EverQuest

The City of Mist is an island in the north of the Kunzar Jungle, full of heroic skeletons and golems and some bosses that, though the zone has been entirely redesigned from EQ1’s zone of elevators (of death) and invisible sky ramps (of death and gravity); EQ2’s is a ziggurat-shaped ramp system leading to the central tower that dominates the city. Several quest lines bring you through the City of Mist in the same way quests should have brought you through Karnor Castle and Chardok, the two dungeons in the Kylong Plains. ...

DINA: Oh, it was a busy night. We’re sitting here in Snake-Eye’s camp, and I have old Lizard Breath sitting next to me. DERA: … I don’t think that swim you took in the Venom Flow river left you smelling like sunshine either, Sewer Skin. DINA: Snake Eye is a huge hunter, totally vicious, a real blood killer, and he’d kill all those Quatches and Trakanasauds down spiffy, except… ...

I really really REALLY wanted to level last night, so I made a promise to myself and to anyone in earshot that yes, THIS TIME, I was going to start on those Kunzar Jungle quests, and damned be he that gets in my way. Just for fun I checked on groups in guild – apparently guild leader changed again, and some people who left came back, I missed all that drama somehow because I was playing my cleric all night before last and she is not in the guild. ...

Still haven’t managed to get a Crypt of Agony group for my troubador (mad gnashing of teeth), but Dera, my cleric, got her second group there. It’s easier for healers, since you need two to do the instance well. Once again, I was headed there for a guild group and once again, it broke up before I got there. The experience was more disappointing this time, since Dera had gotten all the AA experience from killing the nameds and running around the zone the first time she came. I believe she made between 5 and 10%. Two Crystalline Short Swords dropped; I won neither of them, and tried to buy one of them, and then the main healer plopped the one he won in my trade window… I was flabbergasted and thankful. He didn’t want any money, so I sent him 5p after the group ended. ...

I accidentally deleted the pictures I had while cleaning out my Fraps folder. So instead, I have this one of Dera at level fifteen or so, betraying Qeynos to join Freeport – after a very harrowing trip (it took me hours to find the Thundering Steppes zone in Antonica, more hours to find the docks in Thundering Steppes, and though the path through Nektulos was pretty well-defined, it was surrounded on all sides by monsters hungry for halfling). After a trip with no maps and only vague directions from people she met on the way, she made it to the Commonlands and caught this first glimpse of the city that would – after 500 orcs and five uncommon nameds == become her new home. ...

I finally got a Sebilis group with my troub; and the experience was pretty decent. The tank wasn’t quite up to tanking it – he being 72 – so we died a few times and after awhile the group broke up. I had already camped from my troub to my inquisitor to help heal, as one of our healers had had to leave, but the group broke up before I got there. Unperturbed, I continued on, thinking at least to get the discovery experience for the jungle and Sebilis itself. ...

I didn’t want to talk about Winterwing before she finished the Butcherblock quest line, but while I was messing up an alliance between the Timorous Deep and Butcherblock aviaks, I looked up and caught the end of a partial eclipse of the sun as the un-blowed-up moon Drinal passed before it. Whichever artist did the sky – well done. I was blown away. Also, note that Winterwing has a gi now :) That’s the Lonetusk Gi from a named in the Ruins. The stats are awful but… it looks like a gi, and now she doesn’t have to do the woefully out-of-date armor quests in order to look like a monk again. Well, bruiser. ...

A Sarnak, a Goblin and a Burynai walked into a bar, and seeing all were of an adventuring type, decided to form a guild together. They went on many adventures, and after awhile, realized that though they really liked each other, they had different goals. The Sarnak loved exploring and seeing new places. The Goblin loved battle, and would fight anything. They Burynai liked finding shiny things. And so each would make excuses not to do things together, so they could do more of the things each loved best. ...

I cancelled my old credit card and my recurring subscriptions, like my old Virgin cellphone account I couldn’t unsubscribe from, and Station Pass, finally ended. I looked at what the Station Pass offered me and… well, out of all the games SOE offers, I only play EQ2. Station Pass is a phenomenally poor value for me. This was brought home to me last week when a co-worker was talking about starting a character in EQ2, since Lishian and I are always talking about it, and he wanted to know if I was paying $15.00 a month for it and I said, no, I was choosing to spend even more. ...

During Beta, I made some bruiser armor for an Arasai – just to see how it looked. And I thought that Arasai looked so cute in it that I would save her character file and make a level 1 copy of her on the live servers. People were having so much fun in the expansion newbie grounds that I thought I’d take her over there – thanks to Khek’s patient directions, I managed to stumble onto those alien shores with only one death – a death that brought me right to the Sarnak newbie quest-givers. ...