Blue Sky Thinking : EQ2, GW2

I was hoping that the latest GW2 update would drop early today. I wanted to take a quick look and put together some sort of "first impressions" before it was time to go to bed. Well, it did arrive at a reasonable time for me - 5pm in fact - but  unfortunately it also came with a bug that causes disconnection from the server every few seconds

As I write this, nearly two and a half hours later, there's no fix in sight and the increasingly angry thread on the forum has reached six pages. First impressions are on hold until tomorrow. If I get in tonight I'm doing my dailies.

While I wait for my fix, I thought I might pop up a quick post featuring some screenshots I took last night in EQ2's Plane of Magic. Like pretty much every zone added to the game in the last five years or so it's very pretty.

It's no wonder Daybreak are so keen to shepherd newcomers into the newer zones at the earliest possible opportunity. Everything before Chains of Eternity, which arrived in 2012, looks dated but from that point on someone worked out how to use a combination of deep, rich colors and monumental scale to give zone design a facelift.

You still wouldn't mistake the results for modern-day graphics but there's a deliciously overblown, decadent feel to them, layered as they are with fin de siecle filigree and flounce. Everything tends to drip with lace or drift in haze, like a fever-dream or an opium-eater's vision.

That approach works especially well for somewhere like the Plane of Magic. It's a little more out of place, perhaps, in Brokenskull Bay, the byzantine, baroque lair of that drunken ne'er-do-well gang, the Brokenskull Pirates, but I'm prepared to make allowances for the sake of an aesthetic I enjoy.

I recently took my Sage through the crafting line to get him maxed so he can start making spell upgrades for himself, my Inquisitor (already at the cap) and my new Wizard. I was expecting to hit 110 well before the end of the questline but I was surprised when it happened even before the halfway mark. 

As a result, he's benched for now, although he needs to finish the full tradeskill sequence for the excellent rewards. I thought about having him put his pointy Warlock hat on and taking him through the adventure line (and eventually I will) but I was curious to see how well the Wizard performed using only the gear and spells gifted her by the latest free level 100 boost.

Very well indeed is the answer. Especially considering I have no better idea how to play a Wizard in EQ2 than to hit everything that isn't on cooldown until the mob dies or I do. Under the circumstances  it's going exceptionally well although I imagine I'll need to work out what my spells do eventually.

I always thought cloth casters were supposed to be fragile at high levels but apparently that's your grandma's gameplay. I started off using roots and snares or sending the Mercenary to tank (she's an Inquisitor so I didn't expect her to do a great job holding aggro) but it became apparent pretty quickly that such a cautious approach was entirely unnecessary. 

At level 100, every mob in Plane of Magic cons yellow and is at least six levels higher than the Wiz, but with a snare on, most of them die before they even get into melee range. Even so, I don't even bother snaring them any more. Even if they do hit her, she doesn't seem to take any damage.

What with her seemingly inexhaustible mana pool and her 11 million hitpoints, not to mention her own personal healer on tap, it seems she's perfectly capable of face-tanking any solo mob needed for the outdoor quests. To put that in perspective, when when my Berserker did Level 100 on the same mobs, wearing the free starting gear given out with the expansion itself, I believe he had somewhere around 2.5m hit points. He had a much slower time of it until he hit 101.

The Wizard is working on the third of the Plane of Magic factions so most of the content I'm seeing is new to me. It's very similar - kill ten of these, gather ten of those, oh my friend got lost down a hole can you get her out? and so on but at least the dialog is different. 

I need to max all three factions anyway. There's a very good reward for doing so plus an Achievement which flags your account to allow you to spend a currency at vendors who sell gear that's a direct upgrade to the stuff you get from the solo questline and dungeons.

It's all very well thought out. If I was playing EQ2 as my main MMORPG, as I did for a long time, this structure would give me things to do that I would consider worthwhile for a good part of the year. Comparing it to the soul-crushing "end game" of GW2, it's hugely more acessible, manageable and relatable. I'm not a great fan of incremental upgrade mechanics but you have to have some sort of progression to take you from one expansion to the next and EQ2's is sound.

