Age of Conan Player Diary Level 1 - 20

With the basics of the game explained in the previous entry, I can now move onto a more detailed account of my adventures in Age of Conan. As mentioned earlier, you first emerge from the water half-drowned and clutching only a broken oar. You then have a few moments to sit back and enjoy the graphics, and twiddle with the settings, before you speak to the quest NPC in front of you.


The area looks fantastic, and really needs to be seen firsthand - the screenshot really doesn't do it justice. Determined to try the combat that everyone had been talking about for ages, I picked up my broken oar and ran straight into the nearest group of pict savages I could find. The combat system really is excellent, and while it is easy enough to learn you can't help but feel it's going to be tricky to master. Essentially your 1, 2 and 3 keys are bound to directional attack buttons (it doesn't matter where you're standing relative to your opponent, so long as you're facing him and in range). Both you and your opponents also have directional shields, which reduce the amount of damage done by attacks from that particular direction, and those are shifted with the Ctrl button - though by level 20, I still haven't really learned to use them. You can also dodge in any direction with a quick double tap of the appropriate direction key, but as a ranger I have to stand still to use my bow and thus I don't do that much.

All this is made more complex by combos, which are like the class skills in any other MMO. They appear on your hotbar and you click them (or press the appropriate hotkey) to trigger them. Then a series of directional attacks that you have to complete comes up, after which your character will perform the selected attack. To start with, I was mostly just mashing the keyboard, but as I've got more into the game I've calmed down enough - but sometimes I can't help feeling I'm losing time on my autoattacks by not repeatedly spamming directional attacks in combat that often, especially if I'm using a fast-firing weapon. The combat noises and animations are both superb but, in the early stages of the game at least, the formula doesn't depart much from traditional MMOs. Instead of running up to an enemy with my shadowknight and pressing the same series of keys every battle, from level 6 upwards I just pressed 8, to select Pierce Shot, then 1 and 2 to set off the combo - which does enough damage to kill pretty much anything within a level or two of me instantly. However, there is more of an emphasis on fighting groups of creatures rather than single monsters, as individual ones go down quite easily, which makes things more exciting and more realistic too. So, while the formula is basically the same as in other MMOs so far, it's done much better and is much more enjoyable for it.


So, after battering half a dozen savages to death so I could learn the combat system, I actually got on with what I was meant to do. A conveniently-placed damsel in distress is in front of you, begging you to free her from her chains by forcibly taking the key off the slavemaster on the beach nearby. Getting quests is very much like it works in other MMOs, except the quest givers and the quest targets are marked on the map, which makes the whole process considerably more simple than in previous MMOs. Though I do somewhat miss the days of EQ1 where quests could be decidedly cryptic and could sometimes take hours, the genre has moved on since then and now quests are less about lore and entertainment and more a tool to steer players to various areas of the world so they don't miss out on content. Age of Conan has taken this to its logical conclusion and virtually holds your hand throughout the entire process, though in a convenient rather than patronising way. It proved suitably easy to free the girl, and then she agrees to follow you back to the nearby town, Tortage.

What follows is a linear fight down a long path to the city, designed to get you familiar with the controls of the game and to help you gain five or so levels. You also become familiar with the game's appalling voice acting, which is delivered in the conversational cut-scenes you have with NPCs. It's not quite as dire as the faux-Scottish accents of some of the dwarves in EQ2, but generally the NPCs sound like a borderline-retarded Russian putting on a silly voice (it makes you wonder if Blizzard actually own the only competent voice actors in the MMO industry). Thankfully the voice acting ends after Tortage, but it does make you wonder why they bothered with it in the first place.


Getting back on topic - once you complete your little journey to Tortage, you find yourself zoning into a communal multiplayer zone - it turns out the previous area was a single-player instance. Ahead of you is the city of Tortage, but at this point you'll have to twiddle your graphical settings again because the communal zones perform considerably worse than the single-player instances. Anyway, there's a couple of errands you have to do to get into the city, and then it's on to standard MMO fare - running about, questing and killing things, to level up. The city of Tortage is beautifully modelled and textured, and the entire zone looks like it's come straight out of Pirates of the Carribbean. However, there is a twist in the tale, as Tortage is actually two different zones. Bear with me, because this takes a little explaining.

The first twenty levels were initially intended to be a single-player tutorial that would be skippable by subsequent characters, but this has changed somewhat along the way. This is definitely a good thing. Initially you weren't even going to choose your class at the start of the game, but you'd specialise into an archetype at level ten and then into an actual class at level twenty. This will sound familiar to veterans of EQ2, as the launch edition of this game pioneered this approach before eventually (and wisely) dropping it in favour of the standard character creation method. This transition left some unresolved issues in the early game of EQ2, but happily Funcom have done a better job with Age of Conan on this count.


The relatively elegant solution they have come up with is to split the newbie town of Tortage into single-player story mode (nighttime), and the standard multiplayer mode (daytime). These can be switched between by speaking to one of the NPCs in the inn that will act as your base for your time in Tortage. For the first twenty levels, whether you play with other players or not is entirely up to you. The single player missions are actually pretty good, and there's a different set of quests depending on your archetype. Rangers are part of the Rogue archetype, so my quests involved quite a lot of sneaking about. This means there's actually four sets of quests, and as you'll presumably play a different type of class for your alt characters, it means Tortage won't be as repetitive as it could be. The quests also do quite a good job of subtly introducing you to your class skills, which can only be a good thing.

Overall, though, I still have a few gripes with the zone. There's a chronic shortage of vendors to sell your loot to, as well as no vendors who actually sell bags in the town. Worse, there's no vendors in the single-player nighttime missions, and I found myself switching to daytime just to sell things, and then having to come back. As you have to zone to change from one mode to another, and then zone out of the inn to find a vendor, and then zone back into the inn and then shift mode back to night-time again, this is a pain in the ass. They should put a vendor in the night-time version of the inn. If there's one there already, he needs to be made more obvious. The layout of the quest givers I also found a bit irritating. They were dotted all over the place, which meant you'd spend half your time running around the city to hand in various bits of quests. I much prefer quest 'hubs', with four or five NPCs in a little outpost with all the quests. Once you're done with that hub, the game steers you onto the next one. Tortage reminded me a little of Baldur's Gate II, in that after a couple of hours of play I had about 20 quests going at once and no idea which monsters and NPCs were involved in which quest chain. Also, sometimes NPCs standing right next to each other would give out quests of completely different level ranges, which just to me seemed a little odd.


