Everquest II Player Diary - Level 20-25

At level 20, a character can start their armour quests (AQs). These involve a series of six quests, each giving you a single piece of class-specific armour. I had mine finished by level 25 - the first three quests were soloed, then I duoed with an assassin to do the remaining three (calling in a healer for the final one). My main complaint is that I really resent having to look up quests on sites like Allakhazam to know what I'm doing or where the monsters I'm meant to kill are, so I was disappointed that the quest descriptions just told me which zone to go to and the names of the monsters I had to slay. Some of the zones are pretty big and so you're unlikely to find your targets by blundering into them, so some directions would have been nice - I always feel like I'm cheating when I look something up online, and I feel it doesn't add to the immersion of the game. Frankly, I shouldn't have to do it. I don't mind spending 5 minutes finding a location 'in the East of Nektulos Forest', but these quests expect you to know where a small group of monsters spawn in a very large zone, without any directions whatsoever.

Choraz paused to wonder how exactly a wolf managed to get to level 23. Then he stabbed it to death, allowing him to pass an arbitrary experience value and somehow increase in power. Ah, the glamourous life of an adventurer.

The armour you receive is pretty good, particularly if you've got a horrible patchwork of armour on, but I found myself replacing it only five levels later. You see, even the basic player-made armour at 30 is better, and the mastercrafted player-made armour you get at level 22 is far superior to it. However, you're talking around 10pp for a set of mastercrafted gear, and I've only got about 5pp in the bank even at 35, so mastercrafted gear is more for rich players with a level 70 as their main character.

If I were a level 70 creating an alt, I'd not bother going through the hassle of doing it - but for a first-time player, they're pretty good. Having said that, if I was the EQ2 dev team I'd make the entire quest line soloable at level 22 or so. It's pretty gut-wrenching to throw away gear you spent a day questing for only 24 hours later. I also find it disappointing there's no more armour quests after the ones at 20 - I'd like to see a new set every ten levels to upgrade the old set, each time giving a reward better than normal tradeskilled armour but not as good as the mastercrafted stuff. And I'd make it look different, depending on what city I got the quests from (though with the same stats). I think it'd give the different cities some real character and give the game a real sense of advancement when compared to just going to the broker and buying the new set of player-made gear every ten levels.

Anyway, these quests took me all over. Firstly over to the commonlands, then down into the sewers below Freeport (I pity the man who tries that quest without a map), then a lot of killing stuff in Nektulos Forest. Nektulous is, again, not one of my favourite zones, though I do like the visual style of the zone (though I think I might get prtty sick of dark forests at this rate) - this time because you can't run across the zone in a straight line, as they've put a lot of pointless (and unclimbable) geography in to block your path. You can travel from one part of the zone to another from the griffon stations, but the griffon models are atrocious and the griffons stations aren't put by the zone entrances either, so you have to wade through the forest to get to them. The zone does a good job of making you feel like you're in a dangerous forest, but it almost feels too big and too crowded. There are monsters literally everywhere and the zone is massive, so I think it could take a leaf out of the book of WoW's design team and be built more along the lines of Darkshire. I'd have the zone a bit smaller, with two friendly outposts - one reachable by running for a couple of minutes through fairly non-dangerous parts of the zone from the Darklight and Commonlands zone lines, and the other at the docks. I'd make the first outpost a small town under siege by the nasties in the forest, then have Nektropos Castle at the far end of the zone(maybe on a high hill visible from the outpost), with the critters getting harder as you get nearer to it. Like a proper movie where you travel a dangerous, winding path to travel to the dark castle dominating the landscape.

Choraz began to regret accepting the 'Renovate my House' questline from the master of Nektropos Castle.

Aside from armour quests, the other notable thing I did between levels 20 - 25 is to run my first dungeon, the Fallen Gate. It was originally the outlying parts of a certain city called Neriak that has recently reappeared in the game, and it's packed with undead. Running it with a good group was fun, but I feel the place does suffer as it's not an instance. On several occasions we found bosses we wanted to kill had already been killed by someone else, so when we found bosses that were up we had to hurry in case someone else came up and stole them from us. Isn't too conducive to completing the zone at your own pace. In terms of overall character, the zone is a cool concept. It's full of rebel Dark Elves, with one quest line (given by a ghostly halfling) reliving the events five hundred years ago that caused the tunnel to collapse. It has quite a dark and unpleasant feel, with one quest being to find a missing halfling that ends when you find the unfortunate victim as a skeleton sitting in a pot after having fought through a legion of gruesome zombie feasters. The loot can be good too, which is always a nice bonus.

