Beastlords Now And Then: EQ2 & Everquest

Way back at the start of November I commented on the unthinkable arrival of Beastlords in EQ2. Now that my own Beastlord, a few of whose adventures are chronicled in character here, here, here, and here, is a whisker away from level 90, how's it been?

I can't say I've taken to it the way I took to the original. In Old Norrath choosing a beastlord meant a long slow haul until signature abilities kicked in. You didn't even get a warder until Level 9. Magicians and Necromancers came petted up from the get-go and low level Beastlords glared at them with the ill-concealed envy they'd get back in spades from Shamans later on. When the Warder finally did show up it was so small you wondered if the spirits had sent you a vanity pet by mistake.

But just when you'd be thinking of jacking it all in and re-rolling as a Magician you'd get Spirit of the Wolf, which should be enough to cheer anyone up and from there you could pretty much see Spiritual Light coming over the hill. After that it just kept getting better. So much so for me at least that my original Beastlord became and remains one of my favorite characters.

A huge part of that affection and satisfaction came from the bond between the Beastlord and her Warder. An Everquest Beastlord only ever gets the one. He grows alongside you, literally, getting larger and larger as he matures. You have no choice in species. A Barbarian gets a Wolf, an Ogre a Bear and so on. You can't rename your Warder, but unlike the Magician's elemental or the Necromancer's skeleton a Beastlord's warder doesn't get a spilled Scrabble hand for a name. He's your warder and everyone knows it.

And this is where I'm having a bit of a problem with the EQ2 iteration. On the face of it, being able to tame seventeen different "Families" of animal sounds, well, seventeen times better. Add to that a huge variety of appearances, currently 113 with more to come in next week's update and that has to be over a hundred times better! Right?

Well, not really. Right from the start I found it difficult to bond with all those different warders, even leaving aside the practical issue of remembering all their abilities. My Beastlord has just over half the Families but all of them were acquired before Level 30. As for the 113 flavors, once I found out that adding a new creature to a Family pushed out the one you were currently using I completely lost interest. Haven't tamed a creature since.

Then, each Family levels up. They begin at Journeyman and presumably go to Master. My highest is Expert. They level by fighting alongside you, a nice nod to the original, but they progress at a pretty sedate pace. To keep the whole menagerie ticking along at the same level would be quite a project. There are several Beastlord AA trees to contend with as well. I imagine it makes for quite compelling gameplay if you immerse yourself in it, but it hasn't grabbed me yet.

It's surprising me as I write to realize how little attention I've paid to any of this stuff while leveling up. After a bit of dithering I settled on a Bear as my warder around Level 40 and I have used him almost exclusively ever since. I seldom even remember I have the option to summon something different. Sticking with the Bear has largely solved my bonding issues but at the cost of not really playing the class anything like I imagine it was intended to be played. I'm going to have to experiment a bit more. I should at least get around to learning the Tame Exotic Warder skill, although I'll almost certainly end up with a Dire Bear.

The supposedly more action-oriented gameplay of the Beastlord I do like. Not like I loved the Monk/Shaman hybrid gameplay of the original but it's fun and very straightforward for anyone that ever played Rift, or even Dark Age of Camelot. Hit a bunch of hotkeys, fill a meter, hit some specials. The only odd thing about it is the giant blue paw that flashes up on the screen but my brain no longer registers that so it's not annoying. It is pointless, though.

My conclusion after nearly ninety levels of lording is that I still don't really have a handle on this class. I like it but I don't love it. It's certainly the only EQ2 scout class I've ever enjoyed. Doesn't play anything like a scout. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what it's about, which I suppose can only be a good thing. Onwards to 92.

Have You Been Here Long?

"‘Epic’ moments in an MMO don’t always end with a dead dragon. Sometimes, ‘nothing’ happening can be just as, if not more, exciting."   Hardcore Casual

That was always my problem with RvR in Dark Age of Camelot, and with raiding in Everquest come to think of it. Nothing happening and a lot of it.

No, that's not entirely true. Nothing happening would be relaxing. Instead, during the protracted acquisition of a Wormhole in EVE that SynCaine describes with such enthusiasm, waiting happens. Just like waiting happened when we stood at the Mile Gate hoping for some Albs or Hibs to appear or when we loitered in Plane of Disease hoping for the raid to form.

