Attention To Detail : EQ2

When Daybreak Games decided to offer everyone yet another free Level 100 character in EQ2, Wilhelm voiced what were no doubt the thoughts of many. He wondered just how effective such offers are. The answer would seem to be... quite effective.

Wilhelm also kinda, sorta answered his own question by making a new Level 100 Shadow Knight and actually playing him. I made a free Level 100 on the couple of accounts that turned out to have a character slot left. I even paid for an extra slot on my currently subbed account. The rest that were full I left. For now. No doubt there'll be another offer along in a while.

These offers do work - at least to a degree. There were plenty of people on fresh hundreds, asking questions in general chat, commenting that they hadn't played for a while/ages/in forever. It was the chance of a free high level character that drew them in.

I hadn't been playing EQ2 much recently. Not by intention. I got distracted, first by Wizard 101, then Pirate 101 and the KingsIsle pair pushed EQ2 onto the back burner. The free 100 dragged me back, not so much because it was a chance to skip the levels but because I was curious to see how good the offer was.

Very good. Very good indeed. The gear provided is, for once, more than powerful enough to make the experience of playing in the latest content a pleasure rather than a pain for the uninitiated and inexperienced. And, indeed, for those of us who have been around the park before.

I took my new Wizard out for a stroll around Plane of Magic the other night and as a brand new Level 100 in the gifted gear she seemed about as effective as my Berserker had been at 105 or so. It will certainly make the first few dozen quests a heck of a lot less hard work than they were back in the Autumn, when the expansion was new.

That said, a lot seems to have changed, both incrementally as the expansion beds in and suddenly with GU106. All of it for the better, at least  to my way of thinking. As well as the quality of life improvements they announced, I wonder if they've tinkered with the xp curve?

My Inquisitor has been hanging around for weeks, tapping her fingers and twiddling her thumbs, waiting for me to get on with finishing her last four levels. I took her out the other day to get the final faction she needed to complete the first section of the Signature Line, which in turn opened the first Solo Dungeon in Plane of Innovation.

I remember doing that as soon as it became available with my Berserker. It wasn't particularly hard, but Telwyn, who has been doing the same thing on her Inquisitor, reported a lot more difficulty than I'd had. Still, I wasn't expecting much trouble when I took my own Inq into the instance for the first time. At Level 106 she was higher than the Berserker had been and better equipped, not least because she was wearing some of his spare armor.

She died on the first pull. It wasn't even a fight. I think the mob hit her twice. Clearly something was wrong. I tried once more to make sure it wasn't some glitch . It wasn't. So I went and did some research.

A lot of research as it turned out. I read all kinds of advice on all kinds of forums and websites. I tried a few things but nothing helped much. Without going into too many details, the "solo" dungeons in this expansion work by means of a buff, which is intended to let a single player plus an NPC Mercenary handle the same mobs as a full group.

If the buff is working, you should have over 100k Potency and over 20 million hit points. My Inq had the potency but her HPs were stuck at around 3-4 million and nothing I could do would shift them beyond that. Even grinding a few more repeatable faction quests to hit 107 didn't help.

Eventually I found out what the problem was, from the twelfth post in this thread on the official forums. I hadn't maxed Enhanced Vigor in the Prestige AA line. Actually I hadn't set any Prestige AAs, but that's the one that matters. A lot. With that done my HPs went to just over 20m and instead of me dying it was the mobs who fell over.

Telwyn, to whom I commented about my discovery, confirms that it did the same for his Inquisitor. Just in case anyone else is struggling, or if anyone has made a new Level 100 and wonders why someone seems to have built a wall between Level 105 and 106, this is the reason.

MAX YOUR ENHANCED VIGOR IN PRESTIGE AAs!

Ahem. Anyway, with that done the rest of the instance was a breeze. So was the second part.

Another design feature of the expansion is that almost all xp comes from quests, meaning you don't really see the fruits of your labor until you exit the instance, go find whoever sent you there (usually Druzil Ro) and tell her you've done the business.

Based on my previous run as a Berserker I knew I'd get a fair chunk of xp. I know he hit 110 before he'd done all the instanced dungeons in the Sig.line. He did not, however, hit 110 after he finished the first of them.

My Inquisitor did. She went from 107 to 110 in a single hand-in. I couldn't believe it. At first I thought it must be because of the double XP event but that had ended days before. I checked. What I did have was full vitality (110% bonus) and a 20% Veteran Bonus from the 'Zerker having hit max level.

