I Go Shopping

In what could all too easily be seen as some kind of excercise in wilful self-parody following this recent post, touching heavily as it did on my inability or unwillingness either to make or follow plans, this morning I sat down at my PC fully intending to play Black Desert, only to find myself spending nearly three hours shopping for clothes in EverQuest instead. 

All I meant to do was pick up the Overseer rewards I'd failed to collect the evening before because I got wrapped up in Guild Wars 2's Lunar Festival. First doing it then writing about it. All I meant to do in EQ was grab the loot, set the new missions and log out. Five minutes, tops.

Only it just so happened that when I logged in I spotted there were well over two hundred people trading in the Bazaar. Of late, numbers have been down, sometimes as low as a hundred and fifty. I haven't seen the count go over two hundred since well before Christmas. 

I don't really know why it's been quiet on the trading floor but I suspect it may be because when a new expansion comes out people have better things to do than afk in the Bazaar. Not everyone has an alternate account set up just to trade and people want to get out there and play the new content. Also expansions create shake-ups and the market takes a while to adjust. Maybe some people just prefer to let prices settle before jumping in. Who knows?

Whatever the reason, it seemed like a good time to go shopping. The ever-growing pile of platinum I've been adding to since autumn has been burning a hole in my pocket for weeks and there's always the prospect of bargains when an expansion starts to shake out.

In EverQuest, of course, nothing's ever that simple. What might have been a few minutes' browsing and buying turned into a full morning of research. It very nearly turned into an epic excursion into the frozen wastes of Velious, the new, high-level one where a solo player even at the level cap most likely has a life expectancy measured in microseconds.

I wouldn't know from experience just how dangerous it might have been. I have, as yet, managed to avoid finding out for myself. The furthest I've ventured is the safe camp at the entrance to 2019's Torment of Velious. For a while there this morning it seemed like there was a chance I might be making the trek across Eastern Wastes to Crystal Caverns but fortunately sanity prevailed. 

To cut a very long and convoluted story short, after about an hour or so of research I was able to establish that:

1. My unsubscribed Magician can wear Torment of Velious Tier One armor
2. ToV T1 armor patterns are tradeable
3. They're cheap to buy in the Bazaar right now
4. The items you need to combine inside them to make the finished armor can be bought from NPCs
5. One of the items is for sale in Plane of Knowledge
6. The other is for sale in Crystal Caverns
7. That item is also tradeable
   
8. A couple of enterprising players have thought to buy up a bunch of said vendor-sold items in Crystal Caverns and put them up for sale in the Bazaar
9. And they haven't gouged the price much at all.

I'm aware that some players in every game see the re-selling of vendor-sold items via the broker or auction house as tantamount to explotation. I've even know developers to try to put a stop to it. I have always found that to be a very short-sighted view. 

Yes, it can be a scam or a rip-off, paricularly when the price is jacked up by orders of magnitude or the items are extremely easy to find on vendors. In many games, though, the saving in time, effort and especially risk that re-selling provides fully justifies the practice. Far from being vilified as exploitation it ought to be welcomed as a form of community service.

 

In this case one of the vendors was re-selling the 25k item for 30k, a mark-up I was more than willing to pay for the convenience of not having to run half-way across Norrath. Not to mention the inevitable painful and humiliating series of deaths that often come with breaking trail in any new high-level zone.

I scooped up enough to make a full set of visible armor. Or I would have if I could have counted up to eight. Then I made the armor. Or I would have if I'd had a spare inventory space for the conatainer. What with having to go back to the first trader three times, then to five different traders for the best-priced patterns, then to yet another because one guy actually repriced the pattern I was going to buy as I was standing in front of him, then having to log in my own trader to swap out all the trade goods and materals my Mage was carrying to make space for the combines, the whole thing took quite a while.

It was worth it. When I was done not only had the Magician's stats taken a significant step up but for the first time in as long as I can remember she was looking pretty much how I wanted her to look. For years she was stuck with a sickly green outfit that looked like a mildewed bathrobe. This last year she's been looking a lot better in red and I've been happy with that but I prefer the appearance of the Flameweaver set. It's deliciously ironic to look icy cool when you're setting the world on fire.

I didn't stop there, either. I went through every non-visible slot and checked to see if there was anything better available. I found upgrades for several slots including possibly the most important and hardest to come by of all for a Magician, an earring with the Enhanced Minion focus.

