The Return Of The Necromancer or How To Turn A Bug Into A Feature.

After yesterday's cheery assessment of the new EverQuest II expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, I ran smack-bang into an unfortunate glitch. A very unfortunate glitch. A glitch worthy of Amazon's New World, except that if it happened there it would probably affect everyone and make news around the world rather than just affecting me and making one tiny ripple on the EQII forums.

Remember how I said after I remembered to put on all the gear from Tishan's Lockbox, everything was fine and the only death I had was self-inflicted? Yeah, well that didn't last. When I logged back in after finishing the blog post something very strange had happened. Something much worse than the original problem I'd been having.

Somehow, instead of being better able to withstand the blows in his new armor, my Berserker had become about as brittle as one of those roses supervillains like to dunk into liquid nitrogen before shattering to let the hero what's coming next. 

He'd become the absolute definition of a glass cannon. If Ihe opened with one of the Ascension spells and blasted a mob - any mob - from a safe distance, the mob would drop to the ground, dead. If, however, he was careless enough to let the mob hit him first, it would be his turn to hit the floor, instantly.

It made for some very odd gameplay, especially for a melee character. It's possible if he'd been a wizard I might not even have noticed but the traditional Berserker pull tactic of charging up to something and spinning was working about as well as running face-first into a steel door. Hard to miss that.

I spent a while reading combat logs and checking settings. I managed to get some questing done but it wasn't enjoyable at all. In the end I posted on the forums about it and went to bed.

This morning someone had replied, suggesting I might need to reset all my AAs. He'd had the same issue and it had fixed it for him. That has actually happened to me before and it worked for me that time, too. I'd forgotten all about it. So I did that and it didn't make any difference at all.

Being me, I then decided to run a few tests and make a few notes. I wondered if it was only happening in the new expansion. Before all this happened, my Berserker had felt extremely comfortable killing stuff in the opening zones of the previous expansion and close to godlike in the one before that. Would he feel the same way now?

I went back to both, walked the Berserker up to an aggressive mob, stood there and let it hit him. 

He died. Instantly. 

Not every time. A few mobs seemed to do normal damage, but most of them were happy to one-shot him in his fancy new armor. Some of the adornments from VoV don't work in earlier content but even with those out of action, he still had over 800 million hit points. When he did some of those older zones the first time he probably didn't have a tenth of that.

I made a note of the damage he was taking. It was spectacular:

Sand Rock Lizard , Svarni Expanse - 9,293,912,700
Swamp Needler, Svarni Expanse - 4,215,656,200
Rock Growler, Echo Caverns - 5,973,298,500
Enormous Rhino Beetle, The Blinding - 2,947,716,400

Clearly, a character with 992,827,858 HP, as he has in the new expansion, is not going to get far if he's been hit for several billion hit points in a single attack. Also, just as clearly, this cannot be working as intended. 

I went back to the forums and found someone had added a comment to say they'd seen this happen in beta. They also said there'd been a thread on it in the bug forum but the explanation had been misinterpreted as the reporting player not having equipped the right gear and the thread had been marked closed.

The commenter had helpfully opened a new thread reporting the bug was not fixed after all so I added my findings to that. I also did an in-game bug report. We'll see if anything comes of it.

That still left me largely unable to play but I still wanted to play. I was also curious to test whether the problem affected my whole account or just that one character. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to throw a rock at a couple of birds and see if I could knock them both out of their tree. 

It's at times like this that having multiple characters at the cap begins to feel like an insurance policy rather than an indulgence. I've been aware for some time that a Berserker isn't the best class to take through new content and I've been wanting to transition to using my necromancer instead. Well, here was my opportunity. 

Luckily, I'd already tidied her up and got her ready in anticipation of playing her in VoV. All I had to do was port her over and swap out all her panda gear for the stuff in the box. 

I was more than a little anxious that the same thing would happen to her as had happened to the Berserker but I'm very happy to say it didn't. I wheeled her through all the quests the Berserker had done at breakneck speed, not needing to read any of the dialog since I could still remember most of it from last night. 

Her pet could tank everything without seeming to take any damage at all and when I deliberately let things hit the Necro to see what kind of damage they were doing, the numbers in the combat log were as you'd expect - nothing much over 20-40 million hit points. With a health pool of almost 200 million that's barely going to raise a bruise.

I ended up taking her into the first instance, where she acquitted herself well against the regular mobs. The first boss proved to much for her but mostly because of the really awkward positioning. He's an archer who stands on a high rock and also teleports. She died but not for any weird reasons. 

All of which leaves me in a slightly odd position. I'm a little annoyed that I can't play my Berserker, especially since he's by far my most prepared character out of combat, being a maxed Weaponsmith and Adorner among other things, but it's past time I transferred my attention to the Necromancer and this is a nudge in the right direction.

