A Hunting We Will Go or Be Vewy, Vewy, Quiet - I'm Hunting Pandas!

Somewhat to my surprise, I was at my PC at exactly six o' clock yesterday evening, when the timer ticked down to zero for the start of World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. I logged in, partly expecting a queue of some kind, but there was none. It was straight to character select and the option to make a "Timerunner", which is what Blizzard has chosen to call participants in this glorious experiment.

Skipping ahead a step, the whole affair is typically garlanded with unnecessary trimmings. When I arrived in the world, I found myself immediately engaged in some kind of overly complicated, hard-to-follow narrative, involving dragons and time-portals and the inevitable ill-defined existential threat to natural order.

It would have been quite confusing enough on its own but since I was thrown into the middle of it all with what seemed like hundreds of other players, half of them riding mounts the size of busses (I'm surprised no-one was driving an actual bus...) it was positively over-whelming. 

This not being my first - or probably my fifty-first - server launch, I was able to handle it but I would like to go back and start over when things have quietened down, just to see if any of it actually makes any kind of sense. I tend to doubt it.

Going back to character creation, I'd forgotten just how basic a function it is in WoW. I'm so used to spending half an hour just trying to get my eyebrows right, it came as a bit of a shock to realize there was next to nothing for me to do.

Once you've set the trifecta - race, gender, class - there are just eight appearance settings you need to consider and half of those are colors. Given the paucity of options on offer it seems bizarre that "Eyesight" made the cut. Also, what the hell do they mean by "Eyesight", anyway?

In WoW's Character Creation, "Eyesight" means whether you you're blind in one eye, both or neither. I am honestly not sure whether this is Blizzard attempting to be culturally sensitive by offering a disability option or the exact opposite.

I'm assuming that blindness in the game is purely cosmetic, which certainly points towards the latter. If giving your character cataracts actually does impact gameplay, then I take my hat off to whoever came up with the idea. It would be quite radical.

I decided not to risk it. I felt I'd already taken enough of a cultural back-step by making my character blonde. 

Once I was in the game, everything proceeded smoothly. Very smoothly for a new server. At least at first. After about half an hour or so the disconnects began and eventually drove me out but until then, everything was fine.

By then I'd spent around an hour in the Remix, some of it on the Timeless Isle, which is where everything begins, the rest in the starting area of the Pandaria expansion, the name of which escapes me, even though I've been there twice this month already.

Last time I was playing a Goblin for the Horde. This time I was playing a Gnome for the Alliance. Both times I was playing a Hunter.

I was thinking about it as I ran around two-shotting mobs with my bow: the WoW Hunter has to be one of my all-time favorite MMORPG classes. I know it has something of a bad reputation but for all the right reasons. 

Hunters are self-sufficient to an infuriating degree. They can manage pretty well on their own in a genre where team-play is often deemed essential. Even more annoyingly, when played well, they can fit into a group with alarming efficiency. Playing a Hunter is often considered EZ-Mode and not without good reason. If what you're looking for out of your gameplay is relaxation and control, you could do a lot worse.

Given that WoW took a huge amount of inspiration from EverQuest and that many of the original design team had played EQ, I can't help feeling one of the reasons the Hunter is so good is that the Ranger in EQ was so bad.  

Rangers in early EverQuest were deeply disappointing, weak in almost all regards. They got beefed up eventually but for years they were, at best, comedy relief. The WoW Hunter looks like someone asked the EQ Ranger Class Lead for a list of improvements that would make the class worth playing and then doubled down on all of them.

I didn't think about it at the time but it was probably quite important that I pick a class and race I'm comfortable with for this experiment. I'm feeling more and more inclined to re-sub for a month or two while the Remix goes on and if I do, it's not impossible this could end up being my highest character. 

It is apparently possible to level all the way to the cap in the event. When it's over, Timerunners will be converted to regular characters on your regular server, or wherever you made them, if you picked somewhere else. My current highest character on Live is 50 so he may well get overtaken if I decide to take this thing even half-seriously.

From what I've seen so far, I just might. Pandaria is a very enjoyable expansion. I've already played through a lot of it and I remember it quite fondly, which is more than I can say of several others. I certainly wouldn't mind pottering through it again, especially on fast-forward.

