EverQuest

I found this cool little app over at Wordle that takes a bunch of text you throw at it and makes a decorative tag cloud out of it. I just took the front page of my site, plugged it in, and… I guess it’s pretty obvious what my blog is about, with EverQuest right there, front and center. Well, you know, aside from excursions into WoW and some other favorite games I play now and again, I guess my blog has always been about the game I looked forward to so much in 1999, a game I’ve had a love/hate relationship with over the years. ...

I really have to start scouting out dungeons before I put them on the schedule. I really thought I remembered Kaesora being higher in level, but when Coldheat and I reached it, all I saw on track was an endless sea of gray and green. Kaesora still has this odd power I ave never fully understood, and before we knew it, we found ourselves looking back up at the two hundred foot drop we’d just come down, and we were forced to fight legions of scary skeletons and stealthy spiders to return to the entrance. Here’s Coldheat and I appreciating the wonderful architecture of the Library. Other people were logging in, so we cut short our trip and fought back to the entrance. Kaesora wasn’t a challenge, and without a challenge, adventuring is no fun. ...

First of all, there’s no such thing as a so-called “Tipa pull”. For one thing, it’s just more EFFICIENT to nuke something at a door and have the entire fort come after you in groups of three and four. Look, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Everyone dinged, no harm, no foul :) The night started off slowly. We gathered at the Windmill in the Lake of Ill Omen, and the place was just a sea of red to our doughty druid healer Hakiko. Looking for easier prey for the three of us – Hak healing, me tanking in my shiny purple armor, and Fada handling the perilous nuking duties – we headed toward the spires camp. ...

I spent hours last night running around Norrath on Test, killing stuff and doing quests, just so I could write about the Void Storms coming in EQ2’s Game Update 46. Is the next expansion The Void? Or is this just a red herring? Regardless, the appearance armor and weapons are kind of cool and there are a lot more benefits besides, and you can read all about it over on Massively. Fair warning: You will be doing a LOT of cleansing to earn the nicer rewards. ...

Okay, get ready for some links. Most people are pretty content to just remember EverQuest as some game they played once, years back, before WoW came along. Many people tried the new games and went back to EQ. Some never left. Then there’s the odd sort of people who felt they couldn’t leave, even though they had absolutely zero interest in it any more. Such was the sad fate of Loral, the custodian of what was once the premier (only?) EverQuest blog, Mobhunter. From his writing, he seems to have wanted to quit the whole thing a couple years or more ago. Recently he started coving WoW instead. He recently quit to play D&D fourth edition instead of any MMO. Fantastic! ...

Call of Sky FTW, beyotch Friday’s journey into the Luggald caves of Dulak’s Harbor brought all of us many more levels and some of us have even strayed perilously close to level 52, the current max level for us in Nostalgia the Guild. I have locked my experience at level 51 for now so that I can work on AAs. I’ve gotten three so far; the plan is to have a bunch saved up so we can spend them as we reach the next milestones. ...

I don’t know how many people come looking for EverQuest blogs, but there are darn few in the blogosphere that actually cover events in EQ from a player’s perspective. Aside from those bloggers in Nostalgia, and the occasional EQ-oriented post from Loral at Mobhunter.com, I can’t find any. For that matter, where are the DAoC blogs? The Asheron’s Call blogs? The Ultima Online blogs? Come ON. I played DAoC but not those other games. I would LOVE to hear about current play in these older games, but never anything in blogs. It has been explained to me that “back in the day”, discussion of these games was done via official or community forums, cuz blogs did not exist. ...

I remember sitting on the North Wall of Karnor’s Castle back in 2000 or 2001, doing my best to keep my group healed as a mid-40s druid, and chatting with the other people in my group. Yeah, we did a lot of chatting. I don’t know why people keep calling EQ1 a hardcore game… playing EQ1 was like sitting on a beach chair watching the surf crash, and occasionally rousing oneself off that beach chair to fall upon the surf and really mess it up, then relaxing again as the puller went out to find more surf. ...

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. ...

If YOU had to keep a bunch of different dungeons stocked with monstrosities, all day, every day, how would you find time to do anything else, like corrupting snow orcs, or plotting the destruction of the world or anything? The Everfrost LDoN instances? They are there to keep Miragul BUSY. He was working overtime last night as two groups of Nostalgians woke him up from his slumber to hand us some iced confectionery goodness. ...