Going Further Back To Go Forwards Faster

I would have posted yesterday but I was too busy playing. I even had something mapped out in my mind, but I didn't want to stop to write it up.

I suppose that's a good thing. It suggests I was enjoying what I was doing enough to want to carry on, rather than just doing it long enough to gather enough material for a blog post, something I freely admit is often the case when I play games these days.

At this point it's tempting to go into a peroration about blogging and gaming and synergies and which drives what, but blogging about blogging, while very enjoyable for the blogger, can sometimes remind me uncomfortably of all those novels about being a novelist or, worse, those depressingly popular books about someone who reads books. 

Instead, how about I just get on with it and talk about what I was doing? There's an idea.

So, there I was, trying to get my Berserker in EverQuest II to Level 130 so I could start on the new expansion. I already explained the problem and outlined my plan to deal with it and how long I thought that might take. Then, when I was playing on Sunday evening, I had a bit of luck.

I logged in expecting to pick up where I left off, cleaning up all the non-story quests from the previous expansion, Ballads of Zimara, most of which come from starter items that drop off mobs. I opened my quest journal to see exactly where I was up to and because I was in Freeport at the time, instead of sorting it by the zone I was in, as I usually do, I sorted it by Quest Level instead.

That brought up far more yellow quests than I was expecting, yellow meaning just comfortably above the character's level, usually the sweet spot for the best xp. That made me curious so I took a closer look. I found something surprising.

Many of the yellow quests weren't from the last expansion ore ven the one before that. They were from Visions of Vetrovia, which came out in 2021. The level cap back then had been 125 so it seemed strange that the quests were flagged Level 130. But they were.

Since the quests in BoZ were already very easy it seemed logical the ones from the expansion before that would be easier still. Whether they'd be faster wasn't so certain. In my experience with most MMORPGs there are three things that take time when you quest:

1. Killing mobs.
2. Traveling to and/or finding the place you have to go to to kill the mobs.
3. Listening to NPCs telling you why you should go kill the mobs in the first place.

There are other factors, especially in those games where the devs seem to be involved in some kind of in-house competition to find the most obscure, awkward or annoying ways to increment a quest counter. I long ago lost track of the number of ways it's possible to interact with an object in EQII but I can tell you it's too many.

Mostly, though, it's a combination of TTK, TTT and TTR. Time to Kill, Time to Travel and Time to Read. Dropping back three expansions was always going to help with TTK. Having flying enabled in all zones, instant map travel as an All Access member and the exact locations of every update step in the Wiki was going to cut down hugely on TTT. Two out of three. Not bad. 

I wasn't sure there was much I could do about the last one, though. Many players, possibly most of them, shave a good deal off the running time of every quest by skipping the quest text but I always (Well, almost always...) read every word. I could have made an exception for the sake of expediency but it would go against the grain so I knew I would probably skim-read everything, at least.

The big question was would the xp from two expansions ago be worth bothering with? The way Darkpaw has futzed around with xp and leveling over the past few years makes it hard to be sure until you try. Since I had the quests my book already, I thought it was worth a look. 

I was hoping these older quests would move the dial enough to justify the effort because, although I
could see a path to Level 130 by way of the BoZ scraps I had left, nothing was giving me much more than 2% of the level and I still had about 60% to go. I didn't much fancy having to find all the dropped quests and then finish up on the dregs of the few repeatables. If I could find some narrative quests, at least the time might pass faster and the whole thing wouldn't feel quite so formulaic.

Naturally, I started with the quests in my journal for Forlorn Gist, the highest-level zone in VoV, on the assumption those ought to give the best xp. There's no way to travel there directly (Oh yes there is but I'd forgotten!) so I had go the long way, map-hopping to the starting zone, flying to the griffin station, riding public transport to the next zone, Karuupa Jungle, flying across that to the next station and finally arriving in Mahngavi Wastes, from where you can walk to Forlorn Gist. So much for saving on travel time.

I was about to head to the zone line when I happened to notice I also had some quests in the Wastes and what's more two of them were complete and ready to hand in. That seemed like a gimme so I took it. I flew to the questgivers, a couple of centaurs hanging around next to a graveyard, big, red books over their heads to tell me they'd been waiting three years for me to show up. I spoke to the pair of them, accepted their thanks and collected the reward.

Those quests gave easily as much xp as I'd been getting from the ones in BoZ. Maybe a little more. Great! Op success! And both centaurs had more work for me so rather than head off to Forlorn Gist I thought I might as well carry on where I was.

I worked through the two related quest sequences, all of which were either Kill or Fetch quests or a combination of the two. The mobs and objects were all in the same zone. Everything was an insta-kill. Travel distances were short. I barely even needed to refer to the wiki because I had EQMaps up with all the POIs highlighted. It was glorious!

Once again, I'm going to make the point that I prefer questing when there is absolutely no challenge to it. I love one-shotting all the mobs - better yet if I can round up a bunch and one-shot the lot with an AE - and best of all if it's all those inevitable, irelevant, infuriating adds that insist on piling on. 

I can't see how having to spend five to ten seconds killing each mob that gets in your way as you roam around looking for the ones you actually need for the quest adds to the entertainment value in any way whatsoever. If you have to interact with them at all, surely it has to be more fun fun to mow them all down like so many stalks of wheat.

It's more fun for me, anyway. I can one-shot for a long time before I get bored. I'm not sure I've ever gotten bored doing it, in fact. Usually I stop for other reasons long before the warm feeling it gives me begins to cool. Conversely, I get very tired of hacking through hordes mobs that take time and effort to kill. Even thinking about can sometimes be enough to make give up and go play something else instead. Something easier. And more fun.

All of which meant that I was having a high old time, picking up quests and knocking them out as fast as I could. After a while, though, the quests ran out so I had to stop and think again. And I found myself puzzled.

Although all these quests were new to my Berserker, they were far from new to me. I remembered all of them. It took me a while to work out why but the answer, when I found it, was simple: I'd done them on a different character. 

For Visions of Vetrovia three years ago, I ran an experiment. I swapped my regular questing character, the Berserker, for my Bruiser, who I'd heard through some research I'd done should have a better TTK. Also, Bruisers can feign death, which is always handy.

The experiment was inconclusive. I couldn't tell much difference between the two of them. They're both melee classes. They both use a lot of AEs. Plate is thicker than leather but avoidance makes up for it. Feigning death gets you out of a lot of things but so does having three death saves. Solo there doesn't seem to be a lot to choose between them. 

I went back to the Berserker for Ballads of Zimara and I'd forgotten he'd ever skipped an expansion. Thinking about it, I recalled how he'd done the crafting questline and while traveling arond the VoV zones for that, had picked up just enough loose adventure quests as and when he came across them to get his five levels, from 120 to 125. As I discovered yesterday, though, he'd never even started the Adventure Signature questline.

That turned out to be a godsend. I dropped the idea of going to Forlorn Gist and instead I went right back to the start to begin working my way through the MQ. 

Visions of Vetrovia, four expansions ago now, is part of the era when every stage of the main quest rewarded massive chunks of xp, often enough to move the bar half a level or more. Even at 129, with the required xp per level measured in the trillions, allowing for full vitality, I found almost every step of the Signature line was giving around 5% of the level.

That's more than double what I was getting for the BoZ pick-ups and repeatables and I was also getting a lot more than double the entertainment value into the bargain. I was enjoying myself so much that when I dinged 130 yesterday evening I was almost sorry there weren't any more levels left to get.

