In The Event

To no-one's surprise more than my own, I have now completed all the solo content in the recent Shattered Overture update in EverQuest II. 

Okay, no I haven't... not really. According to the press release there are fifteen new Collections and seven solo missions (Five daily, two weekly.) as well as an unspecifed number of achievements. But that's busy work. I'm not bothered with any of that.

What I have done is completed both of the solo instances. I recorded my experiences in the first, Shattered Unrest, in a post last week, along with my thoughts about the pre-expansion event, Fractured Skies. Today I finished the second instance, Imprinted Memory: Origins of the Felfeather.

It didn't take long. Around half an hour or so. That's because it's what's known as an "Event Solo" dungeon. Event Solos differ from regular solo instances in several  important respects. They're smaller,  have fewer bosses and those bosses are significantly tougher. They're PvE fight clubs, basically.

I'd love to go into a bit more detail about what makes Event Solo dungeons diferent from regular Solo or from Advanced Solo, the third kind of "solo" instance, sometimes also known as Duo Dungeons because they're tuned for two players or a player plus a mercenary. Unfortunately, specific information seems to be exceedingly hard to come by. 

Indeed, if I hadn't been there, when all of these things were added to the game, I'm not sure I'd even know they existed. It's only when you come to click on the portal and find yourself confronted with a long list of options that you realise just how many flavors of dungeon EQII has.

Yes, but what?

It's harder than you'd imagine to find out just what they all are, too. The wiki has a Dungeon Timeline that I used to use a lot. I haven't looked at it for a while so I was surprised to see how apallingly out of date it's fallen. The page supposedly listing Solo instances is even worse. MassivelyOP published a very thorough guide to all of EQII's dungeons back in 2015. Now long out of date, it appears to be the last time anyone even attempted anything of the kind.

In a moment of madness, I thought I might ask Bard to bring me up to speed. I asked it

 "What are all the types of instanced dungeons in the MMORPG EverQuest II and how do they differ in difficulty?" 

The reply was so staggeringly inaccurate, I shudder even to summarise it here for fear some of the misinformation it contains might feed back into the system and self-perpetuate, somehow.

I'll just pick out a few of Bard's choicest flights of fantasy:

"Adventure Dungeons are designed for groups of 6-12 players and provide a more challenging experience. They often require players to work together to solve puzzles and defeat difficult bosses."

No, they don't, for the simple reason they don't exist! There's nothing in EQII called an "Adventure Dungeon" and never has been. If an instance allows two groups to enter ("6-12 players".) it's called a Raid X 2 , not an "Adventure".

"Lairs are designed for groups of 3-6 players and are similar to Heroic Dungeons, but they typically have a single boss encounter as their focus."

Excuse me? Lairs? 3-6 players? A single boss? What the hell is this? It's not EQII, that's for sure.

"Group Challenges are short, one-room dungeons that are designed to be completed quickly. They are a good way to test your group's skills or to earn quick rewards."

To be fair, that is kind of what an Event Heroic is like... I think. I've never actually been inside one but it sounds like the general idea. The Event Solo I did today all takes place in one location and doesn't take long. "Group Challenge" is not a term I've ever heard used in EQII, though.

Positively the most egregious error in Bard's typically confident outline of the available options, however, is this utterly wrong-headed, extremely dangerous piece of advice:

Heroic Dungeons: Heroic Dungeons are the easiest type of instanced dungeon in EverQuest II. They are a good starting point for players who are new to instanced dungeons or who are looking for a more casual experience.

That is literally the opposite of the truth. Heroic dungeons are instant death for new players, quite literally. If you enter an at-level Heroic instance as a new player, chances are the very first trash mob you pull will one-shot you. Well, they will over Level 100, anyway, which is the last decade of content.

Even in a group of experienced players a newcomer will probably not survive. It's one of the main complaints made by the few who try. Before you start running heroics, you need to do a lot of prep work just to get your Resolve high enough to be allowed through the door and that's just the start of it. A casual experience is the very last thing anyone would call Heroics in EQII.