Waiting in itself isn't a bad thing but it's hardly entertainment. It barely even counts as occupation. In a leisure context, waiting isn't fun. At best it's the space between the fun you just had and the fun you're going to have. Mostly it's more a fence through which fun can occasionally be glimpsed, far off in the distance where someone else is having it.

Giant Robot! Fun! Kill!

Of course, not everyone is waiting at the same speed. The raid leader isn't. He's trying to herd seventy cats and tearing his hair out in clumps. The skirmish leader isn't. He's receiving tells about enemy movement and seeing the Big Picture. Whereas all I'm usually seeing is some gnome bouncing all over my screen like a sugar-high six-year old on a spacehopper while bored barbarian warriors spam up my chat window with smack talk about sports as they /duel each other and grunt.

At least, that's how I recall the good old days. It's not like that any more. In today's MMO everything happens all the time right now. Anything that gets in the way of Stuff Happening needs to go and most of it already has.

You can complete an entire raid in less than the time it used to take to get people into groups. WoW did away with the boring old "finding people and getting to the dungeon" grind when they came up with their much-copied Dungeon Finder. So much for all that tedious scenery and conversation.

I heard someone on the far shore needed a boar killed

Trion upped the ante. Not content with open groups and raids that autojoin you as soon as there's something to fight, now there's no need to travel to the zone, find a quest hub or click on an NPC even to do basic overland PvE quests. A couple of clicks from your Menu and presto, Instant Adventures. 

Guild Wars 2 goes further still. The entire world is open group by default. Every kill, every quest credit is shared. No need to wait, just all pile on. I've yet to play so I'll reserve judgment on that one. No, no I won't. I'm sure it'll be lovely.

Because it's all about keeping things moving, isn't it? Something needs to happen and it needs to happen now or else we'll all lose interest and wander off, possibly to another game, and where we go our money goes. It's sort of true, too. As I said, I don't like waiting around for something to happen. I never did. Too much of that and I start asking awkward questions like "is this really how I want to spend my evening?" and "don't I have something better to do?" not to mention "are we having fun yet?"

Have Horse, Will Travel

Waiting around for extended periods while someone else organizes something that might be fun when it happens, if it happens, but over which I have no control or influence is one thing I can happily do without. Automating the administrative functions may kill the fun for the handful of people who used to enjoy having their own Conference Co-ordinator Sim (High Fantasy Edition) embedded in an MMO but I would guess that most players are happy to have the game take control of that side of things.

Going through places to get to places where the stuff is that you're going to do, though. That's not "waiting". That's doing. Talking to people about what you're going to do and how you're going to do it, that's doing too. And it's fun. Or it can be. The banter, the jokes, the foul-ups, the getting it wrong and working out how you're going to get it right next time.

Take out too many bones and the cat just won't stand up. And who wants a floppy cat?

Double Eggsperience! : EQ2, Vanguard, EQ

It's double xp all Easter weekend in EQ2. Also in Vanguard. Probably in EQ as well although I haven't checked. Pirates of the Burning Sea for all I know! Consequently I plan to spend more time playing than posting for once. I have so much going on in all three games.

GU63 lands in EQ2 next week, bringing two (count them! TWO! ) new levels, Prestige Points (AAs with Attitude I believe), a new overland zone, Withered Lands, a new city/dungeon, Skyshrine, and the opportunity to re-gear level 90 characters to the current top-end raid spec just by doing solo quests.

My Berserker on Freeport, the one I made on a F2P Silver account just to futz around with back when EQ2X launched, ended up being the most completed, rounded EQ2 character I've ever had in seven years of playing. He's currently 90/90/316 (that's Level 90 Berserker, Level 90 Weaponsmith, 316/320 AAs if you left your scorecard in your locker). I'm hoping to get those last 4 AAs this weekend before SOE gives them to me on Tuesday.

Wear that thing and you're on your own, buddy!

The whole AA curve is being revamped, the result being that we all get a bump-up in AAs. That already happened to Adventure levels when they smoothed the curve there a year or three back. I don't recall it happening to tradeskills but it may have done. The AA adjustment is because of an unusual decision to set a bar of 280 AAs required before level 90 characters can start acquiring xp to get to 92.

My Beastlord needs five more levels to get to 90. Mrs Bhagpuss has two characters in the mid-80s that have been slacking while she designed and decorated about a thousand houses and another guildie is at 87th so the plan is to try and get everyone to 90 while the bonus xp lasts. I suspect we will be very sick of the sight of Chelsith come Monday. I have a bunch of crafting levels to do on all my otter-trainers, too.