I also ought to take my Warlock, who's a max level Sage and can make the upgrades for the Necro's spells, through the tradeskill signature line rather than the Berserker, because who needs a weaponsmith? No-one! Certainly not me.

There's absolutely no doubt that a Necromancer in EQII is much better suited to my solo playstyle. The Berserker is enormous fun to play in combat with all his AEs and death saves but the Necro is the Swiss Army Knife of classes, able to pop out the right tool for any occasion. She kills everything much faster than he does and she can do all kinds of other things, too. Not to mention she can always drop and feign dead if I need to go answer the door. That's incredibly handy.

I very much hope someone at Darkpaw takes note of the report and fixes the bug sooner rather than later because I do want to keep my Berserker up to speed but I can't say I'm unhappy at the turn of events. This could and indeed should mark a turning point, where I return to my EQII roots and go back to playing the class I played so happily for years, before I was lured away by the knockabout fun of first the Bruiser and then the Berserker.

I Just Got A Magic Wand

EverQuest II has so many features and functions. It's all too easy to miss a few. Even the good ones. There's one I've done nothing with until quite recently: the option to morph your combat pets into any number of curious shapes and forms.

It's done using something called a petamorph wand. It's a physical item. It sits in your inventory. You have to click it to make it work. The effectl lasts a couple of hours and then you have to do it again. 

Over the years there have been many requests to turn the wands into spells or abilities so they can be scribed into a spellbook and free up bag space. Not happening. They remain stubbornly tied to the material plane.

I don't know how many there are. A quick google search suggests anything from a few dozen to several hundred. Let's just say it's a lot.

I have fifteeen. I should say my Necromancer has fifteen. No doubt there are a few more scattered around in various bags and bank vaults, here and there, but the only character I have who actually uses the wands is my necro. 

That's because she's the only pet class I play these days. I used to play a Conjuror and a Beastlord but they're both on another account. One I don't play much any more.

I have a channeler, too, another pet class. On the right account this time but very odd. I don't really understand how to play him and I don't plan on learning. So it's down to the necro. Isn't it always?

In EQII, fighting pets already change appearance with alarming frequency. Some classes, like necros and mages, get several different pets and each of those gets a new look every ten levels. 

Originally you were stuck with whatever the game gave you. Each time you levelled up far enough you'd get the next version of the summoning spell but until then you took what you were given. At some point quite early on that was changed to allow you to select from any appearance you'd already unlocked. 

You still have to keep to the right line. An tank pet can only look like another tank pet, a scout like another scout and so on. Pets also change appearance based on what quality the spell is. A master pet looks very different to an adept pet of the same level. If you don't have the Master scribed you can't pick that appearance. Obviously.

When I mostly played on the Test server I spent most of my time as an Iksar Necromancer. I also had a gnome magician and later, on Freeport, I levelled a human magician close to the then-cap. For all of them I picked a pet appearance I liked for each and stuck with that. It was enough for me.

As time passed I moved to other classes. Ones that didn't have pets. I spent a couple of years mostly playing a ratonga bruiser and then I settled on the ratonga berserker who's been my focus character for the last few years. I didn't think much about combat pets or what they looked like.

Even so, I knew about petamorph wands. They turn up not infrequently as quest rewards. They feature in holiday events and giveaways, where I tended not to select them if given the option. If there was no choice the wands ended up in bank vaults somewhere, unused.

When I made a new Iksar Necromancer and levelled her up, a couple of years ago, I was happy to follow past practice. Mostly I let the pets keep the looks they came with. Some I liked, some I didn't, but I never felt strongly enough to do much about it. Not until I got this one, the one in the picture, at 117. 

Not the black cloud with glowing eyes. That's Oor, the peculiar mercenary. Quite cool, if somewhat distracting.

No, the one on the right. The current max level Undead Knight. The tank pet. I think it's a grimling zombie. I know it's short, ugly and has its head on wrong. It  also stares. At you. All the time.

I took one look at it and decided it had to go. I could have replaced its appearance with one from another pet but I wasn't all that struck on most of those either. It occured to me to give one of the wands I had lying about a go. 

I had a look at the few I could find. None of them seemed particularly inspiring. I tried them out. They all looked better than the grimling but they also all had their own drawbacks. 

The drake looks pretty but iksar necros and fey drakes are not a natural team. Also, flying tanks are awkward in action. So are things that scuttle along at your feet like beetles. I seemed to have a lot of beetles.

The one I picked in the end was the lamia. Iksars are really quite nasty and necromancers are really quite evil. It seemed like a match. I can't remember now if I already had the wand or whether I had to go and buy it or quest for it. I got it, anyway, somehow.

The lamia is already one of the default appearances for a necro pet. Unfortunately it's the ranged magic-user, something I'd only use if I was grouping, which I never am. It does seem odd that the spell-related appearances aren't transferable between pet archetypes but the exact same models can be grafted on with a wand but that's EQII for you.

