Everquest 2 Player Diary Level 30-35

At level 30, I headed over to the Enchanted Lands. It's easy enough to get to - just like much of the EQ2 zones from release, you just run to either Nektulous or Thundering Steppes dock and click a Mariner's Bell. This is easy, but I'm really not a fan - I think there's something to be said for running your way across a zone, and having them blend together like a coherent landmass (like Faydwer is and hopefully Kunark will be). The original coders for EQ2 clearly just took the most memorable zones from EQ1 and didn't bother with the rest, having areas of water where interconnecting zones used to be. The Enchanted Lands used to be Rivervale and the surrounding area in EQ1, but they seem to have emerged from the Shattering quite well.

Enchanted Lands is a lovely, pleasant place that would be ideal for a picnic. I wouldn't leave the lid off the Coke bottle, though - the wasps here are not to be trifled with.

Overall, I have to say I liked the Enchanted Lands a lot. A lot of players I know say it's their favourite zone, and I'd rank it right up there with Darklight and Neriak. Why is it so good? Well, first up, it's a very bright and sunny zone. It's very pleasant to level there, even if it is infested with giant, hostile wildlife. It's got a very distinct visual style that's almost ripped straight out of the Lord of the Rings movies, perhaps understandably as Rivervale was the home of the halflings. So it looks nice, with some striking features like a huge wooden palisade wall and some beautiful lakes and mountains. Some of the monsters are quite cool and unique too, like weird half-raccoon half-scorpion things. The actual design of the zone is excellent, with long quest lines that are generally fun and varied, and keep you exploring the zone. Think Darklight, but twenty levels higher.

The local YMCA offered their help to the EQ2 art team, who promptly found the Enchanted Lands bathed in beautiful shades of pink that 'really brought out the feminine side of those rugged mountains'.

That's not to say it doesn't have flaws, though. While most of the monsters aren't linked, which makes it nice and solo friendly, there are some hostile triple heroics (read, 4-5 player content) wandering around in quest areas and in general travel areas. What's worse is that they look just like the normal half-raccoon half-scorpion monsters, so you can get attacked by one and not realise that it's the particularly dangerous variant. In that case, you're dead before you can get away. Similarly, the villagers and the goblins are also heroics - linked heroics at that. I never really understand the mentality behind that, because it means you need a full group to tackle them. I'm not a fan of full group quests in open-air zones, because most people tend only to group for dungeons. Content that needs to be duoed, perhaps. But not linked Heroic mobs, because it's instadeath for anyone who runs into them (and there's no skill involved in trying to single-pull individuals from the group). Also, there's a couple of quests to kill spearfish - I had to spend forty five minutes swimming up and down the coast to try and find the dozen or so I needed to kill, because they're rare spawns. Quest targets should not be rare spawns, or it just makes things frustrating. Not to mention the ocean floor has at least one named (heroic) foe who will attack you as you swim by in search of spearfish - and he isn't too far from the docks/outpost, either. Finally, a very small quibble: there's no mender in Enchanted Lands. To repair your gear you have to mariner's bell to Nektulos Docks and back again. It's not far, but it's just a bit silly to have to go through two loading screens for it.

"Don't leave your stuff around Hobbiton, friend. I once left a ring there by accident and by the time I came back for it the little bastards had thrown it in a volcano." - Sauron

I spent around three levels in the Enchanted Lands, then went to the Ruins of Varsoon. Varsoon is a dungeon in the Thundering Steppes, predictably enough the ruins of something or other ruled over by a chap called Varsoon. Level 33 was towards the upper limit of the dungeon, so it was quite an easy ride for me, though it might be a bit of a challenge to clear the entire zone and instance with a party of level 30s. Overall, I thought the zone was mediocre. It had some good points, and some bad points.

First up, visual style. The entrance is not particularly visible and I think a ruined outpost of the scale of Varsoon should have a more impressive entrance. Once inside the early parts of the zone, things don't really improve. You're in some tunnels and caves that are frankly ugly at best, fighting some bats and sludges and the like. There's also a big named spider we killed, but there's very little to comment on in the early part of the zone. It's ugly and the monsters are boring, despite a few named mobs dotted around. Having said that, if they made the place look a bit prettier I wouldn't mind it so much because it serves as a nice entrance zone that can be soloed by someone without a group, but then it should lead to an instance which would be the Ruins of Varsoon proper and the group content.

