How To Upgrade Ascension Spells (The Easy Way) : EQII

Earlier this week I spent some considerable time trying to work out how to upgrade Ascension spells in EverQuest II. If you just want to know how to do it, scroll down to the end of the post! If you want to see how I got there, read on...

Ascension was introduced in the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. At that time it seemed like a peculiarly perverse system even by EQII's abstruse and obscure standards.

I won't re-hash the bizarre details of how it worked back then. I barely understood it at the time and most of what I once knew I've forgotten. Thankfully, the whole structure has been revised and revamped, possibly more than once, so we can all move on and pretend it never happened.

For historical accuracy, I'd normally at least try to lay out the basic timeline in a post like this but the available information is more fractured and confusing than the original system. I did spend a while reading forum posts and various guides but it made my head hurt so I had to stop.

Ascension was never a popular addition to the game, at least as far as I can make out. It was confusing, expensive, grindy and turned everyone into battle-mages. At least, those are some of the reasons people gave when they claimed to be quitting the game over it.

In retrospect it seems that the main drive behind adding it was to reduce system load, something it attempted to do in several ways.

 Ascension spells do huge damage but have very long cast times. There are also just four Ascension classes, of which you can only use one at a time.

The means of changing from one Ascension class to another is highly restrictive. You have to visit an Ascension trainer to request a change of class, meaning no hot-swapping from one line to another during raids. It's also to your great advantage to use one of your Ascension abilities to convert all your other non-Ascension abilities to do damage of the type your chosen Ascension class uses.

If you have a whole bunch of people concentrating on Ascension abilities, the server has to deal with four classes using four types of damage on a slowish cadence rather than twenty-six classes using seven types of damage in a hyperactive frenzy. You can see how that might lead to fewer calculations.

You can also see how it would lead to fewer options and to the player feeling railroaded. If the system had been slick, straightforward and intuitive that might not have mattered but it was complicated, awkward and gnomic, so it very much did.

Even as a solo player, for whom Ascension spells were really an optional extra, I found it a little annoying at times. And all I was dealing with was the basic leveling process. Until this week I'd never even considered upgrading the spells.

The reason I finally got around to it was mainly that I'd gone quite a long way down the upgrade path on almost everything else. My Berserker has all his gear at 170 Resolve, with some of it at 175 or even 180. Most of his combat arts are Expert, some are Master. He's made and fitted BoL Adornments in almost every slot and he's completed some of the sets. He has max level mercenaries and mounts, decently geared. Even his Familiar is pretty darn nice.

All of this can be improved still further, even within the paramaters of a soloist, but he's at the stage where those improvements are noticeably incremental. I was going over his stats to see if I'd missed anything obvious and it turned out I had: almost all of his Ascension spells were still the basic apprentice versions.

That led to some long and not very fruitful research sessions. I read a lot of contradictory and confusing advice. I studied explanations and discussions of how Ascension spells might be upgraded until I felt even more at sea than when I started. Eventually I worked out that although various crafters can make various subsets of the spells, Sages can now make all of them. That seemed like somewhere to start.

I went through my bank vaults and dug out all the various Illegible Pages and so on, all of which can still be used but some of which belong to different versions of the system. I gave those to my max level Sage to see what he could do with them. Not much, as it turned out.

 I checked to see if he had the recipes to use them. He didn't.

I read some more and discovered he should be able to buy the necessary recipe books from a vendor in the Myrist Library, once he had sufficient faction, for which he'd need to do the Chaos Descending signature tradeskill questline.

I thought he'd done that but he hadn't even started it. I set to and finished it over three sessions. Then I went looking for the vendor to buy the books. I couldn't find him.

Back to the internet. After several unecessary trips to various vendors around the world, because every discussion I read just said "the vendor sells them", but never gave the vendor's name or location, it finally occurred to me that maybe it meant the crafting trainer in Myrist itself.

It did. All the books were there, on sale for chump change. I bought the lot and scribed them. Now my Sage should, in theory, be able to make all levels of all ascension spells. He can't in practice, of course, because some of the levels require those special pages, which are dropped as loot from bosses and given as rewards from missions.

What he can do with just normal mats is make both Journeyman and Expert Ascension spells. So I had him make journeyman for all the ones the Berserker uses regularly. He had a couple of the pages to make Adepts so he made those too, and for those he then made the Experts.

I had to make the whole sequence for those because you can't just jump to the highest quality. A character has to have scribed each preceding level before they can scribe the next.

It's still more complicated and fiddly than regular spell upgrading but compared to how it used to be it is pretty straightforward.

To save anyone else having to work out the basics the way I did, here's my pared down, no frills bullet point guide:

• Sages can make all Ascension spells.
• All the required recipe books are for sale on the crafting trainer in Myrist, The Great Library.
• The vendor is called Elmelar Stilltree and she's in the Crafter's Gallery.
• The books you want are Sage's Primer 01 to Sage's Primer 10.
• To buy them (or even see them on the vendor) the character needs to have completed only the first three quests in The Scrivener's Tale, the tradeskill signature questline.
• That's the part called Escargot Overclocking, for which you get the fantastic 88-slot Crystal Shard Backpack as a reward. You'll probably want to do the quest just for that, anyway.
• You do not need to carry on with the rest of the very long questline, although it's easy and entertaining enough to enjoy for itself. It also has a useful final reward, a vendor selling all kinds of fuel, who you can summon, anywhere, on an hourly cooldown.
• Once your Sage has bought and scribed the books, they will be able to make all Journeyman and Expert level Ascension spells using only regular materials, including one regular rare, Planar Energy.
• The Sage can also make Grandmaster Ascension spells using regular mats, a regular rare and a Celestial Foundation or Spellshard, a kind of ultra-rare regular mat.
• All of these mats, even the ultra-rare, can be gathered from normal gathering nodes. They are all also tradeable and can be bought on the Broker, assuming anyone's selling them.
• For all other grades (Adept, Master, Ancient and Celestial) you'll need the appropriate Illegible Scroll. These are dropped by bosses or found in mission reward crates. They are also tradeable and can be bought from other players.
• Once crafted, the character who wants to use the spells must scribe them in sequence. 
• You can use offline research to upgrade all levels of Ascension, allowing you to skip over any level for which you don't have the mats.

