Buckle Up! (The One And Only Spacey Catgirl)

One of the things that supposedly got me all excited for the launch of EverQuest II's Reign of Shadows expansion late last year was the inclusion of the Vah Shir as a playable race. One of my most-played characters in the original EverQuest was a Vah Shir Beastlord and I have a huge fondness both for the race and the lore surrounding it.

I say "supposedly" because although I was eager enough to fork over the required thousand Daybreak Cash for an extra character slot months ago it turned out I wasn't keen enough to use it until today.

 Partly it's that I've had other things on my mind. First Disco Elysium, then Valheim. Serial game-buying isn't conducive to parallel game-playing, it would appear. Who'd have guessed?

Mostly, though, it was that I couldn't make up my mind what class to choose. I had it narrowed down to either a Magician or one of the Scouts, which wasn't really narrowing it down all that far. There are seven scouts.

As is usual with these dilemmas, really I knew what I wanted. I fancied playing a Mage. So a couple of hours ago I logged in and made a Swashbuckler.

It was a practical decision. I don't have any characters on Skyfire who wear chain armor. I keep getting the stuff and I can't do much with it other than transmute it for mats and I don't need any more mats right now. Selling it for a pittance to NPC vendors annoys me. I might want another cloth class but I need someone who wears chain.

For a given value of "need", that is. There's not much prospect of any new character I make getting played regularly, let alone seriously. I have six max level characters already and only one of them is up to scratch, even by my louche, casual standards.

Race and class decided, next came the rest of the panoply of choices: gender, appearance, alignment, starting city, server. And, of course, name. The tough one.

I looked at the male first. Geez... Remember the EQ Next Kerran? The one everyone hated? Looked a lot better than the male Vah Shir with his head shaped like an anvil - if the anvil was made out of dough. Hard nope.

The female didn't look a lot better until I hit randomize and a perfectly palatable cat-person appeared. She even had cheekbones. I spent a while going through the options. There didn't seem to be nearly as many as some other races get. Only five hairstyles? Six, if you count "Bald". Which I definitely don't. And Vah Shir have to make do with Kerran voices? Shabby.

Doesn't really matter how many or how few the options are, so long as you can get something you're happy with, I guess. I was pleased with my new look. Very different from anything else I play these days. 

Alignment was a given: Vah Shir have to be good. That means starting in one of three places: Qeynos, New Halas or Kelethin. Of the three I only really like Qeynos. Kelethin is just impossible. All those platforms. And elves. New Halas I find bleak and depressing. It makes me feel cold just looking at it. Can't they at least put doors on their shacks?

What I really wanted was a new starting area just for Vah Shir, of course. When I saw in the promotional material for Reign of Shadows that we'd be getting both the city of Shar Vahl and the zone outside it, Shadeweaver's Thicket, I naively imagined Vah Shir player-characters would get to start there, just like they did in EverQuest. 

No such luck. Everything in RoS is determinedly designed for level 120s only. As I discovered later, you even have to be max level to start the Vah Shir racial questline. 

I do get why Daybreak wouldn't want to add yet another starting area, even if they had the resources to develop one. We already have a choice of six and that's not even counting Qeynos and Freeport, which still retain almost all of the original starting content for anyone who knows where to go. Still, it's hard to call yourself a true mooncat if you have to grow up on earth. On Norrath. Oh, you know what I mean... 

Smell that sea air!

 

In the end it was a purely nominal decision. I picked Qeynos but I was only there for a few minutes. Taking Qeynos as your starting option doesn't mean you start in in Qeynos, anyway. Oh, no. That would be far too straightforward.

Logging in for the first time, I found myself once again on the good ship Far Journey. The days when that spurred a fizzling burst of nostalgia are long gone. I've done the trip to the Isles of Refuge to death in recent years. Fortunately, as a member, there's always the option of instant travel. 

Without moving from my spawn-in spot on deck I popped up the map and clicked on Qeynos. See that, Captain Varlos? No one needs you!

I'd already decided I was going to use a level boost. I have a fury in the nineties on Skyfire and a dirge in her twenties on Kaladim, both of whom I'm actively, if sporadically, levelling the old-fashioned way. I don't need to start over again just now. 

The question was, which level boost?

Now I want to go see if the Proving Grounds still exist...

Looking through my banks and /claim, I found half a dozen to choose from: two Level 100 boosts, three 110s and a 120. After the recent discussion on experience vials (two more sold overnight, by the way, but again to the same guy, who put them straight up for sale, so I'm still none the wiser) I thought I'd go for the 100 option and maybe experiment a little.

The boost I picked was one I'd picked up in some Proving Grounds promotion. Remember the Proving Grounds? No, I don't imagine anyone else does, either. Another flower gone to seed.

I applied the boost, dinged 100 and received a care package. I spent a few minutes unpacking it all, getting dressed and sorting out my new set of 24-slot bags. Then I opened my Knowledge Book and spent a lot longer reading every new combat art and slotting them all onto my hot bars (which I'd copied from my Berserker, as I always do, even though it means starting with a lot more slots than I'm going to need right away).

Next I opened the Claim window and claimed one of every "per character" item in there, except for the Veteran packs, half of which I know from experience will end up filling my bags with stuff I won't ever get round to using. 

For some incomprehensible reason the Proving Grounds boost comes with one of the most irritating mounts, a giant wiggly worm that gets in everyones' way at the bank and has an undulating motion that makes me nauseous. And I don't even suffer from motion sickness. Fortunately I have other mounts I can claim so it was off to the imaginary stables for Faerelith, The Obedient One.

Seriously? That's the mount you went with? It couldn't have been a horse?