In Vanguard I have a whole clutch of characters working their way up, all of them far too much fun to play to make it an obvious choice which should get focus. I really should concentrate on improving my Raki Disciple's Diplomacy but I can't fit any more scraps of paper in my Diplomatic Bag and I can never find the informants that want what I know.

So it's not chocolate! I'm eating it anyway.

Everquest I don't even want to think about. From my Druid, born on the day the Luclin server launched, which must be over a decade ago, still in the mid-60s and managing about a level a year on a good year, to my Beastlord beached at 84th to my latest addition, a level 20 Necromancer on Fippy Darkpaw, I have far more characters than I know what to do with. I daren't log in in case I create another. That's what usually happens.

Anyway, if I'm quiet this weekend, that's why. No bank-sorting, dungeon-making or decorating, just Kill! Craft! Diplome! It's the meaning of Easter, like they taught us at school. I think. It was a long time ago. I'm sure it went something like that.

Magic Items Sold By Weight: EQ2

Two of my ratongas were in the West Freeport branch of the Norrathian Universal Bank this afternoon, about three hours into an intense session of inventory spring cleaning (so about 5% done then) when the server came down for a patch. Chief among the small changes was this:

All single group instances now have a lockout of 90 minutes.

Sounds so innocent at first glance, doesn't it?  Who'd complain about fewer restrictions and easier access? The standard lockout for heroic instances in EQ2 is 18 hours. Now we can do the same instance sixteen times a day. Someone will, too.

I'm in favor of the change myself. There have been a few times when I've wanted to do the same instance back to back, to get some drop that didn't or finish some quest while I still remember I have it. It'll be a boon for collects, too. But there's a downside. Loot.

If only we'd had pandas in the EC Tunnel

I have a clear, if hazy, memory of something that happened the first week I played Dark Age of Camelot, back in 2000. I was in Albion, in some starter area the name of which I've long forgotten. Some imps or demons were near a river and one of them had a name. My mercenary fought and killed it and it dropped a magic item.

I have no idea now what the item was or if I could use it. I just remember the sheer astonishment. A Named! A Magic Item! And I killed it on my own! Who knew such a thing was even possible?

Last year, when EQ2 had The Great Item Revamp, I took my Berserker on a tour of Kunark hunting overland named mobs. At first I thought I was having a great run of luck. Every named, and there are lot in Kunark, dropped a Legendary item. No treasured items at all. Sometimes, for variety, they'd drop a Fabled. Eventually it became obvious that that was all they had and they had one every time. Like the good ex-Tester I am I sent a bug report.

It wasn't a bug. Just the latest stop on the ever-ascending Loot Elevator. I should have known. I actually quit playing EQ2 the second time partly because of the changes to loot that came with the Rise of Kunark expansion, when treasured weapons, armor and jewellery started dropping more often than rat whiskers in the Qeynos newbie yard.

You get it. You have wings!

It's not so much that I mind magic items not seeming special anymore, although I do mind that. It's the storage! Every named always drops something and there are so many nameds. Where once I would return to town with my bags oozing with monster body parts for which small-town merchants, presumably backed by some secretive necromantic sect with unlimited financial resources, would shower me with gold and silver, now I come back weighed down with amazing sparkling magic weapons, gleaming enchanted armor and jewellery fit for a Djinn prince.

I can't just sell the stuff! It looks too good to vendor. I blow a lot of it up for the raw materials for Adornments. At least those stack. But lot of it looks too good even for that. So I have to store it. It might come in useful. One day I might have a level 79 Warden and this would be perfect for him. Or a level 90 Assassin, she'd love that! Of course every character I ever level will acquire his own warehouse of "useful" stuff and won't thank me for someone else's cast-offs but let's not think about that.

I really don't want to go all the way back to the "good" old days, when a whole Sunday afternoon could pass while I watched WTS messages streaming up my chat window in the East Commons Tunnel, hoping to see something I both needed and could afford, but a slight frisson of scarcity in the Magic Item market might be nice, just for a change.

Or I could just stop being a packrat.

Nah, not going to happen.

Here Comes The New Boss...

I was pretty cross back in February, when SOE's whole "sell your customers" thing blew up. A lot of people were. Then the weeks rolled on and, as is the way of things, it all slipped to the back of my mind. No news is good news, right?

