One For The Cheap Seats, Please!

A few weeks back, when Darkpaw announced pre-orders for the upcoming EverQuest II expansion, Ballads of Zimara, along with details of the various tiers and prices, I speculated that I might be up for buying the Collector's Edition, a snip at a cent under $70. 

It would have been the first time I'd bought anything other than the basic version but I've been in increasingly urgent need of a better Mercenary for a while now and the Collector's Edition includes a Legendary quality Mercenary, Familiar and Mount. It also throws in a new prestige home and a few other fripperies and honestly it's not a bad deal at all for a regular player. 

It is a bit Pay-to-Win but I think that ship sailed over the horizon years ago, not just in EQII but in pretty much every MMORPG I've played. I certainly don't have an issue with higher grades of Expansion Packs giving an initial advantage so long as the regular pack remains a viable baseline for normal play and I've never had a problem with that, so I'm good.

Usually I've been able to source the upgraded Mercenaries, Mounts and Familiars I want by way of in-game activities, whether from running regular instances or from special events or holidays. Over the last expansion cycle, though, I haven't really played as much as usual and also haven't always had the luck of the dice with RNG. I'm generally fine as far as mounts and familiars go but my merc is really starting to show his age.

As a result, I've been umming and aahing over whether to buy the Collector's Edition, without ever coming to a clear decision. The pre-order page cautiously confirms "expansion available before December 31 2023" so I hadn't been treating the problem with any kind of urgency until last week, when Senior Community Manager Angeliana confirmed on the forums the expansion would go live on 29 November.

That's only a week away now so I figured it was about time I made up my mind. A couple of hours ago, I ordered the base edition at $29.99. With my 10% All Access Member's discount and converted to Sterling, that meant I paid £22.61, which I consider a bargain. I generally get a bare minimum of a couple of month's play out of an EQII expansion, often a lot more, with the limiting factor almost always being how much I feel like playing EQII in general rather than any significant variation in the expansion content itself.

The main reason I went for the base edition in the end was simple. I just find it very, very hard to see any expansion to any MMORPG as worth more than £30-35, tops. 

For me, it doesn't really have anything to do with what you get for the money. It's all about functionality. It doesn't really matter how many extras the marketing department throws in - in the end I'm always going to be playing the game the same way I always have; dabbling, dipping, sampling and generally ambling through the available content, picking off the low-hanging fruit and feeling pretty good about it. Most of those extras I just won't need.

I know starting out with a full roster of current-expansion Legendary companions would have a material effect on the perceived difficulty of the new content but it's not like I find EQII expansions punitively hard. Sometimes there are a few speed bumps along the way but mostly it's a pleasant amble through attractive scenery as I follow the Signature questline to its conclusion.

It helps a lot that I'm never in a hurry to get there. We get one expansion a year and I'm very happy to take most of the twelve months getting to the point where I have nothing much left I want to do. Sometimes I find myself in more of an extended EQII mood and finish up the adventure and tradeskill questlines by the end of January but if I still haven't had enough by then I have half a dozen alts I can take through it all again.

Of course, for most people the questing is over in a few days at most. Then the serious business of chain-running instances and gearing up to chain-run them again at higher difficulty begins. Thanks but I'll pass.

Given all of that, you might wonder why I need to pre-order at all. I could just buy the expansion on the first day after launch, when I log in. To be honest, the main reason I pre-order is just to get it out of the way. It makes no material difference financially so "why wait?" is as valid a question as "why pre-order?"

The other reason is that, while we Standard Edition scrubs don't get much, we don't get nothing. The base edition comes with a boost to Level 125, something I don't really need, but also with a stat boost item I definitely do. 

There's one in every expansion. In the past it's been variously an illusion or a house item. Of late it's been a pet. Last time it was the aesthetically pleasing Takish`Hiz Peafowl. This time it's the less visually arresting Wroughtlands Smasher, some kind of elemental. 

I'm not all that bothered what it looks like, although I could do without the thunderous sound effects as the thing stamps about behind me. I'm more interested in how big an upgrade it is. This one comes with the usual, standard 10% bonus to every type of xp but there's around a 30% boost over the Peafowl to all base stats and better than that for Potency and Ability Mod, two of the real essentials.

That's a big help but I'm still going to need a new mercenary and the pack I've chosen won't do anything about that. The other reason I decided not to trade up, other than the cost, was a realisation that I already potentially have the means to solve that particular problem without getting out my credit card.

The cash shop sells bundles of Mercenary Crates (And Familiar Crates for that matter.) and I'm sitting on a pile of Daybreak Cash I don't know what to do with. It's true the crates are lootboxes - you don't know exactly what you're going to get and you might not get a "good" one at all - but you always get a merc of some description and my current merc is so far behind the curve, even the low-end mercs from the current season would be an upgrade.

As that suggests, the crates do come in "Seasons" and it's my understanding each season is an improvement on the last (Well, it would have to be, wouldn't it, or else no-one would buy new crates.) My tentative plan is to wait until the next season begins, then splurge some of my DBC horde on crates in the expectation that anything I get will be an upgrade.

