EverQuest II - Guides, Links And Not-So-Helpful Advice

Last week Cliff, who's returned to EverQuest II again, apparently inspired so to do, at least in part, by reading some of my recent posts here, left a comment asking, among other things, if I had any sites to recommend that might help with things like understanding the stats in the game or figuring out which AAs are important. Just regular stuff like that, which you might think the game itself would explain.

It doesn't, of course, or not in any particularly helpful way. There's only so much you can do with a tool-tip and EQII doesn't have one of those nifty in-game encyclopedias that tell you everything you need to know. Not that those are ever much help, judging by the ones I've seen in other games.

It's not that SOE or Daybreak or Darkpaw, or whoever was nominally in charge when any and all of the myriad systems and mechanics in the game were added, didn't bother to explain them. It's more that any explanations were couched in long-forgotten press releases, AMAs and forum posts or latterly in Discord discussions, which are even harder to find. The entire game is a palimpsest of ideas, good and bad, some of which have flourished, some of which have atrophied, but all of which have been very poorly cataloged and annotated.

As with most MMORPGs, the best resources for the kind of detailed information that really tells you what you want to know has always come from other people who play the game. Once upon a time, EQII was rich in such resources but not any more. Many have gone dark and the few that remain tend to stop at a certain point, when whoever was updating them lost interest or gave up playing.

After I gave a few less than helpful answers to Cliff's general and specific questions, I had a bit of a think about it and decided I might see if I could find out if any sites that might be useful were still around. I started googling but it was slow going. The returns were meager. Still, there were a few useful results. I thought I might be able to put something together.

And then I ran across this thread on Reddit, the contents of which I am now going to cut and paste into this post just in case the thread gets unstickied or disappears. Full credit for the following goes to Mandalore93, who did all the actual work.

 Official EQ2 Links

• EverQuest 2 Official Site

  • EverQuest 2 Server Status

  • EverQuest 2 Support

• EverQuest 2 Forums

  • News and Announcements (Archive)

    News and Announcements (New) 

  • EQ2 Patch Notes (Archive)

    EQ2 Patch Notes (New) 

    EQ2 Staff Post Tracker (Archive) 

  • EQ2 Staff Post Tracker (New)

• EverQuest 2 Official Discord

EQ2 Guilds

• EQ2 Guild Recruitment Forum

Resource & Info Sites 

• EverQuest 2 Wiki

  • Megaton's Varsoon TLE Guide 

• EQ2U  

• EQ2 Trader's Corner 

• EQ2 Furniture

EQ2 Add Ons

• EQ2 Interface

• EQ2 Maps

• Advanced Combat Tracker

Guides & Strategy

• EQ2 AA Calculator

• Comprehensive Tradeskill Equipment List

• Tradeskill Timeline

• Harvesting Timeline

• Food and Drink Comparison

• EQ2 Travel Baubles - (Sigrdrifa's post, specifically.)

• EQ2 TLE Youtube content by Bear Necessities

I have checked all the links They all work, although at time of writing the EQII API is non-functional so the EQ2U site is of limited functionality. Darkpaw are supposedly working on fixing the API so it should be restored to it's usual self at some point. Cross your fingers! Also, when I tested it, EQ2 Trader's Corner had exceeded its permitted bandwidth and wasn't responding. Presumably that, too, is a temporary condition.

I also removed two links from the guild section because they threw up a malware warning when I clicked on them. You can find them in the Reddit thread if you want to take your chances.

And I added in links to the current forums where appropriate. Mandalore93's links go to the old forums but I've left those in because there's a ton of useful archive information there, at least for as long as Darkpaw keep the old pages up.

As you'll see if you click through all these links, many of them go either to the official Daybreak EQII website or to the excellent EQ2i wiki. In all honesty, these are probably the two most reliable sources these days. There used to be a lot more but time has withered most of them away.

For anyone coming back or just starting, I would strongly recommend Megaton's Varsoon TLE Guide, regardless of whether you plan on playing on the Varsoon server or not. Apart from the restored starting areas, which don't exist on the Live servers, I think most of the rest will be there or thereabouts correct for content on Live, up to wherever Varsoon has gotten to right now. I believe it should be going into the Chains of Eternity expansion next month, which will give it a level cap of 95, right before everything changes at 100, so the guide will stand as the definitive source for how to play what now feels like almost a separate game.

Cliff also asked a couple of very pertinent, specific questions that I ought to be able to answer. Unfortunately, I can't. Not with any confidence, anyway.