I think that's about it. It may not be crystal clear but it's a lot clearer than anything I found!

If anyone spots any errors or omissions, let me know in the comments and I'll correct as necessary.

Ascension spells are very powerful and can be lot of fun to use once you get the hang of them. Worth the trouble they take, I'd say.

I Know What I Like In My Wardrobe : EQ2

It's funny how things turn out, sometimes.

Yesterday I read the patch notes for EQ2's weekly update. They're are always conveniently released well ahead of the downtime, which gives everyone plenty of time to rent their garments and anoint themselves with ashes before reality arrives to spoil everything. It's always best to vent your paranoia about how terrible change is going to be before you get to experience it first-hand, I always find. Reality can be such a letdown.

I read the notes at EQ2Wire as usual. I used to go to the forums for the news but of late I've relied on the estimable Feldon. The EQ2 devs themselves are mostly to found explaining themselves on Discord these days, apparently. I guess Reddit is passé.

EQ2Wire, as has been observed many times, is a reliable and accurate source such as many MMOs must wish they had. I was a tad surprised, then, to see Feldon out himself as a virtual ex-player. In his own words, he has "barely played EQ2 in the last few years", which is why he's advertising for a "Staff Writer", one who does.

It did cross my mind for a moment to apply, although I have had a lifelong rule never to do for money anything I also do for pleasure. As it happens I'm not qualified anyway, since I have neither an Ascended Class at Level 10 or the pre-requisites for an Epic 2.0 (much less the weapon itself).

I do have a Level 94 Warlock that I'm trying to nudge towards 100, though, which was why a couple of lines in the patch notes bothered me somewhat:

• Removed bonus experience multipliers for defeating encounters from all previous expansion zones.
• Going forward, bonus experience multipliers will only be applied to zones in the most recent expansion era.

I wasn't entirely clear about what this meant, as I commented in the EQ2Wire thread. I'd mostly been leveling my Warlock by the painfully slow method of going to level appropriate zones and doing the quests I found there. Primitive, I know.

Of course, no bonuses of any kind ever apply to the xp you earn from quest rewards. Most of the time I'm out playing my lower level characters the regular way I get little benefit from the permanent 60% xp bonus I earn from having three max level characters on the account, or even from the Vitality (100% rested xp) I almost always have running.

That's why, when there's a bonus XP weekend, everyone swigs their pots and rushes to the best bonus xp Heroic dungeon they can manage. Or they used to. I guess that's over and done with now, along with the Powerleveling services provided, at a fee, by bored Shadowknights all Norrath over.

Whether it's either a good or a sustainable thing, guiding everyone into the relatively small number of zones in the current expansion, I guess we'll have to wait and see. This patch also added "Expert" versions of all the instances so the number of "current expansion zones" very nearly doubled overnight. Not that I'll be seeing any of the Expert ones - it'll probably be three more expansions before I poke my nose into the regular Kunark Ascending Heroics. Take me that long just to get the Resolve.

Anyway, that was what spurred me to get the Warlock out and finish off Level 94. Seemed much the same to me. Slowish but then it always was. Certainly no slower than last time I took him hunting.

He dinged 95 and that meant time to visit the bank. There are four key levels in the 90s: 90 itself, 92, 95 and 98. Those are the main steps for gear. Moving from one to the next can be a huge upgrade.

Now that's what I call an upgrade.

My Warlock was largely wearing the generic gear he'd been gifted when I gave him the free boost to 90. No wonder things had seemed to be getting harder to kill; he'd missed a complete upgrade path at 92.

I fiddled around in the shared bank, trying on hand-me-downs but there were surprisingly few that fit him, which is how I ended up on my Berserker, going through his bags and boxes.  And that was when I had the brilliant idea.

Try and stop me!

It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been talking on this blog the other day about the Wardrobe feature. There I was, looking at these drifts and piles of tunics and helmets and boots and cloaks (so many cloaks...), when it occurred to me for the first time ever to see just how much DBG are charging to increase the meager allotment of slots that come with the basic version of the expansion.

Not much is the answer. Not much at all. A pittance, you could say. So little, indeed, I would call it a nominal fee. Oh alright, it's 50DB per row of 6 slots. And as an All Access member I get a 10% discount, so 45DB for me.

Also, as a Member, I get 500DB per month, so if I wanted to I could add eleven rows of six slots to my Wardrobe every month, effectively for nothing. That sounds like a good plan. Only I don't need to wait because I'm sitting on over 15,000DB on that account alone from previous Triple SC weekends and general long-term miserliness.

I doubled all my slots, from six to twelve, for every kind of item the Wardrobe will hold. Then I went through my bank and tried on every No Trade piece of gear in the Dressing Room. I transmuted the ones that were so ugly I couldn't imagine ever wearing them even for a joke and added all the rest to my Wardrobe.

Gotta have more hats...

Some of them wouldn't go in because they had adornments stuck in them. I spent a few minutes googling that because I was sure there was a way to get them out without destroying either the adornment or the item and I was right, there was. What's more it's a permanent, free skill with unlimited uses that you get as one of the final rewards for completing the Age of Malice Signature questline - which my Berserker has done.

He didn't have the skill though. After some extensive swearing research I found the quest reward languishing, unclicked, in the depths of one of his bags. I'd never even realized what it was or what it did, just put it to one side for later and forgot about it.

