Days off and catching up
All the stuff that had piled up in my RSS Reader during my 16 days of absence of civilization came crashing down on me today. I spent most of the day catching up with news that were two weeks old, and I’m not even through one-third of them yet. Seven TV episodes and the live event quests in EQ2 were also on the pile.
A couple new quests were unlocked due to people contributing to and filling up the required bone shards to the brim. I got down to investing the murder of Seeress Ealayna Ithis right away. These quests were extremely well done, backed by a compelling storyline, in contrast to the previous live events that were mindless rinse and repeat ones. The conclusion of the quest even comes with a cut scene! I’d have loved to get them done on as many characters as possible, but with only a short few days of freedom, I don’t have the luxury of time. Sigh.
I also canceled a bunch of subscriptions. I’m actually considering placing my EQ2 account on hold. I want to take this chance (that I’ll rarely be home) to live a life as frugal as possible. The pay, or rather, allowance for National Servicemen is a pittance. Roughly calculated (assuming a 6-day week and 17-hours a day, since we only get 7 hours of sleep) it’s somewhere in the range of a dollar per hour for a Recruit. It makes being employed as a toilet cleaner in the private sector something of a luxury job.
As Murphy’s Law of Combat puts it, “always keep in mind that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder”, so are the men who are supposed to be defending this country (being paid the least).
Life returns to Everfrost
Climate change is something we can bounce back from. Two years ago, Everfrost was hit by global warming in LU27. The tradeskill desks went under and no one in the right mind had any reason to linger around cracking arctic shelves.
However, just as the planet we live on went through multiple heating and cooling stages, and is still, discounting geographical changes, largely intact, so is Everfrost in the world of Norrath. With the recent GU48, Everfrost seem to have bounced back and people once again, flocked back, bringing with them a few new series of quests to the zone.
Proudly discovered by both Calreth senior and junior
One of them happen to be a widow who lost her husband after being attacked by sharks. Poor, poor her. Feeling sorry for her because, having nearly lost my life on multiple occasions before to Dreadwake and his lesser entourage, I understood how she felt and decided to lend her a helping hand. I set about salvaging what remains of her family possessions off the ocean floor, aiding in the eradication of sharks, and retrieving her husband’s wedding ring. I had discovery on the wedding ring and the final mage earing reward on Calreth, both on the Najena and Antonia Bayle server. Yay me!
Also, I suppose due to the melting of glaciers and what not, an opening has been torn in the mountain ranges such that the entire zone is now connected, instead of the NE path from the docks leading to a dead end. Some rather charming ladies seem to have taken up home there.
I haven’t done a lot given how much new content GU48 introduces to the game, but what I can confidently say at this point is that global warming does not signal an end to all life.
It’s my first day
It’s not just an excuse for my bad performance, I swear!
I finally coughed up the US$50 to move a Lv 70 Wizard I had on the Oasis server over to Najena and joined up with Nostalgia so I get to play with all the cool people in it from time to time. I’ve been meaning to do it for sometime now but I always ended up dragging my feet. But with the US dollar going up (1.4 Singapore dollars to 1 US dollar now), it was now or never.
Having read about Tipa’s problem with having her characters transferred due to sales crates, I wisely logged in and remove them before applying for the transfer. I had not logged onto that particular character for what must be at least a thousand days, and I almost felt guilty when I logged into an active guild with people going “that’s one name I haven’t seen in a long time”. That didn’t stop me though.
I didn’t want to play another Wizard since I already have one that’s Lv 80 on the Antonia Bayle server, so I went ahead and betrayed it to a Warlock. I had consulted with Shadowgeist earlier in the day and we both thought it was better that I betrayed first so that I got the chance to learn how to properly play one during the next 10 levels, which meant that I was forced to buy new spells, instead of getting a few levels in first then betraying which would give me the benefit of using my Ad3/Master spells that I had on Wizard. The nice thing about gaining faction for Neriak (betraying from Qeynos to Neriak) prior to being accepted as a citizen is that it comes with a fat load of AA from the series of assassination quest which gives +3000 faction each, including AA from both the easy peasy names and the quest itself. Being evil has it benefits. I made about 3 points worth of AA in total.
In addition, 6 repeatables that give +5000 faction each were also necessary after completing the above mentioned quest line to bring me up to the amiable faction required. Sadly, these quests were neither fun nor rewarding. I picked one which told me to grab 10 stones and to kill a certain number of vampires along the way. The specific mobs needed for the quest, the priests, had a poor spawn and it ended up taking a lot longer than I expected it to. The next one I picked (which I stuck to for the next subsequent attempts) had me kill spiders and collect eggs. The update from the spiders were rare, and therefore it didn’t go that much faster compared to the previous quest.
