Tag: EQ2

Seeress Ealaynya Ithis’s Holy Calling

Back when the gods had been silent for ages and the suffering of people of Norrath huddled together for refuge, faith seemed destined to die.

It was during this time that a young child by the name of Ealaynya Ithis started to exhibit clairvoyance and experience prophetic dreams. Even the most skeptical villagers were convinced when young Ealaynya led hunters to a crying child, having been lost for nearly a week.

She began to lead the village gatherers to hard found resources. Her retelling of her visions comforted them at the fireside. She had earned the praise of her village and brought a glimmer of faith to their forsaken lives. How could they keep such a child’s gift to their selves? She was like the harbringer of faith within this realm. Qeynos would be her pulpt!

They abandoned their village for the city of Qeynos. There they discovered the once grand Temple of Life, nearly abandoned.

The temple that awaited Ealaynya paled in comparison to the one she had beheld in her visions. Only a few acolytes of the Prime Healer remained andthe temple rested in near ruins. The beauty of the pool of Jahnda that once heald the majestic koalindl, fish from the plane of Tranquility, was now dingy and empty of life. The acolytes would not listen to the villagers’ claims, dismissing them as beggars looking for refuge in their sacred hall.

As the villagers and the acolytes argued, Ealaynya walked silently to that carts that held her few belongings. She rummaged through and reached far into a niche, having to stand on her toes to reach her prize. Her hands slowly emerged from the darkness grasping a glass bowl.

Within the bowl was a small, colorful fish. It had been a year ago that alone; she had found her way to a tiny pond in which a single, colorful fish swam within the clear, warm water. She carried the fish back to the village and fed it a morsel of bread everyday, until this day.

Ealaynya walked to the edge of the murky water of the once grand Pool of Jahnda. She began to pour the contents of the fish bowl slowly into the pool. The stream of water hit the film and broke the plane of algae on the pool’s surface.

Upon hearing this, the acolytes ran toward her screaming for her to cease her blasphemous action. Ealaynya was deaf to their cries. As they neared her the tiny, colorful fish was carried through the stream of water and swam into the blackness of the pool.

The acolytes grabbed the girl’s arms and were about to hand her some retribution for her deed when tehy were distracted by something miraculous!

Looking to the pool all present gazed as the cloudy water began to clear around the fish. This circle of pristine wtaer radiated out from the fish dissolving all that was foul within this sacred pool. The Pool of Jahnda was returned to its glory and a single fish, a koalindl, swam within its life giving water!

Ealaynya rejuvenated the temple and its acolytes. The cleansing of the pool was the beginning of the girl’s life amongst by the acolytes, and the villagers had become their new congregation. Ealaynya began to have new visions and share them with the temple.

Through her visions they came to realize they were to unify the faith of the gods of light. They renamed their order the Celestial Watch.

They began to preach to the people and aid those in need. Small crusades lead them into the wilds to perform benevolent actions as they used to ages before the gods were silenced.

Seasons passed and eventually Ealaynya grew into a beautiful woman and the spiritual leader of the Celestial Watch. She became the Seeress Ealaynya Ithis, a beacon of faith, Shepherd of the Celestial Watch.

But she was destined to become more than simply a shepherd. As gods of old have reappeared Seeress Ealaynya has continued to see her visions and prophecies come true. She reassured those that expressed fear of grief over the Prime Healer’s absence that all is part of a grand plan.

“It is not our place to question the widowm of fate, nor that of the Prime Healer. The darkest of night is when the light is most welcome!”

If there was any question about her faith in a grand plan it was dismissed on the day the Temple of Life disappeared!

In the blink of an eye, all who were within the holy temple, save Seeress Ealaynya, now found themselves outside, watching awestruck as it increased its rotation speed and disappeared. There at the edge of the Pool of Jahnda they camped, in prayer and meditation waiting.

A day later, the Temple of Life reappeared with the same ease with which it had left. When its rotation speed slowed, the portal reappeared to allow entry and exit from the floating temple. But no priest, priestess, nor acolyte would enter. They knew they were witness to something of legend, something truly miraculous! They awaited a sign from their Holy Seeress that they could once again, enter the site.

Seeress Ealaynya Ithis emerged from the temple washed in light! She consoled those distraught, and praised all for their faith, stating that she had touched The Holy, and been within the presence of The Prime Healer!

She was blessed, and now so was all of Norrath, for Rodcet Nife’s Prophet walks amongst us!

