My Idea Of Fun: EQII

Look up. Up there, right above us. See that? That's my shared bank, that is. Why don't we take a closer look?

The first box is all potions. Partially sorted. A work in progress. I only got them all into the one box just a few minutes ago.

All of those came from Overseer missions. They're useful and I'm glad to have them only I'm terrible at using consumables. They make a very significant difference to both speed and success when soloing the harder instances but I only remember that when I'm struggling. If I'm up and killing I never think to use potions to go faster. So they pile up. Also, when do I do hard instances? More on that later, kind of.

The second box is Infusers, mostly, plus some Powerlinks, a peculiar kind of one-time buff that I've never used and don't entirely understand. "Things I don't understand in EverQuest II" could be my specialist subject on Mastermind. Also a few overspill Mount items that wouldn't fit in the third box and some old Adornments I probably could junk.

Infusers are both useful and annoying. They're used in the Infusion system (No! Really?) which is how you incrementally improve gear. There are different grades and types. The current expansion uses Empyral Infusers and that's what I'm getting from the Overseer missions but I still have Celestial and Planar Infusions from previous iterations. They all still work.

Hello. It's me again!

The problem is, I can't see the point of using any of them to upgrade gear until I'm reasonably sure I'm going to be wearing or wielding it for a while and I'm nowhere near that point yet. I don't feel like much of anything any of my characters is wearing is likely to be around for long.

I haven't even done the final instance of the Adventure Signature line on anyone yet, let alone completing any of the Achievements that give what's probably going to be the best solo gear I'm going to see. But I have now at least looked at those achievements, thanks to Topauz's suggestion, and many of them seem, erm, achievable. So I'm sitting on my Infusers for now.

Bags three and four are stuffed with saddles, reins, barding and the like. Things mounts wear. A hackamore. Don't ask me what that is. I got most of those in the Dragon Attack pre-expansion event. I have a lot more stashed on individual characters, too.

One of the boxes is mostly tradeables. The other is mostly Heirloom. A few of the tradeable items are worth a lot. Millions, if the ones on the broker are priced to sell. I'm dithering over whether to sell mine or use them. I've been dithering for weeks.

The rest are either not particularly what I need right now or can't be equipped until various mounts level up. Leveling up mounts takes months and you can only level one at a time per character. You can buy your way out of that and you can get mount time potions as drops to speed things up. I have had a couple from Overseer missions.

I don't understand how this works. It's not how you'd think.

Even so, it's going to take a lot of thought and organization to work out which mount gets what on which character. I have half a dozen max level adventurers, four max level crafters and all of them have multiple mounts. I haven't been taking this seriously until now, so some of the mounts I've leveled up are the wrong ones and I only just realized I really need to use separate mounts for crafting and adventuring . Only all my crafters are also adventurers, so they'll need one of each.

I could stash all the mount stuff  in a character's bank to free up two boxes in the shared bank. I have access to an almost unbelievable amount of storage in EQII. Quite literally many, many thousands of slots. Which is fine, only I know that if I stash things on characters I'll never see them again. Out of sight, out of mind.

On occasion I have resorted to making notes on who is keeping what in their bank vault. I had it all written in a notebook at one time but of course it's out of date now. I know there are people who would make a spreadsheet for this but the day I find myself tempted to do something like that is the day I start looking for another hobby.

Box five is full of craft books for levels 111-120. Also some spell upgrade materials and recipes and mats for making yet more mount gear. I need to run all the crafters past this lot so they can scribe whatever books they can. Then I need to decide if I'm going to level up any of the other crafts so I know whether to keep those books.

I don't understand how this works, either. Add it to the list.

I ought then to sell what's left over but due to certain anomalies of crafting in Blood of Luclin, some are valuable and some are worthless. Which means checking them all. Which takes time.

Boxes five and six are full of gear. A lot of this is from Overseer missions. The rest I either picked up as various characters went through the Signature lines or I got as drops from overland Nameds. Most of it probably isn't an upgrade for anyone but some of it will be.

To know for sure I have to have everyone look at everything they could use so I can evaluate the auto-comparison. Sometimes that can be a tad hard to parse so it takes quite a while to do even one character. I have six.

Once I've equipped all the upgrades on everyone I'll have to decide what to do with the rest. I could try and sell some of the better pieces but I never really bother to sell gear. I tend to assume everyone else also has more than they know what to do with.