The rest of the Tortage zone involves several other zones, some public and others instances that you will encounter in your single-player exploits, and they range from a volcano to a desert island. Generally all look very polished, and the monsters are all very well animated and there's a good variety of different types. The only I really had with the communal zones is the community. While I admit I'm pretty sheltered, having played EQ2 as my most recent MMO, the game with probably the most mature and helpful fanbase in the MMORPG universe, it seems like Age of Conan attracted an awful lot of the WoW-kiddies. It might be because I'm playing on a PvP-server, but the General chat was just an uninterrupted stream of newbies spamming questions that could be answered by spending ten seconds either reading the manual or the extensive in-game tutorials, or by people just generally being assholes.


This failed to improve when I left the immediate proximity or Tortage to do some quests on Whitesand Isle, at which point I became PvP eligible. While I'm used to playing on PvP servers and thus I'm quite used to occasionally getting picked off when I'm hunting, the amount of griefing in the game surprised me. One of the issues is that the respawn point is unprotected, and you only have ten seconds of invulnerability before you become fair game to everyone again - by which point you'll be on about 1/3 health. Higher-level people camping the graveyards and just insta-killing everyone that spawns is infuriating, because there's nothing you can do about it at all. Funcom need to make the areas around the graveyard PvP-ineligible, so people can at least gate back to town if they're getting ganked too much. On a similar note, people also like camping the entrance to zones and killing anyone who tries to zone in, over and over. There's no material gain to PvP yet, so the persistence of some of the griefers is remarkable.

Another issue is the rather steep increase in power between the levels (at level 16 I was attacked by three level 13s and managed to kill them all), which means that newbies really get shafted if they try to go hunting in the multiplayer zones. I imagine things will improve as the zones get less populated, but still. I much prefer the WoW system of PvP-realms, where you can kill anyone of the opposing side pretty much anywhere. There's no confusion there - if you see a red name, you try and kill them, and if it's a green name then they're friendly. In AoC everyone is potentially hostile and, as you can't really just attack everyone you meet if you ever want to level up, things are less clear cut. This is almost certainly the intention, but it makes stuff like grouping up is quite hard. Trying to talk to someone is as likely to leave you trying to pull a throwing axe out of your face as it is to find you a group. Generally you'll just find higher level players one-shotting you just because they can (I'm not complaining, I do it myself), but a few people seem to have made it their mission to ruin things for everyone by camping the graveyards and generally griefing.

Overall, though, the first twenty levels were really good. The single-player storyline is pretty cool, the zones look fantastic and the combat is superb. If you've got a good enough PC to run it, I wholly recommend it - and I'd recommend it even more if they put a vendor in the Tortage inn. It's also worth noting that playing on a PvP server is quite a commitment. If you found PvP servers too much to handle on WoW, I wouldn't touch the AoC ones with a barge pole.

Age of Conan Player Diary Introduction

Age of Conan is probably the closest anyone will get to a WoW-killer at any point in the next couple of years. There are plenty of MMOs coming out, but few have garnered the attention and hype that Funcom (the company behind Anarchy Online) have with their latest effort - in fact, over a million people signed up for the beta. So I preordered it, and I'll share my experiences with you. I'll start with a general introduction to the game, which should explain the basics about what makes this game so different from the crowd, before I go into details about zones and my experiences.

First up, the install process takes AGES, which is not entirely surprising when you consider Age of Conan is taking up a grand total of 25 gigs of my hard drive. I think my CD-Rom drive is a bit slow because it took a good couple of hours to install for me, but most people report it finished in under one. After that, the obligatory patching process starts. Despite having the game installed and running before it actually hit store shelves, I was still subjected to a 700 meg download, at which point I just left my PC on and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning it was all done, but if you do run out to the shops and buy this game please be prepared for a wait of at least three or four hours before you can start playing. That being said, there was no drama with the downloads and after 48 hours of play I've experienced only minor server issues (a 3 minute queue last night, and the occasional random disconnect), which I think is quite impressive for a game on launch weekend. Well done Funcom.

Okay, so onto the game itself. Once you've logged in and chosen a server (I picked Wildsoul PVP) you get to the nitty-gritty of creating a character and your first look at the vaunted graphics of AoC. Mighty impressive they are, too.

I started by choosing a gender, race and class. I went for a male Aquilonian Ranger, mostly because I was interested in playing a range DPS class and, as AoC has optional first-person targeting, this seemed an ideal time to try a Ranger. There are a total of 12 classes to choose from, and this figure was initially higher before Funcom merged several of the classes. In my books, this is a good idea - Everquest 2 suffered from having too many classes, as many of them were too similar and PvP balance was a nightmare. The twelve in AoC seem quite distinct from one another and hopefully will have sufficiently different playstyles to keep people interested once they've got sick of playing their first class.


My only concern is over the fact that AoC contains three 'tank' classes. Judging from the experience of playing a tank class in EQ2 (which had 6), one class will be judged as the best tanks, and thus tanking will be exclusively done by them in high-end groups and raiding. This leaves the other two classes out in the cold, as they're taking up room in a group that could be better filled with devoted DPS classes. Funcom appear to have addressed this with at least one of the tank classes, the conqueror, by giving him a whole lot of group buffs. However, the Dark Templar, who is a sort of necro-tank much like the Shadowknights of EQ1 and 2, looks somewhat left out in the cold at this stage. But we'll see how it pans out.


The character creation interface is very detailed, much like the one in Everquest 2 except with far nicer graphics (needless to say, both are light years ahead of World of Warcraft), or at least it is once you click the 'Advanced Options' tab at the top of the screen. Prior to that you've only got a few sliders, and a series of preset heads and hair types to choose from. The advanced options lets you customise all areas of the face and body, allowing you to create a character who looks truly unique. I went with a fairly clean-cut young man, without too many scars or tattoos. Then I gave him his name, Markell, and then sent him off into the world of Hyboria. You get a little cut-scene of you semi-drowning, before you wash up on the shore of an island and start playing.


