Where Does This Door Go? : EQ2

Sometimes you end up doing things you weren't planning on doing. Sometimes you end up doing things when you don't have time to be doing them at all. Sometimes that works out just fine.

A couple of nights ago I found myself standing at the gates of a Thalumbran Advanced Solo instance I had no intention of entering, most especially not a few minutes before midnight. So I went in.

Just to have a look, you understand. Con the mobs. Maybe kill a couple. Test the waters, so to speak.

And then there was a Named and I thought, why not? Give it a try, see how it goes. And it went pretty well, at least after I swapped into tank mode, and next thing I have the wiki up checking what happens next and before you know it it's half past midnight and I'm looking at the final boss.

Well, at least I had the sense to stop there. Camped out at the front (I say "the front". It was a one-room dungeon, near as makes no difference) came back the next morning and finished it off before work.

That was Stygian Threshold: The Howling Gateway. The howling part was a bunch of Kobolds and the gateway looked like the way to the forge of Brell Serilis, The Duke of Below, creator of all the interesting races - dwarves, gnomes, ratonga, goblins, gnolls. And kobolds, don't forget kobolds. Everyone always forgets kobolds.

There's Brell up there, waving his hammer about. You can see him through the wibbly-wobbly window. Gave me a frisson it did, coming across him unexpectedly. Assuming that's who it is. Looks like him, anyway.

Last night, believe it or not, I did it again. Nearly midnight and somehow I ended up outside the entrance to Kralet Penumbra. There was a choice of three portals and I remembered one from the YouTube video I linked before.

I also remembered Borgio saying his dwarven Berserker had 2.5 million hit points. Well, I've been working on that. Mine has 1.9m and rising now. So naturally I began to wonder if I could pull the whole room and AE it down the way he did. Only one way to find out.

Turns out I could! Of course I had my trusty pirate pal, Raffik, to help but still. And this time I didn't have to get up for work the next day so I was able to finish it all off in one go.

It's a testament to the lateness of the hour and the intensity of the combat that I didn't take any screenshots in either instance other than the one of Brell above. Or possibly there wasn't much to look at. These instances are small. Functional but fun.

Today I carried on the "I didn't plan on doing this" theme by running the full Ratonga racial questline in the revamped Temple Street. On Stormhold, the Time limited Expansion server.

Let's forget I have never yet done any of the Qeynos village stories, nor half the Freeport ones. Let's forget I have done the ratonga one at least three times already. Let's forget that it's a terrible use of the current bonus xp event because it involves mostly not doing anything that gives xp. And let's especially forget that it's one of the least "retro" things available on the TLE servers, being not only  anachronistic to the Pillars of Flame era currently running but also identical to the version available on Live.

Then I followed that up by doing something even more pointless, albeit so retro it hurt, namely the access quest for Fallen Gate, a dungeon that ceased to require an access quest about a decade ago. Who cares if it was pointless though? It was fun and I got to go out on the roof of the final instance and look at the view. That was the best bit.

Is that building available anywhere as housing? Because I want a Freeport house with a flat roof you can stand on and look out over the waterfront. If it's not a Prestige House it darn well ought to be.

Then, finally, I picked up my daily present from Santa Glug and got the best one yet: a santa beard and hat combo that looks even less convincing on a ratonga than it does on a goblin. Result!

So, that was my weekend, or some of it, anyway. Unplanned, random, unexpected and often without any purpose whatsoever. The best kind there is.

The Sniper In The Brain : EQ2

Topauz passed on some excellent tips in the comments of my last, bizarrely titled post, regarding a series of quests added with Terrors of Thalumbra. They all begin when you interact with an item in the world; something you might happen upon by chance. You'll notice the object, if you're paying attention, because it will be slightly odd or out of place. If you're curious enough to check it out you'll see that you can Examine it or interact with it in some way and when you do a quest window will pop up.

Of course, in the 21st Century, the wisdom of crowds and the all-seeing eye of Google mean there's no need to lean on chance or serendipity. EQ2Wire has an excellent guide that covers everything from finding these quests to how to complete them to where to get the rewards.

And the rewards are very good. As Topauz explains, "The quest will give a "dirty key." You unpack the key and it will give you a gold, platinum, or umbrite key. You then need to find a matching chest. Gold will give you advanced solo level gear, platinum is heroic and umbrite is raid level". The potential for a solo or casual player to gain substantial upgrades is considerable.