That said, I didn't find the xp rate that invigorating yesterday. I was expecting something a bit faster. As I said, I did two levels in about an hour, which is probably what I'd have guessed I would have gotten in the regular game at the same point.

Then again, there is all that Level Squish nonsense. I may be thinking of how many levels I used to get in an hour, back when there were twice as many. It's hard to keep track.

Other than the leveling speed, there's also the loot. A big deal has been made of the cosmetics but that doesn't mean much to me. Not because I'm not into playing dolly dress-up with my characters. As multiple posts on this blog can attest, I very much am. No, the problem is that I think most WoW characters look pretty bad, whatever they're wearing.

When I see people proudly sharing screenshots of their best-dressed characters I can rarely see what it is they think they're cerebrating. WoW has a particular aesthetic that definitely works but it does not shine in close-ups. I think my characters in almost any other MMORPG look better than even my better-dressed Azerothians.

I do like the new loot, though. The mobs drop little chests that give Remix-specific loot and it's fun to open them. I also like the gem system, which once again reminds me very specifically of Augments and Adornments in the two EQs. They seem like they'll be fun to play around with, not least because the mechanic for slotting and unslotting them is very straightforward.

I can't say the same about the weirdly overwrought system for scrapping items you don't want and turning them into Bronze, the Remix currency. To do that you have to spawn a portal in the world, then open it and drag and drop your items inside. It's very tactile and fun at first but I'm not sure how entertaining it'll be when you have to do it for the thousandth time.

All in all, though, I thought it was a promising start. I'm quite keen to get back and dig into it a bit more. I would think that by the time I hit Level 20, the kick-out point for freeloaders, I should have a pretty clear idea whether I want to subscribe for a month. 

If not, I can always just make another character and try again. It'll be a Warlock, I expect. If it's not a Hunter, it usually is.

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...

Good Things Come To Those Who Wait. No, Really. They Do! Don't Walk Away!

Overseer progression in EverQuest II is a painstaking and time-consuming affair, which I'm guessing is why there are so many offhand comments on the forums about how tedious and/or pointless the feature is. It's also only of sporadic benefit to the more committed players, by which I really mean anyone playing much above solo difficulty. I very much doubt Heroic II Dungeon players would be interested in anything that drops from an Overseer reward chest, let alone raiders. Even H1 players probably find the pickings slim.

For a solo player, things don't look great at the start, either, but the trick is to keep going anyway. At the top end, gear drops from Overseer missions are on a par with drops from solo instance bosses, at least, and they're a lot easier and quicker to get, especially if you have a stable of characters to dress.

It's possible to see some of that in advance. EQII, like Guild Wars 2, has a facility whereby you can preview the potential contents of reward chests. I believe there was some legal reason this was added so as to remove any hint of gambling from the chests you can buy from the stores for cash money but for some reason it was extended to in-game loot containers as well, a change about which I have somewhat mixed feelings. 

On occasion it can be useful to know all of the possible drops from a reward chest but it does mitigate strongly against the sense of elation that an unexpectedly good drop can bring. The option is very useful, however, in determining just how the progression ladder for Overseer works, something that's anything but intuitive. 

I really enjoy the Overseer system but the way it works can be quite oblique. It occured to me it might be an idea to write a detailed guide on the subject, something for which there's obviously a demand. "Overseer" is currently one of the five top-trending searches on the EQII wiki. People clearly want to know more.

Unfortunately, wiki-users are likely to be disappointed if, like me, they're trying to find out more about the new Season 4 rewards or mechanics. Although there's a very extensive Overseer page, it has yet to be updated beyond the end of Season 3. I'd like to be able to do something about that but having thought about it I realize I have nowhere near enough understanding or experience of the changes either to write my own guide or to edit the wiki, always assuming I could figure out how to do it. I've never actually edited a wiki. Maybe I should.

Still, I thought it might be useful to lay out a few of the basics, as much for my own reference as anything else. I've been diligently doing my missions every day since the update and some progress has been made. Not nearly as much as I'd like but at least I think I can begin to see the shape of things now.