One was about stats and what they mean. If only I knew! It would make things so much easier. 

Stats have changed many times. I understood them once but that was a long time ago. The Megaton guide has an very illuminating overview on how they've altered over the years and, more importantly, on what's most important now. It's in the "Adventuring" section. My rule of thumb is that it's generally your Primary stat, Stamina, Potency, Crit Chance and Ability Mod you want to concentrate on but don't quote me on that. It does keep changing...

The one crucial stat Megaton's guide doesn't mention is Resolve. Varsoon hasn't gotten to the expansion that introduced it yet. Resolve, for players on Live servers, is probably the most important stat of all.

Resolve is explained in enormous detail here on the wiki. It doesn't become relevant until Level 100, after which it becomes absolutely central to Heroic and Raid players but less so for soloists. It does still gatekeep solo content but since every expansions gives you a full set of gear with the required Resolve for solo instances, you don't really need know much more than to be sure to pick that up and equip it before you start any new expansion. It'll usually be in a container with the name "Tishan" attached, next to an NPC in the very first area you arrive in.

What Resolve does do is make for a very handy way to decide if a new item is an upgrade or not. If anything you find has higher resolve than what you have, you'll want to swap it in, unless there's some triggered or passive effect you particularly want to keep on the old piece.

On the topic of free gear, solo players working their way up the levels probably also want to make sure they do the Panda quests. There's a ton of free stuff in there, much of it worth having although the Tishan's items tend to overwrite it. 

Cliff's other question was about AAs, which for anyone that doesn't know stands for Alternative Advancement. I wish I could give a good answer to this one. I can confirm that having the right AA build can make a huge difference. 

For example, a few years back, I read a comment on the forums that explained why my Berserker wasn't feeling nearly as robust as he should have. I applied the advice given there and he immediately became much more powerful. 

For what it's worth, I wrote about that in this post and the forum comment that helped me is here. The key AA in that case is Enhanced Vigor in the Prestige line. Max it to double your hit points.

The good thing about AAs in EQII is that you can have multiple builds saved and swap between them, although it is a bit of a faff to do. The best I can suggest if you're not sure what to take is to make a few builds and swap between them. 

And that, I think, is about as helpful as I can be. There are a myriad of quests that give all kinds of highly useful and desirable items and abilities but trying to list them would take forever. I'd suggest keeping Overseer up to date as you go along, if possible, although it can be a diabolical grind. The various time-reducers it gives for Mount, Mercenary, Familiar and Spell progress are invaluable. 

Always remember to keep your upgrades for all of those going and, if you have the time, do the Familiars Wild quest daily every day. At higher levels (Post-100, really.) a huge proportion of your effectiveness comes not from your own stats but from those of your Mount, Merc and Familiar.

But I'm not going to get into that in detail. I barely understand the how the synergies work myself and certainly not well enough to explain them. As I keep saying, systems and mechanics in the game are ferociously complicated now and as population and interest continue to drift down, accurate, up-to-date resources are increasingly hard to come by. 

I hope that helps a bit, anyway.

Digging Deeper Into Noah's Heart

I'm sure what everyone wants to know is how I'm getting on with Noah's Heart. Thank you for asking. I'm doing very nicely, as it happens. I haven't missed a single day since launch, exactly two months ago.

I have one character, Califa. She's Level 78, Adventurer Level 18, Career Level 34. Her house is Level 8. She's a Level 3 Craftsman and Level 2 in both Masterchef and Tailor.

My Valhalla is Level 69 with ten unlocked slots, three of them still unused. My current team is Charlie, Philo, Ave and Euclid. They are Level 2*, 4*,1* and 6* respectively. 

Califa is Diamond III in Fantasy Arena but only Silver I in Honor Arena. At 5222 points she's still a thousand shy of making the top fifty rankings in FA.

I've completed 100% of the first three Seasons - Light and Shadow, Scarlet Mark Mystery and Soul Inspired Art. 

There are seven people on my friends list, which can hold 60 names. I'm in a guild called ΛΣĞΙΩΝ, which is Level 3, has 89 members and a guild hall.

That's probably enough raw data to be going on with, although it's barely scraping the surface. Let me flesh it out a little, starting with the guild.

I joined my guild entirely by accident. I was coming out of an instance when a pop-up appeared as I zoned back into the open world. I clicked on it reflexively, thinking it was a reward for the instance I'd just done. It turned out to be a drive-by guild invite. 

