I'll Be Back! : EQ2

Last night I finished the Signature questline for EQ2's Tears of Veeshan expansion. It's one of the best I can remember.

Every zone was stunning. As Wilhelm pointed out in the comments, EQ2 has always had some beautiful scenery, even back in 2004, when the game began. Dungeon design, particularly, has frequently been exemplary.

Until a few years ago, though, much of that was hard to appreciate behind the muddy textures and clunky rendering. That problem seems to have been resolved and the whole of the later game looks shiny and modern.

The plot almost made sense or, at least, I could just about follow it. For once the "You are the Hero who can Save the World" trope felt, somehow, just about right. This is EQ2, though. Before anyone saves anything we have to have a meeting. There will be minutes.

Quest structure and dialog in EQ2, as I mentioned before, tends to follow a very particular model. The language is often quite formal, there's a tendency to adopt an almost self-consciously high moral tone and no-one ever speaks in anything less than full paragraphs.

When EQ2 launched it's primary USP, now long forgotten, was that it was the world's first fully-voiced MMORPG. The pre-launch publicity centered as much around the involvement of Christopher Lee as Overlord Lucan D'Lere and Heather Graham as Queen Antonia Bayle as it did around any of the gameplay.

That idea got shelved at the first expansion and ever since EQ2 has been a real reader's game. If you don't like reading walls of text then EQ2 is really not going to be your thing...although I might ask, if you don't like reading walls of text, what are you doing here?

Christopher Lee and Heather Graham may be long gone but Lucan and Antonia remain. They both make appearances in the ToV storyline, along with other familiar names and faces. As a Norrathian veteran of extremely long standing I confess this really works for me. I may not remember much of the detail but there's strong name-recognition and I do get a palpable frisson when certain familiar faces appear.

I found it surprisingly affecting to hear The Duality, perhaps Norrath's most powerful mage, discussing magical theory with my ratongan Berserker as though they were equals. Even more so I appreciated going to call on The Overlord in his floating lair, uninvited, and having him take heed rather than having me summarily executed. Although, to be fair, that was his initial reaction, until I straightened him out and calmed him down.

When Firiona Vie made an appearance my ratonga went so far as to take a selfie standing by her side. It's not like he hasn't met her before. He saved her life once as I recall. But she was looking particularly spiffy in her classic costume.

The best part of all, though, was when The Duality sent him to steal something from Mayong Mistmoore. Not for the first time, I might add. The Duality has very louche morals when it comes to private property.

Mayong isn't merely Norrath's most powerful vampire. He has pretensions to godhood and in the past he's come close to making those pretensions a reality. He caught my little ratonga in the act of ransacking his private chambers and unleashed the full force of his vampiric will upon him with the intention of making him his thrall.

And my ratonga laughed in his face. And pointed out all the dragons and gods he'd met and bested. And wondered why a mere vampire thought he had a chance. It was not only ridiculously satisfying but it finally succeeded in contextualizing just why my character is treated as such a powerful opponent, a major threat, a genuine player in the big game. It's because he damn well is!

The fact that power creep has now made even a solo-geared character a one-rat raid goes a long way towards making this work in a way it never used to do. The Tears of Veeshan content is nominally aimed at level 95 to 100. Everything gives xp without the need to mentor down and many of the mobs are yellow cons. And yet they all fall like wheat before the blade.

Until the final movement, that is. The Signature solo questline pulls that annoying SOE/DBG bait and switch trick of turning into group content at the end. Worse, this time the final act is an Epic X2 raid, meaning it's tuned for two full groups.

I tried it anyway. The opening sequence I found genuinely stirring. Very dramatic. The music, the emotion, the sturm und drang. Kerafyrm beating his wings, Lucan barking orders, Antonia Bayle in her full plate battle gear...

For a while it looked as though I might make some impact. My Berserker and his trusty if psychotic orc mercenary Zhugris were managing to cleave through waves of four Epic X2 Awakened soldiers at a time. And then I started getting one-shotted and couldn't work out why.

In the end it turned out to be a Named general. I knew I'd have to fight him later on but right now he was flapping about above the battle and dropping what appeared to be targeted meteor strikes on my head. Zhugris and I gave it the old Freeport College try. He battle-rezzed me several times and eventually killed two EpicX2 mobs all on his own while I stayed down and watched but the General kept dropping his rocks and there seemed to be nothing either of us could do about that.