Event then, the whole process still wasn't exactly what you'd call fast. I didn't time it but I think it probably took me around four hours to do the final two-thirds of Level 129. The important thing was that it didn't feel like a grind or a chore. It felt like having fun.

There were several things that did make it all go by a bit faster. As soon as I realised I'd done the entire storyline before, I felt under no obligation to read any of the dialog. It was quite liberating to click through it all as fast it appeared. 

I also gave up looting most of the mobs after a while, after I thought about the value of what they were dropping. EQII suffers from hyper-inflation, meaning nothing any mob drops is of any value unless you can either use it yourself or sell it to another player. Cash drops that sell to vendors might as well be pocket lint.

Lastly, I was helped considerably in my progress through the MQ by the fortuitous circumstances of my Berserker's happy-go-lucky approach to questing four years ago. The quests he'd been able to get while not following the main storyline mostly turned out to be the same ones you have to do for various NPCs before they'll give you their MQ quests. Every time he got to a point where the wiki said he'd need to go do all of someone's quests to get the next MQ stage, he found he'd already done them and the NPC was happy to speak to him right away.

All things considered, it was both a very enjoyable way to get that last level and a very useful learning experience. I see now that there's a good reason to hold back on doing current content on some characters. 

While it was super-easy to level, I got into the habit of taking half a dozen of my crew to the cap every time it went up. Now it's likely to be more better - or at least a lot less trouble - to let them leap-frog each other a year or two apart and let time and power creep turn what might have been a painful slog into an enjoyable romp.

That, though, is for the future. As soon as the Berserker dinged 130 he got a letter inviting him to come to the new zones to help with the latest crisis, whatever that might be. It means going back to taking things seriously, playing properly, reading all the quest text and doing things the way they're supposed to be done. 

I can't say I'm thrilled but I suppose I'll have to. I mean, that is why I was leveling him in the first place...

That's A Wrap! Oh, Wait...

Just a brief update to my recent post about the adventurer's Signature Questline for EverQuest II's latest expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, which launched in December 2021. I finally finished it!

Compared to the pesky Vorrigan Mistmoore, the actual boss, Vorrigan's master (Sire? Father?) Mayong Mistmoore, was very easy. Scarcely, as they say, an inconvenience.  

Of course, I didn't actually have to kill Mayong Mistmoore. That would be ridiculous. He's made at least one run at godhood and stands not far off the pantheon even now. No, all I had to do was kill a priest he'd turned into an unwilling vassal and keep some werewolves from bringing him snacks.

But wait... why don't I let my bruiser tell you himself?

It's an odd trope of EQII, the post-match summary characters give to... well, themselves I guess. Ostensibly my Bruiser's writing this in his quest journal but it appears overhead in huge, blue letters, hangs there for all of half a second, then vanishes. Usually I miss it entirely but this time I was quick enough to snatch a screenshot. 

Also, props to my mercenary for trying to verdict Mayong! Can't fault her for nerve. Let's just hope he didn't notice.

Unlike every other instance in the Sig line, the finale takes place in a special quest version of the zone, not the regular mission. None of the bosses drop any loot, which I take as proof that this is intended to be a nice, comfortable, easy-mode finish. I'll have to go back and do the repeatable version to see if I'm right - and to get the loot I missed.

The reason for the soft finish is that it isn't the end of the story. Visions of Vetrovia returns to the old school wrap-up for an expansion, namely a raid. At the hand-in with Tavien Faust and later at the debrief  with Antonia Bayle, it's made absolutely clear that if Mayong is to be stopped it's going to take a gathering of heroes to do it, which is fair enough. He is almost a demi-god, after all.

I'm out, though. Or rather, I'm out for now. Give it a few expansions and another couple of level cap increases and I'll be able to solo that raid. And I probably will. I did eventually get to see the conclusion of the decade-long Ages End storyline that way and it was worth the wait.

For now, though, I still have plenty to do. Mayong may have escaped but the evil he brought to Vetrovia lives on. Or unlives, I guess, what with him being a vampire and all...

Finishing the Sig line opens several further questlines, including the zone and dropped item quests. It also allows you to see a new type of shinies for collections. Best of all, the flag you get for having completed the Sig qualifies you for the Merchant's Den instance and questline. Those were added in the April update and I was miffed not to be able to see the content at the time (Through no-one's fault but my own tardiness.)

325 Resolve. Noice!

I'm not sure whether the drops from that will be upgrades for my bruiser now, although two of the final rewards from the Sig line were, so it's likely. Upgrading is such a fast-moving target in EQII it hardly matters. It'll all be out of date by the autumn anyway. I just want to see the new zone and enjoy the story.

Now I have to decide whether to take anyone else through the Sig line. All the unlocks and flags are account-wide, so it's not necessary but I'm curious to see if it would be easier with my Necromancer. I keep saying I'm going to swap to her as my lead character for expansions and new at-cap content but somehow I've ended up benching my Berserker in favor of the Bruiser, which was never the plan.

Ah well, I'm sure it'll all work out in the end. It usually does.

And Stay Down!

 It only took me six months but I finally did it. I killed Vorigan Mistmoore.

What? You haven't heard of him? No reason you should have, if I'm honest. He's hardly the most famous of the Mistmoore clan. That would be Mayong, the one with his own zone in both EverQuest and EverQuest II.

Vorigan is some kind of relative. There was some mention of it in the conversation after I went back to tell Tavian Faust, the vampire who sent me to kill Vorigan in the first place, but I wasn't really paying attention. 

I seem to remember some kind of warning about not going up against Mayong for a while since he might not be happy I'd just killed two of his children but I really wasn't taking much in. I was still reeling from the exhillaration of having finally gotten past the fight that's stymied me since January.

It's not as if Vorigan's even the final boss in the Visions of Vetrovia Signature questline. That is Mayong Mistmoore. Of course it is. He's up next in the final confrontation, Eyes on Vacrul Throne, the twelfth episode of a thirteen part epic, the thirteenth being a debriefing with Antonia Bayle back in Qeynos.

I know that because after I did the hand-in I read ahead on the wiki to see what came next, hoping the whole thing was nearly over. Until then I'd barely looked at it, other then to check strats on some of the bosses.

I checked Vorigan's strats a dozen times and it helped me not at all. EQII no longer attracts a lot of detailed commentary so information is hard to find. The wiki is still admirably up-to-date but if you need a second opinion, you might struggle.

 

The walkthrough for Vorigan did have plenty of detail. It just didn't help me much. Or at all, really. The full instructions for fighting him are:

• Hail the named to start fight. Interrupts can be used to stop his casting.
• Bloody Buffet - Run over the blood boils that appear to remove his incremental stoneskin.
• Vampiric Hemorrhage - Joust out of range or use an interrupt when he casts. If it hits you there is a knockback and a fast-acting trauma that will kill you if not cured very quickly.
  • Seems to be preceded by him leaping into the air. An interrupt at this point works nicely.
  • Staying near the far wall may help. However the knockback throws you in random directions, sometimes while in mid-air, so is very hard to correct for

I managed the "Hail the named" part just fine. After that things didn't go quite so smoothly. 

The first few times, back in January, I spent most of the fight being punted across the cavern, often dying before I even hit the ground. If I managed to avoid that, my Mercenary would inevitably die instead, cutting off the flow of healing but more importantly removing my main option for those essential trauma cures.

