Tag: EQ2

 

Alright, so the weekend got off to a fairly interesting start. Late Friday night I couldn’t sleep, and decided to browse through the recruitment posts just randomly. I noticed Azure Skies was looking for a templar. Those sort of classes never seem to be needed on my server since most templars (and thus guilds) are already well established. So I asked what sort of templar they were looking for. It could have been for a mage group, but surprisingly enough (though I suppose not THAT surprising since the guild is fairly new) they were looking for a main tank templar.

Hmm.

I spent the night pondering it over, talked with Shadowgeist about it, and decided to give it a shot. With raids only three days a week, it wouldn’t take up a huge amount of time, and while some of the folks may not be the friendliest of people, well. Lets be honest here. I want to do well. I’m still in TK on all of my alts and plan on remaining that way. Friends are very important to me, and I wouldn’t want to just abandon anyone. However, I have to admit that I am pretty excited. Last night we did their first ‘major’ raid. We met up at Freethinkers Hideout, and zoned in with three groups, and three characters botted. I was not overly excited. Especially when we wiped on the ‘finger pointer’ a number of times. We were just about naked (and discouraged) when low and behold, our tactics worked, and down she went. We were excited. Malkonis was next, who went down first pull. Trayloth (spelling on that may be off) posed only a slight issue, as we had two bat adds part way through. We got him as well though, first pull. Dasie got the wrist piece pictured above.

We headed off to Clockwork next, no issues there, things went smoothly. I was a little concerned about DPS, but we pulled it off. Not that Clockwork is really difficult, but well, you never know. Next we headed to Courts for some guild status. Azure Skies is fairly new, a few people who broke off from another major raiding guild. So we’re only level 30.  Blew through courts, and decided to go attempt Chel’Drak. Now, a few of the newer members have never been to any of these zones before. So they were in absolute awe as we downed them with what appeared to be ease. Of course it helps when 6 of your members have already been very well geared out by previous raid zones (the core of the guild, in fact). I’m sure it was a lot of fun for the newer members to experience the raids this way.

Oh, and Tipa will be pleased to know that my RoK ‘main’ is indeed, a halfling. Bring on the Jumjum.

 

It was announced this evening that the RoK NDA is finally over, and of course this will be one of many posts I make about the new expansion and my impressions of it. I won’t talk too much about it tonight, since my thoughts are all in a jumble, but I have got to say, wow. The screen shot above is Arysh riding her rhino mount (which she of course quickly named “Bessy”, prone to stomping on shinies rather then harvesting them and leaving giants trails of.. rhino gunk, behind her) in the Fens of Nathsar, just one of many beautiful zones coming on the 13th.

I had a blast partaking in the beta. Even though by the end of it I was getting slowly worn down by the constant “How can we get buffed to 80 with all our uberz stuffz” questions and comments. Didn’t they realize that all content had to be tested, with all levels of gear. Not just level 80 raid geared folks. Ah well. Turning off channels fixed that. I had added my character to beta before I even got in, in preparation. You can /beta add at any time, and I didn’t want to be waiting around while my “real” characters go there. I quickly found the way to Kylong Plains from the Antonia docks (or you can also take the docks in Commonlands, and a Griffin located on the beach in Butcherblock) and just stood in awe. Not only because of the shear number of folks who cluttered the docks and the incredible amount of lag that came with it, but just because of the volume of land that stretched out before me.

Kunark is huge.

You’ll hear it over and over again. It’s giant. The lands are some of the biggest any Norrathian traveler has ever seen. The first thing any person is going to want to do, is to grab the quest from the halflings on the dock, and attempt to get their Sokokar. Which I’ll talk about more another time. As a brief over view though, Sokokar work like portable (to an extent) griffins and more so like the horses you can find in Greater Faydark and Lesser Faydark. You find a hitching post, examin it and learn the “rout” to that hitching post, and then on your travels you find more hitching posts, thus being able to travel from one to another, or from one to multiple choices. The sokokar doubles as a little pet that can follow you around. You do fly on it when you reach a hitching post, but it’s by no means a flying mount for EQ2.

It seems like this was a huge eventful Friday for those involved in EQ2, not only with the NDA of RoK released, but with the games third birthday, and a few more veteran rewards hitting the game. Those are up in the next post!

 

The above picture comes from SoE’s official site, today was EQ2’s third birthday and with it they released some very cool rewards for those who have been subscribed to the game since the start. Only one of my accounts qualifies for this, but I’m excited none the less. The second account doesn’t even (quite) qualify for the two year rewards *grumbles* oh wells.

So what comes with this super duper birthday? Well, not only will you get to dance around in Billy form (and who doesn’t love Billy eh? He’s some what of an icon in EQ2 that’s for sure) you also get a new house item (of course I swooned over this) that reduces the coin value of your rent by 25% – very nice. You also gain a new title, The Zealous. Awesome. Of coures it doesn’t end there.

