Working on the Epic, and ANOTHER Bard?

An absolutely beautiful day yesterday, so I spent a lot of out outside doing some photography in a little village. It was fun, warm, but fun. Later on in the day I logged in to EQ2 to have a little fun. Ultann was busy doing Halls of Fate with Wpus and the boxed inquisitor who managed to climb to level 77 and I went back to working on my epic for a little while. Finally I had gotten my gathering skills high enough to work on it properly.

I completed the first portion that required me to harvest rocks in Kunark and deliver them to a dwarf in Butcherblock Mountains, then it was time to head to Shard of Fear and take down an Eye of Thul. These mobs are just before the graveyard and are pretty close to the zone in, so 5 minutes later it was complete.

Ultann had to leave for a few hours (and ended up being gone for the remainder of the evening) so Wpus agreed to help me level up my dirge. Now, I know. I already HAVE a troubador on Oasis, one who has her dirge AND troubador epic weapons because I’ve betrayed her THAT many times, but I love bards, I truly do. So of course it was natural (for me) to create another. I may betray her to troubador later on as well, I haven’t decided yet.

She started off at level 54, and is linked to the rent-a-friend account that I have so she’s got the benefit of 200% bonus experience. Not to mention 50% from my regular level 80’s on the account, and she had full vitality plus the Orb of Concentrated Memories which is the 5 year veteran reward that grants full vitality once a week.

Needless to say after running her through Clefts of Rujark and an instance within that zone, then heading off to Living Tombs, she was well situated at level 60. I had hoped to gain two more levels and push her to 62 which is the new tier for Mastercrafted gear (and I was planning on checking out new skills as well) but I was feeling pretty tired after a busy day so I decided to call it an early night at 9:30. Hopefully I can get those levels today instead, we’ll just have to see.

I’ve also found myself turning off most of the level channels on Kithicor, and instead joining the role play channels over on Antonia Bayle, which you can join no matter what server you’re on. One of the more popular channels is a player run tavern called “Raven Mythic” which you can join and listen to by /join antonia_bayle.RM  – the tavern is a gathering place for role players who play out their stories within, some acting as staff, others as weary adventurers who have come to sit by the fire and tell their tale. I’ve listened to the stories there off and on for the past two years, enjoying every minute of it. I’d much rather spend my evening leveling and watching the chatter of that one channel then listen to the elitist comments made by the general populace in 70-79. If you’re into that sort of thing, whether to partake or only to listen I highly suggest it.

Other then that, it was a quiet evening. Those are just as nice as one packed with things to do especially after a busy day. I hope everyone else had an amazing Saturday!

Epic Journey

There was only one thing holding me back from starting the epic weapon quest for my mystic. Ok, maybe more then one but one main thing. I took a look through the wiki and noticed what I needed before I got too far with it.

  • You must be lvl 80
  • You must speak Sathirian
  • You must speak Halasian
  • You must speak Death’s Whisper
  • Gathering skill needs to be 300+.
  • Foresting skill needs to be 340+.
  • Mining skill needs to be 340

Now, the languages and the level was not an issue but my harvesting skills were as low as they possibly could be. It happens when you have so many characters, things fall behind. So every once in a while I would take the mystic (when the trio wasn’t already involved in doing something, which was relatively rare) and go harvesting. I was working on the cloak from the Isle of Mara at the same time, so I wouldn’t have to go back and continue harvesting for that.

Yesterday I finally reached the point where I can harvest those skill levels, and so I started my epic. The mystic has been level 80 for quite some time, but since I’ve already got a collection of epics (some times twice such as in the case of my bard who is sporting both the troubador and dirge epics) the shine has worn off a little.

The starter for the mystic epic begins down in Sebilis. You have to speak Sathirian right away and he’ll give you a page. The page speaks about spirits and ancients and a little discovery he partook in, and his desire to go back. From there you head to City of Mist (which is an area in EQ2 and not a zone like EQ which dissapointed me) and kill ‘a timeworn spirit’ who happens to be hanging out. A chest drops which you’ll loot and will start the actual quest. It sends you to Teren’s Grasp to speak with a Runesage.

From there the quest moves on to a million other things I need to do. It’s probably one of the more involved quests I’ve done and I’m not even sure I like the end result. The weapon is great for groups, but has no heal crits and nothing to do with healing on the proc (it actually gives a bonus to combat).

I still want to start the epic with my illusionist some time as well, but since I’ve already started it and completed half of it on Najena, I have even less inspiration.

Aside from that, my gaming was fairly limited last night. I did manage to get the illusionist from 34-40 in carpentry which was fantastic. I churned out rush order writs to fly through the levels while watching Legend of the Seeker on Hulu. 8 episodes later and I’d managed to hit the next tier. I’ll probably wait for vitality to replenish before working through the next tier.