That should not have turned a single quest into three full levels (I'd barely started 107) but it did. Something's up but I'm not complaining.

The way EQ2 works now, max level is only the start. As well as your AAs, which you probably have alreeady, you need your Ascension Levels. The xp that would have gone to Adventure Levels transfers directly to Ascension instead, although there's a convoluted gating process to make sure you keep at it most of the year until the next XPack arrives.

My Berserker has been slacking on Ascension so I thought I might try the new Solo version of Shard of Hate that came with GU106. He could do with the gear, which would be sure to be upgrades or else why would anyone bother? Even if he didn't get anything good, the xp would be useful.

It was a mixed experience. The Solo Shard of Hate is brilliantly designed. There are two dozen Named mobs, split into several groups, each with a method to spawn them. Every time you create a new instance you get a subset of the total. It differs each time, which strongly enhances replayability.

All of this is explained on this wiki page...which hadn't been written the first time I went in. I went in blind, floundered about, found a Named near the start and killed it after a very long fight which ended with me flat out of power. I autoattacked it to death!

Emboldened, I pushed further in until I ran up against a cleric mob that I simply could not kill. It was only a regular mob, not any kind of boss or sub-boss, but it easily outhealed what I had thought was my respectable solo DPS. Eventually I gave up and left.

On my second run I had the wiki to work from. I killed the Mimic-style chests and spawned the Trapped Bellhop. Then he killed me. It was a DPS issue again. That and he has fiddly mechanics that meant I wasn't even doing any DPS half the time.

I didn't give up. I was pulling regular mobs by the roomful and AEing them to death in short order and the xp was coming in so I carried on. I picked another Named to spawn - this time the Anarchic Obscenity. I killed a load of what looked like skeletal spiders and he spawned. And I killed him.

I ran out of Power again but for once I had the presence of mind to drink a potion to restore it. I never remember there are potions in EQ2. It took two full bars of Power and I was flat out at the end but the Obscenity was on 1% health and again I auto-attacked him to death. I clearly have a lot more work to do on improving my DPS. And my Power. And my Health pool. And my resistances.

Two nameds out of three down, though, and each dropped an upgrade, so that's a start. It was hard work, I died a few times, and reading the strats suggests most of the Nameds will take more effort than I'm likely to want to put in, but I have to say this is an excellent piece of solo content. I look forward to picking away at it until the inevitable day when power creep means I can waltz in on a whim and kick the backsides of the lot of them.

If the next EQ2 expansion really is the last, as the rumor has it, it's a shame. The quality is still top-notch. Oh well, enjoy it while it lasts...

A Crow Will Remember Your Face : EQ2

This afternoon I finished A Stitch in Time, the Signature Tradeskill questline from Planes of Prophecy. The entire affair ended up being easier, shorter and more enjoyable than I had expected. I didn't time it but I'd estimate it took me somewhere between six and eight hours, all told. The story made just a tad more sense than the Adventure line, Legacy of Power. I thought the finale was a little more dramatic and scary, even though it didn't involve any combat - or indeed risk.

Speaking as we were of difficulty, it seems to me that whoever worked on the crafting questline took a deal of trouble to make sure it would feel solid, satisfying and sufficiently challenging. At the same time there was a clear and welcome understanding that those who invest the most time in tradeskills aren't necessarily the most digitally dextrous of players, ironic though that may be.

One good example of the care that had obviously been taken to make sure things remained inclusive was the way the quest offered a choice between either jumping across chasms or crafting a device to bridge them. Since it was clear that jumping was going to be faster I tried that first and found that, at least to someone used to GW2's jumping puzzles, the leaps were very easy indeed.

Roll out the red carpet.

What's more, the first chasm had a fall of a mere few feet and a teleport device where you landed to send you back for another go. What happened if you fell after that I can't say because I was as sure-footed as a cat (hem, hem...) but I'm sure there would have been no major penalty beyond a few dings in your armor and a slight delay as you re-oriented yourself back at the start of the zone.

When the final "battle" arrived it had all the chaos and drama of a big set-piece combat event but none of the danger. Even so, I found the whole experience of being yelled at by thirty foot tall gods while their ten foot tall minions barged me out of the way and bounced me from hither to yon quite exciting enough, thank you!

As I mentioned in another post, I have found the interactions between my character and the gods that he's grown up either worshipping, fearing or trying to pretend aren't real, to be surprisngly affecting. I only found out Ulkoruuk existed a week ago but I was still sufficiently impressed that when he appeared I found myself exclaiming out loud "Wow, that's Ulkoruuk!".

