EQ2 – Page 19 – A Pixel Nomad

Nu’roga Nights

Yesterday was a fairly good day as far as leveling goes. I dusted off my swashbuckler and headed to The Mines of Meldrath in Steamfont. I used an experience potion from /claim and the levels were pretty fast, and before I knew it she hit level 52. I don’t have any cobalt clusters to make her some gear or weapons, but I’m hoping I can level to 60+ before that becomes too much of an issue.

Afterwards it was time for the bruiser to get a little love, and I headed to an Everfrost TSO zone. The zone actually ended up being bugged, and no matter how many times me and my group attempted the third named, he would life tap to 100% health. Searching the forums came up with all sorts of other people with the exact same issue. Since we had just taken him down the day before I was a little annoyed that now he was bugged (expected fix: Next update) but there wasn’t much I could do about it last night. The bruiser did manage to get to level 54 though. Another character I’m trying to push through the dreaded 50’s.

So my group decided we would forgo the alts for the evening, and do a TSO instance that most of us (if not all of us) had never been to before. For me personally, that means 1 EF zone, 2 CL zones, 1 Lavastorm zone, 3 LP zones, 3 Moors zones, and the 3 zones in Fens of Nathsar. We decided to head to the Fens of Nathsar and explore Nu’roga. Friends had told us this zone could be solo healed, and said it was ‘medium’ on terms of difficulty.

I’m not sure if it’s just because it was late, or if I was off on my game but DANG this was a hard zone. The group consisted of myself (warden), a shadowknight, ranger, assassin, dirge, and warlock. Since I was the only healer I really had to keep on my toes. The first named is a giant drake, and you have to pull him some what close to these two goblins who have stoneskin on. He casts a dispell, and he will dispell not only all of your buffs (and heals if they’re on someone) but he’ll also dispell the two goblins with stoneskin, so that you can attack them. We fought these guys (dying twice first) for 15 minutes before finding the spot to position the wyvern. If you fight him directly on top of the plat form, for some reason he doesn’t dispell. So we had to pull him a few feet away from the base of the platform every time we killed him. Long, hard fight and I’ve never healed so frantically as I did that encounter.

The other named were all fairly easy, but there are not many of them. This zone is FILLED with trash that you have to clear, and they hit HARD. Typically I don’t see the hitpoints jump around as often as they did last night, spiking from one minute to the next.

The loot was exceptionally abysmal. The stats seemed lower (it’s a required 80 zone and we got a ring that’s for level 77’s) then every other instance I’d been to, with +25 to most things, and +90 or even +70 to health and power with few effects. For the difficulty of the zone I’d say this is NOT worth it, and if it wasn’t for the fact that we did manage to get two void shards (quest + chest) along with a heritage quest update (cloak needs 12 shard drops from mobs) then I’d avoid it. There’s certainly no way I’m going back unless I really have to.

By the time we finished it was bed. I believe today is when Frostfell goes live and I’m really looking forward to that. I should be spending some time in Vanguard today as well if all goes according to plan. I was going to play a little last night, but just wasn’t in the mood.

Void Shard Purchases

I didn’t get a chance to play all that much yesterday, too busy working on some smaller projects, and being cranky. Today is a new day though and that’s great. What I did do yesterday, was the daily double of Evernight Abbey on all three of my level 80’s in less then 30 minutes. Wait, how is that possible? Well, every so often the daily double requires nothing more then clicking something inside of a zone (and of course having the quest on you). So after the zone was clear, I was able to bring my two level 80’s in to get the update as well.

This is how Goudia (my level 80 dirge) managed to get 4 shards and has never set foot into a TSO instance. There are quite a few quests that let you just click updates within a zone, you can hear people looking to purchase entry into a cleared zone so that they can get shard updates. There’s no way I’d actually pay to get my void shard updates, but it was nice to use a cleared instance. So that left me with 4 shards on Goudia, 6 shards on Silhouette (the coercer), and 7 shards on Arysh. Arysh is saving up for the greater void shard gloves, since I just purchased the lesser ones yesterday. It’s 16 void shards I believe from the merchant, which means slightly cheaper from a crafter. The gloves (as I mentioned yesterday) were a slight upgrade but had a nice effect.

The dirge purchased some gloves as well, which were an enormous upgrade for her. The gloves pictured to the right hand side are the lesser version. I absolutely love the effect on these gloves and of course for a bard they come with all of the important stats.

The pretties didn’t end there though, no way. I also ended up purchasing the coercer pants for Silhouette, which were a very nice upgrade and quite cheap. It’s nice to be able to get gear upgrades from merchants even though I was leery at first thinking perhaps people would stop doing the instances. Granted the expansion hasn’t been out quite a month yet, but I hope the popularity stays for a bit.

I headed to Jarsath Wastes with Kasul for a little while before dinner to work on some quests with Stargrace, who is currently 80% of the way into level 78. It’s amusing to me that the character I use as my ‘online persona’ for pretty much every site and forum these days is one of my lowest level characters. At the time that I created this site Stargrace was my ‘main’ and it just sort of stuck. I was contemplating doing some collections to get her the last 20% she needs to ding, but decided against it after I looked at the prices.

Today I have an article to finish up on Darkfall and then hopefully I’ll get a little more time to play. I’m stuck between leveling my paladin (45), my brigand (49), my warlock (27) or my bruiser (53). Ah, the joy of alts.

A Quiet Night

A sure sign of a happy gaming week, last night I had some weird dream about doing an article on a new MMO that was some sort of table top 3D game that was fantasy based but all I remember is physically touching where I wanted my character to go on an actual landscape, and the fact that for some reason my group looked like playmobil toys and were wearing saftey helmets. Weird.