As I play less and less GW2 - or rather as I play GW2 for fewer and fewer hours each week - I'm dotting around between a number of other games. I haven't settled on anything as a "primary secondary" but EQ2 gets a good deal of the available attention.


I already have two max level adventurers and two max level crafters. Given the likely arrival of the next (final?) expansion in November it seems not unlikely that by then I will have four adventure classes at the cap - Bereserker, Inquisitor, Wizard and Warlock. I don't believe that has happened since Guild Wars 2 launched six years ago.

There are three very specific reasons why this is happening now. Firstly, the free Level 100 boosts have jumped several characters directly into starting position. Secondly the ten extra levels that come with the current expansion are much, much easier - and faster - to complete than the previous decile from 90 to 100. Thirdly, the Plane of Magic content has more variety, and therefore replayability for second or third characters, than any expansion for a long time.

Returning to that second point, DBG seems quietly to have dropped SOE's utterly ridiculous practice of splitting levels into fifths by the use of  "Prestige Points". That nasty little ruse effectively turned every 20% into something that took at least as long as a full level to complete. If thay'd used levels in the normal fashion through that period we'd all probably be Level 150 by now.

The takeaway is that EQ2 feels to me to be in a very good place right now when it comes to balance and progression. Plenty of players would disagree I'm sure (it wouldn't be EQ2 if they didn't) but both in game and on the forums the general vibe in this expansion cycle has been noticeably less harsh and hostile than in other years.

It's ironic that the team seems at last to have found some solid ground on which to build at precisely the time the game is most likely entering its final stage. At least it will make maintenance mode as solid and replayable as it can be, if and when it comes.

Along with the similarly robust state of current EverQuest, it also bodes well for whatever new version of Norrath they're working on under wraps. If any. The Smed-led outfit may have had more strut and bluster but this bunch might just actually be able to come up with a finished product that works.

We'll see. Or we won't. If there really is an EQ3 in the works I just hope to live long enough to play it.

Puttering About In A Small Land : EQ2, GW2

The Signature tradeskill questline, Stitch in Time, which would normally have been part of the annual EQ2 expansion, finally arrived last week. Any concern there might have been over the extent or significance of the content was laid to rest with a glance at the details.

I already knew from reports coming back from the Test server that it came in a sequence of five parts, the first alone estimated to take three hours and needing to be completed in a single run. It was clearly going to require both commitment and a block of time but it wasn't until I decided to read the full walkthrough at EQ2Traders that I realised the full scale of the enterprise.

At this point it probably sounds as though I'm winding up to a post about how it went when I tried it for myself. Afraid not! It took me literally forty minutes just to read the walkthrough, after which I felt dazed with detail and a little bit intimidated. Added to that, there are a few known bugs awaiting a fix, which should come in today's weekly patch.

I've decided to wait and let things settle. This looks like a major undertaking and the last thing I want is to get hung up on some bug that then gets fixed a few days later. I have the first week of March off work so I'm penciling it in for then.

I had a couple of paragraphs about that orange wisp trail but it'll have to wait for another day.

Instead, I decided to knuckle down and take a second character from level 100 to the new cap of 110. I have several candidates.

There's my Warlock for one. He got boosted to 95 from somewhere in the 30s a while ago but I did play him through those last five levels so I at least have a vague idea what his spells do. He's also a Level 100 Sage so he's going to have to do both the adventure and the craft line at some point.

Then there's my Necromancer, who was somewhere in the teens when she got bumped all the way to 100 with a free boost. She's never really been played, but I did play a necro on Test for five years all the way to the then-cap of 90 and I have another properly leveled necro in the 70s on another account, so I'm pretty au fait with the class, if a little rusty.

Finally there's my Inquisitor. She also got boosted to 95 then leveled the last step the hard way. Soloing an Inquisitor is mindblowingly simple. It really is the Battle Mage every fourteen year old D&D player imagines they want to play. Plate armor, gigantic healing capacity, a huge range of nukes and best of all Verdict.

This guy was a pain to kill. Looked impressive though.

