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Well now, that was quite a break wasn’t it? I wish I could say I was temporarily disenfranchised from my EQII’ing due to something cool like being roped in to provide emergency assistance to the latest team of intrepid thrill-seekers looking to scale the north face of the Matterhorn, or that a shadowy, er, shadow government had embroiled me in plans to destabilise forces ‘unfriendly to our nation’s interests’, or inventing new fashion genres.
They’re especially tight, aroond the arse…
Instead it’s just been a time of unrest, upheaval and generally extreme busyness both at home and at work, meaning what little EQII time I’ve had has been during lunch breaks and stolen moments when the little ‘un has gone tae sleep and the missus is otherwise engaged.
Nonetheless, I’ve not been entirely neglectful of my ever burgeoning roster of alts. I’d left the dwarven monk fella in the upper levels of Stormhold last we looked, and after rattling around a few dangerous looking places (and promptly running away again) I’ve managed to get about halfway through my quota of fifty life souls (seriously, waaaay too many), as well as getting into bother with all sorts of skellington types and other assorted undead.
Stormhold looks like it could be quite an interesting place to explore, but at present I’m limited to shuffling along a few basic corridors and cowering in the corner of a large banquet hall, hoping that the nasty things don’t see me and start feeling hungry. What it has done is renewed my interest in really exploring the lost art of pick-up grouping. How to attract, what to do, what to wear, when to apply bandages and a hearty attitude to the travails of life, etc. I’ve yet to go in for guild life in any big way, and I figure starting small, with a handful of select strangers calling me n00b and wondering why they ever bothered replying to my incessant pleas for help is going to be far better than an entire roster full of people calling me n00b and wondering etc, etc…
Would you like to be in my group? I’m willing to learn!
Honestly, me and group play almost always runs along the following lines:
Me: “Okay fellows, what for shalst I do-eth?”
Groupie 1: “WTF? This is Crushbone not AB. Keep it real, pal.”
Me: “Oh… okay, sorry. What do you want me to do?”
Groupie 1: “Okay, you’re the Monk, so I want damage assist on the main pulls, watch for adds.”
Me: “Adds…”
Groupie 2: “I’ll be healing so you’ll have to run interference if the aggro switches and pull the mobs back.”
Me: “Yes… but…”
Groupie 1: “And for the love of god, keep a finger on the group feign death, we’ll need it if a boss starts proc’ing hate and the DPS gets too high.”
Me: “The group what was that…?”
Groupie 2: “Okay! Let’s get ‘em!”
Groupie 1: “For Leeeoooooonnnn!”
Me: “Guys? Wait up? Which way did you go? I was looking for a pen. Guys?”
>Your party is dead.
>You have been kicked.
>You are a n00b.
And so on and so on. Obviously I’ve no idea if anything I wrote just then actually made sense, which I guess is part of the problem, but that’s essentially what it sounds like to me. I’m usually lost within two seconds of a fight starting, or I end up on groups where no one actually says a damn thing and just expects everyone to know what’s going on. I play a dwarven monk. Does it look like I know what I’m doing in this game?
So I’ve stuck with soloing for now and it’s gotten me to mid-twenties fairly unscathed, but I have to move up a gear at some point and if not now, then when?
Is it because I’m small? I’ll wear platforms if it helps?
The other thing I’ve been doing is taking my fledgling Arasai down the crafting route. Entire sessions of doing naught but harvesting, progressing down the training route and getting to level 10 in tradeskilling. As much as I’d like to just concentrate on this, I’m discovering that I need to get her adventure level above 4 if I’m ever going to be able to harvest in the areas that yield the juicy fruits. Either that or learn to play the market like Wall Street professional. All tips gratefully received.
Of the information type, naturally. I’m still above begging for scraps of coin, for now anyway.
There can be only one!
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!
Antonica – Blarton Bumble
For a legendary angler, this guy sure makes a good houseplant. Ran the various chain of quests for him today (finding his lure, scouting soggy holes, finding a fish called Ol’ One Eye and getting worms from a gnoll camp (or something). Pretty simple, although I was about six levels above the intended. Only hairy moments were while running hell for leather through eastern Antonica trailing various combos of bears, wolves, gnolls and scientologi… uh, Dark Coven cultists all aggroing instantly and being too numerous to stop and fight. God bless the /sprint command, although I could use a bit more power so that I don’t keep running out just as I stumble into Grolven Chiptooth or some other heroic mob that can kill me just by thinking about looking in my direction.
For some reason I can’t put my finger on, I’m finding Windstalker Village incredibly annoying to have to keep running to. I don’t know if it’s just badly placed, if it’s the layout of the hills and impassable mountain ranges nearby that keep forcing me to do a roundtrip through all of Antonica’s most deadly locations, or the fact I can’t navigate worth a damn, but the sooner I clear my backlog of WV-related quests the better frankly. The Ol’ One Eye part of the quest seemed a bit pointless really. It’s not like this legendary piece of dinner was hard to find or anything. At least put him in an underwater cave or something. On the plus side, at least it wasn’t just a long series of Kill X Mobtype jobs and I got a pretty good overview of the southern part of Eastern Antonica as a result. Which I’m certain was the intention, but I’ll still have forgotten most of it by tomorrow and end up getting lost again. Hey-ho.
Going Nuts In Norrath 
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