All The Colors Of The City

After I finished writing Monday's April Fool's post I thought I probably ought to log into EverQuest II to claim my free baby dragon and check out the Bristlebane Day content. I'm pretty much done with Nightingale for now, at least until they add some new content, and none of the other upcoming games I'm interested in are running tests right now, so it seemed like a good time to get back to what I was doing a couple of months ago - playing EQII.

Before I logged in I checked to see if anything new had been added to the holiday this year, which was when I found out there isn't just one holiday running, there are two. Well, three, if you count the Year of Darkpaw. Four, if there happens to be a City Festival on. (One of those runs for the first week of every month.) Or five, if there's a full moon, when the Moonlight Enchantments appear.

That's why it's not that unusual for holidays, anniversaries and live events to overlap in Norrath. There are just so many of them it's pretty much inevitable. Around this time of year we get Bristlebane Day, the April Fool analog, but also Beast'r, whose real-world counterpart is, I'm sure, readily apparent from the awkward pun.

I had a little trouble chasing down the exact details of what might have changed this year but as usual EQ2 Traders came to my rescue. From there I learned there is indeed something new this time. Quite a bit, in fact. As well as the expected new holiday crafting recipes and vendor items there's also a new quest.

A while ago I remember mentioning that in EQII these days, a new holiday "quest" generally just means a new collection with some framing dialog. Not so this time. This is a bona fide story quest that takes place in a brand-new dungeon. Okay, the dungeon itself is made up of re-purposed rooms from previous content and there are only three of them, but that's absolutely no criticism. It's an exemplary demonstration of how to re-use assets effectively to create enjoyable, new content.

I can say that now because I've finished it. The dungeon itself didn't take long - maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Getting a character ready to try it at all, though - that took me about four hours.

The very surprising thing about the new dungeon is that it requires a minimum level of 128 to enter. It's current expansion content in other words, which does seem odd for a holiday event. Usually these things scale.

I'd forgotten until I tried to enter the dungeon from a big book in the Commonlands that you have to click on. I didn't actually have a character that level. My nearest, the one I was playing, was my Berserker. At around three-quarters of the way into 127 he was close but not close enough.

I could have left it at that. It's only a holiday event after all and now it's been added it'll probably be in the rotation forever. I could have left it for next year. As I said, though, this happens to be a good moment for me to come back to EQII, something I've been wanting to do for a while, so I decided it was about time I knuckled down and got on with the Signature Quest from last December's Ballads of Zimara expansion.

Really, I ought to have finished it ages ago but I'd hit a patch with a lot of dungeon play and I hadn't been able to find the necessar couple of dog-free hours to beat down several bosses in a row. Last night, though, it was raining hard and Beryl was keeping her head down in case anyone suggested going outside. It seemed like an opportunity so I took it.

The dungeon I needed to finish turned out to be two dungeons linked together, both of them set in the final zone of the expansion, the Djinn stronghold, Vaashkaani. I was under the mistaken impression Vaashkaani was an open-world, city zone but while it might still be some kind of city, it's actually made up of several combat instances. 

The first took me about an hour to finish; the second double that, so a little over three hours in total, which is quite a run for me these days. Luckily, I had the invaluable EQ2i walkthroughs up for both. Without those I would probably have been there twice as long.

The fights, of which there were many, weren't all that hard. My Berserker is prety decently equipped for this kind of  entry-level endgame solo stuff, although there's still quite a lot more I could  - and should -do to toughen him up further. 

Having played EQII for so long now, it's interesting how these things change over time. A few years ago, most of the complaints from casuals like me revolved around time-to-kill on both regular mobs and bosses. It could take hours to grind through a solo instance, with each fight taking minutes and the bosses maybe a quarter of an hour.If you got a "kill ten" quest, and there were some, you could be there all morning.

Then there was a phase when just about everything seemed to drain your power or mana, making every fight take even longer. I remember going afk, leaving my Berserker on auto-attack and going to the kitchen to make myself a coffee because I had literally no buttons to press.

