Before The Shadow: Big Skies, Small Horizons

Before The Shadow is turning out to be a very good purchase. I've only managed three sessions so far but they've been lengthy- a couple of hours and more each time. It's mostly been proper, focused gameplay, too. I've been sticking to the main questline, only picking up side-quests as and when I find them. Which is often. There are a lot of quests.

Even so, after as many hours, I'm still less than halfway through level 7, suggesting I could be at this for quite some time. With a reported "expansion cap" somewhere around the low thirties, I can see this becoming my second-longest run in Lord of the Rings Online to date.

I first picked up the game sometime back in the late noughties, when I made it to around Level 40. (The cap was 50 at the time.) If I'm remembering correctly, it took me about three months to get there but it might not have been quite as long as that. Maybe it just felt like it.

I do know that by the end things had gotten very grindy indeed and when some stranger royally pissed me off one Sunday morning, making some entitled roleplaying demands I wasn't interested in meeting,  I grabbed the opportunity to flounce out, taking Mrs Bhagpuss with me. She's never played again. I have, many times.

I'm in there, somewhere. Hobbits are, like, really short, y'know?

I'm even still playing on that same server, mostly because I'm too mean, stubborn and lazy to move. Frankly, it hasn't improved much in the last decade. Last night I had to switch World chat off because I couldn't take the ceaseless bickering over whether housing is or isn't a core part of the game and whether Standing Stone are or are not justified in making housing items the lead attraction in their Black Friday offer.

Without the players, however, Before the Shadow becomes a charming divertissement indeed. The new zones are as huge as these screenshots suggest. I got distracted by the sheer scale of the landscape while out questing last night and found myself climbing to the tops of several crags just to get a better view.

While I was exploring, I ran into some orcs, brigands and footpads, for none of which had I been given quests to hunt or kill. Naturally, this being an mmorpg and I a seasoned mmorpg player, I killed them anyway and I was very glad I did. Several dropped armor and weapons that weren't just far better than anything I had but also much better than anything any questgiver had seen fit to hand out as a reward. 

Yep, these planks all seem fine to me.

This seems like an interesting quirk. The structured gameplay in the new starting zone is clearly defined, with a central narrative and regular breadcrumb quests leading the player to each new quest hub. It would seem sensible, therefore, to stick to the schedule, go where you're sent and do as you're asked, an approach that's become almost compulsory in most modern mmorpgs. 

Despite that, and even though Before The Shadow is entirely composed of newly-written content, it seems the old ways persist. When LotRO launched, back in 2007, World of Warcraft had already begun resetting the parameters for the genre with its quest-based levelling mechanics but the pre-existing practices of older games like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot, where grinding mobs for both xp and gear had long been the baseline, still exerted a powerful influence on game design.

All this second-person reported speech takes a bit of getting used to. It has a serious distancing effect on the narrative, too.

You might have thought the supposedly good currency of questing would have driven out the bad of random mob-killing by now but evidently not, at least in LotRO. Good for Standing Stone! I love levelling up by wandering about, killing anything that can't kill me, then stealing their stuff and using it for myself. It's a simple but eternally satisfying gameplay loop.

Of course, the nature of the quests I'm being offered might have something to do with my enthusiasm for off-piste slaughter, too. I know the early stages of the game have a reputation for cosiness, particularly when Hobbits are involved, but some of the things I'm being asked to get involved with really stretch the definition of "adventuring" well past breaking point.

I forgot the one about finding
some guy's lost boot...

There was the butcher who wanted me to go round the village, collecting next week's meat orders, tacked to his customers' front doors. Or how about the mother who sent me out to look for her five children, none of whom she had the least clue where they might be, just to tell them their tea was ready?

Things like that make the time when I was tasked with retrieving a single, lost arrow, supposedly stolen by a mysterious beast, only to be asked to wash it when I brought it back because it had monster spit on it, seem almost reasonable. Even something as straightforward as swimming across the river to look behind a waterfall, just in case something might be hiding behind it, as one paranoid Hobbit had me do, felt like reckless risk-taking by local standards.

So determinedly trivial are many of the quests that simply being sent to check out some hill where orcs might be hiding (They aren't.) or to retrieve a book from some bandits seems like high adventure. The civillians are bad enough but the local authorities are even worse. 

The bridge inspector, who didn't feel up to working one day and sent me to check the planks for her, had a better claim on my time than the so-called Mayor, a Hobbit so lazy he couldn't even be bothered to tack his weekly meat order on the door but still expected me, a total stranger, only in town to warn him of the impending orcish threat, to go out and kill animals for him just so he could feed his blasted dog!

And yet, somehow, none of it sends my blood pressure soaring. Rather, it all feels surprisngly relaxing. It's old school mmorpg gameplay with all the sharp edges sanded away to leave nothing more than a gentle nub; the adventuring equivalent of a cosy armchair and a pair of slippers. 

If things carry on like this for another twenty-five levels, I won't be complaining - although that might just be because I'll be fast asleep.

Across The Desert By Track And Shrine: Notes On New World's Brimstone Sands.

Belghast put up a long, post today, detailing some of the major ways New World has changed since its fall from grace last year. He knows the game far better than I do, having not only engaged extensively with the previous endgame mechanics that I completely ignored, but also having levelled to sixty under both the old and new regimes, so I don't plan on elaborating on anything he's covered.

I did, however, already have a vague plan to post a bullet point list of a few things specific to Brimstone Sands that I'd noticed since I came back to the game, things that seemed like improvements to me. I even went to the trouble of jotting down a few notes, so rather than waste them, here they are.

• Brimstone Sands Is New World's First Expansion
  

It's not been billed as one and Amazon haven't taken any money for it but after a week playing it I can't see it as anything less. To be specific, it reminds me surprisingly strongly of the kind of expansion I'm used to from EverQuest II. 

There's a central questline that leads you through the new zone, which feels like it could be about the size of the three or four EQII zones that make up the average expansion these days. There's the new hub city, the new mob models, the new crafting materials and recipes, and the wealth of upgrades that almost immediately invalidate what you came in wearing. It all feels very familiar.

My first Legendary weapon. Shame I don't know how to use it.

It feels like it's going to be about the same length, too, at least as far as the storyline goes. I've been following the main questline pretty slavishly and so far I've opened just over half the zone. I'm guessing that means I'm about halfway through but I haven't looked ahead to check. 

It might be a bit less. So far I've had six Legendary weapons from quest rewards. I'm assuming all fifteen types are coming - it would be a bit unfair if anyone got right to the end of the chain and found their weapon had been left out.Of course, they may not be distributed evenly. I'm pretty sure I got at least one from a side quest. Either way, there's plenty still left to do.