This type of quest isn't new to EQ2. There were some in the previous expansion, Altar of Malice, and quite probably long before that. Neither is it unique to the game. The format is almost identical to Adventures in GW2, for example. Most MMOs probably have something similar. In theory they're an excellent addition to any game except for one thing: they're timed.

I really, really don't like timed quests. I don't like any kind of timed content, come to that. I hate having to work against the clock. It seems to me to remove one of the key reasons for playing MMOs in the first place - relaxation.

I can understand why it's done. The rewards, as I mentioned, are good. You can't just be giving them away. There has to be some control mechanism.

I get that but personally I'd take lesser rewards any day if I was given all the time I needed. Or, better yet, they could keep the good loot but just offer the quests less frequently. There's already a time-gate on these quests but it's very short: you can repeat them every two or three hours indefinitely. I'd be happy to make that once a day, or even once a week, if only I could take as long as I needed to do each of them, not have to try and cram it all into five minutes.

This feeds back into the discussion on difficulty, challenge and inconvenience in MMOs that always rumbles away in the background and which was stirred up again yesterday by Syp's response to a post of mine from a while back. Looking at the difficulty of playing video games, Pete at Dragonchasers was ruefully counting the cost of aging the other day but even leaving aside fading reflexes and failing reactions there's the simple measure of innate skill to contend with once you start testing players against the clock.

Even given an equivalent amount of playtime and practice no two players are going to perform identically. They won't share the same motivations, expectations, patience or willpower. No challenge level is going to please everyone.

In offline games a good deal of this can be fudged or finessed with difficulty settings. Over the years MMOs have tried to emulate that with levels, gear and the addition of NPCs to stand in for players when the social nature of the genre unravels.

It's never been entirely satisfactory but we've muddled along well enough. All of which is fine until that little timer starts ticking. At that point the task narrows to a much tighter window in which player skill, or at least accuracy, becomes unusually important and that's a highly malleable yardstick.

By comparison with other video games the skill bar in MMOs isn't all that high. About the only benchmark that the genre can claim as a high water mark is large-scale organization. MMO solo play, by and large, is so easy it's embarassing.

And that's kind of the point of it. It's a low common denominator activity and it attracts an appropriate audience. Hardcore gamers don't flock to MMOs to test their skills against solo  quests designed to appeal as much to parents stuck at home with small children and fifty-somethings filling the silence of their empty nests as to young adults with razor-wire reflexes and the drive to Beat Content until it begs for mercy.

Coming across quests with timers while soloing in an MMO just feels weird. And wrong. It'd be like Lana Del Rey covering Blitzkrieg Bop. Okay, not quite like that. That'd be weird but good. I want to hear that now...

Last night I tried three of the four quests rated "Easy" by Faelen Rizzik in EQ2Wire's guide. One of them really was easy. The box-carrying one. It takes about 45 seconds on a timer of five minutes. That got me a gold key. Another few minutes of flying around with a tracking scroll found me the gold chest. Inside was a hand-slot item that upgraded, slightly, the one I'd gotten only the day before from the Frostfell vendor.

The other two "easy" quests didn't go so well. I ran out of battery power in the drained minecrawler before I even got to the top of the first ramp and I'd only managed to destroy five of the ten rocks required to complete Rubble Rampage when the timer ran out. They were certainly easy in terms of what the quests wanted you to do but the timer changes all that. With the clock ticking, simple, fun diversions become tense, frustrating chores.

That's just a first impression. I've been at this game long enough to know that in a few runs I'll be an old hand, a dab hand even. That onerous, coercive timer will slip into the shadows, forgotten, as the allotment of minutes passes from parsimony to indulgence. It won't be long before I'm recommending these quests to people as a simple, quick way to get great upgrades - just as Topauz recommended them to me.

Thing is, though, if it wasn't for the excellent rewards attached I would never get anywhere near that point. My first impression would remain just that. There'd never be a second one to correct it. With those timers running the only reason I'm doing the quests in the first place is to get the key to open the box to grab the loot.

Which is fine. I like loot. I like upgrades. I am, to a degree, a vertical progression kind of guy. I still hate timed quests though, even if it is possible to bribe me well enough to get me to do them.

A Rum Cellar Indeed: EQ2

When you buy the latest EQ2 expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra, you also gain access to every previous expansion and adventure pack. That sounds like an incredible deal, and it is, although it becomes less impressive when you realize that every expansion other than two latest ones are already open to anyone under the current  F2P model.