So, Bard doesn't know what it's talking about. No surprise there. I sent some appropriate feedback explaining what was wrong with the answer, the first time I've felt motivated to do so. I can't imagine it will make the smallest iota of difference.

Nope. Still none the wiser.

Getting back to the purpose of the post, which I seem to have very successfully derailed, today marks the first time I have ever successfully completed an at-level Event Solo instance. I can't remember the last time I even tried. I just know that they're always much too tough so I never bother with them. So how did I manage it this time and why did I even bother? 

Well, I gave it a go because the first Shattered Overture dungeon seemed surprisingly easy and I got five upgrades out of it, meaning I'd be even stronger going into the second. More cogently, though, I didn't know it was going to be an "Event Solo" until I got there.

First I had to find the damn thing. I was expecting Dr. Arcana to send me there but it turns out the two dungeons have absolutely nothing to do with each other. In fact, if anything, Imprinted Memory seems to relate to the expansion prequel, Fractured Skies, inasmuch as it involves the Hooluk again. 

There doesn't appear to be any obvious lead-in to the dungeon from the storyline. I didn't get a letter and none of the NPCs I'd spoken to gave me any kind of hint on where to go next, let alone an actual breadcrumb quest. In the end I googled it and found the information I needed in Kaitheel's post on the beta test forums. It's a bit of a back-assward way to go about things. Surely I must have missed something that provides a pointer in the game itself?

I was always good at history.

Once I knew where to go it was very easy to get started. I spoke to the Hooluk questgiver, Tento Felfeather, at his roost above the Nest of the Great Egg. He gave me a rundown on what to expect and told me to look at a book on a lectern next to him. I clicked on it and the option of Event Solo or Event Heroic appeared.

I thought "Oh, what the hell... I can only die" and went in. 

And die I did. Three times in total. But that was fine. Twice, my merc rezzed me and I went on to win the fight. Once he rezzed me and I died again immediately and had to take a do-over. Even with the deaths it was all quite manageable, mostly because the whole thing takes place on a small sky island with no mobs at all other than the NPCs and the elementals they summon for you to fight. No running back, no trash to clear. Die, get up, start over.

I won't bore anyone with the complicated set-up involving Hooluk deities, ritual magic and imprinted memories. I found it quite interesting if also mostly incomprehensible. The Hooluk god uses a four-winged model I hadn't seen before although I imagine it's pulled from some raid or other. Impressive, anyway.

After the first death, which happened when I had the boss down to less than ten percent, I decided to swap out of offensive stance so I could have the full beneifit of all my many Berserker Get Out Of Dying Free tricks. Most of them require you to be set up for tanking not DPS.

I'd also recently taken the trouble to read through a whole lot of my abilities that I never use and it seems I have about three times as many "Oh, Shit!" buttons as I though I had. I also discovered that by judicious use of their various non-stacking timers I can use them a lot more freely than I've been in the habit of doing.

Pass the pickaxe!

I made full use of that knowledge during all three big fights and it made a huge difference. My aging mercenary isn't really up to the job of keeping me alive through the kind of beating I was taking so he was very grateful to have some of the responsibility taken off of his hands.

Better still, even though I died several times, I managed to so some proper tanking, positioning the mob away from the healer, meaning my Merc stayed alive throughout. It's the first real test I've given him since the fairly recent change to mercenary AI supposedly improved their reaction time for things like rezzzing and curing. He certainly seemed on the ball today so I think whatever they tweaked must have done the trick.

Part of the event involves not letting two owl brothers die and I managed that as well. All in all, my three deaths seemed like a pretty solid performance, especially for a first run. The instance is repeatable and I could probably make some improvements but even though it went much better than expected, I'm not sure I'll be doing it again. 