 

That alone set me back half a million platinum but it was very well worth it. The Mage's existing earring had Enhanced Minion XVIII, too low to affect the pets she can summon at 115. The new one, the only tradeable, non-prestige upgrade currently available (I checked) is EM XXI. It'll work on her current pets and also, with diminishing effects, on the first few she gets in the next expansion that comes with a level cap increase. I sincerely hope whoever's in charge of itemization will throw her another bone after that.

The only problem is the pet she has right now is so ludicrously overpowered from dozens of raid-level buffs it received when we were sitting in the Guild Lobby for weeks soaking up MGBs that any new pet she summons will be feeble by comparison, even if it's higher level. Before she goes hunting with it she'll need to spend a couple of days afk in the Pile to buff it up.

Which isn't going to be a problem because she's not going hunting any time soon. It's entirely possible she might not go hunting at all until the level cap changes because why would she? She's not going to get any upgrades that way and she certainly can't make money any faster than she's making it right now by standing around, doing nothing.

And money's just rolling in right now. By the time I'd finished shopping I'd spent around a million platinum but I'll have it all back in a couple of weeks. She already picked up a quarter of a million in takings today, when she swapped mats onto her trading partner. 

You might wonder what the point of it all is. I would, myself, if it wasn't for the simple fact that I get as much involvement and satisfaction out of upgrading her gear the way I've just described as I ever got from hunting for it. Quite possibly more.

It's not all about the killing, after all. Sometimes it's just about the dressing-up.

More Than One Membership : EverQuest

In retrospect it seems like a strange decision but I'll say up front I'm very glad I made it. There I was in the Guild Lobby, looking at my raid-buffed pet, feeling like it was a waste to dismiss him just because he was a few levels off his game and I had a better option waiting on the bench. I mean, in the context of conservation of resources, one outgrown pet with a few replaceable buffs scarcely signifies. If I canned him, who'd care?

Well, I would, apparently. Last time I got to this point I'd been able to pocket the pet, pop out the new one and carry on. It miffed me that I couldn't do it again. I still had the old-old one, even though I really didn't want him any more, but the problem was, I couldn't call him to tell him his services were no longer required without first sacking the new-old pet that I wanted to keep because the game wouldn't let me have two pets at once even for that nano-second of transition. So, until I got past that impasse, I couldn't summon the new-new pet, the one I was actually going to use unless I was willing to destroy the one standing next to me.

Catch 22 and then some.

Here's how it breaks down. You might need to take notes. The ability to pack a pet away for a rainy day is an Alternative Advancement ability (henceforth referred to as an "AA"). The specific AA in question is called Companion's Suspension and it comes in eight grades. I had seven of them, which meant I could suspend a pet with full buffs then log out and still have it available to recall at some future time, most likely during some dire emergency my active pet had failed to contain.

I could then summon a second pet to have with me in the world. What I couldn't do was swap the suspended pet for the active pet. To do that I needed to spend that final point. (Actually, from memory I think it cost five points for the final grade).

I had the points. I had over two hundred and fifty, unspent, just waiting to be assigned. Unfortunately, assigning AA points is one of the key perks of All Access Membership.

As a free player in EverQuest, each of your characters is capped at 250AA points. To give that some context, filling out all the AAs available to a single character costs tens of thousands of points. I've heard it said, more than once, that an end-game player, particularly a melee class, should expect to spend over 30,000 AA points to become viable in capped content.

As a "Silver" account, a type of account that no longer exists but to which I was fortunate enough to be grandfathered in, I'm entitled to a thousand AA points per character. Since accounts that unsubscribe also get to keep whatever AAs they bought before they cancelled, my counter read something like 4900/1000.

I didn't grind those out, or not all of them. Another huge benefit of membership is something called Auto-Grant. It's a feature on a toggle. If you switch it on, every time that character levels the game will automagically grant whatever AA points as a character of that level "should" have and also spend them on the appropriate AAs.

That carries on until the character reaches the level cap from a specified previous expansion that runs a fair way behind the current one. Currently it's 2015's The Broken Mirror, for which the level cap was 105. All of which is fine and dandy and a great benefit for subscribers but I just wanted to spend one frickin' point! Okay, five points, but let's not split hairs.

So I sat around and thought about it for a while longer. Did I seriously want to subscribe for a month just to buy one grade of one AA, just so I could swap out two pets, just so I could keep a bunch of buffs, buffs I could most likely replace by letting the game idle in the background for a few hours while I played something else? Is that the action of a rational adult?