It was all going nicely. I was about ready to go try out my new skills. And then it occurred to me. I was heading to Plane of Magic, the obvious, indeed possibly the only, choice at 100. And what would be waiting for me at the zone-in?

Tishan's Lockbox, of course. And inside it, a full set of gear and weapons that would make everything I'd just equipped obsolete. 

Fine! I'll just go swap it all out, then. It won't take a minute. So I did that. Only none of the gear comes with adornments. I have bags and bags full of those. I just have to remember who's got them. Or I could make some new ones. It's not like I don't have the mats.

But hang on... I'm going to need the Panda quest adorns, too. Good thing I have instant travel.

It's a big upgrade but the sad thing is
I had a load of even better Level 100 gear in the bank
until I melted it all down for parts.

I won't go on. I'm sure you get the drift. It took me the best part of an hour and a half to get my new Vah Shir Swashbuckler to the point where I felt ready to take her adventuring, by which time lunch was ready, so I had to log out. And then I came here to write this. 

Will I ever get to play her? Yes, I expect so. Eventually. I want to do the Vah Shir racial questline for one thing. Unfortunately, it starts in Shar Vahl and you need to be 120 before Animist Sanura will even speak to you. So I have some work to do.

In a way it makes me wonder how new and returning players manage but then they probably won't have anything like as many confusing, overlapping and conflicting choices as someone like me, who's been playing forever and still has nearly all the freebies ever handed out just sitting around, waiting to be used. If you were a real newbie you'd probably either begin at level one and play properly or you'd buy the latest expansion, use the max-level boost that comes with it and just accept what it gives you.

My way's more fun, though. No, it is. Really. I'm telling you...

Whispers And Shadows

Shadows of Luclin is one of my favorite EverQuest expansions. Blood of Luclin is one of my favorite EverQuest II expansions. Luclin is my main EQ server. I've been Team Luclin for quite a while.

I don't believe I've ever met the goddess Luclin herself before, though, face to face. 

I have now.

The EverQuest games are hardly exemplars of good writing, even good genre writing. The plots meander and sprawl and mostly make no sense. The characters have names that can barely be read, let alone pronounced. Try saying Ssraeshza without swallowing your front teeth.

The dialog swings wildly between overblown hippy twaddle that would embarass even Jon Anderson and anachronistic slang that sounds suspiciously like someone got their teenage kid to write it. No-one could possibly take any of this preposterous stuff seriously.

And yet it works. It just does. If you've been playing the games for as long as I have, anyway. 

The latest Game Update (#117 if you're keeping count. Looks as though the expansion was #116)  brings the two-year Luclin storyline to a conclusion that I found quite unreasonably satisfying, even after the multiple problems I had getting started. I was expecting a letter or some other form of lead-in to the new Signature quest but no, there's nothing.

To save anyone else the trouble I had, all you need to do is go to Shar Vhal and speak to Head Scholar Nabihan. It is in the patch notes... right at the very end. The problem is, right at the very start of the self-same notes it tells you to "Travel across Shadeweaver's Thicket to the citadel of Vex Thal". 

Don't do that. You'll only have to come back.

 

There's some good stuff in the update other than the questline, including a bunch of class revamps that appear to buff a number of melee classes quite significantly. There are a host of quality of life improvements, the best of which to my mind is the updating of the Fast Travel map to add a number of very welcome locations:

• Obol Plains
• Tranquil Sea
• Phantom Sea
• Thalumbra
• Zek, the Scourge Wastes
• Obulus Frontier
• City of Fordel Midst [Luclin]
• The Blinding [Luclin]

Then there's the third Overseer Season, which takes us to the Kingdom of Sky, making me wonder if the plan is to go through all the expansions in order, something that, at the rate we're going, could take longer than the game might be around. I'd give chapter and verse on the new season only it involves levelling up your Overseer account before you gain access to any of the new quests, traits, agents or rewards and at the rate it's going I estimate I won't open the new content for a week or more. 

To start the new Signature quest you do, of course, need to have completed the one that came with Reign of Shadows. At first, when I couldn't find the questgiver, I wondered if perhaps I hadn't done that. It seems a ridiculously long time ago that I was working on it. Much, much more than a mere three months.

Once I got myself sorted out it turned out I had finished it. (I knew I had, really, but doubt creeps in). Nabihan brought me back up to date and off to Vex Thal we went.

Probably might want to skip this next part if you plan on doing it yourself. It's a bit spoilery.

 

It's a simple enough adventure, solo. It all takes place in a new zone, Oscuris, the Plane of Shadows. The small area we get to see is little more than a series of platforms hanging in the void but it's a haunting, rather lovely place. Dark, as you'd expect, but luscious with it.

None of the fights were particularly hard although one sub-boss did take me from almost full health to a couple of percent in what felt like a single hit. And I had almost a billion hit points at the time.

I've heard numerous reports since the expansion landed about soloists having terrible problems with their mercenaries not being able to keep up with the healing like they used to but I have to say I've seen none of it. Zel`Kriaz, my merc of choice, hasn't let me drop any more than he ever did and, as I mentioned a while back, he seems to have gotten a lot better at remembering to rez me when he does. 

There were no rezzes needed this time. All the bosses seemed to be tank and spank, which was just as well because there as yet no walkthroughs or guides available. The quest content wasn't in the beta for reasons of keeping the story reveals under wraps, which might explain it, although I've noticed the once-exemplary record-keeping at the wiki has tapered off somewhat since RoS.