Either way, if you're one of what must by now be a tiny trickle of genuine first-timers, or even a lapsed veteran returning after a lay-off of a year or three, it means enough content to keep you occupied for many months. Also a learning curve steep enough to make your ears pop but that's what you get for not keeping up with the pack.

There have been lengthy periods when EQ2 was the MMORPG of choice both for me and Mrs Bhagpuss. Expansions were eagerly anticipated, purchased and played from day one. Perversely, however, when I was playing regularly, putting in a solid thirty hours most weeks, I never had a character even close to being as well-geared, ready for action and bang up to date as my Berserker, who gets a run-out here and there a few hours a week if he's lucky.

Don't flap your undead stench in my direction!

In part this is down to changes in the way the game has been restructured. A number of major adjustments were made in latter years that recognized the changing nature of the audience. The addition of Mercenaries in the Age of Discovery "feature" expansion revolutionized solo play for EQ2 as it had previously done for EverQuest but later changes were even more significant.

The expansion that followed AoD, Chains of Eternity, added Advanced Solo Instances; copies of the new "Heroic" zones for groups that scale down to suit a single well-geared player or a duo, be that two players or a single player with a mercenary. Since then every expansion has arrived with separate, fully-developed set of progression mechanics and rewards for all the main playstyles - solo, group, raid and tradeskill. 

When DBG released the Rum Cellar Campaign last April they took a brief and arguably ill-conceived detour back to territory long abandoned by their former incarnation SOE. Back at the start there had always been a plan to update the game with parcels of content that sat somewhere between a free content patch and an expansion (both of which were also in the plan). Between launch and the first expansion, Desert of Flames, we enjoyed two "Adventure Packs": The Bloodline Chronicles and The Splitpaw Saga. Before the third expansion there came the largest of all, The Fallen Dynasty.

Pretty bird thou never wert

All of them were reasonably well-received. They were substantial in size and detail. I bought them all and over the years I've had a great deal of value from them one way and another. Nevertheless, when Rum Cellar arrived I gave it a pass. According to the promotional information it followed recent precedent for adventurers, with parallel content for their various established playstyles, although there was nothing in the mix for crafters, but it looked a little spindly. I'd not long finished the very enjoyable Altar of Malice expansion solo content and I thought I could wait a while to see how the new mini-drop went down with the early adopters before committing myself.

The reception was mixed as this Reddit thread suggests. There were no real howls of outrage but as an experiment in a way of releasing new content for players and generating a revenue stream for the new company it's probably fair to say the return to "Adventure Packs" or "Campaigns" or DLC, however you care to flavor it, was a failure. In any event the idea was quietly forgotten and by late summer we were firmly back on the Expansion trail. Indeed, with ToT up and running, apparently work on the 2016 expansion, EQ2's thirteenth, has already started.

As I mentioned before, I'm stalled on the ToT solo signature line. I watched this video to get an idea of how I might get past the roadblock and it's apparent that, as I thought, I need to gear up some. Or learn to play. Always an option although never a preference.

You'd think someone would have to notice that but no...

As Borgio says at the start, the first Advanced Solo zone required for the Signature questline in ToT comes as something of a wake-up call. The gear I have from AoM is mostly level 95. It upgrades significantly through a process that was supposed to keep solo players busy for a good long time but, while I'd been picking away at that, I hadn't made that much progress.

Then it occurred to me: along with Terrors of Thalumbra expansion I also received a side order of pirate-themed fun that supposedly sat somewhere between the old and the new in terms of difficulty and reward. Which is how I came to be sneaking around the cellars of Highhold Keep with an undead parrot at my side.

At least I think it's a parrot. When I first saw Nibbles I thought he was a vulture. Up close he looks just plain weird but I got him from a pirate and he squawks "Pretty Bird" so circumstantial evidence of parrothood is compelling.

Seriously, can't I just fight him?

Nibbles is also the character name of the last member of our original EQ2 guild to quit playing back in 2005, just before we finally left to go back to EQ, which made it a tad uncomfortable when, at the end of the short solo questline, [SPOILER ALERT] I had to decide whether to kick him repeatedly to make him attack so I could kill him for personal gain. I did actually have to think about that for thirty seconds. But...loot.

