Tag: EQ

 

How things change in just a short amount of time. I decided after day two that I didn’t actually want to play a tank “just because” I thought they may be needed. In fact that’s a very silly reason to play any class and it typically ends in disappointment (at least for me). I decided to create the most disliked class, a magician. Why? Because my pet could tank for me, and when I didn’t have a group, I could still solo. I’ve never played a magician before and they’re disliked because on classic their pets tend to be better than most other melee classes. I can completely understand the dislike, but in the end I decided that shouldn’t be a reason not to play one. I also decided to start boxing my second account along with my mage, so I created a halfling druid. I admit right now my main reason for creating this was not for ports, but because I love forage. It really comes in handy.

So my human mage and my halfling druid headed to Freeport until level 5, and then commonlands where I was instantly killed by griffons roaming the zone. Forgot about those. I spent a few hours running around commonlands and while the experience was nice, I couldn’t settle into a proper camp, so I spent most of my time running. I decided to brave Nektulos Forest and figured it would be ‘safe’ if I stayed away from the guards. It almost was, too, except you need to swim across a river of pirana if you’re agro to the guards on the nearby bridge, and those hurt. Once you cross, you’re next to an orc camp that was way too high level, and then you reach the wizard spires where I began camping until the druid and mage were both level 6.

Once I hit level 6 I had about 200 bone chips on me, so I took both characters to Kaladim where I turned in bone chips to the paladin guild until I had reached level 7 and was almost level 8. I took both characters home, sold all of the items from the bone chip turn ins, and smiled gleefully at my 12 platinum. I was rich! Or so it felt.

I worked on my tailoring and baking once again, and through that spent most of my coin, but did manage to get tailoring and baking up a fair amount. I picked up my new spells, and headed with Kanad to Butcherblock, which is a relatively quiet zone much to my surprise. We found a quiet place to set up camp – and before I knew it, both characters were level 10.

Of course now I’m debating whether or not I want to play a warrior or a paladin instead of the mage. I’ve never played either of those classes. A paladin may be fun. The more I think about it the more the idea of a dwarf paladin really appeals to me. Hmm. Something to think about. I know I am pretty indecisive. I’m just trying to think ahead to future expansions and what would work best for me personally. I love grouping up but I don’t want to feel completely useless if I can’t get a group (which I think is the opinion of pretty much everyone out there). Suggestions?

Daybreak also decided to open a second progression server, Lockjaw. It’s still in the planning stages right now, but it’s supposed to help alleviate some of the queue pressure that’s currently going on. Problem is, I remember the last progression server I played on, and I remember when they opened a second server there, too, and I remember how that server eventually all but died off because the population does eventually thin out. I’ll be staying right here on Ragefire, queues and all.

After getting my gnome enchanter to level 3 I decided that I just didn’t want to have to fight with the throngs of players for mobs in steamfont, and I also decided that I should create some sort of tank class, because hey everyone needs a good tank, right? I made a dark elf shadowknight named Blesse and set off to Nektulos Forest. Experience was much quicker here with the ability to pick through zones in order to find one that didn’t have a hundred plus players wandering around it. I tried to fight spiders in specific along with wolves because I knew I would want their silk and hides. Experience was much faster here and my tank wasn’t doing too poorly. Having harm touch helped once an hour, and Nektulos Forest was quite challenging, especially when a random red zombie would cross my path (which was often).

Kanad created a barbarian shaman, and after reaching level 5 braved the walk from Halas over to Nektulos, and together we settled in camping undead and other various denizens of the forest. After a few hours I managed to reach level 6, at level 5 I received my first ‘useful’ spell, which was a much needed dot. I also managed to do a little bit of crafting, raising my baking and tailoring a few notches. I was proud of the three plat I had earned, though I know some players are earning much more than me, and much faster. It was while I was leveling up the shadowknight that I heard of the bosses of classic having already been defeated by a guild using their mage pets to zerg. While I admit, taking down raid encounters is something I would love to do, I also realize that it’s probably not something I’ll get a chance to do because guilds tend to keep these things on lockdown on progression and non progression servers alike.

The wizard spire in Nektulos Forest had been good experience around this level, as long as I avoided the zombies that pathed by, but I knew that it would soon be time to head on to Commonlands, and maybe work on some of my other crafting skills in the meantime as well. Of course when I finally logged in for my next play session, I didn’t do any of those things, but that will come in another post.