As always, though, that's not the full story. Guess what I'm going to complain about? Yeah, you got it first time, it's the zone design. Even the zone-in starts badly - it's just a gate, set into the the end of a sandy canyon in the Commonlands. Not much indication a major dungeon lies behind it. Come on - this was once the entrance to Neriak! You can see what the current entrance looks like in the diary entry on levels 1-10, so why is this one so crap? And why does it look so pristine after 500 years of wear and tear (and why does it look so ridiculously out of place)? I want to see something massive and imposing and dark and grim and ruined, surrounded by broken statues that showed signs of fighting five centuries ago. I want to see some low-level undead around the entrance, warning you of what you're going to be facing. Right now, the entrance looks like it was cobbled together by one graphic artist in his lunchbreak (just like the rest of the Commonlands).

In an interesting twist on traditional fantasy lore, the original EQ2 team set the Dark Elf city in the middle of a bright sunny zone, full of sand and savannah. Recently uncovered plans show they intended to continue this 'outside the box thinking' by setting the Wood Elf city underwater and moving the Coldain dwarves from frozen Velious to their new home in the middle of a volcano.

Inside, the zone is not at all intuitive. Once you've run it once or twice, you get a feel for it, which is okay - but the first time you run it, you're too busy trying to work out where you're going to have much fun. It's also not very linear (in a bad way), because the path through the zone that involves killing all of the bosses and getting all the quests sees you doubling back on yourself several times (additionally, there's not quite enough monsters to finish your Far Seas Requisition quests in one go, so you'd have to do it twice if you wanted them). The entire zone is quite long, then it is followed by a short instance where you kill a big demony thing. If you want to do all the quests and finish the instance, expect to spend at least four hours in there with a pick-up group. The visual style stays pretty much the same the entire way through (and there's not much grandeur, given that it's meant to be Neriak), too, which doesn't lead to much sense of progression - and I'd later have the same complaint with Crushbone.

A couple of bosses into Fallen Gate.

To contrast this with the Deadmines (I played Alliance in WoW), Fallen Gate comes off badly. Deadmines has a very logical progression, because there's nothing left behind you as you clear the zone. It has a very visual and obvious progression, too. You start off in some mines, then fight your way into a workshop, then you head into wood-processing plant, then you find yourself in a huge underground cavern with a hulking ship in the middle of it, which you fight your way to the top of and kill the end boss. You feel like you're unravelling the workings of the Defias as you go, whereas in Fallen Gate you kinda just know you're going forwards and you can't tell from looking around you how far you're in, or how far you've got left to go. As soon as you see the ship in Deadmines, you know what you have to do, and the final fight is cinematic and as much of a blast as the rest of the zone. You have to kill a fair few normal monsters between the bosses, but not too many. In Fallen Gate, the whole place is PACKED with monsters, and the bosses generally don't look very distinctive. If it wasn't for their names, you probably wouldn't realise they were bosses. They need to have noticeably more impressive armour, or if they're a type of monster they should look bigger and stronger than those around them. Again, I think the zone needs a graphical restyle to add some progression, then a bit of a trim - more isn't always better, particularly in low end dungeons. They should be short-ish and sweet, in my eyes.

A couple more bosses in. Note the frankly ridiculous number of monsters in the room (you kill them one at a time).

The last thing I want to mention is the mentoring system. After all of the above, slagging off EQ2 in comparison to WoW, the game does have one huge factor that I can't recommend enough - the mentoring system. If you need to find a group but all your friends/guildies are too high for the dungeon, you're not out of luck. They can mentor down to your level with a few clicks of the mouse (allowing them to gain Achievement exp, though they only earn 50% normal exp), which is a brilliant idea. I do feel that a level-70 player mentored down is still FAR too powerful - ideally, they should be LESS powerful than a player of the level they are mentoring, to make a genuine lower-levelled player more worthwhile to group with than one mentoring down, however that should not detract from the fact that the mentoring system is a brilliant concept, particularly when you're in a guild or just wanna see a zone you've outlevelled but never properly played.

A little further in - this room actually contains a boss, though he's been killed by a high level player farming the zone. When full this room contains twice as many monsters as you see here - and it still looks basically the same as the first screenshot. And it will stay like that all the way to the end.

It does make you wonder, though, why a team that can come up with that system is so poor at designing dungeons. It's not rocket science, people. Don't make a player's first dungeon an overly long and dull experience. I enjoyed mine, but it was only because I liked the company I was with when I did it - overall, the dungeon itself was average at best.

Hektor.