I emptied my bagful of eggs into the hands of the quest giver and strolled happily into Neriak after all that is done, ready to finally settle down, but not before I got involved in some bodyguard duty, child kidnapping and trafficking, vagabond and courtesan killing and a few pieces of paperwork.
The next hour was spent eating cold refrigerated chicken pieces leftover from my earlier attempt at cooking lunch and mulling over which spells I need to be getting.
I was later invited into an Obelisk of Blight group which I was hesitant to accept because I doubt my abilities. Here I am, a Lv 70 Warlock who has no experience in the class whatsoever. I eventually accepted it anyway and nearly got the group killed when I casted Rift and didn’t realize how much further its range was compared to other AoE spells I had and ended up pulling a ton of mobs. My mix mash of Adept 1 or Apprentice IV (for those which I can’t find Ad1s for, or were just heavily overpriced. 96g for a Ad1 root? I’m not paying that!) didn’t do me very good either and placed me near the bottom of the parse almost all the time. The group must have thought I was a pretty bad player.
Overall, it was a rather productive day in terms of gaming. Also, watching Stargrace’s reaction to me being in her guild sent me grinning and giggling. It was something that I’ve been waiting for all day.
Torrent Knights is level 30
Torrent Knights is now level 30
It took awhile, but we finally made it! Level 30 means more bank slots, and also access to more mounts. I’ve been considering getting Xedil a mount for sometime now, but I keep putting it off thinking that I’ll be able to work my way up the tradeskill levels and get myself an Earring of the Solstice from the tradeskill epic and have a run speed buff from that. It’s still a while away so I might go visit the stables after all.
Congratulations to you Stargrace, even though you no longer play on this server, it’s still your guild!
Nektropos Castle: The Return
I haven’t been able to get a group to do the new Runnyeye instance yet, but I did manage to get a few friends together and do another zone that I’ve always wanted to run through, Nektropos Castle: The Return, or Nek2 for short.
Nek2 is basically a level 50 remake of the good old Nektropos Castle that we’re all so familiar with. The only difference is that unlike Nek1, which has a ton of quests inside, and even more heritage quests which require you to tour the zone, Nek2 has a total sum of zero quests.
Shelia Everling - damn she's massive! (and notice the typo)
The instance is a lot more linear than the first. Unlike the first, the place has caved in at a lot more places, resulting in conveniently blocked passageways and only one path leading to the end of the zone.
Two of my friends returned to the game because of the Living Legacy trial program, who conveniently happened to be a Shadowknight and a Dirge, complimenting my usual duo of a me (a Fury) and friend who plays a Swashbuckler. With the exception of the two patchwork golems right at the beginning of the zone who seemed to have a ton more HP than even some of the other names, we tore through the zone with just four of us.
It was a fun trip down a zone that I’ve always longed to do, and we came out with a decent amount of AA gained. The only thing that I would whine, and whine really badly about the zone is that the drops were pathetic. Every single named we killed dropped wood. Disappointing. Disgusting. Pathetic.
EQ2 Patch (26/02) and Problems
It seems that after yesterday’s EQ2 patch, players in certain regions of Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong) have been reporting problems that they either can’t login (invalid username/password, waiting for login server #) or they crash to desktop moments after being in game with no error message whatsoever. There’s a thread on the official forums going on to discuss this currently, although no official word from SoE has been received.
There doesn’t seem to be a network issue as some people suggested. I did a few tracerts and everything seems in order. I find the problem extremely curious because under normal circumstances, going link dead usually throws me to the login screen, instead of just mysteriously crashing to the desktop. Still, I’m keeping my fingers crossed and trying not to come up with any conspiracy stories until official word has been received.
Edit (28/02): It seems the problem has been fixed. Those who had problems connecting were instructed to drop a PM to one of their tech support agents by the handle of TSR-DanT with their station login and IP address.
Ok, if you have from Singapore and are unable to connect, please PM me your station name and your IP address Please do not give me a 192.168 address, it does me NO good. Make sure you disconnect your router, or use a site like http://whatismyip.com/.
If you ask for my opinion, this makes it sound like they accidentally cut some of us off while they were blocking certain address blocks, and that they were adding us to a white list of sorts to get around the problem.
The not-so-epic epic
It’s done! I beat the game! Okay that was a bit of an exaggeration. The heroic portion of my epic quest was completed yesterday, well actually bit over a day now at the time of this writing. I got lucky with Kotiz, a bunch of guildies were needing updates in deep Sebilis and I managed to tag along and he was right there, and dropped exactly what I need. There seems to be issues with him not dropping the quest item according to other Wizards in a thread over at EQ2flames, so I’m extremely glad mine went smooth.