Well, not always, or so it seems from the inordinately long and complicated new FAQ that surfaced at the weekend, found at its most readable over at EQ2Wire. Plow your way through that if you've nothing better to do for an hour, then spend the rest of the evening picking through SOE Community Director, Global Community Relations Brasse's many forum clarifications in this thread.

Wait, I'll save you the time. SOE listened to the concerns of their players as expressed in a 231 page-long thread on their forums, took it all on board, went away and talked to their German partner PSS1 for a month and a half and came back with a worse deal than they'd started with.

Under the original deal that we all kicked off about, existing SOE customers would have been grandfathered in on their US servers and SOE accounts. Under the new deal we gain the ability to play on any server worldwide but at the cost of a mandatory PSS1 account for anyone logging in from an IP in any of the forty countries for which they now handle SoE's MMO stable.

Mine! Hands off!

And if only it were that simple. PSS1 didn't want all of SOE's MMOs. They turned their noses up at the "it's how old?" Everquest and the "where are the players?" Vanguard. So those two wonderful worlds remain with SOE and everyone in PSS1-Land will still need to log in with their SOE account through their SOE launcher to play them.

Oh, didn't I mention? We get new launchers for PSS1-run games. Yes, we did just get new launchers for all SOE games. Now we get new new launchers. Can't have too many launchers, amiright? Oh, and we keep our existing account names for both PSS1 and SOE, but since SOE can't legally transfer any personal data so PSS1 don't get the passwords. We have to come up with new ones. That's always fun.

So, that's the practical side. Two sets of accounts, passwords and launchers. Messy, incoherent and irritating. Then there's the financial side. We're still waiting to hear if we also have to make two sets of payments. Want to bet?

Don't ask for credit as a bitten-off head often offends

 Then there's the cash shop. Leaving aside what it might sell and for how much, both hotbutton issues, PSS1 won't be using Station Cash. They have their own funny money to which our SC balances will be mirrored. They don't issue game cards, so if we want to add any PSS1 toy money at any time, say to buy an expansion, we'll need to give them some payment details. A lot of people aren't happy about that.

There's a lot more but frankly, who cares? It's a done deal. Live with it or stop playing is the offer on the table. Some people are talking about using proxies and VPNs. Feldon's promised to put up a list on EQ2Wire as and when necessary but I won't be trying to tunnel under the fence like that.

I'll make a PSS1 account providing it's possible to do so without entering payment details. If I want to buy anything from them I'll use PayPal, if they take it, which I believe they do, or game cards if they ever issue them. If they don't, I'll stop playing as Gold under my (now defunct but that's another kettle of worms I don't want to let the cat out of) All Access Pass. We get 30 days notice before any transition so when it comes I'll buy a shedload of unlockers with my hoard of SC and just play Silver. I like Silver better anyway.


Probably be playing GW2 anyway...

Randolph Gets The Boot: Vanguard

The ineffably and appositely named Boots Randolph's signature tune would have made a fine backing track as I tramped up the ramp to New Targonor over and over this morning. Did you ever notice how long that thing is? Or how confusing the entrances to Ahgram are, never mind the maze of streets once you get inside?

Faster than a speeding camel...

I was on foot (or camel) because Vanguard is off life-support. Long ago, when the Vanguard dev team was down to two men and a dog and the dog was only part-time, Randolph the Thematically Inappropriate Reindeer became untethered from Glorian,Telon's version of Christmas (don't worry, I had to look it up) and became flyable all year round. Well, who knew how long Vanguard had left? Glorian might never come again.

But it did. Against any sane odds Vanguard clung on and now here we are looking at a future filled with Glorians-to-Come. In preparation for the once-thought impossible conversion to Free To Play, the dev team has "quadrupled". I think that means there are four of them. Anyway, it's wonderful news for everyone.

Except Randolph.They took away his magic dust. Randolph's hooves don't sparkle any more. More importantly, he doesn't fly. Not on April Fools Day (no Telonian equivalent, as far as I know). Not at Easter (ditto). Next December, for one month only, he'll take to the air. Until then it's shanks's pony. Or any pony. Just don't try to ride into town on a reindeer because this one doesn't only not fly, he doesn't even move. I think that's a bug. Nice to see some things in Vanguard never change.

The road goes ever on

I'm not as annoyed about Randolph's demise as I was when I replied to Ardwulf first thing today. Randolph was never meant to last all year and he does look pretty daft. Still, I think that they could have waited until the purported level 20 flying mount quest is in before removing him. It seems petty to do it this way round.