The weapons all need to be converted into Planar Weapon Essences (you can see some of those in Box Eight). That's what fuels weapons upgrades in addition to Infusing. Of course, the same issue applies, namely I have yet to be sure I'm keeping the weapons I'm using. So those just get stashed for now.

The rest of the gear, I have to decide whether to Transmute or Salvage. I've been exceptionally lucky with my Overseer missions so far. I have several BoL Adornment recipes that use the mats I'd get from transmuting gear over level 111. I even have a recipe to make a Red or Blue Rune (Growth, in fact), which is a big deal right now, let me tell you.

The problem here is that I don't fully understand how the revised system works yet. Some of the recipes have "Charges" and I don't know what that implies. I need to do some research before I make anything.

It's Mythical so I suppose it's a good drop.

The last box has a few odds and ends from earlier eras of the game at the top. I haven't gotten around to sorting those out yet. They probably need to be stashed in someone's bank, after which they will almost certainly never be seen again.

In the middle are the three grades of Fragments that everyone complains bitterly about getting as
rewards. I think they have something to do with Epic Weapons but since I've never even looked at how Epic Weapon quests work in EQII I have no clue what to do with them. I just hold on to them in case I need them one day. I got all of mine from Overseer missions, naturally.

Then there are a couple of boxes. I had my Carpenter make a bunch of Swamp Ash Boxes (44 slots) for my Wizard so she could clear her bags and stuff all the unsorted stuff in her bank vault, which is the EQII equivalent of sweeping the dirt under the carpet.

While I was doing that I noticed she could make a 96 slot Jewellery Box. It says it holds "Jewelery, Baubles, Adornments,Transmuted Components and Cloaks" which sounded extremely handy. Only when I put it in the bank I found out it doesn't open like a normal box. It has a "Use" button but pressing it does nothing. So that's some more reading I have to do.

Finally we come to Agents. I get these now and again as loot from Overseer missions. They duplicate. If I get new ones I add them immediately to the Berserker or the Necromancer, my two primary Overseer operators. The spares I have to shunt around to other characters but I haven't yet found time to think about who is going to get whom.

That, in a rather sizeable nutshell, is a glimpse into my EQII gameplay right now. I'm playing the game for several hours every day and enjoying it as much as, maybe more, than I have for years. It's incredibly complex and it makes me think almost all the time, which I love. Only I'm not really doing anything, am I?

Or, rather, I'm doing an awful lot but almost all of it is preparation. But for what?

As well as all that sorting and upgrading and sending Agents out on Missions, I'm making sure to use my staff every two hours to go searching for Shadowed crafting materials, which I then use to make spell and CA upgrades for myself or to sell. And doing the public crafting quests every time the cooldown allows.

Not the best selection of spells
but the first one I made sold for 150k so I'm not complaining

On the subject of making money, the Shadowed book I got hasn't exactly made me rich but I have made more than two million plat so far, which is a lot of money by my count. I've also either been astoundingly fortunate in having three more Expert/Mastercrafted books drop (a Sage book for Level 115 Caster spells, a Jeweler book for Level 115 Scout CAs and a Level 120 Armorer book) or the rarity of these things, as frequently bemoaned on the forums, is wildly overstated.

I'm involved in a fun (for me, at least) price war with a couple of other crafters, which means I have to check my prices two or three times a day. When things sell I have to replace them and since I'm selling on a different character (because he has the 100% broker fee reduction Veteran sales display) I have to swap them over and it all takes time! So. Much. Time.

I'm still doing the Familiars Wild quest daily on three characters. That involves capturing creatures almost all of which are well below my level so I need either to mentor or to be extremely careful, since they have to be both aggroed and alive when I capture them and they all die instantly if any of my max levels even look at them with an arched eyebrow.

And why am I doing that quest? Well, mainly because I enjoy it but the nominal reason is to upgrade the familiars I'm actually using. Everything leads to upgrading the characters. "Upgrading" means making them more powerful and/or robust. Why am I doing that? So I can kill things faster or more efficiently and die less often while doing it, of course.

Only, when do I ever actually go and fight anything these days? Anything where the conclusion isn't foregone, that is? There I am, happily whiling away several hours every day, having a jolly old time trying to make all my characters fit for battle and yet I have no immediate plans to go fight anything!

In fact, I actively avoid it. The only character who's doing anything that could vaguely be called adventuring is my new Fury and she's only doing it to level up so she can stop like all the rest.

Oh well. I'm enjoying myself. And I guess I'll be ready when the time comes. If it ever does. Which doesn't seem all that likely right now...