People will also gain 3x Draft of the Skilled and Draft of the Wise. Very handy for the new expansion. Of course, it’d be a lot better if I were not planning (as of yet) to use my dps in RoK (who has no veteran rewards) vs. the healer account that will be able to claim these. It should also be noted that no one will actually have these items until after RoK is released and the +90 days that comes with buying an expansion is credited to your account. Right now I’m up to 1365 days, that’s including the 3 years the game has been out, and the +90 per expansion. 3 months short of the 4 year rewards. Of course that’s assuming that RoK will add another 90 days to your account like the others did. If it doesn’t, it’ll be three more months (boo).

So happy birthday to the game (wow does it feel odd to say that) I can hardly believe it’s been that long already. I still remember my EQ1 days. I hope everyone has an amazing weekend, and eats lots of cake!

 

There’s still an NDA, so I can’t write about what I really want to write, but in the mean time I’ve been clearing out old quests, working up those crafters, and making new friends. That’s right, Torrent Knights got a few new members over the past few days, and I’m of course excited to have them. The guild has never been especially large, and I never wanted it to be. I wanted it to be close friends who knew each other and got along. Of course it doesn’t always end up that way, get any amount of people together and you’re bound to have issues that crop up along the way. Anyhow.

Last night I invited a fellow blogger, you guys may know her from her postings over at Mystic Worlds, name is Saylah, though she’s under a different persona here in EQ2. So the little guild grows! We spent a bit of time chattering and talking about random things from WoW, to EQ1, and Vanguard. Mmo goodness. I also have a friend from EQ1 who is going to start playing when RoK releases. In the mean time they’ve been exploring Norrath on a trial account. I plan on asking them what they think of the game vs. their home in EQ1 once they delve a little further into it. Other then that, things in game are quite quiet. I’ve been working on my “pre-rok” goals, Goudia maxed out her tinkering yesterday, I have 11 collection quests saved up so far for turn in (and I’ll be getting more as I can) and I managed to complete two quests in New Tunaria last night with the help of Shadowgeist boosting up the aa that I still need before RoK.

This morning I’m working on the weaponsmith, trying to hit 55. So far she’s 50% into level 53, so it should be do-able if I can manage to keep myself awake long enough to grind off some rush orders. Ever since Calreth moved his main to Arsenal I’ve been missing his spam in guild events. He moved an alt to TK last night though, so I suppose he’ll still be around in some form or another.

 

I’ve got a very small range of goals that I’m trying to get done before the new expansion comes out. Why bother? Well, I’m sort of a lists person. If I want to get anything done, or feel a small sense of accomplishment, I make a list. I do it for a lot of things. One of the items was to get Goudia’s tinkering skill to 350. Now, I already have a tinkerer at 350 skill, Stargrace. But I rarely play her. I decided a few days ago that the level 70 I’d stick with in rise of Kunark will be the troubador. I had her tinkering at around 60 and decided I’d spend 10p of my savings (if it cost that much) and see how high I could get it. I’ve spent roughly 2p50g and gotten it to 300 so far. 50 more points and that will be finished off. I’m exceptionally happy of course.

Down side, Goudia is not at 100aa yet. She needs 9 more. So that’s on the list as well. And so is saving up collection quests in preparation for the expansion. Though I’m sure that there’s so much discovery and quests that it won’t exactly be needed.

The quickest method I found for leveling tinkering, was to stop production after the first completion. Because this craft works on skill rather then experience, you get the same chance at a skill up from pristine as you do from the first tier. Aside from that, one recipe (at least) a tier, uses very few ores, but it uses plenty of loam (fairly cheap still) and rocks (also fairly cheap) thus saving you huge amounts of money. You get no pristine experience so making things for the first time isn’t going to net you anything extra either. You want to see what that cool do-dad is that you just scribed? Easy, open the recipe book and right click the image, then right click the image at the bottom of that, and you can examine the item before you ever make it.

So why tinkering? Well, Arysh is already 350 transmuting. That cost me about 50p to work up (minus any farming) and I’m not going to do it again. Tinkering also has far more usability to my characters. Who doesn’t want to be able to feign death, rez a group member (I’m a troubador remember, not a dirge) or any other number of things to play with. Though I was of course disappointed that my mem wipe item was changed to a de-agro, it happens.

Of course in the mean time Goudia’s bags are a disaster area, as can be seen above. She’s got ore and roots and rocks stashed all over the place and there’s no point in me trying to organize it right now when all I want is another 50 skill ups and then I’ll be done (for now). I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but with the expansion looming and plenty of people hanging out in beta more then in game, there’s been sparse topics to post about. Expect an explosion on the day of release!

Tomorrow the wonderfully smart owners of my building have decided that between 9:30am and 3pm, the power (including heat) is going to be turned off. I’m sure there’s a reason for this (they did it last year too) but they always seem to pick the coldest day of the week to do it. I also live on the 11th floor which means if I want to leave the apartment at all during the day, I’ll be walking. So tonight, I’ll be heading out to go book shopping, find a few extra art supplies, and find something that I can take out of the fridge and eat without having to prepare it on a stove first, and something I won’t need lights for. Since it’s winter months here now pretty much it’s going to be a dark, quiet, day. Thank goodness for my mp3 player and a love of books.