Verdict is the reason everyone wants an Inquisitor mercenary. With Verdict every fight is shorter. Depending on the rating of the opponent, Verdict delivers a giant judge's gavel to the head that one-shot kills weaker mobs at just under 60% health. and most things you'll be soloing at either just under 30% or just over 10%. Even Epics take a nosedive at 3% when the verdict hits and that can be absolutely crucial in a tight fight.

I decided to go with the Inquisitor because she's just fun to play. Verdict came in handy when I accidentally pulled a level 112 named monkey, out questing in Plane of Magic (me, not the monkey. Although who knows?). All the soloable nameds in Planes of Prophecy are level 112 one-up-arrow mobs and I know from my experiences with my Berserker that they don't start to become easy targets until you hit around 105 and have the upgraded quest gear that goes with the levels.

I've been avoiding them for that reason but since I'd aggroed the thing, and since I really don't like monkeys, I decided to give it a go. It was an instructive experience to say the least.

Here's a monkey that could solo Veeshan's Peak. Power creep, much?

The entire fight lasted more than twenty minutes. My Paladin mercenary ran out of power after about five and the monkey (his name is Tiny) was flat out of power not long after. I was chain casting every DD and debuff I have, which is plenty, but my power was holding up far better.

Even so, the fight went on so long and the monkey seemed to have so much health that it looked as if I might run out of power before the end too. I've had fights like that, where it comes down to everyone swinging on auto-atack and casting one spell every few minutes when the little blue bar creeps back over zero. It's not something you want to be doing for entertainment.

Although Tiny appeared to have somewhere north of ten trillion hit points (probably an exaggeration but with EQ2's current insane stat bloat not necessarily) he hit like a wet blancmange. I couldn't even see my health bar dip. I had to open the combat log to check he was actually fighting back. He was, but my passive heals were easily outpacing any damage he could do to me.

Around the time he hit 20% health I had to start managing my mana and by the time I was finally able to verdict the little pest I had 4% left. Without Verdict in the bank it would have gone down to a no-magic slugfest and no-one wants that. Well, I don't.

Don't get excited, Vaynca. There's nothing in there for either of us.

Naturally he dropped something my Inquisitor couldn't use. Isn't it always the way? It was a fun fight - kind of - but I won't be pulling any more nameds in Plane of Magic for a couple more levels at least.

Thanks to the tri-partite faction system in PoP I've managed to reach 103 without duplicating any of the content my Berserker did back before Christmas. This time I went with the Sphinxes, who are an interesting bunch.

Their quest dialog is hilariously overwritten, most likely by someone whose wan't originally employed as a writer. There are some glaring grammatical errors here and there and the tone veers all over the place. I find it quite endearing but I'm not sure everyone would.

Most veterans probably just click through without reading anyway and there are places where it does seem the writer has that in mind. What strength there is comes in the characterization. The Sphinxes all have markedly different personalities and their little humanoid pals, the Aluxob, are hilarious.

Excuse me while I finish your sentence for you.

I particularly enjoyed the exchanges between my character and Grodney, an aluxob who speaks...very...slowly for no reason that's ever explained. I can't help wondering if it's an in-joke about someone in the DBG offices. The way my Inquisitor tried to chivvy him along so she can get on with her quest made me laugh even though the dialog had her expressing herself in a way I'd never imagined she'd speak. Later, when time really is of the essence, she won't let him talk at all, just nod or shake his head. It may not be great literature - or even high-quality quest dialog - but it works for me.

A couple of hours of questing in Plane of Magic is about as much as I want in one session. It's a lovely zone, very varied, attractive to look at and filled with ambient sounds and pleasant music but you can only do so many small tasks and kill so much wildlife before you feel like making a coffee and checking Feedly.

I did appreciate being sent to do some tasks underwater for a change of pace. I don't remember any of that when I took my Berserker through. It struck me as I was killing eels that there's such a ridiculous contrast between the way EQ2 and GW2 use their underwater areas.

Would it have killed you to put down a couple of rocks and some seaweed?