So the very final chapter is on hold until we get a level cap increase and power creep takes us to another order of magnitude. Then we'll see. I'm patient. I can wait.

In the meantime I think I might amuse myself by going round all the Heroic Dungeons and Raid instances that were, until recently, out of my league. There are quite a few. That's the glory of the classic level and gear progression MMO. All content comes to he who waits.

Where To Begin? : EQ2

A short conversation in the comments on the previous post outlined two of the biggest problems older MMOs have in trying to attract and hold new players: they're overwhelmingly vast and they don't look that great by modern standards. A few, Saga of Ryzom, comes to mind, were prescient or fortunate enough to go with a stylized graphic approach that ages well but most older games look, well, old.

As the anonymous commenter observes "the EQ2 graphics were also implemented with an eye to future graphic hardware upgrades". Certainly SOE made a big deal about that at the time. Anyone remember the pre-release video that got everyone so excited and which turned out to look nothing whatsoever like the actual game, when it finally arrived? In practice, though, for the first decade at least, that promise went unfulfilled.

Much though I love EQ2, for the longest time I would never have made any great claims for its visual style. Even back in 2004, coming to the new Norrath from the then five year old 90s stylings of EverQuest, it didn't look that great. Antonica and Commonlands were functional, Thundering Steppes and Nektulos Forest bleak and/or bland. I was always impressed by Freeport but Qeynos was famously so badly optimized that many people simply avoided going there altogether.

Over the years the post-Luclin version of Norrath grew and grew. The Desert of Flames expansion, visually, was much of a muchness with the base game, only with added sand. Kingdom of Sky was a lot more impressive with its soon to become familiar Roger Dean style floating islands but as the expansions rolled out year after year it was the increasingly enjoyable and complex gameplay that kept me coming back, rather than any expectation of anything amazing to look at.

Researching this post I was surprised to find that the EQ2 team only got the new Terrain tools that massively speeded up and improved their ability to create zones from scratch in 2014. That was no doubt why we saw all-new zones in the 2014 and 2015 expansions and updates whereas 2012's Chains of Eternity and 2013's Tears of Veeshan largely re-used and re-vamped older assets.

Something must have changed, though, because as I play through the ToV signature timeline and explore the sky islands of Vesspyr Isles and the alternate-Norrath dungeons they lead to I find myself doing something I rarely do in EQ2: taking screenshot after screenshot just because. As should be readily apparent from the illustrations in recent posts, Tears of Veeshan is a visually sumptuous experience.

It's not just the zones, either. The character models are elaborate and detailed. It's hard to appreciate the sartorial style of a shissar temple guard as he 's trying to cleave you down the middle but these are some snappy dressers and the bixies in the Fractured Hive have certainly followed an entirely different evolutionary path from those buzzing fluffballs I remember back in Misty thicket.

It's been like this for about four or five years. The post-level-95 zones in EQ2, open world and dungeon alike, are much more likely to make you reach for your screenshot key than for excuses. No-one needs to apologize for an aging engine here. The graphics may not be cutting edge but they have, at last, managed to achieve something of the timeless style of good graphic design.

A lot of it seems to have to do with a new approach to surface and color. The ToV zones have a lot of flat surfaces and color washes. Texture frequently seems to be provided by tiles, panels or patinas rather than, in older zones, those tired and tiring texture maps. It reminds me in places of the clean, classic expressionistic comic art of Alex Toth or, to take a less-exalted example, Trevor von Eeden. 

In other parts there's something of the lush, overripe, almost sybaritic indulgence of the "Studio" artists, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Mike Kaluta, Barry Windsor Smith and Bernie Wrightson. There also seems to be a deal of constructivist influence going on as well. All in all it's a far richer mix than anything you're likely to encounter in the first few dozen levels and therein lies the problem.

When nearly all of your players are up in the canopy, enjoying the fruits of a decade or more of improvements in both the design of the game and the tools to apply lessons learned attractively and efficiently, how can you hope to draw fresh sap from the roots? Even with modern leveling speeds it's a long road from installing the game to the good stuff five or ten levels short of the cap.

I'm a huge advocate of low level gaming in MMORPGs. I prefer to be down there in the fields, helping with the turnip harvest, running off the gnolls. For me, EQ2's huge, sprawling hinterland is freighted with nostalgia and memory. Nothing there comes clean and raw. But could I start there now, with no foreknowledge, and stay? I don't know. 

