Refresher Course for Everquest II Veterans

Guildmates and friends have sent me a number of links over the past week, since my return to Everquest II.  Being a tradeskiller and a harvesting junkie–fulginate is going for over 1.2 g a cluster on Crushbone at this very minute–I needed a refresher course on what’s what in the world of nodes.  I also needed help with quests and a variety of other items.  Rather than tell me what to do, most people opted to IM me a link.  Why give a man a fish when you can teach him to catch one himself?  Here are a few of the most useful.

• The official Everquest II site. 
• Everquest II Maps and Quests.  This site is very useful for both.
• Probably my most used quest helper, Allakhazam’s Magical Realm for Everquest II.
• For tradeskillers and those looking for what’s rare and whats not, EQ2 Traders Corner is the place.
• UI issues?  EQ2Interface is the place to customize.  I’m using ThorUI currently.
• A nice guide to Lore and Legend quests complete with screenshots to find the starter books.

Based on Stargrace’s advice, I added the following two sites:

• From EQ2-Daily, EQ2 Wiki for general help.
• EQ2I for quests, spoilers, items, etc.

I know there are many other worthy sites, and I’d be happy to list them next time I revisit this post/topic.  However, these are the most popular sites for me, and I think the coverage between them all is excellent.  I have to add that I play with a two-monitor setup, so I can put up maps, quest guides, etc. on the right hand side while playing on my main screen.  This is also useful for watching movies or TV (a good cable TV card is a must) while grinding along.

Finally, In a shameless parody of TAGN, I’d like to recap the weekend–57 hits in a day may not seem like many, but for me that is a successful day.  I have to thank Wilhelm for putting my “Two Box Equation” article up on EQ2-Daily.com.  I would also like to point out that the handsome (did I just say that about a ’toon?) barbarian with the very Shiny Brass Halberd in his header is indeed the Meclin.  As proof here he is in a helmet–tier 5 vanguard fulginate.  I think I liked this look better.

Happy hunting!

The Return of the Return to Norrath

As I click “view site” on my ‘blog dashboard, I notice the “Two Friends Head Back to Norrath” comment from The Ancient Gaming Noob (TAGN for those of you in the know). The article was from last October, and indeed I headed back to play my main, Meclin a 60 guardian, and dabble with my alt’s. I did run Meclin, with the help of friends, up to level 68.5. I should hit 70 sometime with him. However, after a few days I decided to use my second account and try two boxing—this happy circumstance coincided with my discovery that while guardians were great for taking damage, they were not much for soloing any real content. Enter Gaff and Lurk (pictured on my header).

I started my Ratonga beserker Gaff and picked up with a new Fae fury just to mix it up and was off to the races in the new zones of Echoes of Faydwer. In fact, the Fae, named “Rella” by my daughter, was a reaction to seeing high-end furies literally obliterate mobs with AoEs. For two months I hit the game every night, and around level twenty switched to mentoring with the Froglok mystic Lurk on my second box. I figured he would be the ‘toon I wanted to take to endgame anyway, so why wait to play him? This went on until Gaff was in the upper 30s, and Lurk the low 40s.

I tore through content—returning to the old world zones and dungeons to exploit (used generically here) the high master chest drop rates in such dungeons as Stormhold, Varsoons, and eventually Runnyeye. My obsessive gaming nature was bearing fruit—I stopped tradeskilling my 70 provisioner (Lurk) and concentrated on milking all the gold possible from new transmuters. It was all going great—I even had an occasional friend join for some added DPS. That was my downfall.

Noticing how much easier downing bosses, not to mention spawning them, was with an additional DPS class, I grew a bit apprehensive about my future with this duoing combination. Coupled with a good friend and former collegue’s decision that Norrath was not the place for him, I grew weak. Blizzard would soon own my soul again. However, with some two boxing experience under my belt, I felt I could go on to what many, including myself, believed was a dumbed down MMORG and conquer. This was not to be—I wrote on some of the problems with two boxing content in World of Warcraft yesterday.

After a couple of months back in Azeroth, roughly December ‘06 through February ‘07, I realized that WoW was just not doing it for me. I switched my main to a druid, leaving the tank class behind. Part of the reason I could not stomach WoW was the inability to utilize both my machines adequately to conquer content, some of the problem was boredom, a lot of the problem was unhappiness with the guild I had joined. They ran great content, the guild leaders worked very hard, and all of that—I would be the last to disparage their contribution. But something, and I plan to articulate it in a future article, (it will come to me, and is probably related to my previous article on the subject of raiding) just seemed to rankle.

So I am back to Everquest II. I am unhappy that I left, for a second time. I always feel like I have wasted a whole lot of opportunities when I leave a game for an extended period. It’s as if it is a race or something. However, that feeling is slowly dissipating, and I am beginning to enjoy the playtime I have, and not look to “get ahead” in the shortest possible time. That being said, I am recovering from the “kill one thousand sentient beings” even as I write this…but that’s another story.

SOE Station Access Rate Hike Rankles Some

The above title is my attempt at journalism.  Not the slanted journalism you hear berated and burned in effigy daily on talk radio.  No, this is true objectivity.  I’m writing on the internet aren’t I?  What more proof do you need?  Let’s start with a quote from a friend’s MMORG blog.  You can read his comments, complete with links to previous discussions and other blogs here.

So far all I see for $5 more per month is things I already have.  If they threw me a bone and gave me, say, the EQ2 Players.com stats as part of Station Access I’d probably be okay.  But to run a 20% price increase and give the subscribers nothing?  Insanity!  I want to know which mail-order diploma mill sold the faux MBA to the guy at Sony who came up with that plan.

This is indicative of what most SOE (and probably some non-subscribers who like to throw rocks) think about the rate hike.  If I did subscribe to Station Access I would be upset as well.  However, I gave it up when I last returned to Norrath in Fall ‘06.  I had to talk to Sony customer service, which was both enjoyable and productive.  The last was not sarcasm–every time I have had to call SOE (I still don’t like to interact about business things on a computer) they have been more than helpful.  I even went so far as to compliment the people I dealt with directly.  Then I was instructed to delete extra characters until I had six ‘toons and all would be right with the world.  I already had my other account, so now I was ready for two boxing!

Back to the price hike–I don’t have a solution.  I do have a question.  Is this really affecting a large number of Sony subscribers?  Or, if in fact it does, is it only effecting people who were willing to pay a bit extra for more character slots to play, say, EQ2, but don’t actively play any of the other games?  While I have no empirical evidence (i.e. statistics) I think the latter is true of most the proverbial “ink” I have seen slung about the ‘net.

If you do have some stats, drop a line in the comment section.  I would be happy to put them up here, providing you can cite the source.  As far as I’m concerned, I pay for two accounts, monthly, and get 12 character slots.  I am entirely too obssessional to play another game at the same time, though I am intrigued by some of the original Everquest versus Everquest II zone comparisons.   Perhaps this summer I will pay for Station Access long enough to do one of my own.