EverQuest II

Via Taymar at MMORPG Info (always a fantastic place for information about EQ2 and other games), EQ2’s game update 49 – the last one before the expansion – is live. GU49 introduces guild halls, multicore support, and more. Perhaps another chapter in the Anashti Sul world event? I THOUGHT they were doing a tailoring update with new colors and patterns, but I can’t remember if that was expansion or pre-expansion. My tests with the multicore support on my Core 2 Duo-powered laptop showed a significant improvement on Test.

The EverQuest 2 GU48 world quest deals with, from the evil side, anyway, discovering who is responsible for the death of a Qeynosian Seeress who died mysteriously just before she was to make a pronouncement. All the signs point to work by Bertoxxulous’s disciples, but the high priest of the god of disease swears that though they have no love for any follower of the Prime Healer, Rodcet Nife, it wasn’t them. They were framed. ...

EverQuest 2’s game update 49 is pretty much the most exciting single update since Kunark. As the last (I believe) update before the launch of “The Shadow Odyssey” expansion, they seem to be rolling out a lot of their new tech to prepare for what we’ll be seeing live in November. During “Raising the Banner” (GU49): A team of dedicated excavators and researchers have begun to uncover a remarkable find in the dunes of Sinking Sands. They have numerous tasks for any recruits willing to help defend the site, excavate relics, maintain their assisting clockworks and provide crafted supplies for the team. They cannot fathom how important this project is and how it is fated to reshape the world of Norrath for years to come! ...

Tomb of Thuuga. The boss fight is hard to take screenshots of because of positioning. Yes, yes, I know I don’t have time for raiding, nor the desire to have some group of strangers have control over how I spend my evenings. Hardcore raid guilds have always seemed at odds with modern life. You mean, you actually raid seven days a week? You seriously expect that every single night of their lives, people will want nothing better than to sit in front of the computer and ...

I finally got a Sebilis group with my troub; and the experience was pretty decent. The tank wasn’t quite up to tanking it – he being 72 – so we died a few times and after awhile the group broke up. I had already camped from my troub to my inquisitor to help heal, as one of our healers had had to leave, but the group broke up before I got there. Unperturbed, I continued on, thinking at least to get the discovery experience for the jungle and Sebilis itself. ...

I didn’t want to talk about Winterwing before she finished the Butcherblock quest line, but while I was messing up an alliance between the Timorous Deep and Butcherblock aviaks, I looked up and caught the end of a partial eclipse of the sun as the un-blowed-up moon Drinal passed before it. Whichever artist did the sky – well done. I was blown away. Also, note that Winterwing has a gi now :) That’s the Lonetusk Gi from a named in the Ruins. The stats are awful but… it looks like a gi, and now she doesn’t have to do the woefully out-of-date armor quests in order to look like a monk again. Well, bruiser. ...

Very quick note on Live Update 39, will do more tonight… Hallowe’en quests aren’t in, those are scheduled for the 26th. The next quest in the Kunark line went live, it requires you to kill a few followers of Venril Sathir in Feerrott (there was a line for one of them) and eventually scare them straight by using an illusion of Cazic Thule to bring them away from their heretical belief in the divinity of Venril Sathir. It’s not an instance, but the mobs do innovatively scale to your level nonetheless. ...

This was all part of our “execution strategy”. Carefully arrange ourselves beneath him, with our weapons all pointed up, then when he gets tired and lands, WHAM! Death of a thousand needles, we rez and we loot. It was just crazy enough to work. Okay, we really didn’t think we were going to roll in their with twelve eleven random people and kill Xux’liao (yeah, I looked up his name…), but given we’d just spent a night getting access to the place, seemed worth a look. ...