The solo instance in Rum Cellar is odd. Other than the final boss fight and the Nibbles coda there's no mandatory combat at all. It's all about sneaking and setting traps. A lot of guards die screaming and on fire as you baste them with rum and molasses and immolate them or scald them with steam. I found it mildly disturbing, in dubious taste and morally more difficult to process than the usual round of MMO mass murder.

Unlike many of the deliberately unsettling quests in The Secret World, to take a slightly unfair comparison, it feels as though whoever wrote this one was just thinking of the mechanics. The storyline is clearly supposed to be on the lighter side as these things go, with a hefty dose of pirate yo ho ho and many of the "drinking alchohol is just hilarious!" tropes so typical of certain MMOs.

Stealing liquor for someone with serious mental health issues who hates himself so much he has to drink himself into a stupor.
Then robbing him and leaving him unconscious in a burning building that I set on fire.
Hey, I'm a hero. It's what we do.

I have a built-in filter for that kind of "humor" after a decade and a half so it doesn't make me die a little inside the way it once would have done. Those qualms considered, I enjoyed the solo questline well enough. It is short, yes, but it still took me nearly three hours to complete and that was using the walkthrough on the wiki. If I'd had to work out everything from first principles you could double that at least. It's repeatable but I can't envisage going back often.

There were a couple of decent rewards from the boss at the end including a level 98 cloak that's a significant upgrade. I still have nine or ten gear slots to raise from 95 to 98 or, if possible, 100 before I take another shot at the Algorithm of Destruction. My plans in that direction include the Advanced Solo version of Rum Cellar, which, thankfully, takes a more traditional "kill em all and take their stuff" approach. With luck some of their stuff will be level 98.

I liked you, Nibbles, but not as much as I like loot.

Then there's the Advanced Solo instance Kralet Penumbra, which the questline doesn't mention but which is, apparently, considerably easier than the one it does send you to do. And I should get on with some crafting. A new set of adornments would help. And I ought to read up on Infusions.

So much to learn. Fun times. First of all, though, I need to see about getting myself a house pet version of Nibbles. That's why I decided to kill him. Kill one to buy one. If you can kill an undead parrot. If he is a parrot. Was... Is...

Whatever!

Sisters Under The Skin : EQ2, GW2

Playing through two such different expansions as Heart of Thorns and Terrors of Thalumbra at the same time is a curiously instructive experience. It highlights not only the great differences between the two games and their design strategies and ethics but also some unexpected similarities.

Heart of Thorns is the first expansion for Guild Wars 2, arriving at the very late entry-point of three years after launch. Terrors of Thalumbra is EverQuest 2's twelfth full expansion; by the time EQ2 had been running for as long as GW2 has now it had enjoyed four full expansions and three smaller "Adventure Packs", one of which, The Fallen Dynasty, was probably as large as HoT just on its own.

Indeed, the sheer scale of some of EQ2's expansions looks breathtaking in retrospect. Echoes of Faydwer, for example, could perfectly feasibly have been released as a standalone MMORPG. For almost a decade these expansions were produced, at the rate of better than one per calendar year, under a subscription payment model, for a game that even its most ardent supporters would not claim was among the market leaders in its genre.

Don't start with the waterworks.

GW2, on the other hand, has a fair claim to be one of the largest, certainly the most celebrated, MMOs of the last few years. Despite operating primarily on a Buy-to-Play business model that, one might imagine, would encourage the creation and release of new product, the ArenaNet team has produced just this single example and that with considerable reluctance.

Heart of Thorns has turned out to be a controversial first step onto what we are assuming (but cannot be sure) is the expansion ladder. Although I, personally, have been very pleasantly surprised by the value I've been able to extract from what looked like a meager offering I think it would be fair to categorize the response from the paying and playing audience as "mixed".

Metacritic has settled to a "Generally Favorable" rating for Heart of Thorns but only after a prolonged battle between wildly polarized factions voting 0-1 or 9-10. As for what either the average player or video-game critic thinks about Terrors of Thalumbra, well that's anyone's guess. No-one has reviewed it. Almost no-one has even mentioned it.

Have you tried switching it of then switching it on again?

So far, I like the two about the same, although I have seen far less of ToT than HoT. Both of them are much smaller in terms of explorable imaginary real estate than we've been spoiled to expect in the past but both have made a good fist of providing depth of content through density and verticality where it might have been lacking in raw mileage.