Maybe there was another way. I have a lot of Daybreak Cash, after all. Could I maybe buy some kind of extension to my AA cap on the Marketplace? That way I at least wouldn't be spending real money.

I looked in the store. There was indeed something there that looked like it might do the job. I'd tell you what it was called but I didn't take a screenshot and now I can't see it any more. (Can you guess why? There's a clue there, somewhere). Whatever it was, it cost 250DBC, it applied per character (not per account) and it increased the cap on AAs by one hundred.

It didn't look like such a great deal but I wasn't bothered about that. What concerned me was whether it would work. Reading the small print I was pretty sure it wouldn't. What I reckoned it would do would be to change my cap of 1000 points to a cap of 1100. Since I was already the best part of four thousand points over my cap anyway, what good would that do me?

Still, I had all that DBC just sitting there and I was curious to see if I was right. Curious enough to pay 250DBC to find out? You betcha! And guess what? I was right!

So that was 250DBC down the imaginary drain and there I was, back where I started. I had another think.

I've been incredibly impressed with the speed of levelling via Overseer quests. Sticking at them diligently, I've been making a guaranteed ten per cent of a level a day, for weeks. If I get critical successes, and especially if there's a server xp bonus, that can go to fifteen per cent or even twenty. By contrast, if I can get one per cent of a level in an hour's hunting I think things are going pretty well.

When I dinged 106, though, that changed. Overseer xp per quest dropped by about half. That's clearly intentional. At 106 a character is becoming very viable for groups (albeit as a junior partner) in something approximating current content and Daybreak are very canny about protecting the integrity of the population bubble.

That said, even at five to ten per cent a day rather than ten to twenty, Overseer quests are an excellent addition to solo levelling rates. It does make the prospect of hunting more attractive than it might have been, though. But not as attractive as the prospect of grinding AAXP!

Where it takes days, or more likely weeks, of soloing to grind one level in the hundreds, AAs take no more than a few minutes. Killing comfortable, safe, light blue mobs in a Hot Zone nets five to seven per cent of an AA point per kill. I can rack up a couple of AAs in an hour that way. And quests reward several AAs at a go.

And how do I know that? It's obvious, isn't it? I subbed, didn't I? Yes, on my second account, because my main account is already frickin' subbed, isn't it? Because I play EverQuest II on that one! If I could only stop and start again...

Ah, I'm just play-acting. I'm fine with subbing two accounts for a while. And it's cheaper than I expected. When I went to check how much it would be for a single month the on-screen information said $14.99. With the pound sterling currently tanking in preparation for the UK's grim walk into the north Atlantic's cold and lonely embrace next January, $14.99 is worth £11.63 but, much like our own dear government, Daybreak don't seem to have caught up to economic reality. They're still charging UK customers just £8.99.

Which I happily paid. I'm subbed until late August, which should give me plenty of time to grind some AA points. I made more than twenty yesterday. I also spent most of what I had banked, which may have been a mistake, because when I zoned Auto-Grant kicked in and the game funded me at least as many again. If I'd not just bought a bunch of AAs, I'd most likely have been given those, too.

Even with a few minor errors of judgment it's feeling like a very good decision. I was decorating the kitchen last week and I spent more than the cost of a month's sub on a tin of wax to seal the surfaces. I know which I'm going to get the most pleasure from, that's for sure. You have to keep these things in perspective. Although I do like my wax...

With the added incentive of being able to see my xp (okay, my AAxp) move without the aid of an electron microscope, I spent most of yesterday hunting. I travelled to a bunch of zones I'd never even seen before, found a great spot with good light and plenty of space, killed a bunch of new-to-me mobs and had a great time.

Money well spent, I think. Now I just have to make some in-game money so I can upgrade all my gear and kill things even faster for even more AAXP so I can kill things faster still....

I could be at this a while.

Always Read The Instructions: EverQuest

Before I even begin I need to make a correction to yesterday's post. When I claimed with (unfortunate) confidence that "I'd already researched pet focus items for my new level" and found that "there were none. No tradeable ones, at least. No affordable tradeable ones", it transpires I was talking through my hat.

It's true, I had done my research. I just hadn't done it thoroughly enough. I'd checked several usually reliable guides, ones I've been using for years, ones I've always found to be accurate. Sadly, I fell into the trap of assuming they'd been updated to include the most recent information. As any MMORPG player ought to know, that's never a safe assumption to make.