I tried bringing my own cure trauma potions. I tried putting my back to the wall. I tried jousting out of range. I tried interrupting Vorigan's casts. None of it worked. I can't remember how many times I died, back at the begining of the year, but it was a lot. 

Eventually I gave up, intending to wait until either I'd geared up sufficiently to overpower the script or someone posted a strat that worked.

Over the months I tried a couple of times with no better luck, then today, as I was swapping out several pieces of gear for upgrades from the new Scorched Skies dungeon, it occured to me my Bruiser must now be "geared up sufficiently" to give it another crack. 

So I did. And died nine times in a row. 

I know it was nine because I'd just repaired to full before I went in and I had to use a repair kit when my armor was at 10%. In the end I think it was ten or eleven deaths because I died a couple more times after that, before I finally got it right.

I also watched two YouTube videos of the fight. Yes, there are two. I was surprised as well. Neither of them really helped. 

One has no commentary at all, which is a shame because the person who made it clearly has some kind of strategy that works. He runs into the large pools of blood and stands there and nothing seems to hurt him. I tried that. I died.

The other is a guide of sorts. There's no narration but there are notes. It's helpful but unfortunately the character doing the fighting is so overgeared for solo content, Vorigan barely gets to show off his tricks.

Best loot of the day and it's from the holiday event.

After I'd watched it a couple of times, I noticed, on the one occasion the named does his emote and casts his fatal dot, the player was indeed able to joust comfortably out of range. That didn't depend on gear, just on observation and timing.

I'd tried it several times and it had gone horribly wrong but I had been panicking, running recklessly in random directions, assuming the range of the spell was large enough to reach most of the platform. Maybe it wasn't so big as all that.

I tried again and the merc died and then I died but I could see it might work. It ought to work. This isn't some super-difficult fight that everyone dreads. If it was, even given the age of the game and the corresponding lack of attention it gets, there would certainly be threads on the forum complaining about how unfair it is and demanding it be nerfed. There are none.

Clearly other people haven't been roadblocked by Vorigan the way I have. The two videos suggest there are multiple ways to beat him. My character is easily powerful enough. The sub-bosses in the rest of the instance are absolute pushovers for him now and he can comfortably handle the newer instances that have been added since, all of which are objectively tougher.

Even the issues I was having back in January, where for some reason I couldn't get the camera scrolled back far enough to read the emotes needed to judge the timing, have vanished. I could see and read them perfectly this time around.

Nope, I'm afraid to say there was only one thing getting in the way: lack of skill. The answer to that is usually "Git gud." So I did.

Well, kinda. I concentrated, used my brain, stopped panicking (as much) and took my time. I watched for the emotes, kept my eye on the boss instead of my hot keys and generally played properly for a change. 

Can't say I enjoyed it. Certainly wouldn't want to do it all the time. But it worked. Each time Vorigan went to cast his big spell I didn't waste time trying to interrupt or hit him one last time. I just jousted out of range, backpedalling so I could watch the progress of his animation. And it worked.

The up-gearing helped a lot. My Bruiser's dps is much better than it was six months ago, meaning I only had to dodge two or three casts. I also took the trouble to read all the descriptions of his combat arts, which reminded me he has a trauma cure and several self-heals that I'd completely forgotten about, although in the event the winning fight was one where my merc actually managed to keep herself alive, so I didn't need to use them.

I'm hoping the final instance won't contain any nasty surprises like Vorigan. It shouldn't. In the whole of the VoV Signature line, he's the only one who's given me any serious problems and I'm fairly sure now that most of those were of my own making.

I'm going to give it a couple of days at least before I carry on. Even if I manage to complete the Sig Line this week, that will make it the longest I've ever taken to complete one since they were made soloable a decade or so ago. Not counting the couple of years I was playing catch-up and didn't get the expansions when they came out, of course.

It'll be good to have it done before the warm-up for this year's expansion, anyway. Can't be too long before it begins. A couple of months, maybe.

Probably best not to think about that too much.

Play To Yearn Or How I Found Myself Wondering If Token Systems Might Not Be Quite So Bad After All

As far as I can tell from my lowly position as a casual (if commited) soloist, the latest EverQuest II expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, has been reasonably well-received. I've certainly been enjoying myself, even if I am currently stalled in the Signature solo questline, banging my head against an instance boss I can't beat.

That's a mere problem of player skill. I don't have any. Victory will come with time and patience. 

Of more general concern in VoV is crafting. It's one of the several areas of the game that had been the cause of a good deal of pushback over the last few expansions. Happily, tradeskills seem to have turned a corner with the appointment of Niami Denmother as the developer responsible. The value of mastercrafted gear has been restored and the convoluted and largely unpopular shadowcrafting process has been shelved. I liked the shadow stuff, as it happens, but mine wasn't a widely-shared view.

Still, everything in the new expansion hasn't been unicorns and rainbows for crafters. The current controversy, such as it is, revolves around the acquisition path for Advanced skill books. They're the source for Mastercrafted recipes, which in turn act as the gateway to even higher levels of spells and combat arts, making them more of an essential than a luxury.

Over the years Advanced recipes have come into the game via various means. If I'm remembering correctly, the original source was primarily through mob drops. As I recall, each level of crafting boook (And Adept spells and CAs.) could only drop from a mob of the same, exact level. I have a clear memory of spending hours in Nektulos Forest hunting mobs for the books I was missing and having to keep clearing spawns of creatures just one level shy in the hope of forcing the correct numbers to appear.

Later, quite possibly when uber crafting dev Domino joined the team, a lengthy series of crafting questlines were introduced, the rewards for which were either Advanced crafting books or unlocks for vendors who would sell them to you. I seem to remember a time when you could either quest for or buy most of the books, although there were always a couple of deciles when you either had to go hunting or buy your books from those who would.

My recollection of exactly how this worked is somewhat muddled because I played on the Test server for nearly five years. There, due to the exceptionally small population, certain compromises had to be made, one of which was the addition of a vendor in the Tower of the Moon in Maj`Dul, who would sell you every crafting book ever made.  

Whatever the exact process at any given time, getting your Advanced books wasn't all that difficult. All of them were tradeable and they dropped fairly commonly, so at worst you could buy them from other players at a reasonable price. That's no longer an option.

Without spending an awful lot more time on research than I'm willing to commit, I can only vaguely allude to the extent to which the whole thing has spiralled into a confusing and convoluted combination of wish and hope. Chances are even a thorough explanation would serve only to confuse matters more.

Like most aging mmorpgs, EQII is a palimpsest of half-abandoned ideas. Where there was once a very straightforward progression of crafting recipes, consisting of not much more than the basic books your crafting trainer sold for a pittance and the Advanced books you got via the aforementioned means, these days there are probably dozens of types of texts containing recipes a crafter might or might not consider essential, often relying on different qualifying criteria than your character's crafting level or skill.

To go over the entire EQII crafting process, even limiting the analysis to nothing more than the recipes available and the ways they can be obtained, would take a series of lengthy, detailed posts. A series I have no intention of writing, I should make quite clear.

For the purposes of this post, I'm merely going to talk about the way crafters are currently expected to get their desired Advanced recipes. On the positive side, it's a very simple procedure, something you might expect to go down well with an audience heartily fed-up with the abstruse and awkward choices made by previous crafting devs. I believe people do generally approve of that aspect, at least.