As far as I can tell, each tier of rewards contains the seeds for the next. At the beginning of a new season you get a pair of the shortest, lowest-quality missions, blue-colored Treasured missions that take an hour to complete and have a half-hour cooldown before you can take them again. The loot for those is generally about the same as you'd get doing solo quests in the Signature questline.

These missions have the chance to drop alot of other utility items, boosts and so on but what you're really after at this point are some of the more than twenty further missions. These range from more blue, sixty-minuters to longer blues and even longer yellow "Legendary" missions. I'm vague on the exact numbers and details because, while you can examine the contents of the basic reward chests from the Overseer menu at any time, the only chance you get to look at what's in the more desirable "Bonus" chests is when one pops up as an actual reward for a mission you've completed .

As I write this I have a screenshot of the Bonus chest from a Legendary mission to refer to but I haven't had the chance to snap a picture of the inventory of a Treasured Bonus chest. Should have thought of that before I started, really. As you can see I didn't do my homework.

Leaving the exact provenance of the missions aside, what you're trying to do at this stage is to upgrade your mission options as much as possible. While you have only Treasured missions, the best you can hope for is to add some Legendaries. It can be a slow process. To date I've managed to acquire just two.

The new season began a couple of weeks ago and so far I have a total of eight missions: three Treasured (one-hour), three Treasured (ninety minutes) and two Legendary (two and a half hours). That allows me to do the full ten missions per day simply by taking them all first thing in the morning and then re-taking two of the blue ones when I collect the yellows, which is a big improvement over having to keep logging in every couple of hours to recycle the few blue ones I started with but still isn't really getting me where I want to be.

While just banging out all eight missions then doing two more blues on re-pop may be convenient, it isn't the best use of resources. The blue missions can only give me more blues or yellows and what I really want are some purple "Fabled" missions or better yet, some green "Celestials". I still need to keep coming back to retake the two yellow missions when the cooldown fades.

Or at least I think I do. It's at at this point that I realise I can't say with any certainty what the yellow missions do offer. I'm assuming yellows can give purples and purples can give greens but I don't know that for a fact. Since facts are kind of the important part of this post and since I just realised that "looking inside the box" trick doesn't work for missions on cooldown, which both of my Legendary missions are right now, what say we reconvene in two hours from now, when they're up again?

Intermission. Ice creams are on sale in the lobby.

Okay, everyone back in their seats? Good. Then let's see what we've got.

That was worth waiting for. It doesn't give you the specific quality-rating for the missions but you can tell by the number of agents required that some are going to be Fabled and some Celestial. The rest are Legendary. No Treasured.

There are also a bunch of new agents, ranging upward into the Celestial category. Higher-level agents don't perform better per se. They have more talents, meaning you can find more missions for them and also there's a chance that they could fulfil more than one of the talent requirements for a given mission all on their own. They might even have one of the very rare talents you hardly ever see.

And finally there are the new Overseer Items. I read about these in the update notes, where they only got a passing mention, but now I can see they're familiar iconic items from the game. The conceit is that you can equip your agents with these powerful items when you send them out on missions although I suspect what actually happens is that you slot the item in one of the agent slots. Probably more of a flavor than a mechanic.

Of course, first you have to get lucky with the rng. There are a very large number of other possible rewards in the chest, including a lot of armor. It's the same level gear as in the blue chests, there's just a lot more of it. The better stuff comes from the bonus chests.

The good thing is, the luckier you are, the luckier you're going to get. Every time you do get a better mission it makes it more likely you'll get another. I'm sure someone could do the math but you don't need to math know that increasing the quality of the input will increase the quality of the output. 

That's the key to a successful Overseer career: persistence. At the start it can be very slow going indeed. And if you don't roll well the start can drag on. As I said, I've been doing it for two weeks and so far I've only managed to get two yellow missions. I'm not yet at the point where anything that's a real upgrade is dropping. It would be easy to decide not to bother any more.

From my experience of the last two seasons I can say that that will change and when it does, after a while, it will start to feel like a snowball rolling downhill. The new missions begin to build up until you're filling all ten daily slots with Legendary and Fabled. The chance for bonus chests goes up the better quality the mission is so that it becomes more likely you'll get one than you won't.

