Tag: EQ2

Who doesn’t want MORE alts?!

Of course in game, I need more alts. Why? Because I had character slots free. I made three of them yesterday. Will I stick with any of them? Who knows. While I played on Antonia Bayle I listened to the chatter taking place in the craft channel. It’s amazing to see the difference in community on all of the servers I play on. I have level 80 characters on four different servers, and I’ve played extensively on two others that I moved from. I enjoy playing with friends which is my main reason for changing so often.

The atmosphere on the roleplay servers is completely different then that on ‘regular’ servers. I’m fairly confident that this can be said for almost all games, and roleplay servers also tend to be quite popular. Even the difference between Antonia Bayle and Lucan D’Lere is noticeable in EQ2, mainly because of the size difference. You always have those bad apples who talk louder then the 100 nice people you may have missed coming in contact with.

The casual atmosphere and the openness are two things that I notice the most on roleplay servers. People talk, almost constantly. They talk to people walking by, to strangers in channels and numerous other instances. I love it. Every time I walk through Freeport I can hear people roleplaying and on the roleplay channels there’s always a story going on. I adventured through Zek one day and came across a group of people randomly roleplaying around the druid rings, and walked into their story. It was an incredible experience and one that reminded me why I love these games, why I play.

I hope everyone has an amazing weekend, I’ll see you in Norrath (and maybe Free Realms, and Vanguard, and EverQuest, and.. )

Venril Sathir and Other Goodness

Pictured above is my paladin, with the amulet of necropotence and a nice sword from fear. She’s obviously got some personality good / evil issues, but I’m loving the new look.

Last night was a hodge podge of activity, starting with getting a few steps done on the mystic epic. I managed to get my three skeleton updates, with some help of course. They included skeletons in Jarsath Wastes, Karnor’s Castle, and Kunzar Jungle. Now I’ve got a group instance to do where I have to defeat some heroics, and then more NPC to talk to.

Out of the blue I found myself playing the neglected troubador I have, she’s been at 80 forever, owns both the dirge and troubador fabled epic, and yet I rarely play her. Not because I don’t enjoy the class (I certainly do) but having SO many alts means my time is always split between the flavour of the month. I wish I were one of those people who only had one or two alts instead of the massive army I have now. I’ve said this a lot. I’ve even contemplated deleting all of the ones that I have, but there’s been so much work put into them I can’t bring myself to do it.

The troubador headed to Obelisk of Ahkzul and then over to Anchor of Bazul, which is also within the Moors. I love Anchor, it involves fights that are more then just hack and slash. One of them requires you to possess the body of a void creature to defeat a named. Another has you form a triangle of void portals around a named as you fight it, dispelling its immunity.

In Obelisk I actually won a (useful) master! The first T8 Master I’ve seen in a very long time. Since that particular zone is on a ‘smart loot’ system, it was nice. Happens to be my group haste buff.

Nothing else of note dropped, but afterwards I decided to join in on a Venril Sathir raid.

I know, what was I thinking. It actually didn’t go too bad, even though we didn’t defeat him this time around. Let me explain.

There were only two groups, 90% of them alts to a raid guild. This raid is easier to do with less people, because the less people you have to worry about their power going below a certain mark, or not clicking statues, or not using a cube on the named, or any other number of things that can go wrong, the better. This was my first time doing this encounter, I’d never seen Venril before (aside from his home in EQ) and it was a lot of fun. The entire raid has to keep their power between 30-60% while Venril is ‘watching’ you, or you’ll cause the raid to wipe. You also need to instantly cure a noxious dot, or you’ll wipe a raid. While all this goes on, throughout the fight there are two other important debuffs that will land randomly on two players. One will decrease their power by huge amounts if they cast so much as a simple spell. The other does the opposite. Of course this means you’ll be unable to hover between the 30-60% so when you’re hit with these debuffs so you call it out in raid (typically) and do nothing for the duration. This also means that the remainder of the raid who does NOT have these debuffs can burn Venril Safely, as long as they keep watching their power and that noxious.

