on the Test server last year for some reason I can't recall. I think I was trying out the entry area, known, I believe, as "The Garden", to see if it would be a good hunting ground for the Mage, on the assumption that if it wasn't it wouldn't much matter if a character I never play any more got herself killed.

Five levels ago it would have been ideal. Then, everything would have been light blue and the xp would have been worth having. At 101, though, most of the snakes and dogs were green and even the repeatable quest experience for culling them didn't add up to much.

They were more good practice, though, and even better were the light blue named mobs I kept finding. I can't remember bumping into so many nameds in such short order and close proximity. I killed a named spider, then a snake, then a dog, all outside in the garden. After that I felt properly warmed up, so I pushed on into the house itself, where I killed a named suit of armor called Old Rusty. You and me both, pal.

I'd read up the next bit, which was just as well, because that's where it started to get scary. I had permanent invisibility on and the mobs were still conning green but once I climbed the stairs and zoned into the Upper Floors things became extremely claustrophobic.

I conned everything as it loomed out of the darkness in case it could see me. Nothing did. I ran through the snake pit and down the spider tunnel feeling grateful not to be overly phobic about such things. The room filled with flaming demons almost came as a relief. At least with all that fire I could see where I was going, for once.

The end of the corridor brought me into a room in the center of which was a statue of the god of fear, Cazic Thule, lying dead on a slab. At least I hope it was a statue. Once again I was forewarned by my research, which advised against clicking on him. I don't know what happens if you do and I'd like to keep it that way.

I stepped over him, wondering where the zone line might be and discovered I was standing on it. In a moment I found myself in Fear Itself. Which turned out to be perfect!

The mobs I could see were all light blue. I was at the edge of the zone with a great pull spot next to me, through which nothing seemed to path. As is common with newer expansions (by which I mean ones from the last decade or so) there was someone right at the entrance waiting to give me quests. I took those and set up to kill.

Being a Hot Zone and the mobs being light blue, the xp was much better, even though the fights were still easy enough. I got adds and handled them safely. I saw a named, pulled it and killed it without much risk. Another named wandered up in the middle of the next fight and we killed that one, too.

I'd have settled in for a session only, of course, my bags were full. Aren't they always? I spent a few minutes going through them, trying to make space, but there was nowhere to sell or bank and I didn't even know what most of the stuff I was carrying was for, so I couldn't just throw it away.


It was frustrating, having taken all that effort to get there and then having to leave when I'd just got started. In the old days, being a caster, I'd just have bound myself there, so I could skip the journey back, but it's been years since I've been able to bind anywhere remotely as useful as next to a hunting spot.

Still, I thought I'd give it a try. You never know. It's only mana, after all. I cast Bind Affinity on myself.

I didn't get the usual "You can't bind here, find a city" error message. Had it worked? I wasn't sure. It's been so long I couldn't remember how it was supposed to go. Simple enough to test. I ran a hundred yards or so along the ridge, cast Gate and instantly reappeared back where I'd started. It had worked!

I was exultant. These days there are multiple ways to get home, which makes it all the more galling when you can't bind where you'd like, out in the field. I cast the AA Throne of Heroes and I was back in the Guild Lobby.

Now I had an invisible elastic band stretched between my hunting spot and my resting place, somewhere buffs don't fade and kind players constantly refresh them and there's a bank and a vendor to clear your bags. Things couldn't be better!

So, did I spend the rest of the day flicking back and forth between the two, racking up the xp and the loot? Well... not exactly. It occured to me life would be even sweeter if only I had some bigger bags. All I needed to do was buy some before I gated back.

I mean, how hard could that be?

Count To One Hundred: EverQuest

Things I never thought I'd say in EverQuest:

Ding 100!

It is, of course, all down to the Overseer system introduced back in March. At that time my highest character was a level 93 Magician, a character I'd played the traditional way into the mid-sixties then bumped to 85 with one the many free Heroic upgrade promotions.

From there I leveled her slowly through a combination of Hot Zones, Franklin Teek's missions, Veteran lessons, xp potions and server bonuses. It was steady going for a while, if slow, but by level 93 my options were getting thin.