• They Don't Call It The Empty Quarter For Nothing.
  

The changes to fast travel that make it almost as easy to teleport around Aeternum as it used to be in Tyria, before ArenaNet decided they'd rather people used mounts, presumably because you can't sell skins for waypoints. This morning I was jogging across the dunes on my way to a quest objective, when I decided to take a detour to open a Spirit Shrine, the game's version of a waypoint. When I got there, I could see another Shrine so close by I was able to open it as I ran back without taking a detour. 

There's no shortage of jump-offs, then, but the problem hasn't only been one of availability. (Or cost, for that matter, another non-issue now it's been reduced to almost nothing.) Part of the difficulty with Shrines has always been ease of access - or rather lack of it. Travel doesn't really feel all that instant if you have to fight your way through hordes of wolves to get to the bus stop. Too much of my time in New World has been spent either fighting or running away from endless guards, undead and wildlife, all of which seemed hell-bent on chasing down and killing anything in a hundred meter radius. It certainly put me off using the Shrines that weren't right on the roadways, which hardly any ever were.

Got the place to myself again, I see.

In Brimstone Sands you can hike for miles across the desert trails without coming into aggro range of so much as a single scorpion. Mob density throughout is exceptionally light. If you go off-track and head out into the scrubland you'll be very unlucky to meet much more than the odd jackal. Even when you start poking around the many ruins and collonades that litter the landscape, you'll find their forgotten treasures largely unguarded.

It makes exploring a genuine pleasure. I have to make a detour when I want to kill something, which makes me feel like I have agency, rather than as though I'm only in the gameworld on sufference. One can only hope for a similar sanity pass across the rest of Aeternum.

• Sneaky Sneaky Dodgy Guardy
  

Whereas the vast tracts you need to cross to get to quest locations are largely devoid of annoying interruptions, the larger temples, crypts and complexes that form your primary loci of interest very definitely are not. They're well-guarded and daunting to explore, as they should be.

Let's see any of 'em catch me up here!

That doesn't mean you have to hack your way through a score of mobs to get to every checkpoint. I mean, you can, if that's your thing, but if you want to play it smart there's often a sneaky approach that'll get you to your quest objective without a weapon being drawn.

I've had as much fun working out covert routes to glyphs and chests, sneaking behind pillars, climbing up broken walls and shinning along aquaducts as I've had going full berserker on the sentries on gate duty. It adds a welcome degree of puzzle gameplay to even out all that combat and I find it just plain fun.

• You Call Them "Jumping Puzzles", I Call Them "Vistas"

I saw a certain degree of nervousness expressed in some quarters over Amazon Games' stated intention to add a little variety to questing in the form of "Jumping Puzzles". I suppose people were imagining something along the lines of the often challenging set-piece content in other games, for example Guild Wars 2. 

I've taken several quests so far that required me to climb to the top of something to open a box or read a glyph but thankfully none of them have been any more difficult than an average vista in GW2. Easier, really, since New World comes with a degree of automated parkour baked in., "Climbing" is mostly a case of positioning your character and letting the game engine do the rest. 

Getting up here was easy enough. It's getting down that's the problem.

As for jumping, if you don't quite make it across a gap, your character will often grab on to something and haul themselves up rather than plummet to their death. It turns what could have been a stressful, frustrating experience into something of a jolly romp, something which is beginning to sound like a fair description of New World itself.

• A Busy Map Is A Happy Map
  

As has been widely reported, New World's population, having bottomed out at around 1% of its former peak, has rebounded vigorously of late. The addition of Fresh Start servers have taken concurrency back into six figures for the first time in a long while.

The starting regions of those new servers must be heaving but where I'm playing the focus seems to be very much on Brimstone Sands. New Corsica, the full-service capital of the zone feels lively as a busy city should but even in the far-flung corners of the parched desert you can't go more than a few yards without crossing paths with another adventurer.

Thanks! I can take it from here!

As I discovered many years ago, when mmorpg designers began to move away from individual ownership towards a more collectivist approach, other players doing the same quest as you are always welcome. There's no longer any need to party up, although you can if you want to be sociable. Either way, you can fight side by side as you push forward through the ruins or follow in the slipstream of someone more powerful as they blaze a path towards your mutual objective. I like to take it in turns, leapfrogging from mob to mob, allowing  each player to kill half as many mobs as they would alone, while moving considerably faster towards the goal.

• Risk vs Reward... But Mostly Reward.

I'm not a big fan of risk vs reward. I like the reward part well enough. I'm just not so fond of the risk. 

In Brimstone Sands, the balance seems to have tipped very much in my favor. There's treasure everywhere. Epic items drop from jackals and scorpions at a rate that seems much more generous than I remember from other parts of the game and as for chests, their ever-repleneshing contents remind me of EQII's paradoxical pandas, the ones who boast of never leaving their homeland and yet somehow manage to find an  infinite supply of powerful gear to give away to anyone who wants it.

As for quest rewards, in addition to the aforementioned Legendary weapons there's a torrent of mats needed for their upgrades plus a steady trickle of the sought-after gypsum orbs used to craft yet more epics. My only real issue is that I don't yet fully understand how those systems work. When I've done my research, though, I should have plenty of resources to put my learning into practice right away.

• Brimstone Sands: More To See Than Just Sand!
  

This might be the biggest surprise of all. I've seen a lot of desert zones in mmorpgs and while I like them well enough, I wouldn't claim they're the most diverse of environments. Brimstone Sands makes a strong case for variety, while somehow managing to stay consistent with its theme.

It does help that one of the big threats in the region turns out to be the Angry Earth, Aeternum's druidic/elemental race. Everywhere the Angry Earth go, flowers bloom, something that seems to hold true as much in the arid desert as in the temperate zones from which they come.

Yep. Still in the desert.

Oases add a burst of welcome color but the real variety comes from the built environment. Graeco-Roman ruins and Egyptian pyramids battle for attention with flickering science-fantasy engines straight out of the pulps. Aeternum has always offered a grab-bag of architectural styles but here the range extends well beyond the historical and into the phantasmal.

The natural world more than holds its own, creatively. Blistering pools of acid hiss and bubble, sending out clouds of bilious, olive mists. Wind-carved spires of sandstone stretch upwards from the sand like the deformed fingers of giants. And then there's the sky. The endless, sweeping, overwhelming desert sky, roseate at dawn, glaring at midday, subtle pastels at sunset, shimmering starfields by night. I do love me a good skybox.

