SOE loves reinventing their flagship games. Last fall, SOE decided that their latest EQ2 expansion, Rise of Kunark, should focus on mostly-soloable quests instead of the mostly-groupable open experience zones that had been EQ2’s signature style of play since release. Since those people who prefer to solo had largely already gravitated to World of Warcraft, it came as a shock to those people who played EQ2 for the strong social and community aspects. Many group loving players had a hard time soloing the quests in RoK, since after an initial flurry of activity while everyone leveled to 80, finding groups for the 70-80 quest grind is now virtually impossible.
This week, SOE did something equally game changing to its venerable EverQuest. EQ, like most MMOs of its era, is intensely gear based. Striving for the latest and greatest stuff drove grouping and exploration, and when you joined a group, it was always either for experience or some specific bit of loot.
The introduction of Defiant armor to lure people back in with top-of-the-line, raid quality armor, has changed all that. In a stroke of a pen, SOE signed away any reason at all to explore or try difficult dungeons. Defiant armor is SO GOOD that going to Nagafen’s Lair for the 40-ish armor drops there (Runed Mithril Bracer, Black Chitin Leggings, etc), is insane. Since the gear drops from any mob in any zone, the best strategy is to find a place with lots of easy-to-kill mobs near your level, and just chain pull random mobs for armor and weapon drops.
Our experiment in going through our old haunts as people once did is very much in danger. Last night, a Defiant plate helm dropped off Bonecracker in Najena that might well have been, by itself, better than any three pieces of gear currently equipped.
What they really SHOULD have done is gone through and placed pieces of this cool stuff as the boss loot for mobs already in the world. For instance, those RMBs in Sol B? Pump up their stats to Defiant armor levels. We’d go! We definitely would! As it is, there’s no point.
Well, on to the recap of last night’s Najena run.
Some file refused to patch last night, leaving us with a number of people who simply could not log in. The patcher would stall at some LoN file and just hang there forever. Those of us who got in used a hack to bypass the patcher, but that, alas, did not include our healer, Hakiko. Last week, business had called him away and we did not meet. This week, since the dungeon of Najena was relatively low level, we decided to forge ahead anyway in hopes Hakiko would be able to join us at some point.
Najena, the dungeon, is a dungeon of keys. You go through the dungeon collecting keys to let you get to the next bit. The key off Bonecracker lets you into the anteroom of Rahyl’s room; a mage there drops the key to Rahyl’s room, he himself carries the key to Drelzna’s room, and she drops the key to Najena’s room.
And so we worked our way through the dungeon, with Tesser (beastlord) and I (paladin) sharing healing duties. Some rooms, like the guard captain room, absolutely brought us so close to a deat that would ahave turned quickly into a wipe that I was literally sweating, but we had no deaths for the night, not even from mage Fada, whose inevitable deaths early in usually mark the start of the evening.
After a lot of key camping (Drelzna was being unusually tardy), we finally made it to Najena’s room. Bjeorn cracked open the door with the key he had from Drelzna and… there was a high level necromancer in the room, feigned on the floor, with his pet killing stuff as it spawned. We had no idea how this worked, we thought pets were non-aggro now. But a magician would pop, and the pet would bring it expertly down, meanwhile, no motion from the necro.
He wouldn’t respond to our tells, so we decided he was AFK and set out to take Najena for ourselves. She spawned in short order, and Fada had himself a sharp-looking Flowing Black Robe. After a few minutes, the necro stood up and asked what we were doing there.
My guess? Some sort of macro that continually sends his pet at anything in range, and some sort of alert to bring the necro back to the keyboard when the pet has killed Najena, so that he can loot. I have no proof, but it’s the only thing that explains what we saw.
We waited around for a bit to see if Najena would pop again and drop the silver threaded tome for Fada, but she didn’t, and it was getting late, so we gated out and left Najena – the dungeon AND the sorceress – behind.
It was a great group marred by login issues and a high level farmer. I went from level 24 to 26, far from our nornal five levels. The dungeon was, after all, easy enough so that we could do it without a healer.
That didn’t stop the night from being FUN, though! I had a blast, as always.