This is pretty much the first scene you see and, believe it or not, the screenshot doesn't do it justice. Age of Conan looks phenomenal, end of discussion. The water effects are simply beautiful, the texturing is superb and the modelling is fantastic. The trees and foliage in particular look as though a lot of attention has been spent on them, and it really pays off. Compare this to Stranglethorn Vale in World of Warcraft, and we can see exactly how far gaming has come in the last four years. The ambient sound is very good, as is the music and the sound effects, and the subtle things like the shadows all contribute to a stunning world. Funcom haven't so much moved the bar as propelled it into another field entirely. Bear in mind too that this game is shipping WITHOUT DirectX10 support - the dev team wanted more time with it to polish it or something, so it should be looking even better in the near future. And these screenshots are taken on Medium-High settings, so those with better PCs than mine will find the world looking better than this already.


Problem is, all of this comes at a price. For reference, I'm running an Intel Core 2 Duo 6300, 2gb of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1800XT 256mb graphics card. My PC isn't top of the range by any stretch of the imagination; it'll run Company of Heroes on Max settings, EQ2 on about medium and will just about handle Crysis on Medium. When I arrived in Hyboria, I had to turn a few settings down - I switched off the water reflections, and the shadows, which kept things running nicely. But it turns out the first five or six levels or so are an instance, and when you get into the real world performance drops off. And when you reach the first town, it drops off again. And when you get out of the newbie starting areas and into the real cities, it drops off even more. My machine was chugging along at about 2-3 FPS in the capital cities, on the lowest graphical settings. Alarmingly, turning down the texture settings and all that didn't seem to help a lot, so it was only by turning my monitor resolution down (which looks UGLY) that I could get around the city at a playable 5-8 FPS. And that was on off-peak times. On peak times, it is literally unplayable, no joke. If your computer is worse than mine, DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER buying this game. If it's about on par with mine and you're not willing to upgrade, I wouldn't bother. I'm looking at buying a new graphics card and CPU right as I type this.


Onto the gameplay - the major innovation of AoC is supposed to be the combat, so I eagerly sprinted up the beach and started cracking pirate skulls. Initially it was overly frantic and downright confusing not to have autoattack and instead having to manually aim every strike, but you quickly get into it and soon you're wondering why someone hadn't thought of this type of combat earlier. Of course, a player is not simply limited to his three directional attacks, as you quickly unlock combos as you level up. These are just like the special abilities in all other MMOs, except that when you select one it is not instantly activated. First of all, a series of moves you have to perform with your directional attacks pops up, and it's only one you've pulled those off (if you mess up the combo is lost) that the move actually takes place. The more powerful a move, the longer the required combos, so you can't simply run into combat and spam your most powerful ability to insta-kill everything any more. It's a nice touch, and I imagine it will have a great deal of ramifications for PvP combat. But, tactical considerations aside, the combat is great.


Most of this is due to the frankly awesome sound effects and animations of the characters, something that has been given remarkably little press in the light of the stylised fatalities that occasionally appear when you strike a killing blow. They are entertaining enough, but the meaty sounds when weapons meet bodies and the fact that people fly backwards when you shoot them with a powerful crossbow adds far more to the general experience. You actually feel like your attacks are powerful and they look like they're doing real damage, instead of the rather more detached combat of EQ2 and WoW, and I love it. There's little downtime, too, because any class is capable of resting and rapidly regaining HP and Stamina/Mana if they are out of combat. Fighting in AoC is exciting and satisfying, and I'm really not sure I'd be able to go back to WoW or EQ2 even after a mere 48 hours of AoC - it really is that much better...

The GUI was much less of a hit with me. It looks good, I'll grant Funcom that, but the functionality is poor even compared to WoW and far below what's offered by EQ2. Communicating is unnecessarily difficult, and the chat window is obtrusive and difficult to customise. I still haven't worked out how to add people not in the same zone as me to my friends list, or check if they are online. Inviting people to a party is cumbersome, and the group UI is poor at best. The inventory window looks nice, but when you try and check the stats of an item it often displays half of the stats window offscreen, and as you can't move the inventory windows you can't drag them away from the edge of the screen to rectify this. That been said, the map features are excellent, as they provide detailed and zoomable maps of the locations with quest NPCs and quest objectives clearly marked. It makes getting around and finding quest targets nice and easy, and essentially makes sites like Thottbott relatively obsolete now. But overall, the GUI is terrible, and I hope Funcom upgrade it soon.

Onto the player diary for levels 1-20.

Age of Conan, then...

The escapade with Everquest 2 has ended for the time being. Other commitments in my life took over just as Choraz reached his homeland, somewhat ironically cutting short his journey just before I actually got to do what I'd been looking forward to for the entire time I was playing EQ2 - actually exploring Kunark again (I got as far as the dock, and the monsters immediately around that).

And now, with my finals at university passing in the next week and me having a little free time on my hands, I decided to pre-order Age of Conan. I figured that I'd end up buying it anyway, so I thought I may as well get the in-game Rhino mount that came with the pre-order from Play.com. And now I'm sitting at my desk, typing this while I revise for my exam tomorrow. Age of Conan is now installed on my computer, which took the best part of two hours, and it is now downloading a 95 meg patch which should take the best part of an hour. But the servers are down for the next four hours anyway, as the official release date is not until tomorrow. I can't play it until 5pm anyway, when my exam is done, but rest assured I'll be firing the game up pretty quickly after getting home.

You can expect an in-depth blog of my experiences in Age of Conan, much like what I posted for EQ2 over the last year or so. I will probably pop back to Everquest 2 and have a look around Kunark for a month at some point in the future, but for now I'm going to be concentrating on Funcom's latest effort. Let's just hope Conan proves to be all that it's cracked up to be.

Everquest II Player Diary Level 60-65

Well, Choraz did eventually make it to level 65, though it was a beleaguered effort some two weeks after the release of the expansion.

Sanctum of the Scaleborn was my first port of call at 60. This is a dungeon in the Tenebrous Tangle, and it's superbly executed. It consists of two levels broken up into various rooms, each one containing a named (if he is up). There is quite a lot of trash mobs and the respawns can get annoying, but the zone is brilliant experience and has a lot of achievement experience for the named kills/exploration exp. The big plus, however, are the quests. There are a number of quests for the dungeon, all of which are found within the walls of the dungeon, and they provide a logical progression through the zone and lead you deeper and deeper with each step in the quest chains. They are reasonably interesting quests as well, but it certainly is a bonus to get the free quest exp and AA as well as the dungeon rewards. If a group of friends ran through the dungeon together right from the start, I can see them having a really good time doing it. If I had to pick a flaw, it'd be that the quests are usually multi-stage, so it can be hard to find people on the same part as you (and even rarer to find a whole group there), but really that's just a minor niggle. The Sanctum really isn't too hard for a decent group, but it's still a really well designed zone that gives an ideal place to level up from 60-67 or so.