What they don't like is the way the system leans so heavily on pure RNG. Thinking about that aspect is how I came to coin the expression "Play to Yearn", something I believe applies to any number of similar mechanics in any number of mmorpgs.

It's what happens when you find yourself spending much of your playtime doing things in the vain, vague hope that something you want or need might finally drop. It could be camping a Named in EverQuest or repeatedly soloing an old Raid for a mount drop in World of Warcraft. Whatever your mmorpg of choice, chances are you've done something of the kind. For me, right now, it's doing dailies and weeklies in Visions of Vetrovia, hoping but never trusting one of the Advanced Sage or Alchemist books will pop out of the reward chest at the end.

Some people tolerate this kind of gameplay better than others. I've always ratehr enjoyed a random element to my gaming. It adds a frisson of excitement every time I get to open a chest or a box. 

Others feel differently, especially those who self-identify as "Crafters", it seems. It's the view of the most vocal opponents of the system that all crafters want to do is make their damn items, already! It seems they have little or no interest in the kind of "progression" the EQII dev team is convinced ought to be a core part of the crafting experience. They don't want to eke out the lifetime of the expansion working on getting their crafting books as a form of character arc. They just want the damn things today so they can spend twelve months making stuff.

No, I don't understand it either. I can't imagine how anyone can play an mmorpg pretty much daily for extended periods of time with the specific intent of doing nothing but craft items. What for? Even the busiest guild crafter in the biggest guild is pretty quickly going to make everyone all the stuff they need, aren't they?

Let that rest. It seems to be what some people see as ideal gameplay so we'll have to accept it. Clearly those people aren't going to be happy with any system that doesn't allow fast access to the tools of their trade and from their perspective former systems, no longer in play, supposedly did just that. Andf I suppose they did, to an extent. There may be some rose-tinting going on but it's not such an exaggerated a view of how things used to work.

Here's how they work now. There's an NPC in an instance in the final open zone of the expansion who gives dailies and weeklies for crafters. You get a portal stone to his location as a reward during the crafting Signature questline so you can pop in to see him whenever you want with no problems.

He offers you one quest every day. Just one. It requires you to run around the werewolf and vampire town in Forlorn Gist, picking up thirty each of two items and fifteen of a third from special quest nodes you can only see if you have the quest and you're using the werewolf illusion that comes with it. 

Looking like a werewolf means everything in the area becomes non-hostile, so its completely safe. There's no time limit. Every pull nets you three of whatever it is, so you really have to collect twenty-five items, not seventy-five. 

It's very easy or it would be if there weren't so many people doing it all the fricken' time. Seriously, there are always (And I do mean always.) a bunch of players running around snatching stuff from the spawns. It doesn't matter if I'm there in the morning, the afternoon or the evening. It's the middle of the night, US time, and I still have to race people for cobwebs or werewolf fur or whatever today's recipe calls for. The reason there are so many is, of course, because we all want our Advanced books and this is the only way we're going to get them.

The weekly quest is exactly the same, except it asks for about three times as many items and if you do it on the day it drops, which is Thursday, there are always at least three times as many people trying to do it, so it takes a lot more more than three times as long. The weekly offers a much higher chance of a good drop so people jump on it the moment it comes up.

The items that both quests send you to find are used only for the quests themselves. They have no other function. When you have them, you use them to craft a few items for Renfry, the questgiver. You can't make anything else with the leftovers and you can't save them to use in subsequent quests. The act of gathering them updates the quest. Just having the items in your inventory does nothing.

When you finish the daily you get a reward that pulls one random item from a loot table, the exact
contents of which has not been revealed, so far as I know, but which can definitely include some of the VoV adornment books, tinkering blueprints and recipes for mount gear. I've had a few of each, including a couple of very useful Adornment recipes I will certainly be using.

Mostly what they give you, however, are house items and most of the house items are chess pieces. I already have enough to line the path all through my Mara estate. They used to give you what are disparagingly referred to by crafters as "soda cans", the cylinders that were introduced several years back to deal with the severe lack of items suitable for transmuting into materials used in crafting adornments. 

At the time they were welcomed but now, thanks to other changes in the game, few people need them so they're treated as an insult when they drop. Those were swapped out for the house items after player's kicked up a fuss on the forums but the replacement items aren't going down much better.

It may or may not be possible to get Advance crafting books from the daily. I'm assuming there's a very small chance but so far I haven't been lucky. You definitely can get them from the weekly. I've had two so far. Not ones I wanted, naturally, but I did sell one for 8.5 million plat and the other I can at least use (Or sell. It goes for about 4m.)

You can also get the moulds needed to make very good crafted items as part of another complicated process I don't propose to go into right now. Unfortunately, the loot table for the Weekly also includes some of the same things as the daily, meaning you can end up with nothing useful at all.

Unsurprisingly, this has not gone down well. Leaving aside the "I want all my books on day of release" extremists, a more reasonable view is that the system would be okay if there was a higher chance of an Advanced book in the daily loot table and a guarantee of one for the weekly. Or if you could just buy the books using the special currency both sets of quests also give you. (A currency which, I should point out, I have so far been unable to spend on anything at all. I can't find any vendor willing to take it, even after spending some considerable time searching, both in and out of game.)

Things people don't like about the system include the extreme reliance on randomisation, the irrelevance of most of the rewards and the useleness of the quest materials outside of the quest itself. All of these are valid complaints but for once they're all receiving equally valid replies. 

In marked contrast to previous expansions since Domino departed, the game now has a crafting dev both willing and able to explain why things are being done the way they are and why they can't just be changed overnight because players don't like them. Niami Denmother patiently (For the most part!) points out that we have the furniture items because people asked for the soda cans to be removed and that the useless special mats are a compromise required to guarantee something else players have long demanded, namely a safe place for non-adventuring crafters to do the high-level daily and weekly quests. 

She also goes into some detail about the limitations of her brief, how certain developers need to co-operate and compromise with others to get anything done, how senior developers have structural plans for the game that take preference to specific developmental concerns and how, following the launch of an expansion, changes to systems it introduced cannot be made before sufficient time has elapsed and sufficient data gathered to assess their impact and effectiveness.

In other words, there's a hierarchy that has to be respected and action requires an evidence base. It's eminently reasonable but it's not what people want to hear. 

As a player, I'd have to say it's not what I want to hear, either. I've been doing my dailies and weeklies religiously on three characters, barely missing a daily and never missing a weekly since I was able to get them. I don't have a single Advanced book for my Sage or Alchemist. I do have one advanced book for my Carpenter, though. Yay! More furniture!

My experience would seem to be typical. The recipes books are so rare that insignificant ones sell for 5-10m plat while key spell or CA books change hands for ten times that - if you can find anyone willing to sell. Usually you can't.

There was some of this last year but then there were at least some other options, even if those weren't always very popular either. I did very nicely on Advanced books, filling out most of my own characters recipe sheets and selling the rest on at a good profit. I got them as rewards from the Overseer system. This year the Overseer is still giving out those same books. Last year's. I suspect we'll get a new Overseer Season in the early spring, at which point the new ones will start to drop, but even if that happens, it seems like a long time to wait.

With Niami fighting the crafters' corner, I do have hope that some kind of compromise might be reached before then. It is, after all, only a few weeks since the expansion launched and for some of that time the devs have been taking a well-earned holiday. When everyone's back in the office and data is available on just how many players have actually received their Advanced books via rng, maybe we'll see some positive changes to the process.