It is actually a lot more complicated than that, what with Mercs having gear, levelling up and especially the fairly new "Mercenary Battalion" buff that accrues from a combination of all the mercs you own (I still don't really understand how that works.) but my main aim is to get a merc that can heal me more reliably than my current one, so we have fewer of the unnerving Hail Mary passes we had during the last expansion.

To give Zel credit, he's done a fantastic job up to now but the poor old lizard really needs a rest. I think it would be pushing it to take him into another expansion. Well, too far into it, at least. He'll probably still have to do the opening scenes of this one. 

I don't know when the next season's likely to start but I imagine it'll be a while before his replacement can take over.

The Roadmap Goes Ever On

Ooh! Look! A roadmap! I like roadmaps.

And apparently so does everyone else. We're getting this one because "Last year's "experiment" was so well received".

I suspect "astonished" was closer to most people's reaction at the time, when the inaugural EverQuest II Roadmap appeared on 19 January 2022. I was sufficiently taken with the whole concept, I managed to post two thousand words about it, albeit many of them cut and pasted from the document itself.

I wrapped the whole thing up by saying "Let's hope the players appreciate it". Looks like they did, which is pretty close to a miracle in itself, given the general tenor of the EQII community these days.

In last year's post, I went through the whole thing almost line by line. I'm not planning on doing that again. For one thing I don't have the enthusiasm for it, what with the novelty value having worn off, but for another a quick scan through the details suggests a focus on more renovation, less innovation this time around, which gives me less to talk about.

That's in no way a criticism. EQII is a live service game and this roadmap firmly endorses that model. The team clearly have a handle on what works for the game and its core audience. Almost everything in the schedule involves building on the strong foundation they've already established. 

As I suggested, quite mildly, earlier, the installed base for EQII can be highly critical and hard to please, something it has in common with the equivalent demographic in many long-running mmorpgs. In the last year or so, however, I have begun to detect at least some small cracks in the wall of opposition to anything new. 

Time and attrition have boiled off most of the uncommitted along with many of those who really can't stomach change. I wouldn't say those who remain were more easy-going or open-minded about the direction the game is headed but I do sense less hostility in the conversation. Apparently telling people your plans ahead of time and then sticking to them does build trust. Who'd have guessed?

So, FV! What's the plan?

It's always a bit presumptive to allocate successful policy to a single person but Jenn Chan's appointment as Head of Studio does seem to mark something of a watershed. Compared to just about every one of her predecessors, including figureheads and spokespeople as well as actual Studio leads, she comes across as more straightforward, less tricksy. She has a knack of putting things in terms that sound both friendly and authoritative, which is more than many people in similar positions seem to be able to manage.

All in all, as a player, I get the feeling of a ship in reasonably safe hands, sailing in fairly calm waters. Or, I guess, since this is a roadmap we're talking about, not a navigational chart, a competent driver on a well-maintained highway. Compared to almost any era of EQII's history, from the rocky launch and subsequent Hail Mary pass that saved it, through the imperial decline of the later Smedley administration (Speaking of the devil...) to the frankly terrifying Columbus Nova sleigh-ride, this feels like coming out of the storm into safe harbor at last.

Cue the whole thing falling apart in six weeks time...

Enough preamble. What's in the roadmap that's worth a closer look?

Well, I was taken by the use of the repeated phrases "New updates" and "New large updates" as used to describe the various holiday events. Most of the old favorites get the basic version, which I imagine means some different rewards for the existing quests, new things to buy from the vendors, probably some new crafting books. 

The focus, as last year, seems to be on building the summer into a major festival season. Last year saw Oceanfest, Scorched Sky and Tinkerfest stitched together under the banner of Summer Jubilee. This year sees the process continued and consolidated, with all three events receiving "large updates", something that last year included not just fresh quests but new dungeons and instances. 

Sometimes I wonder if they give us too much... Nah, just kidding!

The Jubilee is clearly intended as a permanent replacement for the old summer Ethereal event, which suits me very well. I never really bothered with that, group-focused as it tended to be. A much-expanded suite of holiday events would seem to have a much wider appeal across the whole playerbase than one purely aimed at the endgame elite, although just how broad a church the EQII playerbase might be nowadays is another question altogether. All in all, though, it looks like a solid use of resources.

Presumably much of that necessarily limited resource (Albeit, perhaps, not quite as limited as it would have been a few years back.) will be directed towards the two numbered Game Updates (122 and 123) and the annual expansion, a very substantial amount of brand-new content for a game of EQII's vintage. 

It's revealing - and reassuring -  that the existence of yet another expansion is now so much to be expected it can simply be mentioned in the same terms as every other recurring, annual event. A sea-change from just a couple of years back, when speculation flourished over whether each expansion would be the last.

There's a lot in the roadmap about various unlocks and server mergers for the TLE subculture, none of which need concern us here. Of slightly more interest is the addition of yet another new, special rules server in April, this one using a PvP ruleset. EQII maintains a highly vocal, if not necessarily all that numerous, advocacy for PvP but almost no iteration of the playstyle yet tried seems to suit enough would-be players to stick. The advantage of catering to the PvP crowd by way of the TLE system would seem to be the format's inbuilt obsolescence, meaning the server doesn't necessarily have to hold a crowd for the long term to be considered a success.

Mark it in your calendar, Zel. Retraining course in May.