Since then I've been slowly acquiring petamorph wands as I happen across them and passing them on to my necro. They're pretty much all tradeable within an account (Heirloom in the jargon) although they bind to the character that equips them. Quite a few are openly tradeable. They go for a very wide range of prices on the broker.

Most of mine come from holiday events. I've been meaning to look into getting more but it's one of those things that goes to the back of the queue when I'm spending time in Norrath. I've also been meaning to post about the topic for over a year now but I'm aware that to do it justice would take more research time and effort than I care to spend on it. 

This is just a sketch of that post, really. I find myself doing that more and more, these days. It's probably just as well. Who wants to read five thousand words on petamorph wands? Who wants to write them? Don't answer that.

This morning, though, I finished the new three-part Overseer quest that came with the Chronoportal event and I thought the rewards were good enough to make it worth at least mentioning again. There's the wand, of course. There's a mummy plush for your house or tomb. And there's a very nice non-combat pet; a disembodied hand. 

Everyone likes a severed hand that skitters around like a spider. Don't they? It's a great pet for a necro or a warlock and in keeping with most EQII pets it's wonderfully characterful. It taps its fingers, scratches itself and it wears a cameo ring. Well worth making the minimal effort required to get it.

There's also a title; "Chrono Defender". Not the kind likely to stop someone in their tracks but decent enough. Would suit a guardian or a paladin rather well.

Then there's the aforementioned Petamorph Wand: Age Of Turmoil Clockwork. It's a an old school gnomish clockwork, all tarnished and rusty. It has a fiery furnace in its middle, its eyes glow and so does the lamp in its head.

The clockwork has several animations. It does that one where it flops forward, pivoting around the waist to stare at the floor. Occasionally it does a 360 degree headspin and now and then its whole head pops off, flies into the air, does a somersault and lands neatly back on its shoulders. The only problem with all of that is the loud clanking it makes. Could get annoying after a while.

It would suit a gnome magician perfectly. If I had one that's who I'd give it to. Since I don't the necro gets it. She has the one the berserker got but now she's doing the quest herself so soon there'll be spare. It gets like that with my team.

 

I'm toying with the idea of making a Vah Shir conjuror. I bought the extra character slot when Reign of Shadows began but I still haven't used it. I don't think a Vah Shir would look right with a clockwork pet, though. Some sort of cat would be much better there. 

Maybe I'll use that slot to make a gnome conjuror and make the Vah Shir a bard of some kind like I originally planned. Oh, I don't know. This is what always happens.  

Choice paralysis. There's so many things I could do in EQII I end up doing none of them. 

Oh well, it took me years to start using petamorph wands at all. I guess I can wait a while longer to decide who gets the next one.

Flying Easy: EQII

More than six months after the expansion arrived I finally took a second character to the conclusion of the Blood of Luclin Signature adventure questline. Everyone I was planning on levelling hit cap in adventuring, crafting or both long, long ago but there never seemed to be any urgency (or point) in finishing up the quests.

Back in January, when my Berserker muscled his way through the Sig line, it felt like moderately heavy going at times. Nowhere near as slow as some previous expansions but certainly not a quick stroll around the park.

The first time around, I was focused on winning the right to fly on the moon. I don't think I really noticed just how subdued the ending was. The whole thing just kind of fizzles out. Other expansions have had really big, kick-ass finales, throwdowns between gods that I found very impressive. This one just ends with a downbeat debriefing in an office.

Being able to fly around Luclin turned out to be no big deal, either. It's convenient, sure, but once I worked out you can either wear a cloak with the Featherfall effect or slot a leaper or glider into your  mount slot to get about eighty per cent of the effectiveness of actual flight, it really stopped being any kind of issue.

I always had my Necromancer pegged as the next character who'd finish the adventure line. I'd been gearing her up in anticipation so by the time she picked the story back up she was already seriously overgeared. The questline naturally provides sequential upgrades so that by the time you finish you have decent starting gear in every slot but the worst item she was wearing was already better than the best the reward she got.

Which was absolutely perfect. It meant the whole thing was a cakewalk. Boss fights that took my Berserker ten minutes or more back in January lasted barely thirty seconds. In one case, when the Necro got teleported into a pitch black room with the boss at thirty per cent and she was running round in circles trying to find the door in the dark, her pet and her mercenary finished him off without her before she could find the way out. 

I've been playing my Berserker a lot recently, plowing through instances in the hope of upgrade drops, the way you're meant to do. As I wrote, his power levels make that a fun romp rather than the effortful grind it has been in previous expansions. I've been very happy with his time to kill and general, all-round capability.