Until then it's back to the dailies and keeping my fingers crossed.

Get Expansion. Register Expansion. Wait.

Today was the day I finally stopped putting it off and pre-ordered End of Dragons. I've been thinking about doing it since the expansion got a firm release date, which must have been sometime around the back end of the summer. Contrast that with the EverQuest II expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, which I pre-ordered the same morning the press release appeared and you can see how keen I was. 

As a rule, I like to pre-order expansions for games I'm playing at the earliest opportunity, not so much for the perks, which are generally quite modest at the level I buy in, but because it seems the tidiest way to do things. I can't think I've ever waited this long before pre-ordering an expansion I always knew I was going to buy.

I guess you could point at EverQuest's Terror of Luclin, which came out in December. I almost certainly will buy that but I haven't yet. As for pre-ordering it, the idea never even entered my head until I started writing this post.

The three purchases, actual or putative, tell an revealing story of their own, standing as they do on very different points of the interest curve. 

I was quite excited about the EQII expansion from the moment I read about what was going to be in it. It looked like more of the stuff I already knew I liked and it was set in a place I was interested to see, with which I felt I had some history. 

Conversely, when the details of the GW2 expansion emerged, most of what I read left me feeling deflated, bored and very slightly annoyed. It looked like more of the stuff I already knew I didn't much like and it was set in a place I wasn't at all interested to see, with which I felt I had no history whatsoever. It really didn't help that a whole load of franchise grognards were all over it, either.

 

The EQ expansion sits somewhere in the middle. It's filled with stuff I neither much like or dislike, for the very good reason I never get to see it. It's a long, long time since I played any current endgame content in the older Everquest and it's likely to be even longer before I do. Longer as in never.

The setting of ToL does appeal to me. I love Luclin. We have just spent two years there in EQII, though, so I feel my Luclin-based needs have been more than adequately met for the time being. The main appeal to me is the extra five levels but there's really no point paying for those until I plan to play the game, which isn't likely to be this side of the late spring or summer.

These last few years I've found myself needing to think about game purchases in a way I haven't had to do since the turn of the milennium. It's nothing to do with the cost, which remains very low in terms of entertainment hours. It's the direct result of the way my gaming habits have changed, itself the direct result of the increased amount of free time I've had.

What with illness, the pandemic and my approaching retirement, I've had more time available both to play games and write about them than ever before. The last three years have been by far my most productive on this blog. In the first eight years I never broke two hundred posts in a calendar year. In 2019 I posted 250 times, last year it was 293 and this will be my 340th post of 2021.

To reach those numbers I've needed to find more to write about than just the handful of mmorpgs I might happen to be playing. I've also needed to find more than the same sets of dailies to keep myself amused during the endless lockdowns, which for me started back in 2019, when I was having chemotherapy.

I made a very deliberate decision to expand the range of content on the blog back then. The most obvious change must be the numerous music posts, the majority of which I freely admit are there for my own pleasure and amusement rather than the entertainment of an audience, but there have been forays into various aspects of popular culture, all of which have, I think, added to the general standing of the blog.

 

Perhaps less obviously, I've written a lot more about games other than mmorpgs. I used to write almost exclusively on that topic. I considered this to be an mmorpg blog, not a gaming blog. That made a lot of sense because I only very rarely played anything else. Mmorpgs readily expand to fill as much time as you care to throw at them so, while I was working at least, the majority of the time I never felt the need for any other kinds of games.

It was partly the extra time that tempted me to go looking outside the boundaries of the genre but it was also the ever-increasing availabilty of free games. Just as the free-to-play revolution hugely expanded the range of mmorpgs I was able to experiment with, so the plethora of gaming platforms vying for customers - Steam, Amazon, Epic and the rest - tempted me to start looking at games and genres I'd never even have considered a few years before.

Almost all of the outcomes of these changes have been positive. I've loved being able to write more, I've played and enjoyed a lot of games I would never have tried and I've generally kept myself interested, amused, entertained and busy during what have been some challenging times both personally and globally.

It does, however, mean more planning than I've been used to for quite a while. There's not much point buying - or even downloading for free - games I have no intention of playing in the immediate future. About the only time that makes sense is when there are limited-time offers for games I would like to play but don't have time for right away.

Everything else needs to be sorted according to practical considerations. Will I play it right now? If not, will I miss out on some worthwhile bonus if I wait until later? Do I want to pay full price or wait for a sale? And so on and so on. All the things I've been reading other people saying about their game-buying choices for years.

While I was exclusively playing mmorpgs and felt I didn't have enough time even to do those justice, I didn't have to bother about any of that. I felt quite smug about it. There are posts here where you can see me being smug about it for several thousand words.

Well, I'm not feeling quite so smug now. Pleased with myself, oh yes. Still that. It's all worked out rather nicely. Smug about being above it all, though? No, not any more.

None of which really explains why I pulled the trigger on End of Dragons today. It's an uninspiring, lackluster patchwork of an expansion, from what I've seen. A bunch more pseudo-classes I won't play, a story I won't care about, a load of weapons I don't want. 

There's a bastardized sort of fishing, the go-to of desperate developers everywhere, combined with a peculiar take on boats that looks to be neither one thing nor the other. That's not setting my pulse racing.

Then there's Cantha. Everyone loves Cantha, apparently. I'm hoping it's going to be pretty, at least. I've probably been there before. I have all the Guild Wars expansions and I've played at least a bit of most of them. If I have, though, it didn't make much of an impression. I can't actually remember Cantha at all.

As for the freebies I'd have missed out on if I'd waited until launch day, I'm not clear on whether there are any. As I look at the official web page it seems to me everything is included in the various tiers regardless of purchase date. I'm not sure any of them are incentives for pre-ordering. Oh, wait, yes there are. I see the tiny asterisks and the tiny footnotes now. Boy, that's really selling it.

The real reason I bought it now rather than later is Christmas. I've been buying so much these last few weeks I've just gotten into the habit of it. Instead of asking myself "Why?" today I found myself asking "Why not?"

It's not the greatest of reasons but I feel good that I got it done. And that's not the greatest of endorsements, either, now I come to think about it. "You know you're going to have to buy this thing eventually. Just get it over with".

Oh well, at least I got another blog post out of it. And there'll be plenty more come February, count on that.

Trivial Pursuits

Tobold has a post up today about difficulty settings - implied, imposed, avoided - in both board and video games. It's a well-argued and sensible piece for the most part but there was one part which didn't quite ring true to me.

Talking about difficulty levels, he claimed "You never want to modify those to be completely trivial." I can see what he means, I think, but it refers back to the old "What is a Game?" question, something I don't want to revisit right now. 

I'm not really very interested in whether something qualifies as a "game". For many years I railed against the use of the world in the acronym "mmorpg". My argument was that mmorpgs were platforms for playing games, not games in themselves. It's an argument that's become harder to sustain in recent years, when developers have consistently tried to constrain the genre within certain gamelike parameters. 

Modern mmorpgs are often more like "games" than anything else. They virtually come with win conditions. When they're not so much like games, it's mainly because they're they're more like movies or stories. Some might as well be movies, although then they'd have to compete at a much higher level, with much more nuanced storytellers, so it's no surprise they aren't.