The hot zones and missions I could handle were giving less and less xp. The next ones up the chain were tough and needed me to learn new zones. In EQ, learning is often freighted with death. Dying, while it doesn't have the sting it once had, still applies a sharp brake to leveling.

What led to me beach at 93 wasn't so much the difficulty as the time. Almost nothing happens quickly in Norrath, other than your demise, should you foolishly try to hurry. People talk blithely about "grinding" xp. If only it were that simple.

First you have to get to the grinding place. These days EQ has ample options for fast travel but they all remind me of flying with a low-cost airline. First you have to travel to your point of departure, be that a Planes of Power "Book", a Combine Spire or the Guild Hall teleporter. Sometimes there's a wait for the device to cycle or a transaction to complete before you can travel.

When you arrive you're likely to be a long way from your final destination. You'll need to run or ride or levitate across hostile territory, avoiding hostile mobs and environmental hazards.

When you do eventually reach the general area you'll need to find the precise spot where you plan to set up camp. If it's a familiar zone it might be quick but if the area's even a little unfamiliar it won't be. You may need to check the pathing of wandering mobs. You might need to split a camp. Chances are you'll need to run or hide, more than once.

If you're doing one of Teek's Tasks, which you will be if you want to maximize your xp, you'll
usually need to move around. He tends to send you to kill mobs that don't cluster. Often he'll have chosen something you can only find deep inside a building or a cave. It will always be filled with hostile creatures you don't need to kill but must to get by.

You'll want to have your thirty minute Lesson running as you kill because it doubles your xp but you'll also want to have it up when your task completes. The big xp is in the reward and it doubles that, too. Or it used to. I vaguely recall they changed that. It often takes longer than half an hour to get the kills you need to finish the task so you have to judge the optimum time to start the clock.

If anything goes wrong.... scratch that... when something goes wrong, you'll have to handle it. If you can't you'll need to make it to a place of safety before it handles you. If you die you should get a rez from your Mercenary, assuming you brought a healer, but you'll lose some xp and a lot of time. If you don't get rezzed, for whatever reason, it's back to the Guild Lobby to get your body summoned and rezzed for a fee by the NPCs there. And then you either quit or start over.

All the time you're out there your buffs are wearing off. You'll have raid-level buffs and so will your merc and your pet, if you use one, because you live in the Guild Lobby, in the dogpile, assuming you have any sense. That's where you start and end every session, so you can keep those buffs refreshed. You have to come back to Plane of Knowledge anyway because Franklin Teek only assigns missions in person and that's where he is.

When I was leveling my Magician this way I'd allow an absolute minimum of an hour to do one thirty-minute Lesson on one of Teek's missions. If things went perfectly that was enough. If something went wrong it could be twice as long to get what I'd come for. I'd usually bail if it looked like that was going to happen, taking whatever xp I'd got and banking it before something else went sour.

If I had time and felt strong, I'd take two or even three tasks, hope to finish all of them before my buffs began to drop. Run the Lesson on the last and get the benefit on all the hand-ins. It rarely worked. I almost never managed three. They come in five level increments, all in different zones. The zones can be on different continents or in different dimensions. The travel time alone was crippling.

Franklin Teek channels Goldilocks. The mission ten levels below is cold. Easy, but it won't give much xp. Five levels below tastes just right. At level? Too hot to be worth the trouble, most times. You'll get burned. Anything above or below those, forget it.

Within that structure, some of the zones he picks will be much harder than others, for all kinds of reasons. Which expansion they're from, what class you're playing, line-of-sight issues, resistances, types of mob, runners, you name it.

The short of it is, soloing in EverQuest isn't hard, it just takes an inordinate amount of planning and concentration. And time. So much time.

Overseer doesn't. Overseer missions take maybe ten minutes to set up, tops. I could do it in five. You can stay in the Guild Lobby so your buffs never fade, not that you need them now. You're not going to be fighting anything. You don't have to move, let alone travel. There's literally no risk so the risk-reward ratio is infinite.