EQ2 is an exceptional case, I think. In many, most MMOs I might well suggest the best of the gameplay is at the lower end. I tend to become disengaged by end games. EQ2 doesn't really go there. For a long, long time it's still the same leveling game only the scenery gets better and better and the plots become more and more involving. There isn't any huge change of playstyle when you hit the buffers on level.

It would be probably be better all round if DBG could split the game in two. There's more than enough content from 1-92 to make most MMOs with years of development behind them look skinny. That could be the retro, nostalgists' version.

The game already makes a step-change at 92. It would be the perfect new beginning, jettisoning the dead weight of a decade of overwrought and underused mechanics and systems, offering instead the much more coherent and visually appealing package that begins somewhere around the introduction of Withering Lands, half way through 2011's Destiny of Velious expansion.

Since that's unlikely to happen I think I would recommend would-be new players in Norrath to lay down a few extra dollars in the Store and begin at Level 90 with a Heroic Character. It seems counter to everything I usually espouse and support but EQ2 really is a different game these days and I suspect very, very few players who start at the bottom in 2016 will ever stick around long enough to discover just how different.

Of course, if you're an experienced MMO veteran who knows what to expect of an old game and isn't unduly phased by spending quite a long time staring at some really unappealing scenery then you're in for a real treat. There's an unconscionable amount of content in those first 90 levels and a lot of it is very entertaining indeed.

The best part is that there is a choice. A few years back it was very much like it or lump it and I suspect that after a few frustrating sessions many chose the latter. Most MMOs of a certain age now offer some kind of elevator to the top and the days of shaking our heads over the supposed entitlement issues that brings up are over. Or should be.

Everyone's A Critic : EQ2

Sometime back in the late 70s I saw Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers play live. It was at the Anson Rooms, a long, rectangular box of a venue used by Bristol University for various functions, the least appropriate of which was punk gigs.

Of course, Jonathan wasn't a punk and The Modern Lovers weren't a punk band. For a while he'd been a fellow traveler of the scene, the most direct link between The Velvet Underground's mid-60s noise/art experiments and the fear-fueled motorik of The Subway Sect.

The chugging paranoia of "She Cracked" and the angry strut of  "Pablo Picasso" from the eponymous, John Cale produced album that I bought in 1976 were important signs and portents but by the time Jonathan walked onto the stage that night he'd repudiated his past or at least turned down the volume.

"Anyone who would hurt a baby's ears sucks", Jonathan pronounced in a controversial interview, as he outlined his new methodology. I saw him play a number of times and sometimes you couldn't easily hear him over the sound of the crowd chattering. Loud he was not.

Which was probably why, a few songs into the gentle, quiet, rockabilly-inflected set that evening, some disgruntled punk decided to lob a meat pie at Jonathan's innocent hangdog head. The poor lamb stood there with gravy dripping down his face looking for all the world like a puppy that's been chided for some infraction of a rule he doesn't, can't, understand.

He wasn't angry. He was hurt. He told us how hurt. Repeatedly. Softly. Unhappily. By the time he'd finished - no, long before he'd finished, because Jonathan kept coming back to the question of "why the pie?" after every number - the crowd was itching for a lynching. The errant pie-thrower wisely exited early, realizing the enormity of his error.

This all came back to me quite vividly yesterday afternoon as I was working my way through the Signature quest line of EQ2's "Tears of Veeshan" expansion. I'd done a range of chores for various dragons, most of whom I vaguely remembered from EverQuest.

I'd re-united Harla Dar with her son Fraka, whom she thought dead. I'd helped Wuoshi, who used to terrorize my characters at the Wakening Lands portal to the point where I parked a sacrificial low-level there to act as a canary in the mine and warn me with his sudden death if it was too dangerous to use the druid ring.

In the Ethernere, the realm of the dead, Wuoshi has mellowed. I enjoyed a long, philosophical conversation with him as I helped tend his garden. I'm really enjoying this expansion. It's so EQ2 it verges on self parody but, like Jonathan, wonderfully so.

That wasn't how I came to be reminded of the pieing of the Bard of Boston. That came later, in High Keep. I was surprised to be in High Keep. I had no idea the old East Karana stronghold had anything to do with the expansion in question. I'm not really clear, even now, on what it's doing there.

