Nostalgia the Guild took most of my time this last weekend. It’s supposed to just be a very casual, once-a-week grouping experience through EverQuest’s old world, and it shouldn’t really require as much work as I’ve put into it. However, I don’t see how it could have taken any less, either. If you have a static group, how do you keep everything arranged? Maybe I just want everything planned out. ...
It was a wild, exhausting first night for our EQ Nostalgia group. We had more show than could fit in one group, so we made two and went our separate ways. The beginning bit with the spiders – didn’t really need a group for that. So things started slow. They picked up when we got to the kobold area; the fight against the giant beast Krenshin definitely capped the evening! The kobolds also dropped a lot of very nice Gloom armor that quickly prepared us for the wider world. ...
Tonight is the first meeting of our EQ Nostalgia group, and I’ve been swamped with work to do. I had to create some forums, try to pull a roster together, try to make this a fun experience for our little group. I think I’m ready for tonight. One advantage EQ vets have over people entirely new to the game is the huge variety of veteran rewards – from double xp to full xp rezzes (once a week) to buff pets that follow you around; there’s a lot of good stuff here. Along with that come all the /claim items for the expansions. I never used any of them except the horse barding, but they include damage auras, bags (I claimed one!), faction items, mounts (there’s a robo-boar and a warg in there)… cool stuff. ...
Based on last week’s discussion where we started off wondering if it was ever possible to get back that “first MMO” feeling, that veered into nostalgia, a few of us thought, maybe we would give EQ a try again. Well, that sounded good to me, so I reactivated my other account, and there for the first time in a year stand my two mains in EQ – Brita the cleric and Tipa the rogue. After raiding Thuuga and Emerald Halls on EQ2, I logged over to EQ to chat, and then omg… a pickup raid. Tonight was the last night of Fabled, and the raiders were trying to get them all killed before they were put away for another year. ...
After we cleared Protector’s Realm tonight, we said, hey, what the heck, let’s pop over to the Shard of Hate and see what we can pull from the place. Since the last time we went, a lot of the Epic x3 mobs have been changed to Epic x4. Why is this important? When an Epic x3 is fought by a four group raid… it drops no loot. This probably explained our abysmal drops the first time we we went. This time, it was fine. We got several chests, some masters, some nice pants – just from trash. The first boss dropped a VERY nice bow which could have been made specifically for a bard (and a bard did win it!), and Davic tells me that mob also drops the most perfect bard weapon in the world, Marrow’s Song; same delay as our epic, boosts our run speed song and our proc song; full of all the stats we love best…. But for some reason, this uber bard weapon which, let’s face it, is nearly as good as our epic, is usable by ALL scouts PLUS guardian and berserkers. Any non-bard who even so much as bids on this in jest… should be hung, feet first, outside the gates of Freeport or Qeynos, exposed to the ridicule of the crowds. I don’t have the DKP to even consider such a weapon, but I’ll bid what I can just so nobody gets the idea bards don’t want this for some reason :) Of course, when bards bid against bards the bids go up by ones or twos :) ...
After I transferred Tsuki the Mage to Stromm, I made Tsuki the Necromancer on Erollisi Marr to save her name if I ever needed to bring her back. Groups were a lot of fun, when I could get them – at this time, there were still plenty of low level groups, and I was getting groups in the Overthere and Echo Caverns regularly. I usually played alts wen I couldn’t find a group with my main, but after long enough without groups for my mains, I tend to wander off to other games. I was leveling Tsuki the Necro fairly regularly when groups became nearly impossible to find on my cleric, and so I went to World of Warcraft, and all my EQ1 alts have been in limbo since. ...
That was a crappy picture of my EQ1 mage in the Shard of Hate article, so I logged back into EQ and took a better picture. There’s her epic that I spent so much time camping. The robe is the Fabled Robe of the Ishva that I camped along with a lot of other people the first or second year of Fableds. It’s weird, but now that I think back on it, usually around Fabled season I was not playing EQ. It was very cyclical for me. The green glowy on her off hand I got from some BoT tower boss – I believe the air one. ...
I took the night off from writing last night because, well, some things are more important. Sometimes, a gamer has just got to GAME. And if not the night when the Shard of Hate returns to Norrath, well, when? Before I get started, though, I want a shout out to a person who has always been there for me, held me up when I was falling; gave me strength to carry on; he is the wind beneath my wings; and – well, he wants to know why I never mention him on my blog. ...
While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too – my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning. ...
As I maybe hinted at a couple of posts ago, I’ve been to the Shard of Hate, which goes live next Tuesday. It’s a raid zone, and while there’s plenty of perfectly precocious and particularly pretty pictures of the place (sorry), I haven’t seen anyone talk about how it will be to actually raid. I had a chance to explore the place with EQ2’s lead designer, Akil “Lyndro” Hooper, and though he remained closemouthed about the specifics, he did have some things to say about it, and he talked a little about the future direction of EQ2. Nothing about the expansion, though! ...