I'm sure there's much more I haven't yet discovered. Brimstone Sands is deep with content and all of New World these days is a cornucopia of entertainment. As Belghast puts it "What You Know about New World is Wrong". 

Unless, of course, what you know is that New World's a very good mmorpg. In my opinion it always has been but now I think it's better than ever. Who said there are no second acts in mmos?

Don't Mind Me! Just Passing Through! I VIsit Every Territory On Aeternum And Live To Talk About It.

Once I'd cooled off on the idea of buying that three-story yellow house in Everfall, it seemed like it might be an idea to go take a look at all of my options - or at least as many as I could get to at Level 35. That meant poking my nose into places I wasn't supposed to know about. Fun!

I've kind of gotten out of the habit of taking low-level characters to high-level zones. I used to do it all the time up until a few years ago. It's a good way to get the feel of a new game. It tells you a lot about how the developers were thinking when they were putting it all together. 

In some mmorpgs it feels as though the devs want us to take the game as seriously as they do. There are rules and they're there to be followed. Sometimes you get the impression anything less might be taken as a personal insult.

Those are the games where mobs have faultless radar that locks onto any character more than a certain number of levels beneath them. You've barely set foot in a new zone when everything in a five-hundred meter radius comes barrelling out of the bushes, snarling and spitting and howling for your blood. 

Instant death follows, of course, because those are the same games that ramp mob damage up exponentially against lower-level targets. One hit is all it takes and since all your defenses are automatically negated as soon as you set foot anywhere you're not meant to go, every attack does hit.

 

When I run into something like that, it tells me the whole game is going to be very much an on-rails experience. The devs will tell you where you should be and when you should be there and don't even think about having any ideas of your own.

I haven't run into all that many mmorpgs quite that bad and of those that come close I've purged the memories. I tend not to stick around where my preferred playstyle isn't just unsupported but actively discouraged. Of the games I have played for a while, the one that sticks in my mind as being a little like that is World of Warcraft, although I suspect it falls more into the next category.

These are the games that use some kind of sliding scale to decide how far you're allowed to push your luck. There's not the same kind of cliff-edge you get with the really harsh mechanics of the first category but there's a pretty treacherous slope all the same. 

In zones above your intended range you get some leeway as aggro ranges increase and mobs get more vicious but you can edge past if you're careful and you might survive a few hits. If you keep on testing the waters, though, you will eventually find yourself in over your head. When your level is sufficiently far below the intended level for the zone the devs take away the safety net and it's back to one-shot kills and nowhere to run.

The third category doesn't much care what you do. Aggro ranges might vary by mob type but level has nothing to do with it. A tiger in a starting zone has the same aggro range as a tiger in the endgame. Hits get harder but incrementally not exponentially. Exploring in those worlds is purely a matter of watching where you're going. Don't bump into anything and you'll be fine. Probably.

 

There are, of course, infinite gradations and variations. So many factors come into play: aggro range but also run speed, line of sight, ranged attacks, crowd control effects, visibility, terrain... Even in games that don't differentiate at all by level, some zones are easy to cross while others are all but impossible for any number of valid and less than valid reasons.

In all the time I've played mmorpgs I can't remember a single game where any of this has ever been overtly explained. Usually, about the best you can hope for are a couple of indicators on the mobs themselves (A death's head or a grinning skull is generally a bad sign.) and a note on the map telling you what the intended level might be.

The only game I can bring to mind that marks the exact aggro range of every mob on the map is Guild Wars, where I have to say I always found it intensely irritating. It turned exploring into a peculiarly geometric affair, where you stare at a series of circles on the mini-map and maneuver yours in such a way that it never intersects with any of the others. I'm sure someone enjoyed it but I can see why no other game copied it.

A more common system that I've seen a few times is a radar ping on a mini map or a heads-up display that notes when some mob has noticed you trying to sneak past. You get a small window of opportunity to pull back or freeze or go into stealth, whatever seems appropriate, before the creature launches itself at you. That I also find quite irritating.

When we get right down to it, I don't like any mechanics that make looking at a map or a HUD the optimal way to travel through dangerous territory. I like to look intensely into the screen and feel myself there, in the world. 

 

I like visual triggers, mobs stopping what they're doing, looking up or casting around, as if for a scent. The more that's done with animation or sound, the better but I'll also settle for a big exclamation point appearing over a mob's head to show it's thinking about something. At least it's in my field of view. 

In every new mmorpg, learning the local rules, the physics of the world, the various behaviors of the different mobs and the trigger cues is one of the best parts. Then the next best part after that is learning how to play them to your advantage.

How well all those myriad factors balance and especially how fair it feels is one of the defining factors in how much fun exploring can be in any given mmorpg. Some, Guild Wars 2 for example, are so permissive there's virtually no thrill in exploration at all (Although in GW2's case, the stellar work of the art department often makes it a glorious pleasure, all the same.) Others (I thought Phantasy Star Online 2 was one, from the little I saw while I was briefly there.) are so restrictive there's no point even trying to explore.

After several hours travelling the highways, byeways and unmarked dirt tracks of Aeternum today, I would tentatively describe New World as both fair and exciting when it comes to going where you're not supposed to go. The main reason I'm slightly cautious is that my character at 35 might be a little too high for a real test. Somewhere in the mid-teens would probably have been more conclusive. 

I'm not rolling a new character and levelling them up just to find out, though, so we'll have to make do with what I learned today. Which was that most but not all of the non-elite open world map is accessible to a determined explorer, provided they don't want to go too far off-road and always keep their eyes very firmly open.

 

The map, when used for planning, is trully excellent. Possibly the best I've ever used in an mmorpg. Not only are all the roads and trails clearly and accurately marked but you can see quite plainly where a road goes through a village, town, hamlet or ruin and also when the road itself breaks up and becomes impassable. 

That is crucial for safe travelling because although the larger roads are mostly safe, almost any settlement other than a player-town will be crawling with aggressive mobs, many of which will spill onto the road as it goes through. Bridges, especially the huge, partially-ruined ones, are also always swarming with undead. It's essential to know when you need to come off the paved highway and cut across country to avoid murder-gauntlets like those.

The map also makes it very clear which areas are impassable. The shading and color even tells you if the obstacle is a mountain or a cliff or deep water. Again, invaluable when planing a route.

As far as mob aggro goes, I think there's a sliding scale. I found it hard to be sure. My feeling is that there's a static upper radius that attaches to mobs your own level and all those above, meaning no mob spots you from further away just because it's higher level than you. The reverse, though, affects mobs as you level past them. The higher above them you get, the less notice they take of you, until eventually you all but have to push them out of the way to get their attention.