If you keep at it, there's a glorious time when almost every day brings some kind of upgrade for your main character or your favorite alts. Then you reach the far side of the plateau and it all starts to get a bit repetitive, with most of the drops being duplicates or things you don't need. You'll have enough potions to last you years. 

You hang on, though, for the few choice pieces you still want until eventually it all starts to feel like more effort than it's worth and you drift away.

So far, for me, each season has taken several months to run through that cycle. It seems like a pretty well-judged progression and drop rate to me but then I find the process itself enjoyable and I'm in absolutely no hurry. I guess if all you wanted was the rewards you might get somewhat ticked off with how long it all takes and how little direct control you have over the results.

Then again, what else have you got to do with your time? You're playing an mmorpg, aren't you?

If I Had A Hammer

It's relatively rare for me to crave any specific item in an mmorpg. As a rule, I'm usually content to make do with whatever comes to hand. It makes me largely immune, or at least strongly resistant, to those kinds of temptations and obsessions that lead players to spend more time or money than they feel comfortable with as they try to get that one specific object of desire.

Back when the genre was young, camping rare spawns for rarer drops was something people both did and complained about doing with equal fervor. I was mostly happy to leave them to it. I had a rough rule of three, meaning if I was interested in something I'd give it three tries before crossing it off my list. And that was only if it was reasonably easy to camp to begin with.

Similarly, I've never been much of a one for long drawn-out quests. If you can't get it finished in one session, two or three hours tops, is it really a good use of your time? If it's entertaining or amusing or fun, then yes, of course, carry on as long as that stays true, but if it's a chore and a pain then why bother? Gaming is supposed to be a pleasure not a punishment, after all.

The advent of token systems, whereby you do more routine, regular activities, such as killing mobs or completing tasks in order to earn credit with NPC vendors willing to sell you the kind of thing boss mobs might drop, did little to change my mind. I first came across such a mechanism in Dark Age of Camelot's Darkness Falls dungeon, where it was widely recieved with rapture and wonder. I was very sniffy about it. If I'd wanted to go shopping, well I'd be down at the mall, wouldn't I, not sitting at home playing an mmorpg.

In time, of course, the mall came to me. Cash shops became an established part of almost every game, whether or not you had to buy a subscription. Are there any mmorpgs left, Free to Play, Buy to Play, Freemium or Sub, that don't have any kind of cash shop at all? I can't immediately think of any.

The advent of real money stores inside games removed one of my two main objections: time. I couldn't say any longer that I wasn't prepared to spend hours and hours doing something I didn't really want to do just to get a pretty bauble or a useful tool. It only takes a few seconds to get a credit card out of your wallet and any time spent doing things I'd rather not have been doing had already long since been accounted for. I call it "going to work".

One of the biggest impacts of the introduction of cash shops to the hobby was to make it clear to me just how very low a value I put on imaginary objects. I routinely spend the same small amounts of money in real life on pointless, trivial, transitory pleasures that I would never contemplate spending in games. 

It turns out I don't want most virtual stuff at virtually any price... unless it's being given away "free", of course, at which point, apparently, I'll jump through as many hoops as you care to hold in front of me. But that's a different post altogether and anyway, I'm not here to psycho-analyze myself, attractive a proposition as that may be.

No, I'm here to say that for all my professed lack of interest, motivation and enthusiasm for both the methods and the rewards, there are exceptions. Sometimes I do see something I absolutely must have. To be clear, even then it also needs to be something I feel I can get without doing anything I positively dislike doing or spending money I feel is disproportionate to the enjoyment I'm likely to receive. But there are things I'm prepared to make more of an effort than usual to lay my hands on.

A few days ago, pretty much by chance, I happened across one such in Guild Wars 2 and it was in the most unlikely place: Super Adventure Box.

 

I'm not much of a fan of SAB. Belghast posted about the 8-bit emulation embedded in a 3D mmorpg the other day, saying "as much as I thought I would enjoy it… I am not really feeling it", which is not too far from how the event affects me, when it rolls around each year. It's extremely impressive that someone was able to build this other game inside GW2 and I have had some fun playing around with it but it's not really what I came to mmorpgs in general or GW2 in particular to do.