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Nostalgia met up last night in EQ2 for some good old fashioned Blackburrow hunting. I’ve been feeling very under the weather the past two days, so I wasn’t exactly much help, in fact barely even made it over to play having spent most of the afternoon sleeping. I really hate feeling like I’ve disappointed anyone though, so when Mayadhros gave me a few nudges (I was in EQ1 at the time just hanging out) I decided I should log over to EQ2 and play for a bit. It started out with just three of us, Dunnos (our trusty mystic), Mayadhros (the paladin with a heart of gold), and Minxe, my swashbuckler. It quickly grew though as we added Kasul (the dinner cooking assassin), Said (A conjuror with no hair as a high elf I’m pretty sure.. that just feels wrong), and Bryzon (Our bruiser who loved feigning around) logged in. We didn’t grab any quests for the zone aside from the ones that dropped (there’s the gnoll language quest, as well as a key quest and a few other things) but we did run around hunting named and smushing whatever happened our way.

It was mostly to get a feel for playing with one another, and I had a lot of fun. Hopefully everyone else did as well. Even though we were mentored to 15 (which ended up being 17 very quickly) everyone still learned aa and experience which is one of the best things about the EQ2 mentor system. There’s no worries of out leveling anyone because you can always go back and mentor them. You can always go see old world content that you missed, and there’s so much to do.

Before I relogged to my 74 templar to help out – things were hard. The trio we started with couldn’t handle the blue ^^^ heroic named because we had a white ^^^ add that was a little too much for us. Pulling was still dangerous. It was fun. I had not been in blackburrow for quite some time and it was completely empty. I remember when that zone used to be so popular and it’s actually quite small, you’d end up bumping into all sorts of people just maneuvering around.

There are some book quests that drop randomly from mobs that I’d hoped to pick up but alas none dropped while I was there. I’ll be taking Minxes back to Timerous Deep to finish up some chains there and catch her back up to Dunnos level wise. So far the swashbuckler has been a lot of fun to play, and I’m hoping I can actually stick with her. We’ll see how it goes. The coercer is still there too, I need to get her another level and get going on that epic so I can actually complete it one day (maybe).

Ok, number one – apparently my site is acting as a read-me only type thing to five people. I have no idea why, no idea how to figure it out either. At first it was just one person with the issue (Rao) but now it’s Rao, Malfi, Lader, and I forget who else. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions on why these very specific people would be unable to leave comments, or click on any links on my site, it’d be greatly appreciated. I’m not good with figuring out that sort of stuff.

Edit: I’ve updated wordpress to the latest version, and updated the wordpress theme I was using as well – if there’s any change for those of you not able to comment in the past, please let me know!

In other news. Nostalgia has made it’s way over to the Najena server in EQ2. That’s right, the guild has been formed and last night we recruited our first 14 players. I was impressed, I didn’t think we’d have so many so soon. I know there are still a few more people to add to the guild as well, like Mayadhros, Said, and Said’s wife, as well as Kanad who should be joining us this weekend. It was a nice relaxing night of everyone getting to know one another, and doing the beginner quests for whatever starter city they came from (or moving onto other starter cities for the more experienced). I plan to uphold the ‘no specific day a week to play’ method with the EQ2 guild, and just have people play when ever they feel like it (and when they have the time) and for day one at least that worked out fairly well. Tipa came over with her new Arasai assassin, and I think, or at least hope, that people will have fun.

The guild also managed to ding level 2. It’ll be a slow steady climb to get any where but I’m confident that in time we can do it. Especially once we start doing heritage quests.

If anyone reading this is interested in joining up with the Nostalgia guild on the Najena server (or with Nostalgia The Guild on the Luclin server in EQ1) we certainly have room for more. Feel free to check out the forums here and say hello. We’re still looking for an enchanter, and a rogue, and I think a second tank on the EQ1 server. On the EQ2 server we’re not in dire need of anything in specific. Our guild roster can be found by searching on EQ2players for Nostalgia (switch the search to guild and not players). I’ll link it once EQ2 is done their maintenance and I can get the site working again.

I played my swashbuckler last night, who managed to get to level 14 with Dunnos (my faithful shaman) and Scudbucket (necromancer, go figure) both also managed to get a few levels and eat up those aa points in Timerous Deep. The quests were fun, even if we sped through the first bit and left Dunnos wondering what was going on as he’d never done the quests before. I still had fun. It was even more fun to watch everyone else in guild (we had 11 people on last night) eat up levels. It was nice to see everyone enjoying themselves. Or at least, I hope they did. It actually felt refreshing, is how it felt.