Well, now it's later. All the adornments popped out neat as peas and the plain clothes popped into the Wardrobe. The whole exercise took me almost three hours, much of which was oohing and aahing and gosh-wowing over the amazing designs and styles I had locked away in my bank vaults. Many of them I'd never even seen before because when I'm out questing and I get a reward that's not an actual upgrade I tend to just huff a bit and throw it in a sack.

Which is a terrible shame because EQ2 has some superlative fashion designers, it seems. So many particle effects! So many sheens and glows and moving parts. What a waste it's been, leaving them all locked away all these years.

I learned a lot today. For one thing, I have strongly revised my opinion of EQ2's new Wardrobe feature. It may not be the very best I've seen but it's up there. It's more flexible, more practical and a lot cheaper than I had been imagining. Yes, you have to pay to expand and yes, it's per character not per account, but with so many of the best-looking items being No Trade that's as it should be. An account-based system would make a nonsense of the entire concept.

I also learned that it doesn't matter how long you've been playing an MMO, you never really, fully understand the systems. Yesterday I was struggling to get to grips with even the basics of the strange mechanics in Revelation Online and today I was doing the same in an MMO I've played almost without a break since it launched well over a decade ago.

Most importantly, though, I learned that, no matter how an MMO might change, it's always more fun if you change along with it rather than digging in your heels and begging it to stop. Some changes are bad but the really bad ones get changed again. Keep the faith and keep going and it will all come right in the end.

And I get to dress like a pirate, whenever I want, which is all I ever really wanted.

Kunark Ascending: First Quarterly Report

I mentioned a while ago that I was just about done with EQ2's most recent expansion, Kunark Ascending, at least as far as completing solo content with my Bereserker goes. Turns out I was somewhat premature in making that assessment.

Power to add, they call it...

KA added several major new features. There were the Epic 2.0 weapon quests, the Wardrobe Tab, gear for Mercenaries and the four Ascension Classes.

Before launch I was probably most excited by the prospect of having a place to throw all the hats, cloaks and fancy robes that had piled up in my bank vaults over the last decade or so. The Wardrobe feature, sad to say, turned out to be more awkward and limited than I'd imagined.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It works. It's an improvement. From my perspective, though, the problems are threefold: it isn't infinite, it isn't free and each item added is destroyed.

You get a reasonably generous allotment of slots, half a dozen for the basic package, rising to a dozen for the Collector's and eighteen for the Premium edition. These can be expanded by way of the cash shop up to an as-yet unknown amount that's not less than sixty. Nevertheless anything short of everything means making choices and making choices was exactly what I was avoiding by dumping all the armor in the bank in  the first place.

So, apart from a couple of hats, I haven't really added anything much to my wardrobe as yet. It means going through literally hundreds of items and making a decision on every one and I keep putting it off for another day - a day that will probably never come.

Missing some Accolades, aren't we?

I've made a lot more progress on leveling and gearing my Mercenaries. My regular Merc is Zhugrus
Blightstaff, the Orc Inquisitor from last year's Zek revamp. He's a powerful and popular choice. I see copies of him running after people all over the place.

The mercenary gear system is on the simple and straightforward side as EQ2 systems go. Quick, too. There are five ranks, each of which allows your Merc to wear additional gear with stats that make him or her more powerful. The gear comes from quests, drops in PQs and instances and can be crafted.

Like most of EQ2's background upgrading processes, and there are many, it's a mixture of  Fire and Forget and hands-on micro-management.  You have to remember to activate each stage and you don't get any reminders but once you've opened the window and clicked the button you can leave your Merc to get on with it until next time.

Zhugrus finished his training some time ago but of course he's not my only Mercenary. My Berserker keeps four of them on standby and every other character I play has at least one more. I'm currently training up Rafik the pirate rat simply because I really like him and I'm also trying to remember (but mostly forgetting) to train the Mercs most used by my Warlock, Inquisitor and Necromancer.

It's a lot to keep track of although not as much as when I was leveling up three of the Tradeskill Apprentices that were added in Game Update 63 almost exactly five years ago. I'm still training up at least one even now!

Three bags full Lady Najena.

For the time being I've shelved any plans towards finishing the Crafter's Epic 2.0. I never had any intention of attempting the Adventuring ones but the tradeskill quest is definitely within my power to complete. It just takes more organizing than I can be doing with at the moment.

That leaves the Ascended Classes. I almost forgot about those. When I finished the expansion's signature questline it was several weeks before I got around to choosing which of the four to begin. Even after reading up on how it all worked I was still somewhat at sea. In the end I picked one pretty much at random and got going.

Weeks later my Berserker is still only about two-thirds of the way to Level 3. The recent Double Ascension Scrolls week struck me as deeply ironic, personally, although I know it was welcomed by people who play more than an hour or two a day.

What the scrolls effectively do is reset some of your limited capacity to acquire Ascended XP, rather like refreshing vitality or Rested XP. Since I generally run with near-full capacity anyway that makes them about as much use to me as a theremin to a badger. Or possibly less. I don't even bother to visit Najena to pick up my regular ones any more.

All the same, I am working on it. Like AAs in EverQuest or Masteries in GW2, Ascended Classes are an excellent way for characters that have capped out to carry on earning xp. I vastly prefer to see my xp going to something even if it's not anything I'm ever going to use. Much better than to see it simply dissipate.

Don't talk to me about dwarves.The rest of the crew I found face-down on the floor but come dawn next day this rat was still propping up the bar. Ratonga power!

It's looking unlikely that I'll have even one Ascended Class maxed before the next expansion arrives and there are four of them. That makes me happy. I like filling bars.

It's just as well, really, because EQ2 is all about the bars. I'm not talking about Brewday, either, which is back right now, bringing with it a fine new quest that I knocked off in half an hour before I began this post.