ANet, with what must be one of the very best art departments in the field, working with a relatively new graphics engine, provide breathtaking visuals but DBG, with a tiny team and an eleven-year old infrastructure, manage to work some small miracles of their own. As for audioscapes HoT just has the edge for ambient sound but ToT has by far the superior score.

Anet certainly packed a lot into the four new maps and when it comes to exploring and sightseeing Terrors of Thalumbra is also larger than I was expecting. Twice as large, in fact. It was trailed as coming with just a single open-world zone, Thalumbra the Ever Deep, but it also contains a full-size, new city, Maldura, which barely got a mention in the pre-publicity.

Maldura is a dwarven settlement on the model of Thurgadin, the Coldain city added in the Destiny of Velious expansion. I never really took to EQ2's version of Thurgadin, perhaps because I spent so much time in and had so many fond memories of the original back in EverQuest. Maldura, though, is a knockout.

A rat can look at a queen.

It has all the feel of a Dwarven capital. It reminds me of both Kaladim and Thurgadin from the original game and yet it also feels original and fresh. It's both easy to navigate and to get lost in as a dwarven city should be. The stone glows in a wonderfully homely fashion and yet there is the inevitable and necessary existential threat that all Dwarven cities have to face, necessitating barred doors and armed guards at every turn.

Every Dwarven city needs a pub, of course, and in The Mushroom Bar and Grill, Maldura has one of the best. I've already spent a considerable while there just listening to the live music, most of which is provided by gnomes.

We Play For Tips.

The gnomes, know locally as Gnemlin, have their own quarter that reminded me a little of the gnomish enclave in Azeroth's Ironforge. I'm unclear whether the gnemlins lost a city of their own to end up sharing a billet with dwarves but if so it would be par for the gnomish course. Losing cities seems to be a cultural pre-requisite with them.

Perhaps the story will emerge in time from the Signature questline. Both HoT and ToT offer a lengthy narrative sequence as a spine, something that seems almost mandatory in modern MMORPGs. EQ2 doubles down with a full-length questline for crafters as well as one for adventurers. I've completed, and thoroughly enjoyed, the tradeskill story but the adventure equivalent is proving...tricky.

Whose move is it?

Here's where ANet and DBG appear to have swapped hats. Where I was expecting to find the new Personal Story an arduous, tedious, neck-aching, shoulder-spasming grind similar to the largely unpleasant and annoying Living Story 2, it turned out to be a reasonably sprightly, quick-footed, gambol, at least in terms of the gameplay. Over in EQ2, however, where I've had little to complain about when it comes to difficulty while soloing the signature lines of the last several expansions, I found myself running into a brick wall in the very first Advanced Solo instance.

The experience illuminates how another strand of the supposedly divergent philosophies of the two games surprisingly intertwines as they seek to expand. GW2, famously or infamously according to taste, eschews both gear and level ladders. The theory is that HoT adds neither. EQ2 trades heavily on both but this particular expansion has no level increase and ostensibly offers horizontal not vertical progression.

In fact each of them deals directly in serious increases to the power and capability of your characters. HoT may not give us weapons with bigger numbers but it adds Elite Specializations for every class, at least a few of which have immediately become Best In Slot and Required For Raids.

A stepladder. How d'you think we hang them? A really big stepladder, okay?

As the player of two HoT-enabled Rangers I can also attest that owning the expansion allows you to tame several new pets that are very significantly more powerful than any you have access to through the base game. Once tamed, they will be the ones you choose to use from then on, unless (like me) you have an irrational, sentimental attachment to some of your old, loyal favorites.

Even though there's no level cap rise to justify it, ToT goes the familiar route of providing quest rewards for the opening, menial, introductory tasks that render the best items from the previous expansion utterly redundant. Merely for killing a few sky-rats and gathering a few mushrooms my Berserker received items that increased his hit points by a third and that's very clearly just the start. Where he'll be by the end of the questline I dread to think.

Except that, of course, at best he's running to stay still. Just as, in Heart of Thorns, the Mastery system largely exists to allow you to grind xp for weeks to earn the right to see all the content you paid for, so in Terrors of Thalumbra you need to quest to get the gear to be able to survive the quests you get sent on to get the gear. My unfortunate and repeatedly fatal experience in the very first instance just indicates that I haven't yet done enough side-quests, much as suddenly pegging out in an apparently innocuous location in Magus Falls reminds me I haven't ground out enough masteries for poison resistance.

There goes the neighborhood.

