EverQuest

Another Friday, another entirely new zone, and we still are ages from seeing more than a fraction of the game. Last week, we started doing the faction quests that open up the main mission arc of the Dragons of Norrath expansion. The first brought us to Stillmoon Temple, deep inside the Broodlands. Last night, though, we stayed a little closer to home, and headed into Lavaspinner’s Lair. A Lavaspinner is a particular kind of spider formed of cooling lava and sent forth by their queen, Volkara, one of DoN’s earlier raid targets, to entrap unwary explorers in their burning webs to use as food for her young. ...

What takes two hours to do, results in a blade nobody will use, and no status at all? That would be the signature quest that ends in Eitholi, Blade of the Fae. Here in the dressing room, since Etha – now known as Ettie – can’t wield it. Green glows are uber. Too bad the stats aren’t! It wasn’t a total wash. Ettie got enough AA experience from all the subquests that she dinged 30 AAs, and, after finishing the Wisdom/Ritualist AA line, is heading down the Stamina line, which includes a very cute little buckler attack. ...

Thought I’d never finish the thirty gathering missions necessary to get the “Guild Hall Constructor” title. I’d get bored, or find something else to do, or… pretty much anything else. But I did want to get the title before the event ends. After all, what better way to tell the world you’re an obsessive-compulsive whose probably going to try and sell you something? It would have been harder without Stargrace’s sage advice. She would grab a mission and head to Sunken City. Few people went there. If she couldn’t finish the mission there, the Graveyard was a short hop away, and it would have the stuff. ...

SOE has a great preview of their re-imagining of the dungeon of Najena on their web site. I loved the original Najena – it was the first raid I ever did with the guild I’d just joined, United Norrath Coalition, and I must have been all of level 19, and Drelzna hated druids so much, she harm touched me to death every time she popped. Good times. I don’t expect it to be the sort of casual fun Najena was in EQ1 (which, despite what people say, was pretty much the ultimate casual, social MMO), but it will be nice to see what it has become. ...

I’d taken all the rare dusts I’d accumulated as by-products of making scout spells with my jeweler, and put them on the market because, since Dorah had changed servers and my defiler/alchemist, Etha, had not, I had no use for them any longer. Which kind of made me sad. Etha was my first serious character in EQ, though she was a druid there. Still, I had a lot of attachment to the character. I’d named her after a wonderful lady at church, and it always felt good to be a druid, able to travel instantly anywhere in the world, explore the strange corners of Norrath, to be free… In a game where most everyone had to slog from place to place and wait on boats, the world was mine. ...

It was another light night, but we had a cleric, warrior, ranger and enchanter and that was enough to make a group. But where? It had been in the back of my mind that we would eventually start working on the Dragons of Norrath missions. Before you can get the missions, you need to build up faction with the one of the two wayfarer camps in Lavastorm; either the goodies or the baddies. ...

Taking action before the GU49 changes no longer requiring rare dusts (the by-products of making Adept III spells) for raid-level cure potions, I dumped all the dusts that had been gathering du… sitting around in my bank and listed them all on the market. I was going to save them to make mastercrafted poisons with on my alchemist, but my alchemist is still on Befallen, so there’s no real reason to keep them. ...

Back in 2003, The Quon was having trouble getting people to realize that their class was crap because they were not a cleric, the class around which Norrath revolved. And if they WERE a cleric, they were crap because they were not The Quon. I can just imagine that The Quon is starting a Warrior Priest on some server right now. If you wanted to group with The Quon, you better know your responsibilities to The Quon – and because he was JUST THAT GOOD, he wrote up a list of his expectations for his groupmates, by class… ...

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! ...

Hey, welcome back to the second in our exclusive series about the exciting innovative gameplay of Mythic’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Public quests, open groups, the excitement of the Tome of Knowledge, all things never seen before the evil geniuses at Mythic brewed them up in charmed cauldrons on some fog-shrouded Scottish moor, with the witch-goddess Hecate shrieking over it. It’s a well-known fact that the color red in the game packaging is made from blood. ...