You want dull and dreary? Well, evidently SOE thought you did.

After fighting your way through the tedious entrance zone, you find yourselves in some man-made tunnels. The feel of Varsoon is very much an underground lair of an evil necromancer, which comes across quite well once you get to the middle part of the zone. Golems wander the halls, with factories for making the creatures dotted about, and there are plenty of undead and vicious books in the libraries to amuse yourselves with. I quite like the concept of Varsoon, I have to admit, but the execution is lacking. The monsters are all pretty samey. Like skeletons and featureless brown golems? Good, because you'll be seeing a lot of them, almost to the exclusion of all else. The zone looks dull too, because the walls are browny and look depressing and dreary, but not in a good way (like Nektulos castle). Instead, it seems like the textures for the zone basically couldn't be arsed. Yes, it is a dungeon from the release of EQ2, but it looks boring. You think Varsoon himself will look cool, once you get to the end of the instance? Nope, he's just a ghostly figure. In fact, he's an average sized, featureless ghostly character. It's such an anti-climax to reach him in his instance, because he looks EXACTLY like all the other ghosts you've been fighting since like level 5. Show me one WoW dungeon where the end boss is exactly the same model as common grind fodder and I'll give you a fiver.

Already smeared from head to toe, Choraz's ogre companion challenged him to a bout of mud wrestling.

Anyway, the zone is good exp and has some nice loot in it. I had a good group and I had fun there, gaining a level and a bit, but I wouldn't really want to go back. There are a lot of named mobs, but as there's no instances they aren't always up (and if they are you may have to compete for the kill with another group). This is stupid. Make it instanced, and have every named mob up in each instance. Then you don't have to mill about for ages, looking for a rare-spawn named quest mob that only one of your group needs. Reduce the frequency of their good loot drops if need be, but right now the system is infuriating. I feel Varsoon seriously needs a revamp because while it's good loot and exp (normal and Achievement), it's neither exciting nor atmospheric. And it's a shame, because it should be. If it was the first dungeon I ran in EQ2 and I had a bad group, it might put me off that game. And I say that honestly - really, the designers should pay at least as much attention to lower level instances than high-level ones.

The most colourful part of the zone. I shit you not.

And after Varsoon, I had passed level 35. Next entry, Zek and Nektropos Castle.

Everquest II Player Diary - Level 25-30

After hitting level 25 with my adventures in Fallen Gate, I decided to broaden my horizons somewhat and travel to the new zones in the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. Though these zones range from levels 1-70 (you're perfectly able to hit max level without ever leaving the new continent, if you so desire), I'd already played a character to level 20 in Faydwer in the one month I played the game on release of EoF. I only decided to head back when there would be new content for me to discover, in this case, Crushbone Keep.

To get to Faydwer, you catch a boat from either the Thundering Steppes or Nektulous Forest. Unlike the zones in the original game, you can't simply click a Mariner's Bell - you actually have to catch the boat. However, the dev team have made this relatively painless and I feel it is actually a wise choice by them. The boat is on something like a five minute timer, which is enough not to inconvenience a player too much but is sufficiently long to give you a genuine sense of travel. I hope they continue the good work when Kunark is released, and bring back the enormous ships used to travel to Kunark in EQ1. At the end of the day, travel between continents should not be instantaneous (unless you have the wizard or druid teleport spells), because it takes away some of the sense of scale that a good world should enjoy.

Choraz broke out the popcorn and watched the ships playing chicken.