There's one planned, systemic change to the game this year that could prove significant. In May there's an updating of the AI used by mercenaries to assist and heal players: "Mercenaries will more reliably heal and resurrect their companions, and generally react faster, with higher tier mercenaries gaining increased reaction time over their common brethren." 

At the purely solo level I play, I haven't noticed any major issues with my mercenaries but I have been aware of some undertow of complaint for a while now. I certainly wouldn't trust mine on anything much harder than a boss in a solo instance and even then it's sometimes a close call. 

What I'd really like to see addressed, though, is the placement of the merc. Mine has a suicidal urge to stand in front of anything I'm fighting, taking every AE full in the face. Even if I put him on Passive and play like a proper tank, turning the mob, he has a terrible habit of shuffling round to stand next to me. Coupled with his seeming unwillingness to heal himself until the last moment, I've died more from my merc not healing himself than from his not healing me. If they fix that I'll be delighted.

There's more in the full roadmap but I think that covers the most salient points for now. If I've missed anything major, entirely likely given the limited attention I was paying as I flipped between the various sections, please let me know. I'd hate to be blindsided by something I should have seen coming down the road.

Skipping (Doors Lead To Other Doors)

 

As you might expect on the day after a new expansion dropped, yesterday I played a lot of EverQuest II. I didn't keep track of the time but I guess I must have put in five or six hours across the day. It was absorbing in that strange way large, fresh content drops can be. 

I almost said "only", then. I wonder if it's true? The sudden arrival of weeks' worth of content all in one go has a far greater chance of making a significant impression than a perpetual trickle of minor updates, even if in the end it all adds up to about the same in hours of play. It seems a lot more likely to lock players into a game for the duration, too. What that says about the way ArenaNet have chosen to approach content delivery for Guild Wars II these last eight and a half years scarcely bears thinking about.

As I've said many times, I strongly prefer a fast and frequent schedule of solid updates, even if those updates fall under the broad heading of "more of the same". I'd also rather have a full expansion that didn't feel completely finished or polished than have to wait longer for things to be deemed just right. As we all know, in online gaming nothing ever is "just right" so why wait?

On that basis I was excited to get my hands on Reign of Shadows even though, as I wrote the other day, I fully expected it to be buggy and incomplete. Only so far it isn't. Granted "so far" is not very far at all but as yet the only glitches I've encountered are ones I've fashioned for myself. More about that in a while.

Pollution Index for Echo Caverns today: Very High.

EQII has a loose pattern to its expansion cycle these days. We get a level increase every other year and thematically, expansions tend to come in pairs. Reign of Shadows is both the second in what we could call the Return to Luclin sequence and the one with no level increase. That could make it something of a filler but it doesn't feel that way to me.

I'm not a big fan of storylines in mmorpgs but I do like there to be some kind of overarching narrative against which I can contextualize the meandering progress of my characters. Of the primary games I've played over the last few years, Guild Wars 2 leans too far in the direction of a cinematic storyline while EQ2 pitches it just about right.

Reign of Shadows pulls the camera back a little further still. Usually there's a letter already waiting in the mail the first time you log in after an expansion begins but this time I didn't get the call from the Duality, Norrath's equivalent of the Watcher, until I'd been playing for several hours. When I did I found the enfolding plot intriguing. I'm keen to find out how it turns out and to do my part in making sure things go the way they should.

I'm sure this is going to come in handy for something

This expansion also introduces the first instanced dungeon much earlier than I've been used to. So early, in fact, I didn't notice I had the quest for it until I was checking something in my journal. By then I'd already ventured into the open world Echo Caverns on a couple of kill quests but it turned out I'd had a mission for an instanced EC-variant for a while.

I was curious about how that might go. When I'd ventured cautiously into the first new combat zone I'd been very pleasantly surprised at the difficulty level. I'm used to a rough session or two before the quest rewards start rolling in, even with the catch-up and prep gear we're given these days.

This time my Berserker felt there or thereabouts as powerful in the new content as he'd become used to feeling in the old. After a few careful pulls he was back to rounding up mobs in groups and AEing the heck out of them. 

As for his healer mercenary, about whom I'd read some very worrying things on the beta forums, if anything, he seemed noticeably more efficient than normal. One of the self-imposed glitches I mentioned earlier was my repeated mistake of catching guards in the crossfire. Since those guards were all Heroic level 130s that didn't end well but my merc was very much more on the ball with the rezzes than expected. 

The only way to find out how difficult the instances were likely to be was to try. I zoned in to find myself facing a bunch of orange con Heroic mobs, which was more or less what I expected. EQII uses a buff system for instanced solo content these days so that instead of having to repopulate the dungeons for the different difficulty settings the game merely re-calibrates the player's ability to handle what's already there, so everyone gets heroics, even soloists.

Even so, in last year's Blood of Luclin the first few solo instances were something of a grind. Yes, the buff meant my Berserker could handle the Heroic mobs but they took a long time to kill and there were a lot of them. In RoS the first instance went very differently.

Nice spot for a picnic

Progress in the instance mirrored my experience in the open world Echo Caverns almost exactly. I started off pulling cautious singles and ended up running in circles to round up groups to AE. Far from reminding me of my time in the first Sanctus Seru instance last year, this felt more like a quick romp through a daily back in the summer.