Having joined, I thought I might as well see what a guild could do for me. Plenty, it seems. I was able to finish a mission I'd had hanging around for ages that was asking me to buy something from the Guild Store, for a start. Being a member of a guild also opened up several new dailies. 

The guild appears to be Greek in origin or at least the name, MOTD and all guild notices are in that language. You might think it would be awkward but so far I've never heard anyone speak. The language issue hasn't arisen.

Until today I was very happy in my silent guild. I've been making guild donations, receiving guild payments and occasionally joining in with guild events. Only yesterday I discovered we had a guild hall, which made me oddly happy for some reason, as if I'd somehow had something to do with it.

It's been all the fun of a guild without any of the stress so I was more than a little miffed to receive a message after today's update telling me the guild will be disbanded in 24 hours due to "Low Health".

I can't deny the guild is clearly in steep decline. Of the 89 members, only nine have registered any form of Guild Contribution this week. Mine was the second-highest and I've barely done anything. 

Even so, I can't see the rationale for forcibly disbanding us unless inactive guilds somehow place unacceptable stress on the server infrastructure, which seems highly unlikely. It seems like a commercially shortsighted move. You don't usually want to give people a reason to leave your game but kicking them out of their guild is likely to do just that.

I won't be leaving Noah's Heart just because my guild went pfutt. I'm enjoying myself far too much for that. I will look for another, though, which makes this the first time in years I've done that. I just hope I can find another guild where no-one speaks, only this time one where they do actually contribute.

Friendship is a similar story. I've had the usual smattering of drive-by friend invites but for once I've been accepting them. So far, none of my "friends" has attempted to communicate with me in any way other than to send me Friendship Points. There's a daily and a reward for doing that so I click the button every day and so, I guess, does everyone else. The points keep piling up.

Friendship Points are useful because you can buy extra Summons with them at a rate of ten points a spin. There are probably other things you can do with them, too, but what those might be I haven't discovered yet.

Speaking of summoning Phantoms, I was fortunate enough to get my third SSR yesterday. She's called Gretel Alexander, a name I can't place in any historical context... oh, wait a moment... I just got it! She's Alexander the Great, isn't she? OMG! that is brilliant! Seriously, that's just genius, isn't it? If someone at Archosaur can craft such excellent English puns, how come the rest of the translation is so bad?

Ahem, sorry, back to the post...

The problem with getting new SSRs is they're very slow to level up without spending money. I can shove them in Valhalla to raise their numerical level but to upgrade their star rating I have to find shards of the same character, which is a tough proposition. All my Rs and SRs are ranking up quite nicely but I've been working on getting Ave her second star for what seems like weeks and I probably still have seven to ten days to go.

Meanwhile, I've been playing around with the team lineup. You can store a number of team builds. Currently I have room for six. I found it made quite a difference when I swapped them around, especially in PvP. There seem to be some synergies I don't quite understand so it's very much a work in progress but it's a fun little game-within-a-game.

The main reason I was doing it was to try and win more matches in the Fantasy Arena. That's the one where your phantoms fight someone else's phantoms while you watch. For a while there I was steamrolling everyone by the simple trick of paying attention to the numbers. 

You can refresh the screen as often as you want to get a new slate of potential opponents. You can see their team's Strength rating, which phantoms they're playing and what their levels and stars are. It's fairly easy to work out who you can and can't beat that way... or it was.

Unfortunately, I have become something of a victim of my own success. By cherry-picking opponents I successfully raised my own standing until my Rank far outpaced my Strength. At Diamond III the average Strength looks to be somewhere around 175-250k. Mine's 114k.

For a long time I was able to find suitable matches by being patient and refreshing the options but now I'm lucky to find anyone even close to my Strength level. Finding anyone weaker than me is like Hannibal Lecter bobbing for apples.

I do have the option of downgrading. Every time you win a match you gain points but every time you lose it's the opposite. In original EverQuest you could lose your level; here you can lose your rank. I've already dropped back to Diamond IV once.

Rather than intentionally de-level, my plan is to work on improving my Strength rating but first I have to determine exactly what factors affect it. I know the level and star rating of your phantoms makes a big difference but I'm not sure if things like the level of their weapons has any effect.

In fact, I still have only the sketchiest idea how most of the systems in Noah's Heart work. There are so many of them and they all have so many levels and ranks and stats. It wouldn't be a bad idea to sit down and start changing things one at a time while making notes but do I really want to invest that much mental energy in what was supposed to be a light, fluffy, amuse-bouche of a game?