The excellent EQMagicians has a comprehensive list of pet focus items that, at first glance, appears to be entirely up to date. I mean, it includes items that focus pets all the way up to level 120, five levels above the current cap. If you look more closely, however, you'll see a clue buried in the body of the text that suggests all is not as it seems: "As of the (final) Call of the Forsaken expansion..."


The Call of the Forsaken expansion is very far from being the "final" anything. It actually came out seven years ago. The reason the effects on the focuses on the list go so much higher than the then-cap of 100 is that they come from what was top-end group content, endgame questlines and raids - in 2013!

If you look at the level required to equip them, rather than what level pets they affect, you'll see it tops out at 101. Whoever was running EQMagicians back then clearly intended to carry on into the following expansion, The Darkened Sea, with its raised cap of 105, because they added entries for focus items with the next two numbered effects. Those have a Required level to equip of 101.

And that was where they stopped. Like so many legacy resources for so many MMORPGs, the information sits there, looking pristine but rusting at the core. And rust spreads.

Allakhazam, still the most reliable information source for EverQuest, doesn't have a focus list of its own. Instead it links to the EQMagician page and also to a discussion thread at Necrotalk.com, a forum for people who play Necromancers in EQ (what else did you expect?).

Since I'm playing a mage I didn't think to click that link. If I had, I'd have discovered that the Enhanced Minion line goes way beyond EQMagician's ceiling of XXIII. All the way to XXX in fact, as Allakhazam knows full well.

All of which amply demonstrates that half-assed research is worse than no research at all. I could have dug the truth out - if I'd just kept digging. Instead I stopped with the surface barely scraped.

All of this began to become clear to me only by chance. I was standing in the Guild Lobby, fiddling around with the search function on the Bazaar window. I'd been trying to decide which pieces of Conflagrant armor to buy first when it occured to me for some reason I can't quite recall, even though it was less than twenty-four hours ago, to remove the qualifier "armor" from the search.

In EverQuest the term "armor" tends to refer to what are known as the "visible" slots. The ones where what you equip shows up not just on your paper doll but on your in-game character as seen by everyone else. Unlike more modern games, jewellery and accessories aren't visible in EQ, so when I took that limiter out, a whole load of earrings, belts, rings and so on popped up.

And one of the earrings was called a Summoner's Conflagrant Earring. In Norrath, "summoner" is a synonym for "pet class". A magician is a summoner. Clue!

I examined the earring and sure enough, there it was in hyperlink purple: Enhanced Minion XVIII. A quick run to the actual Bazaar itself and there I was, forty thousand platinum pieces lighter and the proud - if somewhat red-faced - possessor of a pet focus item fit for my exalted level of one hundred and six.

The moral of this cautionary tale is that you can't always believe everything you read, especially if you don't take the trouble to read it properly. It also means I've gone on so long about my mistake that I probably ought to leave the real second part of the story for next time.

Not that it's much of a story. It's mostly about how I wasted a small amount of imaginary money and then saved a small amount of real money, doing something I was fairly sure I'd never do again. Still, it's something to post about, isn't it?

Just don't hold your breath or anything. I wouldn't want to over-sell it. And I don't give refunds.

We All Love Our Pets: WoW Classic, EverQuest, GW2

SynCaine was singing the praises of WoW Classic's Hunter class the other day. He suggested it might represent "pet-class perfection" in the genre and I wouldn't disagree.

There are other contenders. Magicians in classic-era EverQuest had an equivalent range of options and requirements. They had to travel far and wide for some of their their pet spells, as well as having to craft most of the others (or else commission a crafter to do it for them).

Obtaining the essential focus items that empowered their pets was a far from easy task. Not to mention the perpetual buffing and keeping the pet supplied with appropriate weaponry and armor so they could function effectively.

Mages also had four very different "pets" to work with and you didn't always have access to the one you wanted at the level you'd reached. The line-up was the classic elemental quartet, Earth, Wind, Fire and Air. Don't ask me who played which instrument...

The Earth pet was a tarbaby tank that did next to no damage. The Air pet was often preferred as a tank at higher levels because of its ability to chain stun while evading attacks. It  also put out some decent damage.

Water I was never quite sure about. I  remember it as something of a jack-of-all-trades, possibly with the best dps output after Fire but able to take a lot more punishment. Despite playing several Mages over the years, occasionally to relatively advanced levels, I never really used my Water pets. 