That was not a popular mechanic and I'm happy to say it's largely disappeared. What seems to have replaced it in BoZ is a cute little trick with Heroic Opportunities. 

As any who played EQII when it launched back in 2004 might remember, HOs were once a big part of the game. They are combination attacks that you can do solo or in a group. When the combo is complete they kick off powerful effects that either buff you or damage or debuff the mob.

I didn't much like them then because I was playing in groups much more than I do now and people were constantly yelling at each other, either demanding they complete the HO or complaining they had completed it when they shouldn't have. People were very fussy about the timing for some reason. It got on my nerves and I was glad when it largely fell into disuse.

Some people obviously remembered it more fondly than I did because there have been many requests for the system to be revamped and made useful again. A while ago that made its way to the top of the dev team's to-do list and now HOs are back in fashion.

In the instances I've just finshed there are several occasions when HOs are the only thing that will remove a boss's shield so you can actually hit them. Or you have to complete an HO to blow up some device that, if left unattended, will instantly kill you. There's no real logic to it but it's a lot better than seeing your mana disappear into a black hole. 

It's also a mechanic that requires a certain amount of attention and finesse, which is why I died a few times getting to grips with it. Once I had the method down, though, I thought it was fine. I certainly prefer it to having to chug mana potions, which cost a fortune for the good ones and which I never remembered to pack anyway, let alone the attritional auto-attack grindfest that comes when you run out of them.

The bosses in Vaashkaani also all have the ability to stifle, stun or fear, which would be extremely annoying if there weren't free augments available that negate all of those effects. I had to remember to swap the necessary augs in and out of my belt, the only item that has a slot that will hold them, but that wasn't hard to do - until I found out the hard way you can't change augs in a damaged item.

Eventually I got through the whole instance - both of them - and I have to say it was good fun. The level of challenge was just about right for me. I had to concentrate just enough to feel engaged and I got my timing wrong a couple of times but nothing went on so long it made me dread failure and another try plus I always made progress on each attempt so I could see a way to succeed.

It helped a lot that Vaashkaani is absolutely gorgeous. The screenshots give an impression of how colorful and vibrant it is but you have to imagine all those colors shifting and shimmering as the crystals pulse, clouds drift across the skylights, waterfalls pour down and foliage ripples in the breeze. Once again, you can really see why Darkpaw would like to get new players straight into the current content. The 2004-era graphics of the older zones, much though I love them, really do the game a disservice.

Under current mechanics, you get no meaningful xp for clearing zones. It all comes from quests. When I handed in mine I jumped straight from three-quarters of the way through 127 to five per cent into 128. Mission accomplished!

I also got a lot of drops from all the nameds but I wasn't very lucky with RNG. Most of the gear I got was for other classes. My alts will love it  - if they ever get this far. 

My Berserker didn't much mind not getting stuff he could wear. Everything that dropped was all 155 Resolve, which is mostly what he has now. He got it all from previous holiday events so he's very mildly overgeared for the content he's doing although not for much longer. According to the beta forums for the forthcoming GU 125, bosses in the next update drop 160 and 165 Resolve gear, which will be a nice upgrade.

As soon as I dinged 128, it was straight off to try the new holiday instance. It turned out to be a jolly romp with an amusing story, some good jokes and a lot of fighting. I won't rehash it all here but the gist is that Bristlebane tells you the story of a famous thief and sends you to three episodes from his life, wherein you take various roles, all of which pretty much consist of a massive fight that starts the moment you zone in. It's all action!

The drops were much the same level as the ones I got in the instances, which makes sense since 155 Resolve seems to be about par for current solo endgame gear. I was able to upgrade a couple of 145s I was still uisng so that was nice.

According to EQ2 Traders, if you do the instance three times, you get a silly hat. It's fast and fun so even I ought to be able to manage that before it all goes away in ten days or so. 

If I want the five new Beast'r eggs, though, I'll have to hurry. That event ends in just a few hours.