Probably a bit late to start worrying about that. I'm already playing two or three hours most days and barely doing any open world exploration at all, let alone working on upgrading and decorating my house. Even though I'm not spending any money, I still seem somehow to have managed to get myself tangled up in its myriad progression systems, most of which can be operated and maintained from the UI. It's not so much playing a game as tinkering with a construction set.

This would be a good time to start doing some proper exploring. We're on hiatus as we wait for Season Three to begin. When I finished Season Two there was an ominous prequel to the next, all black background and flowery language. I'm looking forward to it already. Today's update notes suggest it's already here but I can't see it in game. Maybe tomorrow?

Until it arrives, I have an opening of opportunity. Seasons have been occupying most of my time and I got into a routine for doing them that I have yet to break. I'm still doing all the dailies I need to get 200 Active Points every day, even though I no longer need those points to open the next tranche of Seasonal content.

Of course, those dailies also give me a ton of rewards, almost all of which I need for other things. Every activity seems to give you something you need for something else. You can find yourself in a closed loop that can be hard to break out of just to go exploring. It's worth it when you do, though. There's so much to see.

In fact, I think I'll go see some of it right now. Deeper into the Heart we go!

Every Hair Of The Bear Reproduced: Antilia

Following on from a post about a game I can play but can't talk about, here's a short post on a game I can talk about but can't play: Antilia.

There was a brief moment when I could have played it but back then I didn't even know it existed. Still, if only for the blink of an eye, Antilia was an MMORPG, once. It had some kind of off-the-radar run as an alpha or a beta or an Early Access multiplayer project before the development team took it down to re-envision it as a single-player RPG.

I have no idea how or where I came to hear about it (maybe I saw the failed Kickstarter, which goes all the way back to 2013) but however it was, I've had it bookmarked for a few years now. I even wrote about it a couple of times.

I know a rabbit when I see one.

Not that there was all that much to say. The developer, Right Brain Games, does post periodic updates on the website and occasionally there's a video on YouTube, but progress has been slow and there's not been anything particularly blogworthy. Until now.

Last week I happened to check the website to find this. It's a downloadable, offline version of the character creation suite that Jeff Leigh, the guy who seems to be Right Brain Games as far as I can tell, was talking about on camera in his April update.

I love character creators. Like many people, I can play around with them for hours even when I have no intention of playing the game itself. In this case I'd love to play the game but the character creator is all there is and it makes for a very tasty appetizer.

Single-player RPGs do tend to have much more detailed character creation processes than MMOs. I'm not entirely sure why that is.

It could be that a character in a multiplayer online game is seen more as a Player Avatar than a Character. It might be felt that, given the the long lifespan of an MMORPG, it's best to start with a blank page and let time fill in the details. It may just be that developers know MMO players lack patience so it's best to get them into the game as quickly as possible before they squirrel off somewhere else.

Offline RPGs, on the contrary, seem to expect their players to have all the time in the world and to want to spend it on minutiae in a way that might just possibly be seen by an objective observer as a tad obsessive. Not to say weird...

Antilia indulges that expectation in some style. The demo only includes one of the game's three intelligent races, theTaipii, about whom you can read in some detail, both on the website and in the character creator itself. The other two races, the Sakii and the Reisuii are works in progress about whom little has been revealed so far, other than that one is clearly a kind of dragon while the other is some type of rodent.

As I soon discovered, while playing with the character creator, The Taipii are a handy catch-all, covering a variety of the most popular anthropomorphic tropes. They come in five "bloodlines", known as Felo, Kisan, Koro, Lupan and Vulan, which turn out to be Cat, Rabbit, Deer, Wolf and Fox.

Actually, they turn out to be the same character model with different shaped ears or tails and, in the case of the Koro, antlers. They are all very cute and beautifully rendered but I'd be hard-put to tell one bloodline from another at a hundred paces.

There are a plethora of graphical sliders to play with - everything from Snout Length to Tail Floof. Yes, floof. My favorite was Fur Length, which makes your character more or less fuzzy. Who'd ever want to be less fuzzy?

There's the expected color palette to select from for several layers of fur as well as eyes, ears, tail and whiskers. I'm not clear who's going to be able to see the color of your whiskers but there you go.

After that we move on to weightier matters such as where you were born and what your parents did for a living. There's a wealth of options here, with over a dozen locations and thirty professions to choose from but that's not the end of your decision-making.

Next comes your education, offering a separate set of choices for Childhood and Adulthood. Then there's your Personality, with sliders for where you are on the Intorvert-Extrovert scale, what your Work Ethic is, how strongly you respect the Law and several more crucial moral and philosophical positions to take a stance on.