I would stress I'm not entirely sure about that. I have a suspicion predators may work differently. In the whole time I was travelling, it was always either wolves or cats that seemed to attack from a greater distance. Especially wolves. Bloody, sodding wolves. I hate wolves! Oh, and alligators, too. 

 

Run speed seems to be identical for everything, players and all mobs, although once again, I felt wolves seemed to be able to catch me up when nothing else could. I think that's because of a particular lunge attack they do, though, rather than any specific speed buff. I don't think wolves get Spirit of Wolf in Aeternum and I certainly don't see why they should, when no-one else does.

There seem to be few mobs that use crowd control effects or maybe I was just lucky. I did get killed once when I tried to run through half a dozen humanoid mobs and got chain-stunned but only once and it was in Shattered Mountain, which is a 50-60 zone. I probably should have expected it.

Shattered  Mountain was one of only two of the fourteen zones in which I failed in my mission to visit  all the marked player hubs in the game. Both were zones meant for players between 50 and 60. More importantly, I think, they also have no real player towns. They aren't, as far as I can see, included in the territorial PvP set-up and there's no housing available there. 

Those two zones, along with Great Cleave, which I was able to explore, only have "Outposts" for players to craft and bank and sell. The other eleven territories all have Settlements, one per zone, largeish villages or small towns, filled with activity of all kinds. These three each have two Outposts, which very much resembe those in the original alpha. Just a fort with the basic facilities inside, nothing else. 

I did manage to get to both of the Outposts in Great Cleave and one of the two in Edengrove but Shattered Mountain proved too tough, mainly because of the "mountain" part, which meant I couldn't cut around obstacles without getting trapped against a rockface. Even though none of the Outposts had housing, something I didn't realize until I got there, it was still well worth the trip. Now I have fast travel options and respawn points for all of them.

I had no major issues getting to the player hubs in the other very high level Territories. I'd already been to Reekwater, which is supposedly the highest zone in the current game. Mourningdale and Restless Shores are technically within my level range, although only just. 

I had a bit of trouble with some goats outside of Mourningdale, which would have been a very embarrassing way to get killed, but I made it past in one piece. Restless Shores saw me arrive at the gates with four or five slavering withered chasing me in the traditional Benny Hill manner but they were never close to catching me.

The nearest I came to disaster in sight of the safety of the city was coming up the road into Ebonscale Reach, a zone intended for 55-60. It was so close my Berserker death save kicked in so technically I did die but I didn't fall down. Somehow I kept going and got away. 

It was my first visit to Ebonscale Reach, the zone Belghast compared to somewhere in Mists of Pandaria and for very good reason. I'm planning a post on which towns I'd most and least like to own houses in so I'll probably say more about Ebonscale then but for now I'll just say I did not expect anything like that!

On my run I took about eighty screenshots. I would have taken a lot more. There were plenty of times when I wanted to but couldn't stop for fear of near-certain death. 

 

Mostly I only saw what you can see from a road but it very much looked as though Kaylriene's critical observation about the very limited range of mob models in New World remains true right to the cap. I saw the same mobs just about everywhere, occasionally with slightly different skins. 

I don't think it matters. In a way it makes the place feel more convincing. And convincing is the word for much of Aeternum, although possibly not all of it. The nordic forests of Great Cleave are some of the best I've ever seen in an mmorpg but what's going on with all the tropical flowers in Edengrove, right next door, I have no idea. It must be magic.

All in all it was a lot of fun, exciting, involving, immersive and of great practical benefit. I now have fast travel options across the entire map (almost) and a pretty good idea where I want to live. 

All I need to do is grab another four or five levels and start working on my Standing in yet another Settlement. Which one? That's a different post but I'll give you a clue. You can see the house I want to live in somewhere on this page.

Who Would Live In A Place Like This?

The delightful scene above is a pretty fair representation of what I've been looking at for most of the afternoon. That's Weaver's Fen in New World. Charming, isn't it?

I've had it in mind for a few days to say something about how New World follows the unfortunate pattern of most mmorpgs in making the zones increasingly unatractive, not to say hellish, the higher up the levels you go. That's certainly been my experience so far, with the bright, colorful, coasts of First Light and Monarch's Bluffs shading into rich farmlands and autumnal glow of Everfall, before the gloom descends with the haunted house aesthetic of the ironically-named Brightwood and the dismal swamps of Weaver's Fen.

My faction, Marauders, by far the weakest on Zuvendis, holds just a single zone now. We did have two but we lost First Light days ago and despite warring for it ever since show no signs of getting it back. 

Our stronghold, such as it is, is the truly awful Reekwater, a zone that is, I'm sad to say, very accurately named. I imagine the only reason we hold it is because no-one else wants it. No-one with anywhere else to go would dream of setting foot on the rotten, rickety planks of the shanty town it calls a capital, let alone raising a flag.

I went there to see what our faction town was like, just in case I might have wanted to settle there. I think you get some benefits for crafting and so forth in zones owned by your faction. In my case that gives me a choice of one.

Reekwater is apparently a level 58-60 zone but I had no trouble whatsoever getting there in my early thirties. Well, maybe I did have a little trouble. The first time I tried to come in via the road that travels eastwards out of Everfall but that turns out to run right through the middle of a ruined village populated by angry ghosts. I took one look and thought better of it.

Next time, I came down from the north, along the road from Weaver's Fen. It's one of the bigger roads, not just a track. By and large in Aeternum, the wider the road, the safer it is. It helps that just about everything seems to have the same run speed. Provided you get past something, it can't catch you, so long as you don't turn around to see how far behind you it is.

And this is the nice part of town...

One quick trip around the waterlogged decks of Reekwater town confirmed all my fears. It's a classic mmorpg end game zone - ugly, dark, miserable and depressing. They're always either that or frozen solid or on fire.Of the three, I think swampland is the worst.

Based on everything I've seen for myself so far, I'd have been justified in lambasting Amazon's designers for falling into the trap of making the path from character creation to cap a journey from comfort to despair, visually at least. Only I've heard otherwise.

Belghast dinged fifty today and he's been pondering where he might settle down when he caps out and buys a house. He's thinking about Ebonscale Reach, a level 50-60 zone, which he describes as "...really gorgeous... its layout somewhat reminds me of the temples in Pandaria with everything terraced out of the face of a mountainside." 

Someone else (I apologize to whoever it was. I know it was someone whose blog I follow but I can't remember where I read it.) was talking the other day about one of the later zones looking like the Plains in Valheim, an aesthetic that strongly appeals to me. Unfortunately, I also can't remember which zone it was. This isn't helping much, is it?