Well, I was. Until I played my Necromancer in the same content, that is. She's still not as well-geared as he is but the difference is staggering. Those six-minute instance clearances I mentioned someone boasting about in general chat suddenly seem entirely plausible.

It's not just the time to kill, either. It's the way the pet tanks everything without apparently dropping a beat. With a healing mercenary backing her up the pet seems invincible on this solo content. It also gives me a much wider range of options in awkward situations. When mobs do that infuriating power drain, for example, my Necro can simply stand back out of range and let the pet deal with it.

I've been thinking of making the Necromancer my primary character for instance farming. I played a Necromancer for several years back on the Test server and I know how satisfying a class it can be. The Berserker is enormously good fun but it's very much a one trick class. Two, if you swap between offensive and defensive stance, which I haven't done for a long time.

If it's pure speed in killing I was after I'd probably gear up my Wizard. Even in basic gear she's already faster than either the Necro or the Berserker. I'm always a litle nervous of playing pure DPS casters, though. I have it fixed in my mind how fragile they are although I'm not sure that's been true for many years.

Then here's the Warlock and the Bruiser to think about. Warlock, as a class, for some reason I have never really taken to. I always think of my Warlock as a crafter even though he's max level in both disciplines. Bruiser was another one I played for a long time on Test. I liked it a lot but I was almost always in a duo there. I fear that played solo it would end up feeling very similar to the Berserker, only with frustratingly fewer AEs.

As for the Fury I was levelling up from scratch, she's stalled at eighty-nine. It was really very good fun into the seventies. It's still fine and if it was the only way to level I'd be more than happy to keep going but I'm sitting on several Level 100 and 110 boosters and I'm more than half inclined to use one of those and just be done with it.

Overall, things are progressing very handsomely. Soon we'll have the next round of holiday events and then we'll be into the Summer Ethereal season. This looks like being the first year I'll actually be ready to take full advantage of that, assuming Darkpaw roll some of the drops out to solo content as they did last time.

From there we'll run up against this year's Panda quests, if that tradition continues. Then, if precedent holds, we'll head into Gear Up, Level Up and the pre-expansion events, whatever they may be. Atlhough maybe there won't be quite the same focus on getting everyone caught up this time around, seeing there's no level cap increase this year.

Whichever way you look at it, it's a full dance card. I haven't been so invested in EverQuest II for years.

Everything Is Everything Else

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours doing dragons in EverQuest II. The Dragon Attack event is drawing to a close but if anything that's only made it even more popular. There were enough people at each dragon spawn last night to spin up a second copy of the zone and it wasn't even close to prime time for the server.

The event is very well designed in terms of pacing. Each dragon respawns an hour after it's killed and it takes a crowd of fifty or so players seven or eight minutes to kill one. A rotation falls into place; the dragons spawn in a predictable order with a wait of just a few minutes between. Time to go bank or swap to an alt to gather crafting mats from the dragon corpse.

At least, that's how it's supposed to work. It was that way for the first couple of weeks. Some days it still is. At some point, though, some clever bunny came up with a short cut. Instead of the dragon taking anything up to ten minutes to die, it's dead in a couple. I've seen one burned down in less than thirty seconds.

I've been trying to find out how it's done but without much success. Google gives me nothing. I've asked in game several times but the only reply I got was "it's an exploit" without any hint of what the exploit might be.

Over the last couple of days I narrowed my investigations down to "something Necromancers can do". My theory is based on a couple of throwaway comments in general chat, where someone has made a crack about things going a lot faster if the necros "do their thing". Also, I noticed on a couple of occasions in Nektulos Forest, where the dragon summons a horde of elementals that take quite a while to kill, all the sparks suddenly died at once. The cause of death in every case was a "Vampiric Orb" attributed to an NPC Mercenary.

Vampiric orbs are created when a necromancer casts Vampirism on an ally. I have no idea if this is the proximate cause of the so-called "exploit" but it's about the only clue I have.

One reason I'm posting about it is in the hope that one of the handful of people who read this blog and also play EQII might know more about what's going on and chip in with a comment. Another is background to how I came to be looking at Chinese Post-Punk bands on YouTube.

The effect of the "exploit" or tactic or whatever you want to call it is that the elegantly calculated cadence for kills breaks down completely. What tends to happen at first is that all four dragons get killed in about twenty minutes or so and then there's a half hour wait for the first one to respawn. Sometimes the dragons end up overlapping and the order changes.

Either way, there are periods when everyone just stands around in a big gang for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes waiting for something to happen. That suited me fine last night because I had six characters running around gathering dragon mats and it gave me plenty of time to log them in and out. But even then I found myself with time on my hands.

I'd read all the new blog posts in my Feedly and blog roll so I started flipping through my bookmarks, looking for something to keep me occupied. I have a ridiculous amount of unsorted bookmarks, many of which go to things I've completely forgotten about.