I've pointed this out before but every returning Holiday hammers it home - the EQ2 dev team is exemplary when it comes to making the most out of not very much at all. We get a new quest for every holiday, every year. They may be simple but they are always fun and often funny, too. If DBG can do it with a handful of people, why GW2 can't manage it with hundreds...well, there really is no excuse, is there?

Don't look left. That's not for you.

Be that as it may it's progress bars I'm talking about. There's yet another one with the new Deity system. Well, it's more of a circle than a bar but it's the same principle. Fill it up. Spend it. Start again. And like all the others you have to pay attention. If you let the meter hit the top of the dial you're spilling god-juice into the ether until you do something to tap it off.

There are consumable Miracles, similar to the old system (which, I think, is also still in-game) if you want them, but the real attraction here is a permanent boost to your choice of three key stats, Potency, Stamina and Crit Bonus. Everyone, without exception, can always use more of all three so this is another simple, accessible, desirable path to upgrading your character.

That's more stats on one item than some MMOs
give you on a whole character!

EQ2 has a lot of those. It makes it a desperately satisfying game to play, whether casually or obsessively. In addition to all of the above I am also still working on improving my Berserker's gear.

By the time he finished the main KA questline he felt very powerful in all appropriate content but since then he's been able to swap out several items for superior PQ drops. He's also used the Infusion system, lottery though it is, to enhance some even further and he finally got around to crafting Adornments for every available slot.

As it stands he's able to solo much of the Heroic content from 2014's Altar of Malice expansion. I even felt confident enough of his survivablilty to accept a group invite in an AoM contested dungeon the other night, something I haven't done for a long time.

Overall, my strongly positive impression of Kunark Ascending continues to strengthen even further. It's fun, there's a ton of stuff to do and it feels very accessible for a casual player. My server, Skyfire, is still bustling with activity nearly four months after the expansion dropped. PQs are very well attended, there are multiple instances of the new zones and most importantly the tone and tenor of general chat is more cheerful and upbeat than I've heard it for years.

No word yet about either the next expansion or another major interim Game Update. On the evidence before me, though, I expect good things.

There! If that doesn't jinx it I don't know what will!

Backsliding : GW2, EQ2

Jeromai appears to be reaching the very limit of his patience with GW2 and the people running it and who can blame him? He makes some extremely apposite and valid observations, both on his own blog and in the comments to this one, about how a game one touted by its developers as a shining example of inclusivity caved on its principles to become the very opposite:

"Guild Wars 2, an egalitarian enjoyable game, bent over to cater to the strident demands of the "we need raids and like the exclusivity it brings because then I can feel better than others" subset and ripped apart the community in the process."

It's true. It's also utterly confounding. Over the lifespan of GW2 other MMOs, almost across the board, have progressively withdrawn from exclusivity in favor of a variety of mechanisms designed and intended to open up previously elite content to the widest possible audience.

WoW introduced "Looking For Raid" to facilitate pick-up raiding. Rift created Intrepid Adventures "to give all players a chance to experience some of the lore of the high level raids". LotRO redesigned Fellowship Quests so that they could be soloed rather than requiring a full group.

There are many similar examples of MMO developers re-tuning their games to reflect reality: players are less social than they were, they don't play as often or for as long as they did and they have a lot less patience for anything that they don't find fun. As Jeromai points out "Wildstar should have been an object lesson in catering to only one small subgroup and expecting the bills to be paid."

Of the MMOs I play the one that has benefited the most from this change of attitude is EQ2. It's a game that has always had a storyline but for many years it was a narrative largely recounted in raid instances. 

At some point when I wasn't paying close attention this began to change. When I returned after a break and played through the 2012 and 2013 expansions Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan I was surprised to find the entire storyline laid out for me, not just in the open world zones but in specially-created Solo and Advanced Solo instances that mirrored those for groups and even raids.

By the time we got to last years Kunark Ascending the sales pitch made that realignment abundantly clear: "All new dungeons for Solo, Heroic, and Raid parties alike". Note that equivalence. It's important.

The move towards inclusivity extends to open world content as well as instancing. ESO recently flattened the level barrier with the "One Tamriel" initiative and EQ2 has long had the option to recalibrate your character's level to match the zone.

Then there are the open world, raid-like events that bypass traditional raid requirements. Generally considered to have originated in Warhammer Online's "Public Quests" before being refined and formulated by Rift with its "rifts" and "invasions", this kind of all-pile-on, zerg-friendly content perhaps reached its apotheosis of public acceptance in last year's pre-event for WoW's "Legion" expansion.

GW2 was an early adopter and something of a market leader for this kind of thing. The game has auto-leveling maps and well before launch ANet made a huge play of the "Dynamic Events" system. However original, let alone mold-breaking that may have been in 2012, nearly five years later it appears little different from the industry standard.

Rift certainly did much of what GW2 does back when GW2 wasn't even in beta and EQ2 has been dabbling with this kind of open-access, inclusive, large scale content since 2011's Destiny of Velious expansion, albeit with mixed success. The current iteration that came with Kunark Ascending, however, is proving extremely popular.

Four months after the expansion arrived, every day at the time I play, which isn't even during North American prime, there's a good chance there will be multiple instances running for Obolous Frontier, Jarsath Wastes and Fens of Nathsar. General chat pings constantly with calls for OF2 or JW3 and ad hoc pick-up raids form, although there's no requirement to be in a raid to participate. 

It's all remarkably good-humored. Other than the occasional request that someone drops a mercenary to make space for another player I have seen absolutely no histrionics, arguing, complaining or elitist jerkism. 

The events are fun although the aging EQ2 engine does make it hard to tell what's going on at times. They are popular primarily, though, not so much for the gameplay as because they are immediately accessible to anyone of the appropriate level and they offer a good chance of desirable rewards.