It seems to be some alternate timeline where the Pickclaw goblins have gained the upper hand in their eternal battle with the High Keep nobles, gamblers and militia. The meticulously detailed and beautifully rendered castle has been overrun by goblins, who are behaving just exactly as you might expect, overturning furniture, getting drunk and generally making a mess of the old place.

In the huge refectory they're having a food fight. I stood and watched as the pies flew but that wasn't what made me think of The Jonathan Incident. No, the memory trigger was even more specific than that.

I don't know about you but I don't associate goblins with musical talent. Dwarves like to sing about gold, we all know that. The problem is stopping them. Elves have that ethereal thing going on. Goblins, though...

The Pickclaws have a band. A trio. Drums, guitar, vocals. No bass. Usually the singer would play bass. Just a suggestion.

They aren't very good. They are, in fact, so bad that as you get close to the stage a big prompt comes up  across the screen that tells you the singer's so bad he deserves a pie in the face.

That was when I thought of Jonathan. As someone who's sung on stage and later heard the singer (actually, reciter) of another, very much more successful, band tell our guitarist that we're good but we'd be a lot better with a different singer, I can be sensitive to that kind of criticism, even when it doesn't come wrapped in a pastry crust. No singer is so bad that a pie in the face offers a valid critique of his shortcomings.

Still, quests, progression...sometimes bad things happen. I went to look for the pie. That turned out to be harder than expected because I seemed to have a bugged instance. I couldn't interact with any interactable objects. I could see the pie but I couldn't pick it up. It was an existential dilemma.

I solved it by swapping to the Heroic version of the zone. I figured, correctly as it transpired, that my uber-solo Terrors of Thalumbra/Scourge of Zek gear would see me through and so it proved. In fact, the difficulty and challenge in the Heroic (meaning full group expected) version seemed just about perfect.

In the Advanced Solo instance my Berserker was literally one-shotting everything, even bosses. In the Heroic the fights lasted about as long as a reasonably easy Solo instance would. I cleared my way back to where I was before, picked up the pie and lobbed it.

Sadly I was too slow to take a screenshot but the moment was eerily similar to my memory of the real-life event. The pie arced, impacted, exploded. For a moment there was gravy. Gravy and stunned silence.

And then things took a very different turn.

Bloogly, the goblin vocalist, is not Jonathan Richman. Arguably he sings a bit like him, especially that one time I saw Jonathan when he had a bad head cold, but his reaction to being pied was entirely other. So I killed him. And his band. Harsh, but there you go. They knew the risks when they set up. This is punk rock.

The rest of the instance went swimmingly until I ran into the final boss. He turned out to be none other than Brell Serillis's less famous brother Bolgin. No, me neither. I actually thought it was a dwarf with delusions of grandeur but after I died the first time I googled him and he's a real god alright.

Being a god he can Curse. In EQ2 there are no Cure Curse potions. There are no tradeable Cure Curse items. Curses are incurable and, at least in the case of the one Bolgin casts, fatal. You'd think Zhugris might have chipped in with a cure, seeing how he's my Healer Mercenary and all, but no such luck. He doesn't know the spell.

Removing curses remains the final, irreplaceable stock in trade of the player-healer. Without an actual person backing me up Bolgin can roll around on his pile of gold like Uncle Scrooge in his money pit and just laugh and laugh and laugh.

I'll see him back in the Advanced Solo instance. We'll see who's laughing then. And if I can pick up that pie this time round I'll give Bloogly another taste. I always wanted to be a rock critic.

Lucky Number 13 : EQ2

It wasn't until I read Wilhelm's post yesterday afternoon that I realized it was Friday 13th. I'd been having a pretty good day until then. Afterwards it only got better.

I'd spent the morning sorting out my bags in EQ2. Despite the game having by far the most generous storage in all MMORPGs, all my regular characters still manage to end up stuffed to the gunwales.

My berserker has something in excess of three hundred inventory slots just on him, leave alone the twelve hundred in his bank. Counting his house vault he probably has storage for well over two thousand items and then there's four tabs of the guild bank he has all to himself, given he's the only guild member who's logged in in over two years.

There's just no excuse for it. It's out of control hoarding is what it is and I need to get a grip. Three hours of sorting, selling, transmuting, infusing, and adorning later left me with three completely empty bags and a significantly upgraded character.