Once you've upgraded your agents to handle the higher quality quests, xp is better than Teek and the Lesson and you didn't have to go anywhere. Every twelve-hour quest gives somewhere between 0.8% and 1.3% of a level. The better-quality quests, more than that. Longer ones, better still.

Running the full ten would nets ten to fifteen per cent of the level, every time, if you pick the ones with the best xp. I always take the recruitment quests that give you more agents. Those don't give xp at all. I've also been taking grey, easy quests while I level up different jobs. Even so, I make 10%  for ten minutes, twice a day. When I've leveled them all and only take the best xp, I should hit 15% a day, maybe twenty.

I've been doing it every day since the feature was added. My target was level 100. I figured I might get there by October but I hadn't reckoned with the way xp ramps up on the better quality quests. At the start I couldn't do those but now I do one or two every day. As my agents improve I'll do more and xp will roll in even faster.

Which is good, because there are stil twenty more levels to go. That could take me another year. I'm not sure I'll have the discipline to keep going every single day but even if I slack off I know I'll get there, sooner or later. What was once a distant fantasy is now just a matter of time.

I guess at some point the Magician will want to try out her new power, somewhere, on something. First. I'll need to upgrade all her spells. And her pets. And her foci. And her gear. Not much point doing any of that yet, not if I'm still leveling. I guess I'll just stay where I am and carry on as I have been, for now.

Ding 100! though. Ding 100!

Already Home : EverQuest

To no-one's surprise more than my own, my leveling adventure on EverQuest's Vox server continues apace. I've logged in every day since I fortuitously rediscovered my then-Level 6 Necromancer three weeks ago. He's now Level 34.

Given that my average session lasts about an hour that's astonishingly fast progress by the traditional pace of EQ. When I finally settled on a Druid as my focus character sometime around January or February of the year 2000, I think it would have been May or June of that year before she reached the mid-30s - and I played her for maybe twenty hours every week.

The Druid is a good solo class but the Necromancer is supreme so it seems odd that I never really stuck with playing one. It would seem on paper to be a perfect fit for me, plus I played with several truly amazing necros, who showed me the incredible versatility of the class. Mrs Bhagpuss also played a necro with great skill and success for some time but even that didn't prompt me to give it a fair run.
 
It may have something to do with the way my necromantic career was brutally cut short by the infamous Test Server Wipe in June 2000. I've alluded to this extreme low point in SOE's checkered history before so I won't go over it again. Suffice to say it cost SOE three-quarters of their active testing community and it was years before anything like trust was re-established.

I was one of the 75% who took SOE up on their abashed and apologetic offer of a free transfer from Test to Live but my Necro, transplanted, never really flourished. Over the years I've dabbled in the necromantic arts many times. I even played a Necro as my main for five years on EQ2's Test server - a nervous return that worked out well - but in the elder game I settled for the Necro's boorish cousin, the Shadowknight.

This time things may just be different. The necromantic moons may finally be in alignment. It's not so much that I'm planning to level this one all the way. It's more that I already have a boosted Level 85 necro sitting unplayed on my All Access account and the main reason he's unplayed is that I don't know how to play him.

I'm figuring that by the time my Vox necro gets to, say, Crypt of Decay or even Dragonscale Hills I should have the class down well enough to jump ten or even twenty levels and carry on. I could even dual-box the Necro with my 92 Magician (For those keeping score, she hasn't suffered a horrible de-leveling accident. You can't do that any more. I was wishfully exaggerating last time, when I claimed she was 94).

Meanwhile, it's been truly fascinating to observe the culture - especially the leveling culture - on Vox. I've been mixing things up between nostalgia (Qeynos Hills, Blackburrow, Lake Rathetear, South Karana), hot zones featuring Teek's Tasks (Paludal Caverns, Nedaria's Landing, Dalnir) and my need to make some quick Platinum.

Having a Mercenary makes leveling up both easy and relaxing. I absolutely wouldn't be without one. I think they are the single best addition to EQ in the game's 19 year history. They do begin to get expensive around the mid-20s, though, if you don't take care where you hunt.