Yes, I know who that is. It's you I'm not so sure about.

Also I found out Ulkoruuk's not a him. He's a her. The Lady of Insurrection in fact. Saryrn, Mistress of Torment, also showed up to send a shiver down my spine. I already knew her name and gender. I remember her from EverQuest, or, more specificaly, I remember her ravens. I met them in Plane of Torment, one of the handful of second tier Planes I saw when the original PoP expansion was current. They were the first creatures ever to cast silence on my cleric, which was something many groups he was in probably wished they could do.

As for Innoruuk himself, I've been scared of him for twenty years, nigh on, so I really didn't need any of his progeny telling me what a reckless fool I was for bringing him back. Speaking directly to him after I'd restored him to something like his full pomp was one of the creepiest and most disturbing things I've ever done in an MMORPG.

All told, the whole thing did the number on me that it was meant to do. I certainly feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of this expansion and then some.

Will it now? We'll see about that.

Of course there's plenty more to do - mostly a lot of grinding to upgrade gear, combat arts, ascension spells and so on. If EQ2 was my main MMO, getting everything up to standard would most likely keep me occupied until the next expansion arrives.

It isn't, though, so I'll just pick away at things here and there until November. I considered getting an Alchemist up to 110 to make Expert CAs for my Berserker but then I checked the cost of buying them from the broker as against the value of the rares it takes to make them and decided I might as well buy some instead and save myself weeks of effort. So I did.

More player-controlled difficulty there, when you think about it. That's one of the pros of having a balanced and/or stable economy in an MMO. You can divert your effort to things you enjoy and buy your way out of things you don't. Although since I enjoy crafting I'm not sure that logic entirely holds in this case, other than recognizing it's definitely possible to have too much of a quite pleasant thing.

You've heard the expression "A cat can look at a king?" Well this is like that. Only more so.

Now I just have to take my Inquisitor through the rest of the Adventure line and my Warlock/Sage through both and I really will be done. I might, at a push, take my Necro through the Adventure stuff as well, if only to get the extra XP bonus for the account but I think that might be a few repeatable faction quests too far.

With the last one largely behind me, I'm looking forward to some news about this year's expansion, especially since we've had it confirmed already there's going to be one. Druzzil Ro dropped a few ominous hints about the ramifications of what we've done so I'm betting it's going to involve Innoruuk in some fashion.

I just hope he remembers who put him where he is today. Then again, come to think of it, maybe I'm better off if he doesn't...

Integrated Systems : EQ2

When I sat down at my PC yesterday morning, after a Sunday morning walk in the snow, I hadn't planned on writing about EverQuest's 19th anniversary. I was going to mention the new holiday events in the EQ2 Producer's Letter, then go on to use the soft reveal of this year's expansion to segue into a post about Planes of Prophecy.

EQ2 expansions have fallen into something of a pattern for me over the past few years. I pre-order the standard edition as soon as it becomes available then, when it launches, I take my Berserker through the solo Signature storyline. That usually lasts me two or three weeks, playing maybe a couple of hours some evenings and a few longer sessions at the weekend.

My Berserker is also a Weaponsmith so once the Adventure line is complete I turn to crafting. There's always a Signature tradeskill quest of roughly equal length although I tend to find that I can finish it in half the time or less. After that I usually take a little break and log in less often, although that's not really in my own best interests.

Over the years, Daybreak has become quite clever at including content with attractive rewards for logging in regularly. They are much more subtle about it than most developers. There's a perfunctory set of dailies that give Veteran rewards but mostly there are a whole lot of well-integrated, lore-appropriate tasks that increment every day or so, along with some that take days or weeks to mature.

Oh look, it's the ghost of Meldrath's hitherto-unknown twin brother! I think we must be in the Brazillian soap opera dimension!

Every day my Weaponsmith and my Sage get to harvest a bush they received at the end of the Signature tradeskill quest from the expansion before last. That gives them each a load of crafting materials including a guaranteed rare. Crafting rares in EQ2 are genuinely rare and genuinely valuable so a free one is not something you want to miss.

Each day every character can visit a trainer to get a scroll that goes towards leveling up their Ascension class. There are four of those classes and they currently go to Level 15. The abilities they provide are immensely powerful and there's an even bigger synergistic bonus for leveling them all.