For all the supposed differences in approach, attitude and intent that separate the two current expansions for these two apparently unrelated MMORPGs I have to say the experience of playing each isn't as far removed from the other as you might expect. There may be a lot of new paint on the wagon but the wheels are rolling down the same old track.

Which is fine by me. I'm enjoying the ride. Now I just need to quest for some better gear and grind out those masteries. Oh, and I should get on with the collection that gets me my class Ascended weapons and I need to look into these Infusions that go in the new slot on that quest-reward sword because that's a big upgrade and what about this new Deity/Tithe thing and...

Forging Ahead : EQ2

It's been a while since I spent a Sunday morning prospecting for rares. It used to be kind of a thing Chez Bhagpuss once upon a time. Many peaceful and relaxing hours drifted by among the ore nodes beneath Cliffs of Rujark or the root crops of Kerra Isle, Mrs Bhagpuss and I passing each other in opposite directions as we scoured the sands for beryllium or toxnettle.

One down, one to go.

The move to Tyria largely put paid to that. While GW2 has gathering of a kind it's a pale and feeble version by comparison and not something you'd want to spend hour after hour on.

EQ2 has always been a gatherer's dream. The whole process is deliciously complex, with a full range of items, consumables and gear available to enhance your character's effectiveness. Harvesting even has its own epic questlines complete with signature NPCs.

The nodes spit out their highly desirable rares just often enough to make the whole process feel worthwhile rather than a waste of valuable leisure time. The chime of discovery when one pops is less the ringing of a pavlovian bell than the sound of a shot sweetly struck in the middle of the bat.

Satisfying is what it is, frankly. There's nothing in MMOs quite like it, not at least since Vanguard shut up shop. Consequently, when I completed my Research on Containing Magical Gemstones and discovered that I'd need not one but two Arcannium (Arcanniums? Arcannii?) I found my heart flutter more in anticipation than anxiety.

My ore! Mine!!

Checking the broker quickly took the lazy option off the table. At the time of writing Arcannium is selling at close to 500 platinum a piece, which, for comparison, puts it in the same bracket as a successful SLR auction for a max level piece of Fabled gear. Ignore the jargon - just take it for granted that means it's a lot of money.

I confess (and it is a guilty confession) that the relatively recent addition of instant access to the Broker from anywhere that comes a perk of All Access Membership has led me into bad habits. To save myself a few minutes travel time I have been buying mats that previously I would at least have taken out of my own bank, mats that even if I hadn't mined or lumbered or gathered at the direct behest of the questgiver would at least, at some time in the past, have been dug or chopped or picked by me, personally.

Shopping was not an option this time. I had no choice but to flap my wings and go prospecting in Thalumbra. Because it was a Sunday morning and I was in no kind of rush, for once I took my time, stood back and had a think about the best way to go about this potentially time-consuming project. That was how I came to discover my AAs were up the spout.

EQ2 lore. It's an acquired taste.

A little out-of-game research reminded me I should have access to an AA ability that tracks harvesting nodes. Couldn't find it. Also I supposedly own a goblin that goes foraging for me, and unlike my old, trusty pack pony, he can forage rares. Couldn't find him either. And I should have at least a 6% bonus to rare harvests. Only had 1%.

How did we ever manage without?

Something was clearly awry. It took me twenty minutes of fiddling about in my AA window, reading tooltips and swearing to myself before I found the problem. I'd set all my AAs and spent all the points but I hadn't pressed the Commit button. They were notional not actual.

A key-press, a long channeling animation and a smart blow to my own forehead later and everything was as it should have been all along. I also received a string of suffix and prefix titles, almost all of them relating to adventuring, and had to re-cast all of my combat buffs so I wonder if I've been fighting without AAs all this time? If so I can't tell the difference!

My AAs now correctly set and working, a couple of +harvesting items swapped in for adventure gear and having swigged one of the Bountiful Harvest potions provided long ago by my much-neglected Othmir apprentice, I was running a 37% chance at a second pull per strike and an 8% bonus chance on pulling a rare. Nothing more I could think of doing so off I went.

The current, excellent, signature crafting questline for Terrors of Thalumbra is the work of Domino, EQ2's recently-returned Crafting Queen over the Water. Unlike some lesser lights, Domino has always been scrupulous in ensuring that a pure crafter, maxed in her trade but with next to no adventure experience or levels, can still complete the crafting quests safely.