On arrival, you land in Butcherblock. This is a level 20-30 zone, so it's pretty dangerous to run through until you hit at least the minimum level. It's a nice introduction to Faydwer, as it is a real visual treat in some areas (the dock being one of them). I picked up level 26 by grinding blues here for half an hour after I finished Crushbone, and I'm also quite a fan of some of the monsters. The spiders here are different models to the ones in the original EQ2 zones, which is nice - especially as they look pretty damn unpleasant now. The gorillas are well detailed, with nice fighting and death animations. The rock elementals are the same models as before, but when you're fighting one that's ten feet tall you'll appreciate that they are quite impressive. There's also a lot of Kobolds, but they're generally linked groups or Heroics so I didn't attack them. The Aviaks (birdmen) were also nice to see, as they too were nicely animated. Only complaint I had about the zone as a whole were that some areas were far too grey and rocky. At least make the ground grassy, and then you have a very attractive zone indeed. Anyway, kudos to the developers for their work on Butcherblock. Nice zone.

In the grassy areas, Butcherblock is a very striking zone.

From Butcherblock I went to the Greater Faydark, a zone I'm pretty familiar with from playing my wizard there a few months ago. I'm not as big a fan of it as I was Butcherblock, because it's quite a dark zone and I'm not a fan of the design, which uses a lot of different levels. This makes the zone a nightmare to navigate, as you'll frequently run towards the place you're looking for, only to find your path blocked by a river or a cliff face. Then you'll have to follow it for two or three minutes until you find a way around it, then head back to your intended destination. It can get very frustrating indeed, which is a shame as the zone is well-designed in other aspect. The problem gets a little easier at higher levels where you can survive the damage entailed with falling off a cliff, but it's still rather irritating. Maybe the new minimap will cure some of the problems, but the current in-game maps really are totally inadequate to displaying multi-levelled terrain. Choraz also couldn't use Kelethin, as he was an evil character, but the city is okay. It's all one zone, which ranks it about Qeynos and Freeport, but it's not as well-designed as Neriak in terms of layout nor visual style. Currently still the best city for a good character to start in, though.

Clan Crushbone lies in one corner of the Greater Faydark, and contains an awful lot of orcs. The initial camps of orcs provide some decent soloing opportunities, despite being linked. Then there's some higher-level group content outside the castle, and finally the castle zone itself - Crushbone Keep, which is where I was heading. Inside the castle are three levels of orc-filled fun, the top level containing an instance for players in their late twenties. There is actually another instance for level 50+ people in the castle, but Choraz didn't fancy visiting that so I'm not going to cover it.

'That's one big tree', Choraz thought.

First thing to say about the zone is that I liked the look. It looked like it had been partially inspired by Blackrock Spire, with lots of fire dotted around, and it looks good. It's definitely darker than the original Crushbone of EQ1, but in a good way - it's grown up. However, I do have some quibbles. The orcs are too samey. Remember Blackrock Spire, with the robed caster orcs and the leather clad assassin orcs with hoods and daggers (actually dual-wielded Brutality Blades - nice!), as well as the warrior orcs? Well, there isn't that much variation here. It's a shame. Yes, not all the orcs fight in exactly the same way, but we could do with a lot more graphical differentiation between them. Secondly, I'm going to complain about the layout of the place again. Before I begin, I'd like to say that the zone is a step up from Fallen Gate and it doesn't annoy me anywhere near as much, but it could still have been done better.

Choraz started to wonder if he had taken a wrong turning on the way to the hairdressers.

First up, the zone isn't an instance. I don't see why not. There's plenty of content outside the castle for people to share, so the castle should be an instance (alternatively, make the upstairs an instance with an entrance right by the front door and keep the other two floors as is). I also think the progression isn't very logical. I'm all up for having a zone where you can choose to fight in different areas if you so desire, but it should be structured that you can choose a path from the entrance and then fight down it until it reaches its logical conclusion. The EQ2 dungeons are too open-ended, which makes them more like an outdoor zone except with a group - instances should be a different type of play to that.

Once you actually reach the instance (the D'Vinnian Throne), things get rather confusing. You've got to run all over and kill various Orcs to get keys to open various doors so you can challenge D'vinn at the end of it. This is a silly idea. Obviously, this means that there IS a logical progression in the way you do the zone, because you have to kill the orcs in a certain order. Thus, get rid of the puzzle element and make the zone a single straight line with a series of boss fights to unlock the doors the D'vinn. The visual style of the zone is, again, okay - but it doesn't get steadily more impressive as you approach D'vinn. You should be able to tell how far you are from the end by looking at the decoration of the room you're in. There's also no set-piece battles. Think of Blackrock Spire, with the little arena you have to endure before you fight the orc leader Blackhand. Given the way the zone ends, this would have been an ideal thing to implement.