Finally, in a section labelled Difficulty, you get to choose from a number of handicaps and bonuses. I left these alone and I think I would avoid them in a first run-through should the game finally emerge into playable form. They look to have enormous impact on gameplay - one Disadvantage is Cannot Engage In Combat which means exactly what it says, while another is Permadeath.

I read through most of these with pleasure. It took quite a while. They're well-written and well-considered. You could fashion some very interesting characters from these building blocks while still leaving plenty of space for your own interpretation.

These options aren't purely for cosmetic or roleplaying purposes, though. Each choice comes with a basket of bonuses to your character's many, many stats. Antilia appears to be shaping up to be one of those RPGs that covers both ends of the RP spectrum, focusing both on personality and progression.

Without an actual game to play as yet, none of the stats mean much, although they are mostly very straightforward to understand. The whole thing looks very polished and professional and I'd love to be able to take the character I made and walk her around the world she already seems to know so much about.

Of course, I'd be a lot happier if the game was going to be what it was originally intended to be,  an MMORPG, but I'll settle for anything in a playable state. That could be a while yet, I fear.

For now, we have the character creator and it's a fun toy.

Day Million

Despite just telling Jeromai that I never feel guilty for not playing MMOs, and even though I often make the point that I only write for my own amusement, I do nevertheless find myself feeling just a tiny bit uncomfortable about the lack of activity this blog has seen over the holiday period. Yes, December is my busiest time of year, both in and out of work, but even so ten posts is a bit feeble.

Last year I managed a round dozen: the same as 2013. Between those two came a baker's dozen in 2014 and back in 2012, presumably flushed with enthusiasm at the end of my first full year of blogging I somehow managed an absurd nineteen December posts! I can't imagine how that happened.

The turn of the year this time around marks five complete years since Inventory Full began. I actually started posting rather cautiously in July of 2011, racking up just 43 posts in six months, but once I gained momentum things began ticking over fairly steadily at just under 200 posts a year.

This year looks a little slack at 175 but that's the same figure as 2014 so I don't think it indicates any particular decline either in effort or interest on my part.With remarkable consistency, 2012 and 2013 tied at 197 posts, while 2015 ran them both close with 190 exactly.

When the blog hit the landmark half million page views I recorded the fact with a stereotypical British show of  false modesty. I was expecting to do the same again when (if) I hit the full million but the Russian onslaught documented earlier somewhat took the gilt off that particular piece of gingerbread and I didn't bother.

According to Blogger's basic dashboard stats, the ones I've been paying attention to since the blog started, the one million page view milestone was duly passed sometime last month. December 2016 also saw the blog record by far its highest tally of monthly visits, virtually doubling the previous record.

As the visits per country show, China is now riding Russia's coat-tails in a heartening display of (post) Communist solidarity seldom seen since the 1960s. While it's true that they do play a lot of MMOs in both Russia and China I don't flatter myself that I've suddenly acquired a whole host of new readers behind the erstwhile iron or bamboo curtains.

What I have got is meaningless stats so I'm not going to pay any further attention to them, or not, at least, until such time as Blogger cleans up its act. Blogger, of course, is owned by Google, eponymous providers of the widely-used information traffic tool Google Analytics. That tells a very different story.

I've never really followed my GA stats. I look at them maybe once a year. They used to mirror the Blogger stats fairly closely, with GA generally showing lower numbers by maybe 20-25%. That's changed.

According to Google Analytics, rather than just shy 60,000 page views in December this blog actually received 6,500. Around 10% of the figure Blogger gives me. Tellingly, according to GA, almost none of those views came from either Russia or China, or, for that matter, the other minor player in the drama, The Ukraine.

If you drill down past the Top Ten, however, some very odd things start to happen. Take a look at number 12, for example:

Let's blow that up so we can see it better:

Or how about number 19?

Then, all the way down at #37, there's this...

I wonder I ought to bring it to the attention of... Oh, wait...

There's more but that's more than enough. If the stats ever begin to make sense again then maybe I'll pay some attention but for now it's back to how many comments I get and who links to me or writes posts in reply to something I've said.

Kunark Ascending: A Change Of Gear : EQ2

Sunday began with a bang. I woke up to find Mrs Bhagpuss already logged in, answering an APB to defend Valley from the surging JQ hordes. I snatched breakfast and joined the defense effort and that was the morning gone.