I even bit down hard and attuned and equipped the Fabled breastplate I'd been dithering over for weeks. It does put me in a tizzy when I acquire gear I could use then realize it sells on the broker for more than ten times all the money I have in the bank. It was, needless to say, a massive upgrade.

EQ2 seems to be in the throws of uncontrollable inflation right now. Broker prices are spiralling up in the way I remember EverQuest's did in the mid 2000s. The gear I'm getting from soloing The Scourge of Zek outshines raid gear from the last expansion, which is barely six months old. There's a thread on the forums warning that if it goes on like this individual DPS on boss fights will soon parse in the billions.

I love it! My Berserker is a total joy to play. It feels great being this powerful. It feels great picking up spare collects and knowing they'll sell for fifty or a hundred plat each on the broker. And fast. Most of the things I put on the broker at the end of a session have sold by the next time I log in. The economy may be bloated but it moves!

After lunch I finished off the GU100 solo signature storyline. It took me an hour of killing orcs to get the final twenty-one sigils. I did the hand in, took my reward and that was that. So now what?

I went and played GW2 for a few hours. One of our smartest commanders led a golem charge around Eternal Battlegrounds while one of our loudest commanders commentated the whole thing in Team chat as if it was a sports event. It was hilarious.

After the excitement died down and Mrs Bhagpuss went to bed I logged back into EQ2. I thought I'd just have a potter. My Berserker happened to be at the dock in Phantom Sea so I picked up the weeklies and an Advanced Solo dungeon daily for good measure.

I flew around marveling at just how gorgeous the two ocean zones from the Altar of Malice expansion are, especially after the raw ugliness of Zek. All the Nameds I needed for the weeklies were up but not for long. Fights that went to the wire a few months ago now ended so quickly I barely had time to hit a button. I was one-shotting some of the level 105 mobs with the first arrow that was meant to pull them.

Weeklies done, I went to Zavith'loa. I thought I'd been there before but apparently not to this particular version, The Lost Caverns, because I got explore xp on zoning in. That was only the first surprise. I killed the two lizardmen lurking at the entrance and suddenly I was riding a dinosaur!

It reminded me of the Goblin starting area in WoW, where you're always hopping on unlikely mounts and being whisked across hostile territory. Never seen it happen before in Norrath.

Once again the fights were short, explosive and final. All the Nameds I needed to kill put up the challenge of a wet paper bag. I had a walkthrough up just in case but none of them lived long enough to get any of their tricks or traps out.

It was brilliant! It felt absolutely right. This was payback. My Berserker did the grunt work, grinding through all the quests in the expansion at level in old gear and it was fun but it was also hard going. Some of the Advanced Solo stuff back then was a real challenge. Returning, battle-hardened from tougher campaigns, being able to treat these creatures with disdain, was immensely satisfying.

It was so satisfying, in fact, that I wanted more. I thought about running another Shattered Seas Advanced Solo dungeon or maybe even trying a Heroic and seeing how that went. Then I had what turned out to be a much better Idea.

Leveling up to 95, I completed all of the excellent Cobalt Scar content plus the full Signature quest line from the Chains of Eternity expansion. When the cap shifted to 100 I did it all in the Shattered Seas or mentored down, chugging xp pots in old Kunark dungeons. I skipped the intervening level 95 expansion, Tears of Veeshan, almost entirely.

That means I have a whole unused expansion just sitting there. What's more, at my Berserker's current power level, those level 95-100 mobs might as well be level seven Antonican rats. I blew into the Vesspyr Isles late last night ready to pick up where I left off on my last, brief visit.

I vaguely remember I'd been doing something for some dragon or other. At the time it had been hard work, requiring me to pick out the mobs I needed from among scads of other hostile critters. There was either a great deal of unnecessary clearing or else sneaking and hiding and it wasn't a lot of fun, which is why, back then, I never got past the first quest hub.

This time it was different. So very different. No need to clear when you can just run into the middle of whatever's in the way and fire off every AE on your bar. Everything dies. Immediately. If there were quest mobs in there, updates chime. If not, move ten paces and repeat.

Even when I had to harvest and forage and mine it was a pleasure. I just moved from node to node and let my new best friend, Zhugrus, deal with the wildlife. He is, I must say, by far the best healer Mercenary I have had the pleasure of employing in EQ2. He's like Stamper Jeralf on steroids.

Not only does he heal me promptly and efficiently but most of the time he remembers to heal himself too, which is more than any other healer merc I've ever had has managed. Maybe it's that streak of orcish self-regard. Of course he didn't need to do much healing in Vesspyr. He barely ever had time to get a Verdict off.