In this respect Blizzard and Daybreak, like Trion before them, seem to understand something that ANet have never acknowledged, namely that giving people what they want will get them to log in and play. In GW2 the expectation is always that you won't get anything you want from doing an event; in other MMOs you know it's not guaranteed but you feel you're in with a fighting chance.

Contrary to popular belief, GW2 mobs do have desirable drops. Every mob has an infinitesimal chance to drop a variety of "good" items, while "named" mobs such as World Bosses have specific items on their loot tables. The problem isn't what they can drop. It's what they do drop. GW2 has always been exceptionally ungenerous in its in-game rewards. Even though the frequency has been tweaked upwards over the years it remains far and away the most miserly of any major MMO I have played.

This ethos of scarcity (or should we call it meanness?) doesn't extend only to drops from mobs. It even includes holiday events. Compare the recent Lunar New Year event in GW2, in which about the only interesting item (and that's stretching a point) was to be found as a very rare drop from Lucky Envelopes, with the holiday running in EQ2 right now, Erollisi Day.

Erollisi Day is Norrath's analog of Valentine's. It's a relatively minor holiday in the Norrathian calendar. It brings with it nothing much more than ten repeatable quests, six one time only quests, ten achievements, nine books of crafting recipes, a collection, a race and two vendors selling holiday items of all kinds.

Every year the developers add something new and occasionally they retire something old from the line-up. This year they added a short quest called You Don't Bring Me Flowers, which I did with my Berserker on the Skyfire server. It was simple and straightforward and it netted me a pink, patchwork baby dragon for my house.

That was a reward worth considerably more to me than the small effort it required. I logged in my Shadowknight on the Time-Limited Expansion server, Stormhold with the intention of getting him a dragon too. I then found myself wrapped up in all the other entertainment on offer. I ended up taking him racing, doing the collect and completing several of the older holiday quests until eventually I ran out of time before I got around to the doing the thing I came for. I'll be going back again for the little pink dragon and I'll try to get it for several of my other characters as well.

Before that, while I was there on my Berserker I noticed some calls for a Public Quest in Kylong Plains. I didn't know there was a KQPQ. I traveled there by world bell, asked for a raid invite in chat, clicked on the window that popped up, flew to the spot on the map and joined in what turned out to be one of the best PQs I've seen in EQ2 and certainly the most visually appealing.

All of this I did instead of what I'd expected to be doing, namely the new GW2 stuff that came with last week's update. I did it because it was fun, it was easy and it was inclusive. It was, in fact, the very antithesis of  "preparing to have fun rather than just having fun".

Those, by the way, are the three words I used to associate quite specifically with Guild Wars 2: fun, easy, inclusive. The addition of instanced raiding (now with even more elite "Challenge" mode!) and the tuning of more and more content, including both open world and solo instances, towards players able to demonstrate skill sets honed in and for a raid environment, seems to me to mitigate strongly against all of them.

It's painfully ironic that it's GW2 that seems to be focused on adding elite content right at the time other MMOs are tearing it down. For a game that Mike O'Brien promised wasn't about to "fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs" it seems to be making a pretty good fist right now of jumping feet first into the very same traps those traditional MMOs finally escaped.

All For One : EQ2, WoW

Telwyn posted recently about the dubious attractions of repeating the same content you just completed with one character on a second...or third...or fourth... This was something of a theme throughout 2016, from Legion leveling in World of Warcraft, through the Dark vs Light event in SW:tOR to the pre-reqs for EQ2's Kunark Ascending expansion.

There's nothing strange about repeating yourself while playing an MMO, of course. We all know the MMORPG genre was built almost entirely on repetition from the very start. Indeed, all the way back in 1999, when I was doing a little research before deciding whether to plump for Ultima Online or EverQuest, I remember being struck by the extent to which the anecdotes I was reading centered around doing the same thing for what sounded like a very long time. Chopping wood, mostly, as I recall.

In the early years there was, by and large, a distinct division between that sort of repetitive rote activity, required to raise levels, skills or faction, and what we might loosely call story-related content. Quests tended to be a once-only affair, often relevant only to a particular class or race.

There were also, usually, many classes and races in an MMO and many starting points for the leveling journey. Add to that the length of time it took to take a character from creation to cap and the problem of finding yourself doing the exact same thing on a new character you'd done only the week before on another rarely arose. By the time you did get round to doing something for the second time, chances were it was so long ago you'd pretty much forgotten it anyway so it might as well be new content.

Wait a minute...haven't I been here before?

One of the innovations that WoW brought to MMOs, many of which swept through the genre like a forest fire in the years following Blizzard's unforeseen runaway success, was The Quest Hub. It established The Quest as the basic unit of currency for both progression and narrative and that has caused problems ever since.

Certain activities, it seems, can be repeated ad nauseam by many players, with the nausea not appearing for thousands, tens of thousands, millions of iterations. We call it "grinding" and whether it's good, bad or neutral has been discussed, debated and battered into the dirt as a topic for as long as there have been MMOs, without a consensus ever being reached.

Still, people will do it, if grudgingly. Over the years there's been a move by many developers to hide or soften the grind to make it more palatable. Daily quests, weekly quests, bonuses, points systems, you name it, someone's tried it. Perhaps the most dramatic of all these shortcuts has been the move from character-based play to an account-based focus.

When MMORPGs began they were very strongly rooted in the RPG tradition. The idea of characters being interchangeable bits on the drill-head of the player's account, slotted in and out to fit a specific purpose, would have been an anathema to the core playerbase of the era. There was an expectation that the player would have done at least some minimal imaginative homework in preparing the character. The Paper Doll often came with a space specifically for that background to be entered so that it could be perused by other players in the longueurs between pulls or in the fashion parade in front of the city bank.