Leaving aside the question of whether the "games" we play are actually "games" at all, the more interesting question to me is what's required to make them "fun". And, of course, here we go again with another of those words everyone uses but whose meaning no-one can define. 

Tobold says "The purpose of a game is to have fun", which is so incredibly contentious a statement I can only assume he's trolling. Once again, I'll side-step the "What is fun, anyway?" discussion. Let's just pretend we all have the same idea of fun, for once, or we'll never get anywhere.

Giving a pass to both "game" and "fun" takes us neatly past the philosophy and into the action, which is the nub of the whole thing. All games require some form of action, don't they? Without they'd be passive entertainment.

What, then, would constitute "completely trivial" in such a context? Doing nothing at all is the only definition I can come up with, which takes us into the territory of idle games. 

I don't play or follow idle games so I'm far from being the person to extrapolate on how or why they might be "fun". I did, for a while, have Progress Quest installed and occasionally I'd watch it play itself but while Progress Quest may have been one of the ancestors of the modern idle game, I don't think it represents a much better example than Ultima Online would in a conversation about modern mmorrpg gameplay.

My understanding is that most idle games require some level of input from the player these days. I don't think you just install them and never touch them again, other than to see how they're going. At some level they do require some activity and "activity" is the key to all of this.

When Tobold implies a game needs at least a minimal level of "difficulty" I believe what he means is a minimum level of "activity". On that, I think we can agree, although as usual the exact moment where activity slips into inactivity is unclear. I do think a player has to be doing something at least some of the time to qualify as a player.

How much do they have to do, though? It's quite common to see negative comments about mmorpgs, usually non-western free to play titles, that automate most of the routine operations more respectable games expect players to perform for themselves. Apparently there's a qualitative difference for some people in watching their character move from quest giver to quest location based on whether or not they have to press down on the WASD keys to make it happen. 

It gets even more controversial if the character doesn't even need to fight their own battles when they get there. Games that handle all of the combat as well as the pathfinding cease to qualify as games at all for many. Personally I think at this point it's still a matter of degree.

By the standards of many of us, the "difficulty level" in those games has come pretty close to "completely trivial" but does that mean no-one's having fun playing them? Are the games still fun as the level of interactivity declines? Well, people play them, so I think we'd have to accept that for those people, they are.

There's a reason I've been thinking about this other than reading Tobold's post. The latest EverQuest II expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, differs substantively from all its predecessors in one particular manner; never before can I recall being able to one-shot most overland mobs before even completing the Signature quest line.

Someone commented on it in general chat, when the expansion was less than a week old. At the time I was still having to move and pull carefully to avoid being overwhelmed and I was dying not infrequently when I got it wrong. At that point my reaction was basically "Chance'd be a fine thing."

Now, having sorted myself out a little, I can pull literally everything in as wide an area as I can run in a circle without breaking leashes, then one shot every single one of the mobs in range with the first AE I cast. The only thing that stops me clearing the entire field in a single key-press is the time it takes the backfield to catch up to the play.

I can't recall any previous expansion where I found myself doing new, at-level quests for the first time and having them behave exactly though they were quests in out-levelled content. There's usually at least an element of challenge. In the routine VoV overland quests not involving sub-bosses or similar there's none, not now my character's level 125 with gear that's sometimes been upgraded four times already since the epansion launched.

Was I having more fun when it was harder? Am I not having fun now, with the gameplay completely trivialised in this way. 

No, I'm loving it. It was fun before but it's much more fun now. Far from making the quests dull or tedious it makes them much more enjoyable. It's a different kind of enjoyment, sure, but at least as satisfying in its own way, only there's more of it and it's faster. It's a bit like those magic painting books I did as a child, the ones where you just have to dip a brush in wter and swish it over the pictures to see the colors bloom.

When it comes down to it, how many people actively enjoy the navigating and killing parts of routine quests, anyway? I used to love the equivalent process in EverQuest, when breaking a camp could take fifteen minutes and holding it successfully could occupy a tense session, but it's been a long time since I played an mmorpg that offered that experience. And back then all I was doing most of the time was grinding xp. Even then, I didn't find that same process anything like as much fun if it stood between me and a quest reward I wanted.

Games of that era also gave you the tools to play that way and enjoy it. Imagine a modern mmorpg that allowed you remove aggro from a mob for a couple of minutes, root it for five, snare it for fifteen. Virtually all combat abilities in every mmorpg I play now are measureed in seconds, not minutes. Everything happens on fast forward. It's exciting and fun in the moment but enervating across a session, when all you're trying to do is get whole load of quests done.

There's a wide gap between the point where you have to give combat your fullest concentration and when it becomes completely trivial. That vast stretch, which constitutes most comabt gameplay in most mmorpgs, is the gameplaying equivalent of driving a car on a long, straight road. You have to be vigilant because if you drift you could die. It's something you have to do to get from where you are to where you want to be but you couldn't in good conscience say you were having "fun" on the way. 

Well, I couldn't.  For me, the point at which things start to become enjoyable again, rather than irritating, is indeed when they become completely trivial, or as near to it as makes no difference.

Released from the need to keep from dying, I'm able to enjoy my surroundings and also to think. It's when the gameplay becomes completely trivial that my mind moves across the meaning of what I've been sent to do. It's when I begin to think not just about the practicalities of the quest I'm on but its moral, philosophical and ethical implications.

It's in the triviality of the execution that I become aware of the gravity of my actions. There are things I do that I shouldn't and I know it and yet I do them anyway because we all do. We have to or else we can't play. 

Tobold asks, "if there is a rule in it that makes the game not fun for you, would you rather change the rule, or give up on playing the game?" but the same could be said of what we're tasked to do within the games themselves. When my attention is taken up with the what and the how of what I'm doing, it's easy to miss the bigger question: why? 

Yes, all very impressively deep, I'm sure, but there's another, much more persuasive reason why the kind of specifically trivialised combat and questing I'm talking about doesn't damage the overall prospects of an mmorpg, when it comes to having fun. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about mmorpgs being as much platforms for playing games as games in their own right.

We frequently hear it said that the true endgame in mmorpgs is fashion. Guild Wars II's entire business model is built around it and it's often given as the main motivation for sticking around at top level in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV.

Similarly, people talk about the true reason for playing being friendships or community or relationships. In some games it might be having a home, a place to hang out, a way to express creativity. It can be collecting mounts or pets or titles. 

These are all things to which "difficulty levels" could be assigned but seldom are. Such difficulty as exists there is tied up mostly with luck. It can be "difficult" to get the rng gods to give you the drop you need but it's the kind of difficulty no amount of skill or practise will help you with, one iota.

No, when we talk about "difficulty levels" in games we nearly always mean something the player can actively affect by their own performance and when all that player is interested in is the outcome, not the process, the optimum difficulty level is "completely trivial". Anything else is just a waste of valuable time.

I'm very happy to have had my routine gameplay completely trivialised in this way. I hope it's the beginning of a trend not just an aberration to be adjusted next time around. And it's not all traffic in one direction. The overland bosses, usually a total pushover by this stage, are all still incredibly tough. So far I've killed one and I had to use a bunch of potions and all my cooldowns, some of them twice. And even then it came down to almost the last hit.

That was fun, too, but only once. A repeated diet of fights like that would not be fun at all, not for me. I haven't tried again. I'll wait until those bosses are as close to completely trivial as they're likely to get, while anything they drop is still worth having. 