After that it was onto the Barren Sky, the mid-level zone in the Kingdom of Sky that runs to about level 64. The quest lines weren't too hard there and provided me with about a level and a half, and I was able to complete the whole zone by level 63 despite some of the quests going up to level 69. As always, monsters from older expansions are easier, and KoS is considerably easier than Faydwer zones of the same level. The look of the zone is rather nice, mostly Arabic-inspired in architecture and generally pretty deserty, which makes a nice change after the jungle of Tenebrous Tangle but can leave you rather sick of deserts after you've fought through the Desert of Flames (particularly as some of the architecture is remarkably similar). There's not really much to talk about regarding the Barren Sky that wasn't already said about Tenebrous Tangle - the zone isl made up of tiny islands, which I don't like, but you do get used to it even if it is a pain to navigate. A few quibbles with the quests - the major quest line requires you to summon various NPCs at their 'listening posts' with your flute, but it took me ages to find the listening post in the first place...and why? Well, because it's less of a post and more of a stick in the ground that does not look even slightly important. Why not make it suitably impressive, or clickable, and then people won't walk straight past it when they're looking for it...

After Barren Sky, I decided to head down to the Isle of Mara. This was an adventure pack that formerly retailed at $4.99, but as the Kunark expansion comes with all previous EQ2 content I now had access to it. It basically consists of a rather oriental-style village populated by monks, and then a few group instances and some raid bosses. It's actually a very beautiful town, with some rather easy quests available in the town for those of level 55 and up. After completing them, I headed into the other outdoor zone of the adventure pack and explored it for the AA. Towards the end there were a lot of heroics to dodge, but there was some really cool stuff to see too. The big lake near the end of the zone features a flooded temple I had a good time exploring (it contains a dungeon), and there's a big tomb earlier in the zone that also contains another dungeon. Without a group I didn't bother exploring either, but I did very much like the look of the zone even if it was rather easy (pre-EoF monsters again). Whether or not it was worth $5, I don't know - I suppose at the time of release it probably would have been, as the dungeons would have been pretty busy, but I would have felt a bit ripped off paying for what is essentially two outdoor zones (one with no mobs in it) and a couple dungeons when I'm already paying $15 a month - I think SOE showed good sense in abandoning the Adventure Packs and concentrating on expansions and free updates.

Speaking of free updates, along with Kunark came the new racial abilities, which are pretty cool (if not game-breaking) and serve to differentiate between the races a lot more than before. My Iksar can now breathe underwater, for example, while Dark Elves can hover, Gnomes can summon clockwork pets, Kerra can pounce and Sarnark can breathe fire on unsuspecting enemies. The fact that all the races were the same used to annoy me a bit and, while this hasn't exactly brought back all the racial cities and racial tradeskilling of EQ1, it's certainly provided some kind of identity to the different races. Kudos to the dev team for doing so.

The other thing I decided to do post-Kunark release was check out the various mounts on sale. The Kunark rhinos were pretty cool, if perhaps not as outlandish as I expected, but I was struck by the sheer number of mounts that a player could buy if they wanted to. Believe me, there is a LOT of choice there, with the new level 80 guild mounts looking extremely cool (fiery breath, eyes and feet on the new wargs, for example, with your choice of orange or blue flame). The old armoured horse mounts still look fantastic too, but sadly I don't think many people will be using them now all their flame-spewing cousins are available. Still, it's just another testament to the depth of EQ2 in terms of character customisation available.

Anyway, back to the levelling. After Mara I went off to Bonemire, the highest-level outdoor zone in the Kingdom of Sky. This is pretty weird as it is set in space with bright pink rivers and a crashed gnomish spacecraft to get your quests from. The main bad guys here aren't the aviaks of the previous two zones, it's largely the Ravasect, praying-mantis style bad guys who look rather cool and go down quite easily. While the zone does feel a bit incongruous with the rest of EQ2, it's quite refreshing to see a zone that's entirely different from the rest of the world - it reminded me a little of Silithus, if you're a WoW player, except I prefer the Ravasect to the nasties in Silithus. The quest lines are not really anything to write home about, though they do their job, and Bonemire does provide a bit of variation from the standard EQ2 zones. I enjoyed playing through it, though I only got about a level out of it because the solo quests are so easy to do. I'm still not sure if I'm comfortable with spaceships and space stuff being in EQ2, but that's a debate for another day. Bonemire is an okay zone, but by now I was getting thorougly sick of flying between countless tiny little islands in the sky.

So it was back to the Loping Plains to finish the grind up to level 65. The step up from Bonemire was pretty noticeable, as the monsters are packed right in in the Loping Plains and so it's easy to get adds while you fight, but I was able to wrap up the rest of the solo quests without too much trouble. I've got to say that I do like the Loping Plains quite a lot as a zone, with the fog and undead and ruins everywhere making it rather distinctive, like Darkshire in WoW. The quests are quite well done too, so all in all the Loping Plains was a good place to level and felt dangerous and hostile, like a high-end zone should.

Level 60-65, for me, was just a means to an end. There were several zones involved, the best being Loping Plains and the Sanctum of the Scaleborn, but all of them served their purpose. I can't say that they gripped me in the same way as the Steamfont dungeons did, for example, but they raised me up to level 65. Once I hit 65 I went to Kunark immediately, which is probably a good thing. The KoS was fine for seven or eight levels, but the thought of having to find another five levels grinding in Bonemire or the Loping Plains (as I'd done all the quests) really did not excite me, so I was pretty happy that there was an expansion with new zones that I could run off to. And then circumstance (exams) took over and had to stop playing EQ2. Maybe I'll continue the journey in the future (it seems stupid to stop now), but we'll see what happens.

Everquest 2 Player Diary Level 55 - 60

Level 55 to 60 provides players with their first chance to reach the content brought by the Kingdom of Sky expansion, though it is probably one best not to take immediately. The mobs there start at around level 57, so I thought I'd best wait until then before I headed up into the Overrealm. That meant I had to find two levels either in the Desert of Flames or in Faydwer; luckily I almost immediately found a group being put together for the Mines of Meldrath, an instance in the Steamfont Mountains.

