EverQuest

SOE yesterday patched in timed (and untimed) tradeskill writs. You ask for a work order and select a difficulty - from easy to difficult in the tier you most recently completed, or a difficult work order in your current tier. My two main crafters - Dina, a 40 tailor; and Dorah, a 51 jeweler; level largely to make stuff for guildies. I keep some common items on the broker but they rarely sell and never quickly. What I want most is for a system to ease the grind by giving me back the money I spend on fuel and taking away the crap I make purely for selling to the vendor. ...

Tuesday night is Anguish night in EverQuest 1. Two hours of near continual killing, sweeping up trash mobs, boss mobs and a truckload of loot. It’s our most popular raiding night – the epitome of the Crimson Eternity raid machine. It’s where we test out new recruits to see if they have the stuff to become part of the core team. Anguish starts as soon as a couple of groups are logged on and ready to go. This advance team sweeps in and starts killing trash mobs. After about fifty of them, two to four minor bosses spawn that drop augments that add valuable hit points, mana, and usually a bonus to another stat and are prized for almost every armor slot. ...

Sick Friday, I was sent home to sleep it off (unpaid, of course). Instead, I loaded myself up with drugs and logged in to EQ2 to finish the Hoo’loh’s Hat quest. My last Halls of Fate run had left me with only one update to get; from the guards of the dragon deep in the Palace of the Awakening. I wondered aloud if there were any PoA groups that might be heading that way. Matteo from Legends offered me a group, and they might head that way, but on the heels of that came an invitation from a player two-boxing a berserker and a mystic. He was going to go straight there; he needed the dragon and i needed the guards, so it would work out for both of us. ...

You’d get the impression from my blog that EQ2 is the only game I play. It isn’t so. Nearly every night, it is the original EverQuest I load up when I get home from work. There’s nearly always a raid in progress; my Eastern Time guild starts hours before I get home. They usually can use another cleric. We’ve been farming the same content for over a year now. EQ’s slow decline makes it harder to progress – people are moving on to other games or real life, or switching servers to join more advanced guilds, or just cutting back from the time that being a raider requires. We made it to the Demiplane of Blood and the Theater of Blood (there’s some unhealthy obsession there on the part of the devs for blood, I think). We lost many people. Had to rebuild. A couple of times. ...

I logged in intending to make some serious progress toward my Hoo’loh hat. And I did; I quickly found a Halls of Fate group headed by the wizard/conjurer duo with whom I’d killed the scrollbearer and escorted Hoo’loh at the beginning of the quest. Helped a lot by an EC tank and healer, we wasted the zone and got all the kill updates but one for the hat. The last one is in the Palace of the Awakened, from one of creatures guarding the green dragon. ...

I was reading about the new DAoC expansion on MMORPG.com and noticed this animated ad for EverQuest. A direct shot at World of Warcraft players who got to 60 and wonder - now what? The general feeling I get from people in WoW and EQ2 is that the next generation MMO champ title is Vanguard’s to win or lose. I don’t see a huge swell of support for returning to EverQuest. ...

You don’t really appreciate Kingdom of Sky from the top. Weird creatures, lush landscapes, people zipping about on personal clouds, quick with their business. No, to really appreciate Kingdom of Sky, you need to see it from underneath. Someone pushed me – a real good shove – right off the edge of the chain. I fell onto the side of a cliff, with flat ground a hundred feet above me and nothing but a distant chain below me. There was a chance I could let go and maybe reach the chain, if safe fall and blind luck would save me. And it did. Stranded on the chains until Escape was ready to whisk me to safety, I had a lot of chance to really get a good look. ...

Finally FINALLY done leveling Dina. I’ve caught up! Last night when I logged in, I immediately got invited to a guild Halls of Fate run. It was my first time there! Lots of nameds; unfortunately the loot was kind of meh, but the experience was good and we finished the run with me just 3% from 70! There was no way I was going to do anything besides finish this level. ...

Tipa and her husband, Verd, took time out from their busy betrayal of Qeynos to model some of the fashions Dina has been crafting as she finishes up Tier 4 tailoring. Verd isn’t sporting the nice level 37 druid armor as Dina’s tailoring progress has been stalled by running out of tradeskill vitality. A few hex dolls a day (and of course the daily quota of a dozen backpacks to give out to any who can’t run away in time) is all she can manage. ...

Finished fighting the Scholar to finish the Strange Black Stone quest, turned to go, and was taken aback for a moment by the beauty of the sunset. My God, video games have come a long way. And this looked absolutely fabulous on my widescreen monitor… Every gamer blog eventually talks about WoW and some-other-game, usually pointing out how WoW is better, or worse, than this other game. Usually the biases are pretty clear; I left WoW to play EQ2, so you know where I’m coming from. But now and again, I still play WoW. This series of posts is a love affair for two great games. ...