After lunch I pottered for a bit and then moved across to Norrath for what I expected to be a more relaxing, laid-back session. It was entertaining, engaging and enormously satisfying but perhaps not quite as relaxed as all that.

I don't have much that's bad to say about the current EQ2 expansion, Kunark Ascending. So far I've found it to be well paced, intriguing, amusing and fun. Also gorgeous. One thing it isn't, however, is straightforward. Or easy.

In common with every MMO expansion ever, KA comes with a deal of tinkering to the systems. In this case there's more to it than just the whims and fancies of The New Item Guy.

For quite a while the EQ2 team delighted in adding exotic, complex and spectacular effects to gear and weaponry, harking back, no doubt, to the great EverQuest tradition of Things That Proc. Unfortunately, the infrastructure that underpins the game was beginning to struggle under the load of so many ifs, buts and maybes so the current trend favors simple effects and huge boosts to base stats.

EQ2 has a lot of stats but it seems there's always room for one more. We got Fervor a while back. Couldn't tell you what that does without looking it up. I checked mine last night and it was zero so it probably doesn't matter much to soloists like me.

The big, new must-have for the current expansion is Resolve, one of those "must be this tall to ride" stats so beloved of Heroic Content designers everywhere. Chat is already filled with people citing their qualifications under the new regime - "100 SK LFG 198 Resolve". Again, as far as I can tell, it's a stat solo players can safely ignore, at least for now.

That just leaves the other several hundred numbers to consider, then. Okay, I exaggerate. It's only just over three dozen for combat and another eighteen for tradeskills. Granted you have to scroll through three full pages in the in-game window to see them all but what's a little scrolling, eh?

I confess I tend to glaze over when trying to compare items. Is this an upgrade to that? Do I need more of this stat or more of the other? It's a common problem, which is why people often link items in chat and throw the discussion open to the wisdom of crowds. Or just beg for help.

That's what happened last night. A returning player, stepping into The Obolus Frontier for the first time, was questioning whether his gear might be the reason his Time To Kill was pushing five minutes. General chat has, of late, been exceptionally responsive and helpful, a sure sign that people are enjoying themselves, so instead of being told to L2P or Git Gud a very informative round-table debate on the best way to approach the new content ensued.

One particular player took the chair and laid out the precise dos and don'ts, going so far as to link the most easily accessible, cheapest Best In Slot items, with explanations of why and how they were preferred over alternatives. I chipped in with a couple of suggestions of my own and asked a few questions about things that had been puzzling me.

It all answered a number of questions and my Berserker will be making some changes to his outfit as a result. The timing wasn't ideal. It was hard to pay full attention to the details because the whole thing kicked off just as I reached the conclusion of the Signature questline.

As a result I missed some key dialog and the completely unexpected and quite stunning conclusion almost passed me by altogether. I'll have to pay a lot more attention when I take a second character through it - or else watch it on YouTube if someone's been kind enough to post the finale.

In the usual way of things I couldn't really discuss it here anyway because SPOILERS!! Better stick with the stats. It's one hell of a shock ending, though, I'll say that much.

So, those stats. Here's what I learned:

For Kunark Ascending the stats that matter are Resolve (for Heroic and Raid Content), Potency and Ability Mod

For a relaxed, leisurely soloing through the main questline it's recommended that you hit 8k Potency and 100k Ability Mod.

You can do that by spending no more than a few hundred platinum on the Broker for a set of Handcrafted "Twark" Gear and accessories.

And that's pretty much it. For extensive detail on everything else you might want to know I recommend the invaluable, accurate and authoritative  EQ2 Library but the above will get you started nicely.

I'd add that if EQ2's hyper-inflationary economy is making you feel even these "cheap" items are insanely over-priced there are several very easy ways you can join the super-rich. A month ago I had less than 50 platinum to my name. Now I have just under 70k.

If you have All Access Membership (and if you are buying the current expansion you most probably do) then five of the Loyalty Tokens you earn for your very simple dailies will buy you a Small Bag Of Platinum Coins from the Loyalty section of the store. Each bag contains 500p, more than enough to kit you out in KA basics, head to toe.

Alternatively you could buy a three-pack of Experience Vials with your 500 DB Cash monthly stipend, spend an hour or so filling one up and sell it on the Broker for the going rate of around 30,000 plat.

And if you are planning on doing the KA crafting line as well as the Adventure one, do the crafting quests first. They require no special gear and half way through you get the plant I mentioned yesterday which will give you an income stream of several thousand platinum a day for the foreseeable future.