Then there are the spell assistants from expansions deeper in the past. Both my high level crafters still visit the badgers living in their houses to check on the progress there, although these days those recipes probably aren't of all that much practical use or value.

Those are just the ones on my personal "to-do" list. I'm sure there are others. It's a big game and I don't by any means know all the ins and outs these days.

When the wiki tells you not to bother with Track Materials for this stage, ignore it. This stuff is hard to spot.

The really smart design here isn't just giving us so many plates to spin. It's the way all these activities draw you into the world. You can't just log in, grab the instant reward and log out, the way you can in so many MMOs. If you want the good stuff you have to go to a specific location and intereact with an NPC or an object. You could consider that an irritation and I'm sure many do but it also grounds the player in the game. You don't get much unless you play for it.

That said, there are some timegated activities that can be handled directly through the UI, wherever you happen to be. Training your Mercenary, for example. It's a simple process - just click on their training schedule then forget about it until the training is done.

Only, that can take several days and the clever part is that it doesn't automatically move on to the next level. You have to manually select the next step. It's fire and forget except you have to remember to reload. The system that allows you to upgrade your spells and abilities works the same way.

EQ2 nowadays has a ferocious depth and range of spells and spell-like powers. When the game started the upgrade path for each individual spell or combat art went Apprentice/Journeyman/Adept/Expert/Master. (Actually it was a lot more complicated than that but all the interim sub-levels were removed so let's just pretend they never existed).

Don't look at me, I didn't break it. Him. Them!

These days there are two additional grades - Grandmaster and Ancient. If you want the very, very best spells you'll need a raid drop but everyone can have all their abilities at Grandmaster...if they log in often enough. Taking the time and trouble to keep all your free spell upgrades ticking over on all your characters makes a very signifcant difference to their power levels and effectiveness. It also saves you a ton of money when compared to just buying upgrades from other players via the Broker or crafting them yourself.

A player who logs in regularly and attends to his or her background tasks will be richly rewarded  for doing so. It might sound like busywork but I find it engaging and entertaining and even those who don't will certainly find it a valid and justified use of their time.

Of course, if all you really want to do is solo or play with friends, none of this is essential. Those Signature lines gear a character up perfectly well for the content and of late the developers have taken to handing out catch-up kits for free so returnees or newcomers can keep up. Still, if you can maintain your routine it really helps.

When the Path of Prophecy expansion launched last year the signature tradeskill quest wasn't ready. It finally arrived in game a couple of weeks ago but I didn't get round to starting it until this last weekend. The walkthroughs were daunting. It's a five part quest, with each part reckoned to take a few hours.

Sure beats grinding writs.

I did part one on Saturday afternoon. It took me a couple of hours but a lot of that was cross-referencing back to the wiki or EQ2Traders to make sure I was doing it right. There was a lot of cut-and-pasting of locs, too, which always slows things down.

It was a lot of fun. All those times I harvested my bushes helped a lot. I had all the necessary materials ready. The combines didn't seem to be anything like as long and troublesome as I'd heard. The zones were easier to navigate than expected. The puzzles were straightforward. The unkillable mobs were easy to avoid. I did die twice but both times it was because I hadn't paid sufficient attention to the instructions.

My Weaponsmith had full vitality (100% bonus xp) when he began and the server was giving another 100% bonus for the weekend. I went from Level 100 to Level 105 just on part one alone. I'm very confident now of being able to take my Sage through without worrying about leveling his Adventure class to 110 first.

Getting his crafting up to speed is quite important. As a level 110 Sage, he'll be able to make Expert spells using the free rares from the bush. Having Expert spells scribed then allows him to upgrade straight to Masters using the free, time-gated system.

Oh, very amusing. An actual "time gate".

The whole thing fits together seamlessly. It's a very satisfying, elegant arrangement. The only problem is, I no longer have access to a max-level Alchemist to make the Expert combat arts for my Berserker. I used to rely on Mrs Bhagpuss's Alchemist for that, which worked fine even while she was no longer playing, so long as the level cap was stuck at 100. Not any more.

This is where that mildly controversial Level 100 Tradeskill Boost could come in handy. It's pricey at 3500 DBC but I have plenty of funny money saved up. The alternative would be to buy the expansion for Mrs Bhagpuss's account and level her Alchemist up but that would mean spending real money.

Or maybe I'll just level up the old-fashioned way. It's a grind but every writ gives status and status levels the guild. Another clever integrated system.

It's almost like someone knows what they're doing. Not me, obviously, but someone...

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.