The point is, there's anecdotal evidence building up that not every endgame zone in New World is dank, dark and deacayed. It looks as though there's actually some geographical logic to it, not just a desire to exploit the inevitable correlation between the aesthetic tastes of players most likely to make it to the level cap and the kind of imagery traditionally found on the covers of heavy metal albums.

It seems that, from the center to the south-eastern coast, the isle of Aeternum is covered by one massive swamp. Upward from that, along the coast, by all reports the climate improves. I'm going to have to go and check it out for myself.

So far I've visited eight of New World's fourteen zones. I find almost all of the game's progression systems compulsive but by far the most satisfying of them all are the Standings. In a way it's nothing more than the faction we're familiar with from many games but the mechanics and implementation and the fact it's linked directly to the towns themselves make it feel different. And desirable.

Where would you rather live? I mean, come on...

 

Improving my Standing in Everfall made up the main thrust of my gameplay from the moment I decided that was where I wanted to buy my first house. I only changed focus when I started to feel a little burned out from running town and faction missions back to back, session after session, by which time I was already Respected, the title you earn at Standing 15.

At that point I was also Standing 13 in Monarch's Bluff and Standing 10 in Windsward, meaning I could have bought a house in any of them. I'm also at least Standing 5 in First Light, Brightwood and Weaver's Fen by now. Everywhere I go I make an impression, it seems.

You can't really help it. The missions bring in the most credit, of course, but just as everything you do gives you xp, so it gives you Standing. Even running along a road from one side of a new zone to the other without stopping will usually get you enough Standing from discovery xp to raise your profile from Stranger to Newcomer.

I took a couple of sessions off from grinding Everfall faction to go level up a bit. That took me from the late twenties into the early thirties and also filled all my resource pools to the brim. At Level 32 this afternoon I couldn't receive any further Azoth rewards, faction tokens or faction reputation. If I could change one thing about New World it would be to take those caps and hurl them into the ocean.

I made some armor I didn't need and ported somewhere I might just as well have walked to get my Azoth down. I bought a rune of holding for 3000 tokens (and 500 gold, which I could ill afford) to let me earn yet more tokens.

The faction reputation, though, I could do nothing about. I'd run up against the hard cap of a new Rank. 

Ranks have a different name in every faction. In the Marauders, the third rank is Ravager. To become a Ravager you need to do a "Trial", just as you did for the previous rank, Gladiator. 

The trial, which is just a fancy name for a quest, is recommended for Level 35. The Gladiator one didn't just recommend Level 30, it required it or so I thought. I think now I may have misunderstood what was going on because I was able to get the Ravager quest at 32. 

Except when I got it it said it was recommended for Level 40. Gulp! Oh well, it's not like anyone stays dead in Aeternum, is it? (Actually it is but that's a whole other post...) So I followed the marker and went to see how far I could get. 

All the way. With ease. Literally the only difficult part about it was getting to the first of the three or four villages I needed to cleanse. That one was inconveniently crammed between a cliff and a town full of highly agressive Elite mobs, capable of sending me back to spawn in a couple of hits.

Once I'd navigated a route past those obstacles, though, despatching the requisite ten mobs was ridiculously easy. Yes, some of them were six or seven levels higher than me but mobs in New World vary incredibly in difficulty and threat compared to most other mmorpgs I've played. These were all Lost and for my build at least, Lost are just about the softest of kills.

So now I'm a Ravager, which means I can buy the third grade of faction armor. I don't want to, because I don't need it, which is just as well. I can buy it but I can't equip it. Clearly the developers did indeed expect players wouldn't be doing these quests until they hit 35 or even 40 because those are the level requirements to wear the bloody stuff!

Seriously? What do I have to do to get some respect around here? Arm-wrestle alligators? Because I will!

 

Never mind. At least I can gain reputation with the Marauders again and make my way towards the fourth trial so I can become a Destroyer. And there are some useful utilities I can buy for tokens.

Along the way I did do a few more missions in Everfall. My Standing there is now 19, just one level short of being able to buy the Tier Three house I wanted. Note past tense.

I might still want it. I'm not sure. It's a great house. And Everfall is a great town. There's just one problem. It's also an insanely busy town. I get more frame-rate lag there than anywhere else in the game. I can barely move after eight in the evening. I'm begining to think it would be a mistake to settle there.

Then again, I have all that Standing. It would be a shame not to take advantage of it. I can't see myself waiting until I hit the mid-50s to start all over again in Ebonscale Reach, no matter how delightful it is. 

And in the long run, it'll be the endgame zones that are busiest, won't it? It usually is. By then, Everfall might have slipped back into being a quiet, low-level backwater. 

I hope so although I suspect not. It's just too conveniently placed and as we all know... location, location, location.

One thing's for sure. Wherever I end up living it won't be Reekwater, no matter how damn quiet it is. I have some standards, at least!

In Exile

Exile's Reach is World of Warcraft's new, all-race, all-faction, all-purpose starter zone. It sailed in on the update formerly known as the Shadowlands pre-patch, blown loose from its moorings by the storm that pushed the expansion back to an as-yet unknown release date. 

Sorry. Sorry! It's hard to avoid the maritime metaphors when you've just hauled yourself up onto the beach from yet another MMORPG shipwreck. How many times have we done this now? Let me think... when was the last time? Oh, yes, that would be the New World showcase back in the summer. That long?

I love the classics, though, don't you? I mean, why re-invent the wheel, right? But I did find this particular cover version particularly ironic, what with the similarities to WoW's contemporary and so-far-back-in-the-rear-view-mirror-it's-barely-a-dot "rival", EverQuest II, but Norrath does have separate islands for the factions so it's not exactly the same. Is it?

Hard to be sure. So far, I've only run through this thing once, as a goblin with the Horde. Come to think of it, I can't recall seeing any dirty Alliance scum hanging around. Maybe there are two islands after all.

However it works, all brand-new players have no choice other than to begin in Exile's Reach. Experienced players, by which I believe Blizzard means any account that already has a character over level ten, get to choose whether to take the shipwreck or begin in their traditional racial starting zone.

Every character on my regular account (I have two - maybe three - I forget) belongs to the Alliance but I'm planning on starting a Vulpera as soon as I can get the pre-reqs done, which means having a Horde character of high enough level to do the quests. I maybe should have thought of that when they were running the months-long double xp promotion...

To kill two birds with one stone, or at least stun one of them a little, I thought I'd make a goblin and run her through the new starting experience. That also allowed me to take a look at the revamped character creation options. Hey, three birds! What is this, hunting season?