By the looks of things it could be a long wait.

Still Having A Great Time. Wish You Could Have Been There.

My Vetrovian journey continues, although according to the invaluable timeline on EQ2i it's nearing the end. I'm on step eleven of thirteen, the moment when we finally step inside Castle Vacrul, the ominous floating hulk that hangs over the mountains and yet somehow can't be seen by anyone but me.

It's difficult for me to talk about the story and the writing with any kind of objectivity. I worry that by any external standard it would properly be judged a farrago of fantastical nonsense but then so would most mmorpg stories so I'm not sure that's much of a concern.

Stylistically, there are certain problems. Questgivers make long speeches filled with incomprehensible, unpronounceable names, referring to abstruse and arcane events from the past as though quoting holy writ, which is in fact pretty much what they are doing, since as usual almost everyone involved is either a God, a demi-god or a would-be candidate for godhood.

When I'm not trying to unpick paragraph after paragraph of infodump, I'm groaning at bad puns or shaking my head at yet another self-indulgent in-joke. Quests are either humorous and inconsequential or sombre and self-important. Tonally, you can frequently hear the gears grinding as you move from one questgiver to another. 

Six fantasy names in a single paragraph. Not even close to the record!

 

It should be easy enough to sum all of this up as by-the-yard fantasy crossed with self-indulgent fan-fic and yet I fricken' love it! It's writing that understands exactly who the audience is and exactly what they want. I should know. I am that audience and it's exactly what I want.

After more than two decades soaking in the EverQuest ether I know this world as well as I know any, including my own. And by "as well" I mean partially, selectively and subjectively. 

I pick up on references that remind me of things I've done or seen or been told about. I recognize most of the names, even if I can't always remember where I heard them before. When certain, familiar characters emerge from the shadows of the plot I gasp just like I should.

It's like watching a new season of a favorite TV show, something low culture and high camp. It could feel cheap and shameful but instead it feel joyous and uplifting. Like anything that hangs around for long enough, after more than twenty years Norrathian lore has acquired the patina that comes with age. It's very easy to mistake that for gravitas.

As I've read through post after post about Endwalker, happily cracking open the spoilers for a story I know I'll never follow, it's occurred to me how unlikely it is that anyone reading anything I write about Visions of Vetrovia would ever care if I spoiled anything about the plot. I know some regulars here play EverQuest II and at least three people have mentioned buying the latest expansion but if any of them care a hoot about the lore they've mostly kept it to themselves.

Nerds, eh?

Even so, I'd still go out of my way to avoid spoiling any major plot twists or reveals... if there were any. There might be. I couldn't say. 

It might seem strange but even at this late stage of the plot I'm not entirely clear what's going on. I know Mayong Mistmoore is up to something but then Mayong's always up to something. 

He's a busy fellow, always has been. He's "up to something" in Terror of Luclin, the latest expansion for EverQuest, where he's been seen on the moon. The suspicion there is that he may be trying to usurp a god, which I think is what he's doing in Vetrovia half a millenium later. 

To be fair, it's what he's always doing. The idée fixe is one of the less-celebrated vampire tropes. I wonder if the reason Mayong so aspires to godhood is that true immortality, rather than mere undeath, would free his mind from the shackles of habit. Gods play dice. Vampires play chess.

I fear he may have, once again, bitten off more than he can suck. He seems to have set in motion a chain of events that could lead to a return to full godhood for Anashti Sul. 

Usually I'd have fact-checked that last paragraph before committing it to print. For all I know she's already got her Godcard back, if indeed I'm right in thinking she ever lost it. 

Recovered memories are tight!

 

I'm not entirely up to speed with Anashti Sul's history, as must be obvious. I think she's the god of the undead but I have a feeling she was also a major god of healing at one point. I also seem to remember we fought her or helped her or freed her or imprisoned her in some previous storyline. I know that this time around a lot of people stand back and gasp when her name is mentioned so I did too, although I couldn't really tell you why. 

I'm not being twee about that, by the way. I was sitting down, so I didn't actually stand back, but the first time an NPC pointed out whose altar I'd just been messing with, I echoed the name out loud in a tone of exaggerated surprise.

It wasn't even the first time I'd exclaimed out loud at a reveal. It happened close to the start, when I correctly identified Tserrina Syl`Tor in the first instance before anyone said her name. I'm easily excited.

This is the kind of immersion you can't just buy. You can just buy the expansion, sure, but the immersion, that you have to bring with you. That's how serial fiction works and mmorpgs are serial fiction.

In standalone games, just as in novels or movies, it's possible to generate all the necessary emotions to lose yourself in the imagined lives of others in just one, concentrated experience. Long-running TV shows, like comics and series novels, rely on an accretive process for their success. So do mmorpgs.

Some genuinely fascinting implications for the game, should Mayong succeed. He won't, of course.

It's been very noticeable how many bloggers, writing about Endwalker, have referred to the expansion as the culmination of a decade of storytelling. For all that everyone praises the story as something that exemplifies the best of what the genre has so far been able to produce, no-one seems to be suggesting any new player should start there.

Without at least some knowledge of what has gone before, even the finest installment of an ongoing narrative can't hope to have the same emotional impact. No matter how detailed and comprehensive the "Previously on...", there's no substitute for having been there.

Even if you can barely remember what happened. Honestly, it doesn't matter if you can't. There's not going to be a test. All that counts is that you know enough to feel inside the story rather than outside. That's all immersion means, in the end.

For good or ill, I'm inside Norrath's story now. Any judgments I offer are going to be relative.

It's bloody good, though!

Visions Of Vetrovia: A Lot More Fun Than Gates Of Discord And You Can Quote Me On That.

I'd like to preface this post by making it clear I consider myself to be very much at the easily-satisfied end of the mmorpg-player spectrum. A long reading of this blog should support the proposition that I've rarely met an mmorpg I didn't like and that I can find something good to say about almost anything the genre throws my way.

With that caveat, my tentative early assessment of EverQuest II's Visions of Vetrovia is that it might be the game's best expansion for years. Of course, I have to immediately add another layer of qualification: I'm talking purely from the perspective of a solo player. What the heroic group or raid experience is like I have no idea and most likely never will. 

Down in the weeds with the rest of the scrubs, everything's looking peachy. The screenshots don't really do the graphics justice. There's an astonishing sense of space and air about the first two open zones, Svarni Expanse and Karuupa Jungle that can only really be appreciated and experienced by wheeling through them on a flying lizard or a winged horse.

The third zone, Mahngavi Wastes, is bleaker and emptier, as befits its name, but it, too, feels wide, wild and free in a way few, if any, of the zones in the last several expansions have. Although the whole storyline revolves around the undead, only the last zone, Forlorn Gist, has the perpetually darkened, foreboding, closed-in feeling you'd expect when werewolves and vampires are doing the decorating.

All of the zones feel substantially larger than we've come to expect, although I'm not sure a surveyor's report would bear that out. I suspect it has something to do with the way they're designed, They all make great use of dimension and even better use of contrast. 

In the past, designers have employed some well-worn tricks, convoluted twists and turns, various means of blocking line of sight, to make small spaces feel complex and confusing, thereby creating an impression of something larger than its visible bounds. Here, there are broad horizons and vast, vaulted forests. If there's one thing the EQII graphics engine excels at it's foliage and in Vetrovia it gets its best run-out since 2012's Chains of Eternity. I can't remember ever seeing so many leaves.