What Are All These People Doing Here? EQ2

The EQ2 wiki is surprisingly vague on Public Quests, something I only discovered when I was doing a little research for this post. I thought I'd better check a few facts before setting finger to keyboard because, even as I was framing an opening paragraph about the oldest PQs in Norrath, the ones in The Commonlands and Antonica, it occurred to me that I wasn't sure whether they really were the oldest. Didn't the PQs in Great Divide that arrived along with the Velious expansion pre-date them?

As it turns out, yes they did. Public Quests arrived on Norrath as a highlighted feature of Destiny of Velious. So much for my memory.

I do remember doing Echoes of The Ring War in Great Divide many times. Many, many times. Sometimes I'd run it several times in one day, particularly on a Sunday. It was fun and profitable. Also well-attended.

Almost from the day they appeared Public Quests were a popular success. They added a new element to the game, something that felt rather like ad hoc raids. PQ's offered something different, something we hadn't seen before - or not in EQ2, at least.

Bertoxxulous, taking the form of a giant, rotting ratman.
He wanders around talking to himself and one-shotting people. Wouldn't you?

Here, once again, I find my memory playing tricks on me. For this paragraph I first wrote "Newer MMOs like Warhammer Online and Rift had been making hay with this kind of all-pile-on semi-casual content for a while by the time the idea filtered down to Norrath" and then I wondered if they really had. So I checked .

Wrong again! Although WAR, where Public Quests began, had been around for three years by the time EQ2 got its own version, Rift had yet to launch. The first Public Quests in EQ2 opened for business in February 2011; Rift didn't officially go live until the following month.

Despite having stolen a march on the competition, EQ2 remained diffident about its achievement. Where Rift and, eighteen months later, GW2 put their signature large-scale, hot-join events squarely front and center, both in the design of the games themselves and their marketing campaigns, PQs in EQ2 remained something of a supporting feature, at best.

Nevertheless, development of the format continued. And continues to continue. I think every expansion since has had some kind of Public Quest attached and today I did my first PQ in Planes of Prophecy.

I guess this must be the place...

I'm keen on Public Quests. I liked them in WAR, loved them in Rift. I've spent the last half-decade doing little else in GW2. My experience with PQs in EQ2, however, has been somewhat sporadic.

As I said, I started out doing one of the Great Divide PQs with some frequency. The other GDPQ was less popular and less enjoyable. I did that one quite a few times but it was harder to find enough people who knew the mechanics and it often failed.

In the intervening years I've done The Commonlands PQ maybe a dozen times or more but the Antonican one I may only have done twice. Coming up to date, during the last year I did all of the Kunark Ascending PQs multiple times each.

Looking at the wiki page, though, I can see there are plenty more that I've never done at all. Most of them I didn't even know existed. In total there are nearly two dozen listed but that's clearly incomplete because neither Antonica nor Great Divide is included and nor are the various holiday-related PQs.

I'm just going to stand here and watch this round, if that's okay with everyone.

Some of the others I've never even heard of let alone seen and it's more than likely I never will. The idea that a full PUG raid will assemble in Lesser Feydark or Steamfont Mountains to do content from several years ago seems fanciful.

In EQ2 Public Quests seem destined to remain tied to current content. While the old PQs lie forgotten, the Kunark Ascending set have been consistently called in General chat for the whole of the active lifetime of that expansion, with multiple copies of the relevant zones spawning to accommodate demand.

They're still being called, sporadically, even now, so someone's still doing them, at least for the time being. It's a long time since I heard anyone call a Terrors of Thalumbra PQ though and that's only looking two expansions back.

Planes of Prophecy brings a big change to the system in that, for the first time, the new Public Quests take place in their own instances. They're "public" in the sense that anyone can join but no longer in the sense that you could run into one by accident while roaming the open world.

The screen splatters are very clever and all but they do kind of draw attention to the fact that I'm looking at a screen.

The reasons are two-fold. Firstly, recent expansions with reduced development resources don't have a wealth of wide-open, above-world areas where PQs could just happen. Space is limited and a huge event spawning raid mobs would be problematic.

Kunark Ascending dealt with that by having one very localized PQ that was tied to the signature questline and several more in the thematically and geographically associated, but very much larger zones from the original Rise of Kunark expansion. That wasn't really an option for PoP - almost by definition all Planar zones, old and new, are instances anyway.

The second reason is cheating. By their very nature, Public Quests allow for rewards to be obtained for minimal effort. They are large, sprawling , chaotic events for which no-one is required to group or raid.