Admittedly, I was probably a couple of levels too high for the Mines of Meldrath at 55, but the wonderful thing about Everquest 2 is that the Achievement Exp you get for running a dungeon the first time will make up for that. The Mines themselves turned out to be inside an extensive tunnel system in Steamfont, but thankfully all the monsters were grey to me until I actually got into the instance (which took a while, as I had no idea where I was going). Once inside, I realised that I would be mostly facing clockworks, and I probably should have done it before running Klak'Anon - it seems to be intended partly as an introduction to its bigger cousin.

Anyway, the basic setup of the dungeon is that you have to kill a number of bosses and harvest a power stone from each, which are then used to activate a clockwork robot that will build a bridge to the final boss. Along the way a ghostly gnome appears, telling you a small part of his story and luring you onwards, but sadly I did not really get to listen to what he had to say - the group seemed intent on getting through everything as quickly as possible. That was a bit of a shame, I thought, because I do enjoy those little touches that add some background to a dungeon. The final bossfight was relatively challenging and we actually wiped, though that was largely due to my own stupidity (I pulled aggro while AOEing the bodyguards, then I decided to Feign Death to clear the aggro while forgetting I was still assisting the tank - so I FDed him instead, which got everyone killed). In general the zone was actually surprisingly hard, with the monsters hitting much harder than their non-EoF counterparts, so if you're not on your toes you could quite easily wipe. But on the plus side, the Achievement Exp was good, the loot was excellent and it was a fun way to spend forty five minutes or so (it's a relatively short instance).

After that, I figured I'd give the Lesser Faydark another try. I always had quite liked the (admittedly very different) Lesser Faydark from back in Everquest 1, so I wasn't entirely happy leaving the updated version with my previous conclusions of 'worst zone ever'. In fact, at level 55 the zone turned out to be a lot more accessible and, remarkably enough, quite good fun. That's not to say that I don't think the zone is not still badly designed, because it is - frankly, it's like a maze. The wandering hostile heroics are also still a complete nightmare, particularly near the Butcherblock Mountains area. However, at level 55 or 56 you don't instantly die when you get an add while fighting, which makes the zone somewhat less frustrating. The fact that the horse stations have been added makes the zone MUCH easier to traverse too, though naturally you've got to have found each of the stations before you go there.

Once you get into it, though, you'll find the Lesser Faydark quite an interesting zone. The quest lines are plentiful and actually kept me more than interested as I played through them, and the fact that there's an outpost in the zone with a mender and broker there (along with lots of quests) made me very happy. There's also an area in the zone that's been overrun by otherworldly attackers like Shadowed Men, which I really enjoyed fighting in. The Shadowed Men look very impressive with decent graphics settings on (apparently they look similarly good in the Obelisk of Lost Souls, but I always turn my graphics right down in dungeons as you can't afford to lag while tanking), with really cool smoky effects around the edge of their portals. There's also some weird void creatures that look vaguely humanoid while standing still, but then split apart and become very distinctly alien when they move. I spent half a level soloing around there to hit 57 after I'd done the quest lines and I really quite enjoyed it. Thus, I've upgraded the Lesser Faydark to a mediocre zone - it's far from well designed or beginner-friendly, but it's a lot of fun when you get into it. I really wouldn't bother going there till 55+ though; stick to the easier DoF zones instead.

Once I hit 57 I headed up to the Kingdom of Sky using the wizard spires in the Commonlands, ending up in a zone called the Tenebrous Tangle. But even after extensive leveling there, I'm still not sure if I like it, as it is quite an odd design (like much of the KOS that I've seen). Basically, the Overrealm consists of several zones, each broken up into numerous small islands connected by teleporters. While this does allow each little area to have its own distinct theme, usually dictated by the type of monster that lives there, it does strike me as somewhat lazy. Much like the original release zones of Everquest 2, they appear to have come up with a few ideas and then not bothered filling in the blanks, the empty sea between the islands in this case being replaced by empty sky. The graphical style in each zone is generally similar between each island, too, the only difference (as mentioned above) being the monsters that reside there. Having said that, the Tenebrous Tangle and the neighbouring Barren Sky were visually very distinct from one another - it was just pretty monotonous within them.

Putting aside the structure of the zone, though, Kingdom of Sky has some neat ideas. To reach the friendly outpost in the Tenebrous Tangle, for example, you have to leap off a waterfall and fall about five hundred metres into a big pool of water. It's nothing too major, but it is quite a cool touch. The zone is also quite clearly designed as a 'newbie' zone, as it's packed full of repeatable quests that make leveling towards 60 a breeze. I picked up two levels in TT before the easy repeatable quests ran out, and I didn't get bored because it went by so quickly. In terms of monsters, there's a new dragonkin race called the Droag that make up the majority of the enemies, as well as the standard dragonflies/snakes/wasps/hostile plantlife. Some of the islands are quite good for grinding, too, though finding the right teleporter can be a nightmare. The other thing worth mentioning about TT is that it contains the Sanctum of the Scaleborne, a dungeon that starts at about level 60 that I'll cover in my next entry, but I'll say now that it's very well designed and a lot of fun to play though. Overall, Tenebrous is quite a good zone that gives good adventure and achievement experience, though I do find the fact it is literally a series of unconnected islands with different creatures on them rather underwhelming in terms of zone design - had I paid good money to buy the expansion separately, I might have felt a little shortchanged.

To get up to 60 after I had grown tired of soloing in Tenebrous, I returned to Faydwer and did some grouping. My first port of call was New Tunaria, formerly Felwithe from EQ1. This was the home city of the High Elves back in the day, but over the last 500 years they had become a little more insular and now the place is a level 60ish dungeon. First up, it's worth noting the zone's visual style, which is very striking with a lot of gold and white marble. Sadly the exteriors of the buildings are actually quite badly textured when you get close, but the interior areas of the zone look very nice. The creatures you will be fighting are just average looking elves, mixed in with the stone statue mob models that you'll have seen before in countless other dungeons, but it's in the EoF mold and therefore a pretty tough zone. The mobs hit hard compared to those of similar level in other expansions and drop slightly better loot, but the zone overall is pretty badly done despite the potential it had for being really good. I was honestly expecting something special once I'd seen the striking white towers, and I was really hoping that they had done Felwithe justice, but sadly it was not to be.