The best part of returning to Vesspyr Isles, though, was finding just how staggeringly beautiful the whole zone is. The first time I really didn't notice because of having to watch my health bar but now that's no longer a concern I was able to look up and around.

It's like being inside a Yes album cover. I believe I may have mentioned this before, but someone on the EQ2 art team was clearly exposed to Fragile or Tales From Topographic Oceans at an impressionable age. I'm no Roger Dean fan but when it comes to inspiration for evocative, ethereal fantasy imagery there are worse role models.

I spent a long time just flying around taking screen shots until I realized that the entire zone is one huge, never-ending screen shot. There's pretty much nowhere you can point the camera without getting something you'd be happy to use a desktop background. And it all feels so fluffy!

I logged out with the satisfying knowledge that there's a whole new-to-me expansion just waiting to be explored. What's more, now my Berserker is a virtual demi-god in most content more than six months old, it's going to be all fun and no hard work.

What a great Friday the Thirteenth!

Chanelling and Chronomancy : GW2, EQ2

Jeromai has an excellent post up on the forthcoming addition of The Chronomancer to GW2. It covers most of what we know and can extrapolate thus far about just what it is that a Chronomancer does. There's a LiveStream that probably does much the same only at inordinate length and with video and commentary by the developers. I found I had better things to do than watch that but then I didn't need to because I have Dulfy to do it for me. She provides a thorough precis , which I did manage to find time to read.

It's fairly clear what the Chronomancer's abilities will be but I'm still a little unclear on just what, exactly, a "chronomancer" is, in terms of the structure of the game. ANet describe it as an "Elite Specialization" but it's also variously referred to as a class or a sub-class.

It appears to require both the equipping of a shield, the new weapon-type available to Mesmers in the Heart of Thorns expansion, and the slotting of an Elite Specialization . Indeed, on a closer reading, it would seem that Mesmers will only be able to wield shields if they slot that Elite. There will be no shield-wielding, non-chronomancing Mesmers. Probably. I think...

Presumably the same restriction applies to all the other classes. If you want to use the new weapon you have to take on the mantle of the new class. Sub-class. Whatever.

Not giving up my domes and lasers. Nossir. No way.

For certain, every class in GW2 will be given an Elite Specialization by the expansion and each will gain access to a weapon whose subtleties it was hitherto unable to understand. You wouldn't think that grabbing something flat and holding it up between yourself and whatever happens to be attacking you would be that hard to figure out but I guess, given what the Mesmer proposes to do with the shield now she's finally picked one up, maybe something as mundane as blocking always seemed a little beneath her dignity.

Depending on how you look at it, Heart of Thorns will either double the number of classes in the game or merely remove some of the existing class restrictions on weapon-use. I'm struggling to think of another MMORPG I've played that's taken this approach. The only ones that come to mind are the Final Fantasy games with their "jobs". New examples of those are added periodically both within and outside of expansions but although the "one character can be everything" model there means that the new job adds on to the existing character, the player still has to level it up in the same way he did all the earlier jobs.

As with, oh, pretty much everything ANet does with GW2, I'm also really not sure whether I like the approach or not. In a game that's arguably one of the most "alt-friendly" of all MMOs I'd far rather have had just one or two full, new classes than eight "Elite Specializations" bolted onto the existing list. On the other hand it's certainly going to give us all something to play around with for quite a while.

Did someone mention lasers?

Playing around with builds is, for better or for worse, one of the staples of MMO gameplay. Waiting For Rez, one of the new crop of NBI bloggers, has an interesting piece up about the developing mechanics of Talent Trees and Skill Point Systems. Reading both that and Jeromai's thoughts led me to consider how unclear and malleable my own feelings are when it comes to adjusting to this kind of systemic change.

A very large part of the attraction of playing MMORPGs, for me, comes in learning and understanding the systems. It's a prime reason why I try out so many different ones. I have always enjoyed entertainment that doesn't explain itself too readily; I like stories that begin in media res, I like concepts and terminology whose meaning has to be deduced from context. In short, I like starting out completely at sea and having to find my own way to solid ground.

It's why I strongly dislike tutorials and it has a lot to do with why I much prefer the early and mid levels of most MMOs to the end game. Once I've worked out which lever pulls what string I quickly become disillusioned with having to keep pulling it over and over again until I can pull it perfectly. As if I ever could.