If  a single person is not watching everything that’s going on, the raid wipes.

We managed to get him down to 40% with our two groups before I had to call it a night. The raids started fairly late to begin with and since I’m always up exceptionally early I was starting to fall asleep in my chair. They’re going to make another attempt at it on Saturday I believe, adding a third group of guild DPS to the mix because the fight was taking a good length of time as it was. We had three healers, four bards, a few enchanters and only one brigand with no other DPS classes. It was still great fun.

You don’t always have to win in order for an evening to be fun. Especially since I’d never been there before. I understand that RoK raids are ‘old’ now, that there’s better raids to be had and better gear out there, but for myself it was still a great night with a lot of fun. I’m not sure if I want to get into raiding full time or just continue to pop in here and there when I feel like it (very casual), I’ll just have to see.

I hope everyone has a fantastic Friday today. I’ll be off to see Wolverine later on in the afternoon, woot.

Smile, Darathar!

Pictured above, Darathar smiling with ‘the crew’ just before we battled him to steal a prismatic egg. Keyboard issues were fixed for Wpus and it was time to finish the quest. We started off by heading to three zones to raid various dragons and take the shards from their corpses that would allow us to resurrect Lady Vox. If you’ve never done this quest before it’s quite a bit of fun (and even if you have done it before) as you’re about to resurrect the dragon you release each one of the shards and then get killed. If you’ve done it properly you spawn a non agro version of her, if you do it wrong – you spawn an agro version and you get to do all of the raids all over again.

After you speak to her she sends you back down to talk to Nagafen (again) who sends you out to battle three more dragons for some rings, as well as a group instance of DFC to take down an orc. Once you’ve obtained all of the rings you head to the Oracle tower in Antonica and you have access to the Isle of Refuge.

Almost as soon as we got there it started raining, so the screen shots look a little washed out. Darathar was sitting as smug as ever, laughing at us (practically). I remembered this raid. I remembered positioning, and MOST of the strats – what I didn’t remember is that you want to position yourself just inside of his front paw so that you don’t get pummeled by the massive AOE that goes off.

You still need to do this, it doesn’t matter if you’re level 50 or level 80, we had a good 3+ deaths from folks getting one shot by that tail lash. Once I remembered where to stand things went much smoother.

I was sort of disappointed that the script was not the same, I remember him flying away at specific intervals and killing anyone who accidentally left a dot on him as we stood there stunned during the length of his flight. He never left this time around, though we did get stunned.

It was still a mighty battle, and in the end we won (just barely). One  of the greatest things about doing this prismatic line (aside from the appearance weapon at the end) is that Darathar drops one of the guild hall trophies that you can place in your hall. We now own two of them (though we don’t have a hall yet). We have Darathar, and Gynok. Of course, we also don’t have the bases for them yet because the reflective shards are going for 5p a shot and the bases themselves are being sold for 8p a shot, but since we don’t have a hall yet, it’s alright, we’ll just hang onto them.

After we defeated Darathar it was time to head back to Nagafen – where I instantly killed the group, all save for the Shadowknight who had bloodletter up. Lucky. It was an accident though, honestly! I was attempting to turn on auto attack in order to get some action screen shots, and so I targeted a group member who just happened to have Nagafen targeted right then. I watched, practically in slow motion, as my character swiveled around and tried to hack at Nagafen’s ankles. Needless to say we were all one shot with a 25k nuke.

Ouch.

It’s these memories that make the game what it is though, truly. I’ll be teased about that for some time to come. Any time there’s something that relates to that memory, people will bring it up and we’ll all have a good chuckle. That’s what brings me to these games. That’s what keeps me playing, and that’s what I love.

I hope everyone had an amazing Wednesday! See you in Norrath.