What with my Merc charging me several plat an hour and spells starting to edge towards double figures, hunting mobs that give great xp but no coin or valuable vendor drops became a luxury I couldn't really afford. I've been making liberal use of my discovery that you can /barter from anywhere and it is indeed as game-changing as I thought it would be, but low-level drops that people want to buy are fairly rare so I can't yet live off that alone.

For one brief moment there was someone buying High Quality Bear Pelts for 150pp each. I rushed to the bear caves in Nedaria's Landing, a spot I know of old to be the best at lowish levels for farming HQ bear. It was there that I came to appreciate just how very powerful a solo class the Necro is - especially when backed by a Cleric who never complains about bad pulls.

The bears turned out to be deep red cons. I tried to single pull one with the pet but two came and then two more added. Four red cons in a confined space - certain death, xp loss and a long run back if I was foolish enough to want to try again.

Only...I won. It was very close and involved a lot of swearing and bears being feared in all directions but in the end they died and I didn't. A couple more chaotic scenes on respawn and eventually I got a pattern worked out, found a way to single pull to the tunnel and kept the spawn broken and the room cleared until I had plenty of pelts to sell.

By which time, naturally, the guy who was buying them wasn't buying any more and hasn't been since, so I have a load of HQ bear pelts clogging up my packs. Much more valuably, I had the glimmering of an understanding just how powerful my character was becoming.

From there I went on to hunt deeper red cons further in Nedaria's Landing. I got in over my head with a horde of sleek panthers and timber griffawns, which gave me good practice in how to make distance from spawn before feigning death. I also discovered that, left alone, a Cleric merc will chain heal herself for what seems like hours while taking no offensive action whatsoever, which means it's a very bad idea to FD at 2% health and zero mana because it's along wait before you can reset the encounter.

All good learning experience. As were my first and second attempts to break a room in Dalnir. It's a very long run to Dalnir from pretty much anywhere so I didn't want to Gate when things went south, which they did remarkably quickly as red con roamers started to pile on. Fortunately I was the only one in the dungeon so my frantic sprint to the zone line didn't require me to fat finger the traditional /yell of "Trsain to Zojne!"

In a relatively short while I had a room nicely broken in Dalnir. XP was good but loot wasn't. It was at that point that I decided to swallow my pride and go hunt Sand Giants. At 30 I thought I might be a tad low but I seemed to be consistently underestimating what I could kill and there's only one way to know for sure.

I headed to South Ro, where, in the revamped version, there's a handy spawn of Sand Giant Elites up in a quiet corner. I have camped them before on other characters and other servers when I've needed some quick cash and I've always had the place to myself. Not on Vox.

First time there was a 38 Druid camping them. He'd killed most of them and he was medding up when I scampered in on my Worg. I debated whether to be super-polite and cede the camp immediately but I really wanted to know if the SGs were doable for me at 30 or not. So I pulled the one still standing.

And killed it. Quite easily, although giants do have a lot of hit points. The druid was probably preparing his /petition to customer service over abuse of the Play Nice Policy but he never had to send it because I looted my giant and moved on. I had to stop anyway and I knew what I needed to know.

Next evening I came back and the giants were camped again - by a level 84 Shaman. Outrageous! Not like I've ever done it... So I moved to Rathe Mountains, where the Hill Giants live. It's further to travel and not so convenient because the HGs roam whereas the SGs stand still but this time I had the place to myself.

I stayed there until I'd made 500 plat or so. I spawned the Tainted Hill Giant, a named mob for some Epic weapon quest or other. I killed him and the Corrupted Hill Giant immediately spawned in his place. I'd just read the tainted up on Allakhazam, though, so I was standing well back.

When I dinged I gated to Plane of Knowledge, went to buy my new spells, and promptly made more money in two minutes re-buying crafting mats off the spell vendor and selling them on /barter than I'd made on giants in an hour. So it goes.

Lat night at Level 33 I took Franklin Teek's task for Level 35s. It sent me to Stone Hive, where, for the very first time since Level 6, I finally died. Not because the bixies were too tough. Oh no, they were just fine, even the red cons and even when I overpulled.