I won’t be getting the mythical-flagged raid version of my epic anytime soon because it’ll be a long while to go before my guild is able to clear Veeshan’s Peak. For the moment being, I’m glad to have the quest largely out of the way so I can focus on my upcoming exams in two weeks time. That doesn’t mean I’m just going to drop everything I’m doing in EQ2 thought, I’ll be still helping some friends get their updates.
Epic quests and why I hate Chardok
Having finished my tradeskill epic (and dying twice to rats in the special instance of Nek Castle because I was careless), I moved on to progress on my Wizard epic.
Chardok is an absolutely horrible zone. It is much worse than working on the CMM part of SoD in EoF, because not only do you have mobs 6 levels higher than you, you also have to deal with the ambushers that drop from the cliff occasionally, which to make matters worse, are often bugged so you would pull it, only to have it take a swipe at your party, reset, and do it all over again. Therefore, the trip to the Palace where my updates were was much harder than actually hunting inside the Palace. It was extremely frustrating being in pickup groups that would spend all day just attempting the journey, but not actually arriving at the Palace.
However, we soon found out that unlike other heroic zones, you can have more than one group, form a raid, and have the mobs still drop loot. Excellent! If we can’t beat them by skill, we’ll unleash a zerg upon them! And that was what we did, eventually heading there with three groups. After two whole days of hair-pulling frustration, I was able to get the body drops I needed from the mobs in the Palace. Hurray! I wonder if Sebilis could be two-grouped also. I’m not looking forward to have to kill Kotiz deep inside Sebilis at all. I daresay at this point it would be a bigger pain in the ass than in Chardok. Who on earth am I going to convenience to go all to way down to camp a named with a 2h spawn timer right infront of the entrance to Venril Sathir with me?!
Frustrations and an endless slew of curse words aside, I did actually enjoy the experience of getting to know and having to work with strangers, resulting meeting with a whole bunch of people, whom some are really nice, that I’ll never come across otherwise. That’s the beauty of quests which forces you to group and actually help each other out, instead of just soloing the entire way. I hate and love you SoE devs at the same time.
Enter the rat
What’s there to do when you get two days off for Chinese New Year? Raid of course! While most people here are off visiting relatives and other friends, I jumped out of bed early to spend time in Protector’s Realm instead.
Today also marks the day the promised epic weapon/tradeskill quests get added into EQ2. I was going to attempt to do it right after the raid but Gothun dragged me into Karnor’s Castle instead to help him work on parts of his epic quest. We had really good luck in KC, and got a total of 7 reflective smoldering shard drops, 4 of which were within 5 mins of each other. Everyone walked away with one each, except for our MT which won the ffa 7th drop. I wonder if we were truly lucky folks, or that the drop rate had been secretly raised with the introduction of GU42. Either way, I’m glad to be able to switch between two sets of AA now, even though I’m not entirely sure what my alternate setup would be like. Maybe I’ll finally have manaburn.
I also managed to get my epic quest starter (Wizard), which drops off trash in Chelsith. I’ve no clue to what the following steps are and I’ll have to ask around, or hope someone fills in the guide on EQ2i. Rumor has it someone on the Everfrost server has already completed their epic (Corcerer) quest and the non-raid item was linked in public channels. It looked rather impressive, and left me wondering how much better the raid version would be.
It seems that today was a productive start to the year of the rat.
Edit: The drop rates on the reflective smoldering shards were definitely upped, the prices on the broker dropped to just a bit over 2plat per.
An expansion too late
I finally got my Soulfire update this morning after a long battle with Mayong in MMIS. It was one of our more relaxed and casual raid nights, with about 1/3 of the raid filled by picks up, although we performed rather well with the exception of people who occasionally stumble into aggro where they shouldn’t have, such as the pair of blood colossus right on the bottom of the steps before Mayong.
The Mayong fight itself lasted pretty long, with us having about 3 goes at it, not including people stepping on the platform accidentally and resulting in him aggroing and wiping the raid once before we even started. The main issue with Mayong is power due to one of AEs with a huge power drain element if it’s left uncured. Too often our healers were already rather low on power before the AE hit and therefore not able to throw up group cures before being entirely depleted of power. Yay for me having self arcane cures, it was extremely handy and previously served me well for the Doomsworn Zatrakh fight in Labs too.
It couldn’t have been a finer time to completely wrap up SoD with the new epic quests right around the corner. It’s going to a lot of rewatching old TV series grinding up faction quests if it’s anything like what I imagine it to be.
