EverQuest

I haven’t done a “what I’m playing” thing for awhile. So here’s my current roster of games, and I’ll start off with what I’m NOT playing. And that game would be Mythos. MMOs: Mythos had one of the strongest beta communities on record, with unparalleled access to devs. Community Manager Taylor Baldree would hold court in the #mythos IRC channel every night. Devs would respond daily on the forums. And all that was leading to a game that I very much wanted to play. With Hellgate: London’s reprieve by Namco Bandai, let’s hope there IS hope for Mythos as well. ...

Terror – if you’re a dragon. Nostalgia the Guild set up a face-to-face for Naggy and Vox with old Veeshan, and I don’t think Queen Vee will be too happy with her progeny. We’ve been tracking Lord Nagafen all week to see that he remained up. And shockingly, the elder guilds with their twink brigades didn’t move on the dragon, so Friday night, it was Nostalgia’s turn. We were short handed and had only one healer, the incredibly overworked Coldheat, but we weren’t going to be stopped. Also, we didn’t have a FD puller, but we weren’t going to let that stop us either. ...

Mayong Mistmoore looks so hunky in that portrait! He makes ALL the inky ladies swoon! I keep saying EverQuest isn’t hard, but what I should probably say is, EverQuest isn’t hard, if you have great equipment. I haven’t put the same sort of care into Sela’s gear as I did for Tipa’s, and it shows. Empty item slots, missing spells, statless gear in at least one spot… I suspect the same is true for the other members of the Tuesday group. This gives us quite a different experience. Instead of laughing off danger as we slice through enemies without thinking, we can, and do, get overwhelmed, and die. ...

I have nothing against old MMOs. In fact, I spend most of my time in one of the oldest. But I know that EQ is old, and I play it now not to see new things, but just to reminisce about all the good times I had in it. People have been going off to World of Warcraft for years, and starting their adventures in Azeroth. I’ve even done it (and my gosh, has it been three years already?). But I’ve been reading the adventures of Cownose, who recently starting in WoW, and Ogrebears, who is just starting, any my first thought for them both was, why would they want to start out with that old game? ...

I haven’t written up a raid report for YEARS. But I absolutely have never been as happy to do so. Tonight, ten people, level 42 to 52, waded through hundreds of goblins, dozens of giants, and a couple spiders and tentacle terrors, to take down the Queen of Permafrost, the ice dragon Lady Vox. The technique we’d figured out to get the giants out of her lair without having Vox come along worked wonderfully. We tried various pull spots in order to best bring Vox without the adds from her room, and Soaridor suggested the Flag Room, which turned out to be the perfect Vox-pulling spot. ...

No, I totally don’t like this screen shot. My only excuse is this is the only one I took! The Tuesday group may have found its home for the next few weeks. Yes, we’ve started exploring that den of mystery and key-farming, Iceclad’s most notorious dungeon, the Tower of Frozen Shadow. Eschewing the standard Velious all-purpose building material, velium, the vampire queen Tserrina built her fortress instead out of the same solidified shadow that so many Luclin buildings were made from. It’s seven floors of fun, and each is separated from the other by teleport mirrors that take keys. Really RARE keys. We spent half the night farming the key to the Library, floor two. That included me getting hilariously stuck in the pit and being unable to get out because the skeletons at the bottom kept stunning me (finally we killed them and I was able to get out, exhausted from all that jumping). ...

Lars over at MMOment of Zen just got to 80 in EQ2, managing eventually to finish the entirely solo, quest-driven run from 70 on that SOE thought we would enjoy. While there were plenty of people to help with the encounters that required more than one person in the first couple of months of the expansion, the numbers doing them now have thinned considerably. Also, this grind is not something you’d ever want to do again, and so alts often languish at the edge of RoK, because the grind is so punishing. Further, characters who’ve enjoyed leveling in groups all their career suddenly have to learn how to solo, so quick, fun group xp turns into a solo grind in largely abandoned zones. ...

I haven’t blogged about EQ2 in about a month from never. Not because I haven’t been playing it – I have – but just because I haven’t really been doing anything of interest. Running around, exploring. Being without a guild on my main characters tends to limit the time I spend on them, since EQ2 is a group-based game at all levels but especially so at higher levels, and without friends to group with, there’s little incentive to log in. Part of that is due to having two jobs and entirely unable to devote the time to a raiding guild that would be required, since raid guilds are themselves a second (unpaid) job. I suppose a casual guild is the best thing I could hope for, but – I LOVE RAiDING. Logging in and NOT raiding would make me sad. ...

I just had a thought, while writing the Mythos article. We all know where Mythos came from. Diablo II game play with a Warcraft art style. Diablo II came from Diablo, and Diablo was heavily influenced by the rogue-likes Moria and Angband, I think? Both those games were inspired by Hack, which was inspired by Rogue, which was heavily influenced by Temple of Apshai (I’m guessing), which took its inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons. ...

We’ll talk about this picture in a little bit :) Now that everyone in the Friday group is 51 or 52, it was time to stretch our wings a little bit and do something even casual guilds do on occasion – raid. And we being a Nostalgia guild, the only POSSIBLE thing to raid would be the scourges of the old world, Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox. These dragons have some restrictions – anyone higher than level 52 gets punted from the zone. The condition arose when the Ruins of Kunark expansion let everyone level to 60, and the dragons suddenly became trivial to kill. So they added the level cap, and ever since, level 52 has acquired an unholy reverence, your one chance to kill the dragons before departing for more mundane challenges. ...