The main problem with New Tunaria is largely that there's nothing to do. There's not many nameds and almost no quests at all, coupled with little loot worth remarking about (unless you're particularly keen on repeating the word 'average' to yourself). There was one quest, but to get it we had to pray at an altar while being beaten on by four non-heroic mobs. This wasn't too much of a problem once we'd worked out what to do, but then it turned out we couldn't pray at the altar because it was nighttime. A quest that you can only get half of the time? Yeah, great idea...

After getting rather bored of New Tunaria, my group decided just to head to the Court of Innovation instead. This is an instance within Klak'Anon, aimed at those in their high 50s, and it was a complete contrast to New Tunaria. Though by this point I was getting thoroughly sick of fighting clockworks, I had a really good time in the Courts - fighting through the dungeon involves a series of puzzles as well as bossfights, and it was challenging but not impossible. It felt well-balanced in that the zone felt dangerous but doable, and it taxed your head a little more than just hammering your hotbar keys. It was also cool because there were no respawns as it was an instance, meaning that the clearing of trash mobs was not much of a chore - you knew you'd only have to do it once. The final bossfight was pretty climactic (you really felt like you were fighting a final boss) and the loot was excellent, as was both the adventure and achievement experience. Overall, a very polished instance that shouldn't be missed by anyone.

To wrap up, level 55-60 was fine. It took a while to do but, with the release of the Kunark expansion, the level progression pre-70 is being made easier and therefore this is somewhat of a non-issue. I get the impression that the trek would have been quite dull without Faydwer, but being able to alternate between zones in Faydwer and the Kingdom of Sky kept things fresh and meant I didn't have to spend so long anywhere that I became sick of it, and that can only be a good thing. Next time, the Loping Plains and the rest of the KOS.

Everquest II Player Diary Level 50 to 55

Choraz continued his frenzied race through the levels once he had hit 50, hitting 55 with only six days left before the expansion is released (I don't think he's going to make it). That's not through want of effort, however - levelling beyond the big five zero seems to take much longer than it did before it. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, as there's a lot of content for you to explore (hence the long post), but it's not ideal when you're desperately trying to hit level 65. Also, as with the previous entry, screenshots will come once I've got to Kunark. Give it 2-3 weeks and this whole diary will look lovely from start to finish.

Anyway, as I'd already completed the Sinking Sands, I kicked off level 50 by going to the Lesser Faydark. Turns out that was a bit of a mistake - despite being advertised as a zone that ranged from 50 to 60, it's quite clearly impossible to do anything there when you're a level 50. Given that I can solo non-heroic monsters five or six levels higher than me, this is quite astounding. I thought perhaps the dev team had got past the stage where they made horrible zones, but as the Lesser Faydark is most definitely another terrible zone they clearly have not.

So what's terrible about it? Well, first up, it's really enclosed and it's very difficult to work out where you're going. There are very few wide open spaces, if any, and the zone itself is actually pretty small. On top of that, I had the audacity to try zoning in from the Butcherblock Mountains side, which is a level 20-30 zone that contains the docks from Antonica, and I promptly found myself surrounded by level 60 triple heroics intent on melting my face with whatever magic spells they had to hand. Thanks to the fact my class is blessed with all sorts of ways of getting out of trouble, I managed to dodge through them and head towards the outpost beyond them, thinking I was in the clear. But the monk outpost beyond is also surrounded by level 60 mobs and the only quest-giver has hostile triple heroics flying around near him, meaning that you'll usually get killed before you can accept the damn quest.

Seriously unamused by the fact I'd died twice and achieved nothing, I pressed on and went deeper into the zone. I found an outpost in the middle of the zone, but it didn't offer me any quests - it only had quests for the high 50s - so I continued on my way. I immediately was set upon by a level 60 single heroic just as I walked down the path, so I ran past it, only to find myself in a part of the zone surrounded by level 60s. Predictably, I died. I respawned back at that outpost, and took another path. This one turned out to be leading in the vague direction of the Greater Faydark entrance and so did not contain quite as much uberdeath, eventually leading me to an outpost with quests around my level. Sadly, the wandering high-level mobs made the zone impossible to solo in when I found the Thexians I was meant to be killing, so I threw the hat in and moved on. I really don't like saying this, but the Lesser Faydark was one of the worst zones I've played in the game - it's restrictive, very difficult to solo and packed full of heroic mobs that you can't avoid because it's so tight. I genuinely thought the dev team were past that, but obviously not...

After that I went to Maj'Dul, the city in the Desert of Flames. That didn't amuse me overly either, as I'd aligned myself with the Court of Truth and therefore found both the Court of Coin and the Court of Blades hostile to me. This meant their patrolling guards would attack me, cutting off access to the parts of the city that had heroics guarding them. I kinda blundered around there for a bit, not achieving very much, then left. The city was more like a dungeon than a city and was largely abandoned, which to me isn't entirely surprising. I like the concept they went for, but I don't think the execution was ideal. For example, the other two Courts had stairwells down to their Court buildings, whereas the stairway to the Court of Truth was guarded by Court of Coin guards. So I had to fight my way to my court building, where I discovered I couldn't get in anyway.

In the end, most players who want to fight will go to a proper adventure zone, so I think Maj'Dul suffers from trying to mix a city and a dungeon - it's not particularly good at being either. The other thing to mention was the Arena, which is intended to allow people to team PvP one another or fight using 'champions' that can be bought or won from quests. Only problem is, I've never seen or heard about anyone using it - to use it, you have to stand by the entrance while you wait for opponents, rather than being able to run about like the WoW battleground queueing, and once inside the arenas are hardly inspiring anyway. It's a shame, because god knows that EQ2 could do with some casual PvP just for an occasional change of pace.