Always knew this would come in handy

With the ablity to fly and carrying a variety of crafted stealth, invisibility and speed totems, plus the invaluable option to turn into a rock for twelve hours, granted by an earlier crafting reward, I'm sure that's possible even in the caverns of Thalumbra. It very much helps that the great majority of nodes are carefully placed out of agro range of the level 100+ creatures that skulk or squat or hover all around.

Even so, I'd rather be doing it with a full set of level 98 plate and a level 100 Mercenary to back me up. There were some disputes between my Berserker and a few cave locusts that came to blows. Also there was that time with the named one. Stinger, he was called, not entirely originally I feel, but entirely appropriately as it turned out. Had a nice upgrade for me, he did. Would kill again!

We're going to need a bigger swatter.

The RNG in EQ2 is no better than any of them. Everyone always thinks the odds are set against them when it comes to playing the numbers in MMOs. There are even people who believe that different characters (or classes or races) have different luck. Even if that were true, which it isn't, there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to get on with it.

It doesn't help when the particular ore you need comes from the sort of node that has two different rares, of course. That really does halve your chances of getting the one you want. Factoring that in I was expecting a few hours work but the RNG gods must have had a good breakfast because in less than an hour I had the two rares I needed. I also had three Lucites and a Glittervein. Pretty good for around fifty minutes work.

Remember, I'm a professional crafter. Please don't try this at home.

All that remained was a short flutter back to Maldura, the new city-zone that deserves a post of its own, and a session with The Forge of Brell. Brytthel warned me to be careful. You don't mess around at the forge of the god of smelting. When the reactions there say "Lethal" they aren't kidding. I'm ashamed (again) to admit I let my attention wander for a second. It's lucky I always have Visions of Madness up, that's all I'm saying.

I guess it'll have to do.

I took more care over the equally risky ritual conducted by Elenluelle and her coterie of moths. When it said Lethal that time I reacted appropriately. And fast. Turned out I should have been faster but that's another story and a spoiler too so let's not go there.

Let's go back to Mara instead and the distinctly unempathic Captain Ethan Dariani. He pays well, I'll say that much for him and not much more. Speak to him and that's the crafting signature quest completed.

Took about five or six hours all told, a good deal of which was traveling and gathering and all of which was excellent entertainment. Next comes the Adventure version in which I am betting I get to do what the trade-obsessed Captain wouldn't. I hope so, anyway.

As I was leaving another player arrived to hand in the quest and an achievement popped (for him, not me - we don't get Achievements for seeing other players hand in quests - well, not yet...). Out of curiosity I clicked on it and saw it was for completing both the the Craft and Adventure lines and now I know that comes with a gift I know I could put to good use.

Onward and downward for glory and reward! And fun. Let's not forget the fun.

Going Underground : EQ2

As Wilhelm noted in his capacity as Blogger of Record, EQ2's twelfth expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra, went live yesterday. I'd pre-ordered it a while back and yet somehow it still managed to sneak up on me. I thought we had a few weeks to go.

The Author as a Young Roekillik

The unexpected all-round playabilty and high fun content of GW2's Heart of Thorns expansion has all but pushed every other MMORPG off the table over the last few weeks but the drive to Do All The Things in Tyria is beginning to abate at last, leaving at least a little space and time for other worlds. I had planned to wait until today, when I'd have time for a good, long look at the new underlands but in the end I couldn't resist.

Within a few minutes of the servers coming back up last night I logged in, expecting the usual immediate post-launch chaos of bugs and emergency patches, but no, everything seemed remarkably calm. Coming so soon after HoT's exceptionally smooth launch I'm beginning to wonder if, after getting on for two decades, maybe MMO producers might be starting to get the hang of how these games work.

Nah. Couldn't be that. Must be a fluke.

Anyway, I can hardly talk. How many expansions have I experienced now? Thirty? Forty? More? And yet I still begin by rushing straight to the portal and jumping in with both feet. Do I read the in-game mail first? Do I go and find the NPC with the briefing notes? Do I have any kind of understanding of what I'm getting into or why? Of course not!

Somehow, probably from EQ2Wire,  I'd picked up as much as that I'd have to go to Neriak first. Why is it always Neriak for us evils? No-one wants to go to Neriak. and in any case, since when did Queen Cristianos usurp The Overlord as Grand Poobah of Badness?

At least the portal was right there at the docks next to the World Bell. Hard to miss, too, great, whirring mechanical monstrosity that it is. Gnomish work, I fancy. They should have got a ratonga in. Just sayin'.