That's probably what led to my second and more serious self-imposed glitch. Instead of working my way steadily and carefully through the quarry I decided I'd skip the trash and climb up along the side. I was able to get to the wall dividing the quarry from the main part of the zone and jump down, thereby bypassing the locked gate that was the only legitimate exit. Then I spent half an hour exploring and killing without encountering any bosses or updating my quest. 

Don't put yourself out, will you?

After I'd cleared about half the zone it finally occurred to me that maybe by finding my own way past the locked gate at the start I'd failed to set some flag or other. A very long-standing mechanic in EQII instances is the requirement to kill one boss to make the next one spawn and so far I hadn't even seen a boss. 

To cut a long story short, in the first instance the idea is that you clear the trash at the start (as the quest tells you to do) to spawn their boss. Then you kill him to open the gate. After that you kill all the groups of mosquitoes to spawn the Needlite Queen before finding some dead guards on the path to where the little alien guys hang out. You kill enough of them and their Chief appears and so on and so on.

I got it sorted out in the end although I'd already killed so many of the little guys while I was exploring that as soon as I killed the Queen the Chief popped and then I couldn't kill him because I hadn't killed all of his pals and he gets a huge regen bonus for every one of them left alive.

Nothing I couldn't fix, at least once I'd found and read the walkthrough on the wiki to see what I was doing wrong. There were a couple more bosses after that but I hadn't gotten far enough into the zone the first time to affect them so that all went according to plan.

Fancy name, fancy title. All he does is open a gate.

 

As for difficulty, all the bosses were just about in the sweet spot between easy and challenging. None of them did that excruciating power drain that's been the mark of the desperate developer these last few years. None of the fights lasted more than a few minutes except for the Chief, who has an extremely annoying predilection for summoning defenders with more hit points than himself.

Each fight had a couple of fairly straightforward mechanics that I found easily manageable. Until I met the zone boss, Scyphodon, that is. He has a very irritating trick whereby he can't be targeted unless you have a buff up that's called something like "Magic Sugar". You get this by eating a sugar cane reed, plenty of which grow along the riverside near his haunt. So far, so simple.

The problem comes when Scyphodon yells something about eating anyione with sugar in their veins. At this point you have to cancel the buff before grabbing another to re-instate it so you can target him again. 

It shouldn't have been difficult. I'd read about in advance on the wiki and I'd even made a macro for the command to de-sugar myself. What I hadn't counted on was the sheer size of the creature. Scyphodon is so tall compared to my ratonga Berserker that no matter how far back I pulled the camera and pointed it towards the sky I couldn't see his damn speech bubble - assuming he even had one. 

And I'm telling you we can take him!

 

The wiki says he "emotes" his threat but if he does it didn't appear in my chat line. Then again, I habitually turn emotes off so I don't have to deal with idiots spamming bodily functions to alleviate their terminal boredom. 

Either way, when Scyphodon gave his tell I missed it as often as not. Since missing it meant instant death that would normally have been a major set-back. Not this time, thanks to Zel'Kriaz, mercenary extraordinaire. 

Over the years in EQII there have been many occasions when I've seethed behind the keyboard, watching my character face down in the dust while their healer mercenary tried to finish the fight. Many's the time I've yelled "You have the dps of an arthritic kitten! Do your real job and rez me ffs!" all to no avail.

Something seems to have changed. I died twice fighting Scyphodon and both times my merc was right in there with a rez. It made the fight a little jagged but it was a heck of a lot better than having to revive and start over. If this is the new Merc behavior beta testers were complaining about I beg to offer a contrary opinion. 

Told you it'd be worth it. And thanks for the rezzes. I'll buy you a beer when we get back to town.

 

I have the quest for the next instance already. We'll see if that's as much fun as the first. I'm looking forward to it, though, which is a very good sign. 

As for the quest rewards, that's a post of its own. So far I haven't equipped one of the half dozen items I've received because I can't work out whether or not they're upgrades. Experience tells me I'll get better gear later in the signature line and better yet in the later instances so as long as I'm not struggling I think I'll stick with what I'm using until I get something that's an unequivocal improvement.

If itemization that requires the player to make meaningful choices between stats is the worst Reign of Shadows has to throw at me I think I'll call it a resounding success. 

Yeah, okay. Probably a little early for that. It's a promising start, though.

Who'll Be Your Mercenary? : EverQuest II

I was playing EverQuest II yesterday, just pottering around in a Sundayish fashion, sorting bags and trying to keep everyone's upgrade plates spinning, when I happened to look at the Guild Bank. Since I've been the only active member for well over five years, it's really just an extension of my own bank now.

I find it particularly useful for storing Lore items, "Lore" being a tag EQII uses to mean a character can only own one. For some reason it also means you can't put two of them in the shared bank, which never made to me, but there you go. You can put as many of the same Lore item as you like into the Guild bank, though, which is why I have a whole Guild vault tab filled with Blood of Luclin Mercenary claim tokens.

I deleted a bunch of Grollas only yesterday.
I should dump the lot but it seems so... wasteful.

These tokens started to drop with the introduction of the first season Overseer missions although the mercenaries and their tokens may well have been in the game already. Most, maybe all expansions come with new Mercenaries. Some can be found and hired in game, while others only feature as perks in the higher-priced Collectors editions.