What am I doing here then?!

In The Event

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, but what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope. Still none the wiser.

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

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

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

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

I was always good at history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pass the pickaxe!

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

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

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

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

Why We Fight.

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

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

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

That'd be another first...

Solid Gold Easy Action

Something I read in the patch notes for yesterday's EverQuest II update got me wondering. I don't remember any previous expansion labeling an instance in the Signature questline as anything other than "Solo" so I found the following a tad confusing:

"With their early involvement in the Signature quest, the following zones have been relabeled from [Solo] to [Signature], and no longer apply Oppressive Sands:

• Raj'Dur Plateaus: Blood and Sand
• Raj'Dur Plateaus: The Sultan's Dagger
• Buried Takish'Hiz: Terrene Threshold
• Buried Takish'Hiz: The Sacred Gift"

I infer from the mention of "Oppressive Sands" no longer being in effect that this change relates in some way to difficulty. Presumably the intent is to make the four instances easier. I didn't know what "Oppressive Sands" was until I did a bit of digging but from the name it's obviously some kind of debuff, so taking it away has to be beneficial. 

Other than that, I guess we're meant to assume that something labelled "Signature" is inherently less challenging than something labelled "Solo"? Does that track? I'm not sure it does.

The notes also mention that something has been added to Tishan's Lockbox, the stash of free catch-up gear you get with every expansion, nowadays:

"The Jubilant Familiar Infusion, Monolithic Mercenary Infusion, and Tolan's Darkwood Mount Infusion are now free from Tishan's Lockbox."

Since buffs from familiars and mounts are hugely important to player power these days and since solo players rely heavily on mercenaries, these changes once again imply a leg-up for those already struggling with the entry-level content in Renewal of Ro.

Finally, there was this:

"Removed the lore tag from many of Tishan's lockbox white adornments."

That's primarily a bug fix but it means players can now equip extra, free adornments, which is another increase in power. Taken all together. it's hard to avoid the conclusion that someone feels the new content is overtuned and needs toning down.

It wouldn't be the first time, only for once my experience has been very much the opposite. So far, I've had no significant difficulty with any of the content in the new expansion, either overland or in instances. I'm currently some way through the third instance, Buried Takish`Hiz: Terrene Threshold, having killed the first two bosses before I had to stop for lunch.

Yesterday I finished the whole of the second instance, Raj'Dur Plateaus: The Sultan's Dagger without a hitch and a few days ago I ran Raj'Dur Plateaus: Blood and Sand, which also gave me no trouble. Of course, only that last one did I do before the patch, so it's impossible for me to tell if the later instances would have given me pause without the notified nerf but the first one, which is included in the change list, I did before the patch... so make of that what you will.

Whatever, the tl:dr is that so far all the instances have been very straightforward. Several of the bosses have had some kind of script with special attacks at various points in the battle but I've just ignored them and carried on tanking and spanking with no obvious problems. Twice, my mercenary died, leaving me without outside healing and cures but still I prevailed. As yet, I haven't died once.

It probably helps that quite a few of the bosses seem to think calling for assistance is their best option. That might work on some classes but my Berserker actually thrives on chaotic battles with large numbers of opponents, thanks to the number of abilities we get that are designed for exactly that situation. The more the merrier might be his motto. Or his battlecry.

More importantly, the expansion so far has been gloriously free of those infuriating developer's fall-backs of recent years, massive power drain and invulnerability. It makes things so much more enjoyable when you can rely on your massive power pool and regenerative abilities to keep up your relentless barrage of attacks and when the mob you're fighting doesn't magically switch off all damage every couple of minutes, forcing you to go break something or click a switch somewhere, just so you can get back to the scheduled mindless violence.

Well, it makes it much more enjoyable for me, anyway. I appreciate there may be other opinions. I'm just happy it's my preferred playstyle that's getting the love for once. I'm sure it won't be for long.