One of them goes to a potentially fascinating resource called The Music Industrapedia. When I bookmarked this it was fairly new and didn't have a lot of detail but someone's clearly been hard at work since then. It varies an awful lot country by country but some of the entries under the Music Artist category are quite extensive.

I had a good browse through the Canada, Japan and France sections, which are very well-represented, and picked away at a lot of the smaller territories, which aren't. Then I took a look at China.

Chinese pop/rock music fascinates me. We've had so much discussion in the blogosphere lately about Chinese influence on Western culture and mores but it seems to me that's very much a two-way street. The Chinese government may think one thing is happening but the Chinese people seem to have different ideas. A lot of different ideas.

Glancing down the list I saw several names I rcognized from my own explorations in hyperspace: Carsick Cars, Hedgehog, New Pants, Queen Sea Big Shark... One reason I'm drawn to music and musicians from that part of the world is the amazing, evocative names of the bands. I spotted one I hadn't seen before, Streets Kill Strange Animals, and clicked the link.

There were two more links on the landing page; the band's Bandcamp and an article on Post-Punk.com, a website previously unknown to me. The article was fascinating. It told me in a few paragraphs more about the development of alternative music in China than I'd picked up anywhere else in years, although I have to admit I've never made any attempt to research the subject. I'm sure there are tons of journalistic and academic treatises out there just waiting to explain enverything if only I wasn't too lazy to look.

For the next hour or so I killed dragons to the backbeat of Snapline, Ourself Beside Me, Pet Conspiracy and more. I also watched a tremendously unexpected cover of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Massive Attack but that's by-the-by.

It struck me what a strange and wonderful world we live in. In the same moment I was sharing a virtual fantasy with a hundred strangers around the globe, learning about the aesthetics of cultures and the way they cross-pollinate, and planning a creative act to synthesize it all : this post.

And some people say video games are a waste of time...

I Wish It Could Be Blaugust Every Day... Oh, Wait...

Well, we all knew it would come to this eventually. I'm astonished it took this long. Ten consecutive posts of arguable substance. I impress myself.

But now it's Saturday night and I'm tired so here it comes... the screenshot post.

These shots are all from GW2's unexpected and incredibly welcome holiday event, The Festival of the Four Winds. This is my necromancer, who does most of the holiday work. She's green all over courtesy of an extremely sought-after and expensive little doo-dad she got last Halloween.

Here she is, chatting to some nutcase who climbed the highest rock in Labyrinthine Cliffs for reasons he explains but which I've already forgotten. I remember it was something elegaic and mournful. Life is short, then you fall off a rock. Something like that?

I have taken a few other characters there. This is one of my rare humans. Mostly she lives in Lion's Arch and does the "Activity" dailies when they come around. Humans get all the best poses and their armor fits better than anyone else's. I ought to play more humans. Maybe.

There's a party beach in Labyrinthine Cliffs. It has a changing hut. If you go in the hut you can come out wearing a swimming costume. Sometimes there's music and all the sunbathers get up and dance. This is what we call "entertainment" in the 21st century.

I really love this map. I don't want it to go away. I don't want to have to wait a whole year to do this again. Holiday events are great but they should be all the time. That's your cue, Roy.

Already Home : EverQuest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soloing In Heart Of Thorns : GW2

It's been a week now. We're past First Impressions. The dust is beginning to settle on the New Game Shine. Things are falling into a shape they'll hold for a while. It's still too early to stand back and take the cool view but one thing seems clear: Heart of Thorns may well be the best solo experience I've had in an MMORPG since Vanguard.

This first week has, arguably, been a better solo experience than the base game at launch three years ago, strong contender though that was. That's mostly because GW2 was wildly popular when it first arrived and "soloing" meant trying to get a hit in alongside the other fifty new players in your new starting map of choice. Here the world seems much less crowded and not just because of the Megaserver bug that left some maps almost empty for the first few days.

There's still plenty of rolling bubble play, if that's what you want, as Endgame Viable accurately describes. I've done some and loved it. It's GW2's signature gameplay after all. In a week where I've played almost all the hours available to me, though, zerging and massive-scale events have been merely the amuse-bouche to a banquet of top quality solo play.

This, I recognize, is not an opinion universally acknowledged. As I mentioned once before, MassivelyOP's GW2 columnist Tina Lauro adjudged soloing in the expansion "exceptionally difficult", an assessment some commenters on this forum thread would consider wildly optimistic.

Adventure this way!

So, why the extreme difference of opinion? Well, as usual. it all comes down to a definition of terms. To me, "soloing" in MMORPGs means having complete freedom to do whatever I choose, while having that choice meaningfully progress my character. It means walking out of the city gate into adventure, alone, and returning, who knows how much later, still alone but stronger, wiser, battle-scarred and proud.