I'm somewhat vague on the details because I don't generally pay much attention to new mercs. In the past I've been more than happy with the handful I've picked up from events and holidays. I still use the clockworks from Tinkerfest on several characters.

For a long time my Berserker used the obese ogre Zhugrus Blightstrike, introduced in the 2016 update The Scourge of Zek. He was a perfectly acceptable healer but he really wasn't much of a looker. (You can take a close look at him down at the foot of the post but I wouldn't recommend it). Having his bulk looming in the background - or the foreground, due to the way mercs, pets and familiars all seem to love to huddle - made taking screenshots quite awkward.

Odd thing to make the subject of a sub, isn't it?

I was happy to replace him with the much more svelte, if somewhat intense Evania Val`Sara, the mercenary whose services become available when you have sufficient faction with the Cae`Dal in the Chaos Descending expansion. She was in turn replaced by Oqdan Blisterbringer, a fire elemental with a more pleasing appearance than Zhugrus but, unfortunately, equal bulk.

There is, luckily, an ability called Shrink Mercenary, available for a nominal fee (and 150,000 status) from your class trainer. For some inexplicable reason, even though I knew that perfectly well, my berserker had never bothered to buy it until today. Sometimes I think he's been hit in the head a few times too many.

Over the years, following their introduction in 2011's Age of Discovery, mercenaries have grown from a small band of simple hirelings to a vast, shadowy network of strange and sinister accomplices. The extremely long and dauntingly complex guide on the EQII wiki attests to the extent to which these NPCs, loved by many, reviled by some, have embedded themselves deeply into both the gameplay and the commercial model.

Various expansions have added the option to dress the mercenaries in increasingly powerful and specific armor and to raise their stats and abilities with offline training. All of these things I'd been doing, sometimes diligently, sometimes less so, right up to and including the pre-expansion events for Blood of Luclin, which dropped a lot of very good merc armor. In retrospect, that was probably something of a hint.

BoL mercenaries can't even be seen until you consume their token.

BoL added two new reasons to collect mercenaries. Firstly, they're used in the Overseer feature, as are Familiars. You have the option to send one of your mercenaries along with each team of Agents you assign to a mission. Depending on the quality of the merc (they use some of the same, color-coded qualitative ratings as gear - Treasured, Legendary, Fabled, Celestial) a mercenary increases the mission's risk of success by 2%, 3%, 5% or 10% respectively.

To send mercenaries on missions you must first have unlocked them to so they can be summoned from anywhere. This is a feature for which you have to pay 150 Daybreak Cash. It's a small amount (you get 500DBC a month as part of All Access membership) and I would always unlock any merc I planned on using, because who wants to have to go all the way back to wherever you hired them, every time you fancy swapping from one to another?

What I wouldn't have done is unlock all my mercenaries, even the ones I knew I'd never trust in a fight. They have different abilities and, as anyone knows who's tried a few of them, different temperaments. Some of them my berserker quite literally trusts with his life while others he wouldn't trust to feed the pets and water the plants in his Maj'Dul mansion.

Evania Val`Sara is my favorite healer. She's extremely reliable and not at all flaky, unlike some. Even if she does have that thousand yard stare.

With Overseer missions in mind, I unlock all my mercs. I haven't yet started making any special effort to acquire new ones and I certainly won't be buying any Mercenary crates from the cash shop but I am using the tokens that drop to grab all the BoL mercs.

Lord Seru's Fool.
Now he's mine.
More fool me.

And boy, do those tokens drop. Well, most of them. They're all Lore and they're all tradeable and the Broker is stuffed with them.

The commonest, Grolla Skullwielder, is worthless, both financially and practically. She's a Diaku Berserker, only Treasured quality. Mercenary dps has, sadly, failed miserably to keep up with recent developments. You can barely notice the damage they do on at-level mobs. If you want her, you can currently pick up her token on the brokerage for five copper.

Melban Pindleclasp, a Troubador, drops almost as frequently and is nearly as useless. His buffs are of some value but you can still snap up his token for a silver. He is, at least, Legendary. Not that you'd know it.

Rosa Dod is a Fabled Dirge. Her buffs are worth having as is her 5% bonus to Overseer missions. She's still changing hands for a hundred plat or so, which is pocket lint, not even pocket change, by current EQII economic standards. I have several of her tokens in the Guild Bank but I haven't yet found out where to go to hire her. I'll add that to the list of things I have to do.

Oor of Umbra, a mysterious black cloud of smoke with piercing blue eyes, was selling for good money for a while. It's a Fabled Fury, which makes it reasonably useful for healing, although personally I'd always rather have an inquisitor for the Verdict (a  spell, which instantly kills mobs on low health and has for me, on occasion, meant the difference between success and failure in a tough fight). Oor's value is still holding at over a thousand platinum. The drop rate is fairly generous but the spawn spot, inaccessible without Luclin flying, is probably keeping quite a few people from adding Oor to their collection on multiple characters. I only have it on two, so far.

The spooky and uncommunicative Oor. Would you trust it?

