Nostalgia the Guild

No, I totally don’t like this screen shot. My only excuse is this is the only one I took! The Tuesday group may have found its home for the next few weeks. Yes, we’ve started exploring that den of mystery and key-farming, Iceclad’s most notorious dungeon, the Tower of Frozen Shadow. Eschewing the standard Velious all-purpose building material, velium, the vampire queen Tserrina built her fortress instead out of the same solidified shadow that so many Luclin buildings were made from. It’s seven floors of fun, and each is separated from the other by teleport mirrors that take keys. Really RARE keys. We spent half the night farming the key to the Library, floor two. That included me getting hilariously stuck in the pit and being unable to get out because the skeletons at the bottom kept stunning me (finally we killed them and I was able to get out, exhausted from all that jumping). ...

I haven’t blogged about EQ2 in about a month from never. Not because I haven’t been playing it – I have – but just because I haven’t really been doing anything of interest. Running around, exploring. Being without a guild on my main characters tends to limit the time I spend on them, since EQ2 is a group-based game at all levels but especially so at higher levels, and without friends to group with, there’s little incentive to log in. Part of that is due to having two jobs and entirely unable to devote the time to a raiding guild that would be required, since raid guilds are themselves a second (unpaid) job. I suppose a casual guild is the best thing I could hope for, but – I LOVE RAiDING. Logging in and NOT raiding would make me sad. ...

We’ll talk about this picture in a little bit :) Now that everyone in the Friday group is 51 or 52, it was time to stretch our wings a little bit and do something even casual guilds do on occasion – raid. And we being a Nostalgia guild, the only POSSIBLE thing to raid would be the scourges of the old world, Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox. These dragons have some restrictions – anyone higher than level 52 gets punted from the zone. The condition arose when the Ruins of Kunark expansion let everyone level to 60, and the dragons suddenly became trivial to kill. So they added the level cap, and ever since, level 52 has acquired an unholy reverence, your one chance to kill the dragons before departing for more mundane challenges. ...

I really have to start scouting out dungeons before I put them on the schedule. I really thought I remembered Kaesora being higher in level, but when Coldheat and I reached it, all I saw on track was an endless sea of gray and green. Kaesora still has this odd power I ave never fully understood, and before we knew it, we found ourselves looking back up at the two hundred foot drop we’d just come down, and we were forced to fight legions of scary skeletons and stealthy spiders to return to the entrance. Here’s Coldheat and I appreciating the wonderful architecture of the Library. Other people were logging in, so we cut short our trip and fought back to the entrance. Kaesora wasn’t a challenge, and without a challenge, adventuring is no fun. ...

First of all, there’s no such thing as a so-called “Tipa pull”. For one thing, it’s just more EFFICIENT to nuke something at a door and have the entire fort come after you in groups of three and four. Look, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Everyone dinged, no harm, no foul :) The night started off slowly. We gathered at the Windmill in the Lake of Ill Omen, and the place was just a sea of red to our doughty druid healer Hakiko. Looking for easier prey for the three of us – Hak healing, me tanking in my shiny purple armor, and Fada handling the perilous nuking duties – we headed toward the spires camp. ...

Call of Sky FTW, beyotch Friday’s journey into the Luggald caves of Dulak’s Harbor brought all of us many more levels and some of us have even strayed perilously close to level 52, the current max level for us in Nostalgia the Guild. I have locked my experience at level 51 for now so that I can work on AAs. I’ve gotten three so far; the plan is to have a bunch saved up so we can spend them as we reach the next milestones. ...

I remember sitting on the North Wall of Karnor’s Castle back in 2000 or 2001, doing my best to keep my group healed as a mid-40s druid, and chatting with the other people in my group. Yeah, we did a lot of chatting. I don’t know why people keep calling EQ1 a hardcore game… playing EQ1 was like sitting on a beach chair watching the surf crash, and occasionally rousing oneself off that beach chair to fall upon the surf and really mess it up, then relaxing again as the puller went out to find more surf. ...

SOE loves reinventing their flagship games. Last fall, SOE decided that their latest EQ2 expansion, Rise of Kunark, should focus on mostly-soloable quests instead of the mostly-groupable open experience zones that had been EQ2’s signature style of play since release. Since those people who prefer to solo had largely already gravitated to World of Warcraft, it came as a shock to those people who played EQ2 for the strong social and community aspects. Many group loving players had a hard time soloing the quests in RoK, since after an initial flurry of activity while everyone leveled to 80, finding groups for the 70-80 quest grind is now virtually impossible. ...

If YOU had to keep a bunch of different dungeons stocked with monstrosities, all day, every day, how would you find time to do anything else, like corrupting snow orcs, or plotting the destruction of the world or anything? The Everfrost LDoN instances? They are there to keep Miragul BUSY. He was working overtime last night as two groups of Nostalgians woke him up from his slumber to hand us some iced confectionery goodness. ...

I remember level 44. On my first character, my druid Etha, it almost certainly happened in the pits and warrens of Nagafen’s Lair, ridding the place of its kobold problem. On Tipa, I remember that level well; it was in the Dreadlands, and I was so excited because it meant I would soon be able to get Velk’s groups. Brita, my cleric – she was named Dera then – made 44 in Kaesora. We owned that place. ...