To others, it seems, "soloing" means being able to do all the things without anyone's help. That's not a definition I'm willing to embrace but I'll accept right now that, for those who do, Heart of Thorns is not ideal. Alone you won't complete many events and certainly not any full event chains. You can start all the Hero Challenges you want but you won't often finish one on your own. Everywhere as you go there will be many times you'll have to run rather than stand and fight.

Then there's the question of class. It can't be denied that some GW2 professions (and builds) are better at going it alone than others. My Berserker Staff Ele is out there trying to prove otherwise but she's not making a great case so far.

Don't laugh. Spiky doesn't like it when you laugh.

I knew that from beta though and as the drop date drew near I looked at my extensive team and made a specific choice of who would take point. A while ago, for my own amusement, I created and leveled an Asuran Ranger who, at 80, I specced and equipped for maximum healing and survival. He can barely shoot his way out of a paper bag but he can take a licking like Timex. Until last week his main role has been comedy relief but cometh the hour, cometh the cat hat. He's been a superlative choice and he's not even a druid yet.

After preparation add experience to the mix. I've been soloing a long time. I cut my solo teeth in EverQuest back at the turn of the century. Maybe it's first love syndrome but for me EQ, these days usually cited as the archetype of Group Required Gaming, has always represented the apogee of solo play in a massively multiple setting. Vanguard perhaps surpassed it but only by being EQ in fancier pants.

The transferable skills you learn, soloing in EQ, are manifold. Patience, foremost. Pacing. Observation. Attention to your surroundings. Forward planning. Concentration. How to kite. Most importantly of all you learn to fear death.

Dying in EverQuest, back then, hurt. A single death could wipe out all the progress you'd made in a full session. More. At worst it could cost you not just your level but your corpse and everything on it.

All those hours quad-kiting Ulthorks had to pay off sometime.

There are those who claim they want those days back but I'm not one of them. Compared to the "good" old days Heart of Thorns is cake but still, compared instead to much we've come to expect of late, it feels unforgiving. It's unbending, uncaring and harsh and at the same time refreshing, exhillarating, even thrilling. It's a precarious balance but I believe ANet nailed it.

That said, the decision to open with perhaps the most awkward and un-navigable of the maps to travel without the new movement skills could be called perverse. Verdant Brink is an entirely different proposition with several ranks of gliding, jumping mushrooms and Nuhoch Wallows (they provide instant cross-map teleports) unlocked but players come to it blind, with none of that.

As an introduction to the new paradigms it's intense, overwhelming, and it's not surprising many balked. The intent seems to have been that we'd work our way diligently through the Personal Storyline as though it was some kind of hyper-extended tutorial. That way we'd open all the relevant skills as and when we needed them but, well, best intentions and all.

The decision to lock story chapters behind Masteries was widely perceived as coercive, restrictive and downright frustrating, second only in unpopularity to locking the new Elite Specializations behind 400 Hero Points. We're all Commanders of the Pact, for Dwayna's sake! We don't need our hands held. Just let us have it all and have it now and we'll have at it.

Up or Down? Flip a coin.

Both of those mechanics have since been mildly nerfed but perhaps, as Pact Commanders, we should just have buttoned up and buckled down. There is a war on after all. In any event it was mostly moot for me. I haven't touched the Elite Specs yet. My trusty Exotics and familiar skills seem more than up to the new challenges and by the time my Personal Story reached the second map, Auric Basin, I'd opened waypoints all the way to Mordremoth's doorstep in Dragon's Stand.

Exploring is bittersweet sometimes. The storyline kept giving me reveals I'd already discovered. I knew the fate of Rata Novus days before it was explained to me in cut scenes and dialog. I could have told Taimi what we were walking into and saved us the trip. Still and all, I feel more connected to the narrative, not less, because I found my own path.

As well as the feasibility of travel and the viability of combat solo there's the matter of grind. Those who aren't enjoying HoT and even some who are put the need to grind xp for Masteries high among the negatives. It's a position for which I don't feel a great deal of empathy.

There is no agreed definition of "grind" in MMORPGs and there never will be. One person's content gate is another's content. What's hair-pulling frustration for him is a warm, relaxing bath for her.

That's per kill. And I don't even have everything running.

Familiarity is part of it. To many GW2 players these mechanics and processes are either something they've never encountered before or, worse, that they have and which they came to GW2 to escape. To me it's like meeting an old friend in an unexpected place.

In three years I've acquired a lot of "Boosters". Those little icons that pop out of chests and fill my banks, stacking up unused because until now I've had no call for them. Why would I need to boost my experience gain when xp already flows faster than I can find a use for it?

So I saved them for a rainy day and now it's monsoon season. Once again it's all so reminiscent of EQ or EQ2. Piling up the buffs, Birthday, Celebration, XP, food, utility, fireworks (yes, fireworks buff xp) then going hell-for-leather after anything that moves.