No, but I have.

WoW changed that not by any intentional move away from its roots but by the sheer, runaway success with which it mainstreamed the genre. With an overwhelming influx of paying customers for whom "RPG" had a very different meaning and with every developer scrambling to re-bottle Blizzard's lightning there was a race towards convenience and ease of access that led directly away from the granular nature of character-based progress towards the inclusive, smooth integration of Account play.

At the same time and for much the same reason, leveling and progression paths were flattened, focused and accelerated. Starting choices were restricted, divergent options were culled and bottlenecks through which all characters had to pass were created. Players arriving in a new game would learn to ask "Where do I go to level at 20?" and expect to get a simple, unequivocal answer.

With each new character taking a fraction of the time to level up and with the progression path taken by a healer, a tank or a scout looking very much the same, player resistance to going through the same content was considerable, exacerbated by the indissoluble connection with narrative through the Quest Hub mechanic. Some developers dealt with this by mono-focusing their design to encourage players to stick with just the one character but, since it's presumably commercial good sense to encourage players to keep making more characters, the more common approach was to make doing so simpler, easier, more convenient.

And then that stopped. Last year several major MMO developers seemed to decide that the trend towards encouraging large stables of characters should come to an end. I'm sure that's not what happened but reading back from the decisions that were made it does look a little like a gentleman's agreement. However it came about the outcome doesn't seem to have been entirely what was expected.

At least it gives me a chance to admire the amazing Art Nouveau interiors.

As Telwyn and others have pointed out, basing a major selling point of your expansion around diversity (Class Halls) and then implementing mechanics based on unity is not an entirely coherent through-line. At least that all involved new content. In EQ2 and (as I understand, not being a player) SW:tOR, the requirement included going back and re-doing (or doing for the first time had you chosen to dodge it first time round) older content.

Since Kunark Ascending was announced and the pre-reqs revealed there's been a continual grumbling about it in the EQ2 community (although when isn't there, over everything, he grumbled?). A few months after release the positions seem to have hardened to "It sucks but suck it up", "Well it's your own fault - you should have done it the first time" and "Stuff this for a game of soldiers - I'm out". Naturally, because all MMO communities are in the end, a self-selecting group of "willing" volunteers the consensus is settling on "Suck it up".

Whether this is a valid or sustainable design decision in commercial terms I guess we will have to wait and see. Wilhelm has an excellent analysis of the current prospects for the remaining DBG MMOs and as he observes the litmus test is whether these games continue to get expansions. If development money continues to be spent making expansions then the least unlikely explanation must be that those expansions make money.

DBG has a year to assess whether taking this particular approach has made more or less money than they expected or hoped. Only a year because for all the troubles and tribulations of recent times SOE/DBG have always managed to knock out full-size expansions for the EQ titles at least once a year and they have already confirmed that work on the 2017 EQ2 expansion has begun.

And I'm still too short to reach the pestle and mortar. #ratongaproblems

Blizzard takes a lot longer. They may not even announce an expansion this year and certainly no-one on the planet expects them to release one. With those longer gaps between them WoW expansions tend more towards game resets anyway so it's always likely that each will see a sharp change of emphasis, direction or approach.

I'm in two minds. Emotionally I'm a fervent backer of character-based play so I see enforced requirements for each individual character as a positive. For that reason I back the return to content that needs to be completed by each character individually, not just by the player as controller of the account.

Which is fine in theory. In practice I have become soft just like everyone else. I've become used to convenience. Having to do the same thing on my Warlock that I just did on my Berserker and thinking while I'm doing it that I'll have to do it on my Inquisitor next week is not necessarily firing my pleasure centers.

Then again, I don't dread it, either. When all's said and done, this is entertainment. I am choosing to do it. If I decide I don't want to click through another fifty screens of overwritten fantasy twaddle or click on another fifty glowing ground spawns there's no-one making me but me. When I stop having fun I can stop trying to have fun.

The stage awaits. Who's on next?

The current approach to progression, narrative and character that developers seem to be taking in many MMOs, especially the ones that have been around a while, is a muddy, messy compromise but when wasn't it? MMOs are messy.

Trends and fashions in game development come and go and we as players live through them. This, too, will pass. For now I'm probably going to set my focus a little more narrowly and try to run a smaller team in most of my MMOs than I have been wont to do. Something closer to The Legion of Super Pets then The Legion of Super Heroes.

Which, come to think of it, is an analogy that's more apposite than I'm likely to admit.

Expanding Expectations : EQ2

Here's one of those posts that began as a comment to someone else's blog - Stargrace's MMOQuests in this instance - and then grew out of all proportion. Not done one of those for a while.

Stargrace, a very experienced EQ2 player who's not long returned after a while away, has been playing through the new expansion, Kunark Ascending. She's recently had a baby (Congratulations, Stargrace!) and begins her observations with the caveat "I mentioned in my previous post that I don’t have a lot of free time and that what free time I do have is pretty sporadic".

I find this somewhat hard to parse. I've played EQ2 most days since the expansion came out. I don't keep a log of how much I play, but throughout November and early December I was in the habit of popping in for an hour or two after I'd done playing GW2 each evening. This last couple of weeks I've played two-to-three hour sessions almost every day with a couple of longer runs at weekends, to the point where it would be fair to say that, right now, EQ2 is my main MMO and GW2 my secondary.

With this level of involvement I have only just completed the main Signature Adventure questline on a single character. Far from becoming an Ascended, my Berserker hasn't even found where to start the learning process yet.

Dawn over Obolus.

He's made some progress with his Crafting. He has the plant that gives daily harvestable rares which means he can at least think about crafting some adornments to upgrade the new gear he's been getting from the quest rewards but so far he's only gotten around to making a couple of those. He's done the craft timeline as far as the part where you need to speak to the guy in Bathezid's Watch, which he can't do without completing Proof of the Pudding, so that's on hold for now...