Today I’m hoping to get my coercer to 79, she’s 20% away and it shouldn’t take long (ideally). I had to take a break from it yesterday and work my mining up 100 points, seeing as that was my next Danak faction quest. I did manage to find five rares though as I worked on it, so I suppose I can’t complain too much. Other then that, just your typical day in EQ2.

Tomorrow night is Nostalgia, and I am so looking forward to it. I miss playing my healer though. It’s LDoN night and that’s always a lot of fun no matter what. We’re doing Butcherblock LDoN’s which are some of my favorite.

Oh, I almost forgot. Last night randomly I got a tell asking if I was the ‘famous’ Stargrace (I was on Silhouette, the coercer) and after a few minutes found out it was Crookshanks who was saying hello, from the Najena server. We had a pleasant conversation, and promised to keep in touch. Thanks again for the offer of help if you’re reading this today Crook! It was nice meeting you! I’m certainly not famous though, just another blogger out there in the great big sea.

Screen shot is of my 78 coercer Silhouette floating down to the Howling Stones area in Jarsath Wastes. When dark elves were first given hover I couldn’t figure out why, and thought it was slightly unfair that we’d suddenly learned how to glide down as though we had wings. Now it’s hard to play without it because I’m so used to thinking I’m the off spring of a fae or arasai. How cute, there’s even a little scorpion below – I’m obviously doing the repeatable faction quests, which I spent most of the night doing.

GU45 went off without a hitch – at least on Najena. I spent hours re-organizing my banks and putting everything “just so”. I dumped all my money into shared (bleh, I had more then 187p last I checked, I’ll have to earn more!) and made sure all my ‘mains’ had extra strong boxes to fill in the blanks.

The changes to coercers are nice. I dislike the change to the cure button for priests though. Why? Well, healing (for me) is sort of boring. The one way I could ‘prove’ that I was a competent healer though – was to be on top of cures. Now you have a single spell that removes ALL detrimental effects (one of each) with an instant recast and a .8 second cast time. It takes away the whole thrill (to me personally) of “oh no there’s a dot, we have to cure it and we have to cure it NOW” – and I’ve heard a few other healers mention the same thing. Am I glad we’re short three hotbar slots now? Well I don’t really care too much about those. I don’t think it was worth simplifying the spell. I understand a lot will disagree, but healing was something I didn’t need to be more simple.

I adore knowing where gray quests are, on the other hand. Fantastic change and it’s going to be fun. I had every intention of knocking out some gray quests last night to see how the aa works without mentoring – but got swept up with playing in Jarsath Wastes instead. I did level the coercer from 77->78 and managed to get 40% into the level while I chattered with Nostalgia. Last night was their Paludal Cavern run (how I love that zone).

Speaking of Nostalgia. We’ve basically decided to start up an EQ2 branch of the guild – with a slightly different twist then our EQ1 branch. In EQ1 we are very structured, there are very specific things we want to do, we meet at a specific time. It’s needed, in a game like that. There’s no mentor system, we have to stay within range in order to do anything together.

However, EQ2 is not bound by these, mainly due to the mentor system. I personally feel that it’s important in any mmo, to have a strong community. A lot of people end up leaving simply because the community was not for them. If you can start playing a game, with a group of friends already there — even if you don’t get to group with them all the time, but still get to talk, ask question, and generally know they’re around, it makes a huge difference.

Welcome Nostalgia the guild 2.0

We won’t be assigning (or at least I won’t be) a weekly day to play – but we will be hosting events such as dungeon crawls (instance runs) heritage quest nights, maybe city writ nights, old world raids in time (and with enough interest) and what not, on pre planned days so that everyone knows about it first. The guild has yet to technically be formed, I’m waiting for 6 people to be on at the same time and all together in Timerous Deep so it can be put together. Not an easy task when everyone has their own play times, which is one of the things that actually makes Nostalgia work. There’s typically always someone around (except the wee hours of the morning) we have people from all over.

Tipa and myself both agreed there’s no reason why this guild, or the idea of Nostalgia, can’t span across multiple games. We’ve met some wonderful people and none of us started together on one server. Why not present that opportunity to people (if they want it, no pressure of course) to take advantage of. Again, it’s not going to run as the EQ1 Nostalgia guild runs, but it will give people the opportunity to have a semi static group of folks around with planned events and things to do. People who have forums and vent, who are eager to talk and experience everything Norrath and Norrath 2.0 have to offer. In doing this, and the method we’ve been doing it, I think we’re also picking up a fairly good crowd of people. It’s not exactly random. People hear about us through our writing (we have quite a few bloggers) and word of mouth. We’re not just randomly recruiting people. There’s bound to be a bad apple here and there (they let me in, after all) but over all I feel fairly confident and pleased with the folks we’ve met up to this date. Which is surprising, as I’m typically a very anti social person. Not meaning to offend anyone, it’s simply the way I’ve learned to play my games.

