Massively is reporting that Seeds of Destruction goes live today. Since I abandoned the high level game over a year and a half ago, closer to two years, I haven’t really kept track of EQ expansions. They tend to cater to the max level raiders with a zillion AA, and keeping up was just too much of a grind, so I quit and haven’t particularly missed it.
The new stuff is more of the same – grind levels to 85, and then, here’s some more dungeons for people at the level cap. I took a peek at the new stuff with my cleric, just running around, and it’s totally gorgeous – and I STILL had no desire to play my cleric again. Almost two years and the burnout hasn’t faded a bit.
I love playing my 60 61 ranger, of course, but I’m a little bummed that I have to tank everything because all our tanks quit. Rangers can tank, but we’re really more like dps, and I haven’t got all the defensive AAs to really tank effectively. I don’t have ANY defensive AAs; I’ve just been buying the offense AAs. Thinking that at some point I would be able to, you know, be dps.
Every expansion has a little bit for people not at max level. Depths of Darkhollow had shrouds. The Serpent’s Spine had a totally revamped newbie experience. Prophecy of Ro tortured and killed Freeport, Ro and the Commonlands, and left their bruised and bloody corpses for vultures to pick over. Sorry. I guess there was actually nothing positive about Prophecy for low levels. Well, auras for some classes. Anyway. The Buried Sea introduced Fellowships and campfires. Secrets of Faydwer had very cool crafted adornments and powered armor.
Seeds of Destruction brings hired mercenaries to join your party. I don’t know if low level groups can hire them, but I hope they can. It would be odd having to depend upon an NPC to keep the mobs taunted, or the tank healed, but if it works as well as heroes do in Guild Wars, it could change EverQuest entirely.
Now, I don’t expect the hirelings to be as good as those in GW. EQ has never moved far from their core philosophy that everything done for xp is best done in a group. That’s EQ’s “thing”. After all, if you want to group on a regular basis with NPCs, well, Guild Wars is right over there, and it’s free to play to boot.
Will the warrior hireling, though, be good enough so that I don’t have to tank?
I didn’t get the expansion for free, even though I went to Fan Faire; last time I logged in, anyway, it said I was missing it. So I’ll be downloading it tonight. And if I can hire a mercenary warrior, then Friday, I’m bringing him along with us to Plane of Storms and he can tank for us.
See how that goes.
You’ll read about it here :)