Although raids always form and everyone is always desperate to get an invite, anyone who participates gets credit. That's very fair for the soloists taking their chances but less so for the afkers sitting safely out of range, letting everyone else do the work.

Is that it?
Er, I mean, "Phew! That was a close one! And just look at all this ichor on my armor. I'll never get the stains out!"

DBG tried some preventive measures in previous PQs. They made the reward chest spawn at random locations, well clear of the battle and they even added a massive knockback to the end of the event that threw everyone into the air. People still found ways to get the goodies without making much of an effort.

With the new PQs you don't only have to click on a portal in Colosseum of Valor to get in. You also have to go back to CoV and hand in a token to the wonderfully named Dr. Arcana, an NPC who looks as though he's walked straight out of a 1930s Saturday Morning Pictures serial.

Still, none of that means you have to know what you're doing or indeed have to do anything particularly effective, as I discovered in my first run today. I happened to see the PQ was up as I was passing the Plane of Disease alcove, so I zoned in out of curiosity. Once inside, I couldn't see anything happening so I just followed the first person who ran by.

I ended up with a bunch of people at a lake. Someone invited me to join a raid so I did. I said hello and announced that I hadn't done it before. I asked for anyone to let me know if I was doing something wrong, whereupon some wit observed that it wouldn't matter if I was because all I'd need to do would be blame the healer like everyone else.

Dr. Arcana, I presume?

Someone offered a more useful thumbnail of what to do - pull the mobs and kill them under the seeds. I waited. The PQ began. Someone pulled mobs. I helped kill them under the seeds.

After a while of that I noticed there weren't many of us left. Everyone had gone somewhere else. So I went too. Then I cam back because I couldn't find them. Someone ran past me and jumped on a rideable bat so I got on one too. It flew me around for what seemed like quite a long time then, just as it landed and while I was still figuring out what to do next, the PQ ended.

Apparently we'd killed the two Queens of Disease. I never even saw them. All the same, I got full credit and my proof of participation item, so I zoned back to the Colosseum and handed it in for my reward.

That'll do nicely.

About par for the course on a new PQ. It usually takes a few goes to figure out what's going on, then a few more to figure out what you're supposed to do about it. Then there's a few runs where it's all very exciting as you feel like you're really getting the hang of things, followed by a stretch when it starts  to feel like just another day at the office.

Eventually, you reach the penultimate stage, when you turn up and do the minimum you can get away with to get  participation credit, so you can bugger off as quickly as possible to do something more interesting instead. And the final stage? That's when you no longer need anything the PQ has to offer so you never do it again. Until you're leveling up the next character, that is...

All in all, though, I think Public Quests are a Jolly Good Thing in any MMORPG. They may have been Warhammer's only lasting contribution to the genre but it was a good one. Not many developers have come up with anything as successful or as fundamental since then, so thanks for that, Mark Jacobs or Paul Barnett or whoever thought of the idea in the first place.

Meanwhile, EQ2's PQs may not be the most sophisticated around but they're pretty darn fun. I'm going to keep on doing them whenever I get the chance. With a bit of luck and plenty of patience, one day I may even find out what I'm supposed to be doing!

Free Kittens! : EQ2

We're getting towards that time of year when awards get handed out and everyone talks about what they liked or didn't like over the last twelve months. I'm not going to do that.

Frankly, its a lot of work and I don't have the time or the energy. If Awards season rolled around at the end of the financial year, then maybe we could talk. I'll be sitting around doing not very much at all by then - with any luck.

What I am going to say is this: as of the end of 2017, my favorite MMORPG is EverQuest 2. What's more, I think that as things stand right now EQ2 is my favorite MMORPG of all time.

Talk about character...

My top three MMORPGs haven't changed in forever. Well, technically not since 2007, when Vanguard: Saga of Heroes launched.

The three games in question are, of course, EverQuest, EverQuest 2 and Vanguard. A very strong argument could be made that my favorite MMORPG is, in fact, just the one game. I like what I like, there's no getting around it.

Over the years the order of the top three has changed a few times. EQ has the prior claim, the history and the gravitas. Vanguard has the grandeur and the bittersweet feels. EQ2, though...EQ2 has everything.

It's not just the sweeping scale. Most MMOs that survive have that. They have to. It's grow or die.

Neither is it just the depth, the variety, the breadth: the sheer, insurmountable volume of content that's beyond overwhelming by now. There's so much to do the only way a new player can hope to cope is to take the free boost to 100 and pretend the tip of the iceberg they see at end-game is the entire world.