We Choose To Go To The Moon: EQII

I am having a wonderful time in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Blood of Luclin. So much so that I wish I had at least a week off  to give it the time and attention it clearly deserves.

Playing it in short sessions after I get home from work, tired and with other demands on my time, is far from ideal but it brings back those feelings from a decade, a decade and a half ago, when a new expansion or a new game would drop and there just wouldn't be enough hours in the day to play.

I was always pre-disposed to love this expansion. I've been waiting for a return to the shattered moon for fifteen years, pretty much since EQII launched in 2004. Looking up at the scar of Luclin's ruin night after night, I always believed we'd make it back there one day.

When the rogue dragon Kerafyrm was sealed inside a remade Luclin in final fulfilment of the epic Age's End prophecy, driver of  EQII's lore since inception, and we looked up to see the moon made whole, I knew we be going back. And now here we are.

For me, the nostalgic impact of Blood of Luclin dwarfs anything I felt during my time in WoW Classic. I have only ever been a tourist in Azeroth and any frisson of familiarity is on the level of revisiting a town where I once spent a happy holiday, years ago.

I lived on Luclin for a long time. It was the current expansion when I returned to EverQuest after a year in Dark Age of Camelot. It was also where Mrs Bhagpuss and I began, yet again, returning once more from adventures elsewhere, at the launch of one of my favorite server-homes, Stromm, where we went on to found a guild and make many new friends.

It's fair to say Luclin and I have history. And now we have more. If there's one thing Daybreak know how to do it's to haul on those levers of memory. My last few evenings have been an unceasing procession of "Oh wow!", "Is that...?" "OMG!". Every time I see a familiar mob - Thought Horrors, ShikNar, Lightcrawlers, Sambata - it's like seeing an old friend. Well, if by "friend" you mean someone who'd kill you as soon as look at you.

I have so much to say I have no idea where to begin. I also have just one day off work before Christmas and for once I'd really rather spend it playing the game than writing about it. I think I'll just stick to an introduction, rather than digging into the incredible amount of detail that's whirling around my mind right now.

How about how I got there? As Wilhelm says, one does not simply walk to the moon. Getting to Luclin turned out to be both simple and complicated. There was a reason the prequel events all related to the Wizard Spires, Norrath's longstanding means of cross-continental travel. All the work we did these last few months was to upgrade the Spires for interplanetary transport.

The Duality (and who died and made him boss I'm still not sure - I remember him when he was plain old Al'Kabor. Or half of him was, anyway...) doesn't pass out tickets to the moon to just anyone. Before you can see the new link on the spire map you have to have completed either the Adventure or Tradeskill prequel quests that were added back in September.

I'd done the crafting quest on both my Berserker/Weaponsmith and my Warlock/Alchemist so all I had to do was chat briefly to a couple of crafters in Teren's Grasp and off I went. A click on the spires and there I was in The Blinding, the entrance zone for the expansion.

For the first hour I was so gosh-wowed out, running about taking screenshots, figuring out I was in Mons Letalis, finding my way to The Grey, now re-named The Wracklands (no doubt incorporating other areas remembered fondly or otherwise from the elder game) that I didn't exactly notice all I was being given were crafting quests. It turns out that while you can get to Luclin on just your crafter cred, no-one wants to trust a tailor or a carpenter with kill missions. Go figure!

By then it was bedtime so I camped out on the terrace overlooking The Umbral Ocean (quite an upgrade from The Twilight Sea). The next evening, like Wilhelm, I found myself backtracking to complete the prequel I'd neglected. It turned out I had the quest in my journal, I'd just never bothered to do it.

I had a reason for that other than laziness. I vaguely remember hearing it was pretty tough going for casual solo players back when it was introduced. Wilhelm's post makes it very plain that was no exaggeration. Solo instances in EQII can be brutal if you're undergeared or underprepared.

Fortunately, thanks to my crafter pass, I was all kitted out in the free expansion gear from the Tishan's box I found next to me right where I zoned into The Blinding. It doesn't really look like much of an upgrade from the 2019 Panda quest gear but this is not my first expansion rodeo and stats don't fool me.

I took the trouble to take some notes when I swapped my gear. Moving from Bold Crusade gear to Veilwalker took my Berserker's hit points from 62 million to just over 80 million. His potency went from 54k to 76k.