All of this begs the question, which was raised in the discussion in game yesterday, of whether a new expansion should require players to prepare in advance, whether by doing old content, saving money or buying gear. The answer is it doesn't.

As I said, I only learned the above as I was finishing the very final stages of the Signature questline. I did the entire thing wearing the gear I had on the day it launched and the upgrades I acquired from the KA quests and drops themselves. Even by the end I only had around 5.5k Potency and 75k Ability Mod.

There were very short periods when things were genuinely difficult, but none of those were out of line with the difficulty I have experienced in previous expansions. A little lateral thinking, a single session doing some side-quests and swapping some already-acquired items around and those speed bumps soon vanished in the rear-view mirror.

What I had done coming in, however, was complete the whole of the Signature line from the previous expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra. I can confirm that, without question, as a Berserker, the gear from the previous expansion is entirely sufficient to get you rolling in the current one. And that, I think, is entirely reasonable.

GW2: The Existential MMO

I don't know what I'm doing. Three weeks out from launch, Level 80 already. Dressed in leathers I sewed myself, blue in quality, cinnamon in color. Wielding weapons prized from the hands, paws or possibly stomachs of my hapless victims. Studded with jewellery lovingly handcrafted by Mrs Bhagpuss, also mostly blues. Nothing in my upgrade sockets but fresh Tyrian air.

This is not great gear. It's not end-of-leveling gear, let alone end-game gear. I could buy better on the Trading Post for pennies. It looks fantastic but I haven't even matched the stats, let alone chosen them for a particular purpose. I don't, in fact, have a particular purpose. As I said, I don't know what I'm doing.

Gear's not the half of it, either. Look at my Traits. Look at my Skills. When I hit 80 I had over 50 Trait Points and 58 Skill Points unspent. This morning I tried to spend some but I didn't get far. It isn't that the things I could buy with them aren't useful or interesting. It's that I don't need any of them.

Yah! Stupid catapult can't hit me here!

As I type this I'm logged into the game, tucked safely on a ledge below The Colonnade. Three events ticked past as I was typing and I got Gold for two of them and Silver for the third. If I contributed anything I have no idea what it was. Except when it isn't, GW2 is easy. Very pleasantly, enjoyably, comfortably easy. All you have to do is turn up. Sometimes not even that.

I was there! Kinda.

I'm easy with easy but easy doesn't offer much in the way of a plan. Levels drift by like dandelion clocks on the Queensdale breeze, events give out rewards whether you win or lose, and though the gear you have and the skills you've chosen do make a difference to how you perform, how you perform doesn't make a lot of difference to how much fun you have.

There, that's the nub. It's far too easy to enjoy yourself. If it's all fun all the time, where's my motivation? That's something with which some people are having a hard time coming to grips.

My contribution

It certainly wasn't worrying me until I hit the level cap and it's not worrying me now. Puzzling me, yes. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had a long discussion about stats this morning. That's not normal. We do not talk about stats. We were talking about stats on a Monday morning because on Sunday afternoon, while we romped across Malchor's Leap and Cursed Shore, knocking the Risen back down and filling our pockets with Orichalcum, somewhere along the way we bumped into the Karma vendor who sells a full set of Exotic Quality Level 80 armor for 42,000 Karma the piece.

That's a lot of Karma. After 80 levels during which I have barely spent any Karma at all, I have enough squirreled away to buy the coat and one leg of a pair of pants. If you're going to try to collect another quarter of a million Karma points to get the set, you want to be quite sure that what you buy with them is what you really need.

Stats? Who cares? I got a giant matchstick!

Which is how Mrs Bhagpuss got to be thinking about stats and asking me what were my thoughts on the matter, which in turn is when I realized I didn't have any. I've just been living in the moment, going with the flow, doing my own thing. I only tend to start thinking about stats and builds and gear when I hit a roadblock that stops me doing what I want to do and in GW2 there are no roadblocks. (Outside of Dungeons, that is, and I don't plan on going in any of those thank you very much).

So where does that leave us? Confused, mostly. Confused, directionless and happy. My current plan, if it can be dignified as such, is to fiddle about with a few "builds" and see if I can tell the difference. That's always fun. In The Secret World, tweaking my build changed things up hugely in a way I wasn't expecting. Maybe that will happen in GW2.

First of all I need to work on, guess what, bag space. If I'm going to try out different combinations of stats I'll have to lug around a load of gear. GW2 doesn't provide much in the way of convenience for holding or swapping gear sets, unlike TSW. I quite fancy running as a Condition Damage ranger, and as Heal/Support. A Trap/Spirit build could be interesting, too - Natural Engineer I could call that one.