In the expectation of things getting tougher ahead, I took time out from hacking and slashing to get my Alchemist working on Combat Art upgrades. I didn't play my Berserker much in Visions of Vetrovia, the previous expansion, other than to get him up to the level cap. Consequently, almost his abilities between Levels 121 and 125 were the lowest quality grade available, the free "Apprentice" versions you get automatically, when you ding.

That sounds bad but in fact he wasn't really using any of them. He had the Expert or better versions from the expansion before that, when he was favored character on the account. EQII's spell progression means that higher quality versions of lower level spells are generally better than their lower quality, higher level equivalents, at least until you leapfrog more than one level-cap cycle. 

Indeed, because I've been fairly dilligent in utilizing the free, time-gated upgrade system, some of the Berserker's favored attacks are now so far upgraded it's going to take a couple more expansions before even the crafted Expert replacements take over. It's just one example of the ferociously complex, nested, sometimes contradictory network of interlocking progression mechanics that make kitting a character out for current content in EQII such a daunting prospect.

For the moment, I feel like I'm on top of things. I'm playing a character whose armor and abilities are there or thereabouts par for the new course. I realise that most players will be breezing through fights that take me some concentration and effort but I'm winning, not losing, and that's really all that matters. 

Better yet, it's not taking me too long. None of those attritional twenty minute boss fights, so frustratingly common a few years ago. Everything seems much better-judged towards helping the solo player to have fun, which I am.

That's good because the story this time is really interesting. There's a lot of lore and flavor text and I'm reading every word with relish. One stage of a quest today asked me to read a book, which turned out to be twenty pages long, huge by in-game standards. I could just have flipped the pages to get quest credit but I read the whole thing with increasing fascination. I've always found the legend of Takis'Hiz curious and compelling so I'm happy to learn more about the history behind it.

I'm also always glad to meet old friends so it was a pleasure to re-acquaint myself with Firiona Vie. She and my Berserker have met many times before and I was delighted to find she remembered him and their greatest adventure together, the Battle of Ages End. Granted, I didn't play my part until several years after the original raid but who's counting?

Redbeard at Parallel Context was talking about power creep in (mmo)rpgs and how characters who once struggled to protect a farm from bandits can end up fighting Gods and winning. It's the kind of thing that used to worry me, too, although not so much these days. 

My change of heart is mostly due to the successful efforts of writers at ArenaNet and Daybreak in contextualizing these changes, acknowledging the events that brought them about and integrating that history into an ongoing narrative. Sometimes it's done awkwardly but the fact that it's done at all helps a lot. 

When it's done well, as it very much has been in the Renewal of Ro storyline so far, it creates a warm, pleasurable sense of belonging, something like walking down the main street of your home town and passing the time of day with people you know, at least by sight or reputation.

Whether the writers can keep it up for the whole of the expansion remains to be seen. At least, given the foundation laid by both the writers and designers, I can say I'm looking forward to finding out.

Hey, Ray! Won't You Please Stay?

Just as I didn't plan on doing two consecutive music posts last week, I wasn't intending to post twice in a row about new content in EverQuest II but that was before I checked my email right after publishing yesterday's post on the Myth and Monoliths update and found I'd been invited to this year's Oceansfull Festival. 

It started yesterday and runs for another couple of weeks, finishing on August 24, 2022 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. As I type this my Bruiser is sitting on the edge of one of the platforms in the new dungeon, recovering from having been killed by the second boss. 

Yes, the second. He has indeed managed to kill the first, which puts him well ahead of his dismal performance in Fabled Kurns. It took him a long time, although nothing like as long as it took him to spawn and find the second boss, something that requires an insane amount of swimming up and down pipes, lighting braziers and using waterspouts and whirlpools to teleport around the zone.

 

There's a ferociously detailed walkthrough up on the wiki already. It gives some idea of the nit-picking complexity of the whole affair but you can't get the full, vertiginous effect just by reading two-dimensional text. For that you need to be corkscrewing up a column of water, trying to fend off guards and sharks while watching for the almost invisible exits.