It's been so long since I last made a character in WoW I couldn't really remember how it used to be so any comparisons I might try to make between the old and new versions would be fairly meaningless. Also, WoW seems to be having some fairly serious connectivity problems since the big patch so I didn't see things at their best. 

I got disconnected just before I finished making my first goblin. Nothing saved so I had to make another. That one glitched half way through and changed several of the options I'd picked. It was hardly a slick, polished process. After about twice as long as I expected I managed to get a goblin I was happy with, a shaman, a class I don't believe I've ever played.

Things began with a short cinematic with very hyped-up voiceover bigging up the gung-ho collective responsibility of the Horde in what I thought was a peculiarly uncomfortable fashion. I wasn't quite sure if I was joining an anarcho-syndacalist collective or the U.S. marines. That tone, unfortunately, persisted for the entire time I spent in Exile's Reach and seemed set to continue into Orgrimmar, where I ended up, being given the tour by a relatively un-brainwashed goblin, ten levels later.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. How was Exile's Reach itself? 

Buggy, in a word. Really quite buggy. Like, late beta buggy. That buggy. Which I found surprising. Isn't Blizzard the company that's famous for its polish? Maybe that's Old Blizzard, as SynCaine would say.

After a few extremely basic tutorial steps (WASD, how to hit a target dummy)  I got sent to kill murlocs and retrieve First Aid kits they'd stolen. Yeah, didn't make any sense in game, either. Unfortunately I couldn't target any of them."Invalid target", every time.

I couldn't cast my one spell, a lightning bolt, but it didn't stop me killing the little blighters because right-clicking on them and auto-attacking worked fine. Didn't help as much as you'd think, though, because I couldn't loot anything I killed, which meant no first aid kits, which meant I couldn't complete the opening quest.. 

 

I fiddled around with that for a while and got annoyed. Logged in and out a couple of times. Tried another character to see if it was just happening in Exile's Reach (it wasn't). Eventually I found a supposed solution online (you just have to press "Alt" apparently) but when I swapped back to my gobin shaman for the third time the problem had magically fixed itself.

Not the greatest of first impressions. It occured to me that, had I been a brand new player, at this point I might have been thinking of playing something else. Since I'm a veteran I carried on. 

Some more bugs I experienced over the next couple of hours: 

• being told to eat some food to recover my health every single time I opened my bags even though I was always at full health already
• having as many as four flashing prompts on screen at once, all overlapping each other so none of them could be read
• and finally (after I foolishly ate something to get the flashing prompt to go away) getting a huge banner stuck across the bottom of the screen telling me "Don't move while eating. Watch as your health recovers", which would not go away no matter what I tried.

Despite the flurry of irritating and inaccurate messages I persisted. It took me a couple of hours to get to level ten. I was quite surprised when I checked the time at the end. It seemed shorter. I probably lost twenty minutes fighting bugs so I guess it was. 

 

Experience and levels seemed to come pretty quickly and as advertised there was something to get excited about each time I dinged. Mostly a spell, which the game was very, very insistent I should know about. I was understanding of the first animated prompt to tell me how to open my spell book and move a spell icon onto my hotbar but less so when it was still happening at level nine.

The early stages involved a considerable amount of business around making sure my character was prepared for the danger of the fights to come. It seemed ironic considering the speed everything died. At no point was I ever in the slightest danger from anything. Most mobs fell down in two or three hits. If my goblin took any damage I didn't notice it.

Somewhere around level six, as I was running somewhere to do something for someone (to call the storyline generic would be rude to genres) I spotted a big mob with a fancy border around its name so I piled into it to see if I could get an actual fight. 

It wasn't touch and go, let's say that much. The thing did drop an eight-slot bag, though, so I was happy enough. I also received a ten-slot from a quest. With last year's Classic experience still quite fresh in my memory I suspect I may have gotten more excited about getting those bags than was wholly appropriate.

 

Visually, Exile's Reach is impressive. The opening area on the beach doesn't really set the scene for what follows, a romp through some very picturesque and spooky swampland. The ghost army was worth seeing, too.

In retrospect I kind of wish I'd gone a little deeper into the swamp, poked around a little, but the entire experience is very much on rails. There's little incentive to explore. The main sequence questline is extremely linear and although there's the odd side quest none of them actually take place off to the side.

As far as gameplay goes, the designers have managed to throw in several of their favorite tropes:

• the one where you get turned into something else
• the one where you ride an NPC as though they were a mount
• the one where you dangle from a flying contraption
• the one where you destroy hundreds of baddies with massive air strikes. 

Plus, naturally, all the kill ten and fetch quests you'd expect. I don't recall there being an escort quest but I may well have done one and forgotten about it.

The finale involves that nemesis of all introverted would-be soloists, the unavoidable, compulsory group instance. Being WoW, this is as automated as it possibly could be. A dungeon finder window opens, you click it and if you're lucky like I was you're in a group in less than five seconds. 

Astoundingly someone did actually take the trouble to type in "Hello everyone", to which I felt obligated to reply "Hi there", by which time the two players who hadn't taken time out to introduce themselves had already killed most of the trash and were lining up for the boss. We killed him and then (spoiler!) the real final boss spawned so we killed him too.

 

I was nominally playing a healer. A shaman is a healer in Wow, right? Or maybe it's not. Certainly nothing happens in Exile's Reach to suggest anyone ever needs healing of any kind. Well, other than that that blasted "eat your greens" prompt. Anyway, I did keep an eye on the other party members' health but since no-one ever went under 90% it seemed like a moot point.

There was loot that looked like it might be nice. It was blue, at least. I'd barely registered anything had dropped before I found myself alone again. I've never seen people disband so fast. I guess they had somewhere to be.

Back in the open world again, all that was left was a quick debrief and a wyvern ride to Orgrimmar. The wyvern person warned me it was a one-way trip. Frankly, I couldn't think of a reason I'd want to come back. Unless it was to bring a dictionary to show them the correct phonetic pronounciation of "Wyvern". It's Why Verne ffs, not Wivv Urn! What is it with voice actors? They do the same thing in Guild Wars 2.

Anyhoo... there I was in Orgrimmar, still bugged with that stupid food message. I was going to stop but the guy giving the tour was right in front of me and there was something about getting a mount so I carried on for a while until I got my three-wheeled hog. Or Goblin Trike as the game less than thrillingly has it.
 

According to Rohan at Blessing of Kings taking the tour option locks you into doing at least the Battle for Azeroth starting quests. I might as well do that anyway, since it will all be new to me. And I want my fox person!