There. Now I have a plan but I still don't really know what I'm doing. Perfect!

Pretty Green : City of Steam

The City of Steam Sneak Peak has been extended to Thursday, which gives me a chance to  try out the remaining two classes. There are four altogether: Warden, Gunner, Arcanist and Channeler. I'm a little hazy on how the roles fall out between them. The Warden is a tank, for sure. The Gunner is ranged DPS, I think, but so is the Arcanist. The Channeler is Healer/Support and also the one I've not tried yet.

Move Along, Citizen

Everyone but the Warder uses magic, even the Gunner. I thought they were just firing pistols and throwing bombs but it seems they're using their own blood to "transform their sidearms into occult implements". Is that legal? It makes more sense than the the Channeler job description, anyway, which claims they're bardic healers who use "battle-hardened musical instruments to turn the steel eye of the World Machine to the suffering of their companions". Run that by me again?

No-one is officially Melee DPS, although I think everyone can dual wield. Unless the Channeler can't. Hang on, let me make one... Yep. Dual-wields blunt weapons, starting out with Censers, incense optional. I was hoping he might clout ratlings upside the head with a brace of maracas. Maybe later. And yes, there are ratlings. They don't wear any clothes or talk, at least not the ones I've met (and by met I mean chopped up with a big sword). But, hey, they walk on two legs so they count.

The Warden and Gunner I covered last time. The Arcanist seems to be the classic glass cannon. She gets Fire, Ice and Electricity lines, heavy on the AE. The explosions are spectacular. Most solo fights end with her standing in the middle of a pile of dismantled clockworks, beating the flames out of her dress. I took mine down to level 14 of the Nexan Archives. and she didn't die once. She nearly died about twenty times. Not for the faint of heart.

And that's just the healer!

The Channeler gets Fire, Sound and Light lines with some very nice visual effects. All healing and damage derives from a multiple of weapon damage, which I think is true of all the classes. Everyone gets the same vast number of stats. Seven active, seven passive, ten resists making a grand total of twenty-four. That won't last. Items have negative as well as positive stats. Neither will that. Armor has three resistances, different to the ten general resistances. There are at least four grades of armor. Weapons and Armor have class restrictions. I said it was old school!

City of Steam is a real rpg statfest but the UI is so elegantly designed that I haven't found it in the least overwhelming or confusing. It's certainly counter-trend, though, which can't be said about the choice of races.

I don't want to breathe YOUR germs either

Steampunk does not say elves to me. Nor orcs. It might possibly say dwarves, at a push. CoS offers a choice of nine races and five of them are varieties of elf or greenskin. The three greenskins (they call themselves that and it's true) are Goblin, Orc and Hobbe. I'm guessing the Hobbe is a Hobgoblin although they're big enough to be ogres. I called mine Calvin. I assume everyone will.

Checks are in this century

The elves are the first elves I have seen in many years that I would willingly play. They look, sound and act more like pale, fin-de-siecle goths than elves. If they didn't occasionally mention their elvishness I'd have guessed they were vampires. They come in two flavors, Riven or Draug, the main difference between them being their lifespan, short for the Riven and long for the Draug. How that will impact gameplay I cannot say. Ask me in fifty years. Oh, and one kind is blue.

The rest of the races are humans of different regional background and attitude. I notice they are all White European in appearance. There's no option for skin color (so far) at character creation either.

I think the elves work. I remain to be convinced about the Greenskins. I'd have preferred Steam Dwarves as a playable race. Or ratlings, although that might just be me. Still, it's early days. Much could change and much remains to be revealed. The website suggests a considerable level of political intrigue to come, of which as yet there are barely hints in the game. 

There's no mention of crafting but I'm sure it's on the way. There are vendors for Oil and Coal. Also Pleap, Toap and Hawte which appear to be foods. Or diseases of the sheep. One or the other. On the subject of vendors, they all have a timer that tells you when the shop will restock, which suggests an interesting scarcity mechanic could be in the plan. A variety of "Repair Materials" drop in dungeons for which there is as yet no use. They look like crafting raws to me and I hope that's what they are but could they point to armor and weapon degradation. I hope they don't.

I could go on, and on. And on. But I won't. This is now my most-anticipated MMO save only for Guild Wars 2. I'm going to miss it when the server closes on Thursday. Here's hoping for an alpha invite in a month or so. More chance of that than a GW2 beta invite, that's for sure!