After these two levels I was still only about 35% into level 50, so I headed to the Pillars of Flame, which is another large outdoor zone that borders the Sinking Sands. It's unfortunately not as well designed as the Sinking Sands, but it's still not bad to play though(particularly as you get towards the mid-fifties). The quests are quite interesting and the variation of mobs in the level is quite good, and it still looks rather good, but inexplicably the heroics are back. There's one area full of tigers that has linked tigers that are double undercons, meaning I could quite possibly solo five or six of them at once, mixed in with triple heroics who can kill me in less than ten seconds. As they both look exactly the same, this is ridiculous and just makes travelling that part of the zone an undue hazard. I mean, it's not like anyone's going to want to group up and hunt the heroic tigers as any quests involving them can be done by hunting the easier linked ones, so why bother at all? Not to mention that this area is right near the zone-in outpost, meaning that unless you want to be dodging heroic tigers you need to fight your way through an enormous goblin camp to see the rest of the zone. There were also similar wandering heroics among the harpies, again looking exactly the same as their brethren, which killed me on a couple of occasions.

The other thing that annoyed me about the zone is that there were three or four areas you could get quests, but they were spread to different corners of the zone. So you'd complete a couple of quests and find you'd have to run/fly the whole length of the zone just to hand both in. Given quests from both outposts were for the same level range (in fact, often the same monsters), it seems a little strange to do it that way. It would have been more logical to have all the quests for level 50-51 in the first outpost, then you get sent to the second one for the 52-53 quests and the like. That having been said, however, it's still an enjoyable zone to play - it just didn't bowl me over like Sinking Sands thanks to a few niggling design flaws.

After this I popped over to Permafrost for a bit, a dungeon in Everfrost that contains the ghost of Vox, a famous dragon boss from the original EQ. She's an epic mob so we didn't try and tackle her, but we did head around the rest of the place and clear it. While it looks quite impressive in places (in a kind of badly-textured release EQ2 kind of way), the zone was very little challenge and by the end we were three-manning the place with the swashbuckler (rogue class) tanking. The loot was horrible, as in most old world zones, and there was minimal quests on offer as well. I left having gained half a level but feeling a little let down. Permafrost is a zone that needs updating, as it's largely obsolete given that it was made for characters who were capped at level 50 and had none of the gear that came in the later expansions. It can barely count as a dungeon any more either; it's just so damn easy that there's no sense of risk any more.

That done, it was back to the Pillars of Flame, where I headed to a dungeon called the Clefts of Rujark that straddles both the Sinking Sands and the aforementioned Pillars. This is quite a neat zone for two reasons; firstly, the lower level is entirely soloable if you're of the right level. The exp is average and there's not too many named, but it's nice to have somewhere to go that's between Sinking Sands and Pillars of Flame in terms of levels. The upper levels, however, are full of heroic group content with several nameds. You have to use a lift to get between them, so there's no chance of running into a heroic when you're soloing, so I thought that was quite a cool change of pace. Having said that, there were numerous rooms that you could fight your way into only to find that there was nothing to speak of inside them; it would be nice to have some kind of named mob or questgiver/quest target at the end of most of the corridors. With a decent group we cleared most of the Heroics, then did the instance inside the zone. That had three nameds in it, none of whom dropped anything worthwhile, but the Achievement Exp meant it wasn't a complete waste of time. I got a valuable level fighting in Rujark and quite a bit of Achievement exp from exploring the place and killing named enemies, so it was well worth clearing at least once.

The Living Tombs was next, a mid-fifties dungeon accessed from the Sinking Sands. I didn't spend long enough there to do many quests but I got a bit of achievement experience from the few I did, as well as for exploration and killing a couple of nameds. Again, the loot was pretty unimpressive, but I still loved the zone. Why? Simply because it looks so damn cool, with great mausoleums lit up by eeire green lighting and filled with undead. It gives the feeling of a really unnatural zone and that you're somewhere you shouldn't be, which adds to the tension quite a lot. It's really a shame that the zone hasn't been re-itemised because it really looks that good. The screenshots don't even do it justice; everyone should go visit it even if just to look at how pretty all the lights are. Maybe that's just my personal tastes, but I really think it looks that good.

The final zone I spent a bit of time in was Klak'Anon. This is the homeland of the gnomes from Everquest I, Ak'Anon, having been taken over by the clockworks. This is actually only the second dungeon I had visited in Echoes of Faydwer, after Crushbone Keep, and the first thing to mention is that it is damn hard. The monsters hit like a ton of bricks and, even though I'm wearing largely mastercrafted gear, I nearly died on several occasions while fighting a couple of trash mobs. That may be due to questionable healing, of course, but getting more than a couple of triple heroic adds when you're fighting will spell doom in Klak, unless you've got a crowd control class to deal with them. The respawns in the zone are also rather quick, meaning you've got be on your toes and keep moving forward else you'll find yourself in all kinds of trouble.

That having been said, I thought this was really good (despite it being quite mentally draining to tank, given the endless stream of adds you seem to get in some of the rooms). It's nice to have a challenge, and the Echoes of Faydwer dungeons are certainly that. Despite being of similar level to Permafrost, if you tried to three-man Klak the only place you'd be going would be the graveyard. The place is well laid out and comes with an in-game map that allows you to see where you and all your groups are in the zone just like you could in outdoor zones, which is a fantastic touch and one I really appreciated. There are a lot of quests there, one of which took two runs to complete but gave me a very good reward indeed, and plenty of named mobs to keep everyone happy. There's also an instance and a raid zone inside Klak - we went to the instance but found it a little too tough for us, so I'll probably go back around level 60 and give it another go.

Overall, 50-55 was quite a good experience, particularly towards the end when I spent a couple of levels in Klak'Anon. Having said that, though, it took a LONG time to get there and I expect that to only get worse as I progress through the levels. Still, it's nice to see the high-end game content and it's particularly refreshing that the EOF zones are a challenge even to someone with relatively good gear and fair bit of MMORPG experience under their belt. I'm quite eager to see the Kingdom of the Sky after the surprisingly good Desert of Flames, so I plan to visit that in my next entry. Until then, it's adieu from me.

Everquest 2 Player Diary - Levels 45-50

After my three month hiatus from EQ2, enforced by my internet connection, I returned with newfound enthusiasm for the game. Why? Well, because the Kunark expansion is due to come out on November the 13th, meaning that I had all of two and a half weeks to gain at least 20 levels (the proper Kunark content starting at 65). I burned through 45-50 in three days, mostly thanks to having rested (double) experience the whole way, and I actually really enjoyed it. This may be down to the break I'd had from the game, but I think it also had a lot to do with the zones I was in. Screenshots will come later, because I'm too busy trying to level to go and take them.