Zel`Kriaz is a Shissar Inquisitor of Celestial quality. At one point he was trading for millions but he's down to just under 40k plat now. I'm in the process of training him up. I tried him as a healer when I first acquired him and he got me killed on the first pull. I don't know if he's an idiot or if he just needs to be upgraded and equipped before he's useable. I'll find out in a few weeks. If he ends up having to stay in barracks, he's still worth 10% to Overeer missions, and I don't even have to pay him for that.

Vylkorin the Vile, yet another inquisitor is Celestial, top of the shop for BoL mercs. So far I have seen his token drop just once. It's still in the bank because I can't decide who's going to to use it so I don't even know what race or gender Vyl might be. If you want to buy the token it's going to cost you more than a million plat. It also looks completely different from all the others. I don't know if that means anything.

The final reason to build up a large collection of unlocked mercenaries is the Mercenary Battalion. This somewhat confusing and currently slightly buggy feature, also introduced with Blood of Luclin, allows your mercenaries to apply a collective buff, the strength of which depends on how far you've upgraded them through training.

I don't propose to explain it here. It took me long enough just to understand it. Here's the EQ2 Traders page, the simplest explanation I've seen so far.

All in all mercenaries are a very clever and entertaining way for Darkpaw to make some money. In common with most things added to the game in the last decade there's an element of pay to win but I'm absolutely fine with that. The company has to make money or the games won't exist. I find the way Daybreak, and now Darkpaw, balance what you can get for paying versus what you can get for playing significantly enhances my enjoyment. I quite like buying little treats for myself. And I always loved the mercenary feature. I thought it was one of the best things ever added to both EverQuest and EQII.

The more useful and versatile they make them, the more satisfying and interesting the mercenaries become. As Telwyn was saying in the post I linked earlier, talking in that case about familiars, "It’s a reminder of just how much depth the game has, and how little adaptations like this make all the difference to this daily activity".

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go look for Rosa Dod.

Call Of The West

The new Diaku Corral instance in EverQuest II is unsusual in that I've already completed it not once but twice. In common with all too many modern MMORPGs, EQII expects players at the level cap to spend a good deal of their time running the same instances over and over in order to gear up so they can then run a slightly different version of the same instance at a higher difficulty level so they can gear up so...

You get the picture. It's not a playstyle that's ever appealed to me. I don't mind doing instances multiple times so long as there's a healthy gap between runs - a few weeks, say, or better yet months - but grinding through the same mechanics and scripts day after day seems to be taking a love of repetition a little too far.

It's not a matter of principle. It's laziness. If you're doing instances because the bosses drop items that are better than what you're wearing it's almost bound to be a bit of a slog. I will do it, but I won't do it a lot.

Diaku Corral isn't all that different to any other Blood of Luclin instance in terms of difficulty. The ogres hit hard but they prefer to stand well back and pepper you with arrows from a distance. I've died a couple of times because there are a lot of obstacles that break line of sight, which seems to confuse my mercenary. Sometimes she stops healing altogether and sometimes she runs out of range as she tries to find a path.

All the named mobs have quirky mechanics. Some of them took me a while to figure out but most of them are reasonably intuitive. There's a walkthrough up on the wiki now, which explains everything very clearly even though it's written by someone whose first language plainly isn't English. By the time I got to read it I'd already finished the whole instance but it did answer a couple of lingering questions.

For once, most of the boss scripts aren't particularly annoying. The sound effects on the bucking bronco are nerve-jarringly loud and the winds that try to blow you into the shark tank are a pain but as these things go the whole instance is quite painless. The scenery is nice, if a bit orange and the wild west theme amuses me.

Even so, I probably wouldn't have gone straight back for another run had it not been for two things. Firstly, the loot is really good. The regular drops are 165 resolve, which was going to be my baseline for calling my max level characters fully dressed, but the uncommon drops are 170 resolve. I wasn't expecting to see anything that good in solo content this side of the next round of panda quests in late summer.

The bosses also seem very happy to give up their good stuff. I had more Exquisite chests than Ornate. In two runs I've had five 170 items drop, all of which someone can use.

Even so, the main reason I went back wasn't for the loot. It was that the questline carries on. That surprised me. I was imagining the quest existed only to act as an introduction, letting you know where the new instance was but there's more.

I probably should have guessed from the name of the first quest, "A Fistful of Diaku". Naturally, there had to be "For a Few Diaku More".

The second run was, inevitably, much smoother than the first. The whole thing took little more than an hour. My berserker is starting to feel powerful enough in solo content not to need the crutch of defensive stance. I swapped him to offensive, which sped things up considerably. It's also why he died when the healing dried up but you can't have it both ways.

As well as the stat gear, all of which is wild-west themed and looks fantastic, there's also themed appearance gear and themed house items. There's even a gnomophone that plays the theme tune,  "High Noon on the Moon". When Darkpaw throw a themed party they hang out all the banners.

When you down the final boss a cannon appears that shoots a barrel all the way back to Aurelian Coast. It's your fast trip home. I haven't seen one of those since the Moors of Ykesha.  I thought at first it was out of keeping with the cowboy motif but then I realised the whole plot revolves around a gnomish inventor working for the Diaku ogres and those cannons are classic gnome tech.

The cannon is canon, if you will. You won't? Oh, please yourselves.

