EverQuest

Good times….

The best thing about Dorah’s tradeskill epic, is that it was done, start to finish, in a day. She was already a level 80 jeweler, but didn’t have the faction to get the quest. Three easy quests later (kill a dozen cats, click on six weapon caches in the Swamp of No Hope, click on four prisoner cages near Sathir Span, and a last one I can’t remember but was also pretty easy killing twenty brutes), and that brought her to -19,999 with Bathezid – enough to get the quest. ...

In the Temple of the White Lady, deep within the burning spires of Skyfire Mountains, dodging psychopathic cannibalistic yeti giants. seeking the mythical Flame of Yore. “I DEMAND XEGONITE!” it thundered. I BROUGHT Xegonite. It didn’t WANT my Xegonite. Because I’d bought it from the broker and not harvested it myself. I guess Dina-harvested Xegonite is better than someone-else-harvested Xegonite. So I sold my xegonites to a guildy for less than I had paid, and headed to Tenebrous Tangle to get with the harvesting. ...

You can get a sense for how popular a show is by how many people are downloading it. That’s as direct correlation of interest as you’re likely to get. Using the most popular tracker (I may go back and sum up all trackers), Jericho had about 2400 seeds and leeches this morning. By comparison, Lost s04ep01 had over 5000, and Lost s04ep02 had about 3000. That’s pretty strong for a show that was canceled and resurrected, I think. ...

If you’re the same height as a bonsai, you just might be a halfling. If you can use a card table as a dance floor – you just might be a halfling. If the figures on a painting look life sized to you – you just possibly, might be a halfling. After a long, long talk with an officer and a discussion of just what my DPS should be, in which SPECIFIC order I should cast my buffs and spells, what weapons I should choose and with me nodding and going ‘uh huh, uh huh, uh huh’ – I think I learned more about how to be a raid troubador in those twenty minutes than in a year of raiding – I was invited to join Delusions of Grandeur, a guild that transferred to Befallen awhile back. ...

Yeah, full nostalgia mode tonight. This is the last (for now)! I swear! ` ` Another video from Sinzan of Guild Mirage. Sinzan was EverQuest’s Leroy Jenkins. If we needed more healing on a raid, we called for MORE SINZAN! For non-EQ1-ers, most raids had just barely the amount of healing needed to keep the tank alive. In fact, the ONLY heal that could keep the tank alive was something called Complete Heal, which restored 10,000 (later reduced to 7,500) hit points – but it had a ten second cast time and a two second cooldown, so to ensure the tank got the heals they needed, clerics would cast their CHs in order, one every two-four seconds, depending on the mob. (And this would give you the number of clerics you needed for a raid – if it was a 2 second mob, you needed 12/2 = 6 clerics. Or a bigger tank). ...

` ` Famed Japanese EQ guild Guild Mirage made a Flash video for Electric Funstuff’s song about one of EverQuest’s most remembered vocations – looking for your corpse. If you never played EQ1, maybe this will show… a little… how extreme hardships can bring people together. Of course, there are those who say games shouldn’t bring hardships :)

Remember where you were in 2001? If you played EverQuest, maybe you were still running around in patchwork armor, struggling to kill fire beetles with splintered wooden staffs, when someone ran by you in gleaming armor, carrying amazing weapons, and sneered at you, if they even noticed you at all. And maybe you thought to yourself, “Ya know, I wish I could just pay $200 to go on a raid and kill a boss and get some loot some day, and then I could be UBER, and sneer at noobs like me, cuz that’s what I am.” ...

Prices for the reflective smoldering shard have really tanked on Befallen, so even though they’ve eluded me in groups, I got one for cheap from the broker. Loves the broker. I had Dorah make me a mirror of my own, and I hung it here in my little Shrine to the Mirror and stored my DPS spec there. (By the by: Dorah is an 80 jeweler now, and she made the remaining six adept 3s I needed, though some weren’t any improvement at all over my master spells from T7.) ...

Funny thing about the Avatars. They aren’t the real gods themselves, you know. They got over that whole “oh, let’s just stand here and be raidkilled” thing 500 years ago when Druzzil Ro decided letting mortals in to the Plane of Time and perhaps follow Zebuxurok’s path to semi-godhood was just going to ruin the cosmos for everyone and so she rolled back time itself. Anyway, up until a couple of years ago, the gods were on strike (begging the question of what powered the spells of their priests if not the gods…) (and don’t we all miss the old days when priests had to nightly beseech their deities for the next day’s spells?). Then the gods came back to the world, a couple at a time. But they weren’t going to allow themselves to be killed THIS time. Oh, no. ...