Anyway, after all the messing around we finally reached D'vinn, who promptly buggered off after he called in Vindicator Crush, the final boss. Crush's pretty easy, really, but he does look pretty damn badass and he dropped some nice loot. I think it's a shame that the encounter wasn't done more to the tune of the UBRS encounter with Blackhand mentioned above, where Victor Nefarius looks on in a similar way to how D'vinn does. Only thing was that the room design was much more appropriate in World of Warcraft, whereas in EQ2 the final room is basically like all of the rest of the previous rooms. It makes the whole thing feel less cinematic and that much less of an achievement to do.

At the end of the day, I finished the Crushbone instance at level 30 after having spent about 5 hours in the zone - mostly because every time I managed to assemble a full group, someone dropped out and we had to replace them. I enjoyed it, but I do think that there is wasted potential there. I found the World of Warcraft dungeons far more fun to play, and while Crushbone was not unenjoyable I think it could have been excellent. I'd love to see Everquest 2 become the best MMORPG on the market in every way, so I really hope some of the designers upgrade it a bit.

I will say that Crushbone did not really feel like grinding, as I gained the levels without really thinking about it, and I enjoyed the grouping. I learned how to tank properly in the zone, and a couple of times I looked at my experience bar and realised I'd gained half a level without realising it. I'm also a fan of the new expansion zones, as they are much better designed than those from the original EQ2 lands. Playing the game on Extreme graphical settings (which I can do when I'm soloing), the game looks beautiful. It's just a shame there's still a few issues with the zones that stop EQ2 from being completely brilliant. Next entry, up to level 35 - Enchanted Lands and maybe Ruins of Varsoon. We'll see.

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.

Everquest II Diary - Tradeskilling

Tradeskilling in Everquest 2 is quite involved. You don't skill-up like you do in most MMORPG, oh no, you have a full set of tradeskill levels. Yes, all the way from 1-70. And they're not limited by your character (adventure) level, so you could quite happily have a level 1 Assasin who is also a level 70 Weaponsmith. This tends not to happen, however, as the harvesting nodes for each tradeskill level are in the corresponding zones for that adventure level, and a level 1 harvesting in a level 50 zone isn't going to last long (and buying on the broker gets expensive).

Given the fact my class is a platemail-wearing tank class, I decided to turn Armourer. The tradeskill system works how the EQ class system worked originally, in that you can make stuff from any tradeskill at level 1-9, then you first choose one of three classes at level 10 to pursue before eventually specialising down into one of three sub-classes of that class at 20. At 10, I went for Outfitter, who make tailored armour as well as platemail, and at 20 I became the Armourer I intended. There are a total of 9 tradeskills, which cover pretty much any in-game item you might want to make between them. The more unusual skills involve making furtniture for the in-game housing, or making food (which is actually quite lucrative, as everyone needs to eat and the good food gives major benefits over standard vendor stuff).

This is a forge. Used for weaponsmithing, armour-making and disposing of unwanted pets/children.

Now, to actually tradeskill, you have to go to the correct tradeskill machine - in my case a forge - and then select what item you want to make. Successfully producing the item then gives you tradeskill exp, providing the recipe is sufficiently close to your tradeskill level, which will eventually lead you to level up. Each item needs a recipe, the basic ones brought from the tradeskill trainer with new ones each level. They also need the materials, which are harvested in the world of Norrath. There are four harvesting skills, with two different types of resource node for each. Armouring primarily uses ore from Mining, but it also uses furs from Trapping and roots from Gathering. Each node has about 5 different items that you can harvest, probably only about half of which will be of any use to you, the rest used in different professions. The best items, however, use rare harvests - items that are worth an awful lots and (as the name suggests) are only found very rarely. Sadly, new players often don't realise the value of these items and frequently destroy them to make room for conventional loot - at level 25, I destroyed a rare harvest worth about 25 gold, more than I had paid for all of the armour I was then wearing.