It works though. Got to give the gnomes that much. It spat me out somewhere in what I took to be The Underfoot until Al'Kabor corrected that misapprehension much later on, when I finally got around to doing some of the questing spadework.

I'll just chip off a little bit.

The whole expansion, in a really excellent play on words, is set in Subtunaria. I believe the region went by that name in EQOA although I can't be sure. I was never fortunate enough to explore that version of Norrath, which is why I'm so excited to get this unexpected, late opportunity.

It really is the connection to the Lore that lends impact to these extensions of the franchise. You can hear it daily in GW2 as players laud or lay into aspects of Tyria's transition from the elder game to the current version. Over in Eorzea Square Enix are milking player recognition for all it's worth, setting longtime FF devotees like Syl "squealing like a fangirl" (her words!). As the games (and the gamers) age so the emotions deepen.

None of that was apparent last night as I flew around the underground sea of Thalumbra the Ever Deep. It looked entirely unfamiliar. And weird. The level 110 Triple-Up Arrow guards at the gates of what I took to be the city were scowling in my general direction so I stuck to the "countryside", such as it was.

Hmm. Now that I look more closely I'm not sure that is a fairy. Might be a moth.

After a while I found some very big fairies. Tallest fairies I've ever seen. They were willing to speak to me or should I say willing enough to send me on a Kill Ten Foozles quest to let me speak to them. And it was 22 Foozles if you're counting.

So I did that. The foozles were easy enough (they were ooyogs and poxfiends according to my journal but I know a foozle when I see one). I died to some flower that got caught in an AE and didn't see the funny side of it but other than that it all went swimmingly.

Even so it was clear I wasn't going about things the right way. Pootling around running errands for oversized fairy-folk  wasn't going to get me into the city. I called it a night and ported home to Maj'Dul.

Don't just stand there, Raffik - pull! And why are you in my bedroom in the first place???

When I reconvened this morning the day didn't get off to the best of starts. I couldn't get out of bed. Not metaphorically; literally. I'd logged out on my bed for a good night's sleep as I'm wont to do and I woke up wedged into it. Couldn't move. Had to use my handy portal thingummy to port me to the dock in Tranquil Seas just to get free.

From there it was off to Mara, where all tradeskill quests tend to begin. I usually start an EQ2 expansion by doing the crafting Signature questline before I get round to the adventuring version. There are several good reasons for that.

Of wee. Tee hee!

Firstly, it takes a fraction of the time because although the crafting line often has as many steps there aren't any fights and it's all the killing that pads things out. Secondly, it will open up a whole lot of areas, set the necessary factions to Don't Kill On Sight, and provide you with anything you might need in the way of flying permits, teleports and so forth. Thirdly, and most importantly, the crafting quests in EQ2 are almost always entertaining and well-written.

Explain to me again how these bushes grow on solid ice?

This one's no exception. It's meaty, too. I spent nearly three hours on it this morning and I'm just at the point where the new guards don't want to rip my head off any more. The lore was really interesting, with plenty of background about the Dwarves and the Roekillik.

Ah yes, the Roekillik. For a ratonga they are the racial nemesis. They are the anti-ratonga in fact. I still remember vividly the ratonga racial quest line that was added when the old villages were revamped in Freeport and Qeynos. Ratonga are terrified of Roekillik. We left our lovely underground home to escape from them but they followed us to the surface world.

The high point of the expansion thus far has been getting my old mate Al'Kabor (aka The Duality) to make me a Roekillik illusion spell so I could prance around in their secret lair, talking in their silly accent and feeding fish rolls to one of their Elders. Don't ask what I put in those. He didn't, more fool him.

Me and Al'Kabor, we're like *that*, we are.

That got me a truly excellent map of Old Tunaria which is in my mansion right now and looking great. Another prime reason to do the crafting quests is all the house items you get.

That's where I've left it for now. I have a suspicion that compared to some previous expansions this one might turn out to be a little on the lean side. Only one open-world map instead of the usual two, for example, and that one doesn't look all that big.

Excuse me, I think your mushrooms are on fire.

Size isn't everything, though. I enjoyed the previous expansion, Altar of Malice, as much for what I learned about the fate of Luclin and the history of the Far Seas Trading Company as for the loot or the fights. I'm even more interested in the history of the lands below Tunaria so as long as I get my lore fix I'm more than happy I'm getting my money's worth.