Everquest II Diary - Day Two (11-15)

After having levelled from 1 to 10 yesterday, I set myself the target of going from level 10 to 15 and then getting to level 20 tomorrow. This all happens in the Darklight Woods, just as it did yesterday, because the zone ranges from 10-20.

Levelling from 10-15 was, again, not unbelievably time consuming. It was not as fast as 5-10, but even a relatively casual gamer willing to set an hour or two aside a night would likely by able to progress reasonably well in EQ2. There are a number of one-off quests to do, but the quest lines in the Darklight Wood at the third quest hub were numerous and actually quite interesting. Two stand out: the first being the worshippers at this crater trying to summon a big flame demon. Over the course of five or so quests, you have to kill increasingly hard members of their group until you eventually drop their leader and take her summoning staff - which you then get to use to summon the demon they worship, except not exactly as they intended. If you wait a couple of minutes the demon appears and goes on a rampage, killing everyone in the crater. That kind of stuff has been done before in other games, but it's still a bit more of a reward than you normally expect from a quest.

The citizens of Darklight Wood rejoice as they finally receive the industrial-size stove they had ordered.

The second quest line I enjoyed involves some mushroom people, who you are hired to cull. Unfortunately, every time you kill one it spawns a load of little shoomlings. I won't tell you what the eventual solution the quest-giver comes up with to deal with these shroomlings is, but it's quite an amusing quest go on. Certainly more entertaining than the normal 'go to xxx and kill 10 xxx' quests that we get so many of in every MMORPG. Here's a picture of the third quest hub, which sums up the kind of fusion between dark setting and light-hearted cheerfulness that makes Darklight so enjoyable.

This is the third quest hub. I can't think of anything funny to say about it. But that doesn't matter, because you're reading this article for its informative factual content, right? (that should have made you laugh, at least)

Levels 11-15 was the first time I found myself in a party, too. I grouped with two other people to finish the quest lines marked above, and I had a good time. Most of the community in EQ2 seems quite mature, though I won't deny I've met some people that piss me off too. But duoing a quest is much more fun than soloing and after a couple of hours of grouping you might find yourself adding a new player to your friend list. You can kill monsters much quicker with two or more, as well, so you can find yourself gaining a lot of exp very quickly. With some more unusual classes in the game, such as enchanters (who mind-control enemies to fight on your side), grouping can be quite an interesting challenge. Duoing with an enchanter when I was a Shadowknight (basically, a hybrid tank class with limited necromancer abilities) was fun, because we didn't have any healing and the enchanter's damage mostly came from the mind-controlled enemy he was using to fight with, which could break the controlling charm spell at any moment. Grouping in Everquest 2 is made much easier with the mentoring system, but I'm going to go into that in the next entry as it's a fairly large topic and I've got other things to talk about for today.

First up is the Achievement trees. These act like the talents in World of Warcraft, except you gain them in a slightly different way. In WoW, you get one each time you level up, beyond level 10. In EQ2, you have to gain them by 'levelling up' in Achievement Experience, the maximum being 100 Achievement points. The Achievement Experience bar is easily visible by right clicking on your normal exp bar, or it appears at the top of your Achievement tree page, and you can earn this special experience by completing quests, exploring new areas, or killing named NPCs for the first time. It's quite a good system, as it encourages people to quest and gives an additional bonus for killing those rare named spawns.

This is one of the AA trees. Not a very good one, sadly - as a class, Shadowknights are generally regarded as a wee bit wank.

If you have all the expansions to EQ2 (buy the boxed Echoes of Faydwer set, it contains the others for the price of downloading just one), then you have two choices for where to put the points. You have an archetype tree common between both the good and evil equivalents of your class - Choraz, for example, shares his Shadowknight archetype tree with the Paladin - which serves mostly to boost your stats. The second is a class-specific tree that serves to boost your abilities, and you're entitled to put 50 points in each. This does provide a lot of customisation as you can usually have up to 8 points in each improvement, but the archetype tree will tend to have two of the five trees generally useless to your class. My Shadowknight, for example, has no use for the Wisdom tree (presumably put in for Paladins), and in the Intelligence tree there is an improvement for healing that is of no use to me whatsoever - in fact, unless I put four points in it, I can't continue down the tree, so it's actually rather annoying. There is an Achievement tree rebalance coming out in the next Game Update in two or three weeks, so perhaps they'll fix that. I hope so, anyway.

The other tree, the SK-specific one. Again, it's not terribly useful - but on the plus size, I'm a giant lizard with an axe. Just like Jesus.

Next up, I'm going to chat about the interface. It's excellent because it is almost completely customisable (in a way that WoW never was when I played it, up until patch 1.9), though I admit I've still not fully got to grips with it. You can easily change the colour of any type of text you desire, and create new tabs or entirely new windows and choose what text goes into them. I've split combat text, NPC tells (usually quest stuff) and player chat/game info into three different windows. You can also set the opacity of windows, with different values for normal and on mouseover, which prevents everything looking too cluttered even if you have a lot of information onscreen. This is a great touch, as EQ2 is a far more complex game than most MMORPGS. You'll have a lot of different buttons, quests, three different types of exp to keep track of, your own health and buffs, the health and buffs of your group, and all the game chat. WoW's less customisable interface is not necessarily a flaw with WoW, as you don't NEED the same level of customisation for WoW - but for EQ2, it's a necessity. Kudos to the dev team for making it work. The only thing it's lacking at the moment is a minimap, a feature most MMORPGS have, but that should be coming in the near future courtesy of the dev team.

Speaking of which, the development team is one of my favourite parts of EQ2 (as I've said before, and I will say again). Currently, their workrate is phenomenal and they are not short of ambition, either. The last expansion was Neriak and Darklight, both of which were of excellent quality. A new race was also added, the Arsai, who are the evil equivalent to the good fairy-like Fae. Before that, the last couple of Updates mostly added a few quests and minor improvements like new mounts or quest sharing, or a change to the raid loot system so that only items usable by someone in the raid would drop, but the one that preceded them added the Estate of Unrest - another old EQ1 favorite, now a large high-end zone but limited to only one group at a time - giving options to those who want to play endgame content but don't have the manpower for large 24-man raids. The next expansion has the much-needed 'dressing room' feature that allows you to preview what armour looks like before you buy it, as well as letting you try out mounts before you buy. It will also have an Achievement tree rebalance and another new high-end raid zone in the middle of New Tunuria - formerly Felwithe, for all of you EQ1 fans out there. It looks amazing, as this screenshot hopefully illustrates - sadly, it's a raid zone now, rather than the High Elf start zone it used to be.

Felwithe is considerably cooler than it used to be, though it's now packed with level-60 vampire elves. I can see fans of Japanese anime salivating at the mere thought.

I've got plenty more to talk about, actually, but I'll have to leave that to the next entry because I've gone on far too long here. Next time: mentoring, tradeskilling, guild recruiting, collection quests, legend and lore quests, and why you want to gouge out your eyes when you zone out of Darklight and start to visit zones that are three years old.

Hektor.