In the foreground you see two resource nodes. In the background you can see the abandoned home of a necromancer, complete with fiery blue mood lighting. Legend says he left after new laws were passed cracking down on CO2 emissions from flaming skulls.

The other bonus you gain from harvesting is collectibles, which appear as small golden orbs on the ground, marked with a '?'. If you harvest them, you get a collectible item that you can put in your collections. Once you complete a collection, you can hand it in for Achievement exp and usually a coin and item reward. There are a lot of collections, some of them very large, so collecting is quite a good fun pursuit - especially as the items usually sell quite well on the broker if you've got doubles. The collection system is a nice little addition to the game, in my opinion.

And here we have a collectible item. Gotta catch em 'all (much like Pokemon, or STDs).

Onto actual tradeskilling, where I'm going to talk about how it will work in the next patch. Basically, to create the item I gather the materials and make sure I've learned the recipe, then go to the Forge and start work. I get a screen that shows four different levels, with a blue bar representing progress that starts empty, and a green bar representing item durability that starts full. The idea is to fill the blue bar up before the green bar drops below the 75% mark, and if you do so you get the item. If not, you lose some of the materials (depending on how badly you did) and start all over again. Fairly regularly a complication will crop up and you have to use one of your three tradeskill abilities to correct it, or risk losing a substantial whack of durability. The three tradeskill abilities can also be used when not countering complications to increase durability or progress, but at the cost of power (mana) - and if you run out of power you won't be able to counter any complications that might occur, which is inevitably bad news. If that sounds like a tricky balancing act, it's not particularly hard in reality. You just press the right button to counter and spam the other buttons when you feel your durability is dropping; the rest seems dictated largely by luck. It's certainly an involved crafting system that can make some very good items, but I really don't find it as interesting as adventuring. Certainly, though, it's nice to have the option there (and it's nice to be able to outfit yourself, as well as making a tidy profit on the broker if you're willing to put the hours in).

This may look smithing, but in fact I am in the process of setting alight the small fairy beside me. Evil gotta do what evil gotta do.

Everquest II Diary - Day Three (15-20)

Levels 15-20 took considerably longer than 1-10 and 10-15, though I don't actually have any proper figures to give you because I spent a considerable time playing with tradeskills in this period. Still doable in one afternoon, though.

I spent until level 18 in Darklight, finishing the quests there - the newer zones tend to have better quest rewards than the older games, and having played in the Commonlands when back when I played the month on the EU servers, I was well aware of how much I disliked the zone. Nektulous Forest was the other option, but that's a relatively dangerous zone that's best suited for level 22+ players. So after the three levels in Darklight, I took a bit of a break from adventuring and decided to tradeskill. That's covered in the next entry, which is entirely devoted to tradeskilling, due to it being quite an involved system. Harvesting for collectibles is also covered there too.

After getting my tradeskill level to a comparative level to my character level, I set about heading for the big two-zero. Done with Darklight, I headed off into the Commonlands. It's a big zone, and simply exploring it would give me a fair bit of experience and Achievement exp. So off I trundled off into the Commonlands, whereupon I found a sprawling great zone full of what I consider to be cardinal sins in terms of zone design, meaning it's one of my least favourite (I hear rumours the zone is being updated a little in the next Update to fix some of these issues, but we'll see). They're less noticeable when you've just come from Freeport, which I also dislike immensely, but coming from Darklight made them all very apparent very quickly.

