Tag: EQ2

Me Tog!

(A random role player started talking to me in Darklight wood after I’d created a character there specifically to delve into a story of some sort. I have no idea who they were, but I just wanted to say thank you for reminding me why I love these games, and why I play. Whoever “Metog” is – again my thanks if you ever read this, hope they don’t mind me using quotes of our conversation).

How she came to be in Darklight woods standing in an outpost of some sort was a story for another time. All that mattered was the ‘now’ of the moment. She was teamed up with an Arasai who she had known for quite a few years and though the two looked like a highly unlikely pair, they worked well together. 

As she spoke with the various commanders, her attention was drawn to an Ogre who was hopping about on one foot. He displayed none of the typical fear (or something that vaguely resembled hunger) when he looked at her and her winged friend, but sat himself down on the ground, smiling and drooling slightly. 

“Heddo liddle people,” He said, a grin crossing his face. The Teir’Dal and the Arasai looked to one another some what bemused as they introduced themselves in turn. 

“Gud name. Me am Tog. T O G.” He said, drooling even more. 

The Teir’Dal only half listened as a Commander rushed up to her to give her more orders, her shoulders sagged slightly. She waved a hand impatiently at the Ogre who was rambling away. 

“You dog? Well you don’t look much like a dog but if that’s your name then so be it.”

“No dog, Me Tog. Tog eat dog though, yum.”

She tried to pay the ogre the attention he deserved (could it even be said that he deserved attention?) much like one would with an unruly child. She warned him about stepping on the smaller folks who were gathered around as he clamored to his feet. 

“Tog on step if Tog told to step. Blue people tell Tog an Tog do.” She found this intreguing. He was taking orders from someone, obviously. There must be a reward of some sort as well, so she tried to figure out what that was. Perhaps this was some mastermind test set up by her family, a trap for her to get her back home.  “Den dey give Tog nice tings.”

Or maybe not. Maybe it was just greed. 

“Food an sharp tings to smash stuff wit.”

Or survival. Either way, the Teir’Dal couldn’t be bothered with finding out more at the moment. She had things to do, and as always the night refused to stand still to grant her enough time to finish her tasks. She rambled off some excuse to be on her way, and motioned that the Arasai should follow. Medog Metog frowned a little, and moved out of the way of the pair. “Tog like to smash.”

Throughout the rest of the evening, the dark elf heard Metog’s voice muttering about one thing or another 

“Scuse me. Blue people need ta make big doors.” he said once as he tried to bypass the elf entering a building. She sniffed in distaste but said nothing and gave him a brisk nod. For such a large creature he sure got around. There were other, more pressing matters to attend to that night but for some reason the image of the Ogre crouching through doorways and trying to catch fish with his bare hands wouldn’t leave her for the rest of the night and she walked around with a smirk on her face for no reason in particular.

EQ2 Hotfix Notes

Hotfix April / 7 / 2009
GENERAL

  • An issue that was causing UI icons or elements to look blurry and low-quality has been resolved.
  • An issue that was causing low-quality textures on player characters after switching from third person to first person view has been resolved.

 EVERNIGHT ABBEY

  • Marcus Thex should turn aggro now once all five clan leaders have been slain.

 ITEMS

  • The Dancing Satyr has learned how to dance and is anxious to show off his new moves.
  • Bite of the Wolf will now trigger properly and apply to the warden.
  • Restitution Master 1 should no longer drop from spell tables.
  • The Signet of the Flame Disciple has been changed from +3 spell critical bonus to +3 spell critical to be more inline with the other quest rewards.
  • Vampire and Void Bane proc stacking has been fixed such that additional pieces of gear will increase the damage and proc rate, but will not add additional procs. This is the originally intended functionality.
  • The Stone Tower void shard jewelry set now has Deflection Chance as its 3-piece bonus instead of deflection skill. The block and deflection bonuses should now be roughly equivalent.
  • Corruption of the Elements should now proc on offensive spell casts.

 MYSTMYR MANOR

  • Rhul’maldis should no longer occasionally never respond to the volatile liquid.

 PVP

  • An issue that might cause no infamy gain when multiple players are attacking a single target has been fixed.

 SPELLS

  • Tortoise Shell will once again work properly on group members
  • An issue that would cause Surging Tempest to get into an unusable state has been resolved.

 TRADESKILLS

  • The Advanced Armorer Service quest now requires the new improved version of fulginate kite shields.
  • Scholars’ volume 12 books now once again contain recipes for idols, symbols, tomes, and orbs.
  • Jeweler Far Seas writs now correctly accept the new secondary items.
  •  An issue where Adornments would disappear when upgrading or imbuing items through tradeskills has been fixed.

 WARD OF ELEMENTS

  • Najena should respawn when players watch the flythrough then leave the instance and return.
  • Aiden’s banishes have been re-timed to be closer to the beginning of a land phase, giving players more time to get back to the tower.
  • Aiden’s adds have been linked into sizable groups instead of all in separate encounters.
  • Digg should no longer chain-kill players that die and are rezzed during his fight.

I’m glad to see the changes being added today, especially the warden epic portion, that one was causing a lot of anger for some druids out there. The fix to Evernight Abbey is another good one, I wanted to write about that dungeon for a guide but it was quite frustrating since for the weekend it wasn’t functioning properly.