I've been inside maybe three solo dungeons and done them once each, just where the questline requires it. I tried one Advanced Solo dungeon so far, again just once, for fun. I haven't even found where the entrances to the others are. I've done the PQ's (which I love) a few times - maybe eight or nine in total. I've done almost no faction work or timed quests and I'm still finding new side quests I haven't done almost daily.

Some of my recent time in EQ2 has been spent on my Stormhold Shadowknight and also on getting my Inquisitor to 100 (currently at 98.5) so it hasn't all been about the new expansion but so far I estimate I've had around 20-25 hours play just doing the above on my main character. That in itself seems like a fair return for the box price (I bought the basic edition as I always do) but as you can see from all the things I haven't finished (or even started) that tally is going to double or treble before I ever begin repeating myself or grinding for alts (if I ever do, which I most likely won't).

Moon over Jarsath.

I would guess that, by the standards of non-MMO players, the amount of time I put into playing EQ2 would be considered obsessive at maybe 15 hours a week, especially considering it's not even, really, my main MMO. Stargrace considers her play is constrained by not having a lot of free time. Either she is massively more efficient than I am (highly likely) or her definition of "a lot of free time" is radically different from mine.

Much though it differs from my own, however, her point of view and concomitant assessment of the value and worth of the expansion is hardly unusual. The expectations of regular MMO players about what they can reasonably expect from an expansion seem to me to be challenging for game developers, to put it mildly.

Every expansion in any MMO I play I seem to hear veteran players talking about having done everything other than the grind repeat parts in a matter of days, let alone weeks. At this point I'm usually still trying to come to terms with the opening stages. Sticking with EQ2, even the last several, admittedly more modest expansions (when compared to huge, sprawling epics like Rise of Kunark or Echoes of Faydwer) have each taken me a couple of months to complete on a single character.

Jaled Dar's Shade awakens.

Listening to WoW players talk about the generally well-received Legion expansion it was evident that most had begun to feel they'd done as much as they were interested in doing by about six weeks in. Less than four months after it launched everyone seems to have drifted away again. I have yet to set foot in Legion, even though I added it to my account a couple of months ago, my issue being, ironically, that I don't envisage being able to find enough time to do justice to what's on offer.

GW2 certainly made a better fist of keeping players invested in Heart of Thorns, which was de rigeur for most of the year after it dropped and remains, arguably, essential and unavoidable even now. ArenaNet achieved that level of continued relevance, however, at the expense of a great deal of player good will and with a reportedly significant drop in number and income.

The endless dissatisfaction of MMO players with the entertainment provided has been a constant since I first began playing. I came across the term "Bored 50s" in my first month of EverQuest, back in November 1999, when the game had barely been out for six months. With a level cap increase Bored 50s soon morphed into Bitter Vets, the term we still use today to describe people who keep playing even though they don't seem to be enjoying it very much.

The Iksar Hero walks.

Regular injections of new content, be they free updates or paid expansions, are intended to keep these jaded habitués if not happy then at least docile but they rarely have that effect. Instead they become yet another stick with which to beat the developers for not providing all the entertainment and excitement all the time.

As a player who, by and large, rarely even touches "Heroic" or Raid content and therefore, by definition and choice, misses out on a substantial portion of what he's paying for, I would be hard put to think of any MMO expansion I have ever bought that I don't consider to have been good value for money. Indeed, the only one I regret purchasing in almost twenty years is the first Rift expansion, Storm Legion.

As is apparent from the posts I've written since it came out, I think the Kunark Ascending expansion is both excellent in its content and extremely good value.Two months after I bought it I have yet to get to what many players, even casual players who mainly solo, would consider the "meat". I imagine I'll still be picking away at it by the time the next (already confirmed) expansion arrives in late 2017.

Pretty pictures are all very well but here's the heart of the furnace.

I don't think it's that I'm particularly undemanding. As I've often said, I miss the days (the eight or so years, in point of fact) when the main MMOs I played pumped out expansions every six months. Some of those were so huge they would today be greeted as generously-proportioned new MMOs in their own right. Even the smallest (Legacy of Ykesha springs to mind) would be competitive in present day terms.

Even so, even with expectations formed in richer times, when content spewed out of all MMOs in a torrent rather than a trickle, I still find my main problem isn't finding enough new content to keep me amused but finding enough time to do justice to what's on offer.

And I play MMOs obsessively by the standards of anyone other than another MMO player. Oh, I tab out and web browse a lot these days. I don't put in my 40+ hours of pure, focused play like I did in the old days. Still, an average week sees me giving my full attention to the screen for 20-25 hours. That's a lot.

Sometimes, it's what they don't tell you...

It's more, in my estimation, than any single game can be expected to provide, week in, week out, all year, this year, next year, in perpetuity. I deal with that by playing many MMOs. How MMO developers are expected to deal with the players who expect to get all their entertainment from a single source - even if that means only all their MMO entertainment...well, that's the problem, isn't it? That's a circle that no-one's been able to square.

Hence the stampede towards more forgiving formats: sandboxes and survival sims, where all the developers need to manufacture are the sets and the props; MOBAs and Arenas, where all that's required are rulesets and scorecards; chapter-books, where each release comes as a finished, finite chunk of story with a beginning and, most definitely, an end.

All the more praise, then, for those developers who take the hard, thankless path of building on what came before, expanding their vision, integrating their systems, opening their worlds out instead of closing them in. They'll never please everyone. Every expansion will be too hard for some and too easy for others. Someone will have "finished everything" by the end of the first week (first day!) while someone else will be still begging for more time when the pre-events for next year's model begin.

No, they'll never please everyone but so long as they keep on keeping on they'll please me. I'm looking forward to next year's expansion round already.