I would say "Thank Prexus someone took the trouble to write such a comprehensive walkthrough" but it's actually not as much help as you might think. For a start, the map references don't really play all that well with the three-dimensional space and as it turns out there's no need to do most of it in the specific order listed. I didn't and all the portals still opened and the named spawned anyway.

In the end I just used tracking to find the guardians, once I'd killed the first and knew what they were called, then swam about almost randomly until I found the portals. Not efficient but it was quicker than trying to follow the bloody locs.

The first boss was annoying. The second boss is very annoying. She's actually the final boss by the walkthrough's reckoning, which might explain the extra level of difficulty. I guess I won't know for sure until I've found the two that come inbetween. 

 

At least they are doable. I know it's my inexperience with the mechanics that's the problem, not a straightforward gear lockout. I'd rather the walkthrough went into detail about how to kill the bosses instead of noting every last twist and turn of the path leading up to the fight. Trying to mouseover the tiny buff icons on the boss in the middle of a fight to see what immunities she has, while scrolling back the through the chat box to see what warnings she emoted isn't my idea of entertainment. I'd rather read the Cliff Notes version from someone who's done it already.

The drops from the first boss were good enough to make it worth the effort, though. 315 Resolve we're up to now on this solo, holiday stuff. That's an upgrade to most of what any of my characters are wearing. 

Aesthetically, the entire zone is gorgeous, although we have seen it before. It's from an earlier expansion, abeit slightly tweaked. The best thing about the whole instance has to be the manta ray at the beginning, the one you have to stand on and ride to the platform. If Daybreak don't make that into a mount and add it to the cash shop they must not like money.

There's also an interesting crafting opportunity you have to find for yourself. It is mentioned in the preamble to the walkthrough but not, as far as I can see, inside the game itself. I thought it was odd that there were fishing nodes inside a dungeon, even one in the Plane of Water, so I got out my rod and after a few casts I somehow managed to fish up a fishing rod, or rather the recipe to make one.

The Oceansfull Fishing Rod lets you breathe underwater, which is something my Bruiser currently needs to buy Totems of the Otter to do, so it's going to be well worth having. Three of the items he needs to make it can only be found in the instance itself. So far he hasn't seen any of them. I hope they don't drop off the bosses...

There's some other new stuff in this year's festival, including nine new items in the clam shells that spawn all around the coast of every major landmass at this time of year. I always enjoy prying those open. There's also a collection from previous years the Bruiser hasn't finished, as I discovered when he was doing the short, fun access quest to the new dungeon.

Given the way yesterday's session debrief got completely out of hand, I'm going to leave it at that. If you play EQII you'll certainly want to go check Oceansfull out for yourself and if you don't you've probably already heard more than you ever wanted to know about it.

I'm off to open some clams. Finger crossed I get something good, not just twenty different kinds of coral.

Like A Boss : Noah's Heart First Impressions #3

It finally happened! Late yesterday afternoon, not long after dinging 53, I finally lost a boss fight in Noah's Heart.  The momentous event occurred, co-incidentally but amusingly, mere seconds after I'd received the misleadingly-named "Undefeated" achievement, which merely asks that you kill five hundred mobs, not that you don't die while doing it.

It's an achievement that tells a story of its own: Noah's Heart is not primarily a game about killing things for the sake of it. Five hundred mobs in more than fifty levels is nothing by the standards of almost any mmorpg I've ever played. I would guess most games would see that kill count exceeded in the first ten levels. Many would match it in the first five.

The usual murder-hobo trope just hasn't played a major part in the game so far. There's plenty of hoboing, alright, but precious little murder as you travel from place to place almost entirely for the purposes of conversation. The talking almost literally never ends, while the killing almost literally never starts.

That's if you choose to progress almost solely by following the main story quest, as I have. In doing so, you travel a lot without seeing very much of the world. Every time you need to go somewhere further away than the other side of the street, a portal opens up to teleport you or you find yourself whirring across the sky in a balloon. About the only time I've seen open countryside has been when the plot required me to go somewhere I didn't have the portal for and the game was forced to take me there on horseback.