Halls of the Forsaken

The cloak pictured above is a quest reward for one of the Commonlands TSO dungeons – the image on it is new, at least to me, I’m fairly certain that the graphic used to be of something else.  I love seeing things revamped like this. Thanks to Wpus for modeling it for the screen shot. He’s been having a lot of fun adjusting his colourful outfits lately. It’s nice to see so many new options in EQ2 as far as gear goes, even without dye. It has taken a little bit to get there but it’s coming along. 

Since last night was LotRO night, I didn’t have a lot of time to play in game. I did managed to get the Commonlands instances done for shard updates though with my mystic and coercer – and the coercer managed to ding level 79 at the same time which I was really happy about. While we were defeating the final boss in Halls of the Forsaken, we stumbled upon an interesting body drop. It was the head of Gynok in a crate (fabled item). Apparently not all of the trophies come from raid instances which was a great surprise to me. EDIT: Or, and this is probably the more likely culprit – the raid version of Gynok and the instanced version for some reason are sharing the same loot table for this particular trophy, and that’s why it is dropping. Ack! Well, glad I got one in that case!

Of course, my guild on Kithicor doesn’t have a guildhall at the moment, and we don’t have one of the player crafted bases to attach the head to yet but it’s nice to have this trophy waiting for when we do get those things. I’m sure we will even if it takes a bit of time. 

Today is the day that the new station market items get implemented. I think the costs are fairly reasonable, and they’ve been a long time coming. You can rename your character for $15. You can change their gender and appearance (though the barber shop already changes appearance for a gold) for $15. You can also change your character’s name, gender, and appearance for $25. 

I’ve already written about these new SC items over here, and I really don’t think that it’s going to be as big a problem for keeping track of ‘bad eggs’ that some forum users made it out to be. There are always preventative methods and just good common sense when it comes to recruitment. On that same note – I DO wish that the automated server transfer service had been restored instead of implementing these new automated gender and name changes. The service has been down almost a year now and it’s very frustrating to deal with the petition system and days of waiting for the transfer to take place. I understand there’s only so much manpower and there’s always lots of things on the ‘to do’ list and my list certainly doesn’t match those of the SOE employees, but it’s a little personal wish of mine none the less.

Once I had completed the three instances with Wpus, it was time to spend the evening in LotRO which is experiencing it’s own number if bugs and issues lately. It was still a nice evening, hanging out with good friends always makes things much better.

Lets Try Something “New”

Yesterday was great. It started off with me puttering around in game, getting familiar with my housing projects and wondering where I wanted to go next with them. So many characters with unfinished or out dated homes. Then I tried to remember what characters I have where in game – and for me this is no easy feat. I’ve been playing fairly steady (with breaks might I add) for over five years now. I have two accounts, and one used to have station access so I’ve got 12 characters on it. I’m also spread across four servers (which I would change if a free server transfer was ever implemented again, but with the character transfer service (automated version) being down for close to a year – I don’t see it happening any time soon). 

I actually drew a little chart of what characters I have where on which accounts. It was fun, I’d forgotten about some which is easy to do when you have 19.

Before too long Wpus and Ultann were in game, eager to do something. First stop? Obelisk, the one in Moors that we’ve been doing. We only had one death, it was a really smooth run. I know it can be done with no deaths but remember we’re not raid geared and there’s only three of us doing these things! I was hoping that perhaps the healer shield would drop, but I’m beginning to think every time I enter the zone SOE removes it from the loot table. We did each get 4p though from the ‘coin’ chest in the room with the electric balls, which was great. 

Afterwards I was at a little bit of an impasse. I took a break and eventually ended up creating a fury to play along with Wpus’ new Berserker. At that exact time, Ultann came back from dinner so instead of playing alts I decided we’d do something completely different. Something we’ve never done before – at least not in a very long time.

I decided the trio would head to The Laboratory of Lord Vyemm and attempt to ‘raid’ the zone as three people instead of 24. Sounds like a mission ending in lots of debt, right? Well, probably. We only had an hour to waste, so I knew we wouldn’t be clearing it. I’ve posted before about how much I enjoy pushing the envelope with certain encounters, doing things a different way or just plain exploring. I remember doing labs with full raid forces and wiping to things, it brings back fond memories. I hadn’t been there in a while, and I really dislike the fact that we can out level content in EQ2 and thus it remains barren, so off we went.

We actually didn’t do too badly. I remember when we used to raid it, if the main tank got the trama on him (debilitating strike I believe it’s called) his mitigation would drop and so would he. It was *essential* that we cure it as soon as possible. At level 80,  it still needs to be cured but it’s not as bad as I once remembered it being. Trash fell and before too long we were staring at the first named. It’s the one to the left as you come down that first set of stairs. 

We wiped to him once because he pummeled us all with a frontal AoE on incoming but brushed ourselves off and attempted the droag again. I was hoping some random relic would drop from trash, but we didn’t have that sort of luck. We DID however, manage to kill him! He dropped some scout fabled pants that none of us had alts who could use, I won the roll and later sold them to the vendor for 1p. We continued down to the forge room, and after we cleared it we took on the 2nd named, who was far easier then the first. A nice fabled hammer dropped, with a pretty particle effect. Of no use now but since weapons can have appearance slots (and shields) it was still nice to see it. 

Ultann had to leave shortly after we downed the 2nd named, so we called it a night. I was happy that we’d done something completely different that used to be so difficult. I still wish we couldn’t out level zones so that we’d have more of a reason to go back to older content (ie: going back to do EQ gods) but it satisfied that craving at least in some small way. 

I hope everyone else had an amazing Sunday!