Several of the problems quickly became apparent when I headed to the Crossroads, which is the main quest hub in the zone. As the Commonlands is so big that it fills two map pages, it's quite a long walk. The original EQ2 designers (not the current dev team), in their infinite wisdom, thought it would be a good idea to put a lot of aggressive Heroic monsters on the map, for seemingly no reason. There are a sizable group of level 16 monitor lizards that are double Heroic in the middle of the zone (which means they are much, much stronger than normal monsters of that level and really need groups to tackle), who have mauled me to death on several occasions, as well as numerous other seemingly-pointless Heroic foes littered around. Did I add that monsters will chase you for miles in this game, too? Basically, the zone is unnecessarily hazardous, and if you spend a couple of levels here I guarantee you you will be jumped and killed by an overpowered Heroic at some point. It just seems unnecessarily frustrating, though the old-guard of players usually argue 'it keeps you on your toes' and stops EQ becoming too easy. I'd argue that arbitrary death is simply annoying, rather than exciting. Get rid of the heroics, replace them with normal monsters - if one of them kills me then fair enough, but group content really shouldn't be strolling around attacking soloers (as the majority of players are).

These are some of the aforementioned bastard fucker monitor lizards. What the hell is the point, honestly? It's almost like the EQ2 team sat down and thought 'How can we make a zone that is less fun than being shot in the face?'. Well, they came up with this.

Second problem with the Commonlands is that it's incredibly tedious, mostly because it is so vast. There's not much design variation in the zone (it's literally just an enormous rectangle), just endless plains dotted with semi-wrecked towers. There are a lot of different monsters in the zone, but they're standard fare: savannah wildlife, skeletons, bandits and orcs. The zone would be fine if it was smaller and more compact, but it's just a huge desolate (and colourless) space that is not at all interesting to run across. In EQ1 the Commonlands were equally vast, but they were two separate zones, and the EQ2 version just seems pointless and bloated. There are numerous instances leading off them, but they're mostly pointless quest instances that all use the same map over and over, and seem to be there just for the sake of it.

The entire zone looks like this, and boy does the old 'empty, flat' look get old fast. By this point, being shot in the face was starting to look downright appealing.

The absolute WORST bit, however, is the Dervish quest line from the Crossroads. The quest giver is very much in the Eastern part of the Commonlands, while the dervish camp itself is literally as far West as you can possibly go. So if you actually find the bloody camp (surrounded by heroics and hidden behind two mountain ranges), you then go and report you've done it, which takes 5 minutes to run, then get told to kill some of the dervishes....so you run another 5 minutes back, slaughter some dervishes, then run back to the Crossroads, get told to change some plans around, so you run back and then run around the dervish camp for about ten minutes trying to find where the plans are (the quest gives you no instruction), then run back to the Crossroads, to be told you need to kill the dervish commander. So you run back, only to find that the damn commander is a rare spawn and you'd have to camp the dervishes (there's a LOT of them) for hours to finish the quest. It doesn't take a genius to see why EQ2 sucked at release, and I really hope the new dev team will find it in their hearts to remake the Commonlands. Because I honestly think if I had started in Freeport rather than Neriak with this diary, it would have ended with me cancelling my account before I hit level 10. No jokes. And don't even get me started on the fact that you can't see the other half of the Commonlands map, because I think I might end up stabbing someone (likely myself, which I would probably regret).

You will learn to hate this dervish camp with all your heart and soul. Oh yes you will.

Okay, so it's quite clear I hate the Commonlands, but there are other things to talk about too. First among them is guild recruiting. I found myself a guild, which is remarkably easy to do - it's a process that many other MMORPGS could learn from. Basically, you press 'U'. That brings up a list of the guilds that are recruiting, some info on them and what they are looking for, a description of themselves and a list of the recruiters who are online. You pore over it until you find one you like the sound of, then click a button to get in contact with a recruiter, who will usually only be too happy to bring another member on board. Very easy to do, almost left me impressed enough to stem the rising urge to kill that being in the Commonlands had brought on.

Second thing I did was get my first house. The housing in EQ2 is all instanced and multiple people can own the same property, so there's no shortage of it. Consequently, people are unlikely to visit your house and thus decorating the thing is more for personal enjoyment than anything else, but the option is certainly there to be pursued if you so desire. The main benefit of housing lies in the fact that owning property allows you more on the broker. With no house, you have one broker slot, which you naturally put a bag in. This usually allows about 12 items to be sold, though you do get containers up to 60 items big. Getting an inn, which all players get for free (with only a small weekly upkeep), allows you a second. Progressively larger houses allow you more slots. If you buy a salesbox, this allows people to visit your house and buy the items you are selling on the broker without paying broker commission (usually 20%), which allows you to mark up your prices slightly.