Overall, and assuming the bugs get fixed, I wouldn't say Exile's Reach is bad. The story is perfunctory. Although there are a few amusing lines now and again, it all feels very bland. It's unoriginal but functional. It moves along at a good clip. I was never bored, at least.

But, compared with the rich, complex, involving storylines of the goblin or worgen starting areas, just to pick a couple of races, Exile's Reach is a huge step back in immersion and quality. Back in 2013, when I last played through the goblin Isle of Kazan, I called it " a fascinating place" and "genuinely laugh-out-loud funny". I also seem to remember it taking me something like two full evening sessions, maybe five or six hours, just to get to level five there, and all of it fun.

Somehow I can't see Exile's Reach ever fostering the kind of nostalgia that led Daybreak to spring the return of the Isle of Refuge on EQ2's audience as a glorious surprise. It does a job and I guess that's about as much as anyone expected.

There's Been A Change Of Plan: EverQuest

All the shots in this post come from the aptly-named Beast's Domain, a Tier 3 zone from the Veil of Alaris expansion. Zam describes it as "a lush, wild land where the beasts rule".

I never really planned to go there. It just happens to be right next to the Level 95 Hot Zone, Sarith, City of Tides.

Sarith is the final Hot Zone. After this there are no more. I don't know why. Maybe Hot Zones always ran a few expansions behind the cap. I haven't been near enough to the top of the ladder to notice since 2004 and we didn't have Hot Zones back then. I can't say I've been paying attention to what happens when you get this close.

I'm paying attention now, though. My magician dinged 107 a couple of days ago and she's already 20% in. The next gear change comes at 110 but her focus effects already reach to the cap, five levels above that. She's not at endgame yet but she can see it from where she's standing.

With that in mind and planning ahead, I thought I ought to start investigating where she might go when Franklin Teek runs out of tasks to give her. Some of the mobs in Sarin already turned green when she dinged, although most are still a comfortable light blue. Another level, though, and it will definitely be time to move on.

With EverQuest as my focus game, things are changing. I'm finding it quite strange. I've been putting in a lot of work, upgrading gear, spells and AAs and it's paying off. XP per kill still crawls but time to kill has never been shorter. Quite possibly literally.

Instead of the familiar, sedate pace I've been used to, the mage is burning mobs down in seconds. She's started pulling aggro from her pet even on single targets, something that hasn't happened in forever. I'm having to hold back a little, which takes some getting used to.

With the buffs from the pile and the ever-increasing mana regeneration provided by high-level gear it's all but impossible to run out of mana. When I'm burning hard for maximum flow during my daily half-hour, double xp Lesson, I can chain-nuke and never go under half mana. I can kill mobs faster than I can find them - and there are plenty of mobs in Sarith.

With all that in mind, I went exploring in Beast's Domain. Hot Zones have always been unreliable when it comes to levelling efficiency. They have a bonus, it's true, but all EQ zones used to have separate Zone Experience Modifiers and some of them were already better than the Hot Zones for the level.

Something was done about that a few years ago, or I seem to remember it was. I think I might even have posted about it. This kind of thing is notoriously difficult to research, though, and I don't feel like spending the time right now.

Luckily, these days it's easy to test the proposition with a practical experiment. The default UI now renders xp to three decimal places. No more squinting at an analog "xp bar" and trying to guess how many pixels moved.

Another thing I don't know and can't be bothered to research just at the moment is when EQ expansions started using a "Tier" system for zones. It's long been common practice to refer to "T1" or "T2" zones but I always used to associate it with raiding. Now that I'm looking stuff up I realize it also applies to open zones.

I finally began to pay attention to tiers when I subbed my Magician's account at the end of last month. Subscribers can equip "Prestige" items. F2P players can't. I'd been wondering why she could use some of the drops from named mobs and not others.

As Zam explains, "Prestige Items in EverQuest are items obtained from higher-end content in the Seeds of Destruction™ expansion and later". "Higher-end content" is a little vague but a little digging suggests it means T3 zones and above.

Since I don't plan on keeping up the sub for more than a month and since almost all the drops are No Trade, being able to get Prestige items isn't of much practical use, even if anything the mage can kill was likely to drop anything she'd want, which is exceptionally unlikely. What's of more interest to me is a) how much harder the higher tier zones in the same expansion might be and b) whether the xp there is enough to to make any extra risk and effort worth taking. On the basis of my initial experiments the answers to those questions would seem to be "not much" and "just about", respectively.

Mobs in Beast's Landing take a little longer to kill but they give a little more xp. It probably balances out but BL is a really nice zone to hunt in and the drops are worth more. Also, it's visually very impressive - for an EverQuest zone. It's almost pretty in places and it's fun to explore. I like it there.

I even bumbled into the next zone on, the bizarrely named Evantil, the Vile Oak. I walked up an inclined tree-trunk, thinking it led to a raised area in Beast's Domain and half way up I hit a zone line.

When you find yourself in an unfamiliar zone in EverQuest it's best not to wander about. I hugged the trunk on the other side and conned the mobs. They were all aggressive but they were also all light-blue so I chanced it and sent the pet to poke the nearest.

They were tougher but quite manageable. I spent about half an hour there, gradually clearing the area around the zone line and venturing further in. Respawns were fast and there were plenty of roamers. I didn't get far. Eventually, inevitably, I got more adds than I felt equipped to handle, so I took the discretionary path and gated out.

It was good xp while it lasted and the loot sold nicely. I plan on going back but first I want to explore the whole of Beast's Domain. That could take a while. BD is huge. I mean really, really huge. It feels as though you could put several of the Karanas in there and still have space left over. 

That's the current plan, anyway. It's nice to have a plan but you always have to be ready to throw it out, particularly if it goes far better than you expected.

The whole reason I subbed was so I could grind AAs instead of xp, since I was making almost all my xp on Overseer quests anyway. And that's been going beautifully. I spent all my saved AAs and since then I've ground out over a hundred more. I've been saving them until I found out whether or not I'd get any of the free, auto-granted AAs when I dinged 107.

Well... I did. I got thousands of them. I'm not sure exactly how many it was but my Magician currently has 17,385. A week ago, before she subbed, she had about five thousand.

Those auto-granted AAs, automatically assigned to the abilities the developers consider key, make an immense difference. I went out right after I received them to see if I could tell the difference and it was as if the mage had been supercharged. I guess she had. No wonder everyone says the higher game is all about how many AAs you have.

So, change of plan. From now until my sub runs out I'm going to focus on leveling. I can get one more level for sure. Maybe two if I really go at it. If I get auto-grants for those it's going to make one heck of an impact.

