Everytime we try to get away, it pulls us back in...

Hey Everyone,

The site has been updated to the most recent version of Wordpress and some new plugins have been added as well.  It has been a long, long time since the last update and I apologize for that, life has kept me busy over the past months (almost a year) – it is good to be back!

All of the EQJunkies were playing EQ1 last year for awhile.  There was one night when all four of us were on at the same time!  Slowly though, people started to drop off.  First, Greldor had to stop playing since school and his wedding were taking up all of his time, next Surly stopped playing due to work and girlfriend commitments.  Landuran hung in there for awhile, but ultimately he got bored with the game.

I continued to play (four box) for many months.  I managed to reach T5 in Seeds of Destruction.  About the same time I accomplished this the developers decided to hand out better gear via MMs, which was all it took for me to jump ship.  With that single action they trivialized all the work that I had put in over the previous six months.  I mean, I expected that the new expansion, Underfoot, would make my gear useless, but MM gear is low risk better reward – that was simply unacceptable to me.

After I quit EQ1 I started to get busy looking for a home IRL and didn’t have much time to devout to gaming.  After that, I spent a lot of time messing around with MythTV and getting that system setup to help avoid buying cable (more details on all of that will come out on a later post).

Recently, I somehow convinced Landuran to give EQ2 another shot.  I revived my character on the Crushbone server and managed to convince a couple of our old EQ friends to join us.  So far it has been fun and I will keep you posted on how things are going in Norrath.

In the coming months I hope to revive this blog to its former self – providing information on MMOs and also the occasional information regarding linux, MythTV, and linux gaming.

Q1: What’s the latest all-in-one pack I can buy to get caught up with all the expansions?

A: Seeds of Destruction.  You can purchase this ONLY online through the station store or on the server select screen.  There is a new expansion coming out in November, Underfoot.

Q2 – What level can you start using Mercs?

A: Level One.  You just need to own Seeds of Destruction.  Mercs are free until you hit level 10 at which point you pay a small fee every 15 minutes you have them active.

Q3 – Given my long absence and all the changes in the game since I quit… would you recommend I start over with a new char?  Or try and remember how to play my old ones?

A: You have three options (I believe):

1. Goto the new 51/50AA server.  You start at level 51 with 50 AAs.  I hear they have a solid population.
2. Goto the Stormm Server (I hear a lot of people say they have a good population of new players).
3. Start a new character on your original server or another normal server.

If you decide to start fresh on a normal server give Bristlebane a shot.  My guild, Meiyo, is more than willing to help you get started again.

Q4: What has changed since I have been gone?

A: Short answer…everything.

Long answer:

1. Experience is a lot easier to copy by.  Getting to level 70 won’t take you more than a month even if you are a casual player.
2. Everyone gets an experience boost on AAs till you have 1,000.  This will help you catch up faster
3. Your old gear probably is worthless.  SOE introduced defiant gear which is a common drop off of any mob and easily bought in the bazaar.  These items will help you get going again.

Q5: Where Should I Experience?

A: Anywhere you like, but if you are looking for guidance…I would suggest the zones found in this post.  SOE introduced hot zones to provide players with a place to go to gain bonus experience.  Because of the bonus experience you will also notice those zones make it easier to find groups.

• Level 20: Everfrost Peaks

• Level 25: Permafrost Keep

• Level 30: Iceclad Ocean

• Level 35: Tower of Frozen Shadow

• Level 40: Great Divide

• Level 45: Eastern Wastes

• Level 50: Velketor’s Labyrinth

• Level 55: Kael Drakkel

• Level 60: Western Wastes

• Level 65: The Ascent

• Level 70: Icefall Glacier

• Level 75: Valdeholm

• Level 75: Frostcrypt

They are really running with the frozen summer theme, haha.

*** SPAM filtering ***

• SPAM filtering has been added.
  • Messages flagged as spam will appear as “Soandso tells you, (SPAM)”.
  • Clicking the word (SPAM) in the chat window will display the filtered message.
  • Clicking someone’s name in the chat window will bring up a menu that allows you to report what they said as either spam or not spam (in case the message was mis-flagged as spam).
  • Mails are also filtered for SPAM.  An email flagged as SPAM will have its subject replaced by “SPAM”.