On the weekend the servers were so busy that there was a queue to get in. There are people all over the place, even at off-peak hours which is something that I have missed seeing. I imagine that as time goes on more people will leave the game, especially depending on how long it takes for players to unlock expansions, how quickly we reach expansions that others may not enjoy. I’m hoping to keep playing for as long as there are groups to be found. We’ll just have to see.

 

Well, technically I suppose this is day two, or even day three for me. Day one was taken up with the server issues that Daybreak ran into, which included level 50s being created right from the get-go. After that, it was issues with login servers being strained by the mass of players trying to get in. For my specific case, I came across a new issue. I decided to create a gnome enchanter named Stargrace. Ak’anon was absolutely packed with players. Over 100 in the zone. I slowly made my way to Steamfont, and was met with another 100 plus players in that instance.

Now, Daybreak added a new function to starter zones that allowed multiple instances of the same zone up at once, and players could use /pick to travel between those instances every 5 minutes. This appeared to have worked for all starter zones – except steamfont. I didn’t know this at the time, and figured they had just disabled it for everyone instead. Channels like general were also being hammered, so they appeared broken on my gnome and I didn’t have access to anything except the enchanter channel.

Still, I put my LFG tag on and headed to the pit which was swamped with skeleton, rats, drake, and every other imaginable gnome class possible. I turned off grass particles since I could barely see and tried to tag a mob here and there.

The thing about the classic server is that even though we’re all trying to ‘re-live’ days gone by – a majority of players still want to do so on their own terms, which means solo. I saw perhaps one or two groups looking for more, but for the most part players ran around on their own competing with everyone else. The years of playing MMOs on our own have cultivated this notion that grouping is bad or not necessary. Thing is, this is EverQuest, and grouping is absolutely always the best way to go. You get a bonus for being in a group, mobs die faster in a group, and it’s just plain more fun.

I randomly sent tells and invited people to my group since so many seemed reluctant on getting one started. Really, that’s all it takes. No one wants to take the reigns so if you want to get something done you’re best off doing it yourself. Experience was still slow but that was because of a lack of mobs to defeat, especially with no /pick to make use of. Still, our rag tag team of gnomes got a few levels, and I left the first day at level 3. I decided to take a bit of a break to see if things died down any before making another attempt (note: no, they did not die down at all).

As soon as I heard that Daybreak was going to be opening a new EverQuest progression server this summer, I decided that I would dedicate some time to playing it. I didn’t start playing EverQuest until after POK released, so there nostalgia factors that I never experienced. I wanted to help test, the smoother the experience is at release the better, so I patched up the beta client and was met with – old character graphics. This made me smile. These were not the character graphics when I was playing, and it’s odd to think of them making anyone smile this day in age, but there they were. They’re horrible, and it’s fantastic.

The starter zones are packed with people. There’s no beginner armor quests so you have to ignore the dialect from most of the NPC. One thing they have added is the ability to swap to another instance of your zone if there are too many people there (around 50+). You can do this by using the /pickzone zone # command. So for example /pickzone gfay 2 will open a window with a selection of instances to choose from. I did this on my dark elf enchanter, Blesse (pictured above) and ended up in a zone with no one else.

The beta allows players to buff their characters in order to test things like expansion unlocks. Kunark unlocked yesterday afternoon, all of the raid mobs finally defeated. The base game, ‘EverQuest’ doesn’t have a whole lot of quests. Killing is slow depending on what class you’re looking to play. Right now the server is open to anyone, but eventually you’ll need all access to play – which I have to admit, I’m a fan of. Even on the beta server there are people running around with 5+ boxed accounts. I have been debating whether or not I want to box myself, I used to when I was playing on Drinal not so long ago, but I haven’t decided yet. Some days I just like to play and not have to focus on more than one character.

Of course because it’s beta everyone is pretty much doing their own thing. Ideally I’d like to meet up with a social guild, and join others in their adventures. I’m not sure if there’s a central place for people to advertise that stuff, so if anyone else hears anything, let me know.

It took me about an hour to ding level 2 in Nektulos forest. I died a few times when guards couldn’t reach me in time, and I collected 10 or so of the adventure stones that are going to allow players to ‘earn’ rewards when progression goes live, for helping with the beta. I’m unsure what those rewards are yet. All in all, I’m still very excited to begin these adventures. I’m not a huge fan of the beta because of the buff command, but I understand why it’s important to test everything.

You can find me in beta on Stargrace or Blesse.