I kicked off in Steamfont, a zone I've mentioned before. I went from 45 to 47 there, hunting in the two high-level parts of the map I'd not explored before and refamiliarising myself with my character. Both had a few quests and were entertaining enough, helped by the fact that Steamfont is a very pretty zone. The water effects around the geysers are very well done too, as water effects in EQ2 generally are. Not much to say that hasn't already been said regarding Steamfont, though, so I'll move onto what came next.

At 47, I headed over to the Sinking Sands, the first zone in the first expansion pack - Desert of Flames. I thought it was a bit random at first to have an Arab-inspired continent in Everquest 2, given its high fantasy roots, but it quickly began to make sense when I discovered the continent was based on the Desert of Ro in the original EQ. It's a shame that it's a separate continent, really, as there aren't many desert zones in EQ2 and the fact they all seem to be on a continent of their own really serve to emphasise the fact that the in-game world is largely a series of unconnected zones, all surrounded by ocean. Faydwer and Kunark are entire continents and feel much better for it, so it seems a shame that Antonica is so disjointed. If it were joined together again (with the Desert of Flames re-integrated into it), the game would feel a hell of a lot more cohesive for it.

Previously, I had assumed the Desert of Flames would be crap. This was largely thanks to the fact it was released within a year of the original EQ2, so I assumed it would suffer from generally the same malaise as the rest of the release EQ2 zones. However, I'm glad to say that I was wrong - from what I've seen of it so far, the Desert of Flames is a superb expansion. Let's start with my old favourite, visual style. The vast expanses of sand are very striking, and the large numbers of undead and ruins with glowy green writing give a rather eerie feel that does bring back fond memories of the original Ro. The locals have also built their own structures in the classic Arabian style - brightly coloured spiralled towers are visible on the horizon, alongside fantastic palaces on floating islands in the sky and the like. It really does give the sensation of a land filled with powerful magic, and it gives you a very good feeling about the dungeons in the zone.

Onto zone design, and the Sinking Sands comes out pretty well. It's a large zone (though only one map page) and it's packed with content, so you get an awful lot of Achievement Experience for exploring it. The various areas are different from one another too, so it's not packed with content in the tedious sense of the Feerott - this is a proper zone in which you could happily spend three or four levels adventuring and exploring without getting bored. The number of quests is also pretty high and, if you do most of them (which you should do, as you get a lot of Achievement xp), you'll be sent everywhere in the zone. Some of them are quite interesting, too - treasure hunting and exploring, for example. The most intriguing one, however, was helping an armorer who needed intact scarab shells. To get them you would have to chase skittish scarabs into a valley of triple-heroic tarantulas, who would then kill them and let you steal the shell to return to them. Unfortunately, there's 9 quests in the line and to complete them all you'd have to herd well over a hundred scarabs to their doom, but certainly doing two or three is quite entertaining.

In terms of the old bugbear, wandering heroics, Sinking Sands doesn't do too badly. There are quite a lot of heroic monsters, such as the aforementioned tarantulas, but they generally stay in their valley and, besides, they're there for a quest. The only wandering double or triple heroics look like you should stay out of their way - the named heroic orcs have platemail on and the giants are, well, giant. As I mentioned in the last entry, I don't have a problem with a few wandering triple heroics in the zone, so long as they actually LOOK heroic and you can easily see them coming. Linked mobs are more common than in Faydwer, too, but they are confined to static camps in this zone (and only rarely are they linked heroics). Again, that's fine by me - I'd prefer if there weren't any linked mobs at all, but I'm not overly bothered by linked mobs if they don't wander and they're non heroic. Thus, in my book at least, the Sinking Sands has all the hallmarks of an excellent zone and it's left me looking forward to exploring the rest of the expansion.

The other thing I did between level 45 and 50 was go and visit Everfrost, one of my favourite zones from the original EQ. I didn't spend too long there (I earned perhaps 25% of level 48), but I went to level up my harvesting. Sinking Sands only has level 50 harvestables in it, which you need to be level 48 to have any chance to harvesting. Since I started in the SS at 47, I had to go back to Everfrost/Steamfont to get my harvesting up to the required level once I had hit 48. While I was there, I thought I'd have a peek around.

Overall, I have to say that I hated it in pretty much every way. The original Everfrost was mostly open tundra, with a mountain-based newbie zone for those fresh out of Halas, the barbarian city. The new one appears to be some kind of ice floe, and is frankly laughable in its design. You arrive on a dock which is not connected to the mainland, thus forcing you to jump off and swim. Sadly, there does not appear to be any way back up there once you have jumped, which is a bit of a shame if you happened to grab a quest or two off the NPC on the dock. That's pretty annoying and completely mystifying, but to make matters worse there's usually an epic x2 shark called Dreadwake swimming about in the water, ready to devour you when you try to swim for land. If not, the whole sea is filled with hostile and often heroic whales/sharks anyway, so your chances of actually making it to land are minimal anyway.

Fortunate as I am, though, I survived the water and found myself in a canyon. I fought through that, dying only when I was jumped by some linked triple heroic wolves that looked exactly like all the other wolves in the zone, and eventually found myself in some strange icy plateau. It was full of creatures, most non-hostile (except the wandering triple heroics), and eventually led me to a small dungeon filled with some ice spirit maiden things. As the journey had been rather dull, I was somewhat underwhelmed and wondered if there was anything else to the zone. Consulting my map, it appeared I had not even explored half of it, so I set about trying to find the rest of the zone. Turns out, to find the main part of the zone, you have to jump off the docks and swim through a couple of tiny, almost invisible tunnels that lead within the island (while trying not to get eaten by the sharks). Good luck finding that if you didn't already know about it...

When inside, the zone basically consists of (triple heroic) golems and skeletons with their models set to a transparent blue to represent ice. Beyond that there's finally a bit of tundra, filled with the familiar bears and mammoths of the original EQ. But there's few quests, and the mobs are all just milling around (often triple heroic), so it seems rather empty and pointless. Beyond that there's a load of giants guarding the entrance to Permafrost, another dungeon, and a sea filled with ice floes covered in goblins. I left the zone wondering why it had been made in the first place, as it seems only to exist to contain Permafrost. There are almost no quests, few interesting monsters and no friendly outposts to speak of, so overall it's a poor zone at best. Thank god we've got the Sinking Sands to get you to 50 then, eh?