Let's not focus on the negatives, though. Randolph wasn't the only contentious freebie niggling away at some veterans' sense of justice. His presence rankled but so did the absence of the Bracelet of Lucky Charms from any character made before the Isle of Dawn tutorial appeared. All the way to fifty it's a best-in-slot item that you get for completing the main quest-lines on the starter island. It upgrades automatically every ten levels so that you never outgrow it until you hit the post-50 end game, when you can go for the grown-up version, the Kamelot Crystal Cog.


If you made your character before the Isle of Dawn existed, or if you decided to start in one of Vanguard's many very excellent racial starting villages, this must-have was a can't-get. Until now. If you're paying and playing today, there's a Bracelet of Lucky Charms waiting for each and every one of your characters (although I think you might have to get to Level 10. My level 8 Goblin just got a blank look). Which is why a procession of rakis, orcs, goblins and even humans from Team Bhagpuss were trundling up that ramp.

Fox included for scale

Along with the Bracelet they all picked up a title (The Loyal) and a foot-high banshee companion pet called an Ancient of Telon. I also took the trouble to grab the massive 88-slot Gatherer's Sack Of Collectables for everyone who didn't already have one. Get it while you can, I say. It's meant to be for the Mekalian Extravaganza of Science and Technology, which is only supposed to last a few weeks. The MEST Fair's been running non-stop for several years but how much longer will that be allowed to go on?

Beware, gnomes. First they came for Randolph...

We'd Just Like To Ask You A Few Questions: GW2

There's been a lot of information coming out about Guild Wars 2 after this latest beta weekend, most of it very encouraging. Ravious continues his sterling work over at KTR and Massively put up a series of reports. I particularly liked Jef Reahard's piece but the piece that most caught my attention was the one on character creation.

The visual side of the process looks perfectly fine but I goggled a bit at the multiple choice section. I've seen this kind of thing quite often in single-player RPGs, where it kinda-sorta makes sense but to use it in an MMO seems peculiar. Unlike single-player games, MMOs these days generally don't come with a manual the size of a paperback novel to give sufficient context for the questions to be meaningful.

GW2 might get a pass on account of seven years of GW, several novels and a slew of pre-launch lore briefings, but even with that following wind this set of questions doesn't fly. Presumably each has in-game implications but how anyone who hasn't been vicariously living in Tyria for the last few years is supposed to know what they are escapes me.

The potential implications of some, like the Streets/Common Folk/Nobility one might reasonably be guessed at, but what are we meant to make of a choice between "A spangenhelm, A cap helm, No helm at all". What is a "spanglehelm" and what does it says about my character that he chooses to wear one? Is wearing one into battle outrageously camp? Indescribably foolhardy? Redolent of deep religious devotion? Maybe I'll know when I've played the game but I'm being asked the question in the pause between installing and starting to play.

Same applies to "Trickster demon, Skull, Ghostly wraith" or "Universal multi-tool pack, Eagle-eye goggles, Panscopic monocle". Either these choices have in-game meanings that I have no way of knowing, in which case it's pointless to ask me to choose between them, or they don't, in which case choosing between them is meaningless.

The one that really stunned me was Part 8 " "One of my biggest regrets is that _____." (I never searched for my true parents, I never found my sister's body, I passed up an opportunity to perform in the circus) ". What? What?? Is that a placeholder question? Did a dev slip it in to win a bet? I know that if that's still there when I get to choose I'm definitely taking the clown option.

A more obvious example of why I don't think this approach works is Part 9 " "Everyone said I was blessed by _____ when I was young." (Dwayna, Grenth, Balthazar, Melandru, Lyssa, Kormir) ". I play Guild Wars so I recognize that as a list of gods but despite having played on and off for many years, that's as much as I can tell you. Picking a Deity in a roleplaying game, or even an MMO, often has significant gameplay consequences. I'd like to have a chance to visit a few temples and talk with a few priests before I make a decision of such importance.

Indeed I'd much rather learn who my character is by playing him, not through a multiple choice quiz. Couldn't the game observe the actions I take within it and tailor my personal story accordingly, rather than pre-build it at this incredibly early stage? And wouldn't it be better for me at least to have met Maverick, Euryale, Clawspur, Dinky and Reeva before I make up my mind which of them I'd die for?