Just watch that xp fly. It's so satisfying. Exhausting after a couple of hours, sure, but in the way a really good workout is exhausting (not that I can remember what that feels like...). Grind? More like glow.

The expression "overgrown housecat" comes to mind.

Did I say going after anything that moves? That's not right. We're back to knowledge and observation again. Satisfying soloing rests on knowing your enemy, setting achievable goals and picking your targets. In a new environment that means experimenting and that's a big factor in the fun I've been having.

A lot of my time has been spent not just exploring for the sheer spectacle but for potential future profit. Each new creature needs to be tested to destruction - its or mine. That's how you learn that some Veterans are very much not like the others. Why Veteran jungle Spiders and Tigers are so pathetically weak I can't explain but they are. Take them three or four at a time. The xp tastes good.

Chakk, while deadly if you stand still and let them cover you with icky blue goo, are the kobold grunts of Tyria, rounded up and AE'd down. Motile mushrooms, on the other hand, are to be avoided at all times. There's no percentage in AEing an AEer, especially when they come in gangs with bombs.

Hop it, hat boy. It's necro time.

And so it goes. You pull, you fight, you assess. At need you retreat. The glider here is a lifesaver, literally. Every drop is a zone line. Fall, unfurl, escape, start over. And the upside of gliding down is often landing somewhere no-one's been for a while. Untouched mobs in GW2 accrue a bonus that builds and builds. With boosts, killing mobs no-one had disturbed for a good while, you can rake in more xp in one ten-second kill than you get for Gold contribution at the end of a ten minute event.

So, yes, this is solo heaven. For me, anyway. It can be for you. Pick the right class and build. Take your time preparing. Explore until you feel you know how the land lies. Learn your escape routes. Practice your tactics. When you feel ready go to your selected kill zone, pop those boosters and kill, kill, kill. It's a classic interpretation of the MMORPG solo experience and classics never go out of style.

Common Fluency : Everquest

Playing on Ragefire these past couple of days has reaffirmed an uncomfortable truth: for me, after more than a decade-and-a-half and well over one hundred MMORPGs, nothing the genre can offer has ever surpassed the effortless, natural pleasure of starting a new character on a new server. To step out into an unforgiving world with little more than the clothes you stand up in and an empty backpack waiting to be filled, well it's the pure essence of what drew me in all those years ago and held me ever since.

In creating the concept of the Progression Server SOE and now Daybreak Games have had to make many necessary compromises. A list of all the ways the current systems differ from any of the variations that existed during the twelve or so months between the April 1999 launch and the arrival of the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, would fill this blog post several times over. Every single one of those changes has made the game "easier" than it used to be. And yet it's still not easy. Not easy at all.

Aywren asked in yesterday's comments for advice and information on the appropriateness and practicalities of soloing under the new ruleset and I replied that I have always believed EQ to be a very solo-friendly MMO, which I have. It occurred to me today, though, how very much that solo-friendliness depends on experience and knowledge. Much, much more so than any MMO that I've played, or at least any that was released in the last ten years or so. 

Six-boxing means never having to ask for help. Which is just as well because everyone hates you.

As you join Ragefire, your character is inserted automatically into a number of custom chat channels. Yesterday I found myself listening to chatter from characters in my level range, my class, my geographical location and more. Everyone was asking questions. Where do I go? Who do I speak to? What level do I need to be?

These are the kind of questions you expect to hear in any new MMO but they mask a deeper concern: how do I survive here, let alone prosper? How do I even get started? For example, where are the quests?

Famously and perhaps surprisingly in a game that has the word in its very name, Everquest does not use quests as a framework for gameplay. There are quests of course, many hundreds of them in the classic game alone, but there is nothing to tell you where they are, how to find them, how to proceed if you do or what you might get if you succeed. There are no exclamation points, feathers of flags above the head of any NPC. There are no tidily arranged "hubs" marking a breadcrumb trail across the zone.

Players aren't used any longer to being cast so adrift, especially right at the beginning of their journey. Worse still for many, at no point do you ever find out if you are "done" with an area, whether it's time to move on, or if it would profit you to stay a little longer.

Backing away...backing slowly away....

It's not even something you can tell easily by looking at anything as basic and fundamental in most MMOs as the level of the mobs around you. In Classic the scope of opportunity in most zones can span almost the entire level range of the game.

This morning in North Ro, where my Level 3 necromancer was happily hunting Level 2 aardvarks and decaying skeletons, someone trained a Crypt Mummy to the nearby inn. The mummy was somewhere in the mid-teens, capable of killing my necro in a couple of blows. It hung around the doorway for a while, preventing anyone from using the facilities (which didn't bother my necro, who had already been told he was persona non grata there due to his filthy proclivities). A little while later, further out on the sand hunting Level 3 Young Pumas, he saw a Sand Giant serving up rough justice as it wiped out a group a few levels higher than him as they camped the very same camp of undead from which the mummy had been trained.