When I got to the final room and stood facing Emperor Ssraeshza himself and realized he was rated Epic 2X I was a little taken aback but then I remembered that's something the devs like to do in solos nowadays. I set about him with my greatsword and... he ignored me.

It took me a while to figure out why. I thought I'd been following the plot but I'd missed the part where it says only a Phantastic weapon can damage him. It doesn't mention he'll completely ignore you as though you aren't even there if you don't have one but he will.

 

After a good, long search through my bags I found I did have one after all. A Phantastic Gaffi. Whatever that is. It looks like a lump of rock tied to a stick.

One thing it wasn't was adorned. And it was a one-hander. My berserker's been using a two-hander for years.

I ended up having to leave the instance to go first to the bank, then to the Panda vendor and finally to the box on the floor in the Nexus just so I could scrounge up a shield and enough adorns for both of them. It does break the flow when you have to make your excuses to the arch-villain and ask if he wouldn't mind waiting while you go sort yourself out before the battle begins.

It also doesn't help when something you can neither see nor hit keeps attacking you while said arch-villain monologues at interminable length. It was the big climax and there was even voice acting but I can't tell you if it was any good because I couldn't hear much of it over the crashing and banging. I think the Godslayer has an American accent, though, if that helps set the mood.

Even when he was finished and the Goddess Luclin burst out of his slumped body like a dark Marilyn Monroe out of an evil birthday cake, something was still trying to bite me. It stopped as soon as she started talking so I think that part might have been intentional. Maybe it all was. Who knows?

 

And who cares, really? Despite all the things that went wrong, I loved it. It's Luclin, ffs! It's Luclin and she's talking to me!

She was pleasant enough, too, but she did make it quite clear I probably shouldn't come back. So I took a couple of selfies with her before I left. Who knows if I'll ever get another chance?

It's all a load of nonsense but it works for me. Or on me. I thought it was a pretty solid ending to a pretty solid story. That's Luclin (the moon, I mean) done with now, I'd imagine. Next expansion (always assuming there is one) I'd expect to be heading somewhere new.

Meanwhile, there's a new mission in the update I'll have to get to sooner or later: Vex Thal: Den of Shadows. It's the one from the top of the patch notes. I still don't think they really made that clear...

The reward for completing the Signature line, by the way, is a Mythical quality cloak. It hugely upgraded the Ethereal one I had from last summer, although I hadn't fully upgraded that one. The gear ladder in EQII is pretty much a gear sheer cliff face these days, which has its up sides. If you miss out on something that looks unmissable, just wait a couple of months. Something better will come along.

Looking at you, Overseer Season 3.

I've Got A Lot Of Catching Up To Do

 

In a desperate attempt to prove there are other games available besides Valheim (which I just this morning gifted to Mrs. Bhagpuss after she expressed repeated interest in trying it, so we'll see where that goes...), this morning I finally got around to doing something I'd been meaning to do all week, namely log in to EverQuest II.  

I'd been meaning to drop by to celebrate Erollisi Day. It isn't my favorite Norrathian holiday but it's in the top five. (I totally should do a Top Five. A Top Ten even.) It's been running for a while now. I knew there was some fresh content in the form of a new quest and some crafting recipes, plus new rewards for some of the older activities, including that excellent Public Quest I always enjoy doing.

Luckily there are still a few days left. Time to check out the new quest, grab the recipe books and maybe do an old favorite or two. It ends on the twenty-fourth, after which there's a brief respite until Brewday arrives on the fifth of March. Brewday definitely would not make my Top Five. (Damn! I really have to do that...).

It's been a while since I logged in, which is not something I was expecting to be writing about EQII at this point of the expansion cycle. I was thinking I'd still be taking characters through the Reign of Shadows storyline by now and working on all the detailed upgrading and filling out of various slots and abilities that come with vertical progression.

That's not what's been happening but it's very much not the fault either of EQII or the expansion, which I thought was first rate. It's just that I seem to have entered an enthusiasm phase for gaming in general, one where everywhere I look I see things I want to play. Ironic, isn't it, after I was mithering about not really feeling it just a month or so back ? 

It looks as if EQII will very much be back on the schedule soon, though. When I opened the launcher the first thing I noticed was a link to a new episode of the dev podcast, Kander's Candor. It's Season Two : Episode One and it's available through all the usual channels. I like to listen to it on Anchor, which is incredibly simple and unfussy to use.

I had it on in the background as I played through Heartbreaker, the new Errolisi Day quest. It's a classic holiday story of cursed flowers, disruptive demigods and vendors who just want to make a buck. If you're an EQII player and you like the kind of quests you're familiar with from playing EQII then you'll like this one because it's just like all the others. I loved it.

Since I knew exactly how it would go and I was following the walkthrough on the wiki, I had plenty of mental capacity to spare not only to listen to the podcast but even to make notes. I could woerk them up into something more elaborate but I think the notes make pretty solid bullet points just as I wrote them down.

• Lofty plans for the year
• Company "absolutely re-investing in EQII" (and EQ)
• New nodes to reduce lag
• PQs had been off development because they addded to lag
• "Feel like we're in good and safe hands" with new owners
• Blood of Luclin "a rough year"
• RoS "much better"
• Some stuff about raids.
• "Large GU" in March (probably).
  
• Solo, Heroic and a lot of Raid content.
• New Overseer Season
• "Cool stuff" Kander can't talk about
• New RoS Guide quest (lots of status)
• Some guides have been around since the beginning of EverQuest
• Whole bunch of new rewards etc. for Guides
• Something PvP related being worked on for "sooner rather than later"
• Specifics on PvP in next Kander's Candor podcast

That's the bones of it. If you want details, listen to the podcast, but really there's not a lot more detail than I've given. There's a lot of flavor and nuance, though. As always, plenty's said in the things that aren't being said and if you missed that, well Dreamweaver and Kander keep pointing it out.