Anyhow. Yesterday was a lot of fun. Between the new GU changes, and meeting new people through Nostalgia I couldn’t have asked for a better gaming day. I haven’t checked out the new quests added with the GU yet, but I hear there are house item rewards, and so you know it won’t be long before I meander my way over to the nearest quest npc to see what they’re handing out and what it’s all about.

Silhouette wandered around Gorowyn almost aimlessly, just watching. Tucked into corners here and there were angry citizens, taking out their frustrations on one another. That was one of the reasons she’d moved from the almost too quiet town of Freeport, to the bustling commerce city of Gorowyn any how. She thrived on the entertainment. Along her walk, someone tugged at the sleeve of her gown, insistent that she stop.

“What..” She groaned inwardly. No doubt the coward wanted some coin, or some food, or just.. something.

“Do you wish to spread the hate?” Spoke the raspy voice of whomever had grabbed her arm.

“Spread.. the hate?” She puzzled slightly, wondering if this was some new phrase the kids were using and she hadn’t quite caught on to yet.

“Y-Yes.. Misstress… seek out the Priest at the Innoruuk Spires, in Neriak. There you can pledge to spread the hate.. ”

“Well. Alright then. Thanks.” She deftly plucked her sleeve out of the grimy hands, and decided to head to Neriak. Spread the hate? Sure why not.

When she got there she found she was not the only one who had such ideas in her head. There was a line up to speak with the priest. She tapped her foot and shuffled impatiently from one side of the room to the next, waiting for her turn. Once it came, she was given a task.

“Collect rocks.” Was all the priest said, and pointed one bony finger to the rocky walls of Neriak where gems sparkled faintly.

“Rock.. right.. ” Silhouette almost bit back a chuckle, thinking it was some sort of joke. Collect rocks? That was going to help spread the hate? She thought for a minute longer. Well, perhaps they were going to use these rocks to throw at people! Yes, that would spread the hate for sure. No one liked having rocks thrown at them. She nodded to the priest, and went on her way, deftly plucking rocks from the walls and gathering them together in her skirt. Her finger nails were bleeding and broken by the time she returned, the gems having cut her fingers in numerous places. She would have been seething, were it not for the fact that she knew she was doing Innoruuk’s work.

“Bury, the rocks. Outside” The priest pointed a long bony finger towards Darklight Woods.

“You’ve got to be kidding..” Silhouette spoke without thinking. “You just made me collect all these rocks, and now, you want me to bury them, and some how, this is going to spread the hate?” She frowned deeply, and the priest just waved her off.

Well. What else was there to do. She left Neriak, her feet trudging up dirt and dust and rocks. Headed to Darklight Woods, where she found the perfect spots to bury her rocks. All 12 of them. She wished she’d brought along a shovel of some sort, but hadn’t exactly counted on THIS when the offer was presented to her. As the sun started to set, she buried the final rock, and wiped her hands on her grimy dress, that would need a solid washing. She trudged back to the priest in Neriak, and waited her turn, again.

“I buried the rocks. How does that spread hate?” She questioned.

The priest just looked to her.

“Here. Have a fire place. They’re on sale right now, at Wizzlewoop’s-Emporium-For-Marvelous-Wonderful-Things-That-Whirl-Glow-And-Go-Bang.” The priest grinned at her, and Silhouette almost thought for a brief moment she saw a gnome behind those eyes. It couldn’t be…

The fire place was thrust in her hands. Heavy. She dropped it on the floor, fuming, and cast a quick gate spell, enveloping herself and the fire place. Once she’d gotten it situated in her house, she figured it was free after all, Silhouette stood, and burst out laughing.

She supposed in the end, the quest had been completed after all. If she ever got her hands on that grimy little priest.. well.. there was certainly a lot of hatred started right there…

(( Today is GU45, and so in preparation I had to complete the evil quest that rewards you with the house item pictured above, the counterpart to the good aligned one which also gives you a fire place that I’d completed some time ago. They’ll be removing it (the quest) with today’s update, so be sure to finish yours up if you haven’t yet! ))