No, what clinches it for me is the character that shines from every surface. The graphics may be aging, the visual aesthetic may be uncertain but this is a place that's a true place from end to end.
 

Proud to be a two-gnomophone household.

And, what's more important, it's a friendly, welcoming place. No matter how dire the situation, how pressing the need, how near the end times, NPCs tend to speak in full, measured sentences, to address you by your given name and note your concerns.

Freeport may be a den of thieves ruled by a tyrant, Neriak a dark, forbidding underworld, but everyone somehow finds time to chat and life goes brightly on, hourly executions notwithstanding. Everywhere you travel you'll likely be working with boffins or brainiacs lost in the labyrinthine complexities of their genius, or with ancient masters who somehow find time to discuss the mysteries of the universe with you as an equal. There's none of that nonsense about making you the center of the story - you just are and it feels completely natural because the entire game has worked forever to make that make sense.

Aurora Frostfellearis.

Norrath is a world surprisingly filled with whimsy, particularly given the privations of the Cataclysm and the Shattering, not to mention the ever-present threat of imminent destruction from Dragons and Demi-Gods. There's a festival around every corner and a holiday bound to be coming along right after.

I know I'm not alone in finding Frostfell the most engaging of the MMO winter festivals but really it's just the frosting on EQ2's festival cake. And this year we get kittens! Kittens wearing hats!

Norrath is packed right now. The expansion is popular and so is Frostfell. People who play are playing and people who haven't played for a while are dropping by to see what they might be missing.

Stop looking at me!

After my Warlock picked up his kitten I tried to get a screenshot. I kept getting photobombed by passing players but when I found some white space it occurred to me that I'm never really alone in Norrath, not even when I'm the only player in the zone.

There's the Warlock, standing in a ring. Going clockwise there's his old, class-based familiar (some kind of tiny drake), good old Stamper Jeralf (the original ratonga healer Mercenary), a Wicked Gumdrop (vanity pet courtesy of Santa Glug) and the new Frostfell Merry Kitten (new-style Familiar, with stat boosts).

Being a ratonga and therefore something of a techie, the Warlock likes to ride a hover disc. Otherwise you could add some kind of riding animal to the party. And naturally if I'd chosen to take the screenshot with my Necro or my Beastlord there'd have been a combat pet or two somewhere in the mix.

I liked to sleep al fresco on these balmy desert nights. Plenty of room for a kitten or two on the cushions.

When a solo player swings past in EQ2 it often looks like a full party going by - or maybe a small raid getting started. I love that. 

I also love that my Berserker's Maj'Dul mansion, once so huge I wondered how I'd ever furnish it, is now so full of keepsakes, curios and house-pets it looks like a cross between the British Museum storerooms and the Dearly household at the end of 101 Dalmatians.

Meandering through the latest, excellent expansion my Berserker is closing in on the new level cap of 110. With just half a level to go he's finished up the first four Planes on offer - Magic, Innovation, Disease and Storms. Just Sol Ro's Tower left to do although judging from the walkthrough that could take a while.

Everything in this expansion is huge. I guess this guy at least has the excuse of being an actual giant.

I haven't needed to touch two of the three factions for experience. I'm leaving those to give a little variety for whoever makes the run to 110 next. I did do the separate, standalone sequence of music-based quests though. That was...odd. And fun. And incomprehensible. And occasionally emotionally affecting.

I haven't touched the crafting levels yet. Plenty of crafters have ground their way to cap on writs but I'm content to wait for the New Year and the promised tradeskill questline. I'm quite glad it wasn't ready for inclusion in the expansion itself - I wouldn't have had time to do both that and the adventure line before Christmas anyway.

Crafting is another jewel in EQ2's crown, of course. By now it surely must be the most complete, full-featured tradeskill offer in MMOs. Is there anything even close? But then, in EQ2, even gathering gets its own series of multi-part questlines.

Proper sad, this bit was...

I can't think of any MMO that so richly rewards just wandering about picking things up off the floor. Yes, they all do it to some degree, or many of them, but not with such vigor and vim. Shiny hunting alone could keep a player occupied for months.

The older EQ2 becomes, the richer the experience gets, which is definitely not something I'd say about GW2, which was bizarrely - and entirely inappropriately in my opinion - voted Most Improved MMO by Massively OP this week. Improved, sure -  if by "improved" you mean "moved ever-closer to becoming exactly the kind of game it set out to replace", I guess.