I think when the new lot (I've already forgotten their unmemorable name) bought out the old lot (who had more names than I care to recall) most players probably felt more relief than concern. It's good to hear that sentiment covertly echoed from the other side of the fence.

It's also good to hear for sure that Overseer isn't being dumped in the pile of forgotten things that seemed like a good idea at the time. Because Overseer was a good idea. One of the best they've had for a while. Very much looking forward to a new season. I hope EverQuest is getting one, too.

With so much going on all over right now, it's a little hard to say how I'll fit EQII in but I'll manage somehow. Now I'm off to grab those recipe books while I still can.

Around And Around

If there's one thing the many the blog posts I've read on World of Warcraft's Shadowlands expansion have in common it's that they don't seem to agree on very much. I've heard people saying the open-world leveling experience is better than usual and worse than usual, that the expansion is very alt-friendly and that it doesn't really work for alts. 

Some people describe their experiences in Torghast in glowing terms, others aren't so keen. Everyone has their own idea of which covenant is best except for those who don't like any of them. Overall, some people think Blizzard have done a good job, others not so much. About the only thing everyone agrees on is no-one likes the Maw.

Can't say I'm all that surprised. It's probably a good sign. When expansions are genuinely below par the critical voices usually drown out the praise. If people are mainly disagreeing over which parts are good and which bad then the developers have probably got it about right.

It's all a bit notional for me since I'm not playing Shadowlands. Come to think of it, I seem to know a ridiculous amount about an  expansion of which I have no personal experience and not really all that much interest. That's WoW for you.

Reading all that did make me re-assess an mmoprg expansion that launched around the same time, one I am playing: EverQuest II's Reign of Shadows. In particular it got me thinking about EQII's current expansion gameplay loop, at least as it applies to solo players like myself.

The Darkpaw team does have one theoretical advantage over their counterparts at Blizzard. They knock out an expansion every year. With about a hundredth of the people and a thousandth of the resources, true, but at least they can remember what they did last time. Which is handy, because chances are they're going to do the same again.

 

Except not exactly. The level cap only goes up every other year and every expansion has to have at least one new feature to grab everyone's attention. Last year's Blood of Luclin had ten new levels and the Overseer system. It also had an unannounced, unexpected and, for many, unwelcome tradeskill revamp. Reign of Shadows keeps the same level cap but comes with a new race, the Vah Shir, and announced changes to the way both Alternate Advancement and Guilds progress.

Surprisingly little of that factors into my personal gameplay loop, which has remained remarkably consistent not only throughout the two Lunar expansions but the two Planar ones that preceded them and several more before that. Here's how it goes.

First things first. If the expansion has new levels I concentrate on getting those done, usually on my Berserker, who I grudgingly have to admit is my "main" these days. He's also a weaponsmith but far more importantly he's my Transmuter and Adorner, which means he also has crafting levels to work on. 

There's always a "Signature" questline for both adventurers and crafters. Each is usually lengthy, although the craft Sig felt a little shorter this year. The two traditionally carry the same main storyline but from differing perspectives, which makes doing both somewhat synergistic. 

I always start with the adventure quests, which until last year were designed to finish around and about the same time as you capped out. Blood of Luclin changed that, giving hugely increased xp, so last year I hit the cap long before I'd finished the questline. 

 

That made almost no difference to my motivation because as well as telling a story I find interesting, these quests provide regular upgrades. The final reward is either a weapon or a near-best-in-slot item. Something worth having, anyway. 

The rewards from the tradeskill line tend to be a bit fluffier - a lot of house and appearance items - but crafters are fluffy, by and large. Again, the final reward tends to be a very good piece that most players are likely to want. You also often need to complete at least one of the signature lines to get various character flags giving benefits like access to instances and allowing the use of flying mounts.

Blood of Luclin made a raft of changes to crafting that the majority of tradeskillers found detrimental to their enjoyment of the game, mostly for very sound reasons, but I personally liked them and even found them to be in my own best interests. This year, however, things are roughly back to normal, which is fine, too.

Once I've finished both the Signature questlines and completed all my levels, if there are any, the real expansion begins. For group and raid players that means the traditional round of progressively more challenging dungeons but for solo players like me it means a lot of single-use and repeatable quests.

Separate from the Signature quests, these days each expansion includes a load of quests that start with drops. In the distant past EQII had players learning languages and acquiring racial masteries from items mobs dropped. It still happens, but sparingly. The slack has been taken up by drops that give quests which send you around the new zones killing certain types of mob. That's one way you get more upgrades.

 

The other very important way adventurers can upgrade their gear without visiting a dungeon is to join in with the never-ending carnival of Public Quests. These vary quite a bit. Sometimes they're elaborate, with multiple stages requiring people to do different things in different places. Other times they're straightforward open raids on creatures other games might call World Bosses. Last year they happened in instances, this year they're on open maps.

Reign of Shadows must have good PQs because a couple of months after launch they're still very much the hot ticket. They're all the World Boss kind and there seem to be three in each of the new zones. If you kill all three a fourth spawns. 

Just about any time I log in there's either an open raid circling around doing them as they pop or people are calling them out and trying to get a raid started. I did four two nights ago and three last night. I could have done a lot more if I'd wanted because there's so much interest multiple instances of the zones keep spawning, leading to an almost unbroken chain.