Gorgeous graphics make a great foundation but a strong expansion needs much more than pretty pictures. In the case of EQII, what that usually means is a strong central narrative and a seemingly never-ending gear ladder. 

Most mmorpgs rely heavily for incentive on hierarchical content that requires players to replace their gear at regular intervals but EQII has always taken that process to extremes. The expansion has only been out for a couple of weeks and so far I'm only on stage six of the thirteen part Signature quest sequence and yet I've already upgraded some slots no fewer than four times. 

What's more, I know from experience that by the time I get to the end of the questline, most of the items I'm so pleased with will have turned into usless kipple fit only to be transmuted into mats. And that's a good thing.

If upgrading gear was a struggle, such relentless progression would be stressful and frustrating but here it's the opposite. The joy of this expansion is that the first set of gear, the starter equipment in Tishan's lockbox, is more than good enough to get you started and every quest reward and drop after that just adds power to an already-powerful baseline.

The result is a highly satisfying sense of empowerment. Only a couple of weeks ago I was tentatively pulling singles as I edged my way across the platforms and rope bridges. Today I'm barrelling into piles of pygmies, sweeping them up into an angry mob, then unleashing an explosion of AEs that fell the lot of them outright. 

It's immensely enjoyable. What's the point of gearing up if it doesn't make you stronger? Of course, if it made everything utterly trivial I imagine that might get boring eventually, even for me (Although, if I'm honest, I'm not sure about that. It rarely has before.) but that's not what's happening at all.

As the regular open-world mobs cease to offer any kind of threat, more of the storyline moves into instances. I've completed two so far, Heart of Conflict and Dedraka's Descent. They each took me something like an hour and involved some deaths, a modicum of swearing and much reading and re-reading of walkthroughs.

Compared to many previous such instances I've done, I felt these were pitched just about right. Setting out, they appeared daunting. There were moments where I found myself wondering if I'd have the enregy to get through to the end but the difficulty was such that each time I anticipated failure, success came instead, albeit sometimes on the second attempt.

I was most impressed with the items that dropped from the bosses. In the past, two of the more annoying things about instance bosses have been the uselessness of the things they leave behind them when they die and the irritating mechanics involved in getting your hands on them.

There had been some kind of quasi-exploit some years back that necessitated the implementation of a convoluted system to make sure only the person who killed the mob in a solo instance got the reward. I forget the details, if indeed I ever knew them. 

Whatever it was, it seems to have passed, because this time the bosses just drop good, old-fashioned steel chests that you click on to loot like we did fifteen years ago. It's a much more organic method of looting a mob than having some UI frame open. You wouldn't think it would matter that much but it does.

What's in the boxes is what really matters, though. I was surprised and delighted to find that every last boss I killed (More than a dozen so far.) dropped at least two pieces of armor or weaponry. Some dropped three. 

The items weren't always things the character who got them could use, something players of "Mains" might not like, but my characters were forming a disorderly line behind the Bruiser, who unaccountably has ended up being the one I'm taking through the story first. Yes, I know I said it was going to be my Necromancer. I have no more idea why it's not than you do.

The final boss in one instance even droppped a familiar. I don't think I've seen a familiar drop from any boss in the last five years. I know they can. In my experience they just never do.

Whether that was just some fantastic luck or whether the loot table is much more generous this time around I guess I'll find out as I carry on through the rest of the story and its associated instances. I hope it does turn out to be a more common thing than it used to be - that familiar was a massive upgrade.

The tuning of the instances seemed fine enough that I found it worth my while pausing when any item my Bruiser could equip happened to drop, so he could swap it out for whatever he was wearing. I can't recall ever doing that before, possibly because hardly anything that useful has ever dropped during a run, let alone several times in the same instance.

I may very well be over-selling this. My memory of the last few years of expansions isn't that clear to begin with and I'm playing a different character this time. Even so, it feels different. The whole expansion does. Visions of Vetrovia feels as though it's had a better pass for playabilty than usual. It trucks along.

That said, I have a couple of warnings for anyone following along behind me. Warnings and advice.

Firstly, if you're playing an adventuring character who's also skilled enough in a tradeskill to do the Signature crafting questline - do the tradeskill Sig Line first. It's way, way shorter than the adventure line. It'll only take you two or three hours at most and at the end of it your character will be able to fly in the first three zones.

I'm quite a fan of the modern practice of withholding flight until a character's explored the whole of a new zone on foot. I would recommend doing that for fun anyway. The zones, as I said, are wonderful to be in, with all kinds of sights to see and EQII is blessed with relatively forgiving mob density in most areas.

For all the fun of exploring on foot, I have to say the Adventure questline goes better by air. There are a lot of long runs and long runs back and even with the mobs well spaced there can be a lot of extra-curricular killing before you get to the places you need to be. Being able to swoop through the skies and see the land laid out like a map beneath you makes the whole thing fly by, literally and figuratively.

Secondly, do read the timeline carefully before you proceed. I know, spoilers. And not everyone likes a walkthrough the first time. I don't. I try to do it on my own until I get stuck.

The thing is, there's at least one part where you can't really know you have to do a set of side quests before you do a section of the Signature line. Strictly speaking, you don't have to do it first. You'll just wish you had when you realize you didn't.

It's no biggie if you just bumble through like I did. All it means is you have to go back and do the subquest before you can carry on.. only then the subquest takes you into the same instance you just finished. Now you're going to have to do it again. 

If you'd known that in advance you could have prepared. Then, when you killed the fourth of five bosses as you went through the instance for the Sig line, you'd also have gotten a quest drop for the subquest. 

It does tell you that in the wiki. I saw it. I even did some of the subquest. I just didn't finish it. Now I have to do the whole instance again. Which is fine. Did it once, can do it twice. And more loot is always good. Still, would have been neater the other way.

Here's where things stand for me right now. I've taken three crafters all the way through the tradeskill questline. All three of them are doing the crafting dailies, which take about ten or fifteen minutes each. 

Those can reward Advanced crafting books, which would allow me to make upgrades for all my adventuring classes except the Swashbuckler (I still don't have a high-level jeweller.) Those books are rare, though. I've had one so far, an Armorsmith book. I put it on the broker for nine million platinum. If it sells I can buy one I need, when someone offers one. So far there are hardly any for sale but it's early days. There will be, once all the guild crafters have their recipes.

The Bruiser is doing very well in the instances so I'm carrying on with him for now. He's feeding all the gear he can't use back to the team so if he starts to falter, the next in line will already be somewhat geared to see if they can do better. I still think the Necro would be the most powerful but I'd rather have some of her spells upgraded before she tries to prove me right.

Everything is spinning along so nicely I feel confident I'll be playing mostly EQII through Christmas and into the New Year. The sense of progression is very satisfying and there are several clear paths to follow to keep that going. 

There's also more than enough variety to keep things feeling fresh and I have more ideas of things I want to be doing than time to do them all. It's always something like this at this stage of an expansion cycle but this time it feels even more like it than usual.

Naturally, I reserve the right to come back here in a day or a week or a month to rant about where it all fell apart and what a diabolical bait and switch the whole thing turned out to be. I am, after all, not even halfway through the questline yet. Plenty of time for things to go horribly wrong.

I can only report as I find, though, and so far I'm having a fine old time. Here's hoping it continues.