What got me was the mob that spawned when I killed a drone. I'd made the mistake, while passing through Plane of Knowledge, of taking a random quest: Skal's Waking Nightmare. I should have remembered this opt-in death sentence from the last time I did it but that was so long ago...

Suffice it to say that when a red con Enchanter mob spawns instantly on top of you after a long fight that's left you low on mana, then proceeds to chain-stun you with a stun that lasts 48 seconds, things do not go well, even if you have a Mercenary to chain heal. If you then decide to accept your Merc's offer of an in-combat 50% rez on the spurious grounds that you'll be able to sprint a few yards then FD, well more fool you.

Even then, it might have worked, had another player not arrived to help just as I stood up. Before I could do anything the Walking Nightmare charmed me and set me on the new player. As I said to him, while I watched my necro (fortunately flat out of mana and therefore completely harmless) flailing away "I haven't had this happen to me since about 2002".

In fact, I thought they'd put a stop to mobs charming players long ago but apparently not. After a long fight in which I took no part other than observer and during which the Nightmare also charmed the other player and both our Mercs, although not all at once, my new acquaintance finally got the better of the situation. We congratulated ourselves on surviving and I retired to a quiet corner to finish my level. I must remember to delete that quest.

The reason there was another player there in the first place is that Stone Hive, like all the zones in The Serpent's Spine expansion, now forms part of the Golden Path, a preferred leveling plan that, at least on Vox, is well-attended.

There were a dozen people in Blightfire Moors, the previous zone and ten in Stone Hive. Most were an appropriate level although there were some high levels there on buffbot duties. People were even grouping.

Whereas old lags like myself, Wilhelm and Keen mostly bang on about the very old days and suggest hunting in places like The Karanas, Crushbone, Blackburrow or Unrest, the real meat of the low-mid level game these days is in the Serpent's Spine. If you want to start playing EQ and have an experience that's recognizable as something from the post-WoW world, that's where you should go.

Luckily for me, I was playing EQ when TSS launched. Or, to be more accurate, Mrs Bhagpuss and I made one of our periodic returns to EQ specifically because SOE decided to sell an expansion with a new race, new starting area and new set of leveling zones. We made new characters on a fresh server and levelled up in TSS all the way to the 60s or 70s, which means I can go there now and get a moderate nostalgia hit as well as great xp and decent loot. Try doing that in Unrest and see how far it gets you!

Every session I play I remember something, learn something and realize how very much there is I still don't know about EQ, both past and present. Right now I feel like I want to play EverQuest more than I want to play any other MMO and I have more ideas for things I'd like to do than I can come up with for any other game.

We'll see if that lasts. At the moment I can knock off a level in an hour like shelling peas. When that goes to a bubble an hour - 20% of a level - as it will all too soon, we'll see if the whole process still seems so satisfying. Should have another good twenty or even thirty levels before that happens, though.

However long my interest and enthusiasm lasts this go round, it's astonishing to see how much life there is in the old game yet. Long may it continue.

What's Old Is New Again : EverQuest

As a rule, I don't find all that much to complain about in EverQuest these days. Over the long years since I began playing, back at the death of the 20th Century, many of the wrinkles have been smoothed out and I like that. As much as I enjoyed the "up hill both ways in the snow" gameplay of 1999, I prefer the modern version. Coming back yet again after another break of six months or so I noticed a couple of improvements that had slipped under my radar.

Time Stands Still In Plane of Knowledge

Ever since the Guild Lobby was introduced with the Dragons of Norrath expansion in 2005 players have gathered there by the score because that's where time stands still.  If you go afk in the Lobby all your buffs will be in exactly that the same state of decay when you return as when you left. What's more, if you stand around running your idling animations for long enough you can guarantee some generous max-levels will spray MGBs all over you - and that's a good thing.

MGB means Mass Group Buffs - and retinal scarring.

The huge conglomeration of players, pets and mercs huddled in the center of the Lobby has long been known as the Lag pile for obvious reasons. As this thread suggests its not seen as a social activity by everyone but I've always appreciated it.