In my initial First Impressions post I mentioned I hadn't seen much in the way of the usual "Kill Ten Rats" kind of quests. That hasn't changed but I can now also confirm that for the first fifty or so levels, at least, I've not been tasked with many "Fetch" or "Escort" quests either. 

Such traditional quests do exist outside of the core questline, as I discovered when my monomaniacal obsession with the MSQ saw me racing ahead of the expected pace. Twice so far I've had to cool my heels for a while, doing favors for locals in small towns to gain xp until the number next to my name caught up with the level required by the next step in the quest journal.

Even so, I can't say with any confidence there are the kind of xp grind options you'd expect from a game that leaves you to find your own way for a few levels now and then. I did eventually force myself to go exploring, heading over the nearest hill to see what was on the other side, but although I had some adventures, I didn't see many monsters wandering around, doing their own thing, waiting to be popped for xp. I suspect you're supposed to do some of the repeatable instance content instead.

I did quite a bit of that as well. It seemed advisable. My brief experience suggests there isn't a lot roaming around the countryside other than a few small pockets of creatures, probably intended to be culled for crafting materials. I killed a few in passing just to see how tough they were and what they dropped. They either died in one hit or lasted a few seconds at most and all they had were hides, meat and the like. When I figure out how crafting works at least I'll know where to go for the mats.

Such anecdotal evidence isn't of much value, of course. The game tallies exploration stats for all the regions you visit and none of mine stand anywhere higher than 3%, so I wouldn't draw too many conclusions. The absence of aggressive wildlife, bandits, orcs, lizardmen and what-have-you does make the game feel very different from, well, just about any other mmorpg I've ever played, though. 

And not in a bad way, either. It's actually pretty nice just to be able to mosey around the countryside, enjoying the scenery and not getting jumped by the locals. Even other, recent, laid-back games I've enjoyed, like Genshin Impact and Chimeraland, perhaps the two titles Noah's Heart most obviously resembles, don't allow quite this degree of peaceful exploration.

Given the paucity of targets, a reasonable question to ask at this point might be "So how did you come to kill even five hundred mobs, then?" There's a very simple answer: MSQ combat instances. There are loads of them and the further along the storyline I get, the faster they seem to appear.

The pattern is very simple: chat to some NPCs to find out what their problem is; chat to some more NPCs for further details; chat to even more NPCs about what to do next; discover it's going to be a fight.

It's always a fight. That makes it sound more predictable than it really is and there are plenty of variations, but in essence that's the core gameplay loop as far as the MSQ goes so far.

The fights are even more on rails than the story. They always take place in an instanced location. You always teleport there from a window that pops up when you accept the mission. A glowing trail of light always leads you through the instance to the boss. Several groups of mobs always attempt to bar your way. 

Nothing ever happens in the instance other than fights and there's never any need, nor really any opportunity, to look around, much less explore. Every mission is on two timers, a short one for the bonus rewards and a longer one for general quest completion. As soon as you kill the boss you have thirty seconds to leave before the instance closes.

Each of the defending groups has something like four to six members and there are two to four groups before you reach the boss. I'd guess I was killing around a couple of dozen mobs per instance on average. 

All of the above is from memory and therefore subject to revision. I haven't been taking notes.

Until that fateful fight yesterday afternoon, almost none of the mobs, instances or bosses had given me much in the way of trouble at all, to the point where I'd managed to complete every last one of them inside the shorter timer. The regular mobs I just mowed through with no thought or tactics whatsoever; the bosses I occasionally had to take a very slight amount of care over, mostly because the later ones start to exhibit some tactical skills like teleporting or needing to be killed several times before they'd actually die.

I have, as yet, no real understanding of almost any of the elements of the game that contribute to combat efficiency. There's the usual multiplicity of systems relating to power and tactics, everything from team composition, including the choice of which Phantoms to bring for what skills and abilities against which specific mobs that might be vulnerable to them, to the individual skills of those Phantoms and the way they might form combos with one another, to the inevitable upgrades and enhancements for your and their armor and weapons. 