As my berserker stood on the docks, picking splinters of barrel stave out of his armor, he noticed an ogre standing nearby with her shingle out. Who should it be but Grol Skullwielder, one of the BoL mercenaries whose hiring tokens drop from Overseer chests.

Grol is so highly thought of as a sword for hire her token currently sells on the broker for forty silver pieces. Or doesn't, more like. She suffers from being both common as dirt and largely useless. I already have enough of her tokens to give one to every character on Skyfire and still have a few left to play tiddleywinks.

Also, Grol being a berserker herself doesn't exactly make her the best duo partner for my berserker. She'll come in handy for Overseer duties though and she joins the Mercenary Battalion, yet another feature introduced with the Blood of Luclin expansion that I don't entirely understand. I hired her and noticed immediately that she charges for her services, unlike all my pre-BoL mercs, who all apparently decided to work pro bono as soon as we landed on the moon.

When I flew back for the hand-in I was expecting to be given the third quest in what would inevitably become a trilogy to match the inspirational source material. I wasn't disappointed.

Well, I was, a bit, but only with the name they'd come up with, "The Good, The Bad and The Broken". I have to admit I couldn't come up with anything better given the quest itself but I'd have rejigged the plot a little and called it "The Good, The Bad and the Buggy". All it would take is jar of metal-eating beetles and what self-respecting gnome doesn't have a few of those lying around?

Part three means another trip to the Corral but that's fine. I like it there. I might not even need a quest to persuade me to go back next time.

For a little variation I'd run a few more characters through the instance. It would be a significantly different ecperience with each new class. Unfortunatley, entry is restricted to characters who've completed the adventure signature quest line and I've been a little lax on that. Okay, a lot lax.

Maybe it'll give me the spur I need to take a couple more of the team through the final stages . Spur! Geddit? That's a good one.

Okay, no it's not. I'll just be riding off into the sunset then. Yippee kay yay... oh, wait, wrong movie...

Making Plans

Every year, bloggers I follow post their plans. Things they want to do. Things they hope they'll do. Things they need to do. They set out a stall for a whole new approach to both gaming and blogging.

They lay down rules about the games they'll play, how often and for how long. They imagine the new adventures they'll have as they seek to change patterns or break habits or somehow turn themselves into better, more rounded, more complete gamers.

It's New Year, so naturally there's been a flurry of such posts but there are quite a few bloggers I can think of who share their detailed play-plans a lot more often than just once a year. Evidently, quite a lot of gamers like to have their days, weeks and months mapped out ahead of them.

I don't. My gameplay is a lot more whim-based than that. Which is not to say I don't have a few vague plans and some firm expectations.

I know, for example, that I'll be doing my GW2 dailies, every day, on three accounts. I have a mental list of MMORPGs I'm not playing but haven't abandoned, meaning I have a theoretical intention to play them again at some point. I know there are new games or events or expansions in the works that I'll want to take a look at when they appear.

It's not anything that I feel needs to be tabulated or timetabled, though. I just sit down of an evening or on my days off and let the mood of the moment drive my decisions. It's also pretty much how I write these posts, come to think of it.

Now, please pay attention, Bildi. We don't want any repetitions of last time, do we? I still haven't got the ichor out of my cloak.

I certainly had no pre-ordained plan to level a Bruiser in EverQuest II the old-fashioned way. Why would I want to do that? I have so many reasons not to:

1. I already leveled a Bruiser the hard way, through the advancing level caps as they changed, expansion by expansion, capping out at 90 before I changed servers.
2. I'm in the middle of working through the excellent current expansion, Chaos Descending, with my solo-endgame-capable Berserker. 
3. I have two boosted, geared Level 100s waiting to be taken through the last ten levels. 
4. I have an unused Instant Level 110 boost sitting in my /claim window.

And yet, that's what's been happening. All the time I've been posting about Atlas and Ashes of Creation I've really been spending most of my time in  EQ2, playing through old content and loving every minute.

I kind of know how it started. It began when I spotted that unexplained 100% server XP boost all the way back in November. It's still on now. I still don't know why. I knew at the time that I "ought" to use it to get my slacking Level 100s to the cap but that would have meant grinding through Plane of Magic twice more and I'm a tad burned out on that zone after a year of faction quests.

Anyway, xp boosts always feel more spectacular on lower-level characters, where you can fly through a level in a matter of minutes. I had a look at the roster and the most likely candidate seemed to be the Bruiser, then in the very low 60s.

Are you committing all this to memory like I asked you, Bildi? Because all I can hear is you humming that new song you wrote about treants. What is it with you and treants, anyway?

As of last night he's just a few bubbles short of 97. I've played him most days since before Christmas, sometimes for long sessions lasting several hours. When I first logged him in he was in Tenebrous Tangle, the opening zone in the twelve-year old Kingdom of Sky expansion. I did a few quests there, then I took him into The Sanctum of the Scaleborn, an old favorite for level-grinding.

For many years people would circumvent the unpleasant chore of playing through brand new content they'd never seen - and which they'd just paid for - by going to an old dungeon they'd already cleared a thousand times. They would then grind through that dungeon solo, over and over, while complaining how awful the game was and how empty and dull their lives had become.