One thing I hadn't noticed until yesterday is that the temporal stasis effect now extends to both Plane of Knowledge and The Bazaar. I don't know when this change happened but it's incredibly convenient and most welcome. Being able to wander around PoK and go shopping in The Bazaar without having to worry about losing buffage or needing to swap to a "shopping" character is wonderful.

Tunes For A New Moon 

Zoning into The Bazaar yesterday afternoon I was immediately aware of something whose wonderfulness was somewhat less certain: the new zone music. It was so striking that I tabbed out right away to google what had happened.

It seems that when the Shadows of Luclin expansion was released SOE simply forgot to include most of the music files. I know, right? You'd think someone might have noticed but I must have played for many hundreds of hours all across Norrath's ill-fated moon and I can't honestly say it ever occured to me to wonder why there was no orchestra accompanying my adventures.

You'd think she'd notice the lack of music with ears like that...

Dev Dzarn explains on the forums

Previously unreleased music for every Shadows of Luclin zone was recently unearthed from a dangerous trek through the studio archives. These musical pieces will now play when adventuring on Norrath's most cat-filled Moon.

So far I've only heard the music in The Bazaar, which the OP of the thread describes as "elevator music". That's a tad harsh but it certainly is on the jazz-lite end of the musical spectrum. I think whoever composed it might have been taking the "shopping mall" aspect of the zone somewhat too much to heart.

I look forward to exploring the new lunar musical assets at some future date. Right now I have a much more important discovery to unpick.

Gateway to adventure.

Get 'Em While They're Hot Zones

In another unexpected and very welcome evolution for this venerable game, DBG have revamped the way Hot Zones work. This happened back in April but news about EQ is hard to come by when you're not actively playing and I missed it.

It would have been sufficient news in itself to get me to log in again had I known but instead it came as a very pleasant surprise when I spoke to Franklin Teek a few days ago. I took his daily tasks for Levels 75, 80 and 85 and for the first time in many years he didn't ask me to go to Bloodfields or Oceangreen Hills.

Being a little out of practice I decided to start at the easy end with the Level 75 task. That turned out to be a great choice. Not only is Jewel of Atiiki a lovely zone to spend time in - light, airy, relaxing - but the mobs there are perfectly spaced for soloing and exactly the right difficulty level. What's more, with the Hot Zone bonus the xp ticks over nicely, at least by the standards of the late 80s.

I do like a nice, wide corridor.

 
 The Hollow World

Of my few complaints concerning latter-day EQ, near the top of the list would be overly dark zones. I am just about fed up of hunting in gloomy, overcast areas where it always rains and everything is green and brown. My favorite memories of Norrath are of the bright blue waters and glowing yellow sands of Oasis and the Deserts of Ro or the wide open plains and endless skies of the Karanas, not the murky hollows of Hills of Shade.

It was with surprise and delight, then, that I arrived in one of the many zones I've never before visited, Jewel of Atiiki, to find myself in an analog of ancient Egypt. Pyramids, sphinxes, efreeti, palm trees and...gorillas?

The zone is part of The Buried Sea expansion, which is one I have dabbled in before but never fully explored. I had no idea it went from Pirates to Pharaohs. I spent a couple of very happy hours there exploring the pyramids before getting down to the job in hand - finding and killing my five gorillas.

Now that is indoors, I'll  grant you.

Ironically, given the bright sunlight and clear skies, the entire expansion takes place deep underground. It's magic, I expect, although it must be mostly illusion, because although it might look like the wide open spaces down there, apparently it still counts as indoors and you can't ride mounts "indoors".

It meant I couldn't use the new mount I got from opening Legends of Norrath packs, which in turn meant I occasionally needed to take an old school sit and med break. Never mind. That's a small price to pay for being able to see what I'm doing for once.

Onwards And Upwards

With this great new hunting ground I'm confident of reaching level 90 at last. I made over 10% of level 89 yesterday, which feels as good as finishing a full level in most other MMOs. Where to go after that I'm not sure but I expect Franklin Teek will tell me.