There's a lot more to consider. I've just listed the really basic stuff and I haven't begun to come terms even with that. I've been bumbling along, sticking to the same team (The first four Phantoms I happened to acquire.), letting them level up alongside me as they can. I've spent such development points as I've received pretty much at random and equipped whatever drops purely on the say-so of the automatic gear comparison widget that pops up when you loot anything it sees as an upgrade.

It would be more than fair to say I've done very little to improve my skills, knowledge or tactics at any point since I started playing and that my fighting technique consists of little more than frenetic button-mashing. And yet, in fifty-three levels, I have lost just that one fight and I really should have won that, too.

I knew I was taking a risk when I went in. The bosses, as I said, have been getting tougher but the real issue has been my combat rating compared to that of the instances. There's a very clear, numerical value shown on the pop-up for each mission, letting you know how close to par you are and I've been meticulous in not trying to fight above my weight, even if it's meant putting off an instance for a while until I've done a few other things to boost my numbers. It's about the only serious prep I have done.

Yesterday I got cocky. There was something like a four-thousand point difference in ranking between my team and the instance they were attempting. Not in their favor, obviously. I should have waited but I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a go.

It was a proper fight, probably the only one I've had so far. It went on for nearly ten minutes. More than once things looked rough but I kept believing we were going to pull through. Only the damn boss would not die. 

I lost count but I'm minded to say that by the time he finally got the better of me, he himself had come back from the dead three times. It's a mechanic I personally detest. I'd far rather a boss took three times as long to kill than had three health bars. You kill them, you're done, you know? Or I am, anyway.

Even with everyone down, I should still have been able to kill the boss for the purposes of the mission because there's a free in-instance rez that brings you back at full health, while leaving the boss on whatever percentage he was when you died. I can't give chapter and verse on the exact mechanics because, well, I only saw it that once. I'd never died before.

Given my opponents repeated resurrections I felt entirely justified in using one of my own. The problem was it didn't work. I ran into a bug! It was the first I'd seen in the game and showed up at the worst possible time.

The resurrection itself went perfectly except for one thing: when I reappeared I found myself impaled on the scenery. I could see the boss on the other side of the room but he was out of aggro range and none of my abilities could reach him. I wriggled about every which way but I couldn't get loose. It was frustrating, I'll tell you that for nothing.

The fight had gone on so long, there were only a couple of minutes on the clock when my team went down and rezzing doesn't reset the timer. I flopped around while the timer ticked down to zero. Then the instance kicked me out.

Bummer! Now I have to do it all again, something else I really hate. I've learned my lesson, though. Don't get overconfident. Yes, it's been a doddle up to now but as I said last time, it's really just been an extended tutorial. I think that part might finally be coming to an end. I'm rapidly approaching the point where the things I do begin to matter.

Whether that's going to dampen my enthusiasm we'll have to wait to find out. I'm going to have to start figuring out how some of these systems work and applying that knowledge to building a more effective team. I should probably also not try to fight outside my weight class.

One thing I can say for certain is that the combat in Noah's Heart is a lot more to my taste than in the otherwise very similar Genshin Impact. Not enjoying the fights was the main reason I drifted away from that game. I never felt I had much chance of "getting good" there. 

In Noah's Heart, becoming at least competent at combat does seem like it might be a theoretical possibility. It depends on whether I want to make the effort. And also, I guess, on how the monetization works. It is a Gacha game, after all. 

I don't propose to start spending real money on Noah's Heart so I just hope the developers want a lot of casuals running around, making the place look busy for the paying customers. I imagine they do. After all, there's no point flaunting your wealth if there's no-one poorer than you to see you doing it, is there?

If so, I'll be more than happy to sit on a bench for a while, mumbling "Rhubarb rhubarb" at the whales as they swim by in their finery. I think I'd be pretty good at that.

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.

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.