Buttons have been added to the mail window to report emails as spam or not spam (in case they are mis-flagged as spam).

This is extremely good news for Everquest players since the filtering is being developed for this game.  I would imagine similar systems could be setup for their other games.

1. I don’t have to compete with other for the camp site/named
2. Unlike uninstanced named in T4, this guy has some predictability to his spawning.  He either spawns after you kill 15 mobs or he doesn’t spawn at all.

Prerequisites:

• Quest: Times are a Chainin’
• Faction: Kindly with Toskirakk Slaves.

If you need to raise your faction I would recommend the following tasks.

• Find Your Allies
• Whom The Frogs Destroy
• Wraith of the Korascian
• Champions No More
• Disrupt the Siege
• Retinue The Frog-God

The first three tasks must be completed before you can do Champions no More and Disrupt the Siege.  Alla says that Champions/Disrupt the siege gives faction, but I was unable to confirm this.  I stuck to the first three…plus the camp is easier and more named pop there.

Get The Task:

• Talk to Trilyaris (located right when you zone into Toskirakk from the void) and say “meet him”.  She will give you the task, Hiding in Plain Sight.
• Say “ready” to zone into the instance.

Getting to the Camp Site

• Upon Zoning in make sure everyone in the goup is invised

Hiding

• Using the above map as a guide, make your way to the green dot near the center of the map.  This will be your camp spot for the whole process.

Killing 15 Mobs

• You need to kill 15 mobs before Borskar will spawn.  It doesn’t matter how long/short this takes you – he won’t spawn until 15 mobs have died.
• Swarm pets do count (Wizard’s Call of Xuzl for example), but swarm pet procs from weapons do not count (SK swarm pet sword for example).
• I have found that the warboars have the lowest about of health and hit the lightest of anything in the zone.  They spawn all around your campsite and I have pointed out some of them on the map above.
• When pulling boars be aware of the Rallosian mobs around you – they will social agro if a boar gets to close to them.  They have signicantly more hp and hit a lot harder.
• Note: With an 85 SK with 4.2k AC/26k HP and nearly maxed out defensives I am able to tank 15 of these at a time.  Don’t be afraid to pull at least a few at a time.
• Personally, I used a log parser to help me keep track of how many boars I have killed so far.  When you pull a whole bunch at once, it is easy to lose count.

Checking For Borskar

• According to the Allakazam page he shouts “Lazy fools! None of you deserve to be in Rallos’ army. I doubt any of you are worthy of the heroes death you are soon to enjoy.” when he spawns, but I haven’t experienced this.
• Check along the his path I drew out in the above picture or have a tracker look for him.  I have found he does spawn within 20 seconds or so of the 15th kill.

Killing Borskar

• He has nothing to special about him,but can hit for up to 7k.  This can cause problems if your tank doesn’t have high AC or HP.
• My group makeup is Enchanter,Druid,Wizard,SK and 2 cleric mercs.  I was able to do all this boxed (SK/Wizard on one computer and Druid/Enchanter on the other).
• Set one merc to balanced and one merc to reactive so they don’t heal on the same cycle.
• Used edict of command with the enchanter to charm one of the guards for extra dps.
• Hit my deflection displine with the SK and pulled with harm touch (to ensure good agro).  While the disipline was active I tashed and slowed him with the enchanter.
• Sent the chanter’s charmed pet for dps.
• I then began constant spam heals with the druid.
• I then used twincast/other displines with the wizard and burned him down (while continuing spam heals with the druid).  He went down quickly.

Rinse and Repeat

• Once he is dead and you have looted have everyone drop the task.
• You can keep repeating this until you get all the loot you are after.

Everquest Two had a horrible launch.  On top of that – the game was horrible.  Sony spent so much time making sure that the trade skill system wasn’t trivial that they made it so complex it wasn’t even fun.  The graphics were out of this world.  The combat was ok, but it was lacking that EQ1 feeling we were all looking for.