The PQs are popular because they have drops which, while rare, are upgrades even for dungeoneers. I'm not absolutely sure but I think there may even be a few things raiders wouldn't sniff at. That keeps things busy, at least until most people get what they want, which usually takes a good portion of the twelve-month expansion cycle. 

It goes without saying that any of those good drops is going to be be a huge upgrade for a solo player like me but even the regular drops can be better than my quest gear. And there's a currency too, naturally, to spend at a special vendor. I haven't actually checked what you can get with that yet.

 

There are other soloable upgrade paths that shouldn't be ignored. EQII has a fantastic collectables system where you find and pick up "shinies" from the ground in every map and instance. Most are tradeable and the inevitable duplicates can go for big money - some of the rewards are very nice indeed.

Completed collections also come with collectables of their own, leading to meta-collections that can nest several times and provide really very good items for those with the patience or the deep pockets to acquire them all. 

Over the years the collectable system has been expanded to include No Drop shinies that can't be traded and different colored kinds that only characters who've achieved certain benchmarks or completed certain quests can see. Collecting in Norrath is serious business.

So is crafting. Last year there were many complaints about the way crafters acquired their new recipes and what they could make with them but this year things are a little more traditional. Basic recipes are purchasable from trainers and, as far as I know, the more sought-after rare recipes are still dropped by mobs (although possibly only by Bosses and then only rarely). 

The main crafting gameplay loop for me, however, is Research. Most of the new maps have a Researcher NPC who's almost the tradeskill equivalent of a Public Quest. Anyone who qualifies (usually by dint of having progressed a certain distance through the Signature questline) can take a repeatable quest from each of these NPCs several times a day. The more quests the server collectively completes, the more new recipes open up for sale on the associated vendor.

 

That's an incentive in itself but the real draw are the personal rewards you get for completing each quest. From those you can get all kinds of nice things like recipe books, mercenaries and the patterns needed to make the desirable new mastercrafted armor and weapons. They also give you the currency you need to buy things from the aforementioned vendor.

All of the Research quests involve harvesting materials and crafting items, something which melds very comfortably with the adventuring activities listed above. It feels very organic, swooping around the new maps on the mount that now flies because you finished the zone storyline, dropping out of the sky to snatch up a shiny, kill a bunch of quest mobs, harvest some materials or join in with a PQ.

In Blood of Luclin last year this loop kept me happily occupied right into the summer, interspersed as it was with the regular holidays and a couple of big updates. With the ever-popular ethereal season that seems to go on longer each year blending into the now-traditional Panda quests and then the pre-expansion events running up to next year's xpack, it's quite feasible to spend the whole year working on something or other - and that's not even considering playing other characters, of whom I have many.

The downside would be that all this activity can start to feel somewhat familiar, year on year. And, as we all know but don't like to admit, almost every gain our characters make is temporary, set to be wiped out as soon as the next content drop arrives. 

Those are very minor quibbles. The entire hobby relies on, even thrives on, these kinds of repeatable activities. And as an entertaining, satisfying, enjoyable way to spend a few hours as often as the mood takes me, I don't think the way EQII handles the loop can easily be bettered. 

Cruel Garrison

Time for a very quick update on what I've been up to in World of Warcraft. Dithering, mostly. My monthly subscription falls due in five days and I haven't yet decided whether to cancel. 

I re-subbed back in October with the intention of checking out the Shadowlands pre-patch, the level squish, Chromie Time and the new tutorial zone, Exile's Reach. I did all of those, wrote a bunch of posts about it and generally had a pretty good time. 

The plan had also been to open up access to the Vulpera allied race, make a fox and level that character to the cap but what with one thing and another I ended up levelling a goblin shaman first, all the way from character creation to the pre-Shadowlands level cap of fifty, something I definitely hadn't expected to find myself doing. After that I didn't quite have the determination to push the fox to fifty, mostly because the EverQuest II expansion arrived when she was about ten levels shy.

When Reign of Shadows appeared in early December I didn't stop playing WoW altogether but my hours dropped to a bare minimum. I was still logging in but almost entirely to keep my ricketty garrison working on hexweave bags. 

 

Even so, that took more time than I expected. I'd imagined it would be like EverQuest's Overseer, just a few clicks on the UI each day, but it seems Blizzard intended something a lot more hands-on. Making bags required me to keep my tailor supplied with sumptuous furs, while upgrading just the few buildings I needed to get the operation up and running cost gold I didn't have. 

I found myself out hunting wolves and cat-people for their fur for an hour or so almost every other day and making repeated forays into old raid instances to make money. For the last two months I've played WoW every day and while I've been there, that's all I've done. 

At first it was fun. Then it became a habit. Now it's starting to feel like a chore. I guess it's the WoD experience in microcosm. And I'm beginning to realize it's also all been a bit... pointless.

First I noticed that hexweave bags can reliably be bought for between 250g and 300g on my server. Using my garrison I can make a bag every other day or so for free but I can make enough gold to buy three or four bags in just the time it would take me to gather the fur. 

It's more satisfying to make them, in theory, but that satisfaction wears off after the first half-dozen or so. I'm at the point now where I feel I might as well just do a bunch of old raids once a week and buy my bags.

 

More significantly, I realized eventually that having an Alliance character with a garrison isn't going to help my Horde characters with their inventory issues. Blizzard take their faction split a lot more seriously than most other developers. Since one of the main reasons I was doing this in the first place was to put thirty slot bags on my Vulpera hunter I clearly didn't think it through.

Of course, I have Horde characters who could build garrisons of their own. And that sounded like a fairly attractive option until I realized something else. Garrisons are unique to the character that quests for them, not the account or even the faction on that account. 