The Fire pet, as you would expect, was all about the damage, which it dealt well and took badly. No Magician could reasonably expect to solo with a pet that had a caster's armor class and hit points, but Fire was often used, indeed generally preferred, in groups where the Mage's primary role was DPS.

Yes, that torch is right for your level. Stop questioning my decisions and don't wave those things at me. I am your master!

Elementals aren't very cuddly and neither do they easily develop a personality. I always thought of mine as tools more than entities in their own right. Hunters' pets, being animals or, as the game has it, "beasts", enjoy a considerable head start in the affection stakes.

That poses a problem for me. I tend to develop a peculiarly strong affection for my characters' starting pets in any MMORPG. In Guild Wars 2 each of my several rangers hung on to the pet they chose at character creation for far longer than made practical sense.

The question and answer session every character has to go through before being allowed to set foot in Tyria doesn't help. You're encouraged to build up an RP background for your character that includes picking best friends and favorite pets. The game then proceeds to forget about all that forever, leaving you wondering in the thirties just whatever did happen to that Charr who always had your back in the Warband or that childhood friend from whom you were once inseparable.

If you play a Ranger, your First Pet is always with you. Until you send them away. I always find it a notionally traumatic experience. I put it off for as long as possible but eventually you have to admit that pink Moa just isn't right for the job any more. It's time to send him to the farm.

The trauma is ameliorated by GW2's vast, user-friendly stable facility. You can have two pets active at any time, hot-swappable, and all the pets you've ever tamed remain permanently accessible as load-outs.

Best Friends Forever

Compare that to WoW Classic, where you get just three stable slots and can only have a single active pet available at any time. You want to tame new pets because part of being a Hunter is finding beasts with useful special abilities. But sacrifices have to be made. On a pre-Columbian scale.

You tame a beast and then, by hunting alongside them, transfer their abilities to you. That allows you to train your keeper pets to use those abilities in future. The beast that gave of its skills and knowledge is then duly discarded to make room so you can suck the next victim dry.

Or so the theory goes. I wouldn't know from experience because at level 39 my Hunter is still adventuring alongside his first and only pet, the Ice Claw Bear he tamed for his Level 10 Class quest.

Which was fine until the last couple of days. The bear (or Idiot Bear as I tend think of him, when he does the exact opposite of what I wanted him to do) has never been a stand-out tank. Compared to those EQ Magician superglue pets or the kind of bears favored by the infamous Bearbow Rangers in GW2, he's pretty hopeless at holding aggro.

Still, I've learned to work with him and most of the time he manages to keep the mob's attention well enough. Only not any more. I can't work out what changed but over the last couple of days, where I would previously have been able to send him in, give him four or five seconds to establish aggro, then DoT, stun, DD, DD, auto-attack until dead, throwing in a snare as necessary at the end if the mob turned and ran, suddenly I could barely DoT and Stun before the mob turned and ran - at me.

FFS, you idiot bear! What are you doing? You think you can taunt him by waving your backside at his kneecaps?

Towards the end of yesterday's silk-farming session at the vast and barely-visited Ogre camp outside the Ruins of Alterac, there were frequent occasions where I couldn't even send the pet and just auto-attack. A couple of arrows were all it took to infuriate an Ogre and send him bumbling my way, waving the barrel on a stick that passes for a Mace where he comes from.

Given that I was also training up Bow, using a weapon with barely two-thirds the DPS of my regular gun, I found this behavior perplexing. It wasn't a problem in that I was also training four different Melee weapons so I was happy enough to go toe to toe with the ogres, all of whom were two or three levels below me, but it seemed obvious something was wrong.

It became much more of a problem when I finished my farming and weapons training and moved on to Swamp of Sorrows, where my targets were at-level and above. I began to wonder if I'd missed some training for the bear (I hadn't) or whether there was some link between his original level when tamed (he was Level 8) and his usefulness thirty levels later.

I still don't know and since I'm avoiding out-of-game information sources I'm not sure how I can find out. Other, that is, than by the tried and trusted method of trial and error. I'm going to have to park the underperforming ursine in the stables and go and tamed an at-level bear. Then I'll need to bring him to Level Six loyalty and run some comparison experiments.

Maybe it's time I went solo. I mean really solo.

If that bear does as badly then I guess I'll have to go find some non-bear alternative tanks and try those. Boars might be good. Maybe Raptors, although they look more like DPS to me.