GW2 has the most gorgeous underwater landscapes I've ever seen. ANet went to all the trouble of creating special breathing masks with their own equipment slot to make sure all classes could breathe as easily underwater as on land. They created underwater weapons and skills for every class. They even added a great visual splash effect across the screen when you enter or leave the water. Then sometime soon after launch they seemed to decide that everyone hated all of it. They began to act as though deep water no longer existed.

EQ2, on the other hand, has some of the blandest, dullest underwater real estate you can imagine. Everyone needs special equipment or spells or items to breathe underwater and you can quite easily drown if you aren't paying attention. Fighting below the surface is exactly the same as above except you can't see or hear properly. The whole experience is minimal and minimally entertaining yet the developers never hesitate to make use of it.

Like a lot of things in EQ2, it's an acquired taste but it's one I acquired long ago. There's really not much about EQ2 that I don't like these days but I'm aware that there's a whole lot of "well I grew up here so it seems normal to me" going on. What's worrying is that I tend to benchmark most other MMOs against EQ2 these days and they all come up short.

I may have Stockholm Syndrome.

How To Do More With Less : EQ2

When I wasn't slogging through GW2's Living Story yesterday I was ambling amiably around The Plane of Magic, getting some levels done while working on my Yrzu faction. For some reason the Daybreak Games team chose to gate most of EQ2's latest expansion, Planes of Prophecy behind a substantial faction grind. It's an odd move. I mean, I like a faction grind as much as the next twenty-year veteran but I wouldn't choose to start an expansion with one.

You might imagine this would be both an unpopular and a controversial decision, especially given the mixed reception given to last year's Kunark Ascending, which came with any number of pre-requisites and requirements - obscure languages, long-forgotten quest chains, several faction minimums. Apparently, it's not.

Far from it, in fact. If anything, the vibe around PoP has been noticeably less frosty than the usual stone-faced stare all new content engenders from EQ2's famously hostile home crowd. I'd go as far as to say that General Chat has been positively perky, with most of the tantrums reserved for family spats between long-timers over issues that have nothing to do with the expansion's quality or lack thereof. Certainly no-one seems to be complaining about the faction grind. From what I could glean, people seemed to be relishing it.

Among those giving PoP the benefit of the doubt is Kaozz at ECTMMO. She was less than impressed by Kunark Ascending but she's been covering her progress this time around with a good deal more enthusiasm than she did last year. I was taken aback at first by the speed at which she leveled to 105 because my own progress, while entirely enjoyable, was glacial by comparison.

Over the years SOE and DBG have experimented with any number of ways to stop players burning through new content, few of which have been well-received. This time they seem to have come up with something that hasn't driven the usual sales of tar and feathers through the roof.

What they've come up with is rather simple. They've made each new level from 100 to 110 cost many millions of experience points, while leaving the xp per kill just about where it was. Then they've added absolutely huge XP rewards to the main storyline and faction quests, most of which are very straightforward.

With full vitality and the pre-order bonus running, completing a single quest can award close to a third of a level in experience. Even the repeatable faction quests chime in with a large chunk. This approach would be all well and good if it wasn't for the exceptionally slow TTK (time to kill) which quite a few people have been bemoaning.

Quite a few but not everyone. General chat offered a number of discussions on this during the week and it was clear that not everyone was suffering the same slowdown. A common mistake turned out to be that some people hadn't taken advantage of the free armor, weapons and jewellery that lie around in a box at the zone-in just waiting to be picked up.

The lack of that major upgrade to efficiency explained many people's issues but not mine - I was wearing it all and had been from the beginning. Even so, after a couple of sessions, where it took me literally half an hour to kill the necessary eight mobs to finish each single, repeatable faction quest, while I could see other players ripping through the same mobs in seconds, I decided I must be making some other basic error. I was.

A few years back SOE realized that Berserkers were getting all the benefits of being both a DPS class and a Tank with none of the drawbacks of either, at which point they withdrew a number of the perks from the Offensive stance. Since that unhappy day my Berserker has soloed exclusively as a Tank, since even before that, although I may never have grouped with him, I always thought of him as a Tank and geared and specced him accordingly.