Today I’ll be heading to Manotick to take some pictures. It’s a little village just outside of Ottawa, and today is supposed to be absolutely beautiful out. I already have my balcony door open and the cool air is fantastic. I want to go to Upper Canada Village soon for some pictures as well, but their season doesn’t start until May 16th. Then there’s also the Medieval Festival which I hope will be making another appearance this year. Last year I had an amazing time. So many exciting things to do, both in game and out.

I hope everyone has an amazing Saturday, see you in Norrath!

Happy Birthday LotRO

Turbine has another promotion going on right now in celebration of LotRO turning 2 years old. Old players will find their accounts active for a week, there’s 25% bonus experience in game, you can purchase a subscription at a discount price of $9.99/m (if you purchase one of their plans, 3 months or more) and there are also gifts to be found in game by means of ‘tokens’ that drop from mobs. I love promotions like these, and Landroval was bustling yesterday during the day with all sorts of players. On one side it was great to see, on another side, the lag was not great to see. I can only assume Landroval is far more populated then the server Nostalgia moved from, since I don’t remember having lag before. It’s short, and in spurts. It doesn’t hamper my game play any more then being slightly annoying as I run through Bree, and it seems to be limited to the big cities.

I played the rune-keeper for a bit yesterday along with Kasul who is still waiting for his character to transfer over. Word reached that Tipa’s characters made the trip successfully, so his should be up very soon. It’ll be nice to have everyone on the same server again.

We completed a few chapters of book one, volume one, inching ever so closer to where we were at before in the series, which was book one volume one chapter 11, the portion where we’d need a group to complete it. Tipa and Malfi will no doubt be dragged into that one to help out.

After it was decided that we’d do our level 15 class quests, mine was already starting to lighten up in colours as I was level 17 by then, but it made me trek out to the Lone Lands and I didn’t want to walk way out there when I’d not yet received the quests that had me adventure that way.

The quest was fantastic, I had so much fun doing it on my rune-keeper. You speak to an NPC outside the Forsaken Inn (I believe that’s the name, if it’s not dead on please forgive me) and get ported to the top of Weathertop. This is a HUGE mountain just North of the lone lands, and when I got there a thunderstorm was raging. I had to take my rune-keeper around and select a number of stones and then watch them each get hit by lightning. Mother nature at her best or some such story. After I’d carefully selected my three stones, orcs began attacking me. The atmosphere was intense, the sky would be pitch black as rain came pouring down and then suddenly everything would be illuminated bright as day time as the storm grew in height and then BAM an orc would charge me from the darkness.

After a time I received the messages that my three stones had been hit by lightning and I should go back to each one and see what remained. Back to the npc who ported me to the Inn and I received my weapon as well as a new class trait that lets me focus on my lightning skills with crits.

I headed back to Bree and turned in 5 iron tokens I’d gathered while adventuring and received a scroll for a weapon smith that allows a one time creation of a purple (not sure what the classification is actually called, heroic legendary etc) weapon! Neat. Most people were talking about how they’d received food from the gift-giver and naught more.

It was starting to get close to dinner after that, so I decided to break there. The rune-keeper is almost 18 and then it’s just one more level to catch up to Hamal once he moves over. Hopefully I can squeeze that in before our next game day the following week. We’ll see!

A Little Free Realms

Of course I had to jump on the Free Realms bandwagon and add a post about the upcoming game here! The NDA was dropped yesterday afternoon and since then there have been posts galore (not to mention tweets) about this brightly coloured world.

There’s really nothing new I could add right now that others have not already said, so I’ll point you in the direction of a few friends:

Tipa writes about creating a character and the basics of this kid-friendly game.

Cuppy gives the low down on the good and bad points of Free Realms, adding her personal thoughts to each.

Ogrebear talks a little about the specific jobs available and a brief review following cuppy’s good and bad points.

My own thoughts on the matter? I’ve been playing the beta a little while now and I’m really enjoying the overall game. Do I think it will ever be my personal number one game, no not really. It’s great as a secondary game, something you can dip into for a short period of time and have a little fun with. I’m not exactly happy that you can only obtain a permanent pet through purchasing one for real money but as Cuppy states in her post above, that could always change.

The price is certainly right, and adding this to the station access plan is a great idea. If you’re a parent who already plays any of the other SOE titles you may want to subscribe just to bundle it all up together.

One thing I noticed (and Tipa has said a time or two before) is that the mini games are quite mouse intensive. I realize that I am a minority here but I’m left handed, with a right handed mouse (mostly because that’s how I grew up and now it would just be incredibly odd to use a left handed mouse) and that means that for these games I feel that I am constantly under performing due to using the ‘wrong’ hand in order to play them.