Playing a Hunter does indeed involve "many different mechanics" as SynCaine says. Some of them, like what each pet eats, what skills it possesses and what are its stats can be seen clearly enough in-game. As always with WoW Classic, though, I get the very strong feeling that a lot is going on under the hood.

And that's the charm of it. I find it much more entertaining to suspect something is going on yet not be sure exactly what it is, let alone how it's happening, than I do to have everything laid out before me in neatly tabulated columns. I understand not everyone feels that way but it works exceptionally well for me.

If I do prove to my own satisfaction that my first pet has outlived his usefulness it's going to be hard to consign him to history but I'll do it. With only three stable slots available I can't let sentiment stand in the way of productivity. I'm not running a rest home for cast-off companion animals here.

I guess I'd better get out there and tame something. Here, kitty, kitty!

Never Coming Back: Beastlords in EQ2

I know the Very Thing to go here. And no, they're never coming back.

According to Smokejumper's somewhat garbled interview, helpfully summarized by Feldon at EQ2Wire, both the expansion that brings back Beastlords and the Game Update that ruins revamps Freeport will go to closed Beta (from Friends and Family Beta presumably) on Tuesday November 8th. I'm as excited about one as I'm nervous about the other.

I have an affinity for pet classes that long pre-dates MMOs. The first time I ran into the idea was back in the very early '80s in a tabletop RPG called Dragonquest, a quirky ruleset that offered an unusual choice of career paths. I didn't much fancy Military Scientist, Astrologer or Courtesan but I liked the sound of Beast Master. It reminded me of Daniel P Mannix with attitude (if Mannix didn't already have more than enough attitude to be going on with).

Oh sorry! Was he yours?

I loved the catching and taming part but almost immediately I ran into a fundamental design flaw. Should have spotted it earlier, really, given that it was quite literally part of the Beast Master's job description: "A Beast Master will, in almost all cases, become very fond of animals". All too true as I found out when I was repeatedly required to bury the dead after ordering my furry friends to fight monsters much bigger and tougher than they were.


Several dead pets into our group's campaign it became apparent that a Beast Master who was a) rapidly running out of beasts that took months to train and b) increasingly reluctant to allow any of the few he had left to take any risks whatsoever in case "something bad" happened to them, was going to be of limited use outside of a petting zoo. I re-rolled as something less emo and that was about the last I thought of pet classes until I stepped into Norrath some fifteen years later.

We don't do "cute"

For a good while "pet class" in Everquest meant someone who raised the dead or animated rocks. This had two big advantages over the Beast Master, namely that skeletons and earth elementals cannot strictly be called "cuddly" and that if they "die" you just raise or animate a new one. Nothing to bury, nothing to mourn.


Shamans did have a pet that looked like a wolf, but it turned out to be a spirit. It looked cuddly but your hand would just go right through. You couldn't rest a pint on his back like I used to do with the landlord's labrador in a pub where I used to drink. We were close, but we weren't quite there. We'd dealt with the downside but something was still missing. Then came the beastlord.

I arrived late on Luclin, Norrath's doomed moon. We were off playing something else at the time, Dark Age of Camelot probably, so I missed the birth of the Beastlord. When we returned, though, I made a Vah Shir Beastlord immediately. A tiger-girl with a tiger pet? Come on!

I took to the class right away. It had all the things I'd always wanted in a pet class: a really powerful pet that would fight beside me, not a weak creature I'd need to protect nor a living wall I'd hide behind. My warder and I stood hip to shoulder as we fought, falling back or surging forward to support and sustain each other as Shissars hissed or Akhevans made that weird chittering noise they make before they fell to our claws.

What have I told you about claws in town?

My beastlord ended up being the Everquest character I played most over the years. She's my highest level still, beached at 84th. I could understand, though, why Beastlords were lost when Luclin exploded. In many ways they were too powerful, too versatile. Just too damn good. Once you've played a beastlord it's hard to settle for less. The balancing issues that beastlords brought had ripped through Everquest for years and since EQ2 seemed to have "avoiding anything that gave us trouble in EQ1" as its core design brief it must have been an opportunity too tempting to resist. Although Blizzard seemed willing to take the risk when they added the Hunter class to WoW. Wonder how that worked out for them...

For many years Beastlord became the class that dare not say its name. They all died on Luclin. Every last one. They're never coming back. Except they are. Next Tuesday in beta and, with luck and a following wind, by the end of the month for the rest of us. There'll probably be five thousand new beastlords in Freeport on the first day and I'll be one of them. And I'll be keeping a diary.