Wilhelm was looking back at the list of upcoming MMOs of interest he made at the beginning of the year, observing how far we still are from being able to play any of them for real. I have decided I don't care any more. I'm not in the market for novelty right now.

A title might have been nice. Bird-whistler, maybe?

What I want is more of the same. Planes of Prophecy is more of the same and it feels really good.

But then, of course, I also remember how I was feeling six years ago, when GW2 was still not quite in open beta and I was playing EQ2 every day and had been for years. I felt enervated, exhausted, ready for something new.

Right now the polarities are reversed but that could always change. In this hobby its usually when you feel the most comfortable that you need to start worrying.

Oh well. If nothing else, at least I got a kitten.

A Hall Of Mirrors : EQ2, GW2

Pushing on into the Plane of Disease last night, it occured to me how exceptionally reflexive MMORPG gameplay has become. In 1999, as I peered at the dim shapes in the small window at the center of my 15" CRT monitor, shapes that were supposed to be bats but which looked more like kites flapping in a strong wind, I could hardly have been expected to imagine that two decades later I'd still be there, still in that same imaginary world, still killing bats.

The bats look a lot more batlike these days and I can see them much more clearly but they are, nonetheless, bats. Not precisely the same bats, it's true, but one imaginary bat looks much like another, twenty years of technological progress notwithstanding.

Rallius Rattican, protected by bats. Overprotected, I'd say.

The unchanging wildlife, the immortal parade of bears, bats, rats and boars, that's the least of it. More, it's the places and the characters, a litany of familiar names. One of the most striking features of both EQ2's Planes of Prophecy expansion and GW2's Path of Fire is the way every opportunity has been taken to remind us of the past.

There's the nostalgia card being played, of course. As the MMO genre ages, increasingly developers have come to understand just what a strong suit that is. But it's more than that. These worlds have history.

Gryme. He still holds the key.

Tyria may have seen two hundred summers and Norrath half a millennium but time works diferently there and so does death. The dead rise and walk again and the lifespan of a lich or a vampire or a god isn't measured in years but in centuries or millennia or eons.

Even without the supernatural the scant few hundred years across iterations wouldn't be enough to erode all evidence of the old regime. The rise and fall of empires leaves behind a residue of history, statues and cities that even cataclysms cannot entirely obscure. Everywhere you turn you see a face, a shape, a suggestion of the past.

Cubes. Seen one, killed them all.

There's all that and there's so much more. For weeks I've been hearing veterans of the first Guild Wars reminisce not only about the stories they were told but the legends that they made. It's an alienating experience, like hearing tales of a homeland that was never yours.

Well, now I'm getting that feeling all of my own. It's not just that I know the names, nor that I remember the landscapes. I was there. And more than that, I was there not just in one other life but many.

Puslings. Still the same annoying little snots they always were.

MMORPGs, if they last, all become palimpsests, their own iterations overwritten endlessly, but there are layers on layers. From every era memories accrue, lying one atop another.

When Planes of Power was new I spent evening after evening edging along the polluted dunes with five nervous friends, barely able to kill a fly - literally, since Malarian mosquitoes were about all we could handle. As the expansion aged and we grew in confidence we roamed more widely until we opened the doors of the Crypt of Decay. Then we died.

The original Plane of Disease, courtesy of Allakhazam.

 But we came back and eventually we tamed the zone and made it ours. Some of it. A room at a time. 

A couple of years later, on a different server, the Planes became a playground. With levels and the welcome accumulation of power that both blesses and curses MMOs, Crypt of Decay turned into "that zone that drops all the gems", the place Mrs Bhagpuss and I duoed when we needed some quick cash.

The new version, unmistakeably the same place. Only with added horse-goats..

A while later there was only me. Me and my mercenary. Me and my mercenary and my pets, a lone player and a clutch of silent, obedient allies, roaming fearlessly where once a full group cowered and quaked. I had good times alone.

I have such history here. Not just in this plane or this zone but across the world, these worlds. Worlds whose metafictional existence has become so fractionated, so crystalline that every shock splits a shard that reflects the whole.

Crypt of Decay. Now it gets tricky.

The two MMORPGs I play the most right now are each the second generation that's neither a copy nor a continuation. The new exists in tandem with the old, each refelcting the other into infinity. I can see all of those refelctions at once and behind them all the ghosts of what they were and who I was and what we may become.

It's something rich and strange. It's oddly like life.