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Just a quick update today. No pics or fancy video links to obscure (outside the UK) British comedians. Just a big slice of irony pie slapping me in the face like a Three Stooges food fight. No sooner do I post about my new Vista set up working like a dream than I start getting all manner of random game freezes and boots to desktop with memory error messages and the like. Curses.
As soon as I figure out what’s going on (or, more likely, have someone on the EQII forums figure it out and post a solution for me to copy) I’ll post my findings. In the meantime, it’s office-bound XP questing during my lunch hours only, so I’m exepcting a more muted progress over the next week or so. Last I left my little monk, I was venturing over to TS, got sidetracked with Stormhold, and am now tasked with killing 50-odd life souls or somesuch. Ho hum…
So now I’m short and stretched horizontally? Richard Simmons, I need you NOW!
So, it’s been a while. How you all doing? Good, thought as much. The twenty-second version is basically: overloaded at work/new computer at home/complete reinstall needed/Vista a bit of a pain but not so bad once you get used to it.
Thus my EQII’ing has been limited to the brief lunchtime office session and watching the ‘Estimated download time’ indicator on the home PC’s launchpad window run through its bipolar dance of random number generating. Only two hours to go? Great… no wait, four hours twenty five minutes… no, nine hours and seven minutes. Wait, now it’s down to one hour fifteen, oh, no, wait, seven days, three hours and thirty-four minutes… wait, two minutes twenty, no, it’s done. Oh, no, sorry, it’ll now be finished sometime within this year, early 2008 at the latest. Wait, now it’s saying I have to actually travel back through time to 1773 and re-install from the original discs…
Anyway, we finally got there and now my dwarven monk (I know, odd choice but then have you ever seen a little fella kick off in real life? It seemed the natural way to go somehow) is back in business on a glorious top-end ‘ninja’ PC, fully-Vista’d to the nth degree, dual-core’d to a degree somewhere just beyond that one, and sporting a snazzy widescreen display to boot. And Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, if it doesn’t look pretty damn tasty as a result.
Quest-wise, I’m mostly through with all the Vermin’s Snye, Scholar Demini and Rask Heltsot (or however it’s spelt) stuff so far and I’m now bristling with tasks that will ‘introduce’ me to Thundering Steppes. I also managed to see off the accursed pwn machine that was Renux The Undying who’d been laughing off my attempts to kill him in much the same way as Rotweed had in my early teens.
Seriously, unless I can start getting my grouping thang into groove (big daddy), I seem to be stuck in the loop of having to wait until these big name bad guys are just grey to me before I can stand a chance of getting near them. Unless there’s some great combat tactic I’m unaware of – entirely likely given my inability to really be able to explore the 20-30 side of the game in any depth lately. I know I need to work on my heals. All I’ve got is the next-to-useless Mend right now, which is like trying to stave off the effects of having your head decapitated by taking a couple of asprin and going for a bit of a lie down. Maybe potions of some sort?
Also, along with just about everyone else it seems from the straining noises emanating from SOE’s server room in San Diego, I sucummbed…
Pretty, but one gust of wind and I’ll end up miles away.
I’m still surprised to this day that I managed to nab the name Faewray for my Fae templar before some other wag got in there. Nothing so fancy here though (SOE’s filter-o-tron was ridiculously effective against all my childish ‘arse’-related name choices), so I just went with my daughter’s name instead (and no, it isn’t my password for anything anywhere). Only a level 2 coercer, since I hadn’t ever tried that, but if you see me on Kithicor, say hello.
Antonica/North Qeynos – Scholar Demini
Ha! My back-mounted stick is way fancier than yours! N00b.
One thing I love about EQII (or, indeed, all MMOs) are the little idiosyncrasies that crop up due to the limitations of the gaming mechanics and the way my increasingly infertile mind interprets them. For instance, running around Antonica like a blue-arsed fly (paging Arsai players) on the Sage Of Ages quest I find myself in the odd position of hunting dozens of wolves and bears and scouring each and every critter den I can find for missing pages of a book. Which just paints the odd mental picture of packs of feral wolves sitting around in a circle discussing the latest works of literature. Maybe they read The Da Vinci Code? Maybe that’s why they’re always so angry?
Damn you, Lassie. How dare you say Asimov’s work will always be a pale shadow of H.G. Wells. Eat pain stick!
Nonetheless, I worked my way through it, covering most of Antonica in the process and picking up scraps of parchment, plenty of canine saliva (pre-packed in handy pouch-friendly bottles for your convenience!) and the odd piece of gnoll appendage, which helped immensely with my Know Your Cuts Of Gnoll Meat Lore & Legend quest (or whatever it’s called).
Also managed to pick up two Achievment Points along the way, which have gone into the Brawler tree and leave me needing one more to unlock some fancy-dan, kick-ass kung fu move or another that will flatten all around me like something out of a Jackie Chan chair-throwing movie.
Ultimately though, it’s left me with an obvious path into Thundering Steppes and at level 22 I think it might finally be time to leave the rolling fields and picnic spots of Antonica behind me once and for all. If only I wasn’t obssessed with clearing every last quest in my journal before I go. Hell, I’ve still got some Down Below greyed-out jobbies to take care of at some point and the anal retentive in me just can bring myself to delete them. So TS and the Sage of Sega will have to wait for now. There are some Shrillers and Bloodsaber Adepts with my name on them.
Running, always running. Good luck Doctor David Bannah!
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