Anyhow, last night I spent most of it decorating and talking to friends. I headed over to the Antonia Bayle server for a few minutes to talk to Malfi who was decorating his hobbit home (with ideas that I am most certainly going to steal borrow), he did a fantastic job of it. I am really enjoying the smaller scale homes. Almost my entire EQ2 career I’ve been thinking that the larger homes were the way to go, more room for items, more space. I think they are over doing it though, and characters can manage just fine in the smaller abodes, especially the alts.

So no adventuring for me, I didn’t do any dungeons, and I didn’t do any crafting instances. I did still have fun though, decorating my home and talking to people. There’s always a wonderful social aspect to the game that I can fall back on when there’s nothing in particular that I want to do.

I do need to start actually working faction for the Moors some day, or I’ll never be able to craft the new furniture. Also, FROSTFELL will make its way to Norrath next week, and I am REALLY excited about that. Granted, the first few days will be filled with people clawing at each other to try to harvest the nodes and make the new pretties that will be in game, but then things typically settle down.

Today I’m off to my parents place (little brother in tow) to visit, taking my camera so hopefully I’ll get some shots while I’m down there, oh, laptop is coming too (I still need to finish off those Beckett articles).

Safe travels no matter which game you find yourself in!

Plundered House Items – PartI

While you’re adventuring through the newest TSO instances, be on the look out for furniture that you can steal and take home with you. There are a number of house items that can be collected by adventurers and brought home, something that I find absolutely amazing.

You may want to set up a rule for your group before you even enter the zone, as only some of these house items seem to respawn (the rug in Befallen is an example of one that does not seem to respawn).

In each of the Loping Plains instances, one of three paintings can be found with the same title – “Mysterious Painting”

The one of the woman can be found in Evernight Abbey, from a clickable coffin. Keep your eyes open for the other two in the other instances.

The paintings look fantastic, the details are wonderful and there’s a lot of character in them. I only have two of the collection so far, but hopefully I’ll be able to get my hands on the rest before too long and add them to my museum (which is still a work in progress).

Keep in mind that you CAN find these on the broker. They’re treasured house items, tradeable, and are worth 250 status points each. There are a lot more items besides these three paintings, including tapestries, rugs, bushes, chandelier, and even a chair. I’ll post pictures of those next.

Miragul’s Phylactery: The Crucible

There’s only one main down side I have to having so many characters in this new TSO expansion. Because everything is purchased with void shards or Far Seas Tokens, I have shards spread out on multiple characters but no one character has amassed a large amount. There’s about 20 crafting tokens spread over 5 characters, and 10 void shard tokens spread over a few characters as well (I know, I have been slacking in the adventuring department). A few people had raids cancelled so they asked me if I wanted to head to Everfrost and do an instance with them. Sure! The group was made up of a Shadowknight, Assassin, Templar, Dirge, Fury, and myself as Coercer. Albrta and Eyenstein both went, something that has been rare as of late, and we had a blast.

We had a great amount of DPS and the mobs dropped easily enough. When you zone in there is a hallway to the left and the right, and you’re offered a quest right away too. We cleared all of the rooms along the way on the first floor, headed upstairs and took a right. We cleared the rooms there and then it was time to place the little statues. If you stand in the center there are special windows that you can look through that tells you where to place each statue. Easy enough. Killed the named and nothing too impressive dropped, but it was fun. We had to be careful of some minor AOE’s.

When it came to burning the room of named down to 50% before placing them over their little coloured platforms, we had a lot of fun. I wasn’t sure if we burned just one to 50, then put them over their stand, or burn all to 50 and place them. Turns out they all come. We had the shadowknight tank all three of the name (who also spawn adds during the fight) and then once we worked them all down to 50% we moved them over to their proper coloured platforms and there they stayed. The named talked for a bit and then we took him down as well. He does have some aoe’s. Seems like everything has aoe’s these days.

Nothing really phased us until we got to the final named, we did die once because we forgot to pull the named out of the center so that people can see the books and scrolls that spawn on the floor. We had the dirge and assassin on book duty, this allowed us to slow our fight down enoough not to be worried about when the items would spawn. You just have to click them, and as long as you have two people in the center who have their effects on high enough to see the items drop, you’ll be fine. Make sure they grab the torches first. There is an aoe that goes off just before the scrolls and books drop in the middle, so if you’re not sure when it’s about to happen (even though it’s every 20%) you can always look for that. The adds that spawn after the books are clicked are single one up mobs, the dirge and assassin in the center took care of those while we continued to take down the mob.

There are other methods of doing this encounter. You can stun / stifle the mob so that his text doesn’t go off and he doesn’t spawn the books. You can put up an aoe avoidance spell so that the aoe doesn’t touch you. Or you can just have two people click the books, which is really the easiest way to go. Slow your dps right down and just take it easy. We didn’t have any issues with the named once we set our book clickers in the center while we were off to the side, but I realize that since I was with 4 mythical geared people (templar and myself are not raiders) the encounter may not be as easy for everyone else.

A nice legendary earring dropped that was an upgrade for Shadowgeist, it was nice to see since it’s rare that any of the raid geared people want something from the zones. We also got our void shard key on one of the very first mobs, and the chest was on the main floor, so we got our shards after not even clearing the first floor which was nice.

The mission sends you around the zone to click items, chests and book pages. By the end of the evening I walked away with two void shards and had a lot of fun with good friends. It was nice to see a zone where you don’t HAVE to have an enchanter along to beat it. I did no mezing at all. However, I would say that this zone does need two healers. Deep Forge is the only zone I’ve been in so far that we didn’t take two healers (I solo healed it with only one death on the warden).

I am enjoying how each zone has a different feel, and looks different, and has a different puzzle. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do the Guk ones before too long, as well as the loping plains ones, I haven’t been there yet.