Since my end-game here is to be capable of supplying big bags on demand to any new characters I make and play under the free-to-play rules after I cancel my subscription, what I should have done was send one Alliance and one Horde character, under level twenty, to start a garrison and then be very careful not to let them level too far to be able to keep using it. 

I'd already confirmed on my other free account that you don't need to subscribe to have a garrison and that under the new levelling rules you can get the quest at level ten. Today I spent half an hour getting my level fifteen druid from Stormwind to Shadowmoon Valley just to make absolutely sure she couldn't use the garrison I already had. I've found that no matter what online guides tell you about WoW you never really know for sure until you test it in game.

 

This time I could have saved myself the swim. She couldn't even see the damn thing. It exists in some other plane of reality, apparently. I spent the next half hour porting back to talk to Chromie then heading back to Shadowmoon to get the necessary quests.

That was just for proof of concept. I'd have to do the same again with a horde character and then I'd have to level up the garrisons and the necessary buildings and keep farming the furs and I'd have to fund all of that with characters in their teens. It makes absolutely no sense and I'm not going to do it.

A better plan might be to use the remaining five days of my sub to make enough gold with my Horde and Alliance level fifty characters to buy enough hexweave bags for everyone. That would be far, far easier and an ideal project for keeping my hands busy while I listen to the second England-Sri Lanka Test Match.

That's sorted then. Grind some gold, buy some bags, cancel the sub, go back to playing for free. Only...

I've been wondering whether I ought to buy Shadowlands. I've read a lot about it and it sounds pretty good for someone who enjoys levelling. I'd probably get a month or two's solid entertainment out of it and it's looking likely I'll be at home for about that long before I get the call to go back to work.

So, I'm dithering, as I said. Shadowlands is tempting but I haven't really finished with Reign of Shadows yet. It would make more sense to concentrate on finishing one expansion before I start on another. 

Or I could just let the sub roll on for another month and decide later. That's how they get you, isn't it? 

Well, it's how they get me, anyway.

Cat Class

EverQuest II has a lot of classes. Twenty-six to be precise. They break down into four archetypes (Fighter, Priest, Mage, Scout) which reflects the early days of the game, when you didn't get to play as your final class choice until level twenty. And there were only fifty levels.

You had to jump a bunch of in-game hurdles, too, before you finally ended up with the character you wanted. It was never a very popular system, although I guarantee you'll still find veterans who claim it was the bixie's kneecaps. There's always someone who'll claim to like anything. Maybe some of them even mean it.

Along with most of the original systems and mechanics, the class system was changed long ago to allow players to begin as they meant to go on. About the only holdover from the archetype system is the allocation of a single, primary statistic from which each draws all their power, something which was only ratified relatively recently. 

It won't surprise anyone to learn that Fighters rely on strength, Priests on wisdom. Mages on Intelligence and Scouts on agility. And all classes draw on stamina for their health pool. For legacy reasons everyone gets everyone else's stats (officially known as Attributes in the game, a term I have never heard anyone use in sixteen years of playing) but only two of the five actually do anything.

When it comes to armor, things loosen up just a little. The cleanest archetypes are Mages, who all wear cloth, and Scouts, who all wear chain. Most fighters wear plate although monks and bruisers wear leather. That used to be tied in with their reliance on agility to avoid getting hit but of course these days they rely on strength so it no longer makes much sense from a lore perspective. 

Priests are a hotch-potch. Some of them wear plate, some leather and some chain. Their heals also don't always stack well with others of the same class or even wearing the same armor (obviously not because of the armor), which is why you regularly hear lfg calls not just for healers but asking for specific classes or armor-types.

When picking a class at character creation there's also alignment and race to consider. For most practical purposes the original Good/Evil split between Freeport and Qeynos doesn't make much impact on gameplay any more. Anyone can group with anyone else and talk and trade with them freely, almost all quests are neutral and so is just about every city introduced since the first expansion. 

Over the years some of the restrictions that once existed have been relaxed. Ratongas, once pure evil, can now be good or neutral and goodies can become cool Inquisitors instead of boring Templars. If you want to be a Shadowknight or a Necromancer, though, you still won't be able to start in Qeynos or
Kelethin.

It's all very complicated and frankly not all that interesting or important - until you come to make a character. Which is why I'm talking about it now. 

The servers are down for the bi-weekly patch so I thought I'd finally get on with making my Vah Shir, the new race added with Reign of Shadows. I'd already bought another character slot to make space so it seemed about time.

Only I ran into the same problem I always run into when making a new character in EQII (and in pretty much any other game for that matter). I know what I like. 

Doesn't sound like much of a problem, does it? Well, it is.

I like pet classes, I like fighters with massive AEs and I like highly mobile, ranged classes. I also like classes that have fast movement speed and ones who can feign death because I like to be able to get free of combat when things aren't going my way. Back when I used to group more, what I really liked best of all was healers, preferably those with direct heals, but there's not much point playing a healer when you solo all the time, especially in a game with healer mercenaries.

On my subbed account I already have at least one of all the classes in EQII that I really like - Berserker, Necromancer, Bruiser, Shadowknight. I also have most of the ones I quite like - Wizard, Inquisitor, Warlock, Fury. I even have some I really don't get on with very well that were added late to the game and which I felt duty-bound to try - Channeler, Beastlord.

Of those that remain, there are a lot of chain-wearing scouts, about whom I know really not very much. And I could use a chain-wearer if only because it would give me something to do with all the chain armor I get from quests and Overseer missions and as drops. I used to stuff it all in the bank but eventually I transmuted most of it because it obviously wasn't going to get used. 