To Speak as a Dragon

The other bards laughed at me. Why on earth, they sneered, would you want to go visit Nagafen and resurrect Vox when there was so much NEW stuff to do. So many better adventures. With void creatures running a muck there was never a lack of stories to tell. I shrugged at them and continued with my path. They asked me why but to me it was simple. So many others were already traveling down those paths. It was getting redundant. I had already heard about the void creatures in various songs ten times that day alone. Had everyone suddenly forgotten the lore of days gone by? It was these things that pulled me in, these memories and thoughts that drew me to them like a moth to flame. And so I found myself staring face to face with Nagafen, asking the details on how to resurrect Vox, talking openly about Darathar as memories flooded past. It would make a great song, one day.

Needless to say I spent most of my in-game time working on ‘to speak as a dragon’ the language quest required for a number of other quests out there. I eagerly freed the sage from his dungeon in Lavastorm, and from there headed to Antonica to speak with the Oracles. Of course nothing is ever easy with them and they sent me out through the Shattered Lands hunting for runes in order to translate the language. 26 runes later (and quite out of breath) I returned and they imparted their wisdom. I dragged the bard and mystic along to accomplish this, if I was going to get it done it may as well be for both characters.

Once I’d mastered the language I headed back to Nagafen who shared with me the method of reviving Lady Vox, and how I would have to (eventually) travel to the Isle of Refuge and confront Darathar. This was all fine and dandy and I looked forward to it excitedly. Just like I looked forward to it four years ago.

Things have obviously changed. To obtain the draconic language now it’s a heroic instance, and no longer a raid. There are portals in Solusek Eye that will bring you to the lower levels instead of having to walk the entire way – and encounters are grey and worthless. When I first did the prismatic 1.0 quest none of these things were true. It took an incredibly long time to wander to and from Nagafen as many times as you had to for this quest. You had to bring a two group raid in order to even begin it – and all of this was for a LEGENDARY weapon. There were no such things as mythical. Fabled were practically unheard of. Adept3 were rare, and if you had adept1 you were doing great. There was no such thing as +heal or +spell damage.

I remember playing my templar (my first EQ2 character) with an Australian raid force on Najena. I was level 45, still five levels away from the current cap and they needed healers. I was THRILLED that they asked me to go. I was nervous. The raid force had to position itself numerous times. It was exciting to kill our way down to the beach where Darathar was sleeping and then learn the (at the time complex) strat to killing him.

Then the enormous let down as you didn’t get your weapon until AFTER you managed to walk back down to Nagafen. All of that work and you still had more ahead of you. After a few hours of raiding the last thing people typically wanted to do was kill their way back down, but we did it. Oh yes we did. We sported our ‘of the shard’ titles proudly. I still have the weapon on my templar, the only character of mine who has ever completed this raid.

The plan last night was to finish off speak as a dragon and then complete the first three raids that are required for Fire and Ice, then if there was time, to complete the next four raids for Deception, and face Darathar on the Isle of Refuge. Unfortunately one of the trio currently has a broken keyboard, and we’ve put the raids on hold until this gets sorted out. No use doing it if you’re not side by side with your friends. I’m excited though!

Instances and Sleep

With all SOE games being down for a few hours yesterday I didn’t play a great deal. Last night the trio (with me as my 73 dirge and 80 mystic) headed to Crypt of Agony which was surprisingly fun even at level 72. I was hoping that Cardiocutter would drop because we’ve yet to see it drop, but alas my luck holds as true as ever and we saw nothing of use this run. After we decided to head to The Anathema in Everfrost. The bard picked up a new pair of earrings, a new charm items, and Ultann’s healer picked up a few goodies as well.

Aside from that, the day was fairly uneventful and my mood was sour to boot in a typical-Monday-but-not-so-typical-for-me mindset. Ended up calling it an early night and getting some much needed sleep after getting only  4 hours the previous night. I hope everyone else had an incredible day.