Anyone there, ANet? I'm looking at you. Try to keep up...

Kunark Ascending: A Change Of Gear : EQ2

Sunday began with a bang. I woke up to find Mrs Bhagpuss already logged in, answering an APB to defend Valley from the surging JQ hordes. I snatched breakfast and joined the defense effort and that was the morning gone.

After lunch I pottered for a bit and then moved across to Norrath for what I expected to be a more relaxing, laid-back session. It was entertaining, engaging and enormously satisfying but perhaps not quite as relaxed as all that.

I don't have much that's bad to say about the current EQ2 expansion, Kunark Ascending. So far I've found it to be well paced, intriguing, amusing and fun. Also gorgeous. One thing it isn't, however, is straightforward. Or easy.

In common with every MMO expansion ever, KA comes with a deal of tinkering to the systems. In this case there's more to it than just the whims and fancies of The New Item Guy.

For quite a while the EQ2 team delighted in adding exotic, complex and spectacular effects to gear and weaponry, harking back, no doubt, to the great EverQuest tradition of Things That Proc. Unfortunately, the infrastructure that underpins the game was beginning to struggle under the load of so many ifs, buts and maybes so the current trend favors simple effects and huge boosts to base stats.

EQ2 has a lot of stats but it seems there's always room for one more. We got Fervor a while back. Couldn't tell you what that does without looking it up. I checked mine last night and it was zero so it probably doesn't matter much to soloists like me.

The big, new must-have for the current expansion is Resolve, one of those "must be this tall to ride" stats so beloved of Heroic Content designers everywhere. Chat is already filled with people citing their qualifications under the new regime - "100 SK LFG 198 Resolve". Again, as far as I can tell, it's a stat solo players can safely ignore, at least for now.

That just leaves the other several hundred numbers to consider, then. Okay, I exaggerate. It's only just over three dozen for combat and another eighteen for tradeskills. Granted you have to scroll through three full pages in the in-game window to see them all but what's a little scrolling, eh?

I confess I tend to glaze over when trying to compare items. Is this an upgrade to that? Do I need more of this stat or more of the other? It's a common problem, which is why people often link items in chat and throw the discussion open to the wisdom of crowds. Or just beg for help.

That's what happened last night. A returning player, stepping into The Obolus Frontier for the first time, was questioning whether his gear might be the reason his Time To Kill was pushing five minutes. General chat has, of late, been exceptionally responsive and helpful, a sure sign that people are enjoying themselves, so instead of being told to L2P or Git Gud a very informative round-table debate on the best way to approach the new content ensued.

One particular player took the chair and laid out the precise dos and don'ts, going so far as to link the most easily accessible, cheapest Best In Slot items, with explanations of why and how they were preferred over alternatives. I chipped in with a couple of suggestions of my own and asked a few questions about things that had been puzzling me.

It all answered a number of questions and my Berserker will be making some changes to his outfit as a result. The timing wasn't ideal. It was hard to pay full attention to the details because the whole thing kicked off just as I reached the conclusion of the Signature questline.

As a result I missed some key dialog and the completely unexpected and quite stunning conclusion almost passed me by altogether. I'll have to pay a lot more attention when I take a second character through it - or else watch it on YouTube if someone's been kind enough to post the finale.

In the usual way of things I couldn't really discuss it here anyway because SPOILERS!! Better stick with the stats. It's one hell of a shock ending, though, I'll say that much.

So, those stats. Here's what I learned:

For Kunark Ascending the stats that matter are Resolve (for Heroic and Raid Content), Potency and Ability Mod

For a relaxed, leisurely soloing through the main questline it's recommended that you hit 8k Potency and 100k Ability Mod.

You can do that by spending no more than a few hundred platinum on the Broker for a set of Handcrafted "Twark" Gear and accessories.

And that's pretty much it. For extensive detail on everything else you might want to know I recommend the invaluable, accurate and authoritative  EQ2 Library but the above will get you started nicely.

I'd add that if EQ2's hyper-inflationary economy is making you feel even these "cheap" items are insanely over-priced there are several very easy ways you can join the super-rich. A month ago I had less than 50 platinum to my name. Now I have just under 70k.

If you have All Access Membership (and if you are buying the current expansion you most probably do) then five of the Loyalty Tokens you earn for your very simple dailies will buy you a Small Bag Of Platinum Coins from the Loyalty section of the store. Each bag contains 500p, more than enough to kit you out in KA basics, head to toe.

Alternatively you could buy a three-pack of Experience Vials with your 500 DB Cash monthly stipend, spend an hour or so filling one up and sell it on the Broker for the going rate of around 30,000 plat.

And if you are planning on doing the KA crafting line as well as the Adventure one, do the crafting quests first. They require no special gear and half way through you get the plant I mentioned yesterday which will give you an income stream of several thousand platinum a day for the foreseeable future.

All of this begs the question, which was raised in the discussion in game yesterday, of whether a new expansion should require players to prepare in advance, whether by doing old content, saving money or buying gear. The answer is it doesn't.

As I said, I only learned the above as I was finishing the very final stages of the Signature questline. I did the entire thing wearing the gear I had on the day it launched and the upgrades I acquired from the KA quests and drops themselves. Even by the end I only had around 5.5k Potency and 75k Ability Mod.

There were very short periods when things were genuinely difficult, but none of those were out of line with the difficulty I have experienced in previous expansions. A little lateral thinking, a single session doing some side-quests and swapping some already-acquired items around and those speed bumps soon vanished in the rear-view mirror.

What I had done coming in, however, was complete the whole of the Signature line from the previous expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra. I can confirm that, without question, as a Berserker, the gear from the previous expansion is entirely sufficient to get you rolling in the current one. And that, I think, is entirely reasonable.