For that reason I tend to enjoy very much the first run through a talent or trait tree. Working out how to use the user interface, how to slot the skills, where to go to acquire them, that part I like. Subsequent trips through the same detail tend to lose their appeal. I do seem to end up doing it a lot. Too much.

This looks strangely familiar.

 
Some of that isn't the fault of game design, of course. It's the over-exposure to such systems that comes with playing so many characters. Perhaps if I was the kind of player who sticks to a Main and an Alt I'd not be here having this conversation with myself right now.

For good or ill, though, I am not much of a "Main and Alt" person. And then some! That's why last week, when Daybreak Games celebrated the arrival of their new and not entirely original logo, instead of buckling down and banging some levels on any of my many existing characters I found myself rolling a Channeler instead.

It's taken me a very long time to get around to doing it. The Channeler was the most recent new class added to EQ2's already impressive (or overblown if you prefer - the game currently has 26 classes) roster but that was with the Tears of Veeshan expansion back in late 2013.

Don't just stand there! Grab his tail!

I made a Beastlord at the first possible opportunity but it's taken this long to come to the Channeler because the concept of the class never really grabbed me. A leather-wearing priest class that heals by firing arrows and has a pet that can't be controlled? Say what?

It was a post by Kaozz in which she mentioned, just in passing, that her Channeler had dinged 100 that reminded me the class even existed. I'd forgotten all about it. Without fully considering what I was doing, next thing I knew I'd rolled the inevitable ratonga, set his starting city to New Halas and stepped out yet again into Norrath.

Channeler is a very odd class. I played to around level 10 without looking anything up and really had no clue what I was doing. There's a pet that looks like some kind of rock elemental. It's called a "Construct". It can't be killed or commanded (although maybe that will come later). For now it hangs around like a giant vanity pet doing... something... while my character draws a bow, excruciatingly slowly, and fires one arrow every ten or fifteen seconds like a ranger on heavy medication.

Oh! That's where they went...

The amount of information granted inside the game is minimal. I gathered as much as that it was a resource-management class similar to a Beastlord but by the low teens no access to the UI controls for those resources has arrived. I seem to remember, vaguely, that the Beastlord was much the same. A few levels in some familiar-looking skills popped onto my hotbars suggesting that, again like a Beastlord, the Channeler needs to hunt down creatures, beat them to within an inch of their life and then best them in a staring match.

But to what end? I had no idea so I tried to find out the best way - by doing it. Things didn't go well. Sometimes I killed the animal before the channeled skill completed. Sometimes the animal killed me. Sometimes the Construct killed the animal. I hadn't even realized the Construct was attacking until I read my combat log. I thought it was a defensive ward. Mostly, though, we all stood there locked in stalemate as the bear or wolf continually interrupted my channeling until I lost patience, dealt it a death blow and went off in a huff to look for another victim.
Finally I succeeded in getting the skill to complete. I successfully sucked the Essence from a rat. Best not think about that too closely. And then... I was completely stumped. I'd seen some messages pop up about new "abilities" and "customizations" for my Construct but I had no idea how to access them. I couldn't find any "essence" in my bags, there were no new skills on my hotbar. My Construct looked exactly the same as it spun there radiating smugness.

It was around that point that I cracked and went to the ever-reliable Zam, where I found the following:

"To access the Construct Window, first open the character window (C). After you've summoned your construct there will be a Construct tab, which is where you customize your construct's appearance."

Well, duh!

It's a learning curve and that's why it's fun. Even when you have to look things up. I'm not opposed to doing a bit of research, after all. That's all part of the process.

I am less convinced the class will be fun in and of itself and I feel much the same about GW2's upcoming "Elite Specializations". There's precious little chance I'll be abandoning my Berserker, or even my new Warlock, for the channeling life and I very much doubt I'll be giving up the simple life of the Longbow Ranger or Staff Elementalist for whatever over-complicated fussbudget frippery their new weapon types offer.

I will, however, be happy to enjoy the process of opening all the skills and traits and getting the hang of the systems involved in doing so -  before consigning them all to the "new-fangled nonsense" bin and going back to the tried and tested Old Ways. Because, much though I enjoy unraveling the mysteries and complexities of underlying systems and processes, when it comes to everyday combat I'd just as soon hit things with a stick.