Given the age of the game it's very encouraging indeed to see just how much work is still being done on it. Those Hot Zones had languished under SOE for so long that most people probably thought they'd never change again. Of course, most of the commenters in the thread seem to wish they hadn't changed even now, but that's EQ players for you.

Look at me, Ma! Top of the pyramid!

New Blood, Old Blood

There's change afoot out of the game, too. The most prominently reported of the recent bout of hires at DBG was the recruitment of Cryptic's Jack Emmet to be CEO of Daybreak's Austin studio, responsible for DCUO. Of more interest to me was the re-hiring of Ngreth, husband of EQ2Traders' Niami Denmother and longtime tradeskill dev for EverQuest.

For once the forum response was almost entirely enthusiastic. Ngreth, like Domino over at EQ2, has long had the respect of the players, crafters and adventurers alike. As I was pondering yesterday, Columbus Nova's plans are hard to fathom but the signs and portents continue to read very favorably from where I'm looking at them.

So, I'm back in EverQuest for yet another run. I will get my Mage to 90, which will allow her to upgrade the gear she got as part of the level 85 boost, all of which she is still wearing. How much further I can take her, solo, I'm not sure. The level cap now stands at 105. With the added incentive of some attractive new maps to explore I just might be able to make a dent in that before it recedes even further out of reach.

As always it will be fun trying.

The Great Spring Update or Here, Let Me Show You How To Do It!: GW2

GW2's Spring Update dropped on Tuesday and so far the reaction seems mostly positive, which might be a first. As expected, there was little in the way of new content, with the meat of the patch being system revamps and revisions.

The parts of the game under focus were World vs World and the Heart of Thorns maps, all of which received substantial makeovers or, in the case of HoT, nerfs. Seldom can such extreme pruning and cutting have been greeted with such enthusiasm.

The ever-unpopular Desert Borderlands had their barricades torn down, their bridges widened and their annoying House of Fun mechanics toned down or switched off altogether. Where once awkward jump pads or dangerous scrambles provided the fastest routes now hastily bodged-in ramps make access to key areas faster and less fatal.

That all went down well with everyone other than the awkward cusses who professed to have liked the DBLs all along, although I can sense a certain nervousness around the impending return of the Alpine Borderlands among those who can now see the potential in the new maps that was previously hidden behind the Extreme Sports aesthetic.

Almost universally welcomed was the addition of sPvP style "Reward Tracks" to WvW. I've long been of the belief that adding extrinsic rewards to game modes in order to encourage more people to try them is counter-productive. There's some real-world evidence for this.

Given that "lack of rewards" has been one of the top three complaints about WvW since launch, though, rather than fight the concept I can only comment on the execution, which is not at all bad. It's a cut-and-paste from SpVP, for sure, with just one new track specific to WvW added, but it adds some flavor and more stuff is more stuff, however you cut it.

One very clever move was giving Commanders the option to allocate a portion of the reward credit accrued by a squad to specific squaddies, who might be away from the main action on guard or scout duty, tagging siege or walking the commander's basenji.

The main problem with that is that it feeds off a new "Participation" mechanic, whereby players' activity is tallied over the fifteen minute intervals between "ticks", finalizing and handing out permanent reward credit only at the "tick", when the War Score is incremented. That just happens to be the exact same mechanic that this patch removed from the PvE Heart of Maguuma maps (the new, official, name for what has sometimes been referred to as Magus Falls). A little consistency would be nice.

Last night the second shoe dropped for WvW as server merges world linking redued the number of competitors in the North American league from twenty-four to a round dozen. Yak's Bend linked with Anvil Rock, which made about as much difference as an eye-dropper does to an ocean. My third-account server, Ehmry Bay, linked with Henge of Denravi, which might be a tad more noticeable. Gone are the days of wandering around doing dailies and taking camps without seeing a red name, I fear.

It hasn't been half a day yet so how all this will pan out is anyone's guess but by far the strongest reaction on the forums was outrage at the huge queues, hundreds strong and hours long, that most servers had at reset. I suspect that will be seen as a big win at Anet Towers. If nothing else the changes will have at least attracted the interest of a lot of dormant players who are now piling back in to see if the game they didn't like enough to keep playing has anything left to offer.