So what I did was plug my wacom tablet in so that I could use the pen to play the games with my left hand rather then my right. This worked out far better and I’m having a much easier time with it – not to mention I’m enjoying playing the games more rather then struggling to spin a pot with the wrong hand.

I’m looking forward to seeing the game go live, and it will be quite a treat to see it grow from there.

If you’re looking for me in game, remember you can find me as Stephanie Stardreamer – though both people need to be in game at the same time in order for you to add them to your friend list. You can contact me via email, twitter, or Xfire to meet up!

Exciting News All Around

Wow, yesterday was an overload of new happenings in games and lots of excitement came out of it. I’ll be making a post later about Free Realms now that the NDA has lifted (I have to jump on the bandwagon after all!) and if you’re looking for me in game you can find me as Stephanie Stardream – though both people DO have to currently be online in order to friend them.

Also, housing has gone to the test server in Wizard 101! I have really been looking forward to this. Even though I don’t play Wizard 101 as much as I’d like, I still dive in a few times a month and find it a great casual game when you’re looking for a bit of a break from your ‘main’ MMO. Plus it’s perfect for families and who doesn’t enjoy that.

Now, the main bit of news I’d like to focus on at least for this post is the new user generated content coming to EverQuest II! If you haven’t heard of it yet, be sure to check out the blog post made by Rothgar yesterday on the EQ2 dev blog. Basically this will allow players to write their own books in game, pick an appearance for them, and even make copies of them. They will be tradeable and you can put them on the broker.

This will be an amazing feature for people on role play servers to start. I’m absolutely excited about what people will come up with on those servers in specific where everyone has a tale to tell. I think the idea of collecting volumes of player-made books is fantastic. Lets say you’re an author in real life and you want to promote these little books in game, you could develop a whole marketing scheme for them. Now, I have no idea if this would take off on servers OTHER then the role play ones to any great degree. But housing enthusiasts and book lovers can certainly be found everywhere.

There’s also ascii art you could fill the pages with. Poems for friends, Christmas gifts, your own personal Norrathian stories. You could write guides for players in game, leveling guides, how to make money, a method of gaining achievement points, LOTS of things could be written within these pages for players to enjoy. Dungeon guides even if your character is perhaps an adventurer who explores the deep caverns and writes about what they discover. You could collect rare issues of books from players who left the game since their names are written as the author. You could try to convince devs or guides or GM’s to hold events where you could win a one of a kind book created by them.

Obviously my own personal excitement is pretty high. I’m all for making MMO worlds more personal and involving the players in such a way that they become a part of the world itself. Vanguard has this to some degree by allowing players to purchase actual plots of land in the game (no instances) CoX has this with their new user created missions (If I played I’d certainly be all over it).

Of course, there are down sides. As Tipa pointed out, what about gold sellers. Will they just mail you books filled with links to plat farming sites and spam. The books are created by crafters and I’m not sure what level you have to be or what sort of a hassle that may be. Until it goes live there’s no way to really tell if this will become a valid method of promoting gold sales. Also, what about those naughty books that people decide to write. There’s no real way to sensor a player written book – and I don’t think there should be. Sure, you’ve got the choice to read it or not, but do you really want 100 books of how to mate with an ogre covering the broker? Well, actually, maybe you do.

In any case, I think this is a fantastic idea.

On the down side, the next post after the announcement of these wonderful books, is the Research Assistants who are going to help you learn your master spells. I dislike this idea, a lot. I think it’s just another method of dumbing down the game, to just hand out master spells to players after an amount of time has passed for the NPC’s to “research” it for you. While you may think to yourself “well, YOU don’t have to take advantage of it then!” it will be far too easy to be left behind if you don’t have your master spells when it comes to groups and raids. On the Kithicor server there’s already a very high bar set for players. If you don’t meet a certain quota you’re excluded from a lot of going-ons. It only takes an hour or two in 70-79 to see what direction most people seem to head, every “LF” (looking for) message is followed by “must be mythical” “must have such and such gear” “must not suck”. One of the issues with the server that makes  me wish server transfers were free again for a short while.

Game wise last night was pretty relaxing. My trio did Crypt of Agony which was fairly painless, we also did Obelisk (no, the shield still has not dropped) and Nocbot managed to get a few levels and some aa. It wasn’t one of the busiest days in game but it was still lots of fun and I think everyone had a good time. This weekend I believe we’re attempting to get Nocbot to 80 (he’s sitting at 76 I think) so that he can get started on his epic. I also want to finish harvesting on my mystic, so I can start her epic as well as my illusionist’. We’ll see how that goes!

I hope everyone has a fantastic Thursday in the mean time!