You can't do that any more. Daybreak staged an intervention. Last year or the year before they fixed things so that, when they increase the level cap, you have to go to the new expansion zones to level. They didn't do anything to stop you speeding through old content before you hit the current ten-level cap cycle, though!

I don't think they could, really. Depending on how you look at it, the leveling game in EQ2 is either catastrophically broken or the best it's ever been. Having played since beta and experienced every variation, of which there have been many, I very much cleave to the latter interpretation.

Honestly, leveling solo in EQ2 now is a joy. It's pure pleasure from end to end. It still has considerable granularity; if you go it totally alone, without a mercenary, using only quested gear, you can have a smoother, less frustrating version of the original experience.

Yes, Bildi, I am sure we're "up to this". Just follow the plan and we'll be fine. No, it won't be like last time. Anyway, you got paid, didn't you?

If you employ a mercenary, however, your sessions will feel like the very best kind of powerleveling. For a pittance many orders of magnitude smaller than a paid powerleveling partner would have asked back in the day, when players offered such services, your Mercenary will begin by one-shotting anything you point them at.

What's more they'll keep at it for as long as you want, without complaining, patronising, chuntering on about their own problems, leaving you cowering in a corner while they take the dog for a walk or yelling at you for getting them killed when they overestimate their own abilities and pull the entire floor at once.

As you progress your Merc will become slightly less godlike but not by much. Even in the 90s my Bruiser's partner, a Troubador (one of EQ2's several Bard classes), does considerably more damage than he does.

It's not just about the Merc, though. There have been some general changes to both difficulty and rate of xp gain over the years that affect everything you do. These days there are account-based benefits, like the bonus to xp for every max level you have. I get a 60% bonus from that. And the Divine Stamina and Potency boosts that affect all characters on the account as soon as one character gets them.

Then there are item boosts from things like the pre-order illusions. And that mysterious server bonus. And Vitality, which can be refreshed once a week with one of the Veteran Rewards, the Orb of Concentrated Memories. Not to mention the multiplicity of xp potions that pop out of various anniversary bags.

So, your character is more powerful but also the mobs seem weaker. Many of them are. There have been several difficulty passes over the years, with mobs intended for groups being downgraded to solo status and whole zones and instances being re-assigned for solo or duo play.

It's just as well I'm not scared of heights. Drops, on the other hand...

It's not just intentional downgrading that's weakened the wildlife. Playing through the mid-to-high level zones as I have been, I would say it's really not so much what has been changed that affects current difficulty as what hasn't. Where your characters have benefitted from any number of boosts and buffs, the mobs haven't gained at all. 

When I began my current climb up the level ladder, my Bruiser was completely untwinked. All he'd really ever done was a few holiday events and some low-level dungeons for fun. When I picked him up again he was dressed in whatever quest rewards and drops he'd happened upon. Many of them were way below his level.

The mobs he was fighting, even the solo ones, all higher than him, should have been able to eat him alive but even when his Merc was engaged with another mob, the Bruiser was more than able to stand his ground. As levels flew by and better (level-approporiate) gear began to replace the old stuff, everything became easier still.

In the old days I would grind levels very pleasurably in Sanctum of the Scaleborn and other dungeons, either in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss or solo but mentored down. It wouldn't have been feasible to do it alone and at level. It still might not always be practical, wholly solo, in level-appropriate gear, without a Merc, but only because it would be too slow. It certainly would be possible, as in you wouldn't die, over and over. That didn't used to be the case.

With the Merc it was a breeze. In a session I was high enough to think about where I'd like to go next. I opened the map and had a look at my options. In EQ2 they are many. Too many, some might say!

Why is it always night-time when I arrive in Kylong? Oh well, look on the bright side...at least no-one can see what I'm riding. I really must look into getting a new mount.

After a couple of hours in the claustrophobic halls of an underground dungeon I thought my Bruiser would appreciate the wind in his whiskers (Ratonga, of course). He was perhaps a level or two shy of the recommended starting level for Kunark but I was sure he'd cope.

And that's how it came about that I've been playing mostly EQ2 over Christmas and the New Year. Inbetween, I had some fun in Atlas, scratched that new game itch. Looking ahead, while GW2 has been on the back burner, it should come to the boil tomorrow with the release of the next episode of the Living Story. My focus, though, has been on Norrath, yet again.

I wouldn't have expected to get such a fresh-feeling, new experience from a fifteen-year old MMORPG I've been playing for, well, for fifteen years. This is why I mostly don't plan my gaming and even when I do I often end up veering wildly off-course  No plans I could think up could match the kind of serendipity inherent in the wildness of the games themselves.

When I finish this post I'm going to go back and level up my Bruiser some more. It's the most fun thing I can think of to do in MMORPGs just now. So much so that I might move on to some other characters afterwards. I'm not sure if that counts as a plan.

And I'm going to write up some of my Bruiser's adventures here, because there's quite a lot more I have to say on that topic. I guess that's a plan, too.

In fact, I had planned to go into detail about just what he's been up to in this post this morning. I even had the screenshots prepared. I had a whole lot of pertinent observations to share and some wise conclusions to draw from the experience, too.

Well, I got sidetracked, didn't I? Sideswiped by serendipity or poor concentration skills. One or the other.

So much for making plans!

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!