That, in a nutshell, is the overriding theme of the Spring Update: do whatever it takes to get people back through the doors. The suspicion is that Heart of Thorns under-performed at launch and then proceeded to tank hard, dragging the rest of the game down with it. Colin Johansen fell (or was pushed) onto his sword, leaving Mike "Two Hats" O'Brien to awaken from his slumber, remount his shining charger and ride in to Save The Game.

And on this evidence he just might. The WvW changes, while not by any means perfect or complete, have been better received than anything done for or to the game mode since launch. The threads on the Forum are positively glimmering with faint praise. As for the downgrades to difficulty and upgrades to rewards for PvE in Heart of Thorns, if map chat is anything to go by people there are even happier.

No longer do you need to commit a minimum of an hour, maybe as long as two, just to be sure of getting the loot you came for. Participation has been replaced by straightforward as-it-happens, by the event rewards. You can drop in, do two or three events and leave or you can stay all day; it's up to you. Either way you get something worth having.

And what you get has improved. A lot. The reward tables have been fleshed out and plumped up. The various chests have more in them and better. The event rewards have a chance for desirable drops including Ascended items. The rate at which the various map currencies accrue is many times faster.

There's a permanent 50% increase in xp for killing mobs, the hated "diminishing returns" debuff that discouraged farming and grinding is gone, there's increased frequency of access and reduced difficulty for Adventures.  Many existing events have been restructured and many new events added to facilitate solo and small group play.

I soloed one Veteran mob last night that was flagged as an event. It took about twenty seconds (berserker staff ele - ymmv) and I got better rewards than I would have expected from fifteen or twenty minutes of Old HoT.

Oh, and you now get a free upgrade to level 80 with every purchase of Heart of Thorns, complete with all the gear you need and all the waypoints opened so you can jump straight into the expansion content without any of that tedious leveling nonsense. If you already have HoT and all your character slots are filled with 80s, don't worry - you get a big pack of goodies including dyes and some gold.

ANet are on a major love offensive with this update, that's obvious. The "new" regime is clearly prepared to break with any and all of the precepts of the team that got us to where we were until last Tuesday. The new mantra is "give the punters what they want". We even got autoloot in WvW and our old fireball graphics back. It's almost as though someone was actually listening to feedback!

Take dungeons: I don't do them myself so I have no anecdotal evidence to offer but it looks as though there has been a complete climb down on the aggressive decision taken months ago to all but kill that game mode off. Now the talk is all about how that was "unnecessary" and there are new rewards and plenty of encouragement to get back underground.

There's more - a lot more. It's all in the mother of all patch notes if anyone wants the full details.  The key takeaway, though, is that this seems to be about the best-received update I can remember for the game and that's almost entirely down to a complete 180 degree change of direction.

This update acknowledges what the majority of players and commentators have been saying for half a year or more: Heart of Thorns was misconceived, aimed at the wrong demographic (and missed it, too) and was bad for the future of the game. I actually liked HoT a lot more than I expected but I'm certain I'd have liked it a lot more, even than that, had it launched in this latest version.

The "Buy Heart of Thorns" pop up is back in the corner of the screen for my non-HoT accounts. Having done the unpleasant and humiliating work to make the expansion more palatable to those players who voted without their wallets, ANet naturally want to reap the reward of more sales.

I would already have recommended HoT because, as I said, I've enjoyed it and I feel I got my money's worth long ago. This re-envisioning is even easier to recommend. It's slicker, more polished, better-targeted and more accessible. Whereas I previously had no plans to add HoT to my second or third accounts, not because of the value but because I wouldn't have wanted to repeat the required grind, now it's quite likely that one or both will receive the upgrade at some point.

GW2's Spring Update isn't a second coming on the scale of FFXIV:A Realm Reborn but it's a major change of direction that bodes very favorably indeed for the second expansion. If they really have learned their lesson, as, on this evidence, it appears they may have, then the next expansion could be a real cracker!