And I'm going to see how much further up the expansion ladder I can climb. I had no idea when I was there, but checking it today for this post I realized Evantil, the Vile Oak is a zone from 2012's Rain of Fear. A Tier 2 zone, no less.

That's the most recent expansion I've ever hunted in (albeit not visited) and it was eminently doable. Maybe I'll try Call of the Forsaken's Dead Hills next. People keep suggesting that one in chat.

I can only die, right?

Big Blue Diamonds : EverQuest

There's no question that EverQuest is currently my main MMORPG. How weird is that?

I seem to have hit a sweet spot. The last time this happened was probably when I discovered Jewel of Atiki, a strangely-named but delightful zone from the 2007's The Buried Sea. That was four years ago, when I was doing my Lesson and my Hot Zone daily for xp, then keeping myself busy farming plat to pay for armor upgrades in the Bazaar.

That seems to be what works for me because I'm doing it again and loving it. Just as it did back in my days in the Jewel, it helps enormously that I'm hunting in the light, sunny, open zones of 2011's Veil of Alaris. It seems like a delightful expansion, not least when compared to the oppressive, claustrophobic gloom of the inexplicably-preferred House of Thule, through which all re-starters and Heroic characters are funnelled. So glad to be out of that miserable hole at last.

As I posted a few days ago, the mage dinged 106 and I re-subbed her account. As I also explained, I was waiting for that specific level because that's when you can equip Conflagrant armor. In my particular case, Arch Convoker's Conflagrant, the variant intended specifically for the Magician class.

I was dreading hunting sharks when Franklin Teek gave me the task but it turns out there are loads of them right next to the docks, including this huge named.

It's not cheap but it is affordable. By watching the prices in the Bazaar carefully I've managed to upgrade ten slots. That leaves eleven to go, not counting ammo and power source.

I haven't been keeping a count of the exact cost but I must have spent somewhere around a quarter of a million platinum so far. I raided my Beastlord's piggy bank for 50k and bought a bag of platinum worth 13k with some loyalty tokens but mostly I've been farming grey mobs in much older zones.

Money flows in quite comfortably from the xp-level content I'm doing but when it comes to cash drops, EQ has a quirk I think is probably unusual in the genre. I can't speak for current content, which I haven't seen, but in pretty much every expansion from... well, thinking about it, from the original, base game, the standard moneymakers remain the same: gems.

Diamonds sell to a vendor for 190 platinum. Blue diamonds sell for 238pp. Various other gems sell for somewhere around the same amount. The main change between expansions seems to be not so much what gems drop as how often, although even that isn't consistent.

Hunting underwater in this zone is amazingly pleasant, not least because of the spectacular way the water amplifies every spell effect.

When I'm out doing my daily double xp Lesson in the level 95 Hot Zone, Sarith, City of Tides, the sharks Franklin Teek insists on sending me to kill drop diamonds and blue diamonds. So did the boogymen and samhain in Fear Itself. So did the reavers in Meldrath's Majestic Mansion.

Gems are great but high-value stackable mob drops can bring in as much or more. Clockworks in all of the Meldrath-related zones from Secrets of Faydwer (also 2007 - two expansions a year back then) explode into showers of cogs and springs when you smash them and those parts sell to vendors for a lot.

I guess those count as body parts if you're a clockwork, which makes sense because mob body parts have been a vendor staple since the game started. In other MMORPGs it's often barely worth giving bag space to fur and fangs but in EQ those crazy NPCs pay top dollar for the most repulsive and objectively worthless organs. I've always wondered what they do with them, although since no NPC vendor ever leaves his spot it's a bit of a moot point what they could do.

The final consideration when deciding where to farm is what players are currently buying on Barter. Incredibly conveniently, these days you can open the Barter window wherever you are in the game and sell directly out of your bags. No more running around the mazelike corridors looking for that one guy who buys writing ink.

The streets of the city are good, safe hunting. I'd do the quests but for that I need to learn the language. All in good time.

It's nearly all tradeskill materials they want, of course, but not necessarily the obvious ones. Many older mats retain decent value but many more are utterly worthless. Also, when selling things that are new to you, you have to be careful to check what the NPCs are paying before you put your silks and ores in the hand of a reaching player. Some buyers are less than scrupulous about offering a fraction of the coin you could get from cashing out at the nearest vendor.

Gems notwithstanding, it's fair to say the more recent the expansion, the more valuable the drops. If you're focused on making the most money per minute, though, it's makes sense to go somewhere you can cut the mobs down like corn. The individual drops may be worth a little less - although unless you go back almost to the beginning of the game it will only be a little - but being able to pull and clear whole rooms in seconds more than makes up the difference.

I've been experimenting, trying to find the most profitable, fastest, least annoying, most enjoyable farm. All of those. Asking a lot, I know.

I've tried half a dozen zones in Planes of Power. A lot of older guides to making money suggest the Plane of Fire and it is indeed very good for gems, plus there are trade mats there still that sell for hundreds of plat a time. Unfortunately, it's a hideous, ugly, depressing zone. I don't really want to spend more than half an hour there.

The aptly-named Beast's Domain is the next zone along. A lovely, blue-green forest with loads of kiting space.

Few of the PoP zones have aged well. My favorite to farm is Ruins of Lxanvom, better known as the Crypt of Decay. It's also stunningly ugly but as an underground dungeon with corridors and tunnels that seems more acceptable. Also it's relatively small and very simple to navigate.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's fairly popular for exactly the reasons I go there, so its not unusual to zone in to find everything already dead. Luckily the respawn rate is fairly fast and once people have cleared it they tend not to hang around for a second run. I know I don't.

All of the aforementioned Meldrath zones are good but I've done a lot of those over the years and I could do without the clanking. A nice alternative I've been trying is Bloodmoon Keep, a dungeon from the same expansion, refreshingly clockwork-free. All wereorcs, spiders and undead, that one.

I tend to farm until I run out of bag space or until I get tired, both of which clock in at around about an hour. My average for a run is somewhere close to 10,000 platinum but I'm fairly sure I can improve on that.

I probably need to, if only because I've bought up all the cheaper Conflagrant pieces now. The rest are going to run 40-50k a pop, which means I need to make about twice what I've already spent. I was very fortunate to get the chest and legs for about half the going rate, though, so who knows what bargains may turn up if I keep my eyes open?

From long experience I do know that I'll just about have had enough of farming after a couple of weeks. It's one of those activities that starts out as really good fun and ends up being a chore. For now, though, I'm still getting that thrill every time I see my balance go back up after a spending spree.

With a bit of luck I should be able to fill out all the remaining slots by the time my month's sub runs out. After that I imagine I'll be ready for a break, anyway.