It would be profitable to go back. Once again, I got several good upgrades and every time that happens, the next time theoretically becomes easier. I'm very aware, however, that any advances I make now will be overwritten in a matter of weeks so my motivation to go again and again, in search of the increasingly unlikely drops I'd need to replace everything I'm wearing, isn't great.

Why We Fight.

I'm very pleased with myself for having done the two dungeons at all, not least because the upgrades should definitely make finishing the Adventure Signature questline from the current expansion a lot easier. That's something I do plan on doing before the next Xpack drops.

I think my main focus now, in terms of preparation, probably ought to be replacing my mercenary with another Inquisitor. Gotta have one of those for Verdict, the insta-kill spell that finishes off many a fight just in time. There's a chance I might pick up a new Inquisitor in the forthcoming expansion but I didn't get one last time or the time before that so I'm not counting on it. 

Of course, when the new expansion goes on sale, I could always consider stumping up for something better than the basic version. The higher-cost packs usually include a new merc. Maybe I'll consider it this time.

That'd be another first...

A Shattering Experience In EQII

I've been neglecting EverQuest II of late. That's how I came to miss the opening of the new update, Shattered Overture. It arrived a couple of days ago, together with this year's pre-expansion event, Fractured Skies.  

Last summer we got the Myths and Monoliths update in August and the Secrets of the Sands expansion prequel in September. This year it's a two-for-one package.  Does it mean anything? 

Maybe. Ask me again when I've finished the whole thing. What with spending every available gaming minute in Dawnlands (Eighty hours played and still counting.) it was only this morning that I got around to taking a look at the update, trying to read the runes for the expansion. 

Before I logged in I scanned the sketchily-edited press release (Poor verb tense consistency in paragraph one; mismatched singular/plural in paragraph two. The whole thing reads like a first draft and a rushed one at that.) and watched the extremely short trailer. Twenty seconds. Now that's concise.

I only had it in mind to check out the pre-expansion event. I was going to get some screenshots and gather enough background for a post. In the end, I spent a couple of hours doing not just the whole of the Fractured Skies questline (It's short, as the pre-expansion stories always are.) but also the first of the two Shattered Overture solo dungeons, Shattered Unrest. 

I also took a ridiculous number of screenshots (Almost seventy!) documenting most of the quest dialog and all of the rewards and boss drops. I do this almost every time I play any new content in EQII in the mistaken belief that I'll use the pictures in whatever post I write. It's crazy behavior. Can you imagine this post with seventy screenshots, almost all of them showing nothing but item stats and NPC speech bubbles?

 

See what I mean? No-one wants that. Forget all that finnicky detail. Is any of it fun and/or worth doing? Also, does the prequel reveal anything about the setting or theme of the expansion?

Yes, yes and kinda. 

Fractured Skies is a classic EQII expansion prequel event but for my money it's a pretty decent one. They almost always follow the same pattern: your character gets a letter asking them to go see someone, somewhere about something. Sometimes a reference is made to your high standing in Norrath and your past history of saving the world from existential threat. Other times, as now, you're just some adventurer who might be at a loose end.

When you get to wherever it is, whatever crisis precipitated the call has already ended but there's a lot of mopping up to do. Either a Big Name In Norrath (Firiona Vie, The Duality...) or cabal of self-appointed busybodies (The Far Seas Trading Company, The Concordium...) wants you to investigate how the crisis arose and what ought to be done about it.

You spend anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours, wandering around the general area looking at stuff and talking to people about what happened. While you're doing it, creatures related to the mysterious event (Golems, Elementals, Undead...) attack you for no apparent reason. 

You report your findings to whomever and get sent somewhere else to do much the same again, probably several times. All of your research uncovers very little of substance but you get some kind of hint about where the crisis originated. Usually a very vague hint.

When you're done, whoever thinks they're in charge asks you to keep on looking at the same stuff you already looked at, collect the same things you already collected and kill the same things that keep on attacking you. These are your repeatable quests that hang around for as long as there is left to go before the expansion arrives.

