EverQuest

One of the draws EQ2 has for all of us old EQ players is the nostalgia, especially for those of us who were there from the beginning. It’s hard to overstate just the kind of impact Kunark had on us all. Never before and very rarely since had a company so completely matched an expansion to exactly what people wanted. All the good parts of EQ, they added more of. All the bad parts (like medding with your face in a book), they took away. Well, not ALL the bad parts. They had to leave some for Velious, after all. ...

Went in, started, worked through and finished the Shard of Fear last night with an almost all-guild group. My son, who’s been to SoF many times but never finished, vowed never to again go with a pick-up group. Just for fun, I ran Fraps in SoF and took the occasional short clip; here’s about a minute of various things in the zone. I wanted to edit the movies together in Cinellara under Linux, but I couldn’t find a decoder that would take me from a Fraps 4-encoded movie to a Quicktime-encoded movie for Cinellara. So I used the Windows Movie Maker that came with Vista. It was pretty good, actually. ...

Very quick note on Live Update 39, will do more tonight… Hallowe’en quests aren’t in, those are scheduled for the 26th. The next quest in the Kunark line went live, it requires you to kill a few followers of Venril Sathir in Feerrott (there was a line for one of them) and eventually scare them straight by using an illusion of Cazic Thule to bring them away from their heretical belief in the divinity of Venril Sathir. It’s not an instance, but the mobs do innovatively scale to your level nonetheless. ...

This was all part of our “execution strategy”. Carefully arrange ourselves beneath him, with our weapons all pointed up, then when he gets tired and lands, WHAM! Death of a thousand needles, we rez and we loot. It was just crazy enough to work. Okay, we really didn’t think we were going to roll in their with twelve eleven random people and kill Xux’liao (yeah, I looked up his name…), but given we’d just spent a night getting access to the place, seemed worth a look. ...

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream - flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating - urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal … and some were strangely robed … and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head. ...

I was reading Allakhazam’s interview with SOE’s VP of Global Sales & Marketing, Torrie Dorrell, and it was a good read. I was having fun, learning new stuff, and unlike some other recent interviews I’d read, focused more on asking questions than the interviewer’s lame roleplaying. About midway down, though… I couldn’t believe my eyes. We’re getting MURLOCS in EQ2! No necks, fish face, clawed feet… not quite as bright as WoW’s, but I know a Murloc when I see one. ...

Last night we had low raid attendance (and it was lucky I was even there at all – I’d just woken up from a drugged sleep… stupid toothache…), so the raid leaders decided to have everyone that was on finish up their Roost access. Roost is an instance in Mystic Lake, part of the Isle of Mara expansion. For such a small expansion, it sure has enough raid targets – crab, Cheldrak, Matron and Mr. Unpronounceable Name, the four-winged wonder who sits at the end of the shortish Roost instance. ...

Dera’s appearance armor – Blackened Iron Vanguard, tier 2 mastercrafted, made by her.* I play several classes and can’t claim I’m any good at any of them. But I have fun, and my guild still lets me raid with them, so I can’t be a total failure. Interrogation technique #1: Significantly or moderately increase fear level of detainee Anyone who’s taken the time to level a character from one to seventy, though, has figured out a few things. And one of those things is… how to deal with so many buttons. As a cleric in EQ1, I had my main bank of ten which covered my heals and short term buffs like Divine Intercession (protect target from death), Divine Barrier (protect self from damage and also give a little heal over time), and Yaulp (faster mana regen while standing). I had a second bank for rarely used abilities and items. And that really was it. ...

I upgraded to the latest Wordpress and changed my theme just so I could use larger screenshots… After a couple of disappointing attempts at the last dragon I needed to finish my Deathtoll access with my own guild, a pickup raid smooved in and ganked her, with me singing my little lungs out. Like Clockwork Menace, once you kill the first mob you’re on a timer. We had thirty minutes until the trash mobs we cleared would return. ...

With apologies to Potshot… Since we raid Freethinker’s Hideout every few days, I finally got around to doing some of the quests for that zone – Thermal Shocker to accurately judge the placement on the third named (when it just barely is in range to fire, you’re in the correct spot), and the Hand of Glory quest line. Anyway, we killed this ugly guy on the way into the Mistmoore Catacombs for the Sword of Destiny quest a couple of weekends back. No idea what he was for, and he didn’t drop anything, but AA is AA, right? (Unless you have 100 AA… then nothing matters any more…) ...