There was a fair chance I might not have gone to Rata Sum to see what was happening at all this year. Not much changes in SAB year to year and even if it does I can't usually see it. In all the time the event's been running I've never got further than the end of World One, Zone Three and I've never beaten the final World One boss, King Toad. I Gave up trying long ago.

I can look at the stock on the vendors, though. That's something I can manage. And as I said, although I usually give most things a pass, once in a while I'll spot something that really makes me feel the quickening of desire.

Nothing like that happened when I scrolled through the goods on the regular vendors. I'm not all that keen on the look of most Super Adventure Box gear and anyway I have a bunch of unopened SAB weapons boxes in the bank from the World vs World SAB Reward track. 

I did want the boom box when it appeared years ago, enough to make a considerable effort to get the necessary baubles to buy it, but even then I've always been happy with the basic model. It's not like I want to be able to play the tunes for the pleasure of listening to them. So long as I can see my character running around like an extra in a 1970s Blaxploitation movie, I'm good.

This year, though, there was a new vendor. A kodan, no less. Why a seven foot tall talking bear would be in Rata Sum at all, let alone hanging out next to Moto and his magic box, beats me and the spurious rationale the bear offers is scarcely convincing. Nevertheless, there he is, selling three weapons he claims to have crafted.

How a kodan came to craft weapons that look like rejected prototypes from some illegal, underground lab staffed by renegade Canthan bot-makers and Inquest weaponsmiths is something we'd probably best leave to the official reports. I suspect the bear is either lying or deranged, more likely the latter since derangement seems to be an ethnic Kodan trait.

Whatever the provenance, all three weapons are above average in terms of aesthetic desirability and one, the Hammer, is among the best I've seen in the game, ever. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it, even though I don't have a single character that regularly uses a hammer. Always providing it wasn't going to feel too much like hard work to get it, obviously.

The simple way to get the weapons is to buy them from the bear. They cost thirty Bauble Bubbles and four gold each. Someone who's good at SAB could get thirty BBs in a couple of days just by running the event as normal. Even I can get five or six a day at minimal effort. I already had seven in the bank from last year and just a couple of sessions after I decided to get the hammer I have sixteen.

I also have the hammer. 

 

I didn't buy it. I got it as a drop. If you talk to the kodan he explains that's a possibility but I learned it from Mrs Bhagpuss. I linked her the hammer in guild chat when I discovered it and she said "Oh, yes, I've got that one". 

After a bit of to and fro about how she'd come by it, during which she first thought it had been from the WvW SAB track and then corrected herself to say it was a drop in WvW, from a tower boss, we finally worked out it came from a Super Loot Bag, the reward for doing one of the new SAB achievements. It's all in the patch notes, which, unusually, I had neglected to read in full.

That achievement gives three bags per day, one for each of the first three Champion mobs you kill anywhere in Tyria. All tower and keep supervisors in WvW are Champions, which is how Mrs Bhagpuss came to get hers. Some World Bosses also count. I got one from the Shaman at the Maw and three from the pre-event at Jungle Wurm, for example.

Regular champions, of which there are probably hundreds, work just as well. I've been soloing the Champion Troll in Frostgorge for one of my daily drops, when I haven't had the patience to wait for the Wurm.

The Retro-Forged Weapon Chest is a rare drop from the bags but not that rare. I got one on my third day of trying. Of course it was on the wrong account but still. 

And I do have a character on that account who can and quite possibly should use it. He's one of my Engineers and I took the trouble to spend the points to make him into a Scrapper back in Heart of Thorns, meaning he can wield a hammer. He never goes anywhere or does anything but he could always start.

He also has a well-defined, pirate-themed look that I designed for him many years ago. A glitching, technicolor magitech hammer doesn't entirely go with it. I may have to give him a full makeover because the hammer is that good. It really is.

The character I want it for is my Elementalist. The new End of Dragons elite specialization for her class is the Catalyst and the new weapon that goes with that class is the hammer. 