Unfortunately, chain-wearers in EQII don't really suit me very well. There's the Ranger, who you'd think I might enjoy, seeing as how I have no fewer than three Hunters in WoW and three Rangers in Guild Wars 2. Only I played an EQII ranger once and it didn't go at all well. Can't remember why. I just know it didn't.

Anyone who has to position themselves to attack can forget it. I can't be doing with all that fiddliness. That used to rule out all the stealth types, the Troubadors and Brigands and their like. Only I have a vague suspicion that over the years many of the positional restrictions have been watered down or removed altogether. Except, since I always skip anything about classes I don't play when it comes up in patch notes, I can't be sure.

There are several chain healers. I played one, a Defiler, for quite a while. He was my main character for maybe a year or two back in the dawn of time. I enjoyed him a lot in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss but he was excruciating to solo. I hear that's better now but I'm not willing to take the risk.

I've been thinking about it a fair bit and I still haven't made up my mind. Perhaps the obvious pick would be a Conjuror. It's a powerful pet class and while I have one in the nineties already, he's on a different account and anyway I never really got on with him very well - not as a class but as a character.

For some reason that entirely escapes me I chose to make him a human male with a handlebar mustache, which is not someone I can imagine ever wanting to play now. Then to compound the problem I named him after a writer I like, only to realize too late that I'd remembered his name wrong.

None of that relates to the class, which I seem to recall I enjoyed playing. They do have very ugly pets but that's what petamorph wands are for. (Note to self: remember that post on petamorph wands you keep meaning to write? Well, get on and write it, why don't you?).

The other option is one of those aforementioned scouts. Maybe I should do some research and find out just how they play. I do have a Dirge in her low thirties on Kaladim, the Time Limited Expansion server and she's fun but I'm not sure how that retro-fitted gameplay reflects the way the class plays at the upper levels of the current game.

Last but definitely not least would be another Shadowknight. Again, I have one in the 90s but he's on the wrong server. I really enjoy SK gameplay but it's perhaps too similar to the Berserker, minus those fantastic AEs. Being able to feign is a huge attraction but I fear any plate fighter is going to seem like a younger, weaker sibling compared to my berserker, who is by some margin my best-geared and most fully-upgraded character.

I was hoping putting all this down in white and blue might clarify matters but I can't say it's helped all that much. I do think I should go research the scouts, though. I know Mrs Bhagpuss used to play both a Swashbuckler and a Troubador to great effect. I'd ask her for advice but the game has changed so much in the eight years since she stopped playing I'm not sure her experiences would be all that relevant today.

I could log her account on and play them for myself, though. Now there's an idea...

Two Weeks Later

 

Time for a very quick update on how things are going in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Reign of Shadows. Really well.

Okay, that was too quick, wasn't it? Just a little more detail, then.

I finished the signature adventure questline on my Berserker. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt well-paced and entertaining until the very end, when I came to the final instance expecting an epic battle, or at least some relatively tough bosses, only to find everything had dropped an order of magnitude in difficulty. For the first and only time I can remember in at least two years everything was actually flagged "solo", not Heroic. It felt strange at first but then I fell back into it just like the old days. It was nice not to have to do any boss dances. Didn't miss 'em at all.

After I knocked that off it was back to meet up with the Duality again for what has to go down in the annals of Norrath as the most anticlimactic debriefing session ever. I'm guessing we're either finishing this up in one of 2021's big updates or there's a third Luclin expansion on the cards. Whatever, I loved it! I'm on board with wherever the writers want to take us next. Great storyline.

Come again?

Of course, when I say "great" I mean EQII-great. The writing is often funny in the hamfisted, amateurish style that's so much a part of what makes EQII the game it is, while elsewhere it's so cod-serious as to verge on self-parody. There are speeches where it seems as though more than half the words are pure gibberish. God alone knows what anyone who hadn't been following the plot for a decade or so makes of it, but then no-one who hasn't is ever going to come within a mile of any of it in the first place so I guess it doesn't matter.

As is often the case in expansions with no level cap increase, the final reward for completing the signature line was a bit of a grab-bag. There was a title, because there's always a title, and there was a prestige point for the newly revamped AA system.

I suppose I should write something about that at some point but first I'm going to have to understand it, which I don't, yet. I tried to spend my new points and couldn't. There's been something about that in the Message of the Day for weeks but I've been ignoring it because until now I didn't have any points to spend. It suggested I should clear my AA profile and re-commit, which is a thing you can do, so I did and it let me spend my points. I still didn't really follow how the new version works or indeed why it's supposed to be different to the old one. It just looked like some new AAs to me.

I do know a bit more about how the revamped guild system works, although not much. The new perks don't seem to start until your guild hits a very high level. It might be 200. Before then it all carries on as it was so at least Daybreak appear to have avoided the traumatic deconstruction of small guilds ANet inflicted on Guild Wars 2 a few years back.

The weird part is that you now get absolutely huge injections of guild status, the fuel that levels your guild, from the occasional quest. My guild jumped about twenty levels on one hand-in when I finished the Sig line. At that rate I'll get to the new benchmark sooner rather than later. I think I'll save any detailed discussion of the new system until that happens, in the hope that by then I might have some vague idea what's going on.

With the adventure questline finished I started on the tradeskill signature storyline next. I've only done the first couple of parts and so far it's excellent. Very funny and also mechanically quite interesting. I like making things and then using them for purposes that make sense in the context of the narrative. EQII has always been good at that where crafting quests are concerned.

There are gnomes involved so naturally everything's a little haphazard and over-confident. Some of the contraptions are impressive. You get the little one-seater dirigible as a house pet, which is nice. 

