DERA: I am Dera Tanglewood, a 72nd level Inquisitor in service to the Overlord, Lucan D’Lere. My armor was made in the bowels of Fallen Gate my Dwarf metalsmiths whose hands were crushed after to prevent them making another like it. My shoulder and arm armor were stained with the blood of High Elves. I raid occasionally, but usually am content to keep my groups… somewhat alive… in high-end KoS and EoF dungeons, and my gear reflects that. ...
Dan O’Halloran sent me a message Saturday saying that the crew at Massively had tracked down EQ2’s senior producer and asked him about the experience design in Kunark – group experience minimized, quest experience emphasized. When Kunark opened, my guild first made groups and tore off to explore the new content. Having a lot of fun, and exploring, but not making that much experience. Since the expansion came out last week, we have become a guild of soloers; which is fantastic, if you’re a class that can solo well. Everyone has respeced to DPS. Sometimes people pair off. Sometimes people need to finish a quest but can’t because people are just so far away. ...
Rise of Kunark is a beautiful expansion, but the tuning has problems. Three days in, and I’m stumped as to how the tuning I’ve seen so far in the Kylong Plains and the Fens of Nathsar was done. In the beta, I saw a lot of soloers, and a lot of people beta-buffing and grouping up for the dungeons. What I didn’t see much of, was people playing the game as they would do when the game went live. ...
Kendricke over at Clockwork Gamer has also noted that the experience in Karnor’s Castle is seriously out of whack, even going so far as to advise his guild not to bother going there. SOE, you have a real problem here. Don’t let all that beautiful zone design go to waste!
This is my Burynai. His name is Dalnir! When I feed him, he acts like he’s coughing up a hairball, but it’s really collectible items. I got a Crushed Scorpion (ewww) and a Rivervale Scroll from the foods I had on me. I was so happy to see I could claim him – I just hadn’t looked far enough up in the list. I took my alts out of my main guild’s alt guild, “E C Bots”. That name is just embarrassing; a joke someone thought was funny, but just try to be taken seriously in a group when you have that name hovering over you. I asked in guild if there was an alt guild I could join my crafters to, since I will be grinding writs and would like that effort to go to leveling a real guild. The guild leader mentioned “E C Bots”, but, um, no. I know that very few alts join that guild. I see people’s alts in half a dozen other guilds, and I was looking for an invite into one of those. ...
I have great and fond memories of Karnor’s Castle from EQ1. The experience was decent for its level. Loot was plentiful. And the place was absolutely, friggin’ HUGE. There was really no better place to be for levels 49-54, and if you weren’t hunting there at those levels, you were waiting for a spot in a group there. For those who didn’t play EQ1 back when Kunark was king, let me explain what play was like in KC. The zone was split into “camps” – a dozen or so – and each camp had enough mobs so that by the time you finished killing every mob in your camp, they’d begin to respawn. Killing the initial set of mobs in a camp was called “breaking” a camp. A group would move into a camp, break it, then from then on, continual pulling and experience. Loot was and is fairly common in EQ, and so EQ1 groups had various well-known methods of distributing loot. You’d go into KC for a group, and depending on your camp, would walk out with a lot more experience (unless you were in the hell of level 54), plenty of gems and other cash loot and perhaps a rare item. SOE kept adjusting the loot upward to make the zone an attractive place to be even many expansions down the line. ...
Things I accomplished: Leveled to 71, got my Sokokar, got to “amiable” with the Followers of Teren, 103 AAs, explored all of Karnor’s Castle and killed its commander (for no reward), made a server discovery on a tradeskill book, got the new EQ2Maps and ProfitUI running. Things I did not accomplish: Level jewelcrafting, reinstall Windows on my other machine, get enough faction with Teren that I could buy and sell in Teren’s Grasp. ...
Just spoke with my son, and he tells me the patcher is reporting between 12 and 16 hours for the Rise of Kunark digital download. Those of you who were in the beta may be able to just copy some or most of the files over (especially the paks). If you ordered the digital download, and weren’t in the beta, you may be settling in for a long wait. Edit: BETA TESTERS – if you copy your “paks” and “Music” folder from the BetaEQII folder to your EverQuest II folder, you’ll save hours of download time.
How did you get ready for the expansion? Do anything special? First thing I did was to recreate one of my beta characters onto a live server. My son was all excited when I told him I was saving her from deletion by copying her to live. He was hoping you could copy level 80 characters from beta to live, but alas, I just copied her design. She’s just an ordinary level 1 Arasai in Darklight Woods, but she’ll escape the wipe. ...
I promise, this is the last screenshot of clothing :) I logged on tonight, scoured the broker for the rare hides and other stuff I’d need, and made some Tier 8 clothes. The first is the level 80 dress – BLACK! Finally! It looks great… well, considering it looks like every other dress (except all black), maybe it’s not the most amazing thing in the world, but it matches my mask so I’m fine with it. ...