In Norrath everyone is very much in it together, for good or for ill. The Hill Giants and Griffins that send you running for cover as they wander by are the prey of other players whose level you one day aspire to reach. Everyone is on their honor to look out for everyone else and the example of the reward for hard work and determination is always there before you: power, freedom of action, revenge, wealth.

New-fangled conveniences... mutter mutter
Actually this one's a big improvement and long overdue

You cannot help but be aware of the danger posed by creatures outside of your level range but unlike other games you equally cannot be quite certain what is and is not within your capacity to handle. Mobs do have exact levels but that information is concealed at all times. You are merely permitted to see a range of colors and descriptions that encode vital information, which you must learn to decode by trial and experience.

Before you attack anything - or even if you intend to run past it - you should target and "consider" it to assess the risk. Only at this point do you learn whether your target is higher or lower than your own level, something you have to derive from the color of the text. Only if it matches your level exactly will you be certain - mobs of your precise level have their information in White. Below you comes grey, green, light blue and dark blue and above you comes yellow and red.

That helps but not as much as you might imagine. Each color encompasses a level range that is itself variable according to your own level, something that really matters a great deal when considering things that are more powerful than you. In Everquest levels mean a lot but then so do many other factors and many of those are invisible.

It's true that you can tell the attitude of every creature from its description but its easy to forget as an experienced player that the hard information comes with a figurative wrapper. Before you can make a full risk assessment you have first to be able to parse the descriptive language for meaning. An animal that "scowls" at you will attack , unprovoked, from its maximum agro range while one that "glares" will let you pass by unharmed unless you almost trip over it, whereupon it will turn and fight. A "dubious" creature will only attack if you attack it first.

Let's not even start on which creatures are worth killing.
Armadillos drop several stackable items
worth almost 2 gold each though.
Just sayin'

Which would be all very well if you could see the aggro range somehow. You can't. Or if the aggro range was constant. It's not. Or if every creature of the same level was of comparable difficulty. They aren't.

Over time and with experience you will come to know without having to check, for each kind of creature you encounter, in a particular zone that you feel you now know well, what will or won't attack, how close you can approach before something unpleasant is likely to happen and how likely you are to survive the experience. When you get to that point you may feel you're really beginning to make progress but there's so much more to learn before you can begin to think of yourself as a seasoned professional adventurer. For one thing, there's the matter of faction.

There are visible factions you can see and measure and affect. Each time you kill a gnoll you'll be given a list of all the groups in Norrath who approve or disapprove and a numerical value for how much more they like you now because of your gnoll-killing ways or, conversely, find you increasingly detestable for picking on poor innocent gnolls (it's mostly gnolls who feel that way and who cares what they think?). You can and probably should make concerted efforts to curry favor with certain groups, not least because it may stop some guards, who you might have imagined were placed there to help and protect the characters of paying customers like you, from instead attacking and killing your character on sight.

Norrath is a world that seethes with intrigue from the pettiest official to the mightiest cabal. You can get on the right side of some of them but there's always someone on the wrong side of you. There are NPCs who will kill you for the class you chose or your race; they will kill you because you cast an illusion or because you killed someone they like, even though you had no idea they even knew each other.

And after "What Do I kill?" comes "How Do I Kill It?" Let's slide over that one for now...

Even animals have their alliances. I had completely forgotten that Fire Beetles in the Deserts of Ro consider all beetles to be their kin and come racing to the assistance of Scarabs. At least those two look alike. Often creatures that are normally disinterested, like Decaying Skeletons, will become hostile if they notice you  attacking one of their ilk but sometimes creatures that seem to have nothing in common at all will leap to each other's defense. There's literally no way, in game, to know what social ties underpin Norrath's wildlife other than by observing and remembering each encounter.

I could go on and on and on but the the detail doesn't really matter. It's understanding the  level of complexity involved that's the key to survival when you set out to solo your way across Norrath. Compared to any modern MMO you care to name Everquest, even now in its much-simplified and ever-increasingly user-friendly form, offers a ferocious learning curve. It's all very well for me to claim blithely that anyone can and should jump in and solo away but I really ought to remember that it took me months of playing 20-40 hours a week just to get to the stage where I could comfortably and confidently run a character from one end of a zone to the other and expect to get there alive.

So, yes, if you haven't played for a while or ever, do give it a try. I firmly believe that beginning a new character afresh on a new server remains the most compelling experience MMORPGs have to offer and Everquest retains all its magnificent potency. Just don't expect it to be easy. Or painless. Or quick.

It's like learning a language. You can pick up enough to get by in quite a short time but proficiency takes years. I'm nowhere near fluent yet but I'll keep trying.