It's never been much of an issue. He's been able to kill quickly and take a beating all at the same time. Well, not in PoP, it seems. In Defensive stance he's so safe that fighting mobs five levels above him doesn't put a visible dent in his hit point bar but he doesn't do a lot more damage than that in return. When I swapped him into Offensive stance all that changed.

Boy, how it changed! Suddenly every attack was knocking chunks off the mobs and when I cast my big Ascended nuke for the first time after the refit I couldn't believe what I was seeing. A single cast reduced the target's health by the best part of 75%! No wonder people say the Ascension class system has turned everyone into Wizards.

Once I took my self-imposed brakes off everything sped up by an order of magnitude. Literally. I'd been timing my TTK and it went from three minutes to thirty seconds on the same mobs. With a few more refinements I improved on that some more. Now I'm back to the usual situation, where the limiting factor on progress is how fast I can get from the quest-giver to the target and back.

That can take a while. Plane of Magic is big. Or it seems big. I'm not sure it's actually any bigger than the open world maps from the last two expansions but it somehow manages to give the impression of vastness by being surrounded by the void. Actually, make that The Void. I think it used to be a zone in it's own right.

Compared to the Path of Fire maps in GW2, Plane of Magic is an absolute pleasure to explore. Mob density is nigh-on perfect: always enough to complete a quest, never so many they get in the way. What's even better is that most aren't aggressive, the ones that are have very small aggro ranges and nothing I've encountered so far snares  me, roots me, stuns me or knocks me down.

You wouldn't believe what a difference that makes. Or perhaps, if you've struggled to explore PoF, you would. DBG may not have either the engine or the artists to compete with ANet but with maybe a tenth as many developers (and that's being optimistic) they manage to make gorgeous environments that positively encourage exploration - and reward it richly, too.

Then there's the storyline. It's just as much cod-fantasy nonsense as GW2's but it's coherent, comprehensible, well-structured nonsense. It's the same plot as every other EQ2 expansion - some mysterious force/god/demon is messing with the natural order/rules of magic/structure of the universe and only you, the player, can help some very important NPCs Put a Stop To It. The difference is in the language.

EQ2 has an odd house style - there's a stiff formality to it that I love. Of late it's not as relentlessly polished as it once was - infelicities and colloquialisms do slip in form time to time - but it still rolls around the reader's palate like a rich Rioja.

I thoroughly enjoy reading EQ2's quest text. Every word. I also find the NPCs and their odd quirks and personality disorders endearing and amusing. As I quested through the storyline of the first of the three factions I'll need to complete I found myself not dreading the grind but looking forward to it. If I'm going to play a quest-based MMO then these are the kinds of quests and quest-givers I want.

After around four hours on Sunday I'd gone from level 101 to 105 but that only tells part of the story. In that time I also went back to Obulos Frontier in Kunark several times to visit Najena, my Elementalist Ascension Trainer and Miragul, who  looks after my Ethereal Ascension needs. Nothing like being trained by two of the greatest mages of all time.

I also spent a good while sorting my banks - not just for the fun of it this time but because I noticed that crafting mats now stack to 800, a fourfold increase. The entire session was an unalloyed pleasure. So far I've scarcely touched the content of the expansion - I'm not even out of the first zone - but I've enjoyed every moment.

As well as questing I flew all over the place, gawping. I took a lot of screenshots and I found a lot of shinies. I never once felt as though I was "playing a game"; I was in the world, immersed.

After all these years I still can't find an MMO to compete with EQ2 when it comes to settling down in a virtual world- at least not since Vanguard went dark. GW2 looked good for a while but now it just looks like a moderately fun game. Where else, after all, can you step out of your front door and walk into a party fighting a dragon on your doorstep?

I'm sure Planes of Prophecy won't be a perfect expansion. I doubt it will even match the extremely high standard set by SOE's swansong, Altar of Malice, which was twice the size - albeit the work of a much larger team.

But for an MMO in the autumn of its life, tended by a skeleton crew working for a company with an uncertain future? Given that background, Planes of Prophecy is a small miracle and I'm going to enjoy the heck out of it while I still can.