The key to judging whether gear is an upgrade is usually Resolve. Ironically, it's a stat solo players don't even need. It applies only when you move up to Heroic (Group) content but it serves as a kind of shorthand for the kind of Item Level other games use.

It's not an exact science - there are lower Resolve pieces I still wear for various reasons - but it's a decent rule of thumb. All the new starter gear has a lot more Resolve so I figured it would be an upgrade and so it proved. Wearing that lot I had no trouble with the prequel instance. It took me about forty minutes, at least ten of which were taken up with backtracking to find bosses I'd missed.

With my Adventure qualifications established it was back to Teren's Grasp for a short briefing. Then off I went to the moon! Again!

As Wilhelm points out, just completing the first entrance quest gives a huge amount of xp. And huge amounts of quest xp seem to be a feature of Blood of Luclin. Looking at the wiki walkthrough for the Signature Quest for adventurers (which, I might add, I have not yet needed, so clear and straightforward are the in-game instructions) I see I'm only on Step Three of thirteen and yet I'm already Level 117.

It's true I've done some non-Signature quests but compared to any previous expansion this is astoundingly fast progress. It highlights one of the things I'm finding most appealing about this excellent expansion: it's fun!

Although I personally have enjoyed all of EQII's post-SoE expansions, it is definitely true that around the time of Terrors of Thalumbra and, especially, Rise of Kunark, there seemed to be a desire at Daybreak both to slow people down and make the content seem more "important". It led to things like the removal of map-markers for quests, a boatload of pre-reqs involving ancient quests going back years, a lot of language-learning and a heavy focus on NPC faction.

That approach really began to shift around the release of Planes of Prophecy in 2017 and the trend ever since has been towards a more alt-friendly, inclusive approach - at least for the casual player. Apparently, for the Heroic and Raid gamer, not so much, but that's not my thing so I won't comment.

Blood of Luclin, from what I've seen so far, doubles down on casual fun. It's really great to hear a deafening DING! and see your character gain two levels. Far from being concerned that it might mean nothing to do in a week or two I'm thinking how easy it's going to be to get all six of my 110s to 120.

Then there are the fights. In the open world, so far, I haven't experienced anything of that expansion hump, where you struggle through the first few days until you manage to cobble together enough gear to hold your own with a badger. In the free gear from the box, time to kill on overland mobs was measured in seconds from the start. For my Berserker, that is. Not tried anyone else yet.

Crafting xp is just as generous and as for gathering... Words fail me here. I am so used to rare crafting materials in current expansions being, well, rare. As in almost never seen. In Blood of Luclin I'm getting two rares from a single node! And not just as a one-time, freakish rng miracle. It's happened several times.

I'm already at the point where, if I don't get a rare every five minutes that I forage I think something's gone wrong. In the last several expansions I'd have been lucky to get one a week!

Once again, this could backfire. If rares aren't rare do we care about rares? Except that they do actually have a use. In the last few expansions, rares have been so valuable in the marketplace I've never known whether to use them or sell them. This time it looks as though that won't be an issue. I can finally put my crafters to work making stuff. Seems like better design to me.

The needles for progress, acquisition and combat are all set very firmly in the green, then, but the real joy of Blood of Luclin so far is the way it harks back to the kind of expansions we haven't seen since at least 2014's Altar of Malice. Arguably since 2007's Rise of Kunark.

According to an article in Forbes, Blood of Luclin has no fewer than six new, non-instanced zones: "The Blinding, Sanctus Seru, Aurelian Coast, Fordel Midst, Wracklands, as well as the Ssraeshza Ruins and Vault." That's far more than any expansion for a long, long time. (And that's seven, Forbes... I don't think Fordel Midst should be in there).

I would guess that Ssrashza Ruins and Vault are dungeons of some sort - not found them yet. The other four, though, are proper open-world zones and I've at least set foot in all of them. They're not as sprawling as the immense zones of old but they are big enough. And the exploration potential is huge.

Sanctus Seru is a glorious city. We haven't had a new urban hub like this since Thalumbra and the last time we had a city on this scale that was also open to the skies must have been Sentinel's Fate's Paineel.

I took a lot of screenshots but it's hard to do justice to this kind of monumental architecture, so overwhelming in game. In fact, none of my EQII screenshots ever seem to look anywhere near as good as the same scenes appear inside the game itself. I wonder if there are quality settings I should be tweaking?

I'll go look into that when I play next, which is going to be right now! I have a ton more to say but I feel the hands of time moving ever faster. I want to go... Back to the Moon!