If you're only an adventurer you do those until either you have enough faction to buy all the stuff in the prequel faction shop that interests you or you go mad from boredom, whichever comes first. If you're a crafter, you also get to make a bunch of stuff for the busybodies, who always seem to have run out of something because they failed to secure any kind of working supply chain before setting up their camp.

This year's event follows that pattern precisely but I found it considerably more interesting than the cut & paste format might suggest, partly because it's very well done of its kind but also because there are some evocative call-backs to the very start of the game.

In the prequel, chunks of debris come crashing down from space, bringing back memories of The Shattering, when the moon Luclin exploded.  We never got to see that event, which occured immediately prior to the launch of EQII but now we don't just get to hear the locals speak of it again, we also share some of their terrible experiences as the rocks literally crash down around us as we go about our investigations. 

As well as the scares, I also had to laugh when one the residents of Thundering Steppes couldn't remember the ridiculously pompous name this year's know-it-alls have chosen to go by. They're calling themselves the Sky Watcher Sodality. Is it any wonder people find it hard to remember?

The crisis this time causes considerably less damage than the Shattering, but there's still a tidal wave from the impacts in the Shattered Seas (Always lot of shattering and fracturing going on in Norrath...)  and a significant number of casualties. The rocks that hit the shoreline along Thundering Steppes leave a weird turquoise stain and stir up some powerful undead as collateral damage but they also seem to have brought some previously unknown "metallic creatures" with them. Could it be a clue?

During the investigation someone has a vision of bird-people doing something or other. They look like owls, which immediately puts everyone in mind of the Hooluk, a race of owl-like bird-folk who live on several of the sky islands from EQII's second expansion Kingdom of Sky. The suspicion, naturally, is that it's pieces of those islands that have crashed to earth. Muggins here gets sent to check it out.

Once again, I found it quite amusing that none of the Hooluks I spoke to had any idea what I was talking about because as far as they were concerned nothing had happened. I particularly enjoyed the fobbing-off I got from one of the owls, who was quite obviously ready to promise me anything just to make me go away and leave him in peace.

I had a good time doing the short series of quests, partly because they are short and to the point but mostly because I found them quite nostalgic. They're full of call-backs to Norrathian history, something that works well on me, since I've been there for almost all of it. 

I suspect players with little grounding in the lore and legend of the game might find the whole thing a bit dull but at this point there's little chance of anyone like that having to force their way through to the end. There surely can't be anyone left playing the game who isn't deeply invested in it.

I wouldn't call any of this fan service so much as the developers both knowing their audience and also having been at this as long as most of the players. EQII is a job for life, whichever side of the screen you're on.

As for what the prequel might tell us about the expansion... not a lot in my judgment. Something has blown up and crashed down but the obvious candidate seems to have been ruled out. The metal blobs don't remind me of anything I've seen before and I can't remember if I've encounterd Hooluks anywhere other than Kingdom of Sky. We're going to have to wait until someone with a better memory than me figures it out. 

So much for the prequel. What about the update? Well, curiously that seems to tie in with the same theme with similar metallic creatures appearing in both. That's something I really wasn't expecting. I guess it explains why the two launched together.

There's very little backstory for this one, so far anyway. Dr. Arcana has managed to bugger up one of his tomb-raiding expeditions and somehow managed to deconstruct the Estate of Unrest in doing it. I should confess at this point that I have absolutely no fricken' clue who Dr. Arcana is. He turns up at every Public Quest, handing out extremely powerful items for "artefacts" retrieved but why he wants them or what he does with them I have no idea.

Once more, there's a raised eyebrow and a subtle wink in the quest dialog as Arcana admits he hasn't been entirely forthcoming about his motives in the past. He isn't this time, either, but at least he's willing to have a proper conversation for once.

He sends us into the shattered (Oh yes, I said shattered!) estate, now scattered in fragments across some kind of peach-colored void. He wants us to retrieve his lost artifacts along with some strange crystals he spotted there, when he was busy wrecking the joint. Getting them involves riding flying discs from exploded room to exploded room and fighting five (I  think it was five...) boss mobs.