Third thing I did was run my first dungeon, the Fallen Gate. But that's a story for another time as I did it at level 20, so I'll cover that in the next entry along with the mentoring system that comes with it.

Hektor.

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.

Everquest II Diary - Character creation

The character creation in Everquest 2 is one of the game's strengths, as it allows a very impressive amount of customisation (particularly facially) that, frankly, leaves a game like WoW in its dust. If all the characters took their gear off, you're not likely to find many that look alike. You can alter the size of your character, his skin colour, tattoos and headgear (spines and scale patters if you're an Iksar or Froglok), eye colour, and pretty much all the proportions of the character's facial features. It's good fun to play around and create a striking avatar for your adventures, but if you're not interested in doing that, then you can just press the 'randomise all' button until you find a look you like. There is, in fact, two entirely different sets of character models available - the original EQ2 models, and the SOGA models (made by the Asian branch of Sony Online Entertainment) for the Asian EQ2 release. Opinion is divided over which set is better, but I feel that the SOGA models are far, far superior, so I'm using them - even though they can occasionally look a little anime-esque.

The in-game human characters could apparently afford platemail trousers but not a shirt.

The class and race system is large and extremely varied, too. Basically, you can one of eighteen different races, divided into Good, Evil and Neutral (six races in each), that vary from the standard humans, elves and dwarves to the lizardlike Iksar, catlike Kerra or the distinctly amphibian Froglok. Depending on which you choose, you'll be able to choose from up to 4 starting cities - Qeynos & Freeport (the two original starting cities, the hubs for good and evil respectively), then the good city of Kelethin in Faydwer, or the evil city of Neriak near Freeport. Neutral races become either good or evil depending on their choice of starting city, so you can't actually be neutral in game. It's worth thinking about your choice, but you can betray citizenship in game if you desire, so if you make the wrong choice its not the end of the world.

The water between the collection of islands near Qeynos represents EQ1 zones that the EQ2 team couldn't be bothered to redo. Instead, they claimed that it was all flooded. Great save, guys.

After that, you've got your choice of class. There are a grand total of 24 to choose from, though it is somewhat constrained by your choice of alignment - I think only 16 are available to each side. If this seems like a lot of classes, don't be fooled. There are 12 archetypes, each with a good and evil equivalent. If you want to be a Cleric, you will be a Templar if you're good-aligned and you'll be an Inquisitor if you're evil-aligned. Both the good and evil equivalents of the class have the same basic function, though there is some differentiation between them - some more than others, admittedly. A Monk and a Bruiser have only minor differences between them, while a Paladin and a Shadowknight are very distinct classes from another. The same can be said about Rangers and Assassins, too, but sometimes you can't help feeling that the EQ2 team have emphasised a wide class selection to the detriment of the overall game.

After working on the movie Troy, Achilles decided to try his hand at adventuring through Norrath. Intelligently, he decided to bring a pair of metal shoes this time.

If some of the most similar classes were merged, it would make things a lot better in my opinion - some of the classes seem to exist only for the sake of having both a good and evil equivalent, even when it's not really necessary. Things get worse when one class is more powerful than the other, like in the Enchanter archetype the evil Coercer is considered superior to the Illusionist. As both good and evil can freely group with one another, it's a bit of a shame really. You can change to the equivalent of your class by betraying to a city of the opposite alignment, so a character of whatever race can in fact be any class with a little work. My Iksar can't choose a Monk at first, because he's evil, but if I want to be an Iksar monk I can create a Bruiser and then betray to Kelethin or Qeynos.

At the end of the day, though, I don't want to be a Monk. My main in Everquest 1 was an Iksar Shadowknight called Choraz. With Kunark (the Iksar homeland) coming back, it seemed only right to bring him back into the world 500 years after he first walked it. Sadly, instead of Cabalis in Kunark, he's now had to stoop to starting in Neriak with all the Dark Elves. Next entry, we'll see how his adventures go.