Actually, you get a lot of house items as rewards from both the adventure and tradeskill quests, which suits me very well, although I'm not sure what hardcore raiders must think about it. Then again, what else are you going to give them? It's not like they're going to use the gear from solo quests. 

I made that! Not exactly sure what it does...

Since there are no new levels I was a bit puzzled about what would be in all the new recipe books, of which there are a complete set for all crafting classes. I looked it up on EQ2 Traders and it seems the major complaint of last year's Blood of Luclin, that no-one other than spellcrafters could make anything anyone wanted, has been addressed. Mastercrafted gear has a purpose again. 

Some of the books you can buy immediately, some you need to have completed parts of the crafting questline and some come from the new set of public crafting quests, which also tie into the signature line. I like that a lot. I'd do the signature questline just for the story but the rewards give it a nice structure and meaning as well.

Speaking of public quests, I've been doing some of the adventuring ones. They're all out in open world zones this year, which is much better than sticking them away in instances. They're also very well-attended right now, with certain public-spirited individuals taking it upon themselves to orchestrate pick-up raids and keep everyone informed.

Some evenings there have even been enough people interested for there to be organized attempts to force multiple iterations of the zones to open so we can move from one to another as the PQs pop, farming them. I did about half a dozen in a row like that the other night and the atmosphere was excellent. It's exactly the kind of self-generating, broadly social activity I feel mmorpgs were made to support so it's great to see it happening.

There's been so much to do I haven't really had time for Frostfell other than to pop in when I remember to pick up my daily present from Santa Glugg. Some of those have been nice enough that I'm hoping to make the effort before the holiday ends and cycle all my characters through once or twice. Plus there's double xp on Kaladim until the New Year, which is why I was over there last night putting another level on my Dirge.

Next on my EQII to-do list is to make a Vah Shir, the new race that was added with RoS. All my character slots were full so I bought another with my Daybreak Cash stash but then I couldn't decide what class to pick. I'm thinking either Conjuror or Dirge, neither of which I have on the account and Live server where I spend most of my time. Maybe I'll get on that later today. 

Two weeks in and I'm almost ready to say I like Reign of Shadows even better than Blood of Luclin. I'll have to wait and see how long its legs are but suffice it to say I'm a very happy customer right now.

Crystal Blue Persuasion

 

I'm very aware that I've been posting some intimidatingly long and wordy impressions of the new EverQuest II expansion, Reign of Shadows. It's a bit much to expect people who don't - and probably never - will play the game to plow through thousands of words of nit-picking detail about systems, mechanics and lore.

Maybe a few more pictures would help, only EQII doesn't have much of a reputation for looks. It's almost exactly of an age with World of Warcraft but where Blizzard went for a presciently future-proofed cartoon style, Sony Online Entertainment bit down hard on the bleeding-edge capabilities of 2004-era graphics. It didn't go well for them then and it hasn't done their successors any favors since.

Worst of all, the vast bulk of the leveling game, including all the available starting instances, takes place in zones that were made long ago with the original tools. Quite a few years ago now the designers acquired a new toolset that allows them to produce landscapes and architecture orders of magnitude more beautiful and impressive but players don't really begin to see any of that until they have a character in the nineties.

There's another problem. One of the functions of the improved toolset seems to be scale. Every expansion since 2012's Chains of Eternity has a visual impact that derives in considerable part from a sense of heft. There's a sense of immensity the earlier zones just don't have, even though some of them are actually larger in terms of raw distance. 

There's a propensity for vastness in the upper levels. Huge, ethereal forests that enshroud you as you fly through their canopies, lithic crystals that burst from the ground to spear the skies, dwarfing the mountains that guard the great cities and burial places, whose monumental buildings dwarf the peoples who built them.

And the skies. EQII has some of the most wonderful skyscapes I've seen in any imagined world. The shattered moon of Luclin now made whole again; the hallucinogenic sunrises and sunsets; the patterned clouds like fabrics. Norrath, seen from Luclin, gravid and immense.

But scale does not photograph well. It's hard to capture the imposing weight and depth of these overwhelming vistas in a screenshot. You need to look up, look out, look through.

There's an option in the game to send feedback directly to the developers. Mostly it's used for reporting bugs or complaining about things you don't like but if you want to send praise it works for that, too. Last night I used the feedback option to let the art team know what I thought of their work on Reign of Shadows. 

I told them I thought it was the best they'd ever done. The overland zones are beautiful to see and exhilarating to explore. The use of color is magical. The lands tell a story that needs no words. History is written in the bleak, blued sand.

I mentioned how anxious I'd been about spending a year on the dark side of the moon but how they'd turned that fear into joy. The shadowed side of Luclin is wrapped in a cape of dreams and stars, lit by witchlight, always night but never dark.

The magnificent cities deserve their own praise. When I stepped into Shar Vahl for the first time two nights ago I was al but overcome by the sweep and scale of it, the terraced appartments clinging to the crescent cliffs around the bay, the avenues and plazas, the temples and the palaces. Cities I've seen, seascapes I know, they're there in Shar Vahl.

In recent years magnificent cityscapes have become almost so common in EQII as to pass notice but this is something special even by those standards. It seems almost indecent that a setting so dramatic, a city so decisive, should exist almost as an afterthought.

I could go on. My album is filled with studies but snapshots can't do justice to the theme. In a world where even an ants' nest looks like an expressionist fever-dream, where do you begin? 

That's all I have to say. If a picture is worth a thousand words I'm wasting my breath anyway. Let the images speak for themselves. 

But take my word for it. As good as these pictures are, all of this looks so much better still better inside the game.