Everquest Two, as it exists today is a completely different game than it was at launch.  They completely redid the trade skill system to make it a little less painful, added guild housing, improved the solo and small group quests.  Also, they actually go out of their way to have events and seasonal things in the game, which makes it fun.  The graphics continue to improve as systems become more and more powerful. They even have in game voice chat that works (unlike WoW – which is horrible)  …I haven’t seen any of the raid content yet, so I can’t comment on that.

The problem is no one wants to buy a game that is 5 years old and start playing it (unless you are an EQjunkie, of course).  I understand that – I don’t blame you.  This brings me to the point of this entire post – what about Everquest Three?

With all of the lessons learned from making Everquest One and EQ2 image what they could do with Everquest Three.  I realize Verant actually made Everquest One, but Sony supported it long enough that they know the ropes.

Here is what I propose for EQ3:

OS independence:

With consoles basically acting as computers today I don’t think it is unreasonable to support EQ3 on the Playstation 3, OSX, Windows, and Linux.  In reality, the first three I think could happen, but for whatever reason no one likes to develop games for Linux (Thankfully, there is Wine).  With OS independence Sony would have a larger pool of people to buy their game – that is never a bad thing.

Graphics:

Keep the Everquest Two style.  I really like the realism that comes with the graphics.  I also like how the graphics evolve as hardware becomes better and better.  I hate how cartoon like WoW is.

Basic Classes:

Steal this from Everquest One and WoW.  The more classes and specialization you add into the game the more complex balancing, gearing, raiding…everything becomes.  Go back to the original classes in Everquest One and try to revamp them.  Make things more simple and straightforward.

Solo and Group Content:

Continue upon what Everquest Two is doing.  Create solo and duo versions of the group dungeons so casual players will have a chance to experience most of the world.

Scale the loot and difficulty of dungeons dynamically based on how many people are in a group.  This will make things reasonable no matter how many people are in their party, while encouraging people to group together to get better loot…this is an MMO after all.

Keep currency the same.  Everquest one had LDONs and other dungeons that used special crystals to buy things.  It was annoying that each time a new expansion came out your old currency was worth nothing.  At the very least have an exchange NPC that will let you convert one currency to another.

Raid Content:

Make things difficult.  Raiding is not for the casual player and never will be.  Raiding is about putting in lots of time to develop a strategy and coordinate with many other people to defeat an epic monster.  If the fight isn’t epic, it wouldn’t be believable.

Bring back open air raid content.  Everquest One was well known for having dragons in the middle of a low level zone.  This was really cool for a couple of reasons:

1. It brought us back to low level zones we haven’t seen in awhile.

2. It gave everyone a sense of community – the low level players needed us to kill the dragon to make the zone playable.

Quests:

Make quests change.  Nothing makes an MMO more boring than following a guide from Alla or EQ2i.  Imagine if quests were dynamically created and there was no guide.  This is the most complex of all of the proposals, but it is still manageable.  At the very least have a few thousand versions of a quest that are randomly assigned.

Zones:

Create a set of zones for each tier of players 1-10,10-20, etc.  Once you have a set of zones stop.  When you release expansions only release content for higher level players.  Everyone will get a chance to work through the low level stuff if they keep plugging.  By limiting what they can do you push more people towards the level cap which will make finding a group easier on everyone.

Trade skills:

I like the harvesting on Everquest Two.  I would definitely keep that.  I would add a request system into the game so players could create their own writ and place it on the auction house.  Anyone with the right trade skill could fill the writ to earn coin and experience.  I think this would relieve some of the repetitiveness of trades skilling as it exists today.

Events:

Have events going on in game as much as possible.  Best of the Best tournaments, Seasonal quests, anything.  Events are the polish that makes a good MMO great.

Difficulty:

Raids should be hard.  They should make you want to pull your hair out.  They should require lots of communication and dedication.

The solo and group content should be manageable.  Things should be challenging (so it doesn’t get to boring), but not insanely hard.

What suggestions do you have for Everquest Three?