I'm not proposing to play her as a catalyst, heavens no! She's a staff Tempest and that's the way she's staying. The thing is, Elementalists got a second weapon slot a few years back, having been a class that didn't have one, and I have never used it. The universe is just conspiring to put a hammer in her hand. That hammer.

I'll keep killing the champions because I would anyway. If the box drops from the achievement, all well and good. If not, a couple of SAB runs each day for a few days should see me right with the bear.

My Ele will have that hammer. And when she does she will smite the daylights out of every creature that looks at her funny. Just to make the colors fly.

The Method In Miragul's Madness

What with Chimeraland, Lost Ark and now Guild Wars 2's End of Dragons, poor old EverQuest II has had to take something of a back seat these last few weeks. Visions of Vetrovia, EQII's eighteenth expansion, launched at the beginning of December and I had been trucking along quite nicely there until the New Year but once I fell off the wagon I found it surprisingly hard to clamber back on board.

Norrath being Norrath, of course, there's always something going on. I missed almost all of Erolisi Day back in February. I didn't do the Public Quest in Commonlands even once and it's one of my favorites. I think that might be the first year I've missed it completely since it began.

I only lasted a couple of sessions on Kael Drakkel, the new Lore and Legend server. It was kind of fun, being able to go anywhere and do anything, but even after I'd stopped and thought about it for a while, I really couldn't see the point. 

The whole idea revolves around being able to do all the quests and see all the content without having to worry about leveling up but it seems to me you can already do that far more easily simply by taking a high level character on a Live server back through all the old content that interests you, either mentored down or just letting everything go grey. If all you want is the lore and the story, I don't begin to understand the argument that you have to be "at level" or that it needs to be "challenging". Surely, it's far easier to pay attention and follow the plot when all the mobs are either non-agro or one-shot kills. 

As for the supposed L&L gear ladder, where all named mobs drop a chest with an upgrade and there are several tiers of that to work through, it seems exciting until you start to ask yourself why you even need better gear. You can already solo everything very comfortably in the gear they give you when you make a character. If upgrades don't open the door to new content, what are they for?

It's an interesting existential question that I might return to one day but for now I've put Kael Drakkel on indefite hiatus. I found a lot more purpose in the current Chronoportal event, along with a good deal more "challenge" than I was expecting.

In a busy gaming season like this has been, I'd normally have skipped the Chronoportal Phenomenon. It's a very good event with much to recommend it but I've done it all before, more than once. For some reason, though, I found myself looking at the official announcement, where I noticed Darkpaw had added something new for this year's EQ Anniversary celebration.

As well as the obligatory new vendor items, there was a new quest, Beyond the Shimmering Portal, and a new dungeon, Miragul's Madness. That was enough to tempt me back. I never miss a new holiday quest. They're usually light, fluffy, easy and fun. 

Since both the quest and the dungeon were attached to the Chronoportal event, I assumed by "dungeon" they meant one of the instances in which EQII players get to revisit great moments from the elder game's past. Those can be quite intense at level but mentored down they're relaxing holiday entertainment.

I logged in my Berserker, pretty much out of force of habit. He's been my main character for so long I'd forgotten he's no longer quite at the top of the tree. It's my Bruiser who's been doing most of the VoV content so far so he's the one with the best gear right now.

Still, that wasn't going to matter in what I fully expected to be a semi-humorous, light-hearted holiday romp. I took the instant travel option to Commonlands and stepped through the portal into the Chronoweave, the limbo dimension where all the time portals stand neatly beside one another for your time-travelling convenience.  

I spoke to the guy with the feather over his head and picked up the quest, which sent me, as expected, into the new dungeon. And that was about the last thing that did go the way I thought it would.

In retrospect, I suppose the fact that the new dungeon comes with both solo and heroic versions should have given me a clue. I don't think that's the case with the rest of the instances, all of which are technically Heroic content but which scale using the Mentor system, meaning they're eminently soloable for anyone a few levels above the nominal level of the zone.