I was expecting this to be a slog; it was anything but. My Berserker is decently geared for solo instances at this stage of the expansion cycle but by no means as well set up as he could be. Usually new content like this is tuned slightly above his comfort level. This time the regular mobs turned out to be very easy to dispatch and the bosses, with one exception, fun to fight and fast to kill.

The trash mobs dropped so quickly I thought I'd risk the first boss without even looking to see if anyone had written a walkthrough yet. Usually I like a bit of a hint about the tricks bosses employ before I take them on but I was feeling lucky. 

It all went swimmingly. I tanked and spanked Ferroc, who appeared to be a bull made of iron. I think he sumoned some help at one point but I just kept AEing like a good berserker should and barely even noticed. After that I worked my way through Crogyn (Giant beetle.), The Gooey Gobdrop (Exactly as it sounds.), Gildilisk (A drake, I think...) and finally The Bonecleaver (Looked like a robot to me.)

Every one of them I tanked and spanked. There were messages about each of them doing something but I just ignored it and kept on thumping. Nothing untoward happened until The Bonecleaver and even then I didn't change tactics. It just took ten times as long.

Old boney has a buff called Level The Playing Field that he gives himself at about 80% health. It almost completely protects him from all kinds of status effects, which are the source of the majority of damage players dish out. You can still hurt him but all your attacks do is their basic damage. I think he also does some kind of minor power drain too, just to be a pain.

The buff is dispellable so the idea is clearly that you take it off him every time he casts it. Unfortunately, Bereserkers don't get any form of Dispel Magic and I didn't have any items on me that could cast it either. I thought maybe my merc would handle it but either he doesn't have the spell or he was too dim to use it.

The upshot was that I had to grind the bastard down one lousy per cent at a time. It took me about twenty minutes. The upside was that I was never really in any danger. At one point I just left my Berserker and merc auto-attacking while I tabbed out to look the fight up in case there was something I was missing. No-one had written it up so I had to carry on as I was.

It was worth it. All the bosses in the instance drop Fabled gear that's a significant upgrade to anything I'm wearing. Everything is at least 425 Resolve with the best piece I got hiting 435. The portmanteau quest for doing the whole thing netted me a Fabled Prestige item rated 440.

Gear like that will give me a definite leg up but of course, it won't last long. We're on the ever-moving EQII gear train, where no item ever lasts more than a few months and anything you get at this time of year, at least as a solo player, is going to be replaced twice before Christmas. If that's not your bag then you're playing the wrong game.

Before I explore the second instance, the dramatically-named Imprinted Memory: Origin of the Fellfeather, I'll have to take all the Augments out of the pieces I'm replacing and put them in my new armor instead. I'm also going to have make up my mind whether to use the hatchet and dagger that dropped, switching from my two-hander to dual wield, or whether to go sword-and-board with the hachet and my new shield. Decisions, decisions.

And I'll have to remember to keep playing EQII. Every time I do, I have a good time so I'm  not sure why I keep forgetting to go back. At least when Panda Panda Panda starts up again I'll get a reminder once a week.

Oh, and while I remember, there's also a freebie floating around. As I logged in I got a pop-up offering me an EverQuest II 2023 Welcome Windstrider Crate. It was packed!

Inside I found a full set of Runed Windstrider appearance armor complete with staff, a Stormfury Trawler illusion that makes you look like a cyclops and a Trusted Guardian vanity pet that turns out to be another dog. That's my second EQII dog of the summer.

I wondered what had prompted such generosity so I looked it up. Apparently there was an event for Labor Day that I'd missed completely. Until September 25, every account, F2P included, is entitled to the crate I got (One per character) so don't miss out. 

Members are also supposed to get a one-per-account crate with a bunch more stuff including a Jumpa-Lope Windstrider mount that "flies with its ears". I'm a member and I didn't get one. I'm going to have to look into that.