Miragul's Madness is not one of those. It's a fully-fledged, current end-game dungeon. All the mobs are Heroic Level 127-128s and the solo version uses the same upscaling as the ones in the latest expansion. As EQ2i warns you, loudly, right at the top of the walkthrough, "Content in the SOLO zone is level 127 ^^^ heroic and extremely difficult, if not impossible, at level 120 wearing Visions of Vetrovia box gear. It cannot be accomplished wearing pre-VoV gear." 

Oh, well. In for a penny...

Having glanced at the wiki before I started, I was somewhat apprehensive on the first pull. My berserker was 125 with much of his gear upgraded from the free starting kit but the reason I'd swapped from him to the Bruiser was because the Berserker hadn't been having the easiest time of it in Vetrovia's instanced content.

Things went well enough in the first room. Plinking away with the bow, the pulls were manageable. My 'zerker and his trusty Shissar merc had no trouble chopping them down. As they killed, I looked around the room. Impressive. The colors were tasteful, the lighting subtle, the architecture coherent and cool. There were some nice little details and the general feeling was one of class. The screenshots don't really do it justice. 

It also became apparent early on that this dungeon was bigger than I'd expected. A lot bigger. I began by killing everything and waiting to see what happened. The format of most holiday instances is fairly predictable: kill a bunch of mobs then maybe a mini-boss to open a new area, rinse, repeat until finished. 

The main difference between those kinds of knockabout escapades and a proper dungeon is mostly the Bosses. In a holiday instance bosses are generally tank-and-spank pushovers with no real tricks. In a real dungeon every Boss comes with about a gazillion hit points and a bunch of really annoying scripts.

Miragul's Madness is a real dungeon. I had to read the walkthrough carefully before every Boss fight and even then I mostly got it wrong first time. How I would have managed on my own doesn't bear thinking about. 

There are a lot of bosses, too. Seven you have to do plus a bonus one you can ignore. Or, in my case, chase futilely across the entire dungeon in a humiliating slow-motion crawl as you discover your DPS is nowhere remotely close to what you'd need to stop a fleeing snail from making its O.J. Simpson-style getaway with the loot from the last boss, the one you actually did kill.

All of the bosses were hard work with the possible exception of Takaboom and Hakapow, a couple of flying monkeys.The walkthrough dismisses them, accurately enough, with a simple two word tactical briefing: "straight fight".It was, inevitably, my favorite, mostly because I didn't have to to think about anything, just keep hitting.

The rest of them required a lot more attention than that. For a holiday event, the sheer amount of effort, not to say risk, involved would be orders of magnitude out of proportion to the quest rewards, a choice of a couple of housing items. Fortunately, the drops from each Boss more than make up for it.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I opened the first chest to find a piece of 295 Resolve gear inside. While that's nothing special, it is on a par with what drops from Bosses in solo instances in the expansion and significantly better than Sig line quest rewards. When I got to the final Boss, something that took me two sessions over a couple of days, his drops were even better at 300 Resolve.

All in all I think I spent about four hours there. It was a significant effort but it felt worth it. Some of the bosses were more than a little annoying (Looking at you, Edrigen.) but most of them were fun in a mildly masochistic sort of way. I'd be telling a very different story if I hadn't had a walkthrough to follow but since I did I'm not complaining.

Although there's clearly some decent solo gear to be had in Miragul's Madness, I wouldn't go back for another run for a while. I enjoyed it but I don't want to do it again right now. 

What I'm not entirely clear about is whether I'll have the chance to come back later. If the dungeon is indeed tied to the Chronoportal event then it's only going to be sticking around for a couple of weeks. The event ends on 16 March.

Miragul's Madness is a very well-designed, fully fleshed-out dungeon. I thought it was better than some of the expansion instances. It does seem like an awful lot of work for something that's only going to be available for two weeks a year.

Maybe there are plans to keep it in play after the event goes away. I hope so. While I wouldn't want to go through it all while it's still fresh in my mind, I might very well fancy another trip in a few weeks with my Bruiser or my Necro. Whether it stays or goes, though, it's an impressive piece of content that bodes well for future updates.

The EQII Roadmap tells